Society and culture: general Books

People of The Dalles is the story of the Chinookan (Wasco-Wishram) and Sahaptin peoples of The Dalles area of the Columbia River, who encountered the Lewis & Clark expedition in 1805-6. The early history and culture of these communities is reconstructed...

In this psychologically gripping memoir, Blake Allmendinger returns to his childhood home after a forty-year absence. His homecoming to the struggling farming community of Rocky Ford, Colorado, formerly known as the Melon Capital of the World, forces the...

The proliferation of media and their ever-increasing role in our daily life has produced a strong sense that understanding media-everything from oral storytelling, literary narrative, newspapers, and comics to radio, film, TV, and video games-is key to...

Open up Dignity and Old Age, and you'll find a wealth of thoughtful suggestions for how you and others can gain more respect and admiration for your relatives, neighbors, and patients who are in the latter stages of life. You'll examine the word...

Two Spirit People is the first-ever look at social science research exploration into the lives of American Indian lesbian women and gay men. Editor Lester B. Brown posits six gender styles in traditional American Indian culture: men and women, not-men...

Sports are not what they used to be. New publicly funded stadiums resemble shopping malls. Fans compete for cash prizes in fantasy sports leagues. Sports video games are now marketing and public relations tools and team logos have become fashionable...

Consumers today are invested in reality-based media, such as reality television and social media, which in theory draw content from somewhere off-screen in our lived experience. This is seen as more "authentic" than the predominantly fictional media...

We follow celebrities on Twitter and Facebook, watch them on television, and read about them in supermarket checkout lines. Our relationship with celebrities has never been so immediate. Their personal trials are news headlines and water cooler talk. ...

This book provides original essays that suggest ways to engage students in the classroom with the cultural factors of American literature. Some of the essays focus on individual authors' works, others view American literature more broadly, and still...

Africans brought as slaves to North America arrived without possessions, but not without culture. The fascinating elements of African life manifested themselves richly in the New World, and among the most lasting and influential of these was the art...

Informed by more than thirty years of experience, this guide provides a wealth of insight into the clinical observation, diagnosis and treatment of elderly patients. Organized geographically from (literally) head to toes, it concentrates on the basic...

You'd think "strategic planning" would be obvious. It has long been a common practice in the corporate world. It has, however, only recently been applied to the public sector. Local governments find such planning increasingly useful as they strive to...

There are many types and forms of regional government agencies. These include regional planning commissions, council of governments, regional advisory committees, regional allocation agencies, and special purpose regional agencies. Even so innovative...

This work describes the operations of a typical municipal government and examines the many productivity trends that are occurring in city halls across America. Much of the focus is on the increasing need for planning in city government to ensure that...

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the various forms of government below the state level now in use in the United States of America. It sorts through the traditional commission, mayor-council, strong mayor, and council-manager models...

Much of the modern-day vision of Santa Claus is owed to the Clement Moore poem "The Night Before Christmas." His description of Saint Nicholas personified the "jolly old elf" known to millions of children throughout the world. However, far from...

Backs Against the Wall: Battered Women's Resistance Strategies tackles several controversial aspects involved with intimate partner violence (IPV)-namely the approaches many victims use when resisting their oppressors. This sensitive and sensible...

This work examines both predominately black newspapers in general and four in particular--the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Black Dispatch (Oklahoma City), and the Jackson (Mississippi) Advocate--and their coverage of national events...

From the 1920s through the 1950s, the center of black social and business life in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the area known as Vinegar Hill. But in 1960, noting the prevalence of aging frame houses and "substandard" conditions such as outdoor...

Known variously as African studies, black studies, African American studies, Afro-American studies, and Africology, the academic study of the African diaspora as a holistic discipline is a relatively new phenomenon. University programs have been...

Despite the controversial nature of globalization, there is no doubt that the pace and intensity of global interactions has been multiplied exponentially over the last few decades. Criticism of globalization is generally arranged into three camps:...

Much has been written about America's troubled teens, particularly endangered teenage girls. Works like Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia and many others have contributed to the general perception that contemporary young women are in a state of crisis...

Not long after the Allied victories in Europe and Japan, America's attention turned from world war to cold war. The perceived threat of communism had a definite and significant impact on all levels of American popular culture, from government...

How do political conflicts shape popular culture? This book explores that question by analyzing how the Planet of the Apes films functioned both as entertaining adventures and as apocalyptic political commentary. Informative and thought provoking, the...

Towns and communities across America once revolved around their downtowns. Here people shopped, worked, relaxed, and worshipped. Changing needs and developments, however, resulted in their abandonment. Over the past decade, citizens have begun to seek...

In the postwar decades, sexual revolutions - first women's suffrage, flappers, Prohibition, and Mae West; later Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Hefner, and the pill - altered the lifestyles and desires of generations. Since the 1990s, the internet and its...

Performance embodies knowledge transfer, cultural expression, and intercultural influence. It is a method through which Indigenous people express their relations to land and continuously establish their persistent political authority. But performance is...

In 1947, grocer Johnny Lombardi went on air for the first time to share the sounds of "sunny Italy" with the radio listeners of Toronto. Meanwhile, in cities across the country, a handful of theatres began to show films in foreign languages. In the...

During the first six decades of the twentieth century, when the majority of present-day Kenya was under the control of the British Empire, many secular newspapers emerged as the products of tensions between Asian and European immigrants, the British...

Like the flute melody from Hinterland Who's Who, the 1970s haunt Canadian cultural memory. Though the decade often feels lost to history, Hinterland Remixed focuses on boldly innovative works as well as popular film, television, and music to show that...

Over the last thirty years Canadian policy on aboriginal issues has come to be dominated by an ideology that sees aboriginal peoples as "nations" entitled to specific rights. Indians and Inuit now enjoy legal privileges that include the inherent right to...

Agriculture on Plains Indian reserves is generally thought to have failed because the Indigenous people lacked either an interest in farming or an aptitude for it. In Lost Harvests Sarah Carter reveals that reserve residents were anxious to farm and...

Evangelicals have been scandalized by their association with Donald Trump, their megachurches summarily dismissed as "religious Walmarts." In The Subversive Evangelical Peter Schuurman shows how a growing group of "reflexive evangelicals" use irony to...

Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011) was one of the most prominent Yiddish novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Poland in 1923, she survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, immigrating to Canada in 1950 and settling in...

Life in the countryside, often perceived as either idyllic or depleted, has long been misrepresented. Challenging the stereotypes and myths that surround the idea of rurality, Our Rural Selves interrogates and represents individual and collective...

In the wake of Europe's so-called refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016, even traditionally open countries such as Sweden and Germany adopted hostile policies on refugees, closing borders and linking refugees with terrorism and threats to national security...

Highlighting the geopolitical and economic circumstances that have prompted migration from Hong Kong and mainland China to Canada, The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities examines the Chinese Canadian community as a simultaneously...

Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and...

Canada has become the first G7 country to legalize cannabis, and the world is watching. The primary concern facing the Liberal government as it seeks to fulfill its 2015 campaign promise to "legalize, regulate, and restrict access to marijuana" is...

Two centuries ago, many hundreds of Iroquois - principally from what is now Kahnawà:ke - left home without leaving behind their ways of life. Recruited to man the large canoes that transported trade goods and animal pelts from and to Montreal, some...

The steep rise in neighborhood associations in post-Katrina New Orleans is commonly presented in starkly positive or negative terms - either romanticized narratives of community influence or dismissals of false consciousness and powerlessness to elite...

Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in Europe, not all women fit the stereotype of passive housewife and mother. Many led bold and dynamic lives. In this collection of historical portraits, Maria Teresa Brolis tells the fascinating tales of...

With over 240 million migrants in the world, including over 65 million forced migrants and refugees, states have turned to draconian measures to stem the flow of irregular migration, including the criminalization of migration itself. Canada, perceived as...

Many of today's digital platforms are designed according to the same model: they encourage users to create content for fun (a mode of production that some have termed playbour) and to earn points. On Facebook, for example, points are based on a user's...

Liberal democratic societies with diverse populations generally offer minorities two usually contradictory objectives: the first is equal integration and participation; the second is an opportunity, within limits, to retain their culture. Yet Canadian...