University Press Roundup

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best articles from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments. (And look back at our University Press Roundup Manifesto to see why we do this post every Friday.)

In current affairs news, the Beacon Broadside Press cross-posted a piece by Jonathan Rosenblum, the author of the forthcoming Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement, on how it has been the politics of resistance, rather than necessarily the power of judiciary, which has obstructed President Trump’s travel ban. At the Yale University Press blog Amalia D. Kessler, author of A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France, asked whether we can equate adversarial politics with the pursuit of justice and inclusion. The Temple University Press cross-posted a Huffington Post piece by their author Crystal Marie Fleming (Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France) on the complicated state of racial-political discourse in France, which is characterized by what she calls “pretty words and magical thinking.”

To wrap up Black History Month, the University of Chicago Press blog hosted a fun resource: a list of black restauranteurs who worked in Charleston between 1880 and 1920, drawn from the research of David S. Shields, whose book The Culinarians: Lives and Careers from the First Age of American Fine Dining, is forthcoming in fall 2017. To celebrate the start of Women’s History Month in March, the NYU Press blog featured a guest post by Jill Norgren, author of Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Lawyers (2013), about Lavinia Goodell, the first woman to officially practice law in the state of Wisconsin.

For the theme of women’s history and coinciding with last weekend’s Academy Awards, the Cambridge University Press had a post by Michael J. Hogan, author of The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, about the building of the Kennedy brand and the surprisingly unfavorable view of the famous First Couple portrayed in Pablo Larraín’s recent film Jackie. There were also a few more anniversaries celebrated this week: the University Press of Kentucky commemorated the birthday of Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) by sharing some wonderful Appalachian nursery rhymes, and the Oxford University Press unpacked why no-one tends to celebrate Michelangelo’s birthday.

From the grab-bag of the eye-catching and the odd: the University of Washington Press hosted a photo essay of how polar bears have been kept in zoos over the last two centuries. The Princeton University Press announced a trailer for their forthcoming translation of Andrea Carandini’s Atlas of Ancient Rome. And if you’re in Georgia (or, indeed, anywhere else), the University of Georgia Press posted an announcement of their new effort with Georgia Public Broadcasting: the Innovative Virtual Book Club.

Thanks for reading! As always, we hope that you enjoyed the links. Please let us know what you think in the comments!

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