University Press Roundup

Our semi-regular roundup of recent blog posts and features from other university presses:

The Hurst Blog has reprinted an article detailing important new clues to the death of Dag Hammarskjold in 1961, written by Christopher Merrett. Working with Robin Barnes, a journalist in Ndola at the time of the famous plane crash, and Susan Williams, author of the Hurst/CUP book Who Killed Hammarskjold?, Merrett unearths new evidence in the death of the former Secretary-General of the United Nations.

NYU Press has a powerful piece on the recent death of Trayvon Martin, placing his killing in the context of extralegal racial violence throughout the history of the US, written by Kidada E. Williams.

The OUPblog features an examination of the Kony 2012 video by Adam Branch, a scholar studying and living in Uganda. According to Branch, he “wouldn’t have known about Kony 2012 if it hadn’t been for the emails I’ve been receiving from the US. And that, I think, is telling. Kony 2012 and the debate around it are not about Uganda, but about America.”

On a happier note, the McGill-Queen’s University Press Blog has a preview of Leave No Doubt, an inspirational book by Mike Babcock, current coach of the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings and coach of the 2010 Olympic Gold-winning Canadian hockey team.

The UNC Press Blog featured a guest post from Sarah S. Elkind on why we should view “the perpetual national chorus demanding a smaller, more efficient federal government” with suspicion.

Beacon Broadside and William Ayers take a detailed look at education and society in 21st century America. Ayers is worried by the focus on testing and instead supports a “pedagogy of questioning, an approach that opens rather than closes the process of thinking, comparing, reasoning, perspective-taking, and dialogue.”

The University of Illinois Press has a fascinating question-and-answer post with the authors of their new book, The Ecology of the Spoken Word, on an Amazonian tribe, the Napo Runa.

Cambridge University Press has a fun quiz that lets you learn with which great judge you have the most in common. And on the more serious side, they continue their “Women in Science” series in a conversation with three of their science editors.

Princeton University Press has a guest post from Andrew Gelman, an expert in election data, in which he breaks down voting patterns among white voters in America over the last few elections.

Texas A&M University Press has a brief interview with and sample poem from Athena Kashyap in which she discusses what it was like trying to find a place in America as an immigrant, similarities between borders of differet kinds, and losing yourself in the unknown.

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