蜜桃传媒

Finalist, 2025 PROSE Awards: Literature

A new history of manhood, race, and hierarchy in American childhood

Like Children argues that the child has been the key figure giving measure and meaning to the human in thought and culture since the early American period. Camille Owens demonstrates that white men鈥檚 power at the top of humanism鈥檚 order has depended on those at the bottom. As Owens shows, it was childhood鈥檚 modern arc鈥攆rom ignorance and dependence to reason and rights鈥攖hat structured white men鈥檚 power in early America: by claiming that black adults were like children, whites naturalized black subjection within the American family order. Demonstrating how Americans sharpened the child into a powerful white supremacist weapon, Owens nevertheless troubles the notion that either the child or the human have been figures of unadulterated whiteness or possess stable boundaries.

Like Children recenters the history of American childhood around black children and rewrites the story of the human through their acts. Through the stories of black and disabled children spectacularized as prodigies, Owens tracks enduring white investment in black children鈥檚 power and value, and a pattern of black children performing beyond white containment. She reconstructs the extraordinary interventions and inventions of figures such as the early American poet Phillis Wheatley, the nineteenth-century pianist Tom Wiggins (Blind Tom), a child known as 鈥淏right鈥� Oscar Moore, and the early-twentieth century 鈥淗arlem Prodigy,鈥� Philippa Schuyler, situating each against the racial, gendered, and developmental rubrics by which they were designated prodigious exceptions. Ultimately, Like Children displaces frames of exclusion and dehumanization to explain black children鈥檚 historical and present predicament, revealing the immense cultural significance that black children have negotiated and what they have done to reshape the human in their own acts.

The nation's top political scientists, historians, and legal scholars propose solutions for democracy's future

In recent years, the sight of gun-wielding citizens patrolling ballot boxes and voting sites has become increasingly familiar. Major news corporations parroting false claims of election fraud, ballot stuffing, and faulty voting systems is the new normal. In an era of global anti-democratic movements, the sanctity of democratic electoral processes has become a major national security concern, and the need to protect elections from foreign interference, disinformation, voter intimidation, and the danger of election results being overturned, are now front and center. How did we get here? And more importantly, how will this affect the future of democracy?

Award-winning authors Julian E. Zelizer and Karen J. Greenberg bring together the nation鈥檚 top political scientists, historians, and legal scholars to examine how the lack of stability and integrity of the electoral process has become a threat to national security. Through historical and social scientific analysis, contributors outline how these problems have emerged and propose concrete solutions to move us into a period of greater stability. At once urgent and comprehensive, Our Nation at Risk is the preeminent book on election security and a must read for anyone invested in the fight for democracy.

Reveals the possibilities and challenges of civic education in circumstances of extreme polarization, and how civic learning and political divisiveness can interact and influence each other

As fears about polarization鈥攁nd its contribution to democratic crisis and corrosion鈥攔ise, many people have posited civic education as a possible remedy. In a time of increasing political polarization, what should the goals of civic education be, and how should they be implemented? In the latest installment of the NOMOS series, Eric Beerbohm and Elizabeth Beaumont bring together a distinguished group of interdisciplinary scholars across philosophy, politics, and law, inviting us to think deeply about the complex promises and pitfalls of civic education.

Contributors raise a variety of crucial considerations not only about how to educate citizens in a polarized era but also for a polarized era. What types of civic learning hold promise for preparing students to navigate their way through a political landscape of escalating hostile factions, distrust, truth decay, and disagreement about basic facts? Could or should civic education attempt to reduce or counteract polarization, or should it focus on other aims?

Beaumont and Beerbohm show us that the dynamics and circumstances of polarization do not stop at the schoolhouse gates, but bring new urgency together with added pressures and constraints to all civic education. As political polarization continues to intensify across the globe, this riveting volume illuminates the significance, the possibilities, and the challenges of civic education in the contemporary era.

Explores how concerns about poverty-induced Black crime cultivated by police, journalists, and city officials sparked a rise in tough-on-crime policing in Philadelphia

During the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, Philadelphia鈥檚 police department, journalists, and city officials used news media to create and reinforce narratives that criminalized Black people and led to police brutality, segregation, and other dehumanizing consequences for Black communities. Over time, city officials developed a system of racial capitalism in which City Council financially divested from social welfare programs and instead invested in the police department, promoting a 鈥渢ough on crime鈥� policing program that generated wealth for Philadelphia鈥檚 tax base in an attempt to halt white flight from the city.

Drawing from newspapers, census records, oral histories, interviews, police investigation reports, housing project pamphlets, maps, and more, Hope and Struggle in the Policed City draws the connective line between the racial bias African Americans faced as they sought opportunity in the North and the over-policing of their communities, of which the effects are still visible today. Menika B. Dirkson posits that the tough-on-crime framework of this time embedded itself within every aspect of society, leading to enduring systemic issues of hyper-surveillance, the use of excessive force, and mass incarceration.

Hope and Struggle in the Policed City makes important contributions to our understanding of how a city government鈥檚 budgetary strategy can function as racial capitalism that relies on criminal scapegoating. Most cogently, it illustrates how this perpetuates the cycle of poverty-induced crime, inflates rates of incarceration and police brutality, and marginalizes poor people of color.

A state-by-state analysis of the expansion of medical marijuana access in the United States

As of 2023, thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have legalized the medical use of marijuana. Twenty-three have legalized recreational use, supporting what is now a flourishing multibillion-dollar industry. In Green Rush, Daniel J. Mallinson and A. Lee Hannah offer a fascinating history of cannabis legalization in America, highlighting the people, states, and policies that made these victories possible.

With sharp insight, Mallinson and Hannah explore the backdrop to this sea change in policy, including shifts in public opinion, growing opposition to the War on Drugs, the promise of new revenue streams, and more. They examine the complex web of state actors鈥攁nd the steps they took鈥攖o chart a path forward for marijuana legalization, from grassroots activists and interest groups to elected officials and other key policymakers.

Mallinson and Hannah show us how states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia not only created, legitimized, and spread medical marijuana policy but also learned from each other鈥檚 successes and failures throughout the process. As marijuana legalization increasingly finds its way onto state ballots, Green Rush offers fresh insight into how we got here as a country and where we are going鈥攐ne state at a time.

Winner, 2025 C.L.R. James Award, awarded by the Working-Class Studies Association

Shortlisted, 2025 Outstanding Book Award, given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education

Finalist, 2025 PROSE Awards: Music and the Performing Arts

A cultural history of disability, performance, and work in the modern United States

In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing optimism that performance could provide job opportunities for people with disabilities.

Disability Works offers an original cultural history of disability and performance in modern America, exploring rehabilitation鈥檚 competing legacies. The book highlights an unexpected alliance of rehabilitation professionals, deaf teachers, policy makers, disability activists, queer artists, and religious leaders who championed performance鈥檚 rehabilitative potential. At the same time, some disabled artists imagined a different political itinerary for theatrical practice. Rather than acquiescing to the terms of productive citizenship, these artists recuperated rehabilitation as a creative resource for imagining and building a world beyond work. Using previously unexplored archives, Disability Works portrays the history of disabled Americans鈥� performance labor as both a national aspiration and a national problem. The book reveals how disabled artists and activists ingeniously used rehabilitative resources to fuel their performance practices, breaking free from the grasp of rehabilitation and fostering more just institutions.

From state-funded 鈥渟ign-mime鈥� to Black modern dance, community theatre to Stanislavskian actor training, speculative activism to epistolary performance, Disability Works recovers an expansive repertoire of aesthetic and infrastructural investigations into the terms of how disability works in modern American culture.

The first thorough study of the Justice Department鈥檚 pattern or practice program, examining how it works and how court-imposed consent decrees implement needed reforms

American society grapples with an enduring crisis in policing which is inextricably intertwined with the nation鈥檚 deeply rooted racial issues. While there have been great strides in policing over the past five decades, the United States continues to wrestle with serious crime and strained relations between law enforcement and African American communities.

In this comprehensive analysis, Samuel Walker, a leading figure in the study of criminal justice, focuses on the pivotal federal effort behind police reform鈥攖he US Justice Department鈥檚 pattern or practice program. Created by Congress in 1994, this program gives the Justice Department the authority to investigate police departments that display patterns of unconstitutional practices, initiate civil suits, and secure court-enforced consent decrees that mandate reform. Walker meticulously examines the reforms dictated by these consent decrees, delves into the challenges of their implementation, and evaluates the progress made by various departments in enhancing police services. Despite various obstacles, the program has proven successful.

The Future of Police Reform also considers the broader societal, political, and legal issues that profoundly influence reform efforts, such as an entrenched police subculture hindering change, the formidable power of police unions, and a lack of full support from local political leaders.

In conclusion, Walker celebrates reform efforts across the country and foresees a network of local and state centers of activity fostering continued optimism for the future of police reform in the US. A collective effort holds the promise of genuine and lasting change.

Explores global migration through the concept of 鈥渞eturn鈥�

The current global moment is characterized by both forced and desired returns, whether it鈥檚 the United States鈥� mass deportations to Mexico, ships carrying North African migrants turned back en route to Spain and Italy, urban Chinese migrants going back to their rural home communities, or domestic workers returning to their families in Bolivia and Ghana. Yet, the majority of migration research still centers unidirectional movement, which assumes settlement in a host country.

States of Return addresses the many political, economic, and cultural transitions that have accelerated and transformed return during the first decades of the twenty-first century, including new migratory routes, new forms of violence, changing economic conditions, new regulatory regimes of incarceration and deportation, and generational transitions.

This volume features contributions from leading scholars and offers a new theorization of the idea of return. It centers migrants鈥� own understandings of what return movement is and is not, and how it is experienced in terms of impacts on family relationships as well as state interventions that guide return migrations and create new configurations of citizenship and belonging, especially as migrant workers tend to return to states that lack strong infrastructures to support them or welcome them back.

At its core, States of Return highlights the ways in which different migrants鈥� returns reflect conditions of power, privilege, injustice, and violence. The result is a broad and deep account of returns鈥攊magined, achieved, thwarted, or impossible鈥攖hat captures movement across borders in the world today.

How children helped abolish slavery

During the antebellum period, several abolitionist figures, including William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator; Susan Paul, an African American primary school teacher; Henry Clarke Wright, a white reformer; and Frederick Douglass, the internationally renowned activist, consistently appealed to the sympathies of children against slavery. In 1835, Garrison proclaimed, 鈥淚f . . . we desire to see our land delivered from the curse of PREJUDICE and SLAVERY, we must direct our efforts chiefly to the rising generation.鈥� This rallying cry found a receptive audience and ignited action.

Despite their limited scholarly exploration, children occupied a crucial position within the US abolition movement. Through a reexamination of archival materials including antislavery newspapers, correspondence, and autobiographies, Young Abolitionists is the first book to center children鈥檚 participation in the campaign to eradicate slavery in the United States.

Micha毛l Roy uncovers how young advocates鈥擝lack and white alike鈥攃onfidently delivered antislavery speeches within their schools, enrolled in juvenile antislavery societies, and contributed to the editorial process of antislavery newspapers. They aided fugitive slaves, attended antislavery fairs, and engaged in activities commemorating John Brown鈥檚 legacy. They even affixed their signatures to antislavery petitions, thus challenging the boundaries of their own citizenship.

Abolitionists saw childhood as a force for social change. With the help of parents and teachers, children acted in concrete ways against slavery and made a meaningful contribution toward its demise. Young Abolitionists honors their contributions and reminds us that children can鈥攁nd must鈥攂e included in the fight for a better world.

Winner of the 2024 Silver Medal for LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Offers a radical theory of gender formation and its ongoing mutations

Gender Without Identity challenges the argument widely embraced by rights activists and many members of the LGBTQ+ community that gender identity is innate and immutable. Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini chart another path towards the flourishing of queer and trans life. Positing that the idea of an innate core gender identity is simplistic, problematic, and, even, potentially harmful to LGBTQ+ people, they instead argue that gender is something all subjects acquire.

Trauma, they provocatively propose, sometimes has a share in that acquisition. In their way of thinking, lived trauma as well as structural and intergenerationally transmitted traumatic debris may become a resource for transness and queerness. Such a suggestion importantly counters conservative accounts that identify trauma as disrupting or 鈥渨arping鈥� some putatively 鈥渘ormal鈥� gender. Rooted in the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, in queer and trans of color critique, and in the authors鈥� extensive clinical experience with queer and trans people, Gender Without Identity offers a radical theory of gender formation and its ongoing mutations.

Revisits the work of Rick Turner, a South African political theorist, and addresses contemporary debates

Rick Turner was a South African academic and anti-apartheid activist who rebelled against the apartheid state at the height of its power. For this he was assassinated in 1978, at just 32 years of age, but his life and work are testimony to the power of philosophical thinking for humans everywhere. Turner chose to live freely in an unfree time and argued for a non-racial, socialist future in a context where this seemed unimaginable.

This book takes seriously Rick Turner鈥檚 challenge that political theorising requires thinking in a utopian way. Turner鈥檚 seminal book The Eye of the Need: Towards a Participatory Democracy laid out some of his most potent ideas on a radically different political and economic system. His demand was that we work to escape the limiting ideas of the present, carefully design a just future based on shared human values, and act to make it a reality, both politically and in our daily lives.

The contributors to this volume engage critically with Turner鈥檚 work on race relations, his relationship with Steve Biko, his views on religion, education and gender oppression, his participatory model of democracy, and his critique of enduring forms of poverty and economic inequality. They show how, in his life and work, Turner modeled how we can dare to be free and how hope can return, as the future always remains open to human construction. This book makes an important contribution to contemporary thinking and activism where the need for South Africans to define their understanding of their greater common good is of crucial importance.