Frank Carlson Library

An inspiring history of all the women who have taken a seat in Congress! For the first 128 years of America's history, only men served in the Senate and House of Representatives. All that changed in January 1917 when Jeannette Rankin was sworn in as the first woman elected to Congress. From the women's suffrage movement to the 2018 election, Ilene Cooper highlights influential and diverse female leaders who opened doors for women in politics. Women...

In an effort to modernize criminal and civil investigations, early Bolsheviks gave forensic doctors-most of whom had been trained under the tsarist regime-new authority over issues of sexuality. Revolutionaries believed that forensic medicine could provide scientific and objective solutions to sexual disorder in the new society. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics explores the institutional history of Russian and Soviet forensic medicine and examines the effects...

The Pox Lover is a personal history of the turbulent 1990s in New York City and Paris by a pioneering American AIDS journalist, lesbian activist, and daughter of French-Haitian elites. In an account that is by turns searing, hectic, and funny, Anne-Christine d'Adesky remembers "the poxed generation" of AIDS-their lives, their battles, and their determination to find love and make art in the heartbreaking years before lifesaving protease drugs arrived....

Luana Ross writes, "Native Americans disappear into Euro-American institutions of confinement at alarming rates. People from my reservation appeared to simply vanish and magically return. [As a child] I did not realize what a 'real' prison was and did not give it any thought. I imagined this as normal; that all families had relatives who went away and then returned." In this pathfinding study, Ross draws upon the life histories of imprisoned Native...

Michael Mayerfeld Bell is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he is also a faculty associate in religious studies, environmental studies, and agroecology. His many books include the award-winning Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village and, Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability. How we came to seek...

A multidimensional approach captures the complexities of African American racial identity. While the dynamics of racial oppression limit the range of attitudes blacks may construct and hold, their basic humanity introduces additional attitudinal variance that is nearly boundless. Rather than claim it is possible to conceptualize and measure every iteration of blackness, modern social theorists such as Robert Sellers and William Cross Jr. contend...

Consuming with a conscience is one of the fastest growing forms of political participation worldwide. Every day we make decisions about how to spend our money and, for the socially conscious, these decisions matter. Political consumers "buy green" for the environment or they "buy pink" to combat breast cancer. They boycott Taco Bell to support migrant workers or Burger King to save the rainforest. But can we overcome the limitations of consumer identity,...

American and Israeli Jews have historically clashed over the contours of Jewish identity, and their experience of modern Jewish life has been radically different. As Philip Roth put it, they are the "heirs jointly of a drastically bifurcated legacy." But what happens when the encounter between American and Israeli Jewishness takes place in literary form-when Jewish American novels make aliyah, or when Israeli novels are imported for consumption by...

Examine what it means to be a global citizen, and learn about the rights and responsibilities that we all have. The right to grow and thrive in a safe environment. The right to a name and an identity. The right to the free expression of ideas. The right to an education. In Global Citizenship: Engage in the Politics of a Changing World, readers ages 12 to 15 discover the resources and information they need to learn about issues of global concern and...

One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life I sometimes think I was born reading...I can't remember the time when I didn't have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick's celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In...