Books for courses

This Is America: A Short History of the United States provides an introduction to US history and culture for students anywhere in the world, with extracts from important documents.

Women and Leadership: History, Concepts, and Case Studies provides valuable research by experts on leadership and women’s history to help students and citizens who want a more nuanced explanation of what we know about women as leaders – and about how they have led in different fields, in different parts of the world, and in past centuries.

The Joy of Tippling is a toast to importance of drinking together, crafted by the ultimate tippler. Like Ray Oldenburg’s bestselling The Great Good Place, his new book is packed with factual information, humor and wit, personal insights, and sound sociological observations. The Joy of Tippling is a celebration of third places, and a call to community.

“Great news, tipplers! The killjoys, buzzcrushers, pinch-faced scolds, and puritans are WRONG. Knocking a couple back at the local bar is good for you. In The Joy of Tippling, sociologist and inveterate tippler Ray Oldenburg tells us why, backed up with solid research, indisputable facts and real news, all cheerfully served with dash and wit.” — John Tebeau, author of Bars, Taverns, and Dives New Yorkers Love

This Is China: The First 5,000 Years provides a framework for understanding China’s meteoric rise and the issues it faces today in little more than 100 pages.

Sewing Circles, Dime Suppers, and W. E. B. Du Bois: A History of the Clinton A. M. E. Zion Church offers fresh insight into a small New England church’s role in the national civil rights movement. This is the original edition. An updated edition is also available, with the title The African American Community in Rural New England: W. E. B. Du Bois and His Boyhood Church.

The Souls of Black Folk is a founding text of the US civil rights movement, an inspiring work of literature and advocacy by a young man who drew on his own experience as a child in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a teacher in the hills of Tennessee, a father grieving after the death of his baby son. It is a book compiled in haste but nonetheless a command performance. Du Bois’s concept of African American duality is, writes Henry Louis Gates Jr., his “most important gift to the Black literary tradition.”

The Waste Land and Other Poems is based on the 1922 edition produced by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and includes translations of non-English passages. QIU Xiaolong’s foreword explains what Eliot’s poetry means to readers around the world. Karen Christensen’s afterword comments on the women connected with The Waste Land. Read it here.)

Becoming a Dragon: Forty Chinese Proverbs, is a bilingual (English-Chinese) collection of proverbs, popular phrases, and two-part allegorical sayings, designed for self-study and classroom teaching. Each proverb comes with the story behind the proverb and its source in both English and Chinese, a literal translation, the figurative meaning, an English equivalent, a vocabulary list, and examples of how the proverb is used in modern written and spoken Chinese.

Touchdown: An American Obsession is the first comprehensive guide to the history and culture of the sport, by some of the world’s leading sports scholars. The volume includes US high school and college football as well as professional football worldwide.

Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century brings into view over 130 other Black men and women who published poetry in America during the century between Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Berkshire Edition includes a foreword by Jaki Shelton Green, 9th Poet Laureate of North Carolina.

A thorough but compact and accessible text for undergraduates, professionals, and activists, written and edited by leading historians and social scientists who study homelessness. Hardcover, paperback, or ePDF stamped copy for individual use. Also available for Kindle.

World History Teaching in Asia is the first broad survey of the content and approaches used to teach world history in secondary schools and colleges in Asia.