Americans spend billions of dollars every year on drugs, therapy, and other remedies trying to get a good night's sleep. Anxieties about not getting enough sleep and the impact of sleeplessness on productivity, health, and happiness pervade medical opinion, the workplace, and popular culture. In The Slumbering Masses, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer addresses the phenomenon of sleep and sleeplessness in the United States, tracing the influence of medicine and industrial capitalism on the sleeping habits of Americans from the nineteenth century to the present.

Before the introduction of...

Many nuclear and other U.S. military facilities from World War II and the Cold War are now being closed and remediated. Some of these sites have even been transformed into nature refuges and hailed as models of environmental stewardship. Yet, as Shiloh R. Krupar argues, these efforts are too often doing less to solve the environmental and health problems caused by military industrialism than they are acting to obscure the reality of ongoing contamination, occupational illnesses, and general conditions of exposure.

Using an unusual combination of empirical research, creative...

Many nuclear and other U.S. military facilities from World War II and the Cold War are now being closed and remediated. Some of these sites have even been transformed into nature refuges and hailed as models of environmental stewardship. Yet, as Shiloh R. Krupar argues, these efforts are too often doing less to solve the environmental and health problems caused by military industrialism than they are acting to obscure the reality of ongoing contamination, occupational illnesses, and general conditions of exposure.

Using an unusual combination of empirical research, creative...

If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don't we kick the habit? Looking beyond the usual culprits--Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire--Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism.

How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s...

Charity is an economic act. This premise underlies a societal transformation--the merging of religious and capitalist impulses that Mona Atia calls "pious neoliberalism." Though the phenomenon spans religious lines, Atia makes the connection between Islam and capitalism to examine the surprising relations between charity and the economy, the state, and religion in the transition from Mubarak-era Egypt.

Mapping the landscape of charity and development in Egypt, Building a House in Heaven reveals the factors that changed the nature of Egyptian charitable practices--the...

When the interstate highway program connected America's cities, it also divided them, cutting through and destroying countless communities. Affluent and predominantly white residents fought back in a much heralded "freeway revolt," saving such historic neighborhoods as Greenwich Village and New Orleans's French Quarter. This book tells of the other revolt, a movement of creative opposition, commemoration, and preservation staged on behalf of the mostly minority urban neighborhoods that lacked the political and economic power to resist the onslaught of highway...

In the popular imagination, public housing tenants are considered, at best, victims of intractable poverty and, at worst, criminals. More Than Shelter makes clear that such limited perspectives do not capture the rich reality of tenants' active engagement in shaping public housing into communities. By looking closely at three public housing projects in San Francisco, Amy L. Howard brings to light the dramatic measures tenants have taken to create--and sustain and strengthen--communities that mattered to them.

More Than Shelter opens with the tumultuous institutional...

In the popular imagination, public housing tenants are considered, at best, victims of intractable poverty and, at worst, criminals. More Than Shelter makes clear that such limited perspectives do not capture the rich reality of tenants' active engagement in shaping public housing into communities. By looking closely at three public housing projects in San Francisco, Amy L. Howard brings to light the dramatic measures tenants have taken to create--and sustain and strengthen--communities that mattered to them.

More Than Shelter opens with the tumultuous institutional...

In the wake of its early twentieth-century civil wars, Mexico strove to present itself to the world as unified and prosperous. The preparation in Mexico City for the 1968 Summer Olympics was arguably the most ambitious of a sequence of design projects that aimed to signal Mexico's arrival in the developed world. In Spectacular Mexico, Luis M. Castaneda demonstrates how these projects were used to create a spectacle of social harmony and ultimately to guide the nation's capital into becoming the powerful megacity we know today.

Not only the first Latin American country...

In the wake of its early twentieth-century civil wars, Mexico strove to present itself to the world as unified and prosperous. The preparation in Mexico City for the 1968 Summer Olympics was arguably the most ambitious of a sequence of design projects that aimed to signal Mexico's arrival in the developed world. In Spectacular Mexico, Luis M. Castaneda demonstrates how these projects were used to create a spectacle of social harmony and ultimately to guide the nation's capital into becoming the powerful megacity we know today.

Not only the first Latin American country...