The United States detains and deports several hundred thousand migrants every year. Many spend significant amounts of time in immigration detention as they await adjudication of their immigration cases. The Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey is located in a converted warehouse, managed by a private, for-profit prison company. Over three decades, migrants and asylum seekers have been brought to EDC directly from Newark Airport or have been transferred to the site from elsewhere in the...

The definitive portrait of independent filmmaker Robert Kramer that traces the revolutionary dreams of the Left from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century.Robert Kramer (1939–99) was the emblematic filmmaker of the late-1960s New Left in the United States. Yet because most of his three dozen films have been out of circulation for decades, he has long been neglected by film historians and the Left. Kramer was the cofounder of the leftist documentary col...

NJSAA Edited Works Award Winner (2024)Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations that receive far less attention. Though just a few miles from New York, Newark is one of these cities, and its queer ...

For some, he was “America’s leading smut king,” hauled into court repeatedly over thirty years for peddling obscene publications through the mail. But when Samuel Roth appealed a 1956 conviction, he forced the Supreme Court to finally come to grips with a problem that had plagued both American society and constitutional law for longer than he had been in business. For while the facts of Roth v. United States were unexceptional, its constitutional issues would define the relationsh...

In the American imagination, the South is a place both sexually open and closed, outwardly chaste and inwardly sultry. Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture demonstrates that there is no central theme that encompasses sex in the U.S. South, but rather a rich variety of manifestations and embodiments influenced by race, gender, history, and social and political forces.The twelve essays in this volume shine a particularly bright light on the significance of race in sh...

For many Americans, the emergence of a “porno chic” culture provided an opportunity to embrace the sexual revolution by attending a film like Deep Throat (1972) or leafing through an erotic magazine like Penthouse. By the 1980s, this pornographic moment was beaten back by the rise of Reagan-era political conservatism and feminist anti-pornography sentiment.This volume places pornography at the heart of the 1970s American experience, exploring lesser-known forms of pornogra...

While America is not alone in its ambivalence toward sex and its depictions, the preferences of the nation swing sharply between toleration and censure. This pattern has grown even more pronounced since the 1960s, with the emergence of the New Right and its attack on the "floodtide of filth" that was supposedly sweeping the nation. Antipornography campaigns became the New Right's political capital in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for the "family values" agenda that shifted the country t...

"A wonderful introduction to Duberman's writing but is also a fitting tribute to a man who has devoted his life to promoting social change" ( Publishers Weekly).For the past fifty years, prize-winning historian Martin Duberman's groundbreaking writings have established him as one of our preeminent public intellectuals. Founder of the first graduate program in LGBT studies in the country, he is perhaps best known for his biographies of Pau...

From the Pentagon to the wedding chapel, there are few issues more controversial today than gay rights. As William Eskridge persuasively demonstrates in Dishonorable Passions, there is nothing new about this political and legal obsession. The American colonies and the early states prohibited sodomy as the crime against nature, but rarely punished such conduct if it took place behind closed doors. By the twentieth century, America’s emerging regulatory state targeted degenerates an...

A bestselling first collection of humorous and insightful essays by a luminary of the women’s liberation movementThese essays from Gloria Steinem’s first three decades of work offer a portrait of a woman who was not only one of the savviest leaders of the women’s liberation movement, but also a profoundly humane thinker with a wide-ranging intellect and irresistible wit. In “If Men Could Menstruate,” Steinem engages readers in a flight of imagination as incisive as...

In the vein of Taylor Branch's classic Parting of the Waters, Supreme Court lawyer and political pundit Linda Hirshman delivers the enthralling, groundbreaking story of the gay rights movement, revealing how a dedicated and resourceful minority changed America forever.When the modern struggle for gay rights erupted in the summer of 1969, forty-nine states outlawed sex between people of the same gender. Four decades later, in 2011, New York legalized gay marriage ...

In these essays, brought together by the scholar Wahneema Lubiano, some of today's most respected intellectuals share their ideas on race, power, gender, and society.The authors, including Cornel West, Angela Y. Davis, and Toni Morrison, argue that we have reached a crisis of democracy represented by an ominous shift toward a renewed white nationalism in which racism is operating in coded, quasi-respectable new forms.