San Antonio College Library

"In this deeply inspiring book, Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi recount their experiences talking to people from all walks of life about race and identity on a cross-country tour of America. Spurred by the realization that they had nearly completed high school without hearing any substantive discussion about racism in school, the two young women deferred college admission for a year to collect first-person accounts of how racism plays out in this country...

Theories of identity have been built largely on biological, psychological, sociological, and anthropological grounds. Missing from each of these, yet of potential relevance to them all, is a community theory of identity such as the one developed here. Situating Selves presents studies of five American scenes, focusing on the ways social identities are communicatively crafted. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork, the book presents fine-grained analyses...

In recent decades it has become fashionable to maintain that the experience of various American ethnic groups - whether African, Indian, or European - is the most significant. In this important social history, the noted scholar Edward Countryman shows, instead, why the very identity of "American"--Forged by all these people - is what matters. This is a scintillating analysis of what becoming American means in historical terms. Edward Countryman offers...

"In just a few years, diversity has become America's most visible cultural ideal. Corporations alter their recruitment and hiring policies in the name of a diverse workforce. Universities institute new admissions procedures in the name of a diverse student body. Presidents choose their major appointees in the name of a diverse cabinet. And what diversity proponents have in mind, Peter Wood argues, is not the dictionary meaning of the word - variety...

Americans assume that workers do not drink on the job and that, if they do, it is because they suffer from alcoholism rather than because they are conforming to occupational expectations. William J. Sonnenstuhl disagrees. He contends that some occupational cultures encourage heavy drinking. Moreover, his research suggests that the sense of community which motivates drinking can also sometimes inspire workers to break the pattern and work sober. Sonnenstuhl...

"In Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture, Anthony Wilson examines the relationship between the ecological history of the southern swamp and the evolution of southern culture from the colonial era to the present. To early European colonists, the swamp was a place linked with sin and impurity. To the plantation elite, it was a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For the many excluded from the white southern aristocracy - African...

Muslim women living in America continue to be marginalized and misunderstood since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, yet their contributions are changing the face of Islam as it is seen both within Muslim communities in the West and by non-Muslims.

The author concludes his "trilogy of American public life" by contemplating the many cultural associations of the color brown--toil, decay, impurity, and time--as he considers the meaning of Hispanics in American society.

"In this pioneering work of cultural history, historian Anthony Harkins argues that the hillbilly - in his various guises of "briar hopper," "brush ape," "ridge runner," and "while trash"--Has been viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the modern order and as a keeper of traditional values of family, home, and physical production, and thus symbolic of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary...