Dorothy Healey was a member of the Communist movement in the U.S. from 1928 until 1973, leading the Southern California District for over 20 years. She is one of the few women to rise to power in the American Communist Party. She is a survivor of the epic labor struggles of California’s migrant workers in the 1930s and at one point even had a $10,000 price on her head, as she was hunted by vigilantes and police. Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party, recounts her life in her own words, written in collaboration with William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History Maurice Isserman. Isserman edited and supplemented Healey’s engaging narrative. He fills the story, drawing from private letters, the recollections of friends and relatives, newspaper articles, and secret FBI documents. More ...

How does what we know shape the ways we read? Starting from the premise that any productive theory of narrative must take into account the presuppositions the reader brings to the text, Before Reading explores how our prior knowledge of literary conventions influences the processes of interpretation and evaluation. Available again with a new preface by James Phelan, Before Reading offers a valuable and coherent framework for approaching the study of narrative. More ...

As evocative as the aspen foliage that enlivens the high country in October, The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn, originally published in 1982, is the centerpiece of a trilogy that John Nichols wrote about his first fifteen years in Taos, New Mexico. The other volumes are If Mountains Die and On the Mesa. More ...

For the first time in paperback with a new foreword by the author, On the Mesa is an autobiographical celebration of life in a fragile and marginal place. On the deserted sagebrush plain just west of his home in Taos, New Mexico, John Nichols finds a healing serenity and an astonishing variety of life and mood that casual observers rarely notice. With On the Mesa, Nichols takes his place with the great nature writers of the West. More ...

Harry Platt Bristol Professor of International Relations Alan Cafruny has joined with Carl Lankowski in editing this two-part work which explores the validity of European unity since the establishment of the European Union (EU). The authors have focused on the connections between processes of European integration and the articulation of alternative programs and policies. The first part of this volume considers the key unresolved dilemmas of the new economic and political union, while the second part examines case studies of political and social movements through the EU, closely examining those states that have voiced the greatest concern about the union, as well as the greatest support. More ...

Anticorruption reforms provide excellent political cover for public officials, but do they really reduce corruption? And do the benefits outweigh the costs? Maynard-Knox Professor of Government Frank Anechiarico and James B. Jacobs are authors of the book, The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity, How Corruption Conrol Makes Government Ineffective. More ...

Hamilton College Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History Robert Paquette, in coordination with University of Rochester Professor of Economics Stanley L. Engerman offer this collection of essays which explore the Lesser Antilles from the time of Columbus to the abolition of slavery. Paquette and Engerman attempt to demonstrate how the Lesser Antilles emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries as among the most densely populated and advanced economic areas in the world. They hope to show how the Lesser Antilles served as a stepping-stone for expansion of the slave trade and by extension for the plantation system in the Americas. More ...

Hamilton College American Studies and Comparative Literature Professor Thomas Bass has written an anecdotal look at the sad stories of Amerasian children of the Vietnam war. In his book, Vietnamerica: The War Comes Home, Bass examines the stories of children born to American servicemen and Vietnamese women during the war in Vietnam. He focuses on the struggles of these Amerasian children, now adults, attempting to immigrate to the US. Searching for unidentifiable fathers, dealing with bureaucracy and surviving corruption, these young adults try to build themselves a life and finally find acceptance in a society which welcomes them no more than the land of their birth had. Bass tells the sad tales of these immigrants, already Americans by birth, struggling to make it to their new homeland. More ...