Public toilets determine who gets everyday dignity, freedom of movement, and civic belonging-and who doesn't.

Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

For Customers Only is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren't only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.

But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about-provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity.

The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.

Unmasks the long-forgotten story of how a flying, superhuman vigilante played a pivotal role in the founding of the American labor movement.

On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia's night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the announcement of his arrival appeared under the title "The Night-Hawk, No. 1" with a cryptic epigraph from Romeo and Juliet: "I'll be a candleholder and look on." Who and what was the Night Hawk? As Matthew Warner Osborn reveals, this was the sobriquet of a mysterious columnist for the weekly Mechanics' Free Press, the first radical socialist newspaper in America. Dressed in a mysterious cloak, the Night Hawk soared over Philadelphia, revealing the evil crimes of prominent gentlemen, fighting murderous criminals, and calling out fraudulent moral authorities.

The Night Hawk was the ingenious invention of an impoverished actor, Cornelius A. Logan, who created the character as a public champion of Philadelphia's Working Men's movement, the first successful American labor party. The Night Hawk's nocturnal adventures transformed their socialist ideology into an entertaining fantasy that dramatized the struggle against industrial exploitation and the degradation of working people. The success of the character made Logan into a celebrity, and he went on to become a popular and innovative comedian on the antebellum stage.

A harbinger of the superheroes we know today, the Night Hawk promises to illuminate dark secrets from the past, but he can also shed light on our present. He ignites our need to see corrupt elites unmasked and held accountable for their actions, all while protecting the innocent and oppressed. Americans have always loved to fantasize about powerful superheroes who hide behind masks while chasing bad guys, and Osborn shows in this entertaining history how the Night Hawk was perhaps the first standard bearer for that enduring mystique.

This book explores how South Africa's histories of colonialism and apartheid, together with cultural and social norms, shape how primary school teachers understand and respond to men's absence and presence in the early years of schooling. It shows that explanations for why men do-or do not-teach young children are not neutral, but are embedded in complex, gendered processes that reflect the country's distinctive socio-political landscape. In doing so, these interpretations often reproduce gendered inequalities that affect male and female teachers as well as the children they teach. Drawing on Southern theories, the book also offers a decolonial framework for researching men and masculinities in the early years, contributing new perspectives to debates about gender, care, and teaching in the Global South.

This book will be of interest to scholars in Gender Studies, Masculinity Studies, Education, and Sociology.

This book aims to provide a practical and accessible resource for school leaders and educators in Islamic schools, focusing learning and teaching rooted in the Islamic worldview. Drawing from theoretical insights and school and classroom-based case studies, it offers innovative approaches for renewing educational practice in Islamic schools across Australia and beyond. The book serves as an inspiration for educational renewal of Islamic Schools to become schools that advance distinct models of holistic faith-informed educational practice. Through contributions from experienced practitioners and seasoned academics, this book seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practical implementation in Islamic schooling.

From the acclaimed author of The Fate of Rome and Plagues upon the Earth, a monumental history of the world that lays bare the devastating human toll on animal life

Humans are a force of nature like no other animal on the planet. For thousands of years, we have radically altered the destiny of other species. Today, we do so at such an accelerating rate that it is widely proposed that we live on the brink of a Sixth Extinction, comparable to the most destructive moments in the fossil record. The Last Animal provides the first historical account of humanity's impact on animal biodiversity, taking readers from the megafaunal extinctions of the Ice Age to the planetwide perils of the present.

In a masterful blend of global history with the latest discoveries in ecology, evolution, and Earth system science, Kyle Harper casts the Sixth Extinction in a new light. He meticulously documents the long history of human-driven biodiversity loss, insisting that both species extinctions and ecosystem simplification are essential to measuring humanity's impact, which is more profound than recognized. The Last Animal reenvisions the human story by highlighting a wondrous range of extinct creatures and the webs of life they inhabited. Set against a backdrop of migrations and empires, wars and revolutions, and the inexorable march of technological progress, Harper's epic narrative demonstrates how our ability to manipulate nature is a fundamental yet increasingly dangerous element of our success.

Putting the grand sweep of world history into geological perspective, Harper argues that the long view is essential to confronting the urgent challenges we face. A startling account of how much biodiversity has already been lost, The Last Animal is also a poignant call to protect what remains.

Notable historians delve into the brass tacks of launching and sustaining federal agencies.

Critics regularly complain that the United States government can't do big things. While their explanations differ, there is now a growing sense that American institutions are not delivering solutions to the problems of our time. The New Deal offers a striking contrast. During the 1930s, the United States created a wealth of new agencies, departments, offices, and programs-and in very short order.

This illuminating collection brings together leading American historians to offer fifteen detailed accounts of how this remarkable expansion of state capacity actually happened. From the Civilian Conservation Corps to the Rural Electrification Administration to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the authors dig into the nuts and bolts of how exactly the New Dealers did so much all at once. They detail the choices before state builders who, operating under the pressure and immediacy of the era, made decisions that held even greater consequences in the longer term.

In a time when federal agencies are under stress like never before, the contributors offer critical insights about what future administrations can learn from the New Deal's extraordinary achievements and how they can build state capacity and deliver for Americans once again.

Features contributions by W. Tanner Allread, Mary Bridges, Brent Cebul, Sarah E. Igo, Meg Jacobs, Richard R. John, Neil M. Maher, Sharon Ann Musher, Sarah T. Phillips, Kathryn Olmsted and Eric Rauchway, Alex Platt, Jason Scott Smith, Ganesh Sitaraman, Abby Spinak, Chloe Thurston, and Mason B. Williams.

How Zambian Pentecostal activists worked to transform their country into a self-styled "Christian nation"

In 2015, Zambia began an ambitious program to "actualize" the country's constitutional declaration that it was a "Christian nation." For Pentecostal Christian nationalist activists, this was a "divine season," an opportunity to change their country by submitting it to God's control. In this book, Naomi Haynes examines these efforts at national transformation, offering a careful ethnographic exploration of Christian nationalist theology, ritual, and policy initiatives. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Lusaka, Zambia's capital, Haynes describes how activists promoted Zambia's Christian identity, whether by writing books and newspaper articles, posting on social media, building new monuments, praying for the nation, or lobbying for constitutional changes.

By tracing Zambian Christian nationalism's internal contradictions and tensions, Haynes charts its ultimate failure, which she ascribes in part to institutional opposition from the civil service and Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations. She also points to what she terms its fatal theological flaw, going beyond the usual secular analysis in anthropology to engage with theological critiques of Christian nationalism. The example of Zambia offers the most fully realized expression of Christian nationalism outside the West, demonstrating what this movement can look like when given free political rein. With this book, Haynes provides an instructive account of an increasingly influential global movement.

Explores the institutional and environmental transformations that occurred during the Reconstruction Era.

While the Reconstruction Era in America saw a paradigmatic realignment of the country's core institutions and values, there was a physical quality to Reconstruction as well: the country was not only rebuilding the South after the Civil War, but flat-out building as it expanded westward.

In Reconstructors, John Dean Davis details how the Army Corps of Engineers and its subcontractors designed and redesigned the infrastructural landscape to support the republic's rebirth. The Corps' projects not only transformed the landscape; they created markets, fostered a distinctive expansionist culture, and-for a time-enacted a less discriminatory economic and social agenda across the South and West. Davis aims to bring federal power, environmentalism, and capitalism into a frame that reveals the landscape's power to further ideology.

The life and work of an American Jewish convert to Islam who became a leading voice of the global Islamic Revival, explored through the lens of emotion in transnational religious identity

Maryam Jameelah (1934-2012)-born Margaret Marcus in White Plains, New York-followed an unlikely journey, from comfortable suburban childhood to influential voice of the twentieth-century global Islamic Revival. Jameelah's more than twenty books and pamphlets, translated into a dozen languages, were notable for their unrelenting critique of modernity and arguments for the superiority of Islam in opposition to the West. In this exploration of her life and work, Justine Howe shows how Jameelah harnessed negative emotions-what Howe calls an "antimodern affect"-to call attention to what she saw as the catastrophes wrought by materialism and secularism. For Jameelah, galvanizing these emotions formed the basis of global Muslim solidarity that could be mobilized for a reinvigorated Islamic future.

Tracing Jameelah's successive incarnations-from Reform Jew to highly mobile spiritual seeker and finally to fervent Muslim polemicist-Howe analyzes how women, gender, and family became the central nodes of Jameelah's vision. Projecting herself as an embodiment of Muslim femininity as she pursued a career as a public intellectual, Jameelah subverted the very boundaries and prescriptions she sought to impose on others. Howe's exploration of the multivalent threads that animated Jameelah's religious imagination reveals unexpected entanglements of American Judaism, global Islam, feminism, and anticolonialism.

Still Shaking the Table: Activism, Unity, and Supporting Students is the second volume in the Shaking the Table series, which centers the voices of identity center practitioners navigating increasingly complex, politicized, and constrained higher education environments. As colleges and universities continue to struggle to meaningfully support students across marginalized identities-including race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, religion, and citizenship status-those working within identity-based centers remain at the forefront of advocacy, care, and institutional change, often at great personal and professional cost.

Building on the foundation of Shaking the Table, which focused on survival and healing, this volume moves more explicitly into the terrain of campus activism, coalition-building, and sustained support for students. Amid mounting resistance to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts nationwide, practitioners are increasingly asked to navigate competing institutional interests, political pressures, and shifting student needs, while showing up for the communities they serve. Through first-person narratives, contributors illuminate the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities that emerge when identity-centered work exists in opposition to institutional norms and state-level constraints.

Organized around three interconnected themes-Navigating Activism, Fostering Unity, and Supporting Students-this volume highlights how practitioners engage in advocacy within and beyond their institutions, wrestle with questions of privilege and intersectionality, and develop responsive practices to meet students' evolving needs. Across the chapters, authors explore the labor of coalition-building, the emotional toll of identity-based work, and the critical importance of self-reflection, critical hope, and collective care as strategies for longevity.

Still Shaking the Table serves as both a mirror and a roadmap: a reflection of the lived realities of identity center practitioners and a guide for those committed to advancing justice-oriented work in higher education. It is a resource for practitioners, scholars, and graduate students, and a call to action for supervisors, senior leaders, and institutions to move beyond performative commitments toward meaningful, accountable support for identity centers and the people who lead them.

Experience a year in Los Angeles County, in all its glitter and grit, through a unique anthology that pairs essays by acclaimed writers and historians with custom maps.

When many of us picture Los Angeles, we're actually thinking of LA County. Home to roughly ten million people, the county alone is more populous than forty-two US states. Its eighty-eight cities include places made famous by Hollywood glamor and California dreaming-Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Santa Monica-but also working-class municipalities and the self-explanatory City of Industry. With a territory that includes the Pacific coastline, mountain ranges, and the high Mojave Desert, the county's landscapes have been touched by earthquakes, droughts, and, of course, devastating fires. LA County is a place of extremes: progress and injustice, innovation and stagnation.

Visions of the Southland collects essays by writers, journalists, and historians to create a nuanced portrait of LA that's grounded in the county itself-its sites, structures, and stories. Contributors-including Gustavo Arellano, Keri Blakinger, Lynell George, Christopher Hawthorne, Michael Hiltzik, Greg Hise, Carolina Miranda, Becky Nicolaides, Susan Straight, and David L. Ulin-delve into LA's infamous air pollution, movie ranches, prisons, aqueducts, urban forests, SoCal Bohemianism, and more. A custom map by Ezra Rawitsch enriches each piece and grounds the reader in specific locations throughout the county. Unfolding over the course of a year, the book traces the rhythms of politics, sports, weather, and wildlife across this sprawling and enigmatic place.

Sweeping in its scope and gorgeous in its design, Visions of the Southland will delight Angelenos, history buffs, urbanists, and map enthusiasts alike.

How the police in Minneapolis used electoral politics to accrue power and avoid accountability.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd made Minneapolis synonymous with unjust policing and the pain and outrage left in its wake. The city became ground zero for police reform in the United States-even though liberal politicians in Minnesota had promised, and delivered, police reforms for decades. Centered on professionalization, these changes inadvertently exacerbated injustice. Better training and higher standards broadened the influence of the police, who then claimed expertise in public safety. They deployed it to bargain for governmental support, even when they treated residents unfairly. Though Black, Indigenous, and gay residents resisted, the political power amassed by the police rendered real change almost impossible.

In A Police State, historian and fourth-generation Minneapolis resident Michael J. Lansing chronicles how the police became a political force in one of the nation's most liberal cities. Lansing shows how, in the years after World War II, public safety policies that appealed to voters in the overwhelmingly white city protected and expanded police discretion. As union members, administrators, and citizens, officers shaped these policies to shield themselves and their violent actions from scrutiny. They campaigned for better wages, secured legal safeguards, resisted race-neutral policing, and elected one of their own to the mayor's office. Ultimately, they used democratic institutions to cultivate and sustain a police state that protected white people and harmed people of color. Lansing uncovers this dysfunctional relationship between a city and its cops while illuminating a larger American story about reform, resistance, and democracy.

A significant exploration of policing politics, this book helps us understand the history that led to George Floyd's murder-and insists that the future of community safety depends on reenvisioning the role of police in our society.

This volume offers a comprehensive exploration of how displacement and migration are shaped by the gendered politics of place, through the lens of critical feminist geopolitics. It brings together interdisciplinary contributions that connect historical legacies of colonialism with contemporary issues, such as statelessness, refugee crises, and urban precarity. Spanning themes from colonial-era upheavals to present-day refugee narratives and urban marginalization in urban spaces, the chapters demonstrate how gender, identity, and power intersect across diverse geographic contexts. By bridging feminist theory with empirical case studies, the volume provides fresh conceptual frameworks and comparative insights that deepen our understanding of forced migration, belonging and resistance. The book is a vital resource for researchers, scholars, and graduate students in gender studies, migration studies, human geography, and related fields.

The 2024 Paris Olympics broke many records and had multiple highlights. It constituted the first Olympics with gender parity among athletes, had a special focus on sustainability, and showed record breaking performances including 32 new world records. The Games attracted more than 1 million spectators in different venues in and around Paris, and billions of spectators on TV across the globe. Without exaggeration, the Paris Games were the largest and most popular sports event of the year, and most likely the decade so far.

Yet the Paris Olympics were not only a sporting event. From its global scale, corporate sponsors and nationalistic symbols, to the controversies some aspects of the Games triggered, they were also an inherently political spectacle. Focusing particularly on the National Olympic Hospitality Houses and the ways in which global crises such as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine complicated the organization of the Games, this volume examines the political nature of the Paris Games from various perspectives. In doing so, it highlights the dualism between sports and politics, transparency and corruption, and peace and conflict.

A wide-ranging history of American land ownership, from westward expansion to the suburban housing crisis

From its very beginnings, the United States has defined itself by its relationship to land. Settlers saw the continent as the raw material for building a prosperous life while their leaders viewed it as a means for building a people. In the 1950s, the suburban home became a place for Americans to create a personal utopia of lawns and living rooms, of washing machines and dishwashers. Property Values traces how land and its ownership became inextricably tied to the American ideal of independence-and demonstrates why the Homestead Act and a thirty-year mortgage have far more in common than you think.

In this engaging book, Joshua Specht uncovers the history behind the American conviction that widespread land ownership is a fundamental requirement for a flourishing democratic society. We meet the nineteenth-century settler farmers whose dreams of new social and political forms were built on vast quantities of land taken from native peoples, and the European immigrants who came seeking a better life as land-owning citizens. For FDR, homeownership offered a path out of the depths of the Great Depression. For George W. Bush, it gave people a permanent stake in the American dream. Specht charts how the vision of plenty that first drew homesteaders westward gave way to one of scarcity and exclusion as new neighbors came to be seen as a threat to property values and a system meant to promote ownership put it squarely out of reach for many.

Taking readers from the rent wars of the early 1840s through the financial crisis of the late 2000s, Property Values reveals why housing affordability has posed significant challenges to the nation's politics and promise since the founding, and why the American story has always been one about land.

A cultural and legal history intertwined with a deeply emotional meditation on the course of life, memory, and the documents that define us.

During the 1940s and 1950s, an untold number of American children suffered devastating injuries when the fur-like fabric on the chaps of their Gene Autry-branded cowboy playsuits exploded into flame. Barbara Young Welke was researching this history when her teenage daughter unexpectedly died.

The shock of Welke's loss transformed her understanding of the children and their families. Her experience also led her to question the norms of scholarship and of writing. Historians are trained to separate the personal from the intellectual, to be suspicious of emotion. These and other norms are embedded in and reinforced by the calling card of academics, the curriculum vitae. Welke wondered how that cold document-with its literal meaning, "the course of life"-had become a form that excludes so much of what gives life meaning. What impact did that have on what we know, how we know it, and how we understand ourselves? Similarly, Welke wondered, what might we see if we looked at the history of the cowboy suit tragedy as more than a matter of lawsuits brought by grieving families? Here, Welke traces the making, marketing, and selling of the cowboy suits; the lengths the defendants went to avoid and limit liability; and the meaning of the injuries, deaths, and legal settlements in the course of these children's and families' lives.

Writing with Fire interweaves the histories of the cowboy suit tragedy and the curriculum vitae. Grounded in archival and legal research, oral histories, and letters Welke wrote her daughter following her death, Welke offers an inimitable examination of trauma, law, autobiography, and identity. The result is revelatory and unforgettable: a provocative historical reflection on life and death, depression and war, markets and families, law, power, and precarity in modern America.

A richly illustrated history that reveals how the peoples living along the Danube frontier helped transform the Roman Empire

Crossing the Danube offers a new account of the peoples who lived along Europe's greatest river-the nearly 2,000-mile-long Danube-during the dramatic centuries leading up to the end of the Roman Empire in the West. Written sources of this period are dominated by accounts of Rome's struggle against the "barbarians" along the Danube, which marked the border between the empire and the lands beyond, and the crossing of the river by Gothic refugees escaping the Huns in 376 CE was long seen as a catalyst of Rome's fall. But, as Susanne Hakenbeck shows, that is not the whole story. The Danube was not only a political boundary, but a living landscape. Using archaeological evidence, she traces four tumultuous centuries along the river through the material world of the people who lived there.

Crossing the Danube describes how ordinary people and local elites navigated, exploited, and ultimately transformed the Roman frontier. It tells how generations of interactions-through diplomacy, trading, raiding, and recruitment into the Roman army-bound the empire and the people beyond the frontier together. By the fifth century, former "barbarians" embraced the trappings of Roman imperial power and moved toward full political participation. In doing so, the people from beyond the Danube ended up fracturing the empire.

Sweeping in scope yet rich in detail, Crossing the Danube overturns longstanding myths about the role of the so-called barbarians in Rome's collapse.

This book aims to provide insights into the field of ICT-related teacher professional development, making valuable theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions to the research within educational settings in developing countries like Vietnam. Over the years, technology has been an irreversible force driving educational transformation. Teachers' digital competence is increasingly essential for the effective integration of educational technology across curricula and plays an important role in ensuring quality assurance. English language teachers worldwide face similar challenges in upskilling and reskilling due to the fast development of information technology. In response to these global and local demands, governments from different continents (e.g. Asia, Europe or Africa, etc.) have been investing in educational technology as a pathway to sustainable social development.

In-service digital mediated training is essential for teachers' upskilling and reskilling, requiring a context dependent framework for ICT-related professional development. Although numerous studies address the theme of educational technology, this book stands out as the first to establish a framework grounded in general theory of pedagogy, andragogy and a comprehensive need analysis. The empirical triangulation research with data collected from the surveys, interviews and meta-document analysis was employed in this study. This book provides practical guidelines and recommendations for policy makers, educators, curriculum designers and academic scholars. The findings offer valuable insights for language teacher educators and trainers, guiding an effective technology integration in English language education and shaping forward-thinking approach in a digitalized world.