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November 4th, 2019
Scholarly books have long been the backbone of academia, but too often these books do not get the attention they deserve. In this series, we ask our authors which academic works have had a lasting influence on them. Follow this link to see the rest of the series.
This post is written by Nancy Wingfield, a series editor for our Central European Studies series.
When Justin Race, the director at Purdue University Press, asked if I would like to blog about a monograph that has had an impact on me, I agreed with alacrity, before I’d thought through quite what kind of impact I might address. It didn’t take long, however, for me settle on Elizabeth D. Heineman’s What Difference Does a Husband Make?: Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (University of California Press, 1999). The first part of the title always makes me snicker, while the subtitle precisely explains the topic.
What Difference Does a Husband Make? is the providential combination of a book that impressed me greatly and that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It taught me to think broadly about gender. I’ve regularly cited it in my own work, recommended it to other scholars, and assigned it to students in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. Indeed, I pride myself that my letter to the University of California Press about this book’s popularity among my students, many of whom couldn’t afford to buy it in hardback, helped get it published in paper. This pathbreaking book has a clear thesis, a well-written narrative, useful arguments, and interesting examples based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. The chapter titles, like “Marriage Rubble: The Crisis in the Family, Public and Private,” are enticing. Evocative images, often of Heineman’s female subjects, are incorporated into the text. In my opinion, it’s the very model of a monograph, from the elegant dustjacket (monochromatic; no red and no swastikas) to the comprehensive index. I even like the typeface. Every monograph should be as attractive to the eye and to the intellect as this one.
For those of you who don’t know Heineman’s book, it is a gender and social history of a long neglected, but crucial, element of the Third Reich: women. In her impressive work, Heineman doesn’t employ the standard political-historical divisions, but, rather like a social-history superwoman, she leaps over chronological barriers in a single bound. The wide sweep of her narrative arc includes analysis of women—unwed, married, divorced, and/or widowed—at work and at home across three German political regimes. The categories of women Heineman analyzes are not hard and fast, and women standing alone, from those the Nazis refused to permit to marry to those who looked at imploding families in the postwar era, and chose not to, populate the narrative. In her exploration of the construction of marital status, Heineman traces transitions in the relationships between women and the state from the prewar National Socialism of the 1930s through World War II and to the postwar consolidation of liberal democracy—and the reconstruction of the family—in West Germany and of communism in East Germany. As Heinemann writes, she attempts to untangle a web of comparative and interlocking histories: those of three German states and a period of statelessness.
I found Heineman’s book and the rest of her work, which I have voraciously consumed, useful in my own research, an excellent source for lecture material (above all the variety of behaviors the Nazis considered asocial), a popular reading assignment with undergraduates, and an enthusiastically dissected book in graduate seminars. It seems to me that a monograph can’t really be expected to do more.
Filed under: UncategorizedNovember 4th, 2019
This post is written by Purdue University Press Director Justin Race. It is part of the blog tour hosted by the Association of University Presses in celebration of University Press week. To see the rest of the posts in the tour, click here.
The theme of University Press Week this year is “Read. Think. Act.”. It was chosen to emphasize the role that scholarly publishers can play in moving national and international conversations forward on critical and complex issues. The theme of today’s blog tour is “How to Be a Better (Global) Citizen”.
A week shy of my one-year anniversary with Purdue University Press, it’s a natural time to reflect on where we’ve been and where we hope to go in the future. Every Press comes with its unique legacy. In our case, several premier series that have been leaders in their fields for years, such as New Directions in the Human-Animal Bond and Central European Studies. We have a rich history of publishing Holocaust memoirs—horrific in circumstance, but uplifting that these individuals survived, triumphed, and were able to tell their stories. Books like Eva and Otto are all the more important given so many people did not survive and were effectively silenced.
Our Founders Series has been chronicling the history of Purdue for decades, ensuring that with each graduating class and retiring faculty and staff member, a record persists of what Purdue meant at given points in its 150-year history. We were honored to release two titles this past year celebrating Purdue’s sesquicentennial: Ever True: 150 Years of Giant Leaps at Purdue University and Purdue at 150: A Visual History of Student Life. And finally, our Aeronautics and Astronautics Series, which just released Dear Neil: Letters to the First Man from All Mankind—a book that is both local and global. Armstrong went to Purdue before he went to the moon. He walked across campus before he leapt on behalf of all people.
That’s both a lot to stand on and a lot to live up to—more than 700 books published over 59 years. Next year we turn 60, and we’ll be adding 30 more titles to that total. A university press is your next-door neighbor and your pen pal on the other side of the globe. To browse our website is to see a history of Purdue next to a history of Yugoslavia. Though speaking to different audiences, what unites our titles is the time, energy, and rigor that go into all our books, which are meant to make an impact today and remain relevant for years to come.
Books do many things, but for university presses in particular they inform. They educate. They shed light on a sliver of history or a place you’ve never visited or a person you’ve never met. They introduce ideas you may have never considered or challenge you to reexamine your thinking on a topic you believed you knew well. Ideally study leads to reflection, which leads to understanding. And from understanding it’s a small leap to empathy. The world is a smaller, more interconnected place than it’s ever been. We have no choice but to speak to one another. Books ensure we listen and truly hear one another instead of talking past or yelling at one another. That’s the value of a university press. To be a part of that is what I’m celebrating as my first year comes to a close. To grow and add to it is what I’m looking forward to as my second year begins.
University of Florida Press: Carl Lindskoog, author of Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System, provides a list of actions individuals can take if they are concerned about the detention crisis at the US border.
University of Virginia Press: Excerpt from Amitai Etzioni’s latest book, Reclaiming Democracy, in which he explains how recent global threats to democracy demand the response of a social movement on the scale of the civil rights or environmental movements. Etzioni lays out the requirements and opportunities to achieve such a movement.
Georgetown University Press: A post highlighting ways to be a better global citizen in the context of the global refugee crisis according to David Hollenbach’s Humanity in Crisis: Ethical and Religious Response to Refugees.
University of Wisconsin Press: Focuses on book and journal readings that highlight scholars who are engaging with concepts of global citizenship and influencing public policy to improve global situations.
University of Minnesota Press: Ian G. R. Shaw previews his manifesto for building a future beyond late-stage capitalism, drawing up alternate ways to “make a living” beyond what we’re conditioned for.
University of Nebraska Press: Guest post from Robin Hemley, author of Borderline Citizen, on what it means to be a transnational citizen.
University of Toronto Press: An exclusive excerpt from one of the first two books in our New Jewish Press imprint: The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate by Kenneth S. Stern. As the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, Stern offers some brilliant advice on how we can all think rationally and compassionately in order to be better global citizens.
Vanderbilt University Press: A post looking at ways to practice active citizenship, with an excerpt from Awakening Democracy through Public Work by Harry C. Boyte.
University of North Carolina Press: Alex Dika Seggerman, author of Modernism on the Nile, on how art historians can use a global perspective to rethink the underlying narratives of modernism.
Filed under: UncategorizedJune 14th, 2019
This blog post takes part in a blog tour hosted by the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) in recognition and respect of the sudden passing of the University of Virginia Press director Mark Saunders. As our professional organization gathered this week in Detroit for our annual meeting, search on Twitter with #WeAreUP to read more posts about our sorely missed colleague, Mark, and continue to follow @AUPresses and engage with #ReadUP.
I know who Mark Saunders was, but I did not know him.
That seems weird to say since I have been employed by Purdue University Press in various capacities for 22 years as of next month (hey, I’m not that old – the first three and a half years were as a student worker!). I never met Mark but saw him often from afar at one conference or another. Seeing the impact that Mark had on the publishing industry, specifically the university press industry, is awe-inspiring and makes me wish I had stepped out of my box to introduce myself to him; or asked a colleague to make the introduction. As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. But why should it be? The outpouring of grief, love, and admiration for Mark and the wonderful stories celebrating him as a leader, colleague, mentor, and friend from our community of AUPresses has caught me examining my own hindsight and asking the question, why do we wait to do so?
A little more than 11 years ago my colleague and at the time our managing editor, Margaret, lost her war with cancer. She won the first battle a couple years before that, but the evil disease finally won. She did not pass suddenly, like Mark, so we in the office knew this day would come but the shock was similar when we finally received the news. Stupidly, I did not take the opportunity to go and say goodbye. I grieved in my own way, I keep some things in a box like that for better or for worse. One part of grieving was that I volunteered to clean out her office and pack up her personal items in order to get them back to her family. In doing so, I came across a section of her file cabinet that was bursting with notes, cards, and letters sent to her by a plethora of authors, editors, and colleagues. These items were thanking her for the excellent job on a manuscript, sending good wishes at holidays, or sharing cute and cuddly cat pictures (like many publishers, Margaret was a huge cat person and an expert gardener). I knew that Margaret was good at her job. I respected and admired her, but in reading through these items my hindsight suddenly came into focus and became 20/20. I also realized, I should have picked Margaret’s brain more, asked her all the little questions I had about the industry. I thought they were silly, little questions that would waste her time. I missed the opportunity to receive a different perspective. More importantly, I missed the opportunity to express my admiration and respect to her through words; I missed the opportunity to wish her enough. Hindsight is 20/20.
Mark’s sudden passing and the outpouring of admiration, fun stories, and great respect for him as a colleague and friend throughout our industry brought Margaret back from my memories. What do I take away from this? What do I want others to glean from my short post here?
University presses are not run by one person nor do they succeed because of one person. From the smallest to the largest presses, it takes a team to succeed. If I tried to recall the names of all the staff members, interns, student workers, graduate assistants, and colleagues who I have worked with over the past 22 years I would surely miss several; so, I will not try. But to all of them, I say thank you and my apologies if I had not done so previously. To my current colleagues and friends at Purdue University Press: Becki, Katherine, Kelley, Chris, Matt, Susan, Sarah, Sebastian, Ashutosh, Nina, Marcy, and Justin – thank you for all that you do, for me personally and more so for our team. Our success is because of the whole team.
To all past, present, and future colleagues—at Purdue UP and the greater AUPresses family—: don’t wait for your hindsight to become 20/20. I wish you all enough.
About the author: Bryan Shaffer drove the official Purdue University mascot, the Boilermaker Special, to his interview for a student worker position at the Press in July 1997. He was hired on the spot to design advertisements and to pick-and-pack book orders. When he arrived for the first day of work and he switched on the dusty Apple IIc computer he wondered what in the world he got himself into. Almost 22 years later he is the sales and marketing manager for Purdue University Press and is said to be the “institutional memory” and “den bear” of the small family that makes up the Press. He now knows what he got himself into…..a caring family and greater community. He considers himself very blessed, fortunate, and lucky.