Stanford University Press Blog

Surprise Halloween Sale 2021

SUP announces a special treat for this Halloween weekend!

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

Happy Halloween from SUP! We are excited to offer a 30% discount and free North American shipping on the below titles with the code HALLOWEEN30-FM at checkout on sup.org. This offer is good through November 1, 2021.

 

Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science »

ALICIA PUGLIONESI

"Common Phantoms offers an insightful, entertaining look at America's haunted history and Americans' hunger to understand the invisible forces that shape their lives. Alicia Puglionesi's artful examination of psychic science—its investigators and experiments, its skeptics and true believers—provides a fascinating view of the empirical study of spiritual pursuits."

—Peter Manseau, Smithsonian Curator of American Religious History and author of The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost

Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. Common Phantoms brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences.

Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Conference 2021

 

New Books and New SUP Authors

From the Blog 

Recent Award Winners

ASAP Resources

 

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New Books and New SUP Authors

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off  and free North American shipping on these and other recent SUP titles with discount code S21XASAP-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

American Studies Association Conference 2021

 

 

New Books and New SUP Authors

From the Blog 

Recent Award Winners

ASA Resources

 

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New Books and New SUP Authors

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off  and free North American shipping on these and other recent SUP American Studies titles with discount code S21XASTA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

The Vomit School of Literature

Fighting Censorship in New York City

BRETT GARY

May 10 1939, Attorney Morris Ernst appearing as a witness  before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to favor the Ludlow resolution. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-123456]

 

 

In  honor of Banned books week SUP is proud to present an adapted excerpt from Chapter 5 of Dirty Works: Obscenity on Trial in America’s First Sexual Revolution ». A rich account of 1920s to 1950s New York City, starring an eclectic mix of icons like James Joyce, Margaret Sanger, and Alfred Kinsey—all led by an unsung hero of free expression and reproductive rights: Morris L. Ernst, a New York City attorney and long-time general counsel for the ACLU

 

IN THE EARLY 1930s the battles over obscenity laws and their enforcement took place in a rapidly changing media environment in which “objectionable” images and works were increasingly widespread. Amid the “eroticization of leisure time,” to use Jay Gertzman’s phrase, John S. Sumner and his moral reform allies were hard-pressed to protect the “genteel literary code” they and an older generation of established publishers and literary gatekeepers had adhered to.¹ By the end of the 1920s the book publishing industry was regularly making modernist works available to an interested public. Sumner attacked all books that violated this genteel code—books he thought were not morally uplifting or appropriately reticent about discussing the physical body, especially sexual issues. As Gertzman writes, Sumner and his fellow “moral entrepreneurs” believed that “since the life of the human body stood as far from morality as self-centered sensual satisfaction stood from disinterested reason, all texts that focused on sex, whether marriage manuals, birth-control tracts, or steamy novels, spoke aloud what for the sake of spiritual health had to be kept hidden.”²

Although soft-spoken and reserved compared to his predecessor, Anthony Comstock, Sumner viewed the world in similarly stark black-and-white terms. He spoke of decent folks versus cultural pariahs, clean versus dirty, uplifting versus degrading, moral versus immoral, patriotic versus subversive, high versus low, decent versus indecent, and so on. As Gertzman writes, Sumner “thought it necessary to defend a ‘one hundred percent American’ moral consensus—an amalgam of sexual reticence, patriotism, and Christian piety—against the immigrant, the Bolshevik, the money-grubbing urbanite, the worldly sophisticate, and the effete intellectual.”³ Fighting against such moral absolutism was an insurgent intellectual movement—modernism—that privileged individual experience, subjected inherited cultural standards to criticism, and inspected sex and sexuality as the governing principles driving human existence.⁴ These forces and instincts ought to be examined, discussed, performed, and written about, not repressed and silenced.

American Political Science Association Conference 2021

 

 

New Books and New SUP Authors

Recent Award Winners

APSA Resources

 

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New Books and New SUP Authors

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Sociology titles with discount code S21XAPSA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».