New Book: Sabine N. Meyer's We Are What We Drink: The Temperance Battle in Minnesota

A book about the battle over the bottle in the Twin Cities.
We Are What We Drink: The Temperance Battle in Minnesota
by Sabine N. Meyer
University of Illinois Press, 2015

Focusing on the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, Sabine Meyer's We Are What We Drink intertwines national, regional, and urban history during the Progressive era, along with the political motivations and legislative actions at the city and state level in Minnesota, to unravel the temperance movement’s relationship to and effect on identity constructions as well as social, ethnic, racial, religious and political elements.  Covering a 100-year period (1819-1919), the project shows the ways that we are what we drink by examining the formation of civic identities of the cities themselves, Irish and German immigrants, and women in the public sphere and how the groups' involvement in the temperance movement helped to shape their categories of identity and establish a civic role: German immigrants continued to support public drinking to uphold their heritage; Irish immigrants joined religious forces to condemn drinking and to embed themselves in their new homeland; and women sought to protect the domestic sphere by moving their fight into the public sphere. Meanwhile, each Twin City had opposite stances on temperance with St. Paul being liquor friendly and Minneapolis being a hotbed for the liquor reform movement.

Meyer draws on a vast range of primary source materials including newspaper and court archival records and situates her own work within relevant scholarship on temperance, civic identity, Minnesota history, Irish and German American ethnic identity, and construction of female identity in the public sphere. In doing so, Meyer provides a thorough overview about how the role of drink and the attempt to regulate drink in connection with a social movement influenced local, ethnic, and gender identity construction.

This is one of the first books I acquired, and so I am especially pleased to see it out. If you think the cover is awesome, wait until you read what's on the inside!

The Crisis in the Dominican Republic: A Reading List

There is a humanitarian crisis that has been evolving in the Dominican Republic, and it is perplexing why more people aren't talking about it because of its significance regarding law, race, and basic human rights. For decades, Haitians have moved to the Dominican Republic, oftentimes to escape poverty in Haiti. Discrimination against people of Haitian descent is intense in the Dominican Republic (there was a lynching earlier this year), and in 2013 the Dominican Republic courts denied citizenship to all descendants of Haitian-born parents, impacting tens of thousands of people, some of whom have spent their entire lives in the Dominican Republic. Recently, there was news media coverage of authors Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat speaking out about the situation. There is a link to that article below, along with other articles assembled along a timeline that provide a sense of the situation, especially over the past several months as thousands of people face statelessness.

October 15, 2012 article about 1937 event: Parsley Massacre: The Genocide that Still Haunts Haiti-Dominican Relations, International Business Times, by Palash Ghosh

October 7, 2013: The Dominican Republican and Haiti: One Island Riven by An Unresolved Past, The Guardian, by Carrie Gibson

October 24, 2013: Dominicans of Haitian Descent Cast into Legal Limbo by Court, The New York Times, by Randal C. Archibold

May 22, 2014: Dominican Republic Lawmakers Pass Citizenship Bill, BBC News

February 3, 2015: Thousands of Dominicans Woke Up This Week without Citizenship in Any Country, The Huffington Post Latino Voices, Roque Planas

February 11, 2015: Haitian Man Lynched amid Dominican Republic Immigration Controversy, The Huffington Post Latino Voices, Roque Planas

June 16, 2015: Dominicans of Haitian Descent Fear Mass Deportation as Headline Looms, The Guardian, by Sibylla Brodzinsky

June 16, 2015: Dominican Republic Threatens to Deport Haitian Families, The Root, by Nsenga K. Burton

June 25, 2015: Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat Jointly Speak Out Against Dominican Republic Refugee Crisis, Fusion, by Daniel Rivero

June 26, 2015: Haiti PM Warns of "Humanitarian Crisis" Caused by Dominican Deportation Policy, The Guardian, Associated Press

July 2, 2015: The Dominican Time Bomb, The New York Times Magazine, by Jonathan M. Katz

July 5, 2015: Deportations of Noncitizens in Dominican Republic Protested by Activists in Boston, The Boston Globe, by Laura Crimaldi

I have found myself turning the most to the coverage in The Guardian. (Search "Dominican Republic" on The Guardian's homepage for articles on the issue that go back several years.) How will you stay on top of news on this issue?

#AAUP2015

The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) met in Denver, Colorado, June 18 to 21, 2015. I travel to several academic conferences each year for acquisitions purposes where organizations meet to network, exchange ideas, promote professional development, and to present ideas about their current findings; the AAUP meeting is not much different. At Denver #AAUP15, people in all aspects of university press (UP) publishing convened, from production and marketing, to journals and design, to business and acquisitions. Much like UPs attend scholarly conferences to exhibit books to their target audiences, vendors that provide services for publishers attend AAUP, exhibiting while AAUP members dipped in and out of panels and catch up with old friends.

The theme of this year's meeting was "Connect, Collaborate," and that is truly what attendees did. To give a sense, I connected with people from press departments at a similar stage in their career, acquisitions editors at all career levels, early career and first time AAUP members, and a cohort of people who are tapped into social networking and the ways we can harness the power of social media for scholarly publishing purposes across a spectrum. There were also some panels dedicated to exploring the possibility of the intersection of scholarly and social. A roundtable panel that I was a part of asked "Should Scholarly Be Social?" Our conclusion: yes. Yes, because our mission as university presses is to disseminate scholarship to the broadest possible audience, and a tweet, a blog post, and an Instagram are in service of this. Yes, because we have to look to our authors and scholars in the fields we publish and take cues from their practices (oh, and how marvelously you scholars are tweeting and engaging in various media). Yes, because we are at a disadvantage if we don't think openly about the newest technologies at our disposal. Another session at the conference, "Scholarship in 140 Characters? Using Social Media in Acquisitions," spoke about social media specifically from the acquisitions perspective. The conclusions here were the same: the opportunities that social networking creates for you to build relationships far outweighs any potential drawbacks to what you might not be able to predict someone might post/share/tweet.

While the conferences panels are structured and offer enriching insights, some of the most valuable opportunities at the meeting are the informal discussions that happen between panels, during breaks, or over drinks. I see this as crucially beneficial on two main fronts. The first is that these candid moments of telling personal stories can bring to light different processes among jobs or presses that can lead to more efficient operations, whether institutionally, departmentally, or individually. The second is that the connections we make within the organizations have potential to grow into friendships and exchanges that will help to shape the organization and the future of university press publishing. To have established relationships that facilitate open dialogue and multiple perspectives prevent the risk of one, monolithic idea of what UP publishing has to be, because this breeds mediocrity and stifles possibility. The collegiality, generosity, respect toward different practices, and general enthusiasm that pervaded the meeting certainly bodes well for an industry that is always being told it is in crisis.

Of course, this post only covers a smidgeon of what happened. No post could adequately itemize the diverse, dynamic, and multifaceted exchanges throughout keynotes, lunches, and panels. Fortunately, the association has some very dedicated Tweeters, so take a look through the #AAUP15 hashtag, whether you are in publishing and looking for more insight into UP publishing specifically, are a prospective author who wants more insight into the functioning of the UP world, or are someone at a UP who wasn't able to attend the conference this year.