Perhaps the most high-profile trial was Mary Lincoln’s Insanity Case. The author, Jason Emerson, is a participant in The Insanity Retrial of Mary Lincoln, a project “to educate and inform the public about Mary Lincoln’s insanity episode and modern-day mental health issues.” Many of the events are sold out but the online coverage is robust.

Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight, examines how an Illinois woman went from wife and asylum-committed heretic to author and lobbyist for the civil rights of married women and the mentally ill.

In The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law, A. Cheree Carlson writes about the trials of Mary Lincoln, Elizabeth Packard, as well as Lizzie Borden and other less-well-known cases where women were tried for crimes ranging from committing abortions and passing as white to killing a married boyfriend.

Michael A. Rembis takes us nearly to the present day in Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960. Unlike the previous books, Defining Deviance focuses mostly on women and girls whose behavior and names did not make the headlines. Instead of following more well-known and oftentimes more powerful women into courtrooms and jails, interpretations by those in power of the girls as undesirable “defectives” landed them in the State Training School in Geneva, Illinois, where their threatening behavior could be corrected.

Champaign Taste features it in today’s post, and one of the authorial mushroom hunters will sign books at our lovely local farmers’ market in Urbana on May 16. Other events are being scheduled from Chicago to Carbondale and points in between.

Did I hear you say perfect graduation/mother’s day/father’s day/birthday gift? Yes, I think I did.

Our press has had the privilege of publishing her work for the past decade, including Stupidity, The Test Drive, reprints of Dictations:  On Haunted Writing and Crack Wars, and most recently The Ãœberreader, a hearty sampling of her heterogeneity. A collection of essays on her work, Reading Ronell, edited by Diane Davis, is forthcoming later this year, and a translation of her interviews, published as American Philo in Paris, is due next year. 

If you love thinking, if you think Goethe and Dostoyevsky are worth thinking about, if you’ve ever doubted what doubt can do, you owe yourself a date with Ronell’s writing.

-African Women Playwrights edited and with an Introduction by Kathy A. Perkins (Dec. 8, 2008)
-Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire edited by Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Dec. 8, 2008)
-Wartime Diary by Simone de Beauvoir (Dec. 15, 2008)
-Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture by Lisa Woolfork (Dec. 15, 2008)
-Migration, Class, and Transnational Identities: Croatians in Australia and America by Val Colic-Peisker (Dec. 22, 2008)
-Critical Theory: The Major Documents by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine
(Dec. 22, 2008)
-Ancient Rome in Early Opera by Robert C. Ketterer
(Dec. 29, 2008)
-Culture Makers: Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s by Amy Koritz (Dec. 29, 2008)
-Chinese Street Opera in Singapore by Tong Soon Lee
(Jan. 5, 2009)
-Sufficiency of the Actual by Kevin Stein (Jan. 5, 2009)
-An American in Hitler’s Berlin: Abraham Plotkin’s Diary, 1932-33 edited and with an Introduction by Catherine Collomp and Bruno Groppo (Jan. 5, 2009)
-Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946-69 by James Schwoch (Jan. 12, 2009)
-The Legacy of Edward W. Said by William V. Spanos
(Jan. 12, 2009)
-Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology by Ernst Bertram, translated by Robert E. Norton (Jan. 12, 2009)
-The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law by A. Cheree Carlson (Feb 2, 2009)
-Golf in America by George B. Kirsch  (Feb. 2, 2009)

The publication dates are noted above but all will be available to order within the next week.

-Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader edited by Julie Malnig (November 17, 2008)
-Life along the Illinois River by David Zalaznik  (November 17, 2008)
-Postmodern American Literature and Its Other by W. Lawrence Hogue  (November 17, 2008)
-Rudolf Friml by William Everett
(November 24, 2008)
-Sally Potter by Catherine Fowler
(November 24, 2008)
-Made-from-Bone: Trickster Myths, Music, and History from the Amazon by Jonathan D. Hill (November 24, 2008)
-Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage by Susan Thomas (December 1, 2008)
-A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America by Corey D. B. Walker (December 1, 2008)

The publication dates are noted above but all will be available to order within the next week.

-Terrence Malick by Lloyd Michaels
(October 20, 2008)
-Health Culture in the Heartland, 1880-1980: An Oral History by Lucinda McCray Beier
(October 20, 2008)
-AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities edited by Fran Martin, Peter A. Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue (October 20, 2008)
-Country Music Humorists and Comedians by Loyal Jones (November 3, 2008)
-Place Names of Illinois by Edward Callary (November 3, 2008)
-If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture by Robert Cantwell (November 3, 2008)
-Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life by Jonathan M. Wender
(November 3, 2008)

The publication dates are noted above but all will be available to order within the next week.

-America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century Third Edition by Peter W. Williams (September 29, 2008)
-African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 by Leslie M. Alexander (October 6, 2008)
-The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: A Century of Progress by Cheryl R. Ganz (October 20, 2008)
 
The publication dates are noted above but all will be available to order within the next week.

-Laboring to Learn: Women’s Literacy and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era by Lorna Rivera (September 15, 2008)
-Been a Heavy Life: Stories of Violent Men by Lois Presser (September 15, 2008)
-Black Star: African American Activism in the International Political Economy by Ramla M. Bandele (September 19, 2008)
-The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The Lincoln Studies Center Edition edited by Rodney O. Davis and Douglas L. Wilson  (October 1, 2008)

The publication dates are noted above but all will be available to order within the next week.

Frost Medal recipient Michael Harper has been invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to participate in the National Book Festival in Washington D.C., on September 27, 2008. His new book of poems, Use Trouble, will be published in February 2009 by the University of Illinois Press.

-Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging Urban South by Michelle R. Scott
(August 25, 2008)
-Women in American Journalism: A New History by Jan Whitt (September 1, 2008)
-The World of Soy edited by Christine M. Du Bois, Chee-Beng Tan, and Sidney Mintz (September 1, 2008)
-Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound by Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda (September 1, 2008)
-Spring poems by Oni Buchanan (September 15, 2008)

The publication dates are noted above but all will be available to order within the next week.