The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America by Linda Gordon
Gordon’s classic study is the most complete history of birth control ever written. It covers the entire history of the intense controversies about reproductive rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, from the earliest attempts of women to organize for the legal control of their bodies to the effects of second-wave feminism. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention by Judith Wellman
Feminists from 1848 to the present have rightly viewed the Seneca Falls convention as the birth of the women’s rights movement in the United States and beyond. The convention succeeded by uniting powerful elements of the antislavery movement, radical Quakers, and the campaign for legal reform under a common cause. Wellman shows that these three strands converged not only in Seneca Falls, but also in the life of women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China by Danke Li
This collection of annotated oral histories records the personal stories of twenty Chinese women who lived in the wartime capital of Chongqing during China’s War of Resistance against Japan during World War II. Their stories demonstrate that the War of Resistance had two faces: one presented by official propaganda and characterized by an upbeat unified front against Japan, the other a record of invisible private stories and a sobering national experience of death and suffering. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music by Eileen M. Hayes
Drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight women’s music festivals, Eileen M. Hayes shows how studying these festivals—attended by predominately white lesbians—provides critical insight into the role of music and lesbian community formation. She argues that the women’s music festival is a significant institutional site for the emergence of black feminist consciousness in the contemporary period. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

Kaija Saariaho by Pirkko Moisala
This book is the first comprehensive study of the music and career of contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho. Born in Finland in 1952, Saariaho received her early musical training at the Sibelius Academy, where her close circle included composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. She has since become internationally known and recognized for her operas L’amour de loin and Adriana Mater and other works that involve electronic music. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens by Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone
Growing up in a West Virginia coal mining community, Hazel Dickens drew on the mountain music and repertoire of her family and neighbors when establishing her own vibrant and powerful vocal style that is a trademark in old-time, bluegrass, and traditional country circles. Working Girl Blues presents forty original songs that Hazel Dickens wrote about coal mining, labor issues, personal relationships, and her life and family in Appalachia. Conveying sensitivity, determination, and feistiness, Dickens comments on each of her songs, explaining how she came to write them and what they meant to her. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

Sojourner Truth’s America by Margaret Washington
Winner of the inaugural 2010 OAH Darlene Clark Hine Award and co-winner of the 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award, this fascinating biography unravels Sojourner Truth’s world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation’s most significant reform era. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here.

Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War by Scott Christianson
Freeing Charles recounts the life and epic rescue of captured fugitive slave Charles Nalle of Culpeper, Virginia, who was forcibly liberated by Harriet Tubman and others in Troy, New York, on April 27, 1860. Author Scott Christianson follows Nalle from his enslavement by the Hansborough family in Virginia through his escape by the Underground Railroad and his experiences in the North on the eve of the Civil War. Buy the Kindle version here.  Buy the Kobo version here.

A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights by Cornelius L. Bynum
A. Philip Randolph’s career as a trade unionist and civil rights activist fundamentally shaped the course of black protest in the mid-twentieth century. Examining Randolph’s work in lobbying for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatening to lead a march on Washington in 1941, and establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee, Cornelius L. Bynum shows that Randolph’s push for African American equality took place within a broader progressive program of industrial reform. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here.

Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 by Tim Brooks
This groundbreaking in-depth history of the involvement of African Americans in the early recording industry examines the first three decades of sound recording in the United States, charting the surprising roles black artists played in the period leading up to the Jazz Age and the remarkably wide range of black music and culture they preserved.  Lost Sounds won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, ARSC Award for Best Research in General History of Recorded Sound, and the Irving Lowens Award, given by the Society for American Music for the best work published (2004) in the field of American music. Buy the Kobo version here.

ANY list of the leading novelists of the 19th century, writing in English, would almost surely include Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain. But they do not appear at the top of a list of the most influential writers of their time. Instead, a recent study has found, Jane Austen, author of “Pride and Prejudice, “ and Sir Walter Scott, the creator of “Ivanhoe,” had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes. . . . Using similar criteria, Harriet Beecher Stowe was 20 years ahead of her time, said Mr. Jockers, whose research will soon be published in a book, “Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History” (University of Illinois Press).

The challenge to libraries is not insignificant.  Four of the six publishers are not providing eBooks to libraries at any price.  The other two – Random House and HarperCollins lead the industry with two different models.  Random House adjusted eBook pricing in 2012.  While the prices on some books were lowered, the most popular titles increased in price – some dramatically.  Author Justin Cronin’s post-apocalyptic bestseller “The Twelve” whose print edition costs the Douglas County Libraries $15.51 from Baker & Taylor and whose eBook is priced at $9.99 on Amazon was priced at $84 to Douglas County on October 31^st.

“This is why I think the big tent, or as I call it, the DH collective, is so important. We need people who can do all kinds of different things (innovate, built, create, critique, tweak, and disseminate, among other things). I think anyone who is interested in DH should be welcome into the collective and then be permitted to find their space and their community (or form their own) within the collective. Excluding people because they don’t do x or y recreates the pattern of academia as it stand right now. We might never change what it means to be a humanist, but we can change how higher education operates. That, to me, is the biggest promise DH holds.”

If you would like to know more about Topics in Digital Humanites, we have a series for that.

“But even as iPad adoption appears to have stagnated, e-textbooks show signs of finally gaining traction. Twenty percent of students in this year’s survey either bought or ‘rented’ an e-textbook this spring. Over all, electronic versions accounted for 9 percent of all textbook purchases. Print textbooks are nowhere close to extinction, though.”

Many humanities journals still select papers for publication in this manner (UIP has several journals that follow this practice), but Aaron J. Barlow, an associate professor of English at the College of Technology of the City University of New York, argues that “blind peer review is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.” On the panel of another session, others such as Illinois State University English professor and Kairos editor Cheryl E. Ball, offered up alternatives to the traditional peer review process. As Ball notes,

Peer reviewers don’t need rubrics. They need good ways to communicate.

It looks like change may come sooner rather than later, and like communication, change is usually a good thing.

Many in the book business worry about power becoming concentrated in the book world. Amazon likes to play rough: recently it spent $5 million to force a referendum in California on a law it didn’t like. (The state and Amazon have since come to a compromise.) Publishers say quietly that since Borders’s collapse, Amazon has become even more aggressive about wanting better deals. It’s also set up its own publishing division and may well publish some books that aren’t available outside the Amazon e-cosphere. A closed system doesn’t bode well for the general book universe, which for its many quirks and flaws, still brings reading pleasure to tens of millions of people.

Here’s how it works: Students in a select group of courses are required to pay a materials fee, which gets them access to the assigned electronic textbooks or other readings for the course. The university essentially becomes the broker of the textbook sales, and because it is buying in bulk and guaranteeing a high volume, officials say they can score better prices than can the campus bookstore or other retailers. . . . Each professor at Indiana can decide whether to participate in the e-textbook project. So far 22 courses have done so, and last month the university released a report outlining how those professors and their students (1,700 in all) liked the arrangement. It included data from surveys of students in 12 of those courses—1,037 students.