University Of California Press

The go-to guide to California’s natural history, now updated with fresh insights on stewardship for a changing climate and diverse naturalist perspectives.

The California Naturalist Handbook offers a fun, science-based introduction to California’s natural history, emphasizing observation, discovery, communication, and stewardship. This accessible guidebook explores geology, native plants and animals, freshwater resources, forest and rangeland resources, conservation biology, and the effects of pressing environmental issues. Aspiring naturalists will learn how to keep a nature journal, practice participatory science, and improve ecosystem resilience.

Used statewide for the California Naturalist Program, this updated edition includes:

• Updated overview of California’s unique ecosystems and plant and animal communities
• Expanded discussions of Indigenous knowledge and stewardship
• Contributions by diverse naturalist leaders including women, Indigenous peoples, and naturalists of color
• A deeper dive into southern California’s urban and desert ecologies
• Current climate change information, including fire and forest management, drought, flooding and groundwater issues, and recognition of climate grief
• Higher quality images showing a more diverse range of habitats

Stories about new musical instruments are often told as quests for new kinds of sounds. The Composer's Black Box asks, What happens when new musical instruments produce not only new sounds but also new dynamics of musical agency and control? And what consequences do those new dynamics have for musicality beyond sound? With a focus on five key figures—Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Donald Buchla, Alvin Lucier, and Sun Ra—this book explores how scientific and technological developments in mid-twentieth-century America galvanized musicians to reconfigure their conceptions of sociality, freedom, and the creative self. Theodore Gordon shows how cybernetic thinking in a range of disciplines, from experimental music to jazz and electrical engineering, has shaped musical techniques and technologies and changed what it means to be a composer—or, more broadly, a music-making human—in an increasingly informational world.

"In its comprehensive sweep, deep probing and acute critical analysis, Finkelstein's study stands alone."—Noam Chomsky

"No one who ventures an opinion on Gaza . . . is entitled to do so without taking into account the evidence in this book."
—The Intercept

Examining the essential role—and exploitation—of frontline workers across the food chain.

Consumers are demanding a healthier and more sustainable food system. Yet labor is rarely part of the discussion. In Will Work for Food, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa M. Mares chronicle labor across the food chain, connecting the entire food system—from fields to stores, restaurants, home kitchens, and even garbage dumps.

Using a political economy framework, the authors argue that improving labor standards and building solidarity among frontline workers across sectors is necessary for creating a more just food system. What would it take, they ask, to move toward a food system that is devoid of human exploitation? Combining insights from food systems and labor justice scholarship with actionable recommendations for policy makers, the book is a call to action for labor activists, food studies students and scholars, and anyone interested in food justice.

“A Native American rejoinder to Richard White and Jesse Amble White’s California Exposures.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
Rewriting the history of California as Indigenous.

Before there was such a thing as “California,” there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood—paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today’s casino economy. A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.

The first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today's often violent and extractive "big data" regimes. 

Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

• The original cover
• High-quality reproductions of the interior layout

• Structures the story in nine parts around the Greek Muses
• Deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry
• Links the women’s stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes

• Medical treatises
• Case studies
• Artistic works
• Material artifacts
• Archaeological evidence
• Biomedical remains
• Funerary monuments
• Miracle narratives
• Spells and magical recipes

An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century

The US middle class was a product of state and federal policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. But since the 1980s, lawmakers have undermined what they once built, shredding the social safety net and instituting laws that virtually guarantee downward mobility for all but the most privileged. How can we restore what has been lost?
 
Rigorous and highly readable, The Middle-Class New Deal breaks down the policies that have decimated working families and proposes reforms to reverse this trend. As Mechele Dickerson shows, part of the problem is that politicians disingenuously conflate the middle class with the "White lower rich." Such propaganda hides how state and federal lawmakers consistently favor education, labor, housing, and consumer-credit laws that erode the bank accounts of lower- and middle-income people—especially those who are not White and don't have college degrees. Weaving together the latest research with the personal stories of Americans struggling to make ends meet, Dickerson provides a clarion call for political leaders to enact a bold agenda like the one that created the middle class almost a century ago.

Millions of low-income African Americans in the United States lack access to health care. How do they treat their health care problems? In Health Care Off the Books, Danielle T. Raudenbush provides an answer that challenges public perceptions and prior scholarly work. Informed by three and a half years of fieldwork in a public housing development, Raudenbush shows how residents who face obstacles to health care gain access to pharmaceutical drugs, medical equipment, physician reference manuals, and insurance cards by mobilizing social networks that include not only their neighbors but also local physicians. However, membership in these social networks is not universal, and some residents are forced to turn to a robust street market to obtain medicine. For others, health problems simply go untreated.

Raudenbush reconceptualizes U.S. health care as a formal-informal hybrid system and explains why many residents who do have access to health services also turn to informal strategies to treat their health problems. While the practices described in the book may at times be beneficial to people’s health, they also have the potential to do serious harm. By understanding this hybrid system, we can evaluate its effects and gain new insight into the sources of social and racial disparities in health outcomes.
 

• Writing clear, efficient prose
• Crafting strong arguments
• Telling a client's story through a compelling narrative
• Overcoming procrastination and drafting more productively