I mean, I’ve been a socialist since about 8th grade. I can promise you, I was not indoctrinated by the public education system because pretty much all of my teachers were conservative Republicans. (This was a small town in North Carolina). But when I went to the Gastonia public library and checked out the collected works of Marx and Engels, that seemed to make sense. Call me a Red, but I watched my loved ones scratch and scrape through poverty to try to stay alive while people were kicking the crap out of them. Being a lefty added up to me.
I went to college and then graduate school in New York, and I worked there as a research assistant, file clerk, ghostwriter, and labor organizer to keep body and soul together, doing all kinds of crazy stuff. But getting a PhD in history meant, in most cases, trying to write and publish a book. I looked at what books I liked, and what books were important to me.
It’s a gamble. You look at UNC or University of California Press or University of Minnesota, and they all publish amazing books. I proposed a book to Oxford University Press, and the unimaginably brilliant editor Susan Ferber led me through this winding process. I’m still a little bit afraid of her because she’s so smart.
What I’m driving at is that university presses are a utopian project. The idea that you can publish an in-depth, deeply researched study of an issue, or a problem, or a period of time, and maybe a few hundreds or thousands of people will read it, but you still do it – that’s fucking incredible to me. University presses are like think tanks, if think tanks were good.
Out of pure will, authors write these extensive, painstakingly evidenced studies of the historical causes of emphysema in the South Bronx or the long struggle over copyright law in the U.S. (that’s me!), things that would never be funded or published my commercial, for-profit media.
Out of pure commitment and diligence, the editors and designers and managers at university presses sweat their lives to make sure this happens.
This is precious gold. I remember a few years ago when Stanford was going to axe its university press as a cost-cutting measure (what? To give Peter Thiel more vaporous golden socks?), and people got up in arms about it. Thank our good life that Stanford U.P. survived. But we see departments and even colleges being shuttered in this time across the U.S.
I appeal to everyone who believes in this – who cares about the importance of careful, peer-reviewed scholarship, that can help us understand ourselves and our world – please realize that this is an existential fight. Our opponents do not want there to be an autonomous, independent group of researchers, writers, and editors who can tell us what’s really going on. They have made this abundantly clear.
They do not want curiosity, criticism, imagination, even thinking about what might be, and what different world might look like. By definition, they’re against all that, by their code.
We want to live in a world with imagination, inquiry, and hope. University presses are basically the most amazing examples of anything I’ve seen that can make the world better and more reliable just by thinking and writing. To give us a better understanding of what’s happened, what is now, and what could be.
My dearly departed, West Virginia great-grandmother Ethel once said to me, “We’s a gamble, ain’t we?” She was right. We are a gamble.
Most presses have a fund that one can donate to, like this. Here are some great UP books written by our contributors:
- Justice and the Interstates, ed. by Amanda Phillips De Lucas, Ryan Reft, Rebecca Retzlaff
- Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity, by Stan Thangaraj
- Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement, Katherine M. Marino
- Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class, Stacy D. Fahrenthold
- Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, by Keri Leigh Merritt
- Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Transgenerational History of El Movimiento Chicano in Ventura County, California, 1945–1975, by Frank P. Barajas
- Argentina in the Global Middle East, by Lily Pearl Balloffet
- Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, by Nate Holdren
- All Health Politics Is Local: Community Battles for Medical Care and Environmental Health, by Merlin Chowkanyun
Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism, by Wendy Cheng- Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America, by Brian Ingrassia
- The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools, by Joseph Bagley
- Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, by Joanna Dee Das
- East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, ed. by Carribean Fragoza, Romeo Guzmán, Alex Sayf Cummings, and Ryan Reft
- Risk and Ruin: Enron and the Culture of American Capitalism, by Gavin Benke
- Punk Rock: Music Is the Currency of Life, by Mindy Clegg
- Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education, by Nick Juravich
- Not Tiger Moms: Reimagining Asian American Motherhood, by Millian Kang
- Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange, by Rebecca Colesworthy
- One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility, by Zack Furness
- Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño, by Jeffrey Lawrence
- City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York, by Joshua B. Freeman
- Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, by David Austin Walsh
- Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work, by Jason Reznikoff
- Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts
- Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution, by H. Robert Baker