massachusetts
After half a lifetime spent moving from place to place, Alexis Lathem at last settled down with her husband on a small farm near Vermont’s largest city. The lyric essays of Lambs in Winter take readers through the seasonal cycles of raising sheep and hens and growing fruits and vegetables while confronting the challenges of winter storms, summer floods, invasive weeds, and pests and diseases. Ever conscious of her place in a historically colonized and ecologically degraded landscape, Lathem wrestles with ethical questions that come to many rural dwellers who—following Thoreau—set out to “live deliberately,” in a time of climate crisis, persistent racial inequity, and growing economic inequality.
Through elegant prose and insightful investigations into pressing contemporary issues, Lathem evokes the world of her farm and the surrounding countryside with a spiritual awareness of the human journey on this earth. Living in place, attuned to the unfolding changes in the world around her, gives her much to grieve, but the pages of Lambs in Winter are luminous with moments of joy and beauty.
ALEXIS LATHEM is an essayist, poet, journalist, teacher, activist, gardener, and craftsperson. She is the author of the poetry collection Alphabet of Bones and two chapbooks. Her essays and poems have appeared in About Place, AWP Chronicle, The Hopper, Hunger Mountain, Gettysburg Review, Solstice, West Branch, and elsewhere.
November 2025 • 208 pp. • $24.95 paper, 978-1- 62534-901-9
The average reader need not go far in a bookstore before, knowingly or not, encountering authors who started their careers by self-publishing prior to achieving commercial success. Examples include Margaret Atwood, Andy Weir, Colleen Hoover, and many more. Stories of such selfmade writers are compelling and seem more attainable to others with the accessibility of modern publishing platforms. However, as Claire Parnell uncovers in her examination of the two most popular platforms—Amazon and Wattpad—these services in fact perpetuate systemic racial, gender, and sexual bias against authors of color and queer authors through their technological, economic, social, and cultural structures.
At a time when there is a real reckoning with the discrimination that has resulted in publishing opportunities for only relatively few privileged authors—who are often white, upper class, and male—self-publishing presents itself as an equalizer of sorts. Exploring that idea, Parnell shows that these platforms are not just intermediaries for information; they structure content and users in multiple, often inequitable, ways through their ability to set market conditions and apply algorithmic sorting. Far from equalizing the market, the new platforms instead frequently perpetuate the stubborn barriers to mainstream success for BIPOC and queer authors.
CLAIRE PARNELL is lecturer in Digital Publishing at the University of Melbourne. Her research has appeared in Media, Culture & Society, Publishing Research Quarterly, and more October 2025 • 240 pp. • $32.95 paper, 978-1- 62534-905-7
Over the course of more than fifty years, Juanita Harrison travelled constantly, first throughout the US and then throughout the world. Always on the move, she made it a rule to travel alone, and she had a penchant for “passing,” not as white but as local. Her wanderlust was less aspirational and upwardly mobile than dedicated to the pursuit of leisure, freedom, and experience. “It’s my life to see and enjoy,” she declared. In 1936, she published My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, a travelogue that was an immediate success, running through nine printings within ten months and becoming a bestseller. The illustrious Atlantic Monthly published excerpts, the book was reviewed in newspapers and magazines nationwide, and it attracted a remarkably diverse readership.
A Born Writer is the first biography of this fascinating woman who found a uniquely rewarding way to live and work that many would envy today. Cathryn Halverson skillfully traces Harrison from her birth in the bitterly divided South to her death in Hawai’i, tracking her varied experiences along the way. The resulting portrait shows a woman who transcended all kinds of borders—political, social, and cultural—to experience a freedom rarely available to women, and especially women of color, in the early-to-mid twentieth century, an achievement that continues to resonate.
CATHRYN HALVERSON is the author of Faraway Women and The Atlantic Monthly, which won the Thomas J. Lyon Book Award from the Western Literature Association; Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives, 1889–1987; and Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1902–1936
October 2025 • 296 pp. • $34.95 paper, 978-1- 62534- 899-9
January 2026
224 pp., $34.95 paper
978-1- 62534-915-6
September 2025
240 pp., $34.95 paper
978-1- 62534-903-3
In The Assault on American Labor Law, distinguished labor law professor Roger C. Hartley collects and carefully reviews every Supreme Court decision concerning the NLRA over the past sixty years. While scholars have suggested individual reforms to re-establish the efficacy of the NLRA, Hartley’s thorough study illuminates how the current crisis in US labor law evolved—a comprehensive view that is necessary to help restore the rights of workers to unionize.
ROGER C. HARTLEY is professor of law at The Catholic University of America.
October 2025
288 pp., $34.95 paper
978-1- 62534-887-6
In Women March for Peace, Denise Lynn examines the lives of seven Black women and their resistance to domestic and foreign US policies during the height of anticommunist hysteria. Lynn explores how these women connected issues of civil rights at home with international military campaigns and highlights the hypocrisy of containment policies that sought to secure the freedom and rights for Koreans when US citizens were still oppressed.
DENISE LYNN is professor of history and director of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Southern Indiana.
In 1774, a group of men in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts wrote an address to the royal governor thanking him for his service, even as town residents began demanding independence. Town records reveal how the patriot majority pressured signers to withdraw their support for the governor. Enemies to Their Country tells the story of the year following the Address, chronicling the town’s struggle to achieve consensus even as the war for American independence started.
NICHOLAS W. GENTILE is an independent historian.
February 2026
248 pp., $34.95 paper
978-1- 62534-917-0
November 2025
264 pp., $34.95 paper
978-1- 62534- 893-7
On November 1, 1961, thousands of middle-class white women took to the streets throughout the US to demonstrate against atomic weapons. They were brought together by the group Women Strike for Peace (WSP), which grew from modest beginnings at a Georgetown cocktail party to become one of the most effective peace organizations in American history. Not Just a Housewife details how WSP’s unique fusion of radicalism and respectability shaped Cold War-era women’s peace movement history, as well as the broader American culture.
JON COBURN is senior lecturer in American history at the University of Lincoln.
On the morning of June 23, 1976, the NEPCO 140 barge, carrying 8.7 million gallons of thick crude oil, ruptured twice while plying the swift straits of the St. Lawrence River’s Thousand Islands region. Before the spill was halted, 300,000 gallons of oil had leaked, polluting eighty miles of the river and ruining shorelines on both the New York and Canadian sides. In Defending a Borderland, Neil S. Forkey examines ensuing environmental activism along the St. Lawrence River from both sides of the international border.
NEIL S. FORKEY is associate professor of Canadian Studies at St. Lawrence University.
During Emerson’s lifetime, the idea of universal human equality was under intensive assault. Repeatedly—in contexts ranging from slavery, to marriage, to politics and workers’ rights— Americans of the time were being told that equality was an obsolete ideal. Greg Garvey’s Emerson and the Defense of Equality focuses on Emerson as a real-time defender of equality during the antebellum culture wars.
GREG GARVEY is professor of English at the College at Brockport, State University of New York.
Every Revolution Was First a Thought: The Civil War and Transcendentalism in Transatlantic Context
Aren Lerner Craig
$36.95 pb, 987-1-62534-889-0
November 2025
Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848–1940
Kelly M. Duke Bryant
$34.95 pb, 978-1-62534-921-1
February 2026
DISTRIBUTION
Gathered into a Church: IndigenousEnglish Congregationalism in Woodland New England
Lori Rogers-Stokes
$34.95 pb, 987-1-62534-907-1
September 2025
Restoring America: Historic Preservation and the New Deal
Stephanie Gray
$34.95 pb, 978-1-62534-897-5
December 2025
is the publishing arm of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, a multidisciplinary international studies and outreach unit dedicated to the study of the language, literatures, and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. Recognized as a leader in bringing Portuguese literature, history, and culture to an English-speaking audience, Tagus Press’s groundbreaking translations and journals address Portuguese life both abroad and in the United States.
Creating New England, Defending the Northeast: Contested Algonquian and English Spatial Worlds, 1500–1700
Nathan Braccio
$32.95 pb, 987-1-62534-913-2
February 2026
Please Touch: A History of the First Four Children’s Museums in the United States (1899–1965)
Jessie Swigger
$32.95 pb, 978-1-62534-909-2
February 2026
In America I Discovered I
Imagining Health: Medicine, Social Protest, and Modern American Literature
Ira Halpern
$32.95 pb, 987-1-62534-911-8
January 2026
Remembering the Cajun Past: Memory, Race, and the Politics of Public History in Louisiana
Marc David
$34.95 pb, 978-1-62534-919-4
December 2025
Translating from the Portuguese: A Life
Translated
Elizabeth Lowe
$32.95 pb
978-1-951470-34-0
October 2025
