Hot Topics: Commemoration, Abortion, First Amendment

Diverging Public Interpretations

Edited by Melissa M. Bender, continuing lecturer, University Writing Program; and Klara Stephanie Szlezák, postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in American studies, University of Passau, Germany. Eleven essays described as fresh interpretations of public history and collective memory that explore the evolving relationship between the United States and its past. According to the publisher, “the individual chapters investigate efforts to memorialize events or interrogate instances of historical sanitization at the expense of less partial representations that would include other perspectives. ... Contributors use historic sites and monuments, photographs, memoirs, textbooks, periodicals, music and film to discuss the periods from Colonial America, through the Revolutionary and Civil wars up until the Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement and Cold War, to explore how the commemoration of those eras resonates in the 21st century.” (Routledge, October 2019)

The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America

According to the publisher, authors Carole Joffe of UC San Francisco and David S. Cohen of Drexel University “lay bare the often arduous and unnecessarily burdensome process of terminating a pregnancy: the sabotaged decision-making, clinics in remote locations, insurance bans, harassing protesters, forced ultrasounds and dishonest medical information, arbitrary waiting periods, and unjustified procedure limitations.” Cohen is a professor in Drexel’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law; and Joffe is a professor in Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, UCSF, and a professor emerita of sociology, UC Davis. (University of California Press, February 2020)

By Ashutosh Bhagwat, a constitutional law scholar in the School of Law, where he is a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law and holds the Boochever and Bird Endowed Chair for the Study and Teaching of Freedom and Equality. Says Michael W. McConnell, professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center, Stanford University: “'The First Amendment lists four specific freedoms of expression: speech, press, assembly (association) and petition, but the courts have tended to merge them all into one. This engaging book discusses each of these freedoms on its own terms, and explains for a general audience why they all matter now, more than ever. Whether you are liberal or conservative, this book will help you understand your rights as an American.'” (Cambridge University Press, May 2020)