“Will resonate with any readers interested in understanding American landscapes where white, evangelical Christianity dominates both politics and culture.” —Publishers Weekly In the wake of the 2016 election, Lyz Lenz watched as her country and her marriage were torn apart by the competing forces of faith and politics. A mother of two, a Christian, and a lifelong resident of middle America, Lenz was bewildered by the pain and loss around her—the empty churches and the broken hearts. What was happening to faith in the heartland? From drugstores in Sydney, Iowa, to skeet shooting in rural Illinois, to the mega churches of Minneapolis, Lenz set out to discover the changing forces of faith and tradition in God’s country. Part journalism, part memoir, God Land is a journey into the heart of a deeply divided America. Lenz visits places of worship across the heartland and speaks to the everyday people who often struggle to keep their churches afloat and to cope in a land of instability. Through a thoughtful interrogation of the effects of faith and religion on our lives, our relationships, and our country, God Land investigates whether our divides can ever be bridged and if America can ever come together. “God Land, Lyz Lenz’s much-anticipated debut book, is a marvel. Not only is it a window into the middle America so many like to stereotype but fail to fully understand in all of its complexity, but it mixes reportage, memoir, and gorgeous prose so seamlessly I wanted to know how she did it.” —Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita

Mumbai's textile industry is commonly but incorrectly understood to be an extinct relic of the past. In The Archive of Loss Maura Finkelstein examines what it means for textile mill workers—who are assumed not to exist—to live and work during a period of deindustrialization. Finkelstein shows how mills are ethnographic archives of the city where documents, artifacts, and stories exist in the buildings and in the bodies of workers. Workers' pain, illnesses, injuries, and exhaustion narrate industrial decline; the ways in which they live in tenements exist outside and resist the values expounded by modernity; and the rumors and untruths they share about textile worker strikes and a mill fire help them make sense of the industry's survival. In outlining this archive's contents, Finkelstein shows how mills, which she conceptualizes as lively ruins, become a lens through which to challenge, reimagine, and alter ways of thinking about the past, present, and future in Mumbai and beyond.

Between the early 17th century and the early 20th, nearly all U.S. land was transferred from American Indians to whites. Banner argues that neither simple coercion nor simple consent reflects the complicated legal history of land transfers--time, place, and the balance of power between Indians and settlers decided the outcome of land struggles.

Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594--a drop of 93 percent. In his hard-hitting book, historian Pete Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers' fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He exposes the shameful fact that at the very moment civil rights laws promised to end discrimination, hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their hold on the land as they were denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure. More than a matter of neglect of these farmers and their rights, this "passive nullification" consisted of a blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation, blatant acts of discrimination and cronyism, violence, and intimidation. Dispossession recovers a lost chapter of the black experience in the American South, presenting a counternarrative to the conventional story of the progress achieved by the civil rights movement.

State of Disaster: A Historical Geography of Louisiana’s Land Loss Crisis explores Louisiana’s protracted efforts to restore and protect its coastal marshes, nearly always with minimal regard for the people displaced by those efforts. As Craig E. Colten shows, the state’s coastal restoration plan seeks to protect cities and industry but sacrifices the coastal dwellers who have maintained their presence in this perilous place for centuries. This historical geography examines in turn the adaptive capacity of those living through repeated waves of calamity; the numerous disjointed environmental management regimes that contributed to the current crisis; the cartographic visualizations of land loss used to activate public coastal policy; and the phases of public input that nevertheless failed to give voice to the citizens most impacted by various environmental management strategies. In closing, Colten situates Louisiana’s experience within broader discussions of climate change and recovery from repeated crises.

Without the theft of indigenous groups' lands and the exploitation of African slave labor, whites would not currently own over 95 percent of land in the U.S. Due to the forced assimilation to European religious beliefs and customs, many indigenous and former slaves compromised their native beliefs to appease European settlers. Unfortunately, the new way of life led to the five "civilized" tribes owning slaves and some former slaves joining the military to fight against tribal groups after the Civil War. As more Europeans populated the United States, the adoption of English common law beliefs of statehood and demarcation of land created our current property laws, thus replacing indigenous and African beliefs of communal living. U.S. property law was written strategically to provide land protection for whites and equip future generations to continue the European legacy of stealing land from indigenous and black landowners. Due to the history of land theft and property laws Whites now own over 95 percent of U.S. land. White Land Theft explores the history of European settlement in the Plain States and the present-day land loss of both exploited communities. Hishaw's recommendations of land reparations and how to disburse it, along with legal analysis related to tax credits, are backed up by industry interviews and her 15 years of professional experience. White Land Theft is a factual justification for land reparations supported by extensive research.

For most people, the pain of loss dominates their experience of grief. Grief then becomes something to be avoided or completed as quickly as possible. In her new book, Lisa Irish presents grief as our “ally” in the Land of Loss and offers pathways and resources to navigate the confusing and challenging terrain. She explores “conscious grieving,” as she gathers the wisdom of bereavement experts, spiritual leaders and everyday people walking their own individual paths. Lisa encourages us to let seeds of hope find their way into our grieving hearts, to allow self-compassion during the journey, and to trust grief’s healing process. Grieving - The Sacred Art makes a space for love in our sadness and leads us into a Land of Hope.

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.

The new world created through Anglophone emigration in the 19th century has been much studied. But there have been few accounts of what this meant for the Indigenous populations. This book shows that Indigenous communities tenaciously held land in the midst of dispossession, whilst becoming interconnected through their struggles to do so.