Recent notable books by 91探花 faculty members explore the importance of Hebrew to modern America, remember the 1919 Seattle General Strike and look at issues in education, among other topics.

Practical advice for healthy travel, near or far

A new book by offers simple, practical recommendations for those traveling near or far, short or long term, for work or recreation, to “destinations ranging from rural areas to large cities, in both developing and industrialized nations.”

“” was published in December by 91探花 Press. Sanford is an associate professor of family medicine and global health with the 91探花School of Medicine.

In the book, Sanford gives common-sense advice on how to prevent communicable diseases and mosquito-borne illnesses, travelers’ diarrhea and other maladies, and how to evaluate post-trip symptoms. He focuses on ailments and injuries that travelers are most likely to encounter, noting that “if something occurs less frequently than one-in-a-million, it probably isn’t going to happen to you.” The work also covers concerns unique to women, men, children, LGBTQ individuals and travelers with chronic illnesses.

As Sanford said in a , “The more you travel, the less you fear, and the folks who are the most afraid are those who have never traveled.”

To learn more, contact Sanford at casanfo@uw.edu.

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UW-edited book explores value of Hebrew to contemporary America

, 91探花professor of Hebrew and comparative literature, has edited a volume of scholars, writers and translators discussing the changing status of Hebrew in the United States.

“ edited by Sokoloff with of Washington University, was published in late summer by 91探花Press.

The book, publishers notes state, asks how the status of Hebrew is affected by current Jewish identities and shifting attitudes toward Israel and Zionism. “Will Hebrew programs survive the current crisis in the humanities on university campuses? How can the vibrancy of Hebrew language be conveyed to a larger audience?”

The volume features essays “that give fellow Americans a glimpse into the richness of an exceptional language.” Contributors include , a former staff member with the UW’s ; and the late Alan Mintz, who was a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary and author of “,” published by 91探花Press in 2011.

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew” (which borrows part of its title from a famous 1981 by ) “addresses the challenges and joys of being a Hebraist in America in the 21^st century 鈥� focusing not just on what Hebrew means 鈥� as a global phenomenon and long-lived tradition 鈥� but on what it can mean to Americans.”

Sokoloff is the co-editor (with 91探花history professor ) of “,” published in 2010 by 91探花Press, and author of “,” published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1992.

For more information, contact Sokoloff at 206-543-7145 or naosok@uw.edu.

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Principals support teachers in ‘Leading for Professional Learning’

How can principals better support and encourage professional development among teachers? A new book written by faculty members in the 91探花 provides practical tools and guidance.

“” was published in October by Wiley/Jossey-Bass. The book was written by , and . Markholt is the educational leadership center’s associate director and Michelson is its director of teacher leadership and learning. Fink, a 91探花affiliate professor of education, is the center’s founder and was executive director from 2001 until 2018. All are affiliated with the 91探花.

“Leadership is crucial to professional learning, providing the necessary systems and structures that enable teachers to improve their own practice and in turn, improve student learning,” say publisher’s notes for the book. Because each school has different strengths and needs, the book shows school and district leaders ways to create support plans tailored to their own context.

Empowering teachers to improve their craft is more than merely offering opportunity, the book advises 鈥� “it requires collaboration with teachers every step of the way, a deep understanding of how best to support professional learning, a clear set of goals for both individual sessions and an overarching mission, and the necessary technical and relational support required to see these opportunities through.”

Listen to an at Principal Center Radio. To learn more, contact Markholt at 206-221-6881 or markholt@uw.edu; or Michelson at 206-715-2833 or jlm32@uw.edu.

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Unexpected uses of technology the focus of ‘Left to Our Own Devices’

A father uses a smart speaker to gently enforce time limits. A couple uses smart lights to work through conflict. People find unexpected ways to adapt technology to fit their lives, as explores in her book, “.”

Morris is an affiliate faculty member in the UW’s as well as a psychologist and app creator. Her book was published in December by MIT Press.

We are warned of the perils of technology, Morris states, “but our devices and data are woven into our lives. We can’t simply reject them.” Instead, she suggests, “we need to adapt technology creatively to our needs and values.”

In the book, Morris examines how such personalized “life hacks 鈥� cast technology not just as a temptation that we struggle to resist but as a potential ally as we try to take care of ourselves and others.”

To learn more, contact Morris at margiemm@uw.edu.

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College of Education instructor pens field guide to inquiry-based teaching

, a teaching associate in the 91探花College of Education, explores through five key strategies in “,”

“One part practical guide, one part interactive journal, this book provides the opportunity to do inquiry as you read about it,” publishers notes state. Readers can see what inquiry-based instruction looks like in practice through five key strategies that can be implemented in any learning environment.

The book offers 50 practical inquiry experiences that can be used with students or with fellow teachers. One online reviewer said Mitchell “has translated the latest terminology 鈥� pedagogical jargon 鈥� into lively language and useful advice.”

“Experience Inquiry” was published in September by Sage as part of its Corwin Teaching Essentials series. Mitchell is also founder of , a professional learning organization dedicated to promoting inquiry-based teaching strategies.

To learn more, contact Mitchell at 206-434-8274 or klasher@uw.edu

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Other book notes:

• 91探花history professor wrote a new introduction and afterword 鈥� and contributed a photo essay 鈥� to the November republication by 91探花Press of Robert L. Friedheim’s popular 1964 book, “.” 91探花Tacoma historian Michael Honey praised the republication, saying the account of the 1919 work stoppage “takes us back to when labor solidarity seemed to make all things possible.” .
• “” by Margaret Willson has been published in paperback by 91探花Press. Willson is a 91探花affiliate professor of anthropology and a faculty member in the Canadian Studies Center. The book was first published, by 91探花Press, in April 2016.
• “” by , published as an e-book in 2013, has been updated and brought out in paperback by Island Press. Wolfe is an affiliate associate professor of urban design and planning in the 91探花College of Built Environments, where he teaches land use law at the graduate level.

is an associate professor in the 91探花 Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the author of many books and articles, including the 2014 book, “.”

Berger’s new book, “.” His co-author is , assistant professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Berger answered some questions about the book and the prison reform movement.

What’s the concept of the book and how did it come to be written?

D.B.: “Rethinking the American Prison Movement” aims to provide an accessible account of the many ways in which incarcerated people have fought for social justice throughout the 20th century .

Prisoners have not only fought to improve their own circumstances; they have pushed a broader rethinking of such principles as democracy, justice and freedom. Drawing on the explosion of scholarly literature on prisons in recent years, we describe how, at different moments, prisoners came to think of themselves as political actors and to be received as such. We also analyze the strikes, protests, books and lawsuits that have defined the parameters of prisoner rights.

The book is part of a series of textbooks published by Routledge on social and political movements in American history. Each book in the series provides narrative accounts of how different activist campaigns 鈥� from welfare rights to feminism, gay and lesbian liberation to labor 鈥� have contributed to making the modern United States.

The U.S., you write, is the only industrialized nation that uses the death penalty and life-without-parole sentences that “function as a crypto-death penalty,” prosecutes juveniles as adults and holds scores of thousands of individuals in solitary confinement. Has this historically been true? How did things get this way?

D.B.: Throughout its history, the U.S. prison system has been more severe than those of other Western countries, particularly in its use of harsh and degrading punishments.

Since the 1960s, the country has also seen a dramatic expansion of the scale and scope of punishment that has given the U.S. the world鈥檚 largest prison population. The reasons are complex, but they principally involve the convergence of racism, criminalization and globalization. A set of reactionary politicians used 鈥渓aw and order鈥� as a bludgeon against the Black freedom struggle and other social movements. In response, liberal and conservative politicians tried to one-up each other proving who could be more 鈥渢ough on crime.鈥�

Meanwhile, broader changes to the global economy meant that many of the very same communities demanding social transformation 鈥� working class communities of color 鈥� were pushed to the margins of society and increasingly into prison.

The death penalty has a long, ignoble history in this country, one that is inseparable from its racist application against Black men in particular. In the book, we describe the rise of the prison movement in the early 20th century as part of Black activism to stop lynching. Even once lynching declined as a mode of 鈥減opular justice,鈥� the country has continued to rely on executions while other industrialized nations abolished the practice.

The Supreme Court banned the death penalty in the early 1970s, only to reinstate it later in the decade as incarceration rates began to rise. Since then, the 鈥渢ough on crime鈥� approach has yielded a more punitive environment across the board that has sent people to prison for longer periods of time, often at younger ages, with little in the way of rehabilitation programs. Until the constrained the practice, many states even sentenced juveniles to life without parole, including for petty offenses.

Even while the death penalty has declined in popularity, 鈥渄eath by incarceration鈥� remains morbidly common as a result of the expanded use of life-without-parole sentences in overcrowded prisons with poor health care systems.

You write that critics often dismiss the prison abolition movement as a fantasy of eliminating all prisons entirely, “as if there was a central switch to flip that would empty all the prisons.” What is a more accurate description of the movement and its goals?

D.B.: Abolitionism is one of several currents running through the prison movement. In the 1970s, several journalists, judges, politicians, faith communities and others joined radical activists in and out of prison in calling for the abolition of prisons. That demand was largely buried in the ensuing expansion of the prison system. Yet it never disappeared. It has resurfaced with increasing clarity in the last two decades of scholarship on and organizing against mass incarceration.

Abolition is a far-reaching demand. Abolitionists argue that prisons themselves constitute violence: they destroy lives and livelihoods, and offer neither accountability nor deterrence. Seen from that perspective, prisons cannot be reformed.

Rather, society needs to pursue alternative forms of justice. Abolitionists work to reduce the reliance on all aspects of the criminal justice system. They pursue a set of alternative measures to do so, including decriminalization of drugs and sex work, restorative or transformative justice for those that have caused harm, and the redirection of funds from policing and punishment to universal health care, quality public schools, and other necessary programs.

Prison abolitionists self-consciously draw upon the 19th century movement to abolish slavery, a movement that seemed small and incapable of winning up until it succeeded. While only one tendency within a larger movement, abolition exists as a beacon for larger social transformation. Abolition is an analysis that prisons do not make society safer and are themselves aggregators of violence. And so abolition is as much a positive demand for full employment, universal health care and the resources that keep people happy, healthy, and safe as it is a negative demand against prisons.

You write that those in the movement support the decriminalization of drugs and sex work as well as “restorative modes of conflict resolution even for serious offences such as rape and murder” and redirection of funds from policing to health care, schools and other needs. Where does the American public stand on such points, and what needs to change?

D.B.: Public opinions on these issues varies. And of course as we see on issues from health care to taxes and much else, there are wide gaps between what most Americans want and the policies politicians pursue. On some of these questions 鈥� drug decriminalization, say 鈥� public opinion is far more advanced than are our policies. At the federal level, the Trump administration (especially through Attorney General Jeff Sessions) wants to double down on the racist, unpopular, and demonstrably failed policies of the wars on crime and drugs that have given the U.S. such a large prison population to begin with.

Still, I think there are some reasons for optimism. Most incarcerated people are imprisoned in state prisons or local jails, and so we have to look at the local level. The city of Philadelphia just elected the most progressive district attorney the country has ever known, and a number of other reform-minded DAs also have sought office or won election in recent years. Marijuana decriminalization is growing, as are conversations for safe-injection sites for other drug consumption. Campaigns to close or halt construction on jails and prisons can be found from New York to Kentucky to here in Washington. Support for the death penalty is low, and at the Golden Globes, Laura Dern called for “restorative justice,” a hallmark of non-punitive modes of conflict resolution.

There is still a lot of work to be done. While 鈥渕ass incarceration鈥� remains unpopular, the country still imprisons more people than anywhere else on the planet. Many of the remedies to this crisis pursued thus far barely scratch the surface. Think of it this way: The country now locks up more people than anywhere else on the planet. If the U.S. were to reduce its prison population by half 鈥� the demand of a bipartisan initiative launched by Van Jones and Newt Gingrich 鈥� the U.S. would still have the world鈥檚 second largest prison system.

We have to have bigger and bolder conversations about how we move away from mass incarceration. The book tries to contribute to that by putting the spotlight on what incarcerated people and their loved ones have said and done over the last century.

Could you tell a bit more about “restorative justice” for serious crimes? How would such a scenario play out in the judicial system?

D.B.: Restorative and transformative forms of justice have been around for a long time. Many indigenous societies have been practicing non-punitive modes of conflict resolution and community accountability for generations. Restorative justice is a different model than criminal justice 鈥� it pursues individual accountability in a collective and non-punitive context. So it takes place outside the judicial system.

Unlike criminal justice, in which the state determines the process, restorative justice is centered on supporting those who have been harmed by violence while recognizing that the person or people who perpetuated violence is still a human being. In New York, for instance, the organization Common Justice does restorative justice circles, which are facilitated conversations between those who have caused harm, those they have harmed or their surrogates, and people supporting both parties. With the help of a trained facilitator, participants in the circle 鈥渞each agreements about what the responsible party can do to make things as right as possible.鈥�

The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women, you write, formed in 2015 with the motto “Nothing about us without us.” Could you tell about meaning and importance of the saying?

D.B.: It has been heartening to see calls for prison reform gain more traction since 2010. Yet all too often the people most directly impacted by the decisions have been excluded from making or changing policy. The National Council鈥檚 slogan is the clearest invocation of the need for currently and incarcerated people and their loved ones to be part of crafting a solution to America鈥檚 prison problem.

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For more information about Berger and his work, contact him at 425-352-3744 or daberger@uw.edu. Follow Berger on Twitter:

When editors at Time magazine compiled a list of expert picks for “,” 91探花Bothell’s was among the historians they reached out to for a contribution.

An assistant professor in Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Berger was asked to choose a “moment” 鈥� trends and social movements were not allowed 鈥� and write something brief about it. The article ran on June 28 on the Time’s website and in its many social media outlets.

Berger chose to note the Aug. 21, 1971, killing of inmate during an escape attempt from San Quentin prison, which he wrote about at length in his 2014 book “”

He wrote for Time that though incarcerated at 18 and dead at 29, Jackson through his writing “was able to emerge as an author, activist and powerful analyst of what we now call mass incarceration. Writing when the prison system was a fraction of the size it is today, Jackson diagnosed the dangers of ubiquitous incarceration. His insights inspired many people.”

Berger said he had Jackson in mind because 2016 marks the 45^th anniversary of the killing and of the it helped inspire, and because a colleague has a new book coming in August about the Attica riot. That book, by Heather Ann Thompson, is “.”

This is Time’s second list of moments depicting what the magazine’s founder, , famously called The American Century. The first was in 2015, and “animated by the breadth and insight of that round-up, as well as the knowledge that it was only the tip of the iceberg,” the editors created a follow-up list.

For Time, Berger concluded that partly as a result of Jackson’s death and the Attica uprising, “Citizens became more aware of the danger of punishment being so severe 鈥� even as politicians moved further in that direction.”

Q: What is the main concept of this book and how did it come about?

A: “Captive Nation” tells the story of the role black prisoners played in the civil rights and Black Power movements and the role those movements played in generating concern for the health and safety of people in prison between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s. These activists, both in and out of prison, recognized poignant connections between the fate of prisoners and the treatment marginalized communities experienced in cities and towns around the country.

The book reveals the pernicious foundations of mass incarceration to be not just an outcome of the war on the drugs but a bludgeon against black radicalism and other social justice initiatives in the decades after World War II.

Q: Would you tell a bit about your methods? What research went into this book?

A: When I began this book I knew I needed to conduct oral histories to understand what people in prison did and thought, since prison systems do not gather such information.

I was surprised at how much of a paper trail exists. I studied 11 university and institutional archives and several independent collections containing countless documents and audio or visual documentaries of prison conditions, often from the perspective of people in prison.

I also conducted two dozen oral histories 鈥� in the process, I hope, creating a new archive of voices of current and formerly incarcerated people and their family members and supporters. Their voices are critical to understanding incarceration, activism and alternatives.

Q: You note that George Jackson, a California prisoner who became an activist and author, “stands at the center of ‘Captive Nation,'” and that “even death could not erase his political legacy.” What is that legacy, and how did it continue after his death?

A: Many people in prison see in Jackson an exemplary figure who bettered himself despite the limitations of his surroundings.

He was arrested at 18 and because he had been arrested several times as a juvenile, received a sentence of one year to life. In prison, he read, studied and became published. Supporters organized protests, petitioned the United Nations, and called for independent investigations into the mysterious circumstances of his August 1971 death, when he was shot by San Quentin prison guards during a riot.

To prison officials, especially in California, Jackson’s legacy justifies a variety of punitive and censorious policies that seek to keep people in prison incapacitated and separated from both individuals and ideas.

In some California prisons, possession of books by Jackson is enough to get someone placed in solitary confinement. To many, however 鈥� including people in prison who still manage to read his writings 鈥� Jackson remains an inspiration.

Even today, Jackson remains a controversial touchstone of prison politics. In 2005, then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to grant clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams because the former, repentant gang leader had dedicated one of his books to Jackson; Schwarzenegger said it was proof that Williams had not been rehabilitated.

Q: You write that black prisoners “connect the dots, conceptually and practically, of late-twentieth-century political transformation in ways few other groups can 鈥� they speak not only to the conditions of their age but to subsequent generations as well.” In what way do they speak to future generations?

A: Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, black prisoners were at the forefront of antiracist activism. Figures such as Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, George Jackson and others articulated imprisonment as a subset of a larger captivity, a microcosm of the racism that every day saw black communities overpoliced, underemployed and disproportionately denied access to nutritious food, quality health care and education, stable housing and personal safety.

Drawing on their own experiences, imprisoned intellectuals offered prescient analyses of growing inequality. Because they were working-class black men and women with criminal records, few people listened to their warning signs. Yet in the decades since, much of what they feared has come to pass: black communities were hardest hit by the foreclosure and unemployment crises, are frequent victims of police violence, and remain incarcerated at grossly disproportionate numbers.

Q: You write that the courtroom was used as a “theater of black politics,” and that prisoners鈥� letters and articles were read on-air by sympathetic journalists at a radio station. Where are black prisoners finding an external voice now? Who is listening?

A: Prisoners looking to draw attention to their conditions or otherwise connect with the outside world have a much harder time now than they did decades ago. Prisons do not allow Internet access and have byzantine rules governing what books or publications can be sent in. Meanwhile, although several online sites report on prison conditions, there are fewer print publications for people in prison to read or write.

As popular attention faded from prisons, the theater of the courtroom is reserved more for celebrity scandals than social justice initiatives. At the same time, conditions inside prisons are often more dire. As a result, prisoners have more recently adopted dramatic tactics to call attention to their plight. Since 2011, California prisoners have waged three hunger strikes that, at their height, had 30,000 participants refusing food in protest of long-term solitary confinement and related abuses.

Q: What would you like the reader to take away from this book?

A: For starters, I hope readers take seriously that prisoners and other disenfranchised people have both a stake and a voice in debates about culture, politics and society.

Then there is the enduring issue of prison and police violence. In many ways, conditions have worsened in the last three and a half decades through ever-widening wars on crime, drugs, and now terror.

And yet, in the course of researching and writing this book, I learned a great deal about the indomitable nature of the human spirit. The work needed to undo today’s prison industrial complex is daunting in scale and scope. But I hope, paradoxical as it may sound, that readers of “Captive Nation” walk away thinking that such sweeping change is, in fact, possible.

Watch a video of Prof. Berger talking about “Captive Nation” and its meaning to current events:

is an associate professor of history and editor of the book “,” published by 91探花 Press. He answered a few questions about the book.

Q: What is the concept behind this book and how did it come to be written?

A: In May 2011, when I was directing the , we hosted a major conference that sought to center the Pacific Coast in the study of race and politics, in part because the American West tends to be ignored in conversations about race.

But we know that the “left coast” has had a profound impact on movements for racial justice 鈥� from the Industrial Workers of the World and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to the Black Panther Party and the Third World Liberation Front strikes. These movements also generated violent responses, including state repression, that reverberated across the United States and around the world. The collection, which grew out of that conference, represents a preliminary attempt to make sense of that wider history of race, state violence, and radical movements on the Pacific Coast and across the Pacific.

Q: You note Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s 1963 “, which expresses hope that America will “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” calling it a “highly seductive” but “fatally flawed” image of the United States and of King. How is the image flawed, and what is the reality?

A: Don鈥檛 get me wrong, I think “I Have a Dream” was a remarkably effective and moving speech. But we have to be careful not to limit King and his political vision to that single speech. As I tell my students every January, spend a little time reading, watching, or listening to King’s later speeches.

If you listen to his incredible speech voicing his opposition to the Vietnam War, you can’t but recognize that King’s critique ran much deeper than what we’re accustomed to hearing every year on MLK Day.

Calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and speaking as a “citizen of the world,” he identified with the poor in Vietnam and in the U.S. For King and many others, working toward racial justice meant embracing a sense of belonging beyond the U.S. nation-state and confronting the violent machinations of that state.

In contrast, I think the history of race in the U.S. has been domesticated and sanitized to the degree that King’s radical, global vision has become largely illegible. Beginning with Reconstruction in the 1860s and culminating in civil rights legislation in the 1960s, the U.S. state has seemingly stepped forward to advance and sanctify America’s supposed commitment to racial equality and racial justice. The federal government finally mustered a national resolve to defeat racism once and for all, to enforce desegregation on a reluctant South, so the story goes.

That historical depiction, in turn, has been essential to making the U.S. state appear nonracial and even anti-racist across time. Many of the essays in the collection challenge that romanticized and simplifying narrative. The U.S. government, they remind us, has been a central embodiment and agent of white supremacy. And movements across the Pacific make that history of race and state violence pointedly clear.

Q: Your review of race, freedom and state violence in the 19^th and early 20th centuries touches on some dark but familiar themes 鈥� intervention abroad, surveillance of populations, an admitted torture called “the water cure.” How, so far, does the 21^st century compare?聽

A: Rather than comparing the past and the present, let me point out the intimate connections between the past and the present (or the recent past). We are living with the legacies of the past.

One quick example: In October 2003, in an official visit to the Philippines and in a global campaign to justify his invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush announced to the people of the Philippines, with no sense of irony, that the U.S. had “liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.” He conveniently forgot to recall the bloody (1899-1902), in which U.S. troops practiced the “water cure,” and the U.S. colonial rule over the Philippines until 1946. That’s truly messed up. Bush turned to a colonial war from a century ago 鈥� although he did not remember it as such 鈥� to justify his so-called “war on terror.”

It’s depressing and tragic, but many of the historical issues we address in the collection 鈥� racist immigration laws and policies, antiradical repression, police brutality, mass incarceration, and imperial wars 鈥� resonate all too clearly with our current moment.

Q: You write, “I hope our collection serves as a resounding call for new histories, geographies and identities toward building new radical possibilities in the 21^st century.” Briefly, what do you envision those possibilities being like?聽

A: The collection is not only about how depressing the past and the present are. It鈥檚 also very much about the very creative and ingenious ways that human beings have imagined and pursued a radically different world.

I鈥檓 not sure what the future holds, but I’m sure that we鈥檙e living through a critical moment that demands better understandings of the past to guide us forward. As George Lipsitz puts it in his essay, “Times of crisis, ferment, and upheaval produce new perceptions, personalities and politics.”

The movement against state violence in the wake of , I think, is an example of what Lipsitz is talking about. As we move forward, I hope we can be critical and creative in how we frame and interpret the past and the present.

• assistant professor in 91探花Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, was among the contributors to this book, with a chapter titled “Black Power and Slavery in 1970s California Prison Radicalism.”