Vanderbilt University Press – förlag

Although known primarily as a country music star, Marty Stuart has been taking photographs of the people and places surrounding him since he first went on tour with bluegrass performer Lester Flatt at age twelve. His inspirations to do this include his own mother, Hilda Stuart, whom he watched document their family's everyday life in Mississippi, bassist Milt Hinton's photographs of fellow jazz artists, and Edward Curtis's well-known images of Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Stuart's work ranges from intimate and often candid behind-the-scenes depictions of legendary musicians, to images that capture the eccentricities of characters from the back roads of America, to dignified portraits of members of the impoverished Lakota tribe in South Dakota, a people he was introduced to through his former father-in-law, Johnny Cash. Whatever the subject, Stuart is able to sensitively tease out something unexpected or hidden beneath the surface through a skillful awareness of timing and composition as well as a unique relationship with many of the subjects based on years of friendship and trust.This book will present images from these three bodies of work: "Badlands," on his time with the Lakota; "The Masters," from his work with musicians like Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Dolly Parton, George Jones, Kitty Wells, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings; and "Blue Line Hot Shots." As Stuart explains, "The newly built Interstate Highway System was at one time represented on our maps by the color red, while the two-lane highways and back roads of the nation were represented in blue. The back roads are where you'll find some of the people that I admire, respect, and always keep an eye out for. ... They are renegades … As Roger Miller once said, 'These people flush to the beat of a different plumber.' "The photographs are framed by an introduction by Stuart and a context-setting essay by photography historian Susan Edwards, executive director of the First Center for the Visual Arts. The book and accompanying exhibition at the First Center demonstrate that Marty Stuart is a master storyteller not only through his songs but also through his revealing and compelling photographs.

At least two generations of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people have emerged since Becoming a Visible Man was first published in 2004, but the book remains a beloved resource for trans people and their allies.Since the first edition's publication, author Jamison Green's writings and advocacy among business and governmental organizations around the world have led to major changes in the fields of law, medicine, and social policy, and his (mostly invisible) work has had significant effects on trans people globally. This new edition captures the changes of the last two decades, while also imparting a message of self-acceptance and health.With profoundly personal and eminently practical threads, Green clarifies transgender experience for transgender people and their families, friends, and coworkers. Medical and mental health care providers, educators, business leaders, and advocates seeking information about transgender concerns can all gain from Green's integrative approach to the topic. This book candidly addresses emotional relationships that are affected by a transition, and brings refined integrity to the struggle to self-define, whether one undergoes a transition or chooses not to.Emphasizing the lives of transgender men—who are often overlooked—he elucidates the experience of masculinity in a way that is self-assured and inclusive of feminist values. Green's inspirational wisdom has informed and empowered thousands of readers. There is still no other book like Becoming a Visible Man in the transgender canon.

Ordinary Enchantments investigates magical realism as the most important trend in contemporary international fiction, defines its characteristics and narrative techniques, and proposes a new theory to explain its significance. In the most comprehensive critical treatment of this literary mode to date, Wendy B. Faris discusses a rich array of examples from magical realist novels around the world, including the work not only of Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but also of authors like Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, and Ben Okri.Faris argues that by combining realistic representation with fantastic elements so that the marvelous seems to grow organically out of the ordinary, magical realism destabilizes the dominant form of realism based on empirical definitions of reality, gives it visionary power, and thus constitutes what might be called a "remystification" of narrative in the West. Noting the radical narrative heterogeneity of magical realism, the author compares its cultural role to that of traditional shamanic performance, which joins the worlds of daily life and that of the spirits. Because of that capacity to bridge different worlds, magical realism has served as an effective decolonizing agent, providing the ground for marginal voices, submerged traditions, and emergent literatures to develop and create masterpieces. At the same time, this process is not limited to postcolonial situations but constitutes a global trend that replenishes realism from within. In addition to describing what many consider to be the progressive cultural work of magical realism, Faris also confronts the recent accusation that magical realism and its study as a global phenomenon can be seen as a form of commodification and an imposition of cultural homogeneity. And finally, drawing on the narrative innovations and cultural scenarios that magical realism enacts, she extends those principles toward issues of gender and the possibility of a female element within magical realism.

In September 1977, Sandra Mozarowsky—a seventeen-year-old Spanish erotic film actress and purported lover of King Juan Carlos I—died after leaping from her fourth-floor balcony in Madrid. The mysterious circumstances surrounding her death drew immediate public interest and generated conspiracy theories. Was her death a suicide? A covert murder? A cry for help? In The Shy Assassin, award-winning Spanish novelist Clara Usón uses the tragic death of Mozarowsky to provide a powerful philosophical meditation on suicide and the turbulent years of the Spanish transition to democracy. Playfully drawing upon the work of philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-Paul Sartre, Usón weaves together her own experiences as a rebellious teenager with those of Mozarowsky with great power and emotion. Winner of the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Usón’s novel is a funny, provocative, and deeply entertaining look at Spanish culture during a time of historic political and cultural change.

Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays of this book present a radical critique against strategies of literary appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the position of the author as center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza argues for the communality-a term used by anthropologist Floriberto DÍaz to describe modes of life of indigenous peoples of Oaxaca based on notions of collaborative labor-permeating all writing processes.Disappropriating is a political operation at the core of projects acknowledging, both at ethical and aesthetic levels, that writers always work with materials that are not their own. Writers borrow from the practitioners of a language, entering in a debt relationship that can only be covered by ushering the text back to the communities in which it grew. In an increasingly violent world, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may as well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.

In ""First Do No Harm"", David Gibbs raises basic questions about the humanitarian interventions that have played a key role in U.S. foreign policy for the past twenty years. Using a wide range of sources, including government documents, transcripts of international war crimes trials, and memoirs, Gibbs shows how these interventions often heightened violence and increased human suffering. The book focuses on the 1991-1999 breakup of Yugoslavia, which helped forge the idea that the United States and its allies could stage humanitarian interventions that would end ethnic strife. It is widely believed that NATO bombing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo played a vital role in stopping Serb-directed aggression, and thus resolving the conflict. Gibbs challenges this view, offering an extended critique of Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, ""A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide"". He shows that intervention contributed to the initial breakup of Yugoslavia, and then helped spread the violence and destruction. Gibbs also explains how the motives for U.S. intervention were rooted in its struggle for continued hegemony in Europe. ""First Do No Harm"" argues for a new, noninterventionist model for U.S. foreign policy, one that deploys nonmilitary methods for addressing ethnic violence.

Hortense Spillers is one of the most important literary critics and Black feminist scholars of the last fifty years. Her 1987 scholarly article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is one of the most-cited essays in African American literary studies.Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton, The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers is the first collection to take up directly how Spillers’s writing on literature, culture, and theory have been signal posts to the varied and universal threads of Black thought, as well as countless other areas of the academy. Interspersed with archival fragments from Spillers’s papers kept at the Pembroke Center for Feminist Thought at Brown University, the fourteen essays in this collection demonstrate a fidelity to the ways of reading Spillers has taught us, the nomenclature of enslavement keyed into the American lexicon, and the ways that history permeates our cultural boundaries today.

Traditional histories of Black letters in Latin America have delimited their geographic scope to the Caribbean while also omitting intertwined Afro-Indigenous discourses. Inspired by the legacy of Amefrican thinker LÉlia Gonzalez, AmÉfrica in Letters highlights the Black poets, songwriters, novelists, essayists, and bloggers who have created a counter-multiculturalist literary history on the Latin American mainland. To capture a sense of the variety of their contributions, this book spans Mexico, Central America, the Andes, and the Southern Cone—highlighting the transcontinental nature of the legacy of Black writing and its impact beyond national boundaries. The writers examined in the volume engage with regional intellectual frameworks while putting into circulation a demand for a recalibration of the Hispanophone and Lusophone contexts in which they and other Afrodescendants reside.

For years the legendary John Seigenthaler hosted A Word on Words on Nashville's public television station, WNPT. During the show’s four-decade run (1972 to 2013), he interviewed some of the most interesting and most impor­tant writers of our time. These in-depth exchanges revealed much about the writers who appeared on his show and gave a glimpse into their creative pro­cesses. Seigenthaler was a deeply engaged reader and a generous interviewer, a true craftsman. Frye Gaillard and Pat Toomay have collected and transcribed some of the iconic interactions from the show.Featuring interviews with:Arna Bontemps • Marshall Chapman • Pat Conroy • Rodney Crowell • John Egerton • Jesse Hill Ford • Charles Fountain • William Price Fox • Kinky Friedman • Frye Gaillard • Nikki Giovanni • Doris Kearns Goodwin • David Halberstam • Waylon Jennings • John Lewis • David Maraniss • William Marshall • Jon Meacham • Ann Patchett • Alice Randall • Dori Sanders • John Seigenthaler Sr. • Marty Stuart • Pat Toomay

We Are Still in the Fort is a curated selection of about seventy poems by Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy, divided into three sections spanning the quotidian, the amorous, and the political. The first part, “‘I Swipe Their String of Fish’: Poems of Mombasan Society,” features his often satirical commentary on daily life in Mombasa. The second part, “‘Take Your Misery With You’: Poems of Love and Marriage,” focuses on his psychologically sensitive observations on the volatility of love, marriage, and illicit affairs. The last part, “‘We Are Still in the Fort’: Poems of War and State,” includes epigrammatic critiques of local political leaders and a series of anti-imperialist poems defending Mombasa’s independence against the invading Omani Empire. The volume also features contextual materials on Muyaka and the context of Swahili poetry, a translator’s note, and introductions for each of the three sections.

We Are Still in the Fort is a curated selection of about seventy poems by Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy, divided into three sections spanning the quotidian, the amorous, and the political. The first part, “‘I Swipe Their String of Fish’: Poems of Mombasan Society,” features his often satirical commentary on daily life in Mombasa. The second part, “‘Take Your Misery With You’: Poems of Love and Marriage,” focuses on his psychologically sensitive observations on the volatility of love, marriage, and illicit affairs. The last part, “‘We Are Still in the Fort’: Poems of War and State,” includes epigrammatic critiques of local political leaders and a series of anti-imperialist poems defending Mombasa’s independence against the invading Omani Empire. The volume also features contextual materials on Muyaka and the context of Swahili poetry, a translator’s note, and introductions for each of the three sections.

The Noose (also known as Pèlin-Tèt) focuses on the lives of two Haitian immigrants living in a grubby basement apartment in New York City in 1978. One, Polydor, is a middle-class intellectual and political refugee. The other, Pyram, is a lower-class laborer. For the sake of saving money, the two have been sharing the apartment for three years. While Pyram is away working, Polydor apparently does nothing but read books on political theory. His source of funds remains a mystery.With recent productions in Canada and the United States, the publication of this play in English will provide a new generation of audiences access to this important text, accompanied by an introduction by translator Asselin Charles and an afterword by Jean Jonassaint, both preeminent scholars of Frankétienne’s literary output.

The Noose (also known as Pèlin-Tèt) focuses on the lives of two Haitian immigrants living in a grubby basement apartment in New York City in 1978. One, Polydor, is a middle-class intellectual and political refugee. The other, Pyram, is a lower-class laborer. For the sake of saving money, the two have been sharing the apartment for three years. While Pyram is away working, Polydor apparently does nothing but read books on political theory. His source of funds remains a mystery.With recent productions in Canada and the United States, the publication of this play in English will provide a new generation of audiences access to this important text, accompanied by an introduction by translator Asselin Charles and an afterword by Jean Jonassaint, both preeminent scholars of Frankétienne’s literary output.

The Noose (also known as Pelin-Tet) focuses on the lives of two Haitian immigrants living in a grubby basement apartment in New York City in 1978. One, Polydor, is a middle-class intellectual and political refugee. The other, Pyram, is a lower-class laborer. For the sake of saving money, the two have been sharing the apartment for three years. While Pyram is away working, Polydor apparently does nothing but read books on political theory. His source of funds remains a mystery. With recent productions in Canada and the United States, the publication of this play in English will provide a new generation of audiences access to this important text, accompanied by an introduction by translator Asselin Charles and an afterword by Jean Jonassaint, both preeminent scholars of Franketienne's literary output.

Melissa Range’s Printer’s Fist, awarded the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection that tells the story of a political movement—its strides and setbacks, its unity and fractures—with a particular emphasis on print culture. Drawing upon more than a decade’s worth of archival research into nineteenth-century antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and more, Range highlights the expansiveness of the movement by focusing not on one, but a chorus of abolitionist voices. Her investment in celebrating Black and women’s histories, in particular, offers an inclusive account of American history, informed not only by thorough research but through a formal, poetic engagement with the past. In exploring how enslaved people’s self-emancipation was a form of resistance that preceded, operated alongside, and intertwined with organized networks of antislavery activists, Printer’s Fist will help facilitate discussions surrounding race, gender, and activism that are grounded in historical fact and emotional truth.

In February 1960, as lunch counter sit-ins began in Southern cities, national attention focused on Nashville, where demonstrations were carried out by an unusually organized and disciplined group of students tutored extensively in nonviolent direct action. Their mentor was Reverend James Lawson Jr., a graduate student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School with longstanding nonviolent credentials. His workshops with Nashville students, exploring Gandhian style philosophies and tactics, had predated the famed Greensboro sit-ins.As demonstrations continued in Nashville and successive sit-ins saw violence erupt downtown, local Black ministers demanded an audience with Mayor Ben West. At this meeting, an exchange occurred that was misconstrued by subsequent newspaper reportage. Shortly thereafter, Lawson was summarily expelled from Vanderbilt, one semester shy of graduating.Lawson’s ouster triggered a wave of repercussions and headlines. After extended negotiations with their superiors were rebuffed, a large contingent of Divinity School faculty resigned en masse. Simmering dissension between the university’s professors, Board of Trust, and administrators kept the crisis ongoing. Sustained criticism of Vanderbilt both within the city and nationally made for a turbulent situation as Lawson’s expulsion came to symbolize profound tensions about civil rights and racial justice.

Francisco de Paula Brito is a biography of a merchant, printer, bookseller, and publisher who lived in Rio de Janeiro from his birth in 1809 until his death in 1861. That period was key to the history of Brazil, because it coincided with the relocation of the Portuguese Court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro (1808); the dawning of Brazilian Independence (1822) and the formation of the nation-state; the development of the press and of Brazilian literature; the expansion and elimination of the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and the growth of Rio de Janeiro’s population and the coffee economy. Nevertheless, although it covers five generations of Paula Brito’s family—men and women who left slavery in the eighteenth century—this book focuses on its protagonist’s activities between the 1830s and 1850s.During that period, Francisco de Paula Brito became one of the central figures in the cultural and political scene in the Imperial capital, particularly through his work as a publisher. Paula Brito’s success was due in part to his ability to forge solid alliances with the Empire’s ruling elite—among them leading politicians responsible for the unification of the vast Brazilian territory and for the maintenance of slavery and the illegal trafficking of Africans. Consequently, through the books and newspapers he published, Francisco de Paula Brito became part of a much larger project.

Francisco de Paula Brito: A Black Publisher in Imperial Brazil is a biography of a merchant, printer, bookseller and publisher who lived in Rio de Janeiro from his birth in 1809 until his death in 1861. That period was key to the history of Brazil, because it coincided with the relocation of the Portuguese Court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro (1808), Independence (1822) and the formation of the nation-state, the development of the press and the formation Brazilian literature, the expansion and elimination of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the growth of Rio de Janeiro's population and the coffee economy. Nevertheless, although it covers five  generations of Paula Brito's family - men and women who left slavery in the eighteenth century - this book focuses on its protagonist's activities between the 1830s and 1850s. During that period, Francisco de Paula Brito became one of the central figures in the cultural and political scene in the Imperial capital, particularly through his work as a publisher. Paula Brito's success was due to several factors, including to his ability to forge solid alliances with the Empire's ruling elite. They included leading politicians responsible, for example, for the unification of the vast Brazilian territory centralized in Rio de Janeiro, for the maintenance of slavery and the illegal trafficking of Africans, as well as for the monopoly on violence against the poor and free population. Consequently, through the books and newspapers he published, Francisco de Paula Brito became part of a much larger project.

Faith in Disguise follows Martín Tirado, a white Puerto Rican digital historian and research assistant to Fe Verdejo, an Afro-Venezuelan scholar curating an exhibition in Chicago on enslaved and freed Black women in Latin America. As Martín becomes increasingly enmeshed in Fe’s intellectual and erotic orbit, his role as subordinate and interpreter exposes the entanglement of race, power, and desire in the production of historical knowledge. Through the interplay of archival fragments and contemporary encounters, Mayra Santos-Febres illuminates how the afterlives of slavery persist within Latin American racial and sexual imaginaries, and how the erotic, as both method and experience, may gesture toward forms of liberation from them.

Faith in Disguise follows Martín Tirado, a white Puerto Rican digital historian and research assistant to Fe Verdejo, an Afro-Venezuelan scholar curating an exhibition in Chicago on enslaved and freed Black women in Latin America. As Martín becomes increasingly enmeshed in Fe’s intellectual and erotic orbit, his role as subordinate and interpreter exposes the entanglement of race, power, and desire in the production of historical knowledge. Through the interplay of archival fragments and contemporary encounters, Mayra Santos-Febres illuminates how the afterlives of slavery persist within Latin American racial and sexual imaginaries, and how the erotic, as both method and experience, may gesture toward forms of liberation from them.

First published in 1974, Architecture of Middle Tennessee quickly became a record of some of the region's most important and most endangered buildings. Based primarily upon photographs, measured drawings, and historical and architectural information assembled by the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service in 1970 and 1971, the book was conceived of as a record of buildings preservationists assumed would soon be lost. Remarkably, though, nearly half a century later, most of the buildings featured in the book are still standing.Vanderbilt staffers discovered a treasure trove of photos and diagrams from the HABS survey that did not make the original edition in the Press archives. This new, expanded edition contains all the original text and images from the first volume, plus many of the forgotten archived materials collected by HABS in the 1970s.In her new introduction to this reissue, Aja Bain discusses why these buildings were saved and wonders about what lessons preservationists can learn now about how to preserve a wider swath of our shared history.

For the Public Good: Women, Equity and Health in Rural India details the role of the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP), a groundbreaking, internationally recognized primary health care model that uses local solutions to solve intractable global health problems. Emphasizing equity and community participation, this grassroots approach recruits local women to be educated as village-based health workers. In turn, women village health workers collaborate to overcome the dominant double prejudices in local villages-caste and gender inequality. In one generation, village health workers have progressed from child brides and sequestered wives to knowledgeable health practitioners, valued teachers, and community leaders. Through collective efforts, CRHP has reduced infant and maternal mortality, eliminated some endemic health problems, and advanced economic well-being in villages with women's cooperative lending groups.For the Public Good describes how the recognition and elimination of embedded inequalities, in this case caste discrimination, gender subordination, and class injustice, promotes health and well-being and collaboratively establishes the public good.

For the Public Good: Women, Equity and Health in Rural India details the role of the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP), a groundbreaking, internationally recognized primary health care model that uses local solutions to solve intractable global health problems. Emphasizing equity and community participation, this grassroots approach recruits local women to be educated as village-based health workers. In turn, women village health workers collaborate to overcome the dominant double prejudices in local villages-caste and gender inequality. In one generation, village health workers have progressed from child brides and sequestered wives to knowledgeable health practitioners, valued teachers, and community leaders. Through collective efforts, CRHP has reduced infant and maternal mortality, eliminated some endemic health problems, and advanced economic well-being in villages with women's cooperative lending groups.For the Public Good describes how the recognition and elimination of embedded inequalities, in this case caste discrimination, gender subordination, and class injustice, promotes health and well-being and collaboratively establishes the public good.

In 1998, roughly 2 million visitors came to see what there was to see in Nashville. By 2018, that number had ballooned to 15.2 million.In that span of two decades, the boundaries of Nashville did not change. But something did. Or rather, many somethings changed, and kept changing, until many who lived here began to feel they no longer recognized their own city. And some began to feel it wasn't their own city at all anymore, pushed to its fringes by rising housing costs. Between 1998 and 2018, the population of Nashville grew by 150,000. On some level, Nashville has always packaged itself for consumption, but something clicked and suddenly everyone wanted a taste.But why Nashville? Why now? What changed to make all this change possible? This book is an attempt to understand those changes, or, if not to understand them, exactly, then to grapple with the question: What happened?

Critical University Studies and Performance explores how we contend with issues of power, race, class, and gender in higher education, specifically as they relate to the complexities of theater and performance studies programs. In what ways might the fields of theater, performance, and dance studies, as they operate in institutions of higher education, support hegemonic logics as well as model reparative practices, given their perhaps unique disciplinary relationships to staging representation and their shared emphasis on embodiment as a practical and theoretical area of engagement?Montez and Nereson bring together scholars with a diverse range of career experiences and embodied positions inside of higher learning in order to deepen the field’s theoretical inquiry using an ethnic studies framework. By participating in the interdisciplinary discourse of critical university studies, the volume aims to explore how to conduct ethical research that critiques the university while remaining mindful of our always contingent place within it. The contributors examine the ways the university commodifies minoritarian knowledge, tokenizes the arts, and reproduces inequality. This book offers strategic ways to build liberatory communities and revolutionary networks among students and faculty alike in order to envision futures within and beyond the academy.

Critical University Studies and Performance explores how we contend with issues of power, race, class, and gender in higher education, specifically as they relate to the complexities of theater and performance studies programs. In what ways might the fields of theater, performance, and dance studies, as they operate in institutions of higher education, support hegemonic logics as well as model reparative practices, given their perhaps unique disciplinary relationships to staging representation and their shared emphasis on embodiment as a practical and theoretical area of engagement?Montez and Nereson bring together scholars with a diverse range of career experiences and embodied positions inside of higher learning in order to deepen the field’s theoretical inquiry using an ethnic studies framework. By participating in the interdisciplinary discourse of critical university studies, the volume aims to explore how to conduct ethical research that critiques the university while remaining mindful of our always contingent place within it. The contributors examine the ways the university commodifies minoritarian knowledge, tokenizes the arts, and reproduces inequality. This book offers strategic ways to build liberatory communities and revolutionary networks among students and faculty alike in order to envision futures within and beyond the academy.

In Acts of Resistance, Katharina Rynkiewich explores the fight to save the utility of antibiotic medicines amid global antimicrobial resistance. This engaging ethnography follows bacteria, patients, and practitioners as they weave in and out of North American medical institutions. Through an examination of the social dynamics and ethical challenges of everyday antibiotic use, the author expands on the limitations of good intentions in current antibiotic stewardship policy. Her ethnographic account shows the lived experience of multiple central figures as she shifts setting and tone, ultimately deepening our understanding of the global antimicrobial resistance crisis as emergency.Due to the global scale of impact related to antimicrobial resistance, holding industries and institutions accountable is difficult but essential. With new and reemerging multidrug-resistant organisms making their homes within institutions and in the community, tracing the origins of an infection can be an insurmountable challenge. Rynkiewich demonstrates how “microbial highways” coexist along human highways, providing an apt example of how multidrug-resistant organisms spread across hospitals, communities, and entire regions.

In Acts of Resistance, Katharina Rynkiewich explores the fight to save the utility of antibiotic medicines amid global antimicrobial resistance. This engaging ethnography follows bacteria, patients, and practitioners as they weave in and out of North American medical institutions. Through an examination of the social dynamics and ethical challenges of everyday antibiotic use, the author expands on the limitations of good intentions in current antibiotic stewardship policy. Her ethnographic account shows the lived experience of multiple central figures as she shifts setting and tone, ultimately deepening our understanding of the global antimicrobial resistance crisis as emergency.Due to the global scale of impact related to antimicrobial resistance, holding industries and institutions accountable is difficult but essential. With new and reemerging multidrug-resistant organisms making their homes within institutions and in the community, tracing the origins of an infection can be an insurmountable challenge. Rynkiewich demonstrates how “microbial highways” coexist along human highways, providing an apt example of how multidrug-resistant organisms spread across hospitals, communities, and entire regions.

When Nashville became a Catholic diocese in 1837, it was mostly an aspirational exercise. The few Catholics scattered throughout the state were ministered to only occasionally by missionary priests who traveled by horseback from Kentucky. It is believed that Hugh Rogan, who arrived in Middle Tennessee in 1780 after working as a surveyor for the Continental Army, did not see a priest for fifty years.That all changed when the Italian-born Father Aloysius “Luigi” Orengo arrived in Nashville in 1848. He traveled all over the state, sleeping in the woods, using his saddle for a pillow, and eating cheese and crackers. He’s credited with building churches in Franklin, Columbia, Pulaski, East Nashville, Tracy City, Gallatin, Humboldt, Brownsville, Grand Junction, Covington, Jackson, and McEwen.But as influential as he was, Father Orengo’s story remained untold—until now.