New Materials & Collection Highlights
Collection Highlights

Celebrating Native American Heritage Month
Western Libraries is proud to celebrate Native American Heritage Month. We offer a selection of materials representing stories, scholarship, and ways of knowing from a variety of authors and nations.

Celebrating Latine Heritage Month!
In celebration of Latine Heritage Month, Western Libraries has put together a selection of items in our collections to highlight and celebrate the many voices and identities in the Latin American community. Our theme for this year is La Comunidad — Avazando Juntos (moving forward together), building on last year’s theme to emphasize the importance of Latine community unity.

Celebrating Pride Month
New Materials in the Collection
Publication Date: 2016

Publication Date: 2023
Summary:
Between 1941 and 1963, Aaron Copland made four government-sponsored tours of Latin America that drew extensive attention at home and abroad. Interviews with eyewitnesses, previously untapped Latin American press accounts, and Copland's diaries inform Carol A. Hess's in-depth examination of the composer's approach to cultural diplomacy. As Hess shows, Copland's tours facilitated an exchange of music and ideas with Latin American composers while capturing the tenor of United States diplomatic efforts at various points in history.

Publication Date: 2023
Summary:
Abortion access has been transformed by medication abortion pills. These pills have made safe abortion possible around the world, even in the most restrictive legal contexts. Abortion Beyond Borders follows these pills as they are moved by feminist activists from India into Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland and the USA. It explores how medication abortion pills and the activists who supply them have changed abortion access, impacted politics, and catalyzed progressive reforms. Abortion Beyond Borders offers an unprecedented, up-close look into the global self-managed abortion movement--

Publication Date: 2023
Summary:
When a high school student started a private Instagram account that used racist and sexist memes to make his friends laugh, he thought of it as edgy humor. Over time, the edge got sharper. Then a few other kids found out about the account. Pretty soon, everyone knew. Ultimately no one in the small town of Albany, California, was safe from the repercussions of the account's discovery. Not the girls targeted by the posts. Not the boy who created the account. Not the group of kids who followed it.

Publication Date: 2013
Summary:
The Patria is a fascinating four-book collection of short historical notes, stories, and legends about the buildings and monuments of Constantinople, compiled in the late tenth century by an anonymous author who made ample use of older sources. It also describes the foundation and early (pre-Byzantine) history of the city, and includes the Narrative on the Construction of Hagia Sophia, a semi-legendary account of Emperor Justinian I's patronage of this extraordinary church (built between 532 and 537).

Publication Date: 2023
Summary:
The East India Company was the largest commercial enterprise in British history, yet its roots in Tudor England are often overlooked. The Tudor revolution in commerce led ambitious merchants to search for new forms of investment, not least in risky overseas enterprises-and for these adventurers the most profitable bet of all would be on the Company. Through a host of stories and fascinating details, David Howarth brings to life the Company's way of doing business--from the leaky ships and petty seafarers of its embattled early days to later sweeping commercial success.

Publication Date: 2022
Summary:
For decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen and placed in Western museums during the colonial era. In this book, the author brings to light this largely unknown but deeply important history. One of the world's foremost experts on restitution and cultural heritage, the author investigates extensive, previously unpublished sources to reveal that the roots of the struggle extend much further back than prominent recent debates indicate, and that these efforts were covered up by myriad opponents.

Publication Date: 2023
Summary:
Across the Anglophone Caribbean, the great expectations of independence were never met. From Black Power and Jamaican Democratic Socialism to the Grenada Revolution, the radical currents that once animated the region recede into memory. More than half a century later, the likelihood of radical change appears vanishingly small on the horizon. But what were the twists and turns in the postcolonial journey that brought us here? And is there hope yet for the Caribbean to advance towards more just, democratic and empowering futures? After the Postcolonial Caribbean is structured in two parts.

Publication Date: 2023
Summary:
Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women's rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath. In Against the World, a sweeping and ambitious work of history, acclaimed scholar Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century.
