In 1863, just a year after Congress enacted the Land-Grant Colleges Act, Massachusetts Agricultural College embarked on its mission to offer instruction to the state's citizens in the agricultural, mechanical, and military arts. The school boasted a faculty of 4 and a student body of 56. As UMass Amherst celebrates its sesquicentennial in 2013, its full-time faculty numbers nearly 1,200 and the combined undergraduate/graduate student population is close to 28,000. The principles that undergirded Mass Aggie's founding continue to form the basis for UMass Amherst's mission of preparing young people to make their way in life by stretching boundaries in all disciplines, from the physical and social sciences to the liberal arts. UMass Rising looks at the school over the course of its first 150 years and mines that history to reveal not only how these principles have been fostered, but also the whys and whos. The engaging text is enhanced by features on all aspects of life at this unique university. The reader encounters a cavalcade of notable people, as well as many little-known anecdotes, from the humorous to the touching. All are anchored by a gathering of contemporary and archival images, some published here for the first time. Distributed for the University of Massachusetts Amherst by University of Massachusetts Press.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst boasts over a century of both intercollegiate and intramural athletics. The story begins with the early recreational activities of a New England agricultural college and ends with a highly competitive Division I athletic schedule. From playing ice hockey on the campus pond in 1908 or dribbling basketballs in the Curry Hicks cage in 1931 to the construction of the state-of-the-art Mullins Center in 1993, the University of Massachusetts Amherst has produced some of the best athletes in American sports history. These stars include hockey great Jerry McCarthy, a 1924 Olympic silver medalist; softball pitcher Danielle Henderson, a 2000 Olympic gold medalist; and Julius Erving, legendary NBA star.

Rising Up offers a timely exploration of how truthful narratives by and about people of color can be used to advance social justice in the United States. While people of color are fast becoming the majority population in the United States, the perspectives of white America still dominate the vast majority of the media created and consumed every day. Media makers of color, long shut out of the decision-making process, are rising up to advance a set of different narratives, offering stories and perspectives to counter the racism and disinformation that have long dominated America’s political and cultural landscape. In Rising Up, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar delivers a guide to racial justice narrative-setting. With a focus on shifting perspectives in news media, entertainment, and individual discourse, she highlights the writers, creators, educators, and influencers who are successfully building a culture of affirmation and inclusion. “Sonali Kolhatkar reminds us we are the stories we tell. Our stories can cast a spell of hate, division, and fear, or they can break the powerful grip of racial injustices that have held us since our country’s beginning. With personal and collective wisdom, Kolhatkar guides us in the storytelling that liberates.”—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loco/Gang Days in L.A. “Rising Up challenges the reader to not only rethink their assumptions, but to understand the critical importance of the creation of progressive narratives as an instrument in the struggles for human liberation.”—Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of The Man Who Fell From the Sky

Working-class girls in Ciudad Juárez grow up in a context marked by violence against women, the devastating effects of drug cartel wars, unresponsive and abusive authorities, and predatory U.S. capitalism: under constantly precarious conditions, these girls are often struggling to shape their lives and realize their aspirations. Juárez native Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon explores the vital role that transformative secondary education can play in promoting self-empowerment and a spirit of resistance to the violence and social injustice these girls encounter. Bringing together the voices of ten female students at Preparatoria Altavista, an innovative urban high school founded in 1968 on social justice principles, Cervantes-Soon offers a nuanced analysis of how students and their teachers together enact a transformative educational philosophy that promotes learning, self-authorship, and hope. Altavista’s curriculum is guided by the concept of autogestión, a holistic and dialectical approach to individual and collective identity formation rooted in the students’ experiences and a critical understanding of their social realities. Through its sensitive ethnography, this book shows how female students actively construct their own meaning of autogestión by making choices that they consider liberating and empowering. Juárez Girls Rising provides an alternative narrative to popular and often simplistic, sensationalizing, and stigmatizing discourses about those living in this urban borderland. By merging the story of Preparatoria Altavista with the voices of its students, this singular book provides a window into the possibilities and complexities of coming of age during a dystopic era in which youth hold on to their critical hope and cultivate their wisdom even as the options for the future appear to crumble before their eyes.

In Rising Up, Living On, Catherine E. Walsh examines struggles for existence in societies deeply marked by the systemic violences and entwinements of coloniality, capitalism, Christianity, racism, gendering, heteropatriarchy, and the continual dispossession of bodies, land, knowledge, and life, while revealing practices that contest and live in the cracks of these matrices of power. Through stories, narrations, personal letters, conversations, lived accounts, and weaving together the thought of many—including ancestors, artists, students, activists, feminists, collectives, and Indigenous and Africana peoples—in the Americas, the Global South, and beyond, Walsh takes readers on a journey of decolonial praxis. Here, Walsh outlines individual and collective paths that cry out and crack, ask and walk, deschool, undo the nation-state, and break down boundaries of gender, race, and nature. Rising Up, Living On is a book that sows re-existences, nurtures relationality, and cultivates the sense, hope, and possibility of life otherwise in these desperate times.

Leading the Campaign provides an overview of campaigns in higher education. It emphasizes the leadership role of college and university presidents, but also provides important insights on the role of volunteers and fundraising professionals. It provides lessons and examples that are relevant to all types of nonprofit organizations. The campaign has endured over more than a century as a principal strategy for advancing colleges and universities. It is an approach to fundraising that is rooted in fundamentals of human nature and values and its central principles have proven to be effective under a variety of circumstances. This book focuses on those central principles and how they are being applied in today’s changing environment. The second edition has been revised and updated from the first edition, published in 2010, to provide current data and examples. The book has been expanded to include discussion of emerging trends in campaigns, including the increased importance of social media and online giving. It includes numerous examples drawn from various types of colleges and universities and history-making campaigns.

Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums examines a small but significant wave of new U.S. memorial museums that focus on slavery and its ongoing violent legacies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and Greenwood Rising, which commemorates the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. These museums are challenging historical narratives of slavery and race by placing racial oppression at the center of American history and linking historical slavery to contemporary racial injustice, but they have opened in a period marked by growing racial tension, white nationalism, and political division. Sodaro examines how the violence of U.S. slavery and its lasting legacies is negotiated in these museums, as well as their potential to contribute to the development of a more critical historical memory of race in the U.S. at this particularly volatile sociopolitical moment.