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Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA
9781953368751
Regular price $34.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%Ferguson, Missouri, became the epicenter of America’s racial tensions after the 2014 murder of Michael Brown and the protests that followed in its wake. Though this suburb just outside St. Louis might have seemed like an average midwestern town, the activism that exploded there after Brown’s killing laid bare how longstanding municipal planning policies had led to racial segregation, fragmentation, poverty, and police targeting.
In over one hundred maps, Patty Heyda charts the systemic forces that have defined Ferguson, and the first-ring suburb in America more broadly. Through an in-depth look at the contradictions undergirding city planning and design, it illuminates how tax incentives, housing codes, urban design, policing, philanthropy, and even landscaping often work against the betterment of residents’ lives. At its heart lies a key question: Just who are our cities being built for?
A profound rethinking of what maps can be, Radical Atlas of Ferguson USA will challenge city planners, designers, and everyday citizens to change their perspective of public space.
Best of the Rust Belt
9781953368706
Regular price $19.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%The best personal essays from a contested region, from Belt Publishing’s ten years as a press.
Many have an opinion on what the Rust Belt is. It’s the "blue wall," "Trump country," the "flyover states," or the “real America.” Or maybe, as our own president has said, it's a place that no longer exists called by a name that has long outlived its usefulness. But undeniably, there’s something that connects the region. Maybe the question isn’t what defines that connection, but who.
Over the past ten years, Belt Publishing has been putting out books that prioritize the voices of the many people who live here. We’ve collected our favorite writing from our dozens of anthologies, from Pittsburgh to Gary, Chicago to St. Louis, Milwaukee to Cleveland, and more, documenting growing up in segregated St. Louis and elucidating the coded Islamophobia of southern Michigan. Featuring LaToya Ruby Frazier, Connie Schultz, Brian Broome, Megan Stielstra, Vivian Gibson, Aaron Foley, Kathleen Rooney, Sarah Kendzior, Phil Christman, and more.
Midwest Shreds
9781953368713
Regular price $24.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%A guided tour of one of the Midwest’s most vibrant subcultures, one DIY ramp at a time.
The American Midwest may not have a reputation as the nation’s skating mecca, but maybe it should. In Midwest Shreds, Mandy Shunnarah travels around the region for a deep dive into its skating culture, detailing the activity’s long, storied history there and the large and diverse skating community that calls the Midwest home today. Here, you’ll learn how skating has become a form of mutual aid in Iowa, follow hard-core street skaters as they vie to become King of Cleveland, experience the transcendence of skating in a converted St. Louis cathedral, meet the anarchists who’ve built their own skate paradise, cinder block by cinder block, in southern Ohio, and encounter skaters from Des Moines, Madison, Chicago, West Lafayette, Detroit, and other corners of the Midwest.
With writing that revels in the crunching scrape of hard wheels, the joy of nailing a trick for the first time, and the grit required to fall and get back up again, Midwest Shreds illuminates a small corner of Midwest life and offers a portrait of the rich cultural history and diversity that makes the region what it is today.
Currents in the Electric City
9781953368775
Regular price $24.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%In Currents in the Electric City, an installment in Belt’s City Anthologies series, the story of Scranton gets told by the people who know it best.
Scranton, PA, is more than just the setting for The Office. It's the hub of Northeastern Pennsylvania with a rich industrial and labor history. It’s also a small town in many ways: Are you really from Scranton if your family doesn’t go back several generations (as Maria Johnson asks)? Neighborhood talk can reveal your family secrets before you even know them yourself, as Barbara J. Taylor writes. The essays and poems in this collection show the city as it is today, a Rust Belt city that often serves as a punchline for being stuck in the past but one that is very much alive, with stories to tell. Learn about a Gujarati family’s experience, the small but hearty LGBTQ community, the beauty of the Lackawanna River Valley, and the foreign plants along the roadside that mirror the people who emigrated to the region alongside memories from the past: playing on culm banks, the multigenerational family who thrived in a now-dilapidated home, and even voices from the people buried in Dunmore Cemetery. Through it all runs the juxtaposed desire to leave and pull to stay, or return. Though many have heard of Scranton—through television, as President Joe Biden’s birthplace, or as a so-called relic of the past—nobody knows it like the people who call it home.
Hannibal's Invisibles
9781953368768
Regular price $28.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%With over a hundred photos collected by G. Faye Dant, and with an introduction by renowned Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin.
When Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885, he turned Hannibal, Missouri, into one of the most famous towns in the American imagination. But like Twain’s novel, Hannibal’s idyllic façade often elided the darker racial violence that had marked its past, and it overlooked the history and humanity of the Black residents who have called Hannibal home for generations. Without them, there would be no “America’s hometown.”
In Hannibal’s Invisibles, G. Faye Dant, a Hannibal resident and the executive director of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center, tells the incredible story of the Black community in this small Missouri town, giving voice to a history that has been marginalized far too long. Hear first-hand accounts from those who survived enslavement, faced racism after emancipation, endured Jim Crow, and contributed to the triumphs of the civil rights movement. These are the stories of Black doctors, entrepreneurs, and teachers who helped uplift the community, and remembrances of the countless individuals who gave richness and meaning to Hannibal’s everyday life. The vintage photographs and historical documents collected here are a celebration of these resilient people who built and sustained this corner of the Midwest, despite the immense obstacles they met at every turn.