Editor’s Note

Dear AMSJ Subscribers,

Ah, summer: the season when academics box up their course materials, put away their books, lie on the beach for ten minutes, start planning next year’s courses, wrap up the articles we didn’t finish last summer, and order new books. As always, we editors at AMSJ think to ourselves: how can we best serve our readers? What do AMSJ readers need most from a summer issue of a scholarly journal?

We are delighted to share with you our newest feature: the Annual Summer Reading Issue. As many of you know, AMSJ consistently reviews books and provides book review essays as a regular feature of AMSJ and on the journal’s blog (http://amsjournal.wordpress.com). However, we decided that it would be great to provide you with one issue annually solely dedicated to review essays and reviews, and we feel it is an important way to close out each academic year. Over the summer, you are writing your research, preparing courses and seminars, and attempting to catch up on your reading of newer books in the field. We hope this issue will help in those endeavors. We view the Summer Reading Issue, especially the review essays, as a way of discussing emerging themes—race, religion, sexuality, social class, housing, transnational concerns—through current books in American Studies as an interdisciplinary field. This issue also allows us to focus more specifically on the scholarship through the books that are already published.

We hope you enjoy this installment of AMSJ. Happy summer reading!

• All the best,

• Sherrie Tucker, Randal Maurice Jelks
  Editors

• Chris Robinson
  Assistant Editor

• Justine Greve
  Managing Editor

• Lauren Gaylor
  Production Assistant