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November's Featured Ebooks: Comfort Food

11/17/2025

Ashley Hoffman

Ebooks

Did you know that the South College Library provides students, faculty, and staff access to over 100,000 ebooks? The changing foliage, cooler temperatures, and fall holidays energize many people to cook, bake, and share their favorite dishes with family and friends. Enjoy this collection of recipe books from cultures around the world and get inspiration for your latest culinary creation!

Comfort Food

A Domestic Cook Book by Malinda Russell
Publication Date: 2025

A Domestic Cook Book (1866) by Malinda Russell is the oldest known published cookbook written by an African American woman. This book contains 260 recipes and household tips that draw from Malinda Russell's twenty years of experience cooking in Southern kitchens, her boarding house, and her pastry shop, and showcase her skills as a pastry chef. This new edition includes a foreword by scholar Rafia Zafar as well as an introduction by the late food historian Janice Bluestein Longone that contextualize Russell's cookbook.

The Mexican Chile Pepper Cookbook by Dave DeWitt; José C. Marmolejo
Publication Date: 2022

The Mexican Chile Pepper Cookbook is the first book to explore the glories of Mexican regional cooking by focusing on this single, but endlessly variable, ingredient. Authors Dave DeWitt and José C. Marmolejo feature more than 150 recipes that celebrate the role of chiles across appetizers, soups and stews, tacos, enchiladas, tamales, moles, and vegetarian dishes. Comprehensive glossaries of Mexican chiles, cheeses, and food terminology are also included. Savor the history, culture, and recipes of Mexican regional home cooking highlighted in this unique, full-color cookbook and explore the various chile peppers showcased in this spicy trek south of the border.

Sephardi by Hélène Jawhara Piñer
Publication Date: 2021

In this extraordinary cookbook, chef and scholar Hélène Jawhara-Piñer combines rich culinary history and Jewish heritage to serve up over 50 culturally significant recipes. Steeped in the history of the Sephardic Jews (Jews of Spain) and their diaspora, these recipes are expertly collected from such diverse sources as medieval cookbooks, Inquisition trials, medical treatises, poems, and literature. Each creation and bite of the dishes herein are guaranteed to transport the reader to the most deeply moving and intriguing aspects of Jewish history. Jawhara-Piñer reminds us that eating is a way to commemorate the past.

Eating with the Tudors by Brigitte Webster
Publication Date: 2023

An extensive collection of authentic Tudor recipes that tell the story of a dramatically changing world in 16th-century England. Eating with the Tudors highlights how religion, reformation and politics influenced what was served on a Tudor's dining table from the very beginning of Henry VII's reign to the final days of Elizabeth I's rule—and features recipes from suckling pigs to pax cakes. Spice up your culinary habits and step back in time to recreate a true Tudor feast by impressing your guests the Tudor way or prepare a New Year's culinary gift fit for a Tudor monarch.

Kitchen Arabic by Joseph Geha
Publication Date: 2023

As much a memoir as a cookbook, Kitchen Arabic illustrates the journey of author Joseph Geha’s early years in America and his family's struggle to learn the language and ways of a new world. A compilation of family recipes and of the stories that came with them, it deftly blends culture with cuisine. With this book, Geha shares how the food of his heritage sustained his family throughout that cultural journey, speaking to them—in a language that needs no translation—of joy and comfort and love.

Eating Wild Japan by Winifred Bird; Paul Poynter (Illustrator)
Publication Date: 2021

A delicious collection of essays, recipes, and practical plant information exploring Japan's thriving culture of foraged foods. From bracken to butterbur to'princess'bamboo, some of Japan's most iconic foods are foraged, not grown, in its forests, fields, and coastal waters—yet most Westerners have never heard of them. In this book, journalist Winifred Bird eats her way from one end of the country to the other in search of the hidden stories of Japan's wild foods, the people who pick them, and the places whose histories they've shaped.

You can find these and more through the South College Library’s digital collection on the library website.

October's Featured Ebooks: Spooky Season

10/20/2025

Ashley Hoffman

Ebooks

Did you know that the South College Library provides students, faculty, and staff access to over 100,000 ebooks? October is officially Spooky Season, so let’s get into the spirit with books about the paranormal, occult, and downright scary.

Spooky Season

Theorising the Contemporary Zombie by Conor Heffernan (Editor); Scott Eric Hamilton (Editor)
Publication Date: 2022

Zombies have become an increasingly popular object of research in academic studies and, of course, in popular media. Over the past decade, they have been employed to explain mathematical equations, vortex phenomena in astrophysics, the need for improved laws, issues within higher education, and even the structure of human societies. Theorising the Contemporary Zombie defines zombiism as a means of theorizing and examining various issues of society in any given era by immersing those social issues within the destabilizing context of apocalyptic crisis; and applying this definition, the volume considers issues including gender, sexuality, family, literature, health, popular culture and extinction.

A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture by Violet Fenn
Publication Date: 2021

An exploration of the continuing appeal of vampires in cultural and social history. Our enduring love of vampires—the bad boys (and girls) of paranormal fantasy—has persisted for centuries. Author Violet Fenn takes the reader through the history of vampires in “fact” and fiction, their origins in mythology and literature, and their enduring appeal on TV and film. The book delves into the sexuality—and sexism—of vampire lore, as well as how modern audiences still hunger for a pair of sharp fangs in the middle of the night.

Haunted Homes by Dahlia Schweitzer
Publication Date: 2021

Haunted Homes is a short but groundbreaking study of homes in horror film and television. While haunted houses can be fun and thrilling, Hollywood horror tends to focus on haunted homes, places where the suburban American dream of safety and comfort has turned into a nightmare. From classic movies like The Old Dark House to contemporary works like Hereditary and the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, Dahlia Schweitzer explores why haunted homes have become a prime stage for dramatizing anxieties about family, gender, race, and economic collapse. This lively and readable study reveals how and why an increasing number of films imagine that home is where the horror is.

Haunted Kansas by Lisa Hefner Heitz
Publication Date: 2023

Who's that? Is someone there? A whisper of air brushes your cheek. Then all is still. Maybe it was just the wind. Or maybe it wasn't....The evanescent apparitions of these tales have frightened and at times amused Kansans throughout the state's long history. Yet this is the first book to capture for posterity the lively antics of the state's ghostly denizens. Besides preserving a colorful and imaginative, if intangible, side of the state's popular heritage, Heitz supplies ghost-storytellers with ample hair-raising material for, well, eternity. Maybe that person breathing softly behind you has another such story to share. Oh, no one's there? Perhaps it really was just the breeze off the prairie.

Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture by Miranda Corcoran
Publication Date: 2022

In the decades since the Second World War, the teenage witch has emerged as a major American cultural trope. Appearing in films, novels, comics and on television, adolescent witches have long reflected shifting societal attitudes towards the teenage demographic. At the same time, teen witches have also served as a means through which adolescent femininity can be conceptualized, interrogated and reimagined. Drawing on a wide theoretical framework—including the works of Deleuze and Foucault as well as recent new materialist philosophies—this book explores how the adolescent witch has evolved over the course of more than seventy years.

Vampirology by Kathryn Harkup
Publication Date: 2021

Our fascination with the vampire myth has scarcely diminished since Bram Stoker's publication of the classic Dracula tale in 1897, but how much of the lore is based in fact and can science explain the origins of horror's most famous fiend? Vampirology charts the murky waters of the vampire myth – from stories found in many cultures across the globe to our sympathetic pop-culture renditions today – to investigate how a scientific interpretation may shed light on the fears and phenomena of the vampire myth.

You can find these and more through the South College Library’s digital collection on the library website.

September's Featured Ebooks: Remember September

09/15/2025

Ashley Hoffman

Ebooks

Did you know that the South College Library offers students, faculty, and staff access to over 100,000 ebooks? This month's theme is Remember September, where we explore themes of nostalgia, memory, and vintage in contemporary culture and society. Start with these books of poetry, history, fashion, and medicine and then dive into the library's ebook collection to find more!

Remember September

Places of Memory: Spatialised Practices of Remembrance from Prehistory to Today by Christian Horn (Editor); Gustav Wollentz (Editor); Gianpiero Di Maida (Editor); Annette Haug (Editor)
Publication Date: 2020

Places of Memory takes a new look at spatialized practices of remembrance and its role in reshaping societies from prehistory to today, gathering researchers representing diverse but complementary fields of expertise. This collection provides important insights into the great variety of human and social reactions examining memory, encompassing aspects of remembering, the loss of memory, reclaiming memories, and remembering things that may not have happened.

Food in Memory and Imagination by Beth Forrest (Editor); Greg de St. Maurice (Editor)
Publication Date: 2022

How do we engage with food through memory and imagination? This expansive volume spans time and space to illustrate how, through food, people have engaged with the past, the future, and their alternative presents. The editors have brought together first-class contributions, from both established and up-and-coming scholars, to consider how imagination and memory intertwine and sometimes diverge. Chapters draw on cases around the world--including Iran, Italy, Japan, Kenya, and the US--and include topics such as national identity, food insecurity, and the phenomenon of knowledge. This volume is a veritable feast for the contemporary food studies scholar.

Wandering Memory by Jan J. Dominique; Emma Donovan Page (Translator)
Publication Date: 2021

The daughter of Haitian journalist and pro-democracy activist Jean Léopold Dominique, who was assassinated in 2000, Jan J. Dominique offers a memoir that provides a uniquely personal perspective on the tumultuous end of the twentieth century in Haiti. Wandering Memory is her elegy for a father and an ode to a beloved, suffering homeland. The book charts the biographical, emotional, and literary journey of a woman moving from one place to another, attempting to return to her craft and put together the pieces of her life in the aftermath of family tragedy. Dominique writes eloquently about love, loss, and traumas both horrifically specific and tragically universal.

Was It Yesterday? by Matthew Leggatt (Editor)
Publication Date: 2021

Bringing together prominent transatlantic film and media scholars, Was It Yesterday? explores the impact of nostalgia in twenty-first century American film and television. Cultural nostalgia, in both real and imagined forms, is dominant today, but what does the concentration on bringing back the past mean for an understanding of our cultural moment, and what are the consequences for viewers? This book questions the nature of this nostalgic phenomenon, the politics associated with it, and the significance of the different periods, in addition to offering counterarguments that see nostalgia as prevalent throughout film and television history.

The Ruins of Nostalgia by Donna Stonecipher
Publication Date: 2023

This book presents a new series of 64 gorgeous, ramifying, unsettling prose poems by one of the most compelling and transformative writers of contemporary prose poetry. Addressing late-twentieth- and twenty-first century experience and its discontents, The Ruins of Nostalgia offers a strikingly original exploration of the misunderstood phenomenon of nostalgia as both feeling-state and historical phenomenon. Each poem is a kind of lyrical mini-essay, playful, passionate, analytic, with each taking a location, memory, conceit, or object as its theme. Written often in the fictional persona of the first-person plural, The Ruins of Nostalgia explores the rich territory where individual response meets a collective phenomenon.

Vintage Menswear: a Collection from the Vintage Showroom by Josh Sims; Douglas Gunn; Roy Luckett
Publication Date: 2012

Classic workwear, sports, and military apparel. Curated by connoisseurs of vintage clothing, The Vintage Showroom is a vast collection of rare 20th-century pieces that fashion designers and stylists pay to view, using the cut and detailing of individual garments as inspiration for their own work. Offering one-of-a-kind access, Vintage Menswear now makes this unique resource available in book form. Providing over 300 lavishly illustrated pages of rare, must-see designs, Vintage Menswear is the essential choice of 20th-century vintage tailoring and detailing and an inspirational resource for students and menswear fashion designers and stylists.

You can find these and more through the South College Library’s digital collection on the library website.