Bananas in Ham with Cheese Sauce? Meat Salad made of ground bologna and gelatin? Spend any time on the internet, and you’re bound to come across gross recipes from the past. How did anyone with a single taste bud in their mouth come up with this stuff?

American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam®, Bananas, and Jell-O® is a deeply researched and entertaining survey of American food history; connecting cultural, social, and geopolitical events. Author Christina Ward (Preservation: The Art & Science of Canning, Fermentation, and Dehydration, Process, 2017) uses her vast collection of cookbooks to tell the fascinating and often infuriating story of corporate greed and advertising and the manipulation of American cuisine.

Academic researchers have published histories of American food and politics, but Ward brings all these elements together to tell the larger story of why we eat what we do. Though easy to mock, once you learn the real history, you will never look at Jell-O® the same way again! American Advertising Cookbooks, How Corporations Taught Us To Love Bananas, Spam®, and Jell-O® features full-color images and essays uncovering the origins of favorite foods.

Christina is a featured contributor to Serious Eats, Edible Milwaukee, The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel, Remedy Quarterly, and Runcible Spoon magazines. Christina, despite klutziness, is often found in classrooms and community kitchens with sharp knives, spilling vinegar into unsuspecting handbags while wildly gesticulating as she teaches folks how to make perfect pickles. She is a featured guest food expert on Fox6 News Real Milwaukee and public radio stations across the United States.

Christina can trace her Wisconsin roots to the early 1800s. She prides herself on having a hungry mind interested in learning about people, the foods they eat, and the stories that arise from that convergence.

The strange saga of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Marine Corps pal, Kerry Thornley, and his connections to the JFK assassination conspiracy.

“Adam Gorightly offers a unique take on virtually every conspiracy of our time.”—Erskine Payton, Erskine Overnight

Kerry Thornley never imagined that after starting a spoof religion in the 1950s that worshipped Eris—the Greek goddess of chaos and discord—that this seeming joke would unleash a torrent of actual chaos into his life in the years to follow.
During the late 1950s, Thornley became friends with Lee Harvey Oswald when the two served together in the Marines, and was actually writing a novel based on Oswald three years before John F. Kennedy’s assassination. These connections would later cause New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison to suspect that Thornley was one of the notorious Oswald doubles and a part of a JFK assassination plot. Initially, Thornley denied these allegations, but later came to believe that he’d been used as an unwitting pawn in the conspiracy.  This is the story.

Famous for its revolutionary aspects in musical, political, sexual identity and consumerist ideas, punk rock also has its lesser-known gangster ethos as well, explained here by players in the various punk gangs in Los Angeles, Orange County, and South Bay.

Some blue collar kids, responding to the violence and aggression of punk songs, formed punk gangs that got into beatings, drug dealing and murder. No gang was more notorious than La Mirada Punks, or LMP. Says LMP chieftain Frank the Shank after getting arrested by police for murder: “After having my hands in so much bloodshed over the years, I most certainly had it coming. I deserved whatever I got.”

Unexpectedly Frank was bailed out from prison by his father’s friend, a mob gangster. “Too many people died at the hands of punk rock violence,” said Frank. “I got lucky, some didn’t. The gangs ruined punk rock. I still have people telling me today that they quit punk because of LMP. I dig graves at a small cemetery just outside Los Angeles. What else would you expect for Frank the Shank?”

Kudos
“Disco’s Out Murder’s In! is one of my favorite books of all time. I devoured it—An absolute page-turner. It’s an exciting and visceral account of the LA suburbs in the 80’s and an anti-coming of age story. It felt like I was right there. This book is so fucking punk – READ IT!” — Terry Richardson, Photographer/Director

“If you’ve never been in the jungle, a story about a tiger is just a story. Yes, you may shiver… but to you, it’s still just a story, an exciting escape from your every day life. But not to me … It’s real, it’s frightening, and the savagery of that world haunts you forever. I was afraid when I read this book. I caught my fingers tracing over old scars as I turned the pages, and I knew it was real. You can tell yourself that people like this don’t exist, but they do, and they would be pleased to meet you in the dark night of a hardcore boulevard.” — Jack Grisham, Author/Singer TSOL

Click the photo to hear an exclusive playlist created for the book!

Does God have a recipe?

“Holy Food is a titanic feat of research and a fascinating exploration of American faith and culinary rites. Christina Ward is the perfect guide – generous, wise, and ecumenical.” — Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams

“Holy Food doesn’t just trace the influence that preachers, gurus, and cult leaders have had on American cuisine. It offers a unique look at the ways spirituality—whether in the form of fringe cults or major religions—has shaped our culture. Christina Ward has gone spelunking into some very odd corners of American history to unearth this fascinating collection of stories and recipes.” — Jonathan Kauffmann, author of Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat

“An engaging book that shares everything from little-known facts to illuminating profiles of historical figures. Best of all, Ward shares recipes from historic religious communities, updated to reflect modern cooking technology. A must-have for food historians, religious historians, or just the curious and hungry folks in your life. ” — Dr. Julia Skinner, author of Our Fermented Lives

Independent food historian Christina Ward’s highly anticipated Holy Food explores the influence of mainstream to fringe religious beliefs on modern American food culture. Author Christina Ward unravels the numerous ways religious beliefs intersect with politics and economics and, of course, food to tell a different story of America. It’s the story of true believers and charlatans, of idealists and visionaries, and of the everyday people who followed them—often at their peril. Holy Food explains how faith pioneers used societal woes and cultural trends to create new pathways of belief and reveals the interconnectivity between sects and their leaders.

Religious beliefs have been the source of food “rules” since Pythagoras told his followers not to eat beans (they contain souls), Kosher and Halal rules forbade the shrimp cocktail (shellfish are scavengers, or maybe G-d just said “no”). A long-ago Pope forbade Catholics from eating meat on Fridays (fasting to atone for committed sins). Rules about eating are present in nearly every American belief, from high-control groups that ban everything except air to the infamous strawberry shortcake that sated visitors to the Oneida Community in the late 1800s. In America, where the freedom to worship the god of your choice and sometimes of your own making, embraced old traditions and invented new ones.

Holy Food looks at how the explosion of religious movements since the Great Awakenings (the nationwide religious revivals in the 1730s-40s and 1795-1835) birthed a cottage industry of food fads that gained mainstream acceptance. And at the obscure sects and communities of the 20th Century who dabbled in vague spirituality that used food to both entice and control followers. Ward skillfully navigates between academic studies, interviews, cookbooks, and religious texts to make sharp observations with new insights into American history in this highly readable journey through the American kitchen.

Holy Food features over 75 recipes from religious and communal groups tested and updated for modern cooks. Also includes over 100 historic black-and-white images.

Is Lemuria a real place or the fever dream of crackpots, mystics, conspiracy theorists, and Bigfoot hunters?

Below the waters where the Pacific and Indian Oceans lies a lost continent. One of hopes and dreams that housed a race of beings that arrived from foreign planets and from which sprang humanity, religion, civilization, and our modern world. It was called Lemuria and it was all fake.

What began as a theoretical land bridge to explain the mystery of lemurs on Madagascar quickly got hijacked to become the evolutionary home of humankind, the cradle of spirituality, and then the source of cosmological wonders. Abandoned by science as hokum, Lemuria morphed into a land filled with ancient, advanced civilizations, hollowed-out mountains full of gold and crystals, moon-beings descending in baskets, underground evil creatures, and a breast-feeding Bigfoot.

The history of Lemuria is populated with a dizzying array of people from early Darwinists to conspiracy spouting Congressmen, globetrotting madams, Rosicrucians, Hollow-Earthers, sci-fi writers, UFO contactees, sleeping prophets, New Age channelers, a “Mother God”, and a tequila swigging conspiracy theorist. Historian Justin McHenry provides a thoughtful exploration of how pseudo-science hijacked the gentle Victorian-era concept of Lemuria and, in following decades, twisted it into an all-encompassing home for alternative ideas about race, spirituality, science, politics, and the paranormal.

Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place is a fascinating history of a land that doesn’t exist. McHenry takes us on a journey explaining how this strange theory materialized, from the rainforests of Madagascar to Madame Blavatsky’s drawing room to the hidden city in Mount Shasta and a plunge into the depths of 4chan. It’s a wild ride!

–Tea Krulos, American Madness

With narrative deftness and compellingly crafted prose, Lemuria traces the birth and evolution of a more than 150-year-old myth. In exploring the forces that have shaped and buffeted the story of a fake place, the book reveals what those forces and the story itself have to do with modern, digitally connected society. McHenry seamlessly weaves in investigations into topics ranging from evolution to spiritualism, from racism to conspiracy culture, all while bringing the real people who promulgated and propelled the myth of Lemuria to life. Whether you’re interested in science, history, the history of science, or how tales are told, Lemuria is a rigorously researched and fascinatingly unfolded book.

–Sarah Scoles, They Are Already Here and Making Contact

Chicago history as told by the relics of her forgotten people and places. The observed made real to exorcise the hauntings of do-gooders and social engineers.

Chicago was a city of wanderers, truants, and delinquents. It was home to the largest tuberculosis sanitarium in the country, as well as a dizzying number of public and private institutions for wayward children, indigents, the mad, and the poor. Chicago’s socially progressive institutions were influential and respected as saviors of the immigrants and “lower classes.” Yet, the savage race riots of 1919 laid bare the eugenic truth of an ongoing, second Civil War operating as the Northern status quo.

Mother Chicago is the story of three of these institutions – an obscure juvenile experiment called the Chicago Parental School, the great Municipal Sanitarium, and the amalgam of poor house, asylum, and cemetery that occupied the far northern boundaries of the City. This sector of quarantine and detention built on stolen lands acted as a limiter on the production of dreams and an orphan zone for people cast adrift by societal decree. Outside its walls, City power worked in ways both mysterious and transparent while the land harbored peculiar hallucinations that still must be banished.

As the City grew larger, these institutions became fissures in the streets and the transport lines, odd reminders of the Gilded Age, which had made them. Mother Chicago tells the story of the corporeal specters used against the working class: redlining, property speculation, racism, and collateralized debt. Like the game of snakes and ladders, the City lays her traps for the unlucky on a numbered grid — easy to navigate yet impossible to escape.

Billheimer turns a life-long obsession with the ephemera of Chicago history to tell the City’s story through the relics of her forgotten places.

Mother Chicago is a kaleidoscopic romp through America’s most intriguing and confounding city, a city of recent ruins and distant cultures, where the past keeps erupting into the future. In prose that summons the ghostly voices of the machine age, Martin Billheimer excavates the moral core of Chicago by investigating what it did to its own lost children, the kids who were born losers at the game of late-capitalism, the exiles and runaways, the orphaned and unwanted, in a place where the city became the stern parent of its own savage history. –Jeffrey St. Clair, author Born Under a Bad Sky, editor CounterPunch Magazine

Martin’s book elegantly and harrowingly delineates a concept of American education that dwarfs Catholic nuns for sheer evil, a social engineering experiment to kill the gypsy in us all, every mother’s son and daughter indoctrinated with numbed-out stooge as the goal, students with flunky in the bloodstream, capitalism’s WORST form of imperialism, THEY WERE ALWAYS COLONIZING…US!–Daniel Riccuito, The Depression Alphabet Primer, editor of The Chisler

Martin Billheimer’s, Mother Chicago, should be read by everyone who wants to revisit their past. Martin is a living encyclopedia of historical knowledge. With his keen introspection, humor and factual history of old Chicago, I felt that I was actually there looking through his eyes while exploring his childhood home. Brilliant! – HY Thurman, Author, Co-founder of the Young Patriots Organization and the Rainbow Coalition

“Martin’s style is fascinating and engrossing, and his subject is rendered in a kind of shadow that feels both totally mythic and undeniably attuned to that of its time and place. Reading it feels investigative, like a long journalistic piece, while being much more invested in impression than in detail.” – Bryce Lucas, Seminary Co-op Books, Chicago

Is “The Origin of Feces” a Darwinian concern? Perhaps not, but it is the title to the preface of this tongue-in-cheek and unexpectedly revealing exploration of human behavior by the webmaster behind the popular PoopReport.com.

This book is not a history of poop, but a study of today. Its goal is to understand how poop affects us, how we view it, and why; to appreciate its impact from the moment it slides out of our anal sphincters to the moment it enters the sewage treatment plant; to explore how we’ve arrived at this strange discomfort and confusion about a natural product of our bodies; to see how this contradiction-the natural as unnatural-shapes our minds, relationships, environment, culture, economics, media, and art.

Paul Provenza, the director of The Aristocrats, says in his foreword: “It’s shocking to think that a book about poop can be considered an act of courage. But it is. Most of us have knee-jerk responses to the topic that we are not even aware of. Attitudes that, like the awful stench of poop itself, permeate all of society and culture. This book has some very profound and beautiful things to say. It takes a dirty, smelly, unpleasant subject like shit and brings forth ideas that are empowering, dignifying and life affirming.”

Aleister Crowley is best today as a founding father of modern occultism. His wide, hypnotic eyes peer at us on the cover of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his influence can be found everywhere in popular culture.

“The Great Beast” has been the subject of several biographies, some painting him as a misunderstood genius, others as a manipulative charlatan. None of them have looked seriously at his career as an agent of British Intelligence.

Using documents gleaned from British, American, French and Italian archives, Secret Agent 666 sensationally reveals that Crowley played a major role in the sinking of the Lusitania, a plot to overthrow the government of Spain, the thwarting of Irish and Indian nationalist conspiracies, and the 1941 flight of Rudolf Hess.

Author Richard Spence argues that Crowley—in his own unconventional way—was a patriotic Englishman who endured years of public vilification in part to mask his role as a secret agent.

The verification of the Great Beast’s participation in the twentieth century’s most astounding government plots will likely blow the minds of history as well as occult aficionados.

Author Richard B. Spence has been seen on various documentaries on The History Channel and is a consultant for Washington D.C.’s International Spy Museum. He is also the author of Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Feral House).

The Wallace family revisit their classic historical romp, and rework and update it with acerbic behind-the-scenes entries on Tupac Shakur, Kurt Cobain, Anna Nicole Smith, Malcolm X, Jim Morrison and others who have impacted our times.

The Wallace family is the famous publishing phenomenon responsible for many bestsellers, including The Book of Lists and The Book of Predictions. Members of the Wallace family are also individual bestselling authors. Irving Wallace wrote more than a dozen huge-selling books, including four that were made into feature films. David Wallechinsky co-wrote the influential and bestselling What Really Happened to the Class of ‘65? and wrote The Complete Book of the Olympics and Tyrants: The World’s 20 Worst Living Dictators. David also writes a bi-annual feature for Parade magazine on dictators and tyrants. Amy Wallace also wrote The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda, The Punk Rock Book of Lists and several other well-regarded titles.

This revised edition of The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People contains a dozen new entries and over one hundred photographs.

“Revealing! An encyclopedia of what our celebrated better do between the sheets.” — Time

“Entirely fascinating… Hugely entertaining.” — Auberon Waugh