"Winning It Back"

New from Cornell University Press: Winning It Back: Restoration Presidents and the Cycle of American Politics by David A. Crockett.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Winning It Back, David A. Crockett explores why presidents who promise to set things aright―to "restore"―so often usher in the opposite.

Since the earliest days of the United States, presidencies have seemingly unfolded in a cyclical manner, with features from prior eras recurring in later ones. Building on the idea of "political time"―that presidential terms fall within particular regime cycles―Crockett shows that presidents often fall into one of two roles: opposition presidents and restoration presidents. Opposition presidents belong to the political party not representing the dominant governing philosophy of a specific political era―for example, Republican presidents during the New Deal era (e.g., Eisenhower, Nixon) and Democratic presidents during the Reagan era (e.g., Clinton, Obama). Restoration presidents, conversely, belong to the dominant party, come to power after opposition presidents and, as such, face the task of "restoring" the dominant party's governing agenda.

But that return is rarely smooth. Restoration presidents―like Kennedy after Eisenhower, or George W. Bush after Clinton―inherit both the hope of a comeback and the burden of pent-up expectations. Crockett argues that these leaders often overreach in their urgency to restore what was, inadvertently setting the stage for backlash and, eventually, the unraveling of their own political order.

With sharp historical analysis and a wide-angle view of presidential politics from Jackson to today, Winning It Back offers timely insights on leadership legacies and the risks of nostalgia―and a clarion call for what (and who) may come next.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Windrush Cricket"

New from Oxford University Press: Windrush Cricket: Imperial Culture, Caribbean Migration, and the Remaking of Postwar England by Michael Collins.

About the book, from the publisher:

How did the 'quintessentially English' game of cricket come to be so important across Britain's Caribbean empire? As empire declined and gave way to complex patterns of migration, what part did cricket play in the life of the Windrush generation in post-war Britain?

Following the work of the great Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James, much has been written about the profound importance of cricket for the development of social and cultural life within the Anglophone Caribbean. And yet, from at least the 1930s, black West Indian cricketers were celebrated far beyond the Caribbean, in England and across empire. Cricket was in fact a major factor shaping imperial ideas about black people--how they looked and behaved, what their imagined characteristics and traits were--placing the West Indies, as the Caribbean islands were then known, within a racialised, hierarchical structure of cricket-loving peoples, alongside the colonies of white settlement: South Africa, New Zealand, Australia.

During World War II, black West Indians played prominent roles in the surprisingly large amount of cricket played in England, part of a wider propaganda effort to promote the idea of a multiracial empire, united in common cause against fascism. For post-Windrush arrivals after 1948, cricket was not just a peripheral pastime or a recreational footnote. Cricket was a cornerstone of black West Indian social and cultural life and self-empowerment in England, integral to the earliest creation of social and community groups and the development of support networks. Watching the West Indies international cricket team win on the field of play was just one part of the Windrush story. Through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the growth of an extensive network of Windrush cricket teams and clubs, and, by the 1970s, the evolution of Caribbean cricket leagues and competitions, created a subtle and multifaceted sense of being a West Indian in England. In due course, the children of Windrush migrants would seek to play cricket for England, challenging the very notion of what it means to be English.

Interweaving extensive archival and oral history research into an engaging, often surprising narrative about empire and postwar Britain, Windrush Cricket challenges a range of orthodoxies, arguing that cricket constituted a foundational, yet almost entirely ignored aspect of the way in which Windrush migrants settled and made new lives in postwar England.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Jim Crow in the Asylum"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South by Kylie M. Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is a complicated history of racism and psychiatric healthcare in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The asylums of the Jim Crow era employed African American men and women; served as places of treatment and care for African Americans with psychiatric illnesses; and, inevitably, were places of social control. Black people who lived and worked in these facilities needed to negotiate complex relationships of racism with their own notions of community, mental health, and healing.

Kylie M. Smith mixes exhaustive archival research, interviews, and policy analysis to offer a comprehensive look at how racism affected Black Southerners with mental illness during the Jim Crow era. Complicated legal, political, and medical changes in the late twentieth century turned mental health services into a battlefield between political ideology and psychiatric treatment approaches, with the fallout having long-term consequences for patient outcomes. Smith argues that patterns of racially motivated abuse and neglect of mentally ill African Americans took shape during this era and continue to the present day. As the mentally ill become increasingly incarcerated, Jim Crow in the Asylum reminds readers that, for many Black Southerners, having a mental illness was—and still is—tantamount to committing a crime.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Death and Life of Gentrification"

New from Princeton University Press: The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea by Japonica Brown-Saracino.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative account of what is gained and what is lost when a word that once narrowly referred to neighborhood change takes on a life all its own

Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification in the 1960s to mark the displacement of working-class residents in London neighborhoods by the professional classes. The Death and Life of Gentrification traces how the word has far outgrown Glass’s meaning, becoming a socially charged metaphor for cultural appropriation, upscaling, and the loss of authenticity.

In this lively and insightful book, Japonica Brown-Saracino traces how a concept originally intended to describe the brick-and-mortar transformation of neighborhoods has come to characterize transformations that have little to do with cities. She describes how journalists, artists, filmmakers, novelists, and academics use gentrification as a symbolic device to mourn how everyday pleasures and forms of self-expression—from music to marijuana, kale, and tattoos—entered the domain of the elite. She weighs the implications of turning to gentrification as a tool to tell stories, entertain audiences, and communicate political messages. Relying on vivid examples, the book reveals how the term today expresses widespread ambivalence about rising economic inequality and unease with a variety of forms of social change. This pathbreaking book forces us to think about whether the wide-ranging way we use gentrification dilutes its meaning and stymies efforts to identify and resist urban displacement.

Drawing on everything from film and television to novels and art, The Death and Life of Gentrification sheds critical light on the changing meaning of gentrification in contemporary life. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in gentrification and urban dynamics, as well as for readers curious about attitudes about growing income inequality and the evolution and circulation of ideas.

The Page 99 Test: A Neighborhood That Never Changes.

The Page 99 Test: How Places Make Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Belonging on Both Shores"

New from Stanford University Press: Belonging on Both Shores: Mobility, Migration, and the Bordering of the Persian Gulf by Lindsey R. Stephenson.

About the book, from the publisher:

For most of their history, the people around the Persian Gulf littoral were socially intertwined and economically interdependent. But the twentieth century ushered in nationalization projects, British imperial intervention, and border regulations, all of which posed challenges to everyday mobility in this oceanic world. Those crossing the water became the primary foil for bordering spaces, restricting and regulating movement, and defining difference more generally. Belonging on Both Shores tells the story of people's struggles to move freely between Iran and the Arab shores of the Gulf as the unregulated mobility that had characterized everyday life in the nineteenth century was increasingly policed in the twentieth.

Using a wide range of Arabic, Persian, and English sources, Lindsey Stephenson demonstrates how state officials refined notions of territorial belonging against the movement of Iranians, the most visible mobile "group" in the Persian Gulf arena. Engaging migrant voices, Stephenson narrates how Iranians challenged a perceived requirement to belong to a single place and highlights the techniques these migrants employed to remain connected to both shores. Tracing the movement of Iranians across and around the Persian Gulf and investigating how the technologies of state and mobility transformed fluidity and people's understanding of movement, this book tells a new story of how the modern Gulf was formed.

Visit Lindsey Stephenson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hobbes on Sex"

New from Oxford University Press: Hobbes on Sex by Susanne Sreedhar.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why care what Hobbes thought about sex? Contemporary scholars have largely dismissed Hobbes's brief, and somewhat scattered, remarks about gender and sexuality as peripheral to his central concerns. In Hobbes on Sex, the first book-length study of Hobbes's writings on these topics, Susanne Sreedhar challenges this dismissal.

Far from being haphazard or tangential, Hobbes's views on sex are integral to his broader philosophical-political project. Drawing out the underlying logic of his claims, this volume reconstructs a coherent, substantive, and distinctive account of sexual normativity from Hobbes's various remarks. It argues that, in stark contrast to many of his contemporaries and the traditions from which he emerges, Hobbes is logically committed to a view it calls sexual positivism. According to Hobbes, the nature and status of gender and sexuality--from the proper organization of marriage and the family, to prohibitions on sexual behaviors, to the differences between men and women, to the legitimacy of female rule--are entirely a matter of positive (i.e., civil) law. Because matters of gender and sexuality are the result of human action for Hobbes, they are fundamentally contingent and revisable. This contingency stands in contrast with the pervasive and entrenched ways both natural patriarchalism and sexual moralism were enthroned in much of early modern political theorizing. The volume argues that Hobbes's sexual positivism dethrones sex from its usual prominent position in the history of philosophy. By systematically stripping gender and sexuality of their privileged status, whether as a source of normativity or as a topic of inquiry, this dethroning of sex strikes at the heart of beliefs about human nature, moral knowledge, and social and political institutions that are widely accepted even today. This novel interpretation of Hobbes's views on sexual normativity not only challenges traditional understandings of the trajectory of early modern political thought, but it also suggests a new understanding of his place in the intellectual history of sex.

Visit Susanne Sreedhar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Zoning Faith"

New from NYU Press: Zoning Faith: How City Politics Shape Muslim Communities in Chicago by Sultan Tepe.

About the book, from the publisher:

An intriguing look at how the city's built environment influences the shape of Muslim communities in Chicago

Zoning Faith offers a rare in-depth look at three distinct Muslim communities in Chicago, one Shia Muslim, one Sunni, and one Black Muslim community. The volume explores how these communities navigate their social and political environments, and how their experiences in urban settings help to explain the emergence of new Islamic organizations, practices, and theologies in America.

Zoning Faith provides the first comprehensive spatial examination of Muslims' experiences in global cities. Although cities play a crucial role in the enactment of faith, they are often treated as places Muslims happen to live, or as places that are transformed as many Muslims come to inhabit them. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which cities may transform faith groups in meaningful ways, from zoning regulations and debates about where a mosque can be situated to how a building’s structure can influence prayer and communal life. This book pays careful attention to the intersections of urban space and religion, approaching “built spaces” as profoundly political and particularly illuminating of the experiences of minority faiths.

Drawing on a multi-year and multi-site ethnography, the volume provides a previously unobtainable, in-depth look at how Muslim communities in Chicago defy the expectations of conventional places of worship. Crossing the boundaries of urban studies, theological studies, architecture, and public policy, Zoning Faith offers new insights into how Islam is vernacularized and grounded in the US in many different ways.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The French Médersa"

New from Cornell University Press: The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa by Samuel D. Anderson.

About the book, from the publisher:

The French Médersa explores how the French state pursued a century-long project of bicultural Franco-Muslim education in its northwest African colonies, resulting in a new type of school, the médersa, that combined French and Islamic curricula. French officials frequently described these schools and their students as "hyphens," drawing connections between larger French and Islamic forces.Samuel D. Anderson highlights this hyphenating idea, situating Franco-Muslim education between beliefs about not only France and Islam but also about tradition and modernity and about North and West Africa.

The médersa project had two goals: to create an elite class of Muslims friendly to the French imperial project and, subsequently, to mold Islam into a form that could be more easily controlled. A total of ten médersas opened across Algeria, Senegal, French Soudan, and Mauritania and closed only in the 1950s. The graduates of these schools, the medérsiens, went on to shape their societies profoundly but not always in the ways the French anticipated.

Drawing on archival and oral sources from Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and France, The French Médersa proposes new ways to approach trans-Saharan history. Anderson argues that across northwest Africa, and for more than a century, Franco-Muslim education was central to the history of French empire and Islamic education alike.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Adventures in the Archaic"

New from the University of Chicago: Adventures in the Archaic: Primitivism, Degrowth, and the French Social Sciences, 1945–1975 by Ryan L. Allen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examines how four intellectuals with ties to the French social sciences articulated a new primitivist sensibility between 1945 and 1975.

We tend to associate primitivism with the nostalgic idealization of origins, often aimed at parts of the world that are viewed as closer to that idealized past than modern post-industrial society. Primitivist impulses still exist in popular culture, whether in paleo diets or returns to foraging, and they can also be seen in intellectual and political circles in debates around the possibility of degrowth. In this book, historian Ryan L. Allen examines primitivism anew through four fascinating figures: Georges Bataille, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Devereux, and Mircea Eliade.

In the postwar period, Allen shows, the French social sciences reappraised the primitive and archaic from anthropological, sociological, psychiatric, and religious angles. These four thinkers sought past alternatives to midcentury hypermodernization and capitalist excess. They put forth trenchant critiques of contemporary society and sought in the archaic past a way to imagine a more sustainable future. Adventures in the Archaic rehabilitates these thinkers, showing how their critique of growth and consumerism was nourished by an engagement with primitive cultures as potential sources of cultural and ecological wisdom. As we confront planetary crisis, Allen suggests, there is still much we can learn from these iconoclastic approaches.

Visit Ryan Allen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Search for a Rational Faith"

New from Oxford University Press: The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity by Daniel K. Williams.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Enlightenment and Darwinism posed threats to traditional Christianity. So why have so many highly educated Americans remained committed believers?

The Search for a Rational Faith challenges popular theories of secularization with a sweeping 400-year history of Anglo-American Protestant defenses of the Christian faith. Through a detailed study of the arguments of those who found Christian faith compatible with Enlightenment reason, Daniel K. Williams explains why Christian faith has continued to remain a viable intellectual option in the United States even for educated people who accept modern science.

From the seventeenth-century New England Puritans who founded Harvard College to the twentieth-century university professors who believed that Christian theism was the only viable grounding for morality in the atomic age, faith and reason have been an integral part of the Anglo-American experience. This book chronicles that story.

It is a story that intersects with the spiritual lives of well-known figures such as Isaac Newton, John Locke, John Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King Jr., all of whom wrestled with the question of the reason to believe. It is the story of Christian apologists who crafted intellectually sophisticated defenses of the faith. And above all, it is the story of the development of an idea-the idea that there is a rational basis for Christian belief.

This book shows how that idea was transmitted from England to America in the seventeenth century and how it continued to develop and transform over the next four centuries in response to the Enlightenment, Darwinian evolution, historical criticism of the Bible, new theories of religious epistemology, and the ethical challenge of the civil rights movement. The Search for a Rational Faith is the story of what that idea meant in the past and what it still means today, in a new era of secularization.

Visit Daniel K. Williams's website.

The Page 99 Test: God's Own Party.

The Page 99 Test: Defenders of the Unborn.

--Marshal Zeringue