"Breaking Families, Making Families"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Breaking Families, Making Families: Adoption and Child Welfare in the 1990s by Mical Raz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Families in the United States experience child abuse investigations, the removal of children from their homes, and the termination of parental rights at higher rates than peer countries. Yet this does not make them safer and comes at a cost. As a historian and practicing doctor, Mical Raz asks how American society came to accept punitive interventionist policies that prioritize termination of parental rights. These practices “free” children for adoption, which leads to the devastation of families and communities and the creation of “legal orphans”—children who have no legal ties to their families of origin.

Drawing on original archival sources, legislative documents, and oral histories, Raz argues that adoption is not the inevitable solution to a child welfare system in crisis, maps the political history of this shift in child welfare policymaking—exemplified in the passage of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act—and proposes future reforms.

Raz's books include The Lobotomy Letters: The Making of American Psychosurgery (2013), which was awarded the Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Career Development Award; What's Wrong with the Poor? Race, Psychiatry and the War on Poverty (2013), and Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost its Way (2020).

The Page 99 Test: What's Wrong with the Poor?.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Grassroots Women in the Populist Radical Right"

New from Oxford University Press: Grassroots Women in the Populist Radical Right by Sofia Ammassari.

About the book, from the publisher:

Populist radical right (PRR) parties have long been characterised as 'men's parties' due to the overrepresentation of men within their ranks. Yet, not only are PRR parties attracting more women voters than ever, but they are also electing more women MPs than ever. To explain these trends, Grassroots Women in the Populist Radical Right shifts attention to an overlooked step of the political recruitment ladder, the party grassroots, and investigates women's involvement as PRR party members.

The book looks both at the 'supply-side' of membership, assessing whether women and men differ in their motivations for joining, motivations for staying, and activism; and the 'demand-side', exploring if PRR parties adopt distinct recruitment and retention strategies for women and men. It focuses on three PRR parties which have profoundly influenced the politics and societies of their countries: the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the League in Italy, and the Sweden Democrats. Drawing on a vast collection of original qualitative and quantitative data―including interviews with over 100 party members and officials from the three parties, alongside membership surveys of thousands of League and Sweden Democrats members―the book reveals that PRR parties should not still be considered 'men's parties'. Arguing that women PRR grassroots members play a central role in the organisational development, electoral expansion, and growing normalisation of the populist radical right, Ammassari sheds light on one of the defining political phenomena of our century.

Visit Sofia Ammassari's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Her Hat Was in the Ring"

New from NYU Press: Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States by Wendy E. Chmielewski and Jill Norgren.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reveals the untold story of over 6,000 women who ran for office between 1850-1920, expanding our understanding of women's fight for full political citizenship beyond suffrage

Her Hat Was in the Ring details the fascinating story of the thousands of women who ran for elective office in the United States between 1850 and 1920. Contrary to popular belief, women’s right to vote and the right to hold elective office weren’t always tied to one another. Whether women could become candidates, and for which offices, was determined by each state. For several decades after 1850, women ran for local and some state offices without themselves sometimes having the right to vote, motivated by the desire to advance women’s rights and serve their communities as well as personal ambition.

Drawing on newspapers, state government reports, historical and biographical archives, and other resources, historians Wendy E. Chmielewski and Jill Norgren trace the legal, social, and cultural shifts across the country that made it possible for women to gain election to political office. This history is told through the stories of the trailblazing women candidates who ran in thousands of elective campaigns. Chmielewski and Norgren examine how these women were received in their communities, in male-dominated political parties and legislatures, and what administrative and policy contributions they made once elected.

This book expands our understanding of American women’s demand for full citizenship, a struggle that included the successful battle for the right to elective office. At once comprehensive and deeply compelling, Her Hat Was in the Ring illuminates the revolutionary efforts of these candidates throughout this virtually unknown, yet fascinating chapter in American history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Carbon Wave"

New from The MIT Press: The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet by Leah C. Stokes.

About the book, from the publisher:

The true, inspiring story of the new parents who spearheaded an unlikely climate victory.

From the rising climate advocate named to the Time100 Next list, for political junkies and anyone who cares about the environment.

They were perhaps an unlikely trio: the professor Leah Stokes, the policy wonk Sonia Aggarwal in the White House, and the DC insider Adrian Deveny in the Senate, but together, they crafted the boldest climate legislation of our time. In The Carbon Wave, Stokes chronicles the turbulent path of their climate bill as it veered between breakthrough and collapse—from the hopeful beginnings of the Green New Deal in 2018, to the bill’s near-certain defeat by Senator Joe Manchin in the winter of 2021, to the surprise passage of the landmark legislation in August 2022. During this critical time, the author was pregnant or in the NICU with her premature twins, and Aggarwal and Deveny were new parents too.

Interlacing personal narratives with stories from Congress, the White House, and outside activists, Stokes shows how dogged perseverance and collective action can still bend the course of history. The book concludes with an update from the second Trump administration, explaining the parts of the bill that were—and were not—rolled back, and why we should remain hopeful that progress is still being made.

Everyone has been told to shrink their carbon footprint and lighten their load on our planet by changing their behavior. But what if instead of making ourselves smaller, we joined with others to maximize our impact? That’s the carbon wave. And this book shows us how to make it.

Visit Leah C. Stokes's website.

The Page 99 Test: Short Circuiting Policy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Max Bond"

New from Princeton University Press: Max Bond: The Life and Work of the People's Architect by Brian D. Goldstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first biography of a preeminent postwar architect who championed the cause of freedom through architecture and transformed Black history and modernism

J. Max Bond Jr. (1935–2009) was a civil rights activist, educator, and architect who shaped such iconic structures as the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. Driven by the concerns of the civil rights movement, he insisted on a practice centered on deep social engagement during years when his profession became preoccupied with celebrity and spectacle.

Harvard educated and son of an eminent African American family, Bond designed housing, cultural institutions, community centers, and campuses amid an era of sweeping changes in architecture, urbanism, and American culture. He expressed an architectural vision that was democratic and inclusive, international in orientation, and celebratory of cities and their diverse residents. Yet his work has often been overlooked. Award-winning historian Brian Goldstein renders it visible.

Beautifully illustrated, Max Bond is the definitive biography of one of the most important architects of our time, whose aspiration toward an architecture by and for the people was as urgent in his day as it remains in our own.

Visit Brian D. Goldstein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Night at the Inn"

New from Oxford University Press: A Night at the Inn: Space, Place, and the Elite Experience of Empire, 1650–1850 by Daniel Maudlin.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold reinterpretation of Georgian Britian and North America that puts inns at the heart of the imperial project.

Inns were ubiquitous across the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period, inn going was universal among the elite citizens of that world and they feature prominently in contemporary accounts and literature as places of rest, refreshment, and good cheer.

A Night at the Inn follows the experiences of an elite traveller on a journey through the North Atlantic world. What becomes clear along the way is that inns were much more than somewhere for a drink, a meal and a bed for the night; they played a central role in what was first a British, later Anglophone, process of national and imperial placemaking. Whether in Scotland, Virginia, or Jamaica, 'principal inns' contained the useful spaces and things that society's ruling elites needed to establish and maintain power. Moreover, familiar in their sameness, from one inn to the next the material world experienced inside principal inns shaped elite inn-goers' perceptions of place, confirming that here - wherever here was - was somewhere familiar, somewhere 'civilised', somewhere British.

Highly illustrated and drawing on extensive field studies, archival and literary sources, A Night at the Inn offers a new reading of the everyday places and spaces that made and sustained the British Empire, and whose legacies continue to reverberate today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Rule of Law After Artificial Intelligence"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Rule of Law After Artificial Intelligence: Automated Narratives by Katie Szilagyi.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely investigation of what is at stake when AI takes legal decision-making out of human hands.

Artificial intelligence is proliferating in many professions, and the legal field is no exception. In The Rule of Law After Artificial Intelligence, Katie Szilagyi investigates the philosophical and practical implications of using AI in legal spaces, beginning with several fundamental questions: What is the law supposed to do, and from where does it derive its authority? Would law still achieve these aims if automated? How might automation affect the rule of law’s integrity and democratic institutions’ operations?

Blending legal philosophy, applied case studies, and insights from both critical legal scholarship and science and technology studies, Szilagyi argues that law and storytelling are deeply connected. Through creating and contesting the law, we make sense of the information around us and generate narratives about our collective world. These narratives are not static: legal precedent evolves, and legal deliberation on hard cases can help to resolve unclear or unprecedented social issues.

Szilagyi demonstrates that technological innovations make the rule of law vulnerable because large language models and machine learning undermine the visioning function of legal narratives, collapsing exercises of legal interpretation into mere administration. Datafication of law—built on the biased data of our cultural past—threatens longstanding legal ideals, lessens the constraints against abuses of power by private actors, and hamstrings society’s ability to reach a more egalitarian future. Szilagyi argues instead for centering narratives within the law and, in turn, rediscovering the tales the law tells us about who we are.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Watching the Girls Go By"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States by Molly M. Brookfield.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ogling, catcalling, wolf-whistling: such everyday intrusions from male strangers have greeted American women from their first forays into urban space. Watching the Girls Go By is the first book-length history of the phenomenon we know today as street harassment. Spanning more than a century, from the 1860s to the 1980s, this book reveals how street harassment became normalized as part of urban life and restricted women’s freedom of movement through the city.

Historian Molly M. Brookfield charts how American social and cultural discourses cast behaviors like catcalling as the natural entitlement of white, middle-class men, while scapegoating and punishing men of color and working-class men as the stereotypical—and supposedly more dangerous—harassers. She mines a rich archive of newspaper reports, popular culture, women’s writings, public policy, and more to uncover how class, race, and gender shaped Americans' experiences of public space, including who claimed a “right” to women’s bodies, who was seen as a sexual threat, and how women fought back against harassment. Watching the Girls Go By challenges readers to reckon with how the long history and lasting impact of the seemingly trivial intrusions that constitute street harassment continue to shape public space today.

Visit Molly M. Brookfield's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch"

New from Cornell University Press: Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch: Sovereignty and Scribal Culture in Colonial Bukhara by James Pickett.

About the book, from the publisher:

Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch focuses on how, within the emirate of Bukhara, sovereignty was shaped as much by paperwork and quotidian entanglements as by conquest and diplomacy.

By uncovering the paper trail generated by the complex correspondence between Bukhara and Russia, James Pickett reveals figures and voices often missing from other sources. Unlike sanitized court chronicles, the Bukharan chancery records preserve experiences of women navigating patriarchal legal systems, religious minorities seeking state protection, and ordinary subjects petitioning for justice. Pickett provides an unprecedented window into semicolonialism's lived experience, even as many informal systems remained operative during revolution and civil war, after the Russian Empire had ceased to exist.

The emirate of Bukhara represented the apogee of Perso-Islamic society and government at its twilight and as an edge case of colonialism, equally revealing of both phenomena. Bukhara distinguished itself within the Russian Empire through steadfast loyalty, fitting seamlessly into imperial structures bearing many parallels to those already embedded in Central Asia. Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch makes this unique paper trail speak to larger questions about the nature of power and the modern state.

Visit James Pickett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Debt and Refuge"

New from Stanford University Press: Debt and Refuge: Syrian Farmworkers and the Politics of Displacement in Lebanon by China Sajadian.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, including up to 1.5 million displaced Syrians. Many are Syrian farmworkers, who for decades have sustained Lebanon's agricultural system through their seasonal labor. Debt and Refuge traces how the lives of these farmworkers-turned-refugees were transformed by the war in Syria and Lebanon's devastating financial collapse, revealing the slow economic violence that can push people off their land, into waged work, and into cycles of debt.

Drawing on fieldwork centered in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, China Sajadian documents how Syrian farmworkers' debts―to labor brokers, landlords, and relatives―bound them to networks that exploited their labor and also sustained them in the face of profound uncertainty. In contrast to humanitarian portrayals of refugees as uprooted victims awaiting asylum or return, Sajadian locates their predicaments within a longer history of rural migration and familial division across the Lebanese–Syrian border. Linking together the politics of mass displacement, mass indebtedness, and our global food system, she makes a case for radically rethinking forced migration as an agrarian question of labor and feminist question of social reproduction. Written with both ethnographic intimacy and analytical depth, Debt and Refuge offers a deeply human portrait of the gendered politics of displacement and why they matter to the future of our agricultural systems and human mobility―in Lebanon, Syria, and beyond.

--Marshal Zeringue