Monday, April 30, 2018

"Making Peace, Making Riots"

New from Cambridge University Press: Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940-1947 by Anwesha Roy.

About the book, from the publisher:
The decade of the 1940s was a turbulent one for Bengal. War, famine, riots and partition - Bengal witnessed it all, and the unique experience of each of these factors created a space for diverse social and political forces to thrive and impact the lives of people of the province. The book embarks on a study of the last seven years of colonial rule in Bengal, analysing the interplay of multiple socioeconomic and political factors that shaped community identities into communal ones. The focus is on three major communal riots that the province witnessed - the Dacca Riots (1941), the Great Calcutta Killings (August 1946) and the Noakhali Riots (October 1946). This book moves beyond the binary understanding of communalism as Hindu versus Muslim and looks at the caste politics in the province, and offers a complete understanding of the 1940s before partition.
Anwesha Roy is Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Gandhian Politics at the Department of History, King's College London. She completed her Ph.D. from Jawaharlal National University, India, and was also a Charles Wallace Scholar to Britain in 2014.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, April 29, 2018

"Haig's Enemy"

New from Oxford University Press: Haig's Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany's War on the Western Front by Jonathan Boff.

About the book, from the publisher:
During the First World War, the British army's most consistent German opponent was Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Commanding more than a million men as a General, and then Field Marshal, in the Imperial German Army, he held off the attacks of the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French and then Sir Douglas Haig for four long years. But Rupprecht was to lose not only the war, but his son and his throne.

In Haig's Enemy, Jonathan Boff explores the tragic tale of Rupprecht's war--the story of a man caught under the wheels of modern industrial warfare. Providing a fresh viewpoint on the history of the Western Front, Boff draws on extensive research in the German archives to offer a history of the First World War from the other side of the barbed wire. He revises conventional explanations of why the Germans lost with an in-depth analysis of the nature of command, and of the institutional development of the British, French, and German armies as modern warfare was born. Using Rupprecht's own diaries and letters, many of them never before published, Haig's Enemy views the Great War through the eyes of one of Germany's leading generals, shedding new light on many of the controversies of the Western Front.

The picture which emerges is far removed from the sterile stalemate of myth. Instead, Boff re-draws the Western Front as a highly dynamic battlespace, both physical and intellectual, where three armies struggled not only to out-fight, but also to out-think, their enemy. The consequences of falling behind in the race to adapt would be more terrible than ever imagined.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Accounting for Capitalism"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The World the Clerk Made: Accounting for Capitalism by Michael Zakim.

About the book, from the publisher:
The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism, Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust.

This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.”
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, April 28, 2018

"Compulsion in Religion"

New from Oxford University Press: Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq by Samuel Helfont.

About the book, from the publisher:
Samuel Helfont draws on extensive research with Ba'thist archives to investigate the roots of the religious insurgencies that erupted in Iraq following the American-led invasion in 2003. In looking at Saddam Hussein's policies in the 1990s, many have interpreted his support for state-sponsored religion as evidence of a dramatic shift away from Arab nationalism toward political Islam. While Islam did play a greater role in the regime's symbols and Saddam's statements in the 1990s than it had in earlier decades, the regime's internal documents challenge this theory.

The "Faith Campaign" Saddam launched during this period was the culmination of a plan to use religion for political ends, begun upon his assumption of the Iraqi presidency in 1979. At this time, Saddam began constructing the institutional capacity to control and monitor Iraqi religious institutions. The resulting authoritarian structures allowed him to employ Islamic symbols and rhetoric in public policy, but in a controlled manner. Saddam ultimately promoted a Ba'thist interpretation of religion that subordinated it to Arab nationalism, rather than depicting it as an independent or primary political identity.

The point of this examination of Iraqi history, other than to correct the current understanding of Saddam Hussein's political use of religion throughout his presidency, is to examine how Saddam's controlled use of religion was dismantled during the US-Iraq war, and consequently set free extremists that were suppressed under his regime. When the American-led invasion destroyed the regime's authoritarian structures, it unwittingly unhinged the forces that these structures were designed to contain, creating an atmosphere infused with religion, but lacking the checks provided by the former regime. Groups such as the Sadrists, al-Qaida, and eventually the Islamic State emerged out of this context to unleash the insurgencies that have plagued post-2003 Iraq.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Women at War in the Borderlands of the Early American Northeast"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Women at War in the Borderlands of the Early American Northeast by Gina M. Martino.

About the book, from the publisher:
Across the borderlands of the early American northeast, New England, New France, and Native nations deployed women with surprising frequency to the front lines of wars that determined control of North America. Far from serving as passive helpmates in a private, domestic sphere, women assumed wartime roles as essential public actors, wielding muskets, hatchets, and makeshift weapons while fighting for their families, communities, and nations. Revealing the fundamental importance of martial womanhood in this era, Gina M. Martino places borderlands women in a broad context of empire, cultural exchange, violence, and nation building, demonstrating how women's war making was embedded in national and imperial strategies of expansion and resistance. As Martino shows, women's participation in warfare was not considered transgressive; rather it was integral to traditional gender ideologies of the period, supporting rather than subverting established systems of gender difference.

In returning these forgotten women to the history of the northeastern borderlands, this study challenges scholars to reconsider the flexibility of gender roles and reveals how women's participation in transatlantic systems of warfare shaped institutions, polities, and ideologies in the early modern period and the centuries that followed.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, April 27, 2018

"America's Lone Star Constitution"

New from the University of California Press: America's Lone Star Constitution: How Supreme Court Cases from Texas Shape the Nation by Lucas A. Powe Jr.

About the book, from the publisher:
Texas has created more constitutional law than any other state. In any classroom nationwide, any basic constitutional law course can be taught using nothing but Texas cases. That, however, understates the history and politics behind the cases. Beyond representing all doctrinal areas of constitutional law, Texas cases deal with the major issues of the nation. Leading legal scholar and Supreme Court historian Lucas A. Powe, Jr., charts the rich and pervasive development of Texas-inspired constitutional law. From voting rights to railroad regulations, school finance to capital punishment, poverty to civil liberties, this wide-ranging and eminently readable book provides a window into the relationship between constitutional litigation and ordinary politics at the Supreme Court, illuminating how all of the fiercest national divides over what the Constitution means took shape in Texas.
Lucas A. Powe, Jr. is Anne Green Regents Chair in the School of Law and Professor of Government at the University of Texas.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, April 26, 2018

"Is the Cemetery Dead?"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Is the Cemetery Dead? by David Charles Sloane.

About the book, from the publisher:
In modern society, we have professionalized our care for the dying and deceased in hospitals and hospices, churches and funeral homes, cemeteries and mausoleums to aid dazed and disoriented mourners. But these formal institutions can be alienating and cold, leaving people craving a more humane mourning and burial process. The burial treatment itself has come to be seen as wasteful and harmful—marked by chemicals, plush caskets, and manicured greens. Today’s bereaved are therefore increasingly turning away from the old ways of death and searching for a more personalized, environmentally responsible, and ethical means of grief.

Is the Cemetery Dead? gets to the heart of the tragedy of death, chronicling how Americans are inventing new or adapting old traditions, burial places, and memorials. In illustrative prose, David Charles Sloane shows how people are taking control of their grief by bringing their relatives home to die, interring them in natural burial grounds, mourning them online, or memorializing them streetside with a shrine, ghost bike, or RIP mural. Today’s mourners are increasingly breaking free of conventions to better embrace the person they want to remember. As Sloane shows, these changes threaten the future of the cemetery, causing cemeteries to seek to become more responsive institutions.

A trained historian, Sloane is also descendent from multiple generations of cemetery managers and he grew up in Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery. Enriched by these experiences, as well as his personal struggles with overwhelming grief, Sloane presents a remarkable and accessible tour of our new American way of death.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

"The Trouble with Minna"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North by Hendrik Hartog.

About the book, from the publisher:
In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna’s case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate—about care as a “mere voluntary courtesy”—became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about “good Samaritans.” Using Minna’s case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free.

In exploring this liminal and unsettled legal space, Hartog sheds light on the relationships between moral and legal reasoning and a legal landscape that challenges simplistic notions of what it meant to live in freedom. What emerges is a provocative portrait of a distant legal order that, in its contradictions and moral dilemmas, bears an ironic resemblance to our own legal world.
The Page 99 Test: Someday All This Will Be Yours.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

"A Local History of Global Capital"

New from Princeton University Press: A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta by Tariq Omar Ali.

About the book, from the publisher:
Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital.

Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century.

A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, April 23, 2018

"Empire of Guns"

New from Penguin Press: Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution by Priya Satia.

About the book, from the publisher:
We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, upends this conventional wisdom by placing war and Britain’s prosperous gun trade at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the state’s imperial expansion.

Satia brings to life this bustling industrial society with the story of a scandal: Samuel Galton of Birmingham, one of Britain’s most prominent gunmakers, has been condemned by his fellow Quakers, who argue that his profession violates the society’s pacifist principles. In his fervent self-defense, Galton argues that the state’s heavy reliance on industry for all of its war needs means that every member of the British industrial economy is implicated in Britain’s near-constant state of war.

Empire of Guns uses the story of Galton and the gun trade, from Birmingham to the outermost edges of the British empire, to illuminate the nation’s emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the state’s role in economic development, and the origins of our era’s debates about gun control and the “military-industrial complex” — that thorny partnership of government, the economy, and the military. Through Satia’s eyes, we acquire a radically new understanding of this critical historical moment and all that followed from it.

Sweeping in its scope and entirely original in its approach, Empire of Guns is a masterful new work of history — a rigorous historical argument with a human story at its heart.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Are We Not Foreigners Here?"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Are We Not Foreigners Here?: Indigenous Nationalism in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Jeffrey M. Schulze.

About the book, from the publisher:
Since its inception, the U.S.-Mexico border has invited the creation of cultural, economic, and political networks that often function in defiance of surrounding nation-states. It has also produced individual and group identities that are as subversive as they are dynamic. In Are We Not Foreigners Here?, Jeffrey M. Schulze explores how the U.S.-Mexico border shaped the concepts of nationhood and survival strategies of three Indigenous tribes who live in this borderland: the Yaqui, Kickapoo, and Tohono O'odham. These tribes have historically fought against nation-state interference, employing strategies that draw on their transnational orientation to survive and thrive.

Schulze details the complexities of the tribes' claims to nationhood in the context of the border from the nineteenth century to the present. He shows that in spreading themselves across two powerful, omnipresent nation-states, these tribes managed to maintain separation from currents of federal Indian policy in both countries; at the same time, it could also leave them culturally and politically vulnerable, especially as surrounding powers stepped up their efforts to control transborder traffic. Schulze underlines these tribes' efforts to reconcile their commitment to preserving their identities, asserting their nationhood, and creating transnational links of resistance with an increasingly formidable international boundary.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, April 22, 2018

"Lust on Trial"

New from Columbia University Press: Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock by Amy Werbel.

About the book, from the publisher:
Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene. But as Amy Werbel shows in this rich cultural and social history, Comstock’s campaign to rid America of vice in fact led to greater acceptance of the materials he deemed objectionable, offering a revealing tale about the unintended consequences of censorship.

In Lust on Trial, Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice. Werbel describes how Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of “obscene” materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses. Drawing on material culture high and low, including numerous examples of the “obscenities” Comstock seized, Lust on Trial provides fresh insights into Comstock’s actions and motivations, the sexual habits of Americans during his era, and the complicated relationship between law and cultural change.
--Marshal Zeringue

"On Small War"

New from Oxford University Press: On Small War: Carl von Clausewitz and People's War by Sibylle Scheipers.

About the book, from the publisher:
Carl von Clausewitz has long been interpreted as the paradigmatic thinker of major interstate war. This book challenges this assumption by showing that Clausewitz was an ardent analyst of small war and integrated many aspects of his early writings on partisan warfare and people's war into his magnum opus, On War. It reconstructs Clausewitz's intellectual development by placing it in the context of his engagement with the political and philosophical currents of his own times - German Idealism, Romanticism, and Humanism.

The central question that Clausewitz and his contemporaries faced was how to defend Prussia and Europe against Napoleon's expansionist strategy. On the one hand, the nationalization of war that had occurred as a result of the French Revolution could only be countered by drawing the people into the defence of their own countries. On the other, this risked a descent into anarchy and unchecked terror, as the years 1793 and 1794 in France had shown. Throughout his life Clausewitz remained optimistic that the institution of the Prussian Landwehr could achieve both an effective defence of Prussia and a social and political integration of its citizens. Far from leaving behind his early advocacy of people's war, Clausewitz integrated it systematically into his mature theory of war. People's war was war in its existential form; it risked escalating into 'absolute war'. However, if the threat of defensive people's war had become a standard option of last resort in early-nineteenth century Europe, it could also function as a safeguard of the balance of power.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, April 21, 2018

"A Telephone for the World"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age by Martin Collins.

About the book, from the publisher:
In June 1990, Motorola publicly announced an ambitious business venture called Iridium. The project’s signature feature was a constellation of 77 satellites in low-Earth orbit which served as the equivalent of cellular towers, connecting to mobile customers below using wireless hand-held phones. As one of the founding engineers noted, the constellation "bathed the planet in radiation," enabling a completely global communications system.

Focusing on the Iridium venture, this book explores the story of globalization at a crucial period in US and international history. As the Cold War waned, corporations and nations reoriented toward a new global order in which markets, neoliberal ideology, and the ideal of a borderless world predominated. As a planetary-scale technological system, the project became emblematic of this shift and of the role of the United States as geopolitical superpower. In its ambition, scope, challenges, and organizing ideas, the rise of Iridium provides telling insight into how this new global condition stimulated a re-thinking of corporate practices—on the factory floor, in culture and knowledge, and in international relations.

Combining oral history interviews with research in corporate records, Martin Collins opens up new angles on what global meant in the years just before and after the end of the Cold War. The first book to tell the story of Iridium in this context, A Telephone for the World is a fascinating look at how people, nations, and corporations across the world grappled in different ways with the meaning of a new historical era.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, April 20, 2018

"Making a Slave State"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina by Ryan A. Quintana.

About the book, from the publisher:
How is the state produced? In what ways did enslaved African Americans shape modern governing practices? Ryan A. Quintana provocatively answers these questions by focusing on the everyday production of South Carolina’s state space—its roads and canals, borders and boundaries, public buildings and military fortifications. Beginning in the early eighteenth century and moving through the post–War of 1812 internal improvements boom, Quintana highlights the surprising ways enslaved men and women sat at the center of South Carolina’s earliest political development, materially producing the state’s infrastructure and early governing practices, while also challenging and reshaping both through their day-to-day movements, from the mundane to the rebellious. Focusing on slaves’ lives and labors, Quintana illuminates how black South Carolinians not only created the early state but also established their own extralegal economic sites, social and cultural havens, and independent communities along South Carolina’s roads, rivers, and canals.

Combining social history, the study of American politics, and critical geography, Quintana reframes our ideas of early American political development, illuminates the material production of space, and reveals the central role of slaves’ daily movements (for their owners and themselves) to the development of the modern state.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, April 19, 2018

"The Story of Radio Mind"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land by Pamela E. Klassen.

About the book, from the publisher:
At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, a settler-mystic living on northwest coast of British Columbia invented radio mind: Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Retelling Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment, Pamela Klassen shows us how agents of colonialism built metaphysical traditions on land they claimed to have conquered.

Following Du Vernet’s journey westward from Toronto to Ojibwe territory and across the young nation of Canada, Pamela Klassen examines how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—lucidly reveal the spiritual work of colonial settlement. A city builder who bargained away Indigenous land to make way for the railroad, Du Vernet knew that he lived on the territory of Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, and Haida nations who had never ceded their land to the onrush of Canadian settlers. He condemned the devastating effects on Indigenous families of the residential schools run by his church while still serving that church. Testifying to the power of radio mind with evidence from the apostle Paul and the philosopher Henri Bergson, Du Vernet found a way to explain the world that he, his church and his country made.

Expanding approaches to religion and media studies to ask how sovereignty is made through stories, Klassen shows how the spiritual invention of colonial nations takes place at the same time that Indigenous peoples—including Indigenous Christians—resist colonial dispossession through stories and spirits of their own.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

"A Blueprint for War"

New from Yale University Press: A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days That Mobilized America by Susan Dunn.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the cold winter months that followed Franklin Roosevelt’s election in November 1940 to an unprecedented third term in the White House, he confronted a worldwide military and moral catastrophe. Almost all the European democracies had fallen under the ruthless onslaught of the Nazi army and air force. Great Britain stood alone, a fragile bastion between Germany and American immersion in war. In the Pacific world, Japan had extended its tentacles deeper into China. Susan Dunn dramatically brings to life the most vital and transformational period of Roosevelt’s presidency: the hundred days between December 1940 and March 1941, when he mobilized American industry, mustered the American people, initiated the crucial programs and approved the strategic plans for America’s leadership in World War II. As the nation began its transition into the preeminent military, industrial, and moral power on the planet, FDR laid out the stunning blueprint not only for war but for the American Century.
Visit Susan Dunn's website.

Writers Read: Susan Dunn (June 2013).

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

"Class Attitudes in America"

New from Cambridge University Press: Class Attitudes in America: Sympathy for the Poor, Resentment of the Rich, and Political Implications by Spencer Piston.

About the book, from the publisher:
This book explains a long-standing puzzle in American politics: why so many Americans support downwardly redistributive social welfare programs, when such support seems to fly in the face of standard conceptions of the American public as anti-government, individualistic, and racially prejudiced. Bringing class attitudes into the analysis, Spencer Piston demonstrates through rigorous empirical analysis that sympathy for the poor and resentment of the rich explain American support for downwardly redistributive programs - not only those that benefit the middle class, but also those that explicitly target the poor. The book captures an important and neglected component of citizen attitudes toward a host of major public policies and candidate evaluations. It also explains why government does so little to combat economic inequality; in key instances, political elites downplay class considerations, deactivating sympathy for the poor and resentment of the rich.
Visit Spencer Piston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, April 16, 2018

"American Honor"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: American Honor: The Creation of the Nation's Ideals during the Revolutionary Era by Craig Bruce Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:
The American Revolution was not only a revolution for liberty and freedom, it was also a revolution of ethics, reshaping what colonial Americans understood as “honor” and “virtue.” As Craig Bruce Smith demonstrates, these concepts were crucial aspects of Revolutionary Americans’ ideological break from Europe and shared by all ranks of society. Focusing his study primarily on prominent Americans who came of age before and during the Revolution—notably John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington—Smith shows how a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating an ethical ideology that still remains.

By also interweaving individuals and groups that have historically been excluded from the discussion of honor—such as female thinkers, women patriots, slaves, and free African Americans—Smith makes a broad and significant argument about how the Revolutionary era witnessed a fundamental shift in ethical ideas. This thoughtful work sheds new light on a forgotten cause of the Revolution and on the ideological foundation of the United States.
Visit Craig Bruce Smith's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, April 15, 2018

"Addicted to Christ"

New from the University of California Press: Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries by Helena Hansen.

About the book, from the publisher:
How are spiritual power and self-transformation cultivated in street ministries? In Addicted to Christ, Helena Hansen provides an in-depth analysis of Pentecostal ministries in Puerto Rico that were founded and run by self-identified “ex-addicts,” ministries that are also widespread in poor Black and Latino neighborhoods in the U.S. mainland. Richly ethnographic, the book harmoniously melds Hansen’s dual expertise in cultural anthropology and psychiatry. Through the stories of ministry converts, she examines key elements of Pentecostalism: mysticism, ascetic practice, and the idea of other-worldliness. She then reconstructs the ministries' strategies of spiritual victory over addiction: transformation techniques to build spiritual strength and authority through pain and discipline; cultivation of alternative masculinities based on male converts’ reclamation of domestic space; and radical rupture from a post-industrial “culture of disposability.” By contrasting the ministries’ logic of addiction with that of biomedicine, Hansen rethinks roads to recovery, discovering unexpected convergences with biomedicine while revealing the allure of street corner ministries.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, April 14, 2018

"Maternal Bodies"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle

About the book, from the publisher:
In the second half of the eighteenth century, motherhood came to be viewed as women's most important social role, and the figure of the good mother was celebrated as a moral force in American society. Nora Doyle shows that depictions of motherhood in American culture began to define the ideal mother by her emotional and spiritual roles rather than by her physical work as a mother. As a result of this new vision, lower-class women and non-white women came to be excluded from the identity of the good mother because American culture defined them in terms of their physical labor.

However, Doyle also shows that childbearing women contradicted the ideal of the disembodied mother in their personal accounts and instead perceived motherhood as fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Enslaved women were keenly aware that their reproductive bodies carried a literal price, while middle-class and elite white women dwelled on the physical sensations of childbearing and childrearing. Thus motherhood in this period was marked by tension between the lived experience of the maternal body and the increasingly ethereal vision of the ideal mother that permeated American print culture.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, April 13, 2018

"An American Language"

New from the University of California Press: An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States by Rosina Lozano.

About the book, from the publisher:
An American Language is a tour de force that revolutionizes our understanding of U.S. history. It reveals the origins of Spanish as a language binding residents of the Southwest to the politics and culture of an expanding nation in the 1840s. As the West increasingly integrated into the United States over the following century, struggles over power, identity, and citizenship transformed the place of the Spanish language in the nation. An American Language is a history that reimagines what it means to be an American—with profound implications for our own time.
Rosina Lozano is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, April 12, 2018

"The Men of Mobtown"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation by Adam Malka.

About the book, from the publisher:
What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system’s liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery’s final decades. He argues that America’s new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them—and treating them—as criminals. The post–Civil War triumph of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized belief in black criminality.

Mass incarceration may be a recent phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the “new Jim Crow” are very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our police institutions.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

"Rules without Rights"

New from Oxford University Press: Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy by Tim Bartley.

About the book, from the publisher:
Activists have exposed startling forms of labor exploitation and environmental degradation in global industries, leading many large retailers and brands to adopt standards for fairness and sustainability. This book is about the idea that transnational corporations can push these standards through their global supply chains, and in effect, pull factories, forests, and farms out of their local contexts and up to global best practices. For many scholars and practitioners, this kind of private regulation and global standard-setting can provide an alternative to regulation by territorially-bound, gridlocked, or incapacitated nation states, potentially improving environments and working conditions around the world and protecting the rights of exploited workers, impoverished farmers, and marginalized communities. But can private, voluntary standards actually create meaningful forms of regulation? Are forests and factories around the world actually being made into sustainable ecosystems and decent workplaces? Can global norms remake local orders?

This book provides striking new answers by comparing the private regulation of land and labor in democratic and authoritarian settings. Case studies of sustainable forestry and fair labour standards in Indonesia and China show not only how transnational standards are implemented 'on the ground' but also how they are constrained and reconfigured by domestic governance. Combining rich multi-method analyses, a powerful comparative approach, and a new theory of private regulation, Rules without Rights reveals the contours and contradictions of transnational governance.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Spending to Win"

New from Cambridge University Press: Spending to Win: Political Institutions, Economic Geography, and Government Subsidies by Stephanie J. Rickard.

About the book, from the publisher:
Governments in some democracies target economic policies, like industrial subsidies, to small groups at the expense of many. Why do some governments redistribute more narrowly than others? Their willingness to selectively target economic benefits, like subsidies to businesses, depends on the way politicians are elected and the geographic distribution of economic activities. Based on interviews with government ministers and bureaucrats, as well as parliamentary records, industry publications, local media coverage, and new quantitative data, Spending to Win: Political Institutions, Economic Geography, and Government Subsidies demonstrates that government policy-making can be explained by the combination of electoral institutions and economic geography. Specifically, it shows how institutions interact with economic geography to influence countries' economic policies and international economic relations. Identical institutions have wide-ranging effects depending on the context in which they operate. No single institution is a panacea for issues, such as income inequality, international economic conflict, or minority representation.
Stephanie J. Rickard is Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

"Demos Assembled"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–1880 by Stephen W. Sawyer.

About the book, from the publisher:
Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it’s more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being.

Stephen W. Sawyer’s Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order’s genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870–1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer’s findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Labor in Israel"

New from Cornell University Press: Labor in Israel: Beyond Nationalism and Neoliberalism by Jonathan Preminger.

About the book, from the publisher:
Using a comprehensive analysis of the wave of organizing that swept the country starting in 2007, Labor in Israel investigates the changing political status of organized labor in the context of changes to Israel’s political economy, including liberalization, the rise of non-union labor organizations, the influx of migrant labor, and Israel’s complex relations with the Palestinians. Through his discussion of organized labor’s relationship to the political community and its nationalist political role, Preminger demonstrates that organized labor has lost the powerful status it enjoyed for much of Israel’s history. Despite the weakening of trade unions and the Histadrut, however, he shows the ways in which the fragmentation of labor representation has created opportunities for those previously excluded from the labor movement regime.

Organized labor is now trying to renegotiate its place in contemporary Israel, a society that no longer accepts labor’s longstanding claim to be the representative of the people. As such, Preminger concludes that organized labor in Israel is in a transitional and unsettled phase in which new marginal initiatives, new organizations, and new alliances that have blurred the boundaries of the sphere of labor have not yet consolidated into clear structures of representation or accepted patterns of political interaction.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, April 9, 2018

"Sharia Compliant"

New from Stanford University Press: Sharia Compliant: A User's Guide to Hacking Islamic Law by Rumee Ahmed.

About the book, from the publisher:
For over a thousand years, Muslim scholars worked to ensure that Islamic law was always fresh and vibrant, that it responded to the needs of an evolving Muslim community and served as a moral and spiritual compass. They did this by "hacking" Islamic law in accordance with changing times and contexts, diving into the interconnected Islamic legal tradition to recalibrate what was outdated, making some laws work better and more efficiently while leaving others undisturbed. These hacking skills made Islamic law both flexible and relevant so that it could meet the needs of a community with changing values while remaining true to its ancient roots. Today, the hacking process has stalled in the face of unprecedented structural challenges, and Islamic law has stagnated.

This book is designed to revitalize the hacking tradition by getting readers involved in the process. It walks them through the ins and outs of Islamic legal change, vividly describing how Muslim scholars have met new and evolving challenges on topics as diverse as abolition, democracy, finance, gender, human rights, sexuality, and more. And it provides step-by-step instructions for readers to hack laws for themselves, so that through their engagement and creativity, they can help Islamic law regain its intrinsic vitality and resume its role as a forward-looking source for good in the world.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Inland Shift"

New from the University of California Press: Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California by Juan De Lara.

About the book, from the publisher:
The subprime crash of 2008 revealed a fragile, unjust, and unsustainable economy built on retail consumption, low-wage jobs, and fictitious capital. Economic crisis, finance capital, and global commodity chains transformed Southern California just as Latinxs and immigrants were turning California into a majority-nonwhite state. In Inland Shift, Juan D. De Lara uses the growth of Southern California’s logistics economy, which controls the movement of goods, to examine how modern capitalism was shaped by and helped to transform the region’s geographies of race and class. While logistics provided a roadmap for capital and the state to transform Southern California, it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups who argued that commodity distribution exposed them to economic and environmental precarity.
Juan D. De Lara is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and an Affiliate Researcher at its Program for Environmental and Regional Equity. His research interests include the working poor, social movements, urbanization, and social justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, April 8, 2018

"Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society"

New from Cambridge University Press: Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary by Jason A. Springs.

About the book, from the publisher:

US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse and coalition-building across deep moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Democracy in Exile"

New from Cornell University Press: Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual by Daniel Bessner.

About the book, from the publisher:
Anyone interested in the history of U.S. foreign relations, Cold War history, and twentieth century intellectual history will find this impressive biography of Hans Speier, one of the most influential figures in American defense circles of the twentieth century, a must-read.

In Democracy in Exile, Daniel Bessner shows how the experience of the Weimar Republic’s collapse and the rise of Nazism informed Hans Speier’s work as an American policymaker and institution builder. Bessner delves into Speier’s intellectual development, illuminating the ideological origins of the expert-centered approach to foreign policymaking and revealing the European roots of Cold War liberalism.

Democracy in Exile places Speier at the center of the influential and fascinating transatlantic network of policymakers, many of them German émigrés, who struggled with the tension between elite expertise and democratic politics. Speier was one of the most prominent intellectuals among this cohort, and Bessner traces his career, in which he advanced from university intellectual to state expert, holding a key position at the RAND Corporation and serving as a powerful consultant to the State Department and Ford Foundation, across the mid-twentieth century. Bessner depicts the critical role Speier played in the shift in American intellectual history in which hundreds of social scientists left their universities and contributed to the creation of an expert-based approach to U.S. foreign relations, in the process establishing close connections between governmental and nongovernmental organizations. As Bessner writes: to understand the rise of the defense intellectual, we must understand Hans Speier.
Visit Daniel Bessner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, April 7, 2018

"Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism by Emily Ogden.

About the book, from the publisher:
From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years.

Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Politics Beyond Black and White"

New from Cambridge University Press: Politics Beyond Black and White: Biracial Identity and Attitudes in America by Lauren D. Davenport.

About the book, from the publisher:
The US is transforming into a multiracial society: today one-in-six new marriages are interracial and the multiple-race population is the fastest-growing youth group in the country. In Politics Beyond Black and White, Lauren D. Davenport examines the ascendance of multiracial identities and their implications for American society and the political landscape. Amassing unprecedented evidence, this book systematically investigates how race is constructed and how it influences political behavior. Professor Davenport shows that biracials' identities are the product of family, interpersonal interactions, environment, and, most compellingly, gender stereotypes and social class. These identities, in turn, shape attitudes across a range of political issues, from affirmative action to same-sex marriage, and multiracial identifiers are shown to be culturally and politically progressive. But the book also reveals lingering prejudices against race-mixing, and that intermarriage and identification are highly correlated with economic prosperity. Overall findings suggest that multiracialism is poised to dismantle some racial boundaries, while reinforcing others.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, April 6, 2018

"The Sit-Ins"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights by Christopher W. Schmidt.

About the book, from the publisher:
On February 1, 1960, four African American college students entered the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at the lunch counter. This lunch counter, like most in the American South, refused to serve black customers. The four students remained in their seats until the store closed. In the following days, they returned, joined by growing numbers of fellow students. These “sit-in” demonstrations soon spread to other southern cities, drawing in thousands of students and coalescing into a protest movement that would transform the struggle for racial equality.

The Sit-Ins tells the story of the student lunch counter protests and the national debate they sparked over the meaning of the constitutional right of all Americans to equal protection of the law. Christopher W. Schmidt describes how behind the now-iconic scenes of African American college students sitting in quiet defiance at “whites only” lunch counters lies a series of underappreciated legal dilemmas—about the meaning of the Constitution, the capacity of legal institutions to remedy different forms of injustice, and the relationship between legal reform and social change. The students’ actions initiated a national conversation over whether the Constitution’s equal protection clause extended to the activities of private businesses that served the general public. The courts, the traditional focal point for accounts of constitutional disputes, played an important but ultimately secondary role in this story. The great victory of the sit-in movement came not in the Supreme Court, but in Congress, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark legislation that recognized the right African American students had claimed for themselves four years earlier. The Sit-Ins invites a broader understanding of how Americans contest and construct the meaning of their Constitution.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall"

New from Princeton University Press: Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall by Margaret E. Roberts.

About the book, from the publisher:
A groundbreaking and surprising look at contemporary censorship in China

As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be ineffective because they are easily thwarted and evaded by savvy Internet users. In Censored, Margaret Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent can still be enormously effective. Taking advantage of digital data harvested from the Chinese Internet and leaks from China's Propaganda Department, this important book sheds light on how and when censorship influences the Chinese public.

Roberts finds that much of censorship in China works not by making information impossible to access but by requiring those seeking information to spend extra time and money for access. By inconveniencing users, censorship diverts the attention of citizens and powerfully shapes the spread of information. When Internet users notice blatant censorship, they are willing to compensate for better access. But subtler censorship, such as burying search results or introducing distracting information on the web, is more effective because users are less aware of it. Roberts challenges the conventional wisdom that online censorship is undermined when it is incomplete and shows instead how censorship's porous nature is used strategically to divide the public.

Drawing parallels between censorship in China and the way information is manipulated in the United States and other democracies, Roberts reveals how Internet users are susceptible to control even in the most open societies. Demonstrating how censorship travels across countries and technologies, Censored gives an unprecedented view of how governments encroach on the media consumption of citizens.
Visit Margaret E. Roberts's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, April 5, 2018

"Twilight of the Titans"

New from Cornell University Press: Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment by Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent.

About the book, from the publisher:
In this bold new perspective on the United States–China power transition, Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent examine all great power transitions since 1870. They find that declining and rising powers have strong incentives to moderate their behavior at moments when the hierarchy of great powers is shifting. How do great powers respond to decline? they ask. What options do great powers have to slow or reverse their descent?

In Twilight of the Titans, MacDonald and Parent challenge claims that policymakers for great powers, unwilling to manage decline through moderation, will be pushed to extreme measures. Tough talk, intimidation, provocation, and preventive war, they write, are not the only alternatives to defeat. Surprisingly, retrenchment tends not to make declining states tempting prey for other states nor does it promote domestic dysfunction. What retrenchment does encourage is resurrection. Only states that retrench have recovered their former position.

MacDonald and Parent show how declining states tend to behave, what policy options they have to choose from, how rising states respond to decline, and what conditions reward which strategies. Using case studies that include Great Britain in 1872 and 1908, Russia in 1888 and 1903, and France in 1893 and 1924, Twilight of the Titans offers clear evidence that declining powers have a wide array of options at their disposal and offers guidance on how to use the right tools at the right time. The result is a comprehensive rethinking of power transition and hegemonic war theories and a different approach to the policy problems that declining states face. What matters most, the authors write, is the strategic choices made by the great powers.
--Marshal Zeringue

"California Greenin'"

New from Princeton University Press: California Greenin': How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader by David Vogel.

About the book, from the publisher:
A political history of environmental policy and regulation in California, from the Gold Rush to the present

Over the course of its 150-year history, California has successfully protected its scenic wilderness areas, restricted coastal oil drilling, regulated automobile emissions, preserved coastal access, improved energy efficiency, and, most recently, addressed global climate change. How has this state, more than any other, enacted so many innovative and stringent environmental regulations over such a long period of time? The first comprehensive look at California's history of environmental leadership, California Greenin' shows why the Golden State has been at the forefront in setting new environmental standards, often leading the rest of the nation.

From the establishment of Yosemite, America's first protected wilderness, and the prohibition of dumping gold-mining debris in the nineteenth century to sweeping climate- change legislation in the twenty-first, David Vogel traces California's remarkable environmental policy trajectory. He explains that this pathbreaking role developed because California had more to lose from environmental deterioration and more to gain from preserving its stunning natural geography. As a result, citizens and civic groups effectively mobilized to protect and restore their state's natural beauty and, importantly, were often backed both by business interests and bystrong regulatory authorities. Business support for environmental regulation in California reveals that strict standards are not only compatible with economic growth but can also contribute to it. Vogel also examines areas where California has fallen short, particularly in water management and the state's dependence on automobile transportation.

As environmental policy debates continue to grow more heated, California Greenin' demonstrates that the Golden State's impressive record of environmental accomplishments holds lessons not just for the country but for the world.
David Vogel is professor emeritus in the Haas School of Business and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Page 99 Test: The Politics of Precaution.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

"Remembering the Present"

New from Cornell University Press: Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia by Julia L. Cassaniti.

About the book, from the publisher:
What is mindfulness, and how does it vary as a concept across different cultures? How does mindfulness find expression in practice in the Buddhist cultures of Southeast Asia? What role does mindfulness play in everyday life? J. L. Cassaniti answers these fundamental questions and more through an engaged ethnographic investigation of what it means to "remember the present" in a region strongly influenced by Buddhist thought.

Focusing on Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, Remembering the Present examines the meanings, practices, and purposes of mindfulness. Using the experiences of people in Buddhist monasteries, hospitals, markets, and homes in the region, Cassaniti shows how an attention to memory informs how people live today and how mindfulness is intimately tied to local constructions of time, affect, power, emotion, and selfhood. By looking at how these people incorporate Theravada Buddhism into their daily lives, Cassaniti provides a signal contribution to the psychological anthropology of religious experience.

Remembering the Present heeds the call made by researchers in the psychological sciences and the Buddhist side of mindfulness studies for better understandings of what mindfulness is and can be. Cassaniti addresses fundamental questions about selfhood, identity, and how a deeper appreciation of the many contexts and complexities intrinsic in sati (mindfulness in the Pali language) can help people lead richer, fuller, and healthier lives. Remembering the Present shows how mindfulness needs to be understood within the cultural and historical influences from which it has emerged.
--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lost Black Scholar"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought by David A. Varel.

About the book, from the publisher:
Allison Davis (1902–83), a preeminent black scholar and social science pioneer, is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking investigations into inequality, Jim Crow America, and the cultural biases of intelligence testing. Davis, one of America’s first black anthropologists and the first tenured African American professor at a predominantly white university, produced work that had tangible and lasting effects on public policy, including contributions to Brown v. Board of Education, the federal Head Start program, and school testing practices. Yet Davis remains largely absent from the historical record. For someone who generated such an extensive body of work this marginalization is particularly surprising. But it is also revelatory.

In The Lost Black Scholar, David A. Varel tells Davis’s compelling story, showing how a combination of institutional racism, disciplinary eclecticism, and iconoclastic thinking effectively sidelined him as an intellectual. A close look at Davis’s career sheds light not only on the racial politics of the academy but also the costs of being an innovator outside of the mainstream. Equally important, Varel argues that Davis exemplifies how black scholars led the way in advancing American social thought. Even though he was rarely acknowledged for it, Davis refuted scientific racism and laid bare the environmental roots of human difference more deftly than most of his white peers, by pushing social science in bold new directions. Varel shows how Davis effectively helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

"Latino and Muslim in America"

New from Oxford University Press: Latino and Muslim in America: Race, Religion, and the Making of a New Minority by Harold D. Morales.

About the book, from the publisher:
Latino and Muslim in America examines how so-called "minority groups" are made, fragmented, and struggle for recognition. The U.S. is poised to become the first nation whose collective minorities outnumber the dominant population, and Latinos play no small role in this world-changing demographic shift. Even as many people view Latinos and Muslims as growing threats, Latino Muslims celebrate their intersecting identities in their daily lives and in their mediated representations.

In this book, Harold D. Morales follows the lives of several Latino Muslim leaders from the 1970's to the present, tracing their efforts to organize and unify nationally in order to solidify the new identity group's place within the public sphere. Drawing on four years of media analysis, ethnographic and historical research, Morales demonstrates that Latinos embrace Islam within historically specific contexts that include distinctive immigration patterns and new laws, urban spaces, and media technologies that have increasingly brought Latinos and Muslims into contact. He positions this growing community as part of the mass exodus out of the Catholic Church, the growth of Islam, and the digitization of religion. Latino and Muslim in America explores the interactions between religion, race, and media to conclude that these three categories are inextricably entwined.
--Marshal Zeringue