"Meritocratic Democracy"

New from Oxford University Press: Meritocratic Democracy: A Cross-Cultural Political Theory by Elena Ziliotti.

About the book, from the publisher:

Meritocratic Democracy puts into dialogue contemporary works in Western democratic theory and Confucian political theory to examine the effectiveness of democracy as a decision-making system, the role of political leaders and political parties in real-world democracies. The result is a unique cross-cultural theory of democracy, meritocratic democracy, which combines democratic principles with a system of 'partisan juries' at the party level to enhance the quality of political leaders in democracy. Ultimately, this book shows that cross-cultural dialogue is imperative to generate innovative solutions to pressing political issues and foster reciprocal corrections.

Visit Elena Ziliotti's website.

Ziliotti is a tenured Assistant Professor (UD1) of Ethics and Political Philosophy at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Before joining TU Delft, she was an International Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Philosophy, Wuhan University, China, and a recipient of the 2019 China International Postdoctoral Exchange Fellowship. She completed my doctorate degree in Political Philosophy in June 2018 at the King’s College London and the National University of Singapore Joint Ph.D. programme.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Chinese Computer"

New from The MIT Press: The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney.

About the book, from the publisher:

The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing.

A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device? In The Chinese Computer, Thomas S. Mullaney sets out to resolve this paradox, and in doing so, discovers that the key to this seemingly impossible riddle has given rise to a new epoch in the history of writing—a form of writing he calls “hypography.” Based on fifteen years of research, this pathbreaking history of the Chinese language charts the beginnings of electronic Chinese technology in the wake of World War II up through to its many iterations in the present day.

Mullaney takes the reader back through the history and evolution of Chinese language computing technology, showing the development of electronic Chinese input methods—software programs that enable Chinese characters to be produced using alphanumeric symbols—and the profound impact they have had on the way Chinese is written. Along the way, Mullaney introduces a cast of brilliant and eccentric personalities drawn from the ranks of IBM, MIT, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Taiwanese military, and the highest rungs of mainland Chinese establishment, to name a few, and the unexpected roles they played in developing Chinese language computing. Finally, he shows how China and the non-Western world—because of the hypographic technologies they had to invent in order to join the personal computing revolution—“saved” the Western computer from its deep biases, enabling it to achieve a meaningful presence in markets outside of the Americas and Europe.

An eminently engaging and artfully told history, The Chinese Computer is a must-read for anyone interested in how culture informs computing and how computing, in turn, shapes culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Birthing Romans"

New from Princeton University Press: Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome by Anna Bonnell Freidin.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Romans coped with the anxieties and risks of childbirth

Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era.

In this beautifully written book, Anna Bonnell Freidin asks how inhabitants of the Roman Empire—especially women and girls—understood their bodies and constructed communities of care to mitigate and make sense of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, legal documents, poetry, amulets, funerary art, and more, she shows how these communities were deeply human yet never just human. Freidin demonstrates how patients and caregivers took their place alongside divine and material agencies to guard against the risks inherent to childbearing. She vividly illustrates how these efforts and vital networks offer a new window onto Romans’ anxieties about order, hierarchy, and the individual’s place in the empire and cosmos.

Unearthing a risky world that is both familiar and not our own, Birthing Romans reveals how mistakes, misfortunes, and interventions in childbearing were seen to have far-reaching consequences, reverberating across generations and altering the course of people’s lives, their family histories, and even the fate of an empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Enlightenment Biopolitics"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens by William Max Nelson.

About the book, from the publisher:

A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath.

In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals.

In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization.

Visit William Max Nelson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Climate Change as Political Catastrophe"

New from Oxford University Press: Climate Change as Political Catastrophe: Before Collapse by Ross Mittiga.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is now clear scientific consensus that, without immediate and decisive action, the world risks climate catastrophe. This has fueled climate emergency declarations among activist groups and, increasingly, among local, state, and supranational governments. But what exactly counts as a "climate catastrophe" and what does catastrophic climate change portend for contemporary societies?

This book argues that climate change is politically catastrophic insofar as it threatens to undermine the material conditions that make justice - and by extension stable democratic government - possible. It then uses the lens of catastrophe to bring into focus pressing questions concerning how to navigate trade-offs between fairness and precautionary efficacy in the design of climate policy, the permissibility of authoritarian climate emergency powers, and the nature and role of climate disobedience.

Apart perhaps from the spectre of nuclear annihilation, human civilization has never had to reckon with a threat so final and encompassing as that of climate catastrophe. Much as some have argued that "supreme necessity" alters the contours of what is permissible in war, this book starts from the premise that the credible threat of politically catastrophic climate change upends many of the most basic and widely shared assumptions in liberal and democratic thought.

Visit Ross Mittiga's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Visible Ruins"

New from the University of Texas Press: Visible Ruins: The Politics of Perception and the Legacies of Mexico's Revolution by Mónica M. Salas Landa.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of the failures of the Mexican Revolution through the visual and material records.

The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) introduced a series of state-led initiatives promising modernity, progress, national grandeur, and stability; state surveyors assessed land for agrarian reform, engineers used nationalized oil for industrialization, archaeologists reconstructed pre-Hispanic monuments for tourism, and anthropologists studied and photographed Indigenous populations to achieve their acculturation. Far from accomplishing their stated goals, however, these initiatives concealed violence, and permitted land invasions, forced displacement, environmental damage, loss of democratic freedom, and mass killings. Mónica M. Salas Landa uses the history of northern Veracruz to demonstrate how these state-led efforts reshaped the region's social and material landscapes, affecting what was and is visible. Relying on archival sources and ethnography, she uncovers a visual order of ongoing significance that was established through postrevolutionary projects and that perpetuates inequality based on imperceptibility.

Mónica M. Salas Landa is an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at Lafayette College.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Performing Chinatown"

New from Stanford University Press: Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community by William Gow.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a recreation of the House of Wang set from MGM's The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audiences during the Chinese exclusion era. In Performing Chinatown, historian William Gow argues that Chinese Americans in Los Angeles used these performances in Hollywood films and in Chinatown for tourists to shape widely held understandings of race and national belonging during this pivotal chapter in U.S. history. Performing Chinatown conceives of these racial representations as intimately connected to the restrictive immigration laws that limited Chinese entry into the U.S. beginning with the 1875 Page Act and continuing until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. At the heart of this argument are the voices of everyday people including Chinese American movie extras, street performers, and merchants. Drawing on more than 40 oral history interviews as well as research in more than a dozen archival and family collections, this book retells the long-overlooked history of the ways that Los Angeles Chinatown shaped Hollywood and how Hollywood, in turn, shaped perceptions of Asian American identity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Funk the Clock"

New from Cornell University Press: Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time While Young, Perceptive, and Black by Rahsaan Mahadeo.

About the book, from the publisher:

Funk the Clock is about those said to be emblematic of the future yet denied a place in time. Hence, this book is both an invitation and provocation for Black youth to give the finger to the hands of time, while inviting readers to follow their lead.

In revealing how time is racialized, how race is temporalized, and how racism takes time, Rahsaan Mahadeo makes clear why conventional sociological theories of time are both empirically and theoretically unsustainable and more importantly, why they need to be funked up/with.

Through his study of a youth center in Minneapolis, Mahadeo provides examples of Black youth constructing alternative temporalities that center their lived experiences and ensure their worldviews, tastes, and culture are most relevant and up to date. In their stories exists the potential to stretch the sociological imagination to make the familiar (i.e., time) strange. Funk the Clock forges new directions in the study of race and time by upending what we think we know about time, while centering Black youth as key collaborators in rewriting knowledge as we know it.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Librarian’s Atlas"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain by Seth Kimmel.

About the book, from the publisher:

A history of early modern libraries and the imperial desire for total knowledge.

Medieval scholars imagined the library as a microcosm of the world, but as novel early modern ways of managing information facilitated empire in both the New and Old Worlds, the world became a projection of the library. In The Librarian’s Atlas, Seth Kimmel offers a sweeping material history of how the desire to catalog books coincided in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the aspiration to control territory. Through a careful study of library culture in Spain and Morocco—close readings of catalogs, marginalia, indexes, commentaries, and maps—Kimmel reveals how the booklover’s dream of a comprehensive and well-organized library shaped an expanded sense of the world itself.

Seth Kimmel is associate professor of Latin American and Iberian cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle against Thalidomide"

New from Oxford University Press: Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle against Thalidomide by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh.

About the book, from the publisher:

The woman scientist who saved Americans from thalidomide

In the early 1960s, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration became one of the most celebrated women in America when she prevented a deadly sedative from entering the U.S. market. A Canadian-born pharmacologist and physician, Kelsey saved countless Americans from the devastating side effects of thalidomide, a drug routinely given to pregnant women to prevent morning sickness.

As the FDA medical officer charged with reviewing Merrell Pharmaceutical's application for approval in 1960-61, Kelsey was unconvinced that there was sufficient evidence of the drug's efficacy and safety. Despite substantial pressure, she held her ground for nineteen months while the extent of the drug's worldwide damage became known-thousands of stillborn babies, as well as at least 10,000 children across 46 countries born with severe deformities such as missing limbs, arms and legs that resembled flippers, and improperly developed eyes, ears, and other organs.

As a result of Kelsey's efforts, thalidomide was never sold in the United States. The incident led Congress to pass the 1962 Drug Amendment, which fundamentally changed drug regulation in America. Those regulations, still in force today, required pharmaceutical companies to conduct phased clinical trials, obtain informed consent from participants in drug testing, and warn the FDA of adverse effects, and it granted the FDA important controls over prescription-drug advertising.

One of a small minority of women to earn an advanced degree in science in the 1930s, Kelsey faced challenges that resonate with women scientists to this day. Revered by the public as a “good mother of science,” she went on to act as a formidable gatekeeper against other suspect drugs, such as diesthylstilbestrol (DES) and laetrile. As part of the team that tested anti-malarial drugs on prisoner volunteers during World War II, she later was instrumental in the formulation of ethical protocols for drug testing on prisoners and the vulnerable, including the elderly and children. Yet behind the public adulation, she faced professional jealousies and glass ceilings, political interference with FDA's actions, and ongoing hostility from pharmaceutical industry officials. She was sustained and supported by family and friends, co-workers and mentors, and a lifetime commitment to good science.

Based upon FDA archival records, private family papers, and interviews with family and colleagues, this biography brings to light the efforts and legacy of a pioneering woman of science whose contributions are still influential today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Descent of Artificial Intelligence"

New from the University of Pittsburgh Press: The Descent of Artificial Intelligence: A Deep History of an Idea 400 Years in the Making by Kevin Padraic Donnelly.

About the book, from the publisher:

The idea that a new technology could challenge human intelligence is as old as the warning from Socrates and Plato that written language eroded memory. With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence programs, we find ourselves once again debating how a new technology might influence human thought and behavior. Researchers, software developers, and “visionary” tech writers even imagine an AI that will equal or surpass human intelligence, adding to a sense of technological determinism where humanity is inexorably shaped by powerful new machines. But among the hundreds of essays, books, and movies that approach the question of AI, few have asked how exactly scientists and philosophers have codified human thought and behavior. Rather than focusing on technical contributions in machine building, The Descent of Artificial Intelligence explores a more diverse cast of thinkers who helped to imagine the very kind of human being that might be challenged by a machine. Kevin Padraic Donnelly argues that what we often think of as the “goal” of AI has in fact been shaped by forgotten and discredited theories about people and human nature as much as it has been by scientific discoveries, mathematical advances, and novel technologies. By looking at the development of artificial intelligence through the lens of social thought, Donnelly deflates the image of artificial intelligence as a technological monolith and reminds readers that we can control the narratives about ourselves.

Kevin Padraic Donnelly is an associate professor of history at Alvernia University.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wake"

New from Rutgers University Press: Wake: Why the Battle over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters by Karey Alison Harwood.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Wake County Public School System was once described as a beacon of hope for American school districts. It was both academically successful and successfully integrated. It accomplished these goals through the hard work of teachers and administrators, and through a student assignment policy that made sure no school in the countywide district became a high poverty school. Although most students attended their closest school, the “diversity policy” modified where some students were assigned to make sure no school had more than 40% of its students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch or more than 25% performing below grade level. When the school board election of 2009 swept into office a majority who favored “neighborhood schools,” the diversity policy that had governed student assignment for years was eliminated. Wake: Why the Battle Over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters tells the story of the aftermath of that election, including the fierce public debate that ensued during school board meetings and in the pages of the local newspaper, and the groundswell of community support that voted in a pro-diversity school board in 2011. What was at stake in those years was the fundamental direction of the largest school district in North Carolina and the 14th largest in the U.S. Would it maintain a commitment to diverse schools, and if so, how would it balance that commitment with various competing interests and demands? Through hundreds of published opinion articles and several in depth interviews with community leaders, Wake examines the substance of that debate and explores the community’s vision for public education. Wake also explores the importance of knowing the history of a place, including the history of school segregation. Wake County’s example still resonates, and the battle over diverse public schools still matters, because owning responsibility for the problem of segregated schools (or not) will shape the direction of America’s future.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Democracy Tamed"

New from Oxford University Press: Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage by Gianna Englert.

About the book, from the publisher:

Does good democratic government require intelligent, moral, and productive citizens? Can our political institutions educate the kind of citizens we wish or need to have? With recent arguments "against democracy" and fears about the rise of populism, there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. Some even question whether democracy is worth saving.

In Democracy Tamed, Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Englert shows how nineteenth-century French liberals championed the idea of "political capacity" as an alternative to democratic political rights and argued that voting rights should be limited to capable citizens who would preserve free, stable institutions against revolutionary passions and democratic demands. Liberals also redefined democracy itself, from its ancient meaning as political rule by the people to something that, counterintuitively, demanded the guidance of a capable few rather than the rule of all.

Understandably, scholarly treatments of political capacity have criticized the idea as exclusionary and potentially dangerous. Englert argues instead that political capacity was a flexible standard that developed alongside a changing society and economy, allowing liberals to embrace democracy without abandoning their first principles. She reveals a forgotten, uncharted path of liberalism in France that remained open to political democracy while aiming to foster citizen capacity. Overall, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their notion of the "new democracy" to resist universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors' antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them.

Visit Gianna Englert's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A History of the Muslim World"

New from Princeton University Press: A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity by Michael A. Cook.

About the book, from the publisher:

A panoramic history of the Muslim world from the age of the Prophet Muḥammad to the birth of the modern era

This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.

After setting the scene in the Middle East of late antiquity, the book depicts the rise of Islam as one of the great black swan events of history. It continues with the spectacular rise of the Caliphate, an empire that by the time it broke up had nurtured the formation of a new civilization. It then goes on to cover the diverse histories of all the major regions of the Muslim world, providing a wide-ranging account of the key military, political, and cultural developments that accompanied the eastward and westward spread of Islam from the Middle East to the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

At the same time, A History of the Muslim World contains numerous primary-source quotations that expose the reader to a variety of acutely insightful voices from the Muslim past.

Michael Cook is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His books include Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective, A Brief History of the Human Race, and The Koran: A Very Short Introduction.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Shock Values"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy by Carola Binder.

About the book, from the publisher:

How inflation and deflation fears shape American democracy.

Many foundational moments in American economic history—the establishment of paper money, wartime price controls, the rise of the modern Federal Reserve—occurred during financial panics as prices either inflated or deflated sharply. The government’s decisions in these moments, intended to control price fluctuations, have produced both lasting effects and some of the most contentious debates in the nation’s history.

A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, Shock Values reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented—not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures.

Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present.

Visit Carola Binder's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Italian Forgers"

New from Cornell University Press: Italian Forgers: The Art Market and the Weight of the Past in Modern Italy by Carol Helstosky.

About the book, from the publisher:

Italian Forgers takes an unorthodox approach to the fascinating topic of art forgery, focusing not on art forgery per se, but on the major forgery scandals that shifted the Italian art market in response to constant, and often intense, demand for Italian objects. By focusing on power dynamics that both precipitated forgery scandals and forged Italian cultural identities, this book connects the debates and discussions about three well-known Italian forgers―Giovanni Bastianini, Icilio Joni, and Alceo Dossena―to anchor and investigate the mechanics of the Italian art market from unification through the fascist era.

Carol Helstosky examines foreign accounts of transactions and Italian writings about the art market. The actions and words of Italian dealers illustrate how the Italian art and antiquities market was an undeniably modern industry, on par with tourism in terms of its contribution to the Italian economy and to understandings of Italian identity. These accounts also reveal how dealers, artists, go-betweens, guides, and restorers worked to not only meet the intense demand for Italian products but also to develop highly sophisticated business practices to maintain financial stability and respond to shifts in demand consciously (but not always conscientiously).

Italian Forgers weaves a compelling narrative about the history of Italian identity, forgery, and the value of the past. As a result, Helstosky brings historical perspective to the study of art forgery and art fraud. She reveals how historical circumstances and structural imbalances of cultural power shaped the market for art and antiquities and amplified incidents of art deception and forgery scandals.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Unfinished Quest"

New from Oxford University Press: The Unfinished Quest: India's Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi by T.V. Paul.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Unfinished Quest, T.V. Paul charts India's checkered path toward higher regional and global status, and sheds important light on its significance as the "swing power" that can mitigate China's aggressive rise in the Indo-Pacific region.

In 2022, India surpassed the United Kingdom, its former colonial ruler, as the fifth largest economy in the world. Since the 1990s, a series of US presidents and secretaries of state have all acclaimed India as a rising major power that deserves to be recognized as a lead actor in the international arena. All five permanent members of the UN Security Council except China have openly acknowledged the need to include India among their ranks. But even now, India has not attained the status of a globally recognized great power.

In The Unfinished Quest, leading international relations and South Asia scholar T.V. Paul charts India's checkered path toward higher regional and global status, covering both the successes and failures it has experienced since the modern nation's founding in 1947. Paul focuses on the key motivations driving Indian leaders to enhance India's global status and power, but also on the many constraints that have hindered its progress. He carefully specifies what counts as indicators of greater status and uses these as benchmarks in his assessment of each era. In this manner, he also brings forth some important insights on status competition and power transitions in the contemporary international system.

Paul's analysis of India's quest for status also sheds important light on the current geo-strategic situation and serves as a new framework for understanding the China-India rivalry, as well as India's relative position in the broader Indo-Pacific theater. As the economies of China and India grow rapidly, the power balance between them will be determined by each country's ability to develop the hard and soft powers needed to outpace the other and solidify their place in the global hierarchy. Whether India can be a "swing power" able to mitigate China's aggressive rise depends on its relative power position in that theater and its own evolution as an inclusive, tolerant democracy that can develop and utilize its most priced asset, the demographic dividend. This sweeping account of India's uneven rise in the global system will serve as the authoritative work on the subject.

Visit T.V. Paul's website.

The Page 99 Test: Restraining Great Powers.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Who We Are Is Where We Are"

New from Columbia University Press: Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt by Amanda McMillan Lequieu.

About the book, from the publisher:

Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux?

Through the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of southeast Chicago and a shuttered mining community in Iron County, Wisconsin, Amanda McMillan Lequieu traces the power and shifting meanings of the notion of home for people who live in troubled places. Building from on-the-ground observations of community life, archival research, and interviews with long-term residents, she shows how inhabitants of deindustrialized communities balance material constraints with deeply felt identities. McMillan Lequieu maps how the concept of home has been constructed and the ways it has been reshaped as these communities have changed. She considers how long-term residents navigate the tensions around belonging and making ends meet long after the departure of their community’s founding industry.

Who We Are Is Where We Are links the past and the present, rural and urban, to shed new light on life in postindustrial communities. Beyond a story of Midwestern deindustrialization, this timely book provides broader insight into the capacious idea of home―how and where it is made, threatened, and renegotiated in a world fraught with change.

Visit Amanda McMillan Lequieu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Past Progress"

New from Stanford University Press: Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea by Ed Pulford.

About the book, from the publisher:

While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history's most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale. Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book's three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores "post-historical" Hunchun's diverse sociopolitics since high socialism's demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound "end of history" which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Father Time"

New from Princeton University Press: Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping account of male nurturing, explaining how and why men are biologically transformed when they care for babies

It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things. Hasn’t it always been so? When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of labor: mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors’ offspring. But come the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of men are tending babies, sometimes right from birth. How can this be happening? Puzzled and dazzled by the tender expertise of new fathers around the world—several in her own family—celebrated evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy set out to trace the deep history of male nurturing and explain a surprising departure from everything she had assumed to be “normal.”

In Father Time, Hrdy draws on a wealth of research to argue that this ongoing transformation in men is not only cultural, but profoundly biological. Men in prolonged intimate contact with babies exhibit responses nearly identical to those in the bodies and brains of mothers. They develop caring potential few realized men possessed. In her quest to explain how men came to nurture babies, Hrdy travels back through millions of years of human, primate, and mammalian evolution, then back further still to the earliest vertebrates—all while taking into account recent economic and social trends and technological innovations and incorporating new findings from neuroscience, genetics, endocrinology, and more. The result is a masterful synthesis of evolutionary and historical perspectives that expands our understanding of what it means to be a man—and what the implications might be for society and our species.

Visit Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Disembedded"

New from Oxford University Press: Disembedded: Regulation, Crisis, and Democracy in the Age of Finance by Basak Kus.

About the book, from the publisher:

During the last two decades, there has been much scholarly and popular interest in the financialization of the American economy--why the turn to finance has taken place, what constituted it, and what has come out of it. In Disembedded, Basak Kus draws from the theories of Karl Polanyi--one of the greatest and most influential political economists of the twentieth century--to answer these questions. Focused primarily on the state's regulatory role in a dominantly financialized economy, Kus examines how neoliberal principles influenced the evolution of American regulatory policies, shaping the financial sector's operations and practices. Her narrative traces the trajectory of these interactions, highlighting critical junctures, policy decisions, and market outcomes that culminated in the financial crisis. Offering historical insights into the financial crisis spanning 2007-2010 and its ensuing influence on American politics and democracy, Disembedded provides a broad-ranging and systemic explanation of the American political economy, especially the regulatory landscape that shaped the patterns of financialization.

--Marshal Zeringue