"Closed Seasons"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South by Julia Brock.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a unique and personal exploration of the game and fish laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi from the Progressive Era to the 1930s, Julia Brock offers an innovative history of hunting in the New South. The implementation of conservation laws made significant strides in protecting endangered wildlife species, but it also disrupted traditional hunting practices and livelihoods, particularly among African Americans and poor whites.

Closed Seasons highlights how hunting and fishing regulations were relatively rare in the nineteenth century, but the emerging conservation movement and the rise of a regional “sportsman” identity at the turn of the twentieth century eventually led to the adoption of state-level laws. Once passed, however, these laws, were plagued by obstacles, including insufficient funding and enforcement. Brock traces the dizzying array of factors—propaganda, racial tensions, organizational activism, and federal involvement—that led to effective game and fish laws in the South.

Visit Julia Brock's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Assembling Religion"

New from NYU Press: Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America by Kati Curts.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Henry Ford institutionalized a social gospel

Henry Ford did not just mass produce cars. As a member of the Episcopal Church, reader of New Thought texts, believer in the “gospel of reincarnation,” mass marketer of antisemitic material, and employer who institutionalized a social gospel, Henry Ford’s contributions to American models of business were informed by and produced for an America he understood to be broadly Christian. Though Ford’s efforts at the head of the Ford Motor Company have commonly been understood as secular, Ford himself was explicit that his work in engineering and auto production was prophetic and meant to remake the world.

This religious history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company repositions them within critical studies of religion, examining how Ford transformed American religious practice in the twentieth century. Drawing directly on documents from Ford’s archive, it examines Ford’s mass production methods and bureaucratic reforms as examples of prosperity gospel traditions, illuminating the ways manufacturing and technology intersect with American religious practice. Bridging American religious and industrial history, Assembling Religion offers a new and surprising way to understand Ford’s impact on culture, commerce, and the technology of labor.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making the Invisible Real"

New from Oxford University Press: Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Pilgrimage by Catherine Hartmann.

About the book, from the publisher:

How can a person learn to see a mountain as a divine mandala, especially when, to the ordinary eye, the mountain looks like a pile of rocks and snow? This is the challenge that the Tibetan pilgrimage tradition poses to pilgrims, who are told to overcome their ordinary perception to see the hidden reality of the holy mountain.

Drawing on multiple genres of Tibetan literature from the 13th to 20th centuries--including foundational narratives of holy places, polemical debates about the value of pilgrimage, written guides to holy sites, advice texts, and personal diaries--this book investigates how the pilgrimage tradition tries to transform pilgrims' perception so that they might experience the wondrous sacred landscape as real and materially present. Catherine Anne Hartmann argues that the pilgrimage tradition does not simply assume that pilgrims experience this sacred landscape as real, but instead leads pilgrims to adopt deliberate practices of seeing: ways of looking at and interacting with the world that shape their experience of the holy mountain.

Making the Invisible Real explores two ways of seeing: the pilgrim's ordinary perception of the world, and the fantastic vision believed to lie beyond this ordinary perception. As pilgrims move through the holy place, they move back and forth between these two ways of seeing, weaving the ordinary perceived world and extraordinary imagined world together into a single experience. Hartmann shows us how seemingly fantastical religious worldviews are not simply believed or taken for granted, but actively constructed and reconstructed for new generations of practitioners.

Visit Kate Hartmann's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mirages of Reform"

New from Cornell University Press: Mirages of Reform: The Politics of Elite Protectionism in the Arab World by Steve L. Monroe.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Mirages of Reform, Steve L. Monroe argues that geopolitics and social connections between state and capital underpin the Arab world's uneven trade policies. Despite decades of international pressure, neoliberal trade policy reform in the Arab world has been varied, selective, and often ineffective. Neoliberal trade policies have not deepened international trade in many of the region's markets. This book explains why.

When the region's regimes have strong support from global powers and strong social connections to the industrial elite, they engage in extensive but deceptive trade policy reform. Behind an edifice of neoliberal trade policies, neopatrimonial forms of protectionism like tax evasion and noncompetitive procurement shield the socially connected from international competition and obstruct actual trade liberalization. Industrialists are less trustful of regime promises of neopatrimonial protectionism after reform when they have weak social connections to their regime and their regime has low support from global powers. They are more likely to defend existing protectionist policies under these conditions, resulting in less trade policy reform.

Drawing on interviews, firm- and industry-level data, and evidence from Jordan to Morocco, Mirages of Reform reveals how international and domestic factors interact to shape the Arab world's rugged trade policy terrain. Insightful and well researched, this book imparts important lessons and warnings about the repercussions of economic reform in the region.

Visit Steve L. Monroe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Harvests of Liberation"

New from Stanford University Press: Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt by Ahmad Shokr.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the first half of the twentieth century, a major change occurred in Egyptian nationalist understandings of imperialism and economic sovereignty. Where once the volatilities of foreign markets and capital were seen as the main threat, over time large landowners and their imperial allies were targeted as the principal obstacles to the country's industrial progress. The perceived locus of imperial domination shifted from the realm of circulation to the realm of production. Harvests of Liberation situates this transformation in the midcentury dynamics of agrarian capitalism in Egypt. Ahmad Shokr tells a story of decolonization through the lens of cotton, Egypt's prized export. He follows a range of actors—colonial advisors, nationalist leaders, agrarian reformers, merchant-financiers, landowners, and rural workers—whose interactions moved the levers of the cotton trade from institutions that facilitated accumulation on an imperial scale to new sites of control within the nation-state. Amidst depression and war, the transformation of Egypt's cotton economy prompted nationalists to embrace policies of land reform and industrialization and adopt a new conception of history. Ultimately, Shokr argues, these efforts set the stage for the construction of a postcolonial republic under Gamal Abdel Nasser, where national liberation became equated with national development.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Freedom Enterprise"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit by Kendra D. Boyd.

About the book, from the publisher:

Traces the rise and fall of the historic Black business community in Detroit

The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers are well-known, countless African Americans also left the South to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and viewed business as key to Black liberation. Detroit’s status as a mecca for Black entrepreneurship illuminates this overlooked aspect of the Great Migration story. In Freedom Enterprise, Kendra D. Boyd uses “migrant entrepreneurship” as a lens through which to understand the entwined histories of Black-owned business, racial capitalism, and urban space.

Freedom Enterprise follows Black Southerners’ journeys to Detroit during the initial wave of migration in the 1910s and 1920s, through their efforts to build a prosperous Black business community in the 1930s and 1940s, to the destruction of that community through urban renewal projects and freeway construction in the 1950s and 1960s. Combining business and social history methods to analyze an eclectic archive, Boyd chronicles migrant entrepreneurs’ experiences, highlighting tales of racial and economic violence, Black women’s business organizing, illegal business, communist entrepreneurs, and cooperative economics.

Boyd uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine migrant entrepreneurs’ experiences in twentieth-century America. In the Jim Crow South, African Americans worried about white mobs taking away their property, wealth, and lives. Though they sought refuge in Detroit, migrant entrepreneurs subsequently faced the loss of their livelihoods and the businesses they had spent decades building to the bulldozers of state-sponsored urban redevelopment initiatives. Southern migrants’ “freedom enterprise”—their undertaking of attaining freedom through business—was curtailed by the reality of operating within the confines of US racial capitalism.

In tracing Black entrepreneurs across the Great Migration, Freedom Enterprise provides important insights into African Americans’ activism for racial and economic justice and continued racialized wealth disparities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Karl Marx in America"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Karl Marx in America by Andrew Hartman.

About the book, from the publisher:

The vital and untold story of Karl Marx’s stamp on American life.

To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.

In Karl Marx in America, historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.

After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society.

The Page 99 Test: A War for the Soul of America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Challenging Knowledge"

New from Oxford University Press: Challenging Knowledge: How We (Sometimes) Don't Know What We Think We Know by Jody Azzouni.

About the book, from the publisher:

Starting-point epistemology (SPE) is a new position in epistemology that, coupled with agent-centered rationality-the idea that a rational agent is one who cleaves to their own picture of rationality-is the key to resolving philosophical scepticism. SPE acknowledges that metacogntively-sophisticated agents know that they know things, and know some things about the methods by which this happens. Agent-centered rationality implies that a metacognitively-sophisticated agent should only desert a knowledge claim because of a challenge they recognize to be fatal to that claim. Scepticism is metacognitive pathology. Except in those rare cases when an individual is cognitively damaged, sceptical arguments should fail.

In Challenging Knowledge Jody Azzouni studies the various ways the cognitively healthy can protect themselves from prematurely denying what they take themselves to know. A sceptical position results from an agent's failure to correctly monitor their own processes of knowledge gathering. These scenarios are characterized as cases that are "logically compatible" with the evidence had by that agent, but logical possibility is not coextensive with epistemic possibility. The former allows cases that no agent should regard as challenging their knowledge claims, and excludes cases that every agent should be concerned with. Giving in to logically-possible scenarios illustrates an agent's failure to stand their ground when inappropriately challenged; e.g., yielding their knowledge claims in cases where they know the scenarios being presented are too remote to take seriously. Azzouni shows how the arguments for Cartesian and Pyrrhonian scepticism turn on failures to appropriately evaluate one's knowledge-gathering methods.

Visit Jody Azzouni's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Underworld Work"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans by Ahmad Greene-Hayes.

About the book, from the publisher:

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans.

When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.

Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms—ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more—to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.

Visit Ahmad Greene-Hayes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Iroquoia"

New from Cornell University Press: Iroquoia: Haudenosaunee Life and Culture, 1630–1783 by Kelly Y. Hopkins.

About the book, from the publisher:

Iroquoia highlights the innovation of the Haudenosaunee peoples in retaining sovereignty over their homelands through seven generations of social and environmental change following European contact and the settler invasion. Kelly Y. Hopkins argues that Haudenosaunee men and women incorporated articles of European manufacture into their daily lives to fulfill conventional social and cultural needs. They used new trade items and alliances to enhance their lives and to pursue goals specific to their communities. In Iroquoia, Hopkins explores how engagement in the global market economy irreversibly transformed the local environment, severed Indigenous relationships and responsibilities to human and other-than human kin, and challenged longstanding social and economic relationships within Haudenosaunee communities. While settler expansion, violence, and imperial terraforming threatened Indigenous communities, food sovereignty, and water management, The People of the Longhouse produced distinctive new material cultures and new land use practices that incorporated features of the colonial settlement template into longstanding subsistence and settlement patterns. Haudenosaunee peoples employed these survivance strategies to control the scale and scope of European intrusion into their homelands.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Playing through Pain"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Playing through Pain: The Violent Consequences of Capitalist Sport by Daniel Sailofsky.

About the book, from the publisher:

For many fans and casual observers, professional sports and violence are deeply connected. Violence on the field has real consequences for players, notably in the form of life-altering injuries from concussions. Off the field, in the last several decades, scores of athletes have committed violent acts, from domestic abuse and sexual assault to animal abuse and murder. Beyond athletes, sport also serves as a site of political and structural violence, from the displacement and hyperpolicing of everyday people for mega-events to the “sportswashing” of environmentally harmful industries.

Daniel Sailofsky examines the endemic violence in professional sports and argues that—while related to masculinity, misogyny, and individual factors like alcohol consumption and gambling—it is most intimately tied to capitalism and to capitalist modes of consumption and profit. Sailofsky explains how capitalism creates the conditions for violence to thrive and uncovers how sports leaders—coaches, league officials, and team owners—obfuscate these relationships to avoid accountability.

From minor league baseball exploitation to spectator hooliganism, Sailofsky shows the connections between the business of sports and violence, but also, more importantly, he imagines new forms of sport that are not places of harm.

Visit Daniel Sailofsky's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe"

New from Oxford University Press: The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats by Blessing-Miles Tendi.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats argues the 2017 coup that ousted long time Zimbabwean president Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and the generality of coups, cannot be accurately and rigorously understood without examining the crucial role of gender and women's politics in military seizures of power.

Tendi's findings show that the politics of gender and women pervade military coup causes, dynamics, justifications, and international responses to coups. Contrary to influential representations of Zimbabwe's 2017 coup and other recent coups as markedly different from past coups, Tendi draws on deep gendered histories of military coups in Africa to argue that in reality there are significant continuities in coup characteristics across time. This highly original account of the 2017 Zimbabwean coup identifies the motives, dynamics, and trigger of the coup and demonstrates the centrality of gender and women's politics in these factors and processes. Additionally, despite the existence of an international anti-coup norm and democracy promotion in Africa by Western states, Zimbabwean coup makers were largely not publicly condemned or penalised by Western and African diplomats, for staging the coup.

Visit Blessing-Miles Tendi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sex Is a Spectrum"

New from Princeton University Press: Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary by Agustín Fuentes.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why human biology is far more expansive than the simple categories of female and male

Being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture, and while there are important differences between women and men, there is a lot more variation and overlap than we may realize. Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex, drawing on the latest science to explain why the binary view of the sexes is fundamentally flawed—and why having XX or XY chromosomes isn’t as conclusive as some would have us believe.

In this lively and provocative book, leading biological anthropologist Agustín Fuentes begins by tracing the origin and evolution of sex, describing the many ways in the animal kingdom of being female, male, or both. Turning to humans, he presents compelling evidence from the fossil and archaeological record that attests to the diversity of our ancestors’ sexual bonds, gender roles, and family and community structures, and shows how the same holds true in the lived experiences of people today. Fuentes tackles hot-button debates around sports and medicine, explaining why we can acknowledge that females and males are not the same while also embracing a biocultural reality where none of us fits neatly into only one of two categories.

Bringing clarity and reason to a contentious issue, Sex Is a Spectrum shares a scientist’s perspective on why a binary view of sex and gender is not only misguided but harmful, and why there are multitudes of ways of being human.

The Page 99 Test: Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You.

The Page 99 Test: Why We Believe.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Nietzsche's Earthbound Wisdom"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Nietzsche's Earthbound Wisdom: The Philosopher, the Poet, and the Sage by Keith Ansell-Pearson.

About the book, from the publisher:

An incisive exploration of Nietzsche as a bold, visionary poet-philosopher.

Today, Nietzsche is justly celebrated for his rich, philosophical naturalism, but Keith Ansell-Pearson warns that we must not overlook the visionary dimension of his thinking and his focus on the need to cultivate a new care of the self and care of life. In Nietzsche’s Earthbound Wisdom, Ansell-Pearson recovers Nietzsche’s love for a philosophy that guides us through our passions, one that opens us more fully to the possibilities of life and the joy of knowledge.

Ansell-Pearson offers close readings of Nietzsche’s texts in conversation with philosophical and literary figures including Augustine, Baudelaire, Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Emerson, Flaubert, Stendhal, and more. Throughout, Ansell-Pearson examines Nietzsche’s sophisticated critique of literary naturalism and his alternative conception of the poet as a seer who has a deep longing for a new earth.

Visit Keith Ansell-Pearson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Black Religion in the Madhouse"

New from NYU Press: Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake by Judith Weisenfeld.

About the book, from the publisher:

How white psychiatrists pathologized African American religions

In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed “religious excitement” among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements “cults,” unworthy of respect.

As Judith Weisenfeld argues in Black Religion in the Madhouse, psychiatrists’ notions of race and religion became inextricably intertwined in the decades after the end of slavery and into the twentieth century, and had profound impacts on the diagnosis, care, and treatment of Black patients. This book charts how racialized medical understandings of mental normalcy pathologized a range of Black religious beliefs, spiritual sensibilities, practices, and social organizations and framed them as manifestations of innate racial traits. Importantly, these characterizations were marshaled to help to limit the possibilities for Black self-determination, with white psychiatrists’ theories about African American religion and mental health being used to promote claims of Black people’s unfitness for freedom.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Black Religion in the Madhouse is the first book to expose how racist views of Black religion in slavery’s wake shaped the rise of psychiatry as an established and powerful profession.

Visit Judith Weisenfeld's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Religion in the Lands That Became America"

New from Yale University Press: Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History by Thomas A. Tweed.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping retelling of American religious history, showing how religion has enhanced and hindered human flourishing from the Ice Age to the Information Age

Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant and Atlantic. Driven by his strong sense of the historical and moral shortcomings of the usual story, Thomas A. Tweed offers a very different narrative in this ambitious new history. He begins the story much earlier—11,000 years ago—at a rock shelter in present-day Texas and follows Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, transnational migrants, and people of many faiths as they transform the landscape and confront the big lifeway transitions, from foraging to farming and from factories to fiber optics.

Setting aside the familiar narrative themes, he highlights sustainability, showing how religion both promoted and inhibited individual, communal, and environmental flourishing during three sustainability crises: the medieval Cornfield Crisis, which destabilized Indigenous ceremonial centers; the Colonial Crisis, which began with the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans; and the Industrial Crisis, which brought social inequity and environmental degradation. The unresolved Colonial and Industrial Crises continue to haunt the nation, Tweed suggests, but he recovers historical sources of hope as he retells the rich story of America’s religious past.

The Page 99 Test: America's Church.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Andrew Jackson: Old Hickory in Christian America"

New from Oxford University Press: Andrew Jackson: Old Hickory in Christian America by Jonathan M. Atkins.

About the book, from the publisher:

Few today think of Andrew Jackson, the American military hero and president, as a religious man. Nevertheless, Jackson considered himself a Christian throughout his life. Raised a "rigid presbeterian," Jackson's mother wanted her son to grow up to become a clergyman, and despite suffering tragedies and losing his family in the American Revolution, Jackson never rejected the fundamental Christian teachings of his youth. Although he gained notoriety as a rakish young man, religion's influence on him ebbed and flowed as he established himself as part of the South's planter elite.

With his devout wife, Rachel, he attended church and knew his Bible and religious subjects well, and while his determination to preserve his reputation involved him in numerous personal conflicts--including a duel that led to his killing a rival--he blended the principles of the antebellum South's honor-based culture with his belief in a traditional, orthodox version of Christianity. Likewise, he easily reconciled his religion with his ownership of slaves and his advocacy of Native American removal, and while he equated his enemies with the forces of evil, he always attributed his military and political accomplishments to the blessings of Providence. As he aged, Jackson became more devout, but he never experienced a dramatic conversion--contradicting the expectations of the leading revivalists of his era's Second Great Awakening--and he consistently promoted religious liberty and separation of church and state as core republican principles. Ultimately, Jackson's faith reflected a version of Christianity widespread in his era, and his frequent appeals for divine guidance and for God's blessing on his nation further encouraged the development of an American civil religion.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Girl Power?"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Girl Power? A History of Girl-Focused Development from Nairobi by Sarah Bellows-Blakely.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of how, when, and why austerity capitalism and strands of feminism became intertwined, and why girl-focused programs have been at the heart of international policymaking.

Girl-focused education programs have long been at the heart of international policymaking—when girls’ access to education is ensured, the reasoning goes, they are more likely to turn into productive adults who can drive economic growth. These ideas combine strands of feminism and capitalism that have a specific and understudied origin. In this book, historian Sarah Bellows-Blakely shows how a doctored study of girls’ education in East and Southern Africa led to the creation of international norms in the United Nations that would go on to guide policymaking on women’s rights and economic growth, promoting neoliberal feminist policy at the expense of other forms of gender-based justice.

Focusing on the growth of free-market feminism and girl-focused economic development planning through the relationship between UNICEF and the Nairobi-based NGO FEMNET, Bellows-Blakely reveals how their joint efforts set the blueprints for linked movements of economic development and women’s rights that are still ongoing. Through a narrative of the UNICEF-FEMNET lobbying campaign, Bellows-Blakely shows how multiple, contested girl-focused visions of economic programming and gender justice became selectively erased in favor of an approach to global policy centered on the free-market construction and strategic deployment of the African “girl child.”

--Marshal Zeringue

"Decolonizing Medicine"

New from Stanford University Press: Decolonizing Medicine: Indigenous Politics and the Practice of Care in Bolivia by Gabriela Elisa Morales.

About the book, from the publisher:

Decolonizing Medicine examines Bolivian state-led efforts to decolonize health services during the administration of Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president. Governing from 2006 to 2019, the Morales administration undertook sweeping reforms, vowing to reverse intertwined colonial and capitalist systems of oppression and restore Indigenous good living. Predating more recent calls from global health practitioners to "decolonize global health," Bolivian state projects included a range of initiatives, such as integrating Indigenous traditional medical practitioners into clinical care and encouraging cultural sensitivity among healthcare providers. And yet, despite layered institutional investments, many Indigenous patients continued to describe their local hospital as a place "donde no hay atención" ("where there is no care"). Through fine-grained ethnography of health policymaking and implementation, Gabriela Elisa Morales tracks how Bolivian biomedical and public health institutions fell short of the far-reaching transformations proposed by decolonial activists and theorists. At the same time, she foregrounds how Indigenous patients and healers challenged the terms of caregiving and demanded that state and medical institutions fulfill their obligations to Indigenous flourishing. In tracing these dynamics, Morales articulates the multiplicity of ways that care practice becomes a locus of political foreclosure as well as radical transformation, with crucial insights for broader projects of decolonization and Indigenous rights.

--Marshal Zeringue

"How Rabbis Became Experts"

New from Princeton University Press: How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity by Krista N. Dalton.

About the book, from the publisher:

How rabbinic expertise was socially constructed, performed, and defended in Roman Palestine

At the turn of the common era, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine saw the organization of a small group of literate Jewish men who devoted their lives to the interpretation and teaching of their sacred ancestral texts. In this groundbreaking study, Krista Dalton shows that these early rabbis were not an insular specialist group but embedded in a landscape of Jewish piety. Drawing on the writings of rabbis in Roman Palestine from the second through fifth centuries CE, Dalton illuminates the significance of social relationships in the production of rabbinic expertise. She traces the social interactions—everyday instances of mutual exchange, from dinner parties to tithes and patronages—that fostered the perception of rabbis as experts.

Dalton shows how the knowledge derived from the rabbis’ technical skills was validated and recognized by others. Rabbis socialized and noshed with neighbors and offered advice and legal favors to friends. In exchange for their expert judgments, they received invitations, donations, appointments, and recognition. She argues that their status as Torah experts did not arise by virtue of being scholars but from their ability to persuade others that their mobilization of Jewish cultural resources was beneficial. Dalton describes the relational processes that made rabbinic expertise possible as well as the accompanying tensions; social interactions shaped the rabbis’ domain of knowledge while also imposing expectations of reciprocity that had to be managed. Dalton’s authoritative analysis demonstrates that a focus on friendship and exchange provides a fuller understanding of how rabbis claimed and defended their distinct expertise.

Visit Krista Dalton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unholy Sensations"

New from Oxford University Press: Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare by Joshua Paddison.

About the book, from the publisher:

The true story of the first California cult scandal

In 1891, a suffragist and social reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched a moral crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a utopian spiritualist community in northern California. Chevaillier accused the colony's leader, the poet and prophet Thomas Lake Harris, of perverting the teachings of the Bible to promote a “new sexology” that was “worse than Mormonism.” She insisted that Harris used magical powers of hypnosis to take sexual and financial advantage of his followers, turning them into a “spiritual harem” that practiced “free love” and other gross immoralities. Media reports emphasized the presence of Japanese immigrant men at Fountaingrove, raising racialized specters of miscegenation and moral contamination. The international scandal, full of the sorts of salacious details prized by newspaper editors at the dawn of the era of yellow journalism, would last more than a decade, establishing Harris as the prototype for a new type of public menace-the “California cult leader.”

Unholy Sensations takes a close-up look at the Fountaingrove scandal to examine religion, gender, sexuality, and race in the Gilded Age from a fresh perspective. By chronicling the life stories of the people swept up in the scandal, Unholy Sensations reveals connections and tensions between a wide variety of nineteenth-century religious and social groups, including suffragists and spiritualists, Christian Scientists and Theosophists, journalists and politicians, and Protestant ministers and urban reformers. Together, these disparate groups helped spark California's first cult scare, demonizing Harris as the first-but far from the last-dangerous California cult leader. By showing that the term “cult” has always been a marker of race, sexuality, and religion, Unholy Sensations reveals the limits of American freedom and the centrality of religion to the policing of whiteness, family, and nation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Skin Tone"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Politics of Skin Tone: African American Experiences, Identity, and Attitudes by Nicole D. Yadon.

About the book, from the publisher:

A nuanced examination of the salience of skin tone within African American politics.

Research shows that skin tone is associated with significant differences in life experiences. On average, African Americans with darker skin earn lower wages, suffer worse health outcomes, and endure more negative criminal justice experiences than lighter-skinned African Americans. Nicole D. Yadon conceptualizes skin tone as one facet of the multidimensional construct of race that powerfully influences racialized experiences which, in turn, can influence political identities and attitudes.

Drawing on evidence from one hundred in-depth interviews, multiple surveys, and a survey experiment, The Politics of Skin Tone investigates the political associations of skin tone. Yadon finds that skin tone correlates with political attitudes, particularly on issues where color-based disparities are especially pronounced such as criminal justice. Moreover, a sizable number of African Americans adopt a skin tone-based identity. In an era of shifting racial boundaries and growing color-based discrimination, The Politics of Skin Tone examines the implications for both scholars and policymakers.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Living On"

New from Stanford University Press: Living On: Psychiatry and the Future of Disaster in Turkey by Christopher T. Dole.

About the book, from the publisher:

Living On centers around the unprecedented mobilization of mental health professionals in the wake of a massive earthquake that struck western Turkey in 1999―a disaster that left more than 20,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of residents displaced. Working amid unimaginable destruction and suffering, volunteer psychiatrists and psychologists would quickly improvise a makeshift response, offering thousands of survivors access to psychiatric care for the first time. Never before had there been such a collective expression of concern for people's psychological well-being.

Christopher Dole explores how this psychiatric response fashioned individual and collective lives far into the disaster's future. Based on research spanning two decades, from the earthquake to its twentieth anniversary, he considers how this convergence of geological activity and psychiatric expertise introduced novel psychiatric and psychological discourses into everyday lives of survivors, as it also animated new visions of self, society, and technopolitical promise. Living On not only offers insight into Turkey's transformations over the opening decades of the twenty-first century, but it also sheds light on a more general arrangement of disaster, governance, and medical expertise―one that increasingly characterizes our era of planetary ecological crisis.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Imperial Weather"

New from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Imperial Weather: Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya by Fiona Williamson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tropical weather in colonial Malaya presented an unknown atmosphere that manifested in extremes and uncertainties. From 1840 to 1940, the Indigenous landscapes of Singapore and Penang Islands were altered in ways that will never be reclaimed, the natural ecology of much of the peninsula forever changed by the British colonial government. With this book, Fiona Williamson revisits the fraught relationship between climate, weather science, and empire within the Straits Settlements in the long nineteenth century. Her book examines official and scientific responses to local weathers within the multicultural ports and peripheries of Singapore and George Town, Malaysia. The challenges of creating a livable environment in tropical conditions, she explains, frequently pushed the colonial government beyond its capacities, and solutions often came at the expense of nature, which, ironically, made managing the weather more problematic. Imperial Weather offers a deep exploration of various official attempts to understand and apply structure to the previously unknown or uncontrollable through knowledge gathering, institutionalization, and technological and infrastructural change. Drawing from the history of science—especially the history of meteorology—and environmental history, it explores the multiple interests, capacities, and capabilities at play, including the state of scientific knowledge and the economy, funding, and importantly, socioenvironmental needs and practicalities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Searching for Memory"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Searching for Memory: Aluízio Palmar and the Shadow of Dictatorship in Brazil by Jacob Blanc.

About the book, from the publisher:

This biography of Brazilian journalist and activist Aluízio Palmar (b. 1943) tells the remarkable story of a revolutionary who, after surviving torture as a political prisoner during his country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, would devote the second half of his life to investigating human rights abuses. With an eye to the intricacies of how Palmar has narrated his life across interviews, writings, and public engagement, Blanc offers an innovative window into how former activists view their place in history.

Searching for Memory is a singular contribution to literature on dictatorship, memory, and oral history. It does more than just recount Palmar’s life story. It is also a story about stories: how Palmar has told his own life history, why he has transformed his most traumatic memories into a public narrative, and the meanings of memory in the shadow of dictatorship.

Jacob Blanc is associate professor of history and international development studies at McGill University.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Maraña: War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Maraña: War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia by Lina Pinto-García.

About the book, from the publisher:

Delves into the relationship between war and disease, focusing on Colombian armed conflict and the skin disease known as cutaneous leishmaniasis.

Cutaneous leishmaniasis, transmitted by female sandflies, produces skin lesions of varying size and shape. In Colombia, the insect vector of the disease is native to the same forested environments that have served as the main stage for one of the longest and most violent wars in Latin American history. As a result, the populations most affected by leishmaniasis in Colombia are members of the state army and nonstate armed groups.

Lina Pinto-García explores how leishmaniasis and the armed conflict are inextricably connected and mutually reinforcing. Maraña means “tangle” in Spanish but is also commonly used in Colombia to name the entangled greenery, braided lianas, and dense foliage that characterize the tropical forests where leishmaniasis transmission typically occurs. Pinto-García argues that leishmaniasis and the war are not merely linked but enmarañadas to each other through narratives, technologies, and practices produced by the state, medicine, biomedical research, and the armed conflict itself. All told, Maraña is a passionate study of how war has shaped the production of scientific knowledge about leishmaniasis and access to its treatments in Colombia.

Visit Lina Pinto-García's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Merchants of Knowledge"

New from Stanford University Press: Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe by Robert G. Morrison.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between 1450 and 1550, a remarkable century of intellectual exchange developed across the Eastern Mediterranean. As Renaissance Europe depended on knowledge from the Ottoman Empire, and the courts of Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II greatly benefitted from knowledge coming out of Europe, merchants of knowledge—multilingual and transregional Jewish scholars—became an important bridge among the powers. With this book, Robert Morrison is the first to track the network of scholars who mediated exchanges in astronomy, astrology, Qabbalah, and philosophy. Their books, manuscripts, and acts of translation all held economic value, thus commercial and intellectual exchange commingled—knowledge became transactional as these merchants exchanged texts for more intellectual material and social capital. While parallels between medieval Islamic astronomy and the famous heliocentric arrangement posited by Copernicus are already known, Morrison reveals far deeper networks of intellectual exchange that extended well beyond theoretical astronomy and shows how religion, science, and philosophy, areas that will eventually develop into separate fields, were once interwoven. The Renaissance portrayed in Merchants of Knowledge is not, from the perspective of the Ottoman Muslim contacts of the Jewish merchants of knowledge, hegemonic. It's a Renaissance permeated by diversity, the cultural and political implications of which the West is only now waking up to.

--Marshal Zeringue

"On Truth in Politics"

New from Princeton University Press: On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It by Michael Patrick Lynch.

About the book, from the publisher:

The “philosopher of truth” (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker) shows why truth is an essential democratic value—and how it can be strengthened

Do any of us really care about truth when it comes to politics? Should we? In a world of big lies, denialism, and conspiracy theories, democracies are experiencing two interlocked crises: a loss of confidence in democracy itself and the growing sense among many that politics is only about power—not truth. In this book, Michael Patrick Lynch argues that truth not only can—but must—matter in politics. He shows why truth is an essential democratic value—a value we need to sustain our democratic way of life—and how it can be strengthened.

Despite evidence that people are rarely motivated by truth when it comes to politics, On Truth in Politics argues that this isn’t inevitable. Accessibly written and rigorously argued, it draws on the American pragmatist tradition to develop an original theory of the nature and value of truth in the messy world of politics. Contrary to the belief of many, political beliefs can be true or false. But if democracy is to continue to be a space of reason and not just an arena of power, we must build a better infrastructure of knowledge, including stronger schools and media, and renew our commitment to science and history.

A vital and timely book, On Truth in Politics makes an original case for why democracy cannot survive without truth.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Future of the Forest"

New from Cornell University Press: Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India by Anand P. Vaidya.

About the book, from the publisher:

Future of the Forest is the story of legal transformations of forests across India through collective action. Since the nineteenth century, Indian forest dwellers have been unable to enforce their claims to the land on which they live or the products of it that they use. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, a new national movement led to the passage of the Forest Rights Act, a landmark law that recognizes the tenure and use rights of India's millions of landless forest dwellers.

Anand P. Vaidya tracks the Forest Rights Act from the movements that pushed for its passage to its drafting—and the many revisions it underwent to satisfy coalitions of local peoples, conservationists, and a wide spectrum of political parties and movements—and finally to its impact on two neighboring villages in central India's forest belt. The forests have seen a long history of political authority enacted to the benefit of the powerful; Future of the Forest follows the work of activists and forest dwellers who turned to the law to shift this balance of power.

Anand P. Vaidya is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unjust Authority"

New from Oxford University Press: Unjust Authority by Robert Jubb.

About the book, from the publisher:

Unjust Authority addresses a systematic weakness in contemporary political theory and philosophy. Most contemporary political theorists and philosophers are unable to explain, vindicate, or justify the authority of the liberal democratic institutions that they live under. Instead, they endorse moralist accounts of the right to rule which require governments to meet impossibly high standards to avoid condemnation as illegitimate usurpers. This is true not just of the dominant Rawlsian mainstream, but of many of its radical critics, whose membership of more critical traditions leaves them sceptical of the value of existing institutions, even where they provide stable, decent rule.

The book instead provides a realist account of the authority of liberal democratic rule focused on impersonal rule and regulated democratic competition. It uses groundbreaking work in political economy to explain how, at least reasonably favourable conditions, these two mechanisms can be expected to combine to generate a growing surplus whose fruits will be made widely available. The prosperity and protection provided by liberal democratic rule to most of those it governs forms the basis of its authority, even though the hierarchies and exclusions that remain leave liberal democratic societies a long way from justice. Understanding liberal democratic authority in this way allows us to reassess challenges to it. While anger and even violence may then be acceptable and even appropriate, even peaceful attempts to remove the winners of democratic elections must be condemned.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Governing the Global Clinic"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Governing the Global Clinic: HIV and the Legal Transformation of Medicine by Carol A. Heimer.

About the book, from the publisher:

A deep examination of how new, legalistic norms affected the trajectory of global HIV care and altered the practice of medicine.

HIV emerged in the world at a time when medicine and healthcare were undergoing two major transformations: globalization and a turn toward legally inflected, rule-based ways of doing things. It accelerated both trends. While pestilence and disease are generally considered the domain of biological sciences and medicine, social arrangements—and law in particular—are also crucial.

Drawing on years of research in HIV clinics in the United States, Thailand, South Africa, and Uganda, Governing the Global Clinic examines how growing norms of legalized accountability have altered the work of healthcare systems and how the effects of legalization vary across different national contexts. A key feature of legalism is universalistic language, but, in practice, rules are usually imported from richer countries (especially the United States) to poorer ones that have less adequate infrastructure and fewer resources with which to implement them. Challenging readers to reconsider the impulse to use law to organize and govern social life, Governing the Global Clinic poses difficult questions: When do rules solve problems, and when do they create new problems? When do rules become decoupled from ethics, and when do they lead to deeper moral commitments? When do rules reduce inequality? And when do they reflect, reproduce, and even amplify inequality?

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Age of the Borderlands"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850 by Andrew C. Isenberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Age of the Borderlands, acclaimed historian Andrew C. Isenberg offers a new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architects of American expansion faced significant challenges from the diverse groups of people inhabiting each region. In other words, while the manifest destiny paradigm begins with an assumption of US strength, the government and the agents it dispatched to settle and control the frontier had only a weak presence.

Tracing the interconnected histories of Indians, slaves, antislavery reformers, missionaries, federal agents, and physicians, Isenberg shows that the United States was repeatedly forced to accommodate the presence of other colonial empires and powerful Indigenous societies. Anti-expansionists in the borderlands welcomed the precarity of the government’s power: the land on which they dwelled was a grand laboratory where they could experiment with their alternative visions for American society. Examining the borderlands offers an understanding not just about frontier spaces but about the nature of the early American state—ambitiously expansionist but challenged by its native and imperial competitors.

The Page 99 Test: Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life.

My Book, The Movie: Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What to Expect When You're Dead"

New from Princeton University Press: What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife by Robert Garland.

About the book, from the publisher:

An entertaining and enlightening book about how ancient peoples dealt with death—and what we might learn from them

A lively story of death, What to Expect When You’re Dead explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Robert Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought—in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours—to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery.

What to Expect When You’re Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?

Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, What to Expect When You’re Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.

The Page 99 Test: Wandering Greeks.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Provoking Religion"

New from Oxford University Press: Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars by Anthony M. Petro.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the late twentieth century, artists were on the front lines of the culture wars. Leaders of the Christian Right in the U.S. made a national spectacle out of feminist and queer art, blasting it as sacrilegious or pornographic--and sometimes both. On the bully pulpits of television and talk radio, as well as in the halls of Congress, conservatives denounced artists ranging from Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Chicago to Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz. Conservatives, alarmed by shifting sex and gender norms, collided with progressive artists who were confronting sexism, homophobia, and racism. In Provoking Religion, Anthony Petro offers a compelling new history of the culture wars that places competing moralities of gender and sexuality alongside competing visions of the sacred. The modern culture wars, he shows, are best understood not as contests pitting religious conservatives against secular activists, but as a series of ongoing historical struggles to define the relationship between the sacred and the political.

Through captivating case studies of "subversive" artists, Provoking Religion illuminates the underside of the culture wars, revealing how progressive artists and activists rendered from those most apparently profane aspects of human life-the stuff of conservatives' worst nightmares--their own haunting visions of the sacred.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Sanctuary Cities"

New from Stanford University Press: Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, Citizenship, and Urban Governance by Rachel Humphris.

About the book, from the publisher:

From its development in the 1980s, the sanctuary city movement—municipal protection of people with uncertain migration status from national immigration enforcement—has been a powerful and controversial side of progressive migration policy reform. While some migration activists view sanctuary city policy as the most important aspect of their work, others see it as actively impairing efforts in the fight for migrant rights. In Making Sanctuary Cities, Rachel Humphris provides a new understanding of how citizenship is negotiated and contested in sanctuary cities and what political potentials are opened (and closed) by this designation. Through long-term fieldwork across the sanctuary cities of San Francisco, Sheffield, and Toronto—three of the first municipalities to adopt this designation in their respective countries—Humphris investigates the complexity of sanctuary city policy. By capturing the wide-ranging meanings and practices of sanctuary in comparative context, Humphris uncovers how liberal citizenship is undermined by the very thing that makes it worth investing in: the promise of equality. Attending to the tensions inherent in sanctuary policy, this book opens vital questions about the ways governing systems can extinguish political ideals, and how communities choose to live and organize to fight for a better world.

Visit Rachel Humphris's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In Our Interest"

New from Columbia University Press: In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular by Alexander Kustov.

About the book, from the publisher:

The economic benefits of increased immigration are potentially massive, many experts say. The United States and other wealthy countries, however, have put up barriers against even the highest-skilled foreign workers. Such choices reflect public opinion, which typically favors stringent restrictions. Under what conditions do voters in affluent democracies back higher levels of immigration? How can advocates build support for pro-immigration policies?

In this data-driven, counterintuitive book, Alexander Kustov argues that showing people how immigration benefits them and their fellow citizens can lead to greater acceptance of more open policies. Looking beyond the stereotype of xenophobic voters, he identifies people’s genuine concern for their compatriots as a key driver of attitudes toward immigration. Using extensive cross-national surveys and experiments, this book demonstrates that people are willing to bear costs to benefit others―but they prioritize helping their fellow citizens. Voters tend to oppose freer immigration because they believe it threatens the well-being of their communities, but they can be persuaded to support it if they see the outcomes of immigration policies as in their interest. Through in-depth comparison of Canada and Sweden, Kustov shows why pragmatic approaches that focus on attracting skilled, needed workers are more effective than humanitarian appeals and policies. Offering a realistic path forward that meets voters where they are, In Our Interest provides a new, optimistic perspective on the political prospects of pro-immigration reforms.

Visit Alexander Kustov's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sand, Snow, and Stardust"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments by Gretchen Heefner.

About the book, from the publisher:

A vivid tour of US military efforts to understand, survive, and command harsh environments worldwide—and beyond.

Deserts, the Arctic, outer space—these extreme environments are often seen as inhospitable places at the edges of our maps. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, spurred by the diverse and unfamiliar regions the US military had navigated during World War II, the United States defense establishment took a keen interest in these places, dispatching troops to the Aleutian Islands, North Africa, the South Pacific, and beyond. To preserve the country’s status as a superpower after the war, to pave runways and build bridges, engineers had to understand and then conquer dunes, permafrost, and even the surface of the moon.

Sand, Snow, and Stardust explores how the US military generated a new understanding of these environments and attempted to master them, intending to cement America’s planetary power. Operating in these regions depended as much on scientific and cultural knowledge as on military expertise and technology. From General George S. Patton learning the hard way that the desert is not always hot, to the challenges of constructing a scientific research base under the Arctic ice, to the sheer implausibility of modeling Martian environments on Earth, Gretchen Heefner takes us on a wry expedition into the extremes and introduces us to the people who have shaped our insight into these extraordinary environments. Even decades after the first manned space flight, plans for human space exploration and extraplanetary colonization are still based on what we know about stark habitats on Earth.

An entertaining survey of the relationship between environmental history and military might, Sand, Snow, and Stardust also serves as a warning about the further transformation of the planet—whether through desertification, melting ice caps, or attempts to escape it entirely.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Life in the Viking Great Army"

New from Oxford University Press: Life in the Viking Great Army: Raiders, Traders, and Settlers by Dawn Hadley and Julian Richards.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Viking Great Army that landed in East Anglia in late 865 had a lasting impact on English society, culture, politics, and economy.

The Viking Great Army landed in East Anglia in late 865 and over the following fifteen years it fought numerous battles in all four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, made and broke peace treaties, and deposed or killed at least three Anglo-Saxon kings, replacing them with its own appointees. It had a major impact on English society, initiating extensive transformations in Anglo-Saxon society, culture, economy, and political organisation. Previous Viking armies had raided only in the summer months, but the Great Army was a constant presence over this period, overwintering at various locations in northern and eastern England.

This presence changed the political, economic, and social landscape of England forever, but historical sources say very little about it. Now, new archaeological evidence has revealed the location of two of its camps, and at least fifty other places it visited. This book describes life in the tents and towns that the Viking Great Army inhabited: the treasure, tools, and weapons found in the camps and what they reveal about how the groups that made up the Army lived and the activities that took place, including the processing and trading of loot, the minting of coins, and the manufacture of jewellery. What emerges is evidence of a rich and diverse community whose impact on England can be traced to the present day.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Welcome to Soylandia"

New from Cornell University Press: Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado by Andrew Ofstehage.

About the book, from the publisher:

Following a group of US Midwest farmers who purchased tracts of land in the tropical savanna of eastern Brazil, Welcome to Soylandia investigates industrial farming in the modern developing world. Seeking adventure and profit, the transplanted farmers created what Andrew Ofstehage calls "flexible farms" that have severed connections with the basic units of agriculture: land, plants, and labor. But while the transnational farmers have destroyed these relationships, they cannot simply do as they please. Regardless of their nationality, race, and capital, they must contend with pests, workers, the Brazilian state, and the land itself.

Welcome to Soylandia explores the frictions that define the new relationships of flexible farming―a paradigm that Ofstehage shows is ready to be reproduced elsewhere in Brazil and exported to the rest of the globe, including the United States. Through this compelling ethnography, Ofstehage takes readers on a tour of Soylandia and the new world of industrial agriculture, globalized markets, international development, and environmental change that it heralds.

Visit Andrew Ofstehage's website.

--Marshal Zeringue