"The Combination of All Forms of Struggle"

New from Columbia University Press: The Combination of All Forms of Struggle: Insurgent Legitimation and State Response to FARC by Alexandra Rachel Phelan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Over the course of a decades-long armed conflict, the Colombian state took a variety of approaches toward its insurgent opponent, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Successive governments swung between pursuing negotiations and responding with military counterinsurgency measures. FARC, for its part, proclaimed its commitment to “the combination of all forms of struggle”: seeking legitimation through both political and military means.

Investigating the relationship between FARC and the Colombian state from the outbreak of conflict in 1964 to the signing of the final peace agreement in 2016, Alexandra Rachel Phelan offers new insight into the dynamics of insurgencies. In such conflicts, both states and insurgents seek to assert their legitimacy, which has crucial implications for any prospective resolution. Phelan examines how FARC adopted different means of legitimation as part of its overall political and military strategy and how these strategies influenced government responses. She argues that the case of Colombia demonstrates that insurgents are more likely to engage in negotiations when the state recognizes their political legitimacy than when it demands their defeat. During a protracted conflict, when it is unclear that the state can win by military strength alone, offering incentives for political settlements can minimize―and perhaps even end―fighting. Drawing on interviews with former and active FARC leaders and Colombian government officials, as well as access to key primary documents, this book sheds new light on the Colombian conflict and provides rich theoretical understanding of the role of legitimacy in counterinsurgency more broadly.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Abortion Rights Backlash"

New from Oxford University Press: Abortion Rights Backlash: The Struggle for Democracy in Europe and the Americas by Alison Brysk.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reproductive rights are fundamental for the life, freedom, health, and safety of over half the world's population. Yet reproductive freedoms are under attack worldwide, even where women have achieved political rights and workplace participation. According to the World Health Organization, about a third of pregnancies end in abortion--but about half of abortions are unsafe, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths each year. Why are abortion rights backsliding, even in developed democracies? Why do some modern societies progress toward reproductive freedoms, while others regress or stagnate? And what can the struggle for reproductive rights teach us about broader movements for human rights and gender justice?

In Abortion Rights Backlash, Alison Brysk shows how threats to reproductive rights stem from a gendered political struggle over declining democracy, national identity, and widening inequality due to globalization. Formerly dominant groups facing social and economic crisis promote reactionary nationalist ideologies built around patriarchy, race, and religion as they seek to control population politics. Brysk demonstrates that this is a global phenomenon, comparing the diverging experiences of the politics of abortion in Ireland, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States (California vs. Texas). Timely and pathbreaking in its global perspective and feminist analysis, Abortion Rights Backlash transforms our understanding of human rights, the future of democracy, and the struggle for gender justice worldwide.

Visit Alison Brysk's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Identities Matter"

New from Oxford University Press: Identities Matter: The Politics of Immigration and Incorporation by Angela Ju.

About the book, from the publisher:

Grandchildren of immigrants belonging to groups that have achieved high socioeconomic status choose which identities to leverage in the host country's political arena. The scholarship about political incorporation often assumes that immigrant groups and their descendants find it in their best interest to pursue mainstream political incorporation. Those immigrants who belong to ethnic minority groups might choose to engage politically in a number of ways, depending on their racial or economic status; Identities Matter: The Politics of Immigration and Incorporation looks at how descendants of minoritized groups who have achieved, generally speaking, high socioeconomic status choose to identify politically in their adopted nations. Contrary to many expectations about political and social incorporation of immigrants, it finds that assimilation is not necessarily advantageous for groups who are from or associated with countries that are more economically developed than their host country. When this is the case, these immigrant communities may choose to strategically associate themselves with the heritage country over the one in which they reside.

The book draws on original research among third-generation Japanese and Jewish Brazilians to determine the seemingly paradoxical ways in which the descendants of immigrants choose which identities to emphasize in the political arena. It shows that immigrant communities' strategies of political incorporation and social integration are framed within where they fall in existing ethno-racial and socioeconomic hierarchies, and that perceptions of discrimination drive third-generation descendants to vote in line with their ethnic interests. One particularly interesting finding is that in Brazil, a country that suffers from high levels of political corruption, Japanese Brazilian politicians are often incentivized to emphasize their Japanese-ness over their Brazilian-ness to convey to voters that they are more honest as political candidates than their "more Brazilian" opponents. Finally, ethnic community-based organizations allow these groups to leverage their identities transnationally.

Visit Angela Ju's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State by Kirstine Taylor.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of how the American South became the most incarcerated region in the world’s most incarcerated nation.

Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State examines the evolution of southern criminal punishment from Jim Crow to the dawn of mass incarceration, charting this definitive era of carceral transformation and expansion in the southern United States. The demise of the county chain gang, the professionalization of police, and the construction of large-scale prisons were among the sweeping changes that forever altered the southern landscape and bolstered the region’s capacity to punish. What prompted this southern revolution in criminal punishment?

Kirstine Taylor argues that the crisis in the cotton fields and the arrival of Sunbelt capitalism in the south’s rising metropolises prompted lawmakers to build expansive, modern criminal punishment systems in response to Brown v. Board of Education and the Black freedom movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Taking us inside industry-hunting expeditions, school desegregation battles, the sit-in movement, prisoners’ labor unions, and policy commissions, Taylor tells the story of how a modernizing south became the most incarcerated region in the globe’s most incarcerated nation.

Visit Kirstine Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Postal Intelligence"

New from Cornell University Press: Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura.

About the book, from the publisher:

Postal Intelligence connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. In the sixteenth century, postal services became central to domestic governance and foreign policy enterprises, extended government reach and surveillance, and offered new control over the public sphere.

Rachel Midura focuses on the Tassis family, members of which served as official postmasters to the dukes of Milan, the pope, Spanish kings, and Holy Roman emperors. Using administrative records and family correspondence, she follows the Tassis family, their agents, and their rivals as their influence expanded from northern Italy across Europe. Postal Intelligence shows how postmasters and postmistresses were key players in early modern diplomacy, commerce, and journalism, whose ultimate success depended on both administrative ingenuity and strategic ambiguity.

Visit Rachel Midura's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England"

New from Oxford University Press: Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England by Hillary Taylor.

About the book, from the publisher:

What was the interrelation between language, power, and socio-economic inequality in England, c. 1550-1750? Early modern England was a hierarchical society that placed considerable emphasis on order; language was bound up with the various structures of authority that made up the polity. Members of the labouring population were expected to accept their place, defer to their superiors, and refrain from 'murmuring' about a host of issues. While some early modern labouring people fulfilled these expectations, others did not; because of their defiance, the latter were more likely to make their way into the historical record, and historians have previously used the evidence that they generated to reconstruct various forms of resistance and negotiation involved in everyday social relations.

Hillary Taylor instead considers the limits that class power placed on popular expression, and with what implications. Using a wide variety of sources, Taylor examines how members of the early modern English labouring population could be made to speak in ways that reflected and even seemed to justify their subordinated positions--both in their eyes and those of their social superiors. By reconstructing how class power structured and limited popular expression, this study not only presents a new interpretation of how inequality was normalized over the course of the period, but also sheds new light on the constraints that labouring people overcame when they engaged in individual or collective acts of defiance against their 'betters.' It revives domination and subordination as objects of inquiry and demonstrates the ways in which language--at the levels of ideology and social practice--reflected, reproduced, and naturalized inequality over the course of the early modern period.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Terrorism News Beat"

New from the University of Michigan Press: The Terrorism News Beat: Professionalism, Profit, and the Press by Aaron M. Hoffman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Critics of terrorism news coverage often describe it as a sensationalized and intimidating area of reporting. However, this characterization offers a misleading guide to the coverage of terrorist threats and attacks, counterterrorism, and community responses to terrorism that appears in U.S. newspapers. Counterterrorism—not terrorist threats or attacks—is the most reported-on subject in newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Rather than focusing on accounts of terrorist attacks, militarized counterterrorism, or counterterrorism failures, journalists more often cover counterterrorism successes, criminal justice, and diplomatic or community responses to terrorism.

The Terrorism News Beat engages thinking about terrorism and the news media from the fields of political science, communication, criminology, economics, and sociology using multimethod research involving more than 2,500 newspaper articles published between 1997 and 2018. Chapters analyze the terrorism news beat’s subject matter, language, and coverage of the Oklahoma City Bombing, Olympic Park bombing, 9/11 attacks, DC Sniper case, and Dallas Police shooting. When it comes to language use, Hoffman finds that, rather than giving into the temptation to convey the news in lurid detail, journalists are minimalists. The language used to depict events on the terrorism beat is typically moderate and extreme words like “torture” appear only as necessary. The Terrorism News Beat shows that contrary to claims of sensationalism, the tone of terrorism coverage becomes even more sober during terrorism crises than it is during non-crisis periods and meets journalistic standards for quality.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bad Christians and Hanging Toads"

New from Cornell University Press: Bad Christians and Hanging Toads: Witch Crafting in Northern Spain, 1525–1675 by Rochelle Rojas.

About the book, from the publisher:

Bad Christians and Hanging Toads tells riveting stories of witchcraft in everyday life in early modern Navarra. Belief in witchcraft not only emerged in moments of mass panic but was woven into the fabric of village life. Some villagers believed witches sickened crops and cows with poisonous powders, others thought they engaged in diabolism and perverted sex, and still others believed they lovingly raised toads used to commit evil deeds. Most villagers, however, simply saw witches as those with reputations of being mala cristianas―bad Christians. Rochelle Rojas illuminates the social webs of accusations and the pathways of village gossip that created the conditions for the witch beliefs and trials of the period.

While studies of witchcraft in Spain tend to focus on the inquisitorial trials and witch panic of 1609–14, Bad Christians and Hanging Toads turns to witch trials conducted by the region's secular judiciary, Navarra's royal tribunals, tracing the prosecution of accused witches over 150 years. Using detailed evidence from trial records and neighbors' testimonies, Rojas vividly brings to life the women and men crafted as witches by their neighbors and the authorities and guides readers through the judicial process, from accusations and the examination of the evidence to sentencing and punishment.

By privileging the voices of villagers throughout, Bad Christians and Hanging Toads demonstrates that the inner logic of early modern European witchcraft trials can be understood only by examining of the local, everyday aspects of witch belief.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Justice and Reciprocity"

New from Oxford University Press: Justice and Reciprocity by Andrew Lister.

About the book, from the publisher:

Justice and Reciprocity examines the place of reciprocity in egalitarianism, focusing on John Rawls's conception of "justice as fairness." Reciprocity was a central to justice as fairness, but Rawls wasn't explicit about the different forms of reciprocity, nor the diverse roles reciprocity played in his theory.

The book's main thesis is threefold. First, reciprocity is not simply a fact of human psychology or a duty, but a limiting condition on other duties. Second, such conditions are a natural consequence of thinking of equality as a relational value. However, third, we can identify limits on this conditionality, which explains how some duties of justice can be unconditional. The book explores the ramifications of this argument in a series of debates about distributive justice: productive incentives, duties to future generations, unconditional basic income, and global justice. In each domain, thinking about reciprocity as a limiting condition helps explain otherwise puzzling aspects of justice as fairness, in some cases making the view more plausible, but in others underlining limits that will be unappealing to egalitarians of a more unilateral bent. Lister ultimately shows that reciprocity involves more than returning benefits, and that limiting justice with reciprocity conditions need not make justice implausibly undemanding. In this way, the book rehabilitates reciprocity for egalitarianism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"How Politicians Polarize"

New from the University of Chicago Press: How Politicians Polarize: Political Representation in an Age of Negative Partisanship by Mia Costa.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fresh examination of political representation in an era of negative partisanship.

What does representation look like when politicians focus on "othering" the opposing party rather than the policy interests of their constituents? How do voters react to negative partisan rhetoric? And is policy responsiveness still the cornerstone of American representative democracy?

In How Politicians Polarize, Mia Costa draws on survey experiments, analysis of congressional newsletters and tweets, and data on fundraising and media coverage to examine how and why politicians rely so often on negative partisan attacks. Costa shows that most Americans do not like negative rhetoric, and politicians know this. Nonetheless, these kinds of attacks can reap powerful rewards from national media, donors, and party elites. Costa’s findings challenge the popular notion that Americans are motivated more by their partisan identities than by policy representation. Her research illuminates how the political ecosystem rewards negative representation and how this affects the quality of American democracy.

Visit Mia Costa's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Martyrs and Migrants"

New from NYU Press: Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire by Candace Lukasik.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Coptic Christian migrants reshape religious identity through the imagination of US empire

Coptic Orthodox Christians comprise the largest Christian community in the Middle East and are among the oldest Christian communities in the world. While once the objects of American missionary efforts, in recent years Copts have been in the spotlight for their Christianity. A spate of ISIS-related bombings and attacks have garnered worldwide attention, leading to a series of efforts from US politicians, think tanks, and NGOs to re-channel their efforts into “saving” these Middle Eastern Christians from Muslims. The increased targeting of Copts has also contributed to the moral imaginary of the “Persecuted Church,” particularly among American evangelicals, which embraces the idea that Christians around the globe are currently being persecuted more than any other time in history.

Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork among Coptic migrants between Egypt and the United States, Martyrs and Migrants examines how American religious imaginaries of global Christian persecution have remapped Coptic collective memory of martyrdom. Transnational Copts have navigated the sociopolitical conditions in Egypt and the global consequences of the US “war on terror” by translating their suffering into the ambiguous forms of religious and political visibility. Candace Lukasik argues that the commingling of American conservatives and Copts has shaped a new kind of Christian kinship in blood, operating through a double movement between glorification and racialization. Occupying a position between threat and victim, Copts from the Middle East have been subject to anti-terror surveillance in the US even as they have leveraged their roles as “persecuted Christians.” Through Lukasik’s careful examination of the everyday processes shaping Coptic communal formation, Martyrs and Migrants broadly reveals how ideologies of spiritual kinship are forged through theological histories of martyrdom and of blood, demonstrating the global dynamics and imperial politics of contemporary Christianity.

Visit Candace Lukasik's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Market for Skill"

New from Princeton University Press: The Market for Skill: Apprenticeship and Economic Growth in Early Modern England by Patrick Wallis.

About the book, from the publisher:

How apprenticeship shaped the English economy

Apprenticeship dominated training and skill formation in early modern Europe. Years spent learning from a skilled master were a nearly universal experience for young workers in crafts and trade. In England, when apprenticeship reached its peak, as many as a third of all teenage males would serve and learn as apprentices. In The Market for Skill, Patrick Wallis shows how apprenticeship helped reshape the English economy.

Some historians see apprenticeship as a key ingredient in the industrial revolution; others agree with Adam Smith in seeing it as wasteful and conservative. Wallis shows that neither of these perspectives is entirely accurate. He offers a new account of apprenticeship and the market for skill in England, analyzing the records of hundreds of thousands of individual apprentices to tell the story of how apprenticeship worked and how it contributed to the transformation of England. Wallis details the activities of apprentices and masters, the strategies of ambitious parents, the interventions of guilds and the decisions of town officials. He shows how the system of early modern apprenticeship contributed to the growth of cities, the movement of workers from farms to manufacturing and the spread of new technologies and productive knowledge.

In this groundbreaking study, Wallis argues that apprenticeship succeeded precisely because it was a flexible institution which allowed apprentices to change their minds and exit contracts early. Apprenticeship provided a vital channel for training that families could trust and that was accessible to most young people, whatever their background.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The 1968 Florida Teachers' Strike"

New from LSU Press: The 1968 Florida Teachers' Strike: Public Sector Unionism and the Fight against Sunshine State Conservatism by Jody Baxter Noll.

About the book, from the publisher:

In early 1968, more than 27,000 teachers across Florida mailed their resignation letters, initiating the country’s first statewide teachers’ strike. The striking teachers fought for and won a monumental victory, improving education in the state and gaining collective bargaining rights for all public sector employees. Even as the influence of industrial labor unions decreased across the country, the Florida teachers’ strike and the spirit of teacher militancy that swept the nation during the late 1960s and 1970s demonstrate that a vibrant labor movement remained. Jody Baxter Noll’s study challenges the prevailing view of these decades as a period of decline for the American labor movement by turning the spotlight on teachers and public sector unionism.

In his examination of the 1968 strike and its aftermath, Noll illuminates the vital role of teachers in shaping political and social policy in the United States. As a predominantly women-led workforce, teachers challenged notions of feminine passivity in their mobilization efforts and used their union to fight for gender equality. The strike also provides insight into how interracial unionism could be a potent weapon for labor movements, even in the Deep South.

In exploring the political and social factors that prompted the teachers’ strike, Noll considers Florida’s instrumental role in forming modern conservatism. Led by Republican governor Claude Kirk, the first Republican governor elected in the Deep South since Reconstruction, Florida helped to create a blueprint for Republicans to build a New Right powerhouse throughout the country. Though Florida has remained on the periphery of much scholarship on the ascendancy of the New Right, Noll demonstrates that the state more accurately reflects the nation’s political attitudes than much of the rest of the South because of its economic, racial, social, and political diversity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Philosophy as Descartes Found It"

New from Oxford University Press: Philosophy as Descartes Found It: Practice and Theory by Brian Copenhaver.

About the book, from the publisher:

What was philosophy as Descartes found it around 1620? What was philosophy like before Descartes reformed it after 1637? What features of philosophy did he want to fix, and what tools did he use? To answer such questions, how should philosophers do their work today? One answer is surprising: that Descartes wrote picture books, for example. Another is challenging: that philosophers in the present would be better students of their discipline's past if they spent less time on past philosophy as they commonly understand it. The change would be transformative. But big changes have happened in philosophy's past for non-philosophical reasons that need attention from philosophers today, when oblivion has impeded their study of such changes. Attending to understudied causes of philosophical effects will show philosophers how to repair the damage that oblivion has done to their work. Mending stories about philosophy begins in this book with Descartes and his predecessors--mostly the predecessors--on meditation and method. Brian Copenhaver examines these familiar topics from a neglected point of view before introducing a different and unfamiliar Descartes: the author of the Discourse and Meditations as a writer of picture books. Three chapters about these topics--meditation, method, and picturing--are the practice justified by two theoretical chapters, one about how philosophy changes, the other about the oblivion that cancels memories of change.

The Page 99 Test: Magic in Western Culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Airborne Mafia"

New from Cornell University Press: The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America's Cold War Army by Robert F. Williams.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Airborne Mafia explores how a small group of World War II airborne officers took control of the US Army after World War II. This powerful cadre cemented a unique airborne culture that had an unprecedented impact on the Cold War US Army and beyond.

Robert F. Williams reveals the trials and tribulations this group of officers faced in order to bring about their vision. He spotlights the relationship between organizational culture, operational behavior, and institutional change in the United States Army during the Cold War, showing that as airborne officers ascended to the highest ranks of the army they transmitted their culture throughout their service in four major ways―civil-military relations, preparation for potential atomic combat, helicopter airmobility, and strategic response forces.

Experiences of training and commanding airborne divisions in World War II led these men to hold sway in army doctrine by the mid-1950s. Dominating institutional thought and imparting their values, beliefs, and norms throughout the service they enjoyed a special privilege within the group culture. Williams demonstrates this impact, privilege, and power by focusing on the paratrooper triumvirate of Matthew Ridgway, Maxwell Taylor, and James Gavin and the lasting impression they made on how the US Army fought.

The Airborne Mafia illuminates the power subcultures can have in changing their parent cultures over time, particularly one as set in its ways and as large as the US Army. With a deft touch, deep research, and an unwavering eye for the human stories behind organizational change, Williams helps explain the existence and importance of the paratrooper mystique that remains within the military still today.

Visit Robert F. Williams's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Poverty Rebels"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Poverty Rebels: Black and Brown Protest in Post–Civil Rights America by Casey D. Nichols.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1960s Los Angeles, a powerful network within Black and Chicana/o organizations transformed the War on Poverty and Model Cities program. Black and Brown activists worked together and separately to use the US federal government’s War on Poverty as an opportunity to establish programs that would counteract the neglect that led to underfunded schools, inadequate housing, and a lack of community institutions. Casey Nichols examines this diverse group of intentional and unintentional collaborators she calls “poverty rebels,” which included politicians, activists, youth, professionals, community members, and local people.

Poverty rebels leveraged federal antipoverty funding to work around the limited capacity of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to address the dual impact of race and class in African American and Mexican American communities. They understood that unequal policy had created their urban realities and sought to redefine antipoverty legislation in a way that improved their material lives. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including local and federal government documents, oral histories, and organizational records, Nichols examines vital links between the nation’s social and political spheres. Ultimately, she argues that Black-Brown relations gained greater national significance during the mid-1960s amid important civil rights victories and social policies to address so-called disadvantaged communities. By coming into social and political proximity, African Americans and Mexican Americans constructed a national dialogue about Black-Brown relations that had shared benefits, and that continues to shape policy debates today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Disparate Regimes"

New from Oxford University Press: Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965 by Brendan A. Shanahan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It is far less understood that the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the country remained primarily contested in the realms of state politics and law until the mid-to-late twentieth century. Such state-level political debates often centered on whether noncitizen immigrants should vote, count as part of the polity for the purposes of state legislative representation, work in public and publicly funded employment, or obtain professional licensure.

Enacted state alienage laws were rarely self-executing, and immigrants and their allies regularly challenged nativist restrictions in court, on the job, by appealing to lawmakers and the public, and even via diplomacy. Battles over the passage, implementation, and constitutionality of such policies at times aligned with and sometimes clashed against contemporaneous efforts to expand rights to marginalized Americans, particularly US-born women. Often considered separately or treated as topics of marginal importance, Disparate Regimes underscores the centrality of nativist state politics and alienage policies to the history of American immigration and citizenship from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that the proliferation of these debates and laws produced veritable disparate regimes of citizenship rights in the American political economy on a state-by-state basis. It further illustrates how nativist state politics and alienage policies helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in law, practice, and popular perception in the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Safe Havens for Hate"

New from Princeton University Press: Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism by Tamar Mitts.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why efforts to moderate harmful content on social media fail to stop extremists

Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the fight against terrorism and extremism. Yet despite mass content takedowns, account suspensions, and mounting pressure on technology companies to do more, hate thrives online. Safe Havens for Hate looks at how content moderation shapes the tactics of harmful content producers on a wide range of social media platforms.

Drawing on a wealth of original data on more than a hundred militant and hate organizations around the world, Tamar Mitts shows how differing moderation standards across platforms create safe havens that allow these actors to organize, launch campaigns, and mobilize supporters. She reveals how the structure of the information environment shapes the cross-platform activity of extremist organizations and movements such as the Islamic State, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and QAnon, and highlights the need to consider the online ecosystem, not just individual platforms, when developing strategies to combat extremism.

Taking readers to the frontlines of the digital battleground where dangerous organizations operate, Safe Havens for Hate sheds critical light on how governments and technology companies grapple with the tension between censorship and free speech when faced with violence, hate, and extremism.

Visit Tamar Mitts's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fraternal Critique"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Fraternal Critique: The Politics of Muslim Community in France by Kirsten Wesselhoeft.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exploration of ways that discord binds rather than divides communal life, through an ethnography of French Muslim activism.

The conversation about Islam in France is framed by the presumption that Muslim communities are a threat to secular solidarity or fraternité. In the face of state repression, French Muslims have not closed ranks around a narrow range of voices; instead, Kirsten Wesselhoeft finds that young Muslim activists have continued to purposefully spark debate about the values that anchor community life. Wesselhoeft argues that such disagreements, far from dividing communities, actually constitute a form of belonging. Some activists call this ethic “fraternal critique,” and Wesselhoeft finds in it profound insights about the place for critique in civic life. The French state has reacted to Muslim solidarity with repression, but Wesselhoeft argues that unity need not come at the expense of dissent. Instead, fraternal critique can teach us how to build communities that are worth fighting over and fighting for.

Kirsten Wesselhoeft, Associate Professor of Religion at Vassar College, is a scholar of modern and contemporary Islam in contexts shaped by colonialism and liberal secularism. Her research interests include social ethics, gender and religion, critical migration studies, religion and racialization, Islam and the body, food and ritual, and qualitative methods.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sovereign Bodies, Sovereign Spaces"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Sovereign Bodies, Sovereign Spaces: Urban Indigenous Health Activism in the United States and Australia by Maria John.

About the book, from the publisher:

Statistics indicate that Indigenous people worldwide suffer disproportionately poor health outcomes. Since the mid-twentieth century, health activism has become increasingly central to expressions of Indigenous sovereignty and survivance. In this innovative comparative study, Maria John assesses the histories of urban Indigenous health activism in the United States and Australia and how it has sought to counter the medical mistreatment and neglect that Indigenous people have historically faced in these nations. From the crisis of health care access in the 1970s to the strength of Indigenous community responses to COVID-19, John shows how the creation of Indigenous community-controlled health clinics has been a vital response to settler colonial structures of neglect in medical care. John illustrates that these clinics have also created a new kind of political space where Indigenous people from different tribal nations and geographies can develop and practice new ideas of nonterritorial sovereignty and pan-Indigenous solidarities across regions and nations.

John’s arguments expand our understanding of the ways urban places and spaces foster possibilities for Indigenous communities, and her focus on health reveals how Indigenous people strategize, struggle, and work against systems they were never meant to survive.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Political Army"

New from Columbia University Press: The Political Army: How the U.S. Military Learned to Manage the Media and Public Opinion by Thomas Crosbie.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since World War II, the U.S. military has taken a keen interest in shaping press coverage and, through it, public perception and democratic oversight of the armed forces. After misjudging the domestic political landscape during the Vietnam War, Army leaders embraced media management, recognizing that control over information had become central to how wars are fought. Even as the Army presented itself as a scrupulously apolitical organization, its leaders strove to reshape their political environment through public relations.

This book tells the story of the U.S. Army’s deepening involvement in media management over six decades and offers new ways to understand the military as a political actor. Thomas Crosbie examines how the Army gradually transformed its relationship with the civilian government and the public by engaging with the press. He traces Army media management from its origins as an ad hoc task to its professionalization and formalization, alongside the Army’s rise as a political force, its precipitous fall in the Vietnam War era, and its renewed ascent after learning key lessons from the experience of Vietnam. The Political Army draws on the records of Army leaders, archives of major public affairs figures and organizations, and extensive interviews with war correspondents, public affairs officers, and senior Army staff. Demonstrating how the U.S. Army gained, at great expense, potent political sway, this book provides a theoretically rich account of military politics and what it means for democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"We the Men"

New from Oxford University Press: We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality by Jill Elaine Hasday.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for "We the People," too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women's struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decision making, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.

Jill Elaine Hasday's We the Men is the first book to explore how forgetting women's struggles for equality―and forgetting the work America still has to do―perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. Hasday argues that remembering women's stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality. These stories highlight the persistence of women's inequality and make clear that real progress has always required women to disrupt the status quo, demand change, and duel with determined opponents.

America needs more conflict over women's status rather than less. Conflict has the power to generate forward momentum. Patiently awaiting men's spontaneous enlightenment does not. Transforming America's dominant stories about itself can reorient our understanding of how women's progress takes place, focus our attention on the battles that are still unwon, and fortify our determination to push for a more equal future.

Visit Jill Elaine Hasday's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hating Jazz"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse by Andrew S. Berish.

About the book, from the publisher:

A deep dive into the meaning behind the hatred of jazz.

A rock guitarist plays four notes in front of one thousand people, while a jazz guitarist plays one thousand notes in front of four people. You might laugh or groan at this jazz joke, but what is it about jazz that makes people want to disparage it in the first place?

Andrew S. Berish’s Hating Jazz listens to the voices who have denounced, disparaged, and mocked the music. By focusing on the rejection of the music, Berish says, we see more holistically jazz’s complicated place in American cultural life. Jazz is a display of Black creativity and genius, an art form that is deeply embedded in African American life. Though the explicit racial tenor of jazz jokes has become muted over time, making fun of jazz, either in a lighthearted or aggressive way, is also an engagement with the place of Blackness in America. An individual’s taste in music may seem personal, but Berish’s analysis of jazz hatred demonstrates that musical preferences and trends are a social phenomenon. Criticism of jazz has become inextricable from the ways we understand race in America, past and present. In addition to this form of criticism, Berish also considers jazz hate as a form of taste discrimination and as a conflict over genre boundaries within different jazz cultures.

Both enlightening and original, Hating Jazz shows that our response to music can be a social act, unique to our historical moment and cultural context—we react to music in certain ways because of who we are, where we are, and when we are.

Visit Andrew S. Berish's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Veiled Threats"

New from Cornell University Press: Veiled Threats: Women and Global Jihad by Mia Bloom.

About the book, from the publisher:

Veiled Threats challenges the idea that women in violent terrorist groups lack agency. Too often, these women are assumed to be controlled by men: their fathers, their husbands, or some other male relative. Mia Bloom contests this narrow understanding. Although extremist groups often control different aspects of women's lives, including their religious obligations or dress, jihadi women have asserted themselves in myriad ways. Bloom interrogates the prevailing perceptions about women's involvement in violent extremism exclusively as victims: manipulated, drugged, or coerced. Following her pioneering work on women in Bombshell, Bloom lifts the veil of the secret world of women in jihadi groups to provide a nuanced and complex explanation of their motivations and challenge misperceptions about women's agency.

Veiled Threats explores the range of roles of the women involved in jihad―not only across secular and religious groups but within affiliated religious groups―and examines how these extremist groups have used rape as a weapon of war. Bloom explains how women are used and abused, deployed and destroyed, and the many ways in which their roles in terrorism have evolved over the past three decades.

Learn more about Pastels and Pedophiles at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Bombshell: Women and Terrorism by Mia Bloom.

The Page 99 Test: Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom & Sophia Moskalenko.

--Marshal Zeringue

"East of Empire"

New from Stanford University Press: East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars by Erin M.B. O'Halloran.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the outset of the twentieth century, Egyptian and Indian leaders understood their movements for self-determination as linked and part of a shared project. Following World War I, as connections between the Middle East and South Asia proliferated, Egypt and India lay squarely at the heart of increasingly complex and multilateral relations. East of Empire traces how anticolonial nationalism gained momentum across the East and documents the friendships, rivalries, cultural exchanges, and shifting political alliances that came to animate the interwar project of Easternism: a cosmopolitan vision of the world whose center of gravity lay beyond Europe, in the great city of Cairo. Erin O'Halloran offers a compelling new account of the era immediately preceding decolonization and the epochal partitions of India and Palestine. Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Saad Zaghlul, she introduces less familiar but no less intriguing personalities: feminists, diplomats, and poets; surrealists, socialists and spies. Each dreamed, wrote, organized and fought for the liberation of the East—a space universally evoked, though seemingly impossible to pin down. Drawing on a broad cross-section of Indian, Arab, British, and European sources, East of Empire transcends archival partitions to tell a powerful and nearly forgotten set of stories about the rise of anticolonial nationalism and the end of empire across the Middle East and South Asia.

Erin M.B. O'Halloran is Marie Sklodowska Curie European Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Empire of Poverty"

New from Oxford University Press: Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire by Julia McClure.

About the book, from the publisher:

Empire of Poverty examines how changing concepts of poverty in the long-sixteenth century helped shape the deep structures of states and empires and the contours of imperial inequalities. While poverty is often understood to have become a political subject with the birth of political economy in the eighteenth century, this book points to the longer history of poverty as a political subject and a more complicated relationship between moral and political economies. It focuses upon the critical transformations taking place in the long-sixteenth century, with the emergence of the world´s first global empire and the development of colonial capitalism. The book explores how the 'moral-political economy of poverty' - defined as a new and changing conceptualisation of and approach to poverty, across laws, institutions, and acts of resistance - played a critical role in the development and governance of the Spanish Empire. In so doing it offers insights into the negotiated nature of sovereignty, the construction of inequalities, and strategies of resistance. Empire of Poverty explains how the combined processes of the transition to global capitalism and imperialism in the long-sixteenth century wrought a moral crisis which led to the transformation of poverty and reconceptualization of the poor and how the newly emerging beliefs, laws, and institutions of poverty helped structure the inequalities of the new global order.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Landscaping Patagonia"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina by María de los Ángeles Picone.

About the book, from the publisher:

In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as “desert,” through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. But beyond the urban governing halls of Chile and Argentina, explorers, migrants, local authorities, bandits, and visitors also made sense of the nation by inhabiting the physical space of the northern Patagonian Andes. They surveyed passes, opened roads, claimed land titles or leases, traveled miles to the nearest police station, rode miles on horseback to escape the police, and hiked the landscape.

María de los Ángeles Picone tells the story of how people living, governing, and traveling through northern Patagonia sought to construct versions of Chile and Argentina based on their ideas about and experiences in geographical space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By repositioning the analytical focus from Santiago and Buenos Aires to northern Patagonia, Picone reveals how a wide array of actors, with varying degrees of political, economic, and social power, assigned distinctive―and sometimes conflicting―meanings to space and national identity.

Visit Ángeles Picone's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"We Belong Here"

New from the University of Chicago Press: We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place by Shani Adia Evans.

About the book, from the publisher:

A landmark study that shows how Black residents experience and respond to the rapid transformation of historically Black places.

Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast Portland, also called “Albina,” were a haven for and a hub of Black community life. But between 1990 and 2010, Albina changed dramatically—it became majority White.

In We Belong Here, sociologist Shani Adia Evans offers an intimate look at gentrification from the inside, documenting the reactions of Albina residents as the racial demographics of their neighborhood shift. As White culture becomes centered in Northeast, Black residents recount their experiences with what Evans refers to as “White watching,” the questioning look on the faces of White people they encounter, which conveys an exclusionary message: “What are you doing here?” This, Evans shows, is a prime example of what she calls “White spacemaking”: the establishment of White space—spaces in which Whiteness is assumed to be the norm and non-Whites are treated with suspicion—in formerly non-White neighborhoods. Evans also documents Black residents’ efforts to create and maintain places for Black belonging in White-dominated Portland. While gentrification typically describes socioeconomic changes that may have racial implications, White spacemaking allows us to understand racism as a primary mechanism of neighborhood change. We Belong Here illuminates why gentrification and White spacemaking should be examined as intersecting, but not interchangeable, processes of neighborhood change.

Visit Shani Adia Evans's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice"

New from Oxford University Press: The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice: Situating Epistemic Power and Agency by Amandine Catala.

About the book, from the publisher:

Epistemic injustice refers to the injustice that a person suffers specifically in their capacity as a knower--i.e., as someone who produces, conveys, or uses knowledge. Epistemic injustice occurs every day when members of non-dominant groups are not included or taken seriously in conversations or social representations due to individual or societal biases.

Epistemic injustice is inherently connected to epistemic power and epistemic agency: understanding and addressing epistemic injustice allows us to better understand and address epistemic power and agency, and vice versa. Yet, despite vast and rich discussions of epistemic injustice, which often invoke the notions of epistemic power and epistemic agency, both notions remain undertheorized and hence largely elusive. Amandine Catala offers a systematic account of epistemic power and agency by turning to the dynamics of epistemic injustice -- that is, the many forms epistemic injustice can take, the different sites and mechanisms through which it operates, and the various transformations consequently required to cultivate greater epistemic justice.

Adopting standpoint theory as both a theoretical and a methodological framework, Catala considers several pressing social questions, such as deliberative impasses in divided societies, colonial memory, academic migration, the underrepresentation of members of non-dominant groups in certain fields, the marginalization of minoritized minds such as intellectually disabled people, and the underdiagnosing of autistic women. By analyzing these social questions through the lens of the dynamics of epistemic injustice, this book makes two main contributions: it develops a systematic account of epistemic power and agency that highlights the interaction between individual and structural factors, and it offers a pluralist account of epistemic injustice and agency that reveals their non-propositional and non-verbal dimensions.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Prohibition in Turkey"

New from the University of Texas Press: Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity by Emine Ö. Evered.

About the book, from the publisher:

A social history of alcohol, identity, secularism, and modernization from the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras to the present day.

Prohibition in Turkey investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked―and even excluded―aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates.

Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how―amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline―drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation.

Visit Emine Ö. Evered's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In Covid's Wake"

New from Princeton University Press: In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee.

About the book, from the publisher:

What our failures during the pandemic cost us, and why we must do better

The Covid pandemic quickly led to the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history. By early April 2020, half the world’s population—3.9 billion people—were living under quarantine. People were told not to leave their homes; businesses were shuttered, employees laid off, and schools closed for months or even years. The most devastating pandemic in a century and the policies adopted in response to it upended life as we knew it. In this eye-opening book, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee examine our pandemic response and pose some provocative questions: Why did we ignore pre-Covid plans for managing a pandemic? Were the voices of reasonable dissent treated fairly? Did we adequately consider the costs and benefits of different policy options? And, aside from vaccines, did the policies adopted work as intended?

With In Covid’s Wake, Macedo and Lee offer the first comprehensive—and candid—political assessment of how our institutions fared during the pandemic. They describe how, influenced by Wuhan’s lockdown, governments departed from their existing pandemic plans. Hard choices were obscured by slogans like “follow the science.” Benefits and harms were distributed unfairly. The policies adopted largely benefited the laptop class and left so-called essential workers unprotected; extended school closures hit the least-privileged families the hardest. Science became politicized and dissent was driven to the margins. In the next crisis, Macedo and Lee warn, we must not forget the deepest values of liberal democracy: tolerance and open-mindedness, respect for evidence and its limits, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment to telling the whole truth.

The Page 99 Test: Frances E. Lee's Insecure Majorities.

The Page 99 Test: Stephen Macedo's Just Married.

--Marshal Zeringue