"The Means of Prediction"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits) by Maximilian Kasy.

About the book, from the publisher:

An eye-opening examination of how power—not technology—will define life with AI.

AI is inescapable, from its mundane uses online to its increasingly consequential decision-making in courtrooms, job interviews, and wars. The ubiquity of AI is so great that it might produce public resignation—a sense that the technology is our shared fate.

As economist Maximilian Kasy shows in The Means of Prediction, artificial intelligence, far from being an unstoppable force, is irrevocably shaped by human decisions—choices made to date by the ownership class that steers its development and deployment. Kasy shows that the technology of AI is ultimately not that complex. It is insidious, however, in its capacity to steer results to its owners’ wants and ends. Kasy clearly and accessibly explains the fundamental principles on which AI works, and, in doing so, reveals that the real conflict isn’t between humans and machines, but between those who control the machines and the rest of us.

The Means of Prediction offers a powerful vision of the future of AI: a future not shaped by technology, but by the technology’s owners. Amid a deluge of debates about technical details, new possibilities, and social problems, Kasy cuts to the core issue: Who controls AI’s objectives, and how is this control maintained? The answer lies in what he calls “the means of prediction,” or the essential resources required for building AI systems: data, computing power, expertise, and energy. As Kasy shows, in a world already defined by inequality, one of humanity’s most consequential technologies has been and will be steered by those already in power.

Against those stakes, Kasy offers an elegant framework both for understanding AI’s capabilities and for designing its public control. He makes a compelling case for democratic control over AI objectives as the answer to mounting concerns about AI's risks and harms. The Means of Prediction is a revelation, both an expert undressing of a technology that has masqueraded as more complicated and a compelling call for public oversight of this transformative technology.

--Marshal Zeringue

"For a Spell"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: For a Spell: Sissie Collectivism and Radical Witchery in the Southeast by Jason Ezell.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the Southeastern United States of the late 1970s, a regional network of radical communal gay households formed in the face of rising New Right terror. Consisting of primarily white, self-described sissies, the Southeast Network, as it came to be known, spanned from the Ozarks, to New Orleans, to Appalachian Tennessee. Though this network was short-lived, its legacy lives on today through Short Mountain Sanctuary, a thriving member of the international Radical Faerie movement. Jason Ezell’s intimate account of the formation and dissolution of these sissie houses reveals a little-known history of Southern gay liberation, nonbinary gender expression, and radical feminism and femininity.

Drawing on journals, letters, oral histories, collective manifestos, and newsletters, Ezell illustrates how these gay households nurtured their community through lesbian feminist practices such as collectivism, consciousness-raising, witchcraft rituals, and rural gatherings. As people and practices traveled from one house to another, these linked houses attempted to conjure underground sanctuaries for queer Southerners. Preserving their moving stories, Ezell details the visions, experiments, and shortfalls of these radical households in their attempts to build solidarity, resist mounting right-wing violence, and sustain their revolutionary dreams for queer movements yet to come.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Actual Art of Governing"

New from Oxford University Press: The Actual Art of Governing: Justice Robert H. Jackson's Concurring Opinion in the Steel Seizure Case by Gerard N. Magliocca.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the adoption of the US constitution, there has been ongoing calibration of the power balance between the three branches of government, often in the face of rapidly changing social and political contexts. In 1952, US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson took up this debate in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer, a watershed case that barred President Harry S. Truman from seizing privately operated steel mills during the Korean War. Concurring with the majority decision, Jackson penned an opinion that would become the authoritative source on the constitutional boundary between congressional and executive authority.

In The Actual Art of Governing, eminent legal historian Gerard N. Magliocca takes a close look at this landmark opinion, providing a deep reading of the decision and the context surrounding it, and explaining its lasting influence. Magliocca skillfully shows how Justice Jackson's opinion broke free of the rules for judicial writing, taking a pragmatic approach to constitutional interpretation that drew on personal experience and historical examples, rather than sticking strictly to the text, judicial doctrine, and original public meaning. The framework that Jackson proposed took on crucial significance during the fallout of Richard Nixon's Watergate abuses and has continued to be relied upon in controversies involving the reach of the US President's power, including actions taken by Donald Trump. Magliocca concludes by arguing that a proper reading of Jackson's Youngstown concurrence would lead to significant curbs on emergency powers, the discretion of the federal courts, and presidential authority.

The Page 99 Test: The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan: Constitutional Law and the Politics of Backlash.

The Page 99 Test: American Founding Son.

The Page 99 Test: Washington's Heir.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sovereignty Disrupted"

New from Stanford University Press: Sovereignty Disrupted: Spinoza and the Disparity of Reality by Gilah Kletenik.

About the book, from the publisher:

Anthropocentrism, white supremacy, and cishetsexism remain with us. The intransigence of such oppressions, this book proposes, is stayed by the unrecognized force that sovereignty maintains across the domains of "Western" philosophy. To corroborate this original thesis, the book uncovers how the rationales of sovereignty secure dominant "Western" theories about the nature of reality, the promise of reason, and the status of humans. Such approaches rely on properties of sovereignty that essentialize difference, naturalize hierarchy, and valorize autonomy. To redress these models and the supremacies they promote, Gilah Kletenik turns to Spinoza. Through a fresh reading of his Ethics, Kletenik develops an egalitarian alternative that starts with denaturalizing sovereignty. It is not a coincidence that Spinoza critiques the hegemonic rationales of "Western" philosophy nor that his doing so has eluded analysis. This is because his insurrection against "Western" sovereignties is sparked by the scintillas of immanence that he inherits from medieval Jewish and Islamic naturalism, the very philosophies that Christian, "Western" thought has repressed. This book recovers these marginalized voices, exposing centuries of interpretations that assimilate Spinoza's program to the sovereignties he disrupts. Kletenik thinks with Spinoza to unmask the supremacies of colonialism, neoliberalism, and cishetsexism alongside the sovereignties anchoring contemporary theory. In critiquing "Western" philosophy, Kletenik limns a more ethical alternative, oriented by immanence and disparity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Second Estate"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy by Ray D. Madoff.

About the book, from the publisher:

A revelatory book that lifts the curtain on America’s most consequential public deception: how the rich get richer using tools the government gave them.

Amid conflicting narratives about the drivers of wealth and inequality in the United States, one constant hovers in the background: the US tax code. No political force has been more consequential—or more utterly opaque—than the 7,000-page document that details who pays what in American society and government. Most of us have a sense that it’s an unfair system. But does anyone know exactly how it’s unfair?

Legal scholar Ray D. Madoff knows. In The Second Estate, she offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of America’s byzantine system of taxation, laying bare not only its capacity to consolidate wealth but also the mechanisms by which it has created two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit.

This is not a story of offshore accounts or secret tax havens. In The Second Estate, Madoff shows that the US system itself has, over time, been stripped and reconstituted such that it now offers a series of secret paths, hidden in plain sight, for wealthy people in the know to avoid taxation altogether. Through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America’s wealthy do more than just pay less than their share; they remove themselves from the tax system entirely. Wealth becomes its own sovereign state, and the living is surprisingly—and maddeningly—cheap.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Wars of the Roses"

New from Oxford University Press: The Wars of the Roses: War and Martial Culture in England, 1455–1487 by David Grummitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

The series of rebellions against royal authority and the violent clashes between aristocratic families that occurred in England between 1455 and 1487 have long been characterized as the 'Wars of the Roses'. Yet, far from being a continuous period of civil war, the Wars of the Roses were in fact an intermittent series of minor clashes, pitched battles, and sieges. These occurred against the backdrop of a demilitarization of the English aristocracy in the final years of the Hundred Years War.

Drawing on extensive archival research and a wide-ranging synthesis of the secondary literature, David Grummitt here reconsiders the nature of war and the martial culture of the English in the second half of the fifteenth century. He places these experiences within the peculiar legal, constitutional, and political culture of late Lancastrian and Yorkist England, to reexamine in depth the motivation for fighting, the raising and equipping of armies, the experience of battle and its aftermath, and the ways in which civil conflict was rationalized and memorialized. These experiences are compared and contrasted to that in its continental neighbours in an age of expanding royal authority, gunpowder weapons, and emergence of standing, professional armies. The book's conclusions offer a new interpretation of the evidence for the size of armies and scale of conflict during these years, the weaponry and tactics employed, and the wider importance of war, chivalry, and martial culture in late medieval England.

In so doing, and by drawing on a range of new conceptual approaches in the fields of the history of emotions, material culture, and conflict archaeology, alongside other more traditional disciplinary approaches to military history, the book offers a thorough and fulsome history of the Wars of the Roses, one that properly integrates war and marital culture into our understanding of the political and cultural history of fifteenth-century England, and late medieval European military history more generally.

--Marshal Zeringue

"From Vice to Nice"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS by René Esparza.

About the book, from the publisher:

Shifting the focus of AIDS history away from the coasts to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, this impressive book uncovers how homonormative political strategies weaponized the AIDS crisis to fuel gentrification. During the height of the epidemic, white gay activists and politicians pursued social acceptance by assimilating to Midwestern cultural values. This approach, René Esparza argues, diluted radical facets of LGBTQ activism, rejected a politics of sexual dissidence, severed ties with communities of color, and ushered in the destruction of vibrant queer spaces.

Drawing from archival research, oral histories, and urban studies from the 1970s through the 1990s, Esparza illustrates how the onset of the AIDS epidemic provided a pretext for further criminalization of perceived sexual deviance, targeting sex workers, “promiscuous” gay men, and transgender women. More than the criminalization of people and behaviors, this time period also saw increased targeting of urban venues such as bathhouses, adult bookstores, and public parks where casual, anonymous encounters occurred. Cleansing the city of land uses that undermined gentrification became a protective measure against AIDS, and the most marginalized bore the brunt of the ensuing surveillance and displacement. From Vice to Nice illuminates how, despite purporting seemingly progressive values, LGBTQ Midwestern politics of conformity leveraged the AIDS crisis to further instigate racial and sexual exclusion and fundamentally alter the urban landscape.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students' Networks by Janice M. McCabe.

About the book, from the publisher:

Draws attention to the importance of support networks for students as they make, keep, and lose friends throughout college and beyond.

We’re all familiar with the sentiment that “college is the best time of your life.” Along with a newfound sense of freedom, students have a unique opportunity to forge lifelong friendships at a point in life when friendship is particularly important. Why is it, then, that so many college students are falling victim to what the US Surgeon General termed an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation”? How do different aspects of college life help or hinder students’ ability to form deep connections?

In Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks, sociologist Janice M. McCabe shows that the way a college is structured—whether students live in dorms or commute, study abroad or stay close to campus, have plentiful common areas for clubs to meet or not—can either encourage or hinder the making of meaningful friendships. Based on interviews with 95 students on three distinct campuses—a small private college (Dartmouth College), a large public university (University of New Hampshire), and a non-residential community college (Manchester Community College)—McCabe captures a wide range of experiences and discovers how features of the campuses make it easier or harder for students to make and keep friends. She shows how and why, across all three institutions, some students thrive in deep and lasting friendships with their peers.

As McCabe’s research reveals, we need to look at the structures of students’ networks, the institutions they attend, and the importance of their identities in these places if we are to truly uncover and address the loneliness epidemic facing today’s young adults.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Disjunctures"

New from Oxford University Press: Disjunctures: Indigenous Redirections in Political Theory by Yann Allard-Tremblay.

About the book, from the publisher:

As some settler states set out on the difficult and highly contested political project of reconciliation--seeking a legitimate way of living and sharing the land among the Indigenous peoples, settlers, and others who now call these places home--it is important to evaluate the reality which will shape the path forward. In Disjunctures, Yann Allard-Tremblay argues that, even given the variations within Indigenous and Euro-modern political traditions, the two are fundamentally too different to offer any theoretical or practical political options for a middle ground. Allard-Tremblay terms these irreconcilable and inconsistent paths toward reconciliation disjunctures. While dominant Euro-modern political structures are modeled on justice, sovereign autonomy, and non-reciprocal and non-responsive governance, Indigenous traditions emphasize harmony and are non-hierarchical, non-coercive, and responsive to other humans, other-than-humans, and ecological contexts. These disjunctures do not make reconciliation impossible, but reveal that reconciliation can only be achieved by undertaking a deep transformation of dominant political structures and identities, and ways of being, doing, and knowing. Because Indigenous politics provide vital alternatives to oppressive and ecologically destructive relationships, Allard-Tremblay makes the case for a redirection of political theory and conduct toward Indigenous systems and decolonization.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Geopolitics of Fear"

New from Stanford University Press: The Geopolitics of Fear: From Security to Solidarity at Europe's Racial Borders by Berna Turam.

About the book, from the publisher:

The intensified securitization of the borderlands between Europe and the Middle East/North Africa over the past decade has turned the Mediterranean Sea into a graveyard. This book delves into the most vulnerable, yet understudied, area of the EU's anti-immigrant security regime: the port cities in border zones on major refugee routes. Turam shifts the predominant focus from the global scale of fear to the urban scale of native–migrant solidarity in Greece and Sicily—Europe's two major entrance points in the East and Central Mediterranean. Building upon a rapidly growing scholarship on emotional geographies and affective geopolitics, Turam brings emotions to the center and emphasizes their role in forming, transforming, contesting, interrupting, and even evading the securitization of migration. Within the context of rising racism, nativism, and Islamophobia, readers will discover surprising and inspiring acts of day-to-day resistance to securitization empowered by a sense of safety and local trust, as well as cooperation between municipalities, pro-migrant locals, and asylum-seekers. Uncovering how racialized migrants become the catalyst of transformation from the violent legacy of borderlands to peaceful resistance, the ethnography reveals how intense emotions affect pro-migrant practices, contribute to the formation of safe places, and open the way for dynamic Black and Muslim migrant activism and solidarity at Europe's racial borders.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Newport Gardner's Anthem"

New from Cornell University Press: Newport Gardner's Anthem: A Story of Slavery, Struggle, and Survival in Early America by Edward E. Andrews.

About the book, from the publisher:

Newport Gardner's Anthem explores the remarkable life of Occramer Marycoo, an enslaved African who went on to become one of early America's most important Black leaders. In the mid-eighteenth century, Marycoo was taken from West Africa to Newport, Rhode Island, where he was forced into racial bondage and given a name that symbolized the power that his new city and new enslaver held over him: Newport Gardner. In this powerful book, Edward E. Andrews pieces together newspaper articles, church records, letters, and Gardner's own writings to tell the story of his life.

After acquiring his freedom via a winning lottery ticket in 1791, Gardner became a kind of Founding Father for Newport's free Black community. He established and led several Black benevolent organizations that helped the community navigate the complicated waters of freedom as Rhode Island slowly began the process of emancipation. He became a popular educator to young Black Newporters, and also emerged as a key religious figure, serving as a long-standing pillar of Newport's First Congregational Church and later founding an independent Black church in the 1820s. His final act was leading a group of about three dozen Black New Englanders to Liberia, in hopes that a new start in Africa would be better than the discrimination they faced in America.

A richly textured account, Newport Gardner's Anthem tells the story of a forgotten Black leader while exploring the new, but tragically limited, opportunities for formerly enslaved people in the post-Revolutionary world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wars of Ignorance"

New from Oxford University Press: Wars of Ignorance: Silenced Advisers and International Crises by Robert Schub.

About the book, from the publisher:

War is famously associated with uncertainty. Leaders, however, frequently plunge into conflict with great certainty about how it will unfold. Wars of Ignorance explores this puzzling divergence between what leaders seemingly ought to believe on the cusp of war and what they do believe. This stems from a recurring flaw, argues Robert Schub, in the process by which leaders acquire information from advisers. They often sideline the bureaucracy that conducts international diplomacy, thereby marginalizing advisers who possess substantive expertise on an adversary's political, as opposed to military, attributes. This marginalization produces informational blind spots on political traits which are subject to tremendous uncertainty--such as adversary resolve or the extent of its domestic unity. In turn, these blind spots breed misplaced confidence. Ignorant yet certain, leaders blunder into foreign policy fiascos.

Examining case studies including the Bay of Pigs, Iraq War, and turbulence in Laos, as well as analyzing measures of advisory input generated from declassified documents spanning dozens of crises, Schub shows that diplomats foster peace not because they are doves, but because they provide information that leaders need in order to understand the foreign policy challenges they confront. Wars of Ignorance offers important lessons on the enduring worth of competently staffed national security bureaucracies and the value of diligent and curious leaders who seek out the information that advisers have to offer.

Visit Robert Schub's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Invention of Infinite Growth"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Invention of Infinite Growth: How Economists Came to Believe a Dangerous Delusion by Christopher F. Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:

A history of how the pursuit of growth has kept us from creating a more sustainable and just world.

Most economists believe that growth is the surest path to better lives. This has proven to be one of humanity’s most powerful and dangerous ideas. It shapes policy across the globe, but it fatally undermines the natural ecosystems necessary to sustain human life. How did we get here? In The Invention of Infinite Growth, environmental historian Christopher F. Jones takes us through two hundred and fifty years of economic thinking to examine the ideal of growth, its powerful influence, and the crippling burdens many decisions made in its name have placed on us all. Jones argues that the pursuit of growth has never reflected its costs, because economists downplay environmental degradation. What’s worse, skyrocketing inequality and diminishing improvements in most people’s well-being mean growth too often delivers too little for too many. Jones urges economists to engage more broadly with other ways of thinking, as well as with citizens and governments to recognize and slow infinite growth’s impact on the real world.

Both accessible and eye-opening, The Invention of Infinite Growth offers hope for the future. Humans have not always believed that economic growth could or should continue, and so it is possible for us to change course. We can still create new ideas about how to promote environmental sustainability, human welfare, and even responsible growth, without killing the planet and ourselves.

Visit Christopher F. Jones's website.

--Marhsal Zeringue

"Opium Slavery"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis by Jonathan S. Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:

During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, thousands of ailing soldiers became addicted, or “enslaved,” as nineteenth-century Americans phrased it. Veterans, their families, and communities struggled to cope with addiction’s health and social consequences. Medical and government authorities compounded veterans' suffering and imbued the epidemic with cultural meaning by branding addiction as a matter of moral weakness, unmanliness, or mental infirmity. Framing addiction as “opium slavery” limited the efficacy of care and left many veterans to suffer needlessly for decades after the war ended.

Drawing from veterans' firsthand accounts as well as mental asylum and hospital records, government and medical reports, newspaper coverage of addiction, and advertisements, Jonathan S. Jones unearths the poorly understood stories of opiate-addicted Civil War veterans in unflinching detail, illuminating the war’s traumatic legacies. In doing so, Jones provides critical historical context for the modern opioid crisis, which bears tragic resemblance to that of the post–Civil War era.

Visit Jonathan S. Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Imperial Sexism"

New from Oxford University Press: Imperial Sexism: Why Culture and Women's Rights Don't Clash by Denise M. Walsh.

About the book, from the publisher:

Communities across the world engage in gender practices that are seen by many as in conflict with women's rights, such as Muslim women's face veils and polygyny. But in Imperial Sexism, Denise M. Walsh argues that culture and women's rights are not inherently at odds. The root problem is imperial sexism: the legacy of colonial-era racism and sexism and their compounding harms.

Through a cross-regional comparative analysis of three dissimilar policy debates in three very different democracies--the 2014 French "burka ban" adjudicated at the European Court of Human Rights, the 1998 legalization of polygyny in post-apartheid South Africa, and the 1985 reform of the "marrying out" rule for Indigenous women in Canada--Walsh confirms that a clash between culture and women's rights is always avoidable, examines why the presumption of a clash endures, and highlights the damage this presumption causes. She centers the voices of women who experience imperial sexism, many of whom resist the notion of a clash and instead harmonize cultural, religious, and women's rights by focusing on their plural identities and lived experiences. By contrast, when politicians and conservative group leaders insist upon a clash, they rely on imperial myths, binaries, and tropes, and a misuse of history. Ultimately, by amplifying the arguments of women most affected by controversial gender practices, Imperial Sexism develops a framework to promote justice, reject colonial prejudice, and strengthen the indivisibility of human rights and democratic inclusiveness.

Visit Denise M. Walsh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead"

New from Princeton University Press: Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead by Roger Luckhurst.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of Gothic, a marvelously illustrated cultural history of graves and graveyards, from the earliest known burial sites to today’s green burials

Why, how, and where do we inter our dead? How have people throughout history responded to the problem of laying their dead to rest? Roger Luckhurst sets out in search of answers in this arresting book. Taking readers on an unforgettable tour of the rich and unusual visual culture of the grave, he visits locales such as the pyramids of Giza, the catacombs and columbaria of Rome, and the cenotaphs erected to the world’s war dead. Along the way, he examines the diverse role of graveyards in literature, art, film, and television.

In engaging chapters that look at all aspects of the treatment of the dead, Luckhurst covers topics ranging from early burials and the emergence of necropolises and catacombs to grave robbing, garden cemeteries, the perilous overcrowding of the urban dead, and the emergence of modern funerary culture. Exploring the cultural afterlives of burial and memorial sites in the popular imagination, he shows how graves have served as guides to the underworld, poignant dedications to those we have lost, as reminders of our own mortality, and settings in gothic horror.

Blending lively storytelling with a wealth of stunning illustrations, Graveyards is a lyrical, frequently unexpected account of the grave as a signpost to the afterlife, a site of remembrance and self-reflection, and an object of enduring fascination.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Power Lines"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Power Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition by Sanya Carley and David Konisky.

About the book, from the publisher:

On American energy and its persisting power to destroy.

In the United States, the promise of a green-energy future is complicated by its realities. The country’s legacy energy systems are decrepit; the rollout of new technologies is unequal and piecemeal; households find themselves increasingly without reliable or affordable access; and Americans are excluded from the decisions that shape their energy futures. Having power in America has become an exercise in race, class, and wealth—in more ways than one.

Power Lines is a sweeping portrait of American energy in the twenty-first century, rendered in terms of its increasing—and inevitable—human costs. Coal miners in West Virginia lose their livelihoods as energy markets change; historically marginalized households cannot easily access new technologies; children in “sacrifice zones” adjacent to mineral-mining sites suffer health problems and limited resources; and cities and towns are burdened from the production of alternative energies.

Sanya Carley and David Konisky show current challenges and an uncertain future of America’s greatest policy imperative. The result is not only sobering but also essential for planning and pursuing a clean-energy transition that improves on the errors of the past.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Disunited States"

New from Oxford University Press: The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work by Ryan D. Griffiths.

About the book, from the publisher:

Is the breakup of an increasingly polarized America into separate red and blue countries even possible?

There is a growing interest in American secession. In February 2023, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that "We need a national divorce...We need to separate by red states and blue states." Recent movements like Yes California have called for a national divorce along political lines. A 2023 Axios poll shows that 20 percent of Americans favor a national divorce. These trends show a sincere interest in American secession, and they will likely increase in the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election.

Proponents of secession make three arguments: the two sides have irreconcilable differences; secession is a legal right; and smaller political units are better. Through interviews with secessionist advocates in America, Ryan Griffiths explores the case for why Red America and Blue America should split up.

But as The Disunited States shows, these arguments are fundamentally incorrect. Secession is the wrong solution to the problem of polarization. Red and Blue America are not neatly sorted and geographically concentrated. Splitting the two parts would require a dangerous unmixing of the population, one that could spiral into violence and state collapse. Drawing on his expertise on secessionism worldwide, he shows how the process has played out internationally-and usually disastrously. Ultimately, this book will disabuse readers of the belief that secession will fix America's problems. Rather than focus on national divorce as a solution, the better course of action is to seek common ground.

Visit Ryan D. Griffiths's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Intrepid Girls"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA by Amy Erdman Farrell.

About the book, from the publisher:

When eight-year-old Amy Erdman Farrell moved with her family to Akron, Ohio, in 1972, she found herself adrift in a sea of taunting boys and mean girls. Shy by nature, she dreaded her long, unhappy days at school. But a few years later, Farrell found an escape from bullying, the promise of sisterhood, a rising sense of confidence, adventure, and—best of all—lifelong friendship when she joined a Girl Scout troop. Decades later, award-winning author Farrell returns to those formative experiences to explore the complicated and surprising history of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

Drawing from extensive archival research, visits to iconic Girl Scout sites around the world, and vivid personal reflections, Farrell uncovers the Girl Scouts intricate history, revealing how the organization has shaped the lives of more than 50 million girls and women since its founding in 1912. With Farrell as our own intrepid guide, we travel to American Indian boarding schools, Japanese American incarceration centers, segregated African American communities, middle-class white neighborhoods, and outposts throughout the globe. Intrepid Girls unpacks how the Girl Scouts navigated tensions over feminism, race, class, and political differences, carving out extraordinary opportunities for girls and women—even as it participated in the very discrimination it promised to transcend.

For anyone who has ever worn a uniform or wondered about the hidden history behind this iconic American institution, Intrepid Girls will surprise, inspire, and challenge what we think we know about the Girl Scouts.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Do"

New from Stanford University Press: Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia by Mardi Reardon-Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

Cape York is a remote and biodiverse peninsula in northeastern Australia that has been inhabited by Aboriginal communities for thousands of years. Since colonization, much of the peninsula has been used for large scale cattle farming. It is also a place of global significance as the site of multiple environmentally protected bioregions, with ongoing efforts to recognize them as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Despite the very human role in shaping the landscape of Cape York, the region remains widely thought of as a "wilderness" to be conserved and protected. In this context, what counts as natural and native matters crucially—as does who gets to decide how species and people are categorized and, accordingly, how they are controlled.

Based on long-term field research with Aboriginal traditional owners, settler-descended cattle herders, and park rangers, Making Do investigates complex ways in which people form, maintain, and transform relationships to changing environments. How do we know the places in which we live, and how do we care for them among the ruptures created by forces like climate change, settler colonialism, and structural inequalities? To address these questions, Mardi Reardon-Smith traces issues such as the history of land tenure changes, the identification and control of weeds and feral pigs, and wildfires and Aboriginal cultural burning. Mardi Reardon-Smith argues that caring for land, a sprawling, messy, and sometimes violent process, is not just about repair, restoration, or maintenance—rather, it is about bringing into being workable landscapes, livable worlds, and possible futures.

Visit Mardi Reardon-Smith's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Entangled Alliances"

New from Cornell University Press: Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution by Ronald Angelo Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation. Ronald Angelo Johnson brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny.

The American Revolution occurred between two of the greatest achievements in diplomacy of the eighteenth century: the peace treaties at Paris in 1763 and 1783. In Entangled Alliances, Johnson draws on original multilingual sources to offer readers fresh, lively stories in a timely study. While modern understandings of freedom are often linked to the US Declaration of Independence, Johnson argues that the desire of Black Atlantic inhabitants for liberty and their will to resist slavery predated the fateful standoff between minutemen and redcoats at Lexington and Concord.

Entangled Alliances is a US history of the American Revolution, fusing the search for freedom by Black and white founders in the United States and Saint-Domingue into a coherent story of collective resistance during the most explosive twenty-year period of the eighteenth century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Woman Is Responsible for Everything"

New from Princeton University Press: A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe by Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach.

About the book, from the publisher:

A groundbreaking look at the integral role of women in early modern Jewish communal life

In small villages, bustling cities, and crowded ghettos across early modern Europe, Jewish women were increasingly active participants in the daily life of their communities, managing homes and professions, leading institutions and sororities, and crafting objects and texts of exquisite beauty. A Woman Is Responsible for Everything marshals a dazzling array of previously untapped archival sources to tell the stories of these woman for the first time.

Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach focus their lens on the kehillah, a lively and thriving form of communal life that sustained European Jews for three centuries. They paint vibrant portraits of Jewish women of all walks of life, from those who wielded their wealth and influence in and out of their communities to the poorest maidservants and vagrants, from single and married women to the widowed and divorced. We follow them into their homes and learn about the possessions they valued and used, the books they read, and the writings they composed. Speaking to us in their own voices, these women reveal tremendous economic initiative in the rural marketplace and the princely court, and they express their profound spirituality in the home as well as the synagogue.

Beautifully illustrated, A Woman Is Responsible for Everything lifts the veil of silence that has obscured the lives of these women for too long, contributing a new chapter to the history of Jewish women and a new understanding of the Jewish past.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dictating Reality"

New from Columbia University Press: Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News by Martin Moore and Thomas Colley.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false.

Martin Moore and Thomas Colley show how states are battling to control and shape the news in order to entrench their power, evade scrutiny, and ensure that their political narratives are accepted. Combining in-depth analyses of seven countries with a compelling range of stories and characters from around the world, they demonstrate the unprecedented scale and scope of governments’ efforts to take control of the media. Dictating Reality details how Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, AMLO’s Mexico, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Orban’s Hungary have all sought, in their different ways, to exploit news to manufacture alternative realities―and how their methods have taken hold in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other democracies. Combining keen analysis of contemporary world events with years of original research, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how authoritarian leaders use the media, why more and more people are living in different realities, and the ways democracy is under threat.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Race and Racism"

New from Oxford University Press: Race and Racism: A Decolonial Approach by Linda Martín Alcoff.

About the book, from the publisher:

Race and Racism: A Decolonial Approach argues that the topics of race and racism need a decolonial framing if we are to understand their genealogy in the modern world, and explores their current iterations and the path forward.

The chapters develop this argument in three ways. Chapter One presents an account of racialized identities that foreground their essentially historical nature as created through the shared experiences and collective actions of both elite and non-elite groups. Overcoming racial oppression cannot, then, occur simply by a change in policies, but only through new collective experiences of peaceful and just forms of collaborative cohabitation. Chapter Two argues for an expanded focus on cultural racism over individual attitudinal forms. Cultural racism focuses on, and ranks, peoples, and uses this to justify global inequalities and injustices. In truth, all modern cultures, including the West, are the product of transculturation at every level, not only affecting their music and language but also their sciences and political institutions. Cultural supremacy is thus a myth, and cultural ranking an impossibility. It remains vital to engage in criticism and debate over specific ideas and practices, but these discussions are often marred and made ineffective by cultural racism. Chapter Three dissects the current crisis of white identity that is energizing the far right on both sides of the Atlantic, with a focus on migrants as the source of nearly every social problem. The move to ethno-nationalism can only be forestalled by directly addressing the Replacement Theory and the difficult implications of colonialism's continuing effects on global relations. White identities have been based in false histories about the modern era, yet the truly varied experiences of whites are not well represented in the myths that grounded racial supremacy. If we face the truth about our histories, and understand them with more accuracy and nuance, we can formulate a way forward in unity.

Visit Linda Martín Alcoff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Traveling Anatomist"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Traveling Anatomist: Nicolaus Steno and the Intersection of Disciplines in Early Modern Science by Nuno Castel-Branco.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reevaluates Nicolaus Steno’s contributions to anatomy and early modern science, examining his interdisciplinary interests in their historical context.

Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) was a renowned anatomist in his lifetime. He reformed the anatomical understanding of glands, argued that the heart was a muscle, renamed the so-called female testicles as ovaries, and developed a mathematical model for understanding muscle contraction—discoveries that were fundamental to the fields of anatomy and physiology. However, other aspects of Steno’s life have come to define him: his claim that mountains’ strata reveal the history of the Earth and his conversion to Catholicism as a practicing scientist. This excessive attention to his geological discoveries and to asking whether science and religion are compatible, Nuno Castel-Branco argues, has obscured his significant accomplishments as an anatomist. The Traveling Anatomist thus restores Steno to his rightful place as a crucial figure in early modern science.

Using Steno’s extensive travels as a framework, this book depicts him as an active participant in the Republic of Letters. Castel-Branco traverses Leiden, Paris, Copenhagen, Florence, and Rome as he follows Steno in his sojourns through different scientific academies, courts, and artisanal workshops. There he developed new friends, some of whom were women, with whom he researched and exchanged ideas. Drawing on Steno’s books, correspondence, and novel archival material, Castel-Branco invites us to approach Steno and his accomplishments in anatomy, mathematics, and geology through the eyes of his contemporaries. Doing so, Castel-Branco reconstructs the rich and overlapping worlds of scientific disciplines that shaped Steno’s work, revealing the richness of interdisciplinary research in early modern intellectual life. And through Steno, he illustrates larger developments and new networks of significance in mid-seventeenth-century science. By focusing on ideas, scientific genres, institutions, and friendships, Castel-Branco offers a way others might also productively study science from the early modern period until today.

Visit Nuno Castel-Branco's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Neoliberalism and Race"

New from Stanford University Press: Neoliberalism and Race by Lars Cornelissen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized―its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original―perhaps controversial―critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Culture Beyond Country"

New from NYU Press: Culture Beyond Country: Strategies of Inclusion in the Global Iranian Diaspora by Amy Malek.

About the book, from the publisher:

Offers an in-depth exploration of the Iranian diaspora and the negotiation of belonging

With an estimated 5 to 8 million people spread across the globe, the Iranian diaspora has become a visible and dynamic cultural presence―especially in North America and Europe. Faced with shallow or distorted portrayals, diasporic Iranians have responded to persistent misrepresentations and marginalization by turning to culture as a deliberate strategy of inclusion. Reshaping how their stories are told, community organizers, artists, and entrepreneurs are actively challenging public narratives, asserting new cultural imaginaries, and navigating the terms of inclusion and exclusion, putting new visions of Iranian identity into the public eye.

Drawing on transnational ethnographic fieldwork and over 125 semi-structured interviews conducted over the course of 16 years, Culture Beyond Country offers the first comparative ethnography of these cultural strategies of inclusion, examining the distinct practices and experiences of Iranians in three key cities of the diaspora, Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Toronto. Attending to the institutional and ideological forces that come to bear on Iranian cultural organizers in these three diasporic locations, Amy Malek examines how immigrants and their descendants negotiate belonging in response to various and shifting state approaches to cultural citizenship. The volume examines how state multicultural policy influences who is empowered to represent Iranian culture, how local factors shape expressions of Iranian identity across the diaspora, and how these representations are contested within Iranian communities.

Providing a compelling transnational study of immigrant multiculturalism, cultural citizenship, and inclusion across the global Iranian diaspora, Culture Beyond Country showcases not only how the process of representing Iranian culture in the diaspora generates competing views on what it means to be Iranian, but also how competing modes of belonging subvert and reinforce existing power relations across local, national, and transnational scales.

Visit Amy Malek's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Radical Dreamers"

New from Oxford University Press: Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education by Joseph P. Viteritti.

About the book, from the publisher:

An immersive and authoritative history of the school choice movement--from its idealistic roots among Black activists to the costly unaccountable programs of today.

Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education and demands to desegregate public schools, race and class remain the most reliable predictors of educational achievement in America. In attempting to address this divide, many school reformers have championed school choice: solutions like charter schools, vouchers, and other innovations designed to build more options into the system. Today, at least thirty-five states have laws that enable parents to send their children to private and religious schools at public expense while forty-six states have legalized charter schools.

In Radical Dreamers, Joseph P. Viteritti tells the definitive history of the school choice movement. In the 1990s, school choice emerged as an effort by a coalition of Black activists and conservative lawmakers seeking to offer economically disadvantaged students of color a way out of failing schools. As Viteritti shows, however, today's movement--championed by Republicans, conservatives, and faith-based organizations--has become less about placing disadvantaged children in better schools and more about providing public funding to students, irrespective of income, attending private--and frequently religious--schools.

Viteritti, an education insider and supporter of school choice for underserved students, profiles six influential figures, the "radical dreamers," who were integral to understanding the movement for greater education equality and the role that choice can play in fully realizing the movement's potential. Radical Dreamers urges us to have an honest conversation about education in America and where we have gone wrong. Viteritti's compelling narrative of how some of the most passionate educators conceived of school choice provides a valuable context to our nation's long struggle to offer every child in America a good education, and how that goal was undermined by advocates on both the left and right.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Miraculous Celebrity"

New from the University of Texas Press: Miraculous Celebrity: The Christ of Ixmiquilpan and Colonial Piety in Mexico City by Derek S. Burdette.

About the book, from the publisher:

A study of the Christ of Ixmiquilpan, a historically beloved religious icon from sixteenth-century Mexico, and its evolving cultural importance.

The life-sized crucifix known as the Christ of Ixmiquilpan (also the Señor de Santa Teresa) was one of the most important artworks in colonial Mexico. The statue began as an ordinary devotional image, but in 1621 devotees witnessed it undergo a miraculous renovation that gave it a supernatural beauty. Over the next two and half centuries, its perceived power increased until it was surpassed in importance only by the Virgin of Guadalupe. Despite its historical significance, the Christ of Ixmiquilpan’s history has yet to be fully told.

Derek Burdette brings the miraculous crucifix out of the shadows and explores its instrumental role in shaping the devotional culture of New Spain. Following the arc of the statue’s life, he chronicles the story of the statue’s creation, miraculous renovation, and subsequent veneration at the heart of Mexico City. He also reveals how colonial politics were woven into the statue’s life from the very start. Reconstructing the history of a key artwork, Miraculous Celebrity sheds new light on the intersection of art, faith, and politics in the Spanish colonial world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Access Vernaculars"

New from Cornell University Press: Access Vernaculars: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia by Cassandra Hartblay.

About the book, from the publisher:

Access Vernaculars explores moments when accessible design fails. Observing how both disabled and nondisabled people in Russia recognize and point out poorly executed accessible design in built environments, ethnographer Cassandra Hartblay traces how disabled people in one Russian city narrate experiences of pervasive inaccess, and interprets popular images of failed accessibility as critiques of the Russian state and ablenationalism. In the process, Hartblay asks how disability advocacy movements proceed when ablenationalism co-opts accessibility and calls for a critical global disability studies that pushes back against Euro-American hegemony.

Through the stories disabled people tell about access and inaccess, this book examines local terminology used by those with mobility impairments to describe the built environment―a unique lexicon combining translated terms from global disability advocacy with Russophone words inherited from generations of political advocacy. These ethnographic accounts demonstrate the ways vocabularies of disability access spread in friction, taking on dynamic and unexpected meanings in transnational sociopolitical contexts. Access Vernaculars presents a global perspective on the intersection of critical disability studies and sociocultural anthropology.

Visit Cassandra Hartblay's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Heretic of Cacheu"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa by Toby Green.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tells the extraordinary story of seventeenth-century West African slave trader Crispina Peres to explore the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived.

In 1665, Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave-trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Portuguese Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers, the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today’s Guinea-Bissau?

In The Heretic of Cacheu, award-winning historian Toby Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, immersing us in the atmosphere of an otherwise distant setting. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses; styled their clothes; healed themselves from illness; and worshipped, worked, and played. Green renders the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationships between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas were already old and tangled, with slaving ports, colonies, and military bases having intermingled over many generations. But Cacheu also profoundly troubled this dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women such as Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire.

For the first time, through surviving documents recording Peres’s case, The Heretic of Cacheu lets readers experience the reality of this unique place and time through a remarkable act of historical recovery.

Visit Toby Green's website.

--Marshal Zeringue