"The Imperative of Genius"

New from Oxford University Press: The Imperative of Genius by Kenneth Walden.

About the book, from the publisher:

Human beings produce many things, and the most remarkable of these we call works of genius. The symphonies of Beethoven, the of paintings of Cézanne, and the novels of Virginia Woolf are distinguished by their originality and their power. They are novel but not mere novelties. They are original in a way that seems profoundly meaningful, in a way capable of transforming the world. This ideal of genius appears most at home in art and science, but The Imperative of Genius suggests that its reach is much greater.

The problems that Beethoven, Cézanne, and Woolf face as artists--the problems whose solving makes them geniuses--are versions of a problem faced by every human being: the problem of acting in a way that is at once truly our own and intelligible to others. These demands naturally pull us in opposite directions--toward vain eccentricity and bland conformity. Genius is a capacity for synthesizing these demands, and this makes it a practical ideal. We see this ideal in lives marked by the same exemplary originality that we associate with great works of art: in the lives of Jesus, Diogenes the Cynic, Alain Locke, Jane Addams, Simone Weil, and many others.

This fact has consequences not only for our individual lives, but for how we live together. We owe each other a form of respect that extends to our shared capacity for genius. The fullest realization of that respect can be found in activities where creativity becomes collaborative. To create and sustain such activities is a moral task.

Visit Kenneth Walden's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"School Yearbook"

New from the University of Chicago Press: School Yearbook: The Untold Story of a Cringey Tradition and Its Digital Afterlife by Kate Eichhorn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why school yearbooks—as frivolous and cringey as they are—are far more than just objects of nostalgia.

We’re all familiar with the embarrassment that washes over us when recalling our high school yearbooks. Questionable fashion choices, gravity-defying hair, a melodramatic quote—what were we thinking? Even as school yearbooks decline in popularity among contemporary teens, they continue to impact our lives in shocking ways. Collected, digitized, aggregated, and recombined in ways that would have been impossible to imagine just a few decades ago, yearbooks are no longer bound personal archives of adolescent memories. In the twenty-first century, they are shaping our lives in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways. And what could be a more fitting afterlife for these cringey books?

In School Yearbook, cultural critic Kate Eichhorn investigates this ubiquitous object. On the surface, school yearbooks are easily dismissed as innocuous collections of embarrassing photographs and cheesy affirmations, but as Eichhorn reveals, there has never been anything innocent about the school yearbook tradition. Since the early twentieth century, yearbooks have circulated as forms of public relations, propaganda, and hate speech. They have been routinely used by police detectives, private investigators, and even the FBI to identify and profile suspects. With over half a million yearbooks now available online, these books have also acquired the power to continue shaping our lives long after graduation. Would-be landlords, employers, and even creditors can now turn to data culled from their embarrassing pages to make judgments about who we are and what we merit.

In a digital era, school yearbooks have acquired the ability to keep judging us in perpetuity. Both timely and insightful, School Yearbook explores how these books have always been used to rank and judge us.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Remote Revolution"

New from Cornell University Press: The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft by Erik Lin-Greenberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Remote Revolution Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of international security―but not in ways one would expect.

Emerging technologies like drones are often believed to increase the likelihood of crises and war. By lowering the potential risks and human costs of military operations, they encourage decision-makers to deploy military force. Yet as Lin-Greenberg contends, operations involving drones are in fact less likely to evolve into broader, more intense conflicts than similar operations involving traditionally crewed assets. Even as drones increase the frequency of conflict, the decreased costs of their operations reduces the likelihood of conflict escalation.

Leveraging diverse types of evidence from original wargames, survey experiments, and cases of US and Israeli drone operations, Lin-Greenberg explores how drone operations lower risks of escalation. First, they enable states to gather more or better intelligence that may avert or reduce the chances of high-stakes conflict. Second, drone attacks are less likely to affront a target state's honor and therefore less likely to provoke aggressive responses. Lastly, leaders are less likely to take escalatory actions when drones are attacked than they are with incidents involving inhabited assets.

Lin-Greenberg's findings prove conclusively that drones are far less destabilizing than commonly argued. Drones add rungs to the proverbial "escalation ladder" and, in doing so, have brought about a fundamental change―a revolution―in the character of statecraft. With the use of unmanned technologies only set to grow in coming times, The Remote Revolution is critical reading about their possibilities and politics.

Visit Erik Lin-Greenberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Democracy’s Foot Soldiers"

New from Princeton University Press: Democracy’s Foot Soldiers: World War I and the Politics of Empire in the Greater Caribbean by Reena N. Goldthree.

About the book, from the publisher:

A captivating history of the Afro-Caribbean soldiers who fought for the British Empire in World War I and their transnational campaign for equality

Following the outbreak of World War I, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered as soldiers to fight on behalf of the British Empire. Despite living far from the bloody battlefields of Europe, these men enlisted for a variety of reasons—to affirm their masculine honor, pursue economic mobility, or enhance their standing as colonial subjects. Democracy’s Foot Soldiers offers a sweeping account of the British West Indies Regiment, the military unit established in 1915 for Caribbean volunteers, documenting their service during the war and their dramatic battles for racial equality and fair treatment in the armed forces and on the home front.

Drawing on previously overlooked archival sources in the Caribbean, England, and United States, Reena Goldthree demonstrates how wartime military mobilization spurred heightened demands for social, economic, and political reform in the colonial Caribbean. She recovers the forgotten contributions of Afro-Caribbean troops during the war, following their harrowing journeys to military camps in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Goldthree chronicles how, after the war, soldiers, their families, and their civilian allies launched their own “war for democracy,” strategically using the rhetoric of imperial patriotism—rather than the more militant language of anticolonial nationalism—to fight for respect and equality.

Democracy’s Foot Soldiers places these soldiers at the forefront of popular struggles over race, labor, and economic justice in the early twentieth-century Caribbean, showing that the war years were a crucial period of political ferment and mass mobilization in the region.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Homesick"

New from Stanford University Press: Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England by Emily Walton.

About the book, from the publisher:

A racial demographic transition has come to rural northern New England. White population losses sit alongside racial and ethnic minority population gains in nearly all of the small towns of the Upper Valley region spanning New Hampshire and Vermont. Homesick considers these trends in a part of the country widely considered to be progressive, offering new insights on the ways white residents maintain racial hierarchies even there. Walton focuses on the experiences of mostly well-educated migrants of color moving to the area to take well-paid jobs – in this case in health care, higher education, software development, and engineering. Walton shows that white residents maintain their social position through misrecognition—a failure or unwillingness to see people of color as legitimate, welcome, and valuable members of the community. The ultimate impact of such misrecognition is a profound sense of homesickness, a deep longing for a place in which one can feel safe, wanted, and accepted. Tightly and sensitively argued, this book helps us better understand how to recognize and unsettle such processes of exclusion in diversifying spaces in general.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Inquiry and Agency"

New from Oxford University Press: Inquiry and Agency: A Theory of Intellectual Virtues and Vices by Jason Baehr.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Inquiry and Agency, Jason Baehr develops a systematic account of the nature, structure, and evaluative status of intellectual virtues and vices. Drawing on a theory of moral virtue by Robert Adams (2006), Baehr argues that intellectual virtues like curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual courage are ways of "excellently being for epistemic goods" that reflect favorably on who we are as persons, and that intellectual vices like dogmatism, narrow-mindedness, and intellectual arrogance are ways of falling short of this standard that contribute negatively to our personal worth. Inquiry and Agency is the most in-depth and systematic treatment of intellectual virtues and vices since Linda Zagzebski's pioneering work Virtues of the Mind (1996). While advancing several debates in virtue epistemology, it proposes a model of intellectual virtues and vices that will be accessible to non-experts and useful to researchers in other disciplines. Inquiry and Agency is the product of decades of reflection by a leading virtue epistemologist. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the characterological dimensions of the life of the mind.

Visit Jason Baehr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sweatshop Capital"

New from Duke University Press: Sweatshop Capital: Profit, Violence, and Solidarity Movements in the Long Twentieth Century by Beth Robinson.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Sweatshop Capital, Beth Robinson examines the brutal sweatshop labor conditions that produced American consumer goods from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, as well as the labor and social movements that contested them. Arguing that sweatshop labor is a persistent feature of capitalism, she shows how manufacturers used both their influence in government and their mobility to sidestep US labor laws, maximize profits, and perpetuate abuses. She outlines how workers and their allies routinely confronted manufacturers by building solidarity networks across race, class, and national lines. Drawing on activists’ literature, news accounts, archival sources, and oral histories, Robinson presents the long history of the antisweatshop movements that responded to American capital’s pursuit of profit through hyperexploitation with a wide range of protest, legal action, and creativity. Beginning with the sweatshops and reformers of the Progressive Era, Robinson moves through the Great Depression and the activism of the Popular Front, the “free trade” globalization of the 1990s and its discontents, and, finally, the global cyber and gig economies of the twenty-first century and the growing movements to rein them in.

Visit Beth Robinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Profligate Colonial"

New from Cornell University Press: The Profligate Colonial: How the US Exported Austerity to the Philippines by Lisandro E. Claudio.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Profligate Colonial, Lisandro E. Claudio reveals how austerity, long before it became a buzzword of modern technocracy, was a tool of US empire.

Austerity is often praised as prudence in hard times, a responsible response to crisis. In the Philippines today, it is treated as common sense, an unquestioned commitment to a strong currency, low inflation, and fiscal restraint. Claudio argues that this orthodoxy is in fact a colonial inheritance―a legacy of American rule that cast Filipinos as reckless spenders and imposed monetary discipline as a civilizing force. At the center of this logic is the "profligate colonial," a feminized, racialized figure who wastes public funds and so requires the steady hand of imperial governance.

Focusing on key moments in Philippine economic history across the twentieth century, Claudio charts how austerity was first exported through empire, then domesticated in line with nationalist ambitions. He shows that generations of Filipino policymakers, central bankers, and intellectuals absorbed the lessons of American "money doctors," transforming what was a means to build a colonial state on the cheap into a postcolonial moral imperative. Austerity became not just policy, but an ideology that transcended political divides and reshaped the boundaries of the Philippine economic imagination.

As austerity politics rise once more in response to global inflation, The Profligate Colonial is a vital, incisive reminder of how austerity's appeal is less about economics than about a deep-rooted politics of control―one born in empire and still alive in policy today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last House on the Block"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Last House on the Block: Black Homeowners, White Homesteaders, and Failed Gentrification in Detroit by Sharon Cornelissen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Gentrification is not inevitable, reveals Sharon Cornelissen, in this surprising, close look at the Detroit neighborhood of Brightmoor and the harsh reality of depopulation and urban decline.

In the minds of many, Detroit is undergoing a renaissance thanks to gentrifying urbanites who’ve been drawn to the city with the promise of cheap housing and thriving culture. But what happens when gentrification attempts to come to one of the most depopulated neighborhoods in the country—a place where every other property in the neighborhood was a vacant lot and every third house stood empty? To find out, Sharon Cornelissen moved to the Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit for three years and became the owner of a $7,000 house.

The Last House on the Block takes us to Brightmoor to meet Cornelissen’s fellow residents. She introduces us to the long-time residents of the neighborhood who reveal their struggles to keep a home while keeping violence, tall grass, and yes—gentrification—at bay. We also meet the eclectic white newcomers of Brightmoor and learn about their real estate bargains, urban farms, and how they became the unlikely defenders of urban desolation. Where oldtimers take pride in neatly mowed lawns and hope for a return to residential density, newcomers love the open space and aim to buy more empty lots to raise chickens and goats. It is a story of gentrification, but not at all in the usual sense: it is a case of failed gentrification. We often think about gentrification as an unstoppable force—once the first white newcomers with yoga mats enter an often brown or Black community, the coffee shops and restaurants follow. But in Brightmoor, the dreams of white newcomers met the harsh reality of decade-long decline. Nearly a decade after Cornelissen’s fieldwork began, Brightmoor is even emptier than it was when she started.

Today, depopulation remains more common than gentrification in poor communities. Cornelissen’s story offers deep insights into what it is like to live in a declining neighborhood, and through the example of Brightmoor, Cornelissen reveals why depopulation continues and helps us imagine a more inclusive and equitable city turnaround.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Policing Pain"

New from NYU Press: Policing Pain: The Opioid Crisis, Abolition, and a New Ethic of Care by Kevin Revier.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the medicalization of addiction during the U.S. opioid crisis has driven mass incarceration and mass policing in rural and deindustrialized communities

The nationwide opioid public health emergency has led many advocates and public officials to call for drug policy reforms that reject traditional “law-and-order” approaches. In Policing Pain, Kevin Revier approaches the opioid epidemic from an abolitionist framework that seeks to treat people who use opioids not as so-called criminals, but as people in need of health care. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Upstate New York, a region highly impacted by overdoses, job loss, and deindustrialization, Revier shows that incorporation of treatment within the criminal justice system has ultimately expanded the scope of the drug war, turning individuals into "treatable carceral subjects" who are both medicalized and criminalized.

He argues that the incorporation of medical rhetoric and treatment within the criminal legal system maintains a carceral approach in rural and low-income areas facing high rates of opioid overdose and economic disinvestment, further entrenching the carceral state in the lives of people who use drugs. Ultimately, Policing Pain explores alternative strategies to promote harm reduction from an abolitionist ethic of care that advocates for people who use drugs while seeking to minimize criminal justice involvement in drug-related issues.

Visit Kevin Revier's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Intimate Borders"

New from Oxford University Press: Intimate Borders: Feminist Migration Ethics by Amy Reed-Sandoval.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Intimate Borders, Amy Reed-Sandoval offers a decolonial, feminist theory of borders that enables us to perceive hidden gender injustices at borders and then take concrete steps to stop them. Grounded in feminist privacy ethics, Chicana feminism, Indigenous philosophies of borders and space, and original ethnographic research conducted by Reed-Sandoval at two abortion clinics in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, this book challenges political philosophy's public/private divide by urging us to understand borders as intimate. Specifically, it argues that borders are sites of embodied and identity-based harms that often tamper with the boundaries of our "selves" in ways that impact our personal autonomy.

Reed-Sandoval also critically investigates unhelpful dichotomies. Intimate Borders calls into question popular, all-or-nothing proposals for both "open" and "closed borders," arguing instead that a feminist approach to borders requires careful exploration of how different borders (including non-Western borders) may both cause and protect against intimate harms of vulnerable groups. This book unpacks some of the most urgent and under-theorized ethical challenges presented at borders today, including border-crossings for abortion care, the migration of children, pregnancy and miscarriage at borders, family separations at borders, and the complicated relationship between borders and Indigenous identities. Intimate Borders is a theoretical framework for feminist migration scholars, policy makers, activists, and anyone else who wishes to raise awareness of gender injustice at the world's borders.

Visit Amy Reed-Sandoval's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Assassins and Templars"

New from Yale University Press: Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood by Steve Tibble.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of the medieval world’s most extraordinary organisations, the Assassins and the Templars

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels.

In this engaging account, Steve Tibble traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations.

Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory.

Visit Steve Tibble's website.

The Page 99 Test: Templars.

The Page 99 Test: Crusader Criminals.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Smuggling Law"

New from Stanford University Press: Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands by Fırat Bozçali.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Kurdish-populated Wan/Van Province is a major smuggling hub between Turkey and Iran. Kurdish smugglers cross this 180-mile-long land border, transporting everyday consumer goods—fuel, tobacco, sugar, and tea—as well as more illicit goods, and the province supports the financial, technical, and labor capacities that sustain these smuggling economies. As the Turkish state has enacted increasingly punitive anti-smuggling laws, smuggling has also become a site of contentious politics. This book explores anti-smuggling law enforcement and criminal prosecutions to reveal a key site—the criminal court—where borders and claims of sovereignty are simultaneously remade and disrupted. Taking readers from border villages, mountain passes, and road checkpoints to courtrooms, law offices, and forensic laboratories, Fırat Bozçalı examines how Kurdish smugglers, with the help of their lawyers, legally disrupt state sovereignty in criminal courts. Kurdish smugglers and lawyers adopt and rework procedures, rules, and reasonings in ways that interrupt the courts' capacity to coopt, discipline, and oppress. Bozçalı theorizes this evasive engagement with the legal system as a strategy of techno-legal politics among marginalized and persecuted groups, one that extends beyond the Kurdish case. Smuggling Law holds profound relevance in today's world, where ever-expanding regimes of surveillance, oppression, and dispossession unfold in the broader contexts of the global war on terror and data-driven capitalism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Killing the Dead"

New from Princeton University Press: Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World by John Blair.

About the book, from the publisher:

A riveting history of vampire panics across cultures and down through the millennia—and why killing the dead is better than killing the living

Killing the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.

In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.

Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Menace of Prosperity"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981 by Daniel Wortel-London.

About the book, from the publisher:

Upends entrenched thinking about cities, demonstrating how urban economies are defined—or constrained—by the fiscal imagination of policymakers, activists, and residents.

Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects—its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasn’t always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of activists, citizens, and intellectuals in New York City connected local fiscal crises to the greed and waste of the rich. These figures saw other routes to development, possibilities rooted in alternate ideas about what was fiscally viable.

In The Menace of Prosperity, Daniel Wortel-London argues that urban economics and politics are shaped by what he terms the “fiscal imagination” of policymakers, activists, advocates, and other figures. His survey of New York City during a period of explosive growth shows how residents went beyond the limits of redistributive liberalism to imagine how their communities could become economically viable without the largesse of the wealthy. Their strategies—which included cooperatives, public housing, land-value taxation, public utilities, and more—centered the needs and capabilities of ordinary residents as the basis for local economies that were both prosperous and just.

Overturning stale axioms about economic policy, The Menace of Prosperity shows that not all growth is productive for cities. Wortel-London’s ambitious history demonstrates the range of options we’ve abandoned and hints at the economic frameworks we could still realize—and the more democratic cities that might result.

Visit Daniel Wortel-London's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Civil Blood"

New from Cornell University Press: Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy by Amanda G. Madden.

About the book, from the publisher:

Civil Blood is a study of the practice of vendetta among the civic elites in sixteenth-century Italy and illustrates the complex and integral role that vendetta violence played in civic life and state formation on the winding path to state cent

ralization. At many temporal, geographic, and political points in early modern Italy, vendetta appears to have not only disrupted but also constituted the processes by which the modern state emerged.

Amanda G. Madden examines vendetta as both central to politics and as an engine of change and illustrates the degree to which key phenomena of the period―state centralization, growing bureaucracies, institutional reforms, and the process of state formation―were interpenetrated by, and not simply opposed to, ongoing factional violence among civic elites.

Madden further illuminates in Civil Blood how elites utilized violent enmities to maintain a grip on political control and negotiated with the duke concerning political power and civic prerogatives. As a result, ruling elites not only defined their own place in governance but also shaped the function and definition of government.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era"

New from Columbia University Press: Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era by Brandon Rottinghaus.

About the book, from the publisher:

Once, it was thought, a scandal was the kiss of death for a political career. Today, however, surviving scandal seems to be the norm. Donald Trump has weathered―and even perhaps benefited from―controversies that would have been unimaginable for virtually any other candidate. Prominent figures in both parties have won elections and remained in office despite credible allegations of wrongdoing. Do scandals still matter? When and why do voters punish politicians or give them a free pass?

Charting the changes from Watergate to the present, this book is a rigorous and compelling investigation of the politics of scandals. Bringing together wide-ranging survey data, innovative experiment design, and historical analysis, Brandon Rottinghaus demonstrates how political polarization, affective partisanship, fading trust in media, and the spread of misinformation have diminished the resonance of controversies. Although scandals still fell many politicians, there is a clear trend over time for fewer voters to be swayed by them. In a polarized world, scandals take only a modest toll on politicians’ approval ratings, survival in office, ambitions, and legacies. In many cases, partisans accept―or even embrace―misbehavior from members of their own party and revel in scandals affecting the opposing party. Challenging conventional wisdom with extensive data, this book illuminates the declining significance of scandals and the consequences for democratic accountability.

Visit Brandon Rottinghaus's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Empire of Print"

New from Oxford University Press: Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media by Sonia Hazard.

About the book, from the publisher:

Empire of Print offers a fresh account of evangelical power by uncovering how the American Tract Society (ATS) leveraged print media to spread its message across an expanding nation. One of the era's largest media corporations and a pillar of the benevolent empire, the ATS circulated some 5.6 billion printed pages between its founding in 1825 and the eve of the Civil War.

It wasn't just the volume of materials that mattered―it was the sophisticated media infrastructure that evangelicals developed for their message to reach readers, coast to coast. Media infrastructure refers to the material assemblages that work below the surface of media content, including the format of publications, the avenues of their movement, and the circumstances surrounding their reading. As a non-coercive yet effective form of power, infrastructure shaped how, when, and why readers engaged with evangelical texts.

While showing how the ATS became a formidable force in American society during the nineteenth century, Empire of Print opens larger questions about the entanglements among people, things, texts, and institutions, the dynamics of power in a media-saturated world, and the salience of race, class, and region in the distribution and reception of media.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Home Work"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870–1930 by Ruby Oram.

About the book, from the publisher:

How reforms to girlhood education in the Progressive Era cemented inequalities of gender, race, and class in urban school systems.

In Home Work, historian Ruby Oram tells the story of how middle-class, white women reformers lobbied the state to implement various public education reforms to shape the lives of girls and women in industrial cities between 1870 and 1930. Women such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley used education reform to target working-class communities and advocate for their middle-class ideals of girlhood and femininity, which could vary depending on the racial or socio-economic backgrounds of the girls. For example, reformers generally encouraged white girls to care for their future families, while pushing Black girls toward becoming domestic workers in others’ homes. Using Chicago as a case study, Oram also explores how many of the reforms sought by white women were in response to evolving anxieties about immigration, health, and sexual delinquency.

An illuminating addition to the history of urban education in America, Home Work enriches our understanding of educational inequality in twentieth-century schools.

Visit Ruby Oram's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wrangling Pelicans"

New from the University of Texas Press: Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios by Tim Seiter.

About the book, from the publisher:

A richly detailed history of daily life for colonial Spanish soldiers surviving on the eighteenth-century Texas Gulf Coast.

In 1775, Spanish King Carlos III ordered the capture of American pelicans for his wildlife park in Madrid. The command went to the only Spanish fort on the Texas coast—Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía in present-day Goliad. But the overworked soldiers stationed at the fort had little interest indulging a king an ocean away. Their days were consumed with guarding their community against powerful Indigenous peoples and managing the demands of frontier life. The royal order went ignored.

Wrangling Pelicans brings to life the world of Presidio La Bahía’s Hispano soldiers, whose duties ranged from heated warfare to high-stakes diplomacy, while their leisure pursuits included courtship, card playing, and cockfighting. It highlights the lives of presidio women and reveals the ways the Spanish legal system was used by and against the soldiers as they continually negotiated their roles within the empire and their community. Although they were agents of the Spanish crown, soldiers at times defied their king and even their captain as they found ways to assert their autonomy. Offering a fresh perspective on colonial Texas, Wrangling Pelicans recreates the complexities of life at the empire’s edge, where survival mattered more than royal decrees.

Visit Tim Seiter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Counterrevolutionary Shadow"

New from the University Press of Kansas: The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People by Michael Gorup.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold explanation of how reactionary political movements appeal to racism to reconcile American democracy with antidemocratic practices.

“All power to the people!” So goes the familiar slogan of 1960s racial justice politics. The message is clear: the fight against racism is a fight for greater democracy—for the rule of “the people.” And yet, across American history, movements of racial backlash have also framed themselves as aiming to deliver greater democracy and redeem the rule of “the people.” Examples abound, ranging from the Southern Redeemers who overthrew Reconstruction, to the “populist” backlash to the civil rights movement, and the white revanchism of our own time. How is it that we find claims to greater democracy on both sides of these struggles? What does this reveal about modern democracy, popular sovereignty, and the peculiar politics of race in America?

The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People provides a novel account of the relationship between race and democratic politics in the United States. Across five chapters, Michael Gorup turns to the life and work of key figures in the history of American political thought—including Thomas Jefferson, Hosea Easton, David Walker, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Huey P. Newton—to argue that racial politics in the United States has always been a politics of peoplehood. Racism is what Gorup calls a politics of “popular enclosure”: it limits the scope of democratic power by circumscribing who is said to belong to #8220;the people.” In so doing, it contains democratization from within. Neither strictly antidemocratic, nor a necessary entailment of modern democracy as such, Gorup argues that racism is best understood as a political construct developed to manage, if never fully reconcile, the contradictions that beset settler democracy.

Racism is, in short, American democracy’s “counterrevolutionary shadow”—a technology for rendering despotic practices like enslavement, exploitation, and dispossession tolerable within a society where the people are said to rule.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Writing Zoological Natural History for British India"

New from Oxford University Press: Writing Zoological Natural History for British India by John Mathew.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book examines the critical role played by colonial peripheries, specifically British India, in shaping the development of zoology and other disciplines emerging from 19th-century natural history. Through an analysis of publications such as the monumental Fauna of British India series (1888-1949), it explores how zoology became a site of contestation between European metropolitan centres and colonial territories. While taxonomy and comparative anatomy dominated scientific endeavours in Europe, colonial naturalists-primarily European expatriates-engaged in a localized form of natural history and taxonomy that significantly influenced the field. Central to this narrative is the figure of the 'translocate,' a term introduced to describe Europeans who lived and worked extensively in colonial contexts. These intermediaries bridged colonial and metropolitan scientific communities, asserting dual authority: they claimed a superior understanding of the local environment while navigating and often dismissing indigenous knowledge systems within an asymmetrical power dynamic. By doing so, it repositions the colonial periphery as a critical space in the global development of zoological knowledge, highlighting the complex interplay of authority, power, and knowledge production during the colonial era.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Now We Are Here"

New from Stanford University Press: Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life by Gabrielle Oliveira.

About the book, from the publisher:

Who gets to live a life with dignity? Each day, families around the world make the difficult decision to leave their homes in search of safety, stability, and opportunity. For many migrant families, this search centers on access to strong, caring, and equitable educational systems that enable children to flourish. Now We Are Here follows the lives of 16 migrant families from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as they navigate the promises and challenges of the American education system. Drawing on immersive ethnographic research in homes and schools from 2018 to 2021, Gabrielle Oliveira offers an intimate portrait of these families' experiences. She weaves together stories of parental sacrifice, children's educational and migration journeys, and educators' responses to trauma—all shaped by the additional disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Oliveira highlights the perseverance of families confronting the overlapping crises of border detention, family separation, and a public health emergency. These experiences forced them to reimagine education and what it means to build a future in the U.S. By examining how migrant children engage in classrooms, how teachers understand their needs, and how hope evolves, this book offers vital insights into the intersections of schooling and immigration. It calls for more responsive educational practices and policies that affirm the dignity and potential of all migrant children.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Civilizing Contention"

New from Cornell University Press: Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria's War by Rana B. Khoury.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Civilizing Contention, Rana B. Khoury asserts that to understand civilian and refugee activism in war, we must regard the international actors and organizations that enter the scene to help. When these organizations respond to crises, they work with local actors. In so doing, they facilitate the activists' participation in something like a civil society even in the depths of war. Yet as aid imposes its structures and routines, it also leaves activists unprotected from the violence of war and its aftermaths.

Khoury pursues these ideas through analysis of Syria's war that emerged from the 2011 Arab Uprisings. She traces the afterlife of a social movement that did not merely take up arms or capitulate to repression. Interviews with Syrian activists and international aid workers in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon provide insight into action among actors in the war, while original social media data offers additional evidence. Civilizing Contention deepens knowledge of civilian and refugee agency by explaining how ordinary people act in extraordinary ways in a world structured by powerful forces.

Visit Rana B. Khoury's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Climate by Proxy"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Climate by Proxy: A History of Scientific Reconstructions of the Past and Future by Melissa Charenko.

About the book, from the publisher:

How twentieth-century scientists used proxies to understand historic climates, shaping scientific analyses of the past and the future.

Unlike our daily reckoning with the weather, our experience of climate must be mediated through methods that measure the ebb and flow of climate, such as computer models, instruments like thermometers, and organic and inorganic remains known as “proxies.” Climate by Proxy by Melissa Charenko explores how scientists read the record of past climates and how their readings have engendered particular understandings of climate. Charenko focuses on the twentieth century, a period when scientists in Europe and North America began to believe that climate had a dynamic history worth studying. Scientists in this period developed several techniques to infer past climate from fossil pollen, tree rings, pieces of vegetation, and other organic remains imprinted upon by former climates. Climate by Proxy examines how these techniques helped shape notions of climate itself.

Charenko also shows how these varied interpretations of climate played an outsized role in explanations of human history and destiny. Geologists, botanists, ecologists, and other scientists interested in climate over long timescales routinely discussed how climate influenced plants, animals, and, notably, people. By following the scientists who reconstructed climate using natural archives, Climate by Proxy demonstrates how material objects worked with scientists’ perceptions of human groups to compel, constrain, and reinforce their understandings of climate, history, and the future.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Deliberation, Dismissal, and Democracy"

New from Oxford University Press: Deliberation, Dismissal, and Democracy by David Schraub.

About the book, from the publisher:

In civil litigation, dismissal offers the opportunity, early in a controversy, to preemptively dispose of a claim that does not present a legally judiciable case. Everyday talk, of course, is not bound by such procedural rules. Yet in conversation we often engage in a form of discursive dismissal: when faced with discomforting claims, our frequent instinct is not to engage in reasoned deliberation over them, but to brush them aside without considering their merits. How does dismissal fit within a broader ecosystem of deliberation? What is deliberative dismissal? When (if ever) is it justified?

In Deliberation, Dismissal, and Democracy, David Schraub analyzes our tendency toward dismissal and the problems that flow from it. Schraub focuses on dismissal as a social, rather than legal, phenomenon. Drawing on academic work both historical and contemporary, as well as examples drawn from everyday discourse and controversy, he creates a framework explicating why dismissal is a significant problem that defies easy resolution. While a state can be held to an anti-censorship commitment, private actors cannot and should not avoid "discriminating" on basis of viewpoint. What they can do, however, is cultivate certain deliberative virtues--dispositions towards consideration and open-mindedness--that orient them towards deliberating, rather than dismissing, the hard thoughts that any healthy democracy must be willing to tackle.

Visit David Schraub's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Conservative Frontier"

New from the University of Texas Press: The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right by Jeff Roche.

About the book, from the publisher:

How West Texas business and culture molded the rise of conservatism in the United States.

Much of what we understand as modern American political conservatism was born in West Texas, where today it predominates. How did the people of such a vast region—larger than New England and encompassing big cities like Lubbock and Amarillo, as well as tiny towns from Anson to Dalhart—develop such a uniform political culture? And why and how did it go national?

Jeff Roche finds answers in the history of what he calls cowboy conservatism. Political power players matter in this story, but so do football coaches, newspaper editors, and a breakfast cereal tycoon who founded a capitalist utopia. The Conservative Frontier follows these and other figures as they promoted an ideology grounded in the entrepreneurial and proto-libertarian attitudes of nineteenth-century Texas ranchers, including a fierce devotion to both individualism and small-town notions of community responsibility. This political sensibility was in turn popularized by its association with the mythology and iconography of the cowboy as imagined in twentieth-century mass media. By the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, Roche shows, it was clear that the cowboy conservatism of West Texas had set the stage for the emergence of the New Right—the more professionalized and tech-savvy operation that dominated national conservative politics for the next quarter century.

Visit Jeff Roche's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Surviving Rome"

New from Princeton University Press: Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent by Kim Bowes.

About the book, from the publisher:

A radical revision—and worker’s-eye view—of everything we thought we knew about the ancient Roman economy

The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor.

Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children’s toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans’ most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status.

Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today’s laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Latino Fathers"

New from NYU Press: Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting by Fatima Suarez.

About the book, from the publisher:

The contemporary meaning of Latino fatherhood

What does fatherhood mean in the lives of Latino men? In Latino Fathers, Fatima Suarez shifts the attention from how father involvement affects Latine children to how Latino men experience fatherhood and what being a father means to them. Suarez brings attention to the social forces shaping, sustaining, and undermining Latino men’s parenting, how their views and behaviors uphold, challenge, negotiate, and transform culturally dominant ideas of fatherhood, and the lessons they teach us about the reproduction of inequality in family life.

Suarez focuses on the many different facets of fatherhood, including work-life balance, parenting challenges, and empathy and resentment for their own fathers. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 60 Latino fathers in California, Suarez highlights Latino fathers’ familial stories of joy, sorrow, humor, pain, uncertainty, and hope. Latino Fathers provides a compassionate, intimate account of a group of fathers challenging the myths about them, wrestling with the tensions they experience as they negotiate cultural ideas of good fathering, and the structural realities that make it both possible and difficult to meet those expectations.

Visit Fatima Suarez's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Power and Powerlessness"

New from Oxford University Press: Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty-First Century by Edward Hall.

About the book, from the publisher:

Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty-First Century examines whether the liberalism of fear - the negative and cautionary vein of liberal thinking, most famously articulated by Judith Shklar, which urges us to prioritize the avoidance of public cruelty - can effectively orient our political thinking in the twenty first century.

Hall systematically engages with Shklar's writings to offer a defence of liberalism in these terms, and also methodically works through a variety of practical political issues - torture, policing, immigration control, and hate speech. In so doing, Hall upends the suggestion that the liberalism of fear is an outdated species of Cold War Liberalism, arguing that as long as some people are invested with coercive power to exercise over others, there is a likelihood for public cruelty to emerge. Moreover, by examining some central features of politics in the twenty-first century, the book offers a series of vital and original recommendations about how we can respond to public cruelty, here and now.

Edward Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. He works on three main research areas: political ethics, liberal political thought, and realist political theory.

--Marshal Zeringue