"Creating an Informed Citizenry"

New from the University of Virginia Press: Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic by George D. Oberle III.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examining the early debates in the United States over how best to educate the constituents of the new nation.

When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning, George Oberle provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge was created, circulated, and consumed in the early American republic.

Many of the founders, including George Washington, initially favored the creation of a centralized national university to educate Americans from all backgrounds. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, politicians moved away from any notion of publicly educated laypeople generating useful knowledge. The federal government ultimately founded the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to be run by experts only. Oberle’s insightful analysis of the competing ideas over the nature of education offers food for thought as we continue to grapple with a rapidly evolving media landscape amid contested meanings of knowledge, expertise, and the obligations of citizenship.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Divine Hiddenness and Evidence for God"

New from Oxford University Press: Divine Hiddenness and Evidence for God by Charity Anderson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Along with the problem of evil, divine hiddenness presents one of the most important philosophical challenges to religious belief. Theists and nontheists alike grapple with the question of why God's existence isn't more obvious. The aim of this book is to formulate the problem of divine hiddenness as an evidential argument. A central theme is that we can make progress understanding the epistemic import of divine hiddenness if we model the hiddenness argument using Bayesian methods. One advantage to using evidential tools to frame the topic is that theists can agree with some of the core ideas that motivate interest in the topic: such as, that it is surprising that God's existence is not more obvious than it is. This is a thought with which theists can agree-without being pressured into atheism. The approach allows individuals on both sides of the issue to find more common ground.

Divine Hiddenness and Evidence for God advances discussion on several fronts. It uncovers various difficulties that arise in selecting which hiddenness facts to focus on and relocates disagreement to evaluation of the significance of the evidence. A central hiddenness fact concerns the distribution of theistic belief. One result of examining this data in the context of an evidential argument from hiddenness is that some facts which are typically advanced as challenges to theism-such as that there is non-belief-can turn out to have a different impact when we look at more robust data.

The book as a whole raises an important methodological question: can there be evidence against God for theists? While some theists have taken a hard stance against claims that anything is evidence against God, this work suggest theists are better off conceding that some phenomena are evidence against God, and that theists should be open to the possibility that divine hiddenness is among such evidence.

Visit Charity Anderson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Chinese American Mothering"

New from NYU Press: Chinese American Mothering: Toy Len Goon's Legacy and the Myth of the Model Minority by Andrea Louie.

About the book, from the publisher:

A journey from Chinese immigrant to “U.S. Mother of the Year” unpacks the roots of the model minority myth and its legacy

In 1952, Toy Len Goon, a Chinese immigrant widow who raised eight children while running their family laundry, was selected as U.S. Mother of the Year by the American Mother’s Committee of the Golden Rule Foundation. In Chinese American Mothering, Andrea Louie argues that Toy Len Goon's selection for this honor was more than an acknowledgement of her having raised eight successful children while running a business; rather she was chosen precisely because she was a Chinese American woman who could exemplify both the virtues of mothering and of American upward mobility. Her selection for the Mother of the Year honor can only be understood within the context of shifting representations of Chinese Americans during the Cold War era, and the accompanying assumptions about the strategic role that positive representations of Chinese Americans could have in extending U.S. influence in Asia.

Drawing upon immigration records, interviews, and secondary sources, as well as her positionality as Toy Len Goon’s granddaughter, Louie tells an expanded version of Toy Len Goon’s life story. Ultimately, Chinese American Mothering addresses themes of migration, gender, racialization, Americanization, and “success” through the evolving lens of the model minority myth.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Unruly Facts of Race"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate by Sunmin Kim.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reveals the surprising historical roots of US immigration policy and discourse.

Unfortunately, we’re all too familiar with the US’s legacy of maligning immigrants. Some Americans see immigrants as inherently threatening, a blank screen onto which the nation’s worst fears are projected. But this phenomenon is neither timeless nor static. Instead, it arose and transformed alongside the unprecedented arrival of immigrants in the early twentieth century—and the federal government’s response. In The Unruly Facts of Race, sociologist Sunmin Kim explains how American ideas about race and ethnicity were transformed in the early twentieth century as an unintended consequence of anti-immigrant mobilization.

Kim presents a wealth of archival evidence, including the proceedings of the 1907 Dillingham Commission, to reconstruct how competing racialized visions of nationhood evolved in the early twentieth-century immigration debate. Immigration restrictionist politicians believed that the United States should be a White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant nation. However, when they mobilized researchers—some of whom were women and/or immigrants—to gather data at a massive scale to rationalize their aims, they were met with unruly facts that did not support their racial project. Newer European immigrants, as the data showed, were not much different from descendants of earlier immigrants from northern Europe. When facts failed to support the vilification of immigrants, exclusionist politicians instead turned to race as a marker of ineluctable difference to justify their aims. This led to a new principle of national belonging: the United States transitioned to a country that encompassed various European groups, including Catholics and Jews, but excluded non-White immigrants, as they were deemed too different to become a part of the nation.

Kim’s analysis shows that throughout US history, the opportunity for belonging for some immigrants was predicated on the exclusion of others. His focus on the role of facts in the early twentieth century provides a refreshing take on why the so-called “nation of immigrants” has always demonized some immigrants while cherishing others, highlighting the selection and control of immigrants as the core principles of the American nation-building project. Amid a vitriolic explosion of American immigration discourse, Kim offers a needed corrective to and context for debates around who belongs in the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Brown and Blue"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935–2025 by Brian D. Behnken.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book offers a sweeping history of Mexican American interactions with law enforcement and the criminal justice system in the US Southwest. Looking primarily at Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, Brown and Blue tells a complex story: Violent, often racist acts committed by police against Mexican American people sparked protests demanding reform, and criminal justice authorities sometimes responded positively to these protests with measures such as recruiting Mexican Americans into local police forces and altering training procedures at police academies.

Brian D. Behnken demonstrates the central role that the struggle for police reform played in the twentieth-century Chicano movement, and the ways its relevance continues to the present. By linking social activism and law enforcement, Behnken illuminates how the policing issues of today developed and what reform remains to be done.

The Page 99 Test: Fighting Their Own Battles.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield"

New from Oxford University Press: Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield: Outside Wartime by Mirko Palestrino.

About the book, from the publisher:

Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield rethinks hegemonic understandings of military victory as the outcome of war by focusing on the relationship between victory and time. While International Relations and War Studies increasingly recognise that the boundaries between war and peace are blurry, military victory is still conceptualised as an event that brings war to cessation and restores peace.

Instead, this book argues that victory is a temporal, sense-making device. It shows that victory is produced just as much outside the battlefield as on it, during both wartime and peacetime. Palestrino demonstrates that the end of war has little to do with warfighting. Wars are made to end through a series of victory practices that seek to clearly mark a conflict's temporal boundaries to convince key audiences of its definitive outcome.

Analysing exhibitions of military tattoos, war memorials, commemoration rituals, doctrine manuals, history textbooks and videogames, this book shows that, as soon as we stop looking for victory in the usual places, a plurality of wartimes comes to the surface and the assumption that victory ends war is cast into doubt. It also shows that attending to these victory practices and their politics is important because they can appear to be peaceful yet conceal overlooked forms of violence.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Growing People"

New from Columbia University Press: Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey by Natalia Rogach Alexander.

About the book, from the publisher:

John Dewey is among history’s most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human development, whose vision of the centrality of education to democracy, philosophy, and flourishing can still inspire us today.

What can we learn from this great thinker as we face challenges such as widespread drudgery and disaffection, estrangement among individuals and groups, and a crisis of democracy? This book supplies the answers, offering a bold new account of Dewey as an educational theorist who is essential for our troubled times.

Revealing the true scope of Dewey’s educational vision, this book provides a new perspective on a neglected aspect of the philosophical tradition. Growing People presents an alternative canon―running from Plato to Rousseau to Du Bois―that recasts philosophy in terms of education and, in so doing, opens new pathways for social critique and the liberation of human potential.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Special Damage"

New from Stanford University Press: Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law by Jessica Lake.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from "civilised" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving "special damage." Smith should have lost her case, but her action set off a remarkable reform movement.

In Special Damage, Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Drawing upon original archival material, she tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called "whores." Lake reveals, for the first time, the cases brought by women that spurred and benefitted from these reforms. In doing so, she details how debates about women, speech, and reputation circulated through transnational common law networks, connecting countries, colonies, and continents.

The Slander of Women movement furthered legal protections for women, but also created links between ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization. Special Damage tells a compelling story that questions the costs and compromises of legal progress in a patriarchal and unequal "civilised" New World.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Disabled Power"

New from NYU Press: Disabled Power: A Storm, A Grid, and Embodied Harm in the Age of Disaster by Angela Frederick.

About the book, from the publisher:

A call to place disability at the center of climate and disaster responses

Every disaster is a disability disaster, argues Angela Frederick. Disabled Power tells the stories of Texans with disabilities who endured the 2021 Texas power crisis, which forced millions of Texas residents to endure a dayslong winter storm without heat or water. Based on 58 in-depth interviews with disabled Texans and parents of disabled children, Frederick highlights how disabled people and those with chronic health conditions are uniquely harmed when basic infrastructure such as power and water systems fail. She argues that the vulnerability people with disabilities experienced during this disaster was not an inevitable consequence of individual disabled bodies. Rather, disability vulnerability was “produced” by policies that “disabled” vital infrastructure.

Frederick also emphasizes another meaning of the phrase “disabled power:” the individual and collective resilience and creativity Texans with disabilities exercised to survive the disaster. Despite common perceptions of people with disabilities as passive victims, Frederick shows how many found strategies to survive and to provide and receive care within their communities. Ultimately, the implications of this disaster extend far beyond Texas and underscore our increased vulnerability to infrastructural failures as extreme weather events become more common. Disabled Power offers a blueprint for reimagining vulnerability and resilience to center people with disabilities in disaster research and emergency response.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Violence in Proportion"

New from Oxford University Press: Violence in Proportion by Patrick Tomlin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Almost everyone agrees that violence can sometimes be justified, but if it is to be justified it must be proportionate. Whether we are discussing war, self-defence, punishment, human rights law, protest, or free speech, most philosophers agree that inflicted harms or incursions into our most basic rights must be proportionate.

Violence in Proportion closely examines this widely held proportionality principle, focusing on situations in which inflicted harm prevents harm to others. It finds that lurking beneath our surface agreement that violence must be proportionate, there are many philosophically knotty problems that we must address. The book uncovers, explores, and offers solutions to these problems. This is the first philosophical monograph dedicated to the study of this important concept.

The book begins by mapping different species of proportionality, and the limits of their application. Focusing on a specific type of proportionality that Tomlin calls preventive limiting proportionality, Violence in Proportion goes on to explore puzzles concerning counterfactual baselines, proportionality under uncertainty, whether and when to continue a disproportionate course of conduct, the relationship between the proportionality of acts and courses of conduct, and aggregation.

The book seeks to do three things: uncover and explain the philosophical puzzles that a commitment to a proportionality limit on violence and harm gives rise to; map out various positions that we may take in response to these puzzles; and to argue for certain responses, and in so doing build a novel account of proportionality. Along the way, Tomlin shows us how complex this seemingly simple idea is.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Against Innocence"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World by Miriam Ticktin.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative critique of how the concept of innocence functions in contemporary politics and society.

In this timely and bold book, Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that consistently appears as a moral good actually ends up creating harm for so many. Claims to innocence protect migrant children, but often at the expense of their parents; claims to the innocence of the fetus work to punish women. Ticktin shows how innocence structures political relationships, focusing on individual victims and saviors, while foreclosing forms of collective responsibility. Ultimately, she wants to understand how the discourse around innocence functions, what gives it such power, and why we are so compelled by it, while showing that alternative political forms already exist. She examines this process across various domains, from migration, science, and environmentalism to racial and reproductive justice.

Throughout the book, Ticktin shows how the concept of innocence intimately shapes why, how, and for whom we should care and whose lives matter—and how this can have devastating consequences when only an exceptional few can qualify as innocent. A politics grounded on innocence justifies a world built on inequality, designating most people—especially the racialized poor—as unworthy, undeserving, and less than human. As an alternative, she explores the aesthetics and politics of “commoning”—a collective regime of living that refuses a liberal politics of individual identity and victimhood.

--Marshal Zeringue

"When Rebels Win"

New from Cornell University Press: When Rebels Win: Ideology, Statebuilding, and Power After Civil Wars by Kai M. Thaler.

About the book, from the publisher:

In When Rebels Win, Kai M. Thaler explores why victorious rebel groups govern in strikingly different ways.

Many assume civil wars destroy state capacity. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and Libya, for instance, victorious rebels perpetuated state weaknesses. Yet elsewhere, like in China and Rwanda, they built strong, capable states.

Kai M. Thaler argues that, to explain post-victory governance, we must look at rebel group ideologies: the ideas and goals around which a group is formed. Where a group's ideology falls along two key dimensions―programmatic versus opportunistic, inclusive versus exclusive―influences how it governs. Programmatic-inclusive groups seek to reach across territory and work with populations to implement goals, building the state to try to transform society. Opportunistic-exclusive groups, by contrast, prioritize personalized power and private wealth, neglecting statebuilding.

With rich evidence from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, When Rebels Win rethinks accounts of rebel behavior and post-war governance emphasizing factors such as resource availability or international intervention. Wartime rebel ideology, Thaler demonstrates, is not just "cheap talk"―and civil war can, counterintuitively, lead to stronger states.

Visit Kai M. Thaler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Worldly Afterlives"

New from Princeton University Press: Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire by Julia Stephens.

About the book, from the publisher:

The hidden histories of empire, told through the haunted afterlives of colonial migrations

Indian migrants provided the labor that enabled the British Empire to gain control over a quarter of the world’s population and territory. In the mid-1800s, the British government began building an elaborate bureaucracy to govern its mobile subjects, issuing photo IDs, lists of kin, and wills. It amassed records of workers’ belongings such as handwritten IOUs, crumpled newspaper clippings, and copper bangles. Worldly Afterlives uses this trove of artifacts to recover the stories of the hidden subjects of empire.

Navigating the remains of imperial bureaucracy—in archives scattered across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—Julia Stephens follows migrant families as they traverse the Indian Ocean and the British Empire. She draws on in-depth interviews to show how the histories of empire reverberate in the present through the memories and experiences of their descendants, who collected their own remnants of empire in albums and curio cabinets. We encounter women, subaltern migrants, and people of mixed heritage whose family stories upend ethnonationalist and patriarchal approaches to studying Asian diasporas. What emerges is a social history of Indian migration and a political history of British imperial governance, one that offers a new methodological approach to the historian’s craft.

Spanning archives, family collections, cemeteries, online ancestry records, and social media, Worldly Afterlives breaks down boundaries that separate academic, amateur, and public history to open new conversations about the ongoing legacies of empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Fires of Moloch"

New from Oxford University Press: The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One by Timothy Larsen.

About the book, from the publisher:

The First World War is the bloodiest war in British history. As casualties mounted during one of its great, seemingly futile battles, the Passchendaele offensive of 1917, seventeen Anglican priests serving as temporary military chaplains wrote chapters for the book, The Church in the Furnace. In it, they urged the Church of England to make fundamental changes in the light of the war. They were impatient and hard-hitting. They gained a reputation as radicals.

The Furnace seventeen experienced more than enough of the war. Some were wounded, others gassed. One of them was recognized as a war hero but suffered from shell shock for the rest of his life. Some won the Military Cross, the Distinguished Service Order, or other honours. One of them was the most famous padre of them all, the war poet G. A. Studdert Kennedy, who was widely known by his nickname, Woodbine Willie. The others included the Irish novelist, James O. Hannay (who wrote under the penname, George A. Birmingham), the Oxford theologian, Kenneth E. Kirk, and Eric Milner-White, whose response to the war included creating the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for Christmas Eve, King's College, Cambridge. Though they had been scathing about the Church hierarchy during the war, most of them lived to be consecrated a bishop. They strove to make sense of the turbulent events through which they lived, a span of years that included two world wars. Some of their brothers died in the First World War, and some of their sons in the Second World War. They spoke out on issues such as birth control, the League of Nations, Prayer Book revision, church reunion, and pacifism. They sought to do something with their lives after the war that would make retrospectively meaningful all the meaningless losses that had occurred during the war.

The Fires of Moloch is a group biography of a generation which went through the fire--a generation which went from the Victorian age to the atomic age, but which was forever haunted by the trenches and battlefields of France and Flanders, 1914-18.

The Page 99 Test: John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Demolishing Detroit"

New from Stanford University Press: Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures by Nicholas L. Caverly.

About the book, from the publisher:

Innovative field work reveals how infrastructural systems―buildings, laws, algorithms, excavators, regulations, toxins―maintain white supremacy within the urban landscape

For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to making space for Detroit's majority-Black populace to flourish in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. In 2013, the city set out to demolish more than twenty thousand empty buildings by the end of the decade, with administrators suggesting it would offer an innovative model for what other American cities could do to combat the effects of racist disinvestment. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with city residents, demolition workers, and public officials, as well as analyses of administrative archives, Demolishing Detroit examines the causes, procedures, and consequences of empty-building demolitions in Detroit. Contrary to stated goals of equity, the book reveals how racism and intersecting inequities endured despite efforts to level them.

As calls to dismantle racist systems have become increasingly urgent, this book provides cautionary tales of urban transformations meant to combat white supremacy that ultimately reinforced inequality. Bridging political analyses of racial capitalism, infrastructures, and environments in cities, Nick Caverly grapples with the reality that tearing down unjust policies, ideologies, and landscapes is not enough to end racist disparities in opportunities and life chances. Doing so demands rebuilding systems in the service of reparative futures.

Visit Nicholas L. Caverly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Work of Disaster"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line by Aidan Seale-Feldman.

About the book, from the publisher:

A compelling portrait of post-disaster imaginaries of repair in Nepal.

In a world marked by escalating disasters, the forms that care takes are increasingly fraught. In this powerful book, anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman focuses on Nepal, where in 2015 a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and equally powerful aftershock struck the country’s central region. The disaster claimed more than nine thousand lives and inspired a surge of humanitarian concern for the mental health of Nepali people. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, The Work of Disaster examines the possibilities generated by disaster, as well as the vexed relationship between crisis and care.

Moving between NGO offices, mountain trails, therapeutic interventions, and affected villages, Seale-Feldman tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in the disaster’s wake. She also analyzes the changes emergency services bring about in the places they seek to assist, the challenges of psychiatric support provided by international organizations, and the place of mental health counseling in a modern biopolitical reality. The Work of Disaster reveals the simultaneous violence and gentleness of humanitarian encounters, engaging along the way with broader debates about world making and the ethics of care.

Visit Aidan Seale-Feldman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Digital Initiation Rites"

New from Cornell University Press: Digital Initiation Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain by Vita Peacock.

About the book, from the publisher:

Digital Initiation Rites is an ethnography of Anonymous in Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity. Drawing on testimonies of dozens of participants, for whom digital technologies enabled and articulated a political transformation from being "asleep" to being "awake," Vita Peacock narrates the process through which these technologies have become implicated in profound subjective changes. The book joins a wider return of the comparative method in anthropology by placing these accounts in direct conversation with studies of traditional initiation rites―ritual sequences of symbolic death and rebirth―that charge the initiand with knowledge about a society to produce a moral responsibility for it. Through this juxtaposition, Peacock conceptualizes the historically novel form of digital initiation rites, in which digital communication and information technologies play a substantive role in these sequences. Digital Initiation Rites presents another angle to contemporary debates around "conspiracy theorizing" and shows how the consumption of digital media connects to the deep history of humankind.

Vita Peacock is Principal Investigator of the ERC project Surveillance and Moral Community: Anthropologies of Monitoring in Germany and Britain, at King's College London. Her research focuses on hierarchy, surveillance, anonymity, and privacy. She is cofounder of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Founding Fanatics"

New from Oxford University Press: Founding Fanatics: Extremism and the Formation of American Democracy by Noah Eber-Schmid.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the American Revolution, scholars and citizens have often assumed that dispassionate rationality, reciprocity, and nonviolent tolerance are necessary conditions for the sustained development of democracy. Accordingly, they reject oppositional parties that spurn consensus and terms of mutual respect--and often use force to accomplish their political goals--denouncing extremists as irrational and antidemocratic.

Founding Fanatics questions this understanding, examining how moments of tension, violence, and extremism in the United States have sometimes served the pursuit of political equality. Noah Eber-Schmid focuses his analysis on the American Founding era, presenting case studies of the early memorialization of the Boston Massacre, popular debates over Shays' Rebellion, the thought and practices of the Democratic Societies, and the use of the French Revolution in political discourse. From this historical account of popular politics in the Founding era, Eber-Schmid draws new insights for theoretical approaches to contemporary American democracy, challenging assumptions that extremism is always a negative or antidemocratic force. By recognizing the role that democratic extremism has played in the development of American popular democracy, political theorists and citizens will better understand how such movements may contribute to the struggle to deepen and expand political equality and participation that continues today.

Visit Noah Eber-Schmid's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reclaiming Clio"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Reclaiming Clio: Making American Women's History, 1900-2000 by Jennifer Banning Tomás.

About the book, from the publisher:

Women’s history traveled a long and fascinating path before it became a respected and recognized academic field in twentieth-century America. This book explores the field’s development as a multiracial and multigenerational effort, going beyond the careers of individual women historians to focus on how the discipline itself took shape. Focusing on the foundational period between 1900 and 1968, Jennifer Banning Tomás shines a light on the work performed by archivists and professional historians that gave women’s history its own identity and legitimacy.

The women in Reclaiming Clio laid the groundwork for the field’s remarkable expansion during the final wave of twentieth-century feminism after 1970, when a genuine movement for women’s history emerged. Their contributions made the later success of women’s history possible. Tomás reveals the dedication and vision that turned women’s history into the thriving, influential field it is today.

Visit Jennifer Banning Tomás's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Money and the Making of the American Revolution"

New from Princeton University Press: Money and the Making of the American Revolution by Andrew David Edwards.

About the book, from the publisher:

American money and American democracy have always been in tension, pitting political equality against economic inequality. In Money and the Making of the American Revolution, Andrew David Edwards shows how this struggle emerged in America’s founding era. Everyone knows that the founders waged a revolt against taxation without representation. Edwards shows that the dispute over taxes was really a dispute over money: what it was, who could make it, and how to keep it from being used at the expense of the colonists in North America. The colonial rebels refocused their resistance on democratic, local control—defending the power they had used to make money for themselves.

Edwards’s narrative spans four continents, linking the problems of money and revolt in early America to the transatlantic slave trade, the disastrous mismanagement of the East India Company in India, and violence against Native Americans. His analysis emerges from the story itself, through the lives of individuals ranging from John Blackwell, Oliver Cromwell's one-time war treasurer, to Thomas Paine, the impassioned pamphleteer of the American Revolution. Edwards argues that as the republican vision of an agrarian, independent monetary system faded, the leaders of the Revolution tied the nation to capitalism and imperialism at its founding. The colonists may have won the battle for representation, but the money that underpinned European empire had established a stronghold in the new republic. Money and the Making of the American Revolution offers both an ambitious new interpretation of the Revolution and a fascinating story about the power of economic ideas.

--Marshal Zeringue

"America's Middle East"

New from Oxford University Press: America's Middle East: The Ruination of a Region by Marc Lynch.

About the book, from the publisher:

After Hamas' shocking 2023 attack on Israel, the United States stood firmly behind Israel's near-genocidal war on Gaza, despite widespread moral outrage and significant damage to Washington's global agenda. But Gaza is only the latest paradox in thirty-five years of Middle East policy. How did this pattern develop, why can't policymakers learn from repeated Middle Eastern calamities, and what does Gaza's destruction mean for America's place in the world?

Marc Lynch charts the United States' disastrously failed approach to the post-Cold War Middle East, where aspirations for US leadership and a calm region have only produced war, instability and humanitarian catastrophe. Lynch exposes the failure of each president's efforts to transform the Middle East in America's image, or pivot away from the region; Washington's refusal to take seriously the views of Middle Easterners; and its fantasy of forging a regional order 'without' the Palestinian issue.

Moving between American politics and Middle Eastern realities, this incisive account explains why US policy has not changed despite its horrifying human costs, from Iraq, Lebanon and Syria to Iran, Yemen and Libya.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Ryukyu Islands"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Ryukyu Islands: A New History from the Stone Age to the Present by Gregory Smits.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first comprehensive history of the Ryukyu Islands region in English.

The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands’ history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region’s changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this fascinating area, emphasizing the diversity of influences from China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped it. Smits begins by tracing the islands’ early history from the time of the oldest extant human remains, through massive inflows of settlers from Japan, until the emergence of a centralized state in the sixteenth century. He then traces the development of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, examining its major cultural formations and the interplay of local and external influences driving its evolution. Finally, Smits ushers readers to the modern era, from the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 through World War II, the era of American military control, and on to the present. He concludes with their present-day status as a tourist destination affected by ongoing geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges. Synthesizing decades of research, this book is an indispensable, comprehensive guide to the islands’ history for scholars and nonspecialists alike.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Enduring Hostility"

New from Stanford University Press: Enduring Hostility: The Making of America's Iran Policy by Dalia Dassa Kaye.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely and rigorous analysis of a half-century of American policymakers' shifting perceptions of Iran, and how they have driven US-Iran relations. US–Iran hostility has endured for longer than the Cold War. Momentous geopolitical shifts, changing leaderships, and evolving domestic priorities have not fundamentally altered this antagonistic relationship. Standard explanations pin the blame for this enduring hostility on Iran and its leaders' revolutionary ideology and policies at odds with the United States and the West. While Iran bears significant blame for a deeply adversarial relationship—the country often engages in dangerous and repressive activities—this book demonstrates that "it's them, not us" accounts cannot alone explain America's posture toward this complicated but critically important country. Drawing on original interviews with former government officials, oral histories, memoirs, congressional hearings, archival material, and the author's own participation in dozens of Iran-related track two meetings, Dalia Dassa Kaye deftly explores how America's Iran policy is made, the people who make it, and the underlying ideas and perceptions that inform it. Dassa Kaye looks back at US policy toward Iran over the past four decades to help us look ahead, offering wider lessons for understanding American foreign policymaking and providing critical insights at a pivotal time of heightened military tensions in and around the Middle East.

Visit Dalia Dassa Kaye's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Precarious Balance"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865 by Antwain K. Hunter.

About the book, from the publisher:

Spanning the 1720s through the end of the Civil War, this book explores how free and enslaved Black North Carolinians accessed, possessed, and used firearms—both legal and otherwise—and how the state and white people responded. North Carolinians, whether free or enslaved, Black or white, had different stakes on the issue, all of which impacted the reality of Black people’s gun use.

Antwain K. Hunter reveals that armed Black people used firearms for a wide range of purposes: They hunted to feed their families and communities, guarded property, protected crops, and defended maroon communities from outsiders. Further, they resisted the institution of slavery and used guns both against white people and within their own community. Competing views of Black people’s firearm use created social, political, and legal points of contention for different demographics within North Carolina and left the general assembly and white civilians struggling to harness Black people’s armed labor for white people’s benefit. A Precarious Balance challenges readers to rethink how they understand race and firearms in the American past.

--Marshal Zeringue