"The Camphor War"

New from Columbia University Press: The Camphor War: Taiwan in the Age of Imperial Realignments by Ronald C. Po.

About the book, from the publisher:

The First Opium War is remembered as the defining conflict between Britain and China in the nineteenth century. In stark contrast, the Camphor War of 1868 has faded into obscurity. Lasting for only a few weeks, the clash arose from British interests in breaking the Qing monopoly over the lucrative trade in camphor, which was cultivated in Taiwan and widely used for medicinal purposes. Despite its small scale, the war brought to light shifting dynamics in China and Taiwan’s engagement with the world.

Examining this little-known conflict, Ronald C. Po shows how the Qing and British empires evolved during a period of imperial reconfigurations and border realignments. The Qing adopted more active approaches to controlling their frontiers, regulating trade, and responding to foreign aggression. Situating the war in the early decades of the Self-Strengthening Movement, Po demonstrates how the Qing state reshaped Taiwan from a frontier into a political landscape of negotiation, as well as how camphor became both an object of intense commercial interest and a means for power contests. By centering on this seemingly peripheral war, the book shifts focus from grand confrontations to the subtler mechanisms through which empires adjusted, faltered, and realigned. Synthesizing maritime, commodity, environmental, and imperial history, The Camphor War complicates static notions of empire and reveals Taiwan’s importance in nineteenth-century East Asia.

Visit Ronald C. Po's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Autism Era"

New from Stanford University Press: The Autism Era: The Contentious Politics of a Diagnosis by Kristin Bumiller.

About the book, from the publisher:

The invention of autism as a medical category was viewed as a crucial step toward a new era of hope for children with disabilities. However, it has come to be a hindrance to scientific knowledge and advocacy for social inclusion. The Autism Era provides an account of the diminishing value of autism, whether as a diagnostic target for drug discovery, a category of special education eligibility, or as the basis of a neurodiverse identity.

The last few decades have seen rapidly increasing investment in scientific research and technological innovation related to autism spectrum disorder. Kristin Bumiller traces how autism science emerged amidst major changes to the medical profession, the shifting role of parenting, and the retrenchment of social welfare provisions. However, the advancement of autism science has yet to quell the uncertainty and conflict about autism's causes and treatment. Bumiller shows how scientists respond to the extraordinary challenges presented by autism's heterogeneity and deeply contested ideas about the diagnosis. In a close analysis of scientific research, she questions how the technologies of Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) thwart a more humane approach to both treatment and the use of animal modeling. Ultimately, she argues that the behavioralist definition of autism is an obstacle to furthering new understandings of disability which would prioritize the need for social inclusion and resources for care.

This clear-eyed account of how we've gotten to this point cuts through the noise of controversy that has always shrouded autism studies, in order to make a prediction: that this era of autism has come to an end. Against the backdrop of a still-growing infrastructure of this scientific project―in the form of research organizations, applied behavior analysis therapy centers, and advocacy groups―Bumiller points to a nascent reckoning with this project's failure. The Autism Era is a call for a new movement, that brings about more justice for the disabled through more equitable and expansive state support.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Distributing Health"

New from Oxford University Press: Distributing Health by Anders Herlitz.

About the book, from the publisher:

How should scarce health-related resources be distributed at the population level? How should society prioritize whose health needs should be met? These are questions all health systems must grapple with. In Distributing Health, Anders Herlitz introduces the most common normative approaches to this issue and outlines an original approach that builds on insights from both procedural and substantive approaches.

Procedural approaches focus on the process by which distributive decisions are made and put forward conditions that these processes should meet. Herlitz argues that these approaches are attractive because they reflect the idea that those affected by distributive decisions should have influence over them. However, these approaches cannot explain why certain decisions are bad, irrespective of how they have been made. Substantive approaches focus on the features of different alternatives and put forward principles which inform decision-makers of how to rank options. These approaches are attractive because they provide action-guidance. However, any plausible substantive approach must be pluralistic in the sense that several substantive, distributive principles are endorsed. Plausible substantive approaches run into comparability problems because the principles sometimes suggest conflicting rankings.

A hybrid approach would rely on elements from both procedural and substantive approaches. Herlitz suggests a hybrid approach that includes three substantive principles: health maximization, lifetime equality, and time-slice sufficiency. These principles will sometimes be fully action-guiding, but sometimes they will fail to be so. To complement the substantive principles when they fail to be action-guiding, a criterion of the second order should be invoked. This criterion should reflect the collective will of the affected people, which is expressed through a decision process that meets a set of procedural conditions.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Well-Rounded Life"

New from Princeton University Press: The Well-Rounded Life by Amy Berg.

About the book, from the publisher:

An engaging and enlightening book about why having many different pursuits can vastly improve our well-being

It’s good to be well-rounded. When you do a lot of different things, when you work on expanding your horizons, when you dive into the fascinating diversity of the world around you, your life will be a better one. Yet while many of us aspire to become well-rounded, this kind of life has rarely shown up in philosophical discussions of well-being. In The Well-Rounded Life, Amy Berg argues that well-rounded lives are often better, richer lives—more socially connected, happier, and more resilient.

Building on philosophical work on well-being and drawing from social science, history, art, and pop culture, The Well-Rounded Life shows why we should strive to be well-rounded—and how we can do it. In making her case, Berg shows why we don’t need to be afraid of being mediocre at things, even things we care deeply about; why it can be a bad idea to try to lead a life that will make a great story; and how we should navigate tradeoffs between the well-rounded life and other good things.

It may not be the only good life out there, but The Well-Rounded Life shows why embracing a variety of pursuits is one of the best ways to live.

Visit Amy Berg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Natural Risk"

New from Columbia University Press: Natural Risk: A History of Oil, Politics, and the Environment in West Texas by Sarah Stanford-McIntyre.

About the book, from the publisher:

The longest-running oil-producing region in Texas, the Permian Basin fueled the state’s transformation from agricultural backwater to extractive powerhouse in the middle of the twentieth century. During the same period, Texas was also a crucial outlier in a national trend that placed risk management and environmental safety in the hands of state regulators. This book shows how Permian Basin oil production reshaped Texas’s environment, economy, and political culture, with major consequences for American understandings of health, wealth, and the social safety net.

Sarah Stanford-McIntyre argues that the energy industry naturalized the risks of extractive capitalism, redefining what sorts and levels of danger were seen as acceptable. She traces how West Texas oil employers and employees―prospectors, bankers, roughnecks, drillers, contractors, and engineers―encountered and assessed the industry’s many overlapping risks, demonstrating why different groups prioritized immediate economic concerns over long-term public health or the environment. Energy workers and communities often saw environmental and health hazards as inherent and unavoidable, believing that risk could be managed on economic terms. For the industry, risk became a language for justifying deregulation, contamination, and neglect. Bringing together the political, environmental, and business history of West Texas with the lived experience of workers in the energy industries, Natural Risk reveals how Permian Basin oil transformed American capitalism.

Visit Sarah Stanford-McIntyre's website.

--Marshal Zerimgue

"Is Faith Feminine?"

New from Oxford University Press: Is Faith Feminine?: What Americans Really Think About Gender and Religion by Landon Schnabel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why are women often more religious when men dominate religious institutions? This paradox--men in the pulpit, women in the pews--and especially the idea that women are inherently more religious has long been treated as a universal fact. In Is Faith Feminine?, Landon Schnabel shows it's not.

Drawing on cross-national data and original surveys of thousands of Americans--including Muslim, Jewish, and secular oversamples--the book demonstrates that gender gaps vary dramatically across traditions and contexts. Women are more religious than men among Christians, but among Muslims and some other groups, the gap shrinks, disappears, or reverses entirely. To explain this variation, the book develops what Schnabel calls Gendered Incentives and Expectations (GIE) theory, a multilevel framework that distinguishes between individual faith and organized religion and specifies how gendered social and psychological incentives structure religious participation. As the book shows, individual faith and spirituality are often culturally coded as feminine and provide comfort, validation, and meaning, especially for structurally disadvantaged groups. Organized religion, by contrast, is typically masculine--coded, hierarchical, and dominated by men. Incentives and expectations shape who religion appeals to, who participates, and in what ways.

Tracing the political consequences of religion's gendered appeal and why many Americans are disengaging from religious institutions while maintaining personal faith and spirituality, Is Faith Feminine? offers a new account of religion, gender, and social change in the contemporary United States and beyond.

Visit Landon Schnabel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unrepayable Debt"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Unrepayable Debt: Law, Redress, Reconciliation, and the Unmaking of Empire by Yukiko Koga.

About the book, from the publisher:

What does it mean, and take, to repay the unrepayable?

Unrepayable Debt explores belated attempts to reckon with the savage plundering of labor and life under the Japanese empire. Located within global conversations on reparations for colonialism and slavery, and centered on slave labor lawsuits brought by Chinese victims seeking overdue justice in Japanese courts, Yukiko Koga traces a sea change in the legal sphere propelled by an unprecedented transnational redress movement. The lawsuits exposed not only the original violence but also a structure of transitional injustice etched onto the unmaking of the Japanese empire, which left victims silenced and unredressable for decades.

Challenging the idea of reckoning as a discrete event that brings closure through settlements, apology, or compensation, Koga’s ethnography details the slow and messy intergenerational work of reconciliation on the ground. The book shows how the re-pairing of severed relations, separated by lineages of victimhood and perpetration, lies at the core of repair. By bringing to the surface the prolonged and entangled processes of decolonization and deimperialization, Unrepayable Debt compels a rethinking of what redress, repair, and reconciliation mean, how they are practiced, and where accountability lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Pope Against Nuremberg"

New from NYU Press: The Pope Against Nuremberg: How the Vatican Helped Nazis Escape Postwar Justice by Gerald J. Steinacher.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Vatican officials aided Nazi war criminals and undermined Allied justice after World War II

In the aftermath of World War II, the Nuremberg Trials promised a new era of international justice, holding Nazi leaders to account for their crimes. Yet beyond the courtroom, a very different struggle was unfolding, one that played out behind the walls of the Vatican.

Provocative and meticulously researched, The Pope Against Nuremberg uncovers how the Vatican shielded war criminals, challenged the principles of postwar justice, and facilitated ratline networks in which Church leaders played a central role in spiriting perpetrators to safety―what its defenders called Christian mercy. Drawing on newly opened Vatican archives, as well as government and intelligence records from Europe and the Americas, Gerald J. Steinacher reveals a campaign that would ultimately benefit some of the most notorious Nazi perpetrators by helping them avoid prosecution.

From papal diplomats to individual bishops, Church figures petitioned the U.S. president and other Allied leaders, submitted statements for the defense, coordinated public relations campaigns, resisted extraditions, and, in some cases, sheltered Nazi war criminals on Church property. Meanwhile, Pope Pius XII, long criticized for his alleged public silence during the Holocaust, urged the world to forgive Germany. Steinacher places these actions within the turbulent politics of early Cold War Europe, when fear of communism increasingly outweighed the pursuit of accountability for mass crimes. Combining groundbreaking research and compelling storytelling, The Pope Against Nuremberg provides new answers to decades-old questions about the role and motivations of church officials in the networks that helped Nazis escape postwar justice.

Visit Gerald J. Steinacher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Seneca Village"

New from Cornell University Press: Seneca Village: A Story of Black Freedom and Manhattan Real Estate by Alexander Manevitz.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Seneca Village, Alexander Manevitz showcases the ideas of freedom that underpinned this remarkable community, built in upper Manhattan with the intent to foster Black social, economic, and political self-determination. Between 1825 and 1853, free African Americans bought land and built an innovative settlement. Then, through the 1850s, New York City forcibly evicted the residents, seized the land, and destroyed the buildings, burying this thriving neighborhood under the landscape of the new Central Park.

In this most in-depth investigation to date of Seneca Village, Manevitz reconstructs the essential history of the community from the overlooked traces they left behind, focusing on the interconnected lives of Seneca Villagers and the daily work of liberation. Decades before the Civil War and Reconstruction, they honed a vision of Black freedom on their own terms, fighting to create space for themselves in a country that promised liberty for all but denied it to many.

Visit Alexander Manevitz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Help!: The Ethics of Rescue"

New from Oxford University Press: Help!: The Ethics of Rescue by Helen Frowe.

About the book, from the publisher:

Most people agree that we can have duties to prevent harm to others. But there is significant disagreement about what these duties demand of us and what they permit others to do to us. In Help! The Ethics of Rescue, Helen Frowe develops an account of the theoretical underpinnings of the duty to rescue. She rejects the influential view that the limits of the duty to rescue are explained by agent-relative prerogatives to care more about our own interests than the interests of others. In its place, she defends an agent-neutral account of the duty to rescue, grounded in the limits of the duty to use ourselves as a means for the benefit of others. Her account provides a unified, non-consequentialist account of the duty to rescue that tightly connects our right to refrain from saving to the wrongness of others forcing us to save. Frowe explores the implications of this agent-neutral account for a number of key debates in the ethics of rescue, such as the duty to act on lesser-evil justifications for harming, the moral significance of property rights over harm-preventing resources, and the permissibility of forming agreements to save. She also considers its implications for applied aspects of the duty to rescue, including the ethics of abortion, the ethics of war, and duties to refugees.

Visit Helen Frowe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"King Abdullah and the Saudi Arabian National Guard"

New from Stanford University Press: King Abdullah and the Saudi Arabian National Guard: Tribes and Networks in Modern Saudi Arabia by Joshua Teitelbaum.

About the book, from the publisher:

Abdullah bin 'Abd al-'Aziz (1924–2015) was an unlikely contender for the Saudi throne. His kinship ties within the royal family were weak. Yet he rose to power, finally becoming king in 2005. His main instrument was the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), which he took over in 1963, transforming it into a personal power base and a cornerstone of regime security. This book offers the first comprehensive history of SANG, using Abdullah's little-studied trajectory to illuminate how power functions in Saudi Arabia.

Tracing SANG's evolution from tribal roots to the present, Joshua Teitelbaum explores the enduring role of tribal values―especially kinship―in shaping Saudi society and the modern state. He shows how Abdullah compensated for his weak lineage through patronage and kickback schemes. Drawing on newly declassified archival documents and Arabic-language sources, Teitelbaum also uncovers rival royal kinship networks and an American intelligence-business network that challenged Abdullah and SANG. The narrative concludes with Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, whose rule continues this kinship-based network system with a new network of his own. Ultimately, this book reveals how kinship and patronage underpin Saudi governance, providing key insight into one of the world's most opaque and strategically vital monarchies.

Visit Joshua Teitelbaum's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Red Dirt"

New from Princeton University Press: Red Dirt: Class and the Contestations of Indigeneity in Hawaiʻi and Beyond by Ikaika Ramones.

About the book, from the publisher:

How material conditions and social contradictions remake indigeneity

Indigenous studies struggles to analyze class, yet class reshapes the cultural, political, and economic terrain of indigeneity. In Red Dirt, Ikaika Ramones goes beyond the usual conceptual frameworks of resistance and domination to explore the political-economic basis for Native Hawaiian social reproduction and revitalization. By doing so, he casts indigeneity as a contested process rather than reification, encompassing both grassroots revitalization efforts and large, multibillion-dollar Native organizations.

Ramones offers a class analysis that shifts the theorization of indigeneity away from the metaphysical and idealist methodologies of the academy to trace social contradictions and material conditions instead. He counters the notion of Native culture as a coherent given, disentangling different strains of “Native Hawaiian culture”—an elite strain that depoliticizes and buttresses the status quo and grassroots strains that politicize and produce critical consciousness. Amid movements of cultural revitalization, he shows how histories of racialized eugenics rearticulate into a form of “class assimilation.” By examining organizations that support, shape, and constrain Native Hawaiians, Ramones shows how actors appropriate, protect, or rearticulate economic and social relations within or against capitalism. While mired in capitalism and settler colonialism, he argues, Indigenous actors walk shifting lines of subversion and complicity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fresh from the Factory"

New from Oxford University Press: Fresh from the Factory: Nature and the Roots of the Industrial Food Supply by Michael S. Kideckel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Debates about "natural food" have long stood in for broader confrontations about science, health, and power. These persistent tensions in American society can be illuminated by exploring the origins of a beloved consumer product: breakfast cereal.

Shredded Wheat, Corn Flakes, and Grape-Nuts emerged in the 1890s with eye-catching packaging that promised clean, healthy, and natural contents. Producers of these and other early packaged foods developed marketing campaigns that reframed industrial food as the key to reforming capitalism's excesses. In so doing, cereal manufacturers became some of the world's largest food processors and, at the same time, among the nation's most prominent nature writers, health authorities, and social reformers.

Fresh from the Factory shows that American consumption habits and beliefs about nature developed together. Cereal manufacturers gained influence by appealing to a widespread desire among a largely female consumer base for cleanliness, purity, and simplicity in feeding their families. These companies took advantage of and helped promote new ways of making, advertising, selling, and distributing food--and did so in the name of the unadulterated goodness of nature. In an era of little public health regulation, hazy ideas about scientific authority, and public uncertainty about whom to trust, cereal producers promised to deliver the divine powers of nature straight from the factory floor.

Visit Michael S. Kideckel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This Little World"

New from Yale University Press: This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England by Nandini Das.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold new history of Tudor and Stuart England told not through its monarchs but through the people crossing its borders: merchants and migrants, sailors and spies, pilgrims and exiles

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forged a powerful image of England―Shakespeare’s “scepter’d isle,” proud and apart, defined by royal spectacle and myth. Beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, however, lies a more complex and connected reality.

England at this time was far from insular. Travelling in and out of the country were Venetian glassmakers with English wives, African innkeepers, and Native American envoys. There were people like the Flemish artist Levina Teerlinc, probably the only painter to be employed by four English monarchs. There was William Adams, a Kentish navigator who became Japan’s first English samurai. And there was Elizabeth Key, daughter of an enslaved mother in the colony of Virginia, who battled in the courts for herself and her son.

Drawing on extensive archival research, attentive to the textures of daily life yet alive to the sweep of history, Nandini Das offers a startlingly new, globally resonant vision of England’s past and what it meant to be English. It is a story of a nation in the making―on the cusp of empire―told through the traces of those often written out of it. Yet in reframing England’s story within a wider world, it challenges us to rethink some of our most fundamental ideas: about nationhood, about identity, and, above all, about belonging.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Gator!"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Gator!: The Making of America’s Iconic Reptile, from First Encounters to Florida Man by Mark V. Barrow Jr.

About the book, from the publisher:

What this intriguing―and unsettling―apex predator reveals about Americans’ attempts to control and connect with the natural world.

Both a flesh-and-blood critter and the stuff of legend, the alligator inspires as much awe as it does fear. While this apex predator survives mainly on fish, birds, snakes, turtles, and small mammals, it will consume almost anything, including pets, livestock, and―in rare cases―humans. Though dreaded as a man-eater, the alligator has also been cast as a lucrative commodity, a popular roadside attraction, a prized hunting trophy, and even an unlikely household pet.

Gator! tells the riveting story of this iconic predator. Historian Mark V. Barrow, Jr.―a native of Florida, a state famous for its alligators―traces the reptile’s ancient lineage from the age of the dinosaurs to its current status as a cherished mascot and regional icon. He explores its role as a surrogate species, offering vital clues about the health of ecosystems, as well as its profound cultural weight as a totem for Indigenous communities, a mythical sewer-dweller in New York lore, and a disturbing tool of racial oppression used to dehumanize African Americans. Once over-hunted, the alligator has long been celebrated as a triumph of the federal Endangered Species Act. Barrow delves into the nuances of this comeback, one that offers both a cautionary tale of market-driven exploitation and a conservation success story.

An entertaining history of one of North America’s most charismatic animals, Gator! explores how this reptile became a Florida emblem and a national enigma, transforming humans and alligators in the process.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Garbage Economy"

New from Oxford University Press: The Garbage Economy: Casteing Capitalism and the Persistence of Informal Recycling in Delhi by Dana Kornberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the race to become "world-class," the city of Delhi, India, turned to corporate partnerships and incineration technologies that promised to solve the city's garbage problem. However, these efforts exposed an uncomfortable reality: the city's drive toward modernization collided with an informal recycling economy that was more sustainable and deeply rooted. This persistence was not simply a policy failure; it was the outcome of relations between hundreds of thousands of oppressed-caste Dalit and Muslim workers and the dominant-caste, middle-class households they serve.

Based on over a decade of fieldwork, The Garbage Economy blends ethnographic precision with theoretical imagination. It traces the postcolonial remaking of Delhi's solid waste programs and follows transactions in garbage, recyclables, and money from neighborhood collection routes to recycling commodity chains. Dana Kornberg shows how laboring across the "untouchability line" not only perpetuates casteist exploitation but also maintains the city's only provision for recycling. Informal collectors transform stigmatized waste into recyclable commodities-identifying plastics, paper, and metal by feel and sound for recycling-simultaneously sustaining precarious livelihoods and reinforcing structural inequalities.

By introducing concepts such as stigma shifting, alchemization, practical legitimation, and symbolic debt in The Garbage Economy, Dana Kornberg reveals the pathways through which caste articulates with capital, regulating who is allowed to accumulate wealth and who is confined to survival at the margins. These processes-which Kornberg calls the "casteing" of capitalism-produce intersectional inequalities which continue to shape urban life.

Visit Dana Kornberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dreams of Small Countries"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Dreams of Small Countries: How Californios, Land Conflicts, and Race Shaped the Golden State by Camille Suárez.

About the book, from the publisher:

Prior to US conquest, a group of elite, mixed-race Mexicans called Californios nurtured the dream of patria chica (“small homeland”) in what is now the state of California. Californios' settler dreams of wealth and privilege depended upon controlling Indigenous land and labor, but after Anglo settlers and the US Army arrived, Californios struggled to hold onto their own way of life.

Camille Suárez shows that rather than challenge the new regime, elite Californios allied with both the US Army and Anglo settlers, whom they viewed as racial counterparts, to ensure that their dream survived. Despite their differences, Californio and Anglo settlers initially worked together to subjugate Indigenous peoples and exclude non-white residents. However, Californios failed to see that their own lands and power stood in the way of the white settler state. Over time, the legal regime Californios helped shape undermined their own political power, whiteness, and claims to the land. By centering Californios as key political actors from the beginning of the US-Mexico War through the Civil War and Reconstruction, Dreams of Small Countries reexamines the origins of California statehood and explains how California became a white settler state.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A World We Share"

New from Yale University Press: A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold rethinking of politics through Hannah Arendt’s life and thought, arguing that friendship―not truth―is the fragile but necessary foundation of democratic life

A World We Share sounds the warning that politics cannot be saved by truth alone. Against a tradition that elevates truth above all else, Roger Berkowitz draws on the life and thought of Hannah Arendt to argue that a politics governed by an objective ideal of truth becomes cruel, coercive, and ultimately anti-political. Friendship―grounded in dialogue, respect, and plurality―offers a more human political bond.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was known to possess a “genius for friendship.” A Jew in Nazi Germany, an exile in Paris and New York, and an uncompromising critic of postwar orthodoxies, she survived and flourished through friendships that were intellectually intense, complicated, and morally demanding. Her tribe of outsiders included thinkers as disparate as Karl Jaspers, Hans Jonas, Mary McCarthy, Gershom Scholem, Heinrich Blücher, and Martin Heidegger.

This book explores how these friendships shaped Arendt’s political thinking. Berkowitz weaves Arendt’s life, thought, and friendships into a powerful meditation on our present moment. In an age of mass loneliness, ideological certainty, and civic breakdown, A World We Share connects democracy not to consensus or moral purity but to our capacity to maintain relationships with others we do not agree with―and cannot fully understand. Berkowitz argues that our political crisis is actually founded in a crisis of friendship. Only by nurturing private and also public friendships can we reimagine a truly democratic politics.

Visit Roger Berkowitz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Marketing Radicalism"

New from Princeton University Press: Marketing Radicalism: The Cultural Production of Far-Right Populism in Contemporary Hungary by Virág Molnár.

About the book, from the publisher:

The commodification and marketing of nationalism in a populist-governed country

Most accounts of populist politics revolve around political parties, electoral politics, eroding democratic institutions, media, and political propaganda. In Marketing Radicalism, Virág Molnár examines instead populism as a cultural process—one that reshapes cultural identities and meanings of cultural citizenship. Looking at such domains as fashion, publishing, and tourism, Molnár shows how identity politics, culture wars, culture industries, consumer markets, and popular culture contribute to the rise of far-right populism. The marketing of nationalism creates powerful narratives that reimagine the nation as a populist fantasyland, and these narratives are used by far-right governments in their efforts to topple liberal norms.

Hungary under Viktor Orbán has provided an ideological blueprint for far-right populist politicians—and a cautionary tale for liberal democracies. Using Hungary’s commodification of nationalism as a case study, Molnár explores the ways that cultural producers relied on consumer markets to promote traditionalism through folk-revivalist fashion; weaponized the public shredding of a children’s book to disenfranchise LGBTQ+ communities; used tourism to neighboring Transylvania to envision a “Greater Hungary” that spilled over national borders; and packaged a mythic Orientalism in the form of horseback archery. Molnár’s account offers important lessons on the mainstreaming of right-wing popular culture, the importance of markets in circulating and amplifying far-right identity narratives, and the political mobilization of cultural traditions for geopolitical reorientation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Saint of the Republic"

New from Oxford University Press: Saint of the Republic: The American Myth of Martin Luther by Samuel L. Young.

About the book, from the publisher:

Saint of the Republic explores the reception of Martin Luther in American history and culture from the colonial period to the present. As the first Protestant, Luther is among the most significant religious figures in the history of the world. After the American Revolution, Luther came to embody the ideals of the United States, especially individual rights, religious liberty, and freedom of conscience.

Identifying the reformer with these civic virtues meant that many who would find the particulars of Luther's theology distasteful-including American Jews, freethinkers, and atheists-could nonetheless praise him as a proto-American, his bold stand for freedom against the perceived tyranny of the Roman Church anticipating America's divine role in the expansion of liberty. Advocates for temperance, abolitionism, woman's rights, white supremacy, nativism, racial justice, gay rights, as well as partisans for every political party could all look to Luther as an inspiration. Critics of Luther challenged this interpretation of the reformer by drawing attention to un-American elements of his life, including his anti-Semitism, misogyny, political quietism, and violence toward opponents. Nevertheless, the American Luther myth has endured through the present.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beer Ghosts"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grew Them by Jennifer A. Jordan.

About the book, from the publisher:

The little-known story of the young women who played a vital role in the rise of America’s great breweries.

Water, malt, yeast, and hops: these are essential ingredients of beer. Hops, specifically, play an outsized role in determining its flavor and aroma. In Beer Ghosts, Jennifer Jordan takes us back to a brief but pivotal moment in the nineteenth century when Wisconsin produced much of the hops grown in the United States. Yet those long-ago hops are not the only ghosts in Jordan’s story. Haunting the pages of this book are the young women whose work at harvest time was key to the rise of the American beer industry.

Until the early twentieth century, the work of picking hops was a time-consuming process that could only be done by hand, one cone at a time. In nineteenth-century Wisconsin, that work was performed almost exclusively by women and girls, who traveled to hop farms in droves as summer came to a close and the harvest began. At the height of the hop boom in the 1860s, farmers and their families laid out beds and prepared food for tens of thousands of seasonal laborers, and hosted parties and dances well into the night. Despite the scale of Wisconsin’s hop boom (and subsequent crash), the industry left behind little trace aside from local records and archives. And it is that barely discernible trace that lures Jordan to dig deeper.

Jordan’s vivid prose takes us back to this era by drawing on a rich trove of archival sources, from the thousands of hop farmers in the agricultural census to the extraordinary diary of a single hop picker, a young woman named Ella. The history of beer is incomplete without the history of Ella and the others who labored in the hop fields and in the houses that hosted them. In this book, Jordan gives life and voice to these beer ghosts who call to us from the past, showing the rich connections between a nation’s beer and the lives that made it possible.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Social Media Tribes"

New from the University of Texas Press: Social Media Tribes: Jordan's Bedouin and the Margins of the State by Geoffrey F. Hughes.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of the uses of social media in Jordan through the experiences of Bedouin tribespeople.

It has become something of a cliché to say that social media is making us tribal. But what do self-styled tribespeople themselves think about social media, and how might they help us better understand the role of the internet in our current political moment? Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork among Bedouin in Jordan, Social Media Tribes underscores the varied but broadly intelligible ways in which distinctive groups domesticate social media to suit their needs.

Organized around key concepts in Bedouin life (including tribalism, envy, and mercy), Social Media Tribes moves between Facebook-mediated tribal truces, upstart online media platforms, palatial urban villas where self-appointed sheikhs dispense justice, and street clashes organized over WhatsApp in rural communities ignored by state development projects. A meticulous researcher and insightful participant-observer, Geoffrey Hughes reframes social media as part of a global renegotiation of the state-society divide that both preceded the emergence of social media platforms and, in turn, feeds off of them. In this telling, the internet represents a new frontier that, like older frontiers, heralds both novel freedoms and novel forms of social control.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cops and Robbers"

New from NYU Press: Cops and Robbers: What Popular Culture Teaches Kids About Crime and Punishment by Liam Kennedy.

About the book, from the publisher:

How children’s books, tv shows, cartoons, and films often reproduce stereotypes about “good guys” and “bad guys” in terms of crime, policing, and the role of the criminal justice system in societyLiam Kennedy

In Cops and Robbers, Liam Kennedy examines children's popular culture to provide an understanding of how ideas about crime and the criminal justice system are produced and challenged. Based on an analysis of over 220 books, 12 films, and hundreds of television episodes/short videos geared toward children, Cops and Robbers considers the ideological impacts of children’s crime media messaging about what counts as a crime, the causes of crime, the roles and responsibilities of cops and other crime-fighters, as well as the nature and boundaries of justice.

Kennedy demonstrates how kids’ pop culture works to sustain the status quo and inhibits our ability to imagine alternatives to policing and prisons. He argues that children's crime media teaches them that it is correct to criminalize behaviors designated as threats to the capitalist social order, that the perpetrators of these acts are bad or even evil, unworthy of our sympathy, and usually incapable of change. Further, police and crime-fighters are shown to solve a wide array of community problems, produce peace and happiness, and require endless resources to preserve the social order and quell dissent. Finally, he finds that forced labor and incarceration are routinely framed as inevitable consequences – rather than policy decisions – for bad people who have made supposedly bad choices. Ultimately, Cops and Robbers will encourage social scientists, educators, and parents/guardians to think more critically about how children's crime media shapes ideas about crime, cops, and justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Theories of Emancipation"

New from Stanford University Press: Theories of Emancipation: Sociology and Socialism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Aaron Major.

About the book, from the publisher:

Modern sociology and modern socialism were born at the same time and developed in conversation with each other ― a link that is obvious in the work of Marx, but also visible in that of Durkheim, Weber, and Du Bois, among others. However, the extent of this overlap is yet to be fully realized. Theories of Emancipation: Sociology and Socialism at the turn of the Twentieth Century uncovers this relationship to argue that the concepts, questions, and theories that are foundational to the discipline emerged in conversation with, and in reaction to, the political and intellectual movements of the turn of the twentieth century socialist left.

Aaron Major argues that paying attention to the early influence of socialism on the discipline opens a new pathway for advancing central debates around personhood and agency. This book places canonical texts within their broader political and intellectual context, and in so doing offers novel insight into some of the discipline's most pressing concerns. A reimagining of sociology's history also informs current conversations about its future trajectory by reasserting its aspirations to higher, moral ends. Theories of Emancipation recovers a relationship between social science and human emancipation that has largely been displaced or forgotten.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Good, the Bad, and the Feasible"

New from Oxford University Press: The Good, the Bad, and the Feasible: Knowledge and Reasonable Belief by Maria Lasonen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Feasibilism urges manifesting the best feasible dispositions: the most success-conducive ways of forming and retaining doxastic states, as well as choosing and acting, that are available to beings like us. The first part of The Good, the Bad, and the Feasible presents case studies showing how epistemological implementations of feasibilism can advance long-standing debates in epistemology, including the New Evil Demon Problem, puzzles involving higher-order evidence and defeat, and challenges facing broadly consequentialist approaches. Maria Lasonen argues that a knowledge-centric implementation of feasibilism provides the most promising normative theory in epistemology: simple, elegant, metaphysically respectable, and explanatorily powerful.

The second part of the book moves from epistemology to a more systematic defense of feasibilism. Just as in the epistemic domain, in the moral domain we are confronted with problems of luck and limitation. For instance, given any plausible standard of moral rightness, in some situations it is only possible to do the right thing by luck. Again, we need a normative standard more attuned to our limitations. Lasonen argues that applying the feasibilist framework to the moral domain yields interesting and surprising results, such as it being possible to be blameworthy for action that is morally right. Feasibilism thus unifies different normative domains within a single, non-ideal framework, offering standards attuned to human limitations but tied to valuable normative successes.

Visit Maria Lasonen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"How to Win a Culture War"

New from University of Chicago Press: How to Win a Culture War: LGBTQ+ Social Change Through Pop Culture by Lisa M. Stulberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

How elite athletes and entertainment industry movers and shakers work to win the culture war for LGBTQ+ social justice.

The unquestionable runaway television hit of late 2025 was Crave/HBO Max’s Heated Rivalry, a show that tells the love story of two queer ice hockey players. This show―and the wider social context around it―would have been unthinkable without the courageous writing, art, and advocacy of previous generations of LGBTQ+ people and their allies in the entertainment industry. In How to Win a Culture War, sociologist Lisa M. Stulberg argues that, despite substantial barriers, past and current creatives and athletes are changing American culture through their contributions to arts, sports, and politics.

Stulberg conducted in-depth interviews with 170 culture workers―including television, film, and theater actors and creators; musicians; elite athletes; and activists over the span of 14 years. These include stars such as Will & Grace's Eric McCormack, Orange Is the New Black’s Lea DeLaria, Olympic diver Greg Louganis, and several former NFL players, as well as the TV and movie writers, producers, and directors behind some of pop culture’s boldest moves. These culture makers take six primary steps toward LGBTQ+ social change: they become visible, use available platforms, change their workplaces, overachieve, become normal, and stay queer. In this work, they are opening up the culture, changing hearts and minds, and building community, even amid a fresh round of ruthless political attacks on LGBTQ+ people.

Providing rich behind-the-scenes insight and cultural material, Stulberg outlines an urgently needed playbook for how to win a culture war.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Die Your Own Death"

New from Princeton University Press: Die Your Own Death: Walt Whitman’s Existential Democracy by Jack Turner.

About the book, from the publisher:

Humans fantasize about immortality. Billionaires dabble in cryonics, politicians build monuments to themselves, and writers donate their papers to libraries. In Die Your Own Death, Jack Turner argues that the quest for immortality—literal or symbolic—is politically destructive. He does so through a meditation on the work of Walt Whitman. Whitman held that democracy prepares individuals to “die their own deaths”—free of fear, resentment, and illusion. In Whitman’s “existential democracy,” accepting death strengthens freedom and equality. And yet, Turner finds, Whitman only half succeeded in forging a democratic philosophy of death. As Whitman’s thought evolved in response to changing ideas about nation, race, and empire, he encouraged citizens to seek immortality through racial imperialism—the expansion of white empire from North America to the Pacific Islands—as a monument to American greatness.

Turner explores the poetics of death in Leaves of Grass and its relationship to Whitman’s democratic theory (“I exist as I am, that is enough”). Through a close analysis of Drum-Taps and Memoranda During the War, Turner shows that Whitman sought to redeem the mass slaughter of the Civil War by cloaking it in poetic and national glory. And in Whitman’s greatest prose work, Democratic Vistas, Turner argues, Whitman envisioned an antidemocratic national immortalism that ignored Native sovereignty and Black equality. Turner exposes the dark side of Whitman’s philosophy of death, but he also reveals how that philosophy can still be a resource in the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reckoning with Racial Capitalism"

New from Columbia University Press: Reckoning with Racial Capitalism: Settler Colonialism, Anti-Blackness, and Left Critique Beyond Neoliberalism by Siddhant Issar.

About the book, from the publisher:

In recent years, activists and scholars have increasingly turned to the notion of racial capitalism to examine a range of topics, from the role of slavery in the development of the modern economy to the uneven effects of capitalism on nonwhite populations. Yet the meaning, scope, and political implications of this concept are deeply contested. Why has this idea provoked fierce debate? What can critical theory learn from engaging with the framework of racial capitalism and its use by social movements? How might reworking this framework push left politics and thinking to better understand our historical moment?

This book develops a critical theory of racial capitalism and argues that it is indispensable to understanding and contesting the neoliberal present. Challenging deracialized left critiques of neoliberalism, Siddhant Issar reconfigures the paradigm of racial capitalism to illuminate the relationships among anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and capital accumulation. He historicizes the neoliberal era, examining American capitalism’s changing yet durable long-term entanglements with gendered logics of racial and colonial domination. Bringing together political theory, Black studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and critical political economy with the knowledge production of social movements, Reckoning with Racial Capitalism calls for a reorientation of left politics beyond zero-sum framings of antiracist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist struggles.

Visit Siddhant Issar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mastering the Body"

New from Cornell University Press: Mastering the Body: Daily Life, Inequality, and Slavery in Roman Homes and Society by F. Mira Green.

About the book, from the publisher:

Mastering the Body offers an innovative exploration of the intimate, bodily routines that shaped―and were shaped by―Roman society. From kitchens to chamber pots, F. Mira Green uncovers how eating, digesting, and excreting were not just biological necessities but deeply embedded social practices that reinforced hierarchies and power structures in Roman households.

Drawing on archaeological evidence and material culture from Pompeii and Herculaneum and literary works from the Latin authors Seneca, Juvenal, and Apuleius, Mastering the Body reveals how elite Roman men used dietary habits and domestic labor to assert status and mastery. Domestic tools and spaces―designed for bodily care―encoded nonverbal messages of dominance and submission, and when considered with theories of embodiment, materiality, and sensory experience, illustrate the feedback loops between daily routines and the perpetuation of slavery and inequality. Ultimately, Mastering the Body is an invitation to rethink the role of the digesting body in ancient history by asking not only what digestion has to do with Roman society, but also how the body's most basic functions were central to its social order.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rival Civilisations"

New from Princeton University Press: Rival Civilisations: The Rise of Japan and Visions of World Order in Britain by Chika Tonooka.

About the book, from the publisher:

How British intellectuals of the twentieth century reckoned with the emergence of an Asian power

Most historians of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe point to the persistence of racialised and hierarchical views of non-Europeans as “uncivilised.” Yet these accounts overlook the profound intellectual impact of what contemporaries called the “awakening of Asia.” In Rival Civilisations, Chika Tonooka shows how the rise of Japan after 1905 compelled British intellectuals to rethink fundamental questions about world order and human difference. Juxtaposing Japanese and British sources, Tonooka offers an innovative history of British Eurocentrism—its ebbs and flows and emergent pluralist alternatives—through the lens of British debates on Japan.

Tonooka describes how British intellectuals and commentators grappled with such issues as whether civilisation was singular or plural; whether the civilising mission in Asia might be more successfully undertaken as the “yellow man’s burden”; whether non-Christians could be moral; and whether a world converging along Western lines was likely and even desirable. Even at the Empire’s peak, British thinkers began to grasp that Britain could no longer take its civilisational preeminence for granted. But Tonooka also considers what these debates on Japan missed, arguing that British civilisational discourse consistently overlooked what she demonstrates to be the paradoxical nature of global modernity. As a result, these British blind spots repeatedly foreclosed anticipations of critical world political challenges that lay ahead. Her original and rigorous analysis will enable readers to identify analogous blind spots over the rise of China and its consequences for the global order.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Return from the Soviet Union to Franco's Spain during the Cold War"

New from Oxford University Press: The Return from the Soviet Union to Franco's Spain during the Cold War by Glennys Young.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book tells the story of how and why Spaniards who had been catapulted to the USSR by the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Second World War came home. It examines the repatriation, mainly during the Cold War, of Spaniards in the USSR--nearly three thousand children evacuated there during the Spanish Civil War (and their caretakers), communists in exile, Republican aviators and sailors, and prisoners of war who had been soldiers and officers in the 'Blue Division' (the 250th Infantry Division of the Nazi Wehrmacht) that fought against the USSR.

In the post-war years, as the Cold War escalated, the repatriation of this politically, socially, and culturally diverse contingent of Spaniards mattered not just in Spain and the Soviet Union, but to people around the world. Yet there were formidable obstacles to repatriation, among them that Spain and the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations.

For the first time, Glennys Young reveals the behind-the-scenes negotiations between Spain and the Soviet Union that allowed thousands of Spaniards to set foot on Spanish soil during the first full decade of the Cold War. Using archival records from various countries, and incorporating interviews with the child evacuees, the book demonstrates the unrecognized political, social, cultural, and personal consequences of the repatriation of Spanish nationals, chiefly from 1954-1960, and the return of some of them to the Soviet Union during that period or shortly thereafter. It examines what repatriation as a political, social, psychological, and physical process meant for Spain during the Franco era, for the Soviet Union before and after Stalin's death, and for the Cold War. It also places the repatriation of Spaniards from the Soviet Union in comparison to the return of Italian, German, and Japanese prisoners of war and civilians. The narrative moves beyond state institutions to examine how individuals implemented, shaped, and circumvented state policy. In making repatriation possible, personal connections were vital, even between individuals and officials of hostile countries and opposing allegiances.

In so doing, the book offers a unique and valuable perspective on Cold War history: Soviet and Spanish politics and society influenced each other in unrecognized and unanticipated ways, even though the two countries did not have diplomatic relations.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Great Horse Flu"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America by Thomas G. Andrews.

About the book, from the publisher:

Seven years after the US Civil War and nearly 150 years before COVID, horses near Toronto began falling deathly ill with a sickness soon diagnosed as influenza. It took just a few weeks for this mutant flu variant to spread throughout southeastern Canada and into the northeastern US, infecting more than 90 percent of horses, donkeys, and mules wherever it struck. By the time the outbreak relented more than a year later, the Great Horse Flu of 1872 to 1873 had convulsed nearly every corner of North America and parts of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America.

This little-known scourge paralyzed the continent’s horse-powered economy at a critical political moment. As hundreds of thousands of animals died and entire cities ground to a halt, the outbreak exposed the fragility of industrial capitalism and the US’s deep dependence on animal labor. The Great Horse Flu triggered catastrophes such as the Great Boston Fire, unleashed seething social and racial conflict, stoked partisan divides, and set the stage for the Panic of 1873. In the hands of Bancroft Prize–winning historian Thomas G. Andrews, the gripping story of this animal plague becomes a revelatory history of American Reconstruction itself—its possibilities, limitations, and demise—while also illuminating the grave perils that novel viral variants pose to animals, humans, and the world we share.

Visit Thomas G. Andrews's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Remedying the Body"

New from Stanford University Press: Remedying the Body: Plastic Surgery and the Politics of Embodiment in Korea by So-Rim Lee.

About the book, from the publisher:

Plastic surgery has exploded in popularity in the recent decades, with South Korea emerging as a leader of the global beauty economy. In Remedying the Body, So-Rim Lee explores a cultural discourse of plastic surgery in South Korea through the feminist politics of care. Pulling together archival and cultural materials from the 1950s to the 2020s, Lee takes Korea as a paradigmatic example to reimagine coalitional ways of surviving a world governed by oppressive bodily norms.

Drawing from the Korean term koch'ida ("to cure or mend"), Lee uses "remedy" to name a broad spectrum of medical interventions performed to change the bodily appearance to arrive at a bodily norm. Remedy, however, is much more than medical treatment alone. This book contends that remedy is also a critical cultural ethos, a social performance of subjectivity, and a material practice of embodiment where state biopolitics and individual desire for belonging are inextricably entangled.

So-Rim Lee is the Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.

--Marshal Zeringue

"21st Century Yakuza"

New from Oxford University Press: 21st Century Yakuza: Death of Japanese Organised Crime by Martina Baradel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Once dominant and institutionalised, the Yakuza, one of Japan's best known criminal organisations, is now shrinking under the combined pressure of legal exclusion, social stigmatisation, and market regulation. Their membership has dropped from more than 80,000 in 2009 to fewer than 20,000 in 2025. Yet their disappearance is far from complete. Based on extensive fieldwork with active and former members, police officers, lawyers, and journalists, Martina Baradel examines how these organisations adapt to repression and explores what happens when a mafia begins to die.

21st Century Yakuza illuminates how Japan's model of regulatory saturation has dismantled the Yakuza's organisational capacity but left behind governance vacuums in markets the state struggles to control. This book demonstrates how the Yakuza persist through symbolic and residual forms of authority even as their formal power erodes, and how their decline has fragmented the criminal underworld. It traces the transformation of the Yakuza from territorially embedded brokers of governance to marginal actors in a more decentralised criminal landscape, including the delegation of trading activities to non-affiliated networks.

Through a sharp lens on criminal decline and adaptation, 21st Century Yakuza offers a compelling portrait of a fading underworld and the new forms of disorder emerging in its wake. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the shifting boundaries of law, authority, and illicit power in contemporary Japan.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unsettling Sovereignty"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Unsettling Sovereignty: International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and US Extraterritorial Power in Postwar Oceania by M. X. Mitchell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Marshall Islanders and their ancestral lands and waters played important roles in reshaping the United States’ offshore power, state sovereignty, and the international politics of decolonization.

In the years following World War II, the United States conducted sixty-seven devastating nuclear blasts in the Marshall Islands―yet the archipelago was never a US territory. Working through the United Nations, US diplomats engineered a new, one-of-a-kind extraterritorial status, called strategic trusteeship, to control the Native lands, waters, and peoples of the Marshall, Caroline, and Northern Mariana Islands. Strategic trusteeship permitted the US to militarize a vast expanse of Western Oceania. This novel and racialized legal form of international dependency was integral to US nuclear weapons detonations and damage in the region.

In Unsettling Sovereignty, M. X. Mitchell recounts this untold legal history, exploring how nuclear weapons changed claims and practices of sovereignty from the 1940s to the present. US nuclear blasting in the Marshall Islands troubled conventional renderings of state sovereignty under international law. The explosions, disastrous for Marshallese communities and their ancestral atolls, also caused hazardous nuclear fallout, which spread around the globe. Islanders and their allies turned to law, using legal wrangling over blasting and fallout to raise new questions about the location, time, and subjects of state violence in a period of decolonization; the intersections between race, Indigeneity, and wide-scale technogenic harm; and the pitfalls and unfulfilled promises of international law. Mitchell shows that the Marshallese people and their lands and waters were, and remain, central to redefining sovereignty in an era of boundless pollution and climate change.

Visit M. X. Mitchell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine"

New from NYU Press: Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Race, Labor, and Jewish Radicalism in Los Angeles by Caroline Luce.

About the book, from the publisher:

How a cohort of young Jewish radicals from the borderlands of Eastern Europe was critical in reshaping multiracial left-wing activism in southern California

Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine offers a novel account of Eastern European Jewish immigration and Yiddish public culture in Southern California. It traces the journeys of a cohort of young Jewish radicals as they moved from the borderlands of the Russian empire to the borderlands of the American southwest, exploring their engagement with well-known labor and left-wing movements in Los Angeles.

Much of the book is focused on Boyle Heights, a residential neighborhood east of the L.A. River once home to the highest concentration of Jews west of Chicago as well as to dozens of other diasporic communities, showing how the neighborhood’s particular ethno-racial diversity shaped Yiddish public culture. Rich with new details drawn from previously untranslated Yiddish sources, it examines new relationships and tensions that emerged as the Jewish radicals worked to forge multiracial coalitions in the workplace and the community, including with their Mexican, Asian, and African-American neighbors. It frames the community as a site of convergence, where multiple marginalized populations cultivated their own modes of belonging in overlapping ways, as well as of divergence, where residents’ experiences were differentiated by international and domestic political-economic developments.

The book decenters traditional narratives of Jewish immigration and acculturation focused on cities of the northeast, moving Jewish workers in the west from the margins to the center of American Jewish history. It showcases the variety of organizing practices through which Jewish radicals recreated Yiddish public culture in LA, offering a new perspective on the relational dynamics of race and place-making in the American west. Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine recovers the contributions of Eastern European Jewish radicals and trade unionists, demonstrating the ways in which immigrant workers shaped the city of Los Angeles.

Visit Caroline Luce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Street Knowledge"

New from Princeton University Press: Street Knowledge: The Hidden Ways Social Change Happens by Darien Pollock.

About the book, from the publisher:

A philosophical framework for resistance that connects Socrates to the street

Does social change happen “top down” or “bottom up”—brought about by those who hold power or by those who struggle against the powerful? In Street Knowledge, Darien Pollock argues that the most powerful change comes from the bottom up. “Street culture” supplies the creative activity that inspires not only political change but any kind of positive social change. Pollock argues that part of what prevents progressive social change is that people in power only legitimize and respond to ideas and arguments that are legible to them; marginal actors—those with street knowledge—are forced to develop ways of making ideas that are illegible to the broader public meaningful and useful. At its best, street knowledge can be used to address civic injustice, cultural hegemony, and economic exploitation.

Reading Plato, Marx, DuBois, Derrida, and others, Pollock discovered that academic philosophy has had a street orientation all along. The core qualities he associated with the “street disposition”—the psychological and spiritual capacity to resist an unjust social arrangement—were already represented in Plato’s Republic. Drawing on the late Congressman John Lewis’s idea of “good trouble” as well as Socrates, Pollock argues that “the street” should be understood as a universal feature of the human condition—with the potential to emerge anywhere at any time. Street knowledge, Pollock contends, lays the foundation for a radically new way of doing philosophy and achieving social justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Equal Subjection"

New from Oxford University Press: Equal Subjection: What Justice Demands of Political Leaders by Claudio López-Guerra.

About the book, from the publisher:

Politicians like to claim that they are “in it together” or “in the same boat” with their subjects. In fact, they are not. Should they be? To what extent?

This book offers the first systematic treatment of these questions. It contends that, under the status quo, rulers do not have enough skin in the game; they do not bear the consequences of their decisions in office as much as justice demands. López-Guerra defends equal subjection, a novel understanding of political equality that requires rulers to cast their lot with the ruled as equal users of the goods and services that they have a duty to provide for all. He proposes an original way of aligning the interest of rulers and subjects that would mitigate the principal-agent problem in politics and also make societies intrinsically more just.

Authoritarianism is on the rise. What is to be done? Political philosophers are back in the business of thinking seriously and creatively about the design of better political institutions, but their ingenuity remains confined to the choice of decision-making schemes, neglecting the importance of decision-bearing rules. This book makes the case for an original idea that expands the limits of our political imagination.

--Marshal Zeringue