"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 fom 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

"The Politics of Informality"

New from the University of Texas Press: The Politics of Informality: Housing and Planning in Mexico City by Emilio de Antuñano.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of the central role and political power of informal neighborhoods in Mexico City.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexico City was tightly bounded, with a population of about half a million people. By the end of that century, it was an unfathomable megalopolis of some 20 million. It had also become exhibit A in an “urban crisis” decried by demographers, NGOs, and the Mexican government. Mexico City’s greatest sin was its shantytowns―informal neighborhoods built in defiance of regulations and viewed as incurably disordered.

The Politics of Informality is an illuminating political and intellectual history, examining how these neighborhoods have figured in Mexican life and in the ideologies underlying urban planning. Prior to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, urban experts saw Mexico City as a tidy modern capital in-waiting. But during the interwar period, informal neighborhoods boomed, as working-class families asserted claims to housing under the revolution’s framework of citizenship and social justice. Then, amid Cold War realignments, a new cohort of urban experts pathologized Mexico City, turning it into a transnational laboratory for the study of poverty, migration, and overpopulation. Tracing a fascinating evolution, The Politics of Informality underscores the stubborn opposition between technocratic modernism and revolutionary, extralegal politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion by Hugh B. Urban.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping cultural history of our yearning for psychedelics to free us from both modern life and traditional religion.

In 1957, Life Magazine published an article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” about a Mexican healing ritual centered on an obscure psychedelic: Psilocybe mushrooms. Readers raced to experiment with the drug for their own spiritual, therapeutic, and recreational purposes until a psychedelic wave swept the nation. Today, though psilocybin has been transformed from a sacred fungus into a pharmaceutical product, many people still turn to the enigmatic mushroom to encounter profound spiritual experiences without the baggage of traditional religion.

In Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom, Hugh B. Urban examines the alluring promise of mysticism without religion. With psychedelics, one need not fast, flagellate, or even worship a god to encounter the transcendent; a carefully timed ingestion of psilocybin will suffice. But, Urban argues, stripping the trip from its religion came at a cost: the erasure of Indigenous culture and the eventual commercialization and scientification of the psychedelic underground. Urban shows that psychedelic mushrooms, far from the fringe or countercultural margins, have been central players in shaping American attitudes toward religion and science over the last century. He argues that our love affair with the intoxicating fungus reveals a deep frustration with a disenchanted world, desire for meaning beyond religion, yearning for nature amid ecological crisis, faith in science to save us, and the relentless power of capitalism to turn everything into commodities.

The Page 99 Test: Zorba the Buddha.

The Page 99 Test: The Path of Desire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Remember the Tuscania"

New from Cornell University Press: Remember the Tuscania: The Sinking, Its Aftermath, and a Century of Public Memory by Steven Trout.

About the book, from the publisher:

Remember the Tuscania plunges readers into the night of February 5, 1918, when a German U-boat's torpedo found a crowded US troopship in the North Atlantic―and into the century of argument, propaganda, and remembrance that followed. At its heart are the Baraboo Twenty-One, citizen-soldiers from a Wisconsin town who survived the sinking that became the deadliest U-boat attack on Americans in the First World War and the nation's first mass-casualty event of the conflict.

Steven Trout braids military history and cultural history with a dramatic pulse. He reconstructs the voyage and catastrophe in detail. Then he follows the aftershocks across newspapers, posters, cartoons, poems, and sheet music as the home front seizes on a new rallying cry―"Remember the Tuscania!"―and turns the dead into usable symbols. Trout also exposes a War Department fiasco over casualty lists that helped force reforms to identification practices (serial numbers on dog tags; rosters kept at hand aboard transports).

Remember the Tuscania draws attention to how people memorialize dramatic wartime events: the isle of Islay's windswept "American Monument," improvised funerals beneath a hastily sewn Stars and Stripes, the formation of the National Tuscania Survivors Association, and a twenty-first-century resurrection of the story back in Baraboo. Trout shows how myth overtook messy reality and how private grief often resisted public pageantry.

Trout's narrative is a riveting, deeply researched investigation that showcases the meaning for Americans of a nearly forgotten disaster and the unbreakable ties of transatlantic remembrance that it left behind.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Harnessing Disruption"

New from Oxford University Press: Harnessing Disruption: Building the Tech Future Without Breaking Society by Sarah E. Kreps.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely and thought-provoking exploration of technological disruption, drawing on history's most transformative innovations--from nuclear power to AI--to offer a vital roadmap for navigating the future of technology.

In Harnessing Disruption, Sarah E. Kreps--a national security expert and military veteran--offers a fresh, clear-eyed framework for understanding the social and political dynamics that shape technological change. From nuclear weapons to AI, cryptocurrency, and social media, breakthrough innovations rarely arrive without backlash. Disruption is not collapse. History shows it is part of a recurring pattern.

With unmatched insight and authority, Kreps traces a five-stage cycle that technologies follow: emergence, early warnings, crisis, agenda-setting, and institutional response. Drawing on decades of research and real-world policy experience, she argues that disruption is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently self-correcting. Rather, it's a process we can steer, if we learn to see the signs and act decisively.

Harnessing Disruption challenges fatalistic narratives that cast AI and other technologies as uncontrollable forces. It makes the case for cautious optimism: that institutions can adapt, societies can recalibrate, and technologies can be governed in ways that protect both innovation and the public good. Timely, incisive, and grounded in both historical precedent and contemporary case studies, this book provides the tools for anyone, including policymakers, entrepreneurs, and citizens, to understand where we are in the cycle of disruption and how to shape what comes next.

Writers Read: Sarah E. Kreps (January 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The River That Made Texas"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The River That Made Texas: A Forgotten History of the Trinity by Scot McFarlane.

About the book, from the publisher:

Today, half of Texas’s expanding population, including the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, depends on the Trinity River, a river that has shaped the state’s politics, economy, and environment for centuries. From the prairies of North Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, the Trinity established Native nations, foiled Spanish and French imperialism, stood at the center of the Texas plantation system, and fueled the growth of the state’s largest cities.

In the first history of this vital river, historian Scot McFarlane illuminates how the Trinity has defined Texas history. Its floods enriched the soil and destroyed crops, its channel served as both a route and barrier to freedom, and its once-polluted waters now sustain a significant portion of the state. McFarlane’s captivating narrative brims with stories of the people who called the Trinity home over the centuries: the Comanche, steamboat pilots, enslaved and freed people, sharecroppers, inmates, and millions of urban residents. The result is a fresh perspective on economic development, slavery, and the environment—revealing the Trinity not as a backdrop to Texas history but as a force that shaped it.

Visit Scot McFarlane's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last Invasion of England"

New from Princeton University Press: The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada by Arthur der Weduwen.

About the book, from the publisher:

An electrifying narrative history that reframes Britain’s constitutional revolution as a full-scale Dutch invasion

In popular accounts of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the autocratic Catholic King James II was ousted by his subjects and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart, wife of James’s nephew, the Dutch William III of Orange. Devoted to her husband, Mary would not accept the crown alone, and so William and Mary were crowned together, securing a smooth dynastic succession. The Last Invasion of England recounts the forgotten campaign that carried William and his army to English shores and led directly to James’s fall, bringing a revolutionary age vividly to life—and rewriting the history of Britain, Europe and the transatlantic world more widely.

In this bold work of revisionist history, Arthur der Weduwen tells the momentous story of the Dutch Armada, describing the immense risks and near failures of the last seaborne invasion of England—which occurred exactly one hundred years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The sixteen thousand Dutch troops who accompanied William were not on hand for moral support. They came with sword, musket and cannon. Der Weduwen argues that the political revolution in Britain could not have been achieved without the willpower, might and resources of William and the Dutch nation, and explains why the Dutch Republic, a small state that celebrated peace and commerce above all else, would dare to undertake a reckless preemptive military strike on its more powerful neighbour.

Transforming our understanding of the Glorious Revolution and Britain’s ascendancy as a global powerhouse, The Last Invasion of England relies entirely on contemporary sources, many from leading protagonists who prepared and executed the invasion, evoking the historical realities of the women and men who lived during turbulent and uncertain times.

Visit Arthur der Weduwen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue