"Dollars for Life"

New from Yale University Press: Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment by Mary Ziegler.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new understanding of the slow drift to extremes in American politics that shows how the antiabortion movement remade the Republican Party

The modern Republican Party is the party of conservative Christianity and big business—two things so closely identified with the contemporary GOP that we hardly notice the strangeness of the pairing. Legal historian Mary Ziegler traces how the anti-abortion movement helped to forge and later upend this alliance. Beginning with the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Buckley v. Valeo, right‑to‑lifers fought to gain power in the GOP by changing how campaign spending—and the First Amendment—work. The anti-abortion movement helped to revolutionize the rules of money in U.S. politics and persuaded conservative voters to fixate on the federal courts. Ultimately, the campaign finance landscape that abortion foes created fueled the GOP’s embrace of populism and the rise of Donald Trump. Ziegler offers a surprising new view of the slow drift to extremes in American politics—and explains how it had everything to do with the strange intersection of right-to-life politics and campaign spending.

Visit Mary Ziegler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Families We Keep"

New from NYU Press: Families We Keep: LGBTQ People and Their Enduring Bonds with Parents by Rin Reczek and Emma Bosley-Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why LGBTQ adults don’t end troubled ties with parents and why (perhaps) they should

Families We Keep is a surprising look at the life-long bonds between LGBTQ adults and their parents. Alongside the importance of “chosen families” in the queer community, Rin Reczek and Emma Bosley-Smith found that very few LGBTQ people choose to become estranged from their parents, even if those parent refuse to support their gender identity, sexuality, or both.

Drawing on interviews with over seventy-five LGBTQ people and their parents, Reczek and Bosley-Smith explore the powerful ties that bind families together, for better or worse. They show us why many feel obliged to maintain even troubled—and sometimes outright toxic—relationships with their parents. They argue that this relationship persists because what we think of as the “natural” and inevitable connection between parents and adult children is actually created and sustained by the sociocultural power of compulsory kinship. After revealing what holds even the most troubled intergenerational ties together, Families We Keep gives us permission to break free of those family bonds that are not in our best interests.

Reczek and Bosley-Smith challenge our deep-rooted conviction that family—and specifically, our relationships with our parents—should be maintained at any cost. Families We Keep shines a light on the shifting importance of family in America, and how LGBTQ people navigate its complexities as adults.

Visit Rin Reczek's website and Emma Bosley-Smith's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Are We Rich Yet?"

New from the University of California Press: Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain by Amy Edwards.

About the book, from the publisher:

An in-depth history of how finance remade everyday life in Thatcher's Britain.

Are We Rich Yet? tells the story of the financialization of British society. During the 1980s and 1990s, financial markets became part of daily life for many Britons as the practice of investing moved away from the offices of the City of London, onto Britain’s high streets, and into people’s homes. The Conservative Party claimed this shift as evidence that capital ownership was in the process of being democratized. In practice, investing became more institutionalized than ever in late-twentieth-century Britain: inclusion frequently meant tying one’s fortunes to the credit, insurance, pension, and mortgage industries to maintain independence from state-run support systems.

In tracing the rise of a consumer-oriented mass investment culture, historian Amy Edwards explains how the "financial" became such a central part of British society, not only economically and politically, but socially and culturally, too. She shifts our focus away from the corridors of Whitehall and towards a cast of characters that included brokers, bankers and traders, newspaper editors, goods manufacturers, marketing departments, production companies, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women. Between them, they shaped the terrain upon which political and economic reform occurred. Grappling with the interactions between structural transformation and the rhythms of everyday life, Are We Rich Yet? thus understands the rise of neoliberalism as something other than the inevitable outcome of a carefully orchestrated right-wing political revolution.

Follow Amy Edwards on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Secular Paradox"

New from NYU Press: The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious by Joseph Blankholm.

About the book, from the publisher:

A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religious

For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition.

Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today.

Follow Joe Blankholm on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Feminism's Empire"

New from Cornell University Press: Feminism's Empire by Carolyn J. Eichner.

About the book, from the publisher:

Feminism's Empire investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing "pro-imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation.

Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of "nature" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. Feminism's Empire connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Teenage Dreams"

New from Rutgers University Press: Teenage Dreams: Girlhood Sexualities in the U.S. Culture Wars by Charlie Jeffries.

About the book, from the publisher:

Utilizing a breadth of archival sources from activists, artists, and policymakers, Teenage Dreams examines the race- and class-inflected battles over adolescent women’s sexual and reproductive lives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. Charlie Jeffries finds that most adults in this period hesitated to advocate for adolescent sexual and reproductive rights, revealing a new culture war altogether—one between adults of various political stripes in the cultural mainstream who prioritized the desire to delay girlhood sexual experience at all costs, and adults who remained culturally underground in their support for teenagers’ access to frank sexual information, and who would dare to advocate for this in public. The book tells the story of how the latter group of adults fought alongside teenagers themselves, who constituted a large and increasingly visible part of this activism. The history of the debates over teenage sexual behavior reveals unexpected alliances in American political battles, and sheds new light on the resurgence of the right in the US in recent years.

--Marshal Zeringue

"How the Clinic Made Gender"

New from the University of Chicago Press: How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea by Sandra Eder.

About the book, from the publisher:

An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history.

Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering.

Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice.

Follow Sandra Eder on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Invisible Weapons"

New from Oxford University Press: Invisible Weapons: Infiltrating Resistance and Defeating Movements by Marcus Board, Jr..

About the book, from the publisher:

Radicalism is an inclusive political tradition that lives on in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). Key radical principles include empowering people to advocate for themselves and their communities, the idea that power must embrace accountability, and a transformative interpretation of justice and change. Everyone is not a radical any more than everyone supports the M4BL. And yet, some people claim to support the M4BL while rejecting radical movement principles and often practicing deeply anti-radical politics. In Invisible Weapons, Marcus Board Jr. wrestles with these contradictions and reveals the key political stumbling blocks posed by government powerbrokers--from elected officials to welfare-bureaucrats--in the face of radical political movements. Board shows how neoliberalism is synonymous with anti-radicalism and uses invisible weapons that stop oppressed people from advocating for their own needs and grievances.

Board argues that the insidious power of co-optation is transforming participation in mass social movements, potentially rendering active resistance ineffective. To support his argument, he looks at long-term unemployed Black welfare recipients in Chicago, original survey data, and case studies of police shootings in Baltimore and New York. At the center of Invisible Weapons are the seemingly conflicting responses to the 2015 Baltimore City police murder of Freddie Gray Jr. and the 2016 neglectful non-response to the Baltimore County police murder of Korryn Gaines. Beyond geography and personal histories, Board shows that Gray and Gaines are also deeply connected by the myriad systemic failures that shaped their lives. And the aftermath of their deaths further reveals the ways that oppressed masses are being silenced by the state under a veil of anti-radicalism.

Invisible Weapons teaches us how state co-optation of social movements like the M4BL is stealing power from people. This happens both in revolts like the Baltimore Uprising, when people are consciously resisting, and in cases memorialized by countless #SayHerName campaigns, when the masses are conspicuously absent. Neoliberalism and its proponents are creating an anti-democratic political landscape by convincing people falsely that radicalism has no place in U.S. politics. But strategies of non-violence, equality, and cooperation alone are insufficient means to regain this lost power and to stop lives from being destroyed. Grassroots resistance must also return to radicalism, remaining inclusive while also rejecting co-optation politics, embracing political and community self-defense, and recommitting to abolition.

Follow Marcus Board, Jr. on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Koreatown, Los Angeles"

New from Stanford University Press: Koreatown, Los Angeles: Immigration, Race, and the "American Dream" by Shelley Sang-Hee Lee.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of how one ethnic neighborhood came to signify a shared Korean American identity.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Los Angeles County's Korean population stood at about 186,000—the largest concentration of Koreans outside of Asia. Most of this growth took place following the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which dramatically altered US immigration policy and ushered in a new era of mass immigration, particularly from Asia and Latin America. By the 1970s, Korean immigrants were seeking to turn the area around Olympic Boulevard near downtown Los Angeles into a full-fledged "Koreatown," and over the following decades, they continued to build a community in LA.

As Korean immigrants seized the opportunity to purchase inexpensive commercial and residential property and transformed the area to serve their community's needs, other minority communities in nearby South LA—notably Black and Latino working-class communities—faced increasing segregation, urban poverty, and displacement. Beginning with the early development of LA's Koreatown and culminating with the 1992 Los Angeles riots and their aftermath, Shelley Sang-Hee Lee demonstrates how Korean Americans' lives were shaped by patterns of racial segregation and urban poverty, and legacies of anti-Asian racism and orientalism.

Koreatown, Los Angeles tells the story of an American ethnic community often equated with socioeconomic achievement and assimilation, but whose experiences as racial minorities and immigrant outsiders illuminate key economic and cultural developments in the United States since 1965. Lee argues that building Koreatown was an urgent objective for Korean immigrants and US-born Koreans eager to carve out a spatial niche within Los Angeles to serve as an economic and social anchor for their growing community. More than a dot on a map, Koreatown holds profound emotional significance for Korean immigrants across the nation as a symbol of their shared bonds and place in American society.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dangerous Ground"

New from Oxford University Press: Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy by John Suval.

About the book, from the publisher:

The squatter--defined by Noah Webster as "one that settles on new land without a title"--had long been a fixture of America's frontier past. In the antebellum period, white squatters propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. In a bold reframing of the era's political history, John Suval explores how Squatter Democracy transformed the partisan landscape and the map of North America, hastening clashes that ultimately sundered the nation.

With one eye on Washington and the other on flashpoints across the West, Dangerous Ground tracks squatters from the Mississippi Valley and cotton lands of Texas, to Oregon, Gold Rush-era California, and, finally, Bleeding Kansas. The sweeping narrative reveals how claiming western domains became stubbornly intertwined with partisan politics and fights over the extension of slavery. While previous generations of statesmen had maligned and sought to contain illegal settlers, Democrats celebrated squatters as pioneering yeomen and encouraged their land grabs through preemption laws, Indian removal, and hawkish diplomacy. As America expanded, the party's power grew. The US-Mexican War led many to ask whether these squatters were genuine yeomen or forerunners of slavery expansion. Some northern Democrats bolted to form the Free Soil Party, while southerners denounced any hindrance to slavery's spread. Faced with a fracturing party, Democratic leaders allowed territorial inhabitants to determine whether new lands would be slave or free, leading to a destabilizing transfer of authority from Congress to frontier settlers. Squatters thus morphed from agents of Manifest Destiny into foot soldiers in battles that ruptured the party and the country.

Deeply researched and vividly written, Dangerous Ground illuminates the overlooked role of squatters in the United States' growth into a continent-spanning juggernaut and in the onset of the Civil War, casting crucial light on the promises and vulnerabilities of American democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue