"The Great Repair"

New from Cornell University Press: The Great Repair: Emotions, Memory, and the German–Jewish Settlement after the Holocaust by Gideon Reuveni.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Great Repair explores how Jews and Germans began reparations discussions fewer than seven years after the Holocaust―a momentous achievement relegated to the margins of Holocaust scholarship and memory―and the complexities that emerged from the resulting settlement.

Gideon Reuveni illuminates the swift transition and extraordinary chapter in postwar history from the horrors of the Holocaust to a negotiating table where Germans and Jews discussed reparations. Both sides faced the monumental challenge of addressing the injustices of National Socialism through complex deliberations on compensation for collective and individual losses, restitution of property, support for survivors, and formal acknowledgment of Nazi crimes. These negotiations marked a crucial step toward acknowledging historical responsibility and pursuing meaningful redress.

The Great Repair reveals the events, actors, and decisions that led to the signing of the agreement on September 10, 1952, by West Germany, Israel, and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Ultimately, the enactment of this settlement set a global precedent that genocide cannot go unpunished and moral debts must be paid. It was a historic undertaking of immense scope―unmatched in the history of international relations, just as the extermination of the Jewish people was unprecedented in human history.

The Page 99 Test: Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"When the Declaration of Independence Was News"

New from Oxford University Press: When the Declaration of Independence Was News by Emily Sneff.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tracing the moments after its creation, this groundbreaking book follows how news of the Declaration of Independence spread to people throughout the thirteen United States and the Atlantic world.

In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting the text. Although Congress declared independence, the work of spreading the news involved printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats, and translators.

When the Declaration of Independence Was News reveals the stories behind how the Declaration was communicated in the United States and around the Atlantic. Tracing the travels of the founding document of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, Boston, Charleston, London, Leiden, Paris, and beyond, Emily Sneff shows how people both celebrated the Declaration and critiqued it. In the weeks after the document was penned, it was printed in the columns of newspapers, translated into German and French, and shared with Native American allies. The document induced some people to make public their privately held beliefs about whether they wanted the United States to be independent or to reconcile with King George III. The Declaration was met with unique circumstances everywhere it went, and people modified the text along the way. The questions of who experienced the news of independence, when, and how reveal an expansive and complex history of a critical moment in the American Revolution.

Published for the 250th anniversary of American independence, When the Declaration of Independence Was News returns to a time before the legacy of these words and the outcome of the war against Great Britain were known to reconsider what the founding of the United States meant to the people who were living through it.

Visit Emily Sneff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Stewards of the Land"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Stewards of the Land: Race and Reclaiming Environmental Labor in the American West by Stevie Ruiz.

About the book, from the publisher:

The history of the environmental movement—from environmentalism of the nineteenth century to the environmental justice struggles of the late twentieth century—has often been portrayed as a series of efforts led by white environmentalists. In Stewards of the Land, Stevie Ruiz reassesses the movement and reveals that it has always been a multiracial endeavor. From Southern California berry fields to Japanese American concentration camps, from Chinese cooks in national parks to Chicano Civilian Conservation Corps workers, Ruiz traces how the racialized labor and environmental knowledge of Asian migrants and Chicana/o communities built the material foundations of modern environmentalism.

Stewards of the Land argues that environmental justice was never just a reaction to pollution in the 1970s but has a much longer history tied to land theft, labor exploitation, and the everyday struggles of frontline communities to live and work with dignity. Drawing from comparative ethnic studies and archival research and with a commitment to decolonial praxis, Ruiz recovers the stories of those who labored—often invisibly—to build, maintain, and reimagine environmental spaces in the American West.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The First Pariah State"

New from Princeton University Press: The First Pariah State: How the Proslavery Confederacy Menaced the World by Robert E. Bonner.

About the book, from the publisher:

The often-forgotten global story of how the Confederacy lost its bid for sovereign nationhood

In 1861, proslavery secessionists severed ties with the United States, launched the Confederacy, and readied their new government to join the international community as a sovereign nation. In The First Pariah State, Robert Bonner tells the story of how a transatlantic publicity campaign dashed Confederate hopes by ostracizing its rebellion as an immoral, global menace.

The international anti-Confederate campaign built on existing antislavery themes but moved far beyond them. Improvised indictments circulated secessionists’ most incendiary words across the world. The Union and its foreign allies condemned the marauding Southern navy for disrupting high-seas commerce, violating civilized norms, and preparing for the resumption of the African slave trade. Abraham Lincoln and Senator Charles Sumner sought to convert rhetorical barbs and maritime anxieties into novel doctrines of international law designed to counter rogue regimes. And Union opinion-makers, including Black abolitionists, worked with European supporters to stymie the South’s naval expansion, war finances, and diplomatic efforts to gain formal recognition.

International worries about the Confederate rebellion waned after U.S. victory, and the Southern pariahdom of the 1860s left few enduring traces in international law or overseas remembrances. In fact, over the next century and a half, the pro-Confederate “Lost Cause” mythology proved to be as powerful abroad as it was within the restored United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Search for World Democracy"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Search for World Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Politics of Space by Adam Dahl.

About the book, from the publisher:

An incisive conceptual history of global democracy in the transnational political thought of W.E.B. Du Bois.

The Search for World Democracy traces the language of “world democracy” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s oeuvre, stretching from his early sociological writings to his later work on world peace and anticolonialism with and against the United Nations. Drawing on original archival research, several lesser-known writings, and most centrally Du Bois’s unpublished 1937 manuscript A World Search for Democracy, Adam Dahl places his unique approach to democratic theory within the transatlantic debates about the transformation of European imperial order in the twentieth century. Dahl shows how Du Bois’s vision of the spatial scale of democracy situated struggles for popular control, decolonization, industrial democracy, and racial enfranchisement in their shifting, multidimensional geographic contexts. Less a specific model of global governance than a radical politics of space and scale, Du Bois’s idea of world democracy challenges the boundaries between domestic and international politics by linking local sites of democratic struggle within and against the global color line. The Search for World Democracy shows how, for Du Bois, the radical transformation of the United States into a multiracial democracy would require an equally dramatic transformation of the imperial lineages of world politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Domesticated"

New from Oxford University Press: Domesticated: How Cultivated Species Altered Ancient Silk Road Societies by Alicia R. Ventresca-Miller.

About the book, from the publisher:

Domesticated uses novel archaeological methods to rewrite the narrative of the rise of social complexity in the western and eastern Eurasian steppe. Through the study of ancient proteins, DNA, and isotopes, as well as traditional archaeology, Alicia R. Ventresca-Miller tracks the adoption of domesticated animals and plants to show how cultivated species transformed societies during the eras preceding the Silk Road networks. Economies in this region shifted from hunting and gathering to the use of ruminant livestock, horse dairying and riding, and finally to the cultivation of grains, marking major thresholds in human history. Ventresca-Miller proposes a model for how this happened--from the initial introduction of the animal or plant to their acceptance, solidification, and intensification--and shows how each stage of development impacted the ways local communities interacted, settled in the landscape, and gave rise to new social structures.

The management of domesticated species and the alteration of landscapes allowed communities in north-central Asia to build complex societies and long-distance trading networks, which linked cities and supported Empires. In Domesticated, a nuanced narrative emerges, one that situates north-central Asia as a vital locale for the study of the adoption of domesticated species and underscores how these developments contributed to alternative forms of social complexity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Irreconcilable"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Contemporary Canada by Joseph Weiss.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the early 2000s, the Canadian government has attempted reconciliation with Indigenous Nations through varied efforts: treaty processes, government commissions, rebranding campaigns for settler-owned businesses, workshops for state and local officials, school curriculum changes, and a recently christened national holiday. However, Joseph Weiss argues, these state-driven initiatives reinforce Indigenous subordination to the settler state. This incisive study of the varied responses from both Indigenous Nations and individuals illuminates how reconciliation is implicated in ongoing colonial erasure.

Critically engaging with a variety of fields, including Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, political theory, semiotics, and museum studies, Weiss captures the multiple scales at which these contested dynamics unfold and explores their underlying technologies of erasure. Irreconcilable unpacks how reconciliation offers amends for anti-Indigenous violence while disavowing responsibility for that violence, and argues that settler promises of reconciliation cannot be reconciled to the fact of Indigenous sovereignty. Nevertheless, Weiss illustrates how Indigenous Peoples refuse erasure at every turn, instead building alternate futures and lived worlds that are not always already colonially overdetermined.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lowest Freedom"

New from Columbia University Press: The Lowest Freedom: Racial Capitalism and Black Thought in the Nineteenth Century by Justin Leroy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Throughout the nineteenth century, Black thinkers grappled with the material limits of freedom. They insisted that emancipation without economic self-determination would reproduce the inequalities of slavery, arguing that true freedom required not only civil rights and suffrage but also defending the rights of workers and curbing the power of capital. They concluded that free Black life could not flourish in conditions of labor exploitation and economic deprivation.

The Lowest Freedom is an intellectual history of how economic dispossession shaped the meaning of freedom in Black thought from antebellum abolitionism to the rise of Jim Crow. Justin Leroy argues that figures such as Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Ida B. Wells developed a critique of racial capitalism that remains underappreciated. Their theories spanned the eras of slavery and freedom, connecting the North and the South, by illuminating the political economy of racial domination and the interwoven relationship between race and capitalism. By situating their work within broader debates about land, labor, and capital, Leroy provides a new framework for understanding how freedom was theorized, contested, and ultimately constrained in the aftermath of slavery. Bridging Black studies, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism, The Lowest Freedom offers a reinterpretation of African American political thought that places the struggle for economic justice at its core.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Accelerant"

New from Stanford University Press: Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran by Ciruce A. Movahedi-Lankarani.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between the late 1940s and the end of the twentieth century, natural gas became Iran's bedrock energy source. Billed as a futuristic fuel for a future world power, gas became an avenue for the country's developmentalist ambitions. The ability to build technologically sophisticated infrastructures served as a powerful tool of state legitimation, both before and after the 1979 Revolution, and tied top-down politics of modernization to bottom-up feelings of national belonging.

Accelerant analyzes the interwoven histories of energy, development, and the environment in Iran. Following the movement of natural gas from underground deposits, through infrastructures of refining and distribution, and into everyday life, Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani explores the roles of development planners, oil firms, industrialists, engineers, and consumers―as well as the mountain ranges, sedimentary rock, and natural gas itself―to show how natural gas emerged as a crucial enabler of industrialization and a strong impetus for resource nationalism. Tracing the transformation of gas from a waste product into a vital resource, this book offers a history of anticolonial developmentalism in Iran―revealing a key driver toward intensified energy use that suggests why and how societies in the Global South became voracious consumers of fossil fuel energy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Contexts of Justice"

New from Oxford University Press: Contexts of Justice: Native Peoples, Political Theory, and Fair Treatment by Burke A. Hendrix.

About the book, from the publisher:

Non-Indigenous citizens of the United States and Canada often argue that it is unfair for Indigenous peoples to have distinctive political and property rights within countries purportedly dedicated to equal treatment. Yet Indigenous nations in the United States and Canada have long made claims for a more contextually rich sense of fairness, and their legal and political successes in these efforts - difficult, uneven, and partial as they has been - have allowed them to continue to exist into the present. Their fairness arguments have thus found traction even in the face of longstanding political animosity.

Situated within debates on ideal and non-ideal theory, this book begins from arguments of this kind, and seeks to show why they are defensible within a contextually-rich theory of political fairness for Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada. Structured to be accessible to political theorists and their students with little background in Indigenous politics, the book argues that this broader conception of fairness applies in relation to political sovereignty, ownership rights, cultural choices, and - uncomfortably - racially-inflected standards of tribal membership. Seeking to outline parameters for potential future political orders, it argues that such a contextually-rich standard of fairness is likely to be required long into the future as well, given the unavoidably variegated texture of human social order.

--Marshal Zeringue