"Power Lines"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Power Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition by Sanya Carley and David Konisky.

About the book, from the publisher:

On American energy and its persisting power to destroy.

In the United States, the promise of a green-energy future is complicated by its realities. The country’s legacy energy systems are decrepit; the rollout of new technologies is unequal and piecemeal; households find themselves increasingly without reliable or affordable access; and Americans are excluded from the decisions that shape their energy futures. Having power in America has become an exercise in race, class, and wealth—in more ways than one.

Power Lines is a sweeping portrait of American energy in the twenty-first century, rendered in terms of its increasing—and inevitable—human costs. Coal miners in West Virginia lose their livelihoods as energy markets change; historically marginalized households cannot easily access new technologies; children in “sacrifice zones” adjacent to mineral-mining sites suffer health problems and limited resources; and cities and towns are burdened from the production of alternative energies.

Sanya Carley and David Konisky show current challenges and an uncertain future of America’s greatest policy imperative. The result is not only sobering but also essential for planning and pursuing a clean-energy transition that improves on the errors of the past.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Disunited States"

New from Oxford University Press: The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work by Ryan D. Griffiths.

About the book, from the publisher:

Is the breakup of an increasingly polarized America into separate red and blue countries even possible?

There is a growing interest in American secession. In February 2023, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that "We need a national divorce...We need to separate by red states and blue states." Recent movements like Yes California have called for a national divorce along political lines. A 2023 Axios poll shows that 20 percent of Americans favor a national divorce. These trends show a sincere interest in American secession, and they will likely increase in the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election.

Proponents of secession make three arguments: the two sides have irreconcilable differences; secession is a legal right; and smaller political units are better. Through interviews with secessionist advocates in America, Ryan Griffiths explores the case for why Red America and Blue America should split up.

But as The Disunited States shows, these arguments are fundamentally incorrect. Secession is the wrong solution to the problem of polarization. Red and Blue America are not neatly sorted and geographically concentrated. Splitting the two parts would require a dangerous unmixing of the population, one that could spiral into violence and state collapse. Drawing on his expertise on secessionism worldwide, he shows how the process has played out internationally-and usually disastrously. Ultimately, this book will disabuse readers of the belief that secession will fix America's problems. Rather than focus on national divorce as a solution, the better course of action is to seek common ground.

Visit Ryan D. Griffiths's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Intrepid Girls"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA by Amy Erdman Farrell.

About the book, from the publisher:

When eight-year-old Amy Erdman Farrell moved with her family to Akron, Ohio, in 1972, she found herself adrift in a sea of taunting boys and mean girls. Shy by nature, she dreaded her long, unhappy days at school. But a few years later, Farrell found an escape from bullying, the promise of sisterhood, a rising sense of confidence, adventure, and—best of all—lifelong friendship when she joined a Girl Scout troop. Decades later, award-winning author Farrell returns to those formative experiences to explore the complicated and surprising history of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

Drawing from extensive archival research, visits to iconic Girl Scout sites around the world, and vivid personal reflections, Farrell uncovers the Girl Scouts intricate history, revealing how the organization has shaped the lives of more than 50 million girls and women since its founding in 1912. With Farrell as our own intrepid guide, we travel to American Indian boarding schools, Japanese American incarceration centers, segregated African American communities, middle-class white neighborhoods, and outposts throughout the globe. Intrepid Girls unpacks how the Girl Scouts navigated tensions over feminism, race, class, and political differences, carving out extraordinary opportunities for girls and women—even as it participated in the very discrimination it promised to transcend.

For anyone who has ever worn a uniform or wondered about the hidden history behind this iconic American institution, Intrepid Girls will surprise, inspire, and challenge what we think we know about the Girl Scouts.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Do"

New from Stanford University Press: Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia by Mardi Reardon-Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

Cape York is a remote and biodiverse peninsula in northeastern Australia that has been inhabited by Aboriginal communities for thousands of years. Since colonization, much of the peninsula has been used for large scale cattle farming. It is also a place of global significance as the site of multiple environmentally protected bioregions, with ongoing efforts to recognize them as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Despite the very human role in shaping the landscape of Cape York, the region remains widely thought of as a "wilderness" to be conserved and protected. In this context, what counts as natural and native matters crucially—as does who gets to decide how species and people are categorized and, accordingly, how they are controlled.

Based on long-term field research with Aboriginal traditional owners, settler-descended cattle herders, and park rangers, Making Do investigates complex ways in which people form, maintain, and transform relationships to changing environments. How do we know the places in which we live, and how do we care for them among the ruptures created by forces like climate change, settler colonialism, and structural inequalities? To address these questions, Mardi Reardon-Smith traces issues such as the history of land tenure changes, the identification and control of weeds and feral pigs, and wildfires and Aboriginal cultural burning. Mardi Reardon-Smith argues that caring for land, a sprawling, messy, and sometimes violent process, is not just about repair, restoration, or maintenance—rather, it is about bringing into being workable landscapes, livable worlds, and possible futures.

Visit Mardi Reardon-Smith's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Entangled Alliances"

New from Cornell University Press: Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution by Ronald Angelo Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation. Ronald Angelo Johnson brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny.

The American Revolution occurred between two of the greatest achievements in diplomacy of the eighteenth century: the peace treaties at Paris in 1763 and 1783. In Entangled Alliances, Johnson draws on original multilingual sources to offer readers fresh, lively stories in a timely study. While modern understandings of freedom are often linked to the US Declaration of Independence, Johnson argues that the desire of Black Atlantic inhabitants for liberty and their will to resist slavery predated the fateful standoff between minutemen and redcoats at Lexington and Concord.

Entangled Alliances is a US history of the American Revolution, fusing the search for freedom by Black and white founders in the United States and Saint-Domingue into a coherent story of collective resistance during the most explosive twenty-year period of the eighteenth century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Woman Is Responsible for Everything"

New from Princeton University Press: A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe by Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach.

About the book, from the publisher:

A groundbreaking look at the integral role of women in early modern Jewish communal life

In small villages, bustling cities, and crowded ghettos across early modern Europe, Jewish women were increasingly active participants in the daily life of their communities, managing homes and professions, leading institutions and sororities, and crafting objects and texts of exquisite beauty. A Woman Is Responsible for Everything marshals a dazzling array of previously untapped archival sources to tell the stories of these woman for the first time.

Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach focus their lens on the kehillah, a lively and thriving form of communal life that sustained European Jews for three centuries. They paint vibrant portraits of Jewish women of all walks of life, from those who wielded their wealth and influence in and out of their communities to the poorest maidservants and vagrants, from single and married women to the widowed and divorced. We follow them into their homes and learn about the possessions they valued and used, the books they read, and the writings they composed. Speaking to us in their own voices, these women reveal tremendous economic initiative in the rural marketplace and the princely court, and they express their profound spirituality in the home as well as the synagogue.

Beautifully illustrated, A Woman Is Responsible for Everything lifts the veil of silence that has obscured the lives of these women for too long, contributing a new chapter to the history of Jewish women and a new understanding of the Jewish past.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dictating Reality"

New from Columbia University Press: Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News by Martin Moore and Thomas Colley.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false.

Martin Moore and Thomas Colley show how states are battling to control and shape the news in order to entrench their power, evade scrutiny, and ensure that their political narratives are accepted. Combining in-depth analyses of seven countries with a compelling range of stories and characters from around the world, they demonstrate the unprecedented scale and scope of governments’ efforts to take control of the media. Dictating Reality details how Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, AMLO’s Mexico, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Orban’s Hungary have all sought, in their different ways, to exploit news to manufacture alternative realities―and how their methods have taken hold in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other democracies. Combining keen analysis of contemporary world events with years of original research, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how authoritarian leaders use the media, why more and more people are living in different realities, and the ways democracy is under threat.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Race and Racism"

New from Oxford University Press: Race and Racism: A Decolonial Approach by Linda Martín Alcoff.

About the book, from the publisher:

Race and Racism: A Decolonial Approach argues that the topics of race and racism need a decolonial framing if we are to understand their genealogy in the modern world, and explores their current iterations and the path forward.

The chapters develop this argument in three ways. Chapter One presents an account of racialized identities that foreground their essentially historical nature as created through the shared experiences and collective actions of both elite and non-elite groups. Overcoming racial oppression cannot, then, occur simply by a change in policies, but only through new collective experiences of peaceful and just forms of collaborative cohabitation. Chapter Two argues for an expanded focus on cultural racism over individual attitudinal forms. Cultural racism focuses on, and ranks, peoples, and uses this to justify global inequalities and injustices. In truth, all modern cultures, including the West, are the product of transculturation at every level, not only affecting their music and language but also their sciences and political institutions. Cultural supremacy is thus a myth, and cultural ranking an impossibility. It remains vital to engage in criticism and debate over specific ideas and practices, but these discussions are often marred and made ineffective by cultural racism. Chapter Three dissects the current crisis of white identity that is energizing the far right on both sides of the Atlantic, with a focus on migrants as the source of nearly every social problem. The move to ethno-nationalism can only be forestalled by directly addressing the Replacement Theory and the difficult implications of colonialism's continuing effects on global relations. White identities have been based in false histories about the modern era, yet the truly varied experiences of whites are not well represented in the myths that grounded racial supremacy. If we face the truth about our histories, and understand them with more accuracy and nuance, we can formulate a way forward in unity.

Visit Linda Martín Alcoff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Traveling Anatomist"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Traveling Anatomist: Nicolaus Steno and the Intersection of Disciplines in Early Modern Science by Nuno Castel-Branco.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reevaluates Nicolaus Steno’s contributions to anatomy and early modern science, examining his interdisciplinary interests in their historical context.

Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) was a renowned anatomist in his lifetime. He reformed the anatomical understanding of glands, argued that the heart was a muscle, renamed the so-called female testicles as ovaries, and developed a mathematical model for understanding muscle contraction—discoveries that were fundamental to the fields of anatomy and physiology. However, other aspects of Steno’s life have come to define him: his claim that mountains’ strata reveal the history of the Earth and his conversion to Catholicism as a practicing scientist. This excessive attention to his geological discoveries and to asking whether science and religion are compatible, Nuno Castel-Branco argues, has obscured his significant accomplishments as an anatomist. The Traveling Anatomist thus restores Steno to his rightful place as a crucial figure in early modern science.

Using Steno’s extensive travels as a framework, this book depicts him as an active participant in the Republic of Letters. Castel-Branco traverses Leiden, Paris, Copenhagen, Florence, and Rome as he follows Steno in his sojourns through different scientific academies, courts, and artisanal workshops. There he developed new friends, some of whom were women, with whom he researched and exchanged ideas. Drawing on Steno’s books, correspondence, and novel archival material, Castel-Branco invites us to approach Steno and his accomplishments in anatomy, mathematics, and geology through the eyes of his contemporaries. Doing so, Castel-Branco reconstructs the rich and overlapping worlds of scientific disciplines that shaped Steno’s work, revealing the richness of interdisciplinary research in early modern intellectual life. And through Steno, he illustrates larger developments and new networks of significance in mid-seventeenth-century science. By focusing on ideas, scientific genres, institutions, and friendships, Castel-Branco offers a way others might also productively study science from the early modern period until today.

Visit Nuno Castel-Branco's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Neoliberalism and Race"

New from Stanford University Press: Neoliberalism and Race by Lars Cornelissen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized―its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original―perhaps controversial―critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it.

--Marshal Zeringue