"Company Towns"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reveals the deep, historical roots of public distrust in former mining areas in the US, shedding new light on the corrosive feedback loops that persist today.

In Company Towns, Elizabeth Mitchell Elder examines the long-lasting political legacies of mining-company dominance in the Midwest and Appalachia. While the economic consequences of deindustrialization are well-known, Elder shifts the focus to a more insidious problem: the political dysfunction that took root long before the mines shut down.

Drawing on historical and administrative data, Elder shows that the coal industry hindered the growth of local government capacity in the places where it was dominant. Mining companies also engaged in outright corruption to shape local governments, practices which local elites then carried forward. When mining companies withdrew, they left behind not just economic decline, but local governments ill-equipped to govern.

These patterns have had enduring consequences for public life. Elder shows how these historical experiences have fueled a broader cynicism toward government, in which citizens expect little from public institutions and doubt the usefulness of elections. Company Towns underscores the consequences of corporate dominance for state capacity, public opinion, and democratic accountability today.

Visit Elizabeth Mitchell Elder's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"No Restraint"

New from NYU Press: No Restraint: Disabled Children and Institutionalized Violence in America's Schools by Charles Bell.

About the book, from the publisher:

A wake-up call on the use and abuse of restraints against disabled children in public schools

Over 100,000 students are restrained and secluded in locked rooms throughout US public schools; the overwhelming majority are students with disabilities. Despite pleas from parents, disability rights organizations, and at least seventeen state Attorneys General, Congress has refused to pass laws to protect these students from the horrors of harmful restraint and seclusion practices. In No Restraint, Charles Bell argues that seclusion and restraint are so harmful and traumatic that they provoke night terrors, a profound aversion to school, and self-harm in children. Students reported being subjected to aggressive restraint tactics that left bruises on their arms and legs, dragged into seclusion rooms that resemble solitary confinement cells in prisons, and locked inside.

Featuring extensive interviews, ranging across fifteen states, with parents of Black and white children with disabilities as well as university teacher education program directors, Bell explores how parents of children with disabilities perceive the impact of school seclusion and restraint on their families and investigates how the training school officials receive contributes to the misuse of these practices. Among parents, the trauma associated with their child’s restraint and seclusion in school led to physical and mental health challenges, as well as long-term job loss as they advocated for their children. Additionally, as parents challenged harmful restraint and seclusion practices in legal proceedings, school officials often retaliated by filing claims with child protective services, targeting spouses employed within the district, and involving law enforcement.

A deeply moving and timely work, No Restraint exposes how schools function as structurally violent anti-disability institutions. This book will encourage school officials and policymakers to rethink harmful disciplinary strategies and craft stronger policy guidelines that protect children from these practices.

Visit Charles Bell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Political Economy of Security"

New from Princeton University Press: The Political Economy of Security by Stephen G. Brooks.

About the book, from the publisher:

The complex and multifaceted relationship between economic factors and conflict

In this book, Stephen Brooks provides a systematic empirical and theoretical examination of how economic factors influence security affairs. Empirically, he analyzes how economic variables of all kinds affect interstate war, terrorism, and civil war; in total, sixteen pathways are examined. Brooks shows that the relationship between economic factors and conflict is complex and multifaceted; discrete economic factors—such as international trade, economic development, and globalized manufacturing, to name a few—are sometimes helpful for promoting peace and stability, but at other times are detrimental. Brooks also develops a stronger theoretical foundation for guiding future research on the economics-security interaction. Drawing on Adam Smith, he provides a more complete range of answers to the three key conceptual questions analysts must consider: how economic goals relate to security goals; what economic factors to focus on; and how economic actors influence security policies.

Combining an innovative theoretical understanding with empirical rigor, Brooks’s account will reshape our understanding of the political economy of security.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Kin Matters"

New from Oxford University Press: Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences by Robert A. Wilson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Kin and kinship matter to us. We are social creatures and our kin or relatives are typically high on the list of those most important to us. Kin are those we care for and who care for us. Our family ties provide a sense of where and with whom we belong. Kin matters also impose boundaries on who we relate to and how, including in sexual and other intimate matters. The study of kinship has been a cornerstone of anthropology throughout its history, but kin matters matter beyond the confines of any academic discipline.

Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences examines three related themes in the philosophy of anthropology concerning kin matters: the nature of relations, incest and its avoidance, and the study of kinship in cultural anthropology. It develops an integrative framework for thinking about kin matters recognizing that that there should be much more fluidity between the cognitive, biological, and social sciences--the fragile sciences--than one typically finds both in those sciences and in philosophical reflection on them. Along the way, Kin Matters offers a novel account of relations, challenges culture-first explanations of incest avoidance, and advocates for a redirection in the study of kinship.

Kin Matters begins by reflecting on our standing as relational beings. We are creatures who actively relate to one another and our worlds to build social and other relationships. Much of that activity is biologically and psychologically mediated and so there is a ready-made place for each of the cognitive, biological, and social sciences in understanding ourselves as relational beings. We are also relatives: we have parents and often enough we have siblings and children. Kinship is something that changes over the course of our lives, but it is there literally from start to end. No wonder anthropologists early on made kin and the study of kinship pillars of their discipline. Yet current views of kinship in anthropology express a wariness of appeals to biology and psychology, and cultural anthropology has long pursued a separatist research strategy in kin matters. Kin Matters opens the way for a more integrative alternative.

Visit Rob Wilson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Robed Representatives"

New from Stanford University Press: Robed Representatives: How Black Judges Advocate in American Courts by Taneisha Means Davis.

About the book, from the publisher:

The number of Black state and federal judges has grown considerably in the post-Civil Rights Era. They are, in fact, the second most represented group of judges in the state and federal courts. Furthermore, historic appointments of Black men and women to the federal judiciary, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, as well as generally increased calls for the diversification of the courts in recent years, have renewed questions about judicial representation. What does having more Black judges in courthouses and communities mean for the political representation of Black people and Black interests?

In Robed Representatives, Taneisha Means Davis offers new insights into the lives, identity politics, and actions of Black state court judges. The narratives centered in the book reveal an identity-to-politics link that exists among Black judges that lead them to represent their group interests. This link is corroborated with data that highlights numerous previously unidentified manifestations of racial representation in the legal system. Means Davis demonstrates that only through exploration of the lives, identities, and behaviors of historically underrepresented judges will it be possible to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the importance―and limitations―of racial diversity in the courts.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Movement Modern"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Making Movement Modern: Science, Politics, and the Body in Motion by Whitney E. Laemmli.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores how researchers used systems for recording human movement to navigate the relationship between mind and body, freedom and control, and the individual and the state.

In the early twentieth century, human bodily movement garnered interest among researchers who were convinced that understanding and controlling it could help govern an increasingly frazzled, fragmented world. Making Movement Modern traces one movement visualization technique, Labanotation, from its origins in expressionist dance, Austro-Hungarian military discipline, and contemporary physiology to its employment in factories and offices a half-century later. Frustrated by societies that seemed plagued by regimentation and alienation, the users of Laban-inspired systems—from artists and scientists to factory owners, politicians, lawyers, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and computer scientists—hoped to provide opportunities for individual expression while simultaneously harnessing movement to serve the needs of larger communities, businesses, and states.

Making Movement Modern reveals how Labanotation’s creator, choreographer Rudolf Laban, and his acolytes offered this system to a surprising variety of individuals and groups. It was a technique that promised liberation through expressive movement; it was also a means of organizing fascist displays of pure “Aryan” culture. The book explores these political ambiguities as Laban-based systems entered postwar society in the United States and the United Kingdom, where they were used to document disappearing folk cultures, treat Holocaust survivors, and make even the dullest, most repetitive work feel spiritually meaningful. Central to these efforts were vast programs to collect and store new kinds of personal movement data, and this history also has much to tell us about mass data collection today. This is a book for anyone interested in the relationship between art, science, data, and the human body across the tumultuous twentieth century.

Visit Whitney E. Laemmli's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Blood on the Wind"

New from Oxford University Press: Blood on the Wind: An Uncivil War in the Classic Maya Lowlands by James L. Fitzsimmons.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story most often commonly told about the Maya involves their spectacular collapse at the height of their civilization in the early ninth century CE. Crops died, disease and malnutrition spread, and scorched earth warfare became common. People lost faith in their governments and moved to the Caribbean coast, the mountains of Guatemala, or further afield. But there is another tale that is equally compelling. One hundred years earlier, a group of kings known as the Snakes created a League and were able to force, cajole, or convince their fellow rulers to work towards common causes. In so doing, they took the first small steps towards something that had never existed in the Maya area: an empire.

Blood on the Wind narrates this dramatic episode during the Classic Maya period (250-850 CE). From present-day central Mexico across central America, the League attempted to subdue their enemies and transition to an imperial force. In the heart of the lowlands, they created soaring temples, luxurious palaces, and public spaces that continue to captivate visitors to this region. Despite their achievements, a brutal, now forgotten war ensued, and the imperial experiment failed.

Bringing to light the colorful individuals involved and their ambitions and flaws, Mesoamerican expert James L. Fitzsimmons recovers the world of this embryonic empire. Family rivalry, greed, grievances, and blindly clinging to the past meant that future generations would live in an environment where each kingdom made its own political and economic choices--but without the benefit of a stronger union.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Prince's Minneapolis"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Prince's Minneapolis: A Biography of Sound and Place by Rashad Shabazz.

About the book, from the publisher:

When nineteen-year-old Prince took the stage to perform “I Wanna Be Your Lover” on American Bandstand, those who watched couldn’t reconcile how Prince’s funky disco-pop sounds had hailed from a place like Minneapolis. But the Minneapolis Sound, Prince’s signature pop-musical fusion of funk, R&B, rock, punk, and new wave, did not emerge from a vacuum. The place and space of Minneapolis shaped the musical ecosystem that made Prince famous. And in turn, a complex array of social forces shaped the city’s soundscape.

An expert on place, race, and culture, geographer Rashad Shabazz reveals the hidden history of the Minneapolis Sound, Prince, and Prince’s beloved city. More than a biography of Prince, this is a biography of the city and the world of sound from which Prince emerged. Shabazz traces the history of the Minneapolis Sound alongside the city’s history, from colonial contact through periods of Indigenous removal, white settlement, mass migration, industrialization, music education, suburbanization, and systemic racism. This complex history, combined with the exceptional talent cultivated in Minneapolis’s small Black communities, gave rise to a groundbreaking genre, the otherworldly legend that was Prince, and music that captivated the world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Mother's Work"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: A Mother's Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War–Era Nurse by Megan VanGorder.

About the book, from the publisher:

Mary Ann Bickerdyke led a remarkable life. A widowed mother from Illinois, she became an influential traveling nurse and Sanitary Commission agent during the American Civil War. She followed the Union army through four years and nineteen battles, established hundreds of hospitals, assisted surgeons with amputations, treated fevers, and fed the soldiers in her care. Known affectionately as “Mother” to thousands of soldiers, Bickerdyke bridged the private world of home caregiving and the public demands of wartime and institutional medicine.

Drawing on a rich archive of personal letters, military records, and newspapers, Megan VanGorder explores how Bickerdyke used her maternal identity to challenge norms, advocate for soldiers, and pioneer compassionate care practices before, during, and after the Civil War. A Mother’s Work uses key episodes from Bickerdyke’s life to reveal broader truths about motherhood, medicine, and women’s roles in the nineteenth century, and offers an intimate and historically grounded portrait of one woman’s evolving identity and the moniker that made her famous. In reassessing Bickerdyke’s work and legacy, this book also serves as a new perspective on how white working-class women contributed to the transitional period of the Civil War era and reshaped public health, social care, and national memory.

Visit Megan VanGorder's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Computing in the Age of Decolonization"

New from Princeton University Press: Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution by Dwaipayan Banerjee.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Cold War geopolitics and domestic capitalism changed the trajectory of India’s computing industry

India today is widely recognized for producing world-class tech talent and Silicon Valley leaders, yet captures only a fraction of the global tech industry’s profits, primarily providing skilled but inexpensive labor for Western corporations. Computing in the Age of Decolonization uncovers the overlooked history behind this paradox, tracing India's ambitious but ultimately thwarted drive to build a self-reliant computing industry from the 1950s to the 1980s.

After independence in 1947, Indian scientists and policymakers at institutions such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research saw computing as central to national sovereignty, economic growth, and scientific advancement. Through projects such as the groundbreaking TIFRAC computer and the decisive expulsion of IBM, they aimed for technological independence. But almost immediately, these initiatives faced powerful political and economic headwinds. Indian computer scientists grappled with Cold War politics, international trade imbalances, US corporate monopolies, and strategic decisions by India's technocratic elite, who favored profitable technical services over costly investments in research and manufacturing.

In narrating this lost future, Computing in the Age of Decolonization shows that genuine technological independence requires more than technical expertise—it demands addressing enduring political and social structures rooted in colonial legacies. As global struggles over technology intensify, this book reveals how historical pathways continue to shape contemporary battles for technological and economic sovereignty.

Visit Dwaipayan Banerjee's website.

--Marshal Zeringue