"Order of Business"

New Columbia University Press: Monstrous Conceptions: A History of Race, Disability, and Reproductive Medicine in the United States by Miriam Rich.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the nineteenth century, American medical practitioners helped craft a new science of monsters. The term “monstrous birth” had long been applied to newborns with congenital conditions such as anencephaly. When practitioners redefined “monstrosity” in scientific terms, they claimed to be stripping away its fraught connotations. Instead, recast as a biological phenomenon, the monster gained new social and cultural salience. Monstrosity gave form to pervasive ideas about the meaning of racial difference, the fragility of racial order, and the peril of racial degeneration.

Miriam Rich explores the history of monstrosity as a modern scientific category, tracing the practices that transformed newborn bodies into medical specimens across the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Monstrous Conceptions vividly examines experiences of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care; the preparation and display of anatomical specimens; and the production and circulation of scientific knowledge. It shows how diverse laywomen and their families engaged with medical meaning making even as predominantly white, male practitioners increasingly sought to assert authority over reproduction. Rich also reveals how the nineteenth-century category of biological monstrosity helped lay the groundwork for the American eugenics movement―and contributed to ideas about deviant and defective bodies that still haunt us today. Shedding new light on intertwined historical conceptions of race, sex, and disability, Monstrous Conceptions illuminates how medical science produced enduring notions of human difference.

Visit Miriam Rich's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Post-Liberal Peace"

New from Cornell University Press: A Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management by Monalisa Adhikari.

About the book, from the publisher:

In A Post-Liberal Peace, Monalisa Adhikari shows how rising powers like India and China are reshaping global peace governance. Over recent decades, both countries have deepened engagement with institutions built on liberal principles, including those related to peacebuilding. Their growing role raises critical questions about how their approaches diverge from liberal models and their impact on the domestic politics of conflict-affected states.

Focusing on India and China's involvement in peace processes in Nepal and Myanmar, Adhikari demonstrates that these powers advance distinctive, state-centered programs that privilege regional stakeholders, stability, development, and pragmatism. Operating under conditions of "negotiated coexistence" with liberal peacebuilders, their initiatives neither fully align with nor openly contest existing actors, limiting cooperation while avoiding confrontation. This pluralized form of international engagement enables domestic elites to resist external pressures, producing hybrid peace orders that incorporate some liberal elements yet remain largely at the status quo―and often illiberal.

Rich with archival and interview evidence, A Post-Liberal Peace sheds light on alternative forms of peacebuilding and their on-the-ground effects in an increasingly multipolar world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wanting Children"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Wanting Children: Family-Planning Policies and the Engineering of America’s Population by Leonard M. Lopoo.

About the book, from the publisher:

On the eugenic origins of US reproductive laws—and the surprising policy changes needed to remedy it.

The US government spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year to promote and facilitate contraception. Whereas other wealthy countries support broader fertility interventions under the banner of “family planning,” the United States remains committed only to helping Americans—and especially poorer Americans—plan not to have a family.

In an unflinching treatise on one of the century’s defining social issues, Leonard M. Lopoo shows how the US’s asymmetric reproductive approach is a vestige of the country’s earlier sins: America’s first reproductive policies were authored by some of the twentieth century’s most prominent eugenicists, a group whose primary goal was birth prevention among lower economic classes and racial minorities. These origins have consequently created a contradictory position for the country today, in which contraception for the lowest-income Americans is subsidized, while many upper-class Americans employ technologies to have children with preferable traits.

Lopoo recasts this personal and politicized topic in elegant, stark terms. If the United States is to legislate reproduction, the only defensible approach is equity: helping people who want children to have children. Wanting Children posits a new and elevating criterion for how we think about fertility in the twenty-first century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence"

New from Oxford University Press: Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence by John F. Padgett.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Renaissance in Florence was not only a time of extraordinary artistic and philosophical creativity; it also marked a pivotal moment in the invention of new organizational forms that reshaped the city's economic, political, and social life. In Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence, John F. Padgett distills and synthesizes thirty years of research into how Florentine institutions and social networks developed and transformed over two centuries. Drawing on an unparalleled historical dataset encompassing more than 100,000 individuals, Padgett maps the intricate web of relationships that connected Florence's families, businesses, and political actors between 1300 and 1500.

The book centers on three major arenas of organizational change. First, Padgett traces the evolution of business structures, particularly within the banking sector, focusing on the development of the diversified partnership-system form of business organization. Second, he examines the shifts to Florentine kinship networks, Florentine kinship networks, outlining the formation of patrilineage and its diffusion from upper classes to middle classes. Finally, he charts the shifting terrain of political networks and the transformation of oligarchic elites.

Across all three domains, Padgett demonstrates that organizational change did not occur in isolation. Instead, developments in one arena continually spilled over into others through the dense, cross-cutting social networks that underpinned Florentine society. Elites were rarely confined to a single role: they were merchants, bankers, politicians, and civic leaders simultaneously, moving fluidly among spheres as circumstances shifted. This multivalent identity, he argues, was central to Florence's adaptability and resilience. Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence ultimately offers a fresh interpretation of the Renaissance, revealing how social networks emerged, transformed, and generated new forms of collective life during a period of intense social, political, and cultural change.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Invested"

New from Stanford University Press: Invested: Trust and Ignorance in a Middle-Class Fraud by Camilo Arturo Leslie.

About the book, from the publisher:

A riveting and revealing new account of the precarity of the middle class today

To be middle class today connotes a certain prudence when it comes to financial decision-making – steadily building one's nest egg rather than carelessly spending. Constantly enjoined to put their savings to work in shrewd investments, these subjects must constantly guard their class status. In Invested Camilo Leslie contends that these pressures require middle-class adults to engage professionals, experts, brokers, and organizations for help in financializing their futures. These pivotal relationships that comprise the middle class experience cannot be grasped without an account of trust, and, in this case, its betrayal.

Leslie takes the case of the Stanford Financial Group (SFG) – the second largest Ponzi scheme on record – to explore the vulnerability built into middle classness. The Stanford fraud stands out for its twenty-three-year length, its complex structure, and its geographic breadth, ensnaring victims across the Americas, including this book's focal populations: investors in Venezuela and the United States. Victims of the scheme were invariably members of the middle class, with sufficient investable funds to participate. The book's comparative approach reveals how middle classness is made and manifested differently in distinct settings. Tracing SFG's arc in Venezuela and the U.S. reveals the weight of local political and institutional contexts on middle-class subjects' propensity to trust.

Drawing on interviews with investors, ex-employees of SFG, and a range of professionals with ties to the case, Leslie tells a compelling, often poignant story of an unwieldy category. To be middle-class, he shows, is to occupy not just a material location but a moral and epistemic one in which class members are obliged to trust from a place of ignorance.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reading Matters"

New from NYU Press: Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age by Joel Halldorf.

About the book, from the publisher:

Traces earlier revolutions in the history of reading to orient our shift to the digital age

Considered one of the greatest inventions of human civilization, writing has served as a pathway to culture and education through history. The digital revolution has ushered in a dramatic transformation, leading to growing concern over the effects and possible detriments of algorithms, information overload, and fake news. In Reading Matters, Joel Halldorf makes the case that in order to navigate the upheavals of the digital age, we must understand prior technical revolutions and the transformations they engendered. He shows how our ways of reading are inseparable from the media we use, and that the decline of deep, attentive reading may be the most serious consequence of our move from page to screen.

Originally published in Swedish in 2023, this newly revised volume presents a sweeping history of transformations in reading and writing, tracing precedents in the invention of writing, the shift from clay tablets to papyrus and from scrolls to codices, the advent of printing, and the development of industrial printing. It explores how each new format of writing has encouraged new ways to think, relate, and organize the world. Essentially, it is not only what we read that is important, but how we read.

Moving through key historical events including the rise of Christianity, the scientific revolution, and the development of democracy, Halldorf explores how changes in the physical book reflected major cultural and historical shifts of the time. By tracing how new media forms have impacted human attention, authority, and community, the volume equips readers to better understand our own digital habits today. Detailing the riveting cultural history of reading technologies, book revolutions, and cultural upheavals, Reading Matters showcases the massive power of reading, writing, and books in helping us understand who we are.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory"

New from Princeton University Press: The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tracing the genealogy of conspiracy theory, from Machiavelli through the “paranoid style” to QAnon

Truthers, birthers, flat-Earthers, the deep state, crisis actors, chemtrails, the Epstein files, Pizzagate, the Plandemic—it seems as though there’s a conspiracy theory for every situation. But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? And why is the term used to describe beliefs that are so very unlike theories (at least in the scientific sense of the word)? In this erudite and original book, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg answers these questions not by formulating a definition but by tracing a genealogy. He uncovers two crucial strands of contemporary conspiracy theorizing on the threshold of modernity: on the one hand, political analysis as realized by Niccolò Machiavelli in such works as The Prince and, on the other, apocalyptic prophecy as channeled by the charismatic preacher Girolamo Savonarola.

The French Revolution, the antisemitic hoax known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Nuremberg Trials number among the subsequent episodes that progressively entangled these strands before finally knotting them into the twentieth-century concept of conspiracy theory. Alternative labels were also offered, most strikingly by the historian Richard Hofstadter, whose engagement with American right-wing politics in the 1950s and 1960s inspired his notion of the paranoid style. As McKenzie-McHarg shows, Hofstadter’s coinage, with its psychological bent, contributed to personalizing our understanding of conspiracy theory, thus yielding a specific type of person that, for better or worse, has become all too familiar to us today: the conspiracy theorist.

Proceeding from The Prince through The Protocols to the paranoid style and then beyond to QAnon, The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory sheds new light on a complex and troubling phenomenon.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Thinking with Dogs in Roman Britain"

New from Oxford University Press: Thinking with Dogs in Roman Britain: Lived Experience, Inequality, and Ritual in a Roman Province by Robin Fleming.

About the book, from the publisher:

Thinking with Dogs in Roman Britain: Lived Experience, Inequality, and Ritual in a Roman Province argues that in Roman Britain, where little written evidence survives, some aspects of the past are more visible when we look not at people but instead focus on the dogs nipping at their heels. By examining the evidence of more than 1,700 Roman-period dogs preserved in structured deposits that Fleming suggests are the remnants of ritual acts, she provides a history of the relationships between canines and people living in a provincial context. The book begins by investigating the lives of real dogs in Britain under Rome, some of which were pampered working or personal animals, but many of which had hard lives and had to fend for themselves. It then explores how the period's authors used both pampered dogs and strays as metaphors, shedding light on issues of hierarchy, inequality, and enslavement. Finally it then turns to the widespread use of dogs as a material of religion, investigating their role as sacrificial animals and ritual agents, first in temple and shrine rituals and then in everyday household religion. Fleming concludes by asking what dogs did for ritual and what they can tell us about the making of Roman provincial culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bloody Numbers"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality by Pablo F. Gómez.

About the book, from the publisher:

Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualize human beings in terms of populations.

Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, financiers, officials, surgeons, notaries, ship captains, and others began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the world of slave trading used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their calculations with the aim of protecting their financial interests rather than of caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks.

A pathbreaking work, Bloody Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, it shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cats: A History"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: Cats: A History by Rod Phillips.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping and fascinating history of cat-human relationships.

For more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life. But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them became pets. In Cats, Rod Phillips shares a sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered hunters to Europe's suspected familiars of witches and from shipboard rodent controllers to cherished internet icons.

Phillips illustrates how cats have always occupied spaces both familiar and mysterious and how their perceived independence and disruptive nature―and their associations with women, the supernatural, and outsiders―have shaped humans' attitudes toward these fascinating creatures. Cats have been lauded as companions and vermin-killers, reviled as threats to moral and ecological order, and cherished for the very qualities that make them hard to control. This richly textured portrait of cats explores their significance in religion, politics, gender, literature, warfare, and pop culture. It also provides profound insights into our relationships with other animals, especially dogs and rodents.

The many roles that cats have played throughout history illuminate a variety of contradictions in humans' perceptions of them: as affectionate yet aloof, adorable and evil, ordinary and exceptional. This book is the definitive story of the feline presence in human history―an elegant study of how we live with animals whom we see as living by their own rules.

Visit the website for Phillips's books about wine.

--Marshal Zeringue