"Natural Risk"

New from Columbia University Press: Natural Risk: A History of Oil, Politics, and the Environment in West Texas by Sarah Stanford-McIntyre.

About the book, from the publisher:

The longest-running oil-producing region in Texas, the Permian Basin fueled the state’s transformation from agricultural backwater to extractive powerhouse in the middle of the twentieth century. During the same period, Texas was also a crucial outlier in a national trend that placed risk management and environmental safety in the hands of state regulators. This book shows how Permian Basin oil production reshaped Texas’s environment, economy, and political culture, with major consequences for American understandings of health, wealth, and the social safety net.

Sarah Stanford-McIntyre argues that the energy industry naturalized the risks of extractive capitalism, redefining what sorts and levels of danger were seen as acceptable. She traces how West Texas oil employers and employees―prospectors, bankers, roughnecks, drillers, contractors, and engineers―encountered and assessed the industry’s many overlapping risks, demonstrating why different groups prioritized immediate economic concerns over long-term public health or the environment. Energy workers and communities often saw environmental and health hazards as inherent and unavoidable, believing that risk could be managed on economic terms. For the industry, risk became a language for justifying deregulation, contamination, and neglect. Bringing together the political, environmental, and business history of West Texas with the lived experience of workers in the energy industries, Natural Risk reveals how Permian Basin oil transformed American capitalism.

Visit Sarah Stanford-McIntyre's website.

--Marshal Zerimgue

"Is Faith Feminine?"

New from Oxford University Press: Is Faith Feminine?: What Americans Really Think About Gender and Religion by Landon Schnabel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why are women often more religious when men dominate religious institutions? This paradox--men in the pulpit, women in the pews--and especially the idea that women are inherently more religious has long been treated as a universal fact. In Is Faith Feminine?, Landon Schnabel shows it's not.

Drawing on cross-national data and original surveys of thousands of Americans--including Muslim, Jewish, and secular oversamples--the book demonstrates that gender gaps vary dramatically across traditions and contexts. Women are more religious than men among Christians, but among Muslims and some other groups, the gap shrinks, disappears, or reverses entirely. To explain this variation, the book develops what Schnabel calls Gendered Incentives and Expectations (GIE) theory, a multilevel framework that distinguishes between individual faith and organized religion and specifies how gendered social and psychological incentives structure religious participation. As the book shows, individual faith and spirituality are often culturally coded as feminine and provide comfort, validation, and meaning, especially for structurally disadvantaged groups. Organized religion, by contrast, is typically masculine--coded, hierarchical, and dominated by men. Incentives and expectations shape who religion appeals to, who participates, and in what ways.

Tracing the political consequences of religion's gendered appeal and why many Americans are disengaging from religious institutions while maintaining personal faith and spirituality, Is Faith Feminine? offers a new account of religion, gender, and social change in the contemporary United States and beyond.

Visit Landon Schnabel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unrepayable Debt"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Unrepayable Debt: Law, Redress, Reconciliation, and the Unmaking of Empire by Yukiko Koga.

About the book, from the publisher:

What does it mean, and take, to repay the unrepayable?

Unrepayable Debt explores belated attempts to reckon with the savage plundering of labor and life under the Japanese empire. Located within global conversations on reparations for colonialism and slavery, and centered on slave labor lawsuits brought by Chinese victims seeking overdue justice in Japanese courts, Yukiko Koga traces a sea change in the legal sphere propelled by an unprecedented transnational redress movement. The lawsuits exposed not only the original violence but also a structure of transitional injustice etched onto the unmaking of the Japanese empire, which left victims silenced and unredressable for decades.

Challenging the idea of reckoning as a discrete event that brings closure through settlements, apology, or compensation, Koga’s ethnography details the slow and messy intergenerational work of reconciliation on the ground. The book shows how the re-pairing of severed relations, separated by lineages of victimhood and perpetration, lies at the core of repair. By bringing to the surface the prolonged and entangled processes of decolonization and deimperialization, Unrepayable Debt compels a rethinking of what redress, repair, and reconciliation mean, how they are practiced, and where accountability lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Pope Against Nuremberg"

New from NYU Press: The Pope Against Nuremberg: How the Vatican Helped Nazis Escape Postwar Justice by Gerald J. Steinacher.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Vatican officials aided Nazi war criminals and undermined Allied justice after World War II

In the aftermath of World War II, the Nuremberg Trials promised a new era of international justice, holding Nazi leaders to account for their crimes. Yet beyond the courtroom, a very different struggle was unfolding, one that played out behind the walls of the Vatican.

Provocative and meticulously researched, The Pope Against Nuremberg uncovers how the Vatican shielded war criminals, challenged the principles of postwar justice, and facilitated ratline networks in which Church leaders played a central role in spiriting perpetrators to safety―what its defenders called Christian mercy. Drawing on newly opened Vatican archives, as well as government and intelligence records from Europe and the Americas, Gerald J. Steinacher reveals a campaign that would ultimately benefit some of the most notorious Nazi perpetrators by helping them avoid prosecution.

From papal diplomats to individual bishops, Church figures petitioned the U.S. president and other Allied leaders, submitted statements for the defense, coordinated public relations campaigns, resisted extraditions, and, in some cases, sheltered Nazi war criminals on Church property. Meanwhile, Pope Pius XII, long criticized for his alleged public silence during the Holocaust, urged the world to forgive Germany. Steinacher places these actions within the turbulent politics of early Cold War Europe, when fear of communism increasingly outweighed the pursuit of accountability for mass crimes. Combining groundbreaking research and compelling storytelling, The Pope Against Nuremberg provides new answers to decades-old questions about the role and motivations of church officials in the networks that helped Nazis escape postwar justice.

Visit Gerald J. Steinacher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Seneca Village"

New from Cornell University Press: Seneca Village: A Story of Black Freedom and Manhattan Real Estate by Alexander Manevitz.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Seneca Village, Alexander Manevitz showcases the ideas of freedom that underpinned this remarkable community, built in upper Manhattan with the intent to foster Black social, economic, and political self-determination. Between 1825 and 1853, free African Americans bought land and built an innovative settlement. Then, through the 1850s, New York City forcibly evicted the residents, seized the land, and destroyed the buildings, burying this thriving neighborhood under the landscape of the new Central Park.

In this most in-depth investigation to date of Seneca Village, Manevitz reconstructs the essential history of the community from the overlooked traces they left behind, focusing on the interconnected lives of Seneca Villagers and the daily work of liberation. Decades before the Civil War and Reconstruction, they honed a vision of Black freedom on their own terms, fighting to create space for themselves in a country that promised liberty for all but denied it to many.

Visit Alexander Manevitz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Help!: The Ethics of Rescue"

New from Oxford University Press: Help!: The Ethics of Rescue by Helen Frowe.

About the book, from the publisher:

Most people agree that we can have duties to prevent harm to others. But there is significant disagreement about what these duties demand of us and what they permit others to do to us. In Help! The Ethics of Rescue, Helen Frowe develops an account of the theoretical underpinnings of the duty to rescue. She rejects the influential view that the limits of the duty to rescue are explained by agent-relative prerogatives to care more about our own interests than the interests of others. In its place, she defends an agent-neutral account of the duty to rescue, grounded in the limits of the duty to use ourselves as a means for the benefit of others. Her account provides a unified, non-consequentialist account of the duty to rescue that tightly connects our right to refrain from saving to the wrongness of others forcing us to save. Frowe explores the implications of this agent-neutral account for a number of key debates in the ethics of rescue, such as the duty to act on lesser-evil justifications for harming, the moral significance of property rights over harm-preventing resources, and the permissibility of forming agreements to save. She also considers its implications for applied aspects of the duty to rescue, including the ethics of abortion, the ethics of war, and duties to refugees.

Visit Helen Frowe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"King Abdullah and the Saudi Arabian National Guard"

New from Stanford University Press: King Abdullah and the Saudi Arabian National Guard: Tribes and Networks in Modern Saudi Arabia by Joshua Teitelbaum.

About the book, from the publisher:

Abdullah bin 'Abd al-'Aziz (1924–2015) was an unlikely contender for the Saudi throne. His kinship ties within the royal family were weak. Yet he rose to power, finally becoming king in 2005. His main instrument was the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), which he took over in 1963, transforming it into a personal power base and a cornerstone of regime security. This book offers the first comprehensive history of SANG, using Abdullah's little-studied trajectory to illuminate how power functions in Saudi Arabia.

Tracing SANG's evolution from tribal roots to the present, Joshua Teitelbaum explores the enduring role of tribal values―especially kinship―in shaping Saudi society and the modern state. He shows how Abdullah compensated for his weak lineage through patronage and kickback schemes. Drawing on newly declassified archival documents and Arabic-language sources, Teitelbaum also uncovers rival royal kinship networks and an American intelligence-business network that challenged Abdullah and SANG. The narrative concludes with Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, whose rule continues this kinship-based network system with a new network of his own. Ultimately, this book reveals how kinship and patronage underpin Saudi governance, providing key insight into one of the world's most opaque and strategically vital monarchies.

Visit Joshua Teitelbaum's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Red Dirt"

New from Princeton University Press: Red Dirt: Class and the Contestations of Indigeneity in Hawaiʻi and Beyond by Ikaika Ramones.

About the book, from the publisher:

How material conditions and social contradictions remake indigeneity

Indigenous studies struggles to analyze class, yet class reshapes the cultural, political, and economic terrain of indigeneity. In Red Dirt, Ikaika Ramones goes beyond the usual conceptual frameworks of resistance and domination to explore the political-economic basis for Native Hawaiian social reproduction and revitalization. By doing so, he casts indigeneity as a contested process rather than reification, encompassing both grassroots revitalization efforts and large, multibillion-dollar Native organizations.

Ramones offers a class analysis that shifts the theorization of indigeneity away from the metaphysical and idealist methodologies of the academy to trace social contradictions and material conditions instead. He counters the notion of Native culture as a coherent given, disentangling different strains of “Native Hawaiian culture”—an elite strain that depoliticizes and buttresses the status quo and grassroots strains that politicize and produce critical consciousness. Amid movements of cultural revitalization, he shows how histories of racialized eugenics rearticulate into a form of “class assimilation.” By examining organizations that support, shape, and constrain Native Hawaiians, Ramones shows how actors appropriate, protect, or rearticulate economic and social relations within or against capitalism. While mired in capitalism and settler colonialism, he argues, Indigenous actors walk shifting lines of subversion and complicity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fresh from the Factory"

New from Oxford University Press: Fresh from the Factory: Nature and the Roots of the Industrial Food Supply by Michael S. Kideckel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Debates about "natural food" have long stood in for broader confrontations about science, health, and power. These persistent tensions in American society can be illuminated by exploring the origins of a beloved consumer product: breakfast cereal.

Shredded Wheat, Corn Flakes, and Grape-Nuts emerged in the 1890s with eye-catching packaging that promised clean, healthy, and natural contents. Producers of these and other early packaged foods developed marketing campaigns that reframed industrial food as the key to reforming capitalism's excesses. In so doing, cereal manufacturers became some of the world's largest food processors and, at the same time, among the nation's most prominent nature writers, health authorities, and social reformers.

Fresh from the Factory shows that American consumption habits and beliefs about nature developed together. Cereal manufacturers gained influence by appealing to a widespread desire among a largely female consumer base for cleanliness, purity, and simplicity in feeding their families. These companies took advantage of and helped promote new ways of making, advertising, selling, and distributing food--and did so in the name of the unadulterated goodness of nature. In an era of little public health regulation, hazy ideas about scientific authority, and public uncertainty about whom to trust, cereal producers promised to deliver the divine powers of nature straight from the factory floor.

Visit Michael S. Kideckel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This Little World"

New from Yale University Press: This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England by Nandini Das.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold new history of Tudor and Stuart England told not through its monarchs but through the people crossing its borders: merchants and migrants, sailors and spies, pilgrims and exiles

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forged a powerful image of England―Shakespeare’s “scepter’d isle,” proud and apart, defined by royal spectacle and myth. Beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, however, lies a more complex and connected reality.

England at this time was far from insular. Travelling in and out of the country were Venetian glassmakers with English wives, African innkeepers, and Native American envoys. There were people like the Flemish artist Levina Teerlinc, probably the only painter to be employed by four English monarchs. There was William Adams, a Kentish navigator who became Japan’s first English samurai. And there was Elizabeth Key, daughter of an enslaved mother in the colony of Virginia, who battled in the courts for herself and her son.

Drawing on extensive archival research, attentive to the textures of daily life yet alive to the sweep of history, Nandini Das offers a startlingly new, globally resonant vision of England’s past and what it meant to be English. It is a story of a nation in the making―on the cusp of empire―told through the traces of those often written out of it. Yet in reframing England’s story within a wider world, it challenges us to rethink some of our most fundamental ideas: about nationhood, about identity, and, above all, about belonging.

--Marshal Zeringue