"Landlocked"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Landlocked: Water, Energy, and Planetary Politics in Alberta by Jeremy J. Schmidt.

About the book, from the publisher:

A study of oil-rich Alberta reveals the entwined relationships among geoscience, governance, and power.

The Canadian province of Alberta holds the world’s fourth-largest reserve of fossil fuels, with oil sands famous for bitumen, a viscous form of petroleum. A critical testing ground for international environmental ideas and energy policies, Alberta pioneered state-led efforts to understand, extract, and sell bitumen. Without natural access to ocean ports, Alberta must negotiate pipeline routes with neighboring provinces and nations to reach global markets. But Alberta is also landlocked in another sense: it is caught in an extractive relationship with oil-rich earth.

In Landlocked, Jeremy J. Schmidt focuses on Alberta’s energy industry, particularly its use of water and oil, to argue for a new way of understanding how political authority is forged and maintained through the environment. Schmidt details how water and oil were enrolled in early state-making projects, such as irrigation, and examines the consequences of Alberta’s efforts to extract value from land, including a series of events in 2013 that released 4.2 million barrels of bitumen into underground environments. By uncovering the ways that geosciences supported activities―from land settlement to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples―that produced environmental policies and approaches to management and governance, he shows that they aren’t merely instruments of state power but central to Alberta’s political identity and legitimacy.

Visit Jeremy J. Schmidt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Frontiers of Need"

New from Cornell University Press: Frontiers of Need: American Humanitarianism and the Nigerian Civil War by Brian McNeil.

About the book, from the publisher:

Frontiers of Need argues that the Nigerian Civil War marked a turning point in US foreign policy, bringing humanitarian intervention into the center of debates about US engagement with the world. Emerging at a moment when Americans were already questioning the moral foundations of Cold War foreign policy, Biafra became a mirror reflecting a broader crisis of morality―a sense that the United States had lost its ethical bearings in the world. The mass starvation of Biafran children did not merely present a humanitarian catastrophe but, through a US-led humanitarian intervention, offered a chance to overcome moral paralysis and chart a different role for the United States abroad.

Drawing from governmental archives and organizational records across the United States, Britain, and Nigeria, Brian McNeil analyzes how domestic pressure for humanitarian action forced the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations to intervene in Biafra. Yet both administrations treated humanitarian intervention more as a domestic political problem than as a moral imperative, pursuing relief initiatives that managed American dissent without meaningfully addressing Biafran suffering. Through detailed examination of failed negotiations, bureaucratic conflicts, and competing sovereignty claims, Frontiers of Need reveals how efforts to wed humanitarian intervention with American power ultimately prolonged the conflict while failing to deliver the moral renewal Americans sought, establishing instead a troubling precedent for how humanitarian concern could become entangled with national interest in contemporary international politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Socialism Mediated"

New from Oxford University Press: Socialism Mediated: The Making of Soviet Culture in Central Asia by Claire Roosien.

About the book, from the publisher:

When the Bolsheviks took over in Central Asia, they inherited a region that the Russian Empire had colonized less than fifty years before. Tenuously integrated into the Russian Empire and predominantly Muslim, the territories that became the republics of Central Asia were a far cry from the societies where Marxism-Leninism was forged. Despite their narrow foothold, Soviet authorities represented themselves as acting according to the will of Central Asia's people. That representation became increasingly urgent as the state wielded unprecedented violence to enact its policies, such as collectivization, cottonization, religious repression, and women's unveiling. To bridge the gap between Central Asia's masses and the interventionist state agenda many of them perceived as foreign, the Soviet Party-state employed a cohort of Central Asian activists and cultural producers who made common cause with the Bolsheviks. They worked to reorganize social institutions, remake musical form, reshape literary life, and recreate collective imaginaries in conditions of extreme uncertainty and rampant violence.

Socialism Mediated tells the story of these mediators who made Soviet culture in Uzbekistan. From Socialist Realist writers to popular singers, from women's activists to village worker-correspondents, they all worked within Soviet institutions to make Uzbek culture Soviet, and to make Soviet culture Uzbek. Drawing on a wide variety of archival and published sources from collections in three countries, Roosien provides the first study of how Central Asians interpreted, implemented, and resisted the Party-state's utterly novel cultural directives. Through close analysis of cultural production in conversation with social historical methods, she shows how Central Asia's intermediaries formulated a new aesthetics of Socialist Realism as a way to mobilize a legitimizing public for the newfound socialist state, while also often revealing the tensions and inconsistencies in that project. Far from a totalizing takeover, the creation of Soviet culture in Uzbekistan was riven with contradictions and gaps, revealing the unexpected resonances and unresolved tensions in the Soviet project of mass publicity.

Socialism Mediated illuminates hotly debated questions about the legacies of empire and colonialism in the Soviet Union and sheds light on the cultural history of 1930s Central Asia, hitherto unexamined in English.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Shadow Over the World"

Coming soon from Simon & Schuster: A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America's World War II by William I. Hitchcock.

About the book, from the publisher:

From New York Times bestselling author William I. Hitchcock, a riveting, revelatory portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the lead-up to World War II, tracing his—and America’s—awakening to the threat of fascism.

How did FDR and the American public respond to the rise of dictators across Europe and Asia on the eve of World War II? The familiar narrative is that they reacted with indifference and embraced isolationism. Only with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were Americans reluctantly drawn into the global conflict. But distinguished historian William I. Hitchcock reveals a far more complex and surprising story.

From the time Mussolini came to power in 1922 to America’s entry into the war in 1941, Americans engaged in a fraught national debate over the rising threat—and for some, the lure—of fascism. At the center of this debate was Roosevelt himself. When he took office in 1933, Roosevelt was determined to avoid foreign entanglements that would harm his ambitious domestic agenda of the New Deal. But over the course of his first two terms, a network of journalists, activists, advisers, and diplomats gradually awakened him to the global dangers of fascism.

Roosevelt’s transformation was part of a larger national reckoning with authoritarianism around the world. A Shadow Over the World shines a light on a time when a coalition of courageous humanists gathered around a visionary leader to forge a new purpose for America: to protect democracy, oppose imperialism, support human rights, and lead a global fight for freedom. Their successful struggle against the dark forces of fascism holds powerful lessons for our own perilous times.

The Page 99 Test: The Age of Eisenhower.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Black Farm Boys"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Black Farm Boys: The Untold Story of the New Farmers of America by Bobby J. Smith II.

About the book, from the publisher:

Founded in 1935, the New Farmers of America (NFA) was the first national organization for Black farm boys studying vocational agriculture at segregated public high schools across the South—and as far north as New Jersey. Sociologist and award-winning author Bobby J. Smith II charts new terrain in Black history by uncovering the hidden story of the organization, which grew to an annual membership of more than 55,000 members and empowered Black boys to challenge racial exclusion in agriculture by becoming farmers and pursuing careers in agriculture. But by 1965, the NFA had vanished—unraveled by a hostile takeover by the predominantly white Future Farmers of America (FFA). The NFA, and the generation of Black agricultural leaders it helped shape, were largely erased from the historical record.

In vivid prose, Smith confronts the haunting paradox of the NFA: an organization that transformed rural Black life yet remains almost entirely absent from American memory. Reconstructing the NFA’s rise, influence, and disappearance, Black Farm Boys reshapes the history of the Black agricultural experience and restores a vital chapter in the story of education, rural life, and racial justice in the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Tempting Fate"

New from Princeton University Press: Tempting Fate: A Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life by Duncan Pritchard.

About the book, from the publisher:

A leading philosopher explains how risk-taking can help us live authentic and flourishing lives

We take risks every day—perhaps not the extreme, dangling-off-the-side-of-a-mountain kind of risks, but risks nonetheless, in decisions about careers, marriage, children, moving house, and other matters. Tempting fate is simply what we have to do from time to time in life. But how we should go about tempting fate in a reasonable way? In this illuminating book, philosopher Duncan Pritchard explains why risk-taking, even extreme risk-taking, can sometimes be both reasonable and admirable, and how it can play a crucial role in living an authentic life.

Using Alex Honnold’s famous free solo climb of El Capitan as a paradigm example of admirable risk-taking, Pritchard offers a completely new theory of risk, one that explains it in terms of fragility rather than probability. He shows how fragility can explain why skill and preparation are crucial to sensible risk-taking, even when the activity is unavoidably high risk. Fragility also makes clear that taking risks means riding one’s luck and why both risk and luck are vital to living an authentic and meaningful existence. Pritchard shows that his fragility theory of risk has practical implications for making sense of risk in law, arts, sports, and other domains. Tempting fate, in other words, is not merely thrill-seeking but essential for human flourishing.

Visit Duncan Pritchard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Sceptic Isle"

New from Oxford University Press: The Sceptic Isle: How the British Government Sold the Second World War by Steven Casey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Based on a massive array of overlooked primary sources, The Sceptic Isle presents a fast-paced narrative of the British attempt to sell World War II to its citizens. It weaves together government public relations, media reporting, political manoeuvering, and the public's response to reinterpret some of the most famous moments of British history, from Chamberlain and appeasement to Churchill's great speeches, from the Battle of Britain to the military campaigns in the Mediterranean and Western Europe, from food rationing to the Beveridge Report.

Visit Colin Farrelly's website.

The Page 99 Test: When Soldiers Fall.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Europe.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Pacific.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Living Redemption"

New from NYU Press: Living Redemption: Latinas Building Evangelical Futures Under Carceral Control by Melissa Guzman-Garcia.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examines how Latino Evangelical churches promise salvation while reinforcing logics of surveillance and criminalization systems that oppress their congregants

Living Redemption examines how faith-based institutions in Latinx communities enhance the state’s carceral power even as they attempt to empower and redeem their adherents. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research across two Latinx congregations in Fresno and the San Francisco Bay Area, Melissa Guzman-Garcia explores how Mexican, Central American, and Chicana women build their own spiritual services and support systems while recruiting other criminalized people into their church. While these services are meant to offer support, Guzman-Garcia uncovers how they also end up enacting their own spiritual versions of carceral control.

These faith-based organizations tend to socialize people to sanctify state power, either by promoting the idea that collective protests and social movements that challenge capitalism or capitalist exploitation would be unsuccessful, or by putting forward beliefs that the solution to social problems is a matter of “saving your soul,” not working for structural change. Thus, these evangelical settings both perpetuate and disrupt the dominant the racial and gendered social order, sustaining and strengthening state power.

Guzman-Garcia’s analysis urges us to assess the gendered logics and spiritual ideologies that fuel contemporary forms of American carceral governance and consider who exactly benefits from this spiritual and political labor.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Queer Resistance"

New from the University of California Press: Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family, and Inequality in Post-Socialist China by Susanne Yuk-Ping Choi.

About the book, from the publisher:

Queer Resistance examines transformations in intimate lives in post-socialist China through the experiences and resistance of LGBTQ+ people. Drawing on ten years of research conducted between 2015 and 2025, and one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, Susanne Y.P. Choi traces the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative ideals, and shows how LGBTQ+ people build communities amid intensified state crackdowns, develop new forms of personhood that subvert collectivist frameworks, and renegotiate intergenerational contracts. They navigate sexual possibilities opened up by marketization and digitalization while confronting hierarchies of desirability structured by class inequality and gender norms. The book demonstrates that younger Chinese people’s efforts to resist traditional obligations and pursue nonnormative life projects are relational, partial, and intersectional, shaped through encounters with changing configurations of power and inequality at the intersection of global forces and local histories.

Visit Susanne Choi's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bodies at Their Limits"

New from Oxford University Press: Bodies at Their Limits: Rethinking Political Violence through Hunger Strikes by Kerry McInerney.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hunger strikes have profoundly shaped the political landscape of the twentieth century, and in the early twenty-first century show no sign of abating. The prevalence of these costly protests provokes questions about the character of contemporary political violence, power, and resistance. This monograph asks how gender and race shape how hunger strikes are performed, enacted, mediated, and remembered. It argues that female hunger strikers push their bodies to their very limits to challenge their liminal positioning at the very limits of the body politic. Without romanticising these violent, desperate acts of last resort, I argue that female hunger strikers use self-directed political violence to produce new gendered identities that contest the gendered and racialised subjectivities that are violently imposed by the state. I focus on two examples of women’s collective hunger strikes in the British context: the hunger strikes undertaken by the British suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) between 1909 and 1914, and the 2018 hunger strike by detainees at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre (IRC). Through an analysis of these two cases, I argue that women’s hunger strikes are complexly situated within gendered norms, narratives, and discourses that affect the ability of female hunger strikers’ bodies to ‘speak’ of political injustice. Despite this, female hunger strikers still use their bodies to make political claims on the body politic, enact radical political projects that gesture towards a collective vision of freedom, and even invoke new and different ways of being human.

Visit Kerry McInerney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue