"Some White Folks"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity by Jennifer Chudy.

About the book, from the publisher:

A pioneering exploration of the unexamined roots and effect of racial sympathy within American politics.

There is racial inequality in America, and some people are distressed over it while others are not. This is a book about white people who feel that distress. For decades, political scientists have studied the effects of white racial prejudice, but Jennifer Chudy shows that white racial sympathy for Black Americans’ suffering is also a potent force in modern American politics. Grounded in the history of Black-white relations in America, racial sympathy is unique. It is not equivalent to a low level of racial prejudice or sympathy for other marginalized groups. Some White Folks reveals how racial sympathy shapes a significant number of white Americans’ opinions on policy areas ranging from the social welfare state to the criminal justice system. Under certain circumstances, it can also spur action—although effects on political behavior are weaker and less consistent, for reasons Chudy examines.

Drawing on diverse quantitative and qualitative evidence and integrating insights from multiple disciplines, Chudy explores the origins, importance, and complexity of racial sympathy, as well as the practical implications for political and movement leaders. A companion to the rich literature on prejudice, Some White Folks demonstrates the multifaceted role of race in American politics and public opinion.

Visit Jennifer Chudy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Illusions of Control"

New from Columbia University Press: Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria by Erica L. Gaston.

About the book, from the publisher:

Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critics have argued that such partnerships have many perils, from enabling human rights abuses to seeding future threats. Policy makers, however, have sought to mitigate the risks of partnering with irregular armed groups. Militia group leaders in far-flung corners of these war-torn countries were subjected to background checks and instructed about international law and human rights, and their funding was cut when they crossed red lines. To what extent have such mechanisms curbed the dangers of proxy warfare, and what unforeseen consequences has this approach unleashed?

Drawing on a decade of field research and hundreds of interviews with stakeholders, Erica L. Gaston unpacks the dilemmas of attempting to control proxy forces. She demonstrates that, although the tools U.S. policy makers used to constrain partners’ behavior increased in number and sophistication, they never fully addressed the range of political, security, and legal concerns surrounding these forces. Moreover, by shifting policy makers’ calculations, the use of proxy forces introduced additional moral hazards and may have enabled riskier decision making. Featuring substantial empirical detail and close analysis of key internal debates, Illusions of Control offers new perspectives on some of the most significant and controversial elements of recent U.S. security policy. In addition to nuanced insights about proxy relationships, this book provides a novel analytical toolkit for exploring transnational bargaining and foreign policy deliberations in hybrid political environments.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Uncovered: The Story of Insurance in America"

New from Oxford University Press: Uncovered: The Story of Insurance in America by Katherine Hempstead.

About the book, from the publisher:

Historically, the insurance industry in America has been fragmented. As a result, there have been debates and conflicts over the proper roles of federal and state governments, business, and the responsibilities of individuals. Who should cover the risks of loss? And to what extent should risk be shared and by whom?

In Uncovered, Katherine Hempstead answers these questions by exploring the history of the insurance business and its regulation in the United States from the 1870s through the twentieth century. Specifically, she focuses on the friction between the public demand for insurance and the private imperatives of insurers. Tracing the history of the industry from the early days of life, fire, and casualty insurance to the development of state regulation in the late nineteenth century, Hempstead examines the role that insurers initially played in the largely voluntary social safety net and how this changed over time. After the Great Depression, the federal government assumed a greater role in the provision of insurance, while insurers enthusiastically pursued the growing business of employee benefits. As the twentieth century progressed, insurers and government have become interdependent, with insurers participating in publicly funded markets. As Hempstead shows, periodic crises in life, fire, health, auto, and liability insurance highlighted gaps between the coverage that insurers were willing to provide and what the public demanded.

Highlighting how the major part states play in insurance regulation has made it harder to solve important problems, Uncovered fundamentally changes our understanding of the crucial role that insurance has always played in American politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Near and Far Waters"

New from Stanford University Press: Near and Far Waters: The Geopolitics of Seapower by Colin Flint.

About the book, from the publisher:

Seapower has been a constant in world politics, a tool through which powerful countries have policed the seas for commercial advantage. Political geographer Colin Flint highlights the geography of seapower as a dynamic, continual struggle to gain control of near waters―those parts of the oceans close to a country's shoreline―and far waters―parts of the oceans beyond the horizon and that neighbor the shorelines of other countries. A forceful and clarifying challenge to conventional accounts of geopolitics, Near and Far Waters offers an accessible introduction to the combination of economic and political relations that are the reason behind, and the result of, the development of seapower to control near waters and project force into far waters.

Examining the histories of three naval powers (the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States), this book distills the past and present patterns of seapower and their tendency to trigger repercussive conflict and war. Readers will gain an appreciation for how geopolitics works, the importance of seapower in economic competition, the motivations behind China's desire to become a global naval force, and the risks of current and future wars. Drawing on decades of experience, Flint urges readers to take seriously the dilemma of near/far waters as a context for an alternative understanding of global politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Return from the World"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Return from the World: Economic Growth and Reverse Migration in Brazil by Gregory Duff Morton.

About the book, from the publisher:

An anthropologist’s investigation of why some Brazilians choose to leave behind a booming economy and return to their villages.

In Return from the World, anthropologist Gregory Duff Morton traces the migrations of Brazilian workers who leave a thriving labor market and return to their home villages to become peasant farmers. Morton seeks to understand what it means to turn one’s back deliberately on the promise of economic growth.

Giving up their positions in factories, at construction sites, and as domestic workers, these migrants travel thousands of miles back to villages without running water or dependable power. There, many take up subsistence farming. Some become activists with the MST, Brazil’s militant movement of landless peasants. Bringing their stories vividly to life, Morton dives into the dreams and disputes at play in finding freedom in the shared rejection of growth.

Gregory Duff Morton is assistant professor at City College of New York, where he teaches anthropology and Latin American studies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Private Spaces in Public Places"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: Private Spaces in Public Places: Comfort Stations, Fitting Rooms, Public Baths, and Locker Rooms in America, 1880–1930 by Laura Walikainen Rouleau.

About the book, from the publisher:

A unique history of how private spaces in public―such as public restrooms and dressing rooms―developed in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.

Before the late nineteenth century, Americans bathed, dressed, undressed, and relieved themselves in the privacy of their own homes. Yet from 1880 to 1930, the social forces of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration combined to increasingly lure Americans out of the private realm and into the public sphere. In Private Spaces in Public Places, Laura W. Rouleau offers a distinctive look at the history of how new private spaces were built into the broader world.

In deciding what physical form these spaces would take, the very meaning of privacy manifested through the physical and social construction of these newly emerging spaces. Rouleau combines social history with a material culture–based analysis to examine the growing importance and physical development of spaces such as department store dressing rooms, school locker rooms, and public bathrooms that emerged during this era.

Rouleau argues that privacy was physically and socially constructed, as these sites were designed to segregate users by gender, class, race, and age. Creators of these spaces sought to impose their middle-class values regarding privacy through the physical regulation of users' bodies. Nonetheless, the creators' intentions did not always align with the lived reality of these spaces. By interrogating how people navigated these private spaces, this study offers an understanding of the actual historical experience of privacy at the turn of the twentieth century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Grammar of Status Competition"

New from Oxford University Press: The Grammar of Status Competition: International Hierarchies and Domestic Politics by Paul David Beaumont.

About the book, from the publisher:

States do not only strive for wealth and security, but international status too. A burgeoning body of research has documented that states of all sizes spend considerable time, energy, and even blood and treasure when seeking status on the world stage. Yet, for all scholars' success in identifying instances of status seeking, they lack agreement on the nature of the international hierarchies that states are said to compete within. Making sense of this status ambiguity remains the key methodological and theoretical challenge facing status research in international relations scholarship.

In The Grammar of Status Competition, Paul David Beaumont tackles this puzzle head on by making a strength out of status' widely acknowledged slipperiness. Given that states, statesmen, and citizens care about and pursue status despite its difficulty to assess, Beaumont argues that we can study international status hierarchies through these actors' attempts to grapple with this same status ambiguity. The book thus redirects inquiry toward the theories of international status (TIS) that governments and citizens themselves produce and use to make sense of their state's position in the world. Advancing a new framework for studying such TIS, the book illuminates how specific theories of international status emerge, solidify, and become contested, and how these processes influence domestic and foreign policy. Showcasing the value of a TIS approach via multiple historical case studies--from nuclear arms control to Norwegian education policy--Beaumont thereby addresses three major puzzles in IR status research: why states compete for status when the international rewards seem ephemeral; how states can escape the zero-sum game associated with quests for positional status; and how status scholars can overcome the methodological problem of disentangling status from other motivations.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fluid Geographies"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Fluid Geographies: Water, Science, and Settler Colonialism in New Mexico by K. Maria D. Lane.

About the book, from the publisher:

An unprecedented analysis of the origin story of New Mexico’s modern water management system.

Maria Lane’s Fluid Geographies traces New Mexico’s transition from a community-based to an expert-led system of water management during the pre-statehood era. To understand this major shift, Lane carefully examines the primary conflict of the time, which pitted Indigenous and Nuevomexicano communities, with their long-established systems of irrigation management, against Anglo-American settlers, who benefitted from centralized bureaucratic management of water. The newcomers’ system eventually became settled law, but water disputes have continued throughout the district courts of New Mexico’s Rio Grande watershed ever since.

Using a fine-grained analysis of legislative texts and nearly two hundred district court cases, Lane analyzes evolving cultural patterns and attitudes toward water use and management in a pivotal time in New Mexico’s history. Illuminating complex themes for a general audience, Fluid Geographies helps readers understand how settler colonialism constructed a racialized understanding of scientific expertise and legitimized the dispossession of nonwhite communities in New Mexico.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Divergent Democracy"

New from Princeton University Press: Divergent Democracy: How Policy Positions Came to Dominate Party Competition by Katherine Krimmel.

About the book, from the publisher:

An innovative examination of the shift by American political parties toward issue-based differentiation

Recent Democratic and Republican party platforms display clear differences on such issues as abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, gun control, and the environment. These distinctions reflect a programmatic party system—that is, one in which policy positions serve as a key basis of electoral competition. Yet party politics were not always so issue-oriented; the rise of policy positions as the dominant marker of party appeal occurred largely over the last fifty years. In Divergent Democracy, Katherine Krimmel examines this transformation of the American party system, using innovative machine learning techniques to develop and present the first measure of party differentiation on issues since Democrats and Republicans began competing with each other in 1856.

Why did the shift to issue-based party competition take more than a century to materialize? Krimmel offers a groundbreaking theory, focusing on what aids and constrains parties’ abilities to do the difficult, conflict-ridden work of developing issue positions. She argues that clientelistic subnational party organizations, promising material support or jobs in return for votes, long impeded programmatic partisanship while the growth of national party organizations facilitated it. Moreover, institutions and agents of racial oppression extended the life of nonprogrammatic practices, as they attempted to shield discriminatory laws and institutions from interparty competition. Following the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, space opened for programmatic competition to grow.

Using both quantitative and qualitative tools, Krimmel offers a vital view of the foundations of today’s issue-based party competition and its alternatives.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Responsible Pleasure"

New from Oxford University Press: Responsible Pleasure: The Brook Advisory Centres and Youth Sexuality in Postwar Britain by Caroline Rusterholz.

About the book, from the publisher:

The period between the 1960s and the 1990s has traditionally been associated with sexual liberation and a growing sense of permissiveness in Britain, during which cultural and social norms of young people's sexuality went through a dramatic shift. Using the Brook Advisory Centre (Brook) as a case study, Responsible Pleasure examines how and why this occurred, providing a socio-cultural history of youth sexuality in Britain over these three decades. It focuses on Brook as a pioneering sexual health charity operating on the cusp of voluntary and state-financed sectors. From the opening of its first centre in London, followed by other centres including Birmingham (1966), Bristol (1968), and Edinburgh (1968), to the present day, Brook has been a major provider of contraceptive advice and sexual counselling to unmarried people and teenagers. It pioneered an initiative that would form the primary model for the provision of advice on contraception for teenagers in Britain and remains a key player in sexual health services today.

Although Brook has provoked fierce opposition and triggered recurrent public debates on teenage sexuality, little is known of its history. As a non-governmental organization with deep connections to the Family Planning Association (FPA) and the National Health Service (NHS), Brook offers a fascinating case study for exploring the relationship between changing sexual cultures, sexual politics, and young people's sexual experiences, intimacy, and subjectivities. Drawing on a wide range of archived and published materials, as well as oral history interviews conducted by the author, this book provides a substantial and original contribution to scholarship on the forging of the modern sexual subject.

--Marshal Zeringue