"Marriage and the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century"

New from Oxford University Press: Marriage and the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century: 'The Girl I Left Behind Me' by Jennine Hurl-Eamon.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Girl I Left Behind Me addresses a neglected aspect of the history of the Hanoverian army. From 1685 to the beginning of the Victorian era, army administration attempted to discourage marriage among men in almost all ranks. It fostered a misogynist culture of the bachelor soldier who trifled with feminine hearts and avoided responsibility and commitment. The army's policy was unsuccessful in preventing military marriage. By concentrating on the many soldiers' wives who were unable to win permission to live "on the strength" of the regiment (entitled to half-rations) and travel with their husbands, this title explores the phenomenon of soldiers who persisted in defying the army's anti-marriage initiatives.

Using evidence gathered from ballads, novels, court and parish records, letters, memoirs, and War Office papers, Jennine Hurl-Eamon shows that both soldiers and their wives exerted continual pressure on the state through evocative appeals to officers and civilians, fuelled by wives' pride in performing their own military "duty" at home. Respectable, companionate couples of all ranks reflect a subculture within the army that recognized the value in Enlightenment femininity. Looking at military marriages within the telescoping contexts of the state, their regimental and civilian communities, and the couples themselves, The Girl I Left Behind Me reveals the range of masculinities beneath the uniform, the positive influence of wives and sweethearts on soldiers' performance of their duties, and the surprising resilience of partnerships severed by war and army anti-marriage policies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Gurus"

New from Oxford University Press: American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion by Arthur Versluis.

About the book, from the publisher:

By the early twenty-first century, a phenomenon that once was inconceivable had become nearly commonplace in American society: the public spiritual teacher who neither belongs to, nor is authorized by a major religious tradition. From the Oprah Winfrey-endorsed Eckhart Tolle to figures like Gangaji and Adhyashanti, there are now countless spiritual teachers who claim and teach variants of instant or immediate enlightenment.

American Gurus tells the story of how this phenomenon emerged. Through an examination of the broader literary and religious context of the subject, Arthur Versluis shows that a characteristic feature of the Western esoteric tradition is the claim that every person can achieve "spontaneous, direct, unmediated spiritual insight." This claim was articulated with special clarity by the New England Transcendentalists Bronson Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Versluis explores Transcendentalism, Walt Whitman, the Beat movement, Timothy Leary, and the New Age movement to shed light on the emergence of the contemporary American guru.

This insightful study is the first to show how Asian religions and Western mysticism converged to produce the phenomenon of "spontaneously enlightened" American gurus.

Visit Arthur Versluis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Stories of the South"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915 by K. Stephen Prince.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the character of the South, and even its persistence as a distinct region, was an open question. During Reconstruction, the North assumed significant power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth of a New South. In Stories of the South, K. Stephen Prince argues that this cultural production was as important as political competition and economic striving in turning the South and the nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and toward Jim Crow.

Examining novels, minstrel songs, travel brochures, illustrations, oratory, and other cultural artifacts produced in the half century following the Civil War, Prince demonstrates the centrality of popular culture to the reconstruction of southern identity, shedding new light on the complicity of the North in the retreat from the possibility of racial democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"City Girls"

New from Oxford University Press: City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 by Valerie J. Matsumoto.

About the book, from the publisher:

Even before wartime incarceration, Japanese Americans largely lived in separate cultural communities from their West Coast neighbors. Although the Nisei children, the American-born second generation, were U.S. citizens and were integrated in public schools, they were socially isolated in many ways from their peers. These young women found rapport in ethnocultural youth organizations, a forgotten world of female friendship and camaraderie that Valerie J. Matsumoto recovers in this book.

Through extensive networks of social clubs, young Japanese American women competed in sports, socialized with young men, and forged enduring friendships. During the 1920s and 1930s, Nisei girls' organizations flourished in Los Angeles, then home to the largest Japanese American population. In clubs with names such as the Junior Misses and Tartanettes, girls gained leadership training, took part in community service, found jobs, and enjoyed beach outings and parties. Often sponsored by the YWCA, Buddhist temples, and Christian churches, these groups served as a bulwark against racial discrimination, offering a welcoming space that helped young women navigate between parental expectations and the lure of popular culture. Indeed, their dances, meetings, and athletic events filled the social calendars in the ethnic press. As cultural mediators and ethnic representatives, these urban teenagers bridged the cultures of the Japanese American community and mainstream society, whether introducing new foods, holidays, and rituals into the home or dancing in kimono at civic events. Some expressed themselves as poets, writers, and journalists and took leading roles in the development of a Nisei literary network. Women's organizing skills and work would prove critical to the support of their families during World War II incarceration and community rebuilding in the difficult years of resettlement.

By bringing to life a dynamic and long-lasting world of friendship circles and clubs, City Girls highlights the ways in which urban Nisei daughters claimed modern femininity, an American identity, and public space from the Jazz Age through the postwar era.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Justification of Religious Violence"

New from John Wiley & Sons: The Justification of Religious Violence by Steve Clarke.

About the book, from the publisher:

How are justifications for religious violence developed and do they differ from secular justifications for violence? Can liberal societies tolerate potentially violent religious groups? Can those who accept religious justifications for violence be dissuaded from acting violently? Including six in-depth contemporary case studies, The Justification of Religious Violence is the first book to examine the logical structure of justifications of religious violence.

• The first book specifically devoted to examining the logical structure of justifications of religious violence
• Seeks to understand how justifications for religious violence are developed and how or if they differ from ordinary secular justifications of violence
• Examines 3 widely employed premises used in religious justifications of violence – ‘cosmic war’, the importance of the afterlife, and ‘sacred values’
• Considers to what extent liberal democratic societies should tolerate who hold that their religion justifies violent acts
• Reflects on the possibility of effective policy measures to persuade those who believe that violent action is justified by religion, to refrain from acting violently
• Informed by recent work in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and evolutionary biology
• Part of the Blackwell Public Philosophy Series

--Marshal Zeringue

"Justice through Apologies"

New from Cambridge University Press: Justice through Apologies: Remorse, Reform, and Punishment by Nick Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this follow up to I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies, Nick Smith expands his ambitious theories of categorical apologies to civil and criminal law. After rejecting court-ordered apologies as unjustifiable humiliation, this book explains that penitentiaries were originally designed to bring about penance – something like apology – and that this tradition has been lost in the assembly line of mass incarceration. Smith argues that the state should modernize these principles and techniques to reduce punishments for offenders who demonstrate moral transformation through apologizing. Smith also explains the counterintuitive situation whereby apologies come to have considerable financial worth in civil cases because victims associate them with priceless matters of the soul. Such confusions allow powerful wrongdoers to manipulate perceptions to disastrous effect, such as when corporations or governments assert that apologies do not equate to accepting blame or require reform or redress.

The Page 99 Test: Nick Smith's I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Working Man's Reward"

New from Oxford University Press: The Working Man's Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl by Elaine Lewinnek.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between the 1860s and 1920s, Chicago's working-class immigrants designed the American dream of home-ownership. They imagined homes as small businesses, homes that were simultaneously a consumer-oriented respite from work and a productive space that workers hoped to control.

Stretching out of town along with Chicago's assembly-line factories, Chicago's early suburbs were remarkably socially and economically diverse. They were marketed by real estate developers and urban boosters with the elusive promise that homeownership might offer some bulwark against the vicissitudes of industrial capitalism, that homes might be "better than a bank for a poor man" and "the working man's reward." This promise evolved into what Lewinnek terms "the mortgages of whiteness," the hope that property values might increase if that property could be kept white. Suburbs also developed through nineteenth-century notions of the gendered respectability of domesticity, early ideas about city planning and land economics, and an evolving twentieth-century discourse about the racial attributes of property values. Looking at the persistent challenges of racial difference, economic inequality, and private property ownership that were present in urban design and planning from the start, Lewinnek argues that white Americans' attachment to property and community were not simply reactions to post-1945 Civil Rights Movement and federally enforced integration policies. Rather, Chicago's mostly immigrant working class bought homes, seeking an elusive respectability and class mobility, and trying to protect their property values against what they perceived as African American threats, which eventually flared in violent racial conflict.

The Working Man's Reward examines the roots of America's suburbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how Chicagoans helped form America's urban sprawl.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Mad Catastrophe"

New from Basic Books: A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire by Geoffrey Wawro.

About the book, from the publisher:

A prizewinning military historian explores a critical but overlooked cause for World War I: the staggering decrepitude of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east and south to confront the Russians and Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present. Speaking a mystifying array of languages and lugging outdated weapons, the Austrian troops were hopelessly unprepared for the industrialized warfare that would shortly consume Europe.

As prizewinning historian Geoffrey Wawro explains in A Mad Catastrophe, the doomed Austrian conscripts were an unfortunate microcosm of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself—both equally ripe for destruction. After the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, Germany goaded the Empire into a war with Russia and Serbia. With the Germans massing their forces in the west to engage the French and the British, everything—the course of the war and the fate of empires and alliances from Constantinople to London—hinged on the Habsburgs' ability to crush Serbia and keep the Russians at bay. However, Austria-Hungary had been rotting from within for years, hollowed out by repression, cynicism, and corruption at the highest levels. Commanded by a dying emperor, Franz Joseph I, and a querulous celebrity general, Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austro-Hungarians managed to bungle everything: their ultimatum to the Serbs, their declarations of war, their mobilization, and the pivotal battles in Galicia and Serbia. By the end of 1914, the Habsburg army lay in ruins and the outcome of the war seemed all but decided.

Drawing on deep archival research, Wawro charts the decline of the Empire before the war and reconstructs the great battles in the east and the Balkans in thrilling and tragic detail. A Mad Catastrophe is a riveting account of a neglected face of World War I, revealing how a once-mighty empire collapsed in the trenches of Serbia and the Eastern Front, changing the course of European history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Birth of the New Justice"

New from Oxford University Press: The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950 by Mark Lewis.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Birth of the New Justice is a history of the attempts to instate ad hoc and permanent international criminal courts and new international criminal laws from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Cold War. The purpose of these courts was to repress aggressive war, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide.

Rather than arguing that these legal projects were attempts by state governments to project a "liberal legalism" and create an international state system that limited sovereignty, Mark Lewis shows that European jurists in a variety of transnational organizations derived their motives from a range of ideological motives - liberal, conservative, utopian, humanitarian, nationalist, and particularist. European jurists at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 created a controversial new philosophy of prosecution and punishment, and during the following decades, jurists in different organizations, including the International Law Association, International Association for Criminal Law, the World Jewish Congress, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, transformed the ideas of the legitimacy of post-war trials and the concept of international crime to deal with myriad social and political problems. The concept of an international criminal court was never static, and the idea that national tribunals would form an integral part of an international system to enforce new laws was frequently advanced as a pragmatic-and politically convenient-solution.

The Birth of the New Justice shows that legal organizations were not merely interested in ensuring that the guilty were punished or that international peace was assured. They hoped to instil particular moral values, represent the interests of certain social groups, and even pursue national agendas. At the same time, their projects to define new types of crimes and ensure that old ones were truly punished also sprang from hopes that a new international political and moral order would check the power of the sovereign nation-state. When jurists had to scale back their projects, it was not only because state governments opposed them; it was also because they lacked political connections, did not build public support for their ideas, or decided that compromises were better than nothing.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War"

New from Oxford University Press: The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina by Federico Finchelstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

Argentina is famous for its ties with fascism as well as its welcoming of Nazi war criminals after World War II. At mid-century, it was the home of Peronism. It was also the birthplace of the Dirty War and one of Latin America's most criminal dictatorships in the 1970s and early 1980s. How and why did all of these regimes emerge in a country that was "born liberal"? Why did these authoritarian traits first emerge in Argentina under the shadow of fascism?

In this book, Federico Finchelstein tells the history of modern Argentina as seen from the perspective of political violence and ideology. He focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea in Argentine political culture throughout the twentieth century, analyzing the connections between fascist theory and the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the military junta's practices of torture and state violence, with its networks of concentration camps and extermination. The book demonstrates how the state's war against its citizens was rooted in fascist ideology, explaining the Argentine variant of fascism, formed by nacionalistas, and its links with European fascism and Catholicism. It particularly emphasizes the genocidal dimensions of the persecution of Argentine Jewish victims. The destruction of the rule of law and military state terror during the Dirty War, Finchelstein shows, was the product of many political and ideological reformulations and personifications of fascism.

The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War provides a genealogy of state-sanctioned terror, revealing fascism as central to Argentina's political culture and its violent twentieth century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dealing with Darwin"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution by David N. Livingstone.

About the book, from the publisher:

Using place, politics, and rhetoric as analytical tools, historical geographer David N. Livingstone investigates how religious communities sharing a Scots Presbyterian heritage engaged with Darwin and Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century. His findings, presented as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, transform our understandings of the relationship between science and religion.

The particulars of place—whether in Edinburgh, Belfast, Toronto, Princeton, or Columbia, South Carolina—shaped the response to Darwin’s theories. Were they tolerated, repudiated, or welcomed? Livingstone shows how Darwin was read in different ways, with meaning distilled from Darwin's texts depending on readers' own histories—their literary genealogies and cultural preoccupations. That the theory of evolution fared differently in different places, Livingstone writes, is "exactly what Darwin might have predicted. As the theory diffused, it diverged."

Dealing with Darwin shows the profound extent to which theological debates about evolution were rooted in such matters as anxieties over control of education, the politics of race relations, the nature of local scientific traditions, and challenges to traditional cultural identity. In some settings, conciliation with the new theory, even endorsement, was possible—demonstrating that attending to the specific nature of individual communities subverts an inclination to assume a single relationship between science and religion in general, evolution and Christianity in particular.

Livingstone concludes with contemporary examples to remind us that what scientists can say and what others can hear in different venues differ today just as much as they did in the past.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Culling the Masses"

New from Harvard University Press: Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas by David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín.

About the book, from the publisher:

Culling the Masses questions the widely held view that in the long run democracy and racism cannot coexist. David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín show that democracies were the first countries in the Americas to select immigrants by race, and undemocratic states the first to outlaw discrimination. Through analysis of legal records from twenty-two countries between 1790 and 2010, the authors present a history of the rise and fall of racial selection in the Western Hemisphere.

The United States led the way in using legal means to exclude “inferior” ethnic groups. Starting in 1790, Congress began passing nationality and immigration laws that prevented Africans and Asians from becoming citizens, on the grounds that they were inherently incapable of self-government. Similar policies were soon adopted by the self-governing colonies and dominions of the British Empire, eventually spreading across Latin America as well.

Undemocratic regimes in Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Cuba reversed their discriminatory laws in the 1930s and 1940s, decades ahead of the United States and Canada. The conventional claim that racism and democracy are antithetical—because democracy depends on ideals of equality and fairness, which are incompatible with the notion of racial inferiority—cannot explain why liberal democracies were leaders in promoting racist policies and laggards in eliminating them. Ultimately, the authors argue, the changed racial geopolitics of World War II and the Cold War was necessary to convince North American countries to reform their immigration and citizenship laws.

The Page 99 Test: David Cook-Martín's The Scramble for Citizens.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lost Art of Dress"

New from Basic Books: The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish by Linda Przybyszewski.

About the book, from the publisher:

A history of the women who taught Americans how to dress in the first half of the 20th century—and whose lessons we'd do well to remember today.

As a glance down any street in America quickly reveals, American women have forgotten how to dress. We chase fads, choose inappropriate materials and unattractive cuts, and waste energy tottering in heels when we could be moving gracefully. Quite simply, we lack the fashion know-how we need to dress professionally and flatteringly.

As historian and expert dressmaker Linda Przybyszewski reveals in The Lost Art of Dress, it wasn't always like this. In the first half of the twentieth century, a remarkable group of women—the so-called Dress Doctors—taught American women how to stretch each yard of fabric and dress well on a budget. Knowledge not money, they insisted, is the key to timeless fashion. Based in Home Economics departments across the country, the Dress Doctors offered advice on radio shows, at women's clubs, and in magazines. Millions of young girls read their books in school and at 4-H clothing clubs. As Przybyszewski shows, the Dress Doctors' concerns weren't purely superficial: they prized practicality, and empowered women to design and make clothing for both the workplace and the home. They championed skirts that would allow women to move about freely and campaigned against impractical and painful shoes. Armed with the Dress Doctors' simple design principles—harmony, proportion, balance, rhythm, emphasis—modern American women from all classes could learn to dress for all occasions in a way that made them confident, engaged members of society.

A captivating and beautifully-illustrated look at the world of the Dress Doctors, The Lost Art of Dress introduces a new audience to their timeless rules of fashion and beauty—rules which, with a little help, we can certainly learn again.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Witch-Hunt Narrative"

New from Oxford University Press: The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children by Ross E. Cheit.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the 1980s, a series of child sex abuse cases rocked the United States. The most famous case was the 1984 McMartin preschool case, but there were a number of others as well. By the latter part of the decade, the assumption was widespread that child sex abuse had become a serious problem in America. Yet within a few years, the concern about it died down considerably. The failure to convict anyone in the McMartin case and a widely publicized appellate decision in New Jersey that freed an accused molester had turned the dominant narrative on its head. In the early 1990s, a new narrative with remarkable staying power emerged: the child sex abuse cases were symptomatic of a 'moral panic' that had produced a witch hunt. A central claim in this new witch hunt narrative was that the children who testified were not reliable and easily swayed by prosecutorial suggestion. In time, the notion that child sex abuse was a product of sensationalized over-reporting and far less endemic than originally thought became the new common sense.

But did the new witch hunt narrative accurately represent reality? As Ross Cheit demonstrates in his exhaustive account of child sex abuse cases in the past two and a half decades, purveyors of the witch hunt narrative never did the hard work of examining court records in the many cases that reached the courts throughout the nation. Instead, they treated a couple of cases as representative and concluded that the issue was blown far out of proportion. Drawing on years of research into cases in a number of states, Cheit shows that the issue had not been blown out of proportion at all. In fact, child sex abuse convictions were regular occurrences, and the crime occurred far more frequently than conventional wisdom would have us believe. Cheit's aim is not to simply prove the narrative wrong, however. He also shows how a narrative based on empirically thin evidence became a theory with real social force, and how that theory stood at odds with a far more grim reality. The belief that the charge of child sex abuse was typically a hoax also left us unprepared to deal with the far greater scandal of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, which, incidentally, has served to substantiate Cheit's thesis about the pervasiveness of the problem. In sum, The Witch-Hunt Narrative is a magisterial and empirically powerful account of the social dynamics that led to the denial of widespread human tragedy.

Learn more about The Witch-Hunt Narrative at the official website/blog WitchhuntNarrative.org and the book's Facebook fan page.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Age of Evangelicalism"

New from Oxford University Press: The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born-Again Years by Steven P. Miller.

About the book, from the publisher:

At the start of the twenty-first century, America was awash in a sea of evangelical talk. The Purpose Driven Life. Joel Osteen. The Left Behind novels. George W. Bush. Evangelicalism had become so powerful and pervasive that political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote of "a sense in which we are all evangelicals now."

Steven P. Miller offers a dramatically different perspective: the Bush years, he argues, did not mark the pinnacle of evangelical influence, but rather the beginning of its decline. The Age of Evangelicalism chronicles the place and meaning of evangelical Christianity in America since 1970, a period Miller defines as America's "born-again years." This was a time of evangelical scares, born-again spectacles, and battles over faith in the public square. From the Jesus chic of the 1970s to the satanism panic of the 1980s, the culture wars of the 1990s, and the faith-based vogue of the early 2000s, evangelicalism expanded beyond churches and entered the mainstream in ways both subtly and obviously influential.

Born-again Christianity permeated nearly every area of American life. It was broad enough to encompass Hal Lindsey's doomsday prophecies and Marabel Morgan's sex advice, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Carter. It made an unlikely convert of Bob Dylan and an unlikely president of a divorced Hollywood actor. As Miller shows, evangelicalism influenced not only its devotees but its many detractors: religious conservatives, secular liberals, and just about everyone in between. The Age of Evangelicalism contained multitudes: it was the age of Christian hippies and the "silent majority," of Footloose and The Passion of the Christ, of Tammy Faye Bakker the disgraced televangelist and Tammy Faye Messner the gay icon. Barack Obama was as much a part of it as Billy Graham.

The Age of Evangelicalism tells the captivating story of how born-again Christianity shaped the cultural and political climate in which millions of Americans came to terms with their times.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cultivation of Taste"

New from Oxford University Press: The Cultivation of Taste: Chefs and the Organization of Fine Dining by Christel Lane.

About the book, from the publisher:

After many decades, if not centuries, of neglect of fine food and high-level restaurants in Britain, we are seeing a massive explosion of interest in food, cooking, and dining out. Christel Lane's book charts the process of this transformation and examines top contemporary restaurants and their chefs.

The Cultivation of Taste presents a comparative study of Michelin-starred restaurants in Britain and Germany, focusing on two countries without an indigenous haute cuisine but which nevertheless have developed internationally reputed fine-dining sectors. It compares their development to the fine-dining culture in France, as well as offering contrasts with that of the US, Spain, and the Nordic Countries. Written from a sociological perspective, chefs are portrayed as part of a complex network, in their relationships with their employees, their customers, gastronomic critics, suppliers of food, and even their financiers. It will appeal to academics in the areas of economic and cultural sociology, and those with an interest in small entrepreneurial firms and their work relations, but also to all those who have an interest in fine-dining restaurants and the chef patrons at the centre of them.

The book draws on a large number of interviews with renowned chefs, diners, and Michelin inspectors to provide an unprecedented insight into what goes on in Michelin-starred restaurants—what makes their chefs tick, intrigues their critics, and beguiles or annoys their customers. Restaurants are viewed not simply as businesses but as cultural enterprises that shape our taste in food, ambience, and sociality.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Public Empire"

New from Princeton University Press: A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia by Ekaterina Pravilova.

About the book, from the publisher:

"Property rights" and "Russia" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. A Public Empire refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning "public things" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good.

The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects--rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics--should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation.

Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing "the public" through the reform of property rights.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Outside the Gates of Eden"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now by Peter Bacon Hales.

About the book, from the publisher:

Exhilaration and anxiety, the yearning for community and the quest for identity: these shared, contradictory feelings course through Outside the Gates of Eden, Peter Bacon Hales’s ambitious and intoxicating new history of America from the atomic age to the virtual age.

Born under the shadow of the bomb, with little security but the cold comfort of duck-and-cover, the postwar generations lived through—and led—some of the most momentous changes in all of American history. Hales explores those decades through perceptive accounts of a succession of resonant moments, spaces, and artifacts of everyday life—drawing unexpected connections and tracing the intertwined undercurrents of promise and peril. From sharp analyses of newsreels of the first atomic bomb tests and the invention of a new ideal American life in Levittown; from the music emerging from the Brill Building and the Beach Boys, and a brilliant account of Bob Dylan’s transformations; from the painful failures of communes and the breathtaking utopian potential of the early days of the digital age, Hales reveals a nation, and a dream, in transition, as a new generation began to make its mark on the world it was inheriting.

Full of richly drawn set-pieces and countless stories of unforgettable moments, Outside the Gates of Eden is the most comprehensive account yet of the baby boomers, their parents, and their children, as seen through the places they built, the music and movies and shows they loved, and the battles they fought to define their nation, their culture, and their place in what remains a fragile and dangerous world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Noise, Making News"

New from Oxford University Press: Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism by Mary Chapman.

About the book, from the publisher:

For most people, the U.S. suffrage campaign is encapsulated by images of iconic nineteenth-century orators like the tightly coifed Susan B. Anthony or the wimpled Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, as Mary Chapman shows, the campaign to secure the vote for U.S. women was also a modern and print-cultural phenomenon, waged with humor, creativity, and style.

Making Noise, Making News also understands modern suffragist print culture as a demonstrable link between the Progressive Era's political campaign for a voice in the public sphere and Modernism's aesthetic efforts to re-imagine literary voice. Chapman charts a relationship between modern suffragist print cultural "noise" and what literary modernists understood by "making it new," asserting that the experimental tactics of U.S. suffrage print culture contributed to, and even anticipated, the formal innovations of U.S. literary modernism. Drawing on little-known archives and featuring over twenty illustrations, Making Noise, Making News provides startling documentation of Marianne Moore's closeted career as a suffrage propagandist, the persuasive effects of Alice Duer Miller's popular poetry column, Asian-American author Sui Sin Far's challenge to the racism and classism of modern suffragism, and Gertrude Stein's midcentury acknowledgement of intersections between suffrage discourse and literary modernism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Common Threads"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism by Sally Dwyer-McNulty.

About the book, from the publisher:

A well-illustrated cultural history of the apparel worn by American Catholics, Sally Dwyer-McNulty's Common Threads reveals the transnational origins and homegrown significance of clothing in developing identity, unity, and a sense of respectability for a major religious group that had long struggled for its footing in a Protestant-dominated society often openly hostile to Catholics. Focusing on those who wore the most visually distinct clothes--priests, women religious, and schoolchildren--the story begins in the 1830s, when most American priests were foreign born and wore a variety of clerical styles. Dwyer-McNulty tracks and analyzes changes in Catholic clothing all the way through the twentieth century and into the present, which finds the new Pope Francis choosing to wear plain black shoes rather than ornate red ones.

Drawing on insights from the study of material culture and of lived religion, Dwyer-McNulty demonstrates how the visual lexicon of clothing in Catholicism can indicate gender ideology, age, and class. Indeed, clothing itself has become a kind of Catholic language, whether expressing shared devotional experiences or entwined with debates about education, authority, and the place of religion in American society.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Artists of the Possible"

New from Oxford University Press: Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy since 1945 by Matt Grossmann.

About the book, from the publisher:

Do policymakers heed the voices of the American public or only the lobbyists in Washington? Why do they take action on health reform, but not gun control? Why does policymaking usually move slowly, and sometimes not at all? Artists of the Possible takes on these questions, analyzing sixty years of domestic policy history to provide a new understanding of what drives policymaking in all three branches of government. The results are surprising: public policy does not address the public's largest concerns. The amount of policy-and its liberal or conservative direction-emerges instead from coalition building and compromises among political elites. Elections, public opinion, and media coverage have little impact, no matter the issue area. Even changes in Washington's partisan balance and ideological divides fail to reliably produce shifts in policy direction. This data-rich, exhaustively researched work overturns our most basic assumptions about how policy is made, challenging the notion that our government is of, by, and for the people.

Visit Matt Grossmann's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Greening the Red, White, and Blue"

New from Oxford University Press: Greening the Red, White, and Blue: The Bomb, Big Business, and Consumer Resistance in Postwar America by Thomas Jundt.

About the book, from the publisher:

In popular imagination, environmentalism is often linked to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the political activism of the 1960s and '70s that moved increasing numbers of Americans to insist on a better quality of life-open spaces, clean air and water, beautification campaigns. But these interpretations have obscured the significant origins of environmentalism as a moral and intellectual broadside against the growing power of corporate capitalism, both domestically and in the postwar liberal international order the United States was enacting abroad.

In Greening the Red, White, and Blue, Thomas Jundt shows how many Americans came to view powerful corporations and a federal government bent on economic growth as threats to human health and the environment. Fallout from atomic testing, air and water pollution, the proliferation of pesticides and herbicides-all connected to the growing dominance of technology and corporate capitalism in American life-led a variety of constituencies to seek solutions in what came to be known as environmentalism. In addition to political and legal campaigns to effect change, an alternative form of civic participation emerged beginning in the late-1940s as growing numbers of citizens turned to what they deemed environmentally friendly consumption practices. The goal of this politically charged consumption was not only to protect themselves and their families from harm, but also to achieve social change at a time when many believed the government was placing the desires of business before the needs of its citizens. Politicians responded to the growing environmental concerns of middle class Americans, but, in the end, continual political compromises with corporate power meant weak laws and lax enforcement. Many citizens sought refuge in an alternative "green" marketplace-including organic foods, natural-fiber clothing, alternative energy, and everyday products designed to have minimal environmental impact. In doing so, they attempted to create a community for those who shared their concerns and frustrations, as well as their vision for a different American Way.

Thomas Jundt's work highlights the intertwining of consumerism and environmentalism amidst the growing power of corporate capitalism and government in postwar America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Baptized in PCBs"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town by Ellen Griffith Spears.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements.

Spears focuses attention on key figures who shaped Anniston--from Monsanto's founders, to white and African American activists, to the ordinary Anniston residents whose lives and health were deeply affected by the town's military-industrial history and the legacy of racism. Situating the personal struggles and triumphs of Anniston residents within a larger national story of regulatory regimes and legal strategies that have affected toxic towns across America, Spears unflinchingly explores the causes and implications of environmental inequalities, showing how civil rights movement activism undergirded Anniston's campaigns for redemption and justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dissent on the Margins"

New from Oxford University Press: Dissent on the Margins: How Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses Defied Communism and Lived to Preach About It by Emily B. Baran.

About the book, from the publisher:

Emily B. Baran offers a gripping history of how a small, American-based religious community, the Jehovah's Witnesses, found its way into the Soviet Union after World War II, survived decades of brutal persecution, and emerged as one of the region's fastest growing religions after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. In telling the story of this often misunderstood faith, Baran explores the shifting boundaries of religious dissent, non-conformity, and human rights in the Soviet Union and its successor states.

Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses are a fascinating case study of dissent beyond urban, intellectual nonconformists. Witnesses, who were generally rural, poorly educated, and utterly marginalized from society, resisted state pressure to conform. They instead constructed alternative communities based on adherence to religious principles established by the Witnesses' international center in Brooklyn, New York. The Soviet state considered Witnesses to be the most reactionary of all underground religious movements, and used extraordinary measures to try to eliminate this threat. Yet Witnesses survived, while the Soviet system did not. After 1991, they faced continuing challenges to their right to practice their faith in post-Soviet states, as these states struggled to reconcile the proper limits on freedom of conscience with European norms and domestic concerns.

Dissent on the Margins provides a new and important perspective on one of America's most understudied religious movements.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Taken at the Flood"

New from Oxford University Press: Taken at the Flood: The Roman Conquest of Greece by Robin Waterfield.

About the book, from the publisher:

"Is there anyone on earth who is so narrow-minded or uninquisitive that he could fail to want to know how and thanks to what kind of political system almost the entire known world was conquered and brought under a single empire in less than fifty-three years?" --Polybius, Histories

The 53-year period Polybius had in mind stretched from the start of the Second Punic War in 219 BCE until 167, when Rome overthrew the Macedonian monarchy and divided the country into four independent republics. This was the crucial half-century of Rome's spectacular rise to imperial status, but Roman interest in its eastern neighbors began a little earlier, with the First Illyrian War of 229, and climaxed later with the infamous destruction of Corinth in 146.

Taken at the Flood chronicles this momentous move by Rome into the Greek east. Until now, this period of history has been overshadowed by the threat of Carthage in the west, but events in the east were no less important in themselves, and Robin Waterfield's account reveals the peculiar nature of Rome's eastern policy. For over seventy years, the Romans avoided annexation so that they could commit their military and financial resources to the fight against Carthage and elsewhere. Though ultimately a failure, this policy of indirect rule, punctuated by periodic brutal military interventions and intense diplomacy, worked well for several decades, until the Senate finally settled on more direct forms of control.

Waterfield's fast-paced narrative focuses mainly on military and diplomatic maneuvers, but throughout he interweaves other topics and themes, such as the influence of Greek culture on Rome, the Roman aristocratic ethos, and the clash between the two best fighting machines the ancient world ever produced: the Macedonian phalanx and Roman legion. The result is an absorbing account of a critical chapter in Rome's mastery of the Mediterranean.

Visit Robin Waterfield's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Missionaries of Republicanism"

New from Oxford University Press: Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro.

About the book, from the publisher:

The term "Manifest Destiny" has traditionally been linked to U.S. westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the desire to spread republican government, and racialist theories like Anglo-Saxonism. Yet few people realize the degree to which Manifest Destiny and American republicanism relied on a deeply anti-Catholic civil-religious discourse. John C. Pinheiro traces the rise to prominence of this discourse, beginning in the 1820s and culminating in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848.

Pinheiro begins with social reformer and Protestant evangelist Lyman Beecher, who was largely responsible for synthesizing seemingly unrelated strands of religious, patriotic, expansionist, and political sentiment into one universally understood argument about the future of the United States. When the overwhelmingly Protestant United States went to war with Catholic Mexico, this "Beecherite Synthesis" provided Americans with the most important means of defining their own identity, understanding Mexicans, and interpreting the larger meaning of the war. Anti-Catholic rhetoric constituted an integral piece of nearly every major argument for or against the war and was so universally accepted that recruiters, politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, evangelical activists, abolitionists, and pacifists used it. It was also, Pinheiro shows, the primary tool used by American soldiers to interpret Mexico's culture. All this activity in turn reshaped the anti-Catholic movement. Preachers could now use caricatures of Mexicans to illustrate Roman Catholic depravity and nativists could point to Mexico as a warning about what America would be like if dominated by Catholics.

Missionaries of Republicanism provides a critical new perspective on Manifest Destiny, American republicanism, anti-Catholicism, and Mexican-American relations in the nineteenth century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Deborah's Daughters"

New from Oxford University Press: Deborah's Daughters: Gender Politics and Biblical Interpretation by Joy A. Schroeder.

About the book, from the publisher:

Joy A. Schroeder offers the first in-depth exploration of the biblical story of Deborah, an authoritative judge, prophet, and war leader. For centuries, Deborah's story has challenged readers' traditional assumptions about the place of women in society.

Schroeder shows how Deborah's story has fueled gender debates throughout history. An examination of the prophetess's journey through nearly two thousand years of Jewish and Christian interpretation reveals how the biblical account of Deborah was deployed against women, for women, and by women who aspired to leadership roles in religious communities and society. Numerous women-and men who supported women's aspirations to leadership-used Deborah's narrative to justify female claims to political and religious authority. Opponents to women's public leadership endeavored to define Deborah's role as "private" or argued that she was a divinely authorized exception, not to be emulated by future generations of women.

Deborah's Daughters provides crucial new insight into the history of women in Judaism and Christianity, and into women's past and present roles in the church, synagogue, and society.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Good Neighbors"

New from Cornell University Press: Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia by Abigail Perkiss.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the 1950s and 1960s, as the white residents, real estate agents, and municipal officials of many American cities fought to keep African Americans out of traditionally white neighborhoods, Philadelphia's West Mount Airy became one of the first neighborhoods in the nation where residents came together around a community-wide mission toward intentional integration. As West Mount Airy experienced transition, homeowners fought economic and legal policies that encouraged white flight and threatened the quality of local schools, seeking to find an alternative to racial separation without knowing what they would create in its place. In Making Good Neighbors, Abigail Perkiss tells the remarkable story of West Mount Airy, drawing on archival research and her oral history interviews with residents to trace their efforts, which began in the years following World War II and continued through the turn of the twenty-first century.

The organizing principles of neighborhood groups like the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association (WMAN) were fundamentally liberal and emphasized democracy, equality, and justice; the social, cultural, and economic values of these groups were also decidedly grounded in middle-class ideals and white-collar professionalism. As Perkiss shows, this liberal, middle-class framework would ultimately become contested by more militant black activists and from within WMAN itself, as community leaders worked to adapt and respond to the changing racial landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. The West Mount Airy case stands apart from other experiments in integration because of the intentional, organized, and long-term commitment on the part of WMAN to biracial integration and, in time, multiracial and multiethnic diversity. The efforts of residents in the 1950s and 1960s helped to define the neighborhood as it exists today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Regulating Passion"

New from Oxford University Press: Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700-1830 by Kelly A. Ryan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Sexuality was critical to how individuals experienced, learned, and contested their place in early America. Regulating Passion shows the sweeping changes that affected the social and political morass centered on sexual behavior during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Massachusetts-even as patriarchy remained important to those configurations of power. Charting the government's and society's management of sexuality, Kelly A. Ryan uncovers the compelling stories of the individuals charged with sexual crimes and how elites hoped to contain and exploit "illicit" sexual behavior.

In the colonial era, elites designed laws, judicial and religious practices, and sermons that defined certain groups as criminal, the cause of sexual vice, and in need of societal oversight-while defining others as chaste and above reproach. Massachusetts fornicators, adulterers, seducers, and rapists were exemplars of improper behavior in the colonial era and were central to emerging sexual subjectivities associated with gender, race, and class status in the early republic. As Massachusetts modernized, culture and socialization became vehicles for enforcing the marital monopoly on sex and gendered expectations of sexual behavior.

The American Revolution saw the decline of direct sexual regulation by government and religious institutions and a rise in the importance of sexual reputation in maintaining hierarchy. As society moved away from publicly penalizing forms of illicit sexual behavior, it circulated ideas about sexual norms, initiated social ostracism, and interceded with family and friends to promote sexual morality, even as the government remained involved in cases of prostitution and interracial sex. At the same time, this transformation in sexual regulation opened up means to contest the power of patriarchy. Women, African Americans, Indians, and the poor often resisted the efforts of elites and established their own code of sexual conduct to combat ideas about what constituted sexual virtue and how society defined its leaders. They challenged derisive sexual characterizations, patriarchal visions of society, and sexual regulation to establish a space in the body politic. Ironically, their efforts often reinforced patriarchal ideals as their petitions asked for patriarchal privileges to be extended to them.

Based on records of crimes in lower and upper courts, print literature, and other documentary sources, Regulating Passion underscores the ways in which sexual mores remained essential to the project of differentiating between the virtue of citizens and contesting power structures in the tumultuous transitions from the colonial to early national period.

--Marshal Zeringue