"Homes Away from Home"

New from Stanford University Press: Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg by Sarah Wobick-Segev.

About the book, from the publisher:

How did Jews go from lives organized by synagogues, shul, and mikvehs to lives that—if explicitly Jewish at all—were conducted in Hillel houses, JCCs, Katz's, and even Chabad? In pre-emancipation Europe, most Jews followed Jewish law most of the time, but by the turn of the twentieth century, a new secular Jewish identity had begun to take shape.

Homes Away From Home tells the story of Ashkenazi Jews as they made their way in European society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the Jewish communities of Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. At a time of growing political enfranchisement for Jews within European nations, membership in the official Jewish community became increasingly optional, and Jews in turn created spaces and programs to meet new social needs. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of "traditional" Jewish spaces into sites of consumption and leisure, sometimes to the consternation of Jewish authorities. Sarah Wobick-Segev argues that the social practices that developed between 1890 and the 1930s—such as celebrating holydays at hotels and restaurants, or sending children to summer camp—fundamentally reshaped Jewish community, redefining and extending the boundaries of where Jewishness happened.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Working for Respect"

New from Columbia University Press: Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart by Adam Reich and Peter Bearman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce—young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work—Walmartism—in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers’ ability to control their working conditions and their lives.

In Working for Respect, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how workers make sense of their jobs at places like Walmart in order to consider the nature of contemporary low-wage work, as well as the obstacles and opportunities such workplaces present as sites of struggle for social and economic justice. They describe the life experiences that lead workers to Walmart and analyze the dynamics of the shop floor. As a part of the project, Reich and Bearman matched student activists with a nascent association of current and former Walmart associates: the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). They follow the efforts of this new partnership, considering the formation of collective identity and the relationship between social ties and social change. They show why traditional unions have been unable to organize service-sector workers in places like Walmart and offer provocative suggestions for new strategies and directions. Drawing on a wide array of methods, including participant-observation, oral history, big data, and the analysis of social networks, Working for Respect is a sophisticated reconsideration of the modern workplace that makes important contributions to debates on labor and inequality and the centrality of the experience of work in a fair economy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Remote Freedoms"

New from Stanford University Press: Remote Freedoms: Politics, Personhood and Human Rights in Aboriginal Central Australia by Sarah E. Holcombe.

About the book, from the publisher:

What does it mean to be a "rights-holder" and how does it come about? Remote Freedoms explores the contradictions and tensions of localized human rights work in very remote Indigenous communities.

Based on field research with Anangu of Central Australia, this book investigates how universal human rights are understood, practiced, negotiated, and challenged in concert and in conflict with Indigenous rights. Moving between communities, government, regional NGOs, and international UN forums, Sarah E. Holcombe addresses how the notion of rights plays out within the distinctive and ambivalent sociopolitical context of Australia, and focusing specifically on Indigenous women and their experiences of violence. Can the secular modern rights-bearer accommodate the ideals of the relational, spiritual Anangu person? Engaging in a translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the local Pintupi-Luritja vernacular and observing various Indigenous interactions with law enforcement and domestic violence outreach programs, Holcombe offers new insights into our understanding of how the global rights discourse is circulated and understood within Indigenous cultures. She reveals how, in the postcolonial Australian context, human rights are double-edged: they enforce assimilation to a neoliberal social order at the same time that they empower and enfranchise the Indigenous citizen as a political actor. Remote Freedoms writes Australia's Indigenous peoples into the international debate on localizing rights in multicultural terms.

--Marshal Zeringue

"For-Profit Democracy"

New from Yale University Press: For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America by Loka Ashwood.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fascinating sociological assessment of the damaging effects of the for-profit partnership between government and corporation on rural Americans

Why is government distrust rampant, especially in the rural United States? This book offers a simple explanation: corporations and the government together dispossess rural people of their prosperity, and even their property. Based on four years of fieldwork, this eye-opening assessment by sociologist Loka Ashwood plays out in a mixed-race Georgia community that hosted the first nuclear power reactors sanctioned by the government in three decades. This work serves as an explanatory mirror of prominent trends in current American politics. Churches become havens for redemption, poaching a means of retribution, guns a tool of self-defense, and nuclear power a faltering solution to global warming as governance strays from democratic principles. In the absence of hope or trust in rulers, rural racial tensions fester and divide. The book tells of the rebellion that unfolds as the rights of corporations supersede the rights of humans.

Visit Loka Ashwood's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dynasties and Democracy"

New from Stanford University Press: Dynasties and Democracy: The Inherited Incumbency Advantage in Japan by Daniel M. Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

Although democracy is, in principle, the antithesis of dynastic rule, families with multiple members in elective office continue to be common around the world. In most democracies, the proportion of such "democratic dynasties" declines over time, and rarely exceeds ten percent of all legislators. Japan is a startling exception, with over a quarter of all legislators in recent years being dynastic. In Dynasties and Democracy, Daniel M. Smith sets out to explain when and why dynasties persist in democracies, and why their numbers are only now beginning to wane in Japan—questions that have long perplexed regional experts.

Smith introduces a compelling comparative theory to explain variation in the presence of dynasties across democracies and political parties. Drawing on extensive legislator-level data from twelve democracies and detailed candidate-level data from Japan, he examines the inherited advantage that members of dynasties reap throughout their political careers—from candidate selection, to election, to promotion into cabinet. Smith shows how the nature and extent of this advantage, as well as its consequences for representation, vary significantly with the institutional context of electoral rules and features of party organization. His findings extend far beyond Japan, shedding light on the causes and consequences of dynastic politics for democracies around the world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Invisible Countries"

New from Yale University Press: Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood by Joshua Keating.

About the book, from the publisher:

A thoughtful analysis of how our world’s borders came to be and why we may be emerging from a lengthy period of “cartographical stasis”

What is a country? While certain basic criteria—borders, a government, and recognition from other countries—seem obvious, journalist Joshua Keating’s book explores exceptions to these rules, including self-proclaimed countries such as Abkhazia, Kurdistan, and Somaliland, a Mohawk reservation straddling the U.S.-Canada border, and an island nation whose very existence is threatened by climate change. Through stories about these would-be countries’ efforts at self-determination, as well as their respective challenges, Keating shows that there is no universal legal authority determining what a country is. He argues that although our current world map appears fairly static, economic, cultural, and environmental forces in the places he describes may spark change. Keating ably ties history to incisive and sympathetic observations drawn from his travels and personal interviews with residents, political leaders, and scholars in each of these “invisible countries.”

Visit Joshua Keating's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS"

New from Oxford University Press: Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS by Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr.

About the book, from the publisher:

By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014, Epidemics challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics, that invariably across time and space, epidemics provoked hatred, blaming of the "other", and victimizing bearers of epidemic diseases, particularly when diseases were mysterious, without known cures or preventive measures, as with AIDS during the last two decades of the twentieth century.

However, scholars and public intellectuals, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics. Instead of sparking hatred and blame, this study traces epidemics' socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture: that epidemic diseases have more often unified societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Trustworthy Men"

New from Princeton University Press: Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church by Ian Forrest.

About the book, from the publisher:

The medieval church was founded on and governed by concepts of faith and trust--but not in the way that is popularly assumed. Offering a radical new interpretation of the institutional church and its social consequences in England, Ian Forrest argues that between 1200 and 1500 the ability of bishops to govern depended on the cooperation of local people known as trustworthy men and shows how the combination of inequality and faith helped make the medieval church.

Trustworthy men (in Latin, viri fidedigni) were jurors, informants, and witnesses who represented their parishes when bishops needed local knowledge or reliable collaborators. Their importance in church courts, at inquests, and during visitations grew enormously between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The church had to trust these men, and this trust rested on the complex and deep-rooted cultures of faith that underpinned promises and obligations, personal reputation and identity, and belief in God. But trust also had a dark side. For the church to discriminate between the trustworthy and untrustworthy was not to identify the most honest Christians but to find people whose status ensured their word would not be contradicted. This meant men rather than women, and—usually—the wealthier tenants and property holders in each parish.

Trustworthy Men illustrates the ways in which the English church relied on and deepened inequalities within late medieval society, and how trust and faith were manipulated for political ends.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Separating Sheep from Goats"

New from the University of California Press: Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America by Noelle Giuffrida.

About the book, from the publisher:

Separating Sheep from Goats investigates the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art through the lens of the career of renowned American curator and museum director Sherman E. Lee (1918–2008). Drawing upon artworks and archival materials, Noelle Giuffrida excavates an international society of collectors, dealers, curators, and scholars who constituted the art world in which Lee operated. From his early training in Michigan and his work in Occupied Japan as a monuments man to his acquisitions, exhibitions, and publications for museums in Detroit, Seattle, and Cleveland, this study traces how Lee shaped public and scholarly understandings of Chinese art. By examining transnational efforts to collect and present Chinese art and scrutinizing scholarly and museological discourses of the postwar era, this book contributes to the historiography of both Chinese art and American museums.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Financializing Poverty"

New from Stanford University Press: Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance by Sohini Kar.

About the book, from the publisher:

Microfinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. While these for-profit microfinance institutions (MFIs) promise social and economic empowerment, they have mainly succeeded at enfolding the poor—especially women—into the vast circuits of global finance. Financializing Poverty ethnographically examines how the emergence of MFIs has allowed financial institutions in the city of Kolkata, India, to capitalize on the poverty of its residents.

This book reveals how MFIs have restructured debt relationships in new ways. On the one hand, they have opened access to new streams of credit. However, as the network of finance increasingly incorporates the poor, the "inclusive" dimensions of microfinance are continuously met with rigid forms of credit risk management that reproduce the very inequality the loans are meant to alleviate. Moreover, despite being collateral-free loans, the use of life insurance to manage the high mortality rates of poor borrowers has led to the collateralization of life itself. Thus the newfound ability of the poor to use MFI loans has entrapped them in a system dependent not only on their circulation of capital, but on the poverty that threatens their lives.

--Marshal Zeringue

"State of Repression"

New from Princeton University Press: State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein by Lisa Blaydes.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new account of modern Iraqi politics that overturns the conventional wisdom about its sectarian divisions

How did Iraq become one of the most repressive dictatorships of the late twentieth century? The conventional wisdom about Iraq's modern political history is that the country was doomed by its diverse social fabric. But in State of Repression, Lisa Blaydes challenges this belief by showing that the country's breakdown was far from inevitable. At the same time, she offers a new way of understanding the behavior of other authoritarian regimes and their populations.

Drawing on archival material captured from the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's ruling Ba'th Party in the wake of the 2003 US invasion, Blaydes illuminates the complexities of political life in Iraq, including why certain Iraqis chose to collaborate with the regime while others worked to undermine it. She demonstrates that, despite the Ba'thist regime's pretensions to political hegemony, its frequent reliance on collective punishment of various groups reinforced and cemented identity divisions. At the same time, a series of costly external shocks to the economy—resulting from fluctuations in oil prices and Iraq's war with Iran—weakened the capacity of the regime to monitor, co-opt, coerce, and control factions of Iraqi society.

In addition to calling into question the common story of modern Iraqi politics, State of Repression offers a new explanation of why and how dictators repress their people in ways that can inadvertently strengthen regime opponents.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fighting for France"

New from Oxford University Press: Fighting for France: Violence in Interwar French Politics by Chris Millington.

About the book, from the publisher:

Fighting for France is a ground-breaking examination of violence in French politics in the interwar period. During these years, a range of groups at the political extremes employed physical aggression against their enemies and threatened to bring about the violent demise of the democratic regime.

Until now, historians have denied and downplayed the frequency and seriousness of French political violence in favour of an interpretation that emphasises France's weddedness to democracy. Fighting for France demonstrates that the democratic culture of the late Third Republic co-existed with a culture of violence in which the physical punishment of rivals and opponents was considered acceptable. Drawing on the narratives constructed around outbreaks of violence, the book reconstructs the lived experience of fighting and the sense that contemporaries made of conflict. It examines violence in a variety of settings, from the street to the factory floor. A range of actors come under investigation, including fascists, communists, and the police. Fighting for France transforms our understandings of the course of interwar France and Europe.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe"

New from Yale University Press: Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe by Dale K. Van Kley.

About the book, from the publisher:

An investigation into the role of Reform Catholicism in the international suppression of the Jesuits in 1773?

The Jesuits devoted themselves to preaching the word of God, administering the sacraments, and spreading the faith by missions in both Europe and newly discovered lands abroad. But, in 1773, under intense pressure from the monarchs of Europe, the papacy suppressed the Society of Jesus, an act that reverberated from Europe to the Americas and Southeast Asia. In this scholarly history, Dale Van Kley argues that Reform Catholicism, not a secular Enlightenment, provided the justification for Catholic kings to suppress a society instituted by the papacy. Spanning the years from the mid-sixteenth century to the onset of the French Revolution, and the Jesuit presence from China to Brazil, this is the only single volume in English to make coherent sense of the series of expulsions that add up to what was arguably the most important religious event in Europe of the time, resulting in the secularization of tens of thousands of Jesuits.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Venice's Intimate Empire"

New from Cornell University Press: Venice's Intimate Empire: Family Life and Scholarship in the Renaissance Mediterranean by Erin Maglaque.

About the book, from the publisher:

Mining private writings and humanist texts, Erin Maglaque explores the lives and careers of two Venetian noblemen, Giovanni Bembo and Pietro Coppo, who were appointed as colonial administrators and governors. In Venice’s Intimate Empire, she uses these two men and their families to showcase the relationship between humanism, empire, and family in the Venetian Mediterranean.

Maglaque elaborates an intellectual history of Venice’s Mediterranean empire by examining how Venetian humanist education related to the task of governing. Taking that relationship as her cue, Maglaque unearths an intimate view of the emotions and subjectivities of imperial governors. In their writings, it was the affective relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, humanist teachers and their students that were the crucible for self-definition and political decision making. Venice’s Intimate Empire thus illuminates the experience of imperial governance by drawing connections between humanist education and family affairs. From marriage and reproduction to childhood and adolescence, we see how intimate life was central to the Bembo and Coppo families’ experience of empire. Maglaque skillfully argues that it was within the intimate family that Venetians’ relationships to empire—its politics, its shifting social structures, its metropolitan and colonial cultures—were determined.

Visit Erin Maglaque's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies"

New from Harper: 1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies by Richard Vinen.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major new history of one of the seminal years in the postwar world, when rebellion and disaffection broke out on an extraordinary scale.

The year 1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary—around ten million French workers went on strike and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained, but had profound longer-term implications—terrorist groups, feminist collectives, gay rights activists could all trace important roots to 1968.

1968 is a striking and original attempt half a century later to show how these events, which in some ways still seem so current, stemmed from histories and societies which are in practice now extraordinarily remote from our own time. 1968 pursues the story into the 1970s to show both the ever more violent forms of radicalization that stemmed from 1968 and the brutal reaction that brought the era to an end.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Forever Suspect"

New from Rutgers University Press: Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror by Saher Selod.

About the book, from the publisher:

The declaration of a “War on Terror” in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks brought sweeping changes to the American criminal justice and national security systems, as well as a massive shift in the American public opinion of both individual Muslims and the Islamic religion generally. Since that time, sociologist Saher Selod argues, Muslim Americans have experienced higher levels of racism in their everyday lives. In Forever Suspect, Selod shows how a specific American religious identity has acquired racial meanings, resulting in the hyper surveillance of Muslim citizens. Drawing on forty-eight in-depth interviews with South Asian and Arab Muslim Americans, she investigates how Muslim Americans are subjected to racialized surveillance in both an institutional context by the state and a social context by their neighbors and co-workers. Forever Suspect underscores how this newly racialized religious identity changes the social location of Arabs and South Asians on the racial hierarchy further away from whiteness and compromises their status as American citizens.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan"

New from W.W. Norton: Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan by Ruby Lal.

About the book, from the publisher:

Four centuries ago, a Muslim woman ruled an empire.When it came to hunting, she was a master shot. As a dress designer, few could compare. An ingenious architect, she innovated the use of marble in her parents’ mausoleum on the banks of the Yamuna River that inspired her stepson’s Taj Mahal. And she was both celebrated and reviled for her political acumen and diplomatic skill, which rivaled those of her female counterparts in Europe and beyond.In 1611, thirty-four-year-old Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and most cherished wife of the Emperor Jahangir. While other wives were secluded behind walls, Nur ruled the vast Mughal Empire alongside her husband, and governed in his stead as his health failed and his attentions wandered from matters of state. An astute politician and devoted partner, Nur led troops into battle to free Jahangir when he was imprisoned by one of his own officers. She signed and issued imperial orders, and coins of the realm bore her name.Acclaimed historian Ruby Lal uncovers the rich life and world of Nur Jahan, rescuing this dazzling figure from patriarchal and Orientalist clichés of romance and intrigue, and giving new insight into the lives of women and girls in the Mughal Empire, even where scholars claim there are no sources. Nur’s confident assertion of authority and talent is revelatory. In Empress, she finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.

Visit Ruby Lal's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cold War's Killing Fields"

New from Harper: The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace by Paul Thomas Chamberlin.

About the book, from the publisher:

A brilliant young historian offers a vital, comprehensive international military history of the Cold War in which he views the decade-long superpower struggles as one of the three great conflicts of the twentieth century alongside the two World Wars, and reveals how bloody the "Long Peace" actually was.

In this sweeping, deeply researched book, Paul Thomas Chamberlin boldly argues that the Cold War, long viewed as a mostly peaceful, if tense, diplomatic standoff between democracy and communism, was actually a part of a vast, deadly conflict that killed millions on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. For half a century, as an uneasy peace hung over Europe, ferocious proxy wars raged in the Cold War’s killing fields, resulting in more than fourteen million dead—victims who remain largely forgotten and all but lost to history.

A superb work of scholarship illustrated with four maps, The Cold War’s Killing Fields is the first global military history of this superpower conflict and the first full accounting of its devastating impact. More than previous armed conflicts, the wars of the post-1945 era ravaged civilians across vast stretches of territory, from Korea and Vietnam to Bangladesh and Afghanistan to Iraq and Lebanon. Chamberlin provides an understanding of this sweeping history from the ground up and offers a moving portrait of human suffering, capturing the voices of those who experienced the brutal warfare.

Chamberlin reframes this era in global history and explores in detail the numerous battles fought to prevent nuclear war, bolster the strategic hegemony of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and determine the fate of societies throughout the Third World.

The Page 99 Test: The Global Offensive.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Third Lens"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Third Lens: Metaphor and the Creation of Modern Cell Biology by Andrew S. Reynolds.

About the book, from the publisher:

Does science aim at providing an account of the world that is literally true or objectively true? Understanding the difference requires paying close attention to metaphor and its role in science. In The Third Lens, Andrew S. Reynolds argues that metaphors, like microscopes and other instruments, are a vital tool in the construction of scientific knowledge and explanations of how the world works. More than just rhetorical devices for conveying difficult ideas, metaphors provide the conceptual means with which scientists interpret and intervene in the world.

Reynolds here investigates the role of metaphors in the creation of scientific concepts, theories, and explanations, using cell theory as his primary case study. He explores the history of key metaphors that have informed the field and the experimental, philosophical, and social circumstances under which they have emerged, risen in popularity, and in some cases faded from view. How we think of cells—as chambers, organisms, or even machines—makes a difference to scientific practice. Consequently, an accurate picture of how scientific knowledge is made requires us to understand how the metaphors scientists use—and the social values that often surreptitiously accompany them—influence our understanding of the world, and, ultimately, of ourselves.

The influence of metaphor isn’t limited to how we think about cells or proteins: in some cases they can even lead to real material change in the very nature of the thing in question, as scientists use technology to alter the reality to fit the metaphor. Drawing out the implications of science’s reliance upon metaphor, The Third Lens will be of interest to anyone working in the areas of history and philosophy of science, science studies, cell and molecular biology, science education and communication, and metaphor in general.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rules, Paper, Status"

New from Stanford University Press: Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy by Anna Tuckett.

About the book, from the publisher:

Whether motivated by humanitarianism or concern over "porous" borders, dominant commentary on migration in Europe has consistently focused on clandestine border crossings. Much less, however, is known about the everyday workings of immigration law inside borders. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, one of Europe's biggest receiving countries, Rules, Paper, Status moves away from polarized depictions to reveal how migration processes actually play out on the ground. Anna Tuckett highlights the complex processes of inclusion and exclusion produced through encounters with immigration law.

The statuses of "legal" or "illegal," which media and political accounts use as synonyms for "good" and "bad," "worthy" and "unworthy," are not created by practices of border-crossing, but rather through legal and bureaucratic processes within borders devised by governing states. Taking migrants' interactions with immigration regimes as its starting point, this book sheds light on the productive nature of legal and bureaucratic encounters and the unintended consequences they produce. Rules, Paper, Status argues that successfully navigating Italian immigration bureaucracy, which is situated in an immigration regime that is both exclusionary and flexible, requires and induces culturally specific modes of behavior. Exclusionary laws, however, can transform this social and cultural learning into the very thing that endangers migrants' right to live in the country.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rich Russians"

New from Oxford University Press: Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie by Elisabeth Schimpfössl.

About the book, from the publisher:

The lives of wealthy people have long held an allure to many, but the lives of wealthy Russians pose a particular fascination. Having achieved their riches over the course of a single generation, the top 0.1 percent of Russian society have become known for ostentatious lifestyles and tastes. Nevertheless, as Elisabeth Schimpfössl shows in this book, their stories reveal a bourgeois existence that is distinct in its circumstances and self-definition, and far more complex than the caricatures suggest.

Rich Russians takes a deep and unprecedented look at this group: their personal stories, trajectories, ideas about life and how they see their role and position both on top of Russian society as well as globally. These people grew up and lived through a historically unique period of economic turmoil and social change following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But when taken in a wider historical context, their lives follow a familiar path, from new money to respectable money; parvenus becoming part of Society. Based on interviews with millionaires, billionaires, their spouses and children, Rich Russians concludes that, as a class, they have acquired all sorts of cultural and social resources which help consolidate their personal power. They have developed distinguished and refined tastes, rediscovered their family history, and begun actively engaging in philanthropy. Most importantly, they have worked out a narrative to justify why they deserve their elitist position in society - because of who they are and their superior qualities - and why they should be treated as equals by the West. This is a group whose social, cultural and political influence is likely to outlast any regime change. As the first book to examine the transformation of Russia's former "robber barons" into a new social class, Rich Russians provides insight into how this nation's newly wealthy tick.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Siege of Acre, 1189-1191"

New from Yale University Press: The Siege of Acre, 1189-1191: Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, and the Battle That Decided the Third Crusade by John D. Hosler.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first comprehensive history of the most decisive military campaign of the Third Crusade and one of the longest wartime sieges of the Middle Ages

The two-year-long siege of Acre (1189–1191) was the most significant military engagement of the Third Crusade, attracting armies from across Europe, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Maghreb. Drawing on a balanced selection of Christian and Muslim sources, historian John D. Hosler has written the first book-length account of this hard-won victory for the Crusaders, when England’s Richard the Lionheart and King Philip Augustus of France joined forces to defeat the Egyptian Sultan Saladin. Hosler’s lively and engrossing narrative integrates military, political, and religious themes and developments, offers new perspectives on the generals, and provides a full analysis of the tactical, strategic, organizational, and technological aspects on both sides of the conflict. It is the epic story of a monumental confrontation that was the centerpiece of a Holy War in which many thousands fought and died in the name of Christ or Allah.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 by Susan Sleeper-Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest recovers the agrarian village world Indian women created in the lush lands of the Ohio Valley. Algonquian-speaking Indians living in a crescent of towns along the Wabash tributary of the Ohio were able to evade and survive the Iroquois onslaught of the seventeenth century, to absorb French traders and Indigenous refugees, to export peltry, and to harvest riparian, wetland, and terrestrial resources of every description and breathtaking richness. These prosperous Native communities frustrated French and British imperial designs, controlled the Ohio Valley, and confederated when faced with the challenge of American invasion.

By the late eighteenth century, Montreal silversmiths were sending their best work to Wabash Indian villages, Ohio Indian women were setting the fashions for Indigenous clothing, and European visitors were marveling at the sturdy homes and generous hospitality of trading entrepôts such as Miamitown. Confederacy, agrarian abundance, and nascent urbanity were, however, both too much and not enough. Kentucky settlers and American leaders—like George Washington and Henry Knox—coveted Indian lands and targeted the Indian women who worked them. Americans took women and children hostage to coerce male warriors to come to the treaty table to cede their homelands. Appalachian squatters, aspiring land barons, and ambitious generals invaded this settled agrarian world, burned crops, looted towns, and erased evidence of Ohio Indian achievement. This book restores the Ohio River valley as Native space.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Battle for Fortune"

New from Cornell University Press: The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China by Charlene Makley.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a deeply ethnographic appraisal, based on years of in situ research, The Battle for Fortune looks at the rising stakes of Tibetans’ encounters with Chinese state-led development projects in the early 2000s. The book builds upon anthropology’s qualitative approach to personhood, power and space to rethink the premises and consequences of economic development campaigns in China's multiethnic northwestern province of Qinghai.

Charlene Makley considers Tibetans’ encounters with development projects as first and foremost a historically situated interpretive politics, in which people negotiate the presence or absence of moral and authoritative persons and their associated jurisdictions and powers. Because most Tibetans believe the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes, Makley also takes divine beings seriously, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, "religious" or "premodern" world. The Battle for Fortune, therefore challenges readers to grasp the unique reality of Tibetans’ values and fears in the face of their marginalization in China. Makley uses this approach to encourage a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Scientific Journal"

New from The University of Chicago Press: The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century by Alex Csiszar.

About the book, from the publisher:

Not since the printing press has a media object been as celebrated for its role in the advancement of knowledge as the scientific journal. From open communication to peer review, the scientific journal has long been central both to the identity of academic scientists and to the public legitimacy of scientific knowledge. But that was not always the case. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, academies and societies dominated elite study of the natural world. Journals were a relatively marginal feature of this world, and sometimes even an object of outright suspicion.

The Scientific Journal tells the story of how that changed. Alex Csiszar takes readers deep into nineteenth-century London and Paris, where savants struggled to reshape scientific life in the light of rapidly changing political mores and the growing importance of the press in public life. The scientific journal did not arise as a natural solution to the problem of communicating scientific discoveries. Rather, as Csiszar shows, its dominance was a hard-won compromise born of political exigencies, shifting epistemic values, intellectual property debates, and the demands of commerce. Many of the tensions and problems that plague scholarly publishing today are rooted in these tangled beginnings. As we seek to make sense of our own moment of intense experimentation in publishing platforms, peer review, and information curation, Csiszar argues powerfully that a better understanding of the journal’s past will be crucial to imagining future forms for the expression and organization of knowledge.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee by Courtney Elizabeth Knapp.

About the book, from the publisher:

What can local histories of interracial conflict and collaboration teach us about the potential for urban equity and social justice in the future? Courtney Elizabeth Knapp chronicles the politics of gentrification and culture-based development in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by tracing the roots of racism, spatial segregation, and mainstream “cosmopolitanism” back to the earliest encounters between the Cherokee, African Americans, and white settlers. For more than three centuries, Chattanooga has been a site for multiracial interaction and community building; yet today public leaders have simultaneously restricted and appropriated many contributions of working-class communities of color within the city, exacerbating inequality and distrust between neighbors and public officials. Knapp suggests that “diasporic placemaking”—defined as the everyday practices through which uprooted people create new communities of security and belonging—is a useful analytical frame for understanding how multiracial interactions drive planning and urban development in diverse cities over time. By weaving together archival, ethnographic, and participatory action research techniques, she reveals the political complexities of a city characterized by centuries of ordinary resistance to racial segregation and uneven geographic development.

--Marshal Zeringue

"An Anthropology of the Machine"

New from the University of Chicago Press: An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network by Michael Fisch.

About the book, from the publisher:

With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine, Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo’s commuter train network embodies the lived realities of technology in our modern world. Drawing on his fine-grained knowledge of transportation, work, and everyday life in Tokyo, Fisch shows how fitting into a system that operates on the extreme edge of sustainability can take a physical and emotional toll on a community while also creating a collective way of life—one with unique limitations and possibilities.

An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Proper Order of Things"

New from Stanford University Press: The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power, and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses by Heather L. Ferguson.

About the book, from the publisher:

The "natural order of the state" was an early modern mania for the Ottoman Empire. In a time of profound and pervasive imperial transformation, the ideals of stability, proper order, and social harmony were integral to the legitimization of Ottoman power. And as Ottoman territory grew, so too did its network of written texts: a web of sultanic edicts, aimed at defining and supplementing imperial authority in the empire's disparate provinces. With this book, Heather L. Ferguson studies how this textual empire created a unique vision of Ottoman legal and social order, and how the Ottoman ruling elite, via sword and pen, articulated a claim to universal sovereignty that subverted internal challengers and external rivals.

The Proper Order of Things offers the story of an empire, at once familiar and strange, told through the shifting written vocabularies of power deployed by the Ottomans in their quest to thrive within a competitive early modern environment. Ferguson transcends the question of what these documents said, revealing instead how their formulation of the "proper order of things" configured the state itself. Through this textual authority, she argues, Ottoman writers ensured the durability of their empire, creating the principles of organization on which Ottoman statecraft and authority came to rest.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States"

New from Princeton University Press: Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States by Seth Perry.

About the book, from the publisher:

Early Americans claimed that they looked to "the Bible alone" for authority, but the Bible was never, ever alone. Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States is a wide-ranging exploration of the place of the Christian Bible in America in the decades after the Revolution. Attending to both theoretical concerns about the nature of scriptures and to the precise historical circumstances of a formative period in American history, Seth Perry argues that the Bible was not a "source" of authority in early America, as is often said, but rather a site of authority: a cultural space for editors, commentators, publishers, preachers, and readers to cultivate authoritative relationships.

While paying careful attention to early national bibles as material objects, Perry shows that "the Bible" is both a text and a set of relationships sustained by a universe of cultural practices and assumptions. Moreover, he demonstrates that Bible culture underwent rapid and fundamental changes in the early nineteenth century as a result of developments in technology, politics, and religious life. At the heart of the book are typical Bible readers, otherwise unknown today, and better-known figures such as Zilpha Elaw, Joseph Smith, Denmark Vesey, and Ellen White, a group that includes men and women, enslaved and free, Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Mormons, Presbyterians, and Quakers. What they shared were practices of biblical citation in writing, speech, and the performance of their daily lives. While such citation contributed to the Bible's authority, it also meant that the meaning of the Bible constantly evolved as Americans applied it to new circumstances and identities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Fiscalization of Social Policy"

New from Oxford University Press: The Fiscalization of Social Policy: How Taxpayers Trumped Children in the Fight Against Child Poverty by Joshua T. McCabe.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1970, a single mother with two children working full-time at the federal minimum wage in the US received no direct cash benefits from the federal government. Today, after a period of austerity, that same mother would receive $7,572 in federal cash benefits. This money does not come from social assistance, family allowances, or other programs we traditionally see as part of the welfare state. Instead, she benefits from the earned income tax credit (EITC) and the child tax credit (CTC)-tax credits for low-income families that have become a major component of American social policy.

In The Fiscalization of Social Policy, Joshua McCabe challenges conventional wisdom on American exceptionalism, offering the first and only comparative analysis of the politics of tax credits. Drawing comparisons between similar developments in the UK and Canada, McCabe upends much of what we know about tax credits for low-income families. Rather than attributing these changes to anti-welfare attitudes, mobilization of conservative forces, shifts toward workfare, or racial antagonism, he argues that the growing use of tax credits for social policy was a strategic adaptation to austerity. While all three countries employ the same set of tax credits, child US poverty rates remain highest, as their tax credits paradoxically exclude the poorest families.

A critical examination of social policy over the last fifty years, The Fiscalization of Social Policy shows why the US government hasn't tackled poverty, even while it implements greater tax benefits for the poor.

Visit Joshua T. McCabe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Natural Resources and the New Frontier"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China's Borderlands by Judd C. Kinzley.

About the book, from the publisher:

China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang has experienced escalating cycles of violence, interethnic strife, and state repression since the 1990s. In their search for the roots of these growing tensions, scholars have tended to focus on ethnic clashes and political disputes. In Natural Resources and the New Frontier, historian Judd C. Kinzley takes a different approach—one that works from the ground up to explore the infrastructural and material foundation of state power in the region.

As Kinzley argues, Xinjiang’s role in producing various natural resources for regional powers has been an important but largely overlooked factor in fueling unrest. He carefully traces the buildup to this unstable situation over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the shifting priorities of Chinese, Soviet, and provincial officials regarding the production of various resources, including gold, furs, and oil among others. Through his archival work, Kinzley offers a new way of viewing Xinjiang that will shape the conversation about this important region and offer a model for understanding the development of other frontier zones in China as well as across the global south.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Idleness: A Philosophical Essay"

New from Princeton University Press: Idleness: A Philosophical Essay by Brian O'Connor.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first book to challenge modern philosophy’s case against idleness, revealing why the idle state is one of true freedom

For millennia, idleness and laziness have been regarded as vices. We're all expected to work to survive and get ahead, and devoting energy to anything but labor and self-improvement can seem like a luxury or a moral failure. Far from questioning this conventional wisdom, modern philosophers have worked hard to develop new reasons to denigrate idleness. In Idleness, the first book to challenge modern philosophy's portrayal of inactivity, Brian O'Connor argues that the case against an indifference to work and effort is flawed--and that idle aimlessness may instead allow for the highest form of freedom.

Idleness explores how some of the most influential modern philosophers drew a direct connection between making the most of our humanity and avoiding laziness. Idleness was dismissed as contrary to the need people have to become autonomous and make whole, integrated beings of themselves (Kant); to be useful (Kant and Hegel); to accept communal norms (Hegel); to contribute to the social good by working (Marx); and to avoid boredom (Schopenhauer and de Beauvoir).

O'Connor throws doubt on all these arguments, presenting a sympathetic vision of the inactive and unserious that draws on more productive ideas about idleness, from ancient Greece through Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Schiller and Marcuse's thoughts about the importance of play, and recent critiques of the cult of work. A thought-provoking reconsideration of productivity for the twenty-first century, Idleness shows that, from now on, no theory of what it means to have a free mind can exclude idleness from the conversation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rubber and the Making of Vietnam"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 by Michitake Aso.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dating back to the nineteenth-century transplantation of a latex-producing tree from the Amazon to Southeast Asia, rubber production has wrought monumental changes worldwide. During a turbulent Vietnamese past, rubber transcended capitalism and socialism, colonization and decolonization, becoming a key commodity around which life and history have revolved. In this pathbreaking study, Michitake Aso narrates how rubber plantations came to dominate the material and symbolic landscape of Vietnam and its neighbors, structuring the region’s environment of conflict and violence. Tracing the stories of agronomists, medical doctors, laborers, and leaders of independence movements, Aso demonstrates how postcolonial socialist visions of agriculture and medicine were informed by their colonial and capitalist predecessors in important ways. As rubber cultivation funded infrastructural improvements and the creation of a skilled labor force, private and state-run plantations became landscapes of oppression, resistance, and modernity.

Synthesizing archival material in English, French, and Vietnamese, Aso uses rubber plantations as a lens to examine the entanglements of nature, culture, and politics and demonstrates how the demand for rubber has impacted nearly a century of war and, at best, uneasy peace in Vietnam.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Trading in War"

New from Yale University Press: Trading in War: London's Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson by Margarette Lincoln.

About the book, from the publisher:

A vivid account of the forgotten citizens of maritime London who sustained Britain during the Revolutionary Wars

In the half-century before the Battle of Trafalgar the port of London became the commercial nexus of a global empire and launch pad of Britain’s military campaigns in North America and Napoleonic Europe. The unruly riverside parishes east of the Tower seethed with life, a crowded, cosmopolitan, and incendiary mix of sailors, soldiers, traders, and the network of ordinary citizens that served them. Harnessing little-known archival and archaeological sources, Lincoln recovers a forgotten maritime world. Her gripping narrative highlights the pervasive impact of war, which brought violence, smuggling, pilfering from ships on the river, and a susceptibility to subversive political ideas. It also commemorates the working maritime community: shipwrights and those who built London’s first docks, wives who coped while husbands were at sea, and early trade unions. This meticulously researched work reveals the lives of ordinary Londoners behind the unstoppable rise of Britain’s sea power and its eventual defeat of Napoleon.

--Marshal Zeringue

"China's War on Smuggling"

New from Columbia University Press: China's War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965 by Philip Thai.

About the book, from the publisher:

Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority.

Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France"

New from the University of Chicago Press: A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France by Ronald Schechter.

About the book, from the publisher:

In contemporary political discourse, it is common to denounce violent acts as “terroristic.” But this reflexive denunciation is a surprisingly recent development. In A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France, Ronald Schechter tells the story of the term’s evolution in Western thought, examining a neglected yet crucial chapter of our complicated romance with terror.

For centuries prior to the French Revolution, the word “terror” had largely positive connotations. Subjects flattered monarchs with the label “terror of his enemies.” Lawyers invoked the “terror of the laws.” Theater critics praised tragedies that imparted terror and pity. By August 1794, however, terror had lost its positive valence. As revolutionaries sought to rid France of its enemies, terror became associated with surveillance committees, tribunals, and the guillotine. By unearthing the tradition that associated terror with justice, magnificence, and health, Schechter helps us understand how the revolutionary call to make terror the order of the day could inspire such fervent loyalty in the first place—even as the gratuitous violence of the revolution eventually transformed it into the dreadful term we would recognize today. Most important, perhaps, Schechter proposes that terror is not an import to Western civilization—as contemporary discourse often suggests—but rather a domestic product with a long and consequential tradition.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Ecocentrists"

New from Columbia University Press: The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism by Keith Makoto Woodhouse.

About the book, from the publisher:

Disenchanted with the mainstream environmental movement, a new, more radical kind of environmental activist emerged in the 1980s. Radical environmentalists used direct action, from blockades and tree-sits to industrial sabotage, to save a wild nature that they believed to be in a state of crisis. Questioning the premises of liberal humanism, they subscribed to an ecocentric philosophy that attributed as much value to nature as to people. Although critics dismissed them as marginal, radicals posed a vital question that mainstream groups too often ignored: Is environmentalism a matter of common sense or a fundamental critique of the modern world?

In The Ecocentrists, Keith Makoto Woodhouse offers a nuanced history of radical environmental thought and action in the late-twentieth-century United States. Focusing especially on the group Earth First!, Woodhouse explores how radical environmentalism responded to both postwar affluence and a growing sense of physical limits. While radicals challenged the material and philosophical basis of industrial civilization, they glossed over the ways economic inequality and social difference defined people’s different relationships to the nonhuman world. Woodhouse discusses how such views increasingly set Earth First! at odds with movements focused on social justice and examines the implications of ecocentrism’s sweeping critique of human society for the future of environmental protection. A groundbreaking intellectual history of environmental politics in the United States, The Ecocentrists is a timely study that considers humanism and individualism in an environmental age and makes a case for skepticism and doubt in environmental thought.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Aesthetics, Industry, and Science"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society by M. Norton Wise.

About the book, from the publisher:

On January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister received a request by a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psychophysics, members of this small but growing group—which soon included Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke, Werner Siemens, and Hermann von Helmholtz—established leading positions in what only thirty years later had become a new landscape of natural science. How was this possible? How could a bunch of twenty-somethings succeed in seizing the future?

In Aesthetics, Industry, and Science M. Norton Wise answers these questions not simply from a technical perspective of theories and practices but with a broader cultural view of what was happening in Berlin at the time. He emphasizes in particular how rapid industrial development, military modernization, and the neoclassical aesthetics of contemporary art informed the ways in which these young men thought. Wise argues that aesthetic sensibility and material aspiration in this period were intimately linked, and he uses these two themes for a final reappraisal of Helmholtz’s early work. Anyone interested in modern German cultural history, or the history of nineteenth-century German science, will be drawn to this landmark book.

--Marshal Zeringue

"To Master the Boundless Sea"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire by Jason W. Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

As the United States grew into an empire in the late nineteenth century, notions like “sea power” derived not only from fleets, bases, and decisive battles but also from a scientific effort to understand and master the ocean environment. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and concluding in the first years of the twentieth, Jason W. Smith tells the story of the rise of the U.S. Navy and the emergence of American ocean empire through its struggle to control nature. In vividly told sketches of exploration, naval officers, war, and, most significantly, the ocean environment, Smith draws together insights from environmental, maritime, military, and naval history, and the history of science and cartography, placing the U.S. Navy’s scientific efforts within a broader cultural context.

By recasting and deepening our understanding of the U.S. Navy and the United States at sea, Smith brings to the fore the overlooked work of naval hydrographers, surveyors, and cartographers. In the nautical chart’s soundings, names, symbols, and embedded narratives, Smith recounts the largely untold story of a young nation looking to extend its power over the boundless sea.

--Marshal Zeringue

"God and Man in Tehran"

New from Columbia University Press: God and Man in Tehran: Contending Visions of the Divine from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic by Hossein Kamaly.

About the book, from the publisher:

In God and Man in Tehran, Hossein Kamaly explores the historical processes that have made and unmade contending visions of God in Iran’s capital throughout the past two hundred years. Kamaly examines how ideas of God have been mobilized, contested, and transformed, emphasizing how notions of the divine have given shape to and in turn have been shaped by divergent conceptualizations of nature, reason, law, morality, and authority.

The book analyzes official government policies, modern textbooks, and university curricula; popular beliefs and ritual practices; and philosophical and juridical attitudes toward theological questions in traditional institutions. Kamaly considers continuity and change in religiosity under the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties; the significance of outbreaks of messianic expectations; why a modernizing nation took a sudden turn toward state religiosity; and how the Islamic Republic deploys visions of God against foreign enemies and domestic critics. Beyond the majority Shia Muslim population, the book includes minority and suppressed voices. With a focus on the diversity of ideas of the divine, God and Man in Tehran offers a novel perspective on the intellectual movements that have shaped Iranian modernity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Before Voltaire"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Before Voltaire: The French Origins of “Newtonian” Mechanics, 1680-1715 by J.B. Shank.

About the book, from the publisher:

We have grown accustomed to the idea that scientific theories are embedded in their place and time. But in the case of the development of mathematical physics in eighteenth-century France, the relationship was extremely close. In Before Voltaire, J.B. Shank shows that although the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687 exerted strong influence, the development of calculus-based physics is better understood as an outcome that grew from French culture in general.

Before Voltaire explores how Newton’s ideas made their way not just through the realm of French science, but into the larger world of society and culture of which Principia was an intertwined part. Shank also details a history of the beginnings of calculus-based mathematical physics that integrates it into the larger intellectual currents in France at the time, including the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, the emergence of wider audiences for science, and the role of the newly reorganized Royal Academy of Sciences. The resulting book offers an unprecedented cultural history of one the most important and influential elements of Enlightenment science.

Writers Read: J.B. Shank (September 2008).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Writing on the Wall"

New from Princeton University Press: Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity by Karen B. Stern.

About the book, from the publisher:

Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailing perspectives on ancient Jewish life have been shaped largely by the voices of intellectual and social elites, preserved in the writings of Philo and Josephus and the rabbinic texts of the Mishnah and Talmud. Commissioned art, architecture, and formal inscriptions displayed on tombs and synagogues equally reflect the sensibilities of their influential patrons. The perspectives and sentiments of nonelite Jews, by contrast, have mostly disappeared from the historical record. Focusing on these forgotten Jews of antiquity, Writing on the Wall takes an unprecedented look at the vernacular inscriptions and drawings they left behind and sheds new light on the richness of their quotidian lives.

Just like their neighbors throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Egypt, ancient Jews scribbled and drew graffiti everyplace--in and around markets, hippodromes, theaters, pagan temples, open cliffs, sanctuaries, and even inside burial caves and synagogues. Karen Stern reveals what these markings tell us about the men and women who made them, people whose lives, beliefs, and behaviors eluded commemoration in grand literary and architectural works. Making compelling analogies with modern graffiti practices, she documents the overlooked connections between Jews and their neighbors, showing how popular Jewish practices of prayer, mortuary commemoration, commerce, and civic engagement regularly crossed ethnic and religious boundaries.

Illustrated throughout with examples of ancient graffiti, Writing on the Wall provides a tantalizingly intimate glimpse into the cultural worlds of forgotten populations living at the crossroads of Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and earliest Islam.

--Marshal Zeringue