Tuesday, July 31, 2018

"The Empire's New Clothes"

New from Oxford University Press: The Empire's New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth by Philip Murphy.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the wake of Brexit, the Commonwealth has been identified as an important body for future British trade and diplomacy, but few know what it actually does. How is it organized and what has held it together for so long? How important is the Queen's role as Head of the Commonwealth? Most importantly, why has it had such a troubled recent past, and is it realistic to imagine that its fortunes might be reversed. In The Empire's New Clothes, Murphy strips away the gilded self-image of the Commonwealth to reveal an irrelevant institution afflicted by imperial amnesia. He offers a personal perspective on this complex and poorly understood institution, and asks if it can ever escape from the shadow of the British Empire to become an organization based on shared values, rather than a shared history.
Philip Murphy is Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and Professor of British and Commonwealth History at the University of London. He has published extensively on the history of British decolonization and, recently, on the Commonwealth-wide role of the British monarchy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, July 30, 2018

"The Coming of Democracy"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson by Mark R. Cheathem.

About the book, from the publisher:
After the "corrupt bargain" that awarded John Quincy Adams the presidency in 1825, American politics underwent a fundamental shift from deference to participation. This changing tide eventually propelled Andrew Jackson into the White House—twice. But the presidential race that best demonstrated the extent of the changes was that of Martin Van Buren and war hero William Henry Harrison in 1840. Harrison’s campaign was famously marked by sloganeering and spirited rallies.

In The Coming of Democracy, Mark R. Cheathem examines the evolution of presidential campaigning from 1824 to 1840. Addressing the roots of early republic cultural politics—from campaign biographies to songs, political cartoons, and public correspondence between candidates and voters—Cheathem asks the reader to consider why such informal political expressions increased so dramatically during the Jacksonian period. What sounded and looked like mere entertainment, he argues, held important political meaning. The extraordinary voter participation rate—over 80 percent—in the 1840 presidential election indicated that both substantive issues and cultural politics drew Americans into the presidential selection process.

Drawing on period newspapers, diaries, memoirs, and public and private correspondence, The Coming of Democracy is the first book-length treatment to reveal how presidents and presidential candidates used both old and new forms of cultural politics to woo voters and win elections in the Jacksonian era. This book will appeal to anyone interested in US politics, the Jacksonian/antebellum era, or the presidency.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, July 29, 2018

"Immigrants Under Threat"

New from NYU Press: Immigrants Under Threat: Risk and Resistance in Deportation Nation by Greg Prieto.

About the book, from the publisher:
A portrait of two Mexican immigrant communities confronting threats of deportation, detention, and dispossession

Everyday life as an immigrant in a deportation nation is fraught with risk, but everywhere immigrants confront repression and dispossession, they also manifest resistance in ways big and small. Immigrants Under Threat shifts the conversation from what has been done to Mexican immigrants to what they do in response.

From private strategies of avoidance, to public displays of protest, immigrant resistance is animated by the massive demographic shifts that started in 1965 and an immigration enforcement regime whose unprecedented scope and intensity has made daily life increasingly perilous. Immigrants Under Threat focuses on the way the material needs of everyday life both enable and constrain participation in immigrant resistance movements.

Using ethnographic research from two Mexican immigrant communities on California’s Central Coast, Greg Prieto argues that immigrant communities turn inward to insulate themselves from the perceived risks of authorities and a hostile public. These barriers are overcome through the face-to-face work of social-movement organizing that transforms individual grievances into collective demands.

The social movements that emerge are shaped by the local political climates in which they unfold and remain tethered to their material inspiration. Immigrants Under Threat explains that Mexican immigrants seek not to transcend, but to burrow into American institutions of law and family so that they might attain a measure of economic stability and social mobility that they have sought all along.
Visit Greg Prieto's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, July 28, 2018

"After Eunuchs"

New from Columbia University Press: After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China by Howard Chiang.

About the book, from the publisher:
For much of Chinese history, the eunuch stood out as an exceptional figure at the margins of gender categories. Amid the disintegration of the Qing Empire, men and women in China began to understand their differences in the language of modern science. In After Eunuchs, Howard Chiang traces the genealogy of sexual knowledge from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality, showing the centrality of new epistemic structures to the formation of Chinese modernity.

From anticastration discourses in the late Qing era to sex-reassignment surgeries in Taiwan in the 1950s and queer movements in the 1980s and 1990s, After Eunuchs explores the ways the introduction of Western biomedical sciences transformed normative meanings of gender, sexuality, and the body in China. Chiang investigates how competing definitions of sex circulated in science, medicine, vernacular culture, and the periodical press, bringing to light a rich and vibrant discourse of sex change in the first half of the twentieth century. He focuses on the stories of gender and sexual minorities as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, philosophers, educators, reformers, journalists, and tabloid writers, as they debated the questions of political sovereignty, national belonging, cultural authenticity, scientific modernity, human difference, and the power and authority of truths about sex. Theoretically sophisticated and far-reaching, After Eunuchs is an innovative contribution to the history and philosophy of science and queer and Sinophone studies.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, July 27, 2018

"Extralegal Groups in Post-Conflict Liberia"

New from Oxford University Press: Extralegal Groups in Post-Conflict Liberia: How Trade Makes the State by Christine Cheng.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the aftermath of the Liberian civil war, groups of ex-combatants seized control of natural resource enclaves in the rubber, diamond, and timber sectors. With some of them threatening a return to war, these groups were widely viewed as the most significant threats to Liberia's hard-won peace. Building on fieldwork and socio-historical analysis, this book shows how extralegal groups are driven to provide basic governance goods in their bid to create a stable commercial environment. This is a story about how their livelihood strategies merged with the opportunities of Liberia's post-war political economy. But it is also a context-specific story that is rooted in the country's geography, its history of state-making, and its social and political practices. This volume demonstrates that extralegal groups do not emerge in a vacuum.

In areas of limited statehood, where the state is weak and political authority is contested, where rule of law is corrupted and government distrust runs deep, extralegal groups can provide order and dispute resolution, forming the basic kernel of the state. This logic counters the prevailing 'spoiler' narrative, forcing us to reimagine non-state actors and recast their roles as incidental statebuilders in the evolutionary process of state-making. This leads to a broader argument: it is trade, rather than war, that drives contemporary statebuilding. Along the way, this book poses some uncomfortable questions about what it means to be legitimately governed, whether our trust in states is ultimately misplaced, whether entrenched corruption is the most likely post-conflict outcome, and whether our expectations of international peacebuilding and statebuilding are ultimately self-defeating.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, July 26, 2018

"Child Labor in America"

New from the University Press of Kansas: Child Labor in America: The Epic Legal Struggle to Protect Children by John A. Fliter.

About the book, from the publisher:
Child labor law strikes most Americans as a fixture of the country’s legal landscape, involving issues settled in the distant past. But these laws, however self-evidently sensible they might seem, were the product of deeply divisive legal debates stretching over the past century—and even now are subject to constitutional challenges. Child Labor in America tells the story of that historic legal struggle. The book offers the first full account of child labor law in America—from the earliest state regulations to the most recent important Supreme Court decisions and the latest contemporary attacks on existing laws.

Children had worked in America from the time the first settlers arrived on its shores, but public attitudes about working children underwent dramatic changes along with the nation’s economy and culture. A close look at the origins of oppressive child labor clarifies these changing attitudes, providing context for the hard-won legal reforms that followed. Author John A. Fliter describes early attempts to regulate working children, beginning with haphazard and flawed state-level efforts in the 1840s and continuing in limited and ineffective ways as a consensus about the evils of child labor started to build. In the Progressive Era, the issue finally became a matter of national concern, resulting in several laws, four major Supreme Court decisions, an unsuccessful Child Labor Amendment, and the landmark Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Fliter offers a detailed overview of these events, introducing key figures, interest groups, and government officials on both sides of the debates and incorporating the latest legal and political science research on child labor reform. Unprecedented in its scope and depth, his work provides critical insight into the role child labor has played in the nation’s social, political, and legal development.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Security Entrepreneurs"

New from Oxford University Press: Security Entrepreneurs: Performing Protection in Post-Cold War Europe by Alexandra Gheciu.

About the book, from the publisher:
Focusing on four East European polities-Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania--this book examines the dynamics and implications of processes of commercialization of security that have occurred following the collapse of communist regimes. These processes have been central to post-communist liberalization, and have profoundly shaped those states and their integration into European institutional structures and global economic and political circuits. They have also affected -- and been shaped by-- the behaviour and power of regional and global actors (e.g. European institutions, regional, and global corporations) in Eastern Europe. By virtue of the fact that they combine in complex ways local, national, regional, and global dynamics and actors, processes of security commercialization in the former Eastern bloc can be seen as instances of 'glocalization'. Several aspects of security commercialization are particularly important. To begin with, private actors --specifically private security companies (PSCs)-- have been reconstituted as partial agents of public power. As such, they have come to be systematically involved in performing security practices traditionally associated with the state. In addition, a potent commercial logic has come to permeate public security institutions. This has led to redefinition of the relationship between the state and its population in ways that defy conventional wisdom about the role of the state, and pose difficult normative challenges. More broadly, processes of security commercialization in Eastern Europe, which involve important performative dimensions, have led to the emergence of complex, hybrid networks of security providers that transcend domestic/international, public/private boundaries and behave, in many ways, as entrepreneurs.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

"The Trans Generation"

New from NYU Press: The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution by Ann Travers.

About the book, from the publisher:
A groundbreaking look at the lives of transgender children and their families

Some “boys” will only wear dresses; some “girls” refuse to wear dresses; in both cases, as Ann Travers shows in this fascinating account of the lives of transgender kids, these are often more than just wardrobe choices. Travers shows that from very early ages, some at two and three years old, these kids find themselves to be different from the sex category that was assigned to them at birth. How they make their voices heard—to their parents and friends, in schools, in public spaces, and through the courts—is the focus of this remarkable and groundbreaking book.

Based on interviews with transgender kids, ranging in age from 4 to 20, and their parents, and over five years of research in the US and Canada, The Trans Generation offers a rare look into what it is like to grow up as a trans child. From daycare to birthday parties and from the playground to the school bathroom, Travers takes the reader inside the day-to-day realities of trans kids who regularly experience crisis as a result of the restrictive ways in which sex categories regulate their lives and put pressure on them to deny their internal sense of who they are in gendered terms.

As a transgender activist and as an advocate for trans kids, Travers is able to document from first-hand experience the difficulties of growing up trans and the challenges that parents can face. The book shows the incredible time, energy, and love that these parents give to their children, even in the face of, at times, unsupportive communities, schools, courts, health systems, and government laws. Keeping in mind that all trans kids are among the most vulnerable to bullying, violent attacks, self-harm, and suicide, and that those who struggle with poverty, racism, lack of parental support, learning differences, etc, are extremely at risk, Travers offers ways to support all trans kids through policy recommendations and activist interventions. Ultimately, the book is meant to open up options for kids’ own gender self-determination, to question the need for the sex binary, and to highlight ways that cultural and material resources can be redistributed more equitably. The Trans Generation offers an essential and important new understanding of childhood.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

"Journalism Without Profit"

New from Oxford University Press: Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails by Magda Konieczna.

About the book, from the publisher:
The last decade has witnessed a dramatic decline in the presence and influence of legacy news organizations. This decline has led to tremendous growth in news startups, which have attempted to fill the gap left by their legacy counterparts by producing the quality public service journalism upon which the health of U.S. democracy depends. If legacy news organizations, with their existing infrastructure, are failing, can these startups do any better? This question lies at the heart of Journalism Without Profit.

Magda Konieczna explores three prominent news nonprofits: the Center for Public Integrity, one of the oldest and largest of its kind; the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, a university-based watchdog news organization that relies on others to publish its work; and MinnPost, an online news website. Through in-depth study of the practices of each newsroom, Konieczna isolates one common behavior that will contribute to their success: the way these organizations collaborate and share stories. Though this emergent behavior differentiates news nonprofits from the mainstream journalism from which they arose, it also ties the two forms of journalism together, as news nonprofits attempt to share stories with mainstream publications. In other words, the very behavior that may enable these organizations to do better than their mainstream counterparts also limits their ability to evolve much beyond them.

In one of the first major books to focus on nonprofit journalism, Konieczna investigates the major questions that will open the field up to further study. Where did nonprofit news come from, and where is it going? Who funds it, and why? Ultimately, Konieczna offers a new way to think about the seismic changes in journalism that are defining the 21st-century.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, July 23, 2018

"K-pop Live"

New from Stanford University Press: K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance by Suk-Young Kim.

About the book, from the publisher:
1990s South Korea saw the transition from a military dictatorship to a civilian government, from a manufacturing economy to a postindustrial hub, and from a cloistered society to a more dynamic transnational juncture. These seismic shifts had a profound impact on the media industry and the rise of K-pop. In K-pop Live, Suk-Young Kim investigates the meteoric ascent of Korean popular music in relation to the rise of personal technology and social media, situating a feverish cross-media partnership within the Korean historical context and broader questions about what it means to be "live" and "alive."

Based on in-depth interviews with K-pop industry personnel, media experts, critics, and fans, as well as archival research, K-pop Live explores how the industry has managed the tough sell of live music in a marketplace in which virtually everything is available online. Teasing out digital media's courtship of "liveness" in the production and consumption of K-pop, Kim investigates the nuances of the affective mode in which human subjects interact with one another in the digital age. Observing performances online, in concert, and even through the use of holographic performers, Kim offers readers a step-by-step guide through the K-pop industry's variegated efforts to diversify media platforms as a way of reaching a wider global network of music consumers. In an era when digital technology inserts itself into nearly all social relationships, Kim reveals how "what is live" becomes a question of how we exist as increasingly mediated subjects, fragmented and isolated by technological wonders while also longing for a sense of belonging and being alive through an interactive mode of exchange we often call "live."
--Marshal Zeringue

"Redeeming La Raza"

New from Oxford University Press: Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights by Gabriela González.

About the book, from the publisher:
The transborder modernization of Mexico and the American Southwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the lives of ethnic Mexicans across the political divide. While industrialization, urbanization, technology, privatization, and wealth concentration benefitted some, many more experienced dislocation, exploitative work relations, and discrimination based on race, gender, and class. The Mexican Revolution brought these issues to the fore within Mexican society, igniting a diaspora to el norte. Within the United States, similar economic and social power dynamics plagued Tejanos and awaited the war refugees. Political activism spearheaded by individuals and organizations such as the Idars, Leonor Villegas' de Magnón's White Cross, the Magonista movement, the Munguias, Emma Tenayuca, and LULAC emerged in the borderlands to address the needs of ethnic Mexicans whose lives were shaped by racism, patriarchy, and poverty.

As Gabriela Gonzalez shows in this book, economic modernization relied on social hierarchies that were used to justify economic inequities. Redeeming la raza was about saving ethnic Mexicans in Texas from a social hierarchy premised on false notions of white supremacy and Mexican inferiority. Activists used privileges of class, education, networks, and organizational skills to confront the many injustices that racism bred, but they used different strategies. Thus, the anarcho-syndicalist approach of Magónistas stands in contrast to the social and cultural redemption politics of the Idars who used the press to challenge a Jaime Crow world. Also, the family promoted the intellectual, material, and cultural uplift of la raza, working to combat negative stereotypes of ethnic Mexicans. Similar contrasts can be drawn between the labor activism of Emma Tenayuca and the Munguias, whose struggle for rights employed a politics of respectability that encouraged ethnic pride and unity. Finally, maternal feminist approaches and the politics of citizenship serve as reminders that gendered and nationalist rhetoric and practices foment hierarchies within civil and human rights organizations.

Redeeming La Raza examines efforts of activists to create a dignified place for ethnic Mexicans in American society by challenging white supremacy and the segregated world it spawned.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, July 22, 2018

"Globalization Under and After Socialism"

New from Stanford University Press: Globalization Under and After Socialism: The Evolution of Transnational Capital in Central and Eastern Europe by Besnik Pula.

About the book, from the publisher:
The post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe have gone from being among the world's most closed, autarkic economies to being some of the most export-oriented and globally integrated. While previous accounts have attributed this shift to post-1989 market reform policies, Besnik Pula sees the root causes differently. Reaching deeper into the region's history and comparatively examining its long-run industrial development, he locates critical junctures that forced the hands of Central and Eastern European elites and made them look at options beyond the domestic economy and the socialist bloc.

In the 1970s, Central and Eastern European socialist leaders intensified engagements with the capitalist West in order to expand access to markets, technology, and capital. This shift began to challenge the Stalinist developmental model in favor of exports and transnational integration. A new reliance on exports launched the integration of Eastern European industry into value chains that cut across the East-West political divide. After 1989, these chains proved to be critical gateways to foreign direct investment and circuits of global capitalism. This book enriches our understanding of a regional shift that began well before the fall of the wall, while also explaining the distinct international roles that Central and Eastern European states have assumed in the globalized twenty-first century.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, July 21, 2018

"Little Cold Warriors"

New from Oxford University Press: Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s by Victoria M. Grieve.

About the book, from the publisher:
Both conservative and liberal Baby Boomers have romanticized the 1950s as an age of innocence--of pickup ball games and Howdy Doody, when mom stayed home and the economy boomed. These nostalgic narratives obscure many other histories of postwar childhood, one of which has more in common with the war years and the sixties, when children were mobilized and politicized by the U.S. government, private corporations, and individual adults to fight the Cold War both at home and abroad. Children battled communism in its various guises on television, the movies, and comic books; they practiced safety drills, joined civil preparedness groups, and helped to build and stock bomb shelters in the backyard. Children collected coins for UNICEF, exchanged art with other children around the world, prepared for nuclear war through the Boy and Girl Scouts, raised funds for Radio Free Europe, sent clothing to refugee children, and donated books to restock the diminished library shelves of war-torn Europe.

Rather than rationing and saving, American children were encouraged to spend and consume in order to maintain the engine of American prosperity. In these capacities, American children functioned as ambassadors, cultural diplomats, and representatives of the United States. Victoria M. Grieve examines this politicized childhood at the peak of the Cold War, and the many ways children and ideas about childhood were pressed into political service. Little Cold Warriors combines approaches from childhood studies and diplomatic history to understand the cultural Cold War through the activities and experiences of young Americans.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, July 20, 2018

"Intimate Violence"

New from Cornell University Press: Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust by Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg.

About the book, from the publisher:
Why do pogroms occur in some localities and not in others? Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg examine a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The authors note that while some communities erupted in anti-Jewish violence, most others remained quiescent. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of communities saw pogroms in 1941, and most ordinary gentiles never attacked Jews.

Intimate Violence is a novel social-scientific explanation of ethnic violence and the Holocaust. It locates the roots of violence in efforts to maintain Polish and Ukrainian dominance rather than in anti-Semitic hatred or revenge for communism. In doing so, it cuts through painful debates about relative victimhood that are driven more by metaphysical beliefs in Jewish culpability than empirical evidence of perpetrators and victims. Pogroms, they conclude, were difficult to start, and local conditions in most places prevented their outbreak despite a general anti-Semitism and the collapse of the central state. Kopstein and Wittenberg shed new light on the sources of mass ethnic violence and the ways in which such gruesome acts might be avoided.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, July 19, 2018

"Disrupt and Deny"

New from Oxford University Press: Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac.

About the book, from the publisher:
British leaders use spies and Special Forces to interfere in the affairs of others discreetly and deniably. Since 1945, MI6 has spread misinformation designed to divide and discredit targets from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland. It has instigated whispering campaigns and planted false evidence on officials working behind the Iron Curtain, tried to ferment revolution in Albania, blown up ships to prevent the passage of refugees to Israel, and secretly funnelled aid to insurgents in Afghanistan and dissidents in Poland. MI6 has launched cultural and economic warfare against Iceland and Czechoslovakia. It has tried to instigate coups in Congo, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere. Through bribery and blackmail, Britain has rigged elections as colonies moved to independence. Britain has fought secret wars in Yemen, Indonesia, and Oman--and discreetly used Special Forces to eliminate enemies from colonial Malaya to Libya during the Arab Spring.

This is covert action: a vital, though controversial, tool of statecraft and perhaps the most sensitive of all government activity. If used wisely, it can play an important role in pursuing national interests in a dangerous world. If used poorly, it can cause political scandal--or worse.

In Disrupt and Deny, Rory Cormac tells the remarkable true story of Britain's secret scheming against its enemies, as well as its friends; of intrigue and manoeuvring within the darkest corridors of Whitehall, where officials fought to maintain control of this most sensitive and seductive work; and, above all, of Britain's attempt to use smoke and mirrors to mask decline. He reveals hitherto secret operations, the slush funds that paid for them, and the battles in Whitehall that shaped them.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

"Elusive Lives"

New from Stanford University Press: Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley.

About the book, from the publisher:
Muslim South Asia is widely characterized as a culture that idealizes female anonymity: women's bodies are veiled and their voices silenced. Challenging these perceptions, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley highlights an elusive strand of autobiographical writing dating back several centuries that offers a new lens through which to study notions of selfhood. In Elusive Lives, she locates the voices of Muslim women who rejected taboos against women speaking out, by telling their life stories in written autobiography. To chart patterns across time and space, materials dated from the sixteenth century to the present are drawn from across South Asia – including present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Lambert-Hurley uses many rare autobiographical texts in a wide array of languages, including Urdu, English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and Malayalam to elaborate a theoretical model for gender, autobiography, and the self beyond the usual Euro-American frame. In doing so, she works toward a new, globalized history of the field. Ultimately, Elusive Lives points to the sheer diversity of Muslim women's lives and life stories, offering a unique window into a history of the everyday against a backdrop of imperialism, reformism, nationalism and feminism.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

"Interrupting Capitalism"

New from Oxford University Press: Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy by Matthew A. Shadle.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the decade since the financial crisis of 2008, governments around the world have struggled to develop strategies to stabilize precarious markets, encourage growth, and combat mounting wealth inequality. In the United States, the recovery from that crisis has exacerbated the fears of the working and middle classes and pitted those classes against the wealthy. Although we participate every day in economic life as workers, consumers, employers, or activists, we often experience the economy as a mysterious force that we cannot control, or fully understand. Matthew Shadle argues that Catholics ought to be able to draw on their faith to help navigate and make sense of economic life, but too often the effort to get ahead or just stay afloat drowns out faith's appeal.

Interrupting Capitalism proposes a new strategy for Christian economic discipleship. Rather than engage the two theological poles of continuity and rupture, Christians should interrupt capitalism: neither whole-heartedly endorsing global capitalism nor seeking to dismantle it. This means "breaking into" the economy, embracing those aspects that enhance human well-being while transforming the market in a spirit of solidarity. Shadle argues that all three of the dominant theological approaches dealing with economic life-the progressive, neoconservative, and liberationist-are theologies of continuity. A fourth approach, a communitarian one, he believes, can best embody the strategy of interrupting capitalism. The Catholic tradition, including its tradition of social teaching, provides a cultural structure that, along with their own social context, conditions how Catholics think about and engage in economic activity. Drawing on the resources of the tradition, theologians reflect on this activity, giving it a theoretical justification and offering correctives. Both the experience of ordinary Catholics and the work of theologians feed into new articulations of Catholic social teaching. Offering an overview of Catholic thought since the Second World War, Shadle begins with the experience of Catholics in Western Europe at mid-century, moving to Latin America and the United States in the 1970s and 80s, and then concluding with the phenomenon of globalization.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, July 16, 2018

"Raising Global Families"

New from Stanford University Press: Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US by Pei-Chia Lan.

About the book, from the publisher:
Public discourse on Asian parenting tends to fixate on ethnic culture as a static value set, disguising the fluidity and diversity of Chinese parenting. Such stereotypes also fail to account for the challenges of raising children in a rapidly modernizing world, full of globalizing values. In Raising Global Families Pei-Chia Lan examines how ethnic Chinese parents in Taiwan and the United States negotiate cultural differences and class inequality to raise children in the contexts of globalization and immigration. She draws on a uniquely comparative, multisited research model with four groups of parents: middle-class and working-class parents in Taiwan, and middle-class and working-class Chinese immigrants in the Boston area. Despite sharing a similar ethnic cultural background, these parents develop class-specific, context-sensitive strategies for arranging their children's education, care, and discipline, and for coping with uncertainties provoked by their changing surroundings. Lan's cross-Pacific comparison demonstrates that class inequality permeates the fabric of family life, even as it takes shape in different ways across national contexts.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, July 15, 2018

"Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know®"

New from Oxford University Press: Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Michael J. Gerhardt.

About the book, from the publisher:
Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know® is the step back and deep reflection on the law of impeachment that everyone needs now. Written in an accessible and lively question-and-answer format, it offers a timely explanation of the impeachment process from its very meaning to its role in politics today.

The book defines the scope of impeachable offenses, and how the Constitution provides alternative procedures and sanctions for addressing misconduct in office. It explains why the only two presidential impeachments, those of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, failed to lead to conviction, and how the impeachments of federal judges illuminate the law and politics of the process.

As a legal expert and the only joint witness in the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, author Michael J. Gerhardt also explores a question frequently asked-will Donald Trump be impeached? This book does not take a side in the debate over the possible impeachment of the president; instead, it is a primer for anyone eager to learn about impeachment's origins, practices, limitations, and alternatives.
Michael J. Gerhardt is Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor in Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a scholar in residence at the National Constitutional Center, and a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, July 14, 2018

"The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America"

New from the University of California Press: The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America by Maggie M. Cao.

About the book, from the publisher:
The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America examines the dissolution of landscape painting in the late nineteenth-century United States. Maggie M. Cao explores the pictorial practices that challenged, mourned, or revised the conventions of landscape painting, a major cultural project for nineteenth-century Americans. Through rich analysis of artworks at the genre’s unsettling limits—landscapes that self-destruct, masquerade as currency, or even take flight—Cao shows that experiments in landscape played a crucial role in the American encounter with modernity. Landscape is the genre through which American art most urgently sought to come to terms with the modern world.
Maggie M. Cao is David G. Frey Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Virtuous Emotions"

New from Oxford University Press: Virtuous Emotions by Kristján Kristjánsson.

About the book, from the publisher:
Many people are drawn towards virtue ethics because of the central place it gives to emotions in the good life. Yet it may seem odd to evaluate emotions as virtuous or non-virtuous, for how can we be held responsible for those powerful feelings that simply engulf us? And how can education help us to manage our emotional lives? The aim of this book is to offer readers a new Aristotelian analysis and moral justification of a number of emotions that Aristotle did not mention (awe, grief, and jealousy), or relegated, at best, to the level of the semi-virtuous (shame), or made disparaging remarks about (gratitude), or rejected explicitly (pity, understood as pain at another person's deserved bad fortune). Kristjan Kristjansson argues that there are good Aristotelian reasons for understanding those emotions either as virtuous or as indirectly conducive to virtue. Virtuous Emotions begins with an overview of Aristotle's ideas on the nature of emotions and of emotional value, and concludes with an account of Aristotelian emotion education.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, July 13, 2018

"The Collapse of British Rule in Burma"

New from Bloomsbury Academic: The Collapse of British Rule in Burma: The Civilian Evacuation and Independence by Michael D. Leigh.

About the book, from the publisher:
In May 1942 colonial Burma was in a state of military, economic and constitutional collapse. Japanese forces controlled almost the whole country and thousands of evacuees were trapped in a huge area of no-man's-land in the north. They made their way to India through the so-called 'jungles of death', attempting to trek out of Burma amidst perilous conditions. Drawing on diverse and previously unpublished accounts, Michael D. Leigh analyses the experiences of evacuees in both Burma and India and critically examines the impact of evacuation on colonial and Burmese politics in the lead-up to independence in 1948. This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Burmese history, 20th-century imperialism and the global reach of the Second World War.
Michael D. Leigh is a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, UK.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Code of Putinism"

New from Oxford University Press: The Code of Putinism by Brian D. Taylor.

About the book, from the publisher:
What is Vladimir Putin up to? This book shows how the mentality of Putin and his team - the code of Putinism - has shaped Russian politics over the past two decades. It explains not only the thoughts and ideas that motivate Putin's decisions, but also the set of emotions and habits that influence how Putin and his close allies view the world.
The code of Putinism has powerfully shaped the nature of Russia's political system, its economy, and its foreign policy. Taylor draws on a large number of interviews, the speeches of Putin and other top officials, and the Russian media to analyze the mentality of Team Putin. Key features of Russian politics today -- such as authoritarianism, Putin's reliance on a small group of loyal friends and associates, state domination of the economy, and an assertive foreign policy - are traced to the code of Putinism. Key ideas of the code include conservatism, anti-Americanism, and the importance of a state that is powerful both at home and abroad. Dominant habits of Putin and his associates include control, order, and loyalty. Important feelings driving Russia's rulers include the need for respect, resentment about lost status and mistreatment by the West, and vulnerability.

While some observers portray Putin as either a cold-blooded pragmatist or a strident Russian nationalist, Taylor provides a more nuanced and compelling interpretation of Putin's motives and actions. The Code of Putinism also shows how Putin's choices, guided by this mentality, have led to a Russia that is misruled at home and punching above its weight abroad.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, July 12, 2018

"Selling the CIA"

New from the University Press of Kansas: Selling the CIA: Public Relations and the Culture of Secrecy by David S. McCarthy.

About the book, from the publisher:
Dubbed the “Year of Intelligence,” 1975 was not a good year for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Caught spying on American citizens, the agency was under investigation, indicted in shocking headlines, its future covert operations at risk. Like so many others caught up in public scandal, the CIA turned to public relations. This book tells what happened next.

In the mid-1970s CIA officials developed a public relations strategy to fend off the agency’s critics. In Selling the CIA David Shamus McCarthy describes a PR campaign that proceeded with remarkable continuity—and effectiveness—through the decades and regimes that followed. He deftly chronicles the agency’s efforts to project an image of openness and accountability, even as it did its best to put a positive spin on secrecy—“[m]ore openness with greater secrecy,” in the Orwellian words of one director of public affairs. A tale of machinations and manipulation worthy of Hollywood, McCarthy’s work exposes a culture of secrecy unwittingly sustained by the forces of popular culture; a public relations offensive working on all fronts to perpetuate the CIA’s mystique as the heroic guardian of national security.

“Our failures are known, our successes are not” has been the guiding mantra of this initiative. Selling the CIA spotlights how the agency’s success in outmaneuvering Congress and avoiding public scrutiny stands as a direct threat to American democracy.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Playing Fair"

New from Oxford University Press: Playing Fair: Political Obligation and the Problems of Punishment by Richard Dagger.

About the book, from the publisher:
While much has been written on both political obligation and the justification of punishment, there has been little sustained effort to link the two.

In Playing Fair, Richard Dagger aims to fill this gap and provide a unified theory of political obligation and the justification of punishment that takes its bearings from the principle of fair play. To do this, he first establishes the principle of fair play-the idea that people in a cooperative venture have obligations to one another to shoulder a fair share of the burdens because they receive a fair share of the benefits of cooperation-as the basis of political obligation. Dagger then argues that the members of a reasonably just polity have an obligation to obey its laws because they have an obligation of reciprocity, or fair play, to one another. This theory of political obligation provides answers to fundamental and still debated questions about how to justify punishment, who has the right to carry it out, and how much to punish.

Playing Fair brings two long-standing concerns of political and legal philosophy together to rebut those who deny the possibility of a general obligation to obey the law, to defend the link between political authority and obligation, and to establish the proper scope of criminal law.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

"Copycats and Contrarians"

New from Yale University Press: Copycats and Contrarians: Why We Follow Others... and When We Don't by Michelle Baddeley.

About the book, from the publisher:
A multidisciplinary exploration of our human inclination to herd and why our instinct to copy others can be dangerous in today’s interlinked world

Rioting teenagers, tumbling stock markets, and the spread of religious terrorism appear to have little in common, but all are driven by the same basic instincts: the tendency to herd, follow, and imitate others. In today’s interconnected world, group choices all too often seem maladaptive. With unprecedented speed, information flashes across the globe and drives rapid shifts in group opinion. Adverse results can include speculative economic bubbles, irrational denigration of scientists and other experts, seismic political reversals, and more.

Drawing on insights from across the social, behavioral, and natural sciences, Michelle Baddeley explores contexts in which behavior is driven by the herd. She analyzes the rational vs. nonrational and cognitive vs. emotional forces involved, and she investigates why herding only sometimes works out well. With new perspectives on followers, leaders, and the pros and cons of herd behavior, Baddeley shines vivid light on human behavior in the context of our ever-more-connected world.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Reading Politics with Machiavelli"

New from Oxford University Press: Reading Politics with Machiavelli by Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr.

About the book, from the publisher:
Political theorist Wendy Brown has argued recently that contemporary neoliberalism, with its relentless obsession on the economy, has all but undone the tenets of democracy. The focus on maximizing credit scores and capital has, over time, promoted a politics that operates beyond and below the institutional and electoral world, eroding not just the desire for democratic action but even our ability to imagine it. In light of recent politics, it seems we may have reached the apotheosis of this depressing vision.

This book is meant to suggest one way of thinking past and out of the current moment, and it does so by looking to a perhaps unlikely figure: Niccolo Machiavelli. The book presents Machiavelli as an anachronistic thinker -- a thinker who, deprived of his political community and public identity during his exile from Florence, originated a new approach to democratic theory and practice. In particular he immersed himself in the writings of ancient thinkers and looked to them as models for understanding contemporary problems of corruption, conspiracy, and torture. This book's main contribution is a methodological one: it argues that the power in Machiavelli's work derived from this sort of anachronistic reading, which went against the grain of Renaissance thought. In turn it shows that if we imitate Machiavelli's interpretive method in reading The Prince and Discourses of Livy, we can find in them solutions to the neoliberal problems Brown warns about.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

"Risky Shores"

New from Stanford University Press: Risky Shores: Savagery and Colonialism in the Western Pacific by George Behlmer.

About the book, from the publisher:
Why did the so-called "Cannibal Isles" of the Western Pacific fascinate Europeans for so long? Spanning three centuries—from Captain James Cook's death on a Hawaiian beach in 1779 to the end of World War II in 1945—this book considers the category of "the savage" in the context of British Empire in the Western Pacific, reassessing the conduct of Islanders and the English-speaking strangers who encountered them. Sensationalized depictions of Melanesian "savages" as cannibals and headhunters created a unifying sense of Britishness during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These exotic people inhabited the edges of empire—and precisely because they did, Britons who never had and never would leave the home islands could imagine their nation's imperial reach.

George Behlmer argues that Britain's early visitors to the Pacific—mainly cartographers and missionaries—wielded the notion of savagery to justify their own interests. But savage talk was not simply a way to objectify and marginalize native populations: it would later serve also to emphasize the fragility of indigenous cultures. Behlmer by turns considers cannibalism, headhunting, missionary activity, the labor trade, and Westerners' preoccupation with the perceived "primitiveness" of indigenous cultures, arguing that British representations of savagery were not merely straightforward expressions of colonial power, but also belied home-grown fears of social disorder.
--Marshal Zeringue

"No Small Hope"

New from Oxford University Press: No Small Hope: Towards the Universal Provision of Basic Goods by Kenneth A. Reinert.

About the book, from the publisher:
With headlines focused on human suffering-civil wars, refugee flows, the spread of disease due to hunger and poor sanitation, population growth, climate change-it is easy to dive into despair. What is needed, instead, is a radical rethinking of global policy to realize the potential for improving the human condition.

This book provides hope by examining the basic needs for a fundamental shift in thinking about development and human security for both practical and ethical reasons. Kenneth A. Reinert calls for a basic goods approach that focuses on the provision of nutritious food, clean water, sanitation, health services, education services, housing, electricity, and human security services. This approach bridges two perspectives: that of standard growth, which emphasizes increasing GDP per capita, and that of capabilities/human development, which puts priority on the realization of human potential. Reinert argues that only when growth leads to an increase in the broad-based provision of basic goods and services will the hoped-for expansion of human capabilities and development be achieved.

No Small Hope places the basic goods approach on the firm foundation of objective human needs and subsistence rights. It offers a practical agenda for making progress towards human development by focusing on the real determinants of human well-being in an ethical system of moral minimalism. In a world of climate change, increased risk of natural disasters and increased refugee flows, the basic goods approach promises to help alleviate ongoing suffering and address vast deprivations in basic needs fulfillment.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, July 9, 2018

"Mediterranean Encounters: Trade and Pluralism in Early Modern Galata"

New from the University of California Press: Mediterranean Encounters: Trade and Pluralism in Early Modern Galata by Fariba Zarinebaf.

About the book, from the publisher:
Mediterranean Encounters traces the layered history of Galata—a Mediterranean and Black Sea port—to the Ottoman conquest, and its transformation into a hub of European trade and diplomacy as well as a pluralist society of the early modern period. Framing the history of Ottoman-European encounters within the institution of ahdnames (commercial and diplomatic treaties), this thoughtful book offers a critical perspective on the existing scholarship. For too long, the Ottoman empire has been defined as an absolutist military power driven by religious conviction, culturally and politically apart from the rest of Europe, and devoid of a commercial policy. By taking a close look at Galata, Fariba Zarinebaf provides a different approach based on a history of commerce, coexistence, competition, and collaboration through the lens of Ottoman legal records, diplomatic correspondence, and petitions. She shows that this port was just as cosmopolitan and pluralist as any large European port and argues that the Ottoman world was not peripheral to European modernity but very much part of it.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Institutionalizing the Just War"

New from Oxford University Press: Institutionalizing the Just War by Allen Buchanan.

About the book, from the publisher:
Institutionalizing the Just War offers a new approach to thinking about the ethics of large-scale armed conflict. Allen Buchanan takes a unique approach to just war theory, arguing that theories that are content with articulating abstract moral norms specifying right acts of war-making, provide too little guidance for responding to the real world moral problems of war. Buchanan here instead takes an institutional approach, combining moral analysis with data on how institutions are designed, and providing concrete proposals for morally progressive innovations at the institutional level. Buchanan's institutional approach in this book - which is based on the revision of previously published essays -- is singular and will be of great interest not just to scholars of just war theory, but anyone interested in the morality of war within political science, political philosophy, philosophy of international law, and public policy.
Allen Buchanan is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Duke University.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, July 8, 2018

"Genetics in the Madhouse"

New from Princeton University Press: Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity by Theodore M. Porter.

About the book, from the publisher:
The untold story of how hereditary data in mental hospitals gave rise to the science of human heredity

In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages. Genetics in the Madhouse is the untold story of how the collection and sorting of hereditary data in mental hospitals, schools for "feebleminded" children, and prisons gave rise to a new science of human heredity.

In this compelling book, Theodore Porter draws on untapped archival evidence from across Europe and North America to bring to light the hidden history behind modern genetics. He looks at the institutional use of pedigree charts, censuses of mental illness, medical-social surveys, and other data techniques--innovative quantitative practices that were worked out in the madhouse long before the manipulation of DNA became possible in the lab. Porter argues that asylum doctors developed many of the ideologies and methods of what would come to be known as eugenics, and deepens our appreciation of the moral issues at stake in data work conducted on the border of subjectivity and science.

A bold rethinking of asylum work, Genetics in the Madhouse shows how heredity was a human science as well as a medical and biological one.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Stacking the Coffins"

New from Manchester University Press: Stacking the coffins: Influenza, war and revolution in Ireland, 1918-19 by Ida Milne.

About the book, from the publisher:
The 1918-19 influenza pandemic disrupted Irish society and politics. Stilling cities and towns as it passed through, it closed schools, courts and libraries, quelled trade, crammed hospitals, and stretched medical doctors to their limit as they treated hundreds of patients each day. It became part of a major row between nationalists and the Government over interned anti-conscription campaigners. When one campaigner died days before the 1918 general election, Sinn fein swiftly incorporated his death into their campaign. Survivors interviewed by the author tell what it was like to suffer from this influenza; families of the bereaved speak of the change to their lives. Stacking the coffins is the first Irish history of the disease to include statistics to analyse which groups were most affected. It also draws on the memories of child sufferers telling their stories.
Ida Milne is an Irish social historian whose principal research interests lie in the effects of disease on twentieth century Ireland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, July 7, 2018

"A Future in Ruins"

New from Oxford University Press: A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace by Lynn Meskell.

About the book, from the publisher:
Best known for its World Heritage program committed to "the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity," the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded in 1945 as an intergovernmental agency aimed at fostering peace, humanitarianism, and intercultural understanding. Its mission was inspired by leading European intellectuals such as Henri Bergson, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, and Aldous and Julian Huxley. Often critiqued for its inherent Eurocentrism, UNESCO and its World Heritage program today remain embedded within modernist principles of "progress" and "development" and subscribe to the liberal principles of diplomacy and mutual tolerance. However, its mission to prevent conflict, destruction, and intolerance, while noble and much needed, increasingly falls short, as recent battles over the World Heritage sites of Preah Vihear, Chersonesos, Jerusalem, Palmyra, Aleppo, and Sana'a, among others, have underlined.

A Future in Ruins is the story of UNESCO's efforts to save the world's heritage and, in doing so, forge an international community dedicated to peaceful co-existence and conservation. It traces how archaeology and internationalism were united in Western initiatives after the political upheavals of the First and Second World Wars. This formed the backdrop for the emergent hopes of a better world that were to captivate the "minds of men." UNESCO's leaders were also confronted with challenges and conflicts about their own mission. Would the organization aspire to intellectual pursuits that contributed to the dream of peace or instead be relegated to an advisory and technical agency? An eye-opening and long overdue account of a celebrated yet poorly understood agency, A Future in Ruins calls on us all to understand how and why the past comes to matter in the present, who shapes it, and who wins or loses as a consequence.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory"

New from Stanford University Press: Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory by Ana Paulina Lee.

About the book, from the publisher:
In Mandarin Brazil, Ana Paulina Lee explores the centrality of Chinese exclusion to the Brazilian nation-building project, tracing the role of cultural representation in producing racialized national categories. Lee considers depictions of Chineseness in Brazilian popular music, literature, and visual culture, as well as archival documents and Brazilian and Qing dynasty diplomatic correspondence about opening trade and immigration routes between Brazil and China. In so doing, she reveals how Asian racialization helped to shape Brazil's image as a racial democracy.

Mandarin Brazil begins during the second half of the nineteenth century, during the transitional period when enslaved labor became unfree labor—an era when black slavery shifted to "yellow labor" and racial anxieties surged. Lee asks how colonial paradigms of racial labor became a part of Brazil's nation-building project, which prioritized "whitening," a fundamentally white supremacist ideology that intertwined the colonial racial caste system with new immigration labor schemes. By considering why Chinese laborers were excluded from Brazilian nation-building efforts while Japanese migrants were welcomed, Lee interrogates how Chinese and Japanese imperial ambitions and Asian ethnic supremacy reinforced Brazil's whitening project. Mandarin Brazil contributes to a new conversation in Latin American and Asian American cultural studies, one that considers Asian diasporic histories and racial formation across the Americas.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, July 6, 2018

"Proving Ground"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: Proving Ground: Expertise and Appalachian Landscapes by Edward Slavishak.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Appalachian Mountains attracted an endless stream of visitors in the twentieth century, each bearing visions of what they would encounter. Well before large numbers of tourists took to the mountains in the latter half of the century, however, networks of missionaries, sociologists, folklorists, doctors, artists, and conservationists made Appalachia their primary site for fieldwork. In Proving Ground, Edward Slavishak studies several of these interlopers to show that the travelers’ tales were the foundation of powerful forms of insider knowledge.

Following four individuals and one cohort as they climbed professional ladders via the Appalachian Mountains, Slavishak argues that these visitors represented occupational and recreational groups that used Appalachia to gain precious expertise. Time spent in the mountains, in the guise of work (or play that mimicked work), distinguished travelers as master problem-solvers and transformed Appalachia into a proving ground for preservationists, planners, hikers, anthropologists, and photographers.

Based on archival materials from outdoors clubs, trade journals, field notes, correspondence, National Park Service records, civic promotional materials, and photographs, Proving Ground presents mountain landscapes as a fluid combination of embodied sensation, narrative fantasy, and class privilege. Touching on critical regionalism and mobility studies, this book is a boundary-pushing cultural history of expertise, an environmental history of the Appalachian Mountains, and a historical geography of spaces and places in the twentieth century.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, July 5, 2018

"The Tunis Crusade of 1270"

New from Oxford University Press: The Tunis Crusade of 1270: A Mediterranean History by Michael Lower.

About the book, from the publisher:
Why did the last of the major European campaigns to reclaim Jerusalem end in an attack on Tunis, a peaceful North African port city thousands of miles from the Holy Land? In the first book-length study of the campaign in English, Michael Lower tells the story of how the classic era of crusading came to such an unexpected end. Unfolding against a backdrop of conflict and collaboration that extended from England to Inner Asia, the Tunis Crusade entangled people from every corner of the Mediterranean world. Within this expansive geographical playing field, the ambitions of four powerful Mediterranean dynasts would collide. While the slave-boy-turned-sultan Baybars of Egypt and the saint-king Louis IX of France waged a bitter battle for Syria, al-Mustansir of Tunis and Louis's younger brother Charles of Anjou struggled for control of the Sicilian Straits. When the conflicts over Syria and Sicily became intertwined in the late 1260s, the Tunis Crusade was the shocking result.

While the history of the crusades is often told only from the crusaders' perspective, in The Tunis Crusade of 1270, Lower brings Arabic and European-language sources together to offer a panoramic view of these complex multilateral conflicts. Standing at the intersection of two established bodies of scholarship--European History and Near Eastern Studies--this volume contributes to both by opening up a new conversation about the place of crusading in medieval Mediterranean culture.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, July 4, 2018

"Liberia, South Carolina"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community by John M. Coggeshall.

About the book, from the publisher:
In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Owens family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state. Through hours of interviews with Mable and her relatives, as well as friends and neighbors, Coggeshall presents an ethnographic history that allows members of a largely ignored community to speak and record their own history for the first time. This story sheds new light on the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall documents the community’s 150-year history of resistance to white oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.
Learn more about Liberia, South Carolina at The University of North Carolina Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Liberia, South Carolina.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

"The Longest Line on the Map"

New from Scribner: The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas by Eric Rutkow.

About the book, from the publisher:
From the brilliant award-winning author of American Canopy, a dazzling account of the epic quest to link North and South America with the world’s longest road—the Pan American Highway—and how its construction and evolution reflected the divergent fates of North, Central, and South America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Pan-American Highway is the longest road in the world, running the length of the Western Hemisphere from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in South America. It represents a dream of friendship, commerce, mobility, of the Americas united. Our collective imaginations have been forged along its path: Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the iconic Argentine revolutionary, traveled it northward in The Motorcycle Diaries; Jack Kerouac, the voice of the beat generation, followed it southward in On the Road. Many adventurers have journeyed the highway’s distance, but the road itself still remains shrouded in mystery. Why was it built? And why does it remain unfinished, with a sixty-mile long break, the famed Darien Gap, enduring between Panama and Colombia?

Now historian Eric Rutkow chronicles the full story of the highway’s long, winding path to construction, which reshaped foreign policy, cost US taxpayers a billion dollars, consumed countless lives over a 150-year period, and changed the destinies of two continents. Fully illustrated with photographs, documents, and maps, The Longest Line on the Map offers readers a bird’s eye view of the incredible highway that snakes through more than a century’s worth of US and Latin American history, ending in a triumphant ideology that insists the Americas share a common destiny and mutual interests.
--Marshal Zeringue