"Heidegger's Fascist Affinities"

New from Stanford University Press: Heidegger's Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence by Adam Knowles.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reexamining the case of one of the most famous intellectuals to embrace fascism, this book argues that Martin Heidegger's politics and philosophy of language emerge from a deep affinity for the ethno-nationalist and anti-Semitic politics of the Nazi movement. Himself a product of a conservative milieu, Heidegger did not have to significantly compromise his thinking to adapt it to National Socialism but only to intensify certain themes within it. Tracing the continuity of these themes in his lectures on Greek philosophy, his magnum opus, Being and Time, and the notorious Black Notebooks that have only begun to see the light of day, Heidegger's Fascist Affinities argues that if Heidegger was able to align himself so thoroughly with Nazism, it was partly because his philosophy was predicated upon fundamental forms of silencing and exclusion. With the arrival of the Nazi revolution, Heidegger displayed—both in public and in private—a complex, protracted form of silence drawn from his philosophy of language. Avoiding the easy satisfaction of banishing Heidegger from the philosophical realm so indebted to his work, Adam Knowles asks whether what drove Heidegger to Nazism in the first place might continue to haunt the discipline. In the context of today's burgeoning ethno-nationalist regimes, can contemporary philosophy ensure itself of its immunity?

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Cosmic"

New from Oxford University Press: American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology by D.W. Pasulka.

About the book, from the publisher:

More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. American Cosmic examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system that is changing and even supplanting traditional religions.

Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, D.W. Pasulka interviewed successful and influential scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thereby disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society believe in UFOs. She argues that widespread belief in aliens is due to a number of factors including their ubiquity in modern media like The X-Files, which can influence memory, and the believability lent to that media by the search for planets that might support life. American Cosmic explores the intriguing question of how people interpret unexplainable experiences, and argues that the media is replacing religion as a cultural authority that offers believers answers about non-human intelligent life.

Visit Diana Walsh Pasulka's website.

The Page 99 Test: Heaven Can Wait.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dying of Whiteness"

New from Basic Books: Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland by Jonathan M. Metzl.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the era of Donald Trump, many lower- and middle-class white Americans are drawn to politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death.

Physician Jonathan M. Metzl’s quest to understand the health implications of “backlash governance” leads him across America’s heartland. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, he examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. And he shows these policies’ costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. White Americans, Metzl argues, must reject the racial hierarchies that promise to aid them but in fact lead our nation to demise.

Visit Jonathan M. Metzl's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Talking Like Children"

New from Oxford University Press: Talking Like Children: Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands by Elise Berman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Children in the Marshall Islands do many things that adults do not. They walk around half naked. They carry and eat food in public without offering it to others. They talk about things they see rather than hiding uncomfortable truths. They explicitly refuse to give. Why do they do these things?

Many think these behaviors are a natural result of children's innate immaturity. But Elise Berman argues that children are actually taught to do things that adults avoid: to be rude, inappropriate, and immature. Before children learn to be adults, they learn to be different from them. Berman's main theoretical claim therefore is also a novel one: age emerges through interaction and is a social production.

In Talking Like Children, Berman analyzes a variety of interactions in the Marshall Islands, all broadly based around exchange: adoption negotiations, efforts to ask for or avoid giving away food, contentious debates about supposed child abuse. In these dramas both large and small, age differences emerge through the decisions people make, the emotions they feel, and the power they gain. Berman's research includes a range of methods -- participant observation, video and audio recordings, interviews, children's drawings -- that yield a significant corpus of data including over 80 hours of recorded naturalistic social interaction.

Presented as a series of captivating stories, Talking Like Children is an intimate analysis of speech and interaction that shows what age means. Like gender and race, age differences are both culturally produced and socially important. The differences between Marshallese children and adults give both groups the ability to manipulate social life in distinct but often complementary ways. These differences produce culture itself. Talking Like Children establishes age as a foundational social variable and a central concern of anthropological and linguistic research.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Managing Multiculturalism"

New from Stanford University Press: Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia by Jean E. Jackson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Indigenous people in Colombia constitute a mere three percent of the national population. Colombian indigenous communities' success in gaining collective control of almost thirty percent of the national territory is nothing short of extraordinary. In Managing Multiculturalism, Jean E. Jackson examines the evolution of the Colombian indigenous movement over the course of her forty-plus years of research and fieldwork, offering unusually developed and nuanced insight into how indigenous communities and activists changed over time, as well as how she the ethnographer and scholar evolved in turn.

The story of how indigenous organizing began, found its voice, established alliances, and won battles against the government and the Catholic Church has important implications for the indigenous cause internationally and for understanding all manner of rights organizing. Integrating case studies with commentaries on the movement's development, Jackson explores the politicization and deployment of multiculturalism, indigenous identity, and neoliberalism, as well as changing conceptions of cultural value and authenticity—including issues such as patrimony, heritage, and ethnic tourism. Both ethnography and recent history of the Latin American indigenous movement, this works traces the ideas motivating indigenous movements in regional and global relief, and with unprecedented breadth and depth.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This Is Our Message"

New from Oxford University Press: This Is Our Message: Women's Leadership in the New Christian Right by Emily S. Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Over the past 50 years, the architects of the religious right have become household names: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson. They have used their massively influential platforms to build the profiles of evangelical politicians like Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz. Now, a new generation of leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress enjoys unprecedented access to the Trump White House.

What all these leaders share, besides their faith, is their gender. Men dominate the standard narrative of the rise of the religious right. Yet during the 1970s and 1980s nationally prominent evangelical women played essential roles in shaping the priorities of the movement and mobilizing its supporters. In particular, they helped to formulate, articulate, and defend the traditionalist politics of gender and family that in turn made it easy to downplay the importance of their leadership roles. In This Is Our Message, Emily Johnson begins by examining the lives and work of four well-known women-evangelical marriage advice author Marabel Morgan, singer and anti-gay-rights activist Anita Bryant, author and political lobbyist Beverly LaHaye, and televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. The book explores their impact on the rise of the New Christian Right and on the development of the evangelical subculture, which is a key channel for injecting conservative political ideas into purportedly apolitical spaces. Johnson then highlights the ongoing significance of this history through an analysis of Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy in 2008 and Michele Bachmann's presidential bid in 2012. These campaigns were made possible by the legacies of an earlier generation of conservative evangelical women who continue to impact our national conversations about gender, family, and sex.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Giving to God"

New from the University of California Press: Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times by Amira Mittermaier.

About the book, from the publisher:

Giving to God examines the everyday practices of Islamic giving in post-revolutionary Egypt. From foods prepared in Sufi soup kitchens, to meals distributed by pious volunteers in slums, to almsgiving, these acts are ultimately about giving to God by giving to the poor. Surprisingly, many who practice such giving say that they do not care about the poor, instead framing their actions within a unique non-compassionate ethics of giving. At first, this form of giving may appear deeply selfish, but further consideration reveals that it avoids many of the problems associated with the idea of “charity.” Using the Egyptian uprising in 2011 and its call for social justice as a backdrop, this beautifully crafted ethnography suggests that “giving a man a fish” might ultimately be more revolutionary than “teaching a man to fish.”

Amira Mittermaier is Associate Professor of Religion and Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Saint Patrick Retold"

New from Princeton University Press: Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland's Patron Saint by Roy Flechner.

About the book, from the publisher:

A gripping biography that brings together the most recent research to shed provocative new light on the life of Saint Patrick

Saint Patrick was, by his own admission, a controversial figure. Convicted in a trial by his elders in Britain and hounded by rumors that he settled in Ireland for financial gain, the man who was to become Ireland’s patron saint battled against great odds before succeeding as a missionary. Saint Patrick Retold draws on recent research to offer a fresh assessment of Patrick’s travails and achievements. This is the first biography in nearly fifty years to explore Patrick’s career against the background of historical events in late antique Britain and Ireland.

Roy Flechner examines the likelihood that Patrick, like his father before him, might have absconded from a career as an imperial official responsible for taxation, preferring instead to migrate to Ireland with his family’s slaves, who were his source of wealth. Flechner leaves no stone unturned as he takes readers on a riveting journey through Romanized Britain and late Iron Age Ireland, and he considers how best to interpret the ambiguous literary and archaeological evidence from this period of great political and economic instability, a period that brought ruin for some and opportunity for others. Rather than a dismantling of Patrick’s reputation, or an argument against his sainthood, Flechner’s biography raises crucial questions about self-image and the making of a reputation.

From boyhood deeds to the challenges of a missionary enterprise, Saint Patrick Retold steps beyond established narratives to reassess a notable figure’s life and legacy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cigarettes, Inc."

New from the University of Chicago Press: Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism by Nan Enstad.

About the book, from the publisher:

Traditional narratives of capitalist change often rely on the myth of the willful entrepreneur from the global North who transforms the economy and delivers modernity—for good or ill—to the rest of the world. With Cigarettes, Inc., Nan Enstad upends this story, revealing the myriad cross-cultural encounters that produced corporate life before World War II.

In this startling account of innovation and expansion, Enstad uncovers a corporate network rooted in Jim Crow segregation that stretched between the United States and China and beyond. Cigarettes, Inc. teems with a global cast—from Egyptian, American, and Chinese entrepreneurs to a multiracial set of farmers, merchants, factory workers, marketers, and even baseball players, jazz musicians, and sex workers. Through their stories, Cigarettes, Inc. accounts for the cigarette’s spectacular rise in popularity and in the process offers nothing less than a sweeping reinterpretation of corporate power itself.

Visit Nan Enstad's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Peace"

New from Oxford University Press: The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History by Petra Goedde.

About the book, from the publisher:

During a television broadcast in 1959, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower remarked that "people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days our governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." At that very moment international peace organizations were bypassing national governments to create alternative institutions for the promotion of world peace and mounting the first serious challenge to the state-centered conduct of international relations.

This study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations, during the early cold war. It traces the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the cold war used, altered, and fought over a seemingly universal concept. These dynamic interactions involved three sets of global actors: cold war states, peace advocacy groups, and anti-colonial liberationists. These transnational networks challenged and eventually undermined the cold war order. They did so not just with reference to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe, but also by addressing the violence of national liberation movements in the Third World. As Petra Goedde shows in this work, deterritorializing the cold war reveals the fractures that emerged within each cold war camp, as activists both challenged their own governments over the right path toward global peace and challenged each other over the best strategy to achieve it.

The Politics of Peace demonstrates that the scientists, journalists, publishers, feminists, and religious leaders who drove the international discourse on peace after World War II laid the groundwork for the eventual political transformation of the Cold War.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Happy Singlehood"

New from the University of California Press: Happy Singlehood: The Rising Acceptance and Celebration of Solo Living by Elyakim Kislev.

About the book, from the publisher:

Happy Singlehood charts a way forward for singles to live life on their terms, and shows how everyone—single or coupled—can benefit from accepting solo living. Based on personal interviews, quantitative analysis, and extensive review of singles’ writings and literature, author Elyakim Kislev uncovers groundbreaking insights on how unmarried people create satisfying lives in a world where social structures and policies are still designed to favor marriage.

In this carefully crafted book, Kislev investigates how singles nurture social networks, create innovative communities, and effectively deal with discrimination. Happy Singlehood challenges readers to rethink how single people organize social and familial ties in new ways, and illuminates how educators, policymakers, and urban planners should cater to their needs.

Visit Elyakim Kislev's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Why Not Default?"

New from Princeton University Press: Why Not Default? The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt by Jerome Roos.

About the book, from the publisher:

How creditors came to wield unprecedented power over heavily indebted countries—and the dangers this poses to democracy

The European debt crisis has rekindled long-standing debates about the power of finance and the fraught relationship between capitalism and democracy in a globalized world. Why Not Default? unravels a striking puzzle at the heart of these debates—why, despite frequent crises and the immense costs of repayment, do so many heavily indebted countries continue to service their international debts?

In this compelling and incisive book, Jerome Roos provides a sweeping investigation of the political economy of sovereign debt and international crisis management. He takes readers from the rise of public borrowing in the Italian city-states to the gunboat diplomacy of the imperialist era and the wave of sovereign defaults during the Great Depression. He vividly describes the debt crises of developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s and sheds new light on the recent turmoil inside the Eurozone—including the dramatic capitulation of Greece’s short-lived anti-austerity government to its European creditors in 2015.

Drawing on in-depth case studies of contemporary debt crises in Mexico, Argentina, and Greece, Why Not Default? paints a disconcerting picture of the ascendancy of global finance. This important book shows how the profound transformation of the capitalist world economy over the past four decades has endowed private and official creditors with unprecedented structural power over heavily indebted borrowers, enabling them to impose painful austerity measures and enforce uninterrupted debt service during times of crisis—with devastating social consequences and far-reaching implications for democracy.

Visit Jerome Roos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"All Our Trials"

New from the University of Illinois Press: All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence by Emily L Thuma.

About the book, from the publisher:

A grassroots history of resistance to gender violence and the carceral state

During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners’ and psychiatric patients’ rights, and gender and sexual liberation.

All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women’s movement’s strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, broad-based local coalitions, national gatherings, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, she illuminates a crucial chapter in an unfinished struggle––one that continues in today’s movements against mass incarceration and in support of transformative justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Runaway Hollywood"

New from University of California Press: Runaway Hollywood: Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting by Daniel Steinhart.

About the book, from the publisher:

After World War II, as cultural and industry changes were reshaping Hollywood, movie studios shifted some production activities overseas, capitalizing on frozen foreign earnings, cheap labor, and appealing locations. Hollywood unions called the phenomenon “runaway” production to underscore the outsourcing of employment opportunities. Examining this period of transition from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Runaway Hollywood shows how film companies exported production around the world and the effect this conversion had on industry practices and visual style. In this fascinating account, Daniel Steinhart uses an array of historical materials to trace the industry’s creation of a more international production operation that merged filmmaking practices from Hollywood and abroad to produce movies with a greater global scope.

Daniel Steinhart is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. His work on film and media has appeared in Cinema Journal, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, InMedia: The French Journal of Media Studies, and various edited collections.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Girls Next Door"

New from Harvard University Press: The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines by Kara Dixon Vuic.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of the intrepid young women who volunteered to help and entertain American servicemen fighting overseas, from World War I through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The emotional toll of war can be as debilitating to soldiers as hunger, disease, and injury. Beginning in World War I, in an effort to boost soldiers’ morale and remind them of the stakes of victory, the American military formalized a recreation program that sent respectable young women and famous entertainers overseas.

Kara Dixon Vuic builds her narrative around the young women from across the United States, many of whom had never traveled far from home, who volunteered to serve in one of the nation’s most brutal work environments. From the “Lassies” in France and mini-skirted coeds in Vietnam to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, Vuic provides a fascinating glimpse into wartime gender roles and the tensions that continue to complicate American women’s involvement in the military arena. The recreation-program volunteers heightened the passions of troops but also domesticated everyday life on the bases. Their presence mobilized support for the war back home, while exporting American culture abroad. Carefully recruited and selected as symbols of conventional femininity, these adventurous young women saw in the theater of war a bridge between public service and private ambition.

This story of the women who talked and listened, danced and sang, adds an intimate chapter to the history of war and its ties to life in peacetime.

Visit Kara Dixon Vuic's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan"

New from Duke University Press: Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan by Max M. Ward.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Thought Crime Max M. Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ward traces the evolution of an antiradical law called the Peace Preservation Law, from its initial application to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism—what authorities deemed thought crime—to its expansion into an elaborate system to reform and ideologically convert thousands of thought criminals throughout the Japanese Empire. To enforce the law, the government enlisted a number of nonstate actors, who included monks, family members, and community leaders. Throughout, Ward illuminates the complex processes through which the law articulated imperial ideology and how this ideology was transformed and disseminated through the law's application over its twenty-year history. In so doing, he shows how the Peace Preservation Law provides a window into understanding how modern states develop ideological apparatuses to subject their respective populations.

Max M. Ward is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College and coeditor of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism"

New from Stanford University Press: After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism: Taking Back a Revolution by Lynn S. Chancer.

About the book, from the publisher:

It is more than fifty years since Betty Friedan diagnosed malaise among suburban housewives and the National Organization of Women was founded. Across the decades, the feminist movement brought about significant progress on workplace discrimination, reproductive rights, and sexual assault. Yet, the proverbial million-dollar question remains: why is there still so much to be done?

With this book, Lynn S. Chancer takes stock of the American feminist movement and engages with a new burst of feminist activism. She articulates four common causes—advancing political and economic equality, allowing intimate and sexual freedom, ending violence against women, and expanding the cultural representation of women—considering each in turn to assess what has been gained (or not). It is around these shared concerns, Chancer argues, that we can continue to build a vibrant and expansive feminist movement.

After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism takes the long view of the successes and shortcomings of feminism(s). Chancer articulates a broad agenda developed through advancing intersectional concerns about class, race, and sexuality. She advocates ways to reduce the divisiveness that too frequently emphasizes points of disagreement over shared aims. And she offers a vision of individual and social life that does not separate the "personal" from the "political." Ultimately, this book is about not only redressing problems, but also reasserting a future for feminism and its enduring ability to change the world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes"

New from University of California Press: Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes: How Myth and Religion Shape Fantasy Culture by Douglas E. Cowan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes looks at fantasy film, television, and participative culture as evidence of our ongoing need for a mythic vision—for stories larger than ourselves into which we write ourselves and through which we can become the heroes of our own story. Why do we tell and retell the same stories over and over when we know they can’t possibly be true? Contrary to popular belief, it’s not because pop culture has run out of good ideas. Rather, it is precisely because these stories are so fantastic, some resonating so deeply that we elevate them to the status of religion. Illuminating everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Dungeons and Dragons, and from Drunken Master to Mad Max, Douglas E. Cowan offers a modern manifesto for why and how mythology remains a vital force today.

Douglas E. Cowan is Professor of Religious Studies and Social Development Studies at Renison University College. He is the author of Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen, Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television, and, most recently, America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Housing the City by the Bay"

New from Stanford University Press: Housing the City by the Bay: Tenant Activism, Civil Rights, and Class Politics in San Francisco by John Baranski.

About the book, from the publisher:

San Francisco has always had an affordable housing problem. Starting in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and ending with the dot-com boom, Housing the City by the Bay considers the history of one proposed answer to the city's ongoing housing crisis: public housing. John Baranski follows the ebbs and flows of San Francisco's public housing program: the Progressive Era and New Deal reforms that led to the creation of the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1938, conflicts over urban renewal and desegregation, and the federal and local efforts to privatize government housing at the turn of the twenty-first century. This history of public housing sheds light on changing attitudes towards liberalism, the welfare state, and the economic and civil rights attached to citizenship.

Baranski details the ways San Francisco residents turned to the public housing program to build class-based political movements in a multi-racial city and introduces us to the individuals—community activists, politicians, reformers, and city employees—who were continually forced to seek new strategies to achieve their aims as the winds of federal legislation shifted. Ultimately, Housing the City by the Bay advances the idea that public housing remains a vital part of the social and political landscape, intimately connected to the struggle for economic rights in urban America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Promise of the Suburbs"

New from Yale University Press: The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture by Sarah Bilston.

About the book, from the publisher:

A study of the fast-growing Victorian suburbs as places of connection, creativity, and professional advance, especially for women

Literature has, from the start of the nineteenth century, cast the suburbs as dull, vulgar, and unimaginative margins where, by definition, nothing important takes place. Sarah Bilston argues that such attitudes were forged to undermine the cultural authority of the emerging middle class and to reinforce patriarchy by trivializing women’s work. Resisting these stereotypes, Bilston reveals that suburban life offered ambitious women, especially writers, access to supportive communities and opportunities for literary and artistic experimentation as well as professional advancement. Bilston interprets both familiar figures (sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon) and less well-known writers (including interior design journalist Jane Ellen Panton and garden writer Jane Loudon) to reveal how women and society at large navigated a fast-growing, rapidly changing landscape. Far from being a cultural dead end, the new suburbs promised women access to the exciting opportunities of modernity.

Visit Sarah Bilston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Losing"

New from Columbia University Press: The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment by Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Ku Klux Klan has peaked three times in American history: after the Civil War, around the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and in the 1920s, when the Klan spread farthest and fastest. Recruiting millions of members even in non-Southern states, the Klan’s nationalist insurgency burst into mainstream politics. Almost one hundred years later, the pent-up anger of white Americans left behind by a changing economy has once again directed itself at immigrants and cultural outsiders and roiled a presidential election.

In The Politics of Losing, Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep trace the parallels between the 1920s Klan and today’s right-wing backlash, identifying the conditions that allow white nationalism to emerge from the shadows. White middle-class Protestant Americans in the 1920s found themselves stranded by an economy that was increasingly industrialized and fueled by immigrant labor. Mirroring the Klan’s earlier tactics, Donald Trump delivered a message that mingled economic populism with deep cultural resentments. McVeigh and Estep present a sociological analysis of the Klan’s outbreaks that goes beyond Trump the individual to show how his rise to power was made possible by a convergence of circumstances. White Americans’ experience of declining privilege and perceptions of lost power can trigger a political backlash that overtly asserts white-nationalist goals. The Politics of Losing offers a rigorous and lucid explanation for a recurrent phenomenon in American history, with important lessons about the origins of our alarming political climate.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Prince of the Press"

New from Yale University Press: Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History’s Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library by Joshua Teplitsky.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of one of the largest collections of Jewish books, and the man who used his collection to cultivate power, prestige, and political influence

David Oppenheim (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders, and the contacts between Christians and Jews that books facilitated. From contact with the great courts of European nobility to the poor of Jerusalem, his family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended across Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Containing works of law and literature alongside prayer and poetry, his library served rabbinic scholars and communal leaders, introduced old books to new readers, and functioned as a unique source of personal authority that gained him fame throughout Jewish society and beyond. The story of his life and library brings together culture, commerce, and politics, all filtered through this extraordinary collection. Based on the careful reconstruction of an archive that is still visited by scholars today, Joshua Teplitsky’s book offers a window into the social life of Jewish books in early modern Europe.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Borders of Belonging"

New from Stanford University Press: Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed-Status Immigrant Families by Heide Castañeda.

About the book, from the publisher:

Borders of Belonging investigates a pressing but previously unexplored aspect of immigration in America—the impact of immigration policies and practices not only on undocumented migrants, but also on their family members, some of whom possess a form of legal status. Heide Castañeda reveals the trauma, distress, and inequalities that occur daily, alongside the stratification of particular family members' access to resources like education, employment, and health care. She also paints a vivid picture of the resilience, resistance, creative responses, and solidarity between parents and children, siblings, and other kin.

Castañeda's innovative ethnography combines fieldwork with individuals and family groups to paint a full picture of the experiences of mixed-status families as they navigate the emotional, social, political, and medical difficulties that inevitably arise when at least one family member lacks legal status. Exposing the extreme conditions in the heavily-regulated U.S./Mexico borderlands, this book presents a portentous vision of how the further encroachment of immigration enforcement would affect millions of mixed-status families throughout the country.

Visit Heide Castañeda's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Twelve Weeks to Change a Life"

New from the University of California Press: Twelve Weeks to Change a Life: At-Risk Youth in a Fractured State by Max A. Greenberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hailed as a means to transform cultural norms and change lives, violence prevention programs signal a slow-rolling policy revolution that has reached nearly two-thirds of young people in the United States today. Max A. Greenberg takes us inside the booming market for programming and onto the asphalt campuses of Los Angeles where these programs are implemented, many just one hour a week for 12 weeks. He spotlights how these ephemeral programs, built on troves of risk data, are disconnected from the lived experiences of the young people they were created to support. Going beyond the narrow stories told about at-risk youth through data and in policy, Greenberg sketches a vivid portrait of young men and women coming of age and forming relationships in a world of abiding harm and fleeting, fragmented support. At the same time, Greenberg maps the minefield of historical and structural inequalities that program facilitators must navigate to build meaningful connections with the youth they serve. Taken together, these programs shape the stories and politics of a generation and reveal how social policy can go wrong when it ignores the lives of young people.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bloodflowers"

New from Duke University Press: Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s by W. Ian Bourland.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Bloodflowers W. Ian Bourland examines the photography of Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989), whose art is a touchstone for cultural debates surrounding questions of gender and queerness, race and diaspora, aesthetics and politics, and the enduring legacy of slavery and colonialism. Born in Nigeria, Fani-Kayode moved between artistic and cultural worlds in Washington, DC, New York, and London, where he produced the bulk of his provocative and often surrealist and homoerotic photographs of black men. Bourland situates Fani-Kayode's work in a time of global transition and traces how it exemplified and responded to profound social, cultural, and political change. In addition to his formal analyses of Fani-Kayode's portraiture, Bourland outlines the important influence that surrealism, neo-Romanticism, Yoruban religion, the AIDS crisis, experimental film, loft culture, and house and punk music had on Fani-Kayode's work. In so doing, Bourland offers new perspectives on a pivotal artist whose brief career continues to resonate with deep aesthetic and social meaning.

Visit W. Ian Bourland's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Black Handsworth"

New from the University of California Press: Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain by Kieran Connell.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1980s Britain, while the country failed to reckon with the legacies of its empire, a black, transnational sensibility was emerging in its urban areas. In Handsworth, an inner-city neighborhood of Birmingham, black residents looked across the Atlantictoward African and Afro-Caribbean social and political cultures and drew upon them while navigating the inequalities of their locale. For those of the Windrush generation and their British-born children, this diasporic inheritance became a core influence on cultural and political life. Through rich case studies, including photographic representations of the neighborhood, Black Handsworth takes readers inside pubs, churches, political organizations, domestic spaces, and social clubs to shed light on the experiences and everyday lives of black residents during this time. The result is a compelling and sophisticated study of black globality in the making of post-colonial Britain.

Kieran Connell is Lecturer in Contemporary British History at Queen’s University Belfast.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe"

New from Oxford University Press: Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe by Liesbeth Corens.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the wake of England's break with Rome and gradual reformation, English Catholics took root outside of the country, in Catholic countries across Europe. Their arrival and the foundation of convents and colleges on the Continent as attracted scholarly attention. However, we need to understand their impact beyond that initial moment of change. Confessional Mobility, therefore, looks at the continued presence of English Catholics abroad and how the English Catholic community was shaped by these cross-Channel connections.

Corens proposes a new interpretative model of 'confessional mobility'. She opens up the debate to include pilgrims, grand tour travellers, students, and mobile scholars alongside exiles. The diversity of mobility highlights that those abroad were never cut off or isolated on the Continent. Rather, through correspondence and constant travel, they created a community without borders. This cross-Channel community was not defined by its status as victims of persecution, but provided the lifeblood for English Catholics for generations.

Confessional Mobility also incorporates minority Catholics more closely into the history of the Counter-Reformation. Long side-lined as exceptions to the rule of a hierarchical, triumphant, territorial Catholic Church, English Catholic have seldom been recognised as an instrumental part in the wider Counter-Reformation. Attention to movement and mission in the understanding of Catholics incorporates minority Catholics alongside extra-European missions and reinforces current moves to decentre Counter-Reformation scholarship.

Visit Liesbeth Corens's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Love, Inc."

New from the University of California Press: Love, Inc.: Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter by Laurie Essig.

About the book, from the publisher:

The notion of “happily ever after” has been ingrained in many of us since childhood—meet someone, date, have the big white wedding, and enjoy your well-deserved future. But why do we buy into this idea? Is love really all we need?

Author Laurie Essig invites us to flip this concept of romance on its head and see it for what it really is—an ideology that we desperately cling to as a way to cope with the fact that we believe we cannot control or affect the societal, economic, and political structures around us. From climate change to nuclear war, white nationalism to the worship of wealth and conspicuous consumption—as the future becomes seemingly less secure, Americans turn away from the public sphere and find shelter in the private. Essig argues that when we do this, we allow romance to blind us to the real work that needs to be done—building global movements that inspire a change in government policies to address economic and social inequality.

Follow Laurie Essing on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Secular Enlightenment"

New from Princeton University Press: The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people’s everyday lives

The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers.

Margaret Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces.

A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.

--Marshal Zeringue