Wednesday, August 31, 2022

"Rights and Their Limits"

New from Oxford University Press: Rights and Their Limits: In Theory, Cases, and Pandemics by F.M. Kamm.

About the book, from the publisher:
In this volume, F.M. Kamm explores how theories as well as hypothetical and practical cases help us understand rights and their limits. The book begins by considering moral status and its relation to having rights (including whether non-human animals have rights and what rights future persons have). The author then considers whether rights are grounded in duties to oneself, which duties are correlative to rights, and whether neuroscientific and psychological studies can help determine what rights we have. Kamm next investigates the contours of the right not to be harmed by considering critiques of deontological distinctions, the costs that must be undertaken to avoid harming, and a proposal for permissibly harming someone (that allows for resisting the harm) in the Trolley Problem.

Additional chapters cover possible implications of the Trolley Problem for such practical issues as correctly programming self-driving cars, providing medical treatments, and enacting redistributive economic policy. Kamm concludes the book by comparing the use of case-based judgments about extreme cases in moral versus aesthetic theory, and by exploring the significance of the right not to be harmed for morally correct policies in the extreme cases of torture and a pandemic. Where pertinent, Kamm considers the views of Derek Parfit, Tom Regan, Christine Korsgaard, Shelly Kagan, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Allan Gibbard, Joshua Greene, Arthur Danto, and Judith Thomson, among others.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

"The Tormented Alliance"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941-1949 by Zach Fredman.

About the book, from the publisher:
After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, leaders in China and the United States had high hopes of a lasting partnership between the two countries. More than 120,000 U.S. servicemen deployed to China, where Chiang Kai-shek’s government carried out massive programs to provide them with housing, food, and interpreters. But, as Zach Fredman uncovers in The Tormented Alliance, a military alliance with the United States means a military occupation by the United States. The first book to draw on archives from all of the areas in China where U.S. forces deployed during the 1940s, it examines the formation, evolution, and undoing of the alliance between the United States and the Republic of China during World War II and the Chinese Civil War.

Fredman reveals how each side brought to the alliance expectations that the other side was simply unable to meet, resulting in a tormented relationship across all levels of Sino-American engagement. Entangled in larger struggles over race, gender, and nation, the U.S. military in China transformed itself into a widely loathed occupation force: an aggressive, resentful, emasculating source of physical danger and compromised sovereignty. After Japan's surrender and the spring 1946 withdrawal of Soviet forces from Manchuria, the U.S. occupation became the chief obstacle to consigning foreign imperialism in China irrevocably to the past. Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek lost his country in 1949, and the U.S. military presence contributed to his defeat. The occupation of China also cast a long shadow, establishing patterns that have followed the U.S. military elsewhere in Asia up to the present.
Follow Zach Fredman on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, August 29, 2022

"No Longer Welcome"

New from Oxford University Press: No Longer Welcome: The Epidemic of Expulsion from Early Childhood Education by Katherine M. Zinsser.

About the book, from the publisher:
For over 15 years, researchers have described a crisis in our nations' early learning classrooms. Hundreds of children are expelled from childcare and preschool every day; a rate nearly three times that of kindergarten-12th grade students. While policymakers have taken steps to mitigate this crisis, disparities in who is expelled persist. Boys and Black children are routinely over-represented among those pushed out of the exact environments that are supposed to help prepare them for school. Each child's expulsion is symptomatic of a larger crisis--an overburdened, underfunded, undervalued, and fragmented early education system.

In early childhood, expulsion is the result of a series of adult decisions made within constrained contexts and at times blind to downstream consequences: exhausted and underpaid teachers deciding how to expend their limited attention and energy in a chaotic classroom; administrators on razor-thin budgets deciding among hiring additional personnel, providing high-quality training, or investing in adequate classroom resources; fragmented state agencies separately deciding on standards and policies and allocating funds for early intervention and consultation services.

By examining these complex causes, No Longer Welcome starts a critical conversation between and across sectors of the early childhood field. Parents, teachers, preschool administrators, researchers, and policymakers all have a role to play in ensuring that all children can be retained in high-quality early care and education settings. Drawing on her research and interviews with teachers, program administrators, parents, and policymakers, Dr. Zinsser presents the reader with a rich description of the myriad of factors contributing to the expulsion crisis. She presents a compelling argument for not only the importance of ending the practice of excluding young children but also outlines roles that each and every member of the field (from classroom aide to legislator) must play in sustaining this change.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, August 28, 2022

"The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur"

New from Cornell University Press: The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur: War, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Habsburg Europe by Suzanne Sutherland.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur explores how a new kind of international military figure emerged from, and exploited, the seventeenth century's momentous political, military, commercial, and scientific changes. In the era of the Thirty Years' War, these figures traveled rapidly and frequently across Europe using private wealth, credit, and connections to raise and command the armies that rulers desperately needed. Their careers reveal the roles international networks, private resources, and expertise played in building and at times undermining the state.

Suzanne Sutherland uncovers the influence of military entrepreneurs by examining their activities as not only commanders but also diplomats, natural philosophers, information brokers, clients, and subjects on the battlefield, as well as through strategic marital and family allegiances. Sutherland focuses on Raimondo Montecuccoli (1609–80), a middling nobleman from the Duchy of Modena, who became one of the most powerful men in the Austrian Habsburg monarchy and helped found a new discipline, military science.

The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur explains how Montecuccoli successfully met battlefield, court, and family responsibilities while contributing to the world of scholarship on an often violent, fragmented political-military landscape. As a result, Sutherland shifts the perspective on war away from the ruler and his court to instead examine the figures supplying force, along with their methods, networks, and reflections on those experiences.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, August 27, 2022

"Unholy Catholic Ireland"

New from Stanford University Press: Unholy Catholic Ireland: Religious Hypocrisy, Secular Morality, and Irish Irreligion by Hugh Turpin.

About the book, from the publisher:
There are few instances of a contemporary Western European society more firmly welded to religion than Ireland is to Catholicism. For much of the twentieth century, to be considered a good Irish citizen was to be seen as a good and observant Catholic. Today, the opposite may increasingly be the case. The Irish Catholic Church, once a spiritual institution beyond question, is not only losing influence and relevance; in the eyes of many, it has become something utterly desacralized. In this book, Hugh Turpin offers an innovative and in-depth account of the nature and emergence of "ex-Catholicism"—a new model of the good, and secular, Irish person that is being rapidly adopted in Irish society.

Using rich quantitative and qualitative research methods, Turpin explains the emergence and character of religious rejection in the Republic. He examines how numerous factors—including economic growth, social liberalization, attenuated domestic religious socialization, the institutional scandals and moral collapse of the Church, and the Church's lingering influence in social institutions and laws—have interacted to produce a rapid growth in ex-Catholicism. By tracing the frictions within and between practicing Catholics, cultural Catholics, and ex-Catholics in a period of profound cultural change and moral reckoning, Turpin shows how deeply the meanings of being religious or non-religious have changed in the country once described as "Holy Catholic Ireland."
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, August 26, 2022

"The Making of White American Identity"

New from Oxford University Press: The Making of White American Identity by Ron Eyerman.

About the book, from the publisher:
An account of the emergence and development of white consciousness throughout American history.

In The Making of White American Identity, Ron Eyerman provides an explanation for how whiteness has become a basis for collective identification and collective action in the United States. Drawing upon his previous work on the formation of African American identity, as well as cultural trauma theory, collective memory, and social movements, he reveals how and under what conditions such a collective identification emerges, as well as how the mobilization of collective action around an ideology of whiteness and white superiority. Eyerman explores how the American identity was, and is still being established, through both historical and more recent events, including the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, the election of a Black president, the Charlottesville confrontation, and the violent conflict at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He further shows how each event revitalized the trauma narratives stemming from the nation's founding tensions, mobilizing social forces around the idea of white superiority and white consciousness. Tracing the historical contexts and social conditions under which individuals and groups move through this process, the author also looks forward at the prospects of the ideology of white supremacy as a political force in the United States.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, August 25, 2022

"Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care"

New from Cambridge University Press: Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care by Wendy A. Bach.

About the book, from the publisher:
At the height of the opiate epidemic, Tennessee lawmakers made it a crime for a pregnant woman to transmit narcotics to a fetus. They promised that charging new mothers with this crime would help them receive the treatment and support they often desperately need. In Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care, Wendy Bach describes the law's actual effect through meticulous examination of the cases of 120 women who were prosecuted for this crime. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, Bach demonstrates that both prosecuting 'fetal assault', and institutionalizing the all-too-common idea that criminalization is a road to care, lead at best to clinically dangerous and corrupt treatment, and at worst, and far more often, to an insidious smokescreen obscuring harsh punishment. Urgent, instructive, and humane, this retelling demands we stop criminalizing care and instead move towards robust and respectful systems that meet the real needs of families in poor communities.
Wendy A. Bach is a Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee where she teaches primarily in the clinical program. Over the last 25 years, first as a practicing public-interest lawyer, and for the last 17 years as a Law Professor, Bach has represented poor clients in the courts and systems highlighted in Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. She is a nationally recognized scholar in the field of poverty law and has published several law review articles on the relationship between social support and punishment.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

"The Most Absolute Abolition"

New from LSU Press: The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861 by Jesse Olsavsky.

About the book, from the publisher:
Jesse Olsavsky’s The Most Absolute Abolition tells the dramatic story of how vigilance committees organized the Underground Railroad and revolutionized the abolitionist movement. These groups, based primarily in northeastern cities, defended Black neighborhoods from police and slave catchers. As the urban wing of the Underground Railroad, they helped as many as ten thousand refugees, building an elaborate network of like-minded sympathizers across boundaries of nation, gender, race, and class.

Olsavsky reveals how the committees cultivated a movement of ideas animated by a motley assortment of agitators and intellectuals, including famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Henry David Thoreau, who shared critical information with one another. Formerly enslaved runaways―who grasped the economy of slavery, developed their own political imaginations, and communicated strategies of resistance to abolitionists―serve as the book’s central focus. The dialogues between fugitives and abolitionists further radicalized the latter’s tactics and inspired novel forms of feminism, prison reform, and utopian constructs. These notions transformed abolitionism into a revolutionary movement, one at the heart of the crises that culminated in the Civil War.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

"North of America"

New from Yale University Press: North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution by Jeffers Lennox.

About the book, from the publisher:
How the United States was created—a complex and surprising story of patriots, Indigenous peoples, loyalists, visionaries and scoundrels

The story of the Thirteen Colonies’ struggle for independence from Britain is well known to every American schoolchild. But at the start of the Revolutionary War, there were more than thirteen British colonies in North America. Patriots were surrounded by Indigenous homelands and loyal provinces. Independence had its limits.

Upper Canada, Lower Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and especially the homelands that straddled colonial borders, were far less foreign to the men and women who established the United States than Canada is to those who live here now. These northern neighbors were far from inactive during the Revolution. The participation of the loyal British provinces and Indigenous nations that largely rejected the Revolution—as antagonists, opponents, or bystanders—shaped the progress of the conflict and influenced the American nation’s early development.

In this book, historian Jeffers Lennox looks north, as so many Americans at that time did, and describes how Loyalists and Indigenous leaders frustrated Patriot ambitions, defended their territory, and acted as midwives to the birth of the United States while restricting and redirecting its continental aspirations.
Visit Jeffers Lennox's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, August 22, 2022

"Undesirable Immigrants"

New from Princeton University Press: Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration by Andrew S. Rosenberg.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restriction on naturalization to free White persons of “good character.” By the 1980s, the rest of the Anglo-European world had followed suit, purging discriminatory language from their immigration laws and achieving what many believe to be a colorblind international system. Undesirable Immigrants challenges this notion, revealing how racial inequality persists in global migration despite the end of formally racist laws.

In this eye-opening book, Andrew Rosenberg argues that while today’s leaders claim that their policies are objective and seek only to restrict obviously dangerous migrants, these policies are still correlated with race. He traces how colonialism and White supremacy catalyzed violence and sabotaged institutions around the world, and how this historical legacy has produced migrants that the former imperial powers and their allies now deem unfit to enter. Rosenberg shows how postcolonial states remain embedded in a Western culture that requires them to continuously perform their statehood, and how the closing and policing of international borders has become an important symbol of sovereignty, one that imposes harsher restrictions on non-White migrants.

Drawing on a wealth of original quantitative evidence, Undesirable Immigrants demonstrates that we cannot address the challenges of international migration without coming to terms with the brutal history of colonialism.
Visit Andrew Rosenberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, August 21, 2022

"The Ideology of Democratism"

New from Oxford University Press: The Ideology of Democratism by Emily B. Finley.

About the book, from the publisher:
A unique reinterpretation of democracy that shows how history's most vocal champions of democracy from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls have contributed to a pervasive, anti-democratic ideology, effectively redefining democracy to mean "rule by the elites."

The rise of global populism reveals a tension in Western thinking about democracy. Warnings about the "populist threat" to democracy and "authoritarian" populism are now commonplace. However, as Emily B. Finley argues in The Ideology of Democratism, dismissing "populism" as anti-democratic is highly problematic. In effect, such arguments essentially reject the actual popular will in favor of a purely theoretical and abstract "will of the people."

She contends that the West has conceptualized democracy-not just its populist doppelgänger-as an ideal that has all of the features of a thoroughgoing political ideology which she labels "democratism." As she shows, this understanding of democracy, which constitutes an entire view of life and politics, has been and remains a powerful influence in America and leading Western European nations and their colonial satellites. Through a careful analysis of several of history's most vocal champions of democracy, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, John Rawls, and American neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, Finley identifies an interpretation of democracy that effectively transforms the meaning of "rule by the people" into nearly its opposite. Making use of democratic language and claiming to speak for the people, many politicians, philosophers, academics, and others advocate a more "complete" and "genuine" form of democracy that in practice has little regard for the actual popular will.

A heterodox argument that challenges the prevailing consensus of what democracy is and what it is supposed be, The Ideology of Democratism offers a timely and comprehensive assessment of the features and thrust of this powerful new view of democracy that has enchanted the West.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, August 20, 2022

"Pawned States"

New from Princeton University Press: Pawned States: State Building in the Era of International Finance by Didac Queralt.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war. This reliance on external public finance offered emerging nations endless opportunities to overcome barriers to growth, but it also enabled rulers to bypass critical stages in institution building and political development. Pawned States reveals how easy access to foreign lending at early stages of state building has led to chronic fiscal instability and weakened state capacity in the developing world.

Drawing on a wealth of original data to document the rise of cheap overseas credit between 1816 and 1913, Didac Queralt shows how countries in the global periphery obtained these loans by agreeing to “extreme conditionality,” which empowered international investors to take control of local revenue sources in cases of default, and how foreclosure eroded a country’s tax base and caused lasting fiscal disequilibrium. Queralt goes on to combine quantitative analysis of tax performance between 1816 and 2005 with qualitative historical analysis in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, illustrating how overreliance on external capital by local leaders distorts their incentives to expand tax capacity, articulate power-sharing institutions, and strengthen bureaucratic apparatus.

Panoramic in scope, Pawned States sheds needed light on how early and easy access to external finance pushes developing nations into trajectories characterized by fragile fiscal institutions and autocratic politics.
Visit Didac Queralt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, August 19, 2022

"The Good Hegemon"

New from Oxford University Press: The Good Hegemon: US Power, Accountability as Justice, and the Multilateral Development Banks by Susan Park.

About the book, from the publisher:
In 1993 the World Bank created the revolutionary World Bank Inspection Panel and, with it, a precedent under international law that allowed people to seek recourse for harm resulting from the projects the Bank financed in developing countries. This was the first time that a universal international organization recognized and responded to its impact on individuals. Within a decade of the Inspection Panel, other Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) created similar accountability mechanisms. These mechanisms embody a norm of "accountability as justice" that provides recourse for environmentally and socially damaging behavior through a formal sanctioning process.

In The Good Hegemon, Susan Park analyzes the "accountability as justice" norm: its creation, how it functions, and whether it holds the MDBs to account. Park tackles all of these issues using three central arguments. First, the book explains how the United States promoted this norm during debates over how to maintain MDB efficiency and effectiveness in the 1990s. Building on its history of using "accountability as control," the US sought to establish a norm of "accountability as justice" for all the MDBs, even when pressure from activists was absent or muted. Second, Park traces how the MDBs resisted conforming to the norm, leading the US to exert its influence and demand that the Banks reformulate the mechanisms. Third, the book demonstrates how the MDBs have institutionalized the norm over time: improving the accountability mechanisms' accessibility, transparency, independence, responsiveness to affected people, and the effectiveness of compliance investigations and MDB monitoring. Park also shows that, despite these gains, the "accountability as justice" norm is still corrective rather than preemptive; it tends to only come into effect after a transgression by the Banks.

A rigorous analysis of how institutions react to norm creation and diffusion--The Good Hegemon sheds new light on the responsibilities of international institutions and tells the story of how the US uses its influence for good on the global stage.
Visit Susan Park's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, August 18, 2022

"Worldmaking in the Long Great War"

New from Columbia University Press: Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East by Jonathan Wyrtzen.

About the book, from the publisher:
It is widely believed that the political problems of the Middle East date back to the era of World War I, when European colonial powers unilaterally imposed artificial borders on the post-Ottoman world in postwar agreements. This book offers a new account of how the Great War unmade and then remade the political order of the region. Ranging from Morocco to Iran and spanning the eve of the Great War into the 1930s, it demonstrates that the modern Middle East was shaped through complex and violent power struggles among local and international actors.

Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the cataclysm of the war opened new possibilities for both European and local actors to reimagine post-Ottoman futures. After the 1914–1918 phase of the war, violent conflicts between competing political visions continued across the region. In these extended struggles, the greater Middle East was reforged. Wyrtzen emphasizes the intersections of local and colonial projects and the entwined processes through which states were made, identities transformed, and boundaries drawn. This book’s vast scope encompasses successful state-building projects such as the Turkish Republic and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as short-lived political units—including the Rif Republic in Morocco, the Sanusi state in eastern Libya, a Greater Syria, and attempted Kurdish states—that nonetheless left traces on the map of the region. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Worldmaking in the Long Great War retells the origin story of the modern Middle East.
Follow Jonathan Wyrtzen on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

"A Question of Standing"

New from Oxford University Press: A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:
A Question of Standing deals with recognizable events that have shaped the history of the first 75 years of the CIA. Unsparing in its accounts of dirty tricks and their consequences, it values the agency's intelligence and analysis work to offer balanced judgements that avoid both celebration and condemnation of the CIA.

The mission of the CIA, derived from U-1 in World War I more than from World War II's OSS, has always been intelligence. Seventy-five years ago, in the year of its creation, the National Security Act gave the agency, uniquely in world history up to that point, a democratic mandate to pursue that mission of intelligence. It gave the CIA a special standing in the conduct of US foreign relations. That standing diminished when successive American presidents ordered the CIA to exceed its original mission. When they tasked the agency secretly to overthrow democratic governments, the United States lost its international standing, and its command of a majority in the United Nations General Assembly. Such dubious operations, even the government's embrace of assassination and torture, did not diminish the standing of the CIA in US public opinion. However, domestic interventions did. CIA spying on domestic protesters led to tighter congressional oversight from the 1970s on.

The chapters in A Question of Standing offer a balanced narrative and perspective on recognizable episodes in the CIA's history. They include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the War on Terror, 9/11, the weapons of mass destruction deception, the Iran estimate of 2007, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, and Fake News. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 diminished the CIA and is construed as having been the right solution undertaken for the wrong reasons, reasons that grew out of political opportunism. The book also defends the CIA's exposure of foreign meddling in US elections.
Learn about Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's top ten classic spy novels.

The Page 99 Test: In Spies We Trust.

The Page 99 Test: We Know All About You.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

"Religious Liberty and the American Founding"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses by Vincent Phillip Muñoz.

About the book, from the publisher:
An insightful rethinking of the meaning of the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom.

The Founders understood religious liberty to be an inalienable natural right. Vincent Phillip Muñoz explains what this means for church-state constitutional law, uncovering what we can and cannot determine about the original meanings of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses and constructing a natural rights jurisprudence of religious liberty.

Drawing on early state constitutions, declarations of religious freedom, Founding-era debates, and the First Amendment’s drafting record, Muñoz demonstrates that adherence to the Founders’ political philosophy would lead neither to consistently conservative nor consistently liberal results. Rather, adopting the Founders’ understanding would lead to a minimalist church-state jurisprudence that, in most cases, would return authority from the judiciary to the American people. Thorough and convincing, Religious Liberty and the American Founding is key reading for those seeking to understand the Founders’ political philosophy of religious freedom and the First Amendment Religion Clauses.
The Page 99 Test: God and the Founders.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, August 15, 2022

"Sex Trafficking and Human Rights"

New from Georgetown University Press: Sex Trafficking and Human Rights: The Status of Women and State Responses by Heather Smith-Cannoy, Patricia C. Rodda, and Charles Anthony Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:
Case studies explore how women's rights shape state responses to sex trafficking and show how politically empowering women can help prevent and combat human trafficking

Human trafficking for the sex trade is a form of modern-day slavery that ensnares thousands of victims each year, disproportionately affecting women and girls. While the international community has developed an impressive edifice of human rights law, these laws are not equally recognized or enforced by all countries. Sex Trafficking and Human Rights demonstrates that state responsiveness to human trafficking is shaped by the political, social, cultural, and economic rights afforded to women in that state.

While combatting human trafficking is a multiscalar problem with a host of conflating variables, this book shows that a common theme in the effectiveness of state response is the degree to which women and girls are perceived as, and actually are, full citizens. By analyzing human trafficking cases in India, Thailand, Russia, Nigeria, and Brazil, they shed light on the factors that make some women and girls more susceptible to traffickers than others.

This important book is both a call to understanding and a call to action: if the international community and state governments are to responsibly and effectively combat human trafficking, they must center the equality of women in national policy.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, August 14, 2022

"Friends, Neighbours, Sinners"

New from Cambridge University Press: Friends, Neighbours, Sinners: Religious Difference and English Society, 1689–1750 by Carys Brown.

About the book, from the publisher:
Friends, Neighbours, Sinners demonstrates the fundamental ways in which religious difference shaped English society in the first half of the eighteenth century. By examining the social subtleties of interactions between people of differing beliefs, and how they were mediated through languages and behaviours common to the long eighteenth century, Carys Brown examines the graduated layers of religious exclusivity that influenced everyday existence. By doing so, the book points towards a new approach to the social and cultural history of the eighteenth century, one that acknowledges the integral role of the dynamics of religious difference in key aspects of eighteenth-century life. This book therefore proposes not just to add to current understanding of religious coexistence in this period, but to shift our ways of thinking about the construction of social discourses, parish politics, and cultural spaces in eighteenth-century England.
Carys Brown is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. She has published articles in The Historical Journal, British Catholic History, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Cultural and Social History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, August 13, 2022

"Free Will"

New from Oxford University Press: Free Will: An Opinionated Guide by Alfred R. Mele.

About the book, from the publisher:
Free Will: An Opinionated Guide offers a clear and straightforward introduction to a vexing topic, from an internationally recognized authority on free will.

What did you do a moment ago? What will you do after you read this? Are you deciding as we speak, or is something else going on in your brain or elsewhere in your body that is determining your actions? Stopping to think this way can freeze us in our tracks. A lot in the world feels far beyond our control--the last thing we need is to question whether we make our own choices in the way we usually assume we do. Questions about free will are so major and consequential that we may prefer not to think about them at all, lest we feel completely lost and unsure of everything we thought we knew!

Free will is certainly important, but it does not need to be daunting. Free Will: An Opinionated Guide offers a clear and straightforward introduction to this vexing topic. Drawing on decades of extensive research in philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology, internationally recognized authority on free will Alfred R. Mele explains and explores the most prominent theories, puzzles, and arguments about free will, all the while presenting his own distinctive take on the topic.

Mele's use of attention-grabbing thought experiments brings deep philosophical issues to life. He tackles the questions already on readers' minds and some they will encounter for the first time, on topics like determinism, neuroscience, and control. Whether this is the only book on free will you will read, or just the beginning of a deeper investigation, you will never think about free will, or the decisions you believe you're making, in the same ways again.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, August 12, 2022

"Ascending Order"

New from Cambridge University Press: Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions by Rohan Mukherjee.

About the book, from the publisher:
Why do rising powers sometimes challenge an international order that enables their growth, and at other times support an order that constrains them? Ascending Order offers the first comprehensive study of conflict and cooperation as new powers join the global arena. International institutions shape the choices of rising states as they pursue equal status with established powers. Open membership rules and fair decision-making procedures facilitate equality and cooperation, while exclusion and unfairness frequently produce conflict. Using original and robust archival evidence, the book examines these dynamics in three cases: the United States and the maritime laws of war in the mid-nineteenth century; Japan and naval arms control in the interwar period; and India and nuclear non-proliferation in the Cold War. This study shows that the future of contemporary international order depends on the ability of international institutions to address the status ambitions of rising powers such as China and India.
Visit Rohan Mukherjee's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, August 11, 2022

"Pandemic India: From Cholera to Covid-19"

New from Oxford University Press: Pandemic India: From Cholera to Covid-19 by David Arnold.

About the book, from the publisher:
Covid-19 has given renewed, urgent attention to "the pandemic" as a devastating, recurrent global phenomenon. Today the term is freely and widely used-but in reality, it has a long and contested history, centred on South Asia.

Pandemic India is an innovative enquiry into the emergence of the idea and changing meaning of pandemics, exploring the pivotal role played by-or assigned to-India over the past 200 years. Using the perspectives of the social historian and the historian of medicine, and a wide range of sources, it explains how and why past pandemics were so closely identified with South Asia; the factors behind outbreaks' exceptional destructiveness in India; responses from society and the state, both during and since the colonial era; and how such collective catastrophes have changed lives and been remembered. Giving a 'long history' to India's current pandemic, the book offers comparisons with earlier epidemics of cholera, plague and influenza.

David Arnold assesses the distinctive characteristics and legacies of each episode, tracking the evolution of public health strategies and containment measures. This is a historian's reflection on time as seen through the pandemic prism, and on the ways the past is used--or misused--to serve the present.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

"Arrested Development"

New from Cornell University Press: Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968 by Alessandro Iandolo.

About the book, from the publisher:
Arrested Development examines the USSR's involvement in West Africa during the 1950s and 1960s as aid donor, trade partner, and political inspiration for the first post-independence governments in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali.

Buoyed by solid economic performance in the 1950s, the USSR opened itself up to the world and launched a series of programs aimed at supporting the search for economic development in newly independent countries in Africa and Asia. These countries, emerging from decades of colonial domination, looked at the USSR as an example to strengthen political and economic independence. Based on extensive research in Russian and West African archives, Alessandro Iandolo explores the ideas that guided Soviet engagement in West Africa, investigates the projects that the USSR sponsored "on the ground," and analyzes their implementation and legacy.

The Soviet specialists who worked in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali collaborated with West African colleagues in drawing ambitious development plans, supervised the construction of new transport infrastructure, organized collective farms and fishing cooperatives, conducted geological surveys and mineral prospecting, set up banking systems, managed international trade, and staffed repairs workshops and ministerial bureaucracies alike. The exchanges and clashes born out of the encounter between Soviet and West African ideas, ambitions, and hopes about development reveal the USSR as a central actor in the history of economic development in the twentieth century.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, August 9, 2022

"Cairo 1921"

New from Yale University Press: Cairo 1921: Ten Days that Made the Middle East by C. Brad Faught.

About the book, from the publisher:
The first comprehensive history of the 1921 Cairo Conference which reveals its enduring impact on the modern Middle East

Called by Winston Churchill in 1921, the Cairo Conference set out to redraw the map of the Middle East in the wake of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The summit established the states of Iraq and Jordan as part of the Sherifian Solution and confirmed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine—the future state of Israel. No other conference had such an enduring impact on the region.

C. Brad Faught demonstrates how the conference, although dominated by the British with limited local participation, was an ambitious, if ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to move the Middle East into the world of modern nationalism. Faught reveals that many officials, including T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, were driven by the determination for state building in the area to succeed. Their prejudices, combined with their abilities, would profoundly alter the Middle East for decades to come.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, August 8, 2022

"On the Rocks"

New from Rowman & Littlefield: On the Rocks: Straight Talk about Women and Drinking by Susan D. Stewart.

About the book, from the publisher:
Existing portrayals of women who drink typically fall into two categories: disturbing stories of women hitting “rock bottom,” resulting in ruined careers, families, and futures, or amusing stories of fun and harmless “girls’ nights out,” with women drinking and overindulging as a temporary escape from a never-ending list of work and family demands. Drawing on original research and extensive interviews with a diverse group of women, author Susan Stewart challenges these stereotypes, revealing women’s complex relationships with alcohol and factors associated with its use.

In On the Rocks Stewart asks a question others might prefer stay buried: what about women's lives have changed such that they drink more alcohol? Stewart’s participants share stories of the many social forces that encourage women to drink: increased marketing of alcohol to women, the growing presence of alcohol in the workplace, pressure to drink from friends and family, and that drinking provides an easy “time-out” from children and housework. Stewarts' unvarnished examination of women and drinking challenges readers to think through its implications to individuals, families, and society.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, August 7, 2022

"Democracy's Child"

New from Oxford University Press: Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency by Alison L. Gash and Daniel J. Tichenor.

About the book, from the publisher:
A sweeping and innovative study that places young people at the heart of pivotal conflicts, decisions and transformations in American politics.

Even though the voting age is 18, children in the United States are both crucial subjects and actors in democratic politics. Young people have been leveraged for important political causes again and again--from the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade in which civil rights leaders mobilized thousands of school kids in protest marches to the 2018 "family separation" policy in which Trump officials sacrificed migrant children as bargaining chips in its push for border control.

In Democracy's Child, Alison L. Gash and Daniel J. Tichenor focus on the reciprocal relationship between children and politics by placing young people at the heart of pivotal conflicts, decisions, and transformations in American politics. From the March for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter, to Gay Straight Alliances and the Dreamer and Sunrise movements, they show that the prominence of young people as agents of change are unmistakable in contemporary political life. Yet, these movements reflect a long history of youth political mobilization and leadership, including Progressive Era labor organizing and 1960s civil rights and anti-war activism. Gash and Tichenor examine childhood as a potent category that combines with gender, race, class, immigration status, or sexual orientation to produce powerful systems of privilege or disadvantage. Further, they argue that children also are crucial subjects of government and adult control, inspiring contention in nearly every realm of public policy, such as education, social welfare, abortion, gun control, immigration, civil rights and liberties, and criminal justice.

A sweeping and innovative study, Democracy's Child reveals why the control, leveraging, and agency of young people shapes and defines our political landscape.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, August 6, 2022

"Innovate to Dominate"

New from Cornell University Press: Innovate to Dominate: The Rise of the Chinese Techno-Security State by Tai Ming Cheung.

About the book, from the publisher:
In Innovate to Dominate, Tai Ming Cheung offers insight into why, how, and whether China will overtake the United States to become the world's preeminent technological and security power. This examination of the means and ends of China's quest for techno-security supremacy is required reading for anyone looking for clues as to the long-term direction of the global order.

The techno-security domain, Cheung argues, is where national security, innovation, and economic development converge, and it has become the center of power and prosperity in the twenty-first century. China's paramount leader Xi Jinping recognizes that effectively harnessing the complex interactions among security, innovation, and development is essential in enabling China to compete for global dominance.

Cheung offers a richly detailed account of how China is building a potent techno-security state. In Innovate to Dominate he takes readers from the strategic vision guiding this transformation to the nuts-and-bolts of policy implementation. The state-led top-down mobilizational model that China is pursuing has been a winning formula so far, but the sternest test is ahead as China begins to compete head-to-head with the United States and aims to surpass its archrival by mid-century if not sooner.

Innovate to Dominate is a timely and analytically rigorous examination of the key strategies guiding China's transformation of its capabilities in the national, technological, military, and security spheres and how this is taking place. Cheung authoritatively addresses the burning questions being asked in capitals around the world: Can China become the dominant global techno-security power? And if so, when?
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, August 5, 2022

"Divided Not Conquered"

New from Oxford University Press: Divided Not Conquered: How Rebels Fracture and Splinters Behave by Evan Perkoski.

About the book, from the publisher:
From terrorist disputes to splinter offshoots, an inside look at how armed groups break apart.

Terrorist, rebel, and insurgent groups are highly unstable. Amid fears of defeat and even death, intense disagreements have torn many organizations apart, from Syria to Iraq, Ireland to Spain. And while some of these divisions have preceded a group's decline and eventual defeat, others have launched some of the most notorious and deadly organizations in recent history.

In Divided Not Conquered, Evan Perkoski analyzes how armed groups fracture and how breakaway splinter groups behave. Perkoski takes an unprecedented look inside these organizations to understand the specific disagreements that cause groups to break apart, like those over ideology, leadership, and strategy. Drawing on research from organizational studies to social psychology, and leveraging analogies from business firms to religious sects, Perkoski shows how these disputes uniquely shape the behavior and survivability of emerging splinters. When motivated by single, shared disagreements, splinters exhibit higher cohesion, clearer objectives, and greater survivability. When motivated by strategy, splinters attract hardline operatives who steer the group towards increasingly lethal tactics and strategies.

Including case studies of republican militants in Northern Ireland, Basque militants in Spain, and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, Divided Not Conquered demystifies a complex yet common phenomenon with ramifications for counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and our understanding of increasingly fragmented conflicts around the globe.
Visit Evan Perkoski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, August 4, 2022

"Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman"

New from Stanford University Press: Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution from New China by Brian DeMare.

About the book, from the publisher:
The rural county of Poyang, lying in northern Jiangxi Province, goes largely unmentioned in the annals of modern Chinese history. Yet records from the Public Security Bureau archive hold a treasure trove of data on the every day interactions between locals and the law. Drawing on these largely overlooked resources, Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman follows four criminal cases that together uniquely illuminate the dawning years of the People's Republic.

Using a unique casefile approach, Brian DeMare recounts stories of a Confucian scholar who found himself allied with bandits and secret society members; a farmer who murdered a cadre; an evil tyrant who exploited religious traditions to avoid prosecution; and a merchant accused of a crime he did not commit. Each case is a tremendous tale, complete with memorable characters, plot twists, and drama. And while all depict the enemies of New China, each also reveals details of village life during this most pivotal moment of recent Chinese history. Together, the narratives bring rural regime change to life, illustrating how the Chinese Communist Party cemented its authority through mass political campaigns, careful legal investigations, and sheer patience. Balancing storytelling with historical inquiry, this book is at once a grassroots view of rural China's legal system and its application to apparent counterrevolutionaries, and a lesson in archival research itself.
Follow Brian DeMare on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

"Seattle from the Margins"

New from the University of Washington Press: Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City by Megan Asaka.

About the book, from the publisher:
From the origins of the city in the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II, Seattle's urban workforce consisted overwhelmingly of migrant laborers who powered the seasonal, extractive economy of the Pacific Northwest. Though the city benefitted from this mobile labor force—consisting largely of Indigenous peoples and Asian migrants—municipal authorities, elites, and reformers continually depicted these workers and the spaces they inhabited as troublesome and as impediments to urban progress. Today the physical landscape bears little evidence of their historical presence in the city. Tracing histories from unheralded sites such as labor camps, lumber towns, lodging houses, and so-called slums, Seattle from the Margins shows how migrant laborers worked alongside each other, competed over jobs, and forged unexpected alliances within the marine and coastal spaces of the Puget Sound. By uncovering the historical presence of marginalized groups and asserting their significance in the development of the city, Megan Asaka offers a deeper understanding of Seattle's complex past.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

"Shrimp to Whale"

New from Oxford University Press: Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop by Ramon Pacheco Pardo.

About the book, from the publisher:
South Korea has the most remarkable of histories. Born from the ashes of colonialism, partition and a devastating war, back in the 1950s there were real doubts about its survival as an independent state. Yet South Korea did survive, and first became known globally for the export of cheap toys, shoes and clothing. Today, South Korea is a boisterous democracy, a vibrant market economy, a tech powerhouse, and home to the coolest of cultures. In just seventy years, this society has grown from a shrimp into a whale.

What explains this extraordinary transformation? For some, it was ordinary South Koreans who fought to change their country, and still strive to continue shaping it. For others, it was all down to forward-looking political and business leaders, who had the vision that their country would one day be different. Whichever version you prefer, it's clear that, at its core, South Korea's is the story of a people who dreamt big, and saw their dreams coming true.

This is the history of South Korea, from its millennia-old roots, through its foundation as a nation-state and economic development under dictatorship, to its present as a rich, free and cool country on the world stage.
Follow Ramon Pacheco Pardo on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, August 1, 2022

"An Economist Goes to the Game"

New from Yale University Press: An Economist Goes to the Game: How to Throw Away $580 Million and Other Surprising Insights from the Economics of Sports by Paul Oyer.

About the book, from the publisher:
An engaging look at the ways economic thinking can help us understand how sports work both on and off the field

Are ticket scalpers good for teams? Should parents push their kids to excel at sports? Why do Koreans dominate women’s golf, while Kenyans and Ethiopians dominate marathon racing? Why would Michael Jordan, the greatest player in basketball, pass to Steve Kerr for the game-winning shot?

Paul Oyer shows the many ways economics permeates the world of sports. His topics range from the business of sport to how great athletes use economic thinking to outsmart their opponents to why the world's greatest sports powerhouse (at least per capita) is not America or China but the principality of Liechtenstein. Economics explains why some sports cannot stop the use of performance-enhancing drugs while others can, why hundred-million-dollar player contracts are guaranteed in baseball but not in football, how one man was able to set the world of sports betting on its ear—and why it will probably never happen again. This book is an entertaining guide to how a bit of economics can make you a better athlete and a more informed fan.
Follow Paul Oyer on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue