"How the New World Became Old"

New from Princeton University Press: How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America by Caroline Winterer.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the idea of deep time transformed how Americans see their country and themselves

During the nineteenth century, Americans were shocked to learn that the land beneath their feet had once been stalked by terrifying beasts. T. rex and Brontosaurus

ruled the continent. North America was home to saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths, great herds of camels and hippos, and sultry tropical forests now fossilized into massive coal seams. How the New World Became Old tells the extraordinary story of how Americans discovered that the New World was not just old—it was a place rooted in deep time.

In this panoramic book, Caroline Winterer traces the history of an idea that today lies at the heart of the nation’s identity as a place of primordial natural beauty. Europeans called America the New World, and literal readings of the Bible suggested that Earth was only six thousand years old. Winterer takes readers from glacier-capped peaks in Yosemite to Alabama slave plantations and canal works in upstate New York, describing how naturalists, explorers, engineers, and ordinary Americans unearthed a past they never suspected, a history more ancient than anyone ever could have imagined.

Drawing on archival evidence ranging from unpublished field notes and letters to early stratigraphic diagrams, How the New World Became Old reveals how the deep time revolution ushered in profound changes in science, literature, art, and religion, and how Americans came to realize that the New World might in fact be the oldest world of all.

The Page 99 Test: American Enlightenments.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Analog Superpowers"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State by Katherine C. Epstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

A gripping history that spans law, international affairs, and top-secret technology to unmask the tension between intellectual property rights and national security.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships. These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets, conditions that impeded accurate gunfire. Seeing the need to account for a plethora of variables, Pollen and Isherwood built an integrated system for gathering data, calculating predictions, and transmitting the results to the gunners. At the heart of their invention was the most advanced analog computer of the day, a technological breakthrough that anticipated the famous Norden bombsight of World War II, the inertial guidance systems of nuclear missiles, and the networked “smart” systems that dominate combat today. Recognizing the value of Pollen and Isherwood’s invention, the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy pirated it, one after the other. When the inventors sued, both the British and US governments invoked secrecy, citing national security concerns.

Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Analog Superpowers analyzes these and related legal battles over naval technology, exploring how national defense tested the two countries’ commitment to individual rights and the free market. Katherine C. Epstein deftly sets out Pollen’s and Isherwood’s pioneering achievements, the patent questions raised, the geopolitical rivalry between Britain and the United States, and the legal precedents each country developed to control military tools built by private contractors.

Epstein’s account reveals that long before the US national security state sought to restrict information about atomic energy, it was already embroiled in another contest between innovation and secrecy. The America portrayed in this sweeping and accessible history isn’t yet a global hegemon but a rising superpower ready to acquire foreign technology by fair means or foul—much as it accuses China of doing today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Revolutionary Emotions"

New from Oxford University Press: Revolutionary Emotions: The Roots of Revolutionary Waves by Silvana Toska.

About the book, from the publisher:

Revolutionary Emotions proposes a novel emotional theory of revolutionary diffusion and success and argues that emotional mobilization is at the root of both. For centuries, revolutionaries spoke of the emotional arousal--the anger, hope, and the jettisoning of fear--that motivated their participation in revolt. Studies of revolutions, however, rarely give these emotional narratives the power that actors themselves recount. This book argues that revolutionary waves, including the 1848 revolts and the Arab Uprisings, cannot be explained without the emotional arousal that motivated potential revolutionaries to imitate neighboring revolts. The shared identity of revolutionaries across borders leads to a shared emotional arousal and adoption of protest frames and methods. Absent this shared identity, revolutions are unlikely to cause sufficient emotional resonance to spur imitators across borders. In addition to a shared identity, previous history of protests makes diffusion more likely, as seasoned activists capitalize on this emotional jolt to mobilize against their regimes. The emotional power of the crowds is tangible--if difficult to measure--and influences the decisions of key elite players, including the military, on whether to allow the regime to fall.

By grounding the theory in the emotional narratives of revolutionaries and by breaking down the various dichotomies that plague the study of revolutions--structure versus agency, and domestic versus international--Revolutionary Emotions provides the first coherent theory of revolutionary diffusion and success.

Visit Silvana Toska's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship"

New from Stanford University Press: Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China by Samantha A. Vortherms.

About the book, from the publisher:

The redistribution of political and economic rights is inherently unequal in autocratic societies. Autocrats routinely divide their populations into included and excluded groups, creating particularistic citizenship through granting some groups access to rights and redistribution while restricting or denying access to others. This book asks: why would a government with powerful tools of exclusion expand access to socioeconomic citizenship rights? And when autocratic systems expand redistribution, whom do they choose to include? In Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship, Samantha A. Vortherms examines the crucial case of China—where internal citizenship regimes control who can and cannot become a local citizen through the household registration system (hukou)—and uncovers how autocrats use such institutions to create particularistic membership in citizenship. Vortherms shows how local governments explicitly manipulate local citizenship membership not only to ensure political security and stability, but also, crucially, to advance economic development. Vortherms demonstrates how autocrats use differentiated citizenship to control degrees of access to rights and thus fulfill the authoritarian bargain and balance security and economic incentives. This book expands our understanding of individual-state relations in both autocratic contexts and across a variety of regime types.

Visit Samantha A. Vortherms's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Tropical Despotisms"

New from Cornell University Press: Tropical Despotisms: Enlightened Reform in the French Caribbean by David Allen Harvey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tropical Despotisms reveals the alarm that spread among France's Caribbean possessions during the period between the Seven Years' War and the Revolution and the determination to cultivate a new patriotic community rooted in the Enlightenment principles of honor and civic virtue.

Following France's humiliating defeat at the hands of the British, a loose coalition of frustrated and enlightened reformers hoped to promote imperial regeneration in order to restore France's wounded national pride, stabilize and strengthen the Antillean colonies, and bind the colonies more closely to the metropole.

David Allen Harvey describes the historical relationship between capitalism and slavery in the making of the modern world economy and moves beyond simplistic arguments by discussing the contingent and evolving dynamic between the two. As a result, he reveals how capitalism and slavery developed in tandem in the eighteenth-century Caribbean but explains that reformers sought to enact a gradual transition to a free wage labor regime more in keeping with capitalism's ideal of free and voluntary contractual relationships between formally equal parties.

Tropical Despotisms provides a new perspective on the social and demographic structure in the French Antilles and the wider French Atlantic world. Harvey uncovers not only the deep and critical debates around the issues of slavery and race but also the efforts by enlightened reformers as they proposed rethinking the political and economic structures by which the empire had been ruled, rationalizing governing institutions, and liberalizing trade.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Freedom Soldiers"

New from Oxford University Press: Freedom Soldiers: The Emancipation of Black Soldiers in Civil War Camps, Courts, and Prisons by Jonathan Lande.

About the book, from the publisher:

Almost 200,000 African Americans fought to save the Union, many believing that military service was the pathway to freedom. Yet, even after enlisting, their journeys for liberation continued amid the bloody civil war. They marched across taxing terrain, performed backbreaking labor, and endured corporeal punishment meted out by white officers. They also agonized over families still enslaved and suffered virulent diseases. Many grew disillusioned, disgruntled, or homesick. They fought on bravely, yet thousands also ran. Chafing against restraints and violence reminiscent of slavery, they briefly liberated themselves from onerous army discipline.

The men examined in Freedom Soldiers took self-granted breaks--"leaves of freedom"--and, once caught, were tried by the US Army for the military crime of "desertion." In the courts-martial, they justified their unauthorized departures by telling authorities that they left to temporarily help their families, regain their health, and evade violent officers. Army judges nevertheless convicted freedom seekers, sending most to military prisons. From prisons, the convicted deserters wrote petitions to President Abraham Lincoln and Union officials requesting release. These prisoners disputed rulings, offered their continued service to the Union, insisted on the injustice of incarceration, and explained the dire need of kin around the wartime South.

Drawing upon transcripts of the nearly 80,000 Civil War courts-martial cases, as well as prisoners' petitions, soldiers' letters, and government reports, Jonathan Lande recovers this subset of soldiers who took leaves of freedom and defended their breaks within the military justice system. In doing so, he reveals how Black men fought for freedom not only against Confederates but also in US Army camps, courts, and prisons.

Visit Jonathan Lande's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America by Rachel Louise Moran.

About the book, from the publisher:

A powerful look at the changing cultural understanding of postpartum depression in America.

New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular and medical voices blamed women who had emotional and mental distress after childbirth for their own suffering. By the end of the century, though, women with postpartum mental illnesses sought to take charge of this narrative. In Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America, Rachel Louise Moran explores the history of the naming and mainstreaming of postpartum depression. Coalitions of maverick psychiatrists, psychologists, and women who themselves had survived substantial postpartum distress fought to legitimize and normalize women’s experiences. They argued that postpartum depression is an objective and real illness and fought to avoid it being politicized alongside other fraught medical and political battles over women’s health.

Based on insightful oral histories and in-depth archival research, Blue reveals a secret history of American motherhood, women’s political activism, and the rise of postpartum depression advocacy amid an often-censorious conservative culture. By breaking new ground with the first book-length history of postpartum mental illness in the twentieth century, Moran brings mothers’ battles with postpartum depression out of the shadows and into the light.

Visit Rachel Louise Moran's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Playing Possum"

New from Princeton University Press: Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó.

About the book, from the publisher:

How animals conceive of death and dying—and what it can teach us about our own relationships with mortality

When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.

With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today’s leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own.

Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.

Visit Susana Monsó's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mexico's Resilient Journalists"

New from Columbia University Press: Mexico's Resilient Journalists: How Reporters Manage Risk and Cope with Violence by Julieta Brambila.

About the book, from the publisher:

In recent decades, Mexico has been one of the most dangerous democracies for journalists. Their coverage of the war on drugs, abuses of power, and human rights violations has led to harassment, threats, and violence by powerful cartels and corrupt officials. This book provides a ground-level view of how Mexican journalists have navigated this perilous environment, offering insight into how they protect themselves while reporting on the most critical and sensitive subjects.

Based on in-depth interviews with reporters, editors, activists, and officials, Mexico’s Resilient Journalists examines the strategies that media workers have employed in pursuit of both personal safety and the public interest. Julieta Brambila argues that Mexican journalists have developed innovative forms of resilience, highlighting their power and agency amid violence, censorship, and intimidation. She considers how journalists have banded together to develop coping mechanisms, protect each other, and raise public awareness. These resilient newsmakers have adapted to adversity by redefining their professional values and practices, rethinking their surroundings, and reassessing their role. Brambila also evaluates how various media organizations have learned from incidents of violence and changed their policies to better protect their reporters. Shedding new light on defense of the freedom of the press in Mexico, this book offers crucial lessons for other countries seeing a rise in threats to independent journalism.

Visit Julieta Brambila's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This Abominable Slavery"

New from Oxford University Press: This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah by W. Paul Reeve, Christopher B. Rich, LaJean Purcell Carruth.

About the book, from the publisher:

On July 22, 1847, a group of about forty refugees entered the Salt Lake Valley. Among them were three enslaved men, two of whom shared the religion, Mormonism, that had caused them to flee. The valley was also home to members of the Ute tribe, who would sometimes barter captive women and children to Spanish colonizers. Thus, the question of whether the Latter-day Saints would accept or reject slavery in their new Zion confronted them on the day they first arrived. Five years later, after Utah had become an American territory, its legislature was prodded to take up the question then roiling the nation: would they be slave or free?

George D. Watt, the official reporter for the 1852 legislative session, reported debates and speeches in Pitman shorthand. They remained in their original format, virtually untouched, for more than one hundred and fifty years, until LaJean Purcell Carruth transcribed them. In this eye-opening volume, Carruth, Christopher Rich, and W. Paul Reeve draw extensively on these new sources to chronicle the session, during which the legislature passed two important statutes: one that legally transformed African American slaves into "servants" but did not pass the condition of servitude on to their children and another that authorized twenty-year indentures for enslaved Native Americans.

This Abominable Slavery places these debates within the context of the nation's growing sectional divide and contextualizes the meaning of these laws in the lives of Black enslaved people and Native American indentured servants. In doing so, it sheds new light on race, religion, slavery, and unfree labor in the antebellum period.

The Page 99 Test: W. Paul Reeve's Religion of a Different Color.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Roots of Flower City"

New from Cornell University Press: The Roots of Flower City: Horticulture, Empire, and the Remaking of Rochester, New York by Camden Burd.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Roots of Flower City, Camden Burd explores the economic and ecological significance of Rochester plant nurserymen over the course of the nineteenth century. As the first boomtown in the United States, Rochester was an embodiment of nineteenth-century market economies and social reform movements. Connected to the eastern seaboard by the Erie Canal, the city's unique economic, cultural, and environmental conditions fostered and sustained a vast and influential commercial plant nursery industry that attracted the nation's most prominent horticulturists and nurserymen.

Rochester-area nurserymen built parks and rural cemeteries, landscaped homes and schools, and promoted horticultural pursuits regionally and nationally. As their influence grew, many of these horticultural entrepreneurs developed into the city's elite and played a leading role in shaping Rochester's economic, social, and physical landscape. Most significantly, nurserymen enthusiastically participated in the American imperial project, selling and distributing fruit, shade, and ornamental trees, shrubs, and flowers across the continent, transforming landscapes and ecologies far beyond New York.

The Roots of Flower City tells the remarkable history of Rochester's outsized influence on the homes, estates, towns, and cities of nineteenth-century America as it weathered economic downturns and competition from other regions. One threat, however, proved to be too much to overcome. As Burd details, the spread of the destructive San Jose scale through the transcontinental plant trade prompted federal legislation that would lead to the decline of the Rochester plant nursery industry in the last decade of the nineteenth century, ending a sustained era of success and ecological impact.

Visit Camden Burd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The German Empire, 1871–1918"

New from Cambridge University Press: The German Empire, 1871–1918 by Roger Chickering.

About the book, from the publisher:

Furious economic growth and social change resulted in pervasive civic conflict in imperial Germany. Roger Chickering presents a wide-ranging history of this fractious period, from German national unification to the close of the First World War. Throughout this time, national unity remained an acute issue. It appeared to be resolved momentarily in the summer of 1914, only to dissolve in the war that followed. This volume examines the impact of rapid industrialization and urban growth on Catholics and Protestants, farmers and city dwellers, industrial workers and the middle classes. Focusing on its religious, social, regional, and ethnic reverberations, Chickering also examines the social, cultural, and political dimensions of domestic conflict. Providing multiple lenses with which to view the German Empire, Chickering's survey examines local and domestic experiences as well as global ramifications. The German Empire, 1871–1918 provides the most comprehensive survey of this restless era available in the English language.

Roger Chickering is Professor Emeritus of History at Georgetown University. His publications include The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (2007) and Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (2014).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Proximity Politics"

New from Columbia University Press: Proximity Politics: How Distance Shapes Public Opinion and Political Behaviors by Jeronimo Cortina.

About the book, from the publisher:

Republicans who live closer to the U.S.-Mexico border are less likely to support constructing a wall than those who live farther away. After a mass shooting, gun sales and permit applications skyrocket in nearby communities. Experiencing an extreme weather event like a hurricane or flood can encourage someone to attribute climate change to human activity. Why do we react so differently to faraway events and ones that take place on our doorsteps, and what does this reveal about our political landscape?

Proximity Politics is a groundbreaking examination of the role of distance in shaping attitudes, behaviors, and understandings of the world. Analyzing geocoded survey data, Jeronimo Cortina documents the crucial ways space and place influence public opinion. He demonstrates that the closer someone is to an event, social group, or policy, the likelier they are to have first-hand, specific, grounded knowledge of the subject. Conversely, distance leads to detachment, making it more likely that decontextualized or unreliable information and individual or group biases will prevail. Considering a range of case studies, from virus outbreaks to protests, Cortina unravels how spatial, emotional, temporal, social, and cultural distances affect public opinion. Bringing together quantitative and qualitative data in an accessible style, Proximity Politics shows that even in today’s interconnected world, we are still profoundly influenced by what happens next door.

Visit Jeronimo Cortina's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Christian Origins of Tolerance"

New from Oxford University Press: The Christian Origins of Tolerance by Jed W. Atkins.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tolerance is usually regarded as a quintessential liberal value. This position is supported by a standard liberal history that views religious toleration as emerging from the post-Reformation wars of religion as the solution to the problem of religious violence. Requiring the separation of church from state, tolerance was secured by giving the state the sole authority to punish religious violence and to protect the individual freedoms of conscience and religion. Commitment to tolerance is independent of judgements about justice and the common good. This standard liberal history exerts a powerful hold on the modern imagination: it undergirds several important recent accounts of liberal tolerance and virtually every major study of tolerance in the ancient world. Nevertheless, this familiar narrative distorts our understanding of tolerance's premodern origins and impoverishes present-day debates when many members of Christianity and Islam, the two largest global religions, have reservations about liberal tolerance.

Setting aside the standard liberal history, The Christian Origins of Tolerance recovers tolerance's beginnings in a forgotten tradition forged by North African Christian thinkers of the first five centuries CE in critical conversation with one another, St. Paul, the rival tradition of Stoicism, and the political and legal thought of the wider Roman world. This North African Christian tradition conceives of tolerance as patience within plurality. This tradition does not require the separation of religion and the secular state as a prerequisite for tolerance and embeds individual rights and the freedoms of conscience and religion within a wider theoretical framework that derives accounts of political judgement and patience from theological reflection on God's roles as a patient father and just judge. By recovering this forgotten tradition, we can better understand and assess the choices made by leading theorists of liberal tolerance, and as a result, think better about how to achieve peaceful coexistence within and beyond liberal democracies in a world in which many Christians and Muslims are sceptical of liberalism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"We Have Never Been Woke"

New from Princeton University Press: We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi.

About the book, from the publisher:

How a new “woke” elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status—without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged

Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged.

We Have Never Been Woke details how the language of social justice is increasingly used to justify this elite—and to portray the losers in the knowledge economy as deserving their lot because they think or say the “wrong” things about race, gender, and sexuality. Al-Gharbi’s point is not to accuse symbolic capitalists of hypocrisy or cynicism. Rather, he examines how their genuine beliefs prevent them from recognizing how they contribute to social problems—or how their actions regularly provoke backlash against the social justice causes they champion.

A powerful critique, We Have Never Been Woke reveals that only by challenging this elite’s self-serving narratives can we hope to address social and economic inequality effectively.

Visit Musa al-Gharbi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dr. Calhoun's Mousery"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Dr. Calhoun's Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity by Lee Alan Dugatkin.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bizarre and compelling biography of a scientist and his work, using rodent cities to question the potential catastrophes of human overpopulation.

It was the strangest of experiments. What began as a utopian environment, where mice had sumptuous accommodations, had all the food and water they could want, and were free from disease and predators, turned into a mouse hell. Science writer and animal behaviorist Lee Alan Dugatkin introduces readers to the peculiar work of rodent researcher John Bumpass Calhoun. In this enthralling tale, Dugatkin shows how an ecologist-turned-psychologist-turned-futurist became a science rock star embedded in the culture of the 1960s and 1970s. As interest grew in his rodent cities, Calhoun was courted by city planners and his work was reflected in everything from Tom Wolfe’s hard-hitting writing to the children’s book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. He was invited to meetings with the Royal Society and the pope and taken seriously when he proposed a worldwide cybernetic brain—a decade before others made the internet a reality.

Readers see how Calhoun’s experiments—rodent apartment complexes like “Mouse Universe 25”—led to his concept of “behavioral sinks” with real effects on public policy discussions. Overpopulation in Calhoun’s mouse (and rat) complexes led to the loss of sex drive, the absence of maternal care, and a class of automatons that included “the beautiful ones,” who spent their time grooming themselves while shunning socialization. Calhoun—and those who followed his work—saw the collapse of this mouse population as a harbinger of the ill effects of an overpopulated human world.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival research and interviews with Calhoun’s family and former colleagues, Dugatkin offers a riveting account of an intriguing scientific figure. Considering Dr. Calhoun’s experiments, he explores the changing nature of scientific research and delves into what the study of animal behavior can teach us about ourselves.

Visit Lee Alan Dugatkin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Power in the Wild.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Against the Liberal Order"

New from Oxford University Press: Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939 by Samuel J. Hirst.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introduced Western-led multilateral organizations to regulate cross-border flows which became pivotal in the making of an interconnected global order. In contrast to this well-studied transformation, Hirst considers in detail for the first time the responses of the defeated interwar Soviet Union and early Republican Turkey who challenged this new order with a reactive and distinctly state-led international politics.

As Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took up arms in 1920 to overturn the terms of the Paris settlement, Vladimir Lenin provided military and economic aid as part of a partnership that both sides described as anti-imperialist. Over the course of the next two decades, the Soviet and Turkish states coordinated joint measures to accelerate development in spheres ranging from aviation to linguistics. Most importantly, Soviet engineers and architects helped colleagues in Ankara launch a five-year plan and build massive state-owned factories to produce textiles and replace Western imports. Whilst the Kemalists' cooperation with the Bolsheviks has often been described as pragmatic, this book demonstrates that Moscow and Ankara actually came together in an ideological convergence rooted in anxiety about underdevelopment relative to the West, gradually arriving at statist internationalism as an alternative to Western liberal internationalism.

Drawing on extensive archival research and offering an often-ignored and non-Western perspective on the history of international relations and diplomacy, Against the Liberal Order presents a novel interpretation of the international order of the interwar period that crosses the borders of historical disciplines and contributes to questions of current concern in world politics.

Visit Samuel J. Hirst's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Heretics"

New from Yale University Press: American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order by Jerome E. Copulsky.

About the book, from the publisher:

A penetrating account of the religious critics of American liberalism, pluralism, and democracy—from the Revolution until today

The conversation about the proper role of religion in American public life often revolves around what kind of polity the Founders of the United States envisioned. Advocates of a “Christian America” claim that the Framers intended a nation whose political values and institutions were shaped by Christianity; secularists argue that they designed an enlightened republic where church and state were kept separate. Both sides appeal to the Founding to justify their beliefs about the kind of nation the United States was meant to be or should become.

In this book, Jerome E. Copulsky complicates this ongoing public argument by examining a collection of thinkers who, on religious grounds, considered the nation’s political ideas illegitimate, its institutions flawed, and its church‑state arrangement defective. Beholden to visions of cosmic order and social hierarchy, rejecting the increasing pluralism and secularism of American society, they predicted the collapse of an unrighteous nation and the emergence of a new Christian commonwealth in its stead. By engaging their challenges and interpreting their visions we can better appreciate the perennial temptations of religious illiberalism—as well as the virtues and fragilities of America’s liberal democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Faith in Rights"

New from Stanford University Press: Faith in Rights: Christian-Inspired NGOs at Work in the United Nations by Amélie Barras.

About the book, from the publisher:

Faith in Rights explores why and how Christian nongovernmental organizations conduct human rights work at the United Nations. The book interrogates the idea that the secular and the religious are distinct categories, and more specifically that human rights, understood as secular, can be neatly distinguished from religion. It argues that Christianity is deeply entangled in the texture of the United Nations and shapes the methods and areas of work of Christian NGOs. To capture these entanglements, Amélie Barras analyzes—through interviews, ethnography, and document and archive analysis—the everyday human rights work of Christian NGOs at the United Nations Human Rights Council. She documents how these NGOs are involved in a constant work of double translation: they translate their human rights work into a religious language to make it relevant to their on-the-ground membership, but they also reframe the concerns of their membership in human rights terms to make them audible to UN actors. Faith in Rights is a crucial new evaluation of how religion informs Christian nongovernmental organizations' understandings of human rights and their methods of work, as well as how being engaged in human rights work influences these organizations' own religious identity and practice.

Visit Amélie Barras's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Dark Age"

New from Princeton University Press: American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism by Keidrick Roy.

About the book, from the publisher:

How medieval-inspired racial feudalism reigned in early America and was challenged by Black liberal thinkers

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America’s resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience.

Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an “aristocracy of the skin,” Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst—and transformed the nation’s founding liberal tradition. He demonstrates how they drew on spiritual insight, Enlightenment thought, and a homegrown political philosophy that gave expression to their experiences at the bottom of the American social order. Roy sheds new light on how Black abolitionist writers and activists worked to eradicate the pernicious ideology of racial feudalism from American liberalism and renew the country’s commitment to values such as individual liberty, social progress, and egalitarianism.

American Dark Age reveals how the antebellum Black liberal tradition holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups continue to align themselves with fantasies of a medieval past and openly call for a return of all-powerful monarchs, aristocrats, and nobles who rule by virtue of their race.

Visit Keidrick Roy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Nation of Refugees"

New from Oxford University Press: A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I by Polly Zavadivker.

About the book, from the publisher:

When the Great War began, the Russian Empire was home to more than five million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population anywhere in the world. Thirty years later, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of war from 1914 to 1918 launched the forces that scattered and destroyed Eastern European Jewry and transformed it in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. Yet little has been written about the experience of Russia's Jews during this time. A Nation of Refugees uncovers this untold history by revealing the stories of how Jewish civilians experienced the war and its violent epicenter on the Eastern Front. It presents a history of rupture and dispersion at a human level, with accounts of individuals who struggled to survive and the activists who worked to aid them.

The stories in this book are drawn from hundreds of documents held in previously inaccessible archives, the Russian and Yiddish press, and the personal accounts of refugees, relief workers, writers, artists, and political leaders. This is a history of the first state violence and military aggression directed at Jewish civilians anywhere in modern Europe. It is a history of refugees, so numerous and scattered across Russia that they represented the fate of the Jewish nation itself. And it is a history of how Russia's Jews formed the largest and most influential humanitarian campaign in their history, and of their leaders and institutions that endured long past the years of war and revolution.

--Marsha Zeringue

"Constructing Cuban America"

New from the University of Texas Press: Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945 by Andrew Gomez.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Black and white Cubans navigated issues of race, politics, and identity during the post-Civil War and early Jim Crow eras in South Florida.

On July 4, 1876, during the centennial celebration of US independence, the city of Key West was different from other cities. In some of post–Civil War Florida, Black residents were hindered from participating in 4th of July festivities, but Key from participating in 4th of July festivities, but Key West's celebration, “led by a Cuban revolutionary mayor working in concert with a city council composed of Afro-Bahamians, Cubans, African Americans, and Anglos,” represented a profound exercise in interracial democracy amid the Radical Reconstruction era.

Constructing Cuban America examines the first Cuban American communities in South Florida—Key West and Tampa—and how race played a central role in shaping the experiences of white and Black Cubans. Andrew Gomez argues that factors such as the Cuban independence movement and Radical Reconstruction produced interracial communities of Cubans that worked alongside African Americans and Afro-Bahamians in Florida, yielding several successes in interracial democratic representation, even as they continued to wrestle with elements of racial separatism within the Cuban community. But the conclusion of the Cuban War of Independence and early Jim Crow laws led to a fracture in the Cuban-American community. In the process, both Black and white Cubans posited distinct visions of Cuban-American identity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hopped Up"

New from Oxford University Press: Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity by Jeffrey M. Pilcher.

About the book, from the publisher:

A lively history of beer and brewing traditions as globally connected commodities created through borrowing and exchange from precapitalist times to the present.

Virtually every country has a bestselling or iconic national beer brand: from Budweiser in the United States and Corona in Mexico, to Tsingtao in China and Heineken in Holland. Yet, with the sole exception of Ireland's Guinness, every label represents the same style: light, crisp, clear, Pilsner lager. The global spread of lager can be told as a story of Western cultural imperialism: a European product travels through merchants, migrants, and imperialists to upend local patterns and transform faraway consumers' tastes. But this modern beer is just as much a product of globalization, invented and reinvented around the world. While distinctive craft beers such as London Porter, India Pale Ale, and Belgian sour ales have been revived by aficionados over the past half-century, they too have globalized through the same circuits of trade, migration, and knowledge that carried lager.

Here eminent food historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher narrates the brewing traditions and contemporary production of beer across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, and Latin America--from the fermented beverages of precapitalist societies to the present. Over the centuries, he shows, the exchange of technological advances in brewing contributed to regional divergences and convergences in beer varieties, but always in tandem with other social and cultural developments. Unique local products, often homebrewed by women, were transformed into homogenous global commodities as giant brewing factories exported their beers using new refrigeration technology, railroads, and steamships. Industrial food processing helped to recast strong flavors as a source of potential contamination, turning lager, with its clean, fresh taste, into a symbol of hygiene and civilization. Local elites demonstrated their modernity and sophistication by opting for chilled lagers over traditional beverages. These beers became so standardized that most consumers could not tell the difference between them, leading to cutthroat competition that bankrupted countless firms. Over the past half-century, the global concentration of the brewing industry has spawned a reaction among those seeking to return brewing to the local, artisanal, and communitarian roots of the premodern alehouse, but microbrewers have often been driven by the same capitalist quest for profit and expansion.

Based on a wealth of multinational archives and industry publications, Hopped Up explores not only how humans have made beer but also how consumers--from nobility and clergy in the past to those raising a pint today--have used beer to make meaning in their lives.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Thoroughbred Nation"

New from LSU Press: Thoroughbred Nation: Making America at the Racetrack, 1791-1900 by Natalie A. Zacek.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the colonial era to the beginning of the twentieth century, horse racing was by far the most popular sport in America. Great numbers of Americans and overseas visitors flocked to the nation’s tracks, and others avidly followed the sport in both general-interest newspapers and specialized periodicals.

Thoroughbred Nation offers a detailed yet panoramic view of thoroughbred racing in the United States, following the sport from its origins in colonial Virginia and South Carolina to its boom in the Lower Mississippi Valley, and then from its post–Civil War rebirth in New York City and Saratoga Springs to its opulent mythologization of the “Old South” at Louisville’s Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby. Natalie A. Zacek introduces readers to an unforgettable cast of characters, from “plungers” such as Virginia plantation owner William Ransom Johnson (known as the “Napoleon of the Turf”) and Wall Street financier James R. Keene (who would wager a fortune on the outcome of a single competition) to the jockeys, trainers, and grooms, most of whom were African American. While their names are no longer known, their work was essential to the sport. Zacek also details the careers of remarkable, though scarcely remembered, horses, whose achievements made them as famous in their day as more recent equine celebrities such as Seabiscuit or Secretariat.

Based upon exhaustive research in print and visual sources from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, Thoroughbred Nation will be of interest both to those who love the sport of horse racing for its own sake and to those who are fascinated by how this pastime reflects and influences American identities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Laboring in the Shadow of Empire"

New from Rutgers University Press: Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal by Celeste Vaughan Curington.

About the book, from the publisher:

Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African-descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste Vaughan Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, has shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings, where immigrant rights are restricted and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examines workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women’s experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ghost People"

New from Oxford University Press: Ghost People: Race, Religion, and the Affective Sources of Jewish Identity by Paul E. Nahme.

About the book, from the publisher:

What does race feel like? What does race make people feel? Ghost People traces the haunting feelings that constitute race as a structural, social, and psychic experience in modern European history by focusing on the case of Jewish racialization. Taking a theoretical cue from W.E.B. Du Bois' question in the Souls of Black Folk, "How does it feel to be a problem?" Paul E. Nahme queries the affective experience of racial formation and reframes how we should think and talk about the Jewish Question. He explores the ways feeling and emotion have colored the lives of different people in social, political, and psycho-social dimensions. From Enlightenment constructions of rational humanism, to nineteenth-century colonialism, antisemitism and the racialization of Jews in Europe, to the construction of Judaism as a religion and the disavowal of racial categories in liberal secularism, Nahme asks after the enduring problem of race for Jewish identity, and for how Jews have remained haunted by the specter of race in the modern world.

Paul E. Nahme is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies at Brown University.

--Marshal Zeringue

"One (Un)Like the Other"

New from State University of New York Press: One (Un)Like the Other: Rethinking Ethics, Empathy, and Transcendence from Husserl to Derrida by Michael F. Andrews.

About the book, from the publisher:

One (Un)Like the Other responds to the question, "What are the conditions of possibility that make genuine knowledge of other persons--and, therefore, love--possible?" By providing an original interpretive framework for exploring ethics in relation to empathy and transcendence from multiple perspectives in continental philosophy, empathy is described as a trace of what remains essentially and irreducibly "other" in every act of givenness. The use of the phenomenological method places "Einfühlung theory" in its rich historical context, beginning with Husserl and the early phenomenologists and extending to contemporary issues that explore "otherness" in light of consciousness, gender, embodiment, community, intentionality, emotions, intersubjectivity, values, language, and apophatic discourse. The implications of recasting "empathy" in an interpretive and dialogical model of reciprocity envision new paradigms of understanding ethics as an infinite playing field. No longer subservient to metaphysics and ontology, empathy is described as an act of infinite concern, a "hermeneutics of suspicion" that transcends epistemological theory and ethical command. Drawing on Husserl, Scheler, Stein, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and others, this study presents an examination and expansion of empathy as an encounter with otherness in its most radical and transcendent forms.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Philosophy at the Gymnasium"

New from Cornell University Press: Philosophy at the Gymnasium by Erik Kenyon.

About the book, from the publisher:

Philosophy at the Gymnasium returns Greek moral philosophy to its original context—the gyms of Athens—to understand how training for the body sparked training for the mind. The result is an engaging inroad to Greek thought that wrestles with big questions about life, happiness, and education, while providing fresh perspectives on standing scholarly debates.

In Philosophy at the Gymnasium, Erik Kenyon reveals the egalitarian spirit of the ancient gym, in which clothes—and with them, social markers—are shed at the door, leaving individuals to compete based on their physical and intellectual merits alone. The work opens with Socratic dialogues set in gyms that call for reform in character education. It explores Plato's moral and political philosophy through the lens of mental and civic health. And it holds up Olympic victors as Aristotle's model for the life of happiness through training.

Visit Erik Kenyon's website.

Kenyon received his PhD from Cornell University in classics. He is a philosopher, musician, and weightlifter, who teaches Latin and humanities at Friends Academy, Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He is the author of Augustine and the Dialogue and a coauthor of Ethics for the Very Young.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Problem of Evil for Atheists"

New from Oxford University Press: The Problem of Evil for Atheists by Yujin Nagasawa.

About the book, from the publisher:

The problem of evil has long perplexed traditional theists: Why do terrible events, such as crimes, wars, and natural disasters, occur in a world believed to be created by an omnipotent and wholly good God? In The Problem of Evil for Atheists, Yujin Nagasawa offers a fresh perspective that seeks to transform the perennial philosophical debate on this matter.

The book contends that the problem of evil surpasses its conventional understanding, impacting not only traditional theists but also posing a challenge for atheists and other 'non-theists', including pantheists, axiarchists, and followers of Eastern religious traditions. Moreover, it posits that traditional theists, who typically embrace some form of supernaturalism, are better equipped to address the problem than naturalist atheists/non-theists because the only potentially successful response requires supernaturalism. Conversely, it suggests that if atheists/non-theists can develop a successful naturalist response, traditional theists can also adopt it. The volume concludes that traditional theists are better positioned than atheists/non-theists to grapple with the problem-an unexpected assertion, given that the problem of evil is normally viewed as an argument against traditional theism and in favour of atheism/non-theism.

The Problem of Evil for Atheists presents a comprehensive defence of a fundamentally new approach to tackling the age-old philosophical conundrum. By challenging the conventional perspective, it endeavours to reshape our understanding and interpretation of evil in a profound manner.

Visit Yujin Nagasawa's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dual Justice"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Dual Justice: America’s Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime by Anthony Grasso.

About the book, from the publisher:

A far-reaching examination of how America came to treat street and corporate crime so differently.

While America incarcerates its most marginalized citizens at an unparalleled rate, the nation has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. Dual Justice unearths the intertwined histories of these two phenomena and reveals that they constitute more than just modern hypocrisy.

By examining the carceral and regulatory states’ evolutions from 1870 through today, Anthony Grasso shows that America’s divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct.

Since then, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America’s legal system.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Muhammad in the Seminary"

New from NYU Press: Muhammad in the Seminary: Protestant Teaching about Islam in the Nineteenth Century by David D. Grafton.

About the book, from the publisher:

Uncovers what Christian seminaries taught about Islam in their formative years

Throughout the nineteenth century, Islam appeared regularly in the curricula of American Protestant seminaries. Islam was not only the focus of Christian missions, but was studied as part of the history of the Church as well as in the new field of comparative religions. Moreover, Arabic was taught as a cognate biblical language to help students better understand biblical Hebrew. Passages from the Qur’an were sometimes read as part of language instruction.

Christian seminaries were themselves new institutions in the nineteenth century. Though Islam had already been present in the Americas since the beginning of the slave trade, it was only in the nineteenth century that the American public became more aware of Islam and had increasing contact with Muslims. It was during this period that extensive trade with the Ottoman empire emerged and more feasible travel opportunities to the Middle East became available due to the development of the steamship.

Providing an in-depth look at the information about Islam that was available in seminaries throughout the nineteenth century, Muhammad in the Seminary examines what Protestant seminaries were teaching about this tradition in the formative years of pastoral education. In charting how American Christian leaders’ ideas about Islam were shaped by their seminary experiences, this volume offers new insight into American religious history and the study of Christian-Muslim relations.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Emotions of Conflict, Israel 1949-1967"

New from Oxford University Press: Emotions of Conflict, Israel 1949-1967 by Orit Rozin.

About the book, from the publisher:

In its early decades, Israel's citizens had to cope not only with security challenges, but also with the emotional burden that accompanied them. The book unpacks the history of citizens' emotions-an analysis of the reports about how they felt and of the emotional regime-the emotional repertoire designed by political leaders and cultural agents wishing to mold the feelings of Israeli citizens. Policymakers-Prime Minister and Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion first and foremost-sought to fortify the spirits of Israelis and to inculcate an emotional regime that would rise to the challenges of the new frontier state. This emotional regime imbued Israelis with a sense of moral rectitude and equipped them with tools to manage their fears. Most significantly, it met the human need for existential meaning in times of crisis, meaning that is essential for overcoming the fear of impending death. However, the effort to inculcate the emotional norms was Sisyphean and failed at times.

The perspective of the history of emotions leads to hitherto untapped and nuanced insights about the weaknesses and strengths of Israelis, and reveals new connections between identity, morality, state-sanctioned violence, politics, and law, along with a new understanding of the motivations behind policymakers' decisions.

Visit Orit Rozin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reckoning with the Devil"

New from LSU Press: Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory by Court Carney.

About the book, from the publisher:

Court Carney’s Reckoning with the Devil grapples with the troubled, complex legacy of Nathan Bedford Forrest―a slave trader, Confederate general, and prominent Klansman. More than a century after his death, Forrest’s image continues to resonate with certain groups and bear varied interpretations, reflecting the intricate interplay of history, memory, and a contested past. Carney explores how historical omissions and erasures continually reshape perceptions of Forrest as well as the Civil War.

Central to Forrest’s narrative is his involvement in the slave trade, a key to his ascent in the southern social hierarchy. Carney traces Forrest’s trajectory from a prosperous slave trader in Memphis to a politician and eventual military leader in the Confederacy during the Civil War. Forrest’s postwar years reveal his struggle to rebuild his life, leading him to engage in various economic ventures and eventually join the Ku Klux Klan. Carney argues that the slave trade, the Fort Pillow massacre, and his Klan affiliation were the fundamental elements shaping Forrest’s image. Those elements, although steeped in racism and white supremacy, were marked by an ambiguity and malleability that allowed Forrest to attract admirers as well as detractors as his image was memorialized in postwar white southern culture.

Carney covers distinct phases of Forrest’s memorialization, from the unveiling of statues in Memphis in 1905 to his representation in literature and media and the controversies surrounding his monuments in the 2010s. That history culminates with the removal of the Memphis statue in 2017, reflecting the evolving societal perspectives on symbols tied to racism. Forrest’s significance lies in his capacity to encompass conflicting narratives―hero and villain, rebel and patriot. Carney contends that understanding Forrest’s legacy is essential for comprehending the intricacies of the southern past and its enduring impact on American society. By exploring the fluidity of Forrest’s image, Carney’s work illuminates the nuanced interplay of history, memory, and the ongoing struggle to reckon with a tumultuous past.

Visit Court Carney's website.

The Page 99 Test: Cuttin’ Up.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fabricating Homeland Security"

New from Stanford University Press: Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel by Rhys Machold.

About the book, from the publisher:

Homeland security is rarely just a matter of the homeland; it involves the circulation and multiplication of policing practices across borders. Though the term "homeland security" is closely associated with the United States, Israel is credited with first developing this all-encompassing approach to domestic surveillance and territorial control. Today, it is a central node in the sprawling global homeland security industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, India emerged as a major growth market. Known as "India's 9/11" or simply "26/11," the attacks sparked significant public pressure to adopt "modern" homeland security approaches. Since 2008, India has become not only the single largest buyer of Israeli conventional weapons, but also a range of other surveillance technology, police training, and security expertise.

Pairing insights from science and technology studies with those from decolonial and postcolonial theory, Fabricating Homeland Security traces 26/11's political and policy fallout, concentrating on the efforts of Israel's homeland security industry to advise and equip Indian city and state governments. Through a focus on the often unseen and overlooked political struggles at work in the making of homeland security, Rhys Machold details how homeland security is a universalizing project, which seeks to remake the world in its image, and tells the story of how claims to global authority are fabricated and put to work.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Roots of Polarization"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Roots of Polarization: From the Racial Realignment to the Culture Wars by Neil A. O'Brian.

About the book, from the publisher:

A deeply researched account of how battles over civil rights in the 1960s shaped today’s partisan culture wars.

In the late twentieth century, gay rights, immigration, gun control, and abortion debates all burst onto the political scene, scrambling the parties and polarizing the electorate. Neil A. O’Brian traces the origins of today’s political divide on these issues to the 1960s when Democrats and Republicans split over civil rights. It was this partisan polarization over race, he argues, that subsequently shaped partisan fault lines on other culture war issues that persist to this day.

Using public opinion data dating to the 1930s, O’Brian shows that attitudes about civil rights were already linked with a range of other culture war beliefs decades before the parties split on these issues—and much earlier than previous scholarship realized. Challenging a common understanding of partisan polarization as an elite-led phenomenon, The Roots of Polarization argues politicians and interest groups, jockeying for power in the changing party system, seized on these preexisting connections in the mass public to build the parties’ contemporary coalitions.

Visit Neil A. O'Brian's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Revolutionary Warfare"

New from Cornell University Press: Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency by Terrence G. Peterson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Revolutionary Warfare investigates how efforts to counter a revolution could also be revolutionary. The Algerian War fractured the French Empire, destroyed the legitimacy of colonial rule, and helped launch the Third Worldist movement for the liberation of the Global South. By tracing how French generals, officers, and civil officials sought to counter Algerian independence with their own project of radical social transformation, Terrence G. Peterson reveals that the conflict also helped to transform the nature of modern warfare.

The French war effort was never defined solely by repression. As Peterson details, it also sought to fashion new forms of surveillance and social control that could capture the loyalty of Algerians and transform Algerian society. Hygiene and medical aid efforts, youth sports and education programs, and psychological warfare campaigns all attempted to remake Algerian social structures and bind them more closely to the French state. In tracing the emergence of such programs, Peterson reframes the French war effort as a project of armed social reform that sought not to preserve colonial rule unchanged, but to revolutionize it in order to preserve it against the global challenges of decolonization.

Revolutionary Warfare demonstrates how French officers' efforts to transform warfare into an exercise in social engineering not only shaped how the Algerian War unfolded from its earliest months, but also helped to forge a paradigm of warfare that dominated strategic thinking during the Cold War and after: counterinsurgency.

Visit Terrence G. Peterson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Prime Ministerial Court"

New from Oxford University Press: The Prime Ministerial Court: Conservative Statecraft in the Twenty-First Century by R. A. W. Rhodes.

About the book, from the publisher:

Court politics is about who in British government did what to whom, when, how, why, and with what consequences.

In The Prime Ministerial Court Rod Rhodes provides a thorough depiction of the court politics of the Conservative governments of the twenty-first century, namely the courts of David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson. Exploring specific topics, including the courtiers, the prime minister's craft, reshuffles, resignations, and leadership challenges, and the political games and feuds in the court between ministers, advisers, and civil servants, Rhodes concludes that the British government has a new Establishment in which the skills of 'knavery' abound. He finds evidence of betrayal, revenge, lying, scandals, and bullying with such machinations oiled by gossip, humour, and alcohol.

Analysing the everyday practice of the 'dark arts' by the British political and administrative elite, each chapter includes a short case study of the court in action, covering the education wars, the 2018 election, and the Covid-19 crisis. Each case illustrates the personal, electoral, and governmental consequences of court politics.

Rhodes warns that there are more and more knaves, decency is in decline, and British government needs 'rules for rulers'. Above all, he cautions citizens - 'beware, here be dragons'.

Visit R. A. W. Rhodes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue