"Unsilencing"

New from Cornell University Press: Unsilencing: The History and Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag by Lilia Topouzova.

About the book, from the publisher:

Unsilencing provides the first comprehensive study of Bulgaria's forced-labor camps, a network of repression that operated throughout the communist era from 1945 to 1989. Lilia Topouzova uncovers the hidden histories of these camps, often referred to as Bulgaria's "Little Siberia," where thousands were interned without trial, subjected to inhumane conditions, and silenced for decades.

Drawing on two decades of archival research, oral history interviews with survivors and perpetrators, and an array of primary sources, Topouzova reconstructs the harrowing reality of life behind barbed wire. She explores how the communist regime systematically used these camps to suppress dissent, target minority groups, and instill fear across the population. Unsilencing presents detailed accounts of key sites like the Belene and Lovech camps, revealing the brutalities endured by prisoners and the lasting scars these places left on Bulgarian society.

More than a historical recounting, Unsilencing examines the post-1989 period and how Bulgaria has grappled―or often failed to grapple―with its recent past. Topouzova assesses the country's efforts at transitional justice, including the short-lived truth commission and trials that sought to hold perpetrators accountable. She argues that the legacy of the gulag has been largely forgotten and deliberately obscured, leaving a vacuum in Bulgaria's collective memory that continues to affect its society and politics today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Concentration Camps: A Global History"

New from Oxford University Press: Concentration Camps: A Global History by Alan Kramer.

About the book, from the publisher:

A global and comprehensive history of a modern institution of inhumanity.

In popular perception concentration camps are synonymous with genocide and Nazi racial extermination. Yet concentration camps were and are a global phenomenon, not restricted to Nazi Germany, used at times even by democracies, with an astonishing range of functions.

Drawing together a wide range of multi-lingual archival research and synthesising a broad secondary literature, Alan Kramer provides here a comprehensive history of concentration camps, charting their first establishment at the beginning of the twentieth century on the colonial periphery, through their most extreme and inhuman instances in the mid-twentieth century, to their continued use today. Concentration camps are shown to be a truly transnational phenomenon that emerged both simultaneously (within and between imperial spheres―Britain, Spain, the USA, and Germany around 1900), and diachronically (from then to the First World War, the Gulag, and Nazi camps). Such camps existed (and exist) under a variety of regimes, often concomitant with empire-building by revolutionary dictatorships, as sites of genocide, mass murder, and performative violence, but also as central elements of utopian schemes of social and racial transformation. Integrating the perspective of perpetrators and the victims and contextualising them within the historiography of other carceral institutions, the book will reshape the way we think about concentration camps as part of modern civilization, past and present.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dream the Size of Freedom"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism by R. Joseph Parrott.

About the book, from the publisher:

How anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from the 1960s through the 1970s

Dream the Size of Freedom explores how anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from the 1960s through the 1970s and influenced American foreign policy as the Vietnam War drew to a close. These Portuguese African liberation movements, led by nationalists like Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral, built global solidarity networks to support their military and social challenges to empire while defending against Western intervention. US activists disillusioned with the Cold War came to see African self-determination as central to global campaigns for racial and economic justice. A broad coalition ranging from Black Power radicals to religious liberals mobilized against the North Atlantic alliance with Portugal. In the process, this grassroots movement helped define a New Left Internationalism that championed decentralized, multiracial organizing and a collaborative vision of US foreign policy to redress historic inequalities between Global North and South.

Drawing on more than fifty oral histories and research in government and activist archives on three continents in English, Portuguese, French, and Afrikaans, R. Joseph Parrott reconstructs the transnational anti-imperial network that injected Global South priorities into US political debates. Popular protests and informational campaigns led to collaborations with legislators eager to constrain the powerful executive branch. In 1976, this grassroots-legislative alliance halted Gerald Ford’s anti-communist intervention against the Soviet-backed government of newly independent Angola. This victory of New Left Internationalist ideas anticipated future anti-apartheid and Latin American peace movements while also fueling a conservative revival of Cold War containment. By exploring US engagement with the contested process of African decolonization, Dream the Size of Freedom highlights the origins of two contrasting visions of American foreign policy that defined debates over the country’s proper role in the Global South into the 1990s.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Worlds of Unfreedom"

New from Princeton University Press: Worlds of Unfreedom: West Central Africa in the Era of Global Abolition by Roquinaldo Ferreira.

About the book, from the publisher:

An African-centered account of the protracted battle to end the slave trade, connecting local and global histories

In Worlds of Unfreedom, Roquinaldo Ferreira recasts West Central Africa as a key battleground in the struggle to abolish the transatlantic slave trade between the 1830s and the 1860s. Ferreira foregrounds the experiences and agency of enslaved Africans, challenging Eurocentric narratives that marginalize African participation in abolition efforts. Drawing on extensive archival research across multiple continents, he shows how enslaved people actively resisted the oppressive systems that sought to commodify their lives. Doing so, he integrates microhistorical analysis with broader world history, exploring individual trajectories to unravel complex global phenomena. Worlds of Unfreedom bridges a crucial gap by connecting Atlantic and Indian Ocean histories, revealing how abolitionist measures often camouflaged new forms of labor exploitation and forced migration under emerging colonial regimes.

Ferreira’s analysis spans the globe, from Luanda, the kingdom of Kongo, and the Lunda Empire to Havana, Rio de Janeiro, New York City, and Réunion Island. He examines the South Atlantic as a space where politics and race-making were deeply intertwined, with ideas and identities crossing and recrossing the ocean. He considers Portugal’s strategic use of abolition efforts for territorial expansion, its impact on the kingdom of Kongo, and the intricate networks linking West Central Africa to Cuba and Brazil. With Worlds of Unfreedom, Ferreira shows how multiple actors, including Africans, built anti–slave trade politics from the margins. His nuanced, Africa-centered perspective on abolition highlights the resilience and contributions of enslaved Africans in shaping the course of history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bankers' Trust"

New from Cornell University Press: Bankers' Trust: How Social Relations Avert Global Financial Collapse by Aditi Sahasrabuddhe.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Bankers' Trust, Aditi Sahasrabuddhe reveals a crucial element behind the resolution of global financial crises: trust between central bank leaders.

Central bank cooperation during global financial crises has been anything but consistent. While some crises are arrested with extensive cooperation, others are left to spiral. Going beyond explanations based on state power, interests, or resources, Sahasrabuddhe argues that central bank cooperation—or the lack thereof—often boils down to ties of trust, familiarity, and goodwill between bank leaders. These personal relations influence the likelihood of access to ad hoc, bilateral arrangements with more favorable terms.

Drawing on archival evidence and elite interviews, Sahasrabuddhe uncovers just how critical interpersonal trust between central bankers has been in managing global financial crises. She tracks the emergence of such relationships in the interwar 1920s, how they helped prop up the Bretton Woods system in the 1960s, and how they prevented the 2008 global financial crisis from turning into another Great Depression. When traditional signals of credibility fell short during these periods of crisis and uncertainty, established ties of trust between central bank leaders mediated risk calculations, alleviated concerns, and helped innovate less costly solutions.

Sahasrabuddhe challenges the idea that central banking is purely apolitical and technocratic. She pinpoints the unique transnational power central bank leaders hold as unelected figures who nonetheless play key roles in managing states' economies. By calling attention to the influence personal relationships can have on whether countries sink or swim during crises, Bankers' Trust asks us to reconsider the transparency and democratic accountability of global financial governance today.

Visit Aditi Sahasrabuddhe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Emergency Powers and the Home Fronts in Britain and Germany during the First World War"

New from Oxford University Press: Emergency Powers and the Home Fronts in Britain and Germany during the First World War by André Keil.

About the book, from the publisher:

The First World War transformed modern politics. No example demonstrates this more powerfully than the enactment and use of emergency powers by all belligerents. Wartime governments passed extensive emergency legislation that allowed them to pursue their war efforts with little democratic scrutiny and legal restrictions. In Britain, the Defence of the Realm Act transferred law-making powers from Parliament to the government and suspended vital elements of the unwritten constitution. In Germany, the declaration of the state of siege meant that the military assumed executive powers on the home front. These powers were initially used to suppress dissent, establish censorship of the press, and combat espionage. Yet, by 1918, they had been extended to regulate almost any aspect of everyday life on the home front. Understanding the political and social dynamics on the home front is only possible when the crucial importance of these emergency powers is considered. The experience of life under a permanent state of exception during the war transformed the relationship between the state and its citizens. Yet it also marked the rise of the state of exception as a paradigm of rule.

Using Britain and Germany as examples of the wartime state of exception, André Keil offers a detailed analysis of the use of emergency powers during the war. By drawing on a wide range of archival sources, he explains the rise of this new paradigm of government and how it shaped politics in Britain and Germany well beyond the First World War. The book offers a wealth of local examples that explain how ideologies and perceptions of the 'enemy within' shaped the use of repressive emergency powers by politicians, police, and military. It also traces how the critique and resistance against these measures helped to establish civil liberties as a new field of political activism. In essence, Keil offers a unique perspective on German and British politics during the First World War and tests the notion of the war being a 'laboratory for the state of exception'.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Food Fight"

New from the University of California Press: Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World by Richard J. Sexton.

About the book, from the publisher:

Society's most basic challenge is arguably to produce and distribute enough food for its citizens. In 2023, 733 million people faced hunger and 2.3 billion were moderately or severely food insecure. Feeding a growing world population is becoming more difficult in the face of climate change, pest resistance to traditional treatments, and misguided government policies that limit how much food ends up on our plates. Policies to support biofuels, organic agriculture, local foods, and small farms and to oppose genetically modified foods all reduce food production on existing land. This leads to higher food prices, increased carbon emissions, and less natural habitat as cropland expands. Food Fight documents the challenges to adequately feeding the world in the twenty-first century and illustrates the ways in which contemporary food policies in the United States, Europe, and beyond imperil food security. Richard J. Sexton provides a window into the world of modern agriculture and food supply chains. He separates the wheat from the chaff to distinguish policies that will limit, or expand, the global food supply, and he explains how we can construct a food system that forestalls future hunger and environmental degradation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Journey North"

New from Oxford University Press: A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship by Louis P. Masur.

About the book, from the publisher:

A storied friendship between two of America's founders--one that endured for fifty years--and the roadtrip that forged it.

Between May 21 and June 16, 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison went on a trip together through Upstate New York and parts of New England on horseback. This "northern journey" came at a moment of tension for the new nation, one in whose founding these Virginians and political allies had played key roles. The Constitution was ratified and President Washington was in his first term of office. Whether the country could overcome regional and political differences and remain unified, however, was still very much in question. Hence why some observers at the time wondered whether this excursion into Federalist New England by the two most prominent southern Democratic-Republicans, both future presidents, had an ulterior motive.

Madison, maintained that the journey was for "health, recreation, and curiosity." He and Jefferson needed a break from their public responsibilities, so off they set. Along the way, they took notes on the ravages of the Hessian Fly, an insect that had been devastating wheat crops. While in Vermont, they focused on the sugar maple tree, which many hoped might offer a domestic alternative to slave-grown sugar cane imports. An encounter with a free Black farmer at Fort George resulted in a journal entry that illuminates their attitudes toward slavery and race. A meeting with members of the Unkechaug tribe on Long Island led to a vocabulary project that preoccupied Jefferson for decades, and which remains relevant today.

The Northern Journey was also about friendship. Madison later recalled that the trip made Jefferson and him "immediate companions," solidifying a bond with almost no peer in the annals of American history, one that thrived for fifty years. Jefferson declared at the end of his life, that his friendship with Madison had been "a source of constant happiness" to him. This book reveals the moment when it took hold.

Visit Louis P. Masur's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Clawing Back"

New from Stanford University Press: Clawing Back: Redistribution In Precarious Times by Deborah James.

About the book, from the publisher:

The impulse to redistribute wealth is said to be a tool to counter inequalities, applied by the state or society to curb the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation and free trade. In settings where previous political regimes are reformed, or toppled and replaced by new ones, redistribution can also be a policy specifically oriented at redress, one exercised at the formal level of policy. Drawing on a comparative ethnography in South Africa and the United Kingdom, Clawing Back explores how notions of reallocation and payout are intimately connected with those of compensation for a loss. Where financialization is accompanied by increased informalization, redistribution can equally involve the market as well as kinship and social networks. Drawing on a rich ethnography of the human relationships at the center of redistribution, Deborah James shows how borrowing can provide negotiation opportunities to wage earners and welfare beneficiaries alike: they make use of debt to constitute relations and futures, to engage with the state, to convert between commodified and non-commodified relationships. Rather than suggesting that financialization is serving either a totally negative or wholly beneficial purpose, James posits a different way of visualizing the relationship between the finance industry and the world of everyday needs.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Test, Measure, Punish"

New from NYU Press: Test, Measure, Punish: How the Threat of Closure Harms Students, Destroys Teachers, and Fails Schools by Erin Michaels.

About the book, from the publisher:

The risk of closure and repression in schools

In the last two decades, education officials have closed a rising number of public schools nationwide related to low performance. These schools are mainly located in neglected neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty. Despite this credible threat of closure, relatively few individual schools threatened with closure for low performance in the United States are actually shut down. Yet, as Erin Michaels argues, the looming threat is ever present. Test, Measure, Punish critically shifts the focus from school shutdowns to the more typical situation within these strained public schools: operating under persistent risk of closure.

Many K-12 schools today face escalating sanctions if they do not improve according to repressive state mandates, which, in turn, incentivize schools to put into place nonstop test drills and strict student conduct rules. Test, Measure, Punish traces how threats of school closure have distorted education to become more punitive which disproportionately impacts―even targets―Black and Latinx communities and substantially hurts student social development. This book addresses how these new punitive schooling conditions for troubled schools reproduce racial inequalities.

Michaels centers her research in a suburban upstate New York high school serving mainly working-class Black and Latinx students. She reveals a new model of schooling based on testing and security regimes that expands the carceral state, making the students feel dejected, criminalized, and suspicious of the system, their peers, and themselves. Test, Measure, Punish offers a new theory of schooling inequality and shows in vivid detail why state-led school reforms represent a new level of racialized citizenship in an already fragmented public education system.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Sad Citizen"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Sad Citizen: How Politics Is Depressing and Why It Matters by Christopher Ojeda.

About the book, from the publisher:

For many citizens, politics is depressing. How has this come to be the norm? And, how is it influencing democracy?

From rising polarization to climate change, today’s politics are leaving many Western democracies in the throes of malaise. While anger, anxiety, and fear are loud emotions that powerfully activate voters, depression is quiet, demobilizing, and less visible as a result. Yet its pervasiveness is cause for concern: after all, democracy should empower citizens.

In The Sad Citizen, Christopher Ojeda draws on wide-ranging data from the United States and beyond to explain how politics is depressing, why this matters, and what we can do about it. Integrating insights from political science, sociology, psychology, and other fields, The Sad Citizen exposes the unhappy underbelly of contemporary politics and offers fresh ideas to strengthen democracy and help citizens cope with the stress of politics.

Visit Christopher Ojeda's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lives and Deaths of Women in Ancient Pompeii"

New from the University of Texas Press: The Lives and Deaths of Women in Ancient Pompeii by Brenda Longfellow.

About the book, from the publisher:

A study of women’s lives in the public sphere of the ancient city of Pompeii.

Pompeii’s well-preserved remains provide a unique opportunity for the close study of ancient lives. Drawing on statues, inscriptions, graffiti, wall paintings, and the architecture of tombs, sanctuaries, houses, and public spaces, The Lives and Deaths of Women in Ancient Pompeii examines the public lives of women in Pompeii. Art historian Brenda Longfellow explores how historical women of all social backgrounds acted in public and exerted agency on behalf of themselves and others, ultimately finding that female initiatives in Pompeii were not only accepted but desired by the community to a greater extent than has previously been recognized.

Longfellow centers her study on a few key women—including the city’s most notable female patron, Eumachia—and uses them to examine female roles in postmortem commemorations, civic patronage and benefactions, commerce, the priesthood, and the home. By following these individuals, Longfellow examines women’s lives in Pompeii in both abstract and concrete ways, allowing readers to better understand their importance to the city and society. The result is a groundbreaking book that foregrounds the agency of women in everyday Pompeii.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Global Journey of Racism"

New from Stanford University Press: The Global Journey of Racism by Michelle Christian.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Global Journey of Racism, Michelle Christian provides a unified narrative of how the world's racial hierarchies came to be. Christian's story begins before the Ku Klux Klan, Nazi Germany, and South African Apartheid, tracing the historical lineage of white supremacy to the expansion of western, European empire. She uncovers the vast network of legal, political, economic, and social mechanisms—most potently, enslavement—that made up the original design for racialized knowledge, capitalist systems, and colonial management. Contemporary manifestations of this design may have new rhythms, beats, and faces, but they are all rooted in the modern hierarchy of global white supremacy and global anti-Blackness. Christian brings imperial history into conversation with the present, and places the racial mechanisms at work in distinct nations alongside each other, advancing a novel analysis of the global racial system. In doing so, she responds to scholarship on race and racism that emphasizes cultural specificity, and asserts the dominance of a modern world that, despite appeals to the contrary, remains brazenly, and without question, racist.

Michelle Christian is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Apocalyptic Authoritarianism"

New from Oxford University Press: Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power by Hanna E. Morris.

About the book, from the publisher:

As climate change brings devastation to all areas of the world, and U.S. journalists cover these threats more extensively, climate reporting needs to be evaluated. Media representations of the climate crisis are critical because they influence what responses are taken and policies enacted.

In Apocalyptic Authoritarianism, media scholar Hanna E. Morris reveals how national anxieties following the 2016 presidential election have shaped American news coverage of climate change in ways that severely limit how it has come to be known, imagined, and contended with. Looking at climate change reporting across prominent and ideologically diverse U.S. newspapers and magazines over the past decade, the book traces how news media create an illusion of control in the present through nostalgic and heroic stories of the past. Morris identifies a new mode of reactionary politics called "apocalyptic authoritarianism" to describe the post-2016 alignment of historically privileged figures united by a common enemy of the "new" New Left and a shared appeal to fears of "total crisis." Their antidemocratic paradigm portends national and planetary disarray if progressive social and climate justice "warriors" are not controlled at home and if "unruly masses" of climate migrants are not contained abroad.

Ultimately, Morris calls for a robust and inclusive form of climate journalism and politics to facilitate--and not impede--democratic and equitable responses to climate change.

Visit Hanna E. Morris's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Colony and the Company"

New from Princeton University Press: The Colony and the Company: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble by Malick W. Ghachem.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new account of how Haiti under French colonial rule became a violent sugar plantation state

In the early eighteenth century, France turned to its New World colonies to help rescue the monarchy from the wartime debts of Louis XIV. This short-lived scheme ended in the first global stock market crash, known as the Mississippi Bubble. Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was indelibly marked by the crisis, given its centrality in the slave-trading monopoly controlled by the French East Indies Company. Rising prices for enslaved people and devaluation of the Spanish silver supply triggered a diffuse rebellion that broke the company’s monopoly and paved the way for what planters conceived as “free trade.” In The Colony and the Company, Malick Ghachem describes how the crisis that began in financial centers abroad reverberated throughout Haiti. Beginning on the margins of white society before spreading to wealthy planters, the revolt also created political openings for Jesuit missionaries and people of color. The resulting sugar revolution, Ghachem argues, gave rise to an increasingly violent, militarized planter state from which the colony, and later Haiti, would never recover.

Ghachem shows that the wealthy planters who co-opted the rebellion were simultaneously locked in a showdown with maroon resistance. The conflict between the planters’ militant defense of their prerogatives and maroon rebellion laid the foundations for a brutal history of marginalization and immiseration. Haiti became a full-fledged plantation colony held together by a ruthless form of white supremacy and enslavement, triggering a cycle of escalating violence that led to the Haitian Revolution. Tragically, Haiti’s postrevolutionary future remained captive to the imperial sway of money and debt.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Women and the Jet Age"

New from Cornell University Press: Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants by Phil Tiemeyer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Women and the Jet Age is a global history of postwar aviation that examines how states nurtured airlines for competing political and economic goals during the Cold War. While previous histories almost exclusively stress US and Western European aviation progress, Phil Tiemeyer examines how smaller, poorer states in socialist Eastern Europe and in the postcolonial Global South utilized airlines of their own to forge rival pathways to modernization.

Part of this modernization involved norms for working women. Stewardesses at airlines around the globe encountered novel threats to their dignity as the Jet Age approached. By the late 1960s, stewardesses endured harsh objectification: High hemlines, tight uniforms, and raunchy marketing were touted as modern and liberated. These women, whether from the West, East, or South, forged their own pathways to achieve greater dignity at work. In Women and the Jet Age, Tiemeyer's global account of the rise of air travel and of early feminist strivings among stewardesses is one of the first histories to place such developments―political, economic, and feminist―in dialogue with each other.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Good Parents, Better Homes, and Great Schools"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Good Parents, Better Homes, and Great Schools: Selling Segregation before the New Deal by Karen Benjamin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Good Parents, Better Homes, and Great Schools examines how white residential developers, planning consultants, and their allies in government strategically replaced block-level segregation with segregation at the neighborhood level in New South cities such as Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Houston, Raleigh, and Winston-Salem. Going beyond the well-known Home Owners' Loan Corporation maps of the 1930s, Karen Benjamin traces segregation tactics back to the late nineteenth century, when this public-private partnership laid the groundwork for the nationwide segregation strategies codified by the New Deal.

This book links the tactics of residential and school segregation to prevailing middle-class ideas about what constitutes good parenting, ensuring the longevity of both practices. By focusing on efforts that specifically targeted parents, Benjamin not only adds a new dimension to the history of residential segregation but also helps explain why that legacy has been so difficult to undo.

Karen Benjamin is the Lester Brune and Joan Brune Endowed Chair of History at Elmhurst University.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone: Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem by Robert B. Keiter.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of how Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the world’s first national park, has become synonymous with nature conservation—and an examination of today’s challenges to preserve the region’s wilderness heritage.

For more than 150 years, the Yellowstone region—now widely known as the twenty-three million acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—has played a prominent role in the United States’ nature conservation agenda. In this book, Robert B. Keiter, an award-winning public land law and policy expert, traces the evolution and application of fundamental ecological conservation concepts tied to Yellowstone.

Keiter’s book highlights both the conservation successes and controversies connected with this storied region, which has been enmeshed in change. During the 1980s, leaders in Yellowstone embraced ecosystem management concepts to recover a dwindling grizzly bear population and to support wolf reintroduction. Since then, management policies in the region’s two national parks and adjacent national forests have largely followed suit, prioritizing ecosystem-level conservation over industrial activity. Groundbreaking efforts are currently afoot to protect elk, deer, and pronghorn migration corridors and to maintain the park’s bison population, effectively expanding the scope of regional conservation initiatives. But in the face of explosive human population growth and related development pressures, new efforts must also account for the region’s privately owned lands along with accelerating recreational activities that present quite different problems.

Indeed, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—extending across three states and twenty counties and embracing more than sixteen million acres of federal land as well as private and tribal lands —can only be characterized as a complex, jurisdictionally fragmented landscape. As Keiter makes clear, the quest for common ground among federal land managers, state officials, local communities, conservationists, ranchers, Indigenous tribes, and others is a vital, enduring task.

Exploring both notable conservation accomplishments and the ongoing challenges confronting this special place, Keiter’s book explains the many forces—scientific, political, economic, legal, cultural, climatic, and more—at work driving controversy and change across the region. But more than this, Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone shows us that the lessons gleaned from Yellowstone’s expansive nature conservation efforts are profoundly important for both the country and the world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Common Country"

New from Oxford University Press: A Common Country: Solidarity and the Making of American Democracy by Nathan Pippenger.

About the book, from the publisher:

As their democracy faces an array of crises Americans confront a recurring question: whether they really constitute a democratic “people” at all. Reactionaries promote a nostalgic ideal of American nationalism, while implying that many of their compatriots don't belong to their imagined nation. In response, many egalitarians are suspicious of appeals to shared civic belonging―seeing them as outmoded, intolerant, and potentially dangerous.

In A Common Country, Nathan Pippenger shows that for American democracy to flourish, egalitarians must not reject the ideal of shared American peoplehood but instead put forth their own distinctive claim to its meaning. Pippenger shows that at key periods―from Reconstruction through the Progressive Era, New Deal, and Civil Rights era―democratic reformers realized that the transformative changes they sought would succeed only if the meaning of “We the People” expanded to include everyone in the country. Pippenger's analysis of this tradition shows not only that democracy requires solidarity but also that solidarity need not presuppose any common trait other than the fact of shared political membership. Examining contemporary problems of nativism, racial injustice, and ascendant oligarchy, A Common Country weaves together history and normative political theory to intervene in urgent debates over nationalism, citizenship, and the fate of democracy. Its distinctive argument is that the solidarity needed to achieve American democracy is not awaiting discovery in some elusive form of unity―rather, it must be consciously cultivated among citizens who share no more, and no less, than a common country.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Birth Behind Bars"

New from NYU Press: Birth Behind Bars: The Carceral Control of Pregnant Women in Prison by Rebecca M. Rodriguez Carey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Pregnant women's experiences in prison

Four percent of incarcerated women―more than three thousand―are pregnant in US prisons each year, yet little information is known about their pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and motherhood experiences. In Birth Behind Bars, Rebecca M. Rodriguez Carey draws on in-depth interviews with women who were once pregnant in prisons in the heart of the Midwest to provide a rare, intimate portrait into the intersection of motherhood and incarceration.

Using a reproductive-justice framework and narrative accounts, Rodriguez Carey shows how the prison system works alongside other carceral systems, such as the medical system and the child welfare system, to regulate and control women. She reveals how their incarceration goes beyond the function of criminal punishment, threatening both maternal and fetal health and the well-being of families. Birth Behind Bars offers an evocative account of how these powerful carceral systems collectively disrupt entire families and communities during pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period, including long after women are released from prison.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Regime Question"

New from Princeton University Press: The Regime Question: Foundations of Democratic Governance in Europe and the United States by Amel Ahmed.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ongoing struggles over core principles of democratic governance

The regime question—often boiled down to “democracy or autocracy?”—has been central to democratic politics from the start. This has entailed not only fights over the extent of the franchise but also, crucially, ongoing struggles over core principles of democracy, the “rules of the game.” In this timely study, Amel Ahmed examines the origins and development of the regime question in Western democracies and considers the implications for regime contention today. She argues that battles over the regime question were so foundational and so enduring that they constitute a dimension of politics that polarized political opponents across the regime divide.

Ahmed investigates four historical cases in the study of democratic development: the United Kingdom between the Reform Act of 1832 and World War II (1832–1939), Imperial and Weimar–era Germany (1876–1933), the French Third Republic (1870–1939), and the United States before World War II (1789–1939). Focusing on legislative politics as an essential site of democratic governance and key to understanding long-term democratic endurance, she shows that when the regime question became salient, it hindered the formation of viable legislative coalitions along the left-right policy spectrum. This failure opened the door to executive encroachment, destabilizing the regime. Ahmed shows that the resurgence of the regime question today is not, as is often assumed, a break with prior trajectories of political development but a new instantiation of battles fought in previous eras.

Visit Amel Ahmed's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea"

New from Oxford University Press: Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (1381–1517) by Stefan K. Stantchev.

About the book, from the publisher:

The later Middle Ages and the early modern period were important and overlapping historical moments for both Venice and the Ottoman Empire, yet the two--both the periods themselves and the Republic and Empire more generally--have often been considered in isolation. Seeking to understand better this interrelated transition, Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea offers for the first time an integrated view of trade and sea power that transcends the overworn paradigms of trade--the Ottoman territories as a land of opportunity--and crusade--the Ottomans as a military threat--to uncover the complex interplay between economic structures and political decision making that shaped the period between the end of Venice's most devastating war with Genoa in 1381 and the Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1517.

Drawing on the full range of available Venetian sources, as well as Ottoman, Genoese, Florentine, and papal materials, the book clarifies the trajectory of Venice's trade with the Ottomans, the evolution of Venetian defensive measures in the Balkans and of Venetian naval warfare, Venice's attempt to aid the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the dynamics of the Venetian-Ottoman war of 1463-79, and the interconnections between Venice's social and political structures and its Italian and Ottoman politics. In so doing, it offers a comprehensive analysis of Venetian-Ottoman relations, ranging from macro to micro scales, and across matters of economic, political, and military history. From a broader Mediterranean perspective, this highlights the intersections of political, social, economic, and technological factors behind accelerated historical change in the late medieval and early modern periods and offers a case study in the ways in which a Mediterranean elite maintained its privileged position over time.

The Page 99 Test: Spiritual Rationality.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Quest for Individual Freedom"

New from Cambridge University Press: The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History by Moritz Föllmer.

About the book, from the publisher:

What does it mean to see oneself as free? And how can this freedom be attained in times of conflict and social upheaval? In this ambitious study, Moritz Föllmer explores what twentieth-century Europeans understood by individual freedom and how they endeavoured to achieve it. Combining cultural, social, and political history, this book highlights the tension between ordinary people's efforts to secure personal independence and the ambitious attempts of thinkers and activists to embed notions of freedom in political and cultural agendas. The quest to be a free individual was multi-faceted; no single concept predominated. Men and women articulated and pursued it against the backdrop of two world wars, the expanding power of the state, the constraints of working life, pre-established moral norms, the growing influence of America, and uncertain futures of colonial rule. But although claims to individual freedom could be steered and stymied, they could not, ultimately, be suppressed.

Moritz Föllmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He has particular interests in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and concepts of individuality and urbanity in twentieth-century Europe. His publications include Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (2013), Culture in the Third Reich (2020), and, as co-editor, Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany (2022).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Against Abandonment"

New from Stanford University Press: Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest by Jennifer Jihye Chun and Ju Hui Judy Han.

About the book, from the publisher:

Across the world, protest has become a much-debated tactic in struggles against inequality, political corruption, and ecological disaster. In South Korea, protest is a ubiquitous and essential form of political expression. In 1987, mass protests forced reforms that led to democratizing government. In 2017, the Candlelight movement removed the sitting president. Beyond these spectacular national protests, Korean workers and minority groups regularly turn to protest to express their grievances and assert their rights. Based on long-term ethnographic research with labor and social movement activists, Against Abandonment is at once a chronicle of the life-and-death character of protesting precarity in South Korea and a searing examination of repertoires of solidarity for upending injustice. Protest forms such as long-term encampments, life-threatening hunger strikes, and perilous high-altitude occupations are agonizing to perform and to witness but often powerful as catalysts for change. Chun and Han situate South Korean protest in transnational context to demonstrate how the struggles of South Korean workers are inextricably tied to the globalized conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Building on the work of abolitionist feminist thinkers, the book theorizes protest as a political form with far-reaching resonance across history and geography, and underscores the significance of collective survival, self-determination, and emancipatory transformation.

Jennifer Jihye Chun is a sociologist and Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ju Hui Judy Han is a geographer and Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Edge of the Law"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo by Jacinto Cuvi.

About the book, from the publisher:

How street vendors tangle with the law in São Paulo, Brazil.

With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might sell you a number of delights and conveniences familiar to city dwellers—from cold water bottles while you’re sitting in traffic to a popsicle from a cart on a summer afternoon in the park. Such vendors form a significant share of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil, but their ubiquity belies perpetual struggle. Some have the right to practice their trade; others do not. All of them strive to make it—or stay afloat.

In The Edge of the Law, sociologist Jacinto Cuvi introduces us to the world of street vendors and teases out the relationship between the construction of legality and the experience of citizenship. As São Paulo’s city government undertakes a large-scale plan to cancel street vending licenses and evict street vendors, Cuvi reveals how the rights of informal workers can be revoked or withheld and how the lines can be redrawn between work that is “legal” and work that takes place under constant fear of law enforcement. Alongside the mechanics of disenfranchisement, Cuvi captures the lived experience of criminalization, dissecting the distribution of (shallow) rights among vendors who continually reinvent strategies to eke out a living while dealing with the constraints and pressures of informal citizenship at the edge of the law.

Visit Jacinto Cuvi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Subjects of the Sun"

New from Duke University Press: Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism by Myles Lennon.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun, solar power is no less likely to exploit marginalized communities than dirtier forms of energy. Drawing from ethnographic research on clean energy corporations and community solar campaigns in New York City, Lennon argues that both groups overlook solar’s extractive underside because they primarily experience energy from the sun in the virtual world of the cloud. He shows how the material properties of solar technology—its shiny surfaces, decentralized spatiality, and modularity—work closely with images, digital platforms, and quantitative graphics to shape utopic visions in which renewable energy can eradicate the constitutive tensions of racial capitalism. As a corrective to this virtual world, Lennon calls for an equitable energy transition that centers the senses and sensibilities neglected by screenwork: one’s haptic care for their local environment; the full-bodied feel of infrastructural labor; and the sublime affect of the sun.

Visit Myles Lennon's website.

Lennon is an environmental anthropologist, Dean’s Assistant Professor of Environment & Society and Anthropology at Brown University, and a former sustainable energy policy practitioner.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Gifted Children in Britain and the World"

New from Oxford University Press: Gifted Children in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945 by Jennifer Crane.

About the book, from the publisher:

The idea that a child is intellectually 'gifted' has a social and cultural history. This book analyses that social history at multiple scales, and makes the 'voices' of the 'gifted' young themselves central through examination of their poetry, letters, and life-writing. In daily encounters, those labelled 'gifted' sometimes loved this label, and felt special in comparison to peers at school and siblings at home.

For others, 'gifted' was a silly or embarrassing label, and many questioned the idea of separating off young people in terms of intelligence, as well as the specific forms of testing being used. Ideas of the 'gifted' child also reshaped family lives -- parents dedicated time to providing special leisure spaces for those thought of as 'gifted', running them in their own homes and taking their children significant distances to spend time with others that were also 'gifted'.

Voluntary organisations were critical here, as the network through which young people and adults encountered the term, 'gifted', and lived and created it relationally, through interactions with one another. Voluntary organisations, looking to gain attention and visibility, also critically shaped the idea that the 'gifted' young were elites of 'the future', central to answering challenges of economic decline, global warfare, or humanitarian aid. The hopes placed on 'gifted' children between the 1960s and the 1990s were often sky high -- yet many 'gifted' young still felt that the community 'wasted' their talents, and did not support them. This book, then, provides new perspectives on the tensions between elitism and equality in modern Britain. It also offers vivid stories of optimism, hope, disappointment, and criticism, in which young people themselves play a central role.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Anatomy of Boredom"

New from Oxford University Press: The Anatomy of Boredom by Andreas Elpidorou.

About the book, from the publisher:

Boredom is a common human experience. It may strike us as straightforward―a mere absence or lack, an emotional emptiness of sorts―yet it is anything but simple. It is complicated: personal and social, biological and cultural, both ever-changing and constant. It can spur action, both productive and harmful. It affects us differently based on our social identity and standing. Boredom is both a mirror of the complexities of human existence and a cause of them.

In The Anatomy of Boredom, Andreas Elpidorou offers a groundbreaking examination of this ubiquitous yet enigmatic dimension of human existence, illuminating its profound influence on our personal and social lives. Through interdisciplinary analysis, careful argumentation, and captivating insights, Elpidorou presents a functional theory of boredom, which understands and individuates boredom in terms of its role in our mental, behavioral, and social existence. This theory provides a compelling synthesis of existing research, connects the present of boredom to its history, and allows us to apply our knowledge of boredom to relatively unexplored domains, such as its relationship to the good life, self-regulation and self-control, poverty and capitalism, advancements in AI, animal emotions, and even aesthetics and art appreciation. Ultimately, the study of boredom is revealed to be more than just an analysis of an intricate and important affective experience; it is also shown to be an insightful investigation into the complexities of human (and even non-human) existence.

Visit Andreas Elpidorou's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Life at a Distance"

New from Cornell University Press: Life at a Distance: Medicine and Nationalism in India's Pan-African e-Network by Vincent Duclos.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Life at a Distance, Vincent Duclos recounts the story of the Pan-African e-Network. Branded as "India's gift to the world," and as a "shining example of South-South cooperation," the Pan-African e-Network was an exceptionally ambitious project. Between 2009 and 2017 the network used satellite technology to connect hospitals across Africa with hospitals in India, providing medical education and delivering health care for patients at a distance. Duclos shows how, by accelerating the flow of expertise across continents, the network also created connected enclaves, at once commercial, infrastructural, and medical. Life at a Distance is the story of a project that, Duclos suggests, acted as a medium for speculation about the future―about medical markets, the nation, South-South relations, and a new world order beyond Western-centric scripts.

Vincent Duclos is Associate Professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His ethnographic research focuses on global capitalism, digital technology, and medicine, and the many ways they are entangled.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Omnivore’s Deception"

New from NYU Press: The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves by John Sanbonmatsu.

About the book, from the publisher:

Offers the most powerful case yet for ending our exploitation of animals for food

Millions of Americans see themselves as "conflicted omnivores," worrying about the ethical and environmental implications of their choice to eat animals. Yet their attempts to justify their choices only obscure the truth of the matter: in John Sanbonmatsu’s view, killing and eating animals is unethical, regardless of whether they are "free range" or factory farmed. Shattering the conventional wisdom around the meat economy, he reframes the question of animal agriculture from one of "sustainability" to one of existential and moral purpose, presenting a powerful case for the total abolition of the animal economy. In a rejoinder to Michael Pollan and other critics who have told us that we can have our meat and our consciences, too, he shows why "humane meat" is always a contradiction in terms.

The Omnivore’s Deception provides a deeply observed philosophical meditation on the nature of our relationship with animals. Peeling back the myriad layers of myth, falsehoods, and bad faith that keep us eating meat, the book offers a novel perspective on our troubled relations with animals in the food economy. The problem with raising and killing animals for food isn't just that it's "bad for the environment,” but the wrong way to live a human life.

A tour de force of moral philosophy and cultural critique, The Omnivore's Deception will change the way we think about meat, animals, and human purpose.

Visit John Sanbonmatsu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Happy Meat"

New from Stanford University Press: Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea by Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, Emily Huddart, and Merin Oleschuk.

About the book, from the publisher:

North Americans love eating meat. Despite the increased awareness of the meat industry's harms–violence against animals, health problems, and associations with environmental degradation–the rate of meat eating hasn't changed significantly in recent years. Instead, what has emerged is an uncomfortable paradox: a need to square one's values with the behaviors that contradict those values. Using a large-scale, multidimensional, and original dataset, Happy Meat explores the thoughts and emotions that underpin our moral decision-making in this meat paradox. Conscientious meat-eaters turn to the notion of "happy meat" to make sense of their behaviors by consuming meat they see as more healthy, ethical, and sustainable. Happy meat might be labeled grass fed, free-range, antibiotic free, naturally raised, or humane. The people who produce and consume it, together, make up the complex landscape of conscientious meat-eating in modern Western societies. The discourse of happy meat ultimately may not be a sufficient response to all the critiques of meat eating, rife as it is with contradictions. However, it offers a powerful case for understanding how moral boundaries and notions of the 'good eater' are constructed through negotiations of values, identity, and status.

Josée Johnston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on food, gender, culture, and politics. She is the co-author, with Shyon Baumann, of Foodies (2015) and, with Kate Cairns, of Food and Femininity (2015). Shyon Baumann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His work addresses questions of evaluation, legitimacy, status, classification, and inequality. Past book projects include Hollywood Highbrow (2007). Emily Huddart is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She is an environmental sociologist with a focus on consumer attitudes and behaviors. She is the author of Eco-Types (2022). Merin Oleschuk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Mouse in a Cage"

New from NYU Press: A Mouse in a Cage: Rethinking Humanitarianism and the Rights of Lab Animals by Carrie Friese.

About the book, from the publisher:

Questions the treatment of laboratory animals in biomedical research

Laboratory animals are often used to develop medical treatments: vaccines, antibiotics, and organ transplants have all relied upon animal testing to ensure safety and success for human benefit. Yet the relationship between the scientific community's dependence on laboratory animals and the recognition of the need to treat these animals with respect and compassion has given rise to a profound tension.

As animals are increasingly understood to have rights and autonomy, Carrie Friese posits that, while care and compassion for a distant other who suffers are central to humanitarianism, the idea of a distant other itself, which has shaped work with laboratory animals both historically and today, has enacted forms of highly problematic paternalism, creating a double bind. Focusing on the lives of laboratory mice and rats in the United Kingdom, and on the people who take care of, and often kill, these animals, Friese gives the name of “more-than-human humanitarianism” to contradictory practices of suffering and compassion, killing and sacrifice, and compassion and consent that she witnessed in a variety of animal facilities and laboratories.

Friese proposes a new approach to the treatment of laboratory animals that recognizes the interconnectedness of all species and how human actions impact the welfare of other species and the planet as a whole. A Mouse in a Cage is an essential contribution to the ongoing conversation about the ethical treatment of animals.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Protestant Relics in Early America"

New from Oxford University Press: Protestant Relics in Early America by Jamie L. Brummitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Protestant Relics in Early America, Jamie L. Brummitt upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. Brummitt chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered around collecting supernatural memory objects associated with dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends. These objects materialized the real physical presences of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth.

As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life--including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people--sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington's Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, post-mortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women's education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife.

In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, Brummitt demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather than diminished embodied presence. Moreover, Brummitt reveals how the secular historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down. This book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early American history, religion, politics, art, and popular culture.

Visit Jamie L. Brummitt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Maccabee"

New from Princeton University Press: American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews by Andrew Porwancher.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major biography of a mesmerizing statesman whose complex bond with the Jewish people forever shaped their lives—and his legacy

A scion of the Protestant elite, Theodore Roosevelt was an unlikely ally of the waves of impoverished Jewish newcomers who crowded the docks at Ellis Island. Yet from his earliest years he forged ties with Jews never before witnessed in a president. American Maccabee traces Roosevelt’s deep connection with the Jewish people at every step of his dazzling ascent. But it also reveals a man of contradictions whose checkered approach to Jewish issues was no less conflicted than the nation he led.

As a rising political figure in New York, Roosevelt barnstormed the Lower East Side, giving speeches to packed halls of Jewish immigrants. He rallied for reform of the sweatshops where Jewish laborers toiled for pitiful wages in perilous conditions. And Roosevelt repeatedly venerated the heroism of the Maccabee warriors, upholding those storied rebels as a model for the American Jewish community. Yet little could have prepared him for the blood-soaked persecution of Eastern European Jews that brought a deluge of refugees to American shores during his presidency. Andrew Porwancher uncovers the vexing challenges for Roosevelt as he confronted Jewish suffering abroad and antisemitic xenophobia at home.

Drawing on new archival research to paint a richly nuanced portrait of an iconic figure, American Maccabee chronicles the complicated relationship between the leader of a youthful nation and the people of an ancient faith.

Visit Andrew Porwancher's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Devotion in Motion"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Devotion in Motion: Pilgrimage in Modern Mexico by Edward Wright-Ríos.

About the book, from the publisher:

A study of contemporary pilgrimage through the elastic history of a shrine in Oaxaca, Mexico.

For many, pilgrimage conjures ideas about ancient traditions and somber journeys of self-discovery—an escape from modern life. In Devotion in Motion, Edward Wright-Ríos argues that we misunderstand pilgrimage (past and present) if we ignore its dynamic relationship with the rhythms of daily life and community.

Through the story of a centuries-old, ever-changing Catholic shrine to Our Lady of Juquila in Oaxaca, Mexico, Wright-Ríos reveals how tradition, innovation, marketing, and devotion coexist and interact in pilgrimage. Devotees, he shows, are not dissuaded by the embeddedness of the sacred site in the complexities, hierarchies, or conflicts of their lives. In fact, the truckers, accountants, and health-care workers we meet in this book actively seek new resources (including social media) to aid and share their devotion. Part microhistory, part ethnography, Devotion in Motion is a celebration of pilgrimage as a living experience in every generation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rebuilding New Orleans"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Rebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era by Sarah Fouts.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Central American and Mexican immigrants arrived in New Orleans to help clean up and rebuild. When federal relief services overlooked the needs of immigrant-led construction and cleanup crews as part of post-Katrina mass feeding strategies, street food stands and taco trucks stepped in to ensure food security for these workers. Many of these food vendors settled in the city over the next decade, opening restaurants and other businesses. Yet, in a city experiencing whitewashed redevelopment, new immigrants were frequently pitted against Black poor and working-class New Orleanians for access to housing and other resources.

During Fouts’s five years as a volunteer with the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, she came to know and interview the day laborers, food workers, culture producers, and community organizers whose stories shape this book. Her work reveals how, after the storm, immigrant communities have culturally and politically reshaped New Orleans and its suburbs. Fouts also highlights how immigrants forged multiracial solidarities to foster inclusive change at the local level. By connecting migration, labor, and food, Rebuilding New Orleans centers human experiences to illustrate how immigrant and established communities of color resisted criminalization and racial capitalism to create a more just New Orleans.

Visit Susan Fouts's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Absolute Ethical Life"

New from Stanford University Press: Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx by Michael Lazarus.

About the book, from the publisher:

Karl Marx gave us not just a critique of the political economy of capital but a way of confronting the impoverished ethical quality of life we face under capitalism. Interpreting Marx anew as an ethical thinker, Absolute Ethical Life provides crucial resources for understanding how freedom and rational agency are impacted by a social world formed by value under capitalism, with consequences for philosophy today. Michael Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in close dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. Lazarus traces the ethical and political dimensions of Marx's work missed by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, two of the most profound critics of modern politics and ethics. Ultimately, the book claims that Marx's value-form theory is both a continuation of Aristotelian and Hegelian themes and at the same time his most distinctive theoretical achievement. In this normative interpretation of Marx, Lazarus integrates recent moral philosophy with a historically specific analysis of capitalism as a social form of life. He challenges contemporary political and economic theory to insist that any conception of modern life needs to account for capitalism. With a robust critique of capitalism derived from the determinations of what Marx calls the "form of value," Lazarus argues for an ethical life beyond capital.

Visit Michael Lazarus's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What Does It Mean to Be Kazakhstani?"

New from Oxford University Press: What Does It Mean to Be Kazakhstani?: Power, Identity and Nation-Building by Diana T. Kudaibergen.

About the book, from the publisher:

In early 2022, protests rocked Kazakhstan. Initially peaceful demonstrations soon turned violent after brutal government crackdowns, leaving at least 238 dead during "Bloody January". But despite fears that Kazakhstan might split along ethno-linguistic lines, ethnicity played little role in the unrest: deep socio- economic problems and anti-regime grievances pushed protestors onto the streets.

More than thirty years since declaring independence, multi-ethnic Kazakhstan is still grappling with its nationhood. While secessionist movements provoked ethnic conflicts, territorial disputes and civil wars across the former USSR, Kazakhstan developed a relatively stable inter-ethnic policy, and predicted Russo-Kazakh tensions largely failed to materialize. Analyzing the multiple narratives, actors and often contradictory feelings of national belonging in post-1991 Kazakhstan, Diana T. Kudaibergen investigates why Kazakhstani nation-building is so unusual. Has Kazakh society found a solution to divisive ethno-nationalism? How have ordinary citizens shaped their identities? And how will Moscow's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which has led to widespread Russian immigration into Kazakhstan, impact inter-ethnic dynamics?

Kudaibergen builds on unpublished archival materials and hundreds of interviews to explore the "hybrid" nature of nation-building in this complex country. While regime elites promote a top-down civic identity, domestic unrest and pluralistic opposition movements are once again transforming the category "Kazakhstani".

--Marshal Zeringue