"Young and Undocumented"

New from NYU Press: Young and Undocumented: Political Belonging in Uncertain Times by Julia Albarracín.

About the book, from the publisher:

The experiences of DACA recipients

The children of immigrants who arrive in the United States each year sometimes grow up without any knowledge of their undocumented status and the risks it poses. In this timely and important book, Julia Albarracín explores the lives of undocumented immigrant youth with a focus on the unique experiences of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and DREAMers in the United States.

Drawing on interviews and legal research, Albarracín shows us how the precarity surrounding the youth’s DACA status impacts their sense of political identity and belonging, particularly as Republican politicians target legal protections provided to them under DACA and the DREAM Act. The author examines how changes in immigration policies expose undocumented youth to constant ups and downs, leaving them in a limbo between deportation and integration into society, and limiting their social, economic, and political opportunities for advancement.

Albarracín shows us how DREAMers confront―and fight to overcome―barriers in their lives. Young and Undocumented explores how undocumented youth in the United States navigate their identity in the only country they know as home, and how they come-of-age without a path to citizenship.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Free Gifts"

New from Princeton University Press: Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature by Alyssa Battistoni.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely new critique of capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.

Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature’s gifts.

Visit Alyssa Battistoni's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Trade in War"

New from Cornell University Press: Trade in War: Economic Cooperation across Enemy Lines by Mariya Grinberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Trade in War is an urgent, insightful study of a puzzling wartime phenomenon: states doing business with their enemies.

Trade between belligerents during wartime should not occur. After all, exchanged goods might help enemies secure the upper hand on the battlefield. Yet as history shows, states rarely choose either war or trade. In fact, they frequently engage in both at the same time.

To explain why states trade with their enemies, Mariya Grinberg examines the wartime commercial policies of major powers during the Crimean War, the two World Wars, and several post-1989 wars. She shows that in the face of two competing imperatives―preventing an enemy from increasing its military capabilities, and maintaining its own long-term security through economic exchange―states at war tailor wartime commercial policies around a product's characteristics and war expectations. If a product's conversion time into military capabilities exceeds the war's expected length, then trade in the product can occur, since the product will not have time to affect battlefield outcomes. If a state cannot afford to jeopardize the revenue provided by the traded product, trade in it can also occur.

Grinberg's findings reveal that economic cooperation can thrive even in the most hostile of times―and that interstate conflict might not be as easily deterred by high levels of economic interdependence as is commonly believed. Trade in War compels us to recognize that economic ties between states may be insufficient to stave off war.

Visit Mariya Grinberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Faith and Fear"

New from Oxford University Press: Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War since 1945 by Gregory A. Daddis.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this groundbreaking reflection on America's relationship with war in the modern era, Gregory A. Daddis explores the deep-seated tension between faith in and fear of war that has shaped US grand strategy and helped militarize US foreign policy with great costs at home and abroad.

How have Americans conceptualized and understood the "promise and peril" of war since 1945? And how have their ideas and attitudes led to the ever-increasing militarization of US foreign policy since the end of World War II?

In a groundbreaking reassessment of the long Cold War era, historian Gregory A. Daddis argues that ever since the Second World War's fateful conclusion, faith in and fear of war became central to Americans' thinking about the world around them. With war pervading nearly all aspects of American society, an interplay between blind faith and existential fear framed US policymaking and grand strategy, often with tragic results. These inherent tensions--an unwavering trust and confidence in war coupled with a fear that nearly all national security threats, foreign or domestic, are existential ones--have shaped Americans' relationship with war that persists to the current day.

A sweeping history, Faith and Fear makes a forceful argument by examining the tensions between Americans' overreaching faith in war as a foreign policy tool and their overwhelming fear of war as a destructive force.

The Page 99 Test:Westmoreland's War.

The Page 99 Test: Withdrawal.

The Page 99 Test: Pulp Vietnam.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Waning Crescent"

New from Yale University Press: Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam by Faisal Devji.

About the book, from the publisher:

A compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor

Until the nineteenth century, Islam was variously understood as a set of beliefs and practices. But after Muslims began to see their faith as an historical actor on the world stage, they needed to narrate Islam’s birth anew as well as to imagine its possible death. Faisal Devji argues that this change, sparked by the crisis of Muslim sovereignty in the age of European empire, provided a way of thinking about agency in a global context: an Islam liberated from the authority of kings and clerics had the potential to represent the human race itself as a newly empirical reality.

Ordinary Muslims, now recognized as the privileged representatives of Islam, were freed from traditional forms of Islamic authority. However, their conception of Islam as an impersonal actor in history meant that it could not be defined in either religious or political terms. Its existence as a civilizational and later ideological subject also deprived figures like God and the Prophet of their theological subjectivities while robbing the Muslim community of its political agency. Devji illuminates this history and explores its ramifications for the contemporary Muslim world.

The Page 99 Test: The Impossible Indian.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Everyday Futures"

New from Stanford University Press: Everyday Futures: Language as Survival for Indigenous Youth in Diaspora by Stephanie Canizales and Brendan H. O'Connor.

About the book, from the publisher:

Despite increasing attention on unaccompanied Central American youth migration to the United States, little empirical research has examined the crucial role of language in the incorporation process, particularly for Indigenous youth. Drawing on the perspectives of Maya (primarily K'iche')-speaking Guatemalan youth, Everyday Futures explores their experiences of language socialization in the broader Los Angeles immigrant community. Stephanie L. Canizales and Brendan H. O'Connor trace the factors that were most important to their quest for well-being and belonging across Guatemalan and American societies. Coming from contexts where Maya languages were stigmatized, these youth's migration journeys and early years after arrival were characterized by what they called "preparation" and "adaptation," processes through which they actively sought the linguistic and social expertise needed to promote their long-term survival in the US. While many faced struggles, some were able to achieve social and economic mobility, which instilled in them a sensibility of survival that enabled them to advocate for more recently arrived Maya youth and the maintenance of Maya language and culture. This book sheds important light on the dynamic process of "future-making" for Indigenous youth and yields rich insights into the role of language in creating hope in the diaspora.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Money Signal"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Money Signal: How Fundraising Matters in American Politics by Danielle M. Thomsen.

About the book, from the publisher:

A data-rich, eye-opening look at how, when, and why political fundraising is consequential.

Over the last two decades, the number of competitive congressional races has declined precipitously. Yet candidates and officeholders dial for more and more dollars each election, and they do so earlier and earlier in the campaign cycle.

In The Money Signal, Danielle M. Thomsen offers a new perspective on the role of money in politics. She shows that fundraising matters because it is widely used as an indicator of a candidate’s viability and strength, which shapes subsequent donations, dropout decisions, media attention, and rewards in office. Put simply, money is a focal point that candidates, donors, journalists, and party leaders rally around. For candidates, fundraising is a highly public form of self-presentation that pays dividends long before the election and well after the votes are cast.

Thomsen draws on comprehensive fundraising data that spans more than four decades, in addition to interviews, surveys of candidates and donors, newspaper coverage, committee assignments, and analysis of legislative success. The Money Signal highlights the numerous ways that dollars influence the perceptions and behavior of key actors and observers throughout the election cycle.

Visit Danielle M. Thomsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Competing for Foreign Aid"

New from Oxford University Press: Competing for Foreign Aid: The Congressional Roots of Bureaucratic Fragmentation by Shannon P. Carcelli.

About the book, from the publisher:

Every year, the United States authorizes dozens of bureaucracies to craft and implement foreign policy. This fragmentation of authority can result in chaos and infighting when agencies fail to communicate or outright undermine each other. Conventional wisdom considers the president to be the primary actor in US foreign policy, overlooking the extent of this bureaucratic turmoil. Why does the US government create a foreign policy apparatus that is so fragmented as to undermine its own leadership?

In Competing for Foreign Aid, Shannon P. Carcelli argues that bureaucratic fragmentation is an unintended byproduct of the foreign policy-making process. To unpack the black box of foreign policy, Carcelli traces Congress's role in policy incoherence, infighting, and fragmentation in the realm of foreign aid policy. Rather than a centrally driven plan, she explains that foreign policy is better understood as an uneasy compromise between domestic interests that do not always align with ideological or economic preferences. Her theory proposes two factors that lead to fragmentation: congressional interest and disunity. Interestingly, as Carcelli shows, Congress is often the least capable of legislating effectively in the areas where its members care most about policy effectiveness. This is because congressional interest in foreign policy incentivizes micromanagement, territorial disputes, and favoritism.

Combining qualitative process-tracing with a quantitative analysis of legislative voting, Competing for Foreign Aid provides a deep dive into Congress's role in shaping--and often misshaping--the foreign aid bureaucracy.

Visit Shannon P. Carcelli's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Kindergarten Panic"

New from Princeton University Press: Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality by Bailey A. Brown.

About the book, from the publisher:

How school choice reproduces inequality by creating gendered and socioeconomic decision-making labor for parents

School choice policies have proliferated in recent years, with parents forced to navigate complex admission processes. In New York City, families have more options than ever before, but the search for the right school has proven to be time-consuming, painstaking, and anxiety-provoking work. In Kindergarten Panic, Bailey Brown examines the experiences of parents as they search for elementary schools, finding that socioeconomic inequalities and persistent disparities in resources, information access, and decision-making power contribute to broad variation in how families develop and manage their school-choice labor strategies. The labor that parents invest in searching for schools is unevenly distributed, and shaped by gender, socioeconomic background, and neighborhood contexts.

Drawing on interviews with more than a hundred parents of elementary school students in New York City, Brown shows how inequality manifests itself as parents and students deal with the uncertainties of the school choice process. By conceptualizing school decision making as labor, she makes visible the often-unseen work that goes into making educational decisions for children. Brown argues that recognizing school choice as labor both deepens our theoretical understanding of the challenges families confront and identifies vast disparities in parents’ labor across socioeconomic and gender divisions. If parents continue to be charged with searching for schools, we must take seriously how school choice policies reproduce the kind of inequality they are intended to reduce—and we must invest in providing equitable access to high-quality public schooling for all families.

Visit Bailey Brown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bringing Law Home"

New from Stanford University Press: Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights by Katherine Eva Maich.

About the book, from the publisher:

The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging. In Bringing Law Home, Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace.

Visit Katherine Eva Maich's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Knowledge, Information, and Business Education in the British Atlantic World, 1620–1760"

New from Oxford University Press: Knowledge, Information, and Business Education in the British Atlantic World, 1620–1760 by Siobhan Talbott.

About the book, from the publisher:

Accurate information is essential to successful business activity. The early modern period saw an increase in printed commercial information, including newspapers, printed exchange rates, and educational texts--part of the 'print revolution' that permeated all aspects of the early modern world. Rather than relying on externally-produced printed works, commercial agents retained agency in creating and sharing their own business and educational information, which was shared in other forms and prioritised and valued over printed material.

This book explores the ways that merchants and other commercial agents learned about business in the early modern British Atlantic World. It considers how they acquired, dispersed, stored, and used information, as well as considering their contribution to creating and shaping that information. Prioritising a wide range of manuscript material held in disparate collections, including merchants' correspondence, letter-books, notebooks, family papers, exercise books, and ships' logs, Talbott explores the ways that knowledge, information, and business education was created, circulated, and used in the early modern British Atlantic World. It offers a new perspective on the exchange of business information in a period dominated by discussions of print, prioritising manuscript and oral forms of exchange. In doing so, it presents a more holistic account of the ways that networks of knowledge operated in early modern business, centralising the creation, circulation, and use of business information specifically by those individuals most involved in--and most affected by--its production.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Crabgrass Catholicism"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America by Stephen M. Koeth.

About the book, from the publisher:

How suburbanization was a crucial catalyst for reforms in the Catholic Church.

The 1960s in America were a time of revolt against the stifling conformism embodied in the sprawling, uniform suburbs of the 1950s. Typically, the reforms of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, which aimed to make the Church more modern and accessible, are seen as one result of that broader cultural liberalization. Yet in Crabgrass Catholicism, Stephen M. Koeth demonstrates that the liberalization of the Church was instead the product of the mass suburbanization that began some fifteen years earlier. Koeth argues that postwar suburbanization revolutionized the Catholic parish, the relationship between clergy and laity, conceptions of parochial education, and Catholic participation in US politics, and thereby was a significant factor in the religious disaffiliation that only accelerated in subsequent decades.

A novel exploration of the role of Catholics in postwar suburbanization, Crabgrass Catholicism will be of particular interest to urban historians, scholars of American Catholicism and religious studies, and Catholic clergy and laity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Essential Soldiers"

New from NYU Press: Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership by Kenja McCray.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new perspective on women’s Black Power leadership legacies

Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s―that it was male dominated and overrun with autocratic leaders. Yet women’s strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations’ functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhibited a unique service-oriented, collaborative leadership style.

Essential Soldiers documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists’ experiences, considering the ways they produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Relying on oral histories, textual archival material, and scholarly literature, this book delves into women’s organizing and resistance efforts, investigating how they challenged the one-dimensional notions of gender roles within cultural nationalist organizations. Revealing a form of Black Power leadership that has never been highlighted, Kenja McCray explores how women articulated and used their power to transform themselves and their environments. Through her examination, McCray argues that women’s Pan-Africanist cultural nationalist activism embodied a work-centered, people-centered, and African-centered form of service leadership. A dynamic and fascinating narrative of African American women activists, Essential Soldiers provides a new vantage point for considering Black Power leadership legacies.

Visit Kenja McCray's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Art of Coercion"

New from Cornell University Press: The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma by Reid B. C. Pauly.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Art of Coercion presents a fresh explanation for the success―and failure―of coercive demands in international politics.

Strong states are surprisingly bad at coercion. History shows they prevail only a third of the time. Reid B. C. Pauly argues that coercion often fails because targets fear punishment even if they comply. In this "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, targets have little reason to obey.

Pauly illustrates this logic in nuclear counterproliferation efforts with South Africa, Iraq, Libya, and Iran. He shows that coercers face an "assurance dilemma": When threats are more credible, assurances not to punish are less so. But without credible assurances, targets may defy threats, bracing for seemingly inevitable punishment. For coercion to work, as such, coercers must not only make targets believe that they will be punished if they do not comply, but also that they will not be if they do.

Packed with insights for any foreign policy challenge involving coercive strategies, The Art of Coercion crucially corrects assumptions that tougher threats alone achieve results.

Visit Reid B. C. Pauly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Failed Policies"

New from Oxford University Press: The Politics of Failed Policies by Sarah James.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Politics of Failed Policies examines the darker side of state autonomy and policy experimentation in our federal system: policy failure. While advances in statistics and computing promised the ability to evaluate the outcomes of state policies more precisely and accurately, the path from information to responsive policy remains far from guaranteed, especially given our highly polarized political climate. Most of the existing scholarship focuses on individual characteristics that affect public officials' likelihood of internalizing new information and refining their policy preferences. In stark contrast, author Sarah Jamestakes a historical institutionalist approach and shows that the design, resources, and processes of state-level research institutions can systematically influence when evidence can overcome confirmation bias and partisan preferences among elected state officials evaluating a policy. This work contributes a more precise definition of a state's capacity for research that better explains political responses to policy failure. The detailed case studies support a theory of policy feedback in which policy and institutional landscape can empower diffusely organized and disadvantaged policy opponents to overcome the power of the traditional winners in the American political economy.

The Politics of Failed Policies takes seriously that policy research and learning are not isolated from the caprices of party politics, and yet I show that state politics and policymaking are not irrevocably beholden to the whims of partisan bickering. While ideological battles, pressure from well-resourced interest groups, and, yes, even elections, remain formidable forces in American politics, strategically designed state policies and institutions can lay a foundation for building a coalition to respond to actual policy outcomes. Choices about policy and institutional design have long-term effects on when, how, and why public officials feel pressured to acknowledge and respond to policy failure.

Visit Sarah James's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unlawful Advances"

New from Princeton University Press: Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX by Celene Reynolds.

About the book, from the publisher:

The remarkable story of the women who defined sexual harassment as unlawful sex discrimination under Title IX

When the US Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, no one expected it to become a prominent tool for confronting sexual harassment in schools. Title IX is the civil rights law that prohibits education programs from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” At the time, however, the term “sexual harassment” was not yet in use; this kind of misconduct was simply accepted as part of life for girls and women at schools and universities. In Unlawful Advances, Celene Reynolds shows how the women claiming protection under Title IX made sexual harassment into a form of sex discrimination barred by the law. Working together, feminist students and lawyers fundamentally changed the right to equal opportunity in education and schools’ obligations to ensure it.

Drawing on meticulously documented case studies, Reynolds explains how Title IX was applied to sexual harassment, linking the actions of feminists at Cornell, Yale, and Berkeley. Through analyses of key lawsuits and an original dataset of federal Title IX complaints, she traces the evolution of sexual harassment policy in education—from the early applications at elite universities to the growing sexual harassment bureaucracies on campuses today—and how the work of these feminists has forever shaped the law, university governance, and gender relations on campus. Reynolds argues that our political and interpretive struggle over this application of Title IX is far from finished. Her account illuminates this ongoing effort, as well as the more general process by which citizens can transform not only the laws that govern us, but also the very meaning of equality under American law.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Colonization of Names"

New from Columbia University Press: The Colonization of Names: Symbolic Violence and France’s Occupation of Algeria by Benjamin Brower.

About the book, from the publisher:

French colonization dismantled Algerian names. Under the occupation that began in 1830, not only were Algerian towns and streets renamed in honor of French figures, but personal names were forced to follow French conventions and norms. Colonial authorities simplified and transformed Algerian names to suit their administrative and legal purposes, crudely transcribing and transliterating Arabic and Berber. They imposed a two-part name and surname model that stripped away the extended family ties and social context inherent to precolonial naming practices.

This groundbreaking history of personal names in nineteenth-century Algeria sheds new light on the symbolic violence of renaming and the relationship between language and colonialism. Benjamin Claude Brower traces the changes Algerians’ personal names suffered during the colonial era and the consequences for individuals and society. France’s imposition of new names, he argues, destabilized Algerians’ sense of self and place in the community, distorted local identities, and compromised institutions such as the family. Drawing on previously unstudied records, Brower examines different northwestern African naming traditions and how colonialism changed them. With the aid of literary and critical theory, he develops new insights into the name and its relationship to power and subjectivity. A rigorous theoretical and historical account of symbolic violence, The Colonization of Names unveils many unseen forms of harm under colonial rule.

--Marshal Zeringue

"How Time Passes"

New from Oxford University Press: How Time Passes by Thomas Sattig.

About the book, from the publisher:

Time organizes things in a dynamic fashion, whereas space organizes things in a static fashion-so things in time undergo passage, whereas things in space do not. What makes the temporal organization of things dynamic? What is the nature of the passage of time? Traditional discussions of passage have taken one of two perspectives. Some philosophers start with passage as a phenomenon that occurs in the physical world. They ask what constitutes this objective phenomenon. Theirs is a project in metaphysics and the foundations of physics. Others begin with passage as a phenomenon that is given in our experiences of the world. They ask what constitutes this subjective phenomenon. Theirs is a project in philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

In How Time Passes, Thomas Sattig gives both perspectives on passage equal weight. The first part of the book concerns the existence and nature of physical passage. The second part is concerned with the existence and nature of experiential passage. In both parts, the standard kind of explanation of passage is juxtaposed with a new kind of explanation. On the tripartite approach, which has dominated classical and contemporary philosophy of time, the denizens of time undergo passage, in virtue of changing with respect to what is past, what is present, and what is future. On the geometrical approach, the denizens of time undergo passage, in virtue of being temporally organized in a manner that does not involve the holding of any geometrical relations between them.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Legal Plunder"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice by Joshua Page and Joe Soss.

About the book, from the publisher:

A searing, historically rich account of how US policing and punishment have been retrofitted over the last four decades to extract public and private revenues from America’s poorest and most vulnerable communities.

Alongside the rise of mass incarceration, a second profound and equally disturbing development has transpired. Since the 1980s, US policing and punishment have been remade into tools for stripping resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and turning them into public and private revenues. Legal Plunder analyzes this development’s origins, operations, consequences, and the political struggles that it has created.

Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, including original ethnographic research, Joshua Page and Joe Soss examine the predatory dimensions of criminal legal governance to show how practices that criminalize, police, and punish have been retrofitted to siphon resources from subordinated groups, subsidize governments, and generate corporate profits. As tax burdens have declined for the affluent, this financial extraction—now a core function of the country’s sprawling criminal legal apparatus—further compounds race, class, and gender inequalities and injustices. Legal Plunder shows that we can no longer afford to overlook legal plunder or the efforts to dismantle it.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Canal Dreamers"

Coming soon from the University of North Carolina Press: Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions by Jessica M. Lepler.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the 1820s, there was a little-known quest to unite the world by building a waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As Spanish American nations declared independence and new canals intensified US expansion and British industrialization, many imagined the construction of an interoceanic canal as predestined. With dreams substituting for data, an international cast of politicians, lawyers, philosophers, and capitalists sent competing agents on a race to transform Lake Nicaragua, the San Juan River, and the terra incognita of Central American forests into the world’s first global waterway.

Jessica M. Lepler tells the captivating story of this global journey in Canal Dreamers. Although the idea of literally changing the world by connecting the oceans proved too revolutionary for the Age of Revolution, the quest itself changed history. Canal dreams prompted political transformations, financial crisis, recognition of new countries, concern about climate change, and more. Full of adventure, corruption, far-reaching consequences, and present-day parallels, Lepler’s absorbing narrative cuts through two centuries, revealing that dreams do not need to come true to make history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Refusing Sustainability"

New from Stanford University Press: Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe by Elana Resnick.

About the book, from the publisher:

Sustainability has become a touchstone for development worldwide, promising an antidote to environmental degradation and capitalism's excess: waste. Refusing Sustainability presents a fundamentally different account of sustainability and waste itself by uncovering the intersections of international environmental reforms and racialized labor. In Bulgaria, Roma comprise the bulk of the country's waste workers, while anti-Roma racism casts them as socially disposable. Without their labor, however, the country cannot meet the sustainability targets required by the European Union. Drawing on fieldwork that spans twenty years, including eleven months working alongside Romani women street sweepers, and years embedded in waste organizations, political campaigns, Roma NGOs, and activist groups, Elana Resnick examines the power hierarchies that shape both waste management and European geopolitics.

Instead of focusing on only environmental harms or toxic distributions, Refusing Sustainability approaches Romani life-worlds as spaces of creative production, and also tells several larger stories: of postsocialist racial capitalism, environmental progressivism, democratic failures, mutual aid, and the power of women's friendships. Through these stories, Resnick illuminates how ordinary people, racialized as discardable, resist systems that simultaneously rely on and exclude them.

Visit Elana Resnick's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Spanish Atlantic World, 1492–1825"

New from Oxford University Press: The Spanish Atlantic World, 1492–1825: From Kingdoms to Colonies to Independence by Kenneth J. Andrien.

About the book, from the publisher:

The overseas enterprises of Spain expanded dramatically following the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The Spanish had already conquered the Canary Islands, which served as a base for the later conquest of lands in the Americas (known as the Indies) that served as the foundation of the Spanish Atlantic world. After 1492 Spanish colonists fanned out from a few Caribbean outposts to Mexico, as armies overthrew the Aztec Empire and annexed the Maya domains in southern Mexico and Central America. In just over a decade the Spaniards brought down the Inca Empire, giving the Castilians control over the vast human and mineral resources in South America. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Castilian invaders, followed by crown bureaucrats and Catholic clergymen, consolidated control over the central regions of Mexico and Peru. Spain eventually claimed control over the vast region from the current southwest of the United States to the southern tip of South America, creating a massive domain that brought unimaginable wealth to the Kingdoms of Spain.

This wide-ranging study examines the evolution of the Spanish Atlantic World from its inception with the voyages of Christopher Columbus through the period of conquest and expansion in the sixteenth century, the era of consolidation in the seventeenth century, to the reform and renovation of the eighteenth century, culminating in its slow-motion collapse by 1825. Drawing on traditions from the long Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims, the first conquistadors and settlers attempted to establish a stratified patriarchal society, based on Roman Catholic values and firmly tied to metropolitan Spain and the wider Atlantic world. As Spain became mired in a series of disastrous wars with European rivals and the colonial economy expanded, diversified, and became more self-sufficient in the seventeenth century, colonial elites gained greater political and social power. Under the new French Bourbon dynasty after 1700, crown ministers framed Enlightenment-inspired policies to reform the Spanish Atlantic world, creating a more centralized state apparatus with the ability to raise taxes, curtail contraband commerce, and establish a military capable of defending the interests of the crown against its European foes. These Bourbon Reforms enjoyed successes, despite provoking opposition among conservative groups in Spain and unrest and revolts in the Indies. Finally, Spain became embroiled in the wars of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, which led a French invasion of Iberia, political tumult in Spain and the Indies, and the collapse of the Spanish Atlantic World and independence for the Americas.

Drawing on his extensive research and the most recent literature, eminent historian Kenneth J. Andrien lucidly narrates the three hundred years during which the Spanish Indies evolved from kingdoms of the crown to dependent colonies to independent nations, leading to the fracturing of the Spanish Atlantic world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Resilience beyond Rebellion"

New from Cornell University Press: Resilience beyond Rebellion: How Today's Rebels Become Tomorrow's Parties by Sherry Zaks.

About the book, from the publisher:

Resilience beyond Rebellion addresses a critical question in insurgency studies: Why some rebel groups successfully become political parties, while others die trying.

Only half of rebel groups with political aspirations manage to reinvent themselves as lasting political parties. Sherry Zaks argues that the key to successful rebel-to-party transformations lies in the organizational structures and institutions that rebels build during wartime. These proto-party structures, which involve governance, political messaging, social outreach, and other noncombat tasks, equip rebel groups with the personnel, skills, and routines needed to succeed in the electoral arena.

Zaks draws on insights from organizational sociology to reconceptualize how rebel groups operate. Through examining the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador and other cases, they demonstrate that rebel groups with established proto-party structures often form the core of post-conflict parties and attract more votes. Innovative in approach and rich in evidence, Resilience beyond Rebellion advances our understanding of rebel group dynamics both during and after conflict by showing that party-building begins not with the last bullet fired but with the very first.

Visit Sherry Zaks's website.

--Marshal Zeringue