"Intoxicated Ways of Knowing"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Intoxicated Ways of Knowing: The Untold Story of Intoxicants and the Biological Subject in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Matthew Perkins-McVey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Argues that intoxication was fundamental to German physiological, psychological, and psychiatric research during the nineteenth century.

Intoxicating substances can be found lurking in every corner of modern life, and Matthew Perkins-McVey’s pathbreaking book offers the untold story of how they were implicated in shifting perceptions of embodiment found in the emerging sciences of the body and mind in late-nineteenth-century Germany. Their use in this experimental context gave rise to a dynamic conception of the subject within the scientific, psychological, philosophical, and sociological milieu of the era. The history of the modern biological subject, Perkins-McVey argues, turns on “intoxicated ways of knowing.”

Intoxicated Ways of Knowing identifies the state of intoxication as a tacit form of thinking and knowing with the body. Intoxicants force us to feel, intervening directly in our perceptional awareness, and, Perkins-McVey contends, they bring latent conceptual associations into the foreground of conscious thought, engendering new ways of knowing the world. The book unfurls how intoxicants affected nineteenth-century German science and how, ultimately, the connection between mental life and intoxication is taken up in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud, bringing the biological subject out of the lab and into the worlds of philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Police, Activists, and Knowledge"

New from Stanford University Press: The Police, Activists, and Knowledge: The Struggle Against Racialized Policing in France by Magda Boutros.

About the book, from the publisher:

Over the past fifteen years in France, police brutality, racial profiling, and police impunity have become salient issues of the public and political debate. In this book, Magda Boutros examines the social movements that brought these issues to the forefront of public conversations and analyzes how they influenced the terms of the debate about policing and inequality. In France, like in other countries, the police hold significant power to determine what is known – and what remains hidden – about their practices. Drawing on a comparative ethnography of three activist coalitions, Boutros shows the different ways activists produced evidence about policing and racial inequalities: collecting quantitative data, documenting lived experiences of police targets, or victims coming together to analyze patterns of oppression. Each approach to data production shaped activists' conceptions of police violence and racism, their ability to push beyond a "bad apples" narrative, and their visions for change. It also impacted their capacity to push the boundaries of what is knowable and sayable in the media, policy, and judicial fields.

Boutros argues that we must pay attention to the capacity of the police to control what we know, and to the methods movements use to produce knowledge about policing and inequality.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend"

New from LSU Press: Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief by Kenneth W. Noe.

About the book, from the publisher:

Kenneth W. Noe’s Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend boldly questions the long-accepted notion that the sixteenth president was an almost-perfect commander in chief, more intelligent than his generals. The legend originated with Lincoln himself, who early in the war concluded that he possessed a keen strategic and tactical mind. Noe explores the genesis of this powerful idea and asks why so many have tenaciously defended it.

George McClellan, Lincoln’s top general, emerged in Lincoln’s mind and the American psyche as his chief adversary, and to this day, the Lincoln-McClellan relationship remains central to the enduring legend. Lincoln came to view himself as a wiser warrior than McClellan, and as the war proceeded, a few members of Lincoln’s inner circle began to echo the president’s thoughts on his military prowess. Convinced of his own tactical brilliance, Lincoln demanded that Ulysses Grant, McClellan’s replacement, turn to the “hard, tough fighting” of the Overland and Petersburg campaigns, when Grant’s first instinct was to copy McClellan and swing into the Confederate rear.

Noe suggests that the growth and solidification of the heroic legend began with Lincoln’s assassination; it debuted in print only months afterward and was so cloaked in religious piety that for decades it could not withstand the counternarratives offered by secular contemporaries. Although the legend was debated and neglected at times, it reemerged in interwar Great Britain and gained canonical status in the 1950s Cold War era and during the Civil War Centennial of the 1960s. Historians became torchbearers of the heroic legend and much else that we know about Lincoln, reorienting his biography forever. Based on lessons and language from the world wars, their arguments were so timely and powerful that they seized the field. Since then, biographers and historians have reevaluated many aspects of Lincoln’s life, but have rarely revisited his performance as commander in chief. Noe’s reappraisal is long overdue.

Visit Kenneth W. Noe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Doing Identity Labor"

New from Oxford University Press: Doing Identity Labor: How Mixed-Race Politicians Disrupt Descriptive Representation by Danielle Casarez Lemi.

About the book, from the publisher:

As the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris stood to make history as the first Black and South Asian American woman president. Between 2008 and 2024, Americans saw multiracial candidates-Barack Obama and Harris-on four presidential tickets. They rose to power alongside the rising numbers of Americans who identify as multiracial. And yet, despite the presence of major multiracial political figures and a growing multiracial population, voters are still curious about their identities. People often ask multiracial politicians questions that amount to: “What are you?”

In Doing Identity Labor: How Mixed-Race Politicians Disrupt Descriptive Representation, Danielle Casarez Lemi provides one of the first book-length treatments of how multiracial politicians, across office, geography, and background, navigate identity in public life. Lemi develops an interdisciplinary theory of identity labor that explains how multiracial politicians perform their racial identities, especially according to their appearance. The book assembles a rare combination of text analysis, discourse analysis, survey analysis, experimental analysis, nationwide interviews, and case studies of multiracial politicians, including a study of Vice President Kamala Harris. Lemi's groundbreaking multidimensional analysis shows that using racial identity for political gain is neither clear-cut nor ambiguous.

Learn more about Danielle Casarez Lemi.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Island in the Net"

New from Princeton University Press: Island in the Net: Digital Culture in Post-Castro Cuba by Steffen Köhn.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exploration of Cuba’s emerging digital culture and Cubans’ creation of grassroots networks, digital black markets, and online spaces for public debate

Until just a few years ago, Cuba was one of the least-connected countries in the world. But as digital technology has become increasingly available, Cubans have found inventive ways to work around such remaining barriers as slow speeds, high costs, and inadequate infrastructure. In Island in the Net, Steffen Köhn examines Cuba’s nascent digital culture and how it has reconfigured the relationship between the state and its citizens. Köhn shows that through innovations including “sneakernets” (the physical transfer of information by flash drives and other devices), digital black markets, and online spaces for political debates, Cubans have successfully challenged the government’s monopoly on media and public discourse.

Drawing on multisited ethnographic research, Köhn documents Cuba’s digital awakening, from the introduction of accessible Wi-Fi in 2015 to the social media–fueled protests in July 2021. Cubans’ community-driven digital innovations, he suggests, could be models for potential alternatives to the current Big Tech–dominated internet.

Each chapter in Island in the Net is accompanied by a multimodal anthropology work: a video game, interactive installations, video art, an ethnographic documentary, and an expanded cinema installation. These unique media, created with Cuban artist Nestor Siré and other local collaborators, and accessible to readers via a QR code, bring the book’s argument vividly to life.

Visit Steffen Köhn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Waging Sovereignty"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century by Colleen O’Neill.

About the book, from the publisher:

Wage work was supposed to “kill the Indian and save the man,” or so thought Richard Pratt and other late nineteenth-century policymakers. Nevertheless, even as American Indians entered the workforce, they remained connected to their lands and cultures. In this powerful history of resilience and transformation, Colleen O'Neill uncovers the creative strategies Native workers employed to subvert assimilation and fight for justice in the workplace, their collective strength expanding the very meaning of sovereignty.

Drawing on federal archives, Native memoirs, oral histories, and field research, O'Neill traces a sweeping story that stretches from the era of boarding schools to the contemporary world of high-stakes gaming. For more than a century, federal policymakers tried to reshape Native lives through labor. In some cases, children were sent to pick crops and scrub settlers' homes. In others, families were relocated to distant cities for permanent year-round jobs that were designed to replace traditional seasonal labor and lifestyle patterns. But Native workers persevered. They rebuilt their communities, fought to reclaim control of the reservation workplace, and developed distinctive institutions to defend their cultural, political, and economic sovereignty. As Waging Sovereignty illuminates, wage work was a focal point of assimilationist efforts and, in turn, labor became a key factor in Native workers’ anti-colonial struggle.

Visit Colleen O’Neill's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Afterlife of Utopia"

New from Cornell University Press: The Afterlife of Utopia: Urban Renewal in Germany's Model Socialist City by Samantha Maurer Fox.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Afterlife of Utopia, Samantha Maurer Fox traces the transformation of Eisenhüttenstadt, East Germany's first planned socialist city, from a Cold War showcase to a paragon of sustainable shrinkage. Founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt, the city was designed to embody socialist ideals. After German reunification, Eisenhüttenstadt lost over half its population, shifting from a model city at the center of the Eastern Bloc to a shrinking city on the nation's periphery.

Fox portrays Eisenhüttenstadt's story as reinvention rather than decline. Today, its restored center is Europe's largest protected historical site, reshaped by extensive demolition and renewal projects. Fox shows how these initiatives revived the city's original collectivist ideals, creatively reclaiming socialist heritage through an urban strategy unmatched in late industrial Europe. The Afterlife of Utopia explores what happens when grand ideological experiments outlive the regimes that built them, challenging assumptions about resilience, progress, and urban futurity.

Visit Samantha Fox's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Praiseworthiness"

New from Oxford University Press: Praiseworthiness: The Lighter Side of Moral Responsibility by Zoë Johnson King.

About the book, from the publisher:

Philosophers have had a lot to say about moral blameworthiness, but much less about moral praiseworthiness. In this book Zoë Johnson King bucks the trend: she offers a conceptual framework with which to theorise about praiseworthiness in its own right, and a comprehensive theory of the types of thing for which we can be praiseworthy and the substantive conditions under which we are praiseworthy for things of each type. Johnson King argues that what we're fundamentally praiseworthy for― what makes us good people, to the extent that we are― are what we care about and what we try to do. She then argues that we can be praiseworthy for what we successfully do and bring about to the extent that our actions are deliberate and are coming from a good place.

In developing this account, Johnson King draws on resources from moral metaphysics, moral epistemology, moral metasemantics, and philosophy of action, as well as from the philosophical literature on moral responsibility. She then uses her account to shed light on some practical issues concerning improving your own praiseworthiness by working on yourself, the prevalence of moral luck, and the impact of oppression and injustice on praiseworthiness. The final chapter turns from praiseworthiness to the ethics of praise: Johnson King takes the backlash against praise of essential workers during the pandemic as a case study that illustrates an array of pitfalls around which we must delicately skirt when attempting to praise the praiseworthy.

Visit Zoë Johnson King's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Advocacy, Inc."

New from Stanford University Press: Advocacy, Inc.: INGOs and the Business of "Modern Slavery" by Stephanie A. Limoncelli.

About the book, from the publisher:

The contemporary movement to fight "modern slavery" has increasingly turned its attention to issues of forced labor, child labor and labor trafficking in a wide variety of industries and supply chains. At the same time, businesses have become more involved with the movement and their leadership has been touted as a better alternative to the assumed inferiority of civil society responses. How has business influence been playing out in the "anti-slavery" movement and what are the implications for international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) fighting these forms of labor exploitation? Based on interviews, online texts, documents, and media content from a variety of INGOs and other organizations in Europe and the United States fighting these problems, Advocacy, Inc. provides a cautionary case study. "Anti-slavery" advocacy has become a new market in which INGOs are pressed to become increasingly like for-profit businesses and the strategies they pursue do not adequately address the driving forces that have created conditions for continued labor exploitation in the global economy. Moreover, some businesses benefit from this scenario, having to do very little to claim 'hero' status in advocacy efforts, while practices that perpetuate labor exploitation continue unabated.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Heart of Science"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry by Jacob Stegenga.

About the book, from the publisher:

A novel epistemology of science contends that good science need not attain its aims, but it must justify its claims.

In Heart of Science, philosopher Jacob Stegenga breaks with the most dominant epistemologies of science to argue that in judging scientific activity, we should focus on its justification, not the achievement of truth or knowledge. Yet, Stegenga argues, the aim of science goes far beyond justification and is, instead, a special kind of truth—common knowledge, a broadly shared and mutually justified scientific finding.

Drawing on both historical examples and recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic, Stegenga outlines his approach before delving into its implications for scientific evaluation, testimony, values, progress, and credit, as well as the nature of science during times of crisis. Truth, he shows, may not be easily identified in the short term. However, an evaluation of scientific justification, grounded in shared standards, is possible. This framework helps us appraise—and appreciate—historical theories that ultimately weren’t accurate and offers fresh insights about appropriate science communication and public trust in scientific research. Justification and scientific rigor are not just means to an end, Stegenga writes, but the very heart of good science.

Ambitious, authoritative, and accessible, Heart of Science offers a new vision for the philosophy of science.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mediating God"

New from Oxford University Press: Mediating God: Muhammad al-Ghazali and the Politics of Divine Presence in Twentieth-Century Egypt by Arthur Shiwa Zárate.

About the book, from the publisher:

This intellectual biography of the Egyptian Muslim theologian, scholar, and activist, Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–1996), provides the most comprehensive study to date of one of the most influential Sunni Muslim writers of the twentieth century. Al-Ghazali shaped the views of multiple generations of Muslim activists and was a one-time leading intellectual of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Mediating God charts his rise as a leading theologian in the Brotherhood during the 1940s, his subsequent clash and expulsion from the group in 1953, and his extensive post-Brotherhood career during the Nasser years.

To tell this story, it excavates a massive collection of writings by Brotherhood members and their affiliates, many of which have never before been utilized in secondary scholarship. Through an analysis of this collection, Mediating God provides the first in-depth view at the richly cosmopolitan and eclectic intellectual milieu of the Brotherhood and its affiliates from the 1930s through the 1960s. It focuses particular attention on the underexamined, though voluminous, writings al-Ghazali and his colleagues dedicated to charting God as real and meaningful presence in all arenas of human life, from the mundane realms of daily life to political struggles and scientific enterprises. Ultimately, by highlighting the centrality of God as an inscrutable and incalculable-yet intimately known and felt-presence in al-Ghazali and his colleagues' project of spiritual and social uplift, Mediating God provides a way of understanding modern Islamic politics beyond the scholarly framework of Islamism and attendant claims about the functionalization, objectification, and systemization of Islam in modernity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence by Mary T. Freeman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Argues that letter writing enabled a disparate and politically marginal assortment of abolitionists to take shape as a mass movement

Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence examines how opponents of slavery harnessed the power of letter writing to further their political aims, arguing that this practice enabled a disparate and politically marginal assortment of people to take shape as a coherent and powerful movement.

Mary T. Freeman fuses a political and social study of abolitionists with a focus on letter writing and epistolary culture. Through the analysis of correspondence, Freeman portrays abolitionism as a mass movement, made up of participants from a wide range of backgrounds, and she emphasizes the diversity of the movement’s geography, membership, and political activities. The book highlights everyday Americans’ involvement in abolition, shifting focus away from the affluent and publicly prominent white leadership. It pays particular attention to those who used letters to intervene in politics when other avenues were closed to them, especially women and Black Americans.

Freeman expands scholarly understandings of abolitionism by showing how letters enabled activists to transmit information and ideas across long distances in a relatively secure format and how they connected people who otherwise would remain strangers. Correspondence also provided a means of political expression to people on the political fringes and disfranchised persons. Even antislavery leaders and those whose social positions were seemingly secure often used the semi-private medium of correspondence strategically. Letter writers could hone their ideas beyond the purview of public audiences, or, when private letters became public, cultural norms granted their contents a stamp of authenticity and directness. Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence concerns not just what people wrote about but also how they wrote about it: how they manipulated, exploited, and subverted cultural conventions to make political statements and claims.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Filthiest Village in Europe"

New from Cornell University Press: The Filthiest Village in Europe: Grassroots Ecology and the Collapse of East Germany by Andrew Demshuk.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Filthiest Village in Europe traces how a community shrouded by "industrial fog," at the brink of gaping coal pits, became a symbol that galvanized grassroots ecology―campaigns by diverse local actors that exposed environmental and economic crises East Germany's political system could not resolve. Notoriously known by the late 1980s as "the filthiest village in Europe," Mölbis suffocated downwind from the massively polluting carbochemical Espenhain plant. Applying a myriad of private collections, interviews, and untapped archival sources, Andrew Demshuk reveals how pastors, parents, officials, inspectors, workers, and spies negotiated ossified party structures whose inability to reform was showcased by ever-worsening environmental conditions.

After peaceful protests a few kilometers north in Leipzig triggered a revolution, pre-1989 grassroots players launched innovative reconstruction programs with financial and organizational expertise from West Germans. Together, they transformed Europe's filthiest village into a healthy place to live and imbued it with new symbolism, turning it into a sign of hope. The political will and social engagement that saved Mölbis and rejuvenated the surrounding wasteland can inform how to revitalize other postindustrial "filthy places" in our world today.

The Page 99 Test: The Lost German East.

The Page 99 Test: Demolition on Karl Marx Square.

The Page 99 Test: Bowling for Communism.

The Page 99 Test: Three Cities After Hitler.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Kingdom of Football"

New from Oxford University Press: Kingdom of Football: Saudi Arabia and the Remaking of World Soccer by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Kingdom of Football explores how and why Saudi Arabia burst onto the landscape of world football in 2023, and examines what the speed and scale of Saudi engagement--as investor, owner, sponsor, host and competitor--might mean for the Kingdom and for football.

Writing as both a football fan and a Gulf specialist, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen offers historical and comparative contexts for Saudi Arabia's startling emergence as a world football hub in the 2020s, exploring both previous Saudi investment in the game, in the 1970s, and national attempts elsewhere to kickstart the sport, as in the United States, Japan and China.

Going beyond popular media labels such as 'sportswashing', this fascinating book examines what drives Saudi policymaking, connecting the move into football with domestic economic and social developments, as well as external and foreign policy considerations. It also examines how Riyadh's foray into world football both builds upon and yet differs from the approaches taken by other Gulf States, such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Finally, Coates Ulrichsen assesses the sustainability and durability of the Kingdom's engagement with the sport in the decade-long countdown to the 2034 FIFA World Cup, which Saudi Arabia is set to host.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Themistocles"

New from Yale University Press: Themistocles: The Rise and Fall of Athens’s Naval Mastermind by Michael Scott.

About the book, from the publisher:

A portrait of the Athenian politician and general Themistocles, tracing his political development, his victory at the Battle of Salamis, and his exile in Persia

Themistocles (524–459 BC) came of age just as a newly democratic and empowered Athens was emerging. He would become an instrumental political and military figure, fighting in the Battle of Marathon; persuading Athenians to expand their fleet; and engineering the Athenians’ defeat of the Persians at the Battle of Salamis. However, as Michael Scott demonstrates in this biography, Themistocles failed as much as he succeeded.

Scott offers a fully human picture of Themistocles, a man who could be both decisive and heroic as well as uncertain and unprepared. He was loved and hated in Athens, his plans and ideas ignored as often as they were respected. Eventually he was exiled as a traitor, ultimately settling in Persia as an adviser to Artaxerxes, the son of Xerxes, his foe at Salamis. And yet, in the aftermath of his death, he emerged as one of Greece’s historical heroes.

In this portrait of a man Thucydides deemed one of the most illustrious Greeks of his time, Scott reveals one man’s struggle to navigate the turbulent world of Athenian politics, and the crucial role of historians and biographers in shaping, and distorting, the image of Themistocles that has come down to us through the centuries.

Visit Michael Scott's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In Praise of Addiction"

New from Princeton University Press: In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World by Elizabeth F. S. Roberts.

About the book, from the publisher:

A transformative way of understanding addiction—and an invitation to find connection in the pleasures of life we know are bad for us

Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought about self-loathing, reflecting her individual failure to exercise self-control, to keep it together. But during her fieldwork studying chemical exposure in Mexico City, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrate their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in shame. Roberts began to wonder if everything she thought she knew about addiction was wrong.

In Praise of Addiction shares the unexpected journey that led Roberts to a new understanding of addiction. Taking lessons from her years in Mexico City as well as from addiction researchers, harm reduction activists, and scholars of religion, philosophy, and anthropology, Roberts pays close attention to the external forces that so often fuel the damage of addiction. As her neighbors in Mexico City suggest, the adverse health effects brought on by their dependencies on Coca-Cola, processed foods, drugs, and alcohol have more to do with the ongoing effects of the drug war and NAFTA than any personal failings. Taking up this ecological framework, Roberts draws a line between vice that isolates and addiction that connects, a distinction she movingly integrates into her own life and family, making a case for sharing in the pleasures—and suffering—of dependency.

Provocative and deeply humane, In Praise of Addiction invites readers to cast aside the shame, self-hatred, and judgment associated with addiction and discover how dependency can serve as a binding force worthy of our most profound devotion.

--Marshal Zeringue

"New Deep Territories"

New from the University of Chicago Press: New Deep Territories: A Story of France’s Exploration of the Seafloor by Beatriz Martinez-Rius.

About the book, from the publisher:

How France integrated the seafloor into its national territory through an interplay of science, technology, and geopolitical ambition during the Cold War.

Beneath the surface of the seas and oceans lies a territory as important for human societies as the exposed land and the airspace above them: the seafloor. Our daily life is inextricably linked to the seafloor and its resources, from global telecommunications infrastructure to offshore oil and gas extraction to strategic mineral mining.

By focusing on France, a country with an underwater territory seventeen times larger than its emerged lands, New Deep Territories explains how the seafloor emerged as a territory during the second half of the twentieth century. Beatriz Martinez-Rius traces the evolution of the country’s seafloor exploration and the motivations that fueled it from the aftermath of World War I to the late 1970s. In the early 1960s, the seafloor, instead of colonial territories, came to be seen as a source of natural resources. The French government, corporations such as oil companies, and scientists all imagined future uses of the seafloor, and these ever-evolving aspirations drove the development of technologies, techniques, and scientific fields that built up the submerged territory. Government officers and industrial stakeholders massively invested in technoscientific development to prepare for a future reliant on seafloor resources, including oil, gas, and minerals, well before it was technologically possible, economically feasible, and legally acceptable to extract them. The future they envisioned did not arrive, but their investment resulted in an unprecedented understanding of the ocean’s crust. Today, once again, national governments, international organizations, and private stakeholders are turning their attention to the seafloor.

Visit Beatriz Martinez-Rius's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Newton's Metaphysics of Substance"

New from Oxford University Press: Newton's Metaphysics of Substance: God, Bodies, Minds by Patrick J. Connolly.

About the book, from the publisher:

Newton's Metaphysics of Substance offers a systematic interpretation of Isaac Newton's views on the ontology of substance and related issues of modality, causation, and dependence. Alongside and sometimes in dialogue with his work in mathematics and physics, Newton developed a coherent and unified account of God, material bodies, human minds, and the relations between them. Drawing on a large number of published and unpublished sources, Patrick J. Connolly traces the development of Newton's views, situates them within the wider context of early modern philosophy, and highlights their value and originality.

Newton holds that God is different in kind from created substances. While God has a substantial essence or nature, created substances like bodies and human minds are merely collections of powers. Created substances nonetheless enjoy considerable independence and autonomy. Newton rejects positions like occasionalism which deeply involve God in the immediate production of nature's works. Much of his project, then, involves individuating, defining, and analysing the different powers that join together to account for the phenomena displayed by minds and bodies.

Exploring Newton's understanding of God, bodies, and minds in this way reveals his deep engagement with many of the central philosophical issues considered by his contemporaries. Among other topics, the book canvases Newton's approach to arguments for God's existence, the univocity of being, causation, atomism and infinite divisibility, the architecture of matter, human cognitive faculties, and the mind-body problem. On each of these topics Newton carefully engages the views of his predecessors in the course of developing arguments for his preferred position.

While Newton's work is of continuing interest for philosophy of science, this book shows that his philosophical interests and achievements were much broader. Although he never published a unified treatment of his metaphysical views, it is possible to understand Newton as having constructed a philosophical system. In this sense, he can be usefully situated alongside figures like Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Land, Language, and Women"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History by Julie L. Reed.

About the book, from the publisher:

Historians largely understand Native American education through the Indian boarding schools and reservation schools established by the US government during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But Native Americans taught and learned from one another long before colonization, and while white settlers and institutions powerfully influenced Indigenous educational practices, they never stopped Native peoples from educating one another on their own terms.

In this ambitious and imaginatively conceived book, Julie L. Reed uses Cherokee teaching and learning practices spanning more than four centuries to reframe the way we think about Native American educational history. Reed draws on archaeological evidence from Southeastern US caves, ethnohistorical narratives of Cherokee syllabary development, records from Christian mission schools, Cherokee Nation archives, and family and personal histories to reveal surprising continuity amid powerful change. Centering the role of women as educators across generations in Cherokee matrilineal society, the power of land to anchor learning, and the significance of language in expressing sovereignty, Reed fundamentally rethinks the nature of educational space, the roles played by teachers and learners, and the periodization imposed by US settler colonialism onto the Indigenous experience.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Islands and the Stars"

New from Stanford University Press: The Islands and the Stars: A History of Japan’s Space Programs by Subodhana Wijeyeratne.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is among the six largest national space agencies in the world, along with China's CNSA, US's NASA, and Russia's Roscosmos. JAXA's budget is more than $1 billion USD―bigger than France or Germany individually, and more than that of Italy, India, Canada, and the UK combined. And yet, Japan's significant contributions have largely been absent in the history of space exploration, and space exploration largely absent in the history of technology in Japan. The Islands and the Stars corrects this conspicuous oversight. Through meticulous archival research in Japanese and anglophone archives, Subodhana Wijeyeratne examines the history of Japan's space exploration efforts over nearly a century.

Wijeyeratne traces the evolution of Japan's space program from its early origins in the 1920s, through the postwar period of rapid technological innovation, to the consolidation of its various institutional elements into JAXA in 2003. He situates Japan's space programs within the broader history of the country's postwar recovery, economic growth, and cultural identity, while also considering their place within global trends in space exploration. Through this narrative, Wijeyeratne not only illuminates Japan's centrality to the global history of science and technology, but also offers insights into the future of global space exploration, emphasizing the importance of diverse voices and perspectives in the quest to understand our place in the cosmos.

Visit Subodhana Wijeyeratne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Vital Lives"

New from Oxford University Press: Vital Lives: Social Responsibility and the Battle Against Chronic Disease by Carl F. Cranor.

About the book, from the publisher:

Chronic diseases are a major menace to the goal of living healthier, longer, and more vital lives. In the 20th century a sustained, and comprehensive scientific effort by public health officials, physicians, researchers, and legislators, was made to reduce the threat of infectious diseases. Chronic afflictions subsequently became the dominant health burden. All of us are vulnerable to various dysfunctions-cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes and cirrhosis- that decrease the vitality of life and longevity, accelerate aging, and increase pain and misery. Sixty percent of Americans are afflicted by at least one of them. This rises to 78% when cohorts reach 55, and as high as 85% after 65. These illnesses cost more than three trillion dollars annually and constitute 6 of the 10 leading causes of US deaths from disease.

Numerous factors complicate our understanding of, and efforts to reduce, these dysfunctions: lifestyle and personal habits, involuntary and environmental toxic exposures, and inferior social circumstances and institutions-poor and marginal neighborhoods, limited and inadequate healthcare, poorly protected and dangerous workplaces. To fully understand these maladies Carl F. Cranor casts a wide interdisciplinary net, drawing from the research of physicians, epidemiologists, sociologists and philosophers to identify their nature, development, extent, and causal contributions- ultimately recommending a division of responsibilities between individual and broader socially responsible efforts to justly support vital lives. Individuals can influence chronic afflictions, but these actions alone are insufficient. Cranor argues that, while individuals can influence chronic afflictions, they must be comprehensively and responsibly supported by improved social conditions, healthcare and health-protection institutions, all of which require enhanced social responsibility by public officials and legislators.

The Page 99 Test: Legally Poisoned.

--Marshal Zeringue

"On the Altar"

New from Princeton University Press: On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular by Jonathan Sheehan.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Christianity both abolished and absorbed sacrifice

From the beginning, sacrifice lived a double life in Christianity, both abandoned and essential. Christ’s death on the cross was the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, eclipsing the temple sacrifices of Judaism and paganism. And yet at the center of the lived faith was the repetition of sacrifice: the offering of Christ’s body, the sacrifices of ancient patriarchs, and the sacrifices of martyrs woven through liturgy, theology, and popular devotion.

But this double life collapsed in the Reformation. Quarreling heirs to Christian truth discovered that the sacrifices they once called Christian might be nothing of the sort. To build their new faiths—to discover the truth of Christian sacrifice—they turned to the past, learning from Christianity as it was how Christianity ought to be.

In On the Altar, Jonathan Sheehan offers a new account of sacrifice both sacred and secular. His story is in part a history of the Christian imagination across the centuries of the Reformation, when new martyrs and holy warriors fought for the truth of their sacrifices, when the empire of New World sacrifice was recruited to settle Christian conflicts, and when the sacrifices of the ancient Hebrews were weaponized for orthodoxy. But it is a history of the secular imagination as well, as the vast archive of Christian sacrifice was dispersed and applied to things that humans make, their religions, politics, and societies. With On the Altar, Sheehan reveals a new history of both Christianity and the secular world in which we still live.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Brothel and Beyond"

New from Penn State University Press: The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice by Saundra Weddle.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Brothel and Beyond deepens our understanding of women’s engagement in urban life through a close study of Venice’s sex trade. Centering questions of gender, agency, and mobility, it reveals how sex workers were embedded in the social and spatial fabric of the city.

From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the Venetian government attempted to control commercial sex by segregating it in municipal brothels in Rialto and later by minimizing the public’s contact with sex workers, limiting their profits, and cracking down on recruitment. These decentralized efforts proved ineffective, and women who performed this labor lived and worked throughout the city. This book traces the diffusion of sex work from the brothels to the alleys, gondola landings, taverns, bathhouses, and peripheral squares of Venice. Saundra Weddle uses legislation, criminal records, contemporary chronicles, and other archival sources to reconstruct the networks of sex workers, procuresses, clients, landlords, and others who facilitated or profited from their labor. Using maps and photographs of key sites, Weddle demonstrates how the built environment both constrained and enabled women’s practices, offering an alternative urban history that foregrounds embodied experiences and vernacular spaces.

By assigning new meanings to everyday locations and spatial conditions, this study challenges monument- and elite-centered narratives of Venice and redefines the place of women within its urban history. It will be of interest to scholars of architectural and urban history, women and gender studies, early modern social history, and Italian studies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rewriting Rights"

New from Oxford University Press: Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context by Renée Jørgensen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Promising, consenting, and even attacking someone are ways to 'rewrite' our rights, permitting others to treat us in ways that would otherwise have violated the duties they owe us. When unsure whether such a change has been made, we face 'normative opacity'. Incorrect guesses cause injurious mistakes, thus requiring an urgent assessment of the responsibility we have to each other in responding to normative opacity. Rewriting Rights highlights the social dimension of this question: at scale, any bias in the error tendencies of the rules we use yields uneven distributions of actual harm. At the individual level this problem is intractable: we can't do better than responsibly following our best evidence, even when this predictably leads us to make mistakes that injure marginalised groups-in particular women and Black men-at disproportionate rates. Analogizing the problem to safe driving, Jørgensen argues that we must coordinate to adequately control the risks we pose to each other.

The book's main project is to construct and defend a standard for navigating uncertainty about rights-changes that is not overly demanding but avoids compounding extant gender and racial bias. It offers a characterization that is essentially social, mediated by convention, and communicated through social signals. Jørgensen argues that when carefully constrained, social norms can significantly resolve normative opacity-and urges that it is only by recognizing this that we can reform the unjust norms that shape our conception of which mistakes are reasonable.

Visit Renée Jørgensen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Property Disobedience as Protest"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Property Disobedience as Protest: Rethinking Political Nonviolence by William E. Scheuerman.

About the book, from the publisher:

William E. Scheuerman’s book explores when, if ever, politically motivated property harms are justifiable

In 2020, Black Lives Matter activists toppled Confederate monuments and occasionally vandalized police vehicles and stations. Climate activists have damaged natural gas pipelines and famous artworks. In Hong Kong, pro-democracy students targeted businesses sympathetic to the mainland government. On January 6, 2021, far-right groups at the US Capitol mistreated public and private property as part of their efforts to disrupt finalizing election results. Property damage constitutes an increasingly commonplace feature of global political protest. How then to interpret and evaluate its proliferation? The media regularly describes such acts as “violent,” as do most scholars. However, William E. Scheuerman’s book pushes back against conflating politically motivated violations of property rights with violence. Political violence has no place in democratic politics. Yet indiscriminately grouping property damage together with acts destructive of and harmful to persons is conceptually confusing and politically misleading. After all, Americans celebrate the Boston Tea Party. So why do most of us now categorically condemn many seemingly parallel acts?

Scheuerman tackles challenging and politically timely questions. When, if ever, are politically motivated property harms justifiable? What standards should we expect of those pursuing them to meet, under democratic conditions? How are those standards undermined by the rise of authoritarian populism around the world? Focusing on identifiably nonviolent varieties of what Scheuerman calls property disobedience, his book explores a variety of real-life examples, both past and present, to understand how and why such acts may be politically justifiable―or should instead be viewed as beyond the pale.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reimagining Aid"

New from Stanford University Press: Reimagining Aid: Foreign Donors, Women’s Health, and New Paths for Development in Cambodia by Mary-Collier Wilks.

About the book, from the publisher:

It was long assumed that Western liberal democracy and free-market capitalism held all the answers for development and national progress. Today, in the face of growing inequality and global power imbalances, this post–Cold War narrative has faltered. New players on the international scene, many from South and East Asia, have emerged to vie for influence and offer new models of development. Despite these recent changes, however, prominent international aid organizations still work under the assumption there are one-size-fits-all best practices. In Reimagining Aid, Wilks takes readers to Cambodia, a country at the heart of this transformation. Through a vivid, multi-sited ethnography, the book investigates the intricate interplay between aid donors from Japan and the United States, their competing priorities, and their impact on women's health initiatives in Cambodia. Cambodian development actors emerge not just as recipients of aid, but as key architects in redefining national advancement in hybrid, regional terms that juxtapose "Asia" to the "West." This book is a clarion call for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars to rethink what development means in a multipolar world. A must-read for anyone invested in Southeast Asia's role in global affairs and evolving definitions of gender in development, Reimagining Aid is a powerful reminder that the next chapter of global advancement is being written in unexpected places.

Visit Mary-Collier Wilks's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Winning It Back"

New from Cornell University Press: Winning It Back: Restoration Presidents and the Cycle of American Politics by David A. Crockett.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Winning It Back, David A. Crockett explores why presidents who promise to set things aright―to "restore"―so often usher in the opposite.

Since the earliest days of the United States, presidencies have seemingly unfolded in a cyclical manner, with features from prior eras recurring in later ones. Building on the idea of "political time"―that presidential terms fall within particular regime cycles―Crockett shows that presidents often fall into one of two roles: opposition presidents and restoration presidents. Opposition presidents belong to the political party not representing the dominant governing philosophy of a specific political era―for example, Republican presidents during the New Deal era (e.g., Eisenhower, Nixon) and Democratic presidents during the Reagan era (e.g., Clinton, Obama). Restoration presidents, conversely, belong to the dominant party, come to power after opposition presidents and, as such, face the task of "restoring" the dominant party's governing agenda.

But that return is rarely smooth. Restoration presidents―like Kennedy after Eisenhower, or George W. Bush after Clinton―inherit both the hope of a comeback and the burden of pent-up expectations. Crockett argues that these leaders often overreach in their urgency to restore what was, inadvertently setting the stage for backlash and, eventually, the unraveling of their own political order.

With sharp historical analysis and a wide-angle view of presidential politics from Jackson to today, Winning It Back offers timely insights on leadership legacies and the risks of nostalgia―and a clarion call for what (and who) may come next.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Windrush Cricket"

New from Oxford University Press: Windrush Cricket: Imperial Culture, Caribbean Migration, and the Remaking of Postwar England by Michael Collins.

About the book, from the publisher:

How did the 'quintessentially English' game of cricket come to be so important across Britain's Caribbean empire? As empire declined and gave way to complex patterns of migration, what part did cricket play in the life of the Windrush generation in post-war Britain?

Following the work of the great Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James, much has been written about the profound importance of cricket for the development of social and cultural life within the Anglophone Caribbean. And yet, from at least the 1930s, black West Indian cricketers were celebrated far beyond the Caribbean, in England and across empire. Cricket was in fact a major factor shaping imperial ideas about black people--how they looked and behaved, what their imagined characteristics and traits were--placing the West Indies, as the Caribbean islands were then known, within a racialised, hierarchical structure of cricket-loving peoples, alongside the colonies of white settlement: South Africa, New Zealand, Australia.

During World War II, black West Indians played prominent roles in the surprisingly large amount of cricket played in England, part of a wider propaganda effort to promote the idea of a multiracial empire, united in common cause against fascism. For post-Windrush arrivals after 1948, cricket was not just a peripheral pastime or a recreational footnote. Cricket was a cornerstone of black West Indian social and cultural life and self-empowerment in England, integral to the earliest creation of social and community groups and the development of support networks. Watching the West Indies international cricket team win on the field of play was just one part of the Windrush story. Through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the growth of an extensive network of Windrush cricket teams and clubs, and, by the 1970s, the evolution of Caribbean cricket leagues and competitions, created a subtle and multifaceted sense of being a West Indian in England. In due course, the children of Windrush migrants would seek to play cricket for England, challenging the very notion of what it means to be English.

Interweaving extensive archival and oral history research into an engaging, often surprising narrative about empire and postwar Britain, Windrush Cricket challenges a range of orthodoxies, arguing that cricket constituted a foundational, yet almost entirely ignored aspect of the way in which Windrush migrants settled and made new lives in postwar England.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Jim Crow in the Asylum"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South by Kylie M. Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is a complicated history of racism and psychiatric healthcare in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The asylums of the Jim Crow era employed African American men and women; served as places of treatment and care for African Americans with psychiatric illnesses; and, inevitably, were places of social control. Black people who lived and worked in these facilities needed to negotiate complex relationships of racism with their own notions of community, mental health, and healing.

Kylie M. Smith mixes exhaustive archival research, interviews, and policy analysis to offer a comprehensive look at how racism affected Black Southerners with mental illness during the Jim Crow era. Complicated legal, political, and medical changes in the late twentieth century turned mental health services into a battlefield between political ideology and psychiatric treatment approaches, with the fallout having long-term consequences for patient outcomes. Smith argues that patterns of racially motivated abuse and neglect of mentally ill African Americans took shape during this era and continue to the present day. As the mentally ill become increasingly incarcerated, Jim Crow in the Asylum reminds readers that, for many Black Southerners, having a mental illness was—and still is—tantamount to committing a crime.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Death and Life of Gentrification"

New from Princeton University Press: The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea by Japonica Brown-Saracino.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative account of what is gained and what is lost when a word that once narrowly referred to neighborhood change takes on a life all its own

Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification in the 1960s to mark the displacement of working-class residents in London neighborhoods by the professional classes. The Death and Life of Gentrification traces how the word has far outgrown Glass’s meaning, becoming a socially charged metaphor for cultural appropriation, upscaling, and the loss of authenticity.

In this lively and insightful book, Japonica Brown-Saracino traces how a concept originally intended to describe the brick-and-mortar transformation of neighborhoods has come to characterize transformations that have little to do with cities. She describes how journalists, artists, filmmakers, novelists, and academics use gentrification as a symbolic device to mourn how everyday pleasures and forms of self-expression—from music to marijuana, kale, and tattoos—entered the domain of the elite. She weighs the implications of turning to gentrification as a tool to tell stories, entertain audiences, and communicate political messages. Relying on vivid examples, the book reveals how the term today expresses widespread ambivalence about rising economic inequality and unease with a variety of forms of social change. This pathbreaking book forces us to think about whether the wide-ranging way we use gentrification dilutes its meaning and stymies efforts to identify and resist urban displacement.

Drawing on everything from film and television to novels and art, The Death and Life of Gentrification sheds critical light on the changing meaning of gentrification in contemporary life. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in gentrification and urban dynamics, as well as for readers curious about attitudes about growing income inequality and the evolution and circulation of ideas.

The Page 99 Test: A Neighborhood That Never Changes.

The Page 99 Test: How Places Make Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Belonging on Both Shores"

New from Stanford University Press: Belonging on Both Shores: Mobility, Migration, and the Bordering of the Persian Gulf by Lindsey R. Stephenson.

About the book, from the publisher:

For most of their history, the people around the Persian Gulf littoral were socially intertwined and economically interdependent. But the twentieth century ushered in nationalization projects, British imperial intervention, and border regulations, all of which posed challenges to everyday mobility in this oceanic world. Those crossing the water became the primary foil for bordering spaces, restricting and regulating movement, and defining difference more generally. Belonging on Both Shores tells the story of people's struggles to move freely between Iran and the Arab shores of the Gulf as the unregulated mobility that had characterized everyday life in the nineteenth century was increasingly policed in the twentieth.

Using a wide range of Arabic, Persian, and English sources, Lindsey Stephenson demonstrates how state officials refined notions of territorial belonging against the movement of Iranians, the most visible mobile "group" in the Persian Gulf arena. Engaging migrant voices, Stephenson narrates how Iranians challenged a perceived requirement to belong to a single place and highlights the techniques these migrants employed to remain connected to both shores. Tracing the movement of Iranians across and around the Persian Gulf and investigating how the technologies of state and mobility transformed fluidity and people's understanding of movement, this book tells a new story of how the modern Gulf was formed.

Visit Lindsey Stephenson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hobbes on Sex"

New from Oxford University Press: Hobbes on Sex by Susanne Sreedhar.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why care what Hobbes thought about sex? Contemporary scholars have largely dismissed Hobbes's brief, and somewhat scattered, remarks about gender and sexuality as peripheral to his central concerns. In Hobbes on Sex, the first book-length study of Hobbes's writings on these topics, Susanne Sreedhar challenges this dismissal.

Far from being haphazard or tangential, Hobbes's views on sex are integral to his broader philosophical-political project. Drawing out the underlying logic of his claims, this volume reconstructs a coherent, substantive, and distinctive account of sexual normativity from Hobbes's various remarks. It argues that, in stark contrast to many of his contemporaries and the traditions from which he emerges, Hobbes is logically committed to a view it calls sexual positivism. According to Hobbes, the nature and status of gender and sexuality--from the proper organization of marriage and the family, to prohibitions on sexual behaviors, to the differences between men and women, to the legitimacy of female rule--are entirely a matter of positive (i.e., civil) law. Because matters of gender and sexuality are the result of human action for Hobbes, they are fundamentally contingent and revisable. This contingency stands in contrast with the pervasive and entrenched ways both natural patriarchalism and sexual moralism were enthroned in much of early modern political theorizing. The volume argues that Hobbes's sexual positivism dethrones sex from its usual prominent position in the history of philosophy. By systematically stripping gender and sexuality of their privileged status, whether as a source of normativity or as a topic of inquiry, this dethroning of sex strikes at the heart of beliefs about human nature, moral knowledge, and social and political institutions that are widely accepted even today. This novel interpretation of Hobbes's views on sexual normativity not only challenges traditional understandings of the trajectory of early modern political thought, but it also suggests a new understanding of his place in the intellectual history of sex.

Visit Susanne Sreedhar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Zoning Faith"

New from NYU Press: Zoning Faith: How City Politics Shape Muslim Communities in Chicago by Sultan Tepe.

About the book, from the publisher:

An intriguing look at how the city's built environment influences the shape of Muslim communities in Chicago

Zoning Faith offers a rare in-depth look at three distinct Muslim communities in Chicago, one Shia Muslim, one Sunni, and one Black Muslim community. The volume explores how these communities navigate their social and political environments, and how their experiences in urban settings help to explain the emergence of new Islamic organizations, practices, and theologies in America.

Zoning Faith provides the first comprehensive spatial examination of Muslims' experiences in global cities. Although cities play a crucial role in the enactment of faith, they are often treated as places Muslims happen to live, or as places that are transformed as many Muslims come to inhabit them. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which cities may transform faith groups in meaningful ways, from zoning regulations and debates about where a mosque can be situated to how a building’s structure can influence prayer and communal life. This book pays careful attention to the intersections of urban space and religion, approaching “built spaces” as profoundly political and particularly illuminating of the experiences of minority faiths.

Drawing on a multi-year and multi-site ethnography, the volume provides a previously unobtainable, in-depth look at how Muslim communities in Chicago defy the expectations of conventional places of worship. Crossing the boundaries of urban studies, theological studies, architecture, and public policy, Zoning Faith offers new insights into how Islam is vernacularized and grounded in the US in many different ways.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The French Médersa"

New from Cornell University Press: The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa by Samuel D. Anderson.

About the book, from the publisher:

The French Médersa explores how the French state pursued a century-long project of bicultural Franco-Muslim education in its northwest African colonies, resulting in a new type of school, the médersa, that combined French and Islamic curricula. French officials frequently described these schools and their students as "hyphens," drawing connections between larger French and Islamic forces.Samuel D. Anderson highlights this hyphenating idea, situating Franco-Muslim education between beliefs about not only France and Islam but also about tradition and modernity and about North and West Africa.

The médersa project had two goals: to create an elite class of Muslims friendly to the French imperial project and, subsequently, to mold Islam into a form that could be more easily controlled. A total of ten médersas opened across Algeria, Senegal, French Soudan, and Mauritania and closed only in the 1950s. The graduates of these schools, the medérsiens, went on to shape their societies profoundly but not always in the ways the French anticipated.

Drawing on archival and oral sources from Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and France, The French Médersa proposes new ways to approach trans-Saharan history. Anderson argues that across northwest Africa, and for more than a century, Franco-Muslim education was central to the history of French empire and Islamic education alike.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Adventures in the Archaic"

New from the University of Chicago: Adventures in the Archaic: Primitivism, Degrowth, and the French Social Sciences, 1945–1975 by Ryan L. Allen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examines how four intellectuals with ties to the French social sciences articulated a new primitivist sensibility between 1945 and 1975.

We tend to associate primitivism with the nostalgic idealization of origins, often aimed at parts of the world that are viewed as closer to that idealized past than modern post-industrial society. Primitivist impulses still exist in popular culture, whether in paleo diets or returns to foraging, and they can also be seen in intellectual and political circles in debates around the possibility of degrowth. In this book, historian Ryan L. Allen examines primitivism anew through four fascinating figures: Georges Bataille, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Devereux, and Mircea Eliade.

In the postwar period, Allen shows, the French social sciences reappraised the primitive and archaic from anthropological, sociological, psychiatric, and religious angles. These four thinkers sought past alternatives to midcentury hypermodernization and capitalist excess. They put forth trenchant critiques of contemporary society and sought in the archaic past a way to imagine a more sustainable future. Adventures in the Archaic rehabilitates these thinkers, showing how their critique of growth and consumerism was nourished by an engagement with primitive cultures as potential sources of cultural and ecological wisdom. As we confront planetary crisis, Allen suggests, there is still much we can learn from these iconoclastic approaches.

Visit Ryan Allen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Search for a Rational Faith"

New from Oxford University Press: The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity by Daniel K. Williams.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Enlightenment and Darwinism posed threats to traditional Christianity. So why have so many highly educated Americans remained committed believers?

The Search for a Rational Faith challenges popular theories of secularization with a sweeping 400-year history of Anglo-American Protestant defenses of the Christian faith. Through a detailed study of the arguments of those who found Christian faith compatible with Enlightenment reason, Daniel K. Williams explains why Christian faith has continued to remain a viable intellectual option in the United States even for educated people who accept modern science.

From the seventeenth-century New England Puritans who founded Harvard College to the twentieth-century university professors who believed that Christian theism was the only viable grounding for morality in the atomic age, faith and reason have been an integral part of the Anglo-American experience. This book chronicles that story.

It is a story that intersects with the spiritual lives of well-known figures such as Isaac Newton, John Locke, John Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King Jr., all of whom wrestled with the question of the reason to believe. It is the story of Christian apologists who crafted intellectually sophisticated defenses of the faith. And above all, it is the story of the development of an idea-the idea that there is a rational basis for Christian belief.

This book shows how that idea was transmitted from England to America in the seventeenth century and how it continued to develop and transform over the next four centuries in response to the Enlightenment, Darwinian evolution, historical criticism of the Bible, new theories of religious epistemology, and the ethical challenge of the civil rights movement. The Search for a Rational Faith is the story of what that idea meant in the past and what it still means today, in a new era of secularization.

Visit Daniel K. Williams's website.

The Page 99 Test: God's Own Party.

The Page 99 Test: Defenders of the Unborn.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Becoming Zimbabwean"

New from the University of Virginia Press: Becoming Zimbabwean: A History of Indians in Rhodesia by Trishula Rachna Patel.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first comprehensive history of Indian migrants and their descendants in Zimbabwe

Becoming Zimbabwean tells the long-overdue story of the Indian community in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Centering the stories of individuals and families, and building on a foundation of extensive archival research, Trishula Rachna Patel—a Zimbabwean of Indian origin herself—shows that the history of Indians in Zimbabwe is not of a transient diaspora but one of deliberate permanence.

Indians initially played a critical part in the settler colonial process in Southern Rhodesia, but as new generations were born and raised, their politics and social lives evolved to localized forms of citizenship. Eventually, they functioned as part of the resistance to the Rhodesian white minority government, either through participation in the system as nonwhites or by joining the Black anticolonial nationalist movement. They did all this through their shops, African-rooted institutions that became social, economic, and political spaces through which Indians became Zimbabwean. In this highly readable and authoritative study, Patel makes clear that Zimbabwe cannot be properly understood without accounting for the substantial Indian community that has woven itself into the fabric of the nation.

--Marshal Zeringue