"Urban Borderlands"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles by Isabela Seong Leong Quintana.

About the book, from the publisher:

Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century was bustling with the rise of industrialization, but the growing labor force that propelled it, mostly consisting of Mexican and Chinese men, was met with exclusion policies and deportation campaigns. Nevertheless, Chinese and Mexican women, children, and men built vibrant residential and business districts—until they were all but eradicated in the 1930s. In this compelling and textured history, Isabela Quintana unearths the entwined stories of Chinatown and Sonoratown through the everyday lives of their residents. As Quintana argues, their ordinary experiences illuminate the interlocking and gendered processes of racial segregation and border formation that built the Los Angeles we know today.

The blurry borders, geographic, cultural, and otherwise, between these communities—what Quintana calls urban borderlands—were less defined than official records would have us believe. Centering the lives of women and children, and the archival glimpses and silences that account for them, Quintana uncovers moments of familiarity, kinship, conflict, and collaboration born of proximity and shared space, particularly that of the Los Angeles Plaza. Revealing experiences of border policing, racial violence, and perceived foreignness, Quintana’s dynamic narrative offers an innovative approach to understanding the layered histories of urban renewal in Mexican and Chinese Los Angeles.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Archives of Intimacy"

New from Stanford University Press: Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905–1949 by Nadine Attewell.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book offers a rich and innovative study of multiracial social worlds in early-twentieth-century London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong—three port cities linked by their importance to global British shipping networks and circuits of Chinese migration. In these cities, Chinese, Black, South Asian and European people came together to foster multiracial communities which have been largely forgotten, remembered only through sensationalist fictions that reflected white anxieties about racial mixing. Nadine Attewell considers these vibrant multiracial worlds through the eyes of those who knew them best: people of mixed Chinese descent, for whom interracial intimacies were features of everyday life. Mobilizing a wide range of archival materials, including photographs, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, Attewell reconstructs the social experiences of people like Vera Leung, a working-class woman of Irish and Chinese descent growing up in Liverpool's interwar Chinatown, and Percy Chang, a Jamaican man of Chinese and African descent with a wide social network in Hong Kong. Rather than centering identity as the focus of mixed-race people's struggles, she asks what they did and with whom. Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship and integrating British, Asian, and diasporic histories, Attewell presents new ways of thinking about the everyday meanings of interracial intimacy, and practices of relation and survival under global conditions of colonial capitalist rule.

Visit Nadine Attewell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"White Lies"

New from Oxford University Press: White Lies: Dismantling Ten Cultural Myths About Race by Greg Garrett.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely analysis of the myths that underpin white supremacy--and how to counteract them

For centuries, white men in the West have cultivated and perpetuated a set of false narratives about Black people in order to subjugate and maintain power over them. Some of these myths originated abroad but flourished in America, while others were cultivated solely on American soil. All of them, however, continue to find expression in the present as white supremacy strains to maintain its privilege.

These myths have been expressed in almost every form of discourse, from court rulings and sermons to literature and film to material culture and textbooks. They vary from the biological--Black Africans and their descendants are mentally inferior to whites--to the anthropological--Black Africans are incapable of governing themselves and require the supervision of whites--and all have helped to perpetuate Black Americans' enslavement, imprisonment, and exclusion.

White Lies analyzes ten of the most dangerous and pervasive of these myths and observes how they still emerge in political discourse, legislation, pop culture, and religion. This racist rhetoric is present in the words of Abraham Lincoln, George Wallace, and Donald Trump, and the power of white Christian nationalism often evokes these myths, sometimes so subtly listeners may not be conscious of how they are being manipulated. White Lies connects the dots between past narratives, images, and ideas, and present speech about violence, urban life, the suburbs, voter and welfare fraud, and white saviors. It explores myths that individuals and communities may employ to avoid confronting racism, including the notion that America is either post-racial or that white people are the group most liable to suffer discrimination. While these myths continue to spread, White Lies also notes some of the powerful competing narratives which seek to correct them.

Follow Greg Garrett on Facebook.

The Page 99 Test: Entertaining Judgment.

Writers Read: Greg Garrett (June 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Living with the Living Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lies That Bind Us"

New from Cornell University Press: The Lies That Bind Us: Nationalism and History Textbooks by Ahsan I. Butt.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Lies That Bind Us, Ahsan I. Butt explores how history textbooks become battlegrounds of national belonging, borders, and memory.

History education has always sparked fierce debate. Disagreements erupt not just over what to include but whose version to tell―how proud or shameful episodes are portrayed; who bears responsibility; and which voices are heard or silenced. These fights are typically domestic, but when a state's past involves international conflict, the stakes―and the critics―multiply.

Butt delves into such flashpoints in his analysis of the politics of history textbooks. He first disaggregates national identity into three dimensions: boundaries of membership, space, and time. He then considers how each dimension is addressed in narratives of race and immigration across US history textbooks; territorial conflicts in Argentinean and Chilean textbooks; and finally, imperial legacies and independence struggles in Indian and Pakistani textbooks. As book bans and curriculum wars roil classrooms worldwide, The Lies That Bind Us exposes the varieties of nationalism driving textbook battles and how they shape not just which histories students learn but what kind of nation a country becomes.

Visit Ahsan I. Butt's homepage.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Perturbed System"

New from the University of Chicago Press: A Perturbed System: Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World by Susannah Crockford.

About the book, from the publisher:

A moving study of how religion shapes Western climate discourse.

Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we’ve built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate change as anything but the end of the world, an apocalypse with all its biblical trappings. Why?

In A Perturbed System, anthropologist Susannah Crockford argues that we must understand the climate emergency as a spiritual crisis, a result of Christian colonialism that we (religious or not) still struggle to describe without religious language. Climate discourse in the United States and northern Europe, Crockford shows, is framed by the same theological motifs that drove extraction, including ideas about prophecy, mediation, sacrifice, original sin, cult, messiah, and apocalypse. By listening to people on the edge of the crisis, A Perturbed System reveals a world in transition, what happens when worlds end—ecologically, socially, politically, and personally—and how we might live through these endings together.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rebellious Follower"

New from Oxford University Press: Rebellious Follower: China's Search for Science, Technology, and Innovation by Andrew B. Kennedy.

About the book, from the publisher:

How does China pursue science, technology, and innovation? China has emerged as a leading technology power in recent years, and its policies shape issues ranging from geopolitical rivalry to climate change to artificial intelligence. Yet if China's pursuit of science, technology, and innovation (STI) is important, its path is also puzzling. Since 1949, China's party-state has adopted a bewildering array of policymaking approaches in an effort to transform the country into a world science and technology leader. How can we understand the remarkably winding road China has travelled?

Rebellious Follower: China's Search for Science, Technology, and Innovation illuminates major shifts in Chinese STI policymaking since the communist revolution, leveraging concepts from political science and public policy. Focusing on the "policy paradigms" that have driven Chinese policymaking in the STI domain, the book highlights two globally influential paradigms from the past century. The book explores how Chinese policymakers have resisted these belief systems at times while adapting them at others. In that way, they have made their country a rebellious follower of foreign ideas.

This new theoretical framework offers fresh insights into critical episodes in Chinese history, ranging from the formation of China's scientific establishment in the 1950s to the rise of "innovation-driven development" in the 21st century. Combining cutting-edge theoretical analysis with broad historical scope, the book offers a unique perspective on China's rise as a world leader in science, technology, and innovation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"China's Aristocratic Age"

New from Princeton University Press: China's Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs-and-Autumns Period by Yuri Pines.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new perspective on the Springs-and-Autumns period, China’s longest experiment with polycentrism

The Springs-and-Autumns period (770–453 BCE)—the longest aristocratic age in Chinese history—marks a break from what is often associated with the normative orientations of Chinese political life. During this era, political fragmentation was regarded as acceptable, many states transitioned to oligarchic forms of rule, political participation by lower strata was allowed, pedigree mattered more than ability in determining an individual’s career, and the concept of the Mandate of Heaven had little to do with the notion of universal rule. Indeed, in many respects, the politics of this period inverted traditional Chinese political values. In China’s Aristocratic Age, Yuri Pines offers a new history of the Springs-and-Autumns period, arguing that it should be considered on its own terms rather than simply as a precursor for the centralized and bureaucratized Warring States era that followed.

Pines draws on textual, archaeological, and paleographic sources, many of them newly discovered, to examine the political dynamics of the era, which he terms China’s longest experiment with a polycentric world and society. Efforts during this period to establish a viable multistate order, overcome the weaknesses of monarchial rule, and moderate coercive methods of governance have been largely regarded as unsuccessful. Pines explores the consequences of these perceived failures and analyzes the ways negative views of China’s polycentrism contributed to its later quest for political unity and centralization. Pines’s account sheds new light on the Springs-and-Autumns period both within its own contemporaneous context and within the long durée of Chinese history.

Visit Yuri Pines's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Everlasting Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Crime Gone Viral"

New from NYU Press: Crime Gone Viral: Eyewitnessing in a Digital Age by Karen G. Weiss.

About the book, from the publisher:

Highlights crime eyewitnesses who use digital technologies to record, share, and watch crime online

In the digital age, crime and efforts to control crime have been transformed by the ability of ordinary citizens to “witness” crime remotely and intervene through smartphones and computer screens. Crime Gone Viral shines a spotlight on the digital witnesses who record, share and watch crime online to elucidate how their responses impact crime outcomes. With the ability to see crime for themselves and digitally intervene from afar, digital witnesses play outsized roles in social control as both capable guardians who help, and as incapable guardians who make matters worse. Digital witnesses also play important roles as storytellers who inform and shape public perceptions about crime and criminal justice.

By placing crime witnesses front and center, Weiss provides a bold and critical framework that challenges existing criminological research that assumes third parties deter crime by virtue of their presence and problematizes traditional ways of thinking about third party social control. Drawing from original survey data and providing examples of real-life criminal cases from both traditional news media and social media to illustrate and analyze digital responses to crime, Weiss identifies three digital witness types: Samaritans, Voyeurs, and Vigilantes. Together, these witness types form the basis of a theoretical framework meant to provide a more nuanced understanding of third-party participation in social control and punishment in the digital age. Ultimately, Crime Gone Viral provides a necessary and comprehensive understanding of crime in the 21st century aimed at developing a theoretical, empirical, and practical understanding of what it means to witness crime in a digital age.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unruly Fertility"

New from Stanford University Press: Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics by T.D. Harper-Shipman.

About the book, from the publisher:

As sexual and reproductive repression increases around the world, engaging with reproductive politics has become acutely urgent. This reproductive repression exists alongside pervasive economic precarity, untenable costs of living, and pressing demands for higher labor productivity. What feels like the emergence of a novel reproductive and economic dystopia, however, is a long-lasting reality for poor Black women globally. Comparing Senegal and North Carolina, T.D. Harper-Shipman shows how states and markets turn to poor Black women's fertility to assuage economic and social crises that would otherwise expose the failings of modern political economy. Moving through formative moments that draw reproductive health, gender, race, and labor into closer proximity―from the transatlantic slave trade through to the present―Harper-Shipman argues that reproductive health policies are instruments for national and international elites to regulate resource distribution and recreate future stores of differentiated labor across time and space.

Unruly Fertility attends to the innovative and unconventional forms of resistance that poor Black women use to decouple their productive and reproductive labor from state efforts to manage their fertility. These discreet forms of resistance establish new possibilities that scaffold decolonial reproductive politics. Harper-Shipman compels us to view reproductive politics as an enduring battle over which bodies deserve the fruits of modernity, and which bodies get perpetually marked as the vehicles for carrying all of humanity forward.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Subversion and Seduction"

New from Oxford University Press: Subversion and Seduction: China's Economic Statecraft by Audrye Wong.

About the book, from the publisher:

China has consistently sought to wield economic clout in its quest for global geopolitical influence. Yet, as the book shows in convincing detail, this use of economic statecraft has seen varying degrees of effectiveness, with results less successful than commonly assumed.

Subversion and Seduction examines the reasons why economic statecraft only works some of the time, showing that outcomes depend on both the inducement strategy and the target country's political setting. Audrye Wong folds China's numerous economic inducements into two strategic categories--"subversive carrots" and "legitimate seduction"--and then examines how public accountability mechanisms in recipient countries can facilitate or impede the effectiveness of such inducements. Drawing on detailed case studies, extensive field research, and a survey experiment, she diagnoses China's setbacks in gaining geoeconomic influence, but also highlights its successes in achieving short-term transactional goals and driving wedges between and within countries. Her analysis emphasizes the important role recipient countries can play in shaping and constraining China's influence. By developing a theory of China's economic statecraft, the book sheds light on how and when China can use its economic might to reshape US-China relations and the international system as a whole.

Visit Audrye Wong's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Order of Business"

New from Columbia University Press: Monstrous Conceptions: A History of Race, Disability, and Reproductive Medicine in the United States by Miriam Rich.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the nineteenth century, American medical practitioners helped craft a new science of monsters. The term “monstrous birth” had long been applied to newborns with congenital conditions such as anencephaly. When practitioners redefined “monstrosity” in scientific terms, they claimed to be stripping away its fraught connotations. Instead, recast as a biological phenomenon, the monster gained new social and cultural salience. Monstrosity gave form to pervasive ideas about the meaning of racial difference, the fragility of racial order, and the peril of racial degeneration.

Miriam Rich explores the history of monstrosity as a modern scientific category, tracing the practices that transformed newborn bodies into medical specimens across the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Monstrous Conceptions vividly examines experiences of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care; the preparation and display of anatomical specimens; and the production and circulation of scientific knowledge. It shows how diverse laywomen and their families engaged with medical meaning making even as predominantly white, male practitioners increasingly sought to assert authority over reproduction. Rich also reveals how the nineteenth-century category of biological monstrosity helped lay the groundwork for the American eugenics movement―and contributed to ideas about deviant and defective bodies that still haunt us today. Shedding new light on intertwined historical conceptions of race, sex, and disability, Monstrous Conceptions illuminates how medical science produced enduring notions of human difference.

Visit Miriam Rich's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Post-Liberal Peace"

New from Cornell University Press: A Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management by Monalisa Adhikari.

About the book, from the publisher:

In A Post-Liberal Peace, Monalisa Adhikari shows how rising powers like India and China are reshaping global peace governance. Over recent decades, both countries have deepened engagement with institutions built on liberal principles, including those related to peacebuilding. Their growing role raises critical questions about how their approaches diverge from liberal models and their impact on the domestic politics of conflict-affected states.

Focusing on India and China's involvement in peace processes in Nepal and Myanmar, Adhikari demonstrates that these powers advance distinctive, state-centered programs that privilege regional stakeholders, stability, development, and pragmatism. Operating under conditions of "negotiated coexistence" with liberal peacebuilders, their initiatives neither fully align with nor openly contest existing actors, limiting cooperation while avoiding confrontation. This pluralized form of international engagement enables domestic elites to resist external pressures, producing hybrid peace orders that incorporate some liberal elements yet remain largely at the status quo―and often illiberal.

Rich with archival and interview evidence, A Post-Liberal Peace sheds light on alternative forms of peacebuilding and their on-the-ground effects in an increasingly multipolar world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wanting Children"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Wanting Children: Family-Planning Policies and the Engineering of America’s Population by Leonard M. Lopoo.

About the book, from the publisher:

On the eugenic origins of US reproductive laws—and the surprising policy changes needed to remedy it.

The US government spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year to promote and facilitate contraception. Whereas other wealthy countries support broader fertility interventions under the banner of “family planning,” the United States remains committed only to helping Americans—and especially poorer Americans—plan not to have a family.

In an unflinching treatise on one of the century’s defining social issues, Leonard M. Lopoo shows how the US’s asymmetric reproductive approach is a vestige of the country’s earlier sins: America’s first reproductive policies were authored by some of the twentieth century’s most prominent eugenicists, a group whose primary goal was birth prevention among lower economic classes and racial minorities. These origins have consequently created a contradictory position for the country today, in which contraception for the lowest-income Americans is subsidized, while many upper-class Americans employ technologies to have children with preferable traits.

Lopoo recasts this personal and politicized topic in elegant, stark terms. If the United States is to legislate reproduction, the only defensible approach is equity: helping people who want children to have children. Wanting Children posits a new and elevating criterion for how we think about fertility in the twenty-first century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence"

New from Oxford University Press: Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence by John F. Padgett.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Renaissance in Florence was not only a time of extraordinary artistic and philosophical creativity; it also marked a pivotal moment in the invention of new organizational forms that reshaped the city's economic, political, and social life. In Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence, John F. Padgett distills and synthesizes thirty years of research into how Florentine institutions and social networks developed and transformed over two centuries. Drawing on an unparalleled historical dataset encompassing more than 100,000 individuals, Padgett maps the intricate web of relationships that connected Florence's families, businesses, and political actors between 1300 and 1500.

The book centers on three major arenas of organizational change. First, Padgett traces the evolution of business structures, particularly within the banking sector, focusing on the development of the diversified partnership-system form of business organization. Second, he examines the shifts to Florentine kinship networks, Florentine kinship networks, outlining the formation of patrilineage and its diffusion from upper classes to middle classes. Finally, he charts the shifting terrain of political networks and the transformation of oligarchic elites.

Across all three domains, Padgett demonstrates that organizational change did not occur in isolation. Instead, developments in one arena continually spilled over into others through the dense, cross-cutting social networks that underpinned Florentine society. Elites were rarely confined to a single role: they were merchants, bankers, politicians, and civic leaders simultaneously, moving fluidly among spheres as circumstances shifted. This multivalent identity, he argues, was central to Florence's adaptability and resilience. Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence ultimately offers a fresh interpretation of the Renaissance, revealing how social networks emerged, transformed, and generated new forms of collective life during a period of intense social, political, and cultural change.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Invested"

New from Stanford University Press: Invested: Trust and Ignorance in a Middle-Class Fraud by Camilo Arturo Leslie.

About the book, from the publisher:

A riveting and revealing new account of the precarity of the middle class today

To be middle class today connotes a certain prudence when it comes to financial decision-making – steadily building one's nest egg rather than carelessly spending. Constantly enjoined to put their savings to work in shrewd investments, these subjects must constantly guard their class status. In Invested Camilo Leslie contends that these pressures require middle-class adults to engage professionals, experts, brokers, and organizations for help in financializing their futures. These pivotal relationships that comprise the middle class experience cannot be grasped without an account of trust, and, in this case, its betrayal.

Leslie takes the case of the Stanford Financial Group (SFG) – the second largest Ponzi scheme on record – to explore the vulnerability built into middle classness. The Stanford fraud stands out for its twenty-three-year length, its complex structure, and its geographic breadth, ensnaring victims across the Americas, including this book's focal populations: investors in Venezuela and the United States. Victims of the scheme were invariably members of the middle class, with sufficient investable funds to participate. The book's comparative approach reveals how middle classness is made and manifested differently in distinct settings. Tracing SFG's arc in Venezuela and the U.S. reveals the weight of local political and institutional contexts on middle-class subjects' propensity to trust.

Drawing on interviews with investors, ex-employees of SFG, and a range of professionals with ties to the case, Leslie tells a compelling, often poignant story of an unwieldy category. To be middle-class, he shows, is to occupy not just a material location but a moral and epistemic one in which class members are obliged to trust from a place of ignorance.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reading Matters"

New from NYU Press: Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age by Joel Halldorf.

About the book, from the publisher:

Traces earlier revolutions in the history of reading to orient our shift to the digital age

Considered one of the greatest inventions of human civilization, writing has served as a pathway to culture and education through history. The digital revolution has ushered in a dramatic transformation, leading to growing concern over the effects and possible detriments of algorithms, information overload, and fake news. In Reading Matters, Joel Halldorf makes the case that in order to navigate the upheavals of the digital age, we must understand prior technical revolutions and the transformations they engendered. He shows how our ways of reading are inseparable from the media we use, and that the decline of deep, attentive reading may be the most serious consequence of our move from page to screen.

Originally published in Swedish in 2023, this newly revised volume presents a sweeping history of transformations in reading and writing, tracing precedents in the invention of writing, the shift from clay tablets to papyrus and from scrolls to codices, the advent of printing, and the development of industrial printing. It explores how each new format of writing has encouraged new ways to think, relate, and organize the world. Essentially, it is not only what we read that is important, but how we read.

Moving through key historical events including the rise of Christianity, the scientific revolution, and the development of democracy, Halldorf explores how changes in the physical book reflected major cultural and historical shifts of the time. By tracing how new media forms have impacted human attention, authority, and community, the volume equips readers to better understand our own digital habits today. Detailing the riveting cultural history of reading technologies, book revolutions, and cultural upheavals, Reading Matters showcases the massive power of reading, writing, and books in helping us understand who we are.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory"

New from Princeton University Press: The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tracing the genealogy of conspiracy theory, from Machiavelli through the “paranoid style” to QAnon

Truthers, birthers, flat-Earthers, the deep state, crisis actors, chemtrails, the Epstein files, Pizzagate, the Plandemic—it seems as though there’s a conspiracy theory for every situation. But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? And why is the term used to describe beliefs that are so very unlike theories (at least in the scientific sense of the word)? In this erudite and original book, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg answers these questions not by formulating a definition but by tracing a genealogy. He uncovers two crucial strands of contemporary conspiracy theorizing on the threshold of modernity: on the one hand, political analysis as realized by Niccolò Machiavelli in such works as The Prince and, on the other, apocalyptic prophecy as channeled by the charismatic preacher Girolamo Savonarola.

The French Revolution, the antisemitic hoax known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Nuremberg Trials number among the subsequent episodes that progressively entangled these strands before finally knotting them into the twentieth-century concept of conspiracy theory. Alternative labels were also offered, most strikingly by the historian Richard Hofstadter, whose engagement with American right-wing politics in the 1950s and 1960s inspired his notion of the paranoid style. As McKenzie-McHarg shows, Hofstadter’s coinage, with its psychological bent, contributed to personalizing our understanding of conspiracy theory, thus yielding a specific type of person that, for better or worse, has become all too familiar to us today: the conspiracy theorist.

Proceeding from The Prince through The Protocols to the paranoid style and then beyond to QAnon, The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory sheds new light on a complex and troubling phenomenon.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Thinking with Dogs in Roman Britain"

New from Oxford University Press: Thinking with Dogs in Roman Britain: Lived Experience, Inequality, and Ritual in a Roman Province by Robin Fleming.

About the book, from the publisher:

Thinking with Dogs in Roman Britain: Lived Experience, Inequality, and Ritual in a Roman Province argues that in Roman Britain, where little written evidence survives, some aspects of the past are more visible when we look not at people but instead focus on the dogs nipping at their heels. By examining the evidence of more than 1,700 Roman-period dogs preserved in structured deposits that Fleming suggests are the remnants of ritual acts, she provides a history of the relationships between canines and people living in a provincial context. The book begins by investigating the lives of real dogs in Britain under Rome, some of which were pampered working or personal animals, but many of which had hard lives and had to fend for themselves. It then explores how the period's authors used both pampered dogs and strays as metaphors, shedding light on issues of hierarchy, inequality, and enslavement. Finally it then turns to the widespread use of dogs as a material of religion, investigating their role as sacrificial animals and ritual agents, first in temple and shrine rituals and then in everyday household religion. Fleming concludes by asking what dogs did for ritual and what they can tell us about the making of Roman provincial culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bloody Numbers"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality by Pablo F. Gómez.

About the book, from the publisher:

Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualize human beings in terms of populations.

Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, financiers, officials, surgeons, notaries, ship captains, and others began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the world of slave trading used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their calculations with the aim of protecting their financial interests rather than of caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks.

A pathbreaking work, Bloody Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, it shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cats: A History"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: Cats: A History by Rod Phillips.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping and fascinating history of cat-human relationships.

For more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life. But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them became pets. In Cats, Rod Phillips shares a sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered hunters to Europe's suspected familiars of witches and from shipboard rodent controllers to cherished internet icons.

Phillips illustrates how cats have always occupied spaces both familiar and mysterious and how their perceived independence and disruptive nature―and their associations with women, the supernatural, and outsiders―have shaped humans' attitudes toward these fascinating creatures. Cats have been lauded as companions and vermin-killers, reviled as threats to moral and ecological order, and cherished for the very qualities that make them hard to control. This richly textured portrait of cats explores their significance in religion, politics, gender, literature, warfare, and pop culture. It also provides profound insights into our relationships with other animals, especially dogs and rodents.

The many roles that cats have played throughout history illuminate a variety of contradictions in humans' perceptions of them: as affectionate yet aloof, adorable and evil, ordinary and exceptional. This book is the definitive story of the feline presence in human history―an elegant study of how we live with animals whom we see as living by their own rules.

Visit the website for Phillips's books about wine.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Authoritarian Markets"

New from Cornell University Press: Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China's Banking Explosion by Adam Y. Liu.

About the book, from the publisher:

Authoritarian Markets explores the political foundations of China's banking boom and its far-reaching impact on the Chinese economy.

In 1978 China had no commercial banks. Today it commands the world's largest banking system, with assets equal to 40 percent of global GDP. Adam Y. Liu argues that this rise was not the product of market reforms but of political bargains and bureaucratic mobilization.

In the 1990s, Beijing issued bank licenses as bargaining chips―securing cooperation from local governments as it pushed through painful reforms. The result was a sprawling, competitive banking market built not in spite of authoritarian rule but because of it.

Drawing on interviews, spatial data, census records, surveys, and experiments, Liu reveals how local state banks became both engines of China's growth and incubators of its current economic risks. Eye-opening and persuasive, Authoritarian Markets offers fresh insight into the political logic of market development in China and authoritarian states worldwide.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Race in Transit"

New from Stanford University Press: Race in Transit: Tracing the Politics of Migration from Ottoman Syria through US Empire by Randa Tawil.

About the book, from the publisher:

At the turn of the twentieth century, life in Ottoman Syria was upended by European and US colonial and capital expansion. Many people responded by migrating to the United States. In doing so, they stepped into the world of international migration, where they had to navigate overlapping states and migration infrastructures―shipping companies and ticketing agents, health inspectors and border police, universities and kinship networks―that each facilitated, restricted, and policed movement.

With this book, Randa Tawil follows the itineraries of the early Syrian diaspora, stitching together migrants' travels across archives from Beirut, Marseille, Liverpool, Manila, Washington, D.C., Michigan, and Texas. She reveals the overlapping and contradicting ways in which race was forged globally in the early twentieth century and its effects on Syrians in the United States. Syrian migrants encountered multiple imperial and national legal regimes during transit, and their varying relationships with different empires set the conditions under which migrants were considered "desirable" or "undesirable" once they reached US borders. Focusing on the experiences of those on the move, Race in Transit makes migrants the agents of a world history that has too often relegated them to the sidelines.

Visit Randa Tawil's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rarities"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Rarities: Conservation Science in a Time of Unintended Consequences by Zoe Nyssa.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping study that reveals how conservation science does more than simply protect by inadvertently making nature valuable in new ways.

Climate change and other environmental transformations are causing species to go extinct at accelerating rates. What, then, should a science of saving nature look like? In Rarities, Zoe Nyssa traces how conservation emerged as a distinct scientific endeavor in the United States over the twentieth century and how this history has shaped environmental research practices and policy today. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research with leading conservation labs and programs, Nyssa explores how conservation science appears to generate contradictory, even counterintuitive, results as scientists, policymakers, and the public all take up, respond to, and repurpose scientists’ ideas about rarity, vulnerability, and endangerment. The designation of new nature reserves can lead to increased poaching and habitat destruction. The listing of a species as endangered fuels their black-market consumption as pets, food, or luxury items. Protection of natural resources can push resource extraction into unprotected areas. Other effects are less simple to calculate; persuading the public to care about one species might siphon support for another, and paying for one kind of conservation behavior can discourage other forms of conservation activity.

The science of saving nature spans a century of work by ecologists and others to develop a scientific basis for conservation. Yet Nyssa shows how their efforts to understand the natural world in terms of endangerment and extinction unleashed new ways for nonscientists to experience and understand nature as well. The scientific values that emerge, she argues, can transform the complex interconnections between human and nonhuman life. Rarities offers a framework for understanding these surprising socio-ecological dynamics and why they matter, both for contemporary science and for the planet.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Under Authoritarian Eyes"

New from Oxford University Press: Under Authoritarian Eyes: Feminist Solidarity and Resistance in Russia and Serbia by Leandra Bias.

About the book, from the publisher:

Theories of transnational feminism often frame feminist knowledge as a project of Western hegemony to move ideas unilaterally from the "emancipated" West to other parts of the world. How does this framework resonate with feminists in times of authoritarianism?

In Under Authoritarian Eyes, Leandra Bias revisits long-held assumptions of West-East power to understand how power relations influence feminists' lived reality in authoritarian times. She argues that the focus on transnational power relations within critical feminist scholarship has overshadowed another emerging aspect of power: the rise of authoritarianism in post-communist Europe, the gender backlash on which it thrives, and, consequently, the risk of co-optability that accompanies it. With a focus on Russia and Serbia, Bias finds that in authoritarian contexts, feminists often reject the view of transnational feminism as merely an extension of Western dominance. In fact, they argue that this view mirrors the rhetoric of their regimes, which claim feminism and "gender ideology" are Western strategies to destroy "traditional values" and undermine national sovereignty. In highlighting these dynamics, Bias centers domestic over transnational power dynamics to illustrate how arguments that were formulated with an emancipatory aim can contribute to the subjugation of feminists across different political contexts.

Drawing on over seventy interviews with four generations of feminist activists and scholars in Russia and Serbia, Bias offers a nuanced perspective on feminist agency, revealing how feminists innovate resistance and subversive approaches without reinforcing authoritarian narratives. By emphasizing the importance of solidarity, shared experience, and mutual support across borders and regimes, Under Authoritarian Eyes fundamentally reshapes the discourse on transnational feminism with important implications for democracy and human rights more broadly.

Visit Leandra Bias's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Strong State, Weak Links"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Strong State, Weak Links: Eugenics and the Southern Politics of Welfare by Anna Krome-Lukens.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the early twentieth century, most US states established eugenics programs to “improve” the human race through selective breeding. North Carolina ran one of the nation’s most aggressive programs; between 1927 and 1977, at least 5,700 people were sterilized and thousands more were committed to institutions. While sterilizations in the 1950s and 1960s disproportionately targeted Black women receiving public assistance, the program’s early focus was on poor white women. These policies were framed as scientific and progressive, yet they were deeply intertwined with racial and class biases, reflecting long-standing social hierarchies in the South.

Anna Krome-Lukens examines those early years and reveals how white reformers such as social workers, politicians, and activists promoted the principles of eugenics while shaping the emerging welfare state before and during the New Deal. By using claims about fitness and mental defects to justify unequal access to public benefits, they defined who was worthy of care. Tracing this history, Strong State, Weak Links illuminates how North Carolina’s eugenics programs influenced the modern welfare state and how their legacy continues to shape debates over social policy today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs"

New from NYU Press: A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs: Housing Chicago's Great Migration by Amani C. Morrison.

About the book, from the publisher:

Uncovers how Chicago's kitchenette apartments shaped housing, race, and urban life in the twentieth century

During the twentieth century’s Great Migration, kitchenette apartments served as the primary homes for Black migrants to Chicago. These small one- and two-room units were often illegally converted from larger apartments and were concentrated on the city’s densely populated, segregated South Side. Typically featuring a communal hallway bathroom, a cooktop tucked into a closet, chronic overcrowding, and exploitative rents, kitchenettes gained widespread fame and notoriety in news reports, housing code campaigns, and the works of celebrated Black artists including Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Richard Wright. They also preceded and paved the way for Chicago’s notorious public housing projects.

A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs offers the first book-length cultural analysis of the kitchenette within Chicago’s history of housing, race, and urban life. Both materially and symbolically significant, the kitchenette existed at the nexus of the Great Migration and the Great Depression, of housing precarity and domestic innovation, of racial capitalism and racial uplift. Drawing on a rich archive of sources from housing court records and documentary photographs to literature, journalism, and visual art, Amani Morrison reveals how Bronzeville’s kitchenettes served residents, landlords, artists, and institutions, accommodating overlapping but often divergent needs.

Through her theory of “Black spatial affordances,” Morrison illuminates how Black Chicagoans transformed constraint into creativity. Blending history, architecture, and cultural analysis, A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs recasts the kitchenette as central to Chicago’s urban modernity and to the making of Black everyday life.

Visit Amani C. Morrison's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Setting Fire to Reason"

New from Princeton University Press: Setting Fire to Reason: The Ethics of Free Speech by Jeffrey W. Howard.

About the book, from the publisher:

The responsibilities of speakers and platforms in a world where content can go viral

The debate over free speech is often marked by two extremes: in one corner, those who think that the right to free speech is nearly absolute; in the other, those who defend sweeping prohibitions on harmful speech. In Setting Fire to Reason, Jeffrey Howard rejects both extremes. He argues that free speech is among our most important moral rights, but—like all rights—it has limits, determined by moral duties we owe to each other. Yet exactly how these moral limits should be translated into law is complex, depending on the particular speech regulation at issue and the risks of government abuse.

Using incitement as his central example of harmful speech, Howard sets out an integrated framework of speakers’ rights and duties, determining when and why speech restrictions can be justified. In developing this original theory, Howard pinpoints the ethical duties of social media platforms, assesses the role of counter-speech as a weapon against harmful communications, and explores how the law and morality of free speech can and should diverge.

Visit Jeffrey Howard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Russia and Iran"

New from Oxford University Press: Russia and Iran: Partners in Defiance from Syria to Ukraine by Nicole Grajewski.

About the book, from the publisher:

Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has cast a spotlight on Russia's burgeoning partnership with Iran. Moscow looked to Tehran for drones and ammunition to fuel its so-called 'special military operation', and Iran's support for Russia's war reflected a decade-long strengthening of Russo-Iranian ties, beginning with the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian Civil War.

Despite a relationship historically marred by mistrust and unmet expectations, the two regimes have worked together to promote their common interests in Syria, where battlefield coordination soon developed into much deeper political alignment. Drawing on extensive Russian and Persian primary sources, and interviews with elites from both countries, Nicole Grajewski uncovers the drivers of ever-closer cooperation between the Kremlin and the Islamic Republic. Detailing the internal structures, shared anxieties and broader ambitions underpinning this alignment, she explores the genesis of Russia and Iran's mutual antagonism towards the Western-led global order; the impact of deep-seated leadership concerns over regime security and domestic protests; and the future trajectory of the partnership within the larger world order.

Examining both military dynamics and economic endeavors, as well as elaborate sanctions evasion schemes and collaboration within international organizations, this is the definitive account of contemporary Russia-Iran relations.

Visit Nicole Grajewski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Tolerance Generation"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Tolerance Generation: Growing Up Online in the Anti-Bullying Era by Sarah Miller.

About the book, from the publisher:

Draws directly on insights from teens to reframe our understanding of bullying in the age of social media and why anti-bullying campaigns have been unsuccessful in combating it.

Fitting in and standing out in high school is an eternal rite of passage for youth. Increasingly, these struggles to establish and maintain hierarchies are labeled under the umbrella of “bullying.” This form of conflict is considered such a significant problem that all fifty states have passed anti-bullying legislation, and many schools engage in prevention programs. Despite these efforts, bullying rates haven’t decreased. Why is that? Today’s teens face a unique challenge: social media.

In The Tolerance Generation, sociologist Sarah Miller explores how youth grapple with bullying in the digital age and the industry designed to prevent it. Based on two school years with students at a Northeastern high school, Miller calls “Township,” the book chronicles how adolescents navigate conflict in an increasingly digital society, all while their educators promote tolerance. Charting teens’ lives as they are affected not only by bullying, but also by sexting exposures, school shooting threats, and viral cancel culture, their stories illustrate the amplifying pressures social media places on youth and why bullying prevention efforts fail to help them. The school’s anti-bullying campaigns are engineered to address individual instances of explicit conflict, but not to change the culture that contributes to and constitutes bullying, nor to help students who are most likely to be targeted. Miller captures school practices that fail to address bullying as a systemic problem, while she shows how students’ online lives are inextricable from a culture of exclusion and harm.

However, by following teens on a variety of platforms, she also documents another realm, where adolescents develop their own bullying prevention strategies using the very tools adults blame for bullying. Here, youth harness digital culture to go beyond tolerance, using social media as a site for education, conflict resolution, and resistance. Ultimately, Miller establishes that to prevent bullying, schools must address the structural factors that marginalize students and offer tools for creating a true culture of care that supports youth both at school and online.

Visit Sarah Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reinventing Caste"

New from Stanford University Press: Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India by Ashish Koul.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book reveals that caste, usually assumed to be a feature of Hindu society, was in fact a trans-religious phenomenon in colonial India, as it is today. Even in an Islamic religious milieu that was supposedly more egalitarian than hierarchical Hinduism, colonial Indian subjects thought and acted in terms of caste. Through a focus on one agrarian Muslim caste known as Arains, Ashish Koul shows how some Indian Muslims transmuted caste and emplaced it within their understanding of Islam. During this time, Arain Muslims were derogatively called mali― gardener―instead of what they wished to be seen as―respectable landholders. Seeking to refute such negative portrayals, a group of elite Arains came together to develop a new Islamic vocabulary for caste.

Using primary sources in English and Urdu, Koul analyzes the intricacies of caste, religion, and politics among Muslims in colonial India. By asserting that being Arain was a way of being a true Muslim, elite Arains were able to intervene in significant debates about Muslim identity, colonial law, and political representation. Reinventing Caste shows that in order to understand why caste persists among South Asians, we must examine how caste consciousness has been entrenched within multiple religious traditions.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Texan Crucible"

New from the University of Texas Press: Texan Crucible: How the Irish, Germans, and Czechs Became Anglo by Marian J. Barber.

About the book, from the publisher:

A history of European immigrants in Texas and how they redefined racial identity.

While the creation of a Black-White racial binary was foundational to most of the United States, nineteenth-century Texas developed a unique tripartite system that acknowledged the role of individuals of Mexican ancestry in a region that was Spanish, Mexican, and an independent nation before becoming a US (and briefly Confederate) state. Yet this framework was fraught, struggling to accommodate new arrivals from beyond North America, in particular the Irish, Germans, and Czechs. Texan Crucible tells the story of these immigrants and how they became Anglo.

Marian Barber reveals the ways language, religion, alcohol use, and attitudes toward slavery distinguished these newcomers to Texas from those arriving from the eastern United States and how they nevertheless created thriving, influential communities. Their status was shaped by events inside and far beyond Texas, including an 1887 prohibition fight, the Civil War, and two world wars that encouraged them to erase their distinctiveness. As segregation was formally outlawed and civil rights activism grew, understandings of race shifted, cementing these groups’ status as Anglo. Texan Crucible recovers the histories of German, Irish, and Czech immigrants and unveils the social construction of racial difference underpinning Texan identity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Riptides"

New from Oxford University Press: Riptides: How the Spread of Racial Policies Fuels Volatility in American States by Periloux C. Peay.

About the book, from the publisher:

How does state-level policymaking contribute to the perpetual state of racial volatility in America? Riptides examines racialized policy diffusion through a unique framework that captures what motivates the speed and spread of racially progressive and regressive policies. It argues that the nation is locked in a constant competition between racial factions seeking to either preserve or dismantle racial hierarchies. States have, over time, developed and maintained policy cultures that reflect their commitment to and alignment in that competition over racial progress. The most innovative and influential states typically are among those with the broadest influence over the state policy landscape, and they have chosen sides in the policy conflict between white supremacists and transformative egalitarians. They parlay their broader influence into efforts to shape and reshape the racial policy condition in their states and beyond. Once innovated, racialized policies become highly contagious, as progressive and regressive policies diffuse simultaneously across a network of persistent, yet fragile, state-to-state relationships.

This book uses a novel social network analysis approach to map and analyze the spread of racially progressive and regressive policies from state to state to capture the political, social, and racial dynamics that have informed racialized policy innovation and diffusion processes since the Civil Rights Movement. In turn, it sheds light on how policy diffusion is a racialized process, how racialized policies diffuse, and how states use policy innovation and diffusion to shape and reshape the racial condition in America.

Visit Periloux C. Peay's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan"

New from Cornell University Press: Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024 by Xian Aubin Wang.

About the book, from the publisher:

Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan investigates decades of contentious relations between the Communist party-state of China and the Muslim community of southern Yunnan centered on the village of Shadian, site of an incident of state violence in 1975 that resulted in 1600 civilian deaths. Examining the causes and legacies of the Shadian massacre, Xian Aubin Wang draws on an extensive review of internal official documents, original written testimonies, and firsthand interviews with Muslim villagers.

By exploring interactions among Beijing, the Yunnan provincial government, county officials, CCP Muslim cadres, and Shadian villagers against the backdrop of the CCP's nationwide political campaigns since the early 1950s, Wang shows how Islam and Maoism influenced the ways that local villagers and party cadres saw and dealt with each other―and how these encounters shaped the developing conflict and its aftermath. Providing an in-depth account of Chinese religious groups living under the CCP, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan reveals how religion and politics shaped Muslim villagers' responses to the party-state's efforts to control and secularize them.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Strangers and Kinsmen"

New from LSU Press: Strangers and Kinsmen: Portuguese Immigrants and the Spanish Caribbean, 1492–1650 by Brian Hamm.

About the book, from the publisher:

Within the global Spanish empire of the early modern era, the signifier portugués carried an expansive variety of associations. It could mean, depending on the observer, being either Spanish or foreign, Catholic or Jewish, useful or deleterious, loyal or treasonous. In Strangers and Kinsmen, historian Brian Hamm argues that discursive debates about what it meant to be “Portuguese,” to which Spaniards and Portuguese alike contributed, opened a wide range of Lusitanian potentialities that could either accelerate or hinder Portuguese integration within the Spanish Atlantic world. As a result, uncertainty followed Portuguese immigrants across the Atlantic and plagued Spanish officials who had to decide how to respond to an ever-increasing number of Portuguese arrivals. To find convincing answers, as Hamm shows, the Portuguese and Spanish looked to public behavior and personal reputation. The most convincing proof of Portuguese loyalty, piety, and utility came from consistent performances of virtuous actions by the Portuguese themselves. At the same time, public behaviors deemed suspicious, heretical, or treasonous could have the opposite effect, confirming in the minds of Spanish observers that the Portuguese were dangerous foreigners, potentially engaged in conspiratorial activities, who should be excluded. Because of the interpretative significance placed on public patterns of behavior, Portuguese immigrants gained significant opportunities to negotiate a more secure and accepted place in colonial society.

Strangers and Kinsmen recovers the complexity and heterogeneity of Lusitanian immigration to the early modern Spanish Indies. Prioritizing Portuguese immigrants frequently overlooked in previous studies, including pilots, soldiers, priests, and spies, Hamm’s detailed analysis expands scholarly understanding of the thousands of Portuguese who collectively strengthened and threatened Spanish imperialism from within one of the most geopolitically vital regions of the world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Women in Power"

New from Columbia University Press: Women in Power: Fighting for Democracy in an Age of Authoritarianism (A Council on Foreign Relations Book) by Linda Robinson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Around the world, antidemocratic forces are taking aim at women leaders. Misogynistic authoritarianism has entered the mainstream, seeking to reverse decades of progress. Weaponized digital technologies have unleashed sexualized smears and violent threats. There is a deep connection between attacks on women and attacks on democracy―and female leaders can show us how to fight back.

Linda Robinson―an award-winning journalist and foreign policy expert―tells the powerful stories of the women on the frontlines of the battle between democracy and authoritarianism. Despite age-old obstacles and virulent new dangers, these remarkable leaders have strengthened their countries, expanded gender equality, and promoted policies that benefit all. Tsai Ing-wen crafted a strategy to defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression while advancing social reforms. Estonia’s Kaja Kallas and Moldova’s Maia Sandu fought Russian hybrid warfare by pursuing European integration. Balkan leaders Vjosa Osmani and Nataša Pirc Musar bolstered their democracies against Serbian and Russian destabilization. Mia Amor Mottley of Barbados became a global champion for climate justice, rising above sexist attacks to achieve international financial reforms. Robinson distills the hard-won lessons of these and other recent leaders―including New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Finland’s Sanna Marin, and Sigrid Kaag of the Netherlands―providing a roadmap for countries facing existential threats. Timely and vivid, this book spotlights women’s leadership amid the global crisis of democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Contested Continent"

New from Oxford University Press: Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680 by Peter C. Mancall.

About the book, from the publisher:

The newest volume in the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States series, Contested Continent recounts the origins of "America" and how it came to birth the United States.

The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, two New York Times bestsellers, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. In the newest volume in the series, Peter C. Mancall recounts how North America was forged from the experiences of millions of Indigenous women and men as well as Europeans and Africans.

The first volume of the Oxford History of the United States series, Contested Continent is also the most ambitiously far-ranging history of North America concentrating on the period from c. 1000 to 1680, from the arrival of Norse explorers to an explosion of revolts that underlined the stubborn struggle to master the continent some two centuries after Columbus's landfall. This history spans the continent from the North Atlantic to the West Indies and includes the entire Atlantic basin. Mancall emphasizes the experiences of diverse peoples while, at the same time, telling a new story about the origins of major aspects of American culture. He illuminates the rise of a booming trans-Atlantic economy based on the extraction of abundant American natural resources; the central role that European migrants and their descendants played in the enslavement of Africans and the displacement of Indigenous peoples; and the spread of self-governing polities where many enjoyed religious freedom. None of these developments was inevitable. Conflicts broke out frequently as different peoples battled over precious resources. Europeans' appetites for material gain and expanding Christendom brought horrific consequences for those brutalized, enslaved, and vulnerable to infectious diseases.

This is a sweeping history of developments crucial to the eventual founding of the United States. Contested Continent underscores the titanic struggles between the peoples who had populated the Americas for centuries and the migrants from the Old World who initiated changes that created a New World that offered boundless opportunities for some and crushed the aspirations of others.

Visit Peter C. Mancall's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"We All Do the Time"

New from NYU Press: We All Do the Time: Who Cares for Incarcerated Women and Why It Matters by Holly Foster-Talbot.

About the book, from the publisher:

Breaks new ground by showing how women in prison and their families interact through prison boundaries

Although women make up only 7% of the overall prison population in the US, their numbers are rising faster than men's, and yet little research has been done on their lives behind bars. In We All Do the Time, Holly Foster-Talbot focuses on how incarcerated women maintain connections to their families and communities while inside prison and shows how these connections foster positive emotions and feelings of belonging with broader society, in line with re-integrative and rehabilitative ideals. She argues that generating inclusive emotions is a vital part of how imprisoned women and their families cope with and survive imprisonment.

Focusing on the experiences of over 300 women in minimum-security federal prison, Foster-Talbot demonstrates that women and their families navigate the prison-family interface through two key mechanisms: women’s intersectionally linked lives and their intergenerationally linked lives. Among core findings is that Latina and Black women suffer worse self-rated mental health in prison than white women, despite having more supportive family ties. If not for these ties, women’s racial and ethnic health disparities in prison would be even greater than they already are. This book also shows how the families and communities hit hardest by mass incarceration are also more heavily affected by resultant caring-related absences when women are incarcerated. Ultimately, Foster-Talbot argues that understanding these important connections behind bars are vital for prison programming and policy.

--Marshal Zeringue