"Beer Ghosts"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grew Them by Jennifer A. Jordan.

About the book, from the publisher:

The little-known story of the young women who played a vital role in the rise of America’s great breweries.

Water, malt, yeast, and hops: these are essential ingredients of beer. Hops, specifically, play an outsized role in determining its flavor and aroma. In Beer Ghosts, Jennifer Jordan takes us back to a brief but pivotal moment in the nineteenth century when Wisconsin produced much of the hops grown in the United States. Yet those long-ago hops are not the only ghosts in Jordan’s story. Haunting the pages of this book are the young women whose work at harvest time was key to the rise of the American beer industry.

Until the early twentieth century, the work of picking hops was a time-consuming process that could only be done by hand, one cone at a time. In nineteenth-century Wisconsin, that work was performed almost exclusively by women and girls, who traveled to hop farms in droves as summer came to a close and the harvest began. At the height of the hop boom in the 1860s, farmers and their families laid out beds and prepared food for tens of thousands of seasonal laborers, and hosted parties and dances well into the night. Despite the scale of Wisconsin’s hop boom (and subsequent crash), the industry left behind little trace aside from local records and archives. And it is that barely discernible trace that lures Jordan to dig deeper.

Jordan’s vivid prose takes us back to this era by drawing on a rich trove of archival sources, from the thousands of hop farmers in the agricultural census to the extraordinary diary of a single hop picker, a young woman named Ella. The history of beer is incomplete without the history of Ella and the others who labored in the hop fields and in the houses that hosted them. In this book, Jordan gives life and voice to these beer ghosts who call to us from the past, showing the rich connections between a nation’s beer and the lives that made it possible.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Social Media Tribes"

New from the University of Texas Press: Social Media Tribes: Jordan's Bedouin and the Margins of the State by Geoffrey F. Hughes.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of the uses of social media in Jordan through the experiences of Bedouin tribespeople.

It has become something of a cliché to say that social media is making us tribal. But what do self-styled tribespeople themselves think about social media, and how might they help us better understand the role of the internet in our current political moment? Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork among Bedouin in Jordan, Social Media Tribes underscores the varied but broadly intelligible ways in which distinctive groups domesticate social media to suit their needs.

Organized around key concepts in Bedouin life (including tribalism, envy, and mercy), Social Media Tribes moves between Facebook-mediated tribal truces, upstart online media platforms, palatial urban villas where self-appointed sheikhs dispense justice, and street clashes organized over WhatsApp in rural communities ignored by state development projects. A meticulous researcher and insightful participant-observer, Geoffrey Hughes reframes social media as part of a global renegotiation of the state-society divide that both preceded the emergence of social media platforms and, in turn, feeds off of them. In this telling, the internet represents a new frontier that, like older frontiers, heralds both novel freedoms and novel forms of social control.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cops and Robbers"

New from NYU Press: Cops and Robbers: What Popular Culture Teaches Kids About Crime and Punishment by Liam Kennedy.

About the book, from the publisher:

How children’s books, tv shows, cartoons, and films often reproduce stereotypes about “good guys” and “bad guys” in terms of crime, policing, and the role of the criminal justice system in societyLiam Kennedy

In Cops and Robbers, Liam Kennedy examines children's popular culture to provide an understanding of how ideas about crime and the criminal justice system are produced and challenged. Based on an analysis of over 220 books, 12 films, and hundreds of television episodes/short videos geared toward children, Cops and Robbers considers the ideological impacts of children’s crime media messaging about what counts as a crime, the causes of crime, the roles and responsibilities of cops and other crime-fighters, as well as the nature and boundaries of justice.

Kennedy demonstrates how kids’ pop culture works to sustain the status quo and inhibits our ability to imagine alternatives to policing and prisons. He argues that children's crime media teaches them that it is correct to criminalize behaviors designated as threats to the capitalist social order, that the perpetrators of these acts are bad or even evil, unworthy of our sympathy, and usually incapable of change. Further, police and crime-fighters are shown to solve a wide array of community problems, produce peace and happiness, and require endless resources to preserve the social order and quell dissent. Finally, he finds that forced labor and incarceration are routinely framed as inevitable consequences – rather than policy decisions – for bad people who have made supposedly bad choices. Ultimately, Cops and Robbers will encourage social scientists, educators, and parents/guardians to think more critically about how children's crime media shapes ideas about crime, cops, and justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Theories of Emancipation"

New from Stanford University Press: Theories of Emancipation: Sociology and Socialism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Aaron Major.

About the book, from the publisher:

Modern sociology and modern socialism were born at the same time and developed in conversation with each other ― a link that is obvious in the work of Marx, but also visible in that of Durkheim, Weber, and Du Bois, among others. However, the extent of this overlap is yet to be fully realized. Theories of Emancipation: Sociology and Socialism at the turn of the Twentieth Century uncovers this relationship to argue that the concepts, questions, and theories that are foundational to the discipline emerged in conversation with, and in reaction to, the political and intellectual movements of the turn of the twentieth century socialist left.

Aaron Major argues that paying attention to the early influence of socialism on the discipline opens a new pathway for advancing central debates around personhood and agency. This book places canonical texts within their broader political and intellectual context, and in so doing offers novel insight into some of the discipline's most pressing concerns. A reimagining of sociology's history also informs current conversations about its future trajectory by reasserting its aspirations to higher, moral ends. Theories of Emancipation recovers a relationship between social science and human emancipation that has largely been displaced or forgotten.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Good, the Bad, and the Feasible"

New from Oxford University Press: The Good, the Bad, and the Feasible: Knowledge and Reasonable Belief by Maria Lasonen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Feasibilism urges manifesting the best feasible dispositions: the most success-conducive ways of forming and retaining doxastic states, as well as choosing and acting, that are available to beings like us. The first part of The Good, the Bad, and the Feasible presents case studies showing how epistemological implementations of feasibilism can advance long-standing debates in epistemology, including the New Evil Demon Problem, puzzles involving higher-order evidence and defeat, and challenges facing broadly consequentialist approaches. Maria Lasonen argues that a knowledge-centric implementation of feasibilism provides the most promising normative theory in epistemology: simple, elegant, metaphysically respectable, and explanatorily powerful.

The second part of the book moves from epistemology to a more systematic defense of feasibilism. Just as in the epistemic domain, in the moral domain we are confronted with problems of luck and limitation. For instance, given any plausible standard of moral rightness, in some situations it is only possible to do the right thing by luck. Again, we need a normative standard more attuned to our limitations. Lasonen argues that applying the feasibilist framework to the moral domain yields interesting and surprising results, such as it being possible to be blameworthy for action that is morally right. Feasibilism thus unifies different normative domains within a single, non-ideal framework, offering standards attuned to human limitations but tied to valuable normative successes.

Visit Maria Lasonen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"How to Win a Culture War"

New from University of Chicago Press: How to Win a Culture War: LGBTQ+ Social Change Through Pop Culture by Lisa M. Stulberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

How elite athletes and entertainment industry movers and shakers work to win the culture war for LGBTQ+ social justice.

The unquestionable runaway television hit of late 2025 was Crave/HBO Max’s Heated Rivalry, a show that tells the love story of two queer ice hockey players. This show―and the wider social context around it―would have been unthinkable without the courageous writing, art, and advocacy of previous generations of LGBTQ+ people and their allies in the entertainment industry. In How to Win a Culture War, sociologist Lisa M. Stulberg argues that, despite substantial barriers, past and current creatives and athletes are changing American culture through their contributions to arts, sports, and politics.

Stulberg conducted in-depth interviews with 170 culture workers―including television, film, and theater actors and creators; musicians; elite athletes; and activists over the span of 14 years. These include stars such as Will & Grace's Eric McCormack, Orange Is the New Black’s Lea DeLaria, Olympic diver Greg Louganis, and several former NFL players, as well as the TV and movie writers, producers, and directors behind some of pop culture’s boldest moves. These culture makers take six primary steps toward LGBTQ+ social change: they become visible, use available platforms, change their workplaces, overachieve, become normal, and stay queer. In this work, they are opening up the culture, changing hearts and minds, and building community, even amid a fresh round of ruthless political attacks on LGBTQ+ people.

Providing rich behind-the-scenes insight and cultural material, Stulberg outlines an urgently needed playbook for how to win a culture war.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Die Your Own Death"

New from Princeton University Press: Die Your Own Death: Walt Whitman’s Existential Democracy by Jack Turner.

About the book, from the publisher:

Humans fantasize about immortality. Billionaires dabble in cryonics, politicians build monuments to themselves, and writers donate their papers to libraries. In Die Your Own Death, Jack Turner argues that the quest for immortality—literal or symbolic—is politically destructive. He does so through a meditation on the work of Walt Whitman. Whitman held that democracy prepares individuals to “die their own deaths”—free of fear, resentment, and illusion. In Whitman’s “existential democracy,” accepting death strengthens freedom and equality. And yet, Turner finds, Whitman only half succeeded in forging a democratic philosophy of death. As Whitman’s thought evolved in response to changing ideas about nation, race, and empire, he encouraged citizens to seek immortality through racial imperialism—the expansion of white empire from North America to the Pacific Islands—as a monument to American greatness.

Turner explores the poetics of death in Leaves of Grass and its relationship to Whitman’s democratic theory (“I exist as I am, that is enough”). Through a close analysis of Drum-Taps and Memoranda During the War, Turner shows that Whitman sought to redeem the mass slaughter of the Civil War by cloaking it in poetic and national glory. And in Whitman’s greatest prose work, Democratic Vistas, Turner argues, Whitman envisioned an antidemocratic national immortalism that ignored Native sovereignty and Black equality. Turner exposes the dark side of Whitman’s philosophy of death, but he also reveals how that philosophy can still be a resource in the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reckoning with Racial Capitalism"

New from Columbia University Press: Reckoning with Racial Capitalism: Settler Colonialism, Anti-Blackness, and Left Critique Beyond Neoliberalism by Siddhant Issar.

About the book, from the publisher:

In recent years, activists and scholars have increasingly turned to the notion of racial capitalism to examine a range of topics, from the role of slavery in the development of the modern economy to the uneven effects of capitalism on nonwhite populations. Yet the meaning, scope, and political implications of this concept are deeply contested. Why has this idea provoked fierce debate? What can critical theory learn from engaging with the framework of racial capitalism and its use by social movements? How might reworking this framework push left politics and thinking to better understand our historical moment?

This book develops a critical theory of racial capitalism and argues that it is indispensable to understanding and contesting the neoliberal present. Challenging deracialized left critiques of neoliberalism, Siddhant Issar reconfigures the paradigm of racial capitalism to illuminate the relationships among anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and capital accumulation. He historicizes the neoliberal era, examining American capitalism’s changing yet durable long-term entanglements with gendered logics of racial and colonial domination. Bringing together political theory, Black studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and critical political economy with the knowledge production of social movements, Reckoning with Racial Capitalism calls for a reorientation of left politics beyond zero-sum framings of antiracist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist struggles.

Visit Siddhant Issar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mastering the Body"

New from Cornell University Press: Mastering the Body: Daily Life, Inequality, and Slavery in Roman Homes and Society by F. Mira Green.

About the book, from the publisher:

Mastering the Body offers an innovative exploration of the intimate, bodily routines that shaped―and were shaped by―Roman society. From kitchens to chamber pots, F. Mira Green uncovers how eating, digesting, and excreting were not just biological necessities but deeply embedded social practices that reinforced hierarchies and power structures in Roman households.

Drawing on archaeological evidence and material culture from Pompeii and Herculaneum and literary works from the Latin authors Seneca, Juvenal, and Apuleius, Mastering the Body reveals how elite Roman men used dietary habits and domestic labor to assert status and mastery. Domestic tools and spaces―designed for bodily care―encoded nonverbal messages of dominance and submission, and when considered with theories of embodiment, materiality, and sensory experience, illustrate the feedback loops between daily routines and the perpetuation of slavery and inequality. Ultimately, Mastering the Body is an invitation to rethink the role of the digesting body in ancient history by asking not only what digestion has to do with Roman society, but also how the body's most basic functions were central to its social order.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rival Civilisations"

New from Princeton University Press: Rival Civilisations: The Rise of Japan and Visions of World Order in Britain by Chika Tonooka.

About the book, from the publisher:

How British intellectuals of the twentieth century reckoned with the emergence of an Asian power

Most historians of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe point to the persistence of racialised and hierarchical views of non-Europeans as “uncivilised.” Yet these accounts overlook the profound intellectual impact of what contemporaries called the “awakening of Asia.” In Rival Civilisations, Chika Tonooka shows how the rise of Japan after 1905 compelled British intellectuals to rethink fundamental questions about world order and human difference. Juxtaposing Japanese and British sources, Tonooka offers an innovative history of British Eurocentrism—its ebbs and flows and emergent pluralist alternatives—through the lens of British debates on Japan.

Tonooka describes how British intellectuals and commentators grappled with such issues as whether civilisation was singular or plural; whether the civilising mission in Asia might be more successfully undertaken as the “yellow man’s burden”; whether non-Christians could be moral; and whether a world converging along Western lines was likely and even desirable. Even at the Empire’s peak, British thinkers began to grasp that Britain could no longer take its civilisational preeminence for granted. But Tonooka also considers what these debates on Japan missed, arguing that British civilisational discourse consistently overlooked what she demonstrates to be the paradoxical nature of global modernity. As a result, these British blind spots repeatedly foreclosed anticipations of critical world political challenges that lay ahead. Her original and rigorous analysis will enable readers to identify analogous blind spots over the rise of China and its consequences for the global order.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Return from the Soviet Union to Franco's Spain during the Cold War"

New from Oxford University Press: The Return from the Soviet Union to Franco's Spain during the Cold War by Glennys Young.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book tells the story of how and why Spaniards who had been catapulted to the USSR by the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Second World War came home. It examines the repatriation, mainly during the Cold War, of Spaniards in the USSR--nearly three thousand children evacuated there during the Spanish Civil War (and their caretakers), communists in exile, Republican aviators and sailors, and prisoners of war who had been soldiers and officers in the 'Blue Division' (the 250th Infantry Division of the Nazi Wehrmacht) that fought against the USSR.

In the post-war years, as the Cold War escalated, the repatriation of this politically, socially, and culturally diverse contingent of Spaniards mattered not just in Spain and the Soviet Union, but to people around the world. Yet there were formidable obstacles to repatriation, among them that Spain and the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations.

For the first time, Glennys Young reveals the behind-the-scenes negotiations between Spain and the Soviet Union that allowed thousands of Spaniards to set foot on Spanish soil during the first full decade of the Cold War. Using archival records from various countries, and incorporating interviews with the child evacuees, the book demonstrates the unrecognized political, social, cultural, and personal consequences of the repatriation of Spanish nationals, chiefly from 1954-1960, and the return of some of them to the Soviet Union during that period or shortly thereafter. It examines what repatriation as a political, social, psychological, and physical process meant for Spain during the Franco era, for the Soviet Union before and after Stalin's death, and for the Cold War. It also places the repatriation of Spaniards from the Soviet Union in comparison to the return of Italian, German, and Japanese prisoners of war and civilians. The narrative moves beyond state institutions to examine how individuals implemented, shaped, and circumvented state policy. In making repatriation possible, personal connections were vital, even between individuals and officials of hostile countries and opposing allegiances.

In so doing, the book offers a unique and valuable perspective on Cold War history: Soviet and Spanish politics and society influenced each other in unrecognized and unanticipated ways, even though the two countries did not have diplomatic relations.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Great Horse Flu"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America by Thomas G. Andrews.

About the book, from the publisher:

Seven years after the US Civil War and nearly 150 years before COVID, horses near Toronto began falling deathly ill with a sickness soon diagnosed as influenza. It took just a few weeks for this mutant flu variant to spread throughout southeastern Canada and into the northeastern US, infecting more than 90 percent of horses, donkeys, and mules wherever it struck. By the time the outbreak relented more than a year later, the Great Horse Flu of 1872 to 1873 had convulsed nearly every corner of North America and parts of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America.

This little-known scourge paralyzed the continent’s horse-powered economy at a critical political moment. As hundreds of thousands of animals died and entire cities ground to a halt, the outbreak exposed the fragility of industrial capitalism and the US’s deep dependence on animal labor. The Great Horse Flu triggered catastrophes such as the Great Boston Fire, unleashed seething social and racial conflict, stoked partisan divides, and set the stage for the Panic of 1873. In the hands of Bancroft Prize–winning historian Thomas G. Andrews, the gripping story of this animal plague becomes a revelatory history of American Reconstruction itself—its possibilities, limitations, and demise—while also illuminating the grave perils that novel viral variants pose to animals, humans, and the world we share.

Visit Thomas G. Andrews's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Remedying the Body"

New from Stanford University Press: Remedying the Body: Plastic Surgery and the Politics of Embodiment in Korea by So-Rim Lee.

About the book, from the publisher:

Plastic surgery has exploded in popularity in the recent decades, with South Korea emerging as a leader of the global beauty economy. In Remedying the Body, So-Rim Lee explores a cultural discourse of plastic surgery in South Korea through the feminist politics of care. Pulling together archival and cultural materials from the 1950s to the 2020s, Lee takes Korea as a paradigmatic example to reimagine coalitional ways of surviving a world governed by oppressive bodily norms.

Drawing from the Korean term koch'ida ("to cure or mend"), Lee uses "remedy" to name a broad spectrum of medical interventions performed to change the bodily appearance to arrive at a bodily norm. Remedy, however, is much more than medical treatment alone. This book contends that remedy is also a critical cultural ethos, a social performance of subjectivity, and a material practice of embodiment where state biopolitics and individual desire for belonging are inextricably entangled.

So-Rim Lee is the Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.

--Marshal Zeringue

"21st Century Yakuza"

New from Oxford University Press: 21st Century Yakuza: Death of Japanese Organised Crime by Martina Baradel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Once dominant and institutionalised, the Yakuza, one of Japan's best known criminal organisations, is now shrinking under the combined pressure of legal exclusion, social stigmatisation, and market regulation. Their membership has dropped from more than 80,000 in 2009 to fewer than 20,000 in 2025. Yet their disappearance is far from complete. Based on extensive fieldwork with active and former members, police officers, lawyers, and journalists, Martina Baradel examines how these organisations adapt to repression and explores what happens when a mafia begins to die.

21st Century Yakuza illuminates how Japan's model of regulatory saturation has dismantled the Yakuza's organisational capacity but left behind governance vacuums in markets the state struggles to control. This book demonstrates how the Yakuza persist through symbolic and residual forms of authority even as their formal power erodes, and how their decline has fragmented the criminal underworld. It traces the transformation of the Yakuza from territorially embedded brokers of governance to marginal actors in a more decentralised criminal landscape, including the delegation of trading activities to non-affiliated networks.

Through a sharp lens on criminal decline and adaptation, 21st Century Yakuza offers a compelling portrait of a fading underworld and the new forms of disorder emerging in its wake. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the shifting boundaries of law, authority, and illicit power in contemporary Japan.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unsettling Sovereignty"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Unsettling Sovereignty: International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and US Extraterritorial Power in Postwar Oceania by M. X. Mitchell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Marshall Islanders and their ancestral lands and waters played important roles in reshaping the United States’ offshore power, state sovereignty, and the international politics of decolonization.

In the years following World War II, the United States conducted sixty-seven devastating nuclear blasts in the Marshall Islands―yet the archipelago was never a US territory. Working through the United Nations, US diplomats engineered a new, one-of-a-kind extraterritorial status, called strategic trusteeship, to control the Native lands, waters, and peoples of the Marshall, Caroline, and Northern Mariana Islands. Strategic trusteeship permitted the US to militarize a vast expanse of Western Oceania. This novel and racialized legal form of international dependency was integral to US nuclear weapons detonations and damage in the region.

In Unsettling Sovereignty, M. X. Mitchell recounts this untold legal history, exploring how nuclear weapons changed claims and practices of sovereignty from the 1940s to the present. US nuclear blasting in the Marshall Islands troubled conventional renderings of state sovereignty under international law. The explosions, disastrous for Marshallese communities and their ancestral atolls, also caused hazardous nuclear fallout, which spread around the globe. Islanders and their allies turned to law, using legal wrangling over blasting and fallout to raise new questions about the location, time, and subjects of state violence in a period of decolonization; the intersections between race, Indigeneity, and wide-scale technogenic harm; and the pitfalls and unfulfilled promises of international law. Mitchell shows that the Marshallese people and their lands and waters were, and remain, central to redefining sovereignty in an era of boundless pollution and climate change.

Visit M. X. Mitchell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine"

New from NYU Press: Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Race, Labor, and Jewish Radicalism in Los Angeles by Caroline Luce.

About the book, from the publisher:

How a cohort of young Jewish radicals from the borderlands of Eastern Europe was critical in reshaping multiracial left-wing activism in southern California

Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine offers a novel account of Eastern European Jewish immigration and Yiddish public culture in Southern California. It traces the journeys of a cohort of young Jewish radicals as they moved from the borderlands of the Russian empire to the borderlands of the American southwest, exploring their engagement with well-known labor and left-wing movements in Los Angeles.

Much of the book is focused on Boyle Heights, a residential neighborhood east of the L.A. River once home to the highest concentration of Jews west of Chicago as well as to dozens of other diasporic communities, showing how the neighborhood’s particular ethno-racial diversity shaped Yiddish public culture. Rich with new details drawn from previously untranslated Yiddish sources, it examines new relationships and tensions that emerged as the Jewish radicals worked to forge multiracial coalitions in the workplace and the community, including with their Mexican, Asian, and African-American neighbors. It frames the community as a site of convergence, where multiple marginalized populations cultivated their own modes of belonging in overlapping ways, as well as of divergence, where residents’ experiences were differentiated by international and domestic political-economic developments.

The book decenters traditional narratives of Jewish immigration and acculturation focused on cities of the northeast, moving Jewish workers in the west from the margins to the center of American Jewish history. It showcases the variety of organizing practices through which Jewish radicals recreated Yiddish public culture in LA, offering a new perspective on the relational dynamics of race and place-making in the American west. Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine recovers the contributions of Eastern European Jewish radicals and trade unionists, demonstrating the ways in which immigrant workers shaped the city of Los Angeles.

Visit Caroline Luce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Street Knowledge"

New from Princeton University Press: Street Knowledge: The Hidden Ways Social Change Happens by Darien Pollock.

About the book, from the publisher:

A philosophical framework for resistance that connects Socrates to the street

Does social change happen “top down” or “bottom up”—brought about by those who hold power or by those who struggle against the powerful? In Street Knowledge, Darien Pollock argues that the most powerful change comes from the bottom up. “Street culture” supplies the creative activity that inspires not only political change but any kind of positive social change. Pollock argues that part of what prevents progressive social change is that people in power only legitimize and respond to ideas and arguments that are legible to them; marginal actors—those with street knowledge—are forced to develop ways of making ideas that are illegible to the broader public meaningful and useful. At its best, street knowledge can be used to address civic injustice, cultural hegemony, and economic exploitation.

Reading Plato, Marx, DuBois, Derrida, and others, Pollock discovered that academic philosophy has had a street orientation all along. The core qualities he associated with the “street disposition”—the psychological and spiritual capacity to resist an unjust social arrangement—were already represented in Plato’s Republic. Drawing on the late Congressman John Lewis’s idea of “good trouble” as well as Socrates, Pollock argues that “the street” should be understood as a universal feature of the human condition—with the potential to emerge anywhere at any time. Street knowledge, Pollock contends, lays the foundation for a radically new way of doing philosophy and achieving social justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Equal Subjection"

New from Oxford University Press: Equal Subjection: What Justice Demands of Political Leaders by Claudio López-Guerra.

About the book, from the publisher:

Politicians like to claim that they are “in it together” or “in the same boat” with their subjects. In fact, they are not. Should they be? To what extent?

This book offers the first systematic treatment of these questions. It contends that, under the status quo, rulers do not have enough skin in the game; they do not bear the consequences of their decisions in office as much as justice demands. López-Guerra defends equal subjection, a novel understanding of political equality that requires rulers to cast their lot with the ruled as equal users of the goods and services that they have a duty to provide for all. He proposes an original way of aligning the interest of rulers and subjects that would mitigate the principal-agent problem in politics and also make societies intrinsically more just.

Authoritarianism is on the rise. What is to be done? Political philosophers are back in the business of thinking seriously and creatively about the design of better political institutions, but their ingenuity remains confined to the choice of decision-making schemes, neglecting the importance of decision-bearing rules. This book makes the case for an original idea that expands the limits of our political imagination.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Informality"

New from the University of Texas Press: The Politics of Informality: Housing and Planning in Mexico City by Emilio de Antuñano.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of the central role and political power of informal neighborhoods in Mexico City.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexico City was tightly bounded, with a population of about half a million people. By the end of that century, it was an unfathomable megalopolis of some 20 million. It had also become exhibit A in an “urban crisis” decried by demographers, NGOs, and the Mexican government. Mexico City’s greatest sin was its shantytowns―informal neighborhoods built in defiance of regulations and viewed as incurably disordered.

The Politics of Informality is an illuminating political and intellectual history, examining how these neighborhoods have figured in Mexican life and in the ideologies underlying urban planning. Prior to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, urban experts saw Mexico City as a tidy modern capital in-waiting. But during the interwar period, informal neighborhoods boomed, as working-class families asserted claims to housing under the revolution’s framework of citizenship and social justice. Then, amid Cold War realignments, a new cohort of urban experts pathologized Mexico City, turning it into a transnational laboratory for the study of poverty, migration, and overpopulation. Tracing a fascinating evolution, The Politics of Informality underscores the stubborn opposition between technocratic modernism and revolutionary, extralegal politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion by Hugh B. Urban.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping cultural history of our yearning for psychedelics to free us from both modern life and traditional religion.

In 1957, Life Magazine published an article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” about a Mexican healing ritual centered on an obscure psychedelic: Psilocybe mushrooms. Readers raced to experiment with the drug for their own spiritual, therapeutic, and recreational purposes until a psychedelic wave swept the nation. Today, though psilocybin has been transformed from a sacred fungus into a pharmaceutical product, many people still turn to the enigmatic mushroom to encounter profound spiritual experiences without the baggage of traditional religion.

In Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom, Hugh B. Urban examines the alluring promise of mysticism without religion. With psychedelics, one need not fast, flagellate, or even worship a god to encounter the transcendent; a carefully timed ingestion of psilocybin will suffice. But, Urban argues, stripping the trip from its religion came at a cost: the erasure of Indigenous culture and the eventual commercialization and scientification of the psychedelic underground. Urban shows that psychedelic mushrooms, far from the fringe or countercultural margins, have been central players in shaping American attitudes toward religion and science over the last century. He argues that our love affair with the intoxicating fungus reveals a deep frustration with a disenchanted world, desire for meaning beyond religion, yearning for nature amid ecological crisis, faith in science to save us, and the relentless power of capitalism to turn everything into commodities.

The Page 99 Test: Zorba the Buddha.

The Page 99 Test: The Path of Desire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Remember the Tuscania"

New from Cornell University Press: Remember the Tuscania: The Sinking, Its Aftermath, and a Century of Public Memory by Steven Trout.

About the book, from the publisher:

Remember the Tuscania plunges readers into the night of February 5, 1918, when a German U-boat's torpedo found a crowded US troopship in the North Atlantic―and into the century of argument, propaganda, and remembrance that followed. At its heart are the Baraboo Twenty-One, citizen-soldiers from a Wisconsin town who survived the sinking that became the deadliest U-boat attack on Americans in the First World War and the nation's first mass-casualty event of the conflict.

Steven Trout braids military history and cultural history with a dramatic pulse. He reconstructs the voyage and catastrophe in detail. Then he follows the aftershocks across newspapers, posters, cartoons, poems, and sheet music as the home front seizes on a new rallying cry―"Remember the Tuscania!"―and turns the dead into usable symbols. Trout also exposes a War Department fiasco over casualty lists that helped force reforms to identification practices (serial numbers on dog tags; rosters kept at hand aboard transports).

Remember the Tuscania draws attention to how people memorialize dramatic wartime events: the isle of Islay's windswept "American Monument," improvised funerals beneath a hastily sewn Stars and Stripes, the formation of the National Tuscania Survivors Association, and a twenty-first-century resurrection of the story back in Baraboo. Trout shows how myth overtook messy reality and how private grief often resisted public pageantry.

Trout's narrative is a riveting, deeply researched investigation that showcases the meaning for Americans of a nearly forgotten disaster and the unbreakable ties of transatlantic remembrance that it left behind.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Harnessing Disruption"

New from Oxford University Press: Harnessing Disruption: Building the Tech Future Without Breaking Society by Sarah E. Kreps.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely and thought-provoking exploration of technological disruption, drawing on history's most transformative innovations--from nuclear power to AI--to offer a vital roadmap for navigating the future of technology.

In Harnessing Disruption, Sarah E. Kreps--a national security expert and military veteran--offers a fresh, clear-eyed framework for understanding the social and political dynamics that shape technological change. From nuclear weapons to AI, cryptocurrency, and social media, breakthrough innovations rarely arrive without backlash. Disruption is not collapse. History shows it is part of a recurring pattern.

With unmatched insight and authority, Kreps traces a five-stage cycle that technologies follow: emergence, early warnings, crisis, agenda-setting, and institutional response. Drawing on decades of research and real-world policy experience, she argues that disruption is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently self-correcting. Rather, it's a process we can steer, if we learn to see the signs and act decisively.

Harnessing Disruption challenges fatalistic narratives that cast AI and other technologies as uncontrollable forces. It makes the case for cautious optimism: that institutions can adapt, societies can recalibrate, and technologies can be governed in ways that protect both innovation and the public good. Timely, incisive, and grounded in both historical precedent and contemporary case studies, this book provides the tools for anyone, including policymakers, entrepreneurs, and citizens, to understand where we are in the cycle of disruption and how to shape what comes next.

Writers Read: Sarah E. Kreps (January 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The River That Made Texas"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The River That Made Texas: A Forgotten History of the Trinity by Scot McFarlane.

About the book, from the publisher:

Today, half of Texas’s expanding population, including the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, depends on the Trinity River, a river that has shaped the state’s politics, economy, and environment for centuries. From the prairies of North Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, the Trinity established Native nations, foiled Spanish and French imperialism, stood at the center of the Texas plantation system, and fueled the growth of the state’s largest cities.

In the first history of this vital river, historian Scot McFarlane illuminates how the Trinity has defined Texas history. Its floods enriched the soil and destroyed crops, its channel served as both a route and barrier to freedom, and its once-polluted waters now sustain a significant portion of the state. McFarlane’s captivating narrative brims with stories of the people who called the Trinity home over the centuries: the Comanche, steamboat pilots, enslaved and freed people, sharecroppers, inmates, and millions of urban residents. The result is a fresh perspective on economic development, slavery, and the environment—revealing the Trinity not as a backdrop to Texas history but as a force that shaped it.

Visit Scot McFarlane's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last Invasion of England"

New from Princeton University Press: The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada by Arthur der Weduwen.

About the book, from the publisher:

An electrifying narrative history that reframes Britain’s constitutional revolution as a full-scale Dutch invasion

In popular accounts of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the autocratic Catholic King James II was ousted by his subjects and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart, wife of James’s nephew, the Dutch William III of Orange. Devoted to her husband, Mary would not accept the crown alone, and so William and Mary were crowned together, securing a smooth dynastic succession. The Last Invasion of England recounts the forgotten campaign that carried William and his army to English shores and led directly to James’s fall, bringing a revolutionary age vividly to life—and rewriting the history of Britain, Europe and the transatlantic world more widely.

In this bold work of revisionist history, Arthur der Weduwen tells the momentous story of the Dutch Armada, describing the immense risks and near failures of the last seaborne invasion of England—which occurred exactly one hundred years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The sixteen thousand Dutch troops who accompanied William were not on hand for moral support. They came with sword, musket and cannon. Der Weduwen argues that the political revolution in Britain could not have been achieved without the willpower, might and resources of William and the Dutch nation, and explains why the Dutch Republic, a small state that celebrated peace and commerce above all else, would dare to undertake a reckless preemptive military strike on its more powerful neighbour.

Transforming our understanding of the Glorious Revolution and Britain’s ascendancy as a global powerhouse, The Last Invasion of England relies entirely on contemporary sources, many from leading protagonists who prepared and executed the invasion, evoking the historical realities of the women and men who lived during turbulent and uncertain times.

Visit Arthur der Weduwen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Gender Is a Weapon"

New from the University of Michigan Press: Gender Is a Weapon: Liberalism, Difference, and US Counterinsurgency by Elizabeth Mesok.

About the book, from the publisher:

Following the end of the draft in 1973, the US military increasingly offered women the opportunity to transform their lives—to obtain an education, receive healthcare, provide for their families, and prove their worth to the nation. By the time the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan at the turn of the twenty-first century, the labor of women—and Black women in particular—was critical to the military’s ability to simultaneously wage two wars. Within the context of counterinsurgencies fought amid civilian populations, the US military discovered the value of women’s gender difference as a weapon of war.

Through ethnographic and archival research with women soldiers and Marines, as well as military and government officials, Gender Is a Weapon contextualizes women’s service in Iraq and Afghanistan against the promises of liberal inclusion unfolding throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Centered on narratives of Black and Indigenous women, women of color, immigrant women, and queer women, the book analyzes the transformations of martial citizenship; the racialized language of cultural difference in the US’s revitalized counterinsurgency doctrine; the gendered performances of women in combat and civilian engagement missions; and ultimately, the irreparable injuries of body and mind with which these women returned home. The epilogue discusses the recent dismantling of DEI in the military and US government more broadly, reflecting on what we can learn from the violent history of military liberal inclusion to help us better understand our contemporary moment. By carefully attending to both the discursive construction and performative enactment of gender in militarized and securitized contexts, the book advances theoretical frames for studying gender in state militaries, militarism, and late liberalism.

Visit Elizabeth Mesok's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Authenticity"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Politics of Authenticity: First-Personal Truths and Democratic Claims by Nina Hagel.

About the book, from the publisher:

A qualified defense of authenticity claims in contemporary politics.

On both the Left and Right, we see a range of political claims cast in terms of authenticity, from transgender persons seeking recognition of who they truly are to religious business owners requesting exemptions from antidiscrimination laws. For claimants, what is often at stake is an inner self that would be harmed if changed or concealed. At the same time, many scholars are skeptical of authenticity claims, with some worrying that they are too nebulous and inward-looking and others fearing that they contain too much anti-democratic potential. There is also the added difficulty of determining when and on what grounds to accept a claim of authenticity.

Nina Hagel argues that while invoking authenticity has serious risks, it remains a crucial democratic resource. Through an engagement with canonical and contemporary political theorists, and an analysis of current political struggles centering on authenticity, Hagel advances a defense of authenticity’s democratic potential, alongside a practice for interpreting and invoking such claims. While one might assume that this perspective clashes with the post-modern view that there is no true self outside of politics and history, Hagel puts forward a non-essentialist understanding of authenticity that emphasizes subject formation and emancipation. Hagel argues that authenticity claims best support democracy when they collectively steward, rather than overcome, the social powers that shape our identities. We ignore authenticity claims at our peril, since the objects of such claims are the norms and practices that make us who we are.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Living Just Enough for the City"

New from Oxford University Press: Living Just Enough for the City: Experiments in Urban Political Theory by Joe Hoover.

About the book, from the publisher:

Today, most of us call the city home. The city is also the context in which we come to understand ourselves, build relationships with others, and negotiate our collective lives. Many authors have recognised this transformation entails new social and political challenges. What is less often acknowledged is how this alters the way we think about ourselves, as well as politics and social life more broadly. Humanity's move to the city entails a philosophical transformation as well as a physical relocation. Placing the city at the centre of our thinking challenges contemporary political theory, giving rise to distinctive problems, suggesting new ways of thinking, and calling for innovative methods.

Living Just Enough for the City develops an urban political theory by asking "where are we?" and "where should we be going?". By using the city as both a site for theorising and a focal point it reconstructs key concepts in political theory and provides important insights into contemporary political life and the democratic possibilities of the city. It argues the central political problems facing cities, such as gentrification, growing inequality, and conflicts over citizenship, demonstrate the need for a people-centred conception of legitimate authority that challenges state sovereignty. Drawing on urban experience for insights into the nature of contemporary politics and the prospects for positive change, it argues that as individuals and communities are shaped by urban life, the city's denizens have a right to participate in its democratic remaking. Philosophising from and about the city, which is defined by change and contingency, suggests a new approach is needed. To do this, Living Just Enough for the City develops an innovative situationist methodology drawn from Pragmatism, which begins with practical problems arising in everyday experience, and incorporates personal reflection, original empirical research, and artistic representations of the city to understand, critique, and improve our shared urban lives.

Visit Joe Hoover's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Arms Control Paradox"

New from Stanford University Press: The Arms Control Paradox: Managing Uncertainty in an Insecure World by Amy J. Nelson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Arms control is eroding amid a rapidly changing and increasingly uncertain security environment. In addition to a spate of treaty withdrawals and demises that have occurred since 2002, major powers are militarizing space, and private actors are developing technologies at lightning speed. Thus, there is an urgent need for arms control agreements that incorporate multiple actors and weapons to mitigate uncertainty; yet conditions of increasing uncertainty make reaching such agreements extremely challenging, if nearly impossible. This is what Amy J. Nelson calls the arms control paradox. Drawing on years of research and policy experience, Nelson explores why traditional arms control strategies often fall short in today's security environment. Most past agreements were built on assumptions of transparency, reciprocity, and predictability that no longer hold in a multipolar world shaped by advanced technologies and strategic opacity. By focusing narrowly on eliminating known dangers through rigid verification and technical controls, arms control has inadvertently neglected uncertainty management—the ability to acclimate to the unknown. This book proposes an adaptive approach: one that focuses on managing ambiguity rather than eliminating it and reflects how real-world decisions unfold under pressure. The Arms Control Paradox provides valuable insights and policy-relevant guidelines for twenty-first-century arms control.

Visit Amy J. Nelson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Red Mecca"

New from Princeton University Press: Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance by Margaret Litvin.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first literary study of the Arab world’s Soviet entanglements, examining how Arabic writers have retold and reimagined their Soviet and Russian sojourns

During the Cold War, tens of thousands of Arab students journeyed to study in the USSR, drawn by socialism’s red beacon or simply the chance to study abroad for free. For these students, the Soviet Union was not an Evil Empire but a Red Mecca—a relatively free third space, far from home and away from the influence of the West. In this groundbreaking book, Margaret Litvin analyzes how Arab intellectuals understood and narrated their experiences of studying in the Soviet Union, particularly in Russia and Ukraine. Drawing on novels, letters, interviews, Soviet faculty meeting minutes, a student film, and other sources, Litvin reconstructs these Arab students’ lifeworld in all its political tension and human depth. She shows that, far from disappearing in 1991, the legacy of Cold War–era study abroad has offered rich material to twenty-first-century Arab writers, who use Russian or Soviet themes to explore minoritization, rigid gender identities, jihad, dictatorship, and war.

Tracing the unexpected trajectories of people, literary genres, and fantasies, Litvin offers the counterintuitive but illuminating argument that throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, Arab intellectuals have used Soviet educational ties to gain cultural freedom—and that this often worked in spite, not because, of policymakers’ plans. Combining cultural history and literary criticism, Red Mecca recovers a long-overlooked historical conjunction and shows how Arabic novelists have transmuted it into art.

Visit Margaret Litvin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Hamlet's Arab Journey.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Consent Under Pressure"

New from Oxford University Press: Consent Under Pressure by Mollie Gerver.

About the book, from the publisher:

Everyone faces pressure. Pressure can come from your boss to work late, from your friends to go partying, from your government to join the military, and from a mugger demanding your wallet or your life. The pressure can be from individuals, groups, and even society as a whole, as when millions of people spread stigma against those remaining unmarried, pressuring singles to marry, or when millions of voters support candidates rounding up migrants, pressuring these migrants to repatriate home. This is a book about when pressure--whether implicit or explicit, from individuals or groups--leads to invalid consent.

Invalid consent occurs when someone's consent fails to dissolve another person's duty. For example, if a mugger holds you up at gunpoint and demands your money, and so you consent to hand it over, the mugger maintains a duty to not take your money, such that your consent is invalid. Yet, sometimes pressure--even quite explicit and deadly pressure--is perfectly compatible with valid consent. For example, if a refugee is held up gunpoint by a soldier demanding that he leave the country, and he consents to an aid worker smuggling him to safety, his consent to the aid worker seems valid: he makes it the case that the aid worker rescuing him violates no duty in carrying him across the border. The question, then, is why sometimes consent is valid despite extreme pressure, and other times it is not. To answer this question, we must pull apart different types of pressure, different duties people owe each other, and different rights people have when giving consent to others.

Visit Mollie Gerver's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"For Customers Only"

New from the University of Chicago Press: For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality by Bryant Simon.

About the book, from the publisher:

Public toilets determine who gets everyday dignity, freedom of movement, and civic belonging―and who doesn’t.

Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

For Customers Only is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren’t only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.

But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about―provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity.

The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.

The Page 99 Test: Everything But the Coffee.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sick Work"

New from Duke University Press: Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness by Emily Lim Rogers.

About thebook, from the publisher:

In Sick Work, Emily Lim Rogers shows the unpaid labor it takes to be recognized as sick in the United States. Through a historical and ethnographic account of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)—a disease defined by disproportionate exhaustion after any form of exertion, which has no cure or treatment—she reveals how changing formations of labor decide what counts as disability and what does not. Sickness, she writes, is not work’s opposite. Rather, the frequent dismissal of their disease leaves people with ME/CFS to do their own labor of disease advocacy, or “sick work,” even as their symptoms prevent many from working paid jobs. Rogers presents a history of the discursive construction of chronic fatigue and demonstrates its development alongside capitalism since the dawn of industrial management science in the late nineteenth century. These histories, she argues, echo through to the present day, shaping the denial of me/cfs and the stigma that surrounds it. Examining the everyday lives of people with ME/CFS and their activist movements, Sick Work describes how they swim upstream against strong tides of disbelief and demands a radical transformation of how work is defined and valued.

Visit Emily Lim Rogers's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Breaking Families, Making Families"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Breaking Families, Making Families: Adoption and Child Welfare in the 1990s by Mical Raz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Families in the United States experience child abuse investigations, the removal of children from their homes, and the termination of parental rights at higher rates than peer countries. Yet this does not make them safer and comes at a cost. As a historian and practicing doctor, Mical Raz asks how American society came to accept punitive interventionist policies that prioritize termination of parental rights. These practices “free” children for adoption, which leads to the devastation of families and communities and the creation of “legal orphans”—children who have no legal ties to their families of origin.

Drawing on original archival sources, legislative documents, and oral histories, Raz argues that adoption is not the inevitable solution to a child welfare system in crisis, maps the political history of this shift in child welfare policymaking—exemplified in the passage of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act—and proposes future reforms.

Raz's books include The Lobotomy Letters: The Making of American Psychosurgery (2013), which was awarded the Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Career Development Award; What's Wrong with the Poor? Race, Psychiatry and the War on Poverty (2013), and Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost its Way (2020).

The Page 99 Test: What's Wrong with the Poor?.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Grassroots Women in the Populist Radical Right"

New from Oxford University Press: Grassroots Women in the Populist Radical Right by Sofia Ammassari.

About the book, from the publisher:

Populist radical right (PRR) parties have long been characterised as 'men's parties' due to the overrepresentation of men within their ranks. Yet, not only are PRR parties attracting more women voters than ever, but they are also electing more women MPs than ever. To explain these trends, Grassroots Women in the Populist Radical Right shifts attention to an overlooked step of the political recruitment ladder, the party grassroots, and investigates women's involvement as PRR party members.

The book looks both at the 'supply-side' of membership, assessing whether women and men differ in their motivations for joining, motivations for staying, and activism; and the 'demand-side', exploring if PRR parties adopt distinct recruitment and retention strategies for women and men. It focuses on three PRR parties which have profoundly influenced the politics and societies of their countries: the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the League in Italy, and the Sweden Democrats. Drawing on a vast collection of original qualitative and quantitative data―including interviews with over 100 party members and officials from the three parties, alongside membership surveys of thousands of League and Sweden Democrats members―the book reveals that PRR parties should not still be considered 'men's parties'. Arguing that women PRR grassroots members play a central role in the organisational development, electoral expansion, and growing normalisation of the populist radical right, Ammassari sheds light on one of the defining political phenomena of our century.

Visit Sofia Ammassari's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Her Hat Was in the Ring"

New from NYU Press: Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States by Wendy E. Chmielewski and Jill Norgren.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reveals the untold story of over 6,000 women who ran for office between 1850-1920, expanding our understanding of women's fight for full political citizenship beyond suffrage

Her Hat Was in the Ring details the fascinating story of the thousands of women who ran for elective office in the United States between 1850 and 1920. Contrary to popular belief, women’s right to vote and the right to hold elective office weren’t always tied to one another. Whether women could become candidates, and for which offices, was determined by each state. For several decades after 1850, women ran for local and some state offices without themselves sometimes having the right to vote, motivated by the desire to advance women’s rights and serve their communities as well as personal ambition.

Drawing on newspapers, state government reports, historical and biographical archives, and other resources, historians Wendy E. Chmielewski and Jill Norgren trace the legal, social, and cultural shifts across the country that made it possible for women to gain election to political office. This history is told through the stories of the trailblazing women candidates who ran in thousands of elective campaigns. Chmielewski and Norgren examine how these women were received in their communities, in male-dominated political parties and legislatures, and what administrative and policy contributions they made once elected.

This book expands our understanding of American women’s demand for full citizenship, a struggle that included the successful battle for the right to elective office. At once comprehensive and deeply compelling, Her Hat Was in the Ring illuminates the revolutionary efforts of these candidates throughout this virtually unknown, yet fascinating chapter in American history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Carbon Wave"

New from The MIT Press: The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet by Leah C. Stokes.

About the book, from the publisher:

The true, inspiring story of the new parents who spearheaded an unlikely climate victory.

From the rising climate advocate named to the Time100 Next list, for political junkies and anyone who cares about the environment.

They were perhaps an unlikely trio: the professor Leah Stokes, the policy wonk Sonia Aggarwal in the White House, and the DC insider Adrian Deveny in the Senate, but together, they crafted the boldest climate legislation of our time. In The Carbon Wave, Stokes chronicles the turbulent path of their climate bill as it veered between breakthrough and collapse—from the hopeful beginnings of the Green New Deal in 2018, to the bill’s near-certain defeat by Senator Joe Manchin in the winter of 2021, to the surprise passage of the landmark legislation in August 2022. During this critical time, the author was pregnant or in the NICU with her premature twins, and Aggarwal and Deveny were new parents too.

Interlacing personal narratives with stories from Congress, the White House, and outside activists, Stokes shows how dogged perseverance and collective action can still bend the course of history. The book concludes with an update from the second Trump administration, explaining the parts of the bill that were—and were not—rolled back, and why we should remain hopeful that progress is still being made.

Everyone has been told to shrink their carbon footprint and lighten their load on our planet by changing their behavior. But what if instead of making ourselves smaller, we joined with others to maximize our impact? That’s the carbon wave. And this book shows us how to make it.

Visit Leah C. Stokes's website.

The Page 99 Test: Short Circuiting Policy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Max Bond"

New from Princeton University Press: Max Bond: The Life and Work of the People's Architect by Brian D. Goldstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first biography of a preeminent postwar architect who championed the cause of freedom through architecture and transformed Black history and modernism

J. Max Bond Jr. (1935–2009) was a civil rights activist, educator, and architect who shaped such iconic structures as the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. Driven by the concerns of the civil rights movement, he insisted on a practice centered on deep social engagement during years when his profession became preoccupied with celebrity and spectacle.

Harvard educated and son of an eminent African American family, Bond designed housing, cultural institutions, community centers, and campuses amid an era of sweeping changes in architecture, urbanism, and American culture. He expressed an architectural vision that was democratic and inclusive, international in orientation, and celebratory of cities and their diverse residents. Yet his work has often been overlooked. Award-winning historian Brian Goldstein renders it visible.

Beautifully illustrated, Max Bond is the definitive biography of one of the most important architects of our time, whose aspiration toward an architecture by and for the people was as urgent in his day as it remains in our own.

Visit Brian D. Goldstein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue