"Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers"

New from NYU Press: Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers: Jewish Life in Small-Town Vermont by Margaret K. Nelson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Provides a rare study of Jews in small town America

For many years, histories of Jews in the United States focused on Jewish migrants who settled in large cities. Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers offers a rare study of Jews in small town America, illuminating the experiences of Jewish families in towns where they constituted one of, at most, a few Jewish families. In particular, the volume explores the occupational niches of Jews in rural Vermont, from peddling to the ownership of junk yards and dry goods stores that were disparagingly known as “the Jew Store.”

The book also looks specifically at the experiences of Jewish women and children in families headed by men in these occupations. These families lived in communities where they were often isolated from relatives and friends, and without a Jewish congregation. Margaret K. Nelson carefully investigates various aspects of this small-town experience, including how generations of immigrants were regarded by others, how they held onto the practice of their religion, and how they were able to socially integrate into their communities.

By narrating the trajectory of Jewish immigrant experiences through men’s occupations, the volume places the experiences of Jews in Vermont alongside those of other marginalized groups, particularly the families of Chinese restaurant owners and South Asian motel managers, as they established and sustained their own distinctive economic activities in small towns.

Showcasing the largely unexplored history of Jews in very small towns, Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers provides a novel account of Jewish community and belonging as minorities in rural communities.

Learn more about Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Parenting Out of Control.

The Page 99 Test: Like Family.

The Page 99 Test: Keeping Family Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Pierogi"

New from Columbia University Press: Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food by Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann.

About the book, from the publisher:

Today, pierogi are the most recognizable Polish food in the United States and a symbol of Polish American identity. How did this humble dish attain such lofty status?

Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann explores the surprising history of pierogi, tracing how Polish cuisine evolved in the multiethnic landscape of the United States. When Polish immigrants crossed the ocean, they brought with them their traditional cuisine, which came to signify enduring attachment to homeland, family, religion, and culture. In time, they as well as new generations and new immigrant waves gradually transformed Polish American culinary culture, reflecting food trends and changes in the United States, Poland, and the world.

Pierogi takes readers into the kitchens where Polish American families, friends, and community organizations carry on the custom of cooking and eating together. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann highlights small- and large-scale pierogi producers who adapted traditional dishes for the US market and food celebrities who mainstreamed them, and she traces the symbolic representation of pierogi in popular culture. She also shares personal stories, from her family’s resourcefulness in communist-era Poland facing near-constant food shortages to her experiences as an immigrant to the United States in the 1980s. Drawing on sources from historical and recent cookbooks to interviews with Polish American entrepreneurs and community members, this book offers new insights for anyone interested in East Central European and American foodways.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Social Ladders"

New from Oxford University Press: Social Ladders: Urban Inequality and the Ideal of Social Mobility by Anthony Miro Born.

About the book, from the publisher:

Social Ladders offers a new understanding of a core ideal in political, public, and academic discourses on low-income neighbourhoods: that of promoting upward mobility. It explores the contradictions between the lofty promises of social mobility in marginalised areas, its ambivalent politics and its complex manifestations in people's lived experiences. The analysis put forward in this book invites readers to fundamentally question upward mobility as an effective strategy for enhancing social justice in marginalised neighbourhoods.

Drawing on international case studies as well as in-depth fieldwork in Germany, the book depicts the ideal of social mobility from multiple perspectives. Social Ladders, then, is not only an account of how the language of social mobility is used and abused as a way of ignoring the primary needs and problems of disadvantaged communities. It also argues that to understand its divisive nature and hidden costs, we need to hear from more than just the few who have 'made it' up the ladder to social and economic success. We must also include the voices of those commonly seen as having been 'left behind'.

Visit Anthony Miro Born's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fate in My Hands"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union by Yana Skorobogatov.

About the book, from the publisher:

A striking examination of the death penalty in the Soviet Union that documents in heart-rending detail how its citizens, hopeful for a new life post-Stalin, lost faith that their transgressions could be forgiven.

From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly forty thousand citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period―women and men of all ages and backgrounds―who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness.

Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. She offers a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Counter-Terror"

New from Stanford University Press: The Politics of Counter-Terror: Islam and Security in the Postcolonial Muslim State by Nicholas Chan.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is a fundamental paradox in counter-terrorism: while Muslim state elites insist that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, the way Muslim states deal with terrorism has everything to do with Islam. In countries like Morocco and Tunisia, terrorism is treated by governments as if it is a religious problem. Elsewhere, in Malaysia, Islamic actors are relied upon to conduct "deradicalization" programs, Islamic institutions are the key authors of counter-radicalization materials, and Islamic expertise is often considered interchangeable with counter-terror expertise. These findings draw attention to a security logic whereby Islam and Islamic interventions have become central to solving the problem of terrorism. In this theoretically innovative and empirically rich book, Nicholas Chan argues that Malaysia's "Islamized" counter-terrorism is an outcome filtered through a matrix of factors, including postcolonial elite status-seeking, modernist state-building, and the immediacies of governmental problem-solving. Chan fills a void in the Western-centric Global War on Terror literature that often fails to examine what happens when Muslim actors must wage a "war" not of their making but strongly tied to their identity, security, and status. This book's original findings will interest scholars and students of security, international relations, area studies, and Muslim politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This One Will Be Different"

New from Oxford University Press: This One Will Be Different: False Promises and Fiscal Realities of Publicly Funded Stadiums by J.C. Bradbury.

About the book, from the publisher:

For more than a century, America's sports stadiums have evolved from modest, private ballparks into billion-dollar play-palaces for the rich-built increasingly on the backs of taxpayers. Government commitments to major-league venues are approaching $50 billion, and a looming wave of new construction threatens to double public outlays by the end of the next decade. Elected leaders justify the massive subsidies by arguing that stadiums are economic catalysts, despite overwhelming evidence that sports venues are unwise public investments.

Why does this keep happening? The refrain is always the same: This one will be different. The Atlanta Braves's Truist Park in Cobb County, Georgia is the latest example. Marketed as a game-changing mixed-use development that would create a year-round economic hub, the project has fallen far short of its boosters' lofty projections-just like all the venues that came before it.

In This One Will Be Different, sports economist J.C. Bradbury draws from decades of academic research and his up-close and personal experiences with the Cobb Braves stadium deal to elucidate why publicly funded venues never deliver on their promises. Moving beyond the standard explanations of monopoly leagues and special-interest lobbying, Bradbury reveals how pliable politicians-drawn to the prestige and perks of professional sports-buck the will of their constituents to approve increasingly generous taxpayer handouts to billionaire team owners.

Authoritative yet accessible, this book blends economic analysis, political insight, and vivid storytelling to examine why politicians continue to fall for the stadium grift and presents practical steps for reform. Bradbury argues that improved transparency, greater understanding, and giving voters a direct say at the ballot box have the potential to break the stadium subsidy cycle.

Visit J.C. Bradbury's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Silk Roads, Steppe Roads"

New from Princeton University Press: Silk Roads, Steppe Roads: History Unearthed from the Tombs of Medieval China by Jonathan Karam Skaff.

About the book, from the publisher:

An innovative study of medieval Chinese tombs that provides new insights into the history of Eurasian cultural contact and exchange

Silk Roads, Steppe Roads takes the reader on a journey to three sites in northwestern China and Mongolia to investigate medieval Chinese tombs containing evidence of Eastern Eurasian cultural contacts and exchanges. The construction, artifacts, and texts on paper and stone found at these tombs of the Sui (581–618) and early Tang (618–907) dynasties reveal glimpses of people, rituals, and objects that were in motion on the Silk and Steppe roads until being laid to rest over a millennium ago.

Jonathan Karam Skaff shows how the major transit hubs of the Silk and Steppe roads were particularly active sites of cultural contestation, experimentation, and mutual influence that had an impact on the historical development of China and Inner Asia. Challenging the idealized image of the Silk Road, he also examines travel permits and sales contracts that document the trade of enslaved people over the route.

Innovatively drawing on both textual and archaeological sources, Silk Roads, Steppe Roads shows how Eurasian peoples, despite believing their societies to be unique, spun overlapping and entangled webs of culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The End of Violence"

New from Cornell University Press: The End of Violence: France and the Single Struggle of Jacques de Bollardière by Hugh McDonnell.

About the book, from the publisher:

The End of Violence focuses on General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, who transformed from a rising star in the French army into a stalwart of nonviolence. In 1957, de Bollardière abruptly left his command in Algeria out of a refusal to countenance torture, publicly denouncing this paradigmatic war of European decolonization. In doing so, he jettisoned a glittering career forged in the Free French forces and Resistance maquis in the Second World War, and in France's colonial war in Indochina (1945–1954).

Hugh McDonnell offers an innovative contribution with previously unexplored source material that reveals worldviews informing early twentieth-century provincial aristocratic family life, novel insights into Second World War dynamics, ethical problems of the Free French movement, and the messy and lethal world of the Ardennes maquis. He provides a complex analysis of revolutionary warfare as the guiding ethos of the French army in its colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, the retrospective debates in the 1970s about torture in Algeria, and the wider, highly politicized public sphere in late Cold War France.

The End of Violence contextualizes de Bollardière's public interventions to examine the contentious French debates about Western military alliances and commitment to nuclear weaponry. Thus, de Bollardière's story, while unique, sheds light on vital wider historical questions, both in France and beyond: ideas and practices of violence and nonviolence, forms of socialization and possibilities for dissent in the military, and the achievements and limitations of the nonviolence movement.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Expert Authority and the Limits of Critical Thinking"

New from Oxford University Press: Expert Authority and the Limits of Critical Thinking by Thomas Grundmann.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is no doubt that experts play a prominent but controversial role in modern societies. While they constitute an invaluable source of knowledge and represent the gold standard of expertise, they may also exhibit arrogance, harbour blind spots, make mistakes, and contribute to larger institutions that are susceptible to serious abuse. In Expert Authority and the Limits of Critical Thinking, Thomas Grundmann develops a new theory of rationality that enables us to take the epistemic authority of experts seriously without exempting it from rational scrutiny by laypeople.

This volume argues that expert testimony holds epistemic authority over laypeople in a way that may preempt their critical reasoning from being usable in belief formation. This Preemption View of epistemic authority, shaped by philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Joseph Raz, Arnon Keren, and Linda Zagzebski, has yet to receive a thorough epistemological explanation, a compelling motivation, or a robust defence against challenges--all of which this book aims to provide. Preemptive reasons are explored through the framework of higher-order defeat, demonstrating how expert testimony generates these higher-order defeaters; further, the ten most common challenges to the Preemption View are addressed at length. The emerging account explains how laypeople's deference to experts is properly linked to their thinking for themselves and what remains of their epistemic autonomy.

The volume also offers a short history of epistemic authority and applies its theoretical insights to real-world phenomena such as the role of experts in politics, expert communication, and conspiracy thinking, and explores what the interplay between expert authority and critical oversight by the public means for democracy and the Enlightenment ideal of thinking for oneself.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Race on the Move"

New from NYU Press: Race on the Move: Public Transportation and Unequal Spaces by Gwendolyn Y. Purifoye.

About the book, from the publisher:

Whether on the bus, subway or train, public transit continues to be a separate and unequal experience for many Black Americans

In Race on the Move, Gwendolyn Purifoye argues that, whether on the subway, bus, or commuter rail, Black passengers have unequal experiences in terms of time, quality, speed of service, bodily movement, and leisurely enjoyment. As she shows, the capacity to move around a city is of major economic and social import: who has the ability to get to jobs, healthcare, grocery shopping, good schools, and quality and affordable housing are among the features of urban life that are structured by public transportation systems. The woefully inadequate and underperforming public transportation systems in many Black communities has led to unyielding disruptions of families, communities, and futures.

Drawing on interviews and nine years of ethnographic field research and media analysis in Chicago, Purifoye details how covert and overt racial hostilities are shaped through racial residential segregation. Purifoye contends that race and racism have been historically spatialized, materialized, and mobilized through public transportation systems. By showing how minority passengers and transit personnel are not equally protected by the transit agencies, how they experience raced social aggression, and the lack of dignity afforded riders on a daily basis, Purifoye documents the intensity of everyday racism as lived out on public transportation. Race on the Move also offers community organizers and policy makers more equitable and sustainable design options that could improve the lives of Black city dwellers.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Move Over, Mona Lisa"

New from Stanford University Press: Move Over, Mona Lisa: Reimagining What We Read, Look At, and Learn by Peggy Levitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

Calls to include a wider range of art, literature, and ideas in the world's classrooms, libraries, and museums are loud and clear. If so many agree that reforms are needed, why is change so slow? The answer is the inequality pipeline—the multiple obstacles that ideas and art need to overcome to circulate globally. Most strategies to disrupt the pipeline only increase inclusivity, without fundamentally challenging institutional hierarchies. In Move Over, Mona Lisa, Peggy Levitt reveals, through her conversations with creatives, thinkers, and professionals working in the cultural and academic worlds in Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea, that another approach to combatting global cultural and intellectual inequality is underway. Like-minded actors outside of traditional cultural centers are creating new nodes of power, and new pathways which connect them, that allow art, books, and ideas to, "travel from Buenos Aires to Mexico City without having to pass through Madrid." They are circumventing traditional powerbrokers and boldly reconfiguring the cultural and intellectual order. Levitt's journey begins where art and literature are first created; then takes us to where they get discovered, circulated, exhibited, and acquired; and concludes where they are researched, published about, and taught. Along the way, we meet visionary artists, out-of-the box writers, committed activists, and teachers striving to define what it means to train truly global citizens. We also discover how the culture and history of the cities they work from influences what they do. By linking these ideas together, Levitt persuasively demonstrates that what happens in the museum or the library is integrally connected to what happens in institutions of higher learning. With deeply researched, novel insights, ambition, and hope, Move Over, Mona Lisa offers nothing short of a new theory of global cultural and intellectual change.

Visit Peggy Levitt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Macedonia under the Argead Kings"

New from Oxford University Press: Macedonia under the Argead Kings: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower by Ian Worthington.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ancient Macedonia is often synonymous with Alexander the Great. After all, his conquests stretched the Macedonian Empire thousands of miles wide, and during his reign Macedonia was without equal. Alexander and his father, Philip II, who raised Macedonia to superpower status, still dominate our perceptions of this ancient kingdom and empire. Macedonian kings before Philip and Alexander are often portrayed as their opposites--weak and ineffectual--but this book proves that this is a mistake.

While Macedonia under the Argead Kings covers the reigns of Philip, Alexander, and his immediate successors, it takes an even closer look at what life was like in Macedonia before its most famous rulers. While the literary evidence speaks of Macedonia's internal disunity during this period, as well as its dynastic upheavals, it is important to note that the authors of this literature were often Greeks, who had very different perspectives of what their enemies, the Macedonians, were like.

This book supplements the literary sources with archaeological evidence to tell a more complicated story. While the Argead kings certainly varied between successes and failures and faced their fair share of security crises, when viewed as a continuum, we see that Macedonia's earlier history was not a path of steady deterioration but a more subtle rise and fall. When the Argead kings are brought out from the shadows, we can see their importance in the kingdom's development and their influence on each another and the wider Mediterranean world.

My Book, The Movie: Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece.

The Page 99 Test: Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece.

My Book, The Movie: By the Spear.

My Book, The Movie: Ptolemy I.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Information Brokers"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Information Brokers: Political Socialization in Latino Immigrant Families by Roberto F. Carlos.

About the book, from the publisher:

An insightful rethinking of political socialization within Latino immigrant households.

Conventional wisdom tells us that children are passive recipients of political lessons from their parents, with caregivers being the ones who mold the developing behavior and beliefs of the children under their roof. Roberto F. Carlos challenges this preconception by revealing how Latino children, especially those with immigrant parents, often become key sources of political information and guidance in their families. As migrant parents navigate unfamiliar institutions and customs in the United States, they often turn to their children to broker information about everything from daily life to civic engagement. These roles not only place unique responsibilities on children but also create new pathways for them to shape the political behavior of their parents. Moreover, by taking on these roles, children learn the skills that can make them effective advocates later in life, even as they face resource disadvantages that normally correlate with reduced political participation and sense of political efficacy.

Drawing on six original surveys, multiple experiments, and in-depth interviews, including the accounts of youth helping protect their families from deportation, Information Brokers shows how these dynamics influence both immigrant parents and their children in politically consequential ways. With the Latino population now over 64 million, Information Brokers offers vital insight into the political incorporation of America’s largest ethnic group.

Visit Roberto F. Carlos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In the Scholar’s Workshop"

New from Princeton University Press: In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship by Ann Blair.

About the book, from the publisher:

The hidden hands behind history’s great scholarly works

For centuries, many of the world’s most influential thinkers routinely relied on helpers who performed tasks such as taking dictation, correcting, indexing, composing, and endless copying. In the Scholar’s Workshop introduces readers to these unsung scribes, assistants, and collaborators, showing how the scholarly enterprise is rarely as solitary as we tend to think.

Ann Blair traces how the learned have relied on helpers since antiquity, discussing how and when these amanuenses became visible in manuscript and occasionally in print and explaining why they were uniquely positioned to shape the posthumous legacy of their principal. Taking an in-depth look at the later Renaissance, she reconstructs the private lives and academic pursuits of leading figures from the period such as the renowned humanist Erasmus, the reformer Martin Bucer, and Paris professors Adrien Turnèbe and Petrus Ramus. Blair paints multifaceted portraits of the servants, students, and family members who assisted in their work, drawing on sources ranging from scholarly texts in both draft and published forms to correspondence, annotations, biographical accounts, and household rules. Turning to the modern age, she identifies new kinds of digital amanuenses with the rise of chatbots and other powerful software tools.

Panoramic in scope, In the Scholar’s Workshop challenges conventional views about authorship and attribution while affirming the enduring importance of collaboration in scholarly work today.

The Page 99 Test: Too Much to Know.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mass Expulsion"

New from Oxford University Press: Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal by Meghan M. Garrity.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, governments around the world have expelled, en masse, more than 30 million people. Yet despite its prevalence, mass expulsion remains an understudied phenomenon as scholarly attention has been directed toward the gravest atrocities--genocide and mass killing--or toward forced migration more broadly. Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal examines why and how governments expel, providing a systematic, cross-regional account of mass expulsion over the longue durée. Using the original Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset, the book explains when and where expulsion occurs, who is targeted, and what regimes are most likely to expel. The book identifies two overarching categories of mass expulsion--security and economic--and develops a typology of four corresponding types: counter-irredentist, counter-subversive, reprisal, and nativist. It advances a theory of mass expulsion that traces the decision-making process, showing how key structural, proximate, precipitating, and intervening factors combine to shape the conditions under which governments expel or are restrained. Evidence is drawn from archival research conducted at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the League of Nations archives in Geneva, Switzerland.

This research contributes to the fields of international peace and security, political violence, and forced migration. Conceptually, it fills a gap in the literature by systematically examining mass expulsion as a distinct eliminationist policy aimed at the intentional removal of ethnic groups. Theoretically, it extends existing explanations beyond war and security threats, highlighting an entire class of expulsions targeting perceived economic threats. The book deepens our understanding of critical atrocity restraints, demonstrating the importance of alliances, the “homeland” state of the target group, and international organizations. These restraints generate core policy recommendations that seek to spur greater attention to deterring mass expulsion as a priority for atrocity prevention.

Visit Meghan M. Garrity's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Finding Treblinka"

New from Cornell University Press: Finding Treblinka: Forensic and Archaeological Discoveries by Caroline Sturdy Colls.

About the book, from the publisher:

Finding Treblinka challenges the long-held belief that Treblinka, the second-deadliest extermination camp operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland, was completely destroyed. Even though Nazis demolished buildings, exhumed and burned victims' bodies, and planted trees to obscure the site, Caroline Sturdy Colls uncovers what still lies beneath the surface and what this material evidence reveals about the camp's operations, evolution, and afterlife.

Sturdy Colls combines archival insight through newly uncovered and unpublished documents, photographs, maps, and testimonies with the first noninvasive archaeological surveys and excavations ever conducted at Treblinka. Developed in accordance with Jewish burial law (Halacha), her methods allow for ethical access to Holocaust landscapes long considered off limits to archaeologists and offer powerful material counterpoint to the myth of Treblinka's disappearance.

Sturdy Colls not only demonstrates that traces of atrocity continue to shape how we remember and understand the Holocaust but also how archaeology can confront absence with presence, silence with proof. Finding Treblinka reveals how genocide inscribes itself into the land, and how, with the right tools, we can still read it.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Delivering Tolerance"

New from Princeton University Press: Delivering Tolerance: How Unintended Institutional Inclusion Reduces Prejudice by Chagai M. Weiss.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new theory of prejudice reduction, supported by rigorous evidence, arguing that public institutions and the people within them can improve intergroup relations in conflict-ridden societies

Decades of social science research focuses on reducing prejudice, which is considered an impediment to intergroup cooperation. Reducing prejudice is notoriously challenging, however, because it is durable and because it motivates avoidance of experiences that would improve intergroup relations. In Delivering Tolerance, Chagai Weiss develops a theory of prejudice reduction through public institutions. Weiss argues that instrumental, and often unintended, minority inclusion in public institutions that provide essential services—including schools, hospitals, and police forces—can facilitate various forms of exposure to out-group service providers that reduces prejudice at scale. Overcoming the challenges of both durability and avoidance, such exposure is especially persuasive in shifting attitudes toward minorities.

To test his theory, Weiss examines what is perhaps the most extreme, prominent, and intractable example of group conflict—the relationship of Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI). He finds that Israelis’ brief yet meaningful interactions with PCI doctors reduce prejudice, and that information about the rate of PCI inclusion in Israeli healthcare institutions reduces intergroup animosity. He also shows that patterns of prejudice reduction generalize beyond the Israeli case of healthcare institutions, examining other institutional domains and examples of inclusion dynamics in the United States and Germany. Reducing prejudice is discouragingly difficult, but Weiss’s account reveals how institutions and the people within them can improve intergroup relations in conflict-ridden societies.

Visit Chagai M. Weiss's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Louisiana Purchase"

New from Oxford University Press: The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America by Alexander Mikaberidze.

About the book, from the publisher:

A true pivotal moment in American history, the Louisiana Purchase redefined the boundaries of the United States and recharted the course of its history. The story behind it transcends borders

The United States bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleonic France in 1803, paying--so the story goes--a mere 15 million dollars, or "four cents an acre." The young nation more than doubled its size, absorbing the greater part of an entire continent in a single real estate transaction. This overlooks a critical feature of the purchase, however: the agreement signed by Thomas Jefferson did not grant the American republic the land; it merely allowed it to assume the authority to negotiate the acquisition of the land, which was still owned by Native Americans. The Louisiana Purchase was a founding event of what ultimately became the U.S.-Indian Treaty System, one that produced over two hundred Native American cessions between 1804 and 1970 and cost the United States billions of dollars.

Alexander Mikaberidze's provocative and engrossing book examines what lay behind what eventually became one of the costliest undertakings in American history--not only in dollars but in lives displaced and cultures erased. To do that, he looks beyond the period's diplomatic wranglings and delves into a broader story of European colonialism to illuminate why Louisiana was passed around--from France to Spain, then back to France--before the U.S. purchase. How did it go from being a burden to a prize?

Understanding the full significance of the Louisiana Purchase means expanding the narrative. The country's destiny was determined by men who had never walked the streets of New Orleans or gazed upon the majestic panoramas of the Rockies but who instead managed the finances of the world's empires. Territorial ambition remains a persistent feature in American politics. This book compels us to appreciate the larger story of the purchase and its place in both national and global history.

The Page 99 Test: Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace.

--Marshal Zeringue

"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