"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

"A Night at the Inn"

New from Oxford University Press: A Night at the Inn: Space, Place, and the Elite Experience of Empire, 1650–1850 by Daniel Maudlin.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold reinterpretation of Georgian Britian and North America that puts inns at the heart of the imperial project.

Inns were ubiquitous across the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period, inn going was universal among the elite citizens of that world and they feature prominently in contemporary accounts and literature as places of rest, refreshment, and good cheer.

A Night at the Inn follows the experiences of an elite traveller on a journey through the North Atlantic world. What becomes clear along the way is that inns were much more than somewhere for a drink, a meal and a bed for the night; they played a central role in what was first a British, later Anglophone, process of national and imperial placemaking. Whether in Scotland, Virginia, or Jamaica, 'principal inns' contained the useful spaces and things that society's ruling elites needed to establish and maintain power. Moreover, familiar in their sameness, from one inn to the next the material world experienced inside principal inns shaped elite inn-goers' perceptions of place, confirming that here - wherever here was - was somewhere familiar, somewhere 'civilised', somewhere British.

Highly illustrated and drawing on extensive field studies, archival and literary sources, A Night at the Inn offers a new reading of the everyday places and spaces that made and sustained the British Empire, and whose legacies continue to reverberate today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Rule of Law After Artificial Intelligence"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Rule of Law After Artificial Intelligence: Automated Narratives by Katie Szilagyi.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely investigation of what is at stake when AI takes legal decision-making out of human hands.

Artificial intelligence is proliferating in many professions, and the legal field is no exception. In The Rule of Law After Artificial Intelligence, Katie Szilagyi investigates the philosophical and practical implications of using AI in legal spaces, beginning with several fundamental questions: What is the law supposed to do, and from where does it derive its authority? Would law still achieve these aims if automated? How might automation affect the rule of law’s integrity and democratic institutions’ operations?

Blending legal philosophy, applied case studies, and insights from both critical legal scholarship and science and technology studies, Szilagyi argues that law and storytelling are deeply connected. Through creating and contesting the law, we make sense of the information around us and generate narratives about our collective world. These narratives are not static: legal precedent evolves, and legal deliberation on hard cases can help to resolve unclear or unprecedented social issues.

Szilagyi demonstrates that technological innovations make the rule of law vulnerable because large language models and machine learning undermine the visioning function of legal narratives, collapsing exercises of legal interpretation into mere administration. Datafication of law—built on the biased data of our cultural past—threatens longstanding legal ideals, lessens the constraints against abuses of power by private actors, and hamstrings society’s ability to reach a more egalitarian future. Szilagyi argues instead for centering narratives within the law and, in turn, rediscovering the tales the law tells us about who we are.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Watching the Girls Go By"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States by Molly M. Brookfield.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ogling, catcalling, wolf-whistling: such everyday intrusions from male strangers have greeted American women from their first forays into urban space. Watching the Girls Go By is the first book-length history of the phenomenon we know today as street harassment. Spanning more than a century, from the 1860s to the 1980s, this book reveals how street harassment became normalized as part of urban life and restricted women’s freedom of movement through the city.

Historian Molly M. Brookfield charts how American social and cultural discourses cast behaviors like catcalling as the natural entitlement of white, middle-class men, while scapegoating and punishing men of color and working-class men as the stereotypical—and supposedly more dangerous—harassers. She mines a rich archive of newspaper reports, popular culture, women’s writings, public policy, and more to uncover how class, race, and gender shaped Americans' experiences of public space, including who claimed a “right” to women’s bodies, who was seen as a sexual threat, and how women fought back against harassment. Watching the Girls Go By challenges readers to reckon with how the long history and lasting impact of the seemingly trivial intrusions that constitute street harassment continue to shape public space today.

Visit Molly M. Brookfield's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch"

New from Cornell University Press: Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch: Sovereignty and Scribal Culture in Colonial Bukhara by James Pickett.

About the book, from the publisher:

Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch focuses on how, within the emirate of Bukhara, sovereignty was shaped as much by paperwork and quotidian entanglements as by conquest and diplomacy.

By uncovering the paper trail generated by the complex correspondence between Bukhara and Russia, James Pickett reveals figures and voices often missing from other sources. Unlike sanitized court chronicles, the Bukharan chancery records preserve experiences of women navigating patriarchal legal systems, religious minorities seeking state protection, and ordinary subjects petitioning for justice. Pickett provides an unprecedented window into semicolonialism's lived experience, even as many informal systems remained operative during revolution and civil war, after the Russian Empire had ceased to exist.

The emirate of Bukhara represented the apogee of Perso-Islamic society and government at its twilight and as an edge case of colonialism, equally revealing of both phenomena. Bukhara distinguished itself within the Russian Empire through steadfast loyalty, fitting seamlessly into imperial structures bearing many parallels to those already embedded in Central Asia. Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch makes this unique paper trail speak to larger questions about the nature of power and the modern state.

Visit James Pickett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Debt and Refuge"

New from Stanford University Press: Debt and Refuge: Syrian Farmworkers and the Politics of Displacement in Lebanon by China Sajadian.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, including up to 1.5 million displaced Syrians. Many are Syrian farmworkers, who for decades have sustained Lebanon's agricultural system through their seasonal labor. Debt and Refuge traces how the lives of these farmworkers-turned-refugees were transformed by the war in Syria and Lebanon's devastating financial collapse, revealing the slow economic violence that can push people off their land, into waged work, and into cycles of debt.

Drawing on fieldwork centered in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, China Sajadian documents how Syrian farmworkers' debts―to labor brokers, landlords, and relatives―bound them to networks that exploited their labor and also sustained them in the face of profound uncertainty. In contrast to humanitarian portrayals of refugees as uprooted victims awaiting asylum or return, Sajadian locates their predicaments within a longer history of rural migration and familial division across the Lebanese–Syrian border. Linking together the politics of mass displacement, mass indebtedness, and our global food system, she makes a case for radically rethinking forced migration as an agrarian question of labor and feminist question of social reproduction. Written with both ethnographic intimacy and analytical depth, Debt and Refuge offers a deeply human portrait of the gendered politics of displacement and why they matter to the future of our agricultural systems and human mobility―in Lebanon, Syria, and beyond.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Being and Becoming Good"

New from Oxford University Press: Being and Becoming Good: On the Diversity of Human Goodness and Virtue by Anne Jeffrey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Aristotelian Naturalism is an ethics on which moral goodness is a species of natural goodness-the kind of goodness we find on display creatures whose habits and activities enable them to thrive. What it takes for humans to be good is to have habits and engage in activities that contribute to human flourishing. The primary aim of this book is to present a revisionist version of Aristotelian Naturalism enriched by empirical evidence and responsive to criticisms from feminist and disability ethics. Pluralist Aristotelian Naturalism holds that human goodness is not a single, unitary ideal to which all humans should aim, instead admitting of real diversity, just as goodness in general admits of diversity across various species. Consequently, there are various sets of human virtues that promote human flourishing in its many forms.

Being and Becoming Good explicates an Aristotelian methodology of ethics on which philosophical reasoning is used to integrate observational evidence about the shape life forms take and the dispositions that contribute to good human lives. Observing what humans are and do in order to thrive in a wide array of bodies, social-political contexts, and environments, puts pressure on the standard Aristotelian Naturalist singular ideal of human goodness as depicted by a flourishing neurotypical, able-bodied, resource-rich mature adult. There is substantial variation in human forms of life and human flourishing, and so no one human good or single set of virtues. Instead, there is a diversity of forms of human goodness, all equally valuable. Moreover, the achievement of one kind of human goodness changes what we are able to do and be. By being good in one way, humans acquire the capacity to be good in another way. Most of us, for most of our lives, are simultaneously being good and becoming good.

Visit Anne Jeffrey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Diasporic Connections"

New from Columbia University Press: Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism by Reighan Gillam.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is a common narrative of Brazilian racial exceptionalism―that Brazilian society is more racially harmonious than other multiracial countries or, more simply, that Brazil is less racist than the United States. Many Brazilians even point to anti-Black violence in the United States to exceptionalize their own country, minimizing the structural barriers facing Afro-Brazilians and the degree to which racial inequality and prejudice permeate Brazilian society. Reighan Gillam offers a new perspective by showing how Afro-Brazilians draw on African American history and culture to argue that Brazil is typical, not exceptional, emphasizing common experiences across the African diaspora.

Diasporic Connections explores how Afro-Brazilians find parallels with African Americans in performance, films, print culture, and everyday conversation. Gillam considers cases such as a staging of Katori Hall’s play The Mountaintop and the appearance of Black Power figures at lectures and in films. She examines how Afro-Brazilian activists seek to instill the energy of the Black freedom struggle into local social movements, underscoring that lessons from the United States are applicable to Brazil while insisting on their own agency. Discussions of Black representation on television, the visibility of mixed-race people, and the shared experiences of Black women across national boundaries all call Brazilian exceptionalism into question. Based on textual analysis, ethnography, and close interpretation of key works, this book highlights how Afro-Brazilians reframe Brazil’s racial politics as unexceptional and reveals the surprising ways that diasporic ties are forged.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Inner Worlds"

New from the University of Michigan Press: Inner Worlds: Interiority and Capitalist Modernity in Japan by Richard M Reitan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Inner Worlds examines the emergence and operation of representations of interiority—consciousness, “folk mind,” “spirit”—in Japan from its industrial revolution to the rise of fascism during the interwar period. These representations functioned to reproduce the capitalist system by containing its excesses. Thus, poverty in the 1880s was ostensibly the result of defects in one’s innate mental character. A degenerate “crowd mind” explained the strikes and riots of the early twentieth century. State subversion during the 1930s supposedly reflected an attenuated “folk spirit.” By locating the roots of capitalism’s excesses not within the socioeconomic order itself but within a defective interiority, ideologies of interiority operated to contain disruptions to Japan’s socioeconomic order, conceal its defects, and sustain the capitalist system. Inner Worlds reveals how interiority was constituted in ways consistent with both the demands of the emerging capitalist order of the late nineteenth century and the conditions that coalesced to form a fascist conjecture in the 1930s.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Property Values"

New from Princeton University Press: Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner by Joshua Specht.

About the book, from the publisher:

A wide-ranging history of American land ownership, from westward expansion to the suburban housing crisis

From its very beginnings, the United States has defined itself by its relationship to land. Settlers saw the continent as the raw material for building a prosperous life while their leaders viewed it as a means for building a people. In the 1950s, the suburban home became a place for Americans to create a personal utopia of lawns and living rooms, of washing machines and dishwashers. Property Values traces how land and its ownership became inextricably tied to the American ideal of independence—and demonstrates why the Homestead Act and a thirty-year mortgage have far more in common than you think.

In this engaging book, Joshua Specht uncovers the history behind the American conviction that widespread land ownership is a fundamental requirement for a flourishing democratic society. We meet the nineteenth-century settler farmers whose dreams of new social and political forms were built on vast quantities of land taken from native peoples, and the European immigrants who came seeking a better life as land-owning citizens. For FDR, homeownership offered a path out of the depths of the Great Depression. For George W. Bush, it gave people a permanent stake in the American dream. Specht charts how the vision of plenty that first drew homesteaders westward gave way to one of scarcity and exclusion as new neighbors came to be seen as a threat to property values and a system meant to promote ownership put it squarely out of reach for many.

Taking readers from the rent wars of the early 1840s through the financial crisis of the late 2000s, Property Values reveals why housing affordability has posed significant challenges to the nation’s politics and promise since the founding, and why the American story has always been one about land.

Visit Joshua Specht's website.

The Page 99 Test: Red Meat Republic.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Pakistan's Foreign Policy"

New from Oxford University Press: Pakistan's Foreign Policy: Security, State, and Society by Wali Aslam.

About the book, from the publisher:

Pakistan's foreign policy challenges over nearly eight decades stem directly from its persistent civil-military imbalance. The military employs a narrative of existential threats from all directions to strengthen its domestic control. Drawing on Ontological Security Theory, Post-structuralist Discourse Theory, and the concept of 'fantasy,' this study critically examines the narratives crafted by Pakistan's ruling elites, particularly the military, since the country's inception. The analysis reveals a pervasive 'siege mentality' narrative that fosters anxiety and insecurity among the populace. Ongoing tensions along Pakistan's eastern and western borders are used to justify tight domestic control, reinforced by fantasies portraying the military as the nation's sole protector against insecurity.

Drawing on extensive primary data, this book demonstrates how this narrative legitimises the military's outsized influence over foreign and domestic policy, while justifying a disproportionately large defence budget that primarily benefits the military elite. At the same time, much of society remains impoverished, malnourished, and undereducated. Decades of poorly managed foreign policy, driven by a strategy of 'controlled chaos,' have trapped the military and the nation in a cycle of inescapable consequences.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Night Hawk"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture by Matthew Warner Osborn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Unmasks the long-forgotten story of how a flying, superhuman vigilante played a pivotal role in the founding of the American labor movement.

On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia’s night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the announcement of his arrival appeared under the title “The Night-Hawk, No. 1” with a cryptic epigraph from Romeo and Juliet: “I’ll be a candleholder and look on.” Who and what was the Night Hawk? As Matthew Warner Osborn reveals, this was the sobriquet of a mysterious columnist for the weekly Mechanics’ Free Press, the first radical socialist newspaper in America. Dressed in a mysterious cloak, the Night Hawk soared over Philadelphia, revealing the evil crimes of prominent gentlemen, fighting murderous criminals, and calling out fraudulent moral authorities.

The Night Hawk was the ingenious invention of an impoverished actor, Cornelius A. Logan, who created the character as a public champion of Philadelphia’s Working Men’s movement, the first successful American labor party. The Night Hawk’s nocturnal adventures transformed their socialist ideology into an entertaining fantasy that dramatized the struggle against industrial exploitation and the degradation of working people. The success of the character made Logan into a celebrity, and he went on to become a popular and innovative comedian on the antebellum stage.

A harbinger of the superheroes we know today, the Night Hawk promises to illuminate dark secrets from the past, but he can also shed light on our present. He ignites our need to see corrupt elites unmasked and held accountable for their actions, all while protecting the innocent and oppressed. Americans have always loved to fantasize about powerful superheroes who hide behind masks while chasing bad guys, and Osborn shows in this entertaining history how the Night Hawk was perhaps the first standard bearer for that enduring mystique.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Great Communion of Scholars"

New from LSU Press: The Great Communion of Scholars: Evangelical Southerners and the Birth of Modern Intellectual Authority by Joel R. Iliff.

About the book, from the publisher:

While the modern university is typically viewed as secular, Joel R. Iliff argues in The Great Communion of Scholars that the Protestant architects of the modern university in both the U.S. South and Germany consciously patterned their creation on the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints. By attempting to counteract the perceived secularization of their societies, a network of Awakened Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to the development of modern institutions of higher education and attendant notions of intellectual and moral authority.

Beginning in the 1820s, white southern evangelicals looked abroad and found allies among contemporary religious Awakening movements in Germany. Evangelical southerners and Awakened Germans shared a desire to restore not only intellectual and spiritual order but also social and political order in the wake of the lingering upheavals wrought by the Enlightenment. Eventually, southerners drew analogies between their domestic opponents in the North and the opponents of the Awakened, thus creating the perception of a transatlantic battle between infidelity and orthodoxy, of which the American sectional conflict became one theater. This discourse culminated in the revolutions of 1848 and the American Civil War, which both evangelical southerners and Awakened Germans interpreted as religious struggles with global ramifications.

Ultimately, the transnational, ecumenical impulse that fueled the communion of scholars, which reached its zenith in the mid-nineteenth century, proved unstable. It fatefully collapsed over the issue of American slavery when Black evangelical abolitionists in the North waged a successful campaign to brand southern slaveholders, ironically enough, as analogous to the religious radicals and infidels that conservative Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic so feared. By exploring the role that antebellum evangelicalism played in the development of the modern university, Iliff not only dismantles much of what we think we know about the South, American religion, and the origins of the modern higher education but also recovers a lost period in Western intellectual history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Weaponized Policing"

New from NYU Press: Weaponized Policing: Police Violence in São Paulo and LA by Sebastián Sclofsky.

About the book, from the publisher:

How police reproduce social, spatial, and racial inequalities in two global cities

From Donald Trump to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, political leaders endorsing “law and order”―specifically through aggressive policing strategies― have supported the formation of carceral states in self-proclaimed democracies. In Weaponized Policing, Sebastián Sclofsky provides a comparative lens on this dynamic, taking a look at police-civilian violence in the United States and Brazil, and its impact on people’s understanding of race, space, and citizenship.

The book argues that the socio-economic transformations of the last half-century, marked by the rise of neoliberal capitalism, have produced extreme levels of inequality, and created new forms of vulnerability that are managed and reproduced by police. The pacifying processes conducted by the police in their production and reproduction of social order produce the categories of black, poor, and periphery, transforming these subjects into the ultimate “other” against whom police intervention and violence is deemed necessary and justified for the sake of the city’s well-being.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with politicians, police officers, community activists, and low-income residents of São Paulo’s periphery and neighborhoods in South L.A., Sclofsky follows the stories of individuals who live, and are policed, on the “peripheries.” He argues that, in both countries, aggressive policing creates authoritarian enclaves within faulty democracies. As a result, residents of color are criminalized, individual rights are systematically violated, and a sense of second-class citizenship is developed―even when people live in a country where political rights are supposedly guaranteed, and free and fair elections do take place.

Visit Sebastián Sclofsky's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cancelled Futures"

New from Princeton University Press: Cancelled Futures: Class, Race, and Place in Post-Industrial Britain by Amit Singh.

About the book, from the publisher:

How race, class, gender, and place shape the ways working-class young people in Britain envision their transition from education to work

How do the effects of deindustrialisation and neoliberalism influence young people’s perceptions of work and education? In Cancelled Futures, Amit Singh examines how experiences of class-based inequality work through race, place, and gender in different ways. Moving beyond the usual framing of race versus class and the populist fixation with the white working class, Singh shows the intractable challenges that Black, Asian, and white young people share when they envision their futures in changing labour market conditions. Drawing on extensive interviews with sixty-two young working-class Britons, he describes the range of strategies they employ in the absence of viable economic opportunities—and the uneven results that follow.

Singh offers a vivid nationwide portrait, bringing together seemingly divergent locations and their youth—those living in proximity to the extraordinary wealth and perceived opportunity of the City of London, in the former northern mill town of Rochdale, and in the forgotten seaside town of Morecambe Bay—and captures the empathetic sense of struggle that many cultivate. Singh reveals that although the unique features of place raise distinctive racial and gendered reckonings with their circumstances and hopes, these young people have in common an increasingly fading sense of the future. Singh shows that they do not cling to the illusion that hard work pays off or the myth of meritocracy, but seek only to realise some sense of dignity and meaning amid a future that feels not just confusing but altogether absent.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Interfaith Friends and Ideological Foes"

New from Oxford University Press: Interfaith Friends and Ideological Foes: American Jews, Evangelicals, and Israel, 1963–2018 by Amy Weiss.

About the book, from the publisher:

Interfaith Friends and Ideological Foes examines the evolution of the relationship between American Jews and evangelicals. Amy Weiss argues that Jewish interfaith partnerships with evangelicals developed as a necessary, adaptive strategy to deal with the shifting American political landscape. As evangelicals moved from a subculture to the mainstream, and as their political influence grew, their steadfast defense of Israel made them attractive partners for Jewish communal organizations. Jewish groups acknowledged-and accepted-a certain amount of ideological inconsistency to secure broad political support for Israel.

This book speaks directly to today's challenges regarding polarization and the difficulty of coalition-building. Pundits and the public tend to describe the present as an especially divided time in history. Intensified support for white Christian nationalism, the rise of antisemitism, and debates surrounding Israeli governmental policies have all created a divisive American landscape. Support for Israel, at almost any cost, has shaped the policies of major American Jewish organizations, sometimes leading them to act in profound tension with the views of their constituents and their own longstanding commitments to American democracy and religious pluralism. Th evidence presented in this book upends established claims about Jewish organizations' commitments to promoting religious pluralism. It also helps to explain how support for Israel has become increasingly associated with the American political right.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Landlocked"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Landlocked: Water, Energy, and Planetary Politics in Alberta by Jeremy J. Schmidt.

About the book, from the publisher:

A study of oil-rich Alberta reveals the entwined relationships among geoscience, governance, and power.

The Canadian province of Alberta holds the world’s fourth-largest reserve of fossil fuels, with oil sands famous for bitumen, a viscous form of petroleum. A critical testing ground for international environmental ideas and energy policies, Alberta pioneered state-led efforts to understand, extract, and sell bitumen. Without natural access to ocean ports, Alberta must negotiate pipeline routes with neighboring provinces and nations to reach global markets. But Alberta is also landlocked in another sense: it is caught in an extractive relationship with oil-rich earth.

In Landlocked, Jeremy J. Schmidt focuses on Alberta’s energy industry, particularly its use of water and oil, to argue for a new way of understanding how political authority is forged and maintained through the environment. Schmidt details how water and oil were enrolled in early state-making projects, such as irrigation, and examines the consequences of Alberta’s efforts to extract value from land, including a series of events in 2013 that released 4.2 million barrels of bitumen into underground environments. By uncovering the ways that geosciences supported activities―from land settlement to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples―that produced environmental policies and approaches to management and governance, he shows that they aren’t merely instruments of state power but central to Alberta’s political identity and legitimacy.

Visit Jeremy J. Schmidt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Frontiers of Need"

New from Cornell University Press: Frontiers of Need: American Humanitarianism and the Nigerian Civil War by Brian McNeil.

About the book, from the publisher:

Frontiers of Need argues that the Nigerian Civil War marked a turning point in US foreign policy, bringing humanitarian intervention into the center of debates about US engagement with the world. Emerging at a moment when Americans were already questioning the moral foundations of Cold War foreign policy, Biafra became a mirror reflecting a broader crisis of morality―a sense that the United States had lost its ethical bearings in the world. The mass starvation of Biafran children did not merely present a humanitarian catastrophe but, through a US-led humanitarian intervention, offered a chance to overcome moral paralysis and chart a different role for the United States abroad.

Drawing from governmental archives and organizational records across the United States, Britain, and Nigeria, Brian McNeil analyzes how domestic pressure for humanitarian action forced the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations to intervene in Biafra. Yet both administrations treated humanitarian intervention more as a domestic political problem than as a moral imperative, pursuing relief initiatives that managed American dissent without meaningfully addressing Biafran suffering. Through detailed examination of failed negotiations, bureaucratic conflicts, and competing sovereignty claims, Frontiers of Need reveals how efforts to wed humanitarian intervention with American power ultimately prolonged the conflict while failing to deliver the moral renewal Americans sought, establishing instead a troubling precedent for how humanitarian concern could become entangled with national interest in contemporary international politics.

--Marshal Zeringue