"Strong State, Weak Links"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

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

Visit Amani C. Morrison's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Setting Fire to Reason"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

Visit Jeffrey Howard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Russia and Iran"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

Visit Nicole Grajewski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Tolerance Generation"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

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

Visit Sarah Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reinventing Caste"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Texan Crucible"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Riptides"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

Visit Periloux C. Peay's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Strangers and Kinsmen"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Women in Power"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Contested Continent"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

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

Visit Peter C. Mancall's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"We All Do the Time"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Sleepless Ape"

New from Princeton University Press: The Sleepless Ape: The Story of Sleep in Human Evolution by David R. Samson.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the unique sleep habits of early humans fostered survival, innovation, and social evolution—and how this evolutionary legacy holds insights into how we sleep today

Despite sleep’s critical role in maintaining health and cognitive function, humans sleep less than any other primate. The Sleepless Ape reveals the reasons for this evolutionary paradox, showing how our unique sleep patterns evolved when our ancestors left the safety of the forest canopy for more dangerous ground, which led them to form more secure, social sleeping arrangements. As a result, early humans developed shorter, deeper, and more flexible sleep patterns that provided survival advantages and freed more time for crucial activities such as toolmaking, social interaction, and migration.

In this groundbreaking book, David Samson draws on his extensive fieldwork to explain how these sleep patterns contributed to our cognitive and social evolution. He delves into how the human brain adapted to achieve deeper, more restorative sleep, enabling advanced memory consolidation, fostering creativity, and contributing to our success as a species. Samson also addresses modern sleep challenges, demonstrating how an understanding of our evolutionary sleep heritage can help us to address sleep disorders and improve overall health and well-being. He tackles contentious issues such as co-sleeping, whether we should embrace paleo sleep or optimal sleep, and whether we are in fact suffering from an epidemic of too little sleep.

Blending the latest science with engaging storytelling by a leading expert, The Sleepless Ape shares compelling insights into how a fundamental yet overlooked aspect of human biology has shaped our evolutionary trajectory and continues to profoundly influence our daily lives.

Visit David R. Samson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Disabled Empire"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Disabled Empire: The Colonial Body in First World War Britain by Hilary R. Buxton.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores the minute interactions between military servicemen and medical caregivers during World War I to tell a broader story about race, colonialism, labor, and global health.

Disabled Empire examines how imperial precedents and racial ideologies shaped the medical treatments that the British state offered to several million Black and brown servicemen during World War I. In recovering the voices and experiences of these soldiers, Hilary R. Buxton illustrates how they navigated the institutional culture of the imperial military and how they helped to shape health and welfare systems well beyond the interwar period.

The Great War was the first time that troops and volunteers from nearly all reaches of the Empire participated in the war effort side-by-side. Despite official attempts at segregation, colonial troops met in trenches, mobile camps, casualty clearing stations, hospital ships, and convalescent homes. Just as importantly, those organizing treatment encountered men of different ethnicities, religions, and cultures from across and beyond the British Empire. For British officials, this moment offered an opportunity to remake colonial efficiency and medical knowledge. Yet, as Buxton shows, colonial servicemen were not passive subjects in a wartime laboratory: they were vocal participants who demanded a say in the therapies prescribed to them, the rations they required, the psychiatric care they received, and the prosthetics with which they were fitted. Together, these encounters profoundly remade colonial relations, reshaping imperial science, administration, and colonial understandings of subjecthood.

Disabled Empire pushes literature on the war and medicine outside its national, Eurocentric focus to confront the colonial logic of global health inequity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Suitable"

New from Oxford University Press: Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men by Chloe Chapin.

About the book, from the publisher:

The surprising story of how the plain black suit became a symbol of masculinity, democracy, and modernity.

How did black suits become so ubiquitous? Why has men's business clothing been so plain for the last 250 years? How did a style adopted by the Founding Fathers to differentiate themselves from European contemporaries become the dominant style for men around the globe?

Suitable traces the shift from the colorful, flamboyant attire of the eighteenth century to the plain dark suit of the nineteenth century, characterizing this style evolution as a "Sartorial Revolution." In this book, American historian and costume designer Chloe Chapin traces the evolution of masculine style from the American Revolution through the Civil War and shows how men's suits shaped relationships of gender and power. Drawing on a wealth of visual and written sources, she shows how the plainness of suits symbolized new ideals of rationality and democracy and played a crucial role in framing the lasting identity and authority of American men. This richly illustrated book analyzes fashion history's impact on gender dynamics and emphasizes the dynamic relationships between bodies, clothing, and personal identity.

Suitable demonstrates the significance of fashion beyond mere appearance, illustrating the key role modern men's suits have played in shaping the modern world.

Visit Chloe Chapin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A New World of Revolutions"

New from Princeton University Press: A New World of Revolutions: Popular Imaginations and Movements across the Americas by Arturo Chang.

About the book, from the publisher:

The hemispheric politics that shaped popular revolutions against European colonial rule

In A New World of Revolutions, Arturo Chang reconstructs the histories, politics, and legacies of the Age of Revolutions (c. 1770–1850) from the vantage point of popular movements in the Americas. Challenging narratives that center the nation-state, Chang emphasizes the hemispheric politics, practices, and cultural production that connected revolutionary movements from the United States to Argentina. He draws on marching songs, poems, pamphlets, manifestos, plays, proclamations, constitutions, and other archival objects to show that hemispheric imaginaries were critical to the development of postcolonial republicanism in the Americas.

Chang shows that marginalized groups, especially Indigenous, Mestizo, and Pardo communities, contributed to and benefitted from narratives of American emancipation. Armed with hemispheric discourses, they were able to argue for such egalitarian reforms as the abolition of slavery, the elimination of colonial tribute, the protection of Indigenous lands, the end of the Spanish caste system, and the establishment of civic equality. Countering assumptions that actors in popular movements followed elite leaders or had little to say during moments of revolutionary change, Chang shows how each of these campaigns influenced republican principles in ways that reflected their own cultures and histories—and how each produced concrete interventions in the legal, social, and material realities of their communities. Chang links popular movements in New Spain (Mexico), the United States, New Granada (Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador), and the postcolonial Andes (Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina), arguing that, together, they constituted an American tradition of resistance against European rule.

Visit Arturo Chang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Long Revolution"

New from Basic Books: The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776 by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal.

About the book, from the publisher:

For America 250, a provocative argument that a “Long Revolution” formed the violently beating heart of American politics for decades after 1776.

In the century after Independence, many Americans believed that their Revolution was still in progress. Far from a unifying national myth, the Revolution was for generations of Americans a source of radically conflicting political ideas. Nowhere was this clearer than on the Fourth of July, when Americans gathered for speeches that, as one orator put it in 1834, aimed to “examine the present, and to look forward to the future.”

In The Long Revolution, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal mines thousands of Independence Day orations to offer a stirring and revelatory new history of this long American Revolution. In the words of local notables and national celebrities, men and women, white and Black, he identifies the contrasting visions, intense anxieties, and radical power evoked by the Revolution deep into the nineteenth century. This is a history of the American founding for today’s fragmented and anxious political moment, helping us find a usable past to guide us toward our own uncertain future.

The Page 99 Test: The Age of Revolutions.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Colonial Negatives"

New from Cornell University Press: Colonial Negatives: Picturing History and Identity in Morocco by Patricia Goldsworthy.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Colonial Negatives, Patricia Goldsworthy examines the intertwined histories of French, Moroccan Muslim, and Moroccan Jewish photographers in establishing a photography industry in Morocco. She demonstrates how photography in Morocco became linked to French imperialism when Sultan 'Abd al-'Aziz hired French cinematographer Gabriel Veyre as his private photography instructor. 'Abd al-'Aziz saw photography as a tool of political power and control useful in asserting his authority. For the French, photography was a way to control the international perception of their interventions in Morocco. But throughout the colonial era, photography upheld, questioned, and contradicted stereotypes about Moroccan history and society, shaping debates over conquest and rule. Images of colonial violence demonstrated the oppressive nature of French pacification and were used to oppose colonialism. Moroccan Jews established their own studios and captured images depicting historical events overlooked by European photographers. Colonial Negatives addresses the postindependence reappropriation of colonial imagery and colonial tropes to demonstrate the ongoing role and importance of photography in interpreting and reclaiming Moroccan history.

Patricia Goldsworthy is Professor of Transnational Europe and Middle East History at Western Oregon University.

--Marshal Zeringue

"An Elite Education"

New from Princeton University Press: An Elite Education: How Privilege Is Produced in a Private School by Emma Taylor.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of the making of privilege at one of Britain’s top boys’ schools

Alumni of Britain’s elite schools are consistently overrepresented in positions of power and influence. It is no surprise, then, that elite schools play a pivotal role in reproducing inequality. In An Elite Education, Emma Taylor draws on years of immersive ethnographic research and teaching experience at one of Britain’s leading private boys’ schools to highlight how these institutions cultivate the dispositions that propel students into elite universities and professions.

Taylor finds that elite schools provide a forgiving, flexible and exclusive training ground, enabling students to push boundaries, bend rules and negotiate with those in authority. She argues that this ability to navigate elite spaces with confidence—which she conceptualises as “audacity”—is a carefully cultivated form of privilege that is frequently mistaken for merit. Behind the formal façade of architecture, traditions and rituals lies a messy web of everyday interactions through which students learn to assert themselves without fear of consequence.

An Elite Education ultimately calls for a deeper interrogation of the taken-for-granted dispositions that continue to shape access to opportunity in Britain.

Visit Emma Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Protecting Minds"

New from Oxford University Press: Protecting Minds: The Right Against Mental Interference by Thomas Douglas.

About the book, from the publisher:

It is widely accepted that we each possess a right against interference with our bodies. In this book, Thomas Douglas argues that we also possess an analogous right against interference with our minds. He defends the existence of this right―both by appealing to intuitions regarding cases and by invoking the notion of self-ownership―and he describes its content and contours.

In Douglas' view, the right against mental interference protects us against actions that significantly alter our mental states and operate via processes that are insensitive to the reasons that bear on the mental alteration. The interventions that most obviously infringe the right are 'nonconsensual neurointerventions'―interventions that alter a person's mental states by physically modulating their brain states, and are performed without the target's consent. But Douglas argues that some psychological forms of influence can infringe the right too. Examples include the use of subliminal imagery and conditioning-based interventions, such as the use of loot boxes in computer games.

This book contributes both to the increasingly vigorous debate over 'neurorights' and to the wider discussion of the ethics of mental and behavioural influence. Such discussion has traditionally treated manipulation, coercion and persuasion as the most important categories of influence; this volume introduces mental interference as a further category warranting attention.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Mask of Memory"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War by Jason R. Young.

About the book, from the publisher:

Many of the sights and sounds that Americans associate with slavery are rooted in a grandiose historical myth. The image of the Big House, sitting atop carefully manicured rolling green hills, is in large part, a fantasy—as is the idea of the plantation as an expansive family home to chivalrous planters and content slaves. Still, these myths persist.

Jason R. Young explores the persistence of these myths and the historical memory of slavery by focusing on the elite white mythmakers who helped shape our understanding of slavery. In the early twentieth century, a group of white writers, artists, and performers from the cultural hub of Charleston, South Carolina, created and curated a highly sanitized view of slavery. They imagined a once and future plantation society that would reestablish them as the proper heirs of the slave past. In the process, they crafted a set of dangerously durable and virulent stereotypes about slavery. Focusing on literature, art, and performance, Young examines both the power and the folly of these ideas. In uncovering their origins, The Mask of Memory resists these racial fantasies and challenges their stubborn resurgence in our own time.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sexual Heresies"

New from Stanford University Press: Sexual Heresies: Religion, Science, and Sexuality in Modern Britain by Joy Dixon.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the new sexual sciences―from anthropological accounts of religion as rooted in ancient fertility cults to psychoanalytic theories that explained religious experience in terms of psychosexual development―characterized religion as closely connected to the sexual. The outcome, as Joy Dixon argues, was a new sense that religion itself could be sexually suspect. One result was an increasing concern to police "sexual heresies" to produce a supposedly normal (healthy, monogamous, and heterosexual) religiosity. The overall effect was a narrowing of the sexual possibilities inside "orthodox" religion and the association of alternative forms of religion with dissident sexualities that continues to shape both religion and secularism today. Drawing on a wide range of materials from diverse elements of British society, this book emphasizes the dynamic relationships between the histories of religion and of sexuality and the historical contingency of the categories we use to understand the relationship between the two.

Joy Dixon is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia and the author of Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (2001).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Protecting Life"

New from Oxford University Press: Protecting Life: The Ethics of Police Deadly Force by Ben Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:

The idea that police should prioritize protecting life seems obvious. Many use-of-force policies already endorse the principle. But despite general support for this principle in and out of policing, figuring out what exactly it means in practice proves far more challenging.

In Protecting Life, Ben Jones takes up that challenge and provides strategies for navigating it. High-profile, controversial killings in recent years remind us that too often police fall short in their obligations to protect life. The problem goes deeper than a few bad apples. Law, policy, and training entrench practices that result in avoidable killings, which hit marginalized groups the hardest. Importantly, how police use deadly force is intertwined with questions of distributive justice. That insight differentiates Protecting Life in its approach to the ethics of police deadly force. It develops a framework to evaluate police deadly force at the individual and institutional level, with close attention to concerns voiced by Black Lives Matter on how policing contributes to structural injustices in society. The book's extensive engagement with social science research reveals ways to translate bedrock moral principles into policy. Ultimately, its conclusions push readers to rethink the state's obligations to those most vulnerable to police violence--particularly, disadvantaged racial groups and persons with mental illness.

Visit Ben Jones's Penn State webpage.

Coffee with a Canine: Ben Jones & Sloopy.

The Page 99 Test: Apocalypse without God.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Scientific-Military State"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Scientific-Military State: How Enlightened Engineers Reinvented Early American Government by Sveinn M. Jóhannesson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Argues that engineers influenced by French Enlightenment science built much of the machinery of America’s military state while redrawing the line between the federal government and society.

In The Scientific-Military State, Sveinn M. Jóhannesson charts the emergence of a new kind of governance in early-nineteenth-century America: the scientific-military state. Federal officials used mathematics, science, and other forms of enlightened knowledge to launch the nation’s very first experiments in scientific education and expert administration. These figures forged a new intellectual elite that socially elevated itself above ordinary soldiers, workers, and civilians and reshaped the military state itself beyond familiar models of standing army or militia. Originating primarily from the US Military Academy at West Point, these experts, who were often engineers, debated statecraft, analyzed topography, designed fortifications, manufactured weapons, built infrastructure, and exercised military power as the United States spread across the continent. But the even deeper result was a transformed relationship between the government and its citizens, one that echoes today.

Visit Sveinn M. Jóhannesson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"High Lands, Pure Earth"

New from Cornell University Press: High Lands, Pure Earth: Place Making, History, and Urban Transitions on the Tibetan Plateau by Eveline Washul.

About the book, from the publisher:

High Lands, Pure Earth foregrounds Tibetan experiences of urban transitions in China's late-reform period. In the twenty-first century, China's accelerated urbanization has transformed the Tibetan Plateau. Yet Tibetan urban experiences continue to be profoundly shaped by senses of being in the world that long predate Tibet's subjugation into the modern Chinese nation-state.

Eveline Washul adopts Indigenous studies frameworks to explore how Tibetans actively engage history, peoplehood, and place to build belonging and community even in urban spaces characterized by intense state-led development and assimilation. Novel analysis of Tibetan textual sources shows how the geobody of Tibet's empire (seventh to ninth centuries) remained the basis for Tibetan perceptual regions and spatial imaginaries through the centuries, even as those regions changed. Ethnographic research highlights circuits of mobility Tibetans travel between homelands and China's cities―and the new social landscapes these mobilities produce. Urban Tibetans, instead of dissolving ties to home, expand their social networks and mobilities into urban spaces. High Lands, Pure Earth documents the enduring strength of Indigenous resilience despite the hegemony of nation-state power.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Honesty Crisis"

New from Oxford University Press: The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World by Christian B. Miller.

About the book, from the publisher:

Honesty is our most treasured virtue. Research has found that honesty is the single most important characteristic a person can possess when it comes to liking them, respecting them, and understanding them. But honesty is eroding at a frightening rate in many areas of society today, as we are confronted with a number of honesty crises. The frequency of deepfakes has skyrocketed, now that they are simple to make and untraceable. In our relationships, with the easy availability of online pornography, anonymous chatrooms, and infidelity websites like Ashley Madison, cheating in a relationship has never been easier. In education, many students are using AI to complete their writing assignments with little chance of detection. In politics, social media helps with the dissemination of fake news, and polarization reduces our tendency to condemn political dishonesty if it aligns with our own views. In public spaces, it is easier to become a celebrity than it has ever been in human history, and yet celebrity encourages greater dishonesty. In religion, religious leaders are increasingly confronted by temptations to plagiarize sermon material from the Internet and AI.

Christian Miller's The Honesty Crisis diagnoses this problem across a range of social phenomena, drawing on his years of research, and makes the case that the stakes are higher than we realize. Proposing concrete solutions, Miller's urgent and timely book will interest anyone concerned about the moral character of our world, and its future.

Visit Christian B. Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Taking Territory"

New from Cornell University Press: Taking Territory: The Persistence of Conquest Since 1945 by Dan Altman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Taking Territory is an eye-opening account of why territorial conquest remains a phenomenon today.

The end of World War II seemingly brought about a decline of territorial conquest. Many have argued that a strong territorial integrity norm in the postwar era explains this decline. Yet as Dan Altman shows, states have seized territory numerous times since 1945. Large-scale conquests have waned, but small, targeted seizures have persisted. The relationship between conquest and war has also shifted. While states attempting conquest before 1945 often initiated war, then sought to occupy large territories, challengers today more often seize small regions, then try to avoid war. This strategy, the fait accompli, has become the predominant mode of conquest.

Drawing on his own original data consisting of 175 conquest attempts between 1918 and 2024, Altman explains why conquest persists, what motivates it, when it turns violent, and when it succeeds. He shows how miscalculated faits accomplis have sparked many post-1945 wars and why the motives behind many territorial grabs are often about image, domestic politics, and the ambitions of military officers. Incisive and illuminating, Taking Territory cuts against what we think we know about post-1945 conquest to reveal its true causes and consequences.

Visit Dan Altman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Local Gods"

New from Columbia University Press: Local Gods: A Philosophy of Spiritual Diversity by Leah Kalmanson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Indigenous activism against telescope construction on Maunakea involves the deity of volcanoes and fire. In India, a village goddess is visited at her place of residence. Across Asia, ancestors are venerated at family shrines. In many places around the world, spiritual matters and practices are local and contextual. Yet philosophy of religion often takes universalizing monotheism as the norm and overlooks other traditions, which it categorizes with oversimplified terms such as polytheism and animism.

Leah Kalmanson offers a new approach to understanding the world’s varied religious traditions: a philosophy of spiritual diversity. Drawing on perspectives from Asian, Pacific, Indigenous American, and African traditions on engaging gods, ghosts, ancestors, and other types of spiritual agents and forces, Local Gods reimagines philosophy of religion from standpoints it typically neglects. A philosophy of spiritual diversity foregrounds the numinous, subtle, and supernormal factors that pervade many aspects of everyday life but slip through the cracks of discourse on religion. Instead of relying on theological frameworks, it turns to theories and methods that are internal to the traditions it considers. This radically plural philosophy highlights creativity and imagination while opening pathways for critique and political engagement. Exploring a vast range of approaches to spiritual matters, this book asks us to find ethical relations with not only the gods we might call our own but also the gods of others.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unvaccinated Under God"

New from Princeton University Press: Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America by Kira Ganga Kieffer.

About the book, from the publisher:

How vaccine hesitancy can be understood as religious expression

Vaccine hesitancy in America didn’t begin with the uproar over the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw resistance to a wide variety of vaccines. In Unvaccinated Under God, Kira Ganga Kieffer shows that debates over vaccine safety and mandatory vaccination were about more than diseases or injections. They have been proxies for existential concerns about justice and morality. Kieffer argues that vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression—not as the product of scientific misinformation.

Through a series of historical case studies, which range from the “mother warriors” who claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism during the 1990s to opposition to masking and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, Kieffer frames vaccination controversies as contests over religious freedom and moral authority. These debates concerned bodily, spiritual, and sexual purity; the morality of state-mandated medical risk; the importance of children; and the authority of parents and doctors. Kieffer explains that diverse groups of Americans utilized religious ideals and practices to question or resist vaccination. With this new, illuminating perspective on vaccine hesitancy, Kieffer offers a novel and even-handed way to understand Americans’ changing and increasingly divided attitudes toward biomedical knowledge and technology. Her account offers readers an accessible set of tools for how to “think with religion” when it comes to contemporary contests over medical authority.

Visit Kira Ganga Kieffer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Real Men on Top"

New from Oxford University Press: Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality by Robin Dembroff.

About the book, from the publisher:

A revelatory new lens on patriarchy-as a force that governs how we see the world, live in our bodies, and imagine our futures

In Real Men on Top, Robin Dembroff shows us that we don't just live in a patriarchal world. We live in a world that patriarchy taught us to see. Patriarchy is not simply a system where men dominate women, Dembroff argues. It is a deeper reality-shaping force that legitimizes economic exploitation, political injustice, and social cruelty by dividing all of us into the rigid categories of Man, Woman, Animal, and Child.

These categories are presented as natural truths, but Dembroff reveals them as man-made myths―ones that construct a reality in which being characterized as Woman, Animal, or Child marks moral degradation. By no coincidence, feminization, dehumanization, and infantilization are the very degradations used to make a man 'less of a man'.

But this book is more than critique; it's also a guide to transformation especially for those grappling with what it means to be a man under patriarchy. Patriarchy's myths celebrate the identity Man, but these myths are no friend to most men. Promising strength and superiority, they instead fuel isolation, emotional repression, and relentless pressure to prove oneself while propping up systems that enrich the powerful few. Rather than deliver freedom and prosperity, these myths entrap and impoverish. Real Men on Top invites readers to see through them and, in so doing, to find new possibilities for living, relating, and becoming human.

Sharp, daring, and deeply felt, Real Men on Top is a book for anyone who senses that something is deeply wrong with the way we live and wants to understand how we got here, and where we might begin the work of remaking reality.

Visit Robin Dembroff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Politics by Formula"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Politics by Formula: How Congressional Policymaking Creates Disparities by Leah Rosenstiel.

About the book, from the publisher:

A clear-eyed study that reveals how politics shapes and often distorts important federal programs, driving inequalities across states.

From Medicaid to Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers, a large percentage of the annual US federal budget (approximately $1 trillion) is distributed through grants-in-aid, a policy tool that allocates aid to state and local governments rather than to individual Americans. When members of Congress use grants-in-aid to fund healthcare, housing, and other forms of support, they are not solely determining how much assistance one person receives. Instead, they can allot certain localities larger grants, which carry big implications for the quality of public services available to citizens living in different states.

Many reasonably assume that these assistance programs distribute funding to states impartially because they use statistical formulas based on population levels, poverty, and other characteristics that, ostensibly, measure need. However, in Politics by Formula, Leah Rosenstiel shows how this seemingly technocratic aspect of federal policymaking is deeply affected by both the structure of political institutions and the motivations of elected officials. Key congressional committees—and especially their leaders—design formulas to benefit their constituencies. Superficially neutral formulas can shield these political decisions from scrutiny, but formulas also constrain congressmembers. Drawing on formal modeling and quantitative and qualitative evidence, Rosenstiel elucidates how these dynamics shape whose and what needs are met and where.

Visit Leah Rosenstiel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Proxy Africa"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: A Proxy Africa: Guyana, African Americans, and the Radical 1970s by Russell Rickford.

About the book, from the publisher:

Nestled between Brazil, Venezuela, and Suriname, Guyana is the third-smallest sovereign state in mainland South America, and one of its youngest. Originally a Dutch colony, Guyana remained under British rule from the late eighteenth century until gaining independence in 1966 and becoming a republic in 1970. Apart from the 1978 mass murder-suicide of cult leader Jim Jones’s followers in Jonestown, Guyana has been mostly peripheral to mainstream geopolitics. Yet for a generation of Black revolutionaries from around the world, Guyana was a vibrant site of pan-African activism. The country was particularly attractive to veterans of the US civil rights movement who sought alternative places to construct flourishing postcolonial, pan-African nation-states.

In this first, comprehensive history of Guyana’s core role in anticolonial, Black internationalist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, historian Russell Rickford traces the history of African Americans who traveled to the country to work with, learn from, and teach Guyanese politicians, activists, and other international figures in the long fight for Black freedom. With encouragement from Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, they eagerly accepted the invitation to move to Guyana to establish new cooperative settlements. Rickford compellingly narrates Guyana’s allure and promise for Black Americans, along with the limitations they faced when ideology clashed with lived realities—especially political ones—once there.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Explaining Famine in the British Empire"

New from Oxford University Press: Explaining Famine in the British Empire: Agricultural Science, Food Security, and the Rise of Statistics by John Lidwell-Durnin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Famine is humanity's oldest fear. Famine memorials and stories are literally carved into the stones that lie on the beds of Europe's rivers. Our science fiction and fantasy literature often begin by evoking a world of hunger and scarcity. Famine shapes our past, it threatens our future, and we struggle to explain how it is tolerated and permitted to unfold in the present. In eighteenth-century Britain, rising food prices provoked a politics of hunger, manifested in food riots, fears of revolution, and political arguments over how to feed a growing population. In the 1790s, fear of famine provoked the state to experiment with something new: funding a voluntary board of experts to compile agricultural data and promote the use of scientific methods in food production. The problem of scarcity and the threat of famine were to be plainly and clearly represented in statistical data, transparent to both the state and the public.

This book is about the famines and food shortages that struck India and Britain at the close of the eighteenth century, and it explores how these crises and episodes of scarcity gave rise to scientific efforts to explain and quantify 'famine.' Focusing on the time period between the Bengal famine of 1770 and the food shortages in Britain in 1800, it explores the development of the concepts of 'artificial scarcity' (and 'artificial famine'), and how statistical science and philosophy played a role in the naturalization of famine. During this time, Britain's first 'Board of Agriculture' was established, creating political opportunities for a rising class of agriculturalists interested in the promotion of their science as a means of confronting and solving the empire's food insecurity during a time of war and upheaval. Following the networks and collaboration between this Board of Agriculture and the East India Company, the book explores the careers and correspondence of agriculturalists, economists, Company officials, scientists, hack writers, and politicians. Explaining Famine in the British Empire shows how these debates over the anthropogenic and natural causes of scarcity and famine shaped the subsequent development of the field of food security and modern concerns over carrying capacity, environment, and population.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Financial Inclusion"

New from Stanford University Press: Financial Inclusion: How an Idea Became a Global Agenda by Tyler Girard.

About the book, from the publisher:

The number of people in the world with a bank account or money service provider increased by 2 billion over the past decade. This phenomenon reflects what Tyler Girard calls the global financial inclusion agenda. This agenda emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and quickly became a prominent feature of global economic governance. The core idea of financial inclusion is that all individuals and businesses should have access to and use formal financial services, including bank accounts, payment services, credit, and insurance. Today, the widespread ability to digitally store and transfer money has impacted every aspect of our lives. What explains the emergence and evolution of the global financial inclusion agenda? And what does the politics of the agenda tell us about the impacts of new technologies on global politics and how ideas become global agendas? Drawing on an original collection of primary documents and interviews with elites from Ghana, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland, this book traces the global financial inclusion agenda over time and interrogates its adaptation in specific contexts and issue areas. Through the concept of participatory ambiguity, Girard offers a novel explanation of the agenda that advances important debates in international relations and international political economy on the distribution of power and authority in global governance.

Visit Tyler Girard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Agrarian Superpower"

New from Columbia University Press: Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States by Samantha Iyer.

About the book, from the publisher:

The United States’ superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program.

Through the lens of food and agriculture, this book offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Locating Racism in the World"

New from Oxford University Press: Locating Racism in the World by Ainsley LeSure.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Locating Racism in the World, Ainsley LeSure develops a worldly theory of antiblack racism rooted in the analytic promise of phenomenology, a philosophical examination of lived experience, to help explain why and how American democracy is confronting its greatest existential threat since the Civil War on the eve of its 250th anniversary. She argues that racism is best understood as a reality-violating common sense generated and perfected through racist practices that produce a white, antiblack world. This worldly theory of antiblack racism is developed over the course of four chapters that explore how five central texts in political theory and black studies - Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton's Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Hannah Arendt's infamous essay, “Reflections on Little Rock” (1957/1959), Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection and Hortense Spiller's “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” - theorize the dilemma of antiblack racism. This worldly understanding avoids the key pitfall of post-Civil Rights theories of racism: the assumption that one needs to account for the emotional and mental states of individuals to validate beyond dispute that certain racial practices and their outcomes are instances of racism. And it also avoids Black studies' recent pessimism by clarifying that the aim of a democratic politics strong enough to combat racial common sense is to make the world appear, that is normatively bound citizens to substantiality of reality, by bolstering plurality and making equality an inspiring source of action in our everyday lives.

Visit Ainsley LeSure's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Anxious Homes"

New from Cornell University Press: Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market by Mengqi Wang.

About the book, from the publisher:

Anxious Homes is a study of the power that shapes the forms of the homes Chinese citizens strive for and the possible paths they may take to realize their home ownership dreams. Mengqi Wang discusses how the Chinese real estate industry functions in the everyday, welding aspirational middle-class families, especially migrant families, to the property-owning class and the urban growth machine. Urban housing was a socialist benefit in China until the market reforms and privatization in the 1990s. Today, most Chinese citizens consider homeownership a necessity rather than an economic privilege. Wang analyzes the making of homeownership ideologies through "inflexible demand" (gangxu)―a concept that real estate brokers, developers, homebuyers, and the government in China use to craft homeownership as indispensable for fulfilling dreams of urban citizenship. The ethnography shows that gangxu helps to articulate diverse attempts to accumulate value through housing at China's urbanizing city periphery, while giving shape to a housing-based, postsocialist right to the city. Anxious Homes argues that homeownership does not necessarily engender independence but suggests further inclusion of citizens within the dominant regime of accumulation.

Mengqi Wang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research interests include economic anthropology, urban anthropology, political economy, gender studies, and science and technology studies.

--Marshal Zeringue