"Learning to Save the World"

New from Cornell University Press: Learning to Save the World: Global Health Pedagogies and Fantasies of Transformation in Botswana by Betsey Behr Brada.

About the book, from the publisher:

Learning to Save the World provides an innovative analysis of how individuals inhabit, refuse, and reconfigure the contours of global health.

In 2001, Botswana's government, faced with one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world, committed itself to sub-Saharan Africa's first free public HIV treatment program. US-based private foundations and medical schools offered support to demonstrate the feasibility of public HIV treatment in Africa. Given US interest and investment in global health, this support created opportunities for US physicians and medical trainees to interact with local practitioners, treat patients, and shape health policy in Botswana.

Although global health has emerged as a powerful call to planetary moral action, the nature of this exhortation remains unclear. Is global health a new movement for social justice, or is it neocolonial, creating new dependencies under the banner of humanitarianism? Betsey Behr Brada shows that global health is a frontier, an imaginative framework that organizes the space, time, and ethics of encounter.

Learning to Save the World reveals how individuals and collectivities engaged in global health―visiting experts as well as local clinicians and patients―come to regard themselves and others in terms of this framework.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop"

New from W.W. Norton: Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop by Martin Puchner.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Culture, acclaimed author, professor, and public intellectual Martin Puchner takes us on a breakneck tour through pivotal moments in world history, providing a global introduction to the arts and humanities in one engaging volume.

What good are the arts? Why should we care about the past? For millennia, humanity has sought to understand and transmit to future generations not just the “know-how” of life, but the “know-why”—the meaning and purpose of our existence, as expressed in art, architecture, religion, and philosophy. This crucial passing down of knowledge has required the radical integration of insights from the past and from other cultures. In Culture, acclaimed author, professor, and public intellectual Martin Puchner takes us on a breakneck tour through pivotal moments in world history, providing a global introduction to the arts and humanities in one engaging volume.

From Nefertiti’s lost city to the plays of Wole Soyinka; from the theaters of ancient Greece to Chinese travel journals to Arab and Aztec libraries; from a South Asian statuette found at Pompeii to a time capsule left behind on the Moon, Puchner tells the gripping story of human achievement through our collective losses and rediscoveries, power plays and heroic journeys, innovations, imitations, and appropriations. More than a work of history, Culture is an archive of humanity’s most monumental junctures and a guidebook for the future of us humans as a creative species. Witty, erudite, and full of wonder, Puchner argues that the humanities are (and always have been) essential to the transmission of knowledge that drives the efforts of human civilization.

Visit Martin Puchner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Birth Figures"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body by Rebecca Whiteley.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first full study of “birth figures” and their place in early modern knowledge-making.

Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term and here offers the first systematic analysis of the images’ creation, use, and impact. Whiteley reveals their origins in ancient medicine and explores their inclusion in many medieval gynecological manuscripts, focusing on their explosion in printed midwifery and surgical books in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. During this period, birth figures formed a key part of the visual culture of medicine and midwifery and were widely produced. They reflected and shaped how the pregnant body was known and treated. And by providing crucial bodily knowledge to midwives and surgeons, birth figures were also deeply entangled with wider cultural preoccupations with generation and creativity, female power and agency, knowledge and its dissemination, and even the condition of the human in the universe.

Birth Figures studies how different kinds of people understood childbirth and engaged with midwifery manuals, from learned physicians to midwives to illiterate listeners. Rich and detailed, this vital history reveals the importance of birth figures in how midwifery was practiced and in how people, both medical professionals and lay readers, envisioned and understood the mysterious state of pregnancy.

Follow Rebecca Whiteley on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop's Door"

Coming May 1 from Oxford University Press: Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop's Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World by Rudi Matthee.

About the book, from the publisher:

Islam is the only major world religion that resists the juggernaut of alcohol consumption. In many Islamic countries, alcohol is banned; in others, it plays little role in social life. Yet, Muslims throughout history did drink, often to excess--whether sultans and shahs in their palaces, or commoners in taverns run by Jews or Christians.

This evocative study delves into drinking's many historic, literary and social manifestations in Islam, going beyond references to 'hypocrisy' or the temptations of 'forbidden fruit'. Rudi Matthee argues that alcohol, through its 'absence' as much as its presence, takes us to the heart of Islam. Exploring the long history of this faith--from the eight-century Umayyad dynasty to Erdogan's Turkey, and from Islamic Spain to modern Pakistan--he unearths a tradition of diversity and multiplicity in which Muslims drank, and found myriad excuses to do so. They celebrated wine and used it as a poetic metaphor, even viewing alcohol as a gift from God--the key to unlocking eternal truth.

Drawing on a plethora of sources, Matthee presents Islam not as an austere and uncompromising faith, but as a set of beliefs and practices that embrace ambivalence, allowing for ambiguity and even contradiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover"

New from Princeton University Press: The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism by Lerone A. Martin.

About the book, from the publisher:

On a Sunday morning in 1966, a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was not an evangelical, but his Christian admirers anointed him as their political champion, believing he would lead America back to God. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover reveals how Hoover and his FBI teamed up with leading white evangelicals and Catholics to bring about a white Christian America by any means necessary.

Lerone Martin draws on thousands of newly declassified FBI documents and memos to describe how, under Hoover’s leadership, FBI agents attended spiritual retreats and worship services, creating an FBI religious culture that fashioned G-men into soldiers and ministers of Christian America. Martin shows how prominent figures such as Billy Graham, Fulton Sheen, and countless other ministers from across the country partnered with the FBI and laundered bureau intel in their sermons while the faithful crowned Hoover the adjudicator of true evangelical faith and allegiance. These partnerships not only solidified the political norms of modern white evangelicalism, they also contributed to the political rise of white Christian nationalism, establishing religion and race as the bedrock of the modern national security state, and setting the terms for today’s domestic terrorism debates.

Taking readers from the pulpits and pews of small-town America to the Oval Office, and from the grassroots to denominational boardrooms, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover completely transforms how we understand the FBI, white evangelicalism, and our nation’s entangled history of religion and politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Moving Crops and the Scales of History"

New from Yale University Press: Moving Crops and the Scales of History by Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”—the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a crop

Human efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. Crops have been on the move for millennia, from wildlands into fields, from wetlands to dry zones, from one imperial colony to another. This book is a bold but approachable attempt to redefine historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”: the assemblage of people, places, creatures, technologies, and other elements that form around a crop.

The cropscape is a method of reconnecting the global with the local, the longue durée with microhistory, and people, plants, and places with abstract concepts such as tastes, ideas, skills, politics, and economic forces. Through investigating a range of contrasting cropscapes spanning millennia and the globe, the authors break open traditional historical structures of period, geography, and direction to glean insight into previously invisible actors and forces.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Among Women across Worlds"

New from Cornell University Press: Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War by Suzy Kim.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim excavates the transnational linkages between women of North Korea and a worldwide women's movement. Women of Asia, especially those espousing communism, are often portrayed as victims or pawns of a patriarchal Confucian state. Kim undercuts this standard analysis through detailed archival work in the international women's press, and finds that North Korean women asserted themselves in unexpected places from the late 1940s―just before the official beginning of the Korean War―to 1975, the year designated by the UN as International Women's Year.

By centering North Korea and the "East," Kim defies convention to offer an entirely new genealogy of the global women's movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women's Union (KDWU), as part of the global left women's movement led by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), insisted family and domestic issues must be part of both national and international debates, highlighting how race, nationality, sex, and class connect to form systems of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Their intersectional program claimed that there is "no peace without justice," that "the personal is the political," and that "women's rights are human rights" many decades before activists of the West embraced such agendas. Among Women across Worlds is an archaeology of forgotten movements and ideas that became the foundation for those that have come to define our era.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Oil Beach"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond by Christina Dunbar-Hester.

About the book, from the publisher:

Can the stories of bananas, whales, sea birds, and otters teach us to reconsider the seaport as a place of ecological violence, tied to oil, capital, and trade?

San Pedro Bay, which contains the contiguous Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is a significant site for petroleum shipping and refining as well as one of the largest container shipping ports in the world—some forty percent of containerized imports to the United States pass through this so-called America’s Port. It is also ecologically rich. Built atop a land- and waterscape of vital importance to wildlife, the heavily industrialized Los Angeles Harbor contains estuarial wetlands, the LA River mouth, and a marine ecology where colder and warmer Pacific Ocean waters meet. In this compelling interdisciplinary investigation, award-winning author Christina Dunbar-Hester explores the complex relationships among commerce, empire, environment, and the nonhuman life forms of San Pedro Bay over the last fifty years—a period coinciding with the era of modern environmental regulation in the United States. The LA port complex is not simply a local site, Dunbar-Hester argues, but a node in a network that enables the continued expansion of capitalism, propelling trade as it drives the extraction of natural resources, labor violations, pollution, and other harms. Focusing specifically on cetaceans, bananas, sea birds, and otters whose lives are intertwined with the vitality of the port complex itself, Oil Beach reveals how logistics infrastructure threatens ecologies as it circulates goods and capital—and helps us to consider a future where the accumulation of life and the accumulation of capital are not in violent tension.

Visit Christina Dunbar-Hester's website.

The Page 99 Test: Hacking Diversity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"An English Tradition?"

Coming March 26 from Oxford University Press: An English Tradition?: The History and Significance of Fair Play by Jonathan Duke-Evans.

About the book, from the publisher:

For hundreds of years English people have claimed that fair play is at the core of their national identity. Jonathan Duke-Evans looks at the history of fair play in Britain from earliest times to the present, asking whether it is in fact a British, or alternatively an English, characteristic at all - and if so, whether fair play still matters today?

In An English Tradition?, Jonathan Duke-Evans explores the origins of the idea of fair play, tracing it back to the classical world and the Dark Ages, and finding its genesis deep within England's social structure. Charting its early development through both the tales of chivalry and the stories of popular legend, the book shows how fair play manifested itself in literature, the law, the Christian religion, and the family. It examines the way in which fair play was conceived during the ages of slavery and empire, and it proposes a new account of the birth of modern sport in the encounter between age-old popular games and the Victorian cult of amateurism. Taking in the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh manifestations of fair play, Duke-Evans offers contrasts and comparisons from cultures all around the world, and suggests new perspectives on the relevance of fair play in the twenty-first century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South"

Coming April 11 from the University of North Carolina Press: Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South by Sarah McNamara.

About the book, from the publisher:

When we think about the origins of Latina/o Florida, we often imagine Cuban immigrants who fled the regime of Fidel Castro. But decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical, working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the Florida Straits, made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the sunshine state. Located on the eastern edge of the Gulf Coast port city of Tampa, Ybor City was a neighborhood of cigar workers and Caribbean revolutionaries who sought refuge against the shifting tides of international political turmoil during the early half of the twentieth century.

Here historian Sarah McNamara tells the story of immigrant and U.S.-born Latinas/os who fought for survival across generations and against the backdrop of a reconstructed southern order. McNamara follows Latinas who organized strikes, marched against fascism, and criticized U.S. foreign policy. While many members of the immigrant generation maintained their dedication to progressive ideals for years to come, those who came of age in the wake of World War II distanced themselves from leftist politics amidst the Red Scare and the wrecking ball of urban renewal. This portrait of the political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights the underexplored role of women’s leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are.

Follow Sarah McNamara on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue