"Divided Parties, Strong Leaders"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Divided Parties, Strong Leaders by Ruth Bloch Rubin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Drawing on nearly a century of legislative history, this careful account invites readers to think anew about when, why, and how leaders of divided parties wield power in Congress.

For decades, legislative scholars have viewed party divisions as critical constraints on congressional leadership. The more a party’s rank and file disagree with one another, the weaker their leaders are predicted to be; as member preferences converge, leader power is thought to increase.

In a powerful corrective to this prevailing view, Ruth Bloch Rubin argues that party divisions are not inherently limiting. Divided Parties, Strong Leaders highlights and examines variation in how members of party factions choose to work together. She shows that leaders of divided parties are well positioned to overcome, and even draw strength from, their divided ranks when the collaborative efforts of their coalitions’ competing factions are evenly matched. By contrast, their capacity to get what they want is more limited when one faction has out-collaborated its competition. Presenting detailed case studies of some of the most storied leaders of the postwar Congress, including Speakers Sam Rayburn and Nancy Pelosi, Bloch Rubin analyzes the factional configuration each leader encountered and explains why it mattered for their exercise of power.

Visit Ruth Bloch Rubin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Teaching Gender"

New from Oxford University Press: Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939 by Samuel Rutherford.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, universities were one of many institutional state structures wherein gender difference, the male breadwinner ideal, and heterosexuality were central to a conception of citizenship. But while the state could enforce these norms through the parameters it set on the extension franchise or the distribution of welfare benefits, individual women and men also played active roles in creating and renegotiating them through the messy interactions of everyday life.

Teaching Gender immerses the reader in lecture theatres, University Senate meetings, student unions, nightclubs, and halls of residence to show how individuals' efforts to find workable paradigms for relating to one another across gender lines took shape within specific institutional, political, and financial constraints, and in the context of a historical moment when anxiety accrued around non-normative genders and sexualities as symptomatic of wider social and political instability. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of ten colleges and universities across England and Scotland, Samuel Rutherford shows that the nationalization and centralization of higher education at the turn of the twentieth century resulted incidentally in coeducation, over the protest of feminist activists who supported gender segregation; that students' negotiation of cross-gender interaction in coeducational universities ultimately led them to identify heterosexuality as a seemingly less fraught paradigm than more gender-neutral conceptions of 'corporate life'; and that single-sex men's and women's colleges, though increasingly marginal, became important sites for the theorization of life paths and identities outside the heterosexual norm. Through detailed recovery both of political and financial decision-making and of the experiences and emotions of faculty, students, administrators, donors, and national politicians, Rutherford paints a vivid and resonant picture of the university campus as a key site for the transmission of norms around gender and sexuality.

Visit Samuel Rutherford's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Good Kids"

New from Stanford University Press: Good Kids: The Politics of Child Labor in the Global South by Isabel Jijon.

About the book, from the publisher:

One in ten children worldwide is involved in some form of child labor. While almost half are in occupations that put their safety at risk, the other half have "gray" jobs like industrial farming or selling candy on the street. Children in these positions often defend the value of their work, and some even join social movements to demand the "right to work with dignity." In Good Kids, Isabel Jijon reveals how global campaigns against child labor are often met with resistance from the very children they are meant to protect. Conducting interviews in Bolivia and Ecuador with children who defend their labor, Jijon explores what they mean by "value," "rights," and "dignity" in this context. She finds that working children seek a sense of self-worth, as well as worthiness in their closest relationships; they use work to prove that they are "good sons/daughters," "good friends," or simply "good kids." Drawing, also, on interviews with reformers invested in ending child labor, Jijon produces a nuanced picture of the ways that global campaigns can, unintentionally, undermine these relationships and make working children feel stigmatized rather than protected. This fascinating and challenging study of moral meaning-making upends simple understandings of harm and worthiness in a vast but poorly understood labor market.

Isabel Jijon is a Lecturer on Sociology at Harvard University. She is also a Data Consultant at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), in the Child Protection and Development team.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Get It Out"

New from NYU Press: Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy by Andréa Becker.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of hysterectomy and the struggle for bodily and reproductive autonomy

At least one hysterectomy is performed every minute of the year, making it the most common gynecological surgery worldwide. By the age of sixty-five, one out of five people born with a uterus will have it removed. So, why do we seldom talk about this surgery? Highly performed yet overlooked, examining the paradox of hysterectomy begins to unravel the various problems with how we medically treat uteruses and the people who have them.

Get It Out weaves centuries of medical history with rich qualitative data from 100 women, trans men, and nonbinary people who had, want, or are considering hysterectomy. In compelling detail, Andréa Becker reveals how America’s healthcare system routinely deprives people of the ability to control their own bodies along race and gender lines. When people ask for a hysterectomy, they are often met with pushback: Are you sick enough? Old enough? Have you had enough babies? Will you regret this? How will your future husband feel about this? Yet this pushback is not equally experienced. While some people are barred access, others are ushered toward a hysterectomy. These contradictory recommendations reveal the persistent biases entrenched within healthcare.

Get It Out interrogates how little choice people with uteruses ultimately have over their reproductive health, and explores what these “choices” signify amid interlocking systems of inequality.

Visit Andréa Becker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Enduring Empire"

New from Stanford University Press: Enduring Empire: U.S. Statecraft and Race-Making in the Philippines by katrina quisumbing king.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1898 the United States became a formal overseas empire and claimed sovereignty over the Philippine islands, justifying its rule in explicitly racial terms. Less than fifty years later, in 1946, Philippine independence was recognized by the United States, even as it continued to exert influence over the domestic and foreign affairs of the newly decolonized Republic. Despite some differences, U.S. control remained racial and imperial. Enduring Empire shows how U.S. federal state actors translated their ideas of race into state structures. Through innovating constitutional law, bureaucratic administration, and legislation, state actors built a durable and flexible system of racial-imperial rule that not only lasted beyond the period of formal empire but continues to this day. katrina quisumbing king traces debates among U.S. presidents, federal legislators, administrators, and justices about what kind of state the United States should be, the place of nonwhite people in the polity, and the best way to maintain U.S. white hegemony. In charting how state actors' positions—some nativist, isolationist, and protectionist and others expansionist, interventionist, and imperialist—evolved, quisumbing king identifies key moments when they cemented racial ideas into law and reshaped the terms of U.S. racial-imperial formation.

Visit katrina quisumbing king's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Why Democracies Fight Dictators"

New from Oxford University Press: Why Democracies Fight Dictators by Madison Schramm.

About the book, from the publisher:

Over the course of the last century, there has been an outsized incidence of conflict between democracies and personalist regimes--political systems where a single individual has undisputed executive power and prominence. In most cases, it has been the democratic side that has chosen to employ military force.

Why Democracies Fight Dictators takes up the question of why liberal democracies are so inclined to engage in conflict with personalist dictators. Building on research in political science, history, sociology, and psychology and marshalling evidence from statistical analysis of conflict, multi-archival research of American and British perceptions during the Suez Crisis and Gulf War, and non-democracies' understanding of the threat from Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Madison V. Schramm offers a novel and nuanced explanation for patterns in escalation and hostility between liberal democracies and personalist regimes. When conflicts of interest arise between the two types of states, Schramm argues, cognitive biases and social narratives predispose leaders in liberal democracies to perceive personalist dictators as particularly threatening and to respond with anger--an emotional response that elicits more risk acceptance and aggressive behavior. She also locates this tendency in the escalatory dynamics that precede open military conflict: coercion, covert action, and crisis bargaining. At all of these stages, the tendency toward anger and risk acceptance contributes to explosive outcomes between democratic and personalist regimes.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Explaining our Actions"

New from Cambridge University Press: Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing by Peter Carruthers.

About the book, from the publisher:

We often explain our actions and those of others using a commonsense framework of perceptions, beliefs, desires, emotions, decisions, and intentions. In his thoughtful new book, Peter Carruthers scrutinizes this everyday explanation for our actions, while also examining the explanatory framework through the lens of cutting-edge cognitive science. He shows that the 'standard model' of belief–desire psychology (developed, in fact, with scant regard for science) is only partly valid; that there are more types of action and action-explanation than the model allows; and that both ordinary folk and armchair philosophers are importantly mistaken about the types of mental state that the human mind contains. His book will be of great value to all those who rely in their work on assumptions drawn from commonsense psychology, whether in philosophy of mind, epistemology, moral psychology, ethics, or psychology itself. It will also be attractive to anyone with an interest in human motivation.

The Page 99 Test: Human Motives.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The New Voice of God"

New from the University of Oklahoma Press: The New Voice of God: Language, Worldview, and the Cherokee Bible by Margaret Bender and Thomas N. Belt.

About the book, from the publisher:

For Christian European missionaries among the Cherokees at the turn of the eighteenth century, translating the Bible meant wrestling with the extreme structural differences between Cherokee and English. The New Voice of God reveals how these linguistic differences encoded basic predispositions and orientations toward the physical, spiritual, and social worlds—and how their translation in turn encodes the profound linguistic and cultural exchange manifested in the making of the Cherokee Bible. While the introduction of Christianity shaped Cherokee communicative practices and culture, the Cherokee language also reshaped the Bible to reflect a definitive Native worldview.

Focusing on three books of the Cherokee Bible—Genesis, John, and Matthew—Margaret Bender and Thomas N. Belt demonstrate how Christianity, written in and on Cherokee terms, can be uniquely and distinctly Cherokee, while remaining undeniably Christian. For example, Cherokee’s rich and complex grammar work against English’s noun-centeredness, yielding creative approximations of European objects as conditions and essences as events. Cherokee’s radically different pronoun structure includes the reader in Biblical conversation in surprising ways. The authors also explain the relevance of the Cherokee Indigenous writing system—invented by Sequoyah, a non-Christian native speaker—to the complex spiritual landscape of the nineteenth century. Their analysis suggests that the Cherokee Bible records this cross-cultural encounter at a deep philosophical level, providing evidence that microlinguistic detail powerfully and intricately reflects macrosociological phenomena.

In showing how Cherokee Christians ingeniously adapted Christian practices to create unique social and spiritual identities, The New Voice of God documents how this adaptation—manifest in the translation of Christian texts into Cherokee—not only bridged two vastly different languages but also exposed deep philosophical differences, challenging Western cultural norms and reshaping spiritual discourse.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Native America: The Story of the First Peoples"

New from Princeton University Press: Native America: The Story of the First Peoples by Kenneth L. Feder.

About the book, from the publisher:

An epic deep history of the Indigenous peoples of North America, covering more than 20,000 years of astonishing diversity, adaptation, resilience, and continuity

Native America presents an infinitely surprising and fascinating deep history of the continent’s Indigenous peoples. Kenneth Feder, a leading expert on Native American history and archaeology, draws on archaeological, historical, and cultural evidence to tell the ongoing story, more than 20,000 years in the making, of an incredibly resilient and diverse mixture of peoples, revealing how they have ingeniously adapted to the many changing environments of the continent, from the Arctic to the desert Southwest.

Richly illustrated, Native America introduces close to a hundred different peoples, each with their own language, economic and social system, and religious beliefs. Here, we meet the Pequot, Tunxis, Iroquois, and Huron of the Northeast; the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and Apache of the Southwest; the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Lakota of the Northern Plains; the Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Salish of the Northwest Coast; the Tule River and Mohave of Southern California; the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole of the Southeast; and the Inuit and Kalaallit of the Arctic. We learn about hunters of enormous Ice Age beasts; people who raised stone toolmaking to the level of art; a Native American empire ruled by a king and queen, with a huge city at its center and colonies hundreds of miles away; a society that made the desert bloom by designing complex irrigation networks; brilliant architects who built fairy castles in sandstone cliffs; and artists who produced beautiful and moving petroglyphs and pictographs that reflect their deep thinking about history, the sacred, the land, and the sky.

Native America is not about peoples of the past, but vibrant, living ones with an epic history of genius and tenacity—a history that everyone should know.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Brazilian Belonging"

New from Stanford University Press: Brazilian Belonging: Jewish Politics in Cold War Latin America by Michael Rom.

About the book, from the publisher:

Brazilian Belonging examines a century of Brazilian Jewish political activism, from the onset of Jewish mass migration to Brazil in the early 1920s to the present. The home of the largest Jewish community living in a nonwhite-majority country in the world, and a country that has witnessed extended periods of democratic and dictatorial rule, Brazil offers an important window for rethinking Jewish ideas about race and nation, democracy and dictatorship, and local and global forms of state violence. In this book, Michael Rom highlights the important roles Brazilian Jews played in prominent social movements—movements that contested the meaning of the discourse of racial democracy, fought against the military dictatorship, and sought out new political possibilities following the return of democratic rule. He draws on extensive research—including previously unexamined secret police and intelligence records, the Brazilian Yiddish press, and oral history interviews—to illuminate decades of Brazilian Jewish activism under both democratic and dictatorial regimes. Offering the first study of modern Jewish politics and Latin American ethnic belonging throughout the Cold War, this book situates Brazilian Jewish activism within the transnational contexts of the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Cold War superpower rivalries, Latin American revolutionary insurgencies, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Michael Rom is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish History and Culture at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles.

--Marshal Zeringue