Surekha Davies

Humans

$29.95

"Surekha Davies invites readers to imagine the lives of historical monsters and to empathize with their often-wretched treatment." ― Science Magazine

A history of how humans have created monsters out of one another—from our deepest fears—and what these monsters tell us about humanity's present and future.

Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein's monster and E.T., Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal.

In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making and charts a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.

David McNally

Slavery and Capitalism

$32.95

The first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery.

Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labor have fallen out of favor among historians, but David McNally injects new life into them. Slavery and Capitalism gives the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery—using colonial travel literature, planter records and diaries, and slave narratives—to support the provocative claim for enslaved labor in the plantation system as capitalist commodity production.

Weaving together history, political economy, and radical abolitionism, McNally demonstrates that plantation slaves formed a modern working class. Unlike those scholars who insist that enslaved people were too sensible to set their sights on liberty, he highlights the self-activity of enslaved people fighting for their freedom and reframes their resistance as labor struggles over production and reproduction, with significant implications for US and Atlantic history and for understanding the roots of racial capitalism.

Cover image for Slavery and Capitalism, isbn: 9780520415973

Norman G. Finkelstein

Gaza

$26.95

"In its comprehensive sweep, deep probing and acute critical analysis, Finkelstein's study stands alone."—Noam Chomsky

"No one who ventures an opinion on Gaza . . . is entitled to do so without taking into account the evidence in this book."
—The Intercept

The Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated places in the world. More than two-thirds of its inhabitants are refugees, and more than half are under eighteen years of age. Since 2004, Israel has launched eight devastating “operations” against Gaza’s largely defenseless population. Thousands have perished, and tens of thousands have been left homeless. In the meantime, Israel has subjected Gaza to a merciless illegal blockade.

What has befallen Gaza is a man-made humanitarian disaster.

Based on scores of human rights reports, Norman G. Finkelstein's new book presents a meticulously researched inquest into Gaza’s martyrdom. He shows that although Israel has justified its assaults in the name of self-defense, in fact these actions constituted flagrant violations of international law.

But Finkelstein also documents that the guardians of international law—from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the UN Human Rights Council—ultimately failed Gaza. One of his most disturbing conclusions is that, after Judge Richard Goldstone's humiliating retraction of his UN report, human rights organizations succumbed to the Israeli juggernaut.

Finkelstein’s magnum opus is both a monument to Gaza’s martyrs and an act of resistance against the forgetfulness of history.

Satnam Singh

The Road to Empire

$95.00

From the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century, the Sikh community transformed from a relatively insignificant religious minority to an elevated position of kingship and empire. Under the leadership of Guru Gobind Singh (1661–1708), Sikh elites and peasants began to align themselves with discourses of power and authority, and within a few decades Khalsa Sikh warriors conquered some of the wealthiest provinces of the Mughal and Afghan empires.

In this book, Satnam Singh argues that the Sikhs’ increasing self-assertion was not simply a reaction to Mughal persecution but also a result of an active program initiated by the Guru to pursue larger visions of scholarship, conquest, and political sovereignty. Using a vast trove of understudied court literature, Singh shows how Sikhs grappled with Indo-Islamic traditions to forge their own unique ideas of governance and kingship with the aim to establish an independent Sikh polity. The Road to Empire offers an impressive intellectual history of the early modern Sikh world.

Gilbert Achcar

Gaza Catastrophe

$22.95

From a foremost expert on the Middle East—a searing indictment of the forces that led to genocidal war on Gaza and its reverberations across the globe.

The destruction rained on Gaza has been seen and accepted by many as a vengeful overreaction to the reckless Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. This book, however, argues that the new catastrophe befalling the Palestinian people is the culmination of a decades-long pattern that runs parallel with Israel’s inexorable shift to the Right. It also contends that Gaza was the final nail in the coffin of the Atlanticist “international liberal order” before Donald Trump came back to the White House.

Gaza Catastrophe reckons with the lethal consequences far greater than the Nakba of 1948 and the significance of a war waged by an advanced military-industrial state—with full US participation and open support from the West. Renowned political scientist Gilbert Achcar explores the dynamics of a complex historical process that culminated in the war on Gaza and wider conflict in the Middle East. Achcar offers critical insights on the genocide’s regional and international consequences, as well as radical critiques of Zionism, Hamas, and other state and non-state actors. This volume is essential to understanding the root causes of the violence destabilizing the entire region and the wider world, as well as the conditions required to bring it to an end.

Cover image for Gaza Catastrophe, isbn: 9780520423558

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

The Apothecary's Wife

$28.95

"A lively medical, scientific, and economic history."—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Best Nonfiction Books of 2024, Kirkus Reviews

A groundbreaking genealogy of for-profit healthcare and an urgent reminder that centering women's history offers vital opportunities for shaping the future.

The running joke in Europe for centuries was that anyone in a hurry to die should call the doctor. As far back as ancient Greece, physicians were notorious for administering painful and often fatal treatments—and charging for the privilege. For the most effective treatment, the ill and injured went to the women in their lives. This system lasted hundreds of years. It was gone in less than a century.

Contrary to the familiar story, medication did not improve during the Scientific Revolution. Yet somehow, between 1650 and 1740, the domestic female and the physician switched places in the cultural consciousness: she became the ineffective, potentially dangerous quack, he the knowledgeable, trustworthy expert. The professionals normalized the idea of paying them for what people already got at home without charge, laying the foundation for Big Pharma and today’s global for-profit medication system. A revelatory history of medicine, The Apothecary’s Wife challenges the myths of the triumph of science and instead uncovers the fascinating truth. Drawing on a vast body of archival material, Karen Bloom Gevirtz depicts the extraordinary cast of characters who brought about this transformation. She also explores domestic medicine’s values in responses to modern health crises, such as the eradication of smallpox, and what benefits we can learn from these events.

Aaron Eddens

Seeding Empire

$29.95

In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past—and future—of global agriculture. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution projects in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as interviews at development institutions and agribusinesses working to deliver genetically modified crops to millions of small-scale farmers across Africa. From the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the halls of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies to field trials of hybrid maize in Kenya, Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution.

Bayley J. Marquez

Plantation Pedagogy

$29.95

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempted to transform Black and Indigenous peoples and land. This form of teaching—what Bayley J. Marquez names plantation pedagogy—was built on the claim that slavery and land dispossession are fundamentally educational. Plantation pedagogy and the formal institutions that encompassed it were thus integrally tied to enslavement, settlement, and their inherent violence toward land and people. Marquez investigates how proponents developed industrial education domestically and then spread the model abroad as part of US imperialism. A deeply thoughtful and arresting work, Plantation Pedagogy sits where Black and Native studies meet in order to understand our interconnected histories and theorize our collective futures.

Federico Finchelstein

The Wannabe Fascists

$24.95

Meet today's almost fascists and learn the warning signs to intercept them on the road from populism to dictatorship.

With The Wannabe Fascists, historian Federico Finchelstein offers a precise explanation of why Trumpism and similar movements across the world belong to a new political breed, the last outcome of the combined histories of fascism and populism: the wannabe fascists. This new type of populist politician is typically a legally elected leader who, unlike previous populists who were eager to distance themselves from fascism, turns to totalitarian lies, racism, and illegal means to destroy democracy from within.

Drawing on almost three decades of research on the histories of fascism and populism around the world, this book lays out in clear language what the author calls the "four pillars of fascism"—xenophobia, propaganda, political violence, and ultimately dictatorship. Finchelstein carefully explains how and why wannabe fascists like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi embrace the first three pillars but don't quite succeed in dictatorship and total suppression of the popular vote. The Wannabe Fascists stresses the importance of preventing despots from reaching this tipping point and offers a clear warning for what's at stake.

Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer, Jr.

We Are the Land

$24.95

“A Native American rejoinder to Richard White and Jesse Amble White’s California Exposures.”—Kirkus Reviews

Rewriting the history of California as Indigenous.

Before there was such a thing as “California,” there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood—paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today’s casino economy. A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.

Asaf Elia-Shalev

Israel's Black Panthers

$26.95

"Compelling . . . offers a richly detailed account of Israel's Black Panthers in the 1970s.”―Haaretz

"Forces us to confront the sometimes vast distance between constitutional aspiration and social and political practice."―Jewish Book Council

The powerful story of an activist movement that challenged the racial inequities of Israel.

Israel's Black Panthers tells the story of the young and impoverished Moroccan Israeli Jews who challenged their country's political status quo and rebelled against the ethnic hierarchy of Israeli life in the 1970s. Inspired by the American group of the same name, the Black Panthers mounted protests and a yearslong political campaign for the rights of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry. They managed to rattle the country's establishment and change the course of Israel's history through the mass mobilization of a Jewish underclass.

This book draws on archival documents and interviews with elderly activists to capture the movement's history and reveal little-known stories from within the group. Asaf Elia-Shalev explores the parallels between the Israeli and American Black Panthers, offering a unique perspective on the global struggle against racism and oppression. In twenty short and captivating chapters, Israel's Black Panthers provides a textured and novel account of the movement and reflects on the role that Mizrahim can play in the future of Israel.

Stefan Aune

Indian Wars Everywhere

$29.95

References to the Indian Wars, those conflicts that accompanied US continental expansion, suffuse American military history. From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation “Geronimo” used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with warfare. In Indian Wars Everywhere, Stefan Aune shows how these resonances signal a deeper history, one in which the Indian Wars function as a shadow doctrine that influences US military violence. The United States’ formative acts of colonial violence persist in the actions, imaginations, and stories that have facilitated the spread of American empire, from the “savage wars” of the nineteenth century to the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror. Ranging across centuries and continents, Indian Wars Everywhere considers what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be deemed a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare.

Allen James Fromherz

The Center of the World

$29.95

This sweeping history reorients our understanding of the Middle East, placing the Gulf at the heart of globalized trade and cross-cultural encounters.

World history began in the Persian Gulf. The ancient port cities that dotted its coastlines created the first global seaboard, a place from where faiths and cultures from around the world set sail and made contact. More than a history, The Center of the World shows us that contradictions that define our modern age have always been present.

For over four thousand years, the Gulf—sometimes called the Persian Gulf, sometimes the Arabian Gulf—has been a global crossroads while managing to avoid control by the world’s greatest empires. In its history, we see a world of rapid change, fluctuating centers of trade, a dependency on uncertain global markets, and intense cross-cultural encounters that hold a mirror to the contemporary world. Focusing each chapter on a different port around the Gulf, The Center of the World shows how the people of the Gulf adapted to larger changes in world history, creating a system of free trade, merchant rule, and commerce that continues to define the region today.

Marc Egnal

Challenging the Myths of US History

$24.95

A provocative, critical take on the traditional narrative of US history—and a call to reimagine America's past

According to textbooks, the media, and politicians of all stripes, the American story is one of steady progress toward a "more perfect union." In this narrative, ideals of liberty and freedom explain the Revolution and the Civil War and drove racial progress. Similarly, foreign policy, if marked by stumbles, has been largely well-intentioned.

In seven pithy and provocative essays, historian Marc Egnal challenges this account. He argues that wealthy individuals who were set on economic and territorial expansion shaped the American narrative. The seven essays look at progress in the writing of history, the Revolution, the Civil War, violence, Vietnam, the women's movement, and the rise of Donald Trump. Egnal does not ignore protests and lofty ideals. Instead, he shows they were subordinate to the plans of the expansionists and to the racism that so often accompanied their designs. Accessible and engaging, Challenging the Myths of US History urges readers to question long-held assumptions and to look at the American past from a very different perspective.

Cover image for Challenging the Myths of US History, isbn: 9780520402461

Kristi Upson-Saia, Heidi Marx, Jared Secord

Medicine, Health, and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean (500 BCE–600 CE)

$39.95

This sourcebook provides an expansive picture of medicine, health, and healing in ancient Greece and Rome. Covering a wide array of fascinating topics—such as ancient diagnostic practices using the pulse and urine, gynecological theories of women’s illness, treatments involving drugs and surgery, the training and work of physicians, the experiences of patients, and various sites where healing took place—this volume will engage readers interested in the rich history of health and healthcare.

The volume brings together textual sources—many hard to access and some translated into English for the first time—as well as artistic, material, and scientific evidence, including:

Medical treatises
Case studies
Artistic works
Material artifacts
Archaeological evidence
Biomedical remains
Funerary monuments
Miracle narratives
Spells and magical recipes

With substantial explanation of these varied materials—through background chapters, introductions to the thematic chapters, a timeline, and a glossary—the volume is accessible to a broad audience.

Readers will come away with a nuanced understanding of the illnesses people in ancient Greece and Rome experienced, the range of healers from whom they sought help, and the various practices they employed to be healthy.

Medicine, Health, and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean (500 BCE–600 CE)

Ussama Makdisi

Age of Coexistence

$29.95

"Flawless . . . [Makdisi] reminds us of the critical declarations of secularism which existed in the history of the Middle East."—Robert Fisk, The Independent

Today's headlines paint the Middle East as a collection of war-torn countries and extremist groups consumed by sectarian rage. Ussama Makdisi's Age of Coexistence reveals a hidden and hopeful story that counters this clichéd portrayal. It shows how a region rich with ethnic and religious diversity created a modern culture of coexistence amid Ottoman reformation, European colonialism, and the emergence of nationalism.

Moving from the nineteenth century to the present, this groundbreaking book explores, without denial or equivocation, the politics of pluralism during the Ottoman Empire and in the post-Ottoman Arab world. Rather than judging the Arab world as a place of age-old sectarian animosities, Age of Coexistence describes the forging of a complex system of coexistence, what Makdisi calls the "ecumenical frame." He argues that new forms of antisectarian politics, and some of the most important examples of Muslim-Christian political collaboration, crystallized to make and define the modern Arab world.

Despite massive challenges and setbacks, and despite the persistence of colonialism and authoritarianism, this framework for coexistence has endured for nearly a century. It is a reminder that religious diversity does not automatically lead to sectarianism. Instead, as Makdisi demonstrates, people of different faiths, but not necessarily of different political outlooks, have consistently tried to build modern societies that transcend religious and sectarian differences.

James Lin

In the Global Vanguard

$34.95

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

In just half a century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, spurred by efforts of the authoritarian Republic of China government in land reform, farmers associations, and improved crop varieties. Yet overlooked is how Taiwan brought these practices to the developing world. In the Global Vanguard elucidates the history and impact of the “Taiwan model” of agrarian development by incorporating how Taiwanese experts took the country’s agrarian success and exported it throughout rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. Driven by the global Cold War and challenges to the Republic of China’s legitimacy, Taiwanese agricultural technicians and scientists shared their practices, which they claimed were better suited for poor, tropical societies in the developing world. These development missions, James Lin argues, were projected in Taiwan as proof of the ruling government’s modernity and technical prowess and were crucial to how the state sought to hold onto its contested position in the international system and its rule by martial law at home.

Nathaniel Mathews

Zanzibar Was a Country

$29.95

Zanzibar Was a Country traces the history of a Swahili-speaking Arab diaspora from East Africa to Oman. In Oman today, whole communities in Muscat speak Swahili, have recent East African roots, and practice forms of sociality associated with the urban culture of the Swahili coast. These "Omani Zanzibaris" offer the most significant contemporary example in the Gulf, as well as in the wider Indian Ocean region, of an Afro-Arab community that maintains a living connection to Africa in a diasporic setting. While they come from all over East Africa, a large number are postrevolution exiles and emigrés from Zanzibar. Their stories provide a framework for the broader transregional entanglements of decolonization in Africa and the Arabian Gulf. Using both vernacular historiography and life histories of men and women from the community, Nathaniel Mathews argues that the traumatic memories of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 are important to nation-building on both sides of the Indian Ocean.

M. Kat Anderson

Tending the Wild

$34.95

A complex look at California Native ecological practices as a model for environmental sustainability and conservation.

John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today—that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this groundbreaking book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning. Marvelously detailed and beautifully written, Tending the Wild is an unparalleled examination of Native American knowledge and uses of California's natural resources that reshapes our understanding of native cultures and shows how we might begin to use their knowledge in our own conservation efforts.

M. Kat Anderson presents a wealth of information on native land management practices gleaned in part from interviews and correspondence with Native Americans who recall what their grandparents told them about how and when areas were burned, which plants were eaten and which were used for basketry, and how plants were tended. The complex picture that emerges from this and other historical source material dispels the hunter-gatherer stereotype long perpetuated in anthropological and historical literature. We come to see California's indigenous people as active agents of environmental change and stewardship. Tending the Wild persuasively argues that this traditional ecological knowledge is essential if we are to successfully meet the challenge of living sustainably.

Alice Lovejoy

Tales of Militant Chemistry

$27.95

The untold story of film as a chemical cousin to poison gas and nuclear weapons, shaped by centuries of violent extraction

The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century’s history of war, destruction, and cruelty.

This story comes into focus during World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project—uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world’s largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany’s machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak’s film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout.

Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak’s and Agfa’s global empires, Alice Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military-industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling,Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today.

Cover image for Tales of Militant Chemistry, isbn: 9780520402935

Hetta Howes

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife

$29.95

"Brilliantly revealing history of medieval women . . . Howes’s debut has just the right meld of insightful research, enjoyable storytelling and contemporary contexts."—The Guardian

"A history of medieval women’s lives as told through the prism of four exceptional individuals. . . . throughout, the tensions of medieval womanhood strain and stretch—eroticism and purity, sexuality and motherhood, silence and speech."—The New York Times

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife charts the lives and times of four medieval women writers—Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a no-good wife—who all bucked convention and forged their own paths. Largely forgotten by modern readers, these women have an astonishing amount to teach us about love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, and earning a living.

Reading the words of these four writers, Hetta Howes engagingly reveals how everyday women lived, survived, and thrived in medieval times. Who did they marry and why? Did they ever have extramarital affairs? Could they earn money and become self-sufficient? Could they be leaders? What did they think about death—and what about life and their place in it? Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife paints a vibrant portrait of these women, their world, and the ways they speak to us today.

Cover image for Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife, isbn: 9780520396586

Chelsea Schields

Offshore Attachments

$29.95

Offshore Attachments reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world’s largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reproduction, and the family in a bid to maximize profits and turn Caribbean subjects into citizens. Historian Chelsea Schields demonstrates how Caribbean people both embraced and challenged efforts to alter intimate behavior in service to the energy economy. Moving from Caribbean oil towns to European metropolises and examining such issues as sex work, contraception, kinship, and the constitution of desire, Schields narrates a surprising story of how racialized concern with sex shaped hydrocarbon industries as the age of oil met the end of empire.

Edited by John Parker; Foreword by David Adjaye

Great Kingdoms of Africa

$34.95

A groundbreaking, sweeping overview of the great kingdoms in African history and their legacies, written by world-leading experts.

This is the first book for nonspecialists to explore the great precolonial kingdoms of Africa that have been marginalized throughout history. Great Kingdoms of Africa aims to decenter European colonialism and slavery as the major themes of African history and instead explore the kingdoms, dynasties, and city-states that have shaped cultures across the African continent.

This groundbreaking book offers an innovative and thought-provoking overview that takes us from ancient Egypt and Nubia to the Zulu Kingdom almost two thousand years later. Each chapter is written by a leading historian, interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including oral histories and recent archaeological findings. Great Kingdoms of Africa is a timely and vital book for anyone who wants to expand their knowledge of Africa's rich history.

Cover image for Great Kingdoms of Africa, isbn: 9780520395671

Jeffrey S. Adler

Bluecoated Terror

$29.95

A searing chronicle of how racist violence became an ingrained facet of law enforcement in the United States.

Too often, scholars and pundits argue either that police violence against African Americans has remained unchanged since the era of slavery or that it is a recent phenomenon and disconnected from the past. Neither view is accurate. In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler draws on rich archival accounts to show, in narrative detail, how racialized police brutality is part of a larger system of state oppression with roots in the early twentieth-century South, particularly New Orleans.

Wide racial differentials in the use of lethal force and beatings during arrest and interrogation emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Adler explains how race control and crime control blended and blurred during this era, when police officers and criminal justice officials began to justify systemic violence against Black people as a crucial—and legal—tool for maintaining law and order. Bluecoated Terror explores both the rise of these law-enforcement trends and their chilling resilience, providing critical context for recent horrific police abuses as the ghost of Jim Crow law enforcement continues to haunt the nation.

Moon-Ho Jung

Menace to Empire

$29.95

One of Smithsonian Magazine's Favorite Books of 2022

This history reveals how radical threats to the United States empire became seditious threats to national security and exposes the antiradical and colonial origins of anti-Asian racism.

Menace to Empire transforms familiar themes in American history. This profoundly ambitious history of race and empire traces both the colonial violence and the anticolonial rage that the United States spread across the Pacific between the Philippine-American War and World War II. Moon-Ho Jung argues that the US national security state as we know it was born out of attempts to repress and silence anticolonial subjects, from the Philippines and Hawaiʻi to California and beyond.

Jung examines how various revolutionary movements spanning the Pacific confronted the US empire. In response, the US state closely monitored and brutally suppressed those movements, exaggerating fears of pan-Asian solidarities and sowing anti-Asian racism. Radicalized by their opposition to the US empire and racialized as threats to US security, peoples in and from Asia pursued a revolutionary politics that engendered and haunted the national security state—the heart and soul of the US empire ever since.

Norman G. Finkelstein

Gaza

$34.95

"In its comprehensive sweep, deep probing and acute critical analysis, Finkelstein's study stands alone."—Noam Chomsky

"No one who ventures an opinion on Gaza . . . is entitled to do so without taking into account the evidence in this book."
—The Intercept

The Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated places in the world. More than two-thirds of its inhabitants are refugees, and more than half are under eighteen years of age. Since 2004, Israel has launched eight devastating “operations” against Gaza’s largely defenseless population. Thousands have perished, and tens of thousands have been left homeless. In the meantime, Israel has subjected Gaza to a merciless illegal blockade.

What has befallen Gaza is a man-made humanitarian disaster.

Based on scores of human rights reports, Norman G. Finkelstein's new book presents a meticulously researched inquest into Gaza’s martyrdom. He shows that although Israel has justified its assaults in the name of self-defense, in fact these actions constituted flagrant violations of international law.

But Finkelstein also documents that the guardians of international law—from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the UN Human Rights Council—ultimately failed Gaza. One of his most disturbing conclusions is that, after Judge Richard Goldstone's humiliating retraction of his UN report, human rights organizations succumbed to the Israeli juggernaut.

Finkelstein’s magnum opus is both a monument to Gaza’s martyrs and an act of resistance against the forgetfulness of history.

Divya Cherian

Merchants of Virtue

$34.95

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Winner of the 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences

Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of “Hindu,” setting it in contrast to “Untouchable” in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.

Manu Karuka

Empire's Tracks

$29.95

Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

Joe William Trotter, Jr.

Building the Black City

$27.95

A new way of seeing Black history—the sweeping story of how American cities as we know them developed from the vision, aspirations, and actions of the Black poor.

Building the Black City shows how African Americans built and rebuilt thriving cities for themselves, even as their unpaid and underpaid labor enriched the nation's economic, political, and cultural elites. Covering an incredible range of cities from the North to the South, the East to the West, Joe William Trotter, Jr., traces the growth of Black cities and political power from the preindustrial era to the present.

Trotter defines the Black city as a complicated socioeconomic, spiritual, political, and spatial process, unfolding time and again as Black communities carved out urban space against the violent backdrop of recurring assaults on their civil and human rights—including the right to the city. As we illuminate the destructive depths of racial capitalism and how Black people have shaped American culture, politics, and democracy, Building the Black City reminds us that the case for reparations must also include a profound appreciation for the creativity and productivity of African Americans on their own behalf.

Cities covered: Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Richmond, Birmingham, Durham, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Tulsa, early New York (New Amsterdam), Philadelphia, Boston Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Seattle

Christina Heatherton

Arise!

$27.95

An international history of radical movements and their convergences during the Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was a global event that catalyzed international radicals in unexpected sites and struggles. Tracing the paths of figures like Black American artist Elizabeth Catlett, Indian anti-colonial activist M.N. Roy, Mexican revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores Magón, Okinawan migrant organizer Paul Shinsei Kōchi, and Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai, Arise! reveals how activists around the world found inspiration and solidarity in revolutionary Mexico.

From art collectives and farm worker strikes to prison "universities," Arise! reconstructs how this era's radical organizers found new ways to fight global capitalism. Drawing on prison records, surveillance data, memoirs, oral histories, visual art, and a rich trove of untapped sources, Christina Heatherton considers how disparate revolutionary traditions merged in unanticipated alliances. From her unique vantage point, she charts the remarkable impact of the Mexican Revolution as radicals in this critical era forged an anti-racist internationalism from below.

Max K. Strassfeld

Trans Talmud

$29.95

Trans Talmud places eunuchs and androgynes at the center of rabbinic literature and asks what we can learn from them about Judaism and the project of transgender history. Rather than treating these figures as anomalies to be justified or explained away, Max K. Strassfeld argues that they profoundly shaped ideas about law, as the rabbis constructed intricate taxonomies of gender across dozens of texts to understand an array of cultural tensions. Showing how rabbis employed eunuchs and androgynes to define proper forms of masculinity, Strassfeld emphasizes the unique potential of these figures to not only establish the boundary of law but exceed and transform it. Trans Talmud challenges how we understand gender in Judaism and demonstrates that acknowledging nonbinary gender prompts a reassessment of Jewish literature and law.

Elaine Lewinnek, Gustavo Arellano, and Thuy Vo Dang

A People's Guide to Orange County

$24.95

One of the Top Urban Planning Books of 2022, Planetizen

The full and fascinating guidebook that Orange County deserves.

A People’s Guide to Orange County is an alternative tour guide that documents sites of oppression, resistance, struggle, and transformation in Orange County, California. Orange County is more than the well-known images on orange crate labels, the high-profile amusement parks of Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, or the beaches. It is also a unique site of agricultural and suburban history, political conservatism in a liberal state, and more diversity and discordance than its pop-cultural images show. It is a space of important agricultural labor disputes, segregation and resistance to segregation, privatization and the struggle for public space, politicized religions, Cold War global migrations, vibrant youth cultures, and efforts for environmental justice. Memorably, Ronald Reagan called Orange County the place “where all the good Republicans go to die,” but it is also the place where many working-class immigrants have come to live and work in its agricultural, military-industrial, and tourist service economies.

Orange County is the fifth-most populous county in America. If it were a city, it would be the nation’s third-largest city; if it were a state, its population would make it larger than twenty-one other states. It attracts 42 million tourists annually. Yet Orange County tends to be a chapter or two squeezed into guidebooks to Los Angeles or Disneyland. Mainstream guidebooks focus on Orange County’s amusement parks and wealthy coastal communities, with side trips to palatial shopping malls. These guides skip over Orange County’s most heterogeneous half—the inland space, where most of its oranges were grown alongside oil derricks that kept the orange groves heated. Existing guidebooks render invisible the diverse people who have labored there. A People’s Guide to Orange County questions who gets to claim Orange County’s image, exposing the extraordinary stories embedded in the ordinary landscape.

Rachel Brahinsky

A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

$24.95

An alternative history and geography of the Bay Area that highlights sites of oppression, resistance, and transformation.

“Lavishly produced, with beautiful images and crystal clear prose, A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area is for readers and activists who have taken part in protests and demonstrations for decades, and from Berkeley and Oakland to San Francisco, Sonoma and beyond.”—CounterPunch

A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area looks beyond the mythologized image of San Francisco to the places where collective struggle has built the region. Countering romanticized commercial narratives about the Bay Area, geographers Rachel Brahinsky and Alexander Tarr highlight the cultural and economic landscape of indigenous resistance to colonial rule, radical interracial and cross-class organizing against housing discrimination and police violence, young people demanding economically and ecologically sustainable futures, and the often-unrecognized labor of farmworkers and everyday people.

The book asks who had—and who has—the power to shape the geography of one of the most watched regions in the world. As Silicon Valley's wealth dramatically transforms the look and feel of every corner of the region, like bankers' wealth did in the past, what do we need to remember about the people and places that have made the Bay Area, with its rich political legacies?

A useful companion for travelers, educators, or longtime residents, this guide:

Features over 100 must-visit sites to explore and learn from.
Demonstrates how to read the landscape for historical clues.
Connects multicultural streets, lush hills, suburban cul-de-sacs, and wetlands across the Bay Area.
Covers a wide range of locations, from the North Bay to the South Bay, East Bay, and San Francisco.
Includes original maps to guide readers through the region.
Offers thematic tours—such as The Intertribal Bay and The Youth in Revolt tours—as starting points for creating personalized routes.

A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Waste of a White Skin

$34.95

A pathbreaking history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the U.S. and South Africa in the early twentieth century, Waste of a White Skin focuses on the American Carnegie Corporation’s study of race in South Africa, the Poor White Study, and its influence on the creation of apartheid.

This book demonstrates the ways in which U.S. elites supported apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism in the critical period prior to 1948 through philanthropic interventions and shaping scholarly knowledge production. Rather than comparing racial democracies and their engagement with scientific racism, Willoughby-Herard outlines the ways in which a racial regime of global whiteness constitutes domestic racial policies and in part animates black consciousness in seemingly disparate and discontinuous racial democracies. This book uses key paradigms in black political thought—black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition—to provide a rich account of poverty and work. Much of the scholarship on whiteness in South Africa overlooks the complex politics of white poverty and what they mean for the making of black political action and black people’s presence in the economic system.

Ideal for students, scholars, and interested readers in areas related to U.S. History, African History, World History, Diaspora Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.

Eline van Ommen

Nicaragua Must Survive

$29.95

Nicaragua Must Survive tells the story of the Sandinistas' innovative diplomatic campaign, which captured the imaginations of people around the globe and transformed Nicaraguan history at the tail end of the Cold War. The Sandinistas' diplomacy went far beyond elite politics, as thousands of musicians, politicians, teachers, activists, priests, feminists, and journalists flocked to the country to experience the revolution firsthand. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, Eline van Ommen reveals the role that Western Europe played in Nicaragua's revolutionary diplomacy. Blending grassroots organizing and formal foreign policy, pragmatic guerrillas, creative diplomats, and ambitious activists from Europe and the Americas were able to create an international environment in which the Sandinista Revolution could survive despite the odds. Nicaragua Must Survive argues that this diplomacy was remarkably effective, propelling Nicaragua into the global limelight and allowing the revolutionaries to successfully challenge the United States' role in Central America.

Melissa Ooten and Jason Sawyer with photography by Kim Lee Schmidt

A People's Guide to Richmond and Central Virginia

$24.95

An expansive guide for resistance and solidarity across this storied region.

Richmond and Central Virginia are a historic epicenter of America’s racialized history. This alternative guidebook foregrounds diverse communities in the region who are mobilizing to dismantle oppressive systems and fundamentally transforming the space to live and thrive. Featuring personal reflections from activists, artists, and community leaders, this book eschews colonial monuments and confederate memorials to instead highlight movements, neighborhoods, landmarks, and gathering spaces that shape social justice struggles across the history of this rapidly growing area.

The sites, stories, and events featured here reveal how community resistance and resilience remain firmly embedded in the region’s landscape. A People’s Guide to Richmond and Central Virginia counters the narrative that elites make history worth knowing, and sites worth visiting, by demonstrating how ordinary people come together to create more equitable futures.

A People's Guide to Richmond and Central Virginia

Norman G. Finkelstein

Beyond Chutzpah

$28.95

Meticulously researched and tightly argued, Beyond Chutzpah points to a consensus among historians and human rights organizations on the factual record of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Norman G. Finkelstein exposes the corruption of scholarship and the contrivance of controversy shrouding human rights abuses, and interrogates the new anti-Semitism. This paperback edition adds a preface analyzing recent developments in the conflict, and a new afterword on Israel's construction of a wall in the West Bank.

Adam Rovner

The Jew Who Would Be King

$32.95

This vivid reconstruction of one man’s life reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power

The Jew Who Would Be King tells the story of Nathaniel Isaacs—a nineteenth-century British Jew who helped establish the Zulu kingdom only to become a ruthless warlord and slaveholder. Isaacs’ thrilling journey begins with his shipwreck on the shores of Zululand and proceeds to ports across West Africa, including Freetown, Sierra Leone. There, tasked by the colonial governor to end the local slave trade, Isaacs brokered deals that reinforced his own power.

Adam Rovner's meticulous archival research in England, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and St. Helena, coupled with his own travels to the remnants of Isaacs’ island stronghold in Guinea, brings this complex figure to life. Through Isaacs’ story, Rovner exposes the entangled forces of Jewish emancipation and antisemitism, slavery and abolition, the stark dichotomies of civilization and “savagery,” and the creation of whiteness versus Blackness.

Lucia Sorbera

Biography of a Revolution

$29.95

It is not Egypt's 2011 revolution that opened a space for women's and feminist activism, but—as this book shows—the long history of women's activism that created the intellectual and political background for revolution. By centering the experiences and ideas of multiple generations of women activists and intellectuals, Lucia Sorbera traces the feminist genealogies of Egypt's nationalist, student, Marxist, labor, human rights, and democratic social movements. Biography of a Revolution gathers a series of interrelated intimate and relational stories, charting in vivid detail the entanglements between women's aspirations across a century of politics and friendships. This historical analysis innovatively deploys decolonial and indigenous feminist epistemologies, bringing women's, gender, and feminist history into the center of Egypt's political, social, and intellectual history. More than a decade after the 2013 military coup, women's intellectual and political activism remains crucial to keeping the embers of revolution aglow.

Cover image for Biography of a Revolution, isbn: 9780520394759

Fernand Braudel

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

$47.95

This reissue of Fernand Braudel's great work brings the original back in print and looks at the Mediterranean world in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The focus of Fernand Braudel's work is the Mediterranean world in the second half of the sixteenth century, but Braudel ranges back in history to the world of Odysseus and forward to our time, moving out from the Mediterranean area to the New World and other destinations of Mediterranean traders. Braudel's scope embraces the natural world and material life, economics, demography, politics, and diplomacy.

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

Eric Porter

A People's History of SFO

$29.95

An illuminating profile of the San Francisco Bay Area, and its regional and global influence, as seen from the focal point of San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

A People's History of SFO uses the history of San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to tell a multifaceted story of development, encounter, and power in the surrounding region from the eighteenth century to the present. In lively, engaging stories, Eric Porter reveals SFO's unique role in the San Francisco Bay Area's growth as a globally connected hub of commerce, technology innovation, and political, economic, and social influence.

Starting with the very land SFO was built on, A People's History of SFO sees the airport as a microcosm of the forces at work in the Bay Area—from its colonial history and early role in trade, mining, and agriculture to the economic growth, social sanctuary, and environmental transformations of the twentieth century. In ways both material and symbolic, small human acts have overlapped with evolving systems of power to create this bustling metropolis. A People's History of SFO ends by addressing the climate crisis, as sea levels rise and threaten SFO itself on the edge of San Francisco Bay.

Adria L. Imada

An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin

$29.95

What was the longest and harshest medical quarantine in modern history, and how did people survive it? In Hawaiʻi beginning in 1866, men, women, and children suspected of having leprosy were removed from their families. Most were sentenced over the next century to lifelong exile at an isolated settlement. Thousands of photographs taken of their skin provided forceful, if conflicting, evidence of disease and disability for colonial health agents. And yet among these exiled people, a competing knowledge system of kinship and collectivity emerged during their incarceration. This book shows how they pieced together their own intimate archives of care and companionship through unanticipated adaptations of photography.

Natalia Molina

A Place at the Nayarit

$27.95

"Extraordinarily relevant and meaningful."—Elee Wood, New York Times

Los Angeles Times, An Ultimate L.A. Bookshelf Essential Book & Latinx Files 2022 Best Books
New York Times, Best Books about California, New York Times
James Beard Award Finalist in History
L.A. Taco’s 2022 Best Books

MacArthur Genius Natalia Molina unveils the hidden history of the Nayarit, a restaurant in Los Angeles that nourished its community of Mexican immigrants with a sense of belonging.

In 1951, Doña Natalia Barraza opened the Nayarit, a Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, Los Angeles. With A Place at the Nayarit, historian Natalia Molina traces the life’s work of her grandmother, remembered by all who knew her as Doña Natalia––a generous, reserved, and extraordinarily capable woman. Doña Natalia immigrated alone from Mexico to L.A., adopted two children, and ran a successful business. She also sponsored, housed, and employed dozens of other immigrants, encouraging them to lay claim to a city long characterized by anti-Latinx racism. Together, the employees and customers of the Nayarit maintained ties to their old homes while providing one another safety and support.

The Nayarit was much more than a popular eating spot: it was an urban anchor for a robust community, a gathering space where ethnic Mexican workers and customers connected with their patria chica (their “small country”). That meant connecting with distinctive tastes, with one another, and with the city they now called home. Through deep research and vivid storytelling, Molina follows restaurant workers from the kitchen and the front of the house across borders and through the decades. These people's stories illuminate the many facets of the immigrant experience: immigrants' complex networks of family and community and the small but essential pleasures of daily life, as well as cross-currents of gender and sexuality and pressures of racism and segregation. The Nayarit was a local landmark, popular with both Hollywood stars and restaurant workers from across the city and beloved for its fresh, traditionally prepared Mexican food. But as Molina argues, it was also, and most importantly, a place where ethnic Mexicans and other Latinx L.A. residents could step into the fullness of their lives, nourishing themselves and one another. A Place at the Nayarit is a stirring exploration of how racialized minorities create a sense of belonging. It will resonate with anyone who has felt like an outsider and had a special place where they felt like an insider.

Moysés Marcos

Emperors and Rhetoricians

$95.00

Panegyric, the art of publicly praising prominent political figures, occupied an important place in the Roman Empire throughout late antiquity. Orators were skilled political actors who manipulated the conventions of praise giving, taking great license with what they chose to present (or omit). Their ancient speeches are rare windows into the world of panegyrists, emperors, and their audiences. In Emperors and Rhetoricians, Moysés Marcos offers an original, comprehensive look at all panegyrics to and by Julian, who in 355/56 CE promoted himself as a learned caesar by producing his own panegyric on his cousin and Augustan benefactor, Constantius II. During key stages in his public career and throughout the time he held imperial power, Julian experimented with and utilized panegyric as both political communication and political opportunity. Marcos expertly mines this vast body of work to uncover a startlingly new picture of Julian the Apostate, explore anew the arc of his career in imperial office, and model new ways to interpret and understand imperial speeches of praise.

David Carey Jr.; Foreword by Jeremy A. Greene

Health in the Highlands

$34.95

Populated by curanderos, midwives, bonesetters, witches, doctors, nurses, and the indigenous people they served, this nuanced history demonstrates how cultural and political history, misogyny, racism, and racialization influence public health. In the first half of the twentieth century, the governments of Ecuador and Guatemala sought to spread scientific medicine to their populaces, working to prevent and treat malaria, typhus, and typhoid; to boost infant and maternal well-being; and to improve overall health.

Drawing on extensive, original archival research, David Carey Jr. shows that highland indigenous populations in the two countries tended to embrace a syncretic approach to health, combining traditional and new practices. At times, both governments encouraged—or at least allowed—such a synthesis: even what they saw as "nonscientific" care was better than none. Yet both, especially Guatemala's, also wrote off indigenous lifeways and practices with both explicit and implicit racism, going so far as to criminalize native medical providers and to experiment on indigenous people without their consent. Both nations had authoritarian rule, but Guatemala's was outright dictatorial, tending to treat both women and indigenous people as subjects to be controlled and policed. Ecuador, on the other hand, advanced a more pluralistic vision of national unity, and had somewhat better outcomes as a result.

Joshua Bloom

Black against Empire

$27.95

This timely special edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, features a new preface by the authors that places the Party in a contemporary political landscape, especially as it relates to Black Lives Matter and other struggles to fight police brutality against black communities.

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the United States, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in sixty-eight U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world.

Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.

Esmat Elhalaby

Parting Gifts of Empire

$29.95

Parting Gifts of Empire narrates an untold story of how Arabs and South Asians in the twentieth century sought to decolonize their minds. The histories of Palestine and India—both partitioned by the British Empire—were intimately linked. In the face of the same imperially created chasm, intellectuals in Africa and Asia reinvigorated centuries of shared histories to forge new horizons, new solidarities, new institutions, and new fields of knowledge. Esmat Elhalaby traces the forgotten lives of scholars like Wadi’ al-Bustani, revisits Arab and Indian feminist meetings, highlights gatherings such as Delhi’s 1947 Asian Relations Conference, and argues for the centrality of Palestine to the rise of Third Worldism. This book breaks new ground to unfold a global intellectual history of anticolonialism, Asian unity, pan-Islamism, and nonalignment in the making of what became known as the Global South.

Cover image for Parting Gifts of Empire, isbn: 9780520389274

Saree Makdisi

Tolerance Is a Wasteland

$26.95

How denial sustains the liberal imagination of a progressive and democratic Israel.

The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite––an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by the most liberal sectors of European and American society as a manifestation of the progressive values of tolerance, plurality, inclusivity, and democracy, and hence a project that can be passionately defended for its lofty ideals.

Tolerance Is a Wasteland argues that the key to this miraculous act of political alchemy is a very specific form of denial. Here the Palestinian presence in, and claim to, Palestine is not simply refused or covered up, but negated in such a way that the act of denial is itself denied. The effects of destruction and repression are reframed, inverted into affirmations of liberal virtues that can be passionately championed. In Tolerance Is a Wasteland, Saree Makdisi explores many such acts of affirmation and denial in a range of venues: from the haunted landscape of thickly planted forests covering the ruins of Palestinian villages forcibly depopulated in 1948; to the theater of "pinkwashing" as Israel presents itself to the world as a gay-friendly haven of cultural inclusion; to the so-called Museum of Tolerance being built on top of the ruins of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, which was methodically desecrated in order to clear the space for this monument to "human dignity." Tolerance Is a Wasteland reveals the system of emotional investments and curated perceptions that makes this massive project of cognitive dissonance possible.

Larisa L. Veloz

Even the Women Are Leaving

$29.95

The first decades of the twentieth century were crucial for the development of Mexican circular family migration, a process shaped by family and community networks as much as it was fashioned by labor markets and economic conditions. Even the Women Are Leaving explores bidirectional migration across the US-Mexico border from 1890 to 1965 and centers the experiences of Mexican women and families. Highlighting migrant voices and testimonies, Larisa L. Veloz depicts the long history of family and female migration across the border and elucidates the personal experiences of early twentieth-century border crossings, family separations, and reunifications. This book offers a fresh analysis of the ways that female migrants navigated evolving immigration restrictions and constructed binational lives through the eras of the Mexican Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Bracero Program.

Jaime M. Pensado

Love and Despair

$34.95

Love and Despair explores the multiple and mostly unknown ways progressive and conservative Catholic actors, such as priests, lay activists, journalists, intellectuals, and filmmakers, responded to the significant social and cultural shifts that formed competing notions of modernity in Cold War Mexico. Jaime M. Pensado demonstrates how the Catholic Church as a heterogeneous institution—with key transnational networks in Latin America and Western Europe—was invested in youth activism, state repression, and the counterculture from the postwar period to the more radical Sixties. Similar to their secular counterparts, progressive Catholics often saw themselves as revolutionary actors and nearly always framed their activism as an act of love. When their movements were repressed and their ideas were co-opted, marginalized, and commercialized at the end of the Sixties, the liberating hope of love often turned into a sense of despair.

Christen T. Sasaki

Pacific Confluence

$29.95

The 1898 annexation of Hawaiʻi to the US is often framed as an inevitable step in American expansion—but it was never a foregone conclusion. By pairing the intimate and epic together in critical juxtaposition, Christen T. Sasaki reveals the unstable nature not just of the coup state but of the US empire itself. The attempt to create a US-backed white settler state in Hawaiʻi sparked a turn-of-the-century debate about race-based nationalism and state-based sovereignty and jurisdiction that was contested on the global stage. Centered around a series of flash points that exposed the fragility of the imperial project, Pacific Confluence examines how the meeting and mixing of ideas that occurred between Hawaiians and Japanese, white American, and Portuguese transients and settlers led to the dynamic rethinking of the modern nation-state.

Jarrod Hore

Visions of Nature

$29.95

Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate “nature” with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.

Sara Ronis

Demons in the Details

$95.00

The Babylonian Talmud is full of stories of demonic encounters, and it also includes many laws that attempt to regulate such encounters. In this book, Sara Ronis takes the reader on a journey across the rabbinic canon, exploring how late antique rabbis imagined, feared, and controlled demons. Ronis contextualizes the Talmud's thought within the rich cultural matrix of Sasanian Babylonia, placing rabbinic thinking in conversation with Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Syriac Christian, Zoroastrian, and Second Temple Jewish texts about demons to delve into the interactive communal context in which the rabbis created boundaries between the human and the supernatural, and between themselves and other religious communities. Demons in the Details explores the wide range of ways that the rabbis participated in broader discussions about beliefs and practices with their neighbors, out of which they created a profoundly Jewish demonology.

Raj Patel

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

$24.95

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today’s planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

Immanuel Wallerstein

The Modern World-System I

$36.95

Immanuel Wallerstein’s highly influential, multi-volume opus, The Modern World-System, is one of this century’s greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Nicholas P. Roberts

A Sea of Wealth

$29.95

A Sea of Wealth is a sweeping retelling of the Omani position in the Indian Ocean. Here the reign of Oman’s longest-serving ruler, Saʿid bin Sultan, offers a keyhole through which we can peer to see the entangled histories of Arabia and the Gulf, South Asia, and East Africa in the Omani Empire. In centering this empire, Nicholas P. Roberts shows how Arabs, Africans, and Asians actively shaped the conditions of commercial engagement in the Western Indian Ocean, uniting the empire’s domains into a single oceanic marketplace in which Europeans and Americans had to accede if they wished to succeed. Drawing upon sources in three languages from four continents, A Sea of Wealth is a vivid narrative full of colorful characters that upturns many conventional understandings of our modern world.

Cover image for A Sea of Wealth, isbn: 9780520415782

Gladys I. McCormick

The Last Door

$29.95

As guerrilla groups sprouted up across Mexico in the early 1970s, the military and police routinely resorted to extreme acts of violence, including the systematic use of torture. In The Last Door, Gladys McCormick provides the most thorough account of how torture became a crucial and routine practice of the Mexican government’s war against subversives. Drawing from extensive oral history interviews and declassified government documents, McCormick describes experiences of arrest, torture, and detention in which forced disappearances became all too common and advocates for justice rallied around political prisoners. Torture was not always about extracting information; it was also about inflicting punishment on a faceless so-called enemy and instilling terror into advocates of social change. As McCormick argues, torture became a quotidian practice of state making in Mexico during the 1970s, leaving individuals and their families forever changed. The lack of repercussions for government officials notorious for employing torture, even in spite of a growing movement for truth and justice, has led to entrenched impunity that is endemic in Mexico as its contemporary security crisis continues.

Oumelbanine Zhiri

Beyond Orientalism

$29.95

The first in-depth study of the collaborative intellectual exchange between the European and the Arabic Republics of Letters.

Beyond Orientalism reformulates our understanding of the early modern Mediterranean through the remarkable life and career of Moroccan polymath Ahmad Ibn Qâsim al-Hajarî (ca. 1570-1641). By showing Hajarî’s active engagement with some of the most prominent European Orientalists of his time, Oumelbanine Zhiri makes the case for the existence of an Arabic Republic of Letters that operated in parallel to its European counterpart.

A major corrective to the long-held view of Orientalism that accords agency only to Europeans, Beyond Orientalism emphasizes the active role played by Hajarî and other “Orientals” inside and outside of Europe in some of the most significant intellectual movements of the age. Zhiri explores the multiple interactions between these two networks of intellectuals, decentering Europe to reveal how Hajarî worked collaboratively to circulate knowledge among Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Amanda Lanzillo

Pious Labor

$34.95

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class people across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these changes, Indian Muslim artisans began publicly asserting the deep relation between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine Islamic traditions “from below.” Centering the stories and experiences of metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor examines colonial-era social and technological changes through the perspectives of the workers themselves. As Amanda Lanzillo shows, the colonial marginalization of these artisans is intimately linked with the continued exclusion of laboring voices today. By drawing on previously unstudied Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo highlights not only the materiality of artisanal production but also the cultural agency of artisanal producers, filling in a major gap in South Asian history.

Elisabeth B. Armstrong

Bury the Corpse of Colonialism

$24.95

An intimate look at the 1949 Asian Women’s Conference, the movements it drew from, and its influence on feminist anticolonialism around the world.

In 1949, revolutionary activists from Asia hosted a conference in Beijing that gathered together their comrades from around the world. The Asian Women’s Conference developed a new political strategy, demanding that women from occupying colonial nations contest imperialism with the same dedication as women whose countries were occupied. Bury the Corpse of Colonialism shows how activists and movements create a revolutionary theory over time and through struggle—in this case, by launching a strategy for anti-imperialist feminist internationalism.

At the heart of this book are two stories. The first describes how the 1949 conference came to be, how it was experienced, and what it produced. The second follows the delegates home. What movements did they represent? Whose voices did they carry? How did their struggles hone their praxis? By examining the lives of more than a dozen AWC participants, Bury the Corpse of Colonialism traces the vital differences at the heart of internationalist solidarity for women’s emancipation in a world structured through militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the seeming impossibility of justice.

Aaron S. Lecklider

Love's Next Meeting

$26.95

How queerness and radical politics intersected—earlier than you thought.

Well before Stonewall, a broad cross section of sexual dissidents took advantage of their space on the margins of American society to throw themselves into leftist campaigns. Sensitive already to sexual marginalization, they also saw how class inequality was exacerbated by the Great Depression, witnessing the terrible bread lines and bread riots of the era. They participated in radical labor organizing, sympathized like many with the early prewar Soviet Union, contributed to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, opposed US police and state harassment, fought racial discrimination, and aligned themselves with the dispossessed. Whether they were themselves straight, gay, or otherwise queer, they brought sexual dissidence and radicalism into conversation at the height of the Left's influence on American culture.

Combining rich archival research with inventive analysis of art and literature, Love’s Next Meeting explores the relationship between homosexuality and the Left in American culture between 1920 and 1960. Aaron S. Lecklider uncovers a lively cast of individuals and dynamic expressive works, revealing remarkably progressive engagement with homosexuality among radicals, workers, and the poor. Leftists connected sexual dissidence with radical gender politics, antiracism, and challenges to censorship and obscenity laws through the 1920s and 1930s. In the process, a wide array of activists, organizers, artists, and writers laid the foundation for a radical movement through which homosexual lives and experiences were given shape and new political identities were forged. Love's Next Meeting cuts to the heart of some of the biggest questions in American history: questions about socialism, about sexuality, about the supposed clash still making headlines today between leftist politics and identity politics. What emerges is a dramatic, sexually vibrant story of the shared struggles for liberation across the twentieth century.

James Zarsadiaz

Resisting Change in Suburbia

$29.95

2023 Lawrence W. Levine Award Winner, Organization of American Historians

Between the 1980s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, Asian Americans in Los Angeles moved toward becoming a racial majority in the communities of the East San Gabriel Valley. By the late 1990s, their "model minority" status resulted in greater influence in local culture, neighborhood politics, and policies regarding the use of suburban space. In the "country living" subdivisions, which featured symbols of Western agrarianism including horse trails, ranch fencing, and Spanish colonial architecture, white homeowners encouraged assimilation and enacted policies suppressing unwanted "changes"—that is, increased density and influence of Asian culture. While some Asian suburbanites challenged whites' concerns, many others did not. Rather, white critics found support from affluent Asian homeowners who also wished to protect their class privilege and suburbia's conservative Anglocentric milieu. In Resisting Change in Suburbia, award-winning historian James Zarsadiaz explains how myths of suburbia, the American West, and the American Dream informed regional planning, suburban design, and ideas about race and belonging.

Laura Pulido

A People's Guide to Los Angeles

$24.95

A People’s Guide to Los Angeles offers an assortment of eye-opening alternatives to L.A.’s usual tourist destinations. It documents 115 little-known sites in the City of Angels where struggles related to race, class, gender, and sexuality have occurred. They introduce us to people and events usually ignored by mainstream media and, in the process, create a fresh history of Los Angeles. Roughly dividing the city into six regions—North Los Angeles, the Eastside and San Gabriel Valley, South Los Angeles, Long Beach and the Harbor, the Westside, and the San Fernando Valley—this illuminating guide shows how power operates in the shaping of places, and how it remains embedded in the landscape.

Saadia Yacoob

Beyond the Binary

$34.95

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

One of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary Muslim ethics is the status of women in Islamic law. Whereas Muslim conservatives argue that gender-differentiated legal rulings reflect complementary gender roles, Muslim feminists argue that Islamic law has subordinated women and is thus in need of reform. The shared assumption on both sides, however, is that gender fundamentally shapes an individual’s legal status. Beyond the Binary explores an expansive cross section of topics in ninth- to twelfth-century Hanafi legal thought, ranging from sexual crimes to consent to marriage, to show that early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles. Saadia Yacoob offers a restorative reading of Islamic law, arguing that its intersectional and relational understanding of legal personhood offers a productive space for Muslim feminists to move beyond critique and instead think with and through the Islamic legal tradition.

Andre Schmid

North Korea’s Mundane Revolution

$34.95

When the crucial years after the Korean War are remembered today, histories about North Korea largely recount a grand epic of revolution centering on the ascent of Kim Il Sung to absolute power. Often overshadowed in this storyline, however, are the myriad ways the Korean population participated in party-state projects to rebuild their lives and country after the devastation of the war. North Korea's Mundane Revolution traces the origins of the country's long-term durability in the questions that Korean women and men raised about the modern individual, housing, family life, and consumption. Using a wide range of overlooked sources, Andre Schmid examines the formation of a gendered socialist lifestyle in North Korea by focusing on the localized processes of socioeconomic and cultural change. This style of "New Living" replaced radical definitions of gender and class revolution with the politics of individual self-reform and cultural elevation, leading to a depoliticization of the country's political culture in the very years that Kim Il Sung rose to power.

Mitchell Schwarzer

Hella Town

$24.95

Hella Town reveals the profound impact of transportation improvements, systemic racism, and regional competition on Oakland’s built environment.

Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger and more glamorous twin, Oakland has a fascinating history of its own. From serving as a major transportation hub to forging a dynamic manufacturing sector, by the mid-twentieth century Oakland had become the urban center of the East Bay. Hella Town focuses on how political deals, economic schemes, and technological innovations fueled this emergence but also seeded the city’s postwar struggles.

Toward the turn of the millennium, as immigration from Latin America and East Asia increased, Oakland became one of the most diverse cities in the country. The city still grapples with the consequences of uneven class- and race-based development-amid-disruption. How do past decisions about where to locate highways or public transit, urban renewal districts or civic venues, parks or shopping centers, influence how Oaklanders live today? A history of Oakland’s buildings and landscapes, its booms and its busts, provides insight into its current conditions: an influx of new residents and businesses, skyrocketing housing costs, and a lingering chasm between the haves and have-nots.

Joanne Barker

Red Scare

$18.95

How the rhetoric of terrorism has been used against high-profile movements to justify the oppression and suppression of Indigenous activists.

New Indigenous movements are gaining traction in North America: the Missing and Murdered Women and Idle No More movements in Canada, and the Native Lives Matter and NoDAPL movements in the United States. These do not represent new demands for social justice and treaty rights, which Indigenous groups have sought for centuries. But owing to the extraordinary visibility of contemporary activism, Indigenous people have been newly cast as terrorists—a designation that justifies severe measures of policing, exploitation, and violence. Red Scare investigates the intersectional scope of these four movements and the broader context of the treatment of Indigenous social justice movements as threats to neoliberal and imperialist social orders.

In Red Scare, Joanne Barker shows how US and Canadian leaders leverage the fear-driven discourses of terrorism to allow for extreme responses to Indigenous activists, framing them as threats to social stability and national security. The alignment of Indigenous movements with broader struggles against sexual, police, and environmental violence puts them at the forefront of new intersectional solidarities in prominent ways. The activist-as-terrorist framing is cropping up everywhere, but the historical and political complexities of Indigenous movements and state responses are unique. Indigenous criticisms of state policy, resource extraction and contamination, intense surveillance, and neoliberal values are met with outsized and shocking measures of militarized policing, environmental harm, and sexual violence. Red Scare provides students and readers with a concise and thorough survey of these movements and their links to broader organizing; the common threads of historical violence against Indigenous people; and the relevant alternatives we can find in Indigenous forms of governance and relationality.

James M. Lawson Jr., with Michael K. Honey and Kent Wong. Foreword by Angela Davis

Revolutionary Nonviolence

$19.95

A persuasive account of the philosophy and power of nonviolence organizing, and a resource for building and sustaining effective social movements.

Despite the rich history of nonviolent philosophy, many people today are unfamiliar with the basic principles and practices of nonviolence––even as these concepts have guided so many direct-action movements to overturn forms of racial apartheid, military and police violence, and dictatorships around the world. Revolutionary Nonviolence is a crucial resource on the long history of nonviolent philosophy through the teachings of Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., one of the great practitioners of revolution through deliberate and sustained nonviolence. His ongoing work demonstrates how we can overcome violence and oppression through organized direct action, presenting a powerful roadmap for a new generation of activists.

Rev. Lawson’s work as a theologian, pastor, and social-change activist has inspired hope and liberation for more than sixty years. To hear and see him speak is to experience the power of the prophetic tradition in the African American and social gospel. In Revolutionary Nonviolence, Michael K. Honey and Kent Wong reflect on Rev. Lawson's talks and dialogues, from his speeches at the Nashville sit-in movement in 1960 to his lectures in the current UCLA curriculum. This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to Rev. Lawson's teachings on how to center nonviolence in successfully organizing for change.

Eusebius of Caesarea. Translated by Jeremy M. Schott

The History of the Church

$17.95

Eusebius’s groundbreaking History of the Church, remains the single most important source for the history of the first three centuries of Christianity and stands among the classics of Western literature. His iconic story of the church’s origins, endurance of persecution, and ultimate triumph—with its cast of martyrs, heretics, bishops, and emperors—has profoundly shaped the understanding of Christianity’s past and provided a model for all later ecclesiastical histories. This new translation, which includes detailed essays and notes, comes from one of the leading scholars of Eusebius’s work and offers rich context for the linguistic, cultural, social, and political background of this seminal text. Accessible for new readers and thought-provoking for specialists, this is the essential text for anyone interested in the history of Christianity.

Joseph Nevins, Suren Moodliar, and Eleni Macrakis

A People's Guide to Greater Boston

$24.95

A People's Guide to Greater Boston reveals the region’s richness and vibrancy in ways that are neglected by traditional area guidebooks and obscured by many tourist destinations. Affirming the hopes, interests, and struggles of individuals and groups on the receiving end of unjust forms of power, the book showcases the ground-level forces shaping the city. Uncovering stories and places central to people’s lives over centuries, this guide takes readers to sites of oppression, resistance, organizing, and transformation in Boston and outlying neighborhoods and municipalities—from Lawrence, Lowell, and Lynn to Concord and Plymouth. It highlights tales of the places and people involved in movements to abolish slavery; to end war and militarism; to achieve Native sovereignty, racial equity, gender justice, and sexual liberation; and to secure workers’ rights. In so doing, this one-of-a-kind guide points the way to a radically democratic Greater Boston, one that sparks social and environmental justice and inclusivity for all.

Damon B. Akins

We Are the Land

$29.95

“A Native American rejoinder to Richard White and Jesse Amble White’s California Exposures.”—Kirkus Reviews

Rewriting the history of California as Indigenous.

Before there was such a thing as “California,” there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood—paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today’s casino economy. A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.

Immanuel Wallerstein

The Modern World-System II

$36.95

Immanuel Wallerstein’s highly influential, multi-volume opus, The Modern World-System, is one of this century’s greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Anny Gaul

Nile Nightshade

$27.95

A cultural and culinary history of modern Egypt through the nation's beloved tomato.

By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato—indigenous to the Americas—had become Egypt's top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuisine. The tomato brought together domestic consumers, cookbook readers, and home cooks through a shared culinary culture that sometimes transcended differences of class, region, gender, and ethnicity—and sometimes reinforced them.

In Nile Nightshade, Anny Gaul shows how Egyptians' embrace of the tomato and the emergence of Egypt's modern national identity were both driven by the modernization of the country's food system. Drawing from cookbooks, archival materials, oral histories, and vernacular culture, Gaul follows this commonplace food into the realms of domestic policy and labor through the hands of Egypt's overwhelmingly female home cooks. As they wrote recipes and cooked meals, these women forged key aspects of public culture that defined how Egyptians recognized themselves and one another as Egyptian.

Cover image for Nile Nightshade, isbn: 9780520409149

Rhyne King

The House of the Satrap

$95.00

Starting in the sixth century BCE, the conquests of the Persian kings Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius transformed the lives of humans on a continental scale, as their empire reached from the Iranian plateau to eastern Europe, Central Asia, and North Africa. Beyond the imperial center, the kings’ vast territory was ruled by royal representatives known as satraps, who managed the practicalities of running the empire. In this book, Rhyne King explores how the empire was governed by investigating how the satraps and the structures supporting them—their “houses”—operated across great distances. Examining satrapal houses in Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Central Asia, King demonstrates how these systems encouraged local self-interest and advancement even as they benefited the imperial whole. Ultimately, he argues, it was these Persian forms of transregional governance that were key in enabling the vast polity to endure for more than two centuries.

Dana Simmons

On Hunger

$34.95

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

In this book, Dana Simmons explores the enduring production of hunger in US history. Hunger, in the modern United States, became a technology—a weapon, a scientific method, and a policy instrument. During the nineteenth century, state agents and private citizens colluded in large-scale campaigns of ethnic cleansing using hunger and food deprivation. In the twentieth century, officials enacted policies and rules that made incarcerated people, welfare recipients, and beneficiaries of foreign food aid hungry by design, in order to modify their behavior. With the advent of ultraprocessed foods, food manufacturers designed products to stimulate cravings and consumption at the expense of public health. Taking us inside the labs of researchers devoted to understanding hunger as a biological and social phenomenon, On Hunger examines the continuing struggle to produce, suppress, or control hunger in America.

Ahmed White

Under the Iron Heel

$27.95

2022 International Labor History Association Book of the Year

A dramatic, deeply researched account of how legal repression and vigilantism brought down the Wobblies—and how the destruction of their union haunts us to this day.

In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World was rapidly gaining strength and members. Within a decade, this radical union was effectively destroyed, the victim of the most remarkable campaign of legal repression and vigilantism in American history. Under the Iron Heel is the first comprehensive account of this campaign.

Founded in 1905, the IWW offered to the millions of workers aggrieved by industrial capitalism the promise of a better world. But its growth, coinciding with World War I and the Russian Revolution and driven by uncompromising militancy, was seen by powerful capitalists and government officials as an existential threat that had to be eliminated. In Under the Iron Heel, Ahmed White documents the torrent of legal persecution and extralegal, sometimes lethal violence that shattered the IWW. In so doing, he reveals the remarkable courage of those who faced this campaign, lays bare the origins of the profoundly unequal and conflicted nation we know today, and uncovers disturbing truths about the law, political repression, and the limits of free speech and association in class society.

Fernand Braudel

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

$47.95

This reissue of Fernand Braudel's great work brings the original back in print and looks at the Mediterranean world in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The focus of Fernand Braudel's work is the Mediterranean world in the second half of the sixteenth century, but Braudel ranges back in history to the world of Odysseus and forward to our time, moving out from the Mediterranean area to the New World and other destinations of Mediterranean traders. Braudel's scope embraces the natural world and material life, economics, demography, politics, and diplomacy.

Mary Beard

Laughter in Ancient Rome

$18.95

"Superbly acute and unashamedly complex."—The Telegraph
"Rich and provocative."—Times Literary Supplement
"An engaging exploration."—The New Yorker
"The phenomenal Ms. Beard has written another cracking book, one of her best."—The Independent

What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, filled with practical jokes and hearty chuckles? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excess of laughter was a force to fear—a world of wit, irony, and knowing smiles? How did Romans make sense of laughter? What role did it play in the world of the law courts, the imperial palace, or the spectacles of the arena?

Laughter in Ancient Rome explores one of the most intriguing, but also trickiest, of historical subjects. Drawing on a wide range of Roman writing—from essays on rhetoric to a surviving Roman joke book—Mary Beard tracks down the giggles, smirks, and guffaws of the ancient Romans themselves. From ancient “monkey business” to the role of a chuckle in a culture of tyranny, she explores Roman humor from the hilarious, to the momentous, to the surprising. But she also reflects on even bigger historical questions. What kind of history of laughter can we possibly tell? Can we ever really “get” the Romans’ jokes?

James Walvin

A World Transformed

$29.95

A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world.

A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste.

This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions––in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labor lives on today.

Lucia Carminati

Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said

$49.95

Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said probes migrant labor's role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said's residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal's northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia Carminati provides a ground-level perspective on the key processes touching late nineteenth-century Egypt: heightened domestic mobility and immigration, intensified urbanization, changing urban governance, and growing foreign encroachment. By privileging migrants' prosaic lives, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said shows how unevenness and inequality laid the groundwork for the Suez Canal's making.

Cover image for Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, isbn: 9780520385504

Sureshkumar Muthukumaran

The Tropical Turn

$34.95

This book chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical Turn unravels the breathtaking anthropogenic peregrinations of these familiar crops from their homelands in tropical and subtropical Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean, showing the significant impact South Asia had on the ecologies, dietary habits, and cultural identities of peoples across the ancient world. In the process, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran offers a fresh narrative history of human connectivity across Afro-Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the late centuries BCE.

Adel Manna

Nakba and Survival

$34.95

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.

Beginning in 1948, Israeli paramilitary forces began violently displacing Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. Nakba and Survival tells the stories of Palestinians in Haifa and the Galilee during, and in the decade after, mass dispossession. Manna uses oral histories and Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries, and memories to meticulously reconstruct the social history of the Palestinians who remained and returned to become Israeli citizens. This book focuses in particular on the Galilee, using the story of Manna's own family and their village Majd al-Krum after the establishment of Israel to shed light on the cruelties faced by survivors of the military regime. While scholars of the Palestinian national movement have often studied Palestinian resistance to Israel as related to the armed struggle and the cultural struggle against the Jewish state, Manna shows that remaining in Israel under the brutality of occupation and fighting to return to Palestinian communities after displacement are acts of heroism in their own right.

The Institute for Palestine Studies extends our sincere appreciation to Samir Abdulhadi for his generous support of the translation and publication of this book.
Translation by Jenab Tutunji.

Lisa Hajjar

The War in Court

$29.95

How hundreds of lawyers mobilized to challenge the illegal treatment of prisoners captured in the war on terror and helped force an end to the US government's most odious policies.

In The War in Court, sociologist Lisa Hajjar traces the fight against the US torture policy by lawyers who brought the "war on terror" into the courts. Their victories, though few and far between, forced the government to change the way prisoners were treated and focused attention on state crimes perpetrated in the shadows. If not for these lawyers and their allies, US torture would have gone unchallenged because elected officials and the American public, with a few exceptions, did nothing to oppose it. This war in court has been fought to defend the principle that there is no legal right to torture.

Told as a suspenseful, high-stakes story, The War in Court clearly outlines why challenges to the torture policy had to be waged on the legal terrain and why hundreds of lawyers joined the fight. Drawing on extensive interviews with key participants, her own experiences reporting from Guantánamo, and her deep knowledge of international law and human rights, Hajjar reveals how the ongoing fight against torture has had transformative effects on the legal landscape in the United States and on a global scale.

Christina Heatherton

Arise!

$29.95

An international history of radical movements and their convergences during the Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was a global event that catalyzed international radicals in unexpected sites and struggles. Tracing the paths of figures like Black American artist Elizabeth Catlett, Indian anti-colonial activist M.N. Roy, Mexican revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores Magón, Okinawan migrant organizer Paul Shinsei Kōchi, and Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai, Arise! reveals how activists around the world found inspiration and solidarity in revolutionary Mexico.

From art collectives and farm worker strikes to prison "universities," Arise! reconstructs how this era's radical organizers found new ways to fight global capitalism. Drawing on prison records, surveillance data, memoirs, oral histories, visual art, and a rich trove of untapped sources, Christina Heatherton considers how disparate revolutionary traditions merged in unanticipated alliances. From her unique vantage point, she charts the remarkable impact of the Mexican Revolution as radicals in this critical era forged an anti-racist internationalism from below.

Carolina Bank Muñoz

A People's Guide to New York City

$24.95

This alternative guidebook for one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations explores all five boroughs to reveal a people’s New York City.

The sites and stories of A People’s Guide to New York City shift our perception of what defines New York, placing the passion, determination, defeats, and victories of its people at the core. Delving into the histories of New York's five boroughs, you will encounter enslaved Africans in revolt, women marching for equality, workers on strike, musicians and performers claiming streets for their art, and neighbors organizing against landfills and industrial toxins and in support of affordable housing and public schools. The streetscapes that emerge from these groups' struggles bear the traces, and this book shows you where to look to find them.

New York City is a preeminent global city, serving as the headquarters for hundreds of multinational firms and a world-renowned cultural hub for fashion, art, and music. It is among the most multicultural cities in the world and also one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The people that make this global city function—immigrants, people of color, and the working classes—reside largely in the so-called outer boroughs, outside the corporations, neon, and skyscrapers of Manhattan. A People’s Guide to New York City expands the scope and scale of traditional guidebooks, providing an equitable exploration of the diverse communities throughout the city. Through the stories of over 150 sites across the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as thematic tours and contemporary and archival photographs, a people’s New York emerges, one in which collective struggles for justice and freedom have shaped the very landscape of the city.

Genevieve Carpio

Collisions at the Crossroads

$29.95

There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.

Moon-Ho Jung

Menace to Empire

$29.95

One of Smithsonian Magazine's Favorite Books of 2022

This history reveals how radical threats to the United States empire became seditious threats to national security and exposes the antiradical and colonial origins of anti-Asian racism.

Menace to Empire transforms familiar themes in American history. This profoundly ambitious history of race and empire traces both the colonial violence and the anticolonial rage that the United States spread across the Pacific between the Philippine-American War and World War II. Moon-Ho Jung argues that the US national security state as we know it was born out of attempts to repress and silence anticolonial subjects, from the Philippines and Hawaiʻi to California and beyond.

Jung examines how various revolutionary movements spanning the Pacific confronted the US empire. In response, the US state closely monitored and brutally suppressed those movements, exaggerating fears of pan-Asian solidarities and sowing anti-Asian racism. Radicalized by their opposition to the US empire and racialized as threats to US security, peoples in and from Asia pursued a revolutionary politics that engendered and haunted the national security state—the heart and soul of the US empire ever since.

Peter Brown

Augustine of Hippo

$29.95

This classic biography was first published forty-five years ago and has since established itself as the standard account of Saint Augustine's life and teaching.

The remarkable discovery of a considerable number of letters and sermons by Augustine cast fresh light on the first and last decades of his experience as a bishop. These circumstantial texts have led Peter Brown to reconsider some of his judgments on Augustine, both as the author of the Confessions and as the elderly bishop preaching and writing in the last years of Roman rule in north Africa. Brown's reflections on the significance of these exciting new documents are contained in two chapters of a substantial Epilogue to his biography (the text of which is unaltered). He also reviews the changes in scholarship about Augustine since the 1960s. A personal as well as a scholarly fascination infuse the book-length epilogue and notes that Brown has added to his acclaimed portrait of the bishop of Hippo.

Peter Boag

Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past

$29.95

Americans have long cherished romantic images of the frontier and its colorful cast of characters, where the cowboys are always rugged and the ladies always fragile. But in this book, Peter Boag opens an extraordinary window onto the real Old West. Delving into countless primary sources and surveying sexological and literary sources, Boag paints a vivid picture of a West where cross-dressing—for both men and women—was pervasive, and where easterners as well as Mexicans and even Indians could redefine their gender and sexual identities. Boag asks, why has this history been forgotten and erased? Citing a cultural moment at the turn of the twentieth century—when the frontier ended, the United States entered the modern era, and homosexuality was created as a category—Boag shows how the American people, and thus the American nation, were bequeathed an unambiguous heterosexual identity.

Eric Porter

A People's History of SFO

$24.95

An illuminating profile of the San Francisco Bay Area, and its regional and global influence, as seen from the focal point of San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

A People's History of SFO uses the history of San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to tell a multifaceted story of development, encounter, and power in the surrounding region from the eighteenth century to the present. In lively, engaging stories, Eric Porter reveals SFO's unique role in the San Francisco Bay Area's growth as a globally connected hub of commerce, technology innovation, and political, economic, and social influence.

Starting with the very land SFO was built on, A People's History of SFO sees the airport as a microcosm of the forces at work in the Bay Area—from its colonial history and early role in trade, mining, and agriculture to the economic growth, social sanctuary, and environmental transformations of the twentieth century. In ways both material and symbolic, small human acts have overlapped with evolving systems of power to create this bustling metropolis. A People's History of SFO ends by addressing the climate crisis, as sea levels rise and threaten SFO itself on the edge of San Francisco Bay.

Yu Tokunaga

Transborder Los Angeles

$29.95

Focusing on Los Angeles farmland during the years between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Japanese Internment in 1942, Transborder Los Angeles weaves together the narratives of Mexican and Japanese immigrants into a single transpacific history. In this book, Yu Tokunaga moves from international relations between Japan, Mexico, and the US to the Southern California farmland, where ethnic Japanese and Mexicans played a significant role in developing local agriculture, one of the major industries of LA County before World War II. Japanese, Mexicans, and white Americans developed a unique triracial hierarchy in farmland that generated both conflict and interethnic accommodation by bringing together local issues and international concerns beyond the Pacific Ocean and the US-Mexico border. Viewing these experiences in a single narrative form, Tokunaga breaks new ground, demonstrating the close relationships between the ban on Japanese immigration, Mexican farmworkers' strikes, wartime Japanese removal, and the Bracero Program.

Edited by Hakan T. Karateke and Helga Anetshofer

The Ottoman World

$39.95

The Ottoman lands, which extended from modern Hungary to the Arabian peninsula, were home to a vast population with a rich variety of cultures. The Ottoman World is the first primary source reader to bring a wide and diverse set of voices across Ottoman society into the classroom. Written in many languages—not only Ottoman Turkish but also Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Persian—these texts, here translated, span the extent of the early modern Ottoman empire, from the 1450s to 1700.

Instructors are supplied with narratives conveying the lived experiences of individuals through texts that highlight human variety and accelerate a trend away from a state-centric approach to Ottoman history. In addition, samples from court registers, legends, biographical accounts, hagiographies, short stories, witty anecdotes, jokes, and lampoons provide exciting glimpses into popular mindsets in Ottoman society. By reflecting new directions in the scholarship with an innovative choice of texts, this collection provides a vital resource for teachers and students.

Thomas E Burman

The Sea in the Middle

$49.95

The Sea in the Middle presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centered on the Mediterranean and emphasizes the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various denominations engaged with each other in both conflict and collaboration.

Key features:

Fifteen-chapter structure to aid classroom use
Sections in each chapter that feature key artifacts relevant to chapter themes
Dynamic visuals, including 190 photos and 20 maps

The Sea in the Middle and its sourcebook companion, Texts from the Middle, pair together to provide a framework and materials that guide students through this complex but essential history—one that will appeal to the diverse student bodies of today.

Saree Makdisi

Tolerance Is a Wasteland

$29.95

How denial sustains the liberal imagination of a progressive and democratic Israel.

The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite––an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by the most liberal sectors of European and American society as a manifestation of the progressive values of tolerance, plurality, inclusivity, and democracy, and hence a project that can be passionately defended for its lofty ideals.

Tolerance Is a Wasteland argues that the key to this miraculous act of political alchemy is a very specific form of denial. Here the Palestinian presence in, and claim to, Palestine is not simply refused or covered up, but negated in such a way that the act of denial is itself denied. The effects of destruction and repression are reframed, inverted into affirmations of liberal virtues that can be passionately championed. In Tolerance Is a Wasteland, Saree Makdisi explores many such acts of affirmation and denial in a range of venues: from the haunted landscape of thickly planted forests covering the ruins of Palestinian villages forcibly depopulated in 1948; to the theater of "pinkwashing" as Israel presents itself to the world as a gay-friendly haven of cultural inclusion; to the so-called Museum of Tolerance being built on top of the ruins of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, which was methodically desecrated in order to clear the space for this monument to "human dignity." Tolerance Is a Wasteland reveals the system of emotional investments and curated perceptions that makes this massive project of cognitive dissonance possible.

Natalia Molina

A Place at the Nayarit

$29.95

"Extraordinarily relevant and meaningful."—Elee Wood, New York Times

Los Angeles Times, An Ultimate L.A. Bookshelf Essential Book & Latinx Files 2022 Best Books
New York Times, Best Books about California, New York Times
James Beard Award Finalist in History
L.A. Taco’s 2022 Best Books

MacArthur Genius Natalia Molina unveils the hidden history of the Nayarit, a restaurant in Los Angeles that nourished its community of Mexican immigrants with a sense of belonging.

In 1951, Doña Natalia Barraza opened the Nayarit, a Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, Los Angeles. With A Place at the Nayarit, historian Natalia Molina traces the life’s work of her grandmother, remembered by all who knew her as Doña Natalia––a generous, reserved, and extraordinarily capable woman. Doña Natalia immigrated alone from Mexico to L.A., adopted two children, and ran a successful business. She also sponsored, housed, and employed dozens of other immigrants, encouraging them to lay claim to a city long characterized by anti-Latinx racism. Together, the employees and customers of the Nayarit maintained ties to their old homes while providing one another safety and support.

The Nayarit was much more than a popular eating spot: it was an urban anchor for a robust community, a gathering space where ethnic Mexican workers and customers connected with their patria chica (their “small country”). That meant connecting with distinctive tastes, with one another, and with the city they now called home. Through deep research and vivid storytelling, Molina follows restaurant workers from the kitchen and the front of the house across borders and through the decades. These people's stories illuminate the many facets of the immigrant experience: immigrants' complex networks of family and community and the small but essential pleasures of daily life, as well as cross-currents of gender and sexuality and pressures of racism and segregation. The Nayarit was a local landmark, popular with both Hollywood stars and restaurant workers from across the city and beloved for its fresh, traditionally prepared Mexican food. But as Molina argues, it was also, and most importantly, a place where ethnic Mexicans and other Latinx L.A. residents could step into the fullness of their lives, nourishing themselves and one another. A Place at the Nayarit is a stirring exploration of how racialized minorities create a sense of belonging. It will resonate with anyone who has felt like an outsider and had a special place where they felt like an insider.

Robert N. Spengler III

Fruit from the Sands

$26.95

"A comprehensive and entertaining historical and botanical review, providing an enjoyable and cognitive read.”—Nature

The foods we eat have a deep and often surprising past. From almonds and apples to tea and rice, many foods that we consume today have histories that can be traced out of prehistoric Central Asia along the tracks of the Silk Road to kitchens in Europe, America, China, and elsewhere in East Asia. The exchange of goods, ideas, cultural practices, and genes along these ancient routes extends back five thousand years, and organized trade along the Silk Road dates to at least Han Dynasty China in the second century BC. Balancing a broad array of archaeological, botanical, and historical evidence, Fruit from the Sands presents the fascinating story of the origins and spread of agriculture across Inner Asia and into Europe and East Asia. Through the preserved remains of plants found in archaeological sites, Robert N. Spengler III identifies the regions where our most familiar crops were domesticated and follows their routes as people carried them around the world. With vivid examples, Fruit from the Sands explores how the foods we eat have shaped the course of human history and transformed cuisines all over the globe.

Christy Thornton

Revolution in Development

$29.95

One of The Chronicle of Higher Education's Best Scholarly Books of 2021

Revolution in Development uncovers the surprising influence of postrevolutionary Mexico on the twentieth century's most important international economic institutions. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Christy Thornton meticulously traces how Mexican officials repeatedly rallied Third World leaders to campaign for representation in global organizations and redistribution through multilateral institutions. By decentering the United States and Europe in the history of global economic governance, Revolution in Development shows how Mexican economists, diplomats, and politicians fought for more than five decades to reform the rules and institutions of the global capitalist economy. In so doing, the book demonstrates, Mexican officials shaped not only their own domestic economic prospects but also the contours of the project of international development itself.

David G. García

Strategies of Segregation

$29.95

Strategies of Segregation unearths the ideological and structural architecture of enduring racial inequality within and beyond schools in Oxnard, California. In this meticulously researched narrative spanning 1903 to 1974, David G. García excavates an extensive array of archival sources to expose a separate and unequal school system and its purposeful links with racially restrictive housing covenants. He recovers powerful oral accounts of Mexican Americans and African Americans who endured disparate treatment and protested discrimination. His analysis is skillfully woven into a compelling narrative that culminates in an examination of one of the nation’s first desegregation cases filed jointly by Mexican American and Black plaintiffs. This transdisciplinary history advances our understanding of racism and community resistance across time and place.

Carlo Ginzburg

Threads and Traces

$29.95

Carlo Ginzburg’s brilliant and timely new essay collection takes a bold stand against naive positivism and allegedly sophisticated neo-skepticism. It looks deeply into questions raised by decades of post-structuralism: What constitutes historical truth? How do we draw a boundary between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? How do we grapple with the historical conventions that inform, in different ways, all written documents? In his answers, Ginzburg peels away layers of subsequent readings and interpretations that envelop every text to make a larger argument about history and fiction. Interwoven with compelling autobiographical references, Threads and Traces bears moving witness to Ginzburg’s life as a European Jew, the abiding strength of his scholarship, and his deep engagement with the historian’s craft.

Sarah Schulman

The Gentrification of the Mind

$21.95

In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981–1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.