Name: Love's Next Meeting
Brand: Aaron S. Lecklider
Price: 29.95 USD
Availability: InStock

Aaron S. Lecklider

Love's Next Meeting

$29.95

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.

Compiled by William Matthews

British Diaries

$95.00

William Matthews’ British Diaries 1442–1942: An Annotated Bibliography offers an unparalleled exploration of British diary literature spanning five centuries. This meticulously compiled resource catalogs diaries from diverse perspectives—ranging from monarchs to farmers, scholars to soldiers, and clergy to craftsmen—providing a comprehensive cross-section of British society across eras. With annotations that highlight the unique content and context of each diary, the bibliography serves as an invaluable guide for scholars of history, linguistics, sociology, and cultural studies.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

Edited by David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski

Popular Culture in Late Imperial China

$49.95

Popular Culture in Late Imperial China delves into the vibrant and multifaceted world of non-elite Chinese culture during the late imperial period, spanning roughly from 1550 to 1920. This collection of essays challenges the overemphasis on elite narratives in Chinese historical studies, highlighting the importance of exploring the values, ideas, and cultural expressions of the broader populace. Drawing on an array of texts—scriptures, plays, almanacs, novels, and oral traditions—the contributors investigate how popular culture was produced, consumed, and transmitted across social strata. Through this lens, the book reveals a cultural landscape that was both deeply diverse and intricately integrated, reflecting shared values and beliefs despite differences in class, region, and literacy.

The essays explore topics such as local drama, sectarian religious practices, and the interplay between oral and written traditions, emphasizing how these cultural elements served as conduits for communication and the diffusion of values. The book also examines how popular culture intersected with state ideologies and policies, with some essays detailing the state's role in promoting or suppressing certain religious and cultural practices. From the transformation of folk deities into national symbols to the use of simplified explanations of imperial edicts for public instruction, Popular Culture in Late Imperial China illustrates the dynamic interaction between elite and non-elite spheres. This work is an essential resource for understanding the cultural richness of late imperial China and the social forces that shaped its historical trajectory.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

Stephen G. Bloom

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes

$27.95

The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the “Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment” she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism.

The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate the scorching impact of racism. Elliott separated students into two groups. She instructed the brown-eyed children to heckle and berate the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. Without telling the children the experiment’s purpose, Elliott demonstrated how easy it was to create abhorrent racist behavior based on students’ eye color, not skin color. As a result, Elliott would go on to appear on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, followed by a stormy White House conference, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and thousands of media events and diversity-training sessions worldwide, during which she employed the provocative experiment to induce racism. Was the experiment benign? Or was it a cruel, self-serving exercise in sadism? Did it work?

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes is a meticulously researched book that details for the first time Jane Elliott’s jagged rise to stardom. It is an unflinching assessment of the incendiary experiment forever associated with Elliott, even though she was not the first to try it out. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait of the insular community where Elliott grew up and conducted the experiment on the town’s children for more than a decade. The searing story is a cautionary tale that examines power and privilege in and out of the classroom. It also documents small-town White America’s reflex reaction to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the subsequent meteoric rise of diversity training that flourishes today. All the while, Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes reveals the struggles that tormented a determined and righteous woman, today referred to as the “Mother of Diversity Training,” who was driven against all odds to succeed.

Richard A. Pierce

Russian Central Asia 1867-1917

$95.00

Russian Central Asia, 1867–1917: A Study in Colonial Rule by Richard A. Pierce surveys the half-century between the creation of the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan and the fall of the Romanovs, treating the region as a “laboratory” of late-imperial colonial rule. Pierce maps the terrain—vast steppe, desert basins, and oasis belts—and sketches the peoples (Kazakhs, Kirgiz, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Tadzhiks, and others), their economies (pastoral nomadism and irrigated agriculture), and the climatic and geographic constraints that shaped settlement and politics.

Challenging both Soviet teleology and thin Western treatments, he dissects shifting Soviet historiography (from “double oppression,” to annexation as a “lesser evil,” to a “progressive” good) and argues for an evidence-driven appraisal of imperial administration, law, taxation, education, commerce, and native elites. The book situates conquest and rule within broader 19th-century patterns, showing how Russian policies interacted with oasis state structures, clan systems, and Islamic institutions, and how infrastructure, markets, and governance changed under tsarist rule—laying the pre-1917 foundations necessary to judge later Soviet claims of transformation.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1960.

Eleanor M. Gates

End of the Affair

$65.00

Eleanor M. Gates’s End of the Affair: The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance, 1939-40 offers a meticulous diplomatic and military history that probes one of World War II’s most consequential ruptures: the breakdown of cooperation between Britain and France in the face of German aggression. Spanning from the uncertain early months of the war through France’s collapse in 1940, Gates reconstructs how strategic disagreements, mismatched military expectations, diplomatic misfires, and political pressure conspired to undermine the wartime alliance. She draws on previously unpublished documents, cabinet minutes, military plans, and diplomatic correspondence to examine: differences in war aims; conflicts over strategy (especially defense vs. offense); France’s internal political fragility; British hesitation; and the cumulative effects of distrust and unmet commitments. The narrative tracks moments like the Supreme War Council meetings, the French political debates over armistice versus resistance, and the fateful decisions about the French fleet and colonial positions.

More than a recounting of foreign policy failure, End of the Affair illuminates how alliance politics, national character, and military capacity intertwine under stress. Gates argues that Britain and France entered the conflict with incompatible assumptions about how a modern war should be waged, and that each underestimated the internal challenges the other faced—France’s political divisions, fear of defeat, and Britain’s constraints in resources and resolve. The book underscores that the collapse of the alliance was not inevitable, but the result of avoidable miscalculations, communication breakdowns, and shifting domestic politics. For scholars of World War II, diplomatic history, and strategic studies, Gates’s work remains indispensable: it not only fills gaps in archival evidence, but also serves as a warning about how alliances may fracture even among formally committed partners.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

Lorne J. Kavic

India's Quest for Security

$95.00

India's Quest for Security: Defence Policies, 1947-1965 explores the intricate challenges faced by India in its pursuit of national security during its formative years as an independent nation. Against the backdrop of two immutable truths of international relations—the primacy of national self-interest and the enduring role of military power—the book examines how India navigated the complexities of defense policy from 1947 to 1965. It scrutinizes the strategies adopted by the Indian government under Jawaharlal Nehru, emphasizing the balance sought between security needs and resource limitations, and the intersection of moral postures with practical military actions. The study questions whether India’s espoused principles of nonviolence and peaceful coexistence genuinely shaped its defense policies or whether traditional power considerations dominated its approach.

Central to the book is an analysis of India's response to external threats from Pakistan and China, as well as its evolving military posture amidst global and regional tensions. The text delves into key episodes, including India's military engagements in Kashmir, Goa, Nagaland, and its border conflicts with China, highlighting how these shaped the country's defense priorities and expenditures. Furthermore, it investigates the processes through which defense policies were formulated, often reflecting Nehru’s personal influence, and evaluates the impact of these policies on India's military capabilities and international standing. Through a meticulous review of speeches, parliamentary debates, official documents, and firsthand accounts, the book offers insights into India’s strategic decisions, the challenges of policy implementation, and the enduring implications for its defense strategies post-1965.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

Bradford Perkins

Castlereagh and Adams

$95.00

Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823 explores the transformation of Anglo-American relations during a pivotal decade. This volume, the conclusion of a trilogy, examines the United States' journey toward true sovereignty and international recognition. It traces the evolution from the Federalist pragmatism that tempered ambition, through the Republican overreach that culminated in the War of 1812, to the synthesis of realism and aspiration embodied in postwar diplomacy. The narrative focuses on the interplay between British and American policies, emphasizing the role of British foreign secretaries Viscount Castlereagh and George Canning in recognizing American independence and fostering a foundation for equal relations. By 1823, this new dynamic allowed the U.S. to assert its autonomy, notably through the Monroe Doctrine, which marked a decisive step toward self-reliance and independence in foreign policy.

The book situates these developments within a broader context, addressing political, economic, and psychological factors that shaped both nations' approaches. While the emphasis remains on Anglo-American relations, the study integrates significant episodes such as the Treaty of Ghent and the complex dialogue leading to the Monroe Doctrine. It provides insight into how postwar nationalism influenced American self-perception and diplomatic strategies. With a focus on key figures and moments, the volume argues that this era completed the United States’ transition from a dependent former colony to a confident sovereign power, reshaping the international balance and signaling the maturation of its global standing.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

Joseph Levenson

The Mozartian Historian

$95.00

The Mozartian Historian: Essays on the Works of Joseph R. Levenson is a profound tribute to the intellectual legacy of Joseph Levenson, an innovative historian whose interpretations of Chinese history reshaped the discipline. Edited by Maurice Meisner and Rhoads Murphey, this volume emerged from the shared sense of loss and intellectual urgency felt by colleagues after Levenson’s untimely death. More than a commemorative festschrift, the book serves as an analytical deep dive into the themes and methods that defined Levenson’s work, emphasizing their lasting relevance to historical and intellectual inquiry.

Levenson’s scholarship, particularly in his seminal trilogy Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, challenged conventional historiographical norms by intertwining Chinese history with universal historical discourse. His comparative approach revealed the unique dimensions of Chinese traditions while situating them within broader human experiences of modernity and change. The essays in this collection reflect on Levenson’s radical conception of historical continuity, his dialectical understanding of change, and his incisive critique of cultural determinism. Balancing rigorous analysis with personal recollections, the contributors illuminate the intellectual audacity and humanity that defined Levenson’s career, making this book a vital resource for historians, Sinologists, and anyone engaged with the enduring tensions between tradition and modernity.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Bob Blauner, with a new foreword by Gerald Early

Black Lives, White Lives

$24.95

Now with a new foreword, this timely reissue features a remarkable collection of oral histories that trace three decades of turbulent race relations and social change in the United States for a new generation of activists.

One evening in 1955, Howard Spence, a Mississippi field representative for the NAACP investigating the Emmett Till murder, was confronted by Klansmen who burned an eight-foot cross on his front lawn. "I felt my life wasn't worth a penny with a hole in it." Twenty-four years later, Spence had become a respected pillar of that same Mississippi town, serving as its first Black alderman.

The story of Howard Spence is just one of the remarkable personal dramas recounted in Black Lives, White Lives. Beginning in 1968, Bob Blauner and a team of interviewers recorded the words of those caught up in the crucible of rapid racial, social, and political change. Unlike most retrospective oral histories, these interviews capture the intense racial tension of 1968 in real time, as people talk with unusual candor about their deepest fears and prejudices. The diverse experiences and changing beliefs of Blauner's interview subjects—sixteen of them Black, twelve of them white—are expanded through subsequent interviews in 1979 and 1986, revealing as much about ordinary, daily lives as the extraordinary cultural shifts that shaped them. This book remains a landmark historical and sociological document, and an exceptional primary-source commentary on the development of race relations since the 1960s. Republished with a foreword by Professor Gerald Early, Black Lives, White Lives offers new generations of scholars and activists a galvanizing meditation on how divided America was then and still is today.

William B. Taylor

Fugitive Freedom

$24.95

The curious tale of two priest impersonators in late colonial Mexico

Cut loose from their ancestral communities by wars, natural disasters, and the great systemic changes of an expanding Europe, vagabond strangers and others out of place found their way through the turbulent history of early modern Spain and Spanish America. As shadowy characters inspiring deep suspicion, fascination, and sometimes charity, they prompted a stream of decrees and administrative measures that treated them as nameless threats to good order and public morals. The vagabonds and impostors of colonial Mexico are as elusive in the written record as they were on the ground, and the administrative record offers little more than commonplaces about them. Fugitive Freedom locates two of these suspect strangers, Joseph Aguayo and Juan Atondo, both priest impersonators and petty villains in central Mexico during the last years of Spanish rule.

Displacement brought pícaros to the forefront of Spanish literature and popular culture—a protean assortment of low life characters, seen as treacherous but not usually violent, shadowed by poverty, on the move and on the make in selfish, sometimes clever ways as they navigated a hostile, sinful world. What to make of the lives and longings of Aguayo and Atondo, which resemble those of one or another literary pícaro? Did they imagine themselves in literary terms, as heroes of a certain kind of story? Could impostors like these have become fixtures in everyday life with neither a receptive audience nor permissive institutions? With Fugitive Freedom, William B. Taylor provides a rare opportunity to examine the social histories and inner lives of two individuals at the margins of an unfinished colonial order that was coming apart even as it was coming together.

Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Lona Mosk Packer

The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters

$39.95

The Rossetti–Macmillan Letters by Lona Mosk Packer presents 133 previously unpublished letters (1861–1889) from Dante Gabriel, Christina, and William Michael Rossetti to publisher Alexander Macmillan, bookseller–publisher F. S. Ellis, and others, offering a vivid, behind-the-scenes portrait of Victorian literary culture at work. Beginning with William Michael’s introduction to the “rising young publisher” in Cambridge and moving through the famous London “Tobacco Parliaments,” this collection traces how friendships, editorial judgment, and hard economics shaped what reached the page. We watch Christina Rossetti’s *Up-Hill* find a home in *Macmillan’s Magazine*, see *Goblin Market* shepherded into print as a Christmas book despite doubts about its “quaintnesses,” and follow Dante Gabriel’s negotiations over translations and poems amid shifting patronage and publishing risk.

Edited with a substantial introduction and full scholarly notes, the volume situates each letter within the networks of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and the expanding Macmillan firm. Packer illuminates Alexander Macmillan’s blend of literary taste and commercial acumen—his willingness to “take risks,” his eye for design and audience, and his role as candid first reader—while mapping the Rossettis’ evolving strategies for finding readers beyond the small magazine coteries. The result is a granular social history of authorship: contracts and calendars, praise and refusal, proofs, prices, and print runs—alongside the ideals, anxieties, and loyalties that sustained a family of writers. Essential for scholars of Victorian poetry, publishing history, and Pre-Raphaelite studies, The Rossetti–Macmillan Letters restores the human texture of literary production and reveals how, in an age of tight boots and tighter budgets, tact, persistence, and editorial nerve helped make lasting literature.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

Asad Q. Ahmed

Palimpsests of Themselves

$34.95

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

Palimpsests of Themselves is an intervention in current discussions about the fate of philosophy in postclassical Islamic intellectual history. Asad Q. Ahmed uses as a case study the most advanced logic textbook of Muslim South Asia, The Ladder of the Sciences, presenting in English its first full translation and extended commentary. He offers detailed assessments of the technical contributions of the work, explores the social and institutional settings of the vast commentarial response it elicited, and develops a theory of the philosophical commentary that is internal to the tradition. These approaches to the commentarial text complicate presuppositions upon which questions of Islam’s intellectual decline are erected. As such, Ahmed offers a unique and powerful opportunity to understand the transmission of knowledge across the Islamic world.

Bradford Perkins

Castlereagh and Adams

$49.95

Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823 explores the transformation of Anglo-American relations during a pivotal decade. This volume, the conclusion of a trilogy, examines the United States' journey toward true sovereignty and international recognition. It traces the evolution from the Federalist pragmatism that tempered ambition, through the Republican overreach that culminated in the War of 1812, to the synthesis of realism and aspiration embodied in postwar diplomacy. The narrative focuses on the interplay between British and American policies, emphasizing the role of British foreign secretaries Viscount Castlereagh and George Canning in recognizing American independence and fostering a foundation for equal relations. By 1823, this new dynamic allowed the U.S. to assert its autonomy, notably through the Monroe Doctrine, which marked a decisive step toward self-reliance and independence in foreign policy.

The book situates these developments within a broader context, addressing political, economic, and psychological factors that shaped both nations' approaches. While the emphasis remains on Anglo-American relations, the study integrates significant episodes such as the Treaty of Ghent and the complex dialogue leading to the Monroe Doctrine. It provides insight into how postwar nationalism influenced American self-perception and diplomatic strategies. With a focus on key figures and moments, the volume argues that this era completed the United States’ transition from a dependent former colony to a confident sovereign power, reshaping the international balance and signaling the maturation of its global standing.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

Eugen Weber

The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905-1914

$95.00

The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914 offers a penetrating exploration of a transformative era in French history, where nationalism reshaped political ideologies and societal attitudes. This book examines how nationalism evolved from a scattered sentiment into a cohesive, if volatile, force that influenced France's domestic and foreign policies on the eve of World War I. The text explores the nuanced distinction between patriotism and nationalism, highlighting how fear of external threats and internal anxieties over modernization and social unrest galvanized a revival of nationalistic fervor. Through careful analysis, the book uncovers the ways political elites, cultural influencers, and regional loyalties contributed to a complex and often contradictory nationalist narrative.

Focusing on the interplay between political ideologies, social structures, and individual actors, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914 illuminates the varied motivations that fueled this phenomenon. From the remnants of 19th-century revanchist ambitions to the rise of new ultranationalist rhetoric, the book places this revival within a broader European context, drawing parallels with contemporary movements elsewhere. With meticulous research and a focus on Paris as the epicenter of cultural and political agitation, this work is an essential resource for historians, political scientists, and anyone interested in understanding the roots of modern nationalism and its enduring impact on French society and beyond.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

Andrew C. Janos

Revolution in Perspective

$95.00

Revolution in Perspective: Essays on the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, edited by Andrew C. Janos and William B. Slottman, brings together a distinguished group of scholars to reassess one of modern Europe’s most enigmatic revolutions. Arising in the tumultuous aftermath of World War I, the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted just 133 days, yet its legacy continues to spark debate. This collection, the outcome of a landmark Berkeley conference, approaches the 1919 regime not as an isolated Hungarian episode but as part of broader patterns of political collapse, social mobilization, and revolutionary ferment across Central and Eastern Europe. Essays examine the breakdown of oligarchic politics before 1918, the coalition between Socialists and Communists, agrarian dissent, Romania’s and Austria’s reactions, and the movement’s ties to international communism.

By weaving together domestic, regional, and transnational perspectives, the volume illuminates the complexities of coalition politics, the limits of revolutionary legitimacy, and the shifting ideological currents of the European Left. Rather than offering a single interpretation, the essays highlight tensions between local circumstances and global revolutionary aspirations, situating Hungary’s upheaval within the larger story of twentieth-century communism and nation-state formation. Revolution in Perspective thus serves both as a case study in the fragility of post-imperial societies and as a critical intervention in comparative revolutionary history—indispensable for scholars of Eastern Europe, socialism, and the contested legacies of 1919.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Darra Goldstein

The Kingdom of Rye

$24.95

Celebrated food scholar Darra Goldstein takes readers on a vivid tour of history and culture through Russian cuisine.

The Kingdom of Rye unearths the foods and flavors of the Russian land. Preeminent food studies scholar Darra Goldstein offers readers a concise, engaging, and gorgeously crafted story of Russian cuisine and culture. This story demonstrates how national identity is revealed through food—and how people know who they are by what they eat together. The Kingdom of Rye examines the Russians' ingenuity in overcoming hunger, a difficult climate, and a history of political hardship while deciphering Russia's social structures from within. This is a domestic history of Russian food that serves up a deeper history, demonstrating that the wooden spoon is mightier than the scepter.

Mark J. Van Aken

King of the Night

$49.95

King of the Night: Juan José Flores and Ecuador, 1824–1864 offers a nuanced exploration of the political turbulence in early independent Ecuador, focusing on the monarchical aspirations of its first president, General Juan José Flores. Set against the broader context of nineteenth-century Latin America, the book examines the region’s grappling with governance models—especially the allure of monarchy in the wake of colonial rule. Flores, disillusioned with the inefficacies of republicanism, sought to establish a monarchy in Ecuador as a means to bring stability, believing European royal legitimacy could temper political chaos. This study sheds light on the complexities of monarchist sentiment in Latin America, contrasting it with republican ideals and situating Ecuador within a regional struggle for political identity.

The narrative weaves together diplomatic correspondence, historical records, and Flores’ political maneuvers to uncover the motivations and failures of monarchist endeavors. Despite Flores' efforts, including collaboration with Spain, his schemes ultimately faltered, reflecting the broader challenges of imposing monarchy in a region steeped in revolutionary republicanism. By tracing Flores' political biography, the book highlights how his leadership and monarchical ambitions intensified domestic and foreign crises, culminating in the ultimate rejection of royalist ideologies. Through this lens, King of the Night underscores the enduring tensions between authoritarian and representative governance in Ecuador's formative years, while contributing to a deeper understanding of Latin America's political evolution.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Daniel Martinez HoSang

A Wider Type of Freedom

$29.95

A sweeping history of transformative, radical, and abolitionist movements in the United States that places the struggle for racial justice at the center of universal liberation.

In Where Do We Go From Here? (1967), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., described racism as "a philosophy based on a contempt for life," a totalizing social theory that could only be confronted with an equally massive response, by "restructuring the whole of American society." A Wider Type of Freedom provides a survey of the truly transformative visions of racial justice in the United States, an often-hidden history that has produced conceptions of freedom and interdependence never envisioned in the nation's dominant political framework.

A Wider Type of Freedom brings together stories of the social movements, intellectuals, artists, and cultural formations that have centered racial justice and the abolition of white supremacy as the foundation for a universal liberation. Daniel Martinez HoSang taps into moments across time and place to reveal the longstanding drive toward a vision of universal emancipation. From the nineteenth century's abolition democracy and the struggle to end forced sterilizations, to the twentieth century's domestic worker organizing campaigns, to the twenty-first century's environmental justice movement, he reveals a bold, shared desire to realize the antithesis of "a philosophy based on a contempt for life," as articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. Rather than seeking "equal rights" within failed systems, these efforts generated new visions that embraced human difference, vulnerability, and interdependence as core productive facets of our collective experience.

Hasan Kayali

Imperial Resilience

$95.00

Imperial Resilience tells the story of the enduring Ottoman landscape of the modern Middle East's formative years from the end of the First World War in 1918 to the conclusion of the peace settlement for the empire in 1923. Hasan Kayali moves beyond both the well-known role that the First World War's victors played in reshaping the region's map and institutions and the strains of ethnonationalism in the empire's "Long War." Instead, Kayali crucially uncovers local actors' searches for geopolitical solutions and concomitant collective identities based on Islamic commonality. Instead of the certainties of the nation-states that emerged in the wake of the belated peace treaty of 1923, we see how the Ottoman Empire remained central in the mindset of leaders and popular groups, with long-lasting consequences.

Jacques Lévesque

The Enigma of 1989

$95.00

The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe explores the pivotal events of 1989 that reshaped the global political landscape, focusing on the role of the Soviet Union in the collapse of Eastern European Communist regimes. The book centers on the unexpected Soviet passivity in the face of these changes, particularly under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. Unlike the rigid Soviet policies of the past, Gorbachev’s approach allowed for a peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The author examines how this surprising turn of events was not just a sign of Soviet weakness but also a strategic move within Gorbachev’s broader vision for a transformed international order, where Eastern European democratization was part of a controlled process aimed at benefiting the USSR.

The study argues that Gorbachev’s policies were driven by a new ideology of transition, which, despite its roots in Marxism and Leninism, sought to establish a world order based on new, universal values. This ideology, coupled with the immense risks Gorbachev took, helped him manage the crises in Eastern Europe, neutralize conservative opposition, and maintain Soviet influence in international politics until the fall of Eastern Europe in 1989. The book delves into the internal and external dynamics that led to the USSR’s passive role in the dissolution of Eastern Europe and links it to Gorbachev's broader efforts to transform both Soviet foreign policy and domestic politics. Ultimately, it concludes that the collapse of the Eastern European regimes marked the breaking point of Gorbachev’s ambitions, as it led to a loss of control over both the Soviet Union and his foreign policy initiatives.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

O. O. Gruzenberg Edited by Don C. Rawson Translated by Don C. Rawson and Tatiana Tipton

Yesterday

$95.00

Yesterday: Memoirs of a Russian-Jewish Lawyer by O. O. Gruzenberg, edited and introduced by Don C. Rawson, offers an extraordinary insider’s view of the Russian judiciary during the last half-century of the tsarist regime. Gruzenberg (1866–1940), one of the empire’s most prominent defense lawyers, wrote these memoirs in exile after the Bolshevik revolution, reflecting on a career that unfolded in a paradox: an autocracy with one of Europe’s most independent judicial systems. His recollections illuminate not only the workings of Russian courts but also the tensions of Jewish assimilation, liberal politics, and personal identity in a society marked by anti-Semitism and revolutionary upheaval.

Rawson’s introduction situates Gruzenberg at the intersection of law, liberalism, and Jewish experience. Born in Ekaterinoslav to a family steeped in the Jewish haskalah (enlightenment), he was raised to be Russian as well as Jewish, producing an enduring identity conflict—never fully at home in either world. His memoirs recount struggles with professional exclusion under tightening anti-Jewish restrictions, his celebrated defenses in ritual-murder cases, and his role in political trials of figures such as Trotsky, Gorky, and the Beilis affair, which made him internationally known. Equally vivid is his account of a judiciary both modernized and compromised after the Great Reforms of 1864: courts formally independent, with trial by jury and professional advocates, yet still pressured in political cases. Gruzenberg’s liberal commitments—civil liberties, individual rights, and constitutional reform—were eclipsed in 1917, when Bolsheviks dismantled the legal institutions that had defined his life. Exiled in western Europe, he reflected on the irony that he had flourished more under tsarism than under the revolutionary regime he once welcomed.

Both memoir and testament, Yesterday captures a liberal lawyer’s devotion to justice and the fragile space carved out for law in an autocratic state. It is essential reading for scholars of Russian legal history, Jewish emancipation, and the fate of liberalism on the eve of revolution.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

Lauren Hirshberg

Suburban Empire

$95.00

Suburban Empire takes readers to the US missile base at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, at the matrix of postwar US imperial expansion, the Cold War nuclear arms race, and the tide of anti-colonial struggles rippling across the world. Hirshberg shows that the displacement of indigenous Marshallese within Kwajalein Atoll mirrors the segregation and spatial politics of the mainland US as local and global iterations of US empire took hold. Tracing how Marshall Islanders navigated US military control over their lands, Suburban Empire reveals that Cold War–era suburbanization was perfectly congruent with US colonization, military testing, and nuclear fallout. The structures of suburban segregation cloaked the destructive history of control and militarism under a veil of small-town innocence.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Straits

$29.95

An uncompromising study of the fictions, the failures, and the real man behind the myth of Magellan.

With Straits, celebrated historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto subjects the surviving sources to the most meticulous scrutiny ever, providing a timely and engrossing biography of the real Ferdinand Magellan. The truth that Fernández-Armesto uncovers about Magellan’s life, his character, and the events of his ill-fated voyage offers up a stranger, darker, and even more compelling narrative than the fictional version that has been celebrated for half a millennium.

Magellan did not attempt—much less accomplish—a journey around the globe. In his lifetime he was abhorred as a traitor, reviled as a tyrant, self-condemned to destruction, and dismissed as a failure. Straits untangles the myths that made Magellan a hero and discloses the reality of the man, probing the passions and tensions that drove him to adventure and drew him to disaster. We see the mutations of his character: pride that became arrogance, daring that became recklessness, determination that became ruthlessness, romanticism that became irresponsibility, and superficial piety that became, in adversity, irrational exaltation. As the real Magellan emerges, so do his real ambitions, focused less on circumnavigating the world or cornering the global spice market than on exploiting Filipino gold. Straits is a study in failure and the paradox of Magellan’s career, showing that renown is not always a reflection of merit but often a gift and accident of circumstance.

Keith L. Nelson

Victors Divided

$49.95

Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918–1923 by Keith L. Nelson reexamines the United States’ first military occupation of Germany and the ways it shaped both American foreign policy and the fragile European peace after World War I. Moving beyond the familiar debates over the League of Nations or the rise of economic imperialism, Nelson argues that American leaders were centrally concerned with restoring “normal” liberal order in Europe. That project was hampered by conflicting aims among the Allies, domestic political setbacks at home, and Americans’ own reluctance to recognize how deeply the war had destabilized the old order.

At the heart of the story is the American occupation of the Rhineland, established almost by accident and prolonged as much to restrain France as to discipline Germany. Though Americans initially regarded the deployment as an “unnecessary necessity,” the presence of U.S. troops soon proved indispensable in moderating the occupation, balancing French ambitions, and stabilizing a precarious regional peace. Nelson situates this episode within broader efforts—from Wilson’s abortive security guarantees to the Harding administration’s Washington Conference and the Dawes Plan—that sought, with mixed success, to re-integrate Germany into the international community. By restoring attention to this neglected occupation, Victors Divided reveals how Americans groped toward international responsibility in the years after 1918 and how their ambivalence both limited and defined their influence on Europe’s postwar settlement.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

Kristin A. Wintersteen

The Fishmeal Revolution

$29.95

Off the Pacific coast of South America, nutrients mingle with cool waters rising from the ocean’s depths, creating one of the world’s most productive marine ecosystems: the Humboldt Current. When the region’s teeming populations of fish were converted into a key ingredient in animal feed—fishmeal—it fueled the revolution in chicken, hog, and fish farming that swept the United States and northern Europe after World War II.

The Fishmeal Revolution explores industrialization along the Peru-Chile coast as fishmeal producers pulverized and exported unprecedented volumes of marine proteins to satisfy the growing taste for meat among affluent consumers in the Global North. A relentless drive to maximize profits from the sea occurred at the same time that Peru and Chile grappled with the challenge of environmental uncertainty and its potentially devastating impact. In this exciting new book, Kristin A. Wintersteen offers an important history and critique of the science and policy that shaped the global food industry.

Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah

Essays in Population History, Volume One

$95.00

Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, Volume One brings together a series of seven essays that examine the demographic history of Mexico and the Caribbean. The essays are the result of years of research, focused primarily on the impact of European conquest on the indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere, particularly in central Mexico. By examining a variety of archival sources and historical records, the volume addresses the complexities of historical demography, such as gaps in data and inconsistencies in tribute records. The authors' work spans several centuries, from the sixteenth century to the national census of 1960, offering a comprehensive view of the population dynamics in Mexico.

The volume begins by detailing the methodology used in the study of historical demography, such as the creation of coefficients of change and the analysis of population characteristics like family structures and civil categories. It then presents focused studies on the population of different regions, including the Mixteca Alta and west-central Mexico, with comparisons to other areas in the Americas, like Hispaniola and Colombia. The authors explore how geography, climate, and regional histories influenced the patterns of population decline after European contact. The essays also examine how social stratification and tribute systems shaped the demographics of indigenous communities. This volume is the first of a planned series, and while it presents detailed findings, it also sets the stage for future research into other regions and time periods.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Essays in Population History, Volume One

Aaron Windel

Cooperative Rule

$95.00

While many have interpreted the cooperative movement as propagating a radical alternative to capitalism, Cooperative Rule shows that in the late British Empire, cooperation became an important part of the armory of colonialism. The system was rooted in British rule in India at the end of the nineteenth century. Officials and experts saw cooperation as a unique solution to the problems of late colonialism, one able to both improve economic conditions and defuse anticolonial politics by allowing community uplift among the empire’s primarily rural inhabitants. A truly transcolonial history, this ambitious book examines the career of cooperation from South Asia to Eastern and Central Africa and finally to Britain. In tracing this history, Aaron Windel opens the door for a reconsideration of how the colonial uses of cooperation and community development influenced the reimagination of community in Europe and America from the 1960s onward.

Jarrod Hore

Visions of Nature

$95.00

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.

Morton Schwartz

Soviet Perceptions of the United States

$39.95

Soviet Perceptions of the United States examines how Soviet scholars and policy analysts conceptualized American power, politics, and society during the Cold War, and how these perceptions informed Moscow’s foreign policy. Drawing heavily on writings from the USA Institute (founded in 1967 under Georgi Arbatov) and its journal *SShA: ekonomika, politika, ideologiya*, the book traces the evolution of Soviet views from the crude Stalinist caricatures of America as a capitalist dystopia to more nuanced, though still ideologically constrained, analyses in the 1960s and 1970s. It explores Soviet assessments of the U.S. economic system, acknowledging both its technological dynamism and its systemic inequalities, and reviews shifting interpretations of “state-monopoly capitalism” and the role of the military-industrial complex. The text shows how American recessions, the Vietnam War, and Keynesian policy experiments were closely scrutinized, often with a mix of admiration for U.S. adaptability and conviction that capitalism remained crisis-prone and historically doomed.

Beyond economics, the study surveys Soviet analyses of American political institutions and actors. Chapters detail interpretations of the presidency, Congress, the State and Defense Departments, and the influence of interest groups, think tanks, and public opinion. Soviet Americanists increasingly debated how internal U.S. contradictions—social unrest, economic cycles, political scandals—shaped Washington’s foreign policy. The book highlights diverging tendencies: dogmatic portrayals of U.S. imperialism persisted, but more sophisticated arguments emphasized divisions within American elites, particularly between defense-oriented industries and broader corporate interests wary of militarization. These interpretations fed into Soviet expectations of U.S. policy, oscillating between fears of aggression and hopes for détente. By tracing these perceptions, the book underscores their policy significance: Soviet leaders calibrated their responses to American actions through lenses shaped as much by ideology as by selective engagement with U.S. realities. For historians of international relations and Cold War political thought, it offers a revealing account of how superpower rivalry was filtered through competing images and misperceptions.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Jeffrey Herbst

State Politics in Zimbabwe

$49.95

State Politics in Zimbabwe by Jeffrey Herbst is a pioneering study of how government decisions are actually made in postcolonial Africa. Herbst begins from the central enigma of African politics: independence gave leaders control over the state, yet African states remain economically weak, institutionally fragile, and vulnerable to pressures from powerful societal groups, from ethnic movements to multinational corporations. Rather than constructing another grand theory of African politics, Herbst focuses on middle-level questions—state autonomy and the locus of decision-making—arguing that only close analysis of state operations can illuminate how leaders balance independence of action with societal constraints.

Zimbabwe offers an especially rich case. Emerging from a settler state marked by deep racial inequalities, it inherited a strong bureaucratic apparatus, entrenched White economic power, and volatile relations with South Africa and international capital. Herbst traces how the new government navigated land redistribution, agricultural pricing, mining policy, health delivery, wage setting, and foreign investment, showing where the state acted autonomously and where it was constrained. By combining theory with detailed case studies, State Politics in Zimbabwe develops propositions about how African states allocate resources and manage conflict, offering a framework for comparative analysis across the continent. Both a study of Zimbabwe’s early independence years and a methodological intervention in African political studies, the book demonstrates the value of empirical inquiry into the actual practices of governance.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Edited by Wayne S. Vucinich

Contemporary Yugoslavia

$49.95

Contemporary Yugoslavia: Twenty Years of Socialist Experiment offers a comprehensive analysis of Yugoslavia's political, economic, and social evolution since World War II. This volume, based on papers presented at a 1965 Stanford University conference, explores pivotal issues such as Yugoslavia's postwar reconstruction, its departure from Stalinist orthodoxy, and the adoption of "national communism." Featuring contributions from leading scholars, the book examines topics like Tito's leadership, the transformation of Yugoslav-Marxist thought, economic decentralization, and the complex nationality problem. The authors highlight Yugoslavia's unique trajectory, blending socialism with capitalistic reforms, and its impact on both domestic stability and international relations.

This insightful collection underscores the profound effects of wartime disruptions and Communist policies on Yugoslav society, from social modernization to enduring ethnic tensions. Essays delve into the struggle for national unity amid centrifugal forces, the role of strategic leadership, and the challenges of sustaining liberalization and democratization. For scholars and readers interested in Cold War history, socialist systems, or the Balkan region, this book provides a nuanced understanding of Yugoslavia's revolutionary path and its broader implications for global politics and social change.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

Edited by Ida Altman and James Horn

To Make America

$39.95

To Make America: European Emigration in the Early Modern Period brings together leading scholars to examine one of the most consequential yet understudied forces in Atlantic history: the mass movement of Europeans across the ocean between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Edited by Ida Altman and James Horn, this collection explores how migrants from Spain, England, France, and Germany reshaped both their homelands and the diverse colonial societies of the New World. Essays trace the sheer magnitude of emigration—over a million settlers before 1800—while probing the experiences of the people themselves: hidalgos and artisans, indentured servants and redemptioners, filles du roi and convicts. The volume reveals how kinship networks, labor contracts, and state policies structured migration flows, and how poverty, profit, and the pursuit of religious or political refuge motivated departures.

Framing emigration as a transatlantic phenomenon rather than a series of isolated national stories, the book highlights both the diversity and commonality of the European diaspora. Contributors show how regional origins in Europe tied migrants to specific destinations, how the balance between free and unfree labor shaped colonial societies, and how enduring family and commercial connections prevented most colonies from becoming culturally isolated enclaves. Richly comparative, the volume situates indentured servitude alongside the rise of African slavery, explores the interplay of voluntary and coerced migration, and redefines the “making of America” as a process forged through overlapping, mutually influential transatlantic communities. Essential reading for historians of migration, empire, and early modern society, To Make America offers a landmark synthesis of how Europe’s restless multitudes created the foundations of the Americas while simultaneously transforming the Old World they left behind.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

John Lie

Japan, the Sustainable Society

$70.00

By the late twentieth century, Japan had gained worldwide attention as an economic powerhouse. Having miraculously risen from the ashes of World War II, it was seen by many as a country to be admired if not emulated. But by the early 1990s, that bubble burst in spectacular fashion. The Japanese economic miracle was over. In this book, John Lie argues that in many ways the Japan of today has the potential to be even more significant than it was four decades ago. As countries face the prospect of a world with decreasing economic growth and increasing environmental dangers, Japan offers a unique glimpse into what a viable future might look like—one in which people acknowledge the limits of the economy and environment while championing meaningful and sustainable ways of working and living. Beneath and beyond the rhetoric of growth, some Japanese are leading sustainable lives and creating a sustainable society. Though he does not prescribe a one-size-fits-all cure for the world, Lie makes the compelling case that contemporary Japanese society offers a possibility for how other nations might begin to valorize everyday life and cultivate ordinary virtues.

Arthur M. Eckstein

Senate and General

$95.00

Senate and General: Individual Decision Making and Roman Foreign Relations, 264–194 B.C. by Arthur M. Eckstein reconsiders the traditional view that the Roman senate exercised consistent and centralized control over foreign policy in the middle republic. Building on close readings of Livy, Polybius, and other sources, Eckstein argues that while the senate certainly possessed legal authority and wielded enormous prestige, the reality of decision making was far more diffuse, improvised, and contingent. In practice, Roman magistrates and generals in the field—often consuls with imperium—played a vital role in shaping the Republic’s external relations, and their ad hoc choices frequently became the foundation of formal policy once the senate ratified them. Rather than the senate directing a coherent program of imperial expansion, foreign relations from the First Punic War through the post-Hannibalic period were characterized by flexibility, delegation, and a high tolerance for local initiative.

Organized by geography, the book traces Rome’s responses to crises in northern Italy, Sicily, Spain, Africa, and Greece, demonstrating how the senate’s influence was strongest on the Italian frontier but increasingly tenuous overseas. In regions like Sicily, Spain, and the Greek East, generals often determined whether alliances were struck, treaties concluded, or wars initiated, sometimes with only vague or delayed guidance from Rome. Eckstein situates this within the broader primitiveness of ancient diplomacy: the absence of permanent embassies, poor record-keeping, and the cumbersome structure of the senate itself made coherent, long-term planning difficult. Against interpretations that depict Rome as pursuing a deliberate policy of imperialist aggression, Eckstein emphasizes the improvisatory nature of republican decision making amid a volatile Mediterranean environment. The study ultimately portrays Roman expansion as the outcome of aristocratic trust, institutional decentralization, and the contingent actions of individual commanders, offering a nuanced corrective to both older constitutionalist models and modern theories of systematic Roman imperialism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Kay Whitlock

Carceral Con

$95.00

A critical examination of how contemporary criminal justice reforms expand rather than shrink structurally violent systems of policing, surveillance, and carceral control in the United States.

Public opposition to the structural racist, gendered, and economic violence that fuels the criminal legal system is reaching a critical mass. Ignited by popular uprisings, protests, and campaigns against state violence, demands for transformational change have escalated. In response, a now deeply entrenched so-called bipartisan industry has staked its claim to the reform terrain. Representing itself as a sensible bridge across bitterly polarized political divides and party lines, the bipartisan reform industry has sought to control the nature and scope of local, state, and federal reforms. Along the way, it creates an expanding web of neoliberal public-private partnerships, with the promotion and implementation of efforts managed by billionaires, public officials, policy factories, foundations, universities, and mega nonprofit organizations. Yet many bipartisan reforms constitute deceptive sleights of hand that not only fail to produce justice but actively reproduce structural racial and economic inequality.

Carceral Con pulls the veil away from the reform public relations machine, providing a riveting overview of the repressive US carceral state and a critical examination of the reform terrain, quagmires, and choices that face us. This book vividly illustrates how contemporary bipartisan reform agendas leave the structural apparatus of mass incarceration intact while widening the net of carceral control and surveillance. Readers are also provided with information and insights useful for examining the likely impacts of reforms today and in the future. What can we learn from reforms of the past? What strategies hold most promise for dismantling structural inequalities, corporate control, and state violence? What approaches will reduce reliance on carceral control and also bring about community safety? Utilizing an abolitionist lens, Carceral Con makes the compelling case for liberatory approaches to envisioning and creating a just society.

R. L. Rike

Apex Omnium

$95.00

One of the masterpieces of Greco-Roman literature is the history written by Ammianus Marcellinus near the end of the fourth century A.D. His work bears unique witness to an empire struggling at once toward traditional and transformation, the old Rome of Augustus and the new Rome of Christ. Embodied within Ammianus's history is a universally admired spirit of independence that has, however, led to a steady denaturing of the historian's personal commitment to particular causes. At the hands of modern critics, Ammianus frequently seems to lose his character, and his frequently seems to lose his character, and his religion too vanishes. Rike reconstructs Ammianus's religion from the beginning and concludes that he was an enthusiastic pagan whose firm commitment to traditional beliefs cannot be understood without changing our usual conceptions of late Roman religion.

Rike's study widens our too narrowly philosophical sense of paganism; the historian's striving will remind us of the vital spiritual continuum which joined the ages of Augustus and Constantine. Accordingly, this book should itself serve as a useful bridge between students of Late Antiquity and traditional classicists.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Amy Edwards

Are We Rich Yet?

$29.95

An in-depth history of how finance remade everyday life in Thatcher's Britain.

Are We Rich Yet? tells the story of the financialization of British society. During the 1980s and 1990s, financial markets became part of daily life for many Britons as the practice of investing moved away from the offices of the City of London, onto Britain’s high streets, and into people’s homes. The Conservative Party claimed this shift as evidence that capital ownership was in the process of being democratized. In practice, investing became more institutionalized than ever in late-twentieth-century Britain: inclusion frequently meant tying one’s fortunes to the credit, insurance, pension, and mortgage industries to maintain independence from state-run support systems.

In tracing the rise of a consumer-oriented mass investment culture, historian Amy Edwards explains how the "financial" became such a central part of British society, not only economically and politically, but socially and culturally, too. She shifts our focus away from the corridors of Whitehall and towards a cast of characters that included brokers, bankers and traders, newspaper editors, goods manufacturers, marketing departments, production companies, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women. Between them, they shaped the terrain upon which political and economic reform occurred. Grappling with the interactions between structural transformation and the rhythms of everyday life, Are We Rich Yet? thus understands the rise of neoliberalism as something other than the inevitable outcome of a carefully orchestrated right-wing political revolution.

Jesse S.G. Wozniak

Policing Iraq

$95.00

Policing Iraq chronicles the efforts of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq to rebuild their police force and criminal justice system in the wake of the US invasion. Jesse S. G. Wozniak conducted ethnographic research during multiple stays in Iraqi Kurdistan, observing such signpost moments as the Arab Spring, the official withdrawal of coalition forces, the rise of the Islamic State, and the return of US forces. By investigating the day-to-day reality of reconstructing a police force during active hostilities, Wozniak demonstrates how police are integral to the modern state’s ability to effectively rule and how the failure to recognize this directly contributed to the destabilization of Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State. The reconstruction process ignored established practices and scientific knowledge, instead opting to create a facade of legitimacy masking a police force characterized by low pay, poor recruits, and a training regimen wholly unsuited to a constitutional democracy. Ultimately, Wozniak argues, the United States never intended to build a democratic state but rather to develop a dependent client to serve its neoimperial interests.

Keith L. Nelson

Victors Divided

$95.00

Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918–1923 by Keith L. Nelson reexamines the United States’ first military occupation of Germany and the ways it shaped both American foreign policy and the fragile European peace after World War I. Moving beyond the familiar debates over the League of Nations or the rise of economic imperialism, Nelson argues that American leaders were centrally concerned with restoring “normal” liberal order in Europe. That project was hampered by conflicting aims among the Allies, domestic political setbacks at home, and Americans’ own reluctance to recognize how deeply the war had destabilized the old order.

At the heart of the story is the American occupation of the Rhineland, established almost by accident and prolonged as much to restrain France as to discipline Germany. Though Americans initially regarded the deployment as an “unnecessary necessity,” the presence of U.S. troops soon proved indispensable in moderating the occupation, balancing French ambitions, and stabilizing a precarious regional peace. Nelson situates this episode within broader efforts—from Wilson’s abortive security guarantees to the Harding administration’s Washington Conference and the Dawes Plan—that sought, with mixed success, to re-integrate Germany into the international community. By restoring attention to this neglected occupation, Victors Divided reveals how Americans groped toward international responsibility in the years after 1918 and how their ambivalence both limited and defined their influence on Europe’s postwar settlement.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

Susanna Bryant Dakin

A Scotch Paisano in Old Los Angeles

$49.95

A Scotch Paisano in Old Los Angeles by Susanna Bryant Dakin reconstructs the career and milieu of Hugo Reid—a Scottish trader turned Californio hacendado—through an extraordinary epistolary record, chiefly his 1836–1852 correspondence with Abel Stearns. Dakin situates Reid within the intertwined commercial, political, and domestic networks of Mexican-era Southern California, tracing parallel lives that converged in Los Angeles and San Gabriel amid secularization, the hide-and-tallow trade, and the disruptions of war and statehood. The letters—carried by runners, riders, and creaking carretas—preserve the texture of “poco tiempo” sociability as well as the practicalities of land, credit, and reputation. Dakin’s editorial frame is avowedly archival: she mines collections from Gaffey to Coronel and Wagner, supplements lacunae with contemporary diaries and mission registers, and acknowledges a sparing use of informed reconstruction where eyewitness testimony fails (Reid’s first landing in 1832, his meeting with Victoria, and their 1837 wedding). Throughout, she balances narrative warmth with documentary restraint.

The study’s interpretive core challenges received mythologies. Dakin corrects the literary afterlife of Reid in Ramona, disentangling Helen Hunt Jackson’s romantic types from the documented lives of Reid, Doña Victoria (of the Comigrabit line), and their family—especially Maria Ygnacia, the “Flower of San Gabriel.” She reads Reid not as a “squaw man” but as a bilingual, freethinking mediator whose naturalization, marriage, and public service bound him to indigenous and Californio communities while keeping a trader’s eye on Pacific circuits from Callao to San Pedro. By pairing close readings of Reid–Stearns letters with contextual chapters on commerce, secularization, the Mexican–American War, and the Gold Rush, Dakin recovers a cosmopolitan frontier in which Scots, Yankees, Kanakas, and Gabrielino-Tongva actors negotiated status, law, and belonging—an historical Los Angeles that was at once provincial and ocean-facing, leisurely and volatile, improvised and consequential.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1939.

David Johnson

Popular Culture in Late Imperial China

$95.00

Popular Culture in Late Imperial China delves into the vibrant and multifaceted world of non-elite Chinese culture during the late imperial period, spanning roughly from 1550 to 1920. This collection of essays challenges the overemphasis on elite narratives in Chinese historical studies, highlighting the importance of exploring the values, ideas, and cultural expressions of the broader populace. Drawing on an array of texts—scriptures, plays, almanacs, novels, and oral traditions—the contributors investigate how popular culture was produced, consumed, and transmitted across social strata. Through this lens, the book reveals a cultural landscape that was both deeply diverse and intricately integrated, reflecting shared values and beliefs despite differences in class, region, and literacy.

The essays explore topics such as local drama, sectarian religious practices, and the interplay between oral and written traditions, emphasizing how these cultural elements served as conduits for communication and the diffusion of values. The book also examines how popular culture intersected with state ideologies and policies, with some essays detailing the state's role in promoting or suppressing certain religious and cultural practices. From the transformation of folk deities into national symbols to the use of simplified explanations of imperial edicts for public instruction, Popular Culture in Late Imperial China illustrates the dynamic interaction between elite and non-elite spheres. This work is an essential resource for understanding the cultural richness of late imperial China and the social forces that shaped its historical trajectory.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

William A. Schwartz and Charles Derber

The Nuclear Seduction

$49.95

The Nuclear Seduction: Why the Arms Race Doesn’t Matter—And What Does presents a provocative challenge to the conventional wisdom surrounding nuclear weapons and global security. The authors argue that the relentless focus on the arms race—the build-up and reduction of nuclear arsenals—misdirects attention from the true drivers of nuclear danger: geopolitical conflicts and superpower interventions. Drawing on historical case studies and rigorous analysis, the book reveals that the number and nature of nuclear weapons have far less impact on global safety than the volatile political and military entanglements of the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly in the Third World.

Moving beyond the "weapons paradigm," this groundbreaking work urges readers to consider how superpower actions in regions such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central America perpetuate crises that could escalate into nuclear catastrophe. The book critiques arms control efforts as inadequate distractions and calls for a deeper reckoning with the political strategies that fan the flames of global instability. With a blend of incisive critique and bold insight, The Nuclear Seduction challenges policymakers, activists, and citizens alike to rethink the roots of nuclear peril and focus on the global conflicts that threaten humanity’s future.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Morton Schwartz

Soviet Perceptions of the United States

$95.00

Soviet Perceptions of the United States examines how Soviet scholars and policy analysts conceptualized American power, politics, and society during the Cold War, and how these perceptions informed Moscow’s foreign policy. Drawing heavily on writings from the USA Institute (founded in 1967 under Georgi Arbatov) and its journal *SShA: ekonomika, politika, ideologiya*, the book traces the evolution of Soviet views from the crude Stalinist caricatures of America as a capitalist dystopia to more nuanced, though still ideologically constrained, analyses in the 1960s and 1970s. It explores Soviet assessments of the U.S. economic system, acknowledging both its technological dynamism and its systemic inequalities, and reviews shifting interpretations of “state-monopoly capitalism” and the role of the military-industrial complex. The text shows how American recessions, the Vietnam War, and Keynesian policy experiments were closely scrutinized, often with a mix of admiration for U.S. adaptability and conviction that capitalism remained crisis-prone and historically doomed.

Beyond economics, the study surveys Soviet analyses of American political institutions and actors. Chapters detail interpretations of the presidency, Congress, the State and Defense Departments, and the influence of interest groups, think tanks, and public opinion. Soviet Americanists increasingly debated how internal U.S. contradictions—social unrest, economic cycles, political scandals—shaped Washington’s foreign policy. The book highlights diverging tendencies: dogmatic portrayals of U.S. imperialism persisted, but more sophisticated arguments emphasized divisions within American elites, particularly between defense-oriented industries and broader corporate interests wary of militarization. These interpretations fed into Soviet expectations of U.S. policy, oscillating between fears of aggression and hopes for détente. By tracing these perceptions, the book underscores their policy significance: Soviet leaders calibrated their responses to American actions through lenses shaped as much by ideology as by selective engagement with U.S. realities. For historians of international relations and Cold War political thought, it offers a revealing account of how superpower rivalry was filtered through competing images and misperceptions.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Elora Shehabuddin

Sisters in the Mirror

$29.95

"A must read."—CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022
"Holds up a mirror to the unifying, braided futures underlying so-called 'Western' and 'Muslim' feminism that are both undermined by the power of capital, the world trade order, and cynical geopolitics."—2023 Association for Asian Studies Coomaraswamy Book Prize

A crystal-clear account of the entangled history of Western and Muslim feminisms.

Western feminists, pundits, and policymakers tend to portray the Muslim world as the last and most difficult frontier of global feminism. Challenging this view, Elora Shehabuddin presents a unique and engaging history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Western and Muslim societies. Muslim women, like other women around the world, have been engaged in their own struggles for generations: as individuals and in groups that include but also extend beyond their religious identity and religious practices. The modern and globally enmeshed Muslim world they navigate has often been at the weaker end of disparities of wealth and power, of processes of colonization and policies of war, economic sanctions, and Western feminist outreach. Importantly, Muslims have long constructed their own ideas about women’s and men’s lives in the West, with implications for how they articulate their feminist dreams for their own societies.

Stretching from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era to the War on Terror present, Sisters in the Mirror shows how changes in women’s lives and feminist strategies have consistently reflected wider changes in national and global politics and economics. Muslim women, like non-Muslim women in various colonized societies and non-white and poor women in the West, have found themselves having to negotiate their demands for rights within other forms of struggle—for national independence or against occupation, racism, and economic inequality. Through stories of both well-known and relatively unknown figures, Shehabuddin recounts instances of conflict alongside those of empathy, collaboration, and solidarity across this extended period. Sisters in the Mirror is organized around stories of encounters between women and men from South Asia, Britain, and the United States that led them, as if they were looking in a mirror, to pause and reconsider norms in their own society, including cherished ideas about women’s roles and rights. These intertwined stories confirm that nowhere, in either Western or Muslim societies, has material change in girls’ and women’s lives come easily or without protracted struggle.

Herbert R. Southworth

Guernica! Guernica!

$95.00

Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda, and History offers a riveting exploration of one of the most infamous events of the Spanish Civil War—the bombing of Guernica on April 26, 1937. Through meticulous research and an incisive critique of historical narratives, Southworth unpacks not only the event itself but also the layers of controversy, propaganda, and misinformation that have surrounded it for decades. His work shines a light on how journalism, political agendas, and historical memory converge to shape our understanding of such tragedies.

Southworth approaches his subject with a passion for uncovering truth amid the fog of war and propaganda. He delves into primary sources, including press dispatches, diplomatic archives, and firsthand accounts, while scrutinizing the mechanisms of censorship and misinformation. The book is structured in two major parts: "The Event," which examines the facts surrounding the destruction of Guernica, and "The Controversy," which traces the enduring debates and manipulations that have kept this tragedy at the forefront of historical and political discourse. As Southworth reveals, Guernica was not just a military event but a symbolic one, reverberating globally as a testament to the horrors of modern warfare and the power of propaganda. This work is a masterful combination of historical scholarship and media analysis, offering profound insights into the complexities of documenting and interpreting history.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

Bradford Perkins

Prologue to War

$95.00

Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805-1812 offers a fresh and compelling reevaluation of the diplomatic tensions that culminated in the War of 1812. While numerous studies have explored aspects of this conflict, few have synthesized its various causes in a comprehensive manner since the work of Henry Adams. This volume seeks to fill that gap by drawing upon previously untapped manuscript materials, contemporary newspapers, and political pamphlets, with a particular focus on British policy—a dimension often oversimplified in American historiography. The study challenges prevailing interpretations that prioritize rational and material causes, arguing instead that emotion, national pride, and diplomatic missteps played equally decisive roles in shaping U.S.-British relations during this period.

The book positions the War of 1812 within a broader narrative of America's evolving quest for national identity and independence from European influence—an aspiration extending beyond mere recognition of statehood in 1783. By examining this struggle from 1805 to 1812, and ultimately into the postwar years, the study reveals the deep-seated tensions that influenced American foreign policy, from the frustrated ambitions of Jefferson and Madison to the more pragmatic approach of Monroe and John Quincy Adams. With its rigorous scholarship and critical reassessment of Anglo-American relations, Prologue to War offers essential reading for historians and political scholars seeking to understand the complex forces that shaped early U.S. diplomacy and national development.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.

Sanford Lakoff and Herbert F. York

A Shield in Space?

$95.00

A Shield in Space? by Sanford Lakoff and Herbert F. York examines the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), launched in 1983 and popularly dubbed “Star Wars.” Drawing on the program’s first five years, they argue SDI embodied misplaced faith in technological salvation: a politically driven shortcut that bypassed normal vetting and sidelined Defense and State. A technically uninformed president greenlit a research push to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” hoping advanced technologies could replace deterrence. The record, they contend, shows otherwise: comprehensive, reliable defenses have not emerged and, even if feasible, would likely be vulnerable to countermeasures, failing to ensure confidence against a massive attack. Belief in a decisive, last technological move is thus a fallacy. Given these realities, letting hope for a space shield shape planning or block deep cuts in offensive arsenals would be folly; stability, integration, and cooperation offer a realistic path to durable peace.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

George T. Yu

Party Politics in Republican China

$39.95

Party Politics in Republican China: The Kuomintang, 1912–1924 is a pivotal exploration of China's early struggle with political modernization during a transformative era. Written by George T. Yu, the book delves into the Kuomintang's journey from its roots in traditional Chinese secret societies to its adoption and adaptation of Western political ideals. By examining this critical period, the study offers insight into how the Kuomintang sought to reconcile the tensions between China's deeply entrenched traditional structures and the demands of modern nation-building.

The monograph vividly portrays the Kuomintang's initial optimism, marked by a commitment to Western-style republicanism, and its eventual disillusionment with parliamentary democracy due to internal factionalism, corruption, and external military pressures. It traces the party's shift towards a more authoritarian, mass-mobilization model of governance, influenced by both the failures of early Chinese democracy and its interactions with Soviet organizational strategies. This work not only illuminates the political evolution of the Kuomintang but also contextualizes broader patterns of political development in emerging nations grappling with the integration of foreign ideologies and indigenous traditions. Yu's analysis is essential for understanding the challenges of political modernization and its lasting impact on China's 20th-century history.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

Joshua Frens-String

Hungry for Revolution

$34.95

Hungry for Revolution tells the story of how struggles over food fueled the rise and fall of Chile's Popular Unity coalition and one of Latin America's most expansive social welfare states. Reconstructing ties among workers, consumers, scientists, and the state, Joshua Frens-String explores how Chileans across generations sought to center food security as a right of citizenship. In so doing, he deftly untangles the relationship between two of twentieth-century Chile's most significant political and economic processes: the fight of an emergent urban working class to gain reliable access to nutrient-rich foodstuffs and the state's efforts to modernize its underproducing agricultural countryside.

Edited by Mary Elizabeth Berry and Marcia Yonemoto

What Is a Family?

$34.95

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

What Is a Family? explores the histories of diverse households during the Tokugawa period in Japan (1603–1868). The households studied here differ in locale and in status—from samurai to outcaste, peasant to merchant—but what unites them is life within the social order of the Tokugawa shogunate. The circumstances and choices that made one household unlike another were framed, then as now, by prevailing laws, norms, and controls on resources. These factors led the majority to form stem families, which are a focus of this volume. The essays in this book draw on rich sources—population registers, legal documents, personal archives, and popular literature—to combine accounts of collective practices (such as the adoption of heirs) with intimate portraits of individual actors (such as a murderous wife). They highlight the variety and adaptability of households that, while shaped by a shared social order, do not conform to any stereotypical version of a Japanese family.

Corinna Zeltsman

Ink under the Fingernails

$34.95

During the independence era in Mexico, individuals and factions of all stripes embraced the printing press as a key weapon in the broad struggle for political power. Taking readers into the printing shops, government offices, courtrooms, and streets of Mexico City, historian Corinna Zeltsman reconstructs the practical negotiations and discursive contests that surrounded print over a century of political transformation, from the late colonial era to the Mexican Revolution. Centering the diverse communities that worked behind the scenes at urban presses and examining their social practices and aspirations, Zeltsman explores how printer interactions with state and religious authorities shaped broader debates about press freedom and authorship. Beautifully crafted and ambitious in scope, Ink under the Fingernails sheds new light on Mexico's histories of state formation and political culture, identifying printing shops as unexplored spaces of democratic practice, where the boundaries between manual and intellectual labor blurred.

T. O. Ranger

Dance and Society in Eastern Africa 1890–1970

$95.00

Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma explores the cultural phenomenon of Beni ngoma, a dance deeply connected to eastern Africa's history and colonial experience. Combining military-inspired music, drill-style choreography, and dynamic social hierarchies, Beni ngoma reflects and critiques colonial influences. This study traces its origins in Swahili traditions, its evolution across rural and urban settings, and its adaptation into forms like Mganda and Kalela. Using archival research, oral histories, and fieldwork, the book reveals how this vibrant cultural form became a powerful expression of African creativity and resilience during a period of profound social transformation.

Written by a former University of Dar es Salaam professor, the book offers a fresh approach to understanding the colonial experience in eastern Africa through the lens of popular culture. It situates Beni ngoma within the broader context of social and cultural changes, examining its role in negotiating identity, resistance, and adaptation. Highlighting the interplay between African traditions and colonial modernity, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa invites readers to reconsider how festive practices illuminate the lived experiences of those navigating change. This book is ideal for history enthusiasts and cultural scholars seeking an engaging and insightful perspective on eastern Africa’s past.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

Jack R. Censer

Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France

$95.00

Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the role of the press in shaping public opinion and political culture in eighteenth-century France. Traditionally, historians have viewed the French Revolution as a sharp break in press history, marking the transition from an authoritarian model under the monarchy to an unregulated, libertarian press after 1789. However, this collection of essays argues that the transformation was more gradual, with significant elements of a free press emerging well before the Revolution. By examining periodicals that operated outside the official framework—such as the Gazette de Leyde, the Courrier d'Avignon, and the Journal des dames—the contributors reveal a vibrant, semi-independent press that helped shape the political discourse of the era.

This volume situates the pre-revolutionary press within a broader historiographical debate about the nature of the French Revolution itself. Were the upheavals of 1789 a radical break with the past, or did they build upon long-standing political and cultural shifts? The authors make a compelling case for continuity, showing how informal mechanisms of political engagement—through the press, reading groups, and Masonic lodges—created a space for public debate that eroded absolutist control well before the Revolution. With its meticulous case studies and theoretical insights, Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France is an essential resource for scholars of media history, political culture, and the origins of modern democracy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Edited by D. A. Low

Soundings in Modern South Asian History

$95.00

Soundings in Modern South Asian History, edited by D. A. Low, is a wide-ranging collection of essays that probes the complexity of India’s political and social transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book opens with the 1907 travels of Keir Hardie, the British Labour M.P., whose encounters with India’s nationalist leaders reveal both the commonalities and striking regional contrasts in political life at the time. Hardie’s meetings with Bengali bhadralok elites, Punjabi Arya Samaj activists, and divided factions in Bombay demonstrate how nationalist energy was concentrated unevenly across the subcontinent. His relative lack of reception in the United Provinces underscores the political inertia of a region that would later dominate Indian politics through figures like Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru. Low uses this narrative as a springboard to emphasize the importance of studying regional variations, cautioning against overly unified, textbook accounts of the national movement.

From this starting point, the essays expand into broader explorations of social, cultural, and political change. Contributions investigate the persistence of local elite cultures, such as the Indo-Persian husk tradition of Oudh, and their gradual decline under the pressures of agrarian unrest, linguistic shifts, and nationalist mobilization. Other chapters juxtapose regional case studies—Maharashtra, the Panjab, Bengal—highlighting the different trajectories of agrarian society, elite reform, and popular politics under colonial rule. Running through the collection is a concern with authority, identity, and ideology: whether in debates over liberal constitutionalism, the rise of mass nationalism, or the tensions between Hindu and Muslim political identities. Taken together, the essays argue that modern South Asian history cannot be reduced to a simple story of British impact and nationalist response, but must be understood as a kaleidoscope of shifting regional dynamics, social transformations, and contested visions for India’s future.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

Donald J. Pisani

From the Family Farm to Agribusiness

$55.00

From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931 explores the transformative journey of California’s agricultural economy, examining the shifts from mining and livestock to wheat farming, and eventually to horticulture. The book traces how California's economy underwent rapid changes through booms and busts, from the mining gold rushes to speculative real estate and the wheat industry. Despite its rich natural resources, the state's growth was hampered by unpredictable climate, limited land availability, and competition from other regions. The development of large-scale wheat farming in the 1860s brought mechanization and significant production, but it also resulted in soil exhaustion and competition from foreign markets. This ultimately led to the decline of wheat farming and a shift towards more diversified agriculture.

Central to the book is the story of California's struggle with land monopolies and political fragmentation. As vast swathes of land were controlled by speculators, large agricultural estates stifled the development of small family farms that many saw as the backbone of American society. The state’s political environment, rife with corruption and sectional rivalries, slowed efforts to enact meaningful agricultural reforms, especially regarding water management and irrigation. Despite these challenges, the book illustrates how private interests and early irrigation projects laid the foundation for California’s future agribusiness empire, making it a model of commercialized farming. This compelling historical narrative delves into the complex social, economic, and political forces that shaped the agricultural landscape of the American West.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

Bertrand Harris Bronson

Facets of the Enlightenment

$95.00

Facets of the Enlightenment: Studies in English Literature and Its Contexts presents a collection of essays that delve into various aspects of English culture during the eighteenth century. The author emphasizes the complexity of this era, acknowledging its contradictions, self-contradictions, and violent contrasts. The essays aim to offer a balanced view of the period, recognizing both its virtues and shortcomings.

The author reflects on his deep engagement with the Enlightenment era, noting that his interest began in the classroom, both as a student and a teacher. His approach to teaching the Age of Johnson led him to explore not only literature but also social history, intellectual trends, the backgrounds of authors, and other artistic expressions of the time. The collection is driven by a desire to explore the interconnectedness of the arts and literature, challenging simplistic cultural history narratives and questioning the early disappearance of classical ideals.

The essays are varied, some examining the development of trends, others focusing on individual authors or works. While the papers were not written specifically for the classroom, they are rooted in the author's educational experience. Overall, the work expresses a sympathy for the intellectual and moral stance represented by Samuel Johnson, characterized by a positive and dynamic classicism, despite the superficial contradictions of the period.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

Stanley A. Wolpert

Tilak and Gokhale

$49.95

Stanley Wolpert’s study reframes India’s independence as the culmination of a long gestation rather than a sudden post-1947 birth, arguing that the intellectual and organizational groundwork for nationalism was laid well before Gandhi and Nehru. Centering on Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale—Gandhi’s most consequential predecessors—Wolpert tracks how their contrasting strategies and moral frames shaped methods of agitation, political education, and mass mobilization by the end of World War I. Tilak’s fiery populism and constitutional militancy (“Father of Indian Unrest” to detractors, national hero to admirers) drew on newspapers, street politics, and cultural revival; Gokhale’s ethical gradualism relied on legislative craft, institution building, and tutelary reform. The book contends that Gandhi’s later success synthesized Tilak’s mobilizing technique with Gokhale’s moral method, translating an inherited repertoire into a program capable of compelling British retreat without civil collapse.

Wolpert also maps the source terrain and historiography. Tilak has attracted abundant, often hagiographic biographies (notably Kelkar’s Marathi trilogy, Karandikar, Tahmankar), grounded in the rich Kesari–Mahratta archives; British assessments like Chirol’s Indian Unrest supply a hostile counterpoint. Gokhale, by contrast, is underrepresented—his moderation, closeness to British officials, and early death yielding fewer, more memoiristic accounts (Paranjpe, Sastri, Gandhi’s tribute) and a handful of fuller biographies (Shahani, Hoyland). Rather than reprise single-figure lives, Wolpert stages a comparative analysis to show how each leader’s moves refracted and provoked the other’s, how both rode—and redirected—main currents of Indian political tradition, and how their competing impulses—revolution and reform—coalesced in the making of modern India. Rejecting “great man” determinism while foregrounding agency, he reads their interaction against institutional and cultural constraints, arguing that understanding their dialogue clarifies the lineage, limits, and continuity of Indian nationalism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.

Sanford Lakoff and Herbert F. York

A Shield in Space?

$49.95

A Shield in Space? by Sanford Lakoff and Herbert F. York examines the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), launched in 1983 and popularly dubbed “Star Wars.” Drawing on the program’s first five years, they argue SDI embodied misplaced faith in technological salvation: a politically driven shortcut that bypassed normal vetting and sidelined Defense and State. A technically uninformed president greenlit a research push to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” hoping advanced technologies could replace deterrence. The record, they contend, shows otherwise: comprehensive, reliable defenses have not emerged and, even if feasible, would likely be vulnerable to countermeasures, failing to ensure confidence against a massive attack. Belief in a decisive, last technological move is thus a fallacy. Given these realities, letting hope for a space shield shape planning or block deep cuts in offensive arsenals would be folly; stability, integration, and cooperation offer a realistic path to durable peace.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah

Essays in Population History, Volume One

$49.95

Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, Volume One brings together a series of seven essays that examine the demographic history of Mexico and the Caribbean. The essays are the result of years of research, focused primarily on the impact of European conquest on the indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere, particularly in central Mexico. By examining a variety of archival sources and historical records, the volume addresses the complexities of historical demography, such as gaps in data and inconsistencies in tribute records. The authors' work spans several centuries, from the sixteenth century to the national census of 1960, offering a comprehensive view of the population dynamics in Mexico.

The volume begins by detailing the methodology used in the study of historical demography, such as the creation of coefficients of change and the analysis of population characteristics like family structures and civil categories. It then presents focused studies on the population of different regions, including the Mixteca Alta and west-central Mexico, with comparisons to other areas in the Americas, like Hispaniola and Colombia. The authors explore how geography, climate, and regional histories influenced the patterns of population decline after European contact. The essays also examine how social stratification and tribute systems shaped the demographics of indigenous communities. This volume is the first of a planned series, and while it presents detailed findings, it also sets the stage for future research into other regions and time periods.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Carol Devens

Countering Colonization

$39.95

Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900 delves into the complex interplay of gender, colonization, and resistance in Native American communities. This groundbreaking study seeks to shift Native American women from the margins of history to their rightful place as active participants in the narrative. Focusing on the missions in the Great Lakes region, the book explores how indigenous gender dynamics influenced responses to missionary endeavors and colonization. By examining Jesuit and Protestant missions over several centuries, it uncovers patterns of community unity, grudging accommodation, and gender-based division that highlight the nuanced effects of colonization.

Through meticulous analysis of historical records and missionary accounts, the book reveals how colonial systems disrupted Native American gender relations, particularly as missionaries introduced European patriarchal norms. These disruptions often caused deep rifts within communities, with men and women taking divergent paths toward either assimilation or resistance. The study argues that tensions between genders in Native communities were not inherent but were instead a direct consequence of colonization. This nuanced perspective reshapes our understanding of Native American social dynamics and provides critical insights into the enduring impact of colonial forces on indigenous cultures.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Roger Garside

China Coup

$23.95

An expert’s take on how a coup in China could launch a transition to democracy.

This short book predicts—contrary to the prevailing consensus—that China’s leader Xi Jinping will very soon be removed from office in a coup d’état mounted by rivals in the top leadership. The leaders of the coup will then end China’s one-party dictatorship and launch a transition to democracy and the rule of law. Long-time diplomat and development banker Roger Garside draws on his deep knowledge of Chinese politics and economics first to develop a detailed scenario of how these events may unfold, and then—in the main body of the book—to explain why. His gripping, persuasive account of how Chinese leaders plot and plan away from the public eye is unique in published literature.

Garside argues that under Xi’s overconfident leadership, China is on a collision course with an America that is newly awakened out of complacency. As Xi’s rivals look abroad, they are alarmed that he is blind to the reactions that China’s actions have provoked from the world’s strongest power and its allies. In domestic affairs, Xi’s rivals recognize that economic and social change without political reform have created problems that require not just new leaders but a new system of government. Security abroad and stability at home demand a revolution to which Xi is implacably opposed. To save China—and themselves—from catastrophe, they must remove him and end the dictatorship he is determined to defend. But their will and capacity to do so depend crucially on how liberal democracies act. Garside’s scenario shows America leading its allies in creating the conditions in which Xi’s rivals move against him.

Carol Devens

Countering Colonization

$95.00

Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900 delves into the complex interplay of gender, colonization, and resistance in Native American communities. This groundbreaking study seeks to shift Native American women from the margins of history to their rightful place as active participants in the narrative. Focusing on the missions in the Great Lakes region, the book explores how indigenous gender dynamics influenced responses to missionary endeavors and colonization. By examining Jesuit and Protestant missions over several centuries, it uncovers patterns of community unity, grudging accommodation, and gender-based division that highlight the nuanced effects of colonization.

Through meticulous analysis of historical records and missionary accounts, the book reveals how colonial systems disrupted Native American gender relations, particularly as missionaries introduced European patriarchal norms. These disruptions often caused deep rifts within communities, with men and women taking divergent paths toward either assimilation or resistance. The study argues that tensions between genders in Native communities were not inherent but were instead a direct consequence of colonization. This nuanced perspective reshapes our understanding of Native American social dynamics and provides critical insights into the enduring impact of colonial forces on indigenous cultures.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Terrence J. McDonald

The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy

$95.00

The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860–1906 explores the intricate relationship between politics, socioeconomic development, and fiscal policy in a rapidly urbanizing San Francisco. Initially conceived as a social history, this work evolved into a nuanced examination of how municipal fiscal policies were shaped not only by structural socioeconomic forces but also by the strategies and ideologies of political actors. With a focus on municipal expenditures, taxation, and revenue, the book reveals how political culture and competition defined the parameters of fiscal decisions, challenging the assumption that urban public sectors are mere reflections of socioeconomic trends.

Through a combination of quantitative analysis and political history, the book uncovers surprising insights, such as the reluctance of 19th-century San Francisco politicians to expand public services, driven by an ingrained low-tax ethos and electoral strategy. This dynamic changed with the rise of progressive reformers in the 1890s, who reshaped fiscal policy to prioritize public investment. By bridging the "old" political history's focus on personalities and institutions with the "new" social history's structural analysis, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of how fiscal policy both reflected and influenced the city’s transformation during a pivotal era.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

Daniel R. Brower

The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900

$95.00

The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 by Daniel R. Brower explores how Russia’s urban centers became key arenas of reform, contestation, and cultural imagination in the late tsarist era. Between the Great Reforms and the Revolution of 1905, provincial towns joined Moscow and St. Petersburg as sites of demographic growth, manufacturing, trade, education, and print culture. Cities embodied both the promises and perils of reform: they symbolized progress toward enlightenment, prosperity, and order, but also revealed tensions between servility and freedom, backwardness and civilization. Brower examines not only population movements, economic activity, and municipal regulations but also the ideals, debates, and practices through which urban dwellers sought to make the city their own.

Blending quantitative analysis with cultural and anthropological perspectives, Brower introduces the concept of “urbanism” to capture how Russians perceived and shaped their towns in dialogue with Western models and fears. Merchants, migrants, doctors, educators, and officials all created “multiple urban images,” whether celebrating industriousness, condemning disorder, or advocating sanitation, schooling, and civic order. Drawing on census data, archival sources, and the print culture of nearly sixty centers, Brower develops a model of the “migrant city” while situating Russian urbanism in broader European contexts. His synthesis highlights the city’s central role in Russia’s social transformation, placing urban history alongside rural experience as essential to understanding the tensions between tradition and modernity in late imperial Russia.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

William Henry Ellison

A Self-Governing Dominion

$95.00

A Self-governing Dominion: California, 1849–1860 by William Henry Ellison traces California’s turbulent political evolution from the framing of its first constitution to the factional battles that culminated on the eve of the Civil War. Ellison interprets the decade as a formative era when Californians, spurred by circumstance and necessity, developed a strong ethos of self-rule—sometimes cooperative, often contentious, but always marked by a determination to assert autonomy in shaping local and state institutions. The narrative begins with military occupation and improvised legal systems in the wake of conquest, moving through the gold rush and the constitutional convention at Monterey, and continuing into the 1850s with debates over land ownership, Indian policy, vigilante justice, sectional division, and political patronage. At each stage, Ellison underscores the central theme: Californians perceived themselves as a people apart, compelled to devise political structures without waiting for distant authority.

Drawing upon both archival sources and established scholarship, Ellison reconstructs how the new state managed competing claims of sovereignty and legitimacy while simultaneously navigating national controversies over slavery, federal land policy, and Native dispossession. The book highlights emblematic episodes: the Bear Flag Revolt’s improvised republicanism, the persistence of alcalde justice amid American common-law innovations, the explosive constitutional debates over suffrage and slavery, and the dramatic contests between William Gwin and David Broderick, whose rivalry epitomized California’s struggle to define its political identity. Ellison emphasizes how fortuitous circumstances—California’s distance from Washington, the sudden influx of gold seekers, and the sectional tensions rending the nation—magnified the stakes of local decision-making. In presenting California as a “self-governing dominion,” Ellison provides not only a detailed account of a unique frontier political culture but also a reinterpretation of how the state’s formative decade secured its place within the Union while cultivating a tradition of political independence.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

Mahesh C. Regmi

Landownership in Nepal

$39.95

Landownership in Nepal explores the intricate interplay between agrarian institutions and the socio-political landscape of Nepal, aiming to illuminate the historical evolution of land tenure systems and their implications for economic development. This book underscores the importance of understanding Nepal’s landownership framework, not only for crafting effective economic policies but also for appreciating its influence on societal structures. With a focus on Raikar land tenure—Nepal’s traditional system of state ownership—the study delves into the transformation of land grants, communal ownership, and taxation practices, as well as labor obligations tied to land tenure. By tracing these developments from historical origins to the reforms initiated after the fall of the Rana government in 1951, the book contextualizes the complex landlord-tenant dynamics and the challenges of transitioning to private ownership.

Mahesh C. Regmi’s work methodically unpacks the evolution of Nepal's agrarian systems through detailed chapters on various forms of tenure, such as Birta, Guthi, and Jagir, and their socio-economic ramifications. The book culminates in an analysis of land reform measures under the Panchayat system, offering insights into the broader trends in landownership and their alignment with national development goals. Drawing on the author’s extensive research from his earlier multi-volume study, this book serves as both a foundational reference for scholars and a call to further investigate Nepal’s agrarian history. With a multidisciplinary lens, Landownership in Nepal bridges the domains of economics, history, and social science, making it an essential read for understanding the enduring influence of land on Nepalese society.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

William Perkins, With an Introduction and Annotations by Dale L. Morgan and James R. Scobie

William Perkins's Journal of Life at Sonora, 1849 - 1852

$49.95

William Perkins’s Journal of Life at Sonora, 1849–1852 opens a vivid, ground-level window onto the California Gold Rush that few Forty-niner narratives even attempt. Where most memoirs climax at landfall, Perkins “opens up like a flower in the sun” only after reaching the diggings, delivering a sustained, seen-from-within chronicle of Sonora—the uniquely cosmopolitan “Sonoranian Camp” of the Southern Mines. Edited and annotated by Dale L. Morgan and James R. Scobie, this definitive edition restores a voice long relegated to a footnote: an early Sonora merchant and town official with a reporter’s eye for social texture. Perkins writes from the streets and sluices of a boomtown remarkable for its foreign-born communities and—exceptionally for mining camps—its numerous women, from Sonoran and Chilean families to later French arrivals. The result is not merely a ledger of ounces and claims, but a sociological portrait in motion, alive to manners, languages, conflicts, and convivialities that made Sonora unlike any other camp.

The editors frame Perkins’s Sonora years with a gripping prelude: the company’s lesser-traveled crossing through Mexico in 1849, juxtaposed with the tart, often contradictory on-the-spot account by fellow traveler Samuel McNeil. Storm-tossed steamers, cholera-shadowed waystations, mule trains over Durango’s high sierra—these pages contextualize the “arrival” that Gold Rush literature typically treats as an endpoint. Morgan and Scobie’s introduction and notes sift names, dates, and local lore with archival rigor, clarifying contested biographical details and situating Perkins alongside the era’s immigrant networks and emergent institutions. For historians of the West, readers of travel writing, and anyone seeking the lived complexity behind Gold Rush myth, this book turns a little-known diarist into a central witness—one whose luminous, often surprising observations permanently enlarge the story of California’s Southern Mines.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

Arthur M. Eckstein

Senate and General

$49.95

Senate and General: Individual Decision Making and Roman Foreign Relations, 264–194 B.C. by Arthur M. Eckstein reconsiders the traditional view that the Roman senate exercised consistent and centralized control over foreign policy in the middle republic. Building on close readings of Livy, Polybius, and other sources, Eckstein argues that while the senate certainly possessed legal authority and wielded enormous prestige, the reality of decision making was far more diffuse, improvised, and contingent. In practice, Roman magistrates and generals in the field—often consuls with imperium—played a vital role in shaping the Republic’s external relations, and their ad hoc choices frequently became the foundation of formal policy once the senate ratified them. Rather than the senate directing a coherent program of imperial expansion, foreign relations from the First Punic War through the post-Hannibalic period were characterized by flexibility, delegation, and a high tolerance for local initiative.

Organized by geography, the book traces Rome’s responses to crises in northern Italy, Sicily, Spain, Africa, and Greece, demonstrating how the senate’s influence was strongest on the Italian frontier but increasingly tenuous overseas. In regions like Sicily, Spain, and the Greek East, generals often determined whether alliances were struck, treaties concluded, or wars initiated, sometimes with only vague or delayed guidance from Rome. Eckstein situates this within the broader primitiveness of ancient diplomacy: the absence of permanent embassies, poor record-keeping, and the cumbersome structure of the senate itself made coherent, long-term planning difficult. Against interpretations that depict Rome as pursuing a deliberate policy of imperialist aggression, Eckstein emphasizes the improvisatory nature of republican decision making amid a volatile Mediterranean environment. The study ultimately portrays Roman expansion as the outcome of aristocratic trust, institutional decentralization, and the contingent actions of individual commanders, offering a nuanced corrective to both older constitutionalist models and modern theories of systematic Roman imperialism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Out of Our Minds

$32.95

"A stimulating history of how the imagination interacted with its sibling psychological faculties—emotion, perception and reason—to shape the history of human mental life."—The Wall Street Journal

To imagine—to see what is not there—is the startling ability that has fueled human development and innovation through the centuries. As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the picture in our minds.

Traversing the realms of science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy, and history, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reveals the thrilling and disquieting tales of our imaginative leaps—from the first Homo sapiens to the present day. Through groundbreaking insights in cognitive science, Fernández-Armesto explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a tantalizing glimpse into who we are and what we might yet accomplish. Unearthing historical evidence, he begins by reconstructing the thoughts of our Paleolithic ancestors to reveal the subtlety and profundity of the thinking of early humans. A masterful paean to the human imagination from a wonderfully elegant thinker, Out of Our Minds shows that bad ideas are often more influential than good ones; that the oldest recoverable thoughts include some of the best; that ideas of Western origin often issued from exchanges with the wider world; and that the pace of innovative thinking is under threat.

Lynn Welchman

Al-Haq

$34.95

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

The leadership and legacy of al-Haq, from its origins in Palestine to its international impact

Established in Ramallah in 1979, al-Haq was the first Palestinian human rights organization and one of the first such organizations in the Arab world. This inside history explores how al-Haq initiated methodologies in law and practice that were ahead of its time and that proved foundational for many strands of today’s human rights work in Palestine and elsewhere. Lynn Welchman looks at both al-Haq’s history and legacy to explore such questions as: Why would one set up a human rights organization under military occupation? How would one go about promoting the rule of law in a Palestinian society deleteriously served by the law and with every reason to distrust those charged with implementing its protections? How would one work to educate overseas allies and activate international law in defense of Palestinian rights? This revelatory story speaks to the practice of local human rights organizations and their impact on international groups.

Leonard Binder

Religion and Politics in Pakistan

$49.95

Religion and Politics in Pakistan explores the contested role of Islam in the creation and early constitutional development of Pakistan. Tracing debates from the last years of British rule through the first decade of independence, the book examines how politicians, religious scholars, and intellectuals struggled to define the meaning of an “Islamic state.” Pakistan’s founding was driven by anxieties over Hindu majoritarianism, the logic of partition, and the promise of Muslim self-determination. Yet the new nation emerged without a clear consensus about the political application of Islamic principles. Politicians spoke of an Islamic spirit yet had no concrete blueprint, while the ‘ulama’ insisted that the outlines of an Islamic constitution were already available within traditional jurisprudence. Between these poles, modernists and fundamentalists offered rival interpretations, and secularists in the bureaucracy and military pressed for pragmatic solutions.

The book situates these debates within Pakistan’s broader political and social transformations. It analyzes the rise of the Pakistan Muslim League, the influence of reformist thinkers, and the emergence of the Jamaʿat-i-Islami under Abul Aʿla Maududi as a powerful voice for fundamentalism. It charts the centrality of controversies such as the Objectives Resolution, the authority of the legislature versus the shariʿa, and the Ahmadiyya question, showing how they forced political actors to clarify their positions. By reconstructing the constituent process as both political struggle and intellectual exchange, the study demonstrates how tradition, modernism, and fundamentalism contended with one another in shaping Pakistan’s evolving constitutional order. This nuanced account highlights the intersection of religious ideals, political theory, and pragmatic governance in the formative years of the Pakistani state.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.

Jana K. Lipman

In Camps

$95.00

Robert Ferrell Book Prize Honorable Mention 2021, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History Honorable Mention 2022, Association for Asian American Studies

After the US war in Vietnam, close to 800,000 Vietnamese left the country by boat, survived, and sought refuge throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This is the story of what happened in the camps. In Camps raises key questions that remain all too relevant today: Who is a refugee? Who determines this status? And how does it change over time?

From Guam to Malaysia and the Philippines to Hong Kong, In Camps is the first major work on Vietnamese refugee policy to pay close attention to host territories and to explore Vietnamese activism in the camps and the diaspora. This book explains how Vietnamese were transformed from de facto refugees to individual asylum seekers to repatriates. Ambitiously covering people on the ground—local governments, teachers, and corrections officers—as well as powerful players such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the US government, Jana Lipman shows that the local politics of first asylum sites often drove international refugee policy. Unsettling most accounts of Southeast Asian migration to the US, In Camps instead emphasizes the contingencies inherent in refugee policy and experiences.

K. S. Liew

Struggle for Democracy

$39.95

Struggle for Democracy: Sung Chiao-jen and the 1911 Chinese Revolution by K. S. Liew offers a penetrating study of one of the central yet often overlooked figures of modern Chinese history. Sung Chiao-jen, revolutionary organizer, party founder, and political visionary, emerged as a leader during the tumultuous decade that culminated in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. His assassination in 1913, just as the fledgling Republic sought stability, symbolized both the promise and fragility of China’s democratic experiment. Liew situates Sung within the broader sweep of revolutionary thought, factional politics, and the struggles between reformers, militarists, and constitutionalists. In doing so, he sheds light on the competing currents that shaped the 1911 Revolution and the fragile institutions that followed.

Drawing on extensive archival research across China, Japan, and Taiwan, as well as a wide range of Chinese and Western sources, Liew reconstructs Sung’s intellectual formation, his organizational strategies, and his vision for parliamentary governance. The book also engages with the enduring historiographical debate over whether Sung’s pursuit of cabinet government and party politics represented progressive foresight or dangerous moderation in the face of Yuan Shih-k’ai’s ambitions. By tracing Sung’s short yet pivotal career, Struggle for Democracy illuminates both the internal contradictions of China’s first republic and the wider historical trajectory that would lead away from democratic aspiration toward authoritarian rule. It is an essential resource for scholars of modern China, revolutionary movements, and the challenges of democratic institution-building.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Michael Lewis

Rioters and Citizens

$49.95

On 22 July 1918 a group of Japanese fishermen's wives met in a small village on the coast to discuss what they could do to lower the spiraling cost of rice. This peaceful meeting gave rise to the 1918 race riots, a series of mass demonstrations and armed clashes that spread rapidly throughout the country on a scale unprecedented in modern Japanese history.

In this penetrating study, Michael Lewis questions standard historical interpretations of the riots. What political significance did the riots have in the communities where they occurred? How and why did protest change from region to region or when carried out by different groups? How did officials, community leaders, and businessmen cope with the unrest? What effects did the riots have on national and local political relations and economic ties among these various groups?

Lewis argues that the 1918 protests defy a single typology--urban and rural protests had different causes, patterns, forms of mediation, and resolutions. In 1918 Meiji leaders had been struggling for fifty years to create a new citizenry, unified ideologically and consistently supportive of national goals. The disunity revealed by the riots does not suggest that Japan had become polarized between the people and the state; rather, in the wake of the riots, new forms of social policy and public political involvement became possible.

In analyzing the changing traditions of Japanese popular protest in the transition from a rural to an industrial economy, Rioters and Citizens suggests that the diversity of Japanese protests necessitates a rethinking of the stereotypical images of prewar Japanese society as blandly uniform and rigidly controlled by government ideology. It further suggests that in Japan, as in Europe, the action of the unenfranchised crowd came to influence the course of political and social change.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl with a Foreword by Richard S. Kirkendall and an Essay on Sources by Roger M. Anders

Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961

$115.00

Explore the critical juncture in modern history when nuclear technology transitioned from secretive military innovation to a defining force in global politics, economics, and society. Atoms for Peace and War: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission, 1953–1961 provides a comprehensive narrative of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pivotal role in shaping nuclear policy during a transformative era. This authoritative account examines the evolution of atomic energy within the United States, charting its profound impact on military strategy, international diplomacy, and domestic economic development.

Spanning the years from Eisenhower’s secretive 1952 pre-inauguration briefing on nuclear technology to the conclusion of his presidency in 1961, this meticulously researched book delves into the operations of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the debates over nuclear testing, and the challenges of international cooperation in the nuclear age. The work sheds light on groundbreaking initiatives like the "Atoms for Peace" program, the revision of the Atomic Energy Act, and efforts to promote nuclear power, while also addressing the controversies surrounding nuclear fallout, disarmament, and the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance.

Based on unprecedented access to classified materials from the Eisenhower Presidential Library, the AEC archives, and Department of State records, this volume offers unparalleled insight into the policy decisions, technological advancements, and ethical dilemmas that defined an era. A compelling blend of technical analysis and historical narrative, Atoms for Peace and War is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the origins of nuclear policy and its enduring implications for the modern world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Robert E. Cole

Strategies for Learning

$49.95

Strategies for Learning: Small-Group Activities in American, Japanese, and Swedish Industry by Robert E. Cole offers a sweeping comparative analysis of how three advanced economies have sought to harness small-group activities—quality circles, autonomous teams, and participatory work practices—as tools for organizational innovation and competitiveness. Cole investigates why American firms were slower and less effective adopters than their Japanese and Swedish counterparts, tracing the interplay of culture, labor relations, managerial strategy, and national infrastructure in shaping both successes and failures. By situating small-group practices in the larger contexts of industrial democracy, organizational design, and global market pressures, the book demonstrates how work-group innovations are never merely technical fixes, but culturally mediated strategies for managing people and production.

Rich in empirical detail, the study draws on field research, company surveys, and policy documents to show how quality circles in Japan became institutionalized mass movements, how Sweden’s democratic workplace agenda produced ambitious but uneven experiments in self-managing teams, and why U.S. firms often treated participation as a fad rather than a long-term system. Cole frames these developments within theories of innovation, diffusion, and political economy, underscoring how national infrastructures and managerial coalitions enable—or hinder—the institutionalization of change. For scholars and practitioners alike, Strategies for Learning provides a nuanced, comparative account of workplace participation that illuminates enduring debates about culture, productivity, and the democratization of work.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

John C. Bollens

Special District Governments in the United States

$95.00

Special District Governments in the United States by John C. Bollens provides the first comprehensive analysis of one of the least understood but most rapidly expanding elements of American governance. Special districts—independent, single-purpose governments created to provide services such as water, sewage, fire protection, housing, irrigation, and education—have proliferated in both metropolitan and rural contexts, yet they have often remained obscure even to students of public administration. Bollens situates these units within the larger framework of American federalism, distinguishing them from dependent authorities and clarifying their legal, fiscal, and administrative independence. Drawing upon legislation, court cases, Census Bureau classifications, field interviews, and case studies from across the country, he traces how special districts have arisen in response to pressures of urban growth, suburban expansion, and rural modernization, as well as the technical demands of service delivery that general-purpose governments have struggled to meet. The book emphasizes the quantitative importance of these governments and their qualitative significance in revealing the service-oriented dimension of the modern state.

At the core of Bollens’ analysis is a typology that encompasses metropolitan districts, urban fringe districts, coterminous districts, rural districts, and school districts, each with distinct origins, governance structures, and financial arrangements. He shows how districts both solve pressing service problems and complicate democratic accountability, as low-visibility boards wield taxing and borrowing powers with limited public oversight. Case studies of entities such as the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago, the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, and Nebraska’s and Illinois’s contrasting school reorganization experiences illustrate the diverse ways in which districts adapt to local needs while fragmenting political authority. Bollens argues that these governments are “cutting edges” of functional expansion, revealing the tensions between efficiency, responsiveness, and coordination in American public administration. His study thus illuminates not only the rise of special districts but also the broader dynamics of institutional innovation and the evolution of American government.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1957.

G.W.S. Barrow

Robert Bruce

$95.00

G.W.S. Barrow’s Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland has long been recognized as a landmark study of both a pivotal monarch and the constitutional idea that underpinned Scotland’s survival as a polity in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Rather than presenting Bruce as a solitary hero, Barrow situates him within the matrix of feudal society, factional rivalries, and legal culture that shaped his reign. He argues that Bruce’s achievement cannot be explained solely by his courage or political skill; it was rooted in his ability to embody and channel the principle of the *communitas regni Scotie*—the “community of the realm”—a constitutional ideal that gave coherence to Scottish resistance during two decades of crisis. Through close reading of charters, governmental records, and chronicles, Barrow traces how this concept operated in practice, especially in moments of guardianship, vacancy, and national emergency, culminating in the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) as a practical analogue to contemporary continental theories of sovereignty.

The book is therefore both a political biography and a constitutional history, showing how Bruce’s ambitions intersected with the collective will of the realm. Barrow analyzes Bruce’s shifting allegiances—first a supporter of Edward I, then a leader of resistance, and finally king crowned in the wake of John Comyn’s killing—as embedded in the broader struggle for Scotland’s independence. He emphasizes the durability of the Scottish polity: its capacity to sustain corporate action without a monarch, its educated clergy’s continental connections, and its leaders’ use of legal and feudal language to articulate sovereignty. By linking Bruce’s career to the evolving idea of a national community, Barrow illuminates how a small kingdom preserved its integrity against a more powerful neighbor. The result is an indispensable work for historians of medieval Scotland, constitutional thought, and the comparative study of medieval state formation.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

Edited by Wayne S. Vucinich

Contemporary Yugoslavia

$95.00

Contemporary Yugoslavia: Twenty Years of Socialist Experiment offers a comprehensive analysis of Yugoslavia's political, economic, and social evolution since World War II. This volume, based on papers presented at a 1965 Stanford University conference, explores pivotal issues such as Yugoslavia's postwar reconstruction, its departure from Stalinist orthodoxy, and the adoption of "national communism." Featuring contributions from leading scholars, the book examines topics like Tito's leadership, the transformation of Yugoslav-Marxist thought, economic decentralization, and the complex nationality problem. The authors highlight Yugoslavia's unique trajectory, blending socialism with capitalistic reforms, and its impact on both domestic stability and international relations.

This insightful collection underscores the profound effects of wartime disruptions and Communist policies on Yugoslav society, from social modernization to enduring ethnic tensions. Essays delve into the struggle for national unity amid centrifugal forces, the role of strategic leadership, and the challenges of sustaining liberalization and democratization. For scholars and readers interested in Cold War history, socialist systems, or the Balkan region, this book provides a nuanced understanding of Yugoslavia's revolutionary path and its broader implications for global politics and social change.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

Edited by David Rock

Latin America in the 1940s

$49.95

Latin America in the 1940s: War and Postwar Transitions delves into the transformative effects of World War II and the Cold War on Latin America's political and social landscape. This decade, marked by "global shocks," reshaped the region’s international relations, replacing deep ties with Europe with unprecedented dependence on the United States. Internally, the period witnessed a fleeting shift toward democracy, labor union growth, and populist movements in many nations, only to see these gains rolled back by the late 1940s. The book explores how these upheavals created the framework for Latin America's political struggles and economic strategies in the decades that followed.

Through a multidisciplinary lens, the volume examines the interplay of external pressures and internal dynamics in shaping the era’s outcomes. Key chapters highlight the economic transformations fueled by industrialization and population growth, alongside the challenges of uneven development and class tensions. Political case studies reveal a spectrum of experiences, from Brazil's oscillation between authoritarianism and populism to Uruguay's democratic resilience. The text also considers the lasting impact of U.S. Cold War policies, which curtailed reformist movements and cemented conservative regimes. Ultimately, the book situates the 1940s as a pivotal watershed, emphasizing its role in crystallizing the region's integration into a new global order and laying the groundwork for its future political and economic trajectories.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Michel Crozier

The Trouble with America

$39.95

Michel Crozier’s The Trouble with America offers a penetrating, Tocquevillian examination of the United States by one of France’s most influential sociologists. Drawing on his first encounters with America in the 1940s—when he discovered a nation of labor idealism, pragmatic management, and ambitious social science—Crozier contrasts the optimism of “happy days” with what he diagnoses in the 1980s as a pervasive legalism and cultural hesitation. The United States, he argues, once taught the world how negotiation, bargaining, and voluntary association could channel conflict into productive change. By the Reagan era, however, those same institutions had become defensive, procedural, and immobilized: unions obsessed with rules, universities dispirited, students self-enclosed, and voluntary associations fragmented into barricades of self-protection. His central themes—the “fear of decision,” the “delirium of due process,” and the loss of “demon virtue”—capture the paradox of a society whose strengths have hardened into constraints.

Part cultural diagnosis, part comparative sociology, and part warning, Crozier’s book illuminates how America’s fixation on rights, transparency, and procedure risks undermining its ability to adapt and govern itself. His vivid illustrations range from postwar union meetings to contemporary student attitudes toward innovation, from environmental opposition to nuclear power to the decline of civic institutions like the PTA. Like Alexis de Tocqueville before him, Crozier speaks as a European admirer both anxious and hopeful: anxious about the consequences of political and intellectual stagnation, but hopeful that America can renew itself by investing in intellectual effort, scientific capacity, and institutional reform. Written in a moment of cultural uncertainty but strikingly prescient today, The Trouble with America challenges policymakers, educators, and civic leaders to reconsider the balance between rights and responsibility, procedure and decision, and to recover the pragmatic energy that once inspired global admiration.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

Jonathan Kelley and Herbert S. Klein

Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality

$39.95

Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality: A Theory Applied to the National Revolution in Bolivia by Jonathan Kelley and Herbert S. Klein investigates how revolutions reshape social structures, asking whether promises of equality endure or if inequality reemerges in new forms. The authors develop a theory that while revolutions from below—such as those in France, Russia, China, and Bolivia—abolish exploitative elites and initially reduce inequality, in the long run education, skills, land, and capital allow some among the formerly oppressed to rise faster than others. As these advantages accumulate and are transmitted to children, new forms of inherited privilege develop, and inequality begins to grow again. Revolutions, they argue, do improve standards of living for the majority, but not evenly, and not indefinitely.

The book applies this theory to Bolivia’s National Revolution of 1952, when the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario dismantled centuries-old elites, disbanded the army, redistributed land, and nationalized mines and industries. Drawing on an unusually rich dataset—including ethnographic fieldwork, census data, and a large household survey—the authors provide one of the first systematic analyses of how a successful radical revolution affected ordinary people. They examine pre-revolutionary inequality, describe the dramatic upheaval of 1952, and trace the consequences over the following decade and beyond: shifts in income distribution, changes in social mobility, and the persistence or rebirth of privilege. By combining theoretical modeling with rigorous empirical evidence, the book offers both a case study of Bolivia and a broader framework for understanding the paradoxical outcomes of revolutions worldwide.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

William Henry Ellison

A Self-Governing Dominion

$49.95

A Self-governing Dominion: California, 1849–1860 by William Henry Ellison traces California’s turbulent political evolution from the framing of its first constitution to the factional battles that culminated on the eve of the Civil War. Ellison interprets the decade as a formative era when Californians, spurred by circumstance and necessity, developed a strong ethos of self-rule—sometimes cooperative, often contentious, but always marked by a determination to assert autonomy in shaping local and state institutions. The narrative begins with military occupation and improvised legal systems in the wake of conquest, moving through the gold rush and the constitutional convention at Monterey, and continuing into the 1850s with debates over land ownership, Indian policy, vigilante justice, sectional division, and political patronage. At each stage, Ellison underscores the central theme: Californians perceived themselves as a people apart, compelled to devise political structures without waiting for distant authority.

Drawing upon both archival sources and established scholarship, Ellison reconstructs how the new state managed competing claims of sovereignty and legitimacy while simultaneously navigating national controversies over slavery, federal land policy, and Native dispossession. The book highlights emblematic episodes: the Bear Flag Revolt’s improvised republicanism, the persistence of alcalde justice amid American common-law innovations, the explosive constitutional debates over suffrage and slavery, and the dramatic contests between William Gwin and David Broderick, whose rivalry epitomized California’s struggle to define its political identity. Ellison emphasizes how fortuitous circumstances—California’s distance from Washington, the sudden influx of gold seekers, and the sectional tensions rending the nation—magnified the stakes of local decision-making. In presenting California as a “self-governing dominion,” Ellison provides not only a detailed account of a unique frontier political culture but also a reinterpretation of how the state’s formative decade secured its place within the Union while cultivating a tradition of political independence.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

William Perkins, With an Introduction and Annotations by Dale L. Morgan and James R. Scobie

William Perkins's Journal of Life at Sonora, 1849 - 1852

$95.00

William Perkins’s Journal of Life at Sonora, 1849–1852 opens a vivid, ground-level window onto the California Gold Rush that few Forty-niner narratives even attempt. Where most memoirs climax at landfall, Perkins “opens up like a flower in the sun” only after reaching the diggings, delivering a sustained, seen-from-within chronicle of Sonora—the uniquely cosmopolitan “Sonoranian Camp” of the Southern Mines. Edited and annotated by Dale L. Morgan and James R. Scobie, this definitive edition restores a voice long relegated to a footnote: an early Sonora merchant and town official with a reporter’s eye for social texture. Perkins writes from the streets and sluices of a boomtown remarkable for its foreign-born communities and—exceptionally for mining camps—its numerous women, from Sonoran and Chilean families to later French arrivals. The result is not merely a ledger of ounces and claims, but a sociological portrait in motion, alive to manners, languages, conflicts, and convivialities that made Sonora unlike any other camp.

The editors frame Perkins’s Sonora years with a gripping prelude: the company’s lesser-traveled crossing through Mexico in 1849, juxtaposed with the tart, often contradictory on-the-spot account by fellow traveler Samuel McNeil. Storm-tossed steamers, cholera-shadowed waystations, mule trains over Durango’s high sierra—these pages contextualize the “arrival” that Gold Rush literature typically treats as an endpoint. Morgan and Scobie’s introduction and notes sift names, dates, and local lore with archival rigor, clarifying contested biographical details and situating Perkins alongside the era’s immigrant networks and emergent institutions. For historians of the West, readers of travel writing, and anyone seeking the lived complexity behind Gold Rush myth, this book turns a little-known diarist into a central witness—one whose luminous, often surprising observations permanently enlarge the story of California’s Southern Mines.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl with a Foreword by Richard S. Kirkendall and an Essay on Sources by Roger M. Anders

Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961

$75.00

Explore the critical juncture in modern history when nuclear technology transitioned from secretive military innovation to a defining force in global politics, economics, and society. Atoms for Peace and War: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission, 1953–1961 provides a comprehensive narrative of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pivotal role in shaping nuclear policy during a transformative era. This authoritative account examines the evolution of atomic energy within the United States, charting its profound impact on military strategy, international diplomacy, and domestic economic development.

Spanning the years from Eisenhower’s secretive 1952 pre-inauguration briefing on nuclear technology to the conclusion of his presidency in 1961, this meticulously researched book delves into the operations of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the debates over nuclear testing, and the challenges of international cooperation in the nuclear age. The work sheds light on groundbreaking initiatives like the "Atoms for Peace" program, the revision of the Atomic Energy Act, and efforts to promote nuclear power, while also addressing the controversies surrounding nuclear fallout, disarmament, and the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance.

Based on unprecedented access to classified materials from the Eisenhower Presidential Library, the AEC archives, and Department of State records, this volume offers unparalleled insight into the policy decisions, technological advancements, and ethical dilemmas that defined an era. A compelling blend of technical analysis and historical narrative, Atoms for Peace and War is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the origins of nuclear policy and its enduring implications for the modern world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Robert E. Cole

Strategies for Learning

$95.00

Strategies for Learning: Small-Group Activities in American, Japanese, and Swedish Industry by Robert E. Cole offers a sweeping comparative analysis of how three advanced economies have sought to harness small-group activities—quality circles, autonomous teams, and participatory work practices—as tools for organizational innovation and competitiveness. Cole investigates why American firms were slower and less effective adopters than their Japanese and Swedish counterparts, tracing the interplay of culture, labor relations, managerial strategy, and national infrastructure in shaping both successes and failures. By situating small-group practices in the larger contexts of industrial democracy, organizational design, and global market pressures, the book demonstrates how work-group innovations are never merely technical fixes, but culturally mediated strategies for managing people and production.

Rich in empirical detail, the study draws on field research, company surveys, and policy documents to show how quality circles in Japan became institutionalized mass movements, how Sweden’s democratic workplace agenda produced ambitious but uneven experiments in self-managing teams, and why U.S. firms often treated participation as a fad rather than a long-term system. Cole frames these developments within theories of innovation, diffusion, and political economy, underscoring how national infrastructures and managerial coalitions enable—or hinder—the institutionalization of change. For scholars and practitioners alike, Strategies for Learning provides a nuanced, comparative account of workplace participation that illuminates enduring debates about culture, productivity, and the democratization of work.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Sara S. Berry

Fathers Work for Their Sons

$39.95

This book delves into the dynamic changes in Nigeria's economy, particularly focusing on the intersection of agricultural development and the burgeoning petroleum industry in the 1970s. The study centers on Yoruba cocoa farmers in Oy State, offering a detailed analysis of how the cocoa-producing sector shaped regional political economies and social mobility. While oil wealth overshadowed agriculture as the dominant economic driver, the book emphasizes the lasting importance of cocoa farming in rural communities. It explores how farmers navigated economic shifts, including the rising dominance of the oil sector, which exposed deep-rooted tensions and challenges, especially in terms of agricultural stagnation and growing inequality. Through a case study of farmers' use of agricultural surplus and social strategies, the book sheds light on how accumulation patterns influenced class formation, rural poverty, and political participation.

The author examines how Yoruba farmers’ reliance on traditional kinship structures and seniority to access resources influenced their involvement in both agricultural and commercial activities. Rather than fitting neatly into Marxist or neoliberal frameworks, the study uncovers how farming families and their descendants maneuvered through political and economic landscapes shaped by patronage, state policies, and opportunities for social mobility. Education is highlighted as a key avenue for upward mobility, allowing the children of cocoa farmers to transition into urban professions and business. By following individual life histories and the broader regional political context, the book provides a rich narrative of how social, economic, and political processes interwove to shape class structures, inequalities, and collective action within western Nigeria’s evolving economy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

Frank O. Miller

Minobe Tatsukichi

$95.00

Minobe Tatsukichi and the Evolution of Japanese Constitutionalism examines the life, work, and enduring impact of Minobe Tatsukichi, a pivotal figure in Japanese constitutional theory. While Minobe is often referenced in Western literature, his contributions have frequently been reduced to his association with the "emperor-organ theory" and his brief, dramatic clash with militarist factions during the 1935 Minobe Affair. This book seeks to expand beyond those limited narratives, exploring the depth and complexity of Minobe's scholarship, his influence on the interpretation of the Meiji Constitution, and his role in shaping modern Japanese political thought.

The study provides a detailed analysis of Minobe’s constitutional theories, tracing their implications for both prewar and postwar Japan. It situates Minobe as a key player in the evolution of liberal constitutionalism and its tensions with authoritarianism in Japan's modern era. By reevaluating Minobe's ideas in the context of Japan's political transitions—including the post-1945 constitutional reforms—the book sheds light on his lasting relevance. The narrative also addresses Minobe’s ambivalent position during the Occupation period, where his opposition to constitutional revision under American oversight marked a complex and often misunderstood chapter in his career. Through a comprehensive review of Minobe's writings, theoretical contributions, and historical impact, the book enriches our understanding of Japanese constitutional development and the intellectual currents that have shaped it.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

Martin Halliwell

American Health Crisis

$29.95

A history of U.S. public health emergencies and how we can turn the tide.

Despite enormous advances in medical science and public health education over the last century, access to health care remains a dominant issue in American life. U.S. health care is often hailed as the best in the world, yet the public health emergencies of today often echo the public health emergencies of yesterday: consider the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 and COVID-19, the displacement of the Dust Bowl and the havoc of Hurricane Maria, the Reagan administration’s antipathy toward the AIDS epidemic and the lack of accountability during the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Spanning the period from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson to that of Donald Trump, American Health Crisis illuminates how—despite the elevation of health care as a human right throughout the world—vulnerable communities in the United States continue to be victimized by structural inequalities across disparate geographies, income levels, and ethnic groups. Martin Halliwell views contemporary public health crises through the lens of historical and cultural revisionings, suturing individual events together into a narrative of calamity that has brought us to our current crisis in health politics. American Health Crisis considers the future of public health in the United States and, presenting a reinvigorated concept of health citizenship, argues that now is the moment to act for lasting change.

Leo E. Rose

Nepal

$49.95

Nepal: Strategy for Survival delves into the intricate interplay of geography, history, and cultural dynamics that have shaped Nepal’s foreign policy and its interactions with neighboring giants, India and China. Situated along the Himalayan slopes, Nepal’s central location has historically made it both a cultural and commercial bridge between South and East Asia. The book examines Nepal’s strategic importance in controlling trans-Himalayan trade routes, its evolving border politics, and its delicate balancing act between these two influential powers. The analysis extends beyond political strategies, considering the profound impact of Nepal’s ethnic diversity, topographical challenges, and historical connections to Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

Through a detailed exploration of Nepal’s historical and modern diplomatic efforts, the book highlights the nation’s struggle to maintain autonomy while adapting to external pressures and internal complexities. It discusses key moments of Nepal's history, such as its entangled trade and territorial negotiations with Tibet and India, as well as its response to modern geopolitical shifts. Nepal: Strategy for Survival offers a comprehensive understanding of how this small but strategically vital nation has navigated its role as both a mediator and a protector of its unique identity in the midst of powerful regional influences. This work is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the nuanced challenges of small-state diplomacy in a complex and dynamic region.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Michael B. Miller

Shanghai on the Metro

$95.00

Secret agents, gun runners, White Russians, and con men—they all play a part in Michael B. Miller's strikingly original study of interwar France. Based on extensive research in security files and a mass of printed sources, Shanghai on the Métro shows how a distinctive milieu of spies and spy literature emerged between the two world wars, reflecting the atmosphere and concerns of these years.

Miller argues that French fascination with intrigue between the wars reveals a far more assured and playful national mood than historians have hitherto discerned in the final decades of the Third Republic. But the larger history set in motion by World War I and the subsequent reading of French history into global history are the true subjects of this work. Reconstituting through his own narratives the histories of interwar travel and adventure and the willful turning of contemporary affairs into a source of romance, Miller recovers the ambience and special qualities of the age that produced its intrigues and its tales of spies.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Lorne J. Kavic

India's Quest for Security

$39.95

India's Quest for Security: Defence Policies, 1947-1965 explores the intricate challenges faced by India in its pursuit of national security during its formative years as an independent nation. Against the backdrop of two immutable truths of international relations—the primacy of national self-interest and the enduring role of military power—the book examines how India navigated the complexities of defense policy from 1947 to 1965. It scrutinizes the strategies adopted by the Indian government under Jawaharlal Nehru, emphasizing the balance sought between security needs and resource limitations, and the intersection of moral postures with practical military actions. The study questions whether India’s espoused principles of nonviolence and peaceful coexistence genuinely shaped its defense policies or whether traditional power considerations dominated its approach.

Central to the book is an analysis of India's response to external threats from Pakistan and China, as well as its evolving military posture amidst global and regional tensions. The text delves into key episodes, including India's military engagements in Kashmir, Goa, Nagaland, and its border conflicts with China, highlighting how these shaped the country's defense priorities and expenditures. Furthermore, it investigates the processes through which defense policies were formulated, often reflecting Nehru’s personal influence, and evaluates the impact of these policies on India's military capabilities and international standing. Through a meticulous review of speeches, parliamentary debates, official documents, and firsthand accounts, the book offers insights into India’s strategic decisions, the challenges of policy implementation, and the enduring implications for its defense strategies post-1965.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

Jacques Lévesque

The Enigma of 1989

$39.95

The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe explores the pivotal events of 1989 that reshaped the global political landscape, focusing on the role of the Soviet Union in the collapse of Eastern European Communist regimes. The book centers on the unexpected Soviet passivity in the face of these changes, particularly under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. Unlike the rigid Soviet policies of the past, Gorbachev’s approach allowed for a peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The author examines how this surprising turn of events was not just a sign of Soviet weakness but also a strategic move within Gorbachev’s broader vision for a transformed international order, where Eastern European democratization was part of a controlled process aimed at benefiting the USSR.

The study argues that Gorbachev’s policies were driven by a new ideology of transition, which, despite its roots in Marxism and Leninism, sought to establish a world order based on new, universal values. This ideology, coupled with the immense risks Gorbachev took, helped him manage the crises in Eastern Europe, neutralize conservative opposition, and maintain Soviet influence in international politics until the fall of Eastern Europe in 1989. The book delves into the internal and external dynamics that led to the USSR’s passive role in the dissolution of Eastern Europe and links it to Gorbachev's broader efforts to transform both Soviet foreign policy and domestic politics. Ultimately, it concludes that the collapse of the Eastern European regimes marked the breaking point of Gorbachev’s ambitions, as it led to a loss of control over both the Soviet Union and his foreign policy initiatives.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

John S. Galbraith

Crown and Charter

$95.00

Crown and Charter: The Early Years of the British South Africa Company delves into the complex origins and operations of one of the most controversial enterprises of European expansion in Africa. This meticulously researched volume examines the British South Africa Company, a chartered venture driven by Cecil John Rhodes' ambition and the permissive stance of the imperial government. While Rhodes' dominance shaped much of the company’s direction, the book illuminates the broader dynamics, including the interactions between the London board, imperial policymakers, and local contexts in Central Africa. Through vivid detail, the narrative explores the bold ambitions, ethical ambiguities, and far-reaching consequences of the company's early activities, including its ties to stock market speculation and its impact on indigenous populations.

The book balances a critical lens with historical analysis, capturing the contradictions between the company's stated ideals of promoting Christianity, commerce, and civilization and its often self-serving pursuits. With nuanced discussions on Rhodes' character, the moral implications of colonial endeavors, and the passive complicity of other stakeholders, the text provides a comprehensive view of this pivotal chapter in British imperial history. A compelling read for scholars and history enthusiasts alike, Crown and Charter offers both a detailed study of the British South Africa Company and a broader reflection on the ethics and realities of colonialism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

F. G. Bailey

Politics and Social Change

$39.95

Politics and Social Change: Orissa in 1959 offers a dual exploration of political dynamics and theoretical frameworks, reflecting both the region's evolving democratic practices and broader questions in social anthropology. This work builds on earlier studies conducted in Orissa between 1952 and 1955, which examined village-level power dynamics and conflicts between aboriginal Konds and Hindu settlers. In this volume, the author extends the inquiry to explore how the modern institutions of representative democracy interact with traditional forms of social and political organization in Orissa, providing a detailed case study of a society undergoing significant transformation.

Set against the backdrop of political shifts in Orissa during 1959—a year marked by coalition-building and intense political maneuvering—the book captures the practical workings of parliamentary democracy in a diverse and stratified society. The unique political environment, characterized by alliances between the Congress party and smaller opposition groups, created an ideal context for observing the interplay of crisis and action, essential for social analysis. Additionally, the book critically examines how the methodologies of social anthropology, traditionally applied to smaller, isolated communities, can be adapted to analyze complex, multifaceted societies like Orissa, offering valuable insights for scholars of developing nations.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

Eme O. Awa

Federal Government in Nigeria

$95.00

The book offers a critical analysis of Nigeria's political institutions, examining the country's government and constitution in depth. Aimed at stimulating intellectual engagement, particularly for students, it covers key topics such as the development of the party system, the structure of the federation, minority rights concerns, and the relationship between human rights and the social order. The study also explores policy development, the social philosophy underpinning the political system, and the broader social implications. By providing a conceptual framework for understanding Nigeria's political landscape, the book highlights the challenges of balancing minority fears with national unity and offers insight into the country's governance and its social and political foundations.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

R. A. Burchell

The San Francisco Irish, 1848-1880

$39.95

In this vivid social history, R. A. Burchell follows the Irish who crossed not only the Atlantic but an entire continent to make a new kind of urban life in Gold Rush California. The San Francisco Irish, 1848–1880 overturns East Coast narratives of entrenched nativism to show how a city without an inherited ruling class—exploding from fewer than a thousand residents to a quarter million in three decades—opened political, economic, and ecclesiastical space to newcomers. Drawing on census manuscripts, city directories, newspapers, and institutional records, Burchell reconstructs a community that by 1880 comprised roughly a third of San Francisco’s inhabitants, with Catholicism the city’s largest denomination. He tracks the rise of Irish financiers and builders (the Donahues), the founding of banks and orphanages, and early victories at the ballot box—from Frank McCoppin’s mayoralty to Eugene Casserly’s seat in the U.S. Senate—arguing that California’s compressed, improvisational urbanization blunted older hierarchies and recast ethnic power.

Burchell does not romanticize. Against the major theme of mobility and opportunity runs a persistent minor key: structural inequality, the burdens of poverty and disease, and the familiar, if muted, suspicions attached to Catholic allegiance. By juxtaposing riot-scarred Boston and Philadelphia with San Francisco’s cross-confessional “live and let live” ethos, he explains both the city’s unusual tolerance and the limits of that tolerance. The result is a finely grained account of how Irish migrants fashioned institutions, leveraged patronage, and settled permanently—evident in lengthening residence patterns—within a volatile extractive economy driven by gold, railroads, and Nevada silver. A model case study in immigrant urban history, The San Francisco Irish reframes the nineteenth-century American city from the Pacific slope, where the absence of a long past made the future, for a time, radically negotiable.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

William A. Schwartz and Charles Derber

The Nuclear Seduction

$95.00

The Nuclear Seduction: Why the Arms Race Doesn’t Matter—And What Does presents a provocative challenge to the conventional wisdom surrounding nuclear weapons and global security. The authors argue that the relentless focus on the arms race—the build-up and reduction of nuclear arsenals—misdirects attention from the true drivers of nuclear danger: geopolitical conflicts and superpower interventions. Drawing on historical case studies and rigorous analysis, the book reveals that the number and nature of nuclear weapons have far less impact on global safety than the volatile political and military entanglements of the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly in the Third World.

Moving beyond the "weapons paradigm," this groundbreaking work urges readers to consider how superpower actions in regions such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central America perpetuate crises that could escalate into nuclear catastrophe. The book critiques arms control efforts as inadequate distractions and calls for a deeper reckoning with the political strategies that fan the flames of global instability. With a blend of incisive critique and bold insight, The Nuclear Seduction challenges policymakers, activists, and citizens alike to rethink the roots of nuclear peril and focus on the global conflicts that threaten humanity’s future.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Jonathan Kelley and Herbert S. Klein

Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality

$95.00

Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality: A Theory Applied to the National Revolution in Bolivia by Jonathan Kelley and Herbert S. Klein investigates how revolutions reshape social structures, asking whether promises of equality endure or if inequality reemerges in new forms. The authors develop a theory that while revolutions from below—such as those in France, Russia, China, and Bolivia—abolish exploitative elites and initially reduce inequality, in the long run education, skills, land, and capital allow some among the formerly oppressed to rise faster than others. As these advantages accumulate and are transmitted to children, new forms of inherited privilege develop, and inequality begins to grow again. Revolutions, they argue, do improve standards of living for the majority, but not evenly, and not indefinitely.

The book applies this theory to Bolivia’s National Revolution of 1952, when the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario dismantled centuries-old elites, disbanded the army, redistributed land, and nationalized mines and industries. Drawing on an unusually rich dataset—including ethnographic fieldwork, census data, and a large household survey—the authors provide one of the first systematic analyses of how a successful radical revolution affected ordinary people. They examine pre-revolutionary inequality, describe the dramatic upheaval of 1952, and trace the consequences over the following decade and beyond: shifts in income distribution, changes in social mobility, and the persistence or rebirth of privilege. By combining theoretical modeling with rigorous empirical evidence, the book offers both a case study of Bolivia and a broader framework for understanding the paradoxical outcomes of revolutions worldwide.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.