NYU Press

In the nineteenth century, New York City underwent a tremendous demographic transformation driven by European immigration, the growth of a native-born population, and the expansion of one of the largest African American communities in the North. New York's free blacks were extremely politically active, lobbying for equal rights at home and an end to Southern slavery. As their activism increased, so did discrimination against them, most brutally illustrated by bloody attacks during the 1863 New York City Draft Riots.
The struggle for civil rights did not extend to equal gender roles, and black male leaders encouraged women to remain in the domestic sphere, serving as caretakers, moral educators, and nurses to their families and community. Yet as Jane E. Dabel demonstrates, separate spheres were not a reality for New York City's black people, who faced dire poverty, a lopsided sex ratio, racialized violence, and a high mortality rate, all of which conspired to prevent men from gaining respectable employment and political clout. Consequently, many black women came out of the home and into the streets to work, build networks with other women, and fight against racial injustice.
A Respectable Woman reveals the varied and powerful lives led by black women, who, despite the exhortations of male reformers, occupied public roles as gender and race reformers.

For decades, women's history has been one of the most dynamic fields in all of American history. More recently, the study of manhood has drawn the attention of scholars, students, and general readers. Despite the obvious intersections of female and male gender roles, the nineteenth-century doctrine of "separate spheres" has dominated historical inquiry. The shared experiences and complementary lives of men and women have rarely been considered. This important new anthology, reflecting recent trends in the history of men and women, calls for the reintegration of the study of gender.
Only by focusing on the similarities, as well as the differences, in the lives of men and women can we achieve a fully representative portrait. The essays in this exciting collection, most commissioned exclusively for this book, cover American history from colonial times to the present, representing multicultural and interdisciplinary scholarship at its most persuasive.
Combining compelling subjects and thorough research, the contributors represent an appealing mix of established authors and new scholars. A lively blend of experience and innovation, A Shared Experiencemarks an important step in the development of American history and the burgeoning field of gender studies.

Time, it has been said, is the enemy. In an era of harried lives, time seems increasingly precious as hours and days telescope and our lives often seem to be flitting past. And yet, at other times, the minutes drag on, each tick of the clock excruciatingly drawn out. What explains this seeming paradox?
Based upon a full decade's empirical research, Michael G. Flaherty's new book offers remarkable insights on this most universal human experience. Flaherty surveys hundreds of individuals of all ages in an attempt to ascertain how such phenomena as suffering, violence, danger, boredom, exhilaration, concentration, shock, and novelty influence our perception of time. Their stories make for intriguing reading, by turns familiar and exotic, mundane and dramatic, horrific and funny.
A qualitative and quantitative tour de force, A Watched Pot presents what may well be the first fully integrated theory of time and will be of interest to scientists, humanists, social scientists and the educated public alike.
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book.

What role did manhood play in early American Politics? In A Republic of Men, Mark E. Kann argues that the American founders aspired to create a "republic of men" but feared that "disorderly men" threatened its birth, health, and longevity. Kann demonstrates how hegemonic norms of manhood–exemplified by "the Family Man," for instance--were deployed as a means of stigmatizing unworthy men, rewarding responsible men with citizenship, and empowering exceptional men with positions of leadership and authority, while excluding women from public life.
Kann suggests that the founders committed themselves in theory to the democratic proposition that all men were created free and equal and could not be governed without their own consent, but that they in no way believed that "all men" could be trusted with equal liberty, equal citizenship, or equal authority. The founders developed a "grammar of manhood" to address some difficult questions about public order. Were America's disorderly men qualified for citizenship? Were they likely to recognize manly leaders, consent to their authority, and defer to their wisdom? A Republic of Men compellingly analyzes the ways in which the founders used a rhetoric of manhood to stabilize American politics.

While it lasted only sixteen months, King Philip’s War (1675-1676) was arguably one of the most significant of the colonial wars that wracked early America. As the first major military crisis to directly strike one of the Empire’s most important possessions: the Massachusetts Bay Colony, King Philip’s War marked the first time that Massachusetts had to mobilize mass numbers of ordinary, local men to fight. In this exhaustive social history and community study of Essex County, Massachusetts’s militia, Kyle F. Zelner boldly challenges traditional interpretations of who was called to serve during this period.
Drawing on muster and pay lists as well as countless historical records, Zelner demonstrates that Essex County’s more upstanding citizens were often spared from impressments, while the “rabble” — criminals, drunkards, the poor— were forced to join active fighting units, with town militia committees selecting soldiers who would be least missed should they die in action. Enhanced by illustrations and maps, A Rabble in Arms shows that, despite heroic illusions of a universal military obligation, town fathers, to damaging effects, often placed local and personal interests above colonial military concerns.

In A Politics of the Ordinary, Thomas Dumm dramatizes how everyday life in the United States intersects with and is influenced by the power of events, on the one hand, and forces of conformity and normalcy on the other. Combining poststructuralist analysis with a sympathetic reading of a strain of American thought that begins with Emerson and culminates in the work of Stanley Cavell, A Politics of the Ordinary investigates incidents from everyday life, political spectacles, and popular culture.
Whether juxtaposing reflections about boredom in rural New Mexico with Emerson's theory of constitutional amendment, Richard Nixon's letter of resignation with Thoreau's writings to overcome quiet desperation, or demonstrating how Disney's Toy Story allegorizes the downsizing of the American white-collar work force, Dumm's constant concern is to show how the ordinary is the primary source of the democratic political imagination.

Winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education

Taking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday life. Tracing the production of Asian American selfhood from the era of Asian Exclusion through the Global War on Terror, A Race So Different explores the legal paradox whereby U.S. law apprehends the Asian American body as simultaneously excluded from and included within the national body politic.





Bringing together broadly defined forms of performance, from artistic works such as Madame Butterfly to the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the Cambodian American deportation cases of the twenty-first century, this book invites conversation about how Asian American performance uses the stage to document, interrogate, and complicate the processes of racialization in U.S. law. Through his impressive use of a rich legal and cultural archive, Chambers-Letson articulates a robust understanding of the construction of social and racial realities in the contemporary United States.

Does psychoanalysis have a future?
Psychoanalysis is not a relic of a bygone era, argues Jeffrey B. Rubin in A Psychoanalysis for Our Time. Rather, it has profound relevance for our troubled time.
Steering a balanced course between Freud's virulent attackers and his loyalist defenders, Rubin discerns both blind spots and hidden strengths in psychoanalysis. He reveals its covert authoritarianism, Byzantine politics, censorship of dissident thinkers, residual sexism, and overly simplistic accounts of self. A Psychoanalysis for Our Time does not only cogently critique psychoanalysis, however; it also offers a visionary approach for its renewal, based on cultivating greater historical, theoretical, and methodological self-awareness within psychoanalysis.
Drawing on history, deconstructionism, feminism, anthropology, and Eastern meditative disciplines, Rubin portrays a psychoanalysis that is self-reflective and non-authoritarian, pluralistic and emancipatory. Encyclopedic in scope, integrative in spirit, A Psychoanalysis for Our Time is a brilliant and landmark work.

Despite the apparent progress in women's legal status, the law retains a profoundly male bias, and as such contributes to the pervasive violence and injustice against women.
In A Law of Her Own, the authors propose to radically change law's fundamental paradigm by introducing a "reasonable woman standard" for measuring men's behavior. Advocating that courts apply this standard to the conduct of men-and women-in legal settings where women are overwhelmingly the injured parties, the authors seek to eliminate the victimization and objectification of women by dismantling part of the legal structure that supports their subordination.
A woman-based legal standard-focusing on respect for bodily integrity, agency, and autonomy-would help rectify the imbalance in how society and its legal system view sexual and gender-based harassment, rape, stalking, battery, domestic imprisonment, violence, and death.
Examining the bias of the existing "reasonable person" standard through analysis of various court cases and judicial decisions, A Law of Her Own aims to balance the law to incorporate women's values surrounding sex and violence.

Chronologically charts the histories of societies in the Islamic World

The Islamic world—defined as those regions in which Islam is the dominant or single most important religion—covers territories as far apart as Morocco and Indonesia, Somalia, and Bosnia and includes an extraordinary range of societies and cultures. In A Modern History of the Islamic World, eminent scholar Reinhard Schulze charts the history of these societies in the twentieth century, revealing what they have in common as well as their equally profound differences.

Rather than stringing together individual studies of different countries, the book is structured chronologically, tracing political change in the context of culture and society. Schulze opens with a survey of the impact of colonialism and its attendant modernizing effects on the Islamic world. He then moves on to examine the rise of bourgeois nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, the era of independence movements, the relationship between Islamic cultures and the "republican" political culture of the Third World, the reassertion of Islamic ideologies in the 1970s and 1980s and, finally, the issues surrounding the relationship between Islamic culture and civil society that dominated debate in the 1990s.

A Modern History of the Islamic World provides a clear overview of the ways in which twentieth century modernism affected the societies of the Islamic world and how modernism was developed from an Islamic perspective.

An anthology of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies's most provactive LGBT scholarship

This compendious, cutting-edge volume offers a broad array of the most provocative gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender scholarship produced by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) over the first decade (1986-1996) of its existence at the CUNY Graduate School.

CLAGS has had a profound and legitimizing influence on the establishment of gay and lesbian studies as a discipline. Thousands have attended its events, featuring hundreds of scholars, activists, and cultural workers; many thousands more have lamented how they would have liked to have been there. With this book, they finally, vicariously, can be.

Divided into five parts—on identities as they revolve around gender and sexuality; on the terrains of homosexual history; on mind-body relations; on laws and economics; and on policy issues related to gay youth, AIDS, and aging—A Queer World offers a compelling panorama of gay and lesbian life. Featuring the work, among others, of such figures as Yukiko Hanawa, Will Roscoe, Jewelle L. Gomez, Jonathan Ned Katz, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Jeffrey Escoffier, Janice M. Irvine, Kendall Thomas, Gilbert Herdt, Vivien Ng, Douglas Crimp, Walt Odets, Serena Nanda, Cindy Patton, Michael Moon, William Byne, and Randolph Trumback, A Queer World is distinctive in its focus on the social sciences and issues relating to public policy. Consisting largely of previously unpublished essays, this volume—and its companion volume Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures—is an invaluable addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in the study of sexuality.

Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry is, without question, the major literary achievement of the early Middle Ages (c. 700-1100). In no other vernacular language does such a vast store of verbal treasures exist for so extended a period of time. For twenty years the definitive guide to that literature has been Stanley B. Greenfield's 1965 Critical History of Old English Literature. Now this classic has been extensively revised and updated to make it more valuable than ever to both the student and scholar.

Since the end of the Second World War, poverty in the United States has been a persistent focus of social anxiety, public debate, and federal policy. This volume argues convincingly that we will not be able to reduce or eliminate poverty until we take the political factors that contribute to its continuation into account.
Ideal for course use, A New Introduction to Poverty opens with a historical overview of the major intellectual and political debates surrounding poverty in the United States. Several factors have received inadequate attention: the impact of poverty on women; the synergy of racism and poverty; race and gender stratification of the workplace; and, crucially, the ways in which the powerful use their resources to maintain the economic status quo.
Contributors include Mimi Abramovitz, Peter Alcock, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Raymond Franklin, Herman George Jr., Michael B. Katz, Marlene Kim, Rebecca Morales, Sandra Patton, Valerie Polakow, Jackie Pope, Jill Quadagno, David C. Ranney, Barbara Ransby, Bette Woody, and Maxine Baca Zinn.

In A Great Conspiracy against Our Race, Peter Vellon explores how Italian immigrants, a once undesirable and “swarthy” race, assimilated into dominant white culture through the influential national and radical Italian language press in New York City.

Racial history has always been the thorn in America’s side, with a swath of injustices—slavery, lynching, segregation, and many other ills—perpetrated against black people. This very history is complicated by, and also dependent on, what constitutes a white person in this country. Many of the European immigrant groups now considered white also had to struggle with their own racial identities.

Examining the press as a cultural production of the Italian immigrant community, this book investigates how this immigrant press constructed race, class, and identity from 1886 through 1920. Their frequent coverage of racially charged events of the time, as well as other topics such as capitalism and religion, reveals how these papers constructed a racial identity as Italian, American, and white.

A Great Conspiracy against Our Race vividly illustrates how the immigrant press was a site where socially constructed categories of race, color, civilization, and identity were reworked, created, contested, and negotiated. Vellon also uncovers how Italian immigrants filtered societal pressures and redefined the parameters of whiteness, constructing their own identity. This work is an important contribution to not only Italian American history, but America’s history of immigration and race.

An essential introduction to the pre-eminent philosopher Michel Foucault

In such seminal works as Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, the late philosopher Michel Foucault explored what our politics, our sexuality, our societal conventions, and our changing notions of truth told us about ourselves. In the process, Foucault garnered a reputation as one of the pre-eminent philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century and has served as a primary influence on successive generations of philosophers and cultural critics.

With A Foucault Primer, Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace bring Foucault's work into focus for the uninitiated. Written in crisp and concise prose, A Foucault Primer explicates three central concepts of Foucauldian theory—discourse, power, and the subject—and suggests that Foucault’s work has much yet to contribute to contemporary debate.

An essential introduction to the pre-eminent philosopher Michel Foucault

In such seminal works as Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, the late philosopher Michel Foucault explored what our politics, our sexuality, our societal conventions, and our changing notions of truth told us about ourselves. In the process, Foucault garnered a reputation as one of the pre-eminent philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century and has served as a primary influence on successive generations of philosophers and cultural critics.

With A Foucault Primer, Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace bring Foucault's work into focus for the uninitiated. Written in crisp and concise prose, A Foucault Primer explicates three central concepts of Foucauldian theory—discourse, power, and the subject—and suggests that Foucault’s work has much yet to contribute to contemporary debate.

Historians often rely on a handful of unusual cases to illustrate the absence of free speech in the colonies—such as that of Richard Barnes, who had his arms broken and a hole bored through his tongue for seditious words against the governor of Virginia. In this definitive and accessible work, Larry Eldridge convincingly debunks this view by revealing surprising evidence of free speech in early America.
Using the court records of every American colony that existed before 1700 and an analysis of over 1,200 seditious speech cases sifted from those records, A Distant Heritage shows how colonists experienced a dramatic expansion during the seventeenth century of their freedom to criticize government and its officials. Exploring important changes in the roles of juries and appeals, the nature of prosecution and punishment, and the pattern of growing leniency, Eldridge also shows us why this expansion occurred when it did. He concludes that the ironic combination of tumult and destabilization on the one hand, and steady growth and development on the other, made colonists more willing to criticize authority openly and officials less able to prevent it. That, in turn, established a foundation for the more celebrated flowering of colonial dissent against English authority in the eighteenth century.
Steeped in primary sources and richly narrated, this is an invaluable addition to the library of anyone interested in legal history, colonial America, or the birth of free speech in the United States.

In A Great Conspiracy against Our Race, Peter Vellon explores how Italian immigrants, a once undesirable and “swarthy” race, assimilated into dominant white culture through the influential national and radical Italian language press in New York City.

Racial history has always been the thorn in America’s side, with a swath of injustices—slavery, lynching, segregation, and many other ills—perpetrated against black people. This very history is complicated by, and also dependent on, what constitutes a white person in this country. Many of the European immigrant groups now considered white also had to struggle with their own racial identities.

Examining the press as a cultural production of the Italian immigrant community, this book investigates how this immigrant press constructed race, class, and identity from 1886 through 1920. Their frequent coverage of racially charged events of the time, as well as other topics such as capitalism and religion, reveals how these papers constructed a racial identity as Italian, American, and white.

A Great Conspiracy against Our Race vividly illustrates how the immigrant press was a site where socially constructed categories of race, color, civilization, and identity were reworked, created, contested, and negotiated. Vellon also uncovers how Italian immigrants filtered societal pressures and redefined the parameters of whiteness, constructing their own identity. This work is an important contribution to not only Italian American history, but America’s history of immigration and race.

A collection of pronouncements, edicts, and scriptures predicting the apocalypse

The approach of the year 2000 has made the study of apocalyptic movements trendy. But groups anticipating the end of the world will continue to predict Armageddon even after the calendar clicks to triple 0s.

A Doomsday Reader brings together pronouncements, edicts, and scriptures written by prominent apocalyptic movements from a wide range of traditions and ideologies to offer an exceptional look into their belief systems.
Focused on attaining paradise, millenarianism often anticipates great, cosmic change. While most think of religious belief as motivating such fervor, Daniels' comparative approach encompasses secular movements such as environmentalism and the Montana Freemen, and argues that such groups are often more political than religious in nature.

The book includes documents from groups such as the Branch Davidians, the Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, and white supremacists. Each document is preceded by a substantive introduction placing the movement and its beliefs in context.

This important overview of contemporary politics of the End will remain a valuable resource long after the year 2000 has come and gone.

"This is an
extraordinary and ground-breaking book, a wonderfully creative mix of fact and
theory, imagination and drama. Anyone with an interest in law, history, or, for
that matter, great storytelling will fall in love with A Death at Crooked Creek. The startling origin of the complex
'intention exception' to the hearsay evidence rule becomes canvas on which a
grand and marvelously detailed tale is told. This is modern narrative at its
best: a marriage of spectacular writing and hard, documented truth presented by
a brilliant author who doubles as a gifted and fastidious legal scholar and
historian."

—Andrew Popper,
American University


One winter night in
1879, at a lonely Kansas campsite near Crooked Creek, a man was shot to death.
The dead man’s traveling companion identified him as John Hillmon, a cowboy
from Lawrence who had been attempting to carve out a life on the blustery
prairie. The case might have been soon forgotten and the apparent widow, Sallie
Hillmon, left to mourn—except for the $25,000 life insurance policies Hillmon
had taken out shortly before his departure. The insurance companies refused to
pay on the policies, claiming that the dead man was not John Hillmon, and
Sallie was forced to take them to court in a case that would reach the Supreme
Court twice. The companies’ case rested on a crucial piece of evidence: a faded
love letter written by a disappeared cigarmaker, declaring his intent to travel
westward with a “man named Hillmon.”


In A Death at
Crooked Creek, Marianne Wesson re-examines the long-neglected evidence in
the case of the Kansas cowboy and his wife, recreating the court scenes that
led to a significant Supreme Court ruling on the admissibility of hearsay
evidence. Wesson employs modern forensic methods to examine the body of the
dead man, attempting to determine his true identity and finally put this
fascinating mystery to rest.


This engaging and
vividly imagined work combines the drama, intrigue, and emotion of excellent
storytelling with cutting-edge forensic investigation techniques and legal
theory. Wesson’s superbly imagined A Death at Crooked Creek will
have general readers, history buffs, and legal scholars alike wondering whether
history, and the Justices, may have misunderstood altogether the events at that
bleak winter campsite.

When we imagine the activities of Asian American women in the mid-twentieth century, our first thoughts are not of skiing, beauty pageants, magazine reading, and sororities. Yet, Shirley Jennifer Lim argues, these are precisely the sorts of leisure practices many second generation Chinese, Filipina, and Japanese American women engaged in during this time.
In A Feeling of Belonging, Lim highlights the cultural activities of young, predominantly unmarried Asian American women from 1930 to 1960. This period marks a crucial generation—the first in which American-born Asians formed a critical mass and began to make their presence felt in the United States. Though they were distinguished from previous generations by their American citizenship, it was only through these seemingly mundane “American”activities that they were able to overcome two-dimensional stereotypes of themselves as kimono-clad “Orientals.”
Lim traces the diverse ways in which these young women sought claim to cultural citizenship, exploring such topics as the nation's first Asian American sorority, Chi Alpha Delta; the cultural work of Chinese American actress Anna May Wong; Asian American youth culture and beauty pageants; and the achievement of fame of three foreign-born Asian women in the late 1950s. By wearing poodle skirts, going to the beach, and producing magazines, she argues, they asserted not just their American-ness, but their humanity: a feeling of belonging.

Explores the ways in which sexuality, subjectivity and sociality have been discursively produced in various historical and cultural contexts

The book begins by putting gay and lesbian sexuality and politics in historical context and demonstrates how and why queer theory emerged in the West in the late twentieth century. Sullivan goes on to provide a detailed overview of the complex ways in which queer theory has been employed, covering a diversity of key topics including: race, sadomasochism, straight sex, fetishism, community, popular culture, transgender, and performativity. Each chapter focuses on a distinct issue or topic, provides a critical analysis of the specific ways in which it has been responded to by critics (including Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adrienne Rich and Laura Mulvey), introduces key terms, and uses contemporary cinematic texts as examples.

A Critical Introduction to Religion in
the Americas argues
that we cannot understand religion in the Americas without understanding its
marginalized communities. Despite frequently voiced doubts among religious
studies scholars, it makes the case that theology, and particularly liberation
theology, is still useful, but it must be reframed to attend to the ways in
which religion is actually experienced on the ground. That is, a liberation
theology that assumes a need to work on behalf of the poor can seem out of
touch with a population experiencing huge Pentecostal and Charismatic growth,
where the focus is not on inequality or social action but on individual
relationships with the divine.

By
drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic sources, this volume provides
a basic introduction to the study of religion and theology in the Latino/a,
Black, and Latin American contexts, and then shows how theology can be reframed
to better speak to the concerns of both religious studies and the real people
the theologians' work is meant to represent. Informed by
the dialogue partners explored throughout the text, this volume presents a
hemispheric approach to discussing lived religious movements. While not
dismissive of liberation theologies, this approach is critical of their past
and offers challenges to their future as well as suggestions for preventing
their untimely demise. It is clear that the liberation theologies of tomorrow
cannot look like the liberation theologies of today.

What is the problem of sexual love? Neither inclusive of all aspects of sexuality nor fully synonomous with the idealized mythos of romantic love, sexual love as desire is marked by the highly charged intersection of sexuality and romantic love; it is a space where gender is imagined and enacted.
In A Craving Vacancy, Susan Ostrov Weisser examines sexuality in the context of changing ideas of romantic love and feminity in Victorian Britain. Focusing her analysis on the works of Samuel Richardson, George Eliot, and Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Weisser reveals the complex relationship between conceptions of romantic passion and ideologies of sexuality. She illuminates the Victorian period as a time when these conceptions were shifting according to changing ideas of gender. With close attention to textual details, she introduces the concept of Moral Femininity, placing it in useful opposition to the competing Victorian ideal of the Lady.
By forging a direct link between sexuality and romantic love ideology in the 19th century, and by highlighting the way in which the literary preoccupation with these subjects arises from anxieties about the construction of gender, A Craving Vacancy breaks important new ground.

A Sociology of World Religions presents a comparative analysis of the world's religions, focusing on the differences and interrelationships between religious elites and lay masses. In each case the volume contextualizes how the relationships between these two religious forms fit within, and are influenced by, the wider socio-political environment.
After introducing the book's major themes, the volume introduces and builds upon an analysis of Weber's model of religious action, drawing on Durkheim, Marxist scholars, and the work of contemporary sociologists and anthropolgists. The following chapters each focus on major religious cultures, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of China and Japan. This ambitious project is the first to offer a comparison of the popular, or folk, forms of religion around the world.
Sharot's accessible introductions to each of the world religions, synthesizing a vast literature on popular religion from sociology, anthropology, and historians of religion, make the project ideal for course use. His comparative approach and original analyses will prove rewarding even for experts on each of the world religions.

A Sociology of World Religions presents a comparative analysis of the world's religions, focusing on the differences and interrelationships between religious elites and lay masses. In each case the volume contextualizes how the relationships between these two religious forms fit within, and are influenced by, the wider socio-political environment.
After introducing the book's major themes, the volume introduces and builds upon an analysis of Weber's model of religious action, drawing on Durkheim, Marxist scholars, and the work of contemporary sociologists and anthropolgists. The following chapters each focus on major religious cultures, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of China and Japan. This ambitious project is the first to offer a comparison of the popular, or folk, forms of religion around the world.
Sharot's accessible introductions to each of the world religions, synthesizing a vast literature on popular religion from sociology, anthropology, and historians of religion, make the project ideal for course use. His comparative approach and original analyses will prove rewarding even for experts on each of the world religions.

What is the problem of sexual love? Neither inclusive of all aspects of sexuality nor fully synonomous with the idealized mythos of romantic love, sexual love as desire is marked by the highly charged intersection of sexuality and romantic love; it is a space where gender is imagined and enacted.
In A Craving Vacancy, Susan Ostrov Weisser examines sexuality in the context of changing ideas of romantic love and feminity in Victorian Britain. Focusing her analysis on the works of Samuel Richardson, George Eliot, and Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Weisser reveals the complex relationship between conceptions of romantic passion and ideologies of sexuality. She illuminates the Victorian period as a time when these conceptions were shifting according to changing ideas of gender. With close attention to textual details, she introduces the concept of Moral Femininity, placing it in useful opposition to the competing Victorian ideal of the Lady.
By forging a direct link between sexuality and romantic love ideology in the 19th century, and by highlighting the way in which the literary preoccupation with these subjects arises from anxieties about the construction of gender, A Craving Vacancy breaks important new ground.

From Plato to Rorty, A Brief History of Citizenship provides a concise survey of the idea of citizenship. All major periods are covered, beginning with Greece and Rome, continuing on to the Middle Ages, the American and French Revolutions, and finally to the modern era. Heater effectively argues that we cannot begin to understand our current conditions until we have an understanding of the initial idea of "the citizen" and how that idea has evolved over the centuries. Important topics covered include how citizenship differs from other forms of sociopolitical identity, the differences between nationality and citizenship, and how multiculturalism has changed our ideas of citizenship in the twenty-first century. This concise and readable book is an ideal introduction to the history of citizenship.

The aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis still reverberate throughout the globe. Markets are down, unemployment is up, and nations from Greece to Ireland find their very infrastructure on the brink of collapse. There is also a crisis in the management of global affairs, with the institutions of global governance challenged as never before, accompanied by conflicts ranging from Syria, to Iran, to Mali. Domestically, the bases for democratic legitimacy, social sustainability, and environmental adaptability are also changing. In this unique volume from the World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations and the Social Science Research Council, some of the world’s greatest minds—from Nobel Prize winners to long-time activists—explore what the prolonged instability of the so-called Great Recession means for our traditional understanding of how governments can and should function. Through interviews that are sure to spark lively debate, 22 Ideas to Fix the World presents both analysis of past geopolitical events and possible solutions and predictions for the future.

The book surveys issues relevant to the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Speaking from a variety of perspectives, including economic, social, developmental, and political, the discussions here increase our understanding of what’s wrong with the world and how to get it right. Interviewees explore topics like the Arab Spring, the influence of international financial organizations, the possibilities for the growth of democracy, the acceleration of global warming, and how to develop enforceable standards for market and social regulation. These inspiring exchanges from some of our most sophisticated thinkers on world policy are honest, brief, and easily understood, presenting thought-provoking ideas in a clear and accessible manner that cuts through the academic jargon that too often obscures more than it reveals. 22 Ideas to Fix the World is living history in the finest sense—a lasting chronicle of the state of the global community today.

Interviews with: Zygmunt Bauman, Shimshon Bichler & Jonathan Nitzan, Craig Calhoun, Ha-Joon Chang, Fred Dallmayr, Mike Davis, Bob Deacon, Kemal Dervis, Jiemian Yang, Peter J. Katzenstein, Ivan Krastev, Will Kymlicka, Manuel F. Montes, José Antonio Ocampo, Vladimir Popov, Jospeh Stiglitz, Olzhas Suleimenov, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Immanuel Wallerstein, Paul Watson, Vladimir Yakunin, Muhammad Yunus

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law repealing one of the most controversial policies in American criminal justice history: the one hundred to one sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder whereby someone convicted of “simply” possessing five grams of crack—the equivalent of a few sugar packets—had been required by law to serve no less than five years in prison. In this highly original work, Dimitri A. Bogazianos draws on various sources to examine the profound symbolic consequences of America’s reliance on this punishment structure, tracing the rich cultural linkages between America’s War on Drugs, and the creative contributions of those directly affected by its destructive effects.

Focusing primarily on lyrics that emerged in 1990s New York rap, which critiqued the music industry for being corrupt, unjust, and criminal, Bogazianos shows how many rappers began drawing parallels between the “rap game” and the “crack game." He argues that the symbolism of crack in rap’s stance towards its own commercialization represents a moral debate that is far bigger than hip hop culture, highlighting the degree to which crack cocaine—although a drug long in decline—has come to represent the entire paradoxical predicament of punishment in the U.S. today.

In January 2009, Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States.  In the weeks and months following the election, as in those that preceded it, countless social observers from across the ideological spectrum commented upon the cultural, social and political significance of “the Obama phenomenon.” In “At this Defining Moment,” Enid Logan provides a nuanced analysis framed by innovative theoretical insights to explore how Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy both reflected and shaped the dynamics of race in the contemporary United States.

Using the 2008 election as a case study of U.S. race relations,  and based on a wealth of empirical data that includes an analysis of over 1,500 newspaper articles, blog postings, and other forms of public speech collected over a 3 year period, Logan claims that while race played a central role in the 2008 election, it was in several respects different from the past. Logan ultimately concludes that while the selection of an individual African American man as president does not mean that racism is dead in the contemporary United States, we must also think creatively and expansively about what the election does mean for the nation and for the evolving contours of race in the 21st century.  

What is at stake in the production of experimental texts by lesbian writers? what motivates these writers and characterizes their work? In this work, Elizabeth Meese examines the ways in which the experiences of the text, and the experiences of character, diverge and converge wit the writer's own biography.

King Harsha, who reigned over the kingdom of Kanauj from 606 to 647 CE, composed two Sanskrit plays about the mythical figures of King Udayana, his queen, Vásava·datta, and two of his co-wives. The plays abound in mistaken identities, both political and erotic. The characters masquerade as one another and, occasionally, as themselves, and each play refers simultaneously to itself and to the other.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Reveals a complex new portrait of John Brown, radical abolitionist and leader of the 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry

John Brown is usually remembered as a terrorist whose unbridled hatred of slavery drove him to the ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Tried and executed for seizing the arsenal and attempting to spur a liberation movement among the slaves, Brown was the ultimate cause celebre for a country on the brink of civil war.

“Fire from the Midst of You” situates Brown within the religious and social context of a nation steeped in racism, showing his roots in Puritan abolitionism. DeCaro explores Brown's unusual family heritage as well as his business and personal losses, retracing his path to the Southern gallows. In contrast to the popular image of Brown as a violent fanatic, DeCaro contextualizes Brown's actions, emphasizing the intensely religious nature of the antebellum US in which he lived. He articulates the nature of Brown's radical faith and shows that, when viewed in the context of his times, he was not the religious fanatic that many have understood him to be. DeCaro calls Brown a “Protestant saint”—an imperfect believer seeking to realize his own perceived calling in divine providence.

In line with the post-millennial theology of his day, Brown understood God as working through mankind and the church to renew and revive sinful humanity. He read the Bible not only as God's word, but as God's word to John Brown. DeCaro traces Brown's life and development to show how by forging faith as a radical weapon, Brown forced the entire nation to a point of crisis.

“Fire from the Midst of You” defies the standard narrative with a new reading of John Brown. Here is the man that the preeminent Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois called a "mighty warning" and the one Malcolm X called “a real white liberal.”

The collapse of the World Trade Center shattered windows across the street in Battery Park City, throwing the neighborhood into darkness and smothering homes in debris. Residents fled. In the months and years after they returned, they worked to restore their community. Until September 11, Battery Park City had been a secluded, wealthy enclave just west Wall Street, one with all the opulence of the surrounding corporate headquarters yet with a gated, suburban feel. After the towers fell it became the most visible neighborhood in New York.

This ethnography of an elite planned community near the heart of New York City’s financial district examines both the struggles and shortcomings of one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. In doing so, September 12 discovers the vibrant exclusivity that makes Battery Park City an unmatched place to live for the few who can gain entry. Focusing on both the global forces that shape local landscapes and the exclusion that segregates American urban development, Smithsimon shows the tensions at work as the neighborhood’s residents mobilized to influence reconstruction plans. September 12 reveals previously unseen conflicts over the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan, providing a new understanding of the ongoing, reciprocal relationship between social conflicts and the spaces they both inhabit and create.

The collapse of the World Trade Center shattered windows across the street in Battery Park City, throwing the neighborhood into darkness and smothering homes in debris. Residents fled. In the months and years after they returned, they worked to restore their community. Until September 11, Battery Park City had been a secluded, wealthy enclave just west Wall Street, one with all the opulence of the surrounding corporate headquarters yet with a gated, suburban feel. After the towers fell it became the most visible neighborhood in New York.

This ethnography of an elite planned community near the heart of New York City’s financial district examines both the struggles and shortcomings of one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. In doing so, September 12 discovers the vibrant exclusivity that makes Battery Park City an unmatched place to live for the few who can gain entry. Focusing on both the global forces that shape local landscapes and the exclusion that segregates American urban development, Smithsimon shows the tensions at work as the neighborhood’s residents mobilized to influence reconstruction plans. September 12 reveals previously unseen conflicts over the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan, providing a new understanding of the ongoing, reciprocal relationship between social conflicts and the spaces they both inhabit and create.