Organization of American Historians Conference Book Deal

Technology and consumerism are two characteristic phenomena in the history medicine and healthcare, yet the connections between them are rarely explored by scholars. In this edited volume, the authors address this disconnect, noting the ways in which a variety of technologies have shaped patients’ roles as consumers since the early twentieth century. Chapters examine key issues, such as the changing nature of patient information and choice, patients’ assessment of risk and reward, and matters of patient role and of patient demand as they relate to new and changing technologies. They simultaneously investigate how differences in access to care and in outcomes across various patient groups have been influenced by the advent of new technologies and consumer-based approaches to health. The volume spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, spotlights an array of medical technologies and health products, and draws on examples from across the United States and United Kingdom.

Longlisted for The Inner Temple Book Prize 2025

While espionage between states is a practice dating back centuries, the emergence of the internet revolutionised the types and scale of intelligence activities, creating drastic new challenges for the traditional legal frameworks governing them.

This book argues that cyber-espionage has come to have an uneasy status in law: it is not prohibited, because spying does not result in an internationally wrongful act, but neither is it authorised or permitted, because states are free to resist foreign cyber-espionage activities. Rather than seeking further regulation, however, governments have remained purposefully silent, leaving them free to pursue cyber-espionage themselves at the same time as they adopt measures to prevent falling victim to it.

Drawing on detailed analysis of state practice and examples from sovereignty, diplomacy, human rights and economic law, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the current legal status of cyber-espionage, as well as future directions for research and policy. It is an essential resource for scholars and practitioners in international law, as well as anyone interested in the future of cyber-security.

Ellen La Motte: nurse, writer, activist, is a biography of La Motte that traces the arc of her life, from her birth in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1873 to her death in Washington, D.C. in 1961. It integrates original unexamined sources such as diaries, unpublished manuscripts, and publishing contracts along with primary sources—letters, newspaper articles, health department reports, and public records—with an examination of her prolific published writings, about topics as diverse as tuberculosis nursing, women’s suffrage, nursing during the Great War, and the opium trade. It considers of how she developed as a nurse, writer, and activist once she entered the Johns Hopkins Training School for Nurses in 1898 and grew into a potent force in the anti-tuberculosis campaign. Gaining experience speaking and writing on behalf of controversial causes, La Motte put her talents to use on behalf of the fight for the vote for women, nursing during World War I and the anti-opium campaign.

Many people are shocked upon discovering that tens of thousands of innocent persons in the United States were involuntarily sterilized, forced into institutions, and otherwise maltreated within the course of the eugenic movement (1900–30). Such social control efforts are easier to understand when we consider the variety of dehumanizing and fear-inducing rhetoric propagandists invoke to frame their potential victims. This book, now available in paperback, details the major rhetorical themes employed within the context of eugenic propaganda, drawing largely on original sources of the period. Early in the twentieth century the term 'moron' was developed to describe the primary targets of eugenic control. This book demonstrates how the image of moronity in the United States was shaped by eugenicists.

This book will be of interest not only to disability and eugenics scholars and historians, but to anyone who wants to explore the means by which pejorative metaphors are used to support social control efforts against vulnerable community groups.

This collection aims to inaugurate a new direction in research on counterterrorism by exploring global connections - both in terms of practices and discourses, as well as shared ideas and epistemes - that animate counterterrorism practices. The chapters - grouped under the themes of postcoloniality and coloniality, and entanglements of the transnational and the local, and counterterrorism and right-wing extremism - are attentive to global connections and are mindful of the complexities of global historical processes that constitute the politics of counterterrorism. This book aims to bring together scholars studying counterterrorism in the global North and the global South to explore convergence and divergence in how counterterrorism policies function in a range of national and local contexts.

The Introduction is available Open Access on manchesterhive.

During the first half of the twentieth century, world politics was reshaped in pursuit of a new international order. The ideological foundations of the ‘new diplomacy’ (and its fate during the interwar period) are well known. This book instead examines the practices of internationalism and diplomacy from the First Hague Conference of 1899 to the aftermath of the Second World War. By focusing on these practices, such as disarmament regimes or public diplomacy, and their use as instruments to build international order(s), it emphasises the constructed, contested, and experimental character of what subsequently became a standard repertoire of international politics. Essays from a range of interdisciplinary scholars address well-established principles such as self-determination, and also less prominent practices such as small arms control or parliamentary inquiry. The book makes a major contribution to the growing historiography on twentieth-century internationalism.

By the time of his death in 1973, John Ford was probably the most celebrated director of Hollywood’s golden age. The winner of four best director Oscars, he was the first filmmaker to be awarded his country’s highest civilian honour, the Medal of Freedom, and the man chosen by the American Film Institute to receive its first life achievement award.

In his work, Ford returned regularly to the same themes, employed the same actors and had a visual style that was personal and distinctive. This volume explores his preoccupations throughout his long, garlanded career, showing how he attempted to come to terms with American history, with how America kept changing its relationship with history and with how many of the myths of the ‘West’ were just that – myths.

This book examines human disappearances anthropologically in various contexts, ranging from enforced disappearances under oppressive governments and during armed conflicts to disappearing undocumented migrants and, finally, to people who go missing under more everyday circumstances. Two focuses run through the book: the relationship between the state and disappearances, and the consequences of disappearances for the families and communities of missing persons. The book analyses both the circumstances that make some people disappear and the variety of responses that disappearances give rise to; the latter include projects focused on searching for the missing and identifying human remains, as well as political projects that call for accountability for disappearances. While providing empirical examples from a variety of places, with Bosnia-Herzegovina as they key empirical site, the book develops an analytic grip on the slippery category of the ‘disappeared’.

At a time when far, radical, and extreme-right politics are becoming increasingly mainstream globally – sometimes with deadly consequences – research in these fields is essential to understand the most effective ways to combat these dangerous ideologies. Yet engaging with texts and movements that do physical and verbal violence raises a number of urgent ethical issues. Until recently, this has remained understudied, as scholarship on the far right rarely delves explicitly and critically into the ethics of research.

This book seeks to remedy this significant gap in an otherwise extensive and growing literature. Originating from a workshop series in 2020, in which an international group of academics at various career stages shared the ethical challenges and best practices they had developed in their research, this edited collection draws together insights from these ongoing conversations, offering urgent critical reflections on key ethical issues.

The ‘War on Terror’ ushered in a new era of anti-Muslim bias and racism. Anti-Muslim racism, or Islamophobia, is influenced by local economies, power structures and histories. However, the War on Terror, a conflict undefined by time and place, with a homogenised Muslim ‘Other’ framed as a perpetual enemy, has contributed towards a global Islamophobic narrative. This edited international volume examines the connections between interpersonal and institutional anti-Muslim racism that have contributed to the growth and emboldening of nativist and populist protest movements globally. It maps out categories of Islamophobia, revealing how localised histories, conflicts and contemporary geopolitical realities have textured the ways that Islamophobia has manifested across the global North and South. At the same time, it seeks to highlight activism and resistance confronting Islamophobia.

From the United Nations to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, the principles of international organizations affect all of our lives. The principles these organizations live by represent, at least in part, the principles all of us live by. This book quantifies international organizations’ affiliation with particular principles in their constitutions, like cooperation, peace and equality.

Offering a sophisticated statistical and legal analysis of these principles, the authors reveal the values contained in international organizations’ constitutions and their relationship with one another. When these organizations are divided into groups, like regional versus universal organizations, many new, seemingly contradictory, interpretations of international organizations law emerge. Through elaborate network representations, radar charters, k-clusters analyses and scatter plots, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the principles and values of international organizations.

This book examines key moments in which collective and state violence invigorated racialized social boundaries around Mexican and African Americans in the United States, and in which they violently contested them. Bringing anti-Mexican violence into a common analytical framework with anti-black violence, A savage song examines several focal points in this oft-ignored history, including the 1915 rebellion of ethnic Mexicans in South Texas, and its brutal repression by the Texas Rangers and the 1917 mutiny of black soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment in Houston, Texas, in response to police brutality.

Aragon considers both the continuities and stark contrasts across these different moments: how were racialized constructions of masculinity differently employed? How did African and Mexican American men, including those in uniform, respond to the violence of racism? And how was their resistance, including their claims to manhood and nation, understood by law enforcement, politicians, and the press?

Building on extensive archival research, the book examines how African and Mexican American men have been constructed as ‘racial problems’, investigating, in particular, their relationship with law enforcement and ideas about black and Mexican criminality.