Social Science

Winner of The 74th National Jewish Book Award: Amer­i­can Jew­ish Studies Cel­e­brate 350 Award

Reveals the mass mobilization tactics that helped free Soviet Jews and reshaped the Jewish American experience from the Johnson era through the Reagan–Bush years

What do these things have in common? Ingrid Bergman, Passover matzoh, Banana Republic®, the fitness craze, the Philadelphia Flyers, B-grade spy movies, and ten thousand Bar and Bat Mitzvah sermons? Nothing, except that social movement activists enlisted them all into the most effective human rights campaign of the Cold War.

The plight of Jews in the USSR was marked by systemic antisemitism, a problem largely ignored by Western policymakers trying to improve relations with the Soviets. In the face of governmental apathy, activists in the United States hatched a bold plan: unite Jewish Americans to demand that Washington exert pressure on Moscow for change.

A Cold War Exodus delves into the gripping narrative of how these men and women, through ingenuity and determination, devised mass mobilization tactics during a three-decade-long campaign to liberate Soviet Jews—an endeavor that would ultimately lead to one of the most significant mass emigrations in Jewish history.

Drawing from a wealth of archival sources including the travelogues of thousands of American tourists who smuggled aid to Russian Jews, Shaul Kelner offers a compelling tale of activism and its profound impact, revealing how a seemingly disparate array of elements could be woven together to forge a movement and achieve the seemingly impossible. It is a testament to the power of unity, creativity, and the unwavering dedication of those who believe in the cause of human rights.

Explores the long history of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist American Jews

Throughout the twentieth century, American Jewish communal leaders projected a unified position of unconditional support for Israel, cementing it as a cornerstone of American Jewish identity. This unwavering position served to marginalize and label dissenters as antisemitic, systematically limiting the threshold of acceptable criticism. In pursuit of this forced consensus, these leaders entered Cold War alliances, distanced themselves from progressive civil rights and anti-colonial movements, and turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Israel. In The Threshold of Dissent, Marjorie N. Feld instead shows that today’s vociferous arguments among American Jews over Israel and Zionism are but the newest chapter in a fraught history that stretches from the nineteenth century.

Drawing on rich archival research and examining wide-ranging intellectual currents—from the Reform movement and the Yiddish left to anti-colonialism and Jewish feminism—Feld explores American Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel from the 1880s to the 1980s. The book argues that the tireless policing of contrary perspectives led each generation of dissenters to believe that it was the first to question unqualified support for Israel. The Threshold of Dissent positions contemporary critics within a century-long debate about the priorities of the American Jewish community, one which holds profound implications for inclusion in American Jewish communal life and for American Jews’ participation in coalitions working for justice.

At a time when American Jewish support for Israel has been diminishing, The Threshold of Dissent uncovers a deeper—and deeply contested—history of intracommunal debate over Zionism among American Jews.

Winner, 2024 Bourdieu Best Book Award, given by the Sociology of Education Section of the American Sociological Association

Honorable Mention, Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award, given by the Children and Youth Section of the American Sociological Association

An inside look at the racial and class divides between Head Start and private pre-K classrooms for children and their families

The benefits of preschool have been part of our national conversation since the 1960s, when Head Start, a publicly funded preschool program for low-income children, began. In the past two decades, forty-four states have expanded access to preschool, often citing preschool as an anti-poverty policy. Yet, as Casey Stockstill shows, two-thirds of American preschools are segregated—concentrating primarily poor children of color or affluent white children in separate schools. Stockstill argues that, as a result, segregated preschools entrench rather than disrupt inequality.

Stockstill spent two years observing children and teachers at two preschools in Madison, Wisconsin. Madison, like many other small and medium cities in the United States, is segregated, with affluent and middle-class white people and working class or low-income people of color occupying different sectors of the city. Stockstill observed one preschool that was 95% white and another that was 95% children of color. She shows that this segregation was more than a background variable or inconvenient image; segregation had an impact on children’s experiences in multiple ways, but especially in the ways they spent their time, the supervision and instruction they received, and the ways they learned and socialized with other children. Stockstill shows that even in high-quality preschools that on paper have similar resources, de facto segregation creates different school experiences for children that ultimately reinforce racial and class inequality.

False Starts suggests that as we continue to invest in preschool as an anti-poverty policy, we need a fuller understanding of how segregated classroom environments impact children's educational outcomes and their ability to thrive.

The fascinating history of white solidarity with the Black Power movement

In the mid-1960s, as the politics of Black self-determination gained steam, Black activists had a new message for white activists: Go into your own communities and organize white people against racism. While much of the media at the time and many historians since have regarded this directive as a “white purge” from the Black freedom movement, Say Burgin argues that it heralded a new strategy, racially parallel organizing, which people experimented with all over the country. Organizing Your Own shows that the Black freedom movement never experienced a “white purge,” and it offers a new way of understanding Black Power’s relationship to white America.

By focusing on Detroit from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, this volume illuminates a wide cross-section of white activists who took direction from Black-led groups like the Northern Student Movement, the City-Wide Citizens Action Committee, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Organizing Your Own draws on numerous oral histories and heretofore unseen archives to show that these white activists mobilized support for Black self-determination in education, policing, employment, and labor unions. It was a trial-and-error effort that pushed white activists to grapple with tough questions – which white people should they organize and how, which Black-led groups should they take direction from, and when did taking Black direction become mere sycophancy. The story of Detroit’s white fight for Black Power thus not only reveals a broader, richer movement, but it carries great insight into questions that remain relevant.

How can the judgment calls we make in everyday life create or help eradicate social inequality?

Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? Two questions that seem simple on their face, but which invite a host of tangled responses. In this book, Jessi Streib and Betsy Leondar-Wright offer a new way of understanding how inequalities persist by focusing on the individual judgment calls that lead us to decide what's racist, what's sexist, and what's not.

Racism and sexism often seem like optical illusions—with some people sure they see them and others sure they're not there—but the lines that most consistently divide our decisions might surprise you. Indeed, white people's views of what's racist and sexist are increasingly up for grabs. As the largest racial group in the country and the group that occupies the most and the highest positions of power, what they decide is racist and sexist helps determine the contours of inequality.

By asking white people—Southerners and Northerners, Republicans and Democrats, working-class and professional-middle-class, men and women—to decide whether specific interactions and institutions are racist, sexist, or not, Streib and Leondar-Wright take us on a journey through the decision-making processes of white people in America. By presenting them with a variety of scenarios, the authors are able to distinguish the responses as being characteristic of different patterns of reasoning. They produce a framework for understanding these patterns that invites us all to engage with each other in a new way, even on topics that might divide us.

Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? will leave you questioning how you decide whether a joke, a hiring decision, or a policy change is or isn't racist or sexist, and will give you new tools for making more accurate and productive judgment calls.

Nature has gone feral. How can we re-attune ourselves to the new nature? A field guide can help.

While the global scientific community recently made headlines by ruling the Anthropocene—an era many date to the Industrial Revolution when human action truly began to transform the planet—did not qualify for a geological epoch quite yet, understanding the nature of human transformation of the Earth is more important than ever. The effects of human activity are global in scope, but take shape within distinct social and ecological "patches," discontinuous regions within which the key actors may not be human, but the plants, animals, fungi, viruses, plastics, and chemicals creating our new world. Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene takes stock of our current planetary crisis, leading readers through a series of sites, thought experiments, and genre-stretching descriptive practices to nurture a revitalized natural history.

Field guides teach us how to notice, name, and so better appreciate more-than-human worlds. They hone our powers of observation and teach us to see the world anew. Field-based observations and place-based knowledge cultivation—getting up-close and personal with patchy dynamics—are vital to truly grapple with the ecological challenges and the historical conjunctures that are bringing us to multiple catastrophic tipping points. How has commercial agriculture runoff given rise to comb jellies in the Black Sea? What role did the Atlantic slave trade play in the worldwide spread of virus-carrying mosquitoes? How did the green revolution transform the brown planthopper into a superpredator in Philippine rice fields? Questions like these open up new ways of understanding, and ways of living through, the epoch that human activity has ushered in.

This Field Guide shifts attention away from knowledge extractive practices of globalization to encourage skilled observers of many stripes to pursue their commitments to place, social justice, and multispecies community. It is through attention to the beings, places, ecologies, and histories of the Anthropocene that we can reignite curiosity, wonder, and care for our damaged planet.

Charts the myth of the “good guy with a gun,” connecting America’s frontier beginnings with visions of the end of the world

In the midst of widespread mass shootings in America, a common motif stands out: the perpetrators of these attacks often view themselves as vigilante saviors, whose job it is to regulate society in a way that exterminates their enemies.

In this fascinating critique, Rachel Wagner makes the case that this unfortunate phenomenon is best understood through the idea of the cowboy apocalypse. She shows that across much US media, from video games and blockbuster movies to novels and TV, a story arc has been created that provides a complete myth about the end of the world and the future after that. In these stories, the cowboy messiah is envisioned as a good guy with a gun. But he doesn't save the world. He just saves his world: he protects his family and others he deems worthy while embracing the chance to wipe the global slate clean and start fresh, with survivors testing their mettle on a new frontier.

Wagner illuminates the links between Christian apocalypticism, American gun culture, and the romanticization of the white male-dominated American frontier, showing how the vigilante has come to be regarded as a new savior figure, out to protect the world for white supremacy and patriarchy. She also offers ways to respond with other powerful cultural myths, making use of media to tell other stories. Cowboy Apocalypse offers a new means of making sense of how guns profoundly shape American life, and how we might engage with them otherwise.

A personal, journalistic ethnography of the modern American working class, based on the travels and interactions of the author through the American heartland.

"Second Class is the most important book you will read all year. A political realignment is coming, and it’s my hope that the end result will work in favor of our all-too-neglected American working class. When that realignment comes, Batya and her book will help lead the way."

—Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind

Who is the American working class? Do they still have a fair shot at the American Dream? What do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life?

 While writing this book, Batya Ungar-Sargon visited states across the nation to speak with members of the American working-class fighting tooth and nail to survive. In Second Class, working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories—cleaning ladies, health care aides, cops, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians, and more. In their own words, these working-class Americans explain the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives—as well as what policies they think would improve them. Second Class combines deep reporting with a look at the data and expert opinion on America’s emergent class divide, in which the most basic elements of a secure and stable life are increasingly out of reach for those without a college education.

 America has broken its contract with its laboring class. So, how do we get back to the American Dream? How do we once again become the land of opportunity, the promised land where hard work and commitment to family are enough to protect you from poverty? It’s not that hard actually. All it would take, as this book illustrates, is for those in power to once again respect the dignity of work—and the American worker.

Documents the origins, actions, and impacts of the Black Student Union in the state of Washington during the tumultuous late 1960s.

Washington State Rising documents the origins, actions, and impact of the Black Student Union (BSU) in Washington from 1967 to 1970. The BSU was a politicized student organization that had chapters across the West Coast and played a prominent role in the student wing of the Black Power Movement. Through accounts of Black student struggles at two different college campuses in Washington, one urban and one rural, Marc Arsell Robinson details how the BSU led highly consequential protest campaigns at both institutions and beyond, which led to reforms such as the establishment of Black Studies programs, increased hiring of Black faculty and staff, and new initiatives to recruit and retain students of color.

Washington State Rising is the first book to document 1960s Black student activism in the Pacific Northwest and includes extensive oral history interviews with former BSU members. Robinson uncovers new insights into Black politics, locating the Black Power Movement in Seattle, Washington, a city and state not typically associated with 1960s black protest. At once fascinating and revelatory, Washington State Rising provides historical insights for current and future social justice activism.

A remarkable autobiography of Alice Rothchild's journey from 1950's good girl to irreverent, feisty, feminist obstetrician-gynecologist forging her own direction in the contradictory, sexist world of medicine

A remarkable autobiography—written entirely in free verse—of Alice Rothchild's journey from 1950's good girl to irreverent, feisty, feminist obstetrician-gynecologist forging her own direction in the contradictory, sexist world of medicine. As a child who came of age in the turbulent 1960s, she was compelled to create a path in the often outrageous, male-dominated medical field, repeatedly finding herself to be a first: accepted into an ob-gyn residency, opening an all-woman practice, working with midwives, challenging the status quo, shaped by her early involvement with Our Bodies Ourselves. Rothchild's poems are steeped in the often-shocking history of medicine and the conflicted sexual politics of the second half of the twentieth century.

How Yiddish changed to express and memorialize the trauma of the Holocaust

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words, Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.

Occupied Words investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analyzing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals—Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye Spivak—Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, the German-Yiddish encounter and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art—highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language.

Jewish Life in Medieval Spain is a detailed exploration of the Jewish experience in medieval Spain from the dawn of Sephardic society in the ninth century to the expulsion of 1492. An important contribution of the book is the integration of the rise and fall of Jewish life in Muslim al-Andalus into the history of the Jews in medieval Christian Spain. It traces the collapse of Jewish life in Muslim Spain, the emigration of Andalusi Jewry to the lands of Christian Iberia, and the long and difficult confluence of these two distinct Jewish subcultures.

Focusing on internal developments of Jewish society, it offers a narrative of Jewish history from the inside out, bringing to light the various divisions and rivalries within the Jewish community. This approach, in turn, allows for a deeper understanding of the complex relations between Spanish Jews and their Muslim and Christian neighbors. Jonathan Ray’s original perspective on the Jewish experience is particularly instructive when considering the widescale anti-Jewish riots of 1391. The combination of violence and mass conversion of the Jews irrevocably shifted the dynamics of inter-religious relations as well as those within the Jewish community itself. Yet even in the wake of these tragic events, the Jews of Spain continued to flourish, fostering a culture that they would carry into exile and that would preserve the memory of Jewish Spain for centuries to come.

Shows why diversity workshops fail and offers concrete solutions for a path forward

Despite decades of anti-racism workshops and diversity policies in corporations, schools, and nonprofit organizations, racial conflict has only increased in recent years. “Are You Calling Me a Racist?” reveals why these efforts have failed to effectively challenge racism and offers a new way forward.

Drawing from her own experience as an educator and activist, as well as extensive interviews and analyses of contemporary events, Sarita Srivastava shows that racial encounters among well-meaning people are ironically hindered by the emotional investment they have in being seen as good people. Diversity workshops devote energy to defending, recuperating, educating, and inwardly reflecting, with limited results, and these exercises often make things worse. These “Feel-Good politics of race,” Srivastava explains, train our focus on the therapeutic and educational, rather than on concrete practices that could move us towards true racial equity. In
this type of approach to diversity training, people are more concerned about being called a racist than they are about changing racist behavior.

“Are You Calling Me a Racist?” is a much-needed challenge to the status quo of diversity training, and will serve as a valuable resource for anyone dedicated to dismantling racism in their communities, educational institutions, public or private organizations, and social movements.

Any tattoo is the outcome of an intimate, often hidden process. The people, bodies, and money that make tattooing what it is blend together and form a heady cocktail, something described by Matt, the owner of Oakland's Premium Tattoo, as "blood and lightning." Faced with the client's anticipation of pain and excitement, the tattooer must carefully perform calm authority to obscure a world of preparation and vigilance. "Blood and lightning, my dude"—the mysterious and intoxicating effect of tattooing done right.

Dustin Kiskaddon draws on his own apprenticeship with Matt and takes us behind the scenes into the complex world of professional tattooers. We join people who must routinely manage a messy and carnal type of work. Blood and Lightning brings us through the tattoo shop, where the smell of sterilizing agents, the hum of machines, and the sound of music spill out onto the back patio. It is here that Matt, along with his comrades, reviews the day's wins, bemoans its losses, and prepares for the future.

Having tattooed more than five hundred people, Kiskaddon is able to freshly articulate the physical, mental, emotional, and moral life of tattooers. His captivating account explores the challenges they face on the job, including the crushing fear of making mistakes on someone else's body, the role of masculinity in evolving tattoo worlds, appropriate and inappropriate intimacy, and the task of navigating conversations about color and race.

Ultimately, the stories in this book teach us about the roles our bodies play in the social world. Both mediums and objects of art, our bodies are purveyors of sociocultural significance, sites of capitalist negotiation, and vivid encapsulations of the human condition. Kiskaddon guides us through a strangely familiar world, inviting each of us to become a tattooer along the way.

The Hebrew word zimzum originally means “contraction,” “withdrawal,” “retreat,” “limitation,” and “concentration.” In Kabbalah, zimzum is a term for God’s self-limitation, done before creating the world to create the world. Jewish mystic Isaac Luria coined this term in Galilee in the sixteenth century, positing that the God who was “Ein-Sof,” unlimited and omnipresent before creation, must concentrate himself in the zimzum and withdraw in order to make room for the creation of the world in God’s own center. At the same time, God also limits his infinite omnipotence to allow the finite world to arise. Without the zimzum there is no creation, making zimzum one of the basic concepts of Judaism.

The Lurianic doctrine of the zimzum has been considered an intellectual showpiece of the Kabbalah and of Jewish philosophy. The teaching of the zimzum has appeared in the Kabbalistic literature across Central and Eastern Europe, perhaps most famously in Hasidic literature up to the present day and in philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem’s epoch-making research on Jewish mysticism. The Zimzum has fascinated Jewish and Christian theologians, philosophers, and writers like no other Kabbalistic teaching. This can be seen across the philosophy and cultural history of the twentieth century as it gained prominence among such diverse authors and artists as Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Harold Bloom, Barnett Newman, and Anselm Kiefer.

This book follows the traces of the zimzum across the Jewish and Christian intellectual history of Europe and North America over more than four centuries, where Judaism and Christianity, theosophy and philosophy, divine and human, mysticism and literature, Kabbalah and the arts encounter, mix, and cross-fertilize the interpretations and appropriations of this doctrine of God’s self-entanglement and limitation.

Solutions to divorce abuse in Jewish societies


Jewish Marital Captivity centers on the experience of women encountering systemic disadvantage in rabbinic marriage and divorce throughout Jewish history and across the map of Jewish life. In rabbinic law, marriage is a unilateral act by the husband, making divorce, similarly, the husband’s sole prerogative, in which his conscious will is also sacrosanct. Abuse necessarily follows, and has been the case from earliest recorded history when husbands abandoned wives, perished on business trips or in war or criminal incidents, or maliciously refused wives a rabbinic writ of divorce (get), or extorted for one, leaving wives trapped in marriage, including to dead men. There is no time limit to this state. Women in such marital captivity, without a husband’s economic partnership, or divorce or death settlements, yet unfree to contract other marriages, suffered devastating social, economic, and psychological hardship, as did their children. Women’s marital captivity has been treated as an issue in rabbinic law but has not, until now, been studied as a problem in Jewish societies across time and place, with a focus on the predicament and behavior of women.

Jewish Marital Captivity is a social history of this problem from the seventh century to the present across multiple Jewish communities, focusing on the interaction of law and social reality. Magnus documents a pattern of assertive and transgressive actions by pious and rebellious women in traditional Jewish societies to escape marital captivity, often, with the assistance of male kin, also probing why such behavior emerged in pre-modern, patriarchal societies. She charts women’s role in the emergence of reforms in the medieval era offering women significant protections in marriage and divorce, and rabbinic backlash against these advances. This backlash was codified and its legal rulings are enacted to this day in rabbinic courts in the US and other Diaspora communities and in Israel, which lacks civil marriage and divorce and where Jewish citizens can only get divorced in rabbinic courts. It combines a sweeping history of Jewish women’s marital captivity with an analysis of the problem’s systemic nature, however personally and individually women experience it, and with a critique of current policy as seeking to manage and thus, perpetuate, rather than end the abuse. It applies the lessons of the history uncovered to propose solutions to what Magnus presents not an Orthodox or an Israeli problem, but a Jewish one.

Explores the legacies of slavery in Southern cities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts

Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year—centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities —similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan—resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts.

Captive City explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the “hospitality” cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a literary reflection that argues for coastal cities as a distinct region that scrambles time, resisting the “post” in postindustrial and the “neo” in neoliberalism. Jennie Lightweis-Goff offers a cultural exploration bound by American literature, especially life-writing by the enslaved, as well as compelling reassessments of works by canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur.

Lightweis-Goff reveals how the preserved yet fragile landscapes of these cities are haunted—not simply by the ghost tours that are signature stops for travelers in their historic districts—but by the echoes of slavery in their economies and built environments.

Finalist, 2025 PROSE Awards: Media and Cultural Studies

How Black women celebrate their natural hair and uproot racialized beauty standards

Hair is not simply a biological feature; it’s a canvas for expression. Hair can be cut, colored, dyed, covered, gelled, waxed, plucked, lasered, dreadlocked, braided, and relaxed. Yet, its significance extends beyond mere aesthetics. Hair can carry profound moral, spiritual, and cultural connotations, serving as a reflection of one’s beliefs, heritage, and even political stance. In Natural, Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson delves into the complex world surrounding Black women’s hair, and offers a firsthand look into the kitchens, beauty shops, conventions, and blogs that make up the twenty-first century natural hair movement, the latest evolution in Black beauty politics.

Johnson shares her own hair story and amplifies the voices of women across the globe who, after years of chemically relaxing their hair, return to a “natural” style. Johnson describes how many women initially transition to natural hair out of curiosity or as a wellness practice but come to view their choice as political upon confronting personal insecurities and social stigma, both within and outside of the Black community. She also investigates “natural hair entrepreneurs,” who use their knowledge to create lucrative and socially transformative haircare ventures.

Distinct from a politics of respectability or Afrocentricity, Johnson’s argument is that today’s natural hair movement advances a politics of authenticity. She offers “going natural” as a practice of self-love and acceptance; a critique of exclusionary economic arrangements and an exploitative beauty industry; and an act of anti-racist political resistance.

Natural powerfully illustrates how the natural hair movement is part of a larger social change among Black women to assert their own purchasing power, standards of beauty, and bodily autonomy.

Adam Grant’s “8 New Idea Books to Start Spring”
Next Big Idea Club's Must-Read Books for May 2024
"A wonderful litany of the myriad ways in which we can be deceived, and deceive ourselves."—The Guardian
"Entertaining, thorough and full of current examples. . . . It’s excellent." —The Wall Street Journal

How our biases cause us to fall for misinformation—and how to combat it.

Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, executives, and authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions.
 
In this eye-opening book, renowned economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colorful examples—from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death—Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.
 
Armed with the knowledge of what to guard against, he then provides a practical guide to combat this tide of misinformation. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics—the science of cause and effect—ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically. May Contain Lies is an essential read for anyone who wants to make better sense of the world and better decisions.

Charts the changing dynamics of religion and spirituality among African Americans

Recent decades have ushered in a profound transformation within the American religious landscape, characterized by an explosion of religious diversification and individualism as well as a rising number of “nones.” The Contemporary Black Church makes the case that the story of this changing religious landscape needs to be told incorporating more data as it applies specifically to African Americans.

Jason E. Shelton draws from survey data as well as interviews with individuals from a wide variety of religious backgrounds to argue that social reforms and the resulting freedoms have paved the way for a pronounced diversification among African Americans in matters of faith. Many African Americans have switched denominational affiliations within the Black Church, others now adhere to historically White traditions, and a record number of African Americans have left organized religion altogether in recent decades. These changing demographics and affiliations are having a real and measurable effect on American politics, particularly as members of the historic Black Church are much more likely than those of other faiths to vote and to strongly support government policies aimed at bridging the racial divide.

Though not the first work to note that African Americans are not monolithic in their religious affiliation, or to argue that there is a trend toward secularism in Black America, this book is the first to substantiate these claims with extensive empirical data, charting these changing dynamics and their ramifications for American society and politics.

The unknown inside story of the NYPD’s Italian-born detectives who fought both powerful gangsters and the deeply ingrained prejudice against their own beloved immigrant community

The story begins in Sicily, on Friday, March 12, 1909, at 8:45 p.m. Three gunshots thundered in the night, and then a fourth. Two men fled, and investigators soon discovered who they had killed: Giuseppe Petrosino, the legendary American detective whose exploits in New York were celebrated even in Italy.

The Italian Squad, by veteran New York City journalist and historian Paul Moses, explores the lives of the nationally celebrated detectives who followed in the slain Petrosino’s footsteps as leaders of the New York City investigative squad: Anthony Vachris, Charles Corrao, and Michael Fiaschetti. Drawing on new primary sources such as private diaries and city, state, and federal documents, this dramatic narrative history follows the Italian Squad across the first two decades of the twentieth century as its detectives battled increasingly powerful gangsters, political obstacles and deeply ingrained prejudice against their own beloved Italian immigrant community.

Vachris, Corrao, and Fiaschetti became, like Petrosino, famous for meting out tough justice to criminals who comprised the “Black Hand.” Beyond trying to prevent horrific crimes—nighttime bombings in crowded tenements, kidnappings that targeted children at play, gangland shootings that killed innocent bystanders—the Italian Squad commanders hoped to persuade society of what they knew for themselves: that their fellow immigrant Italians, so often maligned, would make good American citizens.

In this explosive story, Moses carefully strips away the mythology that has always enveloped the Italian Squad and offers instead a nuanced portrait of brave but flawed men who fought the good fight for their people and their city.

Gay bars have been closing by the hundreds. The story goes that increasing mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, plus dating apps like Grindr and Tinder, have rendered these spaces obsolete. Beyond that, rampant gentrification in big cities has pushed gay bars out of the neighborhoods they helped make hip. Who Needs Gay Bars? considers these narratives, accepting that the answer for some might be: maybe nobody. And yet...

Jarred by the closing of his favorite local watering hole in Cleveland, Ohio, Greggor Mattson embarks on a journey across the country to paint a much more complex picture of the cultural significance of these spaces, inside "big four" gay cities, but also beyond them. No longer the only places for their patrons to socialize openly, Mattson finds in them instead a continuously evolving symbol; a physical place for feeling and challenging the beating pulse of sexual progress.

From the historical archives of Seattle's Garden of Allah, to the outpost bars in Texas, Missouri or Florida that serve as community hubs for queer youth—these are places of celebration, where the next drag superstar from Alaska or Oklahoma may be discovered. They are also fraught grounds for confronting the racial and gender politics within and without the LGBTQ+ community.

The question that frames this story is not asking whether these spaces are needed, but for whom, earnestly exploring the diversity of folks and purposes they serve today. Loosely informed by the Damron Guide, the so-called "Green Book" of gay travel, Mattson logged 10,000 miles on the road to all corners of the United States. His destinations are sometimes thriving, sometimes struggling, but all offering intimate views of the wide range of gay experience in America: POC, white, trans, cis; past, present, and future.

Winner, Sexuality and Politics Book Award - American Political Science Association

Finalist, PROSE Award - Government and Politics


What the evolving fight for transgender rights reveals about government power, regulations, and the law

Every government agency in the United States, from Homeland Security to Departments of Motor Vehicles, has the authority to make its own rules for sex classification. Many transgender people find themselves in the bizarre situation of having different sex classifications on different documents. Whether you can change your legal sex to “F” or “M” (or more recently “X”) depends on what state you live in, what jurisdiction you were born in, and what government agency you’re dealing with. In Sex Is as Sex Does, noted transgender advocate and scholar Paisley Currah explores this deeply flawed system, showing why it fails transgender and non-binary people.

Providing examples from different states, government agencies, and court cases, Currah explains how transgender people struggle to navigate this confusing and contradictory web of legal rules, definitions, and classifications. Unlike most gender scholars, who are concerned with what the concepts of sex and gender really mean, Currah is more interested in what the category of “sex” does for governments. What does “sex” do on our driver’s licenses, in how we play sports, in how we access health care, or in the bathroom we use? Why do prisons have very different rules than social service agencies? Why is there such resistance to people changing their sex designation? Or to dropping it from identity documents altogether?

In this thought-provoking and original volume, Sex Is as Sex Does reveals the hidden logics that have governed sex classification policies in the United States and shows what the regulation of transgender identity can tell us about society’s approach to sex and gender writ large.Ultimately, Currah demonstrates that, because the difficulties transgender people face are not just the result of transphobia but also stem from larger injustices, an identity-based transgender rights movement will not, by itself, be up to the task of resolving them.

A primer on racism that offers an intersectional, anti-racist, coalition-building view of Asian American identity.

"This is and will be a necessary and useful tool for generations to come." —Jenny Wang, author of Permission to Come Home

What does it mean to be Asian American? How does our racialization in the United States shape our lives and our worldviews? With candor and care, Ellie Yang Camp, a Taiwanese American educator, offers a set of ideas and frameworks to guide us toward a more nuanced understanding of these questions. Drawing on her experiences and observations from history, conversations with Asian American peers, and lessons derived from other people of color, Camp unpacks the confusing dynamics that underlie anti-Asian stigmas and stereotypes in the US. From the model minority myth to yellowface to anti-Blackness among Asian communities, Camp presses into hard questions and moments of discomfort, naming fears so that we might dispel them.

Key stories of resistance reveal the importance of solidarity, both among the diverse people under the Asian American umbrella and with all who are exploited by white supremacy. Acknowledging that racism is a system thrust upon us to control us, Camp fuels our boldness to challenge tropes, dismantle prejudices, and embrace self-determination as an act of radical liberation.

From the winner of The President Joseph R. Biden Lifetime Achievement Award, a spiritual guide to restoring yourself from racial trauma and committing to the long work of dismantling racism.

In her work as Executive Director of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing, Meeks has fought tirelessly to shed light on racism and provide tools and experiences to enable faith communities to work to combat it. In this new book, she shares highlights and insights from her journey and offers a much-needed meditative guide for the weary and frustrated. By looking inward and at each other clearly, she argues, good people of all backgrounds can forge a long term and individual path to making a difference. With personal stories and thoughtful direction, she takes the reader on the trajectory from self-awareness to recognition of the past to a new and individual way forward.

Meditation topics include how to work through fear and rage, how stories can help heal, honoring your ancestors while looking toward the future, what it really means to love one another and the meaning of social justice.

A unique insider perspective of daily life in New York City’s most notorious house of correction

While most people behind bars at Rikers Island are detainees awaiting the settlement of their cases, a smaller population have already been convicted and are serving sentences deemed too short for the state prison system. These stints are called “city time.” The sentences range from a few days to a year, and are generally served within large, open dormitories lacking in privacy and sanitation. Within these spaces, incarcerated people reproduce an elaborate set of rules, rituals, and relationships, as a means both of survival and of giving meaning to the time taken from them.

Written by David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan, who both served sentences at Rikers, City Time reflects its authors’ personal experiences and observations of short-stay incarceration to present a nuanced and vivid account of a social world kept locked away from the public eye. The authors reconstruct the daily realities of sanitation, nourishment, recreation, work, and other necessary activities, and emphasize the complex interpersonal relationships that emerge in response to city time. Simultaneously, they paint a grim and urgent picture of structural racism, class violence, and the disastrous lack of mental health and substance abuse resources for poor New Yorkers, who are shuttled in and out of city time sentences as “frequent flyers.”

Beginning with the authors’ own processes of intake, and ending with the ritual of late-night release, City Time takes readers behind the splashy headlines to depict, in intimately human terms, the rich and variegated social world unfolding, at this very moment, on Rikers Island.

Provides a child’s-eye perspective on how the culture wars are playing out in our nation’s schools

Kids are at the center of today’s “culture wars”—pundits, politicians, and parents alike are debating which books they should be allowed to read, which version of history they should learn in school, and what decisions they can make about their own bodies. And yet, no one asks kids what they think about these issues.

In Children of a Troubled Time, award-winning sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman amplifies the voices of children who grew up during Trump’s presidency and explores how they learn about race in America today. Hagerman interviewed nearly fifty children between the ages of ten to thirteen in two dramatically different political landscapes: Mississippi and Massachusetts. Hagerman interviewed kids who identified as conservative and liberal in both places as well as kids from different racial groups. She discovered remarkably similar patterns in the ideas expressed by these children. Racism, she asserts, is not just a local or regional phenomenon: it is a broad American project affecting childhoods across the country.

In Hagerman’s emotionally compelling interviews, children describe what it is like to come of age during years of deep political and racial divide, and how being a kid during the Trump era shaped their views on racism, democracy, and America as a whole. Children’s racialized emotions are also central to this book: disgust and discomfort, fear and solidarity, dominance and apathy.

As administrators, teachers, and parents struggle to help children make sense of our racially and politically polarized nation, Hagerman offers concrete examples of the kinds of interventions necessary to help kids learn how to become members of a multi-racial democracy and to avoid the development of far-right thinking in the white youth of today. Children of a Troubled Time expands our understanding of how the rising generation grapples with the complexities of racism and raises critical questions about the future of American society.

In recent decades, authenticity has become an American obsession. It animates thirty years' worth of reality TV programming and fuels the explosive virality of one hot social media app after another. It characterizes Donald Trump's willful disregard for political correctness (and proofreading) and inspires multinational corporations to stake activist claims in ways that few "woke" brands ever dared before. It buttresses a multibillion-dollar influencer industry of everyday folks shilling their friends with #spon-con and burnishes the street cred of rock stars and rappers alike. But, ironically, authenticity's not actually real: it's as fabricated as it is ubiquitous.

In The Authenticity Industries, journalist and scholar Michael Serazio combines eye-opening reporting and lively prose to take readers behind the scenes with those who make "reality"—and the ways it tries to influence us. Drawing upon dozens of rare interviews with campaign consultants, advertising executives, tech company leadership, and entertainment industry gatekeepers, the book slyly investigates the professionals and practices that make people, products, and platforms seem "authentic" in today's media, culture, and politics. The result is a spotlight on the power of authenticity in today's media-saturated world and the strategies to satisfy this widespread yearning. In theory, authenticity might represent the central moral framework of our time: allaying anxieties about self and society, culture and commerce, and technology and humanity. It infects and informs our ideals of celebrity, aesthetics, privacy, nostalgia, and populism. And Serazio reveals how these pretenses are crafted, backstage, for audiences, consumers, and voters.

A literary mixtape of transformative dialogues on justice with a cast of visionary rebel activists, organizers, artists, culture workers, thought leaders, and movement builders.

Rebel Speak sounds the alarm for a global movement to end systemic injustice led by people doing the day-to-day rebel work in the prison capital of the world. Prison activist, artist, and scholar Bryonn Rolly Bain brings us transformative oral history ciphers, rooted in the tradition of call-and-response, to lay bare the struggle and sacrifice on the front lines of the fight to abolish the prison industrial complex.

Rebel Speak investigates the motives that inspire and sustain movements for visionary change. Sparked by a life-changing interview with working-class heroes Dolores Huerta and Harry Belafonte, Bryonn invites us to join conversations with change-makers whose diverse critical perspectives and firsthand accounts expose the crisis of prisons and policing in our communities. Through dialogues with activists including Albert Woodfox, founder of the first Black Panther Party prison chapter, and Susan Burton, founder of Los Angeles's A New Way of Life Reentry Project; a conversation with a warden pushing beyond traditions at Sing Sing Correctional Facility; and an intimate exchange with his brother returning from prison, Bryonn reveals countless unseen spaces of the movement to end human caging. Sampling his provocative sessions with influential artists and culture workers, like Public Enemy leader Chuck D and radical feminist MC Maya Jupiter, Bryonn opens up and guides discussions about the power of art and activism to build solidarity across disciplines and demand justice.

With raw insight and radical introspection, Rebel Speak embodies the growing call for "credible messengers" on prisons, policing, racial justice, abolitionist politics, and transformative organizing. Reimagining the role of the writer and scholar as a DJ and MC, Bryonn moves the crowd with this unforgettable mix of those working within the belly of the beast to change the world. This is a new century's sound of movement-building and Rebel Speak.

David R. Maines (1940-2021), one of the most important sociological scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries, constructed a vast area of research to advance the field of symbolic interactionism during his career. Highlighting the significance of Maines’ works in symbolic interactionism, Festschrift in Honor of David R. Maines documents his most celebrated areas of scholarship, including social structure, narrative sociology, social interaction, dialectic perspective, temporality, and mesostructure.

Including stories from individuals who knew Maines via kinship, friendship, or professional relationship, the chapters conclude with two new empirical studies to reflect Maines’ interest in continually advancing the field with cutting-edge research. The collection also features a list of Maines’ selected works for further reading to guide other symbolic interactionists in their research endeavors.

Volume 57 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction is a source of both consolation and celebration for those who knew David R. Maines, as well as those who have just begun to discover his inspiring work.

How serialized crime shows became an American obsession

TV shows and podcasts like Making a Murderer, Serial, and Atlanta Monster have taken the cultural zeitgeist by storm, and contributed to the release of wrongly imprisoned people—such as Adnan Syed. The popularity of these long-form true crime docuseries has sparked greater attention to issues of inequality, power, social class, and structural racism. More and more, the American public is asking, Who is and is not deserving of punishment, and who is and is not protected by the law? In The New True Crime, Diana Rickard argues that these new true crime series deserve our attention for what they reveal about our societal understanding of crime and punishment, and for the new light they shine on the inequalities of the criminal justice system. Questioning the finality of verdicts, framing facts as in the eye of the beholder—these new series unmoor our faith in what is knowable, even as, Rickard critically notes, they often blur the lines between “fact” and “fiction.”

With a focus on some of the most popular true crime podcasts and streaming series of the last decade, Rickard provides an in-depth analysis of the ways in which this new media—which allows for binge-listening or watching—makes crime into a public spectacle and conveys ideological messages about punishment to its audience. Entertainment values have always been entwined with crime news reporting. Newsworthy stories, Rickard reminds us, need to involve sex, violence, or a famous person, and contain events that can be framed in terms of individualism and conservative ideologies about crime. Even as these old tropes of innocent victims and deviant bad guys still dominate these docuseries, Rickard also unpacks how the new true crime has been influenced by the innocence movement, a diverse group of organizers and activists, be they journalists, lawyers, formerly incarcerated people, or family members, who now have a place in mainstream consciousness as DNA evidence exonerates the wrongly convicted.

The New True Crime questions the knowability of truth and probes our anxieties about the “real” nature of true crime media. For fans of true crime shows and anyone concerned about justice in America, this book will prove to be essential reading.

Analyzes the impact of International Conflict Feminism’s alliance with powerful global institutions

In this book, Vasuki Nesiah tells the story of the astonishing uptake of International Conflict Feminism (ICF) in the most powerful institutions of global governance. ICF refers to a repertoire of policy agendas and legal strategies allied with those institutions to focus on women’s vulnerabilities, fight impunity for sexual violence, and promote women’s roles in peace-building processes. ICF emerged from feminist networks anchored in the Global North that gained momentum in the aftermath of the Cold War. Although this volume offers a testament to ICF’s remarkable success, it also analyzes how this success was intertwined with the defeat of alternative visions and agendas, including a range of dissident and heterodox feminisms that were eclipsed as ICF gained traction.

Emerging from Nesiah’s dual occupations in academia and international law and policy practice, International Conflict Feminism shows how centrally the ICF agenda has shaped fields such as peace building, international criminal law, transitional justice, and post-conflict economic policy. Each section pauses at different sites in the international governance architecture to analyze the distributive impact of ICF and its allied global policy agendas to examine what is privileged, legitimized, and empowered, and what is subordinated, marginalized, and further excluded.

ICF is a project of ideas and passions, legal proposals, and policy orientations. Today, when the most powerful countries of the world are describing their military, economic, and political interventions as a “feminist foreign policy,” the task of understanding and assessing the ICF project is especially urgent. Nesiah argues that, rather than obfuscating and denying the power of the ICF agenda, grappling with ICF’s power is essential to achieving solidarity with feminisms that don’t have a seat at the table, in particular those dissident feminist traditions with priorities and interests that challenge the dominant world order and its injustices and hierarchies.

The definitive reference guide to artifacts representing 14,000 years of cultural evolution

Pennsylvania is geographically, ecologically, and culturally diverse. The state is situated at the crossroads of several geographic zones and drainage basins which resulted in a great deal of variation in Native American societies. The Archaeology of Native Americans in Pennsylvania is the definitive reference guide to rich artifacts that represent 14,000 years of cultural evolution. This authoritative work includes environmental studies, descriptions and illustrations of artifacts and features, settlement pattern studies, and recommendations for directions of further research.

Containing previously unpublished data and representing fifty years of collaborative findings gathered under historic preservation laws, the book is organized into five parts, reflecting five major time periods. Essential for anyone conducting archaeological research in Pennsylvania and surrounding regions, especially professionals conducting surveys and research in compliance with state and federal preservation laws, as well as professors and students engaging in research on specific regions or topics in Middle Atlantic archaeology.

An inside look at Black LGBTQ college students and their experiences

Black and Queer on Campus offers an inside look at what life is like for LGBTQ college students on campuses across the United States. Michael P. Jeffries shows that Black and queer college students often struggle to find safe spaces and a sense of belonging when they arrive on campus at both predominantly white institutions and historically black colleges and universities. Many report that in predominantly white queer social spaces, they feel unwelcome and pressured to temper their criticisms of racism amongst their white peers. Conversely, in predominantly straight Black social spaces, they feel ignored or pressured to minimize their queer identity in order to be accepted. This fraught dynamic has an impact on Black LGBTQ students in higher education, as they experience different forms of marginalization at the intersection of their race, gender, and sexuality.

Drawing on interviews with students from over a dozen colleges, Jeffries provides a new, much-needed perspective on the specific challenges Black LGBTQ students face and the ways they overcome them. We learn through these intimate portraits that despite the gains of the LGBTQ rights movement, many of the most harmful stereotypes and threats to black queer safety continue to haunt this generation of students. We also learn how students build queer identities. The traditional narrative of “coming out” does not fit most of these students, rather, Jeffries describes a more gradual transition to queer acceptance and pride.

Black and Queer on Campus sheds light on the oft-hidden lives of Black LGBTQ students, and how educational institutions can better serve them. It also highlights the quiet beauty and joy of Black queer social life, and the bonds of friendship that sustain the students and fuel their imagination.

How American symbols inspired enslaved people and their allies to fight for true freedom

In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal,” Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty, or give me death!,” and Francis Scott Key’s “star-spangled banner” waving over “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” were anthemic celebrations of a newly free people. Resonating across the country, they encouraged the creation of a republic where the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was universal, natural, and inalienable.

For enslaved people and their allies, the language and symbols that served as national touchstones made a mockery of freedom. Deriding the ideas that infused the republic’s founding, they encouraged an empty American culture that accepted the abstract notion of equality rather than the concrete idea. Yet, as award-winning author Matthew J. Clavin reveals, it was these powerful expressions of American nationalism that inspired forceful and even violent resistance to slavery.

Symbols of Freedom is the surprising story of how enslaved people and their allies drew inspiration from the language and symbols of American freedom. Interpreting patriotic words, phrases, and iconography literally, they embraced a revolutionary nationalism that not only justified but generated open opposition. Mindful and proud that theirs was a nation born in blood, these disparate patriots fought to fulfill the republic’s promise by waging war against slavery.

In a time when the US flag, the Fourth of July, and historical sites have never been more contested, this book reminds us that symbols are living artifacts whose power is derived from the meaning with which we imbue them.

Envisioned as a tribe of ruddy-faced, redheaded, red-bearded Jewish warriors, bedecked in red attire who purportedly resided in isolation at the fringes of the known world, the Red Jews are a legendary people who populated a shared Jewish-Christian imagination. But in fact the red variant of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is a singular invention of late medieval vernacular culture in Germany. This idiosyncratic figure, together with the peculiar term “Red Jews,” existed solely in German and Yiddish, the German-Jewish vernacular. These two language communities assessed the Red Jews differently and contested their significance, which is to say, they viewed them in different shades of red. The voyage of the Red Jews through the Jewish and Christian imagination, from their medieval Christian nascence, through early modern Old Yiddish literature, to modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe, Palestine, and America, is the story of this book.

By studying this vernacular icon, Rebekka Voß contributes to our understanding of the formation of minority awareness and the construction of Ashkenazic Jewish identity through visual cultural encounters. She also spotlights the vitality of vernacular culture by demonstrating how the premodern motif of the Red Jews informed modern Yiddish literature, and how the stereotype of Jewish red hair found its way into Jewish social critiques, political thought, and arts through the present day.

Sons of Saviors is a story about power: the Yiddish reappropriation of the Red Jews subverted the Christian color symbolism by adjusting the focus on redness from a negative stereotype into a proud badge of self-assertion. The book also includes in an appendix the full text of a significant Yiddish tale featuring the Red Jews.

A chronicle of neighborhood redevelopment politics in West Philadelphia over 60 years

In twenty-first-century American cities, policy makers increasingly celebrate university-sponsored innovation districts as engines of inclusive growth. But the story is not so simple. In University City, Laura Wolf-Powers chronicles five decades of planning in and around the communities of West Philadelphia’s University City to illuminate how the dynamics of innovation district development in the present both depart from and connect to the politics of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Wolf-Powers concludes that even as university and government leaders vow to develop without displacement, what existing residents value is imperiled when innovation-driven redevelopment remains accountable to the property market.

The book first traces the municipal and institutional politics that empowered officials to demolish a predominantly Black neighborhood near the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University in the late 1960s to make way for the University City Science Center and University City High School. It also provides new insight into organizations whose members experimented during that same period with alternative conceptions of economic advancement. The book then shifts to the present, documenting contemporary efforts to position university-adjacent neighborhoods as locations for prosperity built on scientific knowledge. Wolf-Powers examines the work of mobilized civic groups to push cultural preservation concerns into the public arena and to win policies to help economically insecure families keep a foothold in changing neighborhoods.

Placing Philadelphia’s innovation districts in the context of similar development taking place around the United States, University City advocates a reorientation of redevelopment practice around the recognition that despite their negligible worth in real estate terms, the time, care, and energy people invest in their local environments—and in one another—are precious urban resources.

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Pictured on the book's cover is a luncheon on Melon Street between 37th and 38th Streets in West Philadelphia, May 31, 2014. The community meal was part of Funeral for a Home, a project that honored the life and passing of a house at 3711 Melon Street in Mantua. Photo by Jeffrey Stockbridge. Funeral for a Home was commissioned by Temple Contemporary, Temple University. Original support for Funeral for a Home was provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia.

To heal a world in crisis, we must rethink “legacy”—and commit to something bigger than ourselves.

From the time he was born, Martin Luther King III has carried the weight of his father’s legacy—and his dream of a Beloved Community built on justice, love and equal rights for all. Today, in a world burdened by histories of violence, oppression, racism, poverty, fear and disconnectedness, that dream seems more remote than ever.

In answer to these challenges, Martin has teamed up with his wife and fellow activist, Arndrea Waters King, and legacy architects Marc Kielburger and Craig Kielburger to find a new way forward. Drawing on breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology, epigenetics and their own lived experiences, they have created a groundbreaking new framework called Living Legacy. It’s based on the simple but profound recognition that our small, day-to-day actions create legacies that have the power to transform, uplift and unite us all. It’s time to reevaluate, recognize, and reclaim those legacies. Living Legacy invites us to live our best lives and lives larger than ourselves—and in doing so, discover the most sought-after yet elusive state of being: fulfillment.

In conjunction with the Realize the Dream campaign, What Is My Legacy? kicks off an essential conversation on how to best refocus our individual stories to achieve collective change. Featuring never-been-told stories from the King family and contributions from celebrities and thought leaders—including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Jay Shetty, Julia Roberts, Yara Shahidi, Rev. Al Sharpton and Sanjay Gupta—it’s an extraordinary road map for finding genuine connection, bringing us closer to Dr. King’s dream of a Beloved Community.

Evaluating Jewish donors over time


The American Jewish philanthropic enterprise is unparalleled in scope, dynamism, and the diversity of funders and the causes they support. Yet even as Jewish giving has been largely successful in responding with alacrity to emergencies, it has been subjected to severe criticism. What once was regarded as a point of pride has become the object of scorn and dismissal, with skepticism—if not harsh criticism—about its work rife both within and outside Jewish communal circles.

Based on 320 interviews with professionals at Jewish not-for-profits across the United States, principals of foundations and their top staff personnel, and also tax filings of major foundations, Jewish Giving provides readers with fresh perspectives to evaluate the efforts of Jewish donors, large and small. The book traces the evolution of Jewish giving from the colonial era to the present, charting the changing profile of those who give to Jewish causes and what funders have aimed to achieve through their largesse. It makes the case that philanthropy serves as a prism through which broader themes in communal life are illuminated. As society or politics change, the priorities of charitable giving adjust in response. These changes in targeted funding can help to sharpen our understanding of demographic and social patterns. Devoting much attention to twenty-first century developments in contemporary Jewish giving, the book pays special attention to the changing landscape of donors who are remaking Jewish philanthropy, including women, Orthodox Jews, Sephardi givers, and young funders.

If politics is about the state, can a stateless people be political? Until recently, scholars were fiercely divided regarding whether Jews engaged in politics, displayed political wisdom, or penned works of political thought over the two millennia when there was no Jewish state. But over the past few decades, the field of Jewish political thought has begun to examine the ways in which Jewish individuals and communal organizations behaved politically even in diaspora.

The King Is in the Field centers writing from leading scholars that serves as an introduction to this exciting field, providing critical resources for anyone interested in thinking about politics both within and beyond the state. From kabbalistic theology to economic philanthropy, from race and nationalism in the U.S. to Israeli legal discourse and feminist activism, this key study of Jewish political thought holds the promise to reorient the field of political thought as a whole by expanding conceptions of what counts as “political.”

In a world in which statelessness now applies to 100 million individuals, this volume illuminates ways to understand how diaspora Jewish political thought functioned in adopted homelands. This approach allows the book to offer questions and analysis that add depth and breadth to academic studies of Jewish politics while simultaneously offering a blueprint for future volumes interrogating political action through multiple diasporas.

Contributors: Samuel Hayim Brody, Lihi Ben Shitrit, Julie E. Cooper, Arye Edrei, Meirav Jones, Rebecca Kobrin, Vincent Lloyd, Menachem Lorberbaum, Shaul Magid, Assaf Tamari, Irene Tucker, Philipp Von Wussow, Michael Walzer.

Questions what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state

In one of the first books to ask head-on what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state, Yaacov Yadgar delves into what the designation “Jewish” amounts to in the context of the sovereign nation-state, and what it means for the politics of the state to be identified as Jewish. The volume interrogates the tension between the notion of Israel as a Jewish state—one whose very character is informed by Judaism—and the notion of Israel as a “state of the Jews,” with the sole criterion the maintenance of a demographically Jewish majority, whatever the character of that majority’s Jewishness might or might not be.

The volume also examines Zionism’s relationship to Judaism. It provocatively questions whether the Christian notion of supersessionism, the idea that the Christian Church has superseded the nation of Israel in God’s eyes and that Christians are now the true People of God, may now be applied to Zionism, with Zionism understood by some to have taken over the place of traditional Judaism, rendering the actual Jewish religion superfluous.

To Be a Jewish State deeply informs the democratic crisis in Israel, discussing whether Jewish laws put into effect by the state or political moves made to ensure a Jewish majority can be seen as undermining democracy. In our current era, with nationalism resurging, To Be a Jewish State urges a critical re-assessment of the very meaning of modern Jewish identity.

Winner of the 2024 Jewish Music Special Interest Group Prize

A compelling look at the lives of ultra-Orthodox and formerly ultra-Orthodox Jewish women and their use of media technologies to create a new market for music and film

Mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women often frame their faith as oppressive: they are empowered only when they leave their community. This book flips this notion on its head. Drawing on six years of fieldwork between New York and Montreal, Jessica Roda examines modern performances on the stage and screen directed by and for ultra-Orthodox women. Their incredibly vibrant Jewish artistic scenes defy stereotypes that paint these women as repressed, reclusive to their shtetl (village), and devoid of creativity and agency.

For Women and Girls Only argues that access to technology has completely transformed how ultra-Orthodox women express their way of being religious and that the digital era has enabled them to create an alternative entertainment market outside of the public, male-dominated one. Because expectations surrounding modesty, ultra-Orthodox women do not sing, dance, or act in front of men and the public. Yet, in a revolutionary move, they are creating “women and girls only” spaces onsite and online, putting the onus on men to shield themselves from the content. They develop modest public spaces on the Internet, about which male religious leaders are often unaware. The book also explores the entanglement between these observant female artists and those who left religion and became public performers. The author shows that the arts expressed by all these women offer a means of not only social but also economic empowerment in their respective worlds.

For Women and Girls Only is a groundbreaking reversal of mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women, and of those who have left the community yet maintain ties to it. It is the first work to focus on the ultra-Orthodox female art scene in music, film, and dance across North America and on social media.

Honorable Mention for the 2023 Francis Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize

2023 Judy Grahn Award-Publishing Triangle Finalist

Restores queer suffragists to their rightful place in the history of the struggle for women’s right to vote

The women’s suffrage movement, much like many other civil rights movements, has an important and often unrecognized queer history. In Public Faces, Secret Lives Wendy L. Rouse reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the suffrage movement included a variety of individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities. However, owing to the constant pressure to present a “respectable” public image, suffrage leaders publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public.

Rouse argues that queer suffragists did take meaningful action to assert their identities and legacies by challenging traditional concepts of domesticity, family, space, and death in both subtly subversive and radically transformative ways. Queer suffragists also built lasting alliances and developed innovative strategies in order to protect their most intimate relationships, ones that were ultimately crucial to the success of the suffrage movement. Public Faces, Secret Lives is the first work to truly recenter queer figures in the women’s suffrage movement, highlighting their immense contributions as well as their numerous sacrifices.

A rich examination of the securitization of the everyday lives of the citizens of Cairo and how to build a more equitable urban order

Until the year 2000, Cairo had been a model megacity, relatively crime free, safe, and public facing. It featured a thriving public culture and vibrant street life. In recent decades, however, the Egyptian state has accelerated a wholesale dismantlement of public education and public sector jobs and reversed the modest land reforms of the Nasser era. As a result, the vast majority of Cairo’s people have been forcibly deprived of their social rights, social goods, and educational capital.

Eschewing the traditional focus on top-down regime and state security, the contributors to this volume, who represent a wide array of academics, activists, artists, and journalists, explore how repressive policies affect the everyday lives of citizens. They show the ways in which urban security crises are politically fashioned and do not emanate from the urban social fabric on their own: city crime, violence, and fear are created by specific means of extraction, production, and control.

Another kind of city can live again. But how? By tackling a range of issues, including public health, transportation, labor safety, and housing and property distribution, Cairo Securitized unsettles simplistic binaries of thug and police, public versus private, and slum versus enclave, and proposes compelling new ways in which securitizing processes can be reversed, reengineered, and replaced with a participatory and equitable urban order.

Contributors:
Sara Soumaya Abed African Leadership Centre, Kings College London
Zeinab Abul-Magd Oberlin College, USA
Mohamed Ahmed Political Scientist and historian, Cairo Egypt
Rania Ahmed Independent Researcher, Cairo Egypt
Nicholas Simcik Arese University of Cambridge, UK
Ahmed Awadalla University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Ahmad Borham The American University in Cairo, Cairo Egypt
Miguel A. Fuentes Carreño University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Roberta Duffield Scholar on urbanism, public space, Cairo Egypt
Momen El-Husseiny The American University in Cairo, Cairo Egypt
Mohamed Elmeshad SOAS, London UK
Ifdal Elsaket Netherlands-Flemish Institute, Cairo Egypt
Mohamed Elshahed Independent Writer and Curator, Mexico City
Amy Fallas University of California Santa Barbara, USA
Tina Guirguis University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Elena Habersky The American University in Cairo, Cairo Egypt
Hanan Hammad Texas Christian University, USA
Hatem Hassan Impact Justice, Pittsburgh, USA
Amira Hetaba Federal Government of Lower Austria, Austria
Deena Khalil The American University in Cairo, Cairo Egypt
Omnia Khalil City University of New York, USA
Sabrina Lilleby University of Texas, Austin, USA
Paul Miranda Nonviolent Peaceforce, South Mosul, Iraq
Mostafa Mohie American University in Cairo, Cairo Egypt
Laura Monfleur University François-Rabelais, Tours, France
Aya Nassar Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Nora Noralla human rights researcher, Berlin, Germany
Aly El Reggal Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence Italy
Afsaneh Rigot Harvard University, Cambridge USA
Yahia Saleh Malmö University, Sweden
Bassem al-Samragy political analyst at the International Criminal Court, The Hague, The Netherlands
Yahia Shawkat Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Maïa Sinno Géographie Cités Lab, CNRS / Sorbonne University, Paris France
Mark Westmoreland Leiden University, The Netherlands

How is popular knowledge of war shaped by the stories we consume, what are the boundaries of this knowledge, and how are these boundaries policed or contested by journalists producing knowledge from war zones? Based on years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, Conflicted challenges normative conceptions of war by revealing how representational authority comes to be. Turning the lens on journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other prominent publications, Isaac Blacksin shows why news coverage of contemporary conflict, widely presumed to function as a critique of excessive violence, instead serves to sanction official rationales for war.

Blacksin argues that journalism's humanitarian frame—now hegemonic in conflict coverage—serves to depoliticize and remoralize war, transforming war from an effect of policy on populations to a matter of violence against the innocent. Exploring the tension between experience and expression in conditions of violence, and tracking how journalists respond to dominant expectations of reality, Conflicted tells the story of war, reporters, and the consequences of their convergence. As new wars, and new reportage, continue to shape our understanding of armed conflict, this book makes visible both the power and the particularity of war reportage.

Anti-racist movements have continued to grow worldwide after the death of George Floyd in 2020. Following the BLM protests, many promises were made to deal with the impact of structural discrimination. While this led to more talk than action, there has also been meaningful change, some of which has gone under the radar. The US media focused primarily on the backlash that resulted in book bans and laws against having DEI offices in universities.

In contrast, this book, a follow-up to Terri E. Givens’s bestselling book Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides, highlights the promises that were delivered. It focuses on hope and taking action and creating a positive environment including the use of the radical empathy approach to empower ongoing change.

On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown climbed into a large wooden postal crate and was mailed from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “Box Brown,” as he came to be known after this astounding feat, went on to carve out a career as an abolitionist speaker, actor, magician, hypnotist, and even faith healer, traveling the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada until his death in 1897.

The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown is the first book to show how subversive performances were woven into Brown’s entire life, from his early days practicing magic in Virginia while enslaved, to his last shows in Canada and England in the 1890s. It recovers forgotten elements of Brown’s history to illustrate the ways he made himself a spectacle on abolitionist lecture circuits via outlandish performances, and then fell off these circuits and went on to reinvent himself again and again. Brown’s stunts included creating a moving panoramic picture show about his escape; parading through the streets dressed as a “Savage Indian” or “African Prince”; convincing hypnotized individuals that they were sheep who would gobble down raw cabbage; performing magic, dark séances, and ventriloquism; and even climbing back into his “original” box to jump out of it on stage.

In this study, Martha J. Cutter analyzes contemporary resurrections of Brown’s persona by leading poets, writers, and visual artists. Both in Brown’s time and in ours, stories were created, invented, and embellished about Brown, continuing to recreate his intriguing, albeit fragmentary and elusive, story. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown fosters a new understanding not only of Brown’s life but of modern Black performance art that provocatively dramatizes the unfinished work of African American freedom.

Examines the role of the American Revolution in the everyday lives of women

Patriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women’s rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploited these confines, transforming constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Through a close reading of thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across seventy years of history in three urban centers, Jacqueline Beatty illustrates the ways in which women in the revolutionary era asserted their status as dependents, demanding the protections owed to them as the assumed subordinates of men. In so doing, they claimed various forms of aid and assistance, won divorce suits, and defended themselves and their female friends in the face of patriarchal assumptions about their powerlessness. Ultimately, women in the revolutionary era were able to advocate for themselves and express a relative degree of power not in spite of their dependent status, but because of it.

Their varying degrees of success in using these methods, however, was contingent on their race, class, and socio-economic status, and the degree to which their language and behavior conformed to assumptions of Anglo-American femininity. In Dependence thus exposes the central paradoxes inherent in American women’s social, legal, and economic positions of dependence in the Revolutionary era, complicating binary understandings of power and weakness, of agency and impotence, and of independence and dependence. Significantly, the American Revolution provided some women with the language and opportunities in which to claim old rights—the rights of dependents—in new ways. Most importantly, In Dependence shows how women’s coming to consciousness as rights-bearing individuals laid the groundwork for the activism and collective petitioning efforts of later generations of American feminists.

We live in a modern world of social media, cars, electricity, supermarkets, television, fast food, and Hollywood pop culture, and few Westerners have known anything else. Ireland, however, modernized long after most Western countries; many rural areas lacked electricity or technology even in the 1970s. Within living memory villagers lived much as humans had for centuries, or as the Amish do today; they grew and raised their own food, built their own homes, traded with their neighbours, and spent their evenings making their own music and telling their own stories. 

When Brian Kaller moved to a homestead in rural Ireland, he found that some of his elderly neighbours grew up this way, the last who remember a traditional world. Over the next two decades Kaller interviewed his neighbours and assembled oral histories, archives, diaries and memoirs to create a portrait of their lives that can help illuminate traditional cultures everywhere. 

The Last Who Remember invites the reader on a tour of agrarian life, with each chapter, devoting chapters to childhood, schooling, working, socialising, courting, and dying. He looks at the safe, literate, high-trust society they created, and shows how their self-reliance and close communities sustained them in times of hardship. He compares it to today’s unprecedented levels of unhappiness, mental illness and addiction while surrounded by material goods, and questions what we abandoned when we became modern. 

How German Jews used photographs to document their experiences in the face of National Socialism

Still Lives is a systematic study of the ways Jews used photographs to document their experiences in the face of National Socialism. In a time of intensifying anti-Jewish rhetoric and policies, German Jews documented their lives and their environment in tens of thousands of photographs. German Jews of considerably diverse backgrounds took and preserved these photographs: professional and amateurs, of different ages, gender, and classes. The book argues that their previously overlooked photographs convey otherwise unuttered views, emotions, and self-perceptions. Based on a database of more than fifteen thousand relevant images, it analyzes photographs within the historical contexts of their production, preservation, and intended viewing, and explores a plethora of Jews’ reactions to the changing landscapes of post-1933 Germany. Here, the authors claim that these reactions complement, complicate, and, sometimes, undermine the contents of contemporaneous written sources.

Still Lives develops a new methodology for historians to use while reading and analyzing photographs, and shows how one can highlight an image’s role in a narrative that comments on, and assigns meaning to, the reality it documents. In times of radical uncertainty, numerous German Jews used photography to communicate their intricate, confused, and conflicting expectations, fears, and beliefs. Through careful analysis of these photographs, this book lays the foundations for a new history of the German-Jewish experience during the National Socialist years.

WINNER, 2024 Pauli Murray Book Prize, given by the African American Intellectual History Society

A history of Black urban placemaking and politics in Philadelphia from the Great Migration to the era of Black Power

In this book, author J.T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly—dark agoras—in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane acts of refashioning intimate spaces to expressly confrontational and liberatory efforts to transform the city’s social and ecological arrangement, these communities challenged the imposition of Progressive and post-Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them.

Under the rubric of dark agoras Roane brings together two formulations of collectivity and belonging associated with working-class Black life. While on their surface diametrically opposed, the city’s underground—its illicit markets, taverns, pool halls, unlicensed bars, as well as spaces housing illicit sex and informal sites like corners associated with the economically and socially disreputable--constituted a spatial and experiential continuum with the city’s set apart—its house meetings, storefronts, temples, and masjid, as well as the extensive spiritually appropriated architectures of the interwar mass movements that included rural land experiments as well as urban housing, hotels, and recreational facilities. Together these sites incubated Black queer urbanism, or dissident visions for urban life challenging dominant urban reform efforts and their modes of producing race, gender, and ultimately the city itself. Roane shows how Black communities built a significant if underappreciated terrain of geographic struggle shaping Philadelphia between the Great Migration and Black Power. This fascinating book will help readers appreciate the importance of Black spatial imaginaries and worldmaking in shaping matters of urban place and politics.

ASALH 2023 Book Prize Winner

A lively living history of anti-colonialist movements across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans

Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation.

Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse battles against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists Oceania's many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific’s Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa’s Albert Wendt, African American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, West Papua’s Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia’s Déwé Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will ‘Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

In a world grappling with the global significance of Black Lives Matter and state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies, Pasifika Black is a both triumphant history and tragic reminder of the ongoing quests for decolonization in Oceania, the African world, and the Global South.

Co-Winner of the 2023 Latino/a Section Best Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association

Honorable Mention, 2024 Best Book Award, given by the Asia and Asian America section of the American Sociological Association

The stories of second-generation immigrant gay men coming of age in Los Angeles

Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA could not have felt further removed from a world where queerness was accepted and celebrated. Instead, the men profiled here maneuver through family and friendship circles where masculinity dominates, gay sexuality is unspoken, and heterosexuality is strictly enforced. For these men, the path to sexual freedom often involves chasing the dreams while resisting the expectations of their immigrant parents—and finding community in each other.

Ocampo also details his own story of reconciling his queer Filipino American identity and those of men like him. He shows what it was like for these young men to grow up gay in an immigrant family, to be the one gay person in their school and ethnic community, and to be a person of color in predominantly White gay spaces. Brown and Gay in LA is an homage to second-generation gay men and their radical redefinition of what it means to be gay, to be a man, to be a person of color, and, ultimately, what it means to be an American.

The history of queer politics in the United States since 1968 is commonly narrated as either a progressive campaign for state recognition or as a subcultural rejection of prevailing gender norms. But these accounts miss the true scale of queer politics in the post-war era. By centering transnational relations, practices, and infrastructures in the history of sexual rebellion, Eros and Empire provides an alternative view of US-based struggles for sexual freedom.

Alexander Stoffel analyzes three prominent US-based social movements—gay liberationism, Black lesbian feminism, and AIDS activism—to argue that they were fundamentally shaped by their transnational entanglements. Departing from popular domestic framings of these movements, Stoffel recasts the history of radical queer thought and action as a project of erotic worldmaking. This project mobilized queer affects of pleasure, desire, and eroticism in the fight for revolutionary transformation on a world scale. The transnational perceptions, activities, and consciousness of queer radicals, Stoffel argues, not only conditioned the trajectory of queer history, but also radicalized wider anti-imperialist, socialist, and abolitionist struggles past and present.

In this ambitious and interdisciplinary work, Stoffel reconsiders the United States' revolutionary sexual past and creates new opportunities for the study of sexual formations in relation to questions of capital accumulation, empire, and resistance.

A richly imagined, photo illustrated narrative of 150 years of life in slavery on tobacco plantations in Southern Maryland

For over 165 years, plantation owners in Southern Maryland depended on the labor of enslaved men, women, and children to bring in the tobacco crop. The photographs and stories in this book grew out of the author’s quest to understand how these people, who were subjected to a system that made every attempt to brutalize and dehumanize them, were able not only to survive but to build families and meaningful lives. Author Merideth Taylor has created a credible, well-researched, richly imagined world that is both informative and moving. The traditional central figure and linear plot of the novel has been replaced by an interwoven collage of scenes and community of characters, that reflect the diversity of experience, “silences,” and incompleteness of the historical record. Her choice to largely avoid graphic depictions of the violence perpetrated on enslaved bodies allows the reader to focus, instead, on the remarkable resilience, ingenuity, skills, and cultural strengths that enabled them to make a way out of no way.

Author royalties will be donated to Historic Sotterley’s Descendant’s Project.

Ever since Plato’s Republic, the study of statecraft has been a staple of Western discourse, and so has the study of particular leaders. Although Jewish scholars, thinkers, and popularizers have contributed notably to this genre, strikingly few have turned their attention to the history of Jewish leaders—that is, leaders specifically of the Jewish people—in particular. 

And yet there has been no lack of such outstanding figures, from the biblical period of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land and once again in present-day Israel or during the millennia of exile and formal Jewish statelessness in the Diaspora. This book, devoted to ten of the most colorful, fascinating, and consequential Jewish political leaders over the past three millennia, fills the gap. 

Among the ten, men and women alike, some were firmly bound to Judaic religious teachings and others less so, but guiding all of them was the fixed lodestar of their own Jewish identity. By the mid-20th century, the legacy of past generations would inspire modern successors bent on the re-founding of the sovereign Jewish state, one of the greatest political feats in human history. 

In delving into the unique circumstances and predicaments faced by these ten, and into the characteristics that mark them and their statesmanship as specifically Jewish, readers will also become familiar with what Jewish tradition has to say about the demands of statesmanship and, by inference, with the qualities needed by successful Jewish political leaders encountering the challenges of today and tomorrow.    

Japan is a place where powerful earthquakes have occurred more frequently and have caused more harm in the modern era than they have in all but a handful of other locations on the planet. In the twentieth century alone, earthquake disasters in Japan took almost as many lives as they had in all of the country’s recorded history up to that point. Predicting Disasters is the first English-language book to explore how scientists convinced policy makers and the public in postwar Japan that catastrophic earthquakes were coming, and the first to show why earthquake prediction has played such a central role in Japan’s efforts to prepare for a dangerous future ever since.

Kerry Smith shows how, in the twentieth century, scientists struggled to make large-scale earthquake disasters legible to the public and to policy makers as significant threats to Japan’s future and as phenomena that could be anticipated and prepared for. Smith also explains why understanding those struggles matters. Disasters, Smith contends, belong alongside more familiar topics of analysis in modern Japanese history—such as economic growth and its impacts, political crises and popular protest, and even the legacies of the war—for the work they do in helping us better understand how the past has influenced beliefs about Japan’s possible futures, and how beliefs about the future shape the present.

Predicting Disasters makes relevant elements of Japan’s past more accessible to readers interested in the histories of disaster and scientific communities, as well as to those who want to gain a better understanding of the risk and uncertainty surrounding natural phenomena.

Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience. To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, pincushions and gift books, broadsides and panoramas. Building on the distinctive practices of British antislavery and evangelical reform movements, the AASS utilized innovative business strategies to market its productions and developed a centralized distribution system to circulate them widely. In Selling Antislavery, Teresa A. Goddu shows how the AASS operated at the forefront of a new culture industry and, by framing its media as cultural commodities, made antislavery sentiments an integral part of an emerging middle-class identity. She contends that, although the AASS's dominance waned after 1840 as the organization splintered, it nevertheless created one of the first national mass markets.

Goddu maps this extensive media culture, focusing in particular on the material produced by AASS in the decade of the 1830s. She considers how the dissemination of its texts, objects, and tactics was facilitated by the quasi-corporate and centralized character of the organization during this period and demonstrates how its institutional presence remained important to the progress of the larger movement. Exploring antislavery's vast archive and explicating its messages, she emphasizes both the discursive and material aspects of antislavery's appeal, providing a richly textured history of the movement through its artifacts and the modes of circulation it put into place.

Featuring more than seventy-five illustrations, Selling Antislavery offers a thorough case study of the role of reform movements in the rise of mass media and argues for abolition's central importance to the shaping of antebellum middle-class culture.

2021 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

How taking Indigenous sovereignty seriously can help dismantle the structural racism encountered by other people of color in the United States

Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law provides a timely analysis of structural racism at the intersection of law and colonialism. Noting the grim racial realities still confronting communities of color, and how they have not been alleviated by constitutional guarantees of equal protection, this book suggests that settler colonial theory provides a more coherent understanding of what causes and what can help remediate racial disparities.

Natsu Taylor Saito attributes the origins and persistence of racialized inequities in the United States to the prerogatives asserted by its predominantly Angloamerican colonizers to appropriate Indigenous lands and resources, to profit from the labor of voluntary and involuntary migrants, and to ensure that all people of color remain “in their place.”

By providing a functional analysis that links disparate forms of oppression, this book makes the case for the oft-cited proposition that racial justice is indivisible, focusing particularly on the importance of acknowledging and contesting the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands. Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law concludes that rather than relying on promises of formal equality, we will more effectively dismantle structural racism in America by envisioning what the right of all peoples to self-determination means in a settler colonial state.

A chronicle of fifty years of deep hanging out in California’s Indian country!

"Deep Hanging Out is a vibrant testament to one man’s commitment to nurturing community and dancing with change." —Terry Tempest Williams

Writer and publisher Malcolm Margolin has been "deep hanging out"—or immersing himself in a social, informal way—in California's Indian country since the 1970s. This volume collects thirty articles, introductions, and other pieces he wrote about California's diverse Indian country (well over one hundred tribes), drawn mainly from the quarterly magazine he cofounded in 1987, News from Native California. He shares with his readers the experiences, knowledge, and cultural renewal that California Indians have generously shared with him, often after years of friendship, from the erection of a ceremonial enclosure in Northern California—built to fall apart within a generation so that the knowledge of how to construct one is always current—to a visit by aboriginal Hawaiians in diplomatic recognition of native Southern Californian tribes. He draws on both archives and interviews with elders in longer reports about leadership traditions, pedagogical techniques, and conservation practices in various parts of the state—fascinating glimpses into worldviews very different from those of contemporary America. Filled with insight and affection, as well as some of the most gorgeous writing,Deep Hanging Out will appeal both to newcomers and to those whose roots and hearts reside in the state’s Indian country.

A historical and contemporary study of Palestinian musicianship in exile in the Middle East, spanning half a century in disparate locations

Palestinian Music in Exile is a historical and contemporary study of Palestinian musicianship in exile in the Middle East, spanning half a century in disparate locations including Gaza, Turkey, Kuwait, and Egypt. Grassroots musicians emerge here as powerful actors, their stories taking center stage, offering critiques of existing conditions, and new perspectives on displacement and the transmission of Palestinian narratives, and presenting alternative visions for the future.

Louis Brehony argues that, under conditions of colonial relations and repeated displacement, the reclaiming of public space has gone hand in hand with aesthetic revolution, both broadening and traditionalizing the sounds of Palestine, and carrying messages of sumud (steadfastness) and resistance. Based on a decade’s research in Europe and the Middle East, this timely and inspiring collection of musical ethnographies provides a rich oral history of contemporary Palestinian musicianship and encompasses a broad range of experiences of the ghurba, or state of exile.

The spread of democracy across the Global South has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country's citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the policies they put forth? In Indicators of Democracy Diana Graizbord exposes the complex, often-hidden world of the institutions that are meant to ensure democratic accountability and transparency. Taking the case of Mexico's National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), Graizbord provides a deep theory of what happens when democratic aspirations intersect with technocratic ambitions. Analyzing what it takes to establish and sustain monitoring and evaluation as a form of official state expertise, Graizbord is able to put forward the contours of technodemocracy—a democratic political project that hinges on the power of experts to shape politics in unexpected but profound ways.

Explores the College Equal Suffrage League’s work to advance the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment

The woman suffrage movement is often portrayed as having been led and organized by middle-aged women and mothers in stuffy, formal settings. This dominant account grossly neglects a significant demographic within the movement—college women. Between 1870 and 1910, the proportion of college women in the United States rose from 21 to 40 percent. By 1880, there were 155 private colleges in the Northeast and the South for female students and numerous coeducational institutions in the West. The widespread extension of academic training for women helped spur a well-organized campaign for female voting rights on college campuses, where suffragists found a new audience and stage to earn respect and support.

Votes for College Women examines archives from the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), established in 1900 as an affiliate of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, to illustrate the outsize and dynamic role that young women played in the woman suffrage movement. The book vividly illustrates how the CESL’s campaigns served a dual purpose: not only did they invigorate the Nineteenth Amendment campaign at a crucial moment, but they also brought about a profound transformation in the culture of women’s organizing and higher education. Furthermore, Kelly L. Marino argues that the CESL’s campaigns set trends in youth activism and helped lay the groundwork for later and more well-known college protests against gender inequality. Fascinating and timely, Votes for College Women shows how these brave women solidified the campus and the classroom as arenas for civic and social activism.

The first thorough study of the Justice Department’s pattern or practice program, examining how it works and how court-imposed consent decrees implement needed reforms

American society grapples with an enduring crisis in policing which is inextricably intertwined with the nation’s deeply rooted racial issues. While there have been great strides in policing over the past five decades, the United States continues to wrestle with serious crime and strained relations between law enforcement and African American communities.

In this comprehensive analysis, Samuel Walker, a leading figure in the study of criminal justice, focuses on the pivotal federal effort behind police reform—the US Justice Department’s pattern or practice program. Created by Congress in 1994, this program gives the Justice Department the authority to investigate police departments that display patterns of unconstitutional practices, initiate civil suits, and secure court-enforced consent decrees that mandate reform. Walker meticulously examines the reforms dictated by these consent decrees, delves into the challenges of their implementation, and evaluates the progress made by various departments in enhancing police services. Despite various obstacles, the program has proven successful.

The Future of Police Reform also considers the broader societal, political, and legal issues that profoundly influence reform efforts, such as an entrenched police subculture hindering change, the formidable power of police unions, and a lack of full support from local political leaders.

In conclusion, Walker celebrates reform efforts across the country and foresees a network of local and state centers of activity fostering continued optimism for the future of police reform in the US. A collective effort holds the promise of genuine and lasting change.

In his newest book, Charles Murray fearlessly states two controversial truths about the American population: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. If we aim to navigate public policy with wisdom and realism, these realities must be brought into the light.

“Facing Reality provides a powerful overview of one perspective that those who allege sweeping forms of systemic or institutional racism find it all to convenient to ignore―or cancel without due consideration.”―Wilfred Reilly, Commentary

“Facing Reality is a bold, important book which should be widely read and discussed.” ―Amy L. Wax, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, for the Claremont Review of Books

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart float free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.

What good can come of bringing them into the open? America’s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.

We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed’s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.

Composed in Germany in the early thirteenth century by Judah ben Samuel he-hasid, Sefer Hasidim, or "Book of the Pietists," is a compendium of religious instruction that portrays the everyday life of Jews as they lived together with and apart from Christians in towns such as Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Regensburg. A charismatic religious teacher who recorded hundreds of original stories that mirrored situations in medieval social living, Judah's messages advocated praying slowly and avoiding honor, pleasure, wealth, and the lures of unmarried sex. Although he failed to enact his utopian vision of a pietist Jewish society, his collected writings would help shape the religious culture of Ashkenazic Judaism for centuries.

In "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe, Ivan G. Marcus proposes a new paradigm for understanding how this particular book was composed. The work, he contends, was an open text written by a single author in hundreds of disjunctive, yet self-contained, segments, which were then combined into multiple alternative versions, each equally authoritative. While Sefer Hasidim offers the clearest example of this model of composition, Marcus argues that it was not unique: the production of Ashkenazic books in small and easily rearranged paragraphs is a literary and cultural phenomenon quite distinct from anything practiced by the Christian authors of northern Europe or the Sephardic Jews of the south. According to Marcus, Judah, in authoring Sefer Hasidim in this manner, not only resisted Greco-Roman influences on Ashkenazic literary form but also extended an earlier Byzantine rabbinic tradition of authorship into medieval European Jewish culture.

From teen pregnancy and gay sexuality to Communism and disability, the startling secrets that families kept during the Cold War era

All families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays A lesbian partnership, a “bastard” son, an aunt who is a prostitute, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unraveled a family at an earlier moment in history. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise would risk eliciting not only embarrassment or discomfort, but profound shame and, in some cases, danger. Drawing on over 150 memoirs describing childhoods in the period between the aftermath of World War II and the 1960s, Nelson highlights the importance of history in creating family secrets and demonstrates the use of personal stories to understand how people make sense of themselves and their social worlds.

Keeping Family Secrets uncovers hidden stories of same-sex attraction among boys, unwed pregnancies among teenage girls, the institutionalization of children with mental and physical disabilities, participation in left-wing political activities, adoption, and Jewish ancestry. The members of ordinary families kept these issues secret to hide the disconnect between the reality of their own family and the prevailing ideals of what a family should be. Personal accounts reveal the costs associated with keeping family secrets, as family members lie, hurl epithets, inflict abuse, and even deny family membership to protect themselves from the shame and danger of public knowledge. Keeping Family Secrets sheds light not only on decades-old secrets but pushes us to confront what secrets our families keep today.

Highlights Bruce Lee’s influence beyond martial arts and film

An Asian and Asian American icon of unimaginable stature and influence, Bruce Lee revolutionized the martial arts by combining influences drawn from around the world. Uncommonly determined, physically gifted, and artistically brilliant, Lee rose to fame as part of a wave of transpacific globalization that bridged the nearly seven thousand miles between Hong Kong and California. Like Water unpacks Lee’s global impact, linking his legendary status as a martial artist, actor, and director to his continual traversals across the newly interconnected Asia and America.

Daryl Joji Maeda’s multifaceted account of Bruce Lee’s legacy uniquely traces how movements and migrations across the Pacific Ocean structured the cultures Bruce Lee inherited, the milieu he occupied, the martial art he developed, the films he made, and the world he left behind. A unique blend of cultural history and biography, Like Water unearths the cultural strands that Lee intertwined in his rise to a new kind of global stardom. Moving from the gold rush in California and the British occupation of Hong Kong, to the Cold War and the deployment of American troops across Asia, Maeda builds depth and complexity to this larger-than-life figure. His cultural chronology of Bruce Lee reveals Lee to be both a product of his time and a harbinger of a more connected future.

Nearly half a century after his tragic death, Bruce Lee remains an inspiring symbol of innovation and determination, with an enduring legacy as the first Asian American global superstar.

A courtside view of how women athletes’ identities are policed, on and off the court

Women’s college basketball is big business—top teams bring in millions of dollars in revenue for their schools. Women’s NCAA games are broadcast regularly on sports networks, and many of the top players and coaches are household names. Yet these athletes face immense pressure to be more than successful at their sport. They must also conform to expectations about gender, sexuality, and race—expectations that are often in direct contrast to success in the game. They are not supposed to have muscles that are too big, they are not supposed to be too tough, they are not supposed to be too masculine or “look like men,” and they are not supposed to be queer.

A former college athlete herself, Michelle J. Manno spent a full season with a highly competitive NCAA Division I women’s basketball program as one of the team’s managers. In vivid detail, she takes us on the court, on the team bus, into the locker room, and to championship games to show the intense dedication that these women give to the game. She found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that these extremely talented women were strictly policed around the presentation of their gender and sexuality, especially the athletes who were Black. They were routinely monitored, banned from engaging in certain activities, and often punished for behavior that put their queerness, Blackness, and masculinity on display. Convincingly conforming to conventional expectations of gender and sexuality—from the clothes they wore to the people they dated—was yet another challenge at which they needed to excel. Importantly, Manno also highlights several well-known contemporary professional athletes—Brittney Griner, Serena Williams, Gabby Douglas, and Caster Semenya, among others—to show that fame and performing at the highest levels in sport does not protect women athletes from having to navigate the conflicting and often contradictory expectations of identity.

A riveting portrait of an elite basketball program, Denied will forever change our understanding of women athletes and the sports they play.

An archaeological, historical, and art historical study of a remarkable early church excavated at Amheida in Egypt's Dakhla Oasis

Early Christianity at Amheida (Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis): A Fourth-Century Church. Volume 1: The Excavations is an archaeological, historical, and art historical study of a remarkable basilica-church excavated at Amheida in Dakhla Oasis. This church, excavated between 2012 and 2023, dates to the fourth century CE and therefore is among the earliest purpose-built churches in Egypt. It also contains one of the oldest, if not the oldest, excavated Christian funerary crypts in the country. The church at Amheida thus offers a wealth of new data on early Christianity in Egypt, particularly with respect to the earliest phases of Christian art and architecture and burial customs. Aravecchia presents a systematic treatment of the stratigraphy, building techniques, materials, features, architecture, decoration, and finds of the church, carefully contextualized in the early Christianity of the late antique Great Oasis and Egypt more broadly.

Examines the significance of sports in the lives of diasporic Filipino Americans

Organized sports have occupied a central place in Filipino American life since US colonialism began in the Philippines in 1898. For Filipino diasporas in the United States, sports are important cultural sites through which men and women cultivate a sense of ethnic community and belonging to the American national fabric.

Sports studies focused on Asian America have tended to focus on East Asians, largely ignoring Filipinos. Thus, we know very little about how sports work as critical arenas to understand larger questions about Filipino identity formations, racialization, gender dynamics, diasporic contours, and post-colonial sporting cultures. This book offers an in-depth ethnographic examination of the significance of sports to the lives of Filipino Americans under the shadow of US empire and neocolonial inequities. Through a close examination of Filipino American sporting
cultures—from boxing and the Manny “Pac-Man” Pacquiao phenomenon to men’s basketball leagues to women’s flag football—this book shows how engagements with sports reveal the shifting nature of Filipino Americanness and Filipino American subjectivity.

Drawing on over four years of data collected in Southern California, Las Vegas, Urbana-Champaign, and Arlington, Constancio R. Arnaldo, Jr. documents the intimate connections among Filipino American sports, transnationalism, and diasporic belonging. Filipino American Sporting Cultures adds an important voice to the body of work using sports as a lens to look at US culture and communities of color.

Acting as a follow up to Volume 41 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction (2013), Symbolic Interaction and Inequality explores further the concept of Radical Interactionism, a perspective of researching domination and subordination introduced by scholar Lonnie Athens.

Demonstrating advancements made in Radical Interactionism over the past decade, chapters examine the omnipresent and insidious nature of inequality as well as its social construction among family members, cisgender and gender-diverse people, as well as university students and personnel, particularly college athletes.

Highlighting fruitful accomplishments achieved by a range of symbolic interactionists, this volume exhibits the significance of studying inequality, a venture that not only enriches symbolic interactionism but human life as a whole.

Scripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism.

In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques—black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)—in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst.

Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.

Comparative insights on astronomy, divination, and medicine from ancient texts

Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East presents a collection of articles by leading scholars on scientific practices in the ancient world, with emphasis on the fields of medicine, astronomy, astrology, and other forms of divination. The essays engage with a wide variety of textual sources in many different languages and scripts from Egypt and the Near East spanning more than a millennium, including some texts that are edited and discussed here for the first time. The contributors to this volume were tasked with approaching their texts not only as specialists, but also from a cross-cultural perspective, and the resulting body of work reveals new and exciting evidence for the transfer of scientific knowledge across cultural borders in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.

This book will be of interest primarily to specialists in the history of medicine, science, divination, and magic, as well as to papyrologists, Egyptologists, and Assyriologists.

As officials scrambled in 2020 to manage the spread of COVID, the reverberations of the crisis reached well beyond immediate public health concerns. The governance problems that emerged in the pandemic would be problems in other climate-related disasters, too.

Many of these governance problems wound up in court. Businesses filed insurance claims for lost commerce; when the claims were denied, some companies sued. Defense attorneys tried to get inmates released from prison, citing dangerous living conditions. As state governments ordered closures and otherwise tried to adapt, interest organizations that had long sought to limit government authority challenged them in court. Political officials railed against litigation they argued would stop businesses from reopening. The United States, like other countries, governs partly through litigation, and litigation is one way of seeing the multiple governance failures during the pandemic.

Drawing on databases of cases filed, news reports, and the websites of advocacy groups and law firms, Susan M. Sterett argues that governing during the pandemic, or in any disaster, must include the human institutions intertwined with the effects of the virus. Those institutions reveal problems well beyond the reach of technical expertise. Failures in private insurance as a way of governing risk, conflicts about the primacy of religion, government authority, and health, are problems that predated the pandemic and will persist in future disasters.

2023 Co-Winner of the Herbert Jacob Book Prize, given by the Law and Society Association

Illustrates how the power of narrative influences how police, prosecutors, juries, and judges construct
legal reality

Wrongful convictions have been studied primarily through the lenses of law, psychology, and the social sciences. Though scholarship has established canonical factors that help explain why the innocent are convicted, a very simple question has not been answered: How is it possible that prosecutors can convince juries and themselves of the guilt of an innocent defendant, often even against strong exculpatory evidence? Narratives of Guilt and Innocence seeks to address this crucial question by highlighting the narrative blueprint of a given criminal justice system and then how the power of narrative influences how police, prosecutors, juries, and judges construct legal reality and the evidence for it. That law and storytelling are connected is a common trope, but we know surprisingly little about the intricate role storytelling plays in criminal cases and wrongful convictions in particular.

This book questions the effectiveness of the adversarial contest between prosecutor and defense as a means to arrive at the truth and argues that narrative is an important a factor in the construction of legal reality. Wrongful convictions exemplify that narrative and truth have an uncomfortable relationship. Ralph Grunewald provides a retelling and reading of well-known miscarriages of justice, including the best-known wrongful conviction in Germany. Applying a comparative perspective shows that the narrative desire as a human trait has a universal power with a persistence that transcends the regulatory and procedural setup of a given system.

Narratives of Guilt and Innocence puts wrongful convictions into an interdisciplinary and comparative context and vividly demonstrates just how much the process of storytelling affects legal reality.

Heartfelt personal accounts from transgender people fighting for the right to serve in the military

“Prior to coming out as transgender I served the first several years of my career under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” hiding my sexual orientation out of the constant fear of expulsion. I then found myself in the same predicament as when I first joined, wanting nothing more than to serve my country and do my job, but at the cost of sacrificing a major part of who I am. . . . This time, however, I decided that I could no longer sacrifice my own well-being, my own authentic self.”—Mak Vaden, Warrant Officer 1, U.S. Army National Guard, 2006-present

“I have traveled around the world. . . . I have been on five cutters with eleven years of sea time and commanded the Coast Guard cutter Campbell. I have negotiated treaties and fostered international law enforcement cooperation. I have stopped drug smugglers and seized illegal fishing vessels on the high seas. And, I also have gender dysphoria and identify as a trans woman.”—Allison Caputo, Captain, US Coast Guard, 1995–present

On January 25, 2021, in one of his first acts as President, Joe Biden reversed the Trump Administration’s widely condemned ban on transgender people in the military. In With Honor and Integrity, Máel Embser-Herbert and Bree Fram introduce us to the brave individuals who are on the front lines of this issue, assembling a powerful, accessible, and heartfelt collection of first-hand accounts from transgender military personnel in the United States.

Featuring twenty-six essays from current service members or veterans, these eye-opening accounts show us what it is like to serve in the military as a transgender person. From a religious affairs specialist in the Army National Guard, to a petty officer first class in the Navy, to a veteran of the Marine Corps who became “the real me” at age forty-nine, these accounts are personal, engaging, and refreshingly honest. Contributors share their experiences from before and during President Trump’s ban—what barriers they face at work, why they do or don’t choose to serve openly, and how their colleagues have treated them. Fram, a lieutenant colonel who is serving openly as a transgender woman in the US Space Force, and has advocated for open service policies, shares her experience in the aftermath of Trump’s announcement of the ban on Twitter.

Ultimately, Embser-Herbert and Fram provide an inspiring look at the past, present, and future of transgender military service. At a time when LGBTQ rights are under siege, and the opportunity to serve continues to be challenged, With Honor and Integrity is a timely and necessary read.

When most of their jobs disappear, how do communities survive? In the hard-hit area explored in this book – the Bonavista Peninsula, on the island of Newfoundland – many residents transitioned into "everyday" entrepreneurs such as restauranteurs. Rural Revival explains how these business owners developed a place rich in "entrepreneurial capital." The author draws on six years of ethnographic fieldwork in the area: observations from listening, watching and learning with people in their everyday settings.

Camera work opened doors to people’s ventures and their lives. The many photographs in this book bring you deeply into a sense of presence among the people and their natural settings. To interpret the findings from fieldwork, the author draws on rural sociology and economic anthropology. He shows how people transformed the value of once-neglected things in the "house economy" into assets for tourists, leaving the "market economy." He uses theories of "cross-sector partnerships" to show the ways in which regional development is tough to sustain.

For decades, the outside world mostly knew Myanmar as the site of a valiant human rights struggle against an oppressive military regime, predominantly through the figure of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. And yet, a closer look at Burmese grassroots sentiments reveals a significant schism between elite human rights cosmopolitans and subaltern Burmese subjects maneuvering under brutal and negligent governance. While elites have endorsed human rights logics, subalterns are ambivalent, often going so far as to refuse rights themselves, seeing in them no more than empty promises. Such alternative perspectives became apparent during Burma's much-lauded decade-long "transition" from military rule that began in 2011, a period of massive change that saw an explosion of political and social activism.

How then do people conduct politics when they lack the legally and symbolically stabilizing force of "rights" to guarantee their incursions against injustice? In this book, Elliott Prasse-Freeman documents grassroots political activists who advocate for workers and peasants across Burma, covering not only the so-called "democratic transition" from 2011-2021, but also the February 2021 military coup that ended that experiment and the ongoing mass uprising against it. Taking the reader from protest camps, to flop houses, to prisons, and presenting practices as varied as courtroom immolation, occult cursing ceremonies, and land reoccupations, Rights Refused shows how Burmese subaltern politics compel us to reconsider how rights frameworks operate everywhere.

In an era of mass incarceration, corrections face significant challenges, such as inmate mistreatment, poor confinement conditions, and unpreparedness for reentry. Solutions often focus on individual correctional officers—removing "rotten apples." However, this approach overlooks the systemic issues within correctional institutions. In Corrections at Work, TaLisa J. Carter argues that while officers play a crucial role in maintaining order, institutions themselves must be held accountable for the behavior of their employees.

Reframing the conversation around mass incarceration, Corrections at Work shifts focus from the individual failures of officers to the relationship between employee and organization, and places responsibility on the institutions accountable for the mistreatment of inmates. Carter lays bare the inner workings of correctional facilities and reveals the role of race and identity in shaping institutional responses to employee behavior. Drawing on both her personal experience as a former corrections officer and original research in a Mid-Atlantic correctional system, Carter proposes a new model to examine systems of praise and punishment of individual officers by institutions. Corrections at Work stresses the responsibility of criminal justice institutions in shaping employee behavior and makes clear connections between correctional facilities, officers, and inmate outcomes with significant insights for future practice, policy, and research.

Ultimately, by shifting the focus from individual misconduct to institutional accountability, this book offers a unique perspective on reforms needed to address challenges in corrections.