University of Pennsylvania Press Inc.

Circumventing the Law probes the rabbinic logic behind the use of loopholes, the legal phenomenon of finding and using gaps within law to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. The logic of ha’aramah, a subset of rabbinic legal circumventions mostly defined as a tool for private life, underpins both well-known circumventions, such as selling leaven before Passover, and lesser-known mechanisms, such as designating an animal intended for sacrifice “blemished” before birth to allow it to be slaughtered for food instead. Elana Stein Hain traces the development of these loopholes over time, revealing that rabbinic literature does not consistently accept or reject loopholes. Instead, rabbinic Judaism applies categories of evasion (prohibited), avoidance (permitted), and avoision (contested) to loopholes on a case-by-case basis. The intended outcome of a given loophole determines its classification, as does the legal integrity of the circumventive process in question.

Yet these understandings of loopholes are not static—instead, rabbinic attitudes toward loopholing change over time. Early works display an objective, performative understanding of the self and of intention, but evolve over time to reflect more subjective and intimate understanding of the self and intention. This evolution redefines what legal integrity means in Jewish legal philosophy.

Circumventing the Law brings readers through the Second Temple period to the modern era to see how loopholing has evolved over millennia. With a focus on late antiquity, Stein Hain explores tannaitic literature, the Palestinian Talmud, and contemporaneous Greco-Roman and Persian thought to show that when warranted, Jewish rhetoric and philosophy around understandings of loopholes was a unique phenomenon that relied on changes in understanding the definition of integrity itself, a key finding for scholars of Jewish Studies and of religious and of secular law writ large.

Chronicles the history of emancipation through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a remarkable generation of black northerners

The Rising Generation chronicles the long history of emancipation in the United States through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a generation of black New Yorkers. Born into precarious freedom after the American Revolution and reaching adulthood in the lead-up to the Civil War, this remarkable generation ultimately played an outsized role in political and legal conflicts over slavery’s future, influencing both the nation’s path to the Civil War and changes to the US Constitution.

Through exhaustive research in archives across New York State, where the largest enslaved population in the North resided at the time of the American Revolution, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater begins by exploring how English colonial laws shaped late eighteenth-century gradual abolition acts that freed children born to enslaved mothers. The boys and girls affected by these laws were born into a quasi-free legal status. They were technically not enslaved but were nonetheless required to labor as servants until they reached adulthood. Parents, teachers, and mentors of these “children of gradual abolition” found multiple ways to protect and nurture the boys and girls in their midst. They supported and founded schools, formed ties with white lawyers and abolitionists, petitioned local and state officials for better laws, guarded against kidnapping and cruelty, and shaped New York’s evolving identity as a free state. Black fathers used their votes during annual state elections in the early 1800s to influence legislative antislavery efforts. After many but not all black men in the state were disfranchised by a race-based property requirement in 1822, black citizens across New York organized to regain equal suffrage and to expand and protect other crucial, non-gendered features of state citizenship. Women and children were critical participants in these efforts.

Gronningsater shows how, as the children of gradual abolition reached adulthood, they took the lessons of their youth into midcentury campaigns for legal equality, political inclusion, equitable common school education, and the expansion of freedom across the nation.

Home to the first two drafts of the U.S. Constitution, an original printer’s proof of the Declaration of Independence, and the earliest surviving American photograph, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) is one of the nation’s largest libraries. Published in conjunction with the anniversary of the Society’s founding in 1824, Two Hundred Years is the first book to survey the more than twenty-one million documents, newspapers, graphics, and rare books in its archive.

The book presents one hundred essays highlighting carefully preserved artifacts, spanning the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. Drawing on everything from letters and maps, paintings and photographs, family Bibles and musical scores, Two Hundred Years reflects on the early days of the nation, the relationships colonists had with indigenous peoples, the rapid development of Philadelphia, and the evolution of banking, engineering, and medicine, among other industries and sectors. Through such collections as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers and the archives of the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, HSP enables stories to come to light, including those of women, people of color, and immigrants, that would otherwise go untold. Creative artists and their audiences, technological innovators, and the people they impact, are all represented in this extraordinary book.

Two Hundred Years is not only a beautifully illustrated tour of the HSP’s vast holdings but also a comprehensive story of the origin and recent past of the United States told through the artifacts and documents carefully preserved, protected, and treasured by one of the nation’s oldest historical institutions.

Contributors: Lee Arnold, David Barnes, Katy Bodenhorn Barnes, Georgia B. Barnhill, Wendy Bellion, Rebecca Brannon, David R. Brigham, Kathleen M. Brown, David B. Brownlee, Jane E. Calvert, Mark Clague, Jeffrey A. Cohen, Marie A. Conn, Charles T. Cullen, Susan G. Davis, Richardson Dilworth, Megan J. Elias, Patrick M. Erben, Joel T. Fry, Alice L. George, James N. Green, Emma Hart, Sandra M. Hewlett, Martha Hutson-Saxton, Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Christina Larocco, Michael J. Lewis, Walter Licht, David M. Lubin, Anna O. Marley, Holly A. Mayer, Amy Meyers, Randall M. Miller, Elizabeth Milroy, Kristen Nassif, Therese O’Malley, Nell Irvin Painter, Robert McCracken Peck, Danya M. Pilgrim, Kymberly Pinder, John H. Pollack, Daniel K. Richter, Jessica Choppin Roney, Dan Rottenberg, Janny Scott, Matthew Skic, Patrick Spero, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, John C. Van Horne, Anne A. Verplanck, David Waldstreicher, Sarah J. Weatherwax, Ralph Richard Whyte, Kathryn E. Wilson, Michael Winship, James Wolfinger, Karin Wulf, Aaron V. Wunsch.

Americana Insights 2023 presents the latest research and discoveries on traditional American folk art and material culture. Groundbreaking essays by leading scholars provide a wealth of new insights on a wide array of artistic traditions. Covering a broad geographic area—including New England, the mid-Atlantic, South, and mid-West—and spanning the colonial era to early twentieth century, these essays enhance our understanding of the diverse American experience. This is the only interdisciplinary publication devoted exclusively to traditional Americana and folk art.

Contributors cover a range of topics including portraiture, furniture, jewelry, textiles, and works on paper. In the first volume, authors share groundbreaking research on the use of hooked rugs in the colonial revival era; revisit the work of a famed Connecticut portrait painter known as the Beardsley Limner and his namesake sitters; Rufus Porter’s work as an artist and entrepreneur; a distinctive group of paint-decorated dressing tables from New Hampshire; delicate cutworks made by an incarcerated inmate in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary; painted tavern signs; jewelry in folk portraiture; New Jersey schoolmaster and calligrapher Thomas Earl; and signature quilts from the nineteenth century.

Contributors: Deborah M. Child, Pamela and Brian Ehrlich, Cynthia Fowler, Emelie Gevalt, Mark D. Mitchell, Eileen M. Smiles, Laura Fecych Sprague.

During the first quarter-century after its founding, the United States was swept by a wave of land speculation so unprecedented in intensity and scale that contemporaries and historians alike have dubbed it a “mania.” In Speculation Nation, Michael A. Blaakman uncovers the revolutionary origins of this real-estate bonanza—a story of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and statecraft that stretched across millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and Georgia to the Great Lakes.

Patriot leaders staked the success of their revolution on the seizure and public sale of Native American territory. Initially, they hoped that fledgling state and national governments could pay the hefty costs of the War for Independence and extend a republican society of propertied citizens by selling expropriated land directly to white farmers. But those democratic plans quickly ran aground of a series of obstacles, including an economic depression and the ability of many Native nations to repel U.S. invasion. Wily merchants, lawyers, planters, and financiers rushed into the breach. Scrambling to profit off future expansion, they lobbied governments to convey massive tracts for pennies an acre, hounded revolutionary veterans to sell their land bounties for a pittance, and marketed the rustic ideal of a yeoman’s republic—the early American dream—while waiting for land values to rise.

When the land business crashed in the late 1790s, scores of “land mad” speculators found themselves imprisoned for debt or declaring bankruptcy. But through their visionary schemes and corrupt machinations, U.S. speculators and statesmen had spawned a distinctive and enduring form of settler colonialism: a financialized frontier, which transformed vast swaths of contested land into abstract commodities. Speculation Nation reveals how the era of land mania made Native dispossession a founding premise of the American republic and ultimately rooted the United States’ “empire of liberty” in speculative capitalism.

A richly illustrated presentation of the latest research on traditional American folk art

Americana Insights 2024 is the second volume of an annual series that presents the latest research and discoveries on traditional American folk art and material culture. This installment explores a diverse range of craftspeople and artifacts, treating readers to a journey from Appalachia to the mid-Atlantic and New England, and even onto the Atlantic Ocean. Each essay offers a fresh perspective on American creativity and ingenuity, introducing readers to the makers and materials of early America. This remains the only interdisciplinary publication devoted exclusively to traditional Americana and folk art.

Contributors cover a range of topics including historic Cherokee river cane basket weaving traditions, New England folk artists Sturtevant J. Hamblin, the almshouse paintings of German immigrant Charles Hofmann, and the display of American antiques on mid-twentieth-century ocean liners. Additional subjects include Pennsylvania German fraktur, carousel carving, carriage signs, quilts, and game boards.

Contributors: Trevor Brandt, Paul D’Ambrosio, Tobin Fraley, Emelie Gevalt, Christopher Malone, Richard Miller, Matthew Monk, Amelia Peck, Christian Roden, Cynthia Schaffner, Eileen M. Smiles, Jennifer Swope.

A comprehensive history of Philadelphia from the region’s original Lenape inhabitants to the myriad of residents in the twenty-first century

Philadelphia is famous for its colonial and revolutionary buildings and artifacts, which draw tourists from far and wide to gain a better understanding of the nation’s founding. Philadelphians, too, value these same buildings and artifacts for the stories they tell about their city. But Philadelphia existed long before the Liberty Bell was first rung, and its history extends well beyond the American Revolution.In Philadelphia: A Narrative History, Paul Kahan presents a comprehensive portrait of the city, from the region’s original Lenape inhabitants to the myriad of residents in the twenty-first century.

As any history of Philadelphia should, this book chronicles the people and places that make the city unique: from Independence Hall to Eastern State Penitentiary, Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross to Cecil B. Moore and Cherelle Parker. Kahan also shows us how Philadelphia has always been defined by ethnic, religious, and racial diversity—from the seventeenth century, when Dutch, Swedes, and Lenapes lived side by side along the Delaware; to the nineteenth century, when the city was home to a vibrant community of free Black and formerly enslaved people; to the twentieth century, when it attracted immigrants from around the world. This diversity, however, often resulted in conflict, especially over access to public spaces. Those two themes— diversity and conflict— have shaped Philadelphia’s development and remain visible in the city’s culture, society, and even its geography. Understanding Philadelphia’s past, Kahan says, is key to envisioning future possibilities for the City of Brotherly Love.

Since its inception in 2012, the hugely successful online introduction to modern poetry known as ModPo has engaged some 415,000 readers, listeners, teachers, and poets with its focus on a modern and contemporary American tradition that runs from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson up to some of today's freshest and most experimental written and spoken verse. In The Difference Is Spreading, ModPo's Al Filreis and Anna Strong Safford have handed the microphone over to the poets themselves, by inviting fifty of them to select and comment upon a poem by another writer.

The approaches taken are various, confirming that there are as many ways for a poet to write about someone else's poem as there are poet-poem matches in this volume. Yet a straight-through reading of the fifty poems anthologized here, along with the fifty responses to them, emphatically demonstrates the importance to poetry of community, of socioaesthetic networks and lines of connection, and of expressions of affection and honor due to one's innovative colleagues and predecessors. Through the curation of these selections, Filreis and Safford express their belief that the poems that are most challenging and most dynamic are those that are open—the writings, that is, that ask their readers to participate in making their meaning. Poetry happens when a reader and a poet come in contact with one another, when the reader, whether celebrated poet or novice, is invited to do interpretive work—for without that convergence, poetry is inert.

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.

Explores how Black New Englanders maintained a sense of belonging among their kin in the face of slavery

As winter turned to spring in the year 1699, Sebastian and Jane embarked on a campaign of persuasion. The two wished to marry, and they sought the backing of their community in Boston. Nothing, however, could induce Jane’s enslaver to consent. Only after her death did Sebastian and Jane manage to wed, forming a long-lasting union even though husband and wife were not always able to live in the same household.

New England is often considered a cradle of liberty in American history, but this snippet of Jane and Sebastian’s story reminds us that it was also a cradle of slavery. From the earliest years of colonization, New Englanders bought and sold people, most of whom were of African descent. In Belonging, Gloria McCahon Whiting tells the region’s early history from the perspective of the people, like Jane and Sebastian, who belonged to others and who struggled to maintain a sense of belonging among their kin. Through a series of meticulously reconstructed family narratives, Whiting traces the contours of enslaved people’s intimate lives in early New England, where they often lived with those who bound them but apart from kin. Enslaved spouses rarely were able to cohabit; fathers and their offspring routinely were separated by inheritance practices; children could be removed from their mothers at an enslaver’s whim; and people in bondage had only partial control of their movement through the region, which made more difficult the task of maintaining distant relationships.

But Belonging does more than lay bare the obstacles to family stability for those in bondage. Whiting also charts Afro-New Englanders’ persistent demands for intimacy throughout the century and a half stretching from New England’s founding to the American Revolution. And she shows how the work of making and maintaining relationships influenced the region’s law, religion, society, and politics. Ultimately, the actions taken by people in bondage to fortify their families played a pivotal role in bringing about the collapse of slavery in New England’s most populous state, Massachusetts.

In popular mythology, the Overland Trail is typically a triumphant tale, with plucky easterners crossing the Plains in caravans of covered wagons. But not everyone reached Oregon and California. Some 6,600 migrants perished along the way and were buried where they fell, often on Indigenous land. As historian Sarah Keyes illuminates, their graves ultimately became the seeds of U.S. expansion.

By the 1850s, cholera epidemics, ordinary diseases, and violence had remade the Trail into an American burial ground that imbued migrant deaths with symbolic power. In subsequent decades, U.S. officials and citizens leveraged Trail graves to claim Native ground. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples pointed to their own sacred burial grounds to dispute these same claims and maintain their land. These efforts built on anti-removal campaigns of the 1820s and 30s, which had established the link between death and territorial claims on which the significance of the Overland Trail came to rest.

In placing death at the center of the history of the Overland Trail, American Burial Ground offers a sweeping and long overdue reinterpretation of this historic touchstone. In this telling, westward migration was a harrowing journey weighed down by the demands of caring for the sick and dying. From a tale of triumph comes one of struggle, defined as much by Indigenous peoples’ actions as it was by white expansion. And, finally, from a migration to the Pacific emerges instead a trail of graves. Graves that ultimately undergirded Native dispossession.

In Sex Lives, Joseph Gamble draws from literature, art, and personal testimonies from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe to uncover how early moderns learned to have sex. In the early modern period, Gamble contends, everyone from pornographers to Shakespeare recognized that sex requires knowledge of both logistics (how to do it) and affect (how to feel about it). And knowledge, of course, takes practice.

Gamble turns to a wide range of early modern texts and images from England, France, and Italy, ranging from personal accounts to closet dramas to visual art in order to excavate and analyze a variety of sexual practices in early modernity. Using an intersectional, phenomenological approach to bring historical light to the quotidian sexual experiences of early modern subjects, the book develops the critical concept of the “sex life”—a colloquialism that opens up methodological avenues for understanding daily lived experience in granular detail, both in the distant past and today. Through this lens, Gamble explores how sex organized and permeated everyday life and experiences of gender and race in early modernity. He shows how affects around sex structure the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, revealing the role of sexual feeling and sexual racism in early modern English drama.

Sex Lives reshapes how we understand Renaissance literature, the history of sexuality, and the meaning of sex in both early modern Europe and our own moment.

People have been using tobacco in a variety of forms for centuries. Remarkably, it was originally seen as something that could promote vigor and health. Of course, now we all know that tobacco use causes death and disability in epidemic proportions. If smoking is so bad for us, why in heaven’s name would anyone still smoke?

Quite a bit has changed since tobacco first made the transition to a widely available agricultural product. Unfortunately, the general clinical approach to addressing this problem has failed to keep pace with tobacco technology and its addictive properties. People around the world who have fallen prey to the subtleties of nicotine addiction, or who care for those who have, would benefit from a deeper understanding of the ways in which nicotine can affect the brain’s function and change behaviors over a lifetime. Why People Smoke breaks down the science of tobacco dependence and presents it in a way that is both easily understandable and clinically useful for anyone interested in helping people break free of nicotine’s influence.

Why People Smoke is a first-of-its-kind clinical guide to treating tobacco dependence. The book helps readers make meaningful connections between tobacco’s effects at the cellular level, the predictable behavioral manifestations of the disorder, and the social science and systems requirements required to make a fundamental impact on this disorder. Unlike previous publications like self-help books, step-by-step curricula, or clinical guidelines, Why People Smoke puts practical clinical insights—gained from twenty-five years of practice—into perspective, helping the reader understand how “brain change” translates into “mind change” and the persistent compulsion to smoke . . . despite a person’s desperate desire to stop.

Reading Why People Smoke will change the way you see smoking forever.

The construction of the Panama Canal is typically viewed as a marvel of American ingenuity. What is less visible, and less understood, is the project’s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. The Silver Women shifts the focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who travelled to Panama, inviting readers to place women’s intimate lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama Canal and U.S. imperial expansion.

Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans. But while also subject to racial discrimination and segregation, West Indian women mostly worked outside the umbrella of U.S. canal authorities. They did not hold contracts, had little access to official services and wages, and received pay in both silver and gold. From this position, they found ways to skirt, and at times subvert, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial authorities sought to impose on the migrant workforce. West Indian women developed important strategies of claims-making, kinship, community building, and market adaptation that helped them navigate the contradictions and violence of U.S. empire. In the meantime, these strategies of social reproduction nurtured further West Indian migrations, linking Panama to places like Harlem and Santiago de Cuba.

The Silver Women is thus a history of Black women’s labor of social reproduction as integral to U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.

Wall Street Journal Bestseller
USA Today Bestseller
Amazon Bestseller

When we talk about debt and its impact on our economy, we almost always mean “government debt.” However, this is only a small part of the picture: individuals, private firms, and households owe trillions, and these private debts are vital to understanding the economy.

In this iconoclastic book, Richard Vague examines the assets, liabilities, and incomes of the entire country, private and public sector, to reveal its net worth. His holistic analysis shows that the real factor that drives both financial crises and spiraling inequality—but also, paradoxically, economic growth—is ever rising private debt. The paradox is that while debt is essential and our economy relies on it, it also brings instability unless it is periodically deleveraged—and that is very hard to do. It can, however, be carefully managed, and Vague ends the book by showing how to do so in policy areas ranging from trade and housing to financial policy and student debt.

Underpinned by pioneering data analysis and the author’s lifetime of experience in the financial world, this book is essential for anyone who wants to understand the deep, underlying dynamics of the American economy.

In Fictions of Consent Urvashi Chakravarty excavates the ideologies of slavery that took root in early modern England in the period that preceded the development of an organized trade in enslaved persons.

Despite the persistent fiction that England was innocent of racialized slavery, Chakravarty argues that we must hold early modern England—and its narratives of exceptional and essential freedom—to account for the frameworks of slavery that it paradoxically but strategically engendered. Slavery was not a foreign or faraway phenomenon, she demonstrates; rather, the ideologies of slavery were seeded in the quotidian spaces of English life and in the everyday contexts of England's service society, from the family to the household, in the theater and, especially, the grammar school classroom, where the legacies of classical slavery and race were inherited and negotiated. The English conscripted the Roman freedman's figurative "stain of slavery" to register an immutable sign of bondage and to secure slavery to epidermal difference, even as early modern frameworks of "volitional service" provided the strategies for later fictions of "happy slavery" in the Atlantic world. Early modern texts presage the heritability of slavery in early America, reveal the embeddedness of slavery within the family, and illuminate the ways in which bloodlines of descent underwrite the racialized futures of enslavement.

Fictions of Consent intervenes in a number of areas including early modern literary and cultural studies, premodern critical race studies, the reception of classical antiquity, and the histories of law, education, and labor to uncover the conceptual genealogies of slavery and servitude and to reveal the everyday sites where the foundations of racialized slavery were laid. Although early modern England claimed to have "too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in," Chakravarty reveals slavery was a quintessentially English phenomenon.

From 1994 to 2006, William F. Schulz headed Amnesty International USA. During this time, he and the organization confronted some of the greatest challenges to human rights, including genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan; controversies over the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the use of torture by the United States after 9/11; as well as growing concern about inequities in the American justice system, from police misconduct to the death penalty. Drawing upon his encounters with tyrants, the inspiration of brave human rights heroes, and collaborations with celebrities ranging from Patrick Stewart to Salma Hayek, Schulz uses poignant narrative and amusing anecdotes to discuss the day-to-day realities of struggling with life-and-death human rights crises. In the process he ducks an assassination threat in Liberia; brings tears to the eyes of the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland; and bests America’s self-described “toughest sheriff” on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect.

Full of reflection as well as action, Reversing the Rivers provides Schulz with the opportunity to address profound philosophical questions, such as “What is the nature of evil?”; “How do we foster the ‘better angels of our nature’?” “When may we use force to stop people from using force?” “Is the prohibition on torture as simple as it seems?” and “What’s wrong with an eye for an eye?” Most important, in an eloquent concluding chapter, he answers the quandary most frequently posed to him during his years at Amnesty, “Given all the horrors in the world you see day after day, how do you retain any hope at all in humanity?”

Would there have been a Frederick Douglass if it were not for Betsy Bailey, the grandmother who raised him? Would Harriet Jacobs have written her renowned autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, if her grandmother, a free black woman named Molly Horniblow, had not enabled Jacobs’ escape from slavery?

In Black Elders, Frederick C. Knight explores the experiences of African Americans with aging and in old age during the eras of slavery and emancipation. Though slavery put a premium on young labor, elders worked as caregivers, domestics, cooks, or midwives and performed other tasks in the margins of Southern and Northern economies. Looking at black families, churches, mutual aid societies, and homes for the aged, Knight demonstrates the pivotal role of elders in the history of African American community formation through Reconstruction.

Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, including slave narratives, plantation records, letters, diaries, meeting minutes, and state and federal archives, Knight also examines how blacks and whites, men and women, the young and the old developed competing ideas about age and aging, differences that shaped social relations in coastal West and West Central Africa, the Atlantic and domestic slave trades, colonial and antebellum Southern slave societies, and emancipation in the North and South.

Black Elders offers a unique window into the individual and collective lives of African Americans, the day-to-day struggles they waged around their experiences of aging, and how they drew upon these resources to define the meaning of family, community, and freedom.

A fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South

In The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis (Peoria) tells the stories of the many smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of the Gulf South. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Ellis’s narrative chronicles how diverse Indigenous peoples—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—influenced and often challenged the growth of colonial Louisiana. The book centers on questions of Native nation-building and international diplomacy, and it argues that Native American migration and practices of offering refuge to migrants in crisis enabled Native nations to survive the violence of colonization.

Indeed, these practices also made them powerful. When European settlers began to arrive in Indigenous homelands at the turn of the eighteenth century, these small nations, or petites nations as the French called them, pulled colonists into their political and social systems, thereby steering the development of early Louisiana. In some cases, the same practices that helped Native peoples withstand colonization in the eighteenth century, including frequent migration, living alongside foreign nations, and welcoming outsiders into their lands, have made it difficult for their contemporary descendants to achieve federal acknowledgment and full rights as Native American peoples.

The Great Power of Small Nations tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South.

Illuminates how coffee tied the economic future of the early United States to the wider Atlantic world

Coffee is among the most common goods traded and consumed worldwide, and so omnipresent its popularity is often taken for granted. But even everyday habits have a history. When and why coffee become part of North American daily life is at the center of Coffee Nation. Using a wide range of archival, quantitative, and material evidence, Michelle Craig McDonald follows coffee from the slavery-based plantations of the Caribbean and South America, through the balance sheets of Atlantic world merchants, into the coffeehouses, stores, and homes of colonial North Americans, and ultimately to the growing import/export businesses of the early nineteenth-century United States that rebranded this exotic good as an American staple. The result is a sweeping history that explores how coffee shaped the lives of enslaved laborers and farmers, merchants and retailers, consumers and advertisers.

Coffee Nation also challenges traditional interpretations of the American Revolution, as coffee’s spectacular profitability in US markets and popularity on the new nation’s tables by the mid-nineteenth century was the antithesis of independence. From its beginnings as a colonial commodity in the early eighteenth century, coffee’s popularity soared to become a leading global economy by the 1830s. The United States dominated this growth, by importing ever-increasing amounts of the commodity for drinkers at home and developing a lucrative re-export trade to buyers overseas. But while income generated from coffee sales made up an expanding portion of US trade revenue, the market always depended on reliable access to a commodity that the nation could not grow for itself. By any measure, the coffee industry was a financial success story, but one that runs counter to the dominant narrative of national autonomy. Distribution, not production, lay at the heart of North America’s coffee business, and its profitability and expansion relied on securing and maintaining ties first with the Caribbean and then Latin America.

Terrence Malick is one of American cinema’s most celebrated filmmakers. His films—from Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) to The Thin Red Line (1998), The Tree of Life (2011), and, most recently, A Hidden Life (2019)—have been heralded for their artistry and lauded for their beauty, but what really sets them apart is their ideas. Terrence Malick and the Examined Life is the most comprehensive account to date of this unparalleled filmmaker’s intellectual and artistic development.

Utilizing newly available archival sources to offer original interpretations of his canonical films, Martin Woessner illuminates Malick’s early education in philosophy at Harvard and Oxford as well as his cinematic apprenticeship at the American Film Institute to show how a young student searching for personal meaning became a famous director of Hollywood films. Woessner’s book presents a rich, interdisciplinary exploration of the many texts, thinkers, and traditions that made this transformation possible—from the novels of Hamlin Garland, James Jones, and Walker Percy to the philosophies of Stanley Cavell, Martin Heidegger, and Søren Kierkegaard to road movies, Hollywood Westerns, and the comedies of Jean Renoir. Situating Malick’s filmmaking within recent intellectual and cultural history, Woessner highlights its lasting contributions to both American cinema and the life of the mind.

Terrence Malick and the Examined Life suggests it is time for philosophy to be viewed not merely as an academic subject, overseen by experts, but also as a way of life, open to each and every moviegoer.

A fascinating account of two eighteenth-century princes from East Africa, their travels, and their encounters with the British Empire and slavery

In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes—known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John—convinced a lawyer to purchase them, free them, and travel with them to London. The lawyer perished when a hurricane wrecked their ship, but the princes survived and arrived in England in 1720. Even though the East India Company had initially thought that the princes might assist in their aspirations to develop a trade for gold in East Africa and for enslaved labor in Madagascar, its interest waned. The princes would need to look elsewhere to return home. It was at this point that members of the Royal African Company and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge took up their cause, in the hope that profit and perhaps Christian souls would follow. John would make it home, but tragically, James would end his own life just before the ship sailed for Africa.

In The Two Princes of Mpfumo, Lindsay O’Neill brings to life individuals caught up in the eighteenth-century slave trade. O’Neill also shows how the princes’ experiences reflect the fragmented, chaotic, and often deadly realities of the early British empire. A fascinating and deeply researched historical narrative, The Two Princes of Mpfumo blurs the boundaries between the Atlantic and Indian ocean worlds; reveals the intertwined networks, powerful individuals, and unstable knowledge that guided British attempts at imperial expansion; and illuminates the power of African polities, which decided who lived and who died on their coasts.

An in-depth analysis of literary and cultural productions from Haiti and the Dominican Republic and their diasporas

Spirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Spirals details how a paradigm of permanent conflict between the two nations has its roots in reactions to the Haitian Revolution—a conflict between slavers and freedom-seekers—contests over which have been transmitted over generations, repeating with a difference. Anti-Haitian nationalist rhetoric hides this long trajectory. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Maríñez explores representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.

With its emphases on folk tales, responses to the 1937 genocide, the Constitution of the Dominican Republic, Afro-indigenous collective memories, and lesser-known literary works on the genocide of indigenous populations in the Caribbean, Spirals in the Caribbean will attract students, scholars, and general readers alike.

A fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South

In The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis (Peoria) tells the stories of the many smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of the Gulf South. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Ellis’s narrative chronicles how diverse Indigenous peoples—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—influenced and often challenged the growth of colonial Louisiana. The book centers on questions of Native nation-building and international diplomacy, and it argues that Native American migration and practices of offering refuge to migrants in crisis enabled Native nations to survive the violence of colonization.

Indeed, these practices also made them powerful. When European settlers began to arrive in Indigenous homelands at the turn of the eighteenth century, these small nations, or petites nations as the French called them, pulled colonists into their political and social systems, thereby steering the development of early Louisiana. In some cases, the same practices that helped Native peoples withstand colonization in the eighteenth century, including frequent migration, living alongside foreign nations, and welcoming outsiders into their lands, have made it difficult for their contemporary descendants to achieve federal acknowledgment and full rights as Native American peoples.

The Great Power of Small Nations tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South.

The history of the Black Sea as a source of Mediterranean slaves stretches from ancient Greek colonies to human trafficking networks in the present day. At its height during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Black Sea slave trade was not the sole source of Mediterranean slaves; Genoese, Venetian, and Egyptian merchants bought captives taken in conflicts throughout the region, from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and the Aegean Sea. Yet the trade in Black Sea slaves provided merchants with profit and prestige; states with military recruits, tax revenue, and diplomatic influence; and households with the service of women, men, and children.

Even though Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Greater Syria were the three most important strands in the web of the Black Sea slave trade, they have rarely been studied together. Examining Latin and Arabic sources in tandem, Hannah Barker shows that Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the Mediterranean shared a set of assumptions and practices that amounted to a common culture of slavery. Indeed, the Genoese, Venetian, and Mamluk slave trades were thoroughly entangled, with wide-ranging effects. Genoese and Venetian disruption of the Mamluk trade led to reprisals against Italian merchants living in Mamluk cities, while their participation in the trade led to scathing criticism by supporters of the crusade movement who demanded commercial powers use their leverage to weaken the force of Islam.

Reading notarial registers, tax records, law, merchants' accounts, travelers' tales and letters, sermons, slave-buying manuals, and literary works as well as treaties governing the slave trade and crusade propaganda, Barker gives a rich picture of the context in which merchants traded and enslaved people met their fate.

A thought-provoking reappraisal of the first European encounters with Africa

As early as 1441, and well before other European countries encountered Africa, small Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels were plying the coast of West Africa, where they conducted business with African kingdoms that possessed significant territory and power. In the process, Iberians developed an understanding of Africa's political landscape in which they recognized specific sovereigns, plotted the extent and nature of their polities, and grouped subjects according to their ruler.

In African Kings and Black Slaves, Herman L. Bennett mines the historical archives of Europe and Africa to reinterpret the first century of sustained African-European interaction. These encounters were not simple economic transactions. Rather, according to Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics. Bennett unearths the ways in which Africa's kings required Iberian traders to participate in elaborate diplomatic rituals, establish treaties, and negotiate trade practices with autonomous territories. And he shows how Iberians based their interpretations of African sovereignty on medieval European political precepts grounded in Roman civil and canon law. In the eyes of Iberians, the extent to which Africa's polities conformed to these norms played a significant role in determining who was, and who was not, a sovereign people—a judgment that shaped who could legitimately be enslaved.

Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as being solely mediated through the slave trade and racial difference. By asking in what manner did Europeans and Africans configure sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett offers a new depiction of the diasporic identities that had implications for slaves' experiences in the Americas.

Making and consuming rum created a new means of profit that transformed the Atlantic world

It was strong. It was cheap. It was ubiquitous. Fermented and distilled from the refuse of sugar production, rum emerged in the seventeenth-century Caribbean as a new commodity. To conjure something desirable from waste, the makers, movers, and drinkers of rum arrived at its essential qualities through cross-cultural experimentation and exchange. Those profiting most from the sale of rum also relied on plantation slavery, devoured natural resources, and overlooked the physiological effects of overconsumption in their pursuit of profit. Focusing on the lived experiences of British colonists, Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, The Invention of Rum shows how people engaged in making and consuming this commodity created a new means of profit that transformed the Atlantic world.

Jordan B. Smith guides readers from the fledgling sugar plantations and urban distilleries where new types of alcohol sprung forth to the ships, garrisons, trading posts, and refined tables where denizens of the Atlantic world devoured it. He depicts the enslaved laborers in the Caribbean as they experimented with fermentation, the Londoners caught up in the Gin Craze, the colonial distillers in North America, and the imperial officials and sailors connecting these places. This was a world flooded by rum.

Based on extensive archival research in the Caribbean, North America, and Britain, The Invention of Rum narrates the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of one of the Atlantic world’s most ubiquitous products. Smith casts this everyday item as both a crucial example of negotiation between Europeans, Africans, and Americans and a harbinger of modernity, connecting rum’s early history to the current global market. The book reveals how individuals throughout the Atlantic world encountered—and helped to build—rapidly shifting societies and economies.

How studying material texts can help us better understand the diversity of the Americas, past and present

A Hawai’ian quilt stitched with anti-imperial messages; a Jesuit report that captures the last words of a Wendat leader; an invitation to a ball, repurposed by enslaved people in colonial Antigua; a book of poetry printed in a Peruvian penitentiary. Countless material texts—legible artifacts—resulted from the diverse intercultural encounters that characterize the history of the Americas.

American Contact explores the dynamics of intercultural encounters through the medium of material texts. The forty-eight short chapters present biographies about objects that range in size from four miles long to seven by ten centimeters; date from millennia in the past to the 2000s; and originate from South America, North America, the Caribbean, and other parts of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Each essay demonstrates how particular ways of reading can render the complex meanings of the objects legible—or explains why and how the meanings remain illegible.

In its diversity and breadth, this volume shows how the field of book history can be more inclusive and expansive. Taken together, the essays shed new light on the material practices of communicating power and resistance, subjection and survivance, in contact zones of America.

Contributors: Carlos Aguirre, Ahmed Idrissi Alami, Chadwick Allen, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Molly H. Bassett, Brian Bockelman, George Aaron Broadwell, Rachel Linnea Brown, Nancy Caronia, Raúl Coronado, Marlena Petra Cravens, Agnieszka Czeblakow, Lori Boornazian Diel, Elizabeth A. Dolan, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Cecily Duffie, Devin Fitzgerald, Glenda Goodman, Rachel B. Gross, David D. Hall, Sonia Hazard, Rachel B. Herrmann, Alex Hidalgo, Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis, Alexandra Kaloyanides, Rachael Scarborough King, Danielle Knox, Bishop Lawton, Jessica C. Linker, Don James McLaughlin, John Henry Merritt, Gabriell Montgomery, Emily L. Moore, Isadora Moura Mota, Barbara E. Mundy, Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, Marissa Nicosia, Diane Oliva, Megan E. O’Neil, Sergio Ospina Romero, John H. Pollack, Shari Rabin, Daniel Radus, Nathan Rees, Anne Ricculli, Maria Ryan, Maria Carolina Sintura, Cristina Soriano, Chelsea Stieber, Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman, Chris Suh, Mathew R. Swiatlowski, Marie Balsley Taylor, Martin A. Tsang, Germaine Warkentin, Adrian Chastain Weimer, Bethany Wiggin, Xine Yao, Corinna Zeltsman.

Atmospheric Violence grapples with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict and examines how people attempt to flourish despite and alongside continuing violence. Departing from conventional approaches to the study of disaster and conflict that have dominated academic studies of Kashmir, Omer Aijazi’s ethnography of life in the borderlands instead explores possibilities for imagining life otherwise, in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control and its surrounding mountainscapes, the book takes us to two remote mountainous valleys that have been shaped by recurring environmental disasters, as well as by the landscape of no-go zones, army barracks, and security checkpoints of the contested India/Pakistan border. Through a series of interconnected scenes from the lives of five protagonists, all of whom are precariously situated within their families or societies and rarely enjoy the expected protections of state or community, Aijazi reveals the movements, flows, and intimacies sustained by a landscape that enables alternative modes of life. Blurring the distinctions between story, theory, and activism, he explores what emerges when theory becomes a project of seeing and feeling from the non-normative standpoint of those who, like the book’s protagonists, do not subscribe to the rules by which most others have come to know the world.

Bringing the critical study of disaster into conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and the capaciousness of affect theory, held accountable to Black studies and Indigenous studies, Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labor through which communities living with disaster refuse the conditions of death imposed upon them and create viable lives for themselves, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation.

In A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how, more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule.

With the return of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, the puritan-led colonies faced enormous pressure to conform to the crown’s priorities. Charles demanded that puritans change voting practices, baptismal policies, and laws, and he also cast an eye on local resources such as forests, a valuable source of masts for the English navy. Moreover, to enforce these demands, the king sent four royal commissioners on warships, ostensibly headed for New Netherland but easily redirected toward Boston. In the face of this threat to local rule, colonists had to decide whether they would submit to the commissioners’ authority, which they viewed as arbitrary because it was not accountable to the people, or whether they would mobilize to defy the crown.

Those resisting the crown included not just freemen (voters) but also people often seen as excluded or marginalized such as non-freemen, indentured servants, and women. Together they crafted a potent regional constitutional culture in defiance of Charles II that was characterized by a skepticism of metropolitan ambition, a defense of civil and religious liberties, and a conviction that self-government was divinely sanctioned. Weimer shows how they expressed this constitutional culture through a set of well-rehearsed practices—including fast days, debates, committee work, and petitions. Equipped with a ready vocabulary for criticizing arbitrary rule, with a providentially informed capacity for risk-taking, and with a set of intellectual frameworks for divided sovereignty, the constitutional culture that New Englanders forged would not easily succumb to an imperial authority intent on consolidating its power.

The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In The Driver’s Story, Randy M. Browne illuminates the predicament and harrowing struggles of these men—and sometimes women—at the heart of the plantation world. What, Browne asks, did it mean to be trapped between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the constant resistance of one’s fellow enslaved laborers?

In this insightful and unsettling account of slavery and racial capitalism, Browne shows that on plantations across the Americas, drivers were at the center of enslaved people’s working lives, social relationships, and struggles against slavery. Drivers enforced labor discipline and confronted the resistance of their fellow enslaved laborers, aiming to maintain a position that helped them survive in a world where enslaved people were treated as disposable. Drivers also protected the people they supervised, negotiating workloads and customary rights to essentials like food and rest with white authorities. Within the slave community, drivers helped other enslaved people create a sense of belonging, as husbands and fathers, as Big Men, and as leaders of diasporic African “nations.” Sometimes, drivers even organized rebellions, sabotaging the very system they were appointed to support.

Compelling and original, The Driver’s Story enriches our understanding of the never-ending war between enslavers and enslaved laborers by focusing on its front line. It also brings us face-to-face with the horror of capitalist labor exploitation.

In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The product of those studies was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society.

More than one hundred years after its original publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press, The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic work. It is the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarship—the kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it.

In his introduction, Elijah Anderson examines how the neighborhood studied by Du Bois has changed over the years and compares the status of blacks today with their status when the book was initially published.

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.

Traces the rise and fall of the historic Black business community in Detroit

The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers are well-known, countless African Americans also left the South to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and viewed business as key to Black liberation. Detroit’s status as a mecca for Black entrepreneurship illuminates this overlooked aspect of the Great Migration story. In Freedom Enterprise, Kendra D. Boyd uses “migrant entrepreneurship” as a lens through which to understand the entwined histories of Black-owned business, racial capitalism, and urban space.

Freedom Enterprise follows Black Southerners’ journeys to Detroit during the initial wave of migration in the 1910s and 1920s, through their efforts to build a prosperous Black business community in the 1930s and 1940s, to the destruction of that community through urban renewal projects and freeway construction in the 1950s and 1960s. Combining business and social history methods to analyze an eclectic archive, Boyd chronicles migrant entrepreneurs’ experiences, highlighting tales of racial and economic violence, Black women’s business organizing, illegal business, communist entrepreneurs, and cooperative economics.

Boyd uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine migrant entrepreneurs’ experiences in twentieth-century America. In the Jim Crow South, African Americans worried about white mobs taking away their property, wealth, and lives. Though they sought refuge in Detroit, migrant entrepreneurs subsequently faced the loss of their livelihoods and the businesses they had spent decades building to the bulldozers of state-sponsored urban redevelopment initiatives. Southern migrants’ “freedom enterprise”—their undertaking of attaining freedom through business—was curtailed by the reality of operating within the confines of US racial capitalism.

In tracing Black entrepreneurs across the Great Migration, Freedom Enterprise provides important insights into African Americans’ activism for racial and economic justice and continued racialized wealth disparities.

A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law

A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who challenged European empires from the inside, Republic of Indians tells the story of Indigenous leaders who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law.

While in the Spanish Empire, Natives were a recognized part of “la república de indios,” the “republic of Indians,” other Natives across the early American South understood themselves to be joined with European colonists in larger polities, each jealously guarding their own bodies of liberties under royal sanction. Thus, rather than simply rejecting European pretensions to rule them as subjects and vassals, Native Southerners as diverse as the Apalachees, Pamunkeys, Powhatans, and Timucuas redefined their status to become political players in legislative assemblies and the courts of distant monarchs. They pushed for incorporation in larger political systems in which they had a say and were themselves instrumental in creating.

Adapting pre-invasion practices to the technology of writing and the challenges of colonialism, Indigenous petitioners sought exemptions from labor and protection for “the lands that God gave to them,” as well as the right to install preferred leaders, avoid enslavement, ally with the Crown against colonists, ease harsh colonial laws, and even amend the terms of treaties and compacts. Bradley J. Dixon shows how their petitions also stand as enduring contributions to American political thought and how it was these “vassals” and “subjects” who gave meaning to the modern idea of tribal sovereignty. In the South, the Spanish and English empires came to resemble one another precisely because they were both dependent to a remarkable degree on maintaining Indigenous political consent and were founded in large part on Indigenous conceptions of law.

Cairo’s synagogues shed new light on the transformation Egyptian society and its Jewish community underwent from 1875 to the present

Sacred Places Tell Tales is the previously untold history of Egyptian Jewry and the ways in which Cairo’s synagogues historically functioned as active institutions in the social lives of these Jews. Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo’s synagogues as exquisite storytellers. The synagogues still stand in Cairo, and they shed new light on the social, cultural, and political processes that Egyptian society and the Jews underwent from 1875 to the present. Studying old and new synagogues in the Egyptian capital, their locations, the items they stored, and the range of religious and nonreligious activities they hosted reveals the social heterogeneity and the diverse ways in which modern Jewish sociocultural identity was constructed within Cairo’s Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Karaite communities. Meital contends that studying the congregations and the social services provided in synagogues reveals the local Jewish community’s customs, cultural preferences, socioeconomic gaps, and class divisions.

Sacred Places Tell Tales narrates not only the past but also the unprecedented transformations that have occurred in recent years in Egypt. While only a handful of Jews live in Egypt, the preservation of Jewish heritage, first and foremost synagogues and cemeteries, enjoy a growing interest in public discourse and popular culture. This new desire to preserve Jewish heritage is inseparable from the ongoing public debate about Egyptian society, its characteristics, and its identity, past and present. By contextualizing Jewish heritage preservation in a longer Egyptian and Jewish history, Meital opens a window into one of the most significant political discussions dividing Egyptian society today.

In Occupied America, Donald F. Johnson chronicles the everyday experience of ordinary people living under military occupation during the American Revolution. Focusing on day-to-day life in port cities held by the British Army, Johnson recounts how men and women from a variety of backgrounds navigated harsh conditions, mitigated threats to their families and livelihoods, took advantage of new opportunities, and balanced precariously between revolutionary and royal attempts to secure their allegiance.

Between 1775 and 1783, every large port city along the Eastern seaboard fell under British rule at one time or another. As centers of population and commerce, these cities—Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston—should have been bastions from which the empire could restore order and inspire loyalty. Military rule's exceptional social atmosphere initially did provide opportunities for many people—especially women and the enslaved, but also free men both rich and poor—to reinvent their lives, and while these opportunities came with risks, the hope of social betterment inspired thousands to embrace military rule. Nevertheless, as Johnson demonstrates, occupation failed to bring about a restoration of imperial authority, as harsh material circumstances forced even the most loyal subjects to turn to illicit means to feed and shelter themselves, while many maintained ties to rebel camps for the same reasons. As occupations dragged on, most residents no longer viewed restored royal rule as a viable option.

As Johnson argues, the experiences of these citizens reveal that the process of political change during the Revolution occurred not in a single instant but gradually, over the course of years of hardship under military rule that forced Americans to grapple with their allegiance in intensely personal and highly contingent ways. Thus, according to Johnson, the quotidian experience of military occupation directly affected the outcome of the American Revolution.

Angel, a Black tenth-grader at a New York City public school, self-identifies as a nerd and likes to learn. But she’s troubled that her history classes leave out events like the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people in the Americas, presenting a sugar-coated image of the United States that is at odds with her everyday experience. “The history I learned in school is simpler,” she says. “The world I live in is a lot more complex.”

Angel, like every student interviewed in Discipline Problems, has been identified by teachers as a “troublemaker,” a student whose behavior disrupts classroom norms and interferes with instruction. But her critiques of the curriculum she’s taught speak to her curiosity and insight, crucial foundations for understanding history. Like many students who have been marginalized by systemic racism in American schools, she exposes the shortcomings of her classrooms’ academic environments by challenging both the content and the methods of her education. All too often, these challenges are framed as “troublemaking,” and the students are disciplined for “acting out” instead of being rewarded for their intellectual engagement.

Tadashi Dozono, a professor of education and former high school social studies teacher, takes seriously the often-overlooked critiques that students of color who get labeled as troublemakers direct toward their high school history curriculum. He reinterprets “troublemaking,” usually cast as a behavioral deficit, as an intellectual asset and form of reasoning that challenges the “disciplining reason” of classrooms where whiteness is valued over the histories and knowledge of people of color. Dozono shows how what are traditionally framed as discipline problems can be seen through a different lens as responses to educational practices that marginalize non-white students. Discipline Problems reveals how students of color seek out alternate avenues for understanding their world and imagines a pedagogy that champions the curiosity, intellect, and knowledge of marginalized learners.

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.

Long before the rise of New World slavery, West Africans were adept swimmers, divers, canoe makers, and canoeists. They lived along riverbanks, near lakes, or close to the ocean. In those waterways, they became proficient in diverse maritime skills, while incorporating water and aquatics into spiritual understandings of the world. Transported to the Americas, slaves carried with them these West African skills and cultural values. Indeed, according to Kevin Dawson's examination of water culture in the African diaspora, the aquatic abilities of people of African descent often surpassed those of Europeans and their descendants from the age of discovery until well into the nineteenth century.

As Dawson argues, histories of slavery have largely chronicled the fields of the New World, whether tobacco, sugar, indigo, rice, or cotton. However, most plantations were located near waterways to facilitate the transportation of goods to market, and large numbers of agricultural slaves had ready access to water in which to sustain their abilities and interests. Swimming and canoeing provided respite from the monotony of agricultural bondage and brief moments of bodily privacy. In some instances, enslaved laborers exchanged their aquatic expertise for unique privileges, including wages, opportunities to work free of direct white supervision, and even in rare circumstances, freedom.

Dawson builds his analysis around a discussion of African traditions and the ways in which similar traditions—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—emerged within African diasporic communities. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

The first comprehensive study of self-purchase in the United States from the American Revolution to the Civil War

Enslaved people lived in a world in which everything had a price. Even freedom. Freedom’s Currency follows enslaved people’s efforts to buy themselves out of slavery across the United States from the American Revolution to the Civil War. In the first comprehensive study of self-purchase in the nation, Julia Wallace Bernier reveals how enslaved people raised money, fostered connections, and made use of slavery’s systems of value and exchange to wrest control of their lives from those who owned them. She chronicles the stories of famous fugitives like Frederick Douglass, who, with the help of friends and supporters, purchased his freedom to protect himself against the continued legal claims of his enslavers and the possibility of recapture. She also shows how enslaved fathers like Lunsford Lane and mothers like Elizabeth Keckley tried to secure lives for their families outside of slavery.

Freedom’s Currency argues that freedom played a central role in the social and economic lives of the enslaved and in the ways that these aspects of their lives overlapped. This intimate portrait of community illuminates the complexity of enslaved people’s ideas about their place at the intersection of slavery and American capitalism and their attempts to value freedom above all. Given the stakes—liberation or remaining enslaved—it is an account of both triumph and devastating failure.

In the early nineteenth century, the American commercial marketplace was a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knock-offs and outright frauds thrived. Appearances could be deceiving, and entrepreneurs often relied on their personal reputations to close deals and make sales. Rapid industrialization and expanding trade routes opened new markets with enormous potential, but how could distant merchants convince potential customers, whom they had never met, that they could be trusted? Through wide-ranging visual and textual evidence, including a robust selection of early advertisements, Branding Trust tells the story of how advertising evolved to meet these challenges, tracing the themes of character and class as they intertwined with and influenced graphic design, trademark law, and ideas about ethical business practice in the United States.

As early as the 1830s, printers, advertising agents, and manufacturers collaborated to devise new ways to advertise goods. They used eye-catching designs and fonts to grab viewers’ attention and wove together meaningful images and prose to gain the public’s trust. At the same time, manufacturers took legal steps to safeguard their intellectual property, formulating new ways to protect their brands by taking legal action against counterfeits and frauds. By the end of the nineteenth century, these advertising and legal strategies came together to form the primary components of modern branding: demonstrating character, protecting goodwill, entertaining viewers to build rapport, and deploying the latest graphic innovations in print. Trademarks became the symbols that embodied these ideas—in print, in the law, and to the public.

Branding Trust thus identifies and explains the visual rhetoric of trust and legitimacy that has come to reign over American capitalism. Though the 1920s has often been held up as the birth of modern advertising, Jennifer M. Black argues that advertising professionals had in fact learned how to navigate public relations over the previous century by adapting the language, imagery, and ideas of the American middle class.

Reveals how medieval Jews developed religious law through contact with their Muslim neighbors

After Revelation offers a dynamic new perspective on medieval Jewish legal thought and its integration in the wider Islamic world. Here, Marc D. Herman demonstrates that Jews were fully conversant in their contemporaries’ ideas about revelation, law, and legal interpretation. Bookended by the two luminaries of medieval Judaism—Saadia Gaon and Moses Maimonides—After Revelation analyzes the legal theory that medieval Jews produced in Islamic lands, mostly in Arabic, and reveals previously unrecognized commonalities between Jewish and Islamic constructions of religious law.

Herman tackles one of the central doctrines of post-biblical Judaism: that God had supplemented the written Hebrew Bible with an Oral Torah. Tracing this idea from Baghdad to Córdoba to Cairo, he shows that the Oral Torah took many new forms in the medieval Islamic world. After Revelation makes plain that medieval Judaism took the shapes that it did largely because of contact with Islam.

The Root and the Branch examines the relationship between the early labor movement and the crusade to abolish slavery between the early national period and the Civil War. Tracing the parallel rise of antislavery movements with working-class demands for economic equality, access to the soil, and the right to the fruits of labor, Sean Griffin shows how labor reformers and radicals contributed to the antislavery project, from the development of free labor ideology to the Republican Party’s adoption of working-class land reform in the Homestead Act. By pioneering an antislavery politics based on an appeal to the self-interest of ordinary voters and promoting a radical vision of “free soil” and “free labor” that challenged liberal understandings of property rights and freedom of contract, labor reformers helped to birth a mass politics of antislavery that hastened the conflict with the Slave Power, while pointing the way toward future struggles over the meaning of free labor in the post-Emancipation United States.

Bridging the gap between the histories of abolitionism, capitalism and slavery, and the origins of the Civil War, The Root and the Branch recovers a long-overlooked story of cooperation and coalition-building between labor reformers and abolitionists and unearths new evidence about the contributions of artisan reformers, transatlantic radicals, free Black activists, and ordinary working men and women to the development of antislavery politics. Based on painstaking archival research, The Root and the Branch addresses timely questions surrounding the relationships between slavery, antislavery, race, labor, and capitalism in the early United States.

In her eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North America’s premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschall a nurturing environment enriched by diverse healing cultures and the Quaker values of gender equality and women’s education. She participated in transatlantic medical and scientific networks with her friend, Benjamin Franklin. Paschall was not unique, however. Women Healers recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries.

Although the history of women practitioners often begins with the 1850 founding of Philadelphia’s Female Medical College, the first women’s medical school in the United States, these students merely continued the legacies of women like Paschall. Remarkably, though, the lives and work of early American female practitioners have gone largely unexplored. While some sources depict these women as amateurs whose influence declined, Susan Brandt documents women’s authoritative medical work that continued well into the nineteenth century. Spanning a century and a half, Women Healers traces the transmission of European women’s medical remedies to the Delaware Valley where they blended with African and Indigenous women’s practices, forming hybrid healing cultures.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.

A social and transnational history of black abolitionism in Brazil

Freedom’s Horizon is a transnational history of black abolitionism in Brazil. In the last country to abolish slavery in the Western Hemisphere, enslaved and free Africans and their descendants crafted their visions of liberation by thinking comparatively about the uneven spread of abolition across the Atlantic world. Between the 1840s and 1860s, they acted on the idea that the end of slavery anywhere placed freedom on the horizon in Brazil. Thus, they pursued alliances with British diplomats; rose in arms at the sight of both Union and Confederate warships off Brazil’s Atlantic coast; sought free soil at foreign consulates, on ships, and in maroon settlements (called quilombos); and organized uprisings for immediate abolition after learning of international emancipation struggles in the newspapers.

Isadora Moura Mota shows that through flight, marronage, rebellion, and literacy practices, enslaved and freed peoples in Brazil developed a geopolitical imagination in dialogue with the British campaign against the slave trade (banned in Brazil in 1850), French antislavery, the Haitian Revolution, the US Civil War, and the Triple Alliance War (1865–1870) in South America. Traditionally, historical research has focused on the 1870s and 1880s, when abolition emerged as Brazil’s first national mass political movement, ultimately leading to the outlawing of slavery in 1888. By turning attention to earlier decades and to the role of literacy in the associational lives of afro-Brazilians, Freedom’s Horizon reveals that abolitionism was more than just the cause of North Atlantic reformers, Latin American modernizing elites, or middle-class advocates. It was a grassroots movement that originated in the social and conceptual worlds of the enslaved and connected to a hemispheric black radical tradition.

In Vanishing Vienna historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna’s cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new chronology of cultural reconstruction that links the Nazi and postwar years, and a new geography that includes the history of refugees from Nazi Vienna.

Rather than presenting the Nazi, exile, and postwar periods as discrete chapters of Vienna’s history, Tanzer argues that they are part of a continuous spectrum of cultural evolution—the result of which was the creation of a coherent Austrian identity and culture that emerged by the 1950s. As she shows, antisemitism and philosemitism were not contradictory forces in post-Nazi Austrian culture. They were deeply interconnected aspirations in a city where nostalgia for the past dominated cultural reconstruction efforts and supported seemingly contradictory impulses. Viennese nostalgia at times concealed the perpetuation of antisemitic fantasies of the city without Jews. At the same time, the postwar desire to return to a pre-Nazi past relied upon notions of Austrian culture that Austrian Jews perfected in exile, as well as on the symbolic remigration of a mostly imagined “Jewish” culture now taxed with redeeming Austria in the aftermath of the Holocaust. From this perspective, philosemitism is much more than a simple inversion of antisemitism—instead, Tanzer argues, philosemitism, problematic as it may be, defines Vienna in the era of postwar reconstruction.

In this way, Vanishing Vienna uncovers a rarely discussed phenomenon of the aftermath of the Holocaust—a society that consumes, redefines, and bestows symbolic meaning on the victims in their absence.

In The Creole Archipelago, Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region.

Through use of wide-ranging sources including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy shows how this watery borderland became a center of broader imperial experimentation, contestation, and reform. British and French officials dispatched to Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago after 1763 encountered a creolized society that repeatedly frustrated their attempts to transform the islands into productive plantation colonies. By centering the stories of Kalinagos who asserted continued claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who insisted on their right to own land and enslaved people, Murphy offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies like Jamaica and Barbados.

By looking outward from the eastern Caribbean chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes central to understanding early American and Atlantic history, including European usurpation of Indigenous lands, the rise of slavery and plantation production, and the creation and codification of racial difference.

In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does.

In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass.

Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.

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.

Today, the word “neoliberal” is used to describe an epochal shift toward market-oriented governance begun in the 1970s. Yet the roots of many of neoliberalism’s policy tools can be traced to the ideas and practices of mid-twentieth-century liberalism.

In Illusions of Progress, Brent Cebul chronicles the rise of what he terms “supply-side liberalism,” a powerful and enduring orientation toward politics and the economy, race and poverty, that united local chambers of commerce, liberal policymakers and economists, and urban and rural economic planners. Beginning in the late 1930s, New Dealers tied expansive aspirations for social and, later, racial progress to a variety of economic development initiatives. In communities across the country, otherwise conservative business elites administered liberal public works, urban redevelopment, and housing programs. But by binding national visions of progress to the local interests of capital, liberals often entrenched the very inequalities of power and opportunity they imagined their programs solving.

When President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty—which prioritized direct partnerships with poor and racially marginalized citizens—businesspeople, Republicans, and soon, a rising generation of New Democrats sought to rein in its seeming excesses by reinventing and redeploying many of the policy tools and commitments pioneered on liberalism’s supply side: public-private partnerships, market-oriented solutions, fiscal “realism,” and, above all, subsidies for business-led growth now promised to blunt, and perhaps ultimately replace, programs for poor and marginalized Americans.

In this wide-ranging book, Brent Cebul illuminates the often-overlooked structures of governance, markets, and public debt through which America’s warring political ideologies have been expressed and transformed. From Washington, D.C. to the declining Rustbelt and emerging Sunbelt and back again, Illusions of Progress reveals the centrality of public and private forms of profit that have defined the enduring boundaries of American politics, opportunity, and inequality— in an era of liberal ascendance and an age of neoliberal retrenchment.

A heavily illustrated catalog of 78 objects, dating from 1760 to 1790, from the collection of the Concord Museum in Massachusetts

In 1775, the people of Concord, Massachusetts, understood they were living through extraordinary times. David Brown, captain of one of Concord’s minute companies, and his family carefully saved and passed through generations a looking glass broken by British troops vandalizing the town on April 19, 1775. Today, that fractured mirror, with its single surviving shard, stands as a poignant witness to the Revolution, prominently displayed at the Concord Museum and featured in this book. It is objects like David Brown’s looking glass that form the heart of the Concord Museum’s American Revolution collection—artifacts that not only witnessed history but, in some cases, quite literally reflected it.

Eyewitness to Revolution features 78 objects dating from 1760 to 1790 that relate to the American Revolution. It includes all the items on view in the April 19, 1775 gallery, as well as April 19 material not in the exhibition. Also included are objects dating from 1760 to 1775 pertaining to the lead-up to the conflict, and another group dating from 1775 to 1790 that are associated with events from the Siege of Boston to just past the end of the Revolutionary War. The images are accompanied by a continuous narrative, carried forward by the objects in the collection.

A needlework picture, a smashed looking glass, a wooden spoon, a stair tread, a scattering of flints, a silver-hilted sword—each was an eyewitness to the American Revolution. In testifying to what they saw, they testify as well to the power of material culture to improve our understanding of history.

A Home Away from Home examines the significance of Caribbean American mutual aid societies and benevolent associations to the immigrant experience, particularly their implications for the formation of a Pan-Caribbean American identity and Black diasporic politics.

At the turn of the twentieth century, New York City exploded with the establishment of mutual aid societies and benevolent associations. Caribbean immigrants, especially women, eager to find their place in a bustling new world, created these organizations, including the West Indian Benevolent Association of New York City, founded in 1884. They served as forums for discussions on Caribbean American affairs, hosted cultural activities, and provided newly arrived immigrants with various forms of support, including job and housing assistance, rotating lines of credit, help in the naturalization process, and its most popular function—sickness and burial assistance. In examining the number of these organizations, their membership, and the functions they served, Tyesha Maddox argues that mutual aid societies not only fostered a collective West Indian ethnic identity among immigrants from specific islands, but also strengthened kinship networks with those back home in the Caribbean. Especially important to these processes were Caribbean women such as Elizabeth Hendrickson, co-founder of the American West Indian Ladies’ Aid Society in 1915 and the Harlem Tenants’ League in 1928.

Immigrant involvement in mutual aid societies also strengthened the belief that their own fate was closely intertwined with the social, economic, and political welfare of the Black international community. A Home Away from Home demonstrates how Caribbean American mutual aid societies and benevolent associations in many ways became proto-Pan-Africanist organizations.

Beyond 1619 brings an Atlantic and hemispheric perspective to the year 1619 as a marker of American slavery’s origins and the beginnings of the Black experience in what would become the United States by situating the roots of racial slavery in a broader, comparative context.

In recent years, an extensive public dialogue regarding the long shadow of racism in the United States has pushed Americans to confront the insidious history of race-based slavery and its aftermath, with 1619—the year that the first recorded enslaved persons of African descent arrived in British North America—taking center stage as its starting point. Yet this dialogue has inadvertently narrowed our understanding of slavery, race, and their repercussions to the U.S. context. Beyond 1619 showcases the fruitful results when scholars examine and put into conversation multiple empires, regions, peoples, and cultures to get a more complete view of the rise of racial slavery in the Americas.

Painting racial slavery’s emergence on a hemispheric canvas, and in one compact volume, provides historical context beyond the 1619 moment for discussions of slavery, racism, antiracism, freedom, and lasting inequalities. In the process, this volume shines new light on these critical topics andillustrates the centrality of racial slavery, and contests over its rise, in nearly every corner of the early modern Atlantic World.

Contributors: John N. Blanton, Jesse Cromwell, Erika Denise Edwards, Rebecca Anne Goetz, Rana Hogarth, Chloe L. Ireton, Marc H. Lerner, Paul J. Polgar, Brett Rushforth, Casey Schmitt, Jenny Shaw, James Sidbury.

Toward the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) made a surprising disclosure. Instead of the critically lauded The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett declared her “best story” to be A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel. Why? One reason is that it demonstrates Jewett’s range. Known primarily for her vignettes, Jewett accomplished in these pages a truly great novel. Undoubtedly, another reason lies in the novel’s themes of queer kinship and same-sex domesticity, as enjoyed by the flamboyant protagonist Dick Dale. Written a few years into Jewett’s decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, A Marsh Island echoes Jewett’s determination to split time between her family home in Maine and Fields’s place on Charles Street in Boston. The novel follows the adventures of Dale, a Manhattanite landscape painter in the Great Marsh of northeastern Massachusetts and envisions the latter region’s saltmarsh as a figure for dynamic selfhood: the ever-shifting boundaries between land and sea a model for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others.

Jewett’s works played a major role in popularizing the genre of American regionalism and have garnered praise, both in her time and ours, for her skill in rendering the local landscapes and fishing villages along or near the coasts of New England. Just as Jewett brought attention to the unique beauty and value of the Great marsh region, editor Don James McLaughlin reveals a convergence of regionalism and sexuality in Jewett’s work in his introduction. A Marsh Island reminds us that queer kinship has a long tradition of being extended to incorporate queer ecological belonging, and that the meaning of “companionship” itself is enriched when we acknowledge its indebtedness to environment.

A new history of the medieval Dominican liturgy, from the perspective of women’s communities

In Fixing the Liturgy, CJ Jones opens a window into the daily practice of medieval liturgy, uncovering the astounding breadth of knowledge, the deep expertise, and the critical thinking required just to coordinate each day’s worship. Focusing on the Dominican order, Jones shows how changes in medieval piety and ritual legislation disrupted the fine-tuned system that Dominicans instituted in the thirteenth century. World-historical events, including the Great Western Schism and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, had an impact on the practice of liturgy even in individual communities. Through a set of never-before-studied records from Dominican convents, Jones shows how women’s communities reacted and adapted to historical change and how their surviving sources inform our understanding of the friars’ lives, as well. Tracing the narrative up to the eve of the Protestant Reformation, this study culminates in a multi-media reconstruction of the sounds, sights, and smells of worship in the rightfully famous southern German convent of St. Katherine in Nuremberg.

Fixing the Liturgy makes this late medieval world accessible through clear introductions to medieval liturgy and to the Dominican order’s governance. Jones illustrates how Dominican friars and sisters reconciled their order’s rules with their own concrete circumstances and with the changing world around them. On the way, a new history of the medieval Dominican liturgy unfolds, told from the perspective of women’s communities.

Through a focus on Lenape art, culture, and history and a critical examination of historical visualizations of Native and European American relationships, Never Broken explores the ways in which art can create, challenge, and rewrite history. This richly illustrated volume features contemporary work by Lenape artists in dialogue with historic Lenape ceramics, beadwork, and other cultural objects as well as re-creations of Benjamin West’s painting Penn’s Treaty with the Indians by European American artists.

Published in conjunction with the first exhibition in Pennsylvania of contemporary Lenape artists who can trace their families back to the time of William Penn, Never Broken includes essays by Laura Turner Igoe, Joel Whitney, and Joe Baker. Igoe argues that the plethora of prints, paintings, and decorative arts that incorporated imagery from West’s iconic painting over a century after the depicted event attempted to replace the fraught history of Native and Anglo-American conflict with a myth of peaceful coexistence and succession. Whitney’s essay provides an overview of the culture of the Lenape and their forced removal out of Pennsylvania and the northeast to Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Finally, Baker highlights how he and the other contemporary Lenape artists featured in the exhibition, including Ahchipaptunhe (Delaware Tribe of Indians and Cherokee), Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation and Cherokee), and Nathan Young (Delaware Tribe of Indians, Pawnee, and Kiowa), tell their own stories rooted in memory, ancestry, oral history. Their work underscores the continuing legacy and evolution of Lenape visual expression and cross-cultural exchange, reasserts the agency of their Lenape ancestors, and establishes that the Lenape’s ties to the area were—unlike Penn’s Treaty—never broken.

Contributors: Joe Baker, Laura Turner Igoe, Joel Whitney

In Equality and the City, Enrique Peñalosa Londoño draws on his experience as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, as well as his many years of international work as a lecturer and consultant, to share his perspective on the issues facing developing cities, especially sustainable transportation and equal access to public space.

As mayor of Bogotá, Peñalosa Londoño initiated development of the TransMilenio Rapid Bus Transit system, among the largest and most comprehensive public transit systems in the Global South, which carries 2.5 million passengers a day along dedicated bus lanes, bike paths, and a rapid metro line. The system emphasizes accessibility for the entire population. Peñalosa Londoño’s efforts to create public space were similarly ambitious: over the course of his two terms, more than a thousand public parks were created or improved. Underlying these policies was a conviction of how cities should be—a compelling humanistic philosophy of sustainable urbanism. For Peñalosa Londoño, city design is not just engineering; it defines human happiness, dignity, and equality. “An advanced city is not one where the poor own a car,” Peñalosa writes, “but one where the rich use public transport.”

Equality and the City provides practical criteria for conceiving and constructing different and better cities, describes the obstacles that are confronted when doing so, and identifies ways to overcome them.

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony.

The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution’s development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them.

Throughout South Carolina’s long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.

The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost their scriptural resonance in modernity, such as drinking water and uttering one’s last words. And within a scriptural universe, no work exerted more force than the Psalter, the most cherished text among all the books of the Hebrew Bible.

A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity clarifies the world of late ancient Judaism through the versatile and powerful lens of the Psalter. It asks a simple set of questions: Where did late ancient Jews encounter the Psalms? How did they engage with the work? And what meanings did they produce? A. J. Berkovitz answers these queries by reconstructing and contextualizing a diverse set of religious practices performed with and on the Psalter, such as handling a physical copy, reading from it, interpreting it exegetically, singing it as liturgy, invoking it as magic and reciting it as an act of piety. His book draws from and contributes to the fields of ancient Judaism, biblical reception, book history and the history of reading.

Undoing Slavery excavates cultural, political, medical, and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Motivated by their conviction that the physical form of the human body was universal and faced with the growing racism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, abolitionists in North America and Britain focused on undoing slavery’s harm to the bodies of the enslaved. Their pragmatic focus on restoring the bodily integrity and wellbeing of enslaved people threw up many unexpected challenges. This book explores those challenges.

Slavery exploited the bodies of men and women differently: enslaved women needed to be acknowledged as mothers rather than as reproducers of slave property, and enslaved men needed to claim full adult personhood without triggering white fears about their access to male privilege. Slavery’s undoing became more fraught by the 1850s, moreover, as federal Fugitive Slave Law and racist medicine converged. The reach of the federal government across the borders of free states and theories about innate racial difference collapsed the distinctions between enslaved and emancipated people of African descent, making militant action necessary.

Escaping to so-called “free” jurisdictions, refugees from slavery demonstrated that a person could leave the life of slavery behind. But leaving behind the enslaved body, the fleshy archive of trauma and injury, proved impossible. Bodies damaged by slavery needed urgent physical care as well as access to medical knowledge untainted by racist science. As the campaign to end slavery revealed, legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.

Reveals how, through auctions, early Americans learned capitalism

As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earliest days of colonial conquest, auctions put Native land and human beings up for bidding alongside material goods, normalizing new economic practices that turned social relations into economic calculations and eventually became recognizable as nineteenth-century American capitalism.

Starting in the eighteenth century, neighbors collectively turned speculative value into economic “facts” in the form of concrete prices for specific items, thereby establishing ideas about fair exchange in their communities. This consensus soon fractured: during the Revolutionary War, state governments auctioned loyalist property, weaponizing local group participation in pricing and distribution to punish political enemies. By the early nineteenth century, suspicion that auction outcomes were determined by manipulative auctioneers prompted politicians and satirists to police the boundaries of what counted as economic exchange and for whose benefit the economy operated. Women at auctions—as commodities, bidders, or beneficiaries—became a focal point for gendering economic value itself. By the 1830s, as abolitionists attacked the public sale of enslaved men, women, and children, auctions had enshrined a set of economic ideas—that any entity could be coded as property and priced through competition—that have become commonsense understandings all too seldom challenged.

In contrast to histories focused on banks, currencies, or plantations, America Under the Hammer highlights an institution that integrated market, community, and household in ways that put gender, race, and social bonds at the center of ideas about economic worth. Women and men, enslaved and free, are active participants in this story rather than bystanders, and their labor, judgments, and bodies define the resulting contours of the American economy.

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.

Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

For the average tourist, the history of Philadelphia can be like a leisurely carriage ride through Old City. The Liberty Bell. Independence Hall. Benjamin Franklin. The grooves in the cobblestone are so familiar, one barely notices the ride. Yet there are other paths to travel, and the ride can be bumpy. Beyond the famed founders, other Americans walked the streets of Philadelphia whose lives were, in their own ways, just as emblematic of the promises and perils of the new nation.

Philadelphia Stories chronicles twelve of these lives to explore the city's people and places from the colonial era to the years before the Civil War. This collective portrait includes men and women, Black and white Americans, immigrants and native born. If mostly forgotten today, banker Stephen Girard was one of the wealthiest men ever to have lived, and his material legacy can be seen by visiting sites such as Girard College. In a different register, but equally impressive, were the accomplishments of Sarah Thorn Tyndale. In a few short years as a widow she made enough money on her porcelain business to retire to a life as a reformer. Others faced frustration. Take, for example, Grace Growden Galloway. Born to an important family, she saw her home invaded and her property confiscated by patriot forces. Or consider the life of Francis Johnson, a Black bandleader and composer who often performed at the Musical Fund Hall, which still stands today. And yet he was barred from joining its Society. Philadelphia Stories examines their rich lives, as well as those of others who shaped the city's past.

Many of the places inhabited by these people survive to this day. In the pages of this book and on the streets of the city, one can visit both the people and places of Philadelphia's rich history.

In Colonial Complexions, historian Sharon Block examines how Anglo-Americans built racial ideologies out of descriptions of physical appearance. By analyzing more than 4,000 advertisements for fugitive servants and slaves in colonial newspapers alongside scores of transatlantic sources, she reveals how colonists transformed observable characteristics into racist reality. Building on her expertise in digital humanities, Block repurposes these well-known historical sources to newly highlight how daily language called race and identity into being before the rise of scientific racism.

In the eighteenth century, a multitude of characteristics beyond skin color factored into racial assumptions, and complexion did not have a stable or singular meaning. Colonists justified a race-based slave labor system not by opposing black and white but by accumulating differences in the bodies they described: racism was made real by marking variation from a norm on some bodies, and variation as the norm on others. Such subtle systemizations of racism naturalized enslavement into bodily description, erased Native American heritage, and privileged life history as a crucial marker of free status only for people of European-based identities.

Colonial Complexions suggests alternative possibilities to modern formulations of racial identities and offers a precise historical analysis of the beliefs behind evolving notions of race-based differences in North American history.

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.

From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for African Americans, black abolitionist leaders embraced violence as the only means of shocking Northerners out of their apathy and instigating an antislavery war.

In Force and Freedom, Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Through rousing public speeches, the bourgeoning black press, and the formation of militia groups, black abolitionist leaders mobilized their communities, compelled national action, and drew international attention. Drawing on the precedent and pathos of the American and Haitian Revolutions, African American abolitionists used violence as a political language and a means of provoking social change. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, black abolitionist leaders accomplished what white nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War. Force and Freedom takes readers beyond the honorable politics of moral suasion and the romanticism of the Underground Railroad and into an exploration of the agonizing decisions, strategies, and actions of the black abolitionists who, though lacking an official political voice, were nevertheless responsible for instigating monumental social and political change.

In Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century, Margot E. Fassler takes readers into the rich, complex world of Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias (meaning “Know the ways”) to explore how medieval thinkers understood and imagined the universe. Hildegard, renowned for her contributions to theology, music, literature, and art, developed unique methods for integrating these forms of thought and expression into a complete vision of the cosmos and of the human journey. Scivias was Hildegard’s first major theological work and the only one of her writings that was both illuminated and copied by scribes from her monastery during her lifetime. It contains not just religious visions and theological commentary, but also a shortened version of Hildegard’s play Ordo virtutum (“Play of the virtues”), plus the texts of fourteen musical compositions.

These elements of Scivias, Fassler contends, form a coherent whole demonstrating how Hildegard used theology and the liturgical arts to lead and to teach the nuns of her community. Hildegard’s visual and sonic images unfold slowly and deliberately, opening up varied paths of knowing. Hildegard and her nuns adapted forms of singing that they believed to be crucial to the reform of the Church in their day and central to the ongoing turning of the heavens and to the nature of time itself. Hildegard’s vision of the universe is a “Cosmic Egg,” as described in Scivias, filled with strife and striving, and at its center unfolds the epic drama of every human soul, embodied through sound and singing. Though Hildegard’s view of the cosmos is far removed from modern understanding, Fassler’s analysis reveals how this dynamic cosmological framework from the Middle Ages resonates with contemporary thinking in surprising ways, and underscores the vitality of the arts as embodied modes of theological expression and knowledge.

When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. Following Champlain's example, fellow colonists nurtured similar gardens through the Saint Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes region. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind.

As Parsons relates, colonists soon discovered that there were limits to what they could accomplish in their gardens. The strangeness of New France became woefully apparent, for example, when colonists found that they could not make French wine out of American grapes. They attributed the differences they discovered to Native American neglect and believed that the French colonial project would rehabilitate and restore the plant life in the region. However, the more colonists experimented with indigenous species and communicated their findings to the wider French Atlantic world, the more foreign New France appeared to French naturalists and even to the colonists themselves.

Parsons demonstrates how the French experience of attempting to improve American environments supported not only the acquisition and incorporation of Native American knowledge but also the development of an emerging botanical science that focused on naming new species. Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.

When Jesus was five he killed a boy, or so reports the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. A little boy had run into Jesus by accident, bumping him on the shoulder, and Jesus took offense: "Jesus was angry and said to him, 'You shall go no further on your way,' and instantly the boy fell down and died." A second story recounts how Jesus transformed mud into living birds, while yet another has Joseph telling Mary to keep Jesus in the house so that no one else gets hurt. What was life really like in the household of Joseph, Mary, and little Jesus? The canon of the New Testament provides few details, but ancient Christians, wanting to know more, would turn to the texts we know as the "Infancy Gospels."

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a collection of stories from the mid-second century C.E. describing events in the life of Jesus between the ages of five and twelve. The Proto-gospel of James, also dating from the second century, focuses on Mary and likewise includes episodes from her childhood. These gospels are often cast aside as marginal character sketches, designed to assure the faithful that signs of divine grace cropped up in the early years of both Mary and Jesus. Christopher A. Frilingos contends instead that the accounts are best viewed as meditations on family. Both gospels offer rich portrayals of household relationships at a time when ancient Christians were locked in a fierce debate about family—not only on the question of what a Christian family ought to look like but also on whether Christians should pursue family life at all.

Describing the conflicts of family life, the gospels present Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in moments of weakness and strength, reminding early Christians of the canyon separating human ignorance and divine knowledge. According to Frilingos, the depicted acts of love and courage performed in the face of great uncertainty taught early Christian readers the worth of human relationships.

In Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators, historian Katherine Aron-Beller analyzes the common Christian charge that Jews habitually and compulsively violated Christian images, identifying this allegation as one that functioned alongside other anti-Jewish allegations such as ritual murder, blood libel, and host desecration to ultimately inform dangerous and long-lasting prejudices in medieval and early modern Europe.

Through an analysis of folk tales, myths, legal proceedings, and religious art, Aron-Beller finds that narratives alleging that Jews committed violence against images of Christ, Mary, and the disciples flourished in Europe between the fifth and seventeenth centuries. She then explores how these narratives manifested differently across the continent and the centuries, finding that their potency reflected not Jewish actions per se, but Christians’ own concerns about slipping into idolatry when viewing depictions of religious figures. In addition, Aron-Beller considers Jews’ own attitudes toward Christian imagery and the ways in which they responded to and rejected—or embraced—such allegations. By examining how desecration allegations affected Jewish individuals and communities spanning Byzantium, medieval England, France, Germany, and early modern Spain and Italy, Aron-Beller demonstrates that this charge was a powerful expression of the Christian majority’s anxiety around committing idolatry and their eagerness to participate in practices of veneration that revolved around visual images—an anxiety that evolved through the centuries and persists to this day.

Contrary to popular belief, the American Revolutionary War was not a limited and restrained struggle for political self-determination. From the onset of hostilities, British authorities viewed their American foes as traitors to be punished, and British abuse of American prisoners, both tacitly condoned and at times officially sanctioned, proliferated. Meanwhile, more than seventeen thousand British and allied soldiers fell into American hands during the Revolution. For a fledgling nation that could barely afford to keep an army in the field, the issue of how to manage prisoners of war was daunting.

Captives of Liberty examines how America's founding generation grappled with the problems posed by prisoners of war, and how this influenced the wider social and political legacies of the Revolution. When the struggle began, according to T. Cole Jones, revolutionary leadership strove to conduct the war according to the prevailing European customs of military conduct, which emphasized restricting violence to the battlefield and treating prisoners humanely. However, this vision of restrained war did not last long. As the British denied customary protections to their American captives, the revolutionary leadership wasted no time in capitalizing on the prisoners' ordeals for propagandistic purposes. Enraged, ordinary Americans began to demand vengeance, and they viewed British soldiers and their German and Native American auxiliaries as appropriate targets. This cycle of violence spiraled out of control, transforming the struggle for colonial independence into a revolutionary war.

In illuminating this history, Jones contends that the violence of the Revolutionary War had a profound impact on the character and consequences of the American Revolution. Captives of Liberty not only provides the first comprehensive analysis of revolutionary American treatment of enemy prisoners but also reveals the relationship between America's political revolution and the war waged to secure it.

Philadelphia Trees is a pocket-sized resource for identifying the native trees, commonly encountered exotics, and popular ornamentals of the Philadelphia metropolitan area and adjacent counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Each of the 118 tree-identification entries features a description of a tree species or several related species; a list of places to see specimens; individual photos of leaves, bark, fruits, and seeds; striking portrait photos; and winter-silhouette drawings.

The guide also contains a section on more than fifty of the best parks, botanical gardens, and preserves for viewing trees in and around Philadelphia. Included in this section are ten maps identifying specific trees in such places as Fairmount Park, one of the world’s largest urban parks, and the Morris Arboretum, the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

A third section, “Great Trees of Philadelphia,” highlights fifty special, historic, and record-breaking trees. Using this field guide, nature lovers will be able to identify and locate the fantastic trees that this unique region, sometimes called “the cradle of American horticulture,” has to offer.

In the decades following England’s 1655 conquest of Spanish Jamaica, the western Caribbean became the site of overlapping and competing claims—to land, maritime spaces, and people. English Jamaica, located in the midst of Spanish American port towns and shipping lanes, was central to numerous projects of varying legality, aimed at acquiring Spanish American wealth. Those projects were backdrop to a wide-ranging movement of people who made their own claims to political membership in developing colonial societies, and by extension, in Atlantic empires.

Boundaries of Belonging follows the stories of these individuals—licensed traders, smugglers, freedom seekers, religious refugees, pirates, and interlopers—who moved through the contested spaces of the western Caribbean. Though some were English and Spanish, many others were Sephardic, Tule, French, Kalabari, Scottish, Dutch, or Brandenberg. They also included creole people who identified themselves by their local place of origin or residence--as Jamaican, Cuban, or Panamanian.

As they crossed into and out of rival imperial jurisdictions, many either sought or rejected Spanish or English subjecthood, citing their place of birth, their nation or ethnicity, their religion, their loyalty, or their economic or military contributions to colony or empire. Colonial and metropolitan officials weighed those claims as they tried to impose sovereignty over diverse and mobile people in a region of disputed and shifting jurisdictions. These contests over who belonged in what empire and why, and over what protections such belonging conferred, in turn helped to determine who would be included within a developing law of nations.

Created in a world of empires, the United States was to be something new: an expansive republic proclaiming commitments to liberty and equality but eager to extend its territory and influence. Yet from the beginning, Native powers, free and enslaved Black people, and foreign subjects perceived, interacted with, and resisted the young republic as if it was merely another empire under the sun. Such perspectives have driven scholars to reevaluate the early United States, as the parameters of early American history have expanded in Atlantic, continental, and global directions. If the nation’s acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands in 1898 traditionally marked its turn toward imperialism, new scholarship suggests the United States was an empire from the moment of its creation.

The essays gathered in The Early Imperial Republic move beyond the question of whether the new republic was an empire, investigating instead where, how, and why it was one. They use the category of empire to situate the early United States in the global context its contemporaries understood, drawing important connections between territorial conquests on the continent and American incursions around the globe. They reveal an early U.S. empire with many different faces, from merchants who sought to profit from the republic’s imperial expansion to Native Americans who opposed or leveraged it, from free Black colonizationists and globe-trotting missionaries to illegal slave traders and anti-imperial social reformers. In tracing these stories, the volume’s contributors bring the study of early U.S. imperialism down to earth, encouraging us to see the exertion of U.S. power on the ground as a process that both drew upon the example of its imperial predecessors and was forced to grapple with their legacies. Taken together, they argue that American empire was never confined to one era but is instead a thread throughout U.S. history.

Contributors:Brooke Bauer, Michael A. Blaakman, Eric Burin, Emily Conroy-Krutz, Kathleen DuVal, Susan Gaunt Stearns, Nicholas Guyatt, Amy S. Greenberg, M. Scott Heerman, Robert Lee, Julia Lewandoski, Margot Minardi, Ousmane Power-Greene, Nakia D. Parker, Tom Smith

Mass-produced of tin-lead alloys and cheap to make and purchase, medieval badges were brooch-like objects displaying familiar images. Circulating widely throughout Europe in the High and late Middle Ages, badges were usually small, around four-by-four centimeters, though examples as tiny as two centimeters and a few as large as ten centimeters have been found. About 75 percent of surviving badges are closely associated with specific charismatic or holy sites, and when sewn or pinned onto clothing or a hat, they would have marked their wearers as having successfully completed a pilgrimage. Many others, however, were artifacts of secular life; some were political devices—a swan, a stag, a rose—that would have denoted membership in a civic organization or an elite family, and others—a garland, a pair of clasped hands, a crowned heart—that would have been tokens of love or friendship. A good number are enigmatic and even obscene. The popularity of badges seems to have grown steadily from the last decades of the twelfth century before waning at the very end of the fifteenth century. Some 20,000 badges survive today, though historians estimate that as many as two million were produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries alone. Archaeologists and hobbyists alike continue to make new finds, often along muddy riverbanks in northern Europe.

Interdisciplinary in approach, and sumptuously illustrated with more than 115 color and black-and-white images, Medieval Badges introduces badges in all their variety and uses. Ann Marie Rasmussen considers all medieval badges, whether they originated in religious or secular contexts, and highlights the different ways badges could confer meaning and identity on their wearers. Drawing on evidence from England, France, the Low Countries, Germany, and Scandinavia, this book provides information about the manufacture, preservation, and scholarly study of these artifacts. From chapters exploring badges and pilgrimage, to the complexities of the political use of badges, to the ways the visual meaning-making strategies of badges were especially well-suited to the unique features of medieval cities, this book offers an expansive introduction of these medieval objects for a wide readership.

It was far from inevitable that Rome would emerge as the spiritual center of Western Christianity in the early Middle Ages. After the move of the Empire's capital to Constantinople in the fourth century and the Gothic Wars in the sixth century, Rome was gradually depleted physically, economically, and politically. How then, asks Maya Maskarinec, did this exhausted city, with limited Christian presence, transform over the course of the sixth through ninth centuries into a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of sanctity?

Conventional narratives explain the rise of Christian Rome as resulting from an increasingly powerful papacy. In City of Saints, Maskarinec looks outward, to examine how Rome interacted with the wider Mediterranean world in the Byzantine period. During the early Middle Ages, the city imported dozens of saints and their legends, naturalized them, and physically layered their cults onto the city's imperial and sacred topography. Maskarinec documents Rome's spectacular physical transformation, drawing on church architecture, frescoes, mosaics, inscriptions, Greek and Latin hagiographical texts, and less-studied documents that attest to the commemoration of these foreign saints. These sources reveal a vibrant plurality of voices—Byzantine administrators, refugees, aristocrats, monks, pilgrims, and others—who shaped a distinctly Roman version of Christianity. City of Saints extends its analysis to the end of the ninth century, when the city's ties to the Byzantine world weakened. Rome's political and economic orbits moved toward the Carolingian world, where the saints' cults circulated, valorizing Rome's burgeoning claims as a microcosm of the "universal" Christian church.

A provocative new history of modern black liberalism

Black Excellence offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.

In the 1970s and ’80s, cities across the country elected black mayors for the first time. Just as these officials gained political power, however, their cities felt the full brunt of white flight and deindustrialization. Tasked with governing cities in crisis, black political leaders responded in seemingly conservative ways to the social problems that austerity worsened. Nowhere was this response more evident than in Atlanta. In the nation’s preeminent black urban regime, black leaders such as mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young employed the power of policing and the private sector to discipline black Atlantans, hoping they would equip vulnerable communities with the tools to manage the volatility of the era.

Danielle Wiggins shows that these punitive responses to the problems of crime, family instability, and unemployment were informed by black liberalism’s disciplinary impulse: an enduring tendency to reform behaviors believed to threaten black survival in a white supremacist nation. Forged in response to the violence of Jim Crow, the disciplinary impulse relied upon notions of pathology and its inverse, black excellence. Wiggins identifies several black liberal efforts to cultivate excellent black communities, families, and workers in the post–civil rights era, including community policing, corporate-sponsored family initiatives, and black entrepreneurship.

In embracing disciplinary strategies, however, black liberals often focused on behavior at the expense of addressing structural inequality. Consequently, their approaches dovetailed with those of the “New” Democrats, whose post–Great Society social policies were informed by urban black liberals. Black Excellence reveals thus how urban black liberals not only reshaped black politics but, as Democrats, also helped build the neoliberal Democratic Party.

A new interpretation of captivity, human trafficking, and colonization in the seventeenth-century Caribbean

A century before the height of the Atlantic slave trade, early modern racialized slavery emerged through practices of captive-taking and human trafficking in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Caribbean. The Predatory Sea offers the first full-length study of this deeply entangled history of captivity and colonialism.

Between 1570 and 1670, a multinational assortment of privately funded ship captains, sailors, merchants, and adventurers engaged in widespread practices of captive-taking and human trafficking. Raids against coastal communities and regional shipping in the Caribbean ensnared multitudes, including free and previously enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent, who found themselves trafficked into slavery away from their communities of belonging. Beginning in the 1570s, their captors established maritime bases on small, strategically located islands throughout the region. Those anchorages served as temporary settlements for northern European traffickers decades before their respective monarchs sanctioned official colonies. Colonization thus started with practices of captive-taking and human trafficking, which remained central to the development of the first English and French colonies in the Caribbean.

Through extensive research in Spanish, French, and English archives in Europe and the Caribbean, Casey Schmitt offers a fresh perspective on how captivity and maritime violence shaped early English, French, and Dutch settlement. Reading across imperial archives, she also reveals the experiences of those ensnared in this trade. Many captives escaped to Spanish population centers, where they testified to officials about what they witnessed in early English, French, and Dutch colonies. Those testimonies informed a series of Spanish attacks on foreign settlements in the Caribbean over the decades leading up to the 1650s. As Schmitt argues, captives were cause and consequence of inter-imperial competition and warfare during this violent century of Caribbean history. This captive economy, as explicated in The Predatory Sea, shaped English and French colonization, inter-imperial competition, and the lived experiences of captives and their captors.

The first comprehensive biography of Philadelphia’s Henry C. Lea (1825–1909): historian, publisher, political activist, and reformer

Writing in 1868, the Philadelphia publisher-cum-historian Henry Charles Lea informed a friend, “I am trying to collect the materials for a history of the Inquisition.” The collecting of these materials—books, manuscripts, and copies of thousands of pages of documents housed in musty European archives and libraries—would occupy Lea (1825–1909) for the remainder of his life. It also led to publication of A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1884–87) and his acknowledged masterpiece, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (1906–7). Regarded as classics, these path-breaking books inaugurated better understanding of the history of an institution whose aims and methods troubled Lea and remain subjects of heated debate.

The first biography of Lea since 1931, The Inquisition’s Inquisitor offers the most comprehensive review to date of his writing on the history of the Catholic Church. Though Lea is generally regarded as a leading practitioner of “scientific” history, Richard L. Kagan examines the extent to which Lea’s religious convictions compromised the ostensibly objective character of his work. Lea’s extensive surviving correspondence also enables Kagan to examine other aspects of Lea’s long and productive career as one of Philadelphia’s most prominent citizens. Lea appears here a young literary critic; a businessman who skillfully transformed his family’s publishing firm into the country’s leading producer of medical books; a dogged political reformer; and a philanthropist whose largesse benefitted many of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions. Newly discovered sources also allow for insights into Lea’s private life, notably his controversial infatuation with his first cousin and future wife, Anna C. Jaudon, and the periodic breakdowns that required abandonment of his beloved “intellectual pursuits.”

The Inquisition’s Inquisitor concludes with a survey of Lea’s legacy with respect to current understanding of the Inquisition and to Philadelphia, where reminders of his accomplishments include an eponymous library at the University of Pennsylvania and public elementary school in nearby West Philadelphia.

The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures.

The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world.

Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.

When women have full socioeconomic citizenship as well as equitable and respectful partnerships with men, transformative justice can be sustained in postconflict societies

In Women’s Work, Jennifer Moore presents a reimagined theory of peacebuilding and transformative justice based on the experiences and insights of women farmers and microentrepreneurs who lived through protracted civil conflicts, drawing on seven years of interviews with women activists across ten communities—five in the Acholi region of Northern Uganda and five in the Moyamba and Koinadugu Districts of Sierra Leone. Despite the important differences between the preconflict and conflict histories and demographics of the two countries, Moore finds commonalities in the practical, yet visionary, approaches to community life emerging from the core values, daily activities, and long-range goals shared by rural cooperative members in both regions.

Collective survival, communal healing, and conflict resolution define the rhythm of these women’s daily lives as they go about building peace, piecemeal. They reject punitive retribution models and demand, instead, a peacebuilding model that advocates for advances in material well-being, the acknowledgment of state accountability for community suffering, and reconciliation and restoration of community networks. But most important, Moore amplifies these women’s voices when they insist that legal equality for women and healthy partnerships between women and men are also essential components to enduring transformation of their societies.

Moore theorizes what peacebuilding look like if it were modeled on these women-led, matriarchically structured communities that proved not only to be effective at holding governments accountable but also to have the capacity to feed their people and revitalize their local economies. Women’s Work shows that when women have full socioeconomic citizenship as well as equitable and respectful partnerships with men, transformative justice can be sustained through the arts of collective livelihood, violence-free conflict management, and celebration.

How elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own

Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome explores the creative efforts of some of Rome’s most prominent noble families to weave themselves into Rome’s Christian past. Maya Maskarinec shows how, from late antiquity to early modernity, elite Roman families used genealogy, architecture, and the urban fabric to appropriate the city’s saints for their own, eventually claiming them as ancestors.

Over the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. These associations, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity as well as in noble lineages, enabled Roman families to “domesticate” the city’s saints and dominate the urban landscape and its politics into the early modern era. These families cultivated saintly genealogies and saintly topologies (exploiting, for example, the increasingly prolific identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints), cementing presumed connections between place, descent, and moral worth.

Drawing from sources spanning the fourth to the late sixteenth century, Maskarinec brings into conversation saints’ lives, documentary evidence, family genealogies, monumental and domestic architecture, and medieval and early modern guidebooks, sources not often studied together. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred histories of Rome, Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome repositions these materials within a new story, of how Romans made the city’s classical and Christian past their own and thereby empowered and immortalized their families.

A new literary history of Arabic poetry from 500–750 CE that includes hundreds of lines of poetry never before translated into English

To interpret the Quran’s Arabic, early medieval Muslims turned to pre-Islamic poetry, a corpus that the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin called “the archive of the Arabs.” While this principle seems straightforward, pre-Islamic Arabs did not, in fact, think of themselves as either pre-Islamic or Arab. The term Arab barely appears at all in pre-Islamic poetry.

The Emergence of Arabic Poetry reexamines this early poetry to reconstruct what pre-Islamic culture actually entailed. Nathaniel A. Miller draws on a wide range of texts, including hundreds of lines of poetry never before translated into English—in addition to new inscriptional, archaeological, and non-Arabic sources—to explore the diverse world of pre- and early-Islamic Arabia in which Islam developed. Miller traces the emergence of two regional identities, and their distinctive poetic traditions, in the Arabian Peninsula of late antiquity: Najdi in the center and northeast and Hijazi in the southwest. The book shows how later efforts of Muslim scholars to use early poetry as an aesthetic, linguistic ideal to interpret the Quran resulted in an image of a unitary, exceptional, and isolated Arab identity and culture. These scholars drew on the Najdi tradition, canonizing its forms as classical Arabic poetry par excellence, and solidifying many tropes of Arabness that are still ubiquitous today: of nomadism, performative generosity, and martial equestrianism. However, Miller argues, it was the neglected Hijazi tradition that was actually more central to the emergence of early Islam.

Early Arabic poetry has been largely overlooked in current scholarship in adjacent fields, largely due to twentieth-century controversies over whether this corpus is legitimate or was forged. In combining a reconstruction of pre-Islamic poetry’s social function with a consideration of the circumstances of its later canonization, The Emergence of Arabic Poetry offers an urgently needed reappraisal of a significant but underexamined poetic corpus, as well as a new literary history of the origins of Arabic poetry from 500 to 750 CE.

In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Fuentes takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with an enslaved runaway; inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color; in the midst of a white urban household in sexual chaos; to the gallows where enslaved people were executed; and within violent scenes of enslaved women's punishments. In the process, Fuentes interrogates the archive and its historical production to expose the ongoing effects of white colonial power that constrain what can be known about these women.

Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death. By vividly recounting enslaved life through the experiences of individual women and illuminating their conditions of confinement through the legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, colonial authorities, and the archive, Fuentes challenges the way we write histories of vulnerable and often invisible subjects.

What can we know about the everyday experiences of Christians during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries? How did non-elite men and women, enslaved, freed, and free persons, who did not renounce sex or choose voluntary poverty become Christian? They neither led a religious community nor did they live in entirely Christian settings. In this period, an age marked by “extraordinary” Christians—wonderworking saints, household ascetics, hermits, monks, nuns, pious aristocrats, pilgrims, and bishops—ordinary Christians went about their daily lives, in various occupations, raising families, sharing households, kitchens, and baths in religiously diverse cities. Occasionally they attended church liturgies, sought out local healers, and visited martyrs’ shrines. Barely and rarely mentioned in ancient texts, common Christians remain nameless and undifferentiated.

Unfinished Christians explores the sensory and affective dimensions of ordinary Christians who assembled for rituals. With precious few first-person accounts by common Christians, it relies on written sources not typically associated with lived religion: sermons, liturgical instruction books, and festal hymns. All three genres of writing are composed by clergy for use in ritual settings. Yet they may also provide glimpses of everyday Christians’ lives and experiences. This book investigates the habits, objects, behaviors, and movements of ordinary Christians by mining festal preaching by John Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa, and Romanos the Melodist, among others. It also mines liturgical instructions to explore the psalms and other songs performed on various feast days. “Unfinished,” then, connotes the creativity and agency of unremarkable Christians who engaged in making religious experiences: the “Christian-in-progress” who learns to work with material and bring something into being; the artisans who attended sermons; and, more widely, the bearers of embodied knowing.

Natural Designs chronicles the life and work of the earliest and most influential Spanish historian of the New World, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557). Through a combination of biography and visual and textual analysis, Elizabeth Gansen explores how Oviedo, in his writings, brought the European Renaissance to bear on his understanding of New World nature.

Oviedo learned much from the humanists with whom he came into contact in the courtly circles of Spain and Italy, including Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Pietro Bembo, and witnessed Christopher Columbus regaling Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand with news from his inaugural voyage to the Indies. Fascinated by the Caribbean flora and fauna Oviedo encountered on his arrival to the Caribbean in 1514, he made them the protagonists of his writings on the Indies. From his consumption of the prickly pear cactus, which led him to believe his death was imminent, to the behavior of the iguana, which defied his efforts to determine if the lizard was fish or flesh, his works reveal the challenges at the heart of Spain’s encounter with the biological wonders of the Americas.

Natural Designs foregrounds Oviedo’s role as a writer, illustrator, and editor of New World nature. As much as Oviedo is credited as a pioneer in the literary genre of American natural history, his contributions to early modern conceptions of the flora and fauna of the Indies are still not widely understood and appreciated. Gansen situates us in the early sixteenth century to reappraise the works of the Spanish historian who first shaped these realities.

The Virginia Venture is an innovative exploration of how a wider public of women, children, and men across English society contributed to the foundation of the first permanent English colony in America: Jamestown, Virginia. Drawing on sources from dozens of archives in the United States and England, it provides a fresh perspective on how capital and labor were mobilized to help build the colony—not from the perspective of elite investors alone, but from the point of view of ordinary people across the country. Women and the laboring poor have been overlooked in these efforts: The Virginia Venture brings them center stage.

As well as exploring how society at home supported colonization, the book examines the impact that colonization had on English society, including changes in attitudes and behaviors—from the provision of poor relief to domestic tobacco cultivation. The book shows that as English society became more tightly invested in colonization in America, this sparked contestations over the prioritization of “English” and “American” interests. English social history in the seventeenth century cannot be understood without this imperial perspective.

The Virginia Venture is essential reading for scholars of English social and imperial history and early American history. It draws on the methods of transatlantic history, showing the intimate connections between England and America, but it is deeply rooted in the social history archive of England. It demonstrates how English archives can be used, to their fullest extent, to illuminate this crucial period of American history.

In Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages, Elisheva Baumgarten seeks a point of entry into the everyday existence of people who did not belong to the learned elite, and who therefore left no written records of their lives. She does so by turning to the Bible as it was read, reinterpreted, and seen by the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz. In the tellings, retellings, and illustrations of biblical stories, and especially of those centered around women, Baumgarten writes, we can find explanations and validations for the practices that structured birth, marriage, and death; women's inclusion in the liturgy and synagogue; and the roles of women as community leaders, givers of charity, and keepers of the household.

Each of the book's chapters concentrates on a single figure or a cluster of biblical women—Eve, the Matriarchs, Deborah, Yael, Abigail, and Jephthah's daughter—to explore aspects of the domestic and communal lives of Northern French and German Jews living among Christians in urban settings. Throughout the book more than forty vivid medieval illuminations, most reproduced in color, help convey to modern readers what medieval people could have known visually about these biblical stories. "I do not claim that the genres I analyze here—literature, art, exegesis—mirror social practice," Baumgarten writes. "Rather, my goal is to examine how medieval Jewish engagement with the Bible offers a window onto aspects of the daily lives and cultural mentalités of Ashkenazic Jews in the High Middle Ages."

In a final chapter, Baumgarten turns to the historical figure of Dulcia, a late twelfth-century woman, to ponder how our understanding of those people about whom we know relatively more can be enriched by considering the lives of those who have remained anonymous. The biblical stories through which Baumgarten reads contributed to shaping a world that is largely lost to us, and can help us, in turn, to gain access to lives of people of the past who left no written accounts of their beliefs and practices.

Between 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, millions of nude photographs of the female form—artistic, pornographic, and everything in-between—were produced in France, the birthplace of photography. Drawing upon government records, legal decisions, newspaper accounts, and contemporary literature, Raisa Rexer recounts the history of these illicit and ubiquitous images and elucidates their immense cultural and artistic reach.

Rexer focuses in particular on the ways that nude photographic imagery influenced some of the greatest authors of the period, including Charles Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, and Émile Zola, and sets their work against historical records and nonfiction print sources to tell the story of evolving perceptions of nude photography. In the period immediately after photography's invention, nude photographs were vitally connected to the questions of art and artistry, particularly with regard to photography's aspirations to high cultural status. By the end of the century, however, as production and sales expanded internationally and as photographs of nudes flooded the streets and shops, proliferation of these pictures was increasingly viewed as one of a host of social problems plaguing France.

Illustrated with nearly ninety period images, The Fallen Veil offers the first full treatment of the photographic nude in the nineteenth century and considers how this history continues to influence many of the same questions we ask today about art, pornography, and the relation between the two.

A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world, and an introduction to historical method.

A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world, and an introduction to historical method. Written in a clear and accessible style, it reworks a well-loved book to provide an entirely new resource for students, teachers, and general readers.

Like Cecilia Penifader, most people in the Middle Ages were peasants, humble people living socially below the knights, bishops, and kings who figure so large in history books. Judith M. Bennett shows that peasants, too, made history. She explores how peasant lives were closely entangled with the lives and interests of those more privileged, looking at manors as well as villages; parishes, faith, and ritual practices; royal taxes and justice; economy and trade; famine and disease. By moving out from Cecilia's perspective, the book explores the ties and tensions that bound all medieval people—poor as well as rich—into a medieval society.

The book also provides a primer on the fact-finding and interpretative debates that are at the heart of the historian's craft. Each chapter includes a new section on how medievalists today are studying such topics as puberty, morals, courtship, and climate change. The illustrations, taken from the famous Luttrell Psalter, provide a coherent, rich, and interpretatively complex visual program. And the final chapter explores some of the different ways in which historians, for better and for worse, have understood medieval society.

In Elf Queens and Holy Friars Richard Firth Green investigates an important aspect of medieval culture that has been largely ignored by modern literary scholarship: the omnipresent belief in fairyland.

Taking as his starting point the assumption that the major cultural gulf in the Middle Ages was less between the wealthy and the poor than between the learned and the lay, Green explores the church's systematic demonization of fairies and infernalization of fairyland. He argues that when medieval preachers inveighed against the demons that they portrayed as threatening their flocks, they were in reality often waging war against fairy beliefs. The recognition that medieval demonology, and indeed pastoral theology, were packed with coded references to popular lore opens up a whole new avenue for the investigation of medieval vernacular culture.

Elf Queens and Holy Friars offers a detailed account of the church's attempts to suppress or redirect belief in such things as fairy lovers, changelings, and alternative versions of the afterlife. That the church took these fairy beliefs so seriously suggests that they were ideologically loaded, and this fact makes a huge difference in the way we read medieval romance, the literary genre that treats them most explicitly. The war on fairy beliefs increased in intensity toward the end of the Middle Ages, becoming finally a significant factor in the witch-hunting of the Renaissance.

Reveals the role of Arthuriana in the racial logics of medieval Europe through an analysis of the construction of chivalric whiteness

The Other Faces of Arthur reveals the role of Arthuriana in the racial logics of medieval Europe through an analysis of the construction of whiteness in the global North Atlantic: Scandinavia, Britain, Iberia, and North Africa. Taking a comparative approach that draws on language traditions not commonly studied together and places lesser-known Arthurian texts in conversation with each other, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia explores the important role of translation in the dissemination and analysis of Arthuriana, showing how these texts functioned within the settings that produced them.

Introducing the framework of the global North Atlantic within the field of global medieval studies, Otaño Gracia examines Arthurian texts written in Castilian, Catalan, Middle Welsh, and Old Norse, among other languages, in order to illustrate the various ways that the writers adapt the materials to serve their specific cultural and aesthetic purposes. Tracing how Arthuriana shifts and changes throughout the global North Atlantic, Otaño Gracia uncovers the hierarchies of power present in Arthurian texts and how they reflect, manipulate, and critique the power relations existing in the courts that circulated the texts. Arthuriana’s obsession with chivalry, Otaño Gracia demonstrates, is fundamentally about whiteness; these texts deploy chivalric whiteness to naturalize relations of domination and normalize violence against racialized subjects.

The Other Faces of Arthur establishes Arthuriana as a pan-European project of racialization that ultimately serves to rationalize geocultural conquest and expansion.

An important new biography of Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress

During her keynote speech at the 1976 Democratic Party convention, Barbara Jordan of Texas stood before a rapt audience and reflected on where Americans stood in that bicentennial year. “Are we to be one people bound together by a common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future.” The civil rights movement had changed American politics by opening up elected office to a new generation of Black leaders, including Jordan, the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress. Though her life in elected politics lasted only twelve years, in that short time, Jordan changed the nation by showing that Black women could lead their party and legislate on behalf of what she called “the common good.”

In She Changed the Nation, biographer Mary Ellen Curtin offers a new portrait of Jordan and her journey from segregated Houston, Texas, to Washington, DC, where she made her mark during the Watergate crisis by eloquently calling for the impeachment of President Nixon. Recognized as one of the greatest orators of modern America, Jordan inspired millions, and Black women became her most ardent supporters. Many assumed Jordan would rise higher and become a US senator, Speaker of the House, or a Supreme Court justice. But illness and disability, along with the obstacles she faced as a Black woman, led to Jordan’s untimely retirement from elected office—though not from public life. Until her death at the age of fifty-nine, Jordan remained engaged with the cause of justice and creating common ground, proving that Black women could lead the country through challenging times.

No change in the law alone could guarantee the election of Black leaders. It took courage and ambition for Barbara Jordan to break into politics. This important new biography explores the personal and the political dimensions of Jordan’s life, showing how she navigated the extraordinary pressures of office while seeking to use persuasion, governance, and popular politics as instruments of social change and betterment.

In 1934, at the age of fourteen, Colette Brull-Ulmann knew that she wanted to become a pediatrician. By the age of twenty-one, she was in her second year of studying medicine. By 1942, Brull-Ulman and her family had become registered Jews under the ever-increasing statutes against them enacted by Petain’s government. Her father had been arrested and interned at the Drancy detention camp and Brull-Ulman had become an intern at the Rothschild Hospital, the only hospital in Paris where Jewish physicians were allowed to practice and Jewish patients could go for treatment.

Under Claire Heyman, a charismatic social worker who was a leader of the hospital’s secret escape network, Brull-Ulmann began working tirelessly to rescue Jewish children treated at the Rothschild. Her devotion to the protection of children, her bravery, and her imperviousness in the face of the deadly injustices of the Holocaust were always evident—whether smuggling children to safety through the Paris streets in the dead of night or defying officers and doctors who frighteningly held her fate in their hands. Ultimately, Brull-Ulmann was forced to flee the Rothschild in 1943, when she joined her father’s resistance network, gathering and delivering information for De Gaulle’s secret intelligence agency until the Liberation in 1945.

In 1970, Brull-Ulmann finally became a licensed pediatrician. But after the war, like so many others, she sought to bury her memories. It wasn’t until decades later when she finally started to speak publicly—not only about her own work and survival, but about the one child who affected her most deeply. Originally published in French in 2017, Brull-Ulmann’s memoir fearlessly illustrates the horrors of Jewish life under the German Occupation and casts light on the heretofore unknown story of the Rothschild Hospital during this period. But most of all, it chronicles the life of a truly exceptional and courageous woman for whom not acting was never an option.

How, Barbara Newman asks, did the myth of the separable heart take such a firm hold in the Middle Ages, from lovers exchanging hearts with one another to mystics exchanging hearts with Jesus? What special traits gave both saints and demoniacs their ability to read minds? Why were mothers who died in childbirth buried in unconsecrated ground? Each of these phenomena, as diverse as they are, offers evidence for a distinctive medieval idea of the person in sharp contrast to that of the modern "subject" of "individual."

Starting from the premise that the medieval self was more permeable than its modern counterpart, Newman explores the ways in which the self's porous boundaries admitted openness to penetration by divine and demonic spirits and even by other human beings. She takes up the idea of "coinherence," a state familiarly expressed in the amorous and devotional formula "I in you and you in me," to consider the theory and practice of exchanging the self with others in five relational contexts of increasing intimacy. Moving from the outside in, her chapters deal with charismatic teachers and their students, mind-reading saints and their penitents, lovers trading hearts, pregnant mothers who metaphorically and literally carry their children within, and women and men in the throes of demonic obsession. In a provocative conclusion, she sketches some of the far-reaching consequences of this type of personhood by drawing on comparative work in cultural history, literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, and ethics.

The Permeable Self offers medievalists new insight into the appeal and dangers of the erotics of pedagogy; the remarkable influence of courtly romance conventions on hagiography and mysticism; and the unexpected ways that pregnancy—often devalued in mothers—could be positively ascribed to men, virgins, and God. The half-forgotten but vital idea of coinherence is of relevance far beyond medieval studies, however, as Newman shows how it reverberates in such puzzling phenomena as telepathy, the experience of heart transplant recipients who develop relationships with their deceased donors, the phenomenon of psychoanalytic transference, even the continuities between ideas of demonic possession and contemporary understandings of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In The Permeable Self Barbara Newman once again confirms her status as one of our most brilliant and thought-provoking interpreters of the Middle Ages.

Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates observed that citizenship was "now as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government."

Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were, Christopher James Bonner argues, at the center of creating the very meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after Bates's lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations it imposed. They thus played a vital role in the long, fraught process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of that belonging.

Remaking the Republic chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newpsapers, state and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

In this sweeping saga that spans empires, peoples, and nations, M. Scott Heerman chronicles the long history of slavery in the heart of the continent and traces its many iterations through law and social practice. Arguing that slavery had no fixed institutional form, Heerman traces practices of slavery through indigenous, French, and finally U.S. systems of captivity, inheritable slavery, lifelong indentureship, and the kidnapping of free people. By connecting the history of indigenous bondage to that of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, Heerman shows how French, Spanish, and Native North American practices shaped the history of slavery in the United States.

The Alchemy of Slavery foregrounds the diverse and adaptable slaving practices that masters deployed to build a slave economy in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, attempting to outmaneuver their antislavery opponents. In time, a formidable cast of lawyers and antislavery activists set their sights on ending slavery in Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, Lyman Trumbull, Richard Yates, and many other future leaders of the Republican party partnered with African Americans to wage an extended campaign against slavery in the region. Across a century and a half, slavery's nearly perpetual reinvention takes center stage: masters turning Indian captives into slaves, slaves into servants, former slaves into kidnapping victims; and enslaved people turning themselves into free men and women.

A groundbreaking study of slavery and power in the British Caribbean that foregrounds the struggle for survival

Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive.

Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate. Field laborers invoked abolitionist-inspired legal reforms to protest brutal floggings, spiritual healers conducted secretive nighttime rituals, anxious drivers weighed the competing pressures of managers and the condition of their fellow slaves in the fields, and women fought back against abusive masters and husbands. Browne shows that at the core of enslaved people's complicated relationships with their enslavers and one another was the struggle to live in a world of death.

Provocative and unflinching, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean reorients the study of Atlantic slavery by revealing how differently enslaved people's social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies appear when seen in the light of their unrelenting struggle to survive.