University of Pennsylvania Press

Before Alaska became a mining bonanza, it was a scenic bonanza, a place larger in the American imagination than in its actual borders. Prior to the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, thousands of scenic adventurers journeyed along the Inside Passage, the nearly thousand-mile sea-lane that snakes up the Pacific coast from Puget Sound to Icy Strait. Both the famous—including wilderness advocate John Muir, landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, and photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Edward Curtis—and the long forgotten—a gay ex-sailor, a former society reporter, an African explorer, and a neurasthenic Methodist minister—returned with fascinating accounts of their Alaskan journeys, becoming advance men and women for an expanding United States.

In Darkest Alaska explores the popular images conjured by these travelers' tales, as well as their influence on the broader society. Drawing on lively firsthand accounts, archival photographs, maps, and other ephemera of the day, historian Robert Campbell chronicles how Gilded Age sightseers were inspired by Alaska's bounty of evolutionary treasures, tribal artifacts, geological riches, and novel thrills to produce a wealth of highly imaginative reportage about the territory. By portraying the territory as a "Last West" ripe for American conquest, tourists helped pave the way for settlement and exploitation.

The pursuit of health and wellness has become a fundamental and familiar part of everyday life in America. We are surrounded by an enticing world of products, practices, and promotions assuring health and happiness—cereal boxes claim that their contents can reduce the risk of heart disease, bars of aromatherapy soap seek to wash away our stresses, newspapers celebrate the wonders of the latest superfoods and herbal remedies. No longer confined to the domain of Western medicine, suggestions for healthy living often turn to alternatives originating in distant times and places, in cultures very different from our own. Diets from ancient or remote groups are presented as cures for everything from colds to cancer; exercise regimens based on Eastern philosophies are heralded as paths to physical health and spiritual wellbeing.

In New Age Capitalism, Kimberly Lau examines the ideological work that has created this billion-dollar business and allowed "Eastern" and other non-Western traditions to be coopted by Western capitalism. Extending the orientalist logic to the business of health and wellness, American companies have created a lucrative and competitive market for their products, encouraging consumers to believe that they are making the right choices for personal as well as planetary health. In reality, alternative health practices have been commodified for an American public longing not only for health and wellness but also for authenticity, tradition, and a connection to the cultures of an imagined Edenic past. Although consumers might prefer to buy into "authentic" non-Western therapies, New Age Capitalism argues that the market economy makes this goal unattainable.

Although representations of medieval Christians and Christianity are rarely subject to the same scholarly scrutiny as those of Jews and Judaism, "the Christian" is as constructed a term, category, and identity as "the Jew." Medieval Christian authors created complex notions of Christian identity through strategic use of representations of Others: idealized Jewish patriarchs or demonized contemporary Jews; Woman represented as either virgin or whore. In Western thought, the Christian was figured as spiritual and masculine, defined in opposition to the carnal, feminine, and Jewish.

Women and Jews are not simply the Other for the Christian exegetical tradition, however; they also represent sources of origin, as one cannot conceive of men without women or of Christianity without Judaism. The bifurcated representations of Woman and Jew found in the literature of the Middle Ages and beyond reflect the uneasy figurations of women and Jews as both insiders and outsiders to Christian society.

Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare provides the first extended examination of the linkages of gender and Jewish difference in late medieval and early modern English literature. Focusing on representations of Jews and women in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, selections from medieval drama, and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Lampert explores the ways in which medieval and early modern authors used strategies of opposition to—and identification with—figures of Jews and women to create individual and collective Christian identities. This book shows not only how these questions are interrelated in the texts of medieval and early modern England but how they reveal the distinct yet similarly paradoxical places held by Woman and Jew within a longer tradition of Western thought that extends to the present day.

In 1631, when the Dutch tried to develop plantation agriculture in the Delaware Valley, the Lenape Indians destroyed the colony of Swanendael and killed its residents. The Natives and Dutch quickly negotiated peace, avoiding an extended war through diplomacy and trade. The Lenapes preserved their political sovereignty for the next fifty years as Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and English colonists settled the Delaware Valley. The European outposts did not approach the size and strength of those in Virginia, New England, and New Netherland. Even after thousands of Quakers arrived in West New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the late 1670s and '80s, the region successfully avoided war for another seventy-five years.

Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of the multiethnic society of the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. After Swanendael, the Natives, Swedes, and Finns avoided war by focusing on trade and forging strategic alliances in such events as the Dutch conquest, the Mercurius affair, the Long Swede conspiracy, and English attempts to seize land. Drawing on a wide range of sources, author Jean R. Soderlund demonstrates that the hallmarks of Delaware Valley society—commitment to personal freedom, religious liberty, peaceful resolution of conflict, and opposition to hierarchical government—began in the Delaware Valley not with Quaker ideals or the leadership of William Penn but with the Lenape Indians, whose culture played a key role in shaping Delaware Valley society. The first comprehensive account of the Lenape Indians and their encounters with European settlers before Pennsylvania's founding, Lenape Country places Native culture at the center of this part of North America.

Tomography is a method of exploring a phenomenon through a large number of examples or perspectives. In medical tomography, such as a CAT scan, two-dimensional slices or images of a three-dimensional organ are used to envision the organ itself. Urban tomography applies the same approach to the study of city life. To appreciate different aspects of a community, from infrastructure to work to worship, urban planning expert Martin H. Krieger scans the myriad sights and sounds of contemporary Los Angeles. He examines these slices of life in Urban Tomographies.

The book begins by introducing tomographic methods and the principles behind them, which are taken from phenomenological philosophy. It draws from the examples of Lee Friedlander and Walker Evans, as well as Denis Diderot, Charles Marville, and Eugène Atget, who documented the many facets of Paris life in three crucial periods. Rather than focus on singular, extraordinary figures and events as do most documentarians, Krieger looks instead at the typical, presenting multiple specific images that call attention to people and activities usually rendered invisible by commonality. He took tens of thousands of photographs of industrial sites, markets, electrical distributing stations, and storefront churches throughout Los Angeles. He also recorded the city's ambient sounds, from the calls of a tamale vendor to the buzz of a workshop saw. Krieger considers these samples from the urban sensorium in this innovative volume, resulting in a thoughtful illumination of the interplay of people with and within the built environment. With numerous maps and photographs, as well as Krieger's unique insights, Urban Tomographies provides an unusually representative and rounded view of the city.

In the decades following the triumphant proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the UN General Assembly was transformed by the arrival of newly independent states from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. This diverse constellation of states introduced new ideas, methods, and priorities to the human rights program. Their influence was magnified by the highly effective nature of Asian, Arab, and African diplomacy in the UN human rights bodies and the sheer numerical superiority of the so-called Afro-Asian bloc. Owing to the nature of General Assembly procedure, the Third World states dominated the human rights agenda, and enthusiastic support for universal human rights was replaced by decades of authoritarianism and an increasingly strident rejection of the ideas laid out in the Universal Declaration.

In Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, Roland Burke explores the changing impact of decolonization on the UN human rights program. By recovering the contributions of those Asian, African, and Arab voices that joined the global rights debate, Burke demonstrates the central importance of Third World influence across the most pivotal battles in the United Nations, from those that secured the principle of universality, to the passage of the first binding human rights treaties, to the flawed but radical step of studying individual pleas for help. The very presence of so many independent voices from outside the West, and the often defensive nature of Western interventions, complicates the common presumption that the postwar human rights project was driven by Europe and the United States. Drawing on UN transcripts, archives, and the personal papers of key historical actors, this book challenges the notion that the international rights order was imposed on an unwilling and marginalized Third World. Far from being excluded, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern diplomats were powerful agents in both advancing and later obstructing the promotion of human rights.

Concord, Massachusetts, has long been heralded as the birthplace of American liberty and American letters. It was here that the first military engagement of the Revolutionary War was fought and here that Thoreau came to "live deliberately" on the shores of Walden Pond. Between the Revolution and the settlement of the little cabin with the bean rows, however, Walden Woods was home to several generations of freed slaves and their children. Living on the fringes of society, they attempted to pursue lives of freedom, promised by the rhetoric of the Revolution, and yet withheld by the practice of racism. Thoreau was all but alone in his attempt "to conjure up the former occupants of these woods." Other than the chapter he devoted to them in Walden, the history of slavery in Concord has been all but forgotten.

In Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts, Elise Lemire brings to life the former slaves of Walden Woods and the men and women who held them in bondage during the eighteenth century. After charting the rise of Concord slaveholder John Cuming, Black Walden follows the struggles of Cuming's slave, Brister, as he attempts to build a life for himself after thirty-five years of enslavement. Brister Freeman, as he came to call himself, and other of the town's slaves were able to leverage the political tensions that fueled the American Revolution and force their owners into relinquishing them. Once emancipated, however, the former slaves were permitted to squat on only the most remote and infertile places. Walden Woods was one of them. Here, Freeman and his neighbors farmed, spun linen, made baskets, told fortunes, and otherwise tried to survive in spite of poverty and harassment.

With a new preface that reflects on community developments since the hardcover's publication, Black Walden reminds us that this was a black space before it was an internationally known green space and preserves the legacy of the people who strove against all odds to overcome slavery and segregation.

This widely acclaimed and highly regarded book, used extensively by students, scholars, policymakers, and activists, now appears in a new third edition. Focusing on the theme of visions seen by those who dreamed of what might be, Lauren explores the dramatic transformation of a world patterned by centuries of human rights abuses into a global community that now boldly proclaims that the way governments treat their own people is a matter of international concern—and sets the goal of human rights "for all peoples and all nations." He reveals the truly universal nature of this movement, places contemporary events within their broader historical contexts, and explains the relationship between individual cases and larger issues of human rights with insight.

This new edition incorporates material from recently declassified documents and the most recent scholarship relating to the creation of the new Human Rights Council and its Universal Periodic Review, the International Criminal Court, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), terrorism and torture, the impact of globalization and modern technology, and activists in NGOs devoted to human rights. It provides perceptive assessments of the process of change, the power of visions and visionaries, politics and political will, and the evolving meanings of sovereignty, security, and human rights themselves.

Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political history to consider not whether black people participated in the politics of the nineteenth century but how, when, and with what lasting effects. Collectively, its authors insist that historians go beyond questioning how revolutionary the American Revolution was, or whether Reconstruction failed, and focus, instead, on how political change initiated by African Americans and their allies constituted the rule in nineteenth-century American politics, not occasional and cataclysmic exceptions.

The essays in this groundbreaking collection cover the full range of political activity by black northerners after the Revolution, from cultural politics to widespread voting, within a political system shaped by the rising power of slaveholders. Conceptualizing a new black politics, contributors observe, requires reorienting American politics away from black/white and North/South polarities and toward a new focus on migration and local or state structures. Other essays focus on the middle decades of the nineteenth century and demonstrate that free black politics, not merely the politics of slavery, was a disruptive and consequential force in American political development.

From the perspective of the contributors to this volume, formal black politics did not begin in 1865, or with agitation by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass in the 1840s, but rather in the Revolutionary era's antislavery and citizenship activism. As these essays show, revolution, emancipation, and Reconstruction are not separate eras in U.S. history, but rather linked and ongoing processes that began in the 1770s and continued through the nineteenth century.

Contributors: Christopher James Bonner, Kellie Carter Jackson, Andrew Diemer, Laura F. Edwards, Van Gosse, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, M. Scott Heerman, Dale Kretz, Padraig Riley, Samantha Seeley, James M. Shinn Jr., David Waldstreicher.

The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis—both experiential and existential—at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed.

Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events. Seasons of Misery addresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity.

A fascinating portrait of Jewish life in Suriname from the 17th to 19th centuries

Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society explores the political and social history of the Jews of Suriname, a Dutch colony on the South American mainland just north of Brazil. Suriname was home to the most privileged Jewish community in the Americas where Jews, most of Iberian origin, enjoyed religious liberty, were judged by their own tribunal, could enter any trade, owned plantations and slaves, and even had a say in colonial governance.

Aviva Ben-Ur sets the story of Suriname's Jews in the larger context of Atlantic slavery and colonialism and argues that, like other frontier settlements, they achieved and maintained their autonomy through continual negotiation with the colonial government. Drawing on sources in Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Spanish, Ben-Ur shows how, from their first permanent settlement in the 1660s to the abolition of their communal autonomy in 1825, Suriname Jews enjoyed virtually the same standing as the ruling white Protestants, with whom they interacted regularly. She also examines the nature of Jewish interactions with enslaved and free people of African descent in the colony. Jews admitted both groups into their community, and Ben-Ur illuminates the ways in which these converts and their descendants experienced Jewishness and autonomy. Lastly, she compares the Jewish settlement with other frontier communities in Suriname, most notably those of Indians and Maroons, to measure the success of their negotiations with the government for communal autonomy. The Jewish experience in Suriname was marked by unparalleled autonomy that nevertheless developed in one of the largest slave colonies in the New World.

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.

Humanitarian aid workers increasingly remain present in contexts of violence and are injured, kidnapped, and killed as a result. Since 9/11 and in response to these dangers, aid organizations have fortified themselves to shield their staff and programs from outside threats. In Aid in Danger, Larissa Fast critically examines the causes of violence against aid workers and the consequences of the approaches aid agencies use to protect themselves from attack.

Based on more than a decade of research, Aid in Danger explores the assumptions underpinning existing explanations of and responses to violence against aid workers. According to Fast, most explanations of attacks locate the causes externally and maintain an image of aid workers as an exceptional category of civilians. The resulting approaches to security rely on separation and fortification and alienate aid workers from those in need, representing both a symptom and a cause of crisis in the humanitarian system. Missing from most analyses are the internal vulnerabilities, exemplified in the everyday decisions and ordinary human frailties and organizational mistakes that sometimes contribute to the conditions leading to violence. This oversight contributes to the normalization of danger in aid work and undermines the humanitarian ethos. As an alternative, Fast proposes a relational framework that captures both external threats and internal vulnerabilities. By uncovering overlooked causes of violence, Aid in Danger offers a unique perspective on the challenges of providing aid in perilous settings and on the prospects of reforming the system in service of core humanitarian values.

An investigation into how indigenous rights are conceived in legal language and doctrine

In the twenty-first century, it is politically and legally commonplace that indigenous communities go to court to assert their rights against the postcolonial nation-state in which they reside. But upon closer examination, this constellation is far from straightforward. Indigenous communities make their claims as independent entities, governed by their own laws. And yet, they bring a case before the court of another sovereign, subjecting themselves to its foreign rule of law.

According to Jonas Bens, when native communities enter into legal relationships with postcolonial nation-states, they "become indigenous." Indigenous communities define themselves as separated from the settler nation-state and insist that their rights originate from within their own system of laws. At the same time, indigenous communities must argue that they are incorporated in the settler nation-state to be able to use its judiciary to enforce these rights. As such, they are simultaneously included into and excluded from the state.

Tracing how the indigenous paradox is inscribed into the law by investigating several indigenous rights cases in the Americas, from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, Bens illustrates how indigenous communities have managed—and continue to manage—to navigate this paradox by developing lines of legal reasoning that mobilize the concepts of sovereignty and culture. Bens argues that understanding indigeneity as a paradoxical formation sheds light on pressing questions concerning the role of legal pluralism and shared sovereignty in contemporary multicultural societies.

Hawaiian legends figure greatly in the image of tropical paradise that has come to represent Hawai'i in popular imagination. But what are we buying into when we read these stories as texts in English-language translations? Cristina Bacchilega poses this question in her examination of the way these stories have been adapted to produce a legendary Hawai'i primarily for non-Hawaiian readers or other audiences.

With an understanding of tradition that foregrounds history and change, Bacchilega examines how, following the 1898 annexation of Hawai'i by the United States, the publication of Hawaiian legends in English delegitimized indigenous narratives and traditions and at the same time constructed them as representative of Hawaiian culture. Hawaiian mo'olelo were translated in popular and scholarly English-language publications to market a new cultural product: a space constructed primarily for Euro-Americans as something simultaneously exotic and primitive and beautiful and welcoming. To analyze this representation of Hawaiian traditions, place, and genre, Bacchilega focuses on translation across languages, cultures, and media; on photography, as the technology that contributed to the visual formation of a westernized image of Hawai'i; and on tourism as determining postannexation economic and ideological machinery.

In a book with interdisciplinary appeal, Bacchilega demonstrates both how the myth of legendary Hawai'i emerged and how this vision can be unmade and reimagined.

What if historical fiction were understood as a disfiguring of calculus? Or poems enacting the formation and breakdown of community as expositions of irrational numbers? What if, in other words, literary texts possessed a kind of mathematical unconscious?

The persistence of the rhetoric of "two cultures," one scientific, the other humanities-based, obscures the porous border and productive relationship that has long existed between literature and mathematics. In eighteenth-century Scottish universities, geometry in particular was considered one of the humanities; anchored in philosophy, it inculcated what we call critical thinking. But challenges to classical geometry within the realm of mathematics obligated Scottish geometers to become more creative in their defense of the traditional discipline; and when literary writers and philosophers incorporated these mathematical problems into their own work, the results were not only ingenious but in some cases pioneering.

Literature After Euclid tells the story of the creative adaptation of geometry in Scotland during and after the long eighteenth century. It argues that diverse attempts in literature and philosophy to explain or even emulate the geometric achievements of Isaac Newton and others resulted in innovations that modify our understanding of descriptive and bardic poetry, the aesthetics of the picturesque, and the historical novel. Matthew Wickman's analyses of these innovations in the work of Walter Scott, Robert Burns, James Thomson, David Hume, Thomas Reid, and other literati change how we perceive the Scottish Enlightenment and the later, modernist ethos that purportedly relegated the "classical" Enlightenment to the dustbin of history. Indeed, the Scottish Enlightenment's geometric imagination changes how we see literary history itself.

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.

The decades following the end of World War II witnessed the establishment of a large and diverse German-American scholarly community studying modern German history. As West Germany's formerly deeply nationalist academic establishment began to reconcile itself with postwar liberalism, American historians played a crucial role, both assisting and learning from their German counterparts' efforts to make sense of the Nazi past—and to reconstruct how German society viewed it.

In History After Hitler, Philipp Stelzel puts this story center stage for the first time, positioning the dialogue between German and American historians as a key part of the intellectual history of the Federal Republic and of Cold War transatlantic relations. Making extensive use of previously inaccessible or unexplored personal papers and institutional files in German and American archives, Stelzel demonstrates that several factors fostered the growth of this transatlantic scholarly community. As a result of both National Socialism and the Cold War, American interest in Germany grew remarkably. In addition, a small but increasingly influential cohort of German émigré historians working in the United States served as transatlantic intermediaries. Finally, the strong appeal of American academia to West German historians of different generations led many of them to form and maintain close ties with their American colleagues.

History After Hitler explores how these historians participated as public intellectuals in debates about how to cope with the Nazi past, believing that the historical awareness of West German citizens would bolster the Federal Republic's democratization. Stelzel also corrects simplistic arguments regarding the supposed "Westernization" of the Federal Republic, emphasizing that American scholars, too, benefited from the transatlantic conversation. History After Hitler makes the case that, together, German and American historians contributed to the development of postwar German culture, intellectual life, and national self-understanding.

A little over a century ago the American Museum of Natural History launched its ambitious Jesup North Pacific Expedition to learn more about the peoples inhabiting the remote easternmost extension of Siberia and the northwest coast of North America. In The Museum at the End of the World: Encounters in the Russian Far East, anthropologists Alexia Bloch and Laurel Kendall tell the story of their journey through this same part of the world in 1998, retracing the old expedition as they link the expedition legacy of artifacts, photographs, and archival material from the museum in New York to the present-day descendants of its subjects.

Contrasting the time of the Jesup expedition with their own travel, the authors reveal a physical and cultural landscape that was profoundly shaken over the past century, first by Soviet control and then by that empire's unraveling. The Museum at the End of the World is not the story of a heroic adventure but rather a series of conversations about Siberian culture with museum workers, native scholars, performers and artisans, and a great variety of ordinary people. They reveal a strong concern about past legacies, cultural preservation, and their uncertain future as they struggle to reinvent themselves.

The authors' combination of travelers' curiosity and professional inquiry provide a compelling portrait of life in the Russian Far East and a meditation on the fate of culture and tradition in the face of hard economic times and sudden autonomy after decades of state control.

For much of the twentieth century, most religious and secular Jewish thinkers believed that they were witnessing a steady, ongoing movement toward secularization. Toward the end of the century, however, as scholars and pundits began to speak of the global resurgence of religion, the normalization of secularism could no longer be considered inevitable. Recent decades have seen the strengthening of Orthodox movements in the United States and in Israel; religious Zionism has grown and radically changed since the 1960s, and new and vibrant nondenominational Jewish movements have emerged.

Secularism in Question examines the ways these contemporary revivals of religion prompt a reconsideration of many issues concerning Jews and Judaism from the early modern era to the present. Bringing together scholars of history, religion, philosophy, and literature, this volume illustrates how the categories of "religious" and "secular" have frequently proven far more permeable than fixed. The contributors challenge the problematic assumptions about the development of secularism that emerge from Protestant European and American perspectives and demonstrate that global Jewish experiences necessitate a reappraisal of conventional narratives of secularism. Ultimately, Secularism in Question calls for rethinking the very terms that animate many of the most contentious debates in contemporary Jewish life and far beyond.

Contributors: Michal Ben-Horin, Aryeh Edrei, Jonathan Mark Gribetz, Ari Joskowicz, Ethan B. Katz, Eva Lezzi, Vivian Liska, Rachel Manekin, David Myers, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Andrea Schatz, Christophe Schulte, Daniel B. Schwartz, Galili Shahar, Scott Ury.

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

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

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

Scholars who investigate race—a label based upon real or perceived physical differences—realize that they face a formidable task. The concept has been contested and condoned, debated and denied throughout modern history. Presented with the full understanding of the complexity of the issue, Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation concentrates on the archaeological analysis of race and how race is determined in the archaeological record.

Most archaeologists, even those dealing with recent history, have usually avoided the subject of race, yet Charles E. Orser, Jr., contends that its study and its implications are extremely important for the science of archaeology. Drawing upon his considerable experience as an archaeologist, and using a combination of practice theory as interpreted by Pierre Bourdieu and spatial theory as presented by Henri Lefebvre, Orser argues for an explicit archaeology of race and its interpretation.

The author reviews past archaeological usages of race, including a case study from early nineteenth-century Ireland, and explores the way race was used to form ideas about the Mound Builders, the Celts, and Atlantis. He concludes with a proposal that historical archaeology—cast as modern-world archaeology—should take the lead in the archaeological analysis of race because its purview is the recent past, that period during which our conceptions of race developed.

In Fighting for Dignity, Sarah S. Willen explores what happened when the Israeli government launched an aggressive deportation campaign targeting newly arrived migrants from countries as varied as Ghana and the Philippines, Nigeria, Colombia, and Ukraine. Although the campaign was billed as a solution to high unemployment, it had another goal as well: to promote an exclusionary vision of Israel as a Jewish state in which non-Jews have no place. The deportation campaign quickly devastated Tel Aviv's migrant communities and set the stage for even more aggressive antimigrant and antirefugee policies in the years to come.

Fighting for Dignity traces the roots of this deportation campaign in Israeli history and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and shows how policies that illegalize and criminalize migrants wreak havoc in their lives, endanger their health, and curtail the human capacity to flourish. Children born to migrant parents are especially vulnerable to developmental and psychosocial risks. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic engagement in homes and in churches, medical offices, advocacy organizations, and public spaces, Willen shows how migrants struggle to craft meaningful, flourishing lives despite the exclusions and vulnerabilities they endure. To complement their perspectives, she introduces Israeli activists who reject their government's exclusionary agenda and strive to build bridges across difference, repair violations of migrants' dignity, and resist policies that violate their own moral convictions. Willen's vivid and unflinching ethnography challenges us to reconsider our understandings of global migration, human rights, the Middle East— and even dignity itself.

Magic, always part of the occult underground in North America, has experienced a resurgence since the 1960s. Although most contemporary magical religions have come from abroad, they have found fertile ground in which to develop in North America. Who are today's believers in Witchcraft and how do they worship? Alternative spiritual paths have increased the ranks of followers dramatically, particularly among well-educated middle-class individuals. Witchcraft and Magic conveys the richness of magical religious experiences found in today's culture, covering the continent of North America and the Caribbean.

These original essays survey current and historical issues pertinent to religions that incorporate magical or occult beliefs and practices, and they examine contemporary responses to these religions. The relationship between Witchcraft and Neopaganism is explored, as is their intersection with established groups practicing goddess worship. Recent years have seen the growth in New Age magic and Afro-Caribbean religions, and these developments are also addressed in this volume.

All the religions covered offer adherents an alternative worldview and rituals that are aimed at helping individuals redefine themselves and make their interactions with the environment more empowered. Many modern occult religions share an absence of dogma or central authority to determine orthodoxy, and have become a contemporary experience embracing modern concerns like feminism, environmentalism, civil rights, and gay rights. Afro-Caribbean religions such as Santería, Palo, and Curanderismo, which do have a more developed dogma and authority structure, offer their followers a religion steeped in African and Hispanic traditions. Responses to the growth of magical religions have varied, from acceptance to an unfounded concern about the growth of a satanic underground. And, as magical religions have flourished, increased interest has resulted in a growing commercialization, with its threat of trivialization.

The Romans depicted the civil law as a body of rules crafted through communal deliberation for the purpose of self-government. Yet, as Clifford Ando demonstrates in Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition, the civil law was also an instrument of empire: many of its most characteristic features developed in response to the challenges posed when the legal system of Rome was deployed to embrace, incorporate, and govern people and cultures far afield.

Ando studies the processes through which lawyers at Rome grappled with the legal pluralism resulting from imperial conquests. He focuses primarily on the tools—most prominently analogy and fiction—used to extend the system and enable it to regulate the lives of persons far from the minds of the original legislators, and he traces the central place that philosophy of language came to occupy in Roman legal thought.

In the second part of the book Ando examines the relationship between civil, public, and international law. Despite the prominence accorded public and international law in legal theory, it was civil law that provided conceptual resources to those other fields in the Roman tradition. Ultimately it was the civil law's implication in systems of domination outside its own narrow sphere that opened the door to its own subversion. When political turmoil at Rome upended the institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively ended Roman democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings transformed. As a result, forms of domination once exercised by Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome, henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.

The Strangers Book explores how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. Rejecting the idea that humans have easy access to a common reserve of experiences and emotions, they countered the notion that a person can use a supposed knowledge of human nature to claim full understanding of any other person's life. Instead they posited that being a stranger, unknown and unknowable, was an essential part of the human condition. Affirming the unknown and unknowable differences between people, as individuals and in groups, laid the groundwork for an ethical and democratic society in which all persons could find a place. If everyone is a stranger, then no individual or class can lay claim to the characteristics that define who gets to be a human in political and public arenas.

Lloyd Pratt focuses on nineteenth-century African American writing and publishing venues and practices such as the Colored National Convention movement and literary societies in Nantucket and New Orleans. Examining the writing of Frederick Douglass in tandem with that of the francophone free men of color who published the first anthology of African American poetry in 1845, he contends these authors were never interested in petitioning whites for sympathy or for recognition of their humanity. Instead, they presented a moral imperative to develop practices of stranger humanism in order to forge personal and political connections based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences.

Sometime before the middle of the twelfth century, an anonymous English writer composed the Leges Edwardi, a treatise purporting to contain the laws that had been in force under the Anglo-Saxon King Edward the Confessor (1042-1066), cousin of William the Conqueror. The laws were said to have been spoken to William shortly after the Conquest by "English nobles who were wise men and learned in their law," recounting "the rules of their laws and customs" for the invading Norman king. When they had finished, the king wondered whether it might not be better for all of them to live under the law of his Viking ancestors; the English, however, protested that they preferred to live by their own preconquest laws. The king acquiesced, and thus, goes the story, were the laws of King Edward the Confessor authorized.

Looking through the lens of this important—if spurious—treatise, God's Peace and King's Peace offers the first ground-level view of English law during the century in which the common law was born. Bruce R. O'Brien compares the Leges Edwardi to other memorials of legal policy and practice from before and after 1066, in both Normandy and England, and advances conclusions about the treatises' reliability on specific points of law. He also shows how the Laws of Edward the Confessor, taken as a record of English law at the conquest, came to be used as authoritative evidence behind the Magna Carta that the king was under the law, and how it was eventually declared a notorious forgery by seventeenth-century antiquaries and Enlightenment historians.

Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation.

Following Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 Executive Order 9066, which called for the exclusion of potentially dangerous groups from military zones along the West Coast, the federal government placed Japanese Americans in makeshift prisons throughout the country. In addition to working on day-to-day operations of the camps, Japanese Americans were coerced into harvesting crops, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, and building barracks for little to no compensation and often at the behest of privately run businesses—all in the name of national security.

How did the U.S. government use incarceration to address labor demands during World War II, and how did imprisoned Japanese Americans respond to the stripping of not only their civil rights, but their labor rights as well? Using a variety of archives and collected oral histories, Japanese American Incarceration uncovers the startling answers to these questions. Stephanie Hinnershitz's timely study connects the government's exploitation of imprisoned Japanese Americans to the history of prison labor in the United States.

Over the past seventy years, World Vision has grown from a small missionary agency to the largest Christian humanitarian organization in the world, with 40,000 employees, offices in nearly one hundred countries, and an annual budget of over $2 billion. While founder Bob Pierce was an evangelist with street smarts, the most recent World Vision U.S. presidents move with ease between megachurches, the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, and the corridors of Capitol Hill. Though the organization has remained decidedly Christian, it has earned the reputation as an elite international nongovernmental organization managed efficiently by professional experts fluent in the language of both marketing and development.

God's Internationalists is the first comprehensive study of World Vision—or any such religious humanitarian agency. In chronicling the organization's transformation from 1950 to the present, David P. King approaches World Vision as a lens through which to explore shifts within post-World War II American evangelicalism as well as the complexities of faith-based humanitarianism. Chronicling the evolution of World Vision's practices, theology, rhetoric, and organizational structure, King demonstrates how the organization rearticulated and retained its Christian identity even as it expanded beyond a narrow American evangelical subculture. King's pairing of American evangelicals' interactions abroad with their own evolving identity at home reframes the traditional narrative of modern American evangelicalism while also providing the historical context for the current explosion of evangelical interest in global social engagement. By examining these patterns of change, God's Internationalists offers a distinctive angle on the history of religious humanitarianism.

The period from 1850 to 1876 was the most transformative era in American history. During the course of this tumultuous quarter century Americans fought a bloody civil war, tried to settle the issue of state versus central government power, recognized the dominance of the new industrial economy over the older agricultural one, and ended slavery, long the shame of the nation. At the same time, a major political realignment occurred with the collapse of the "second American party system" and the emergence of a new party, the Republicans.

But the defeat of slavery—the chief catalyst for the birth of the Republican party—was at best a limited success. The Constitution had been rewritten to abolish slavery and guarantee equal protection under the law, but social equality for African Americans and expanding freedom for others remained elusive throughout the nation. For these triumphs and enduring tragedy, the Republican party, which became in time and memory the party of Abraham Lincoln, bore primary responsibility.

This collection of six original essays by some of America's most distinguished historians of the Civil War era examines the origins and evolution of the Republican party over the course of its first generation. The essays consider the party in terms of its identity, interests, ideology, images, and individuals, always with an eye to the ways the Republican party influenced midnineteenth-century concerns over national character, political power, race, and civil rights.

The authors collectively extend their inquiries from the 1850s through the 1870s to understand the processes whereby the second American party system broke down, a new party and politics emerged, the Civil War came, and a new political and social order developed. They especially consider how ideas about freedom in the 1850s coalesced during war and Reconstruction to produce both an expanded call for political and civil rights for the ex-slaves and a concern over expanded federal involvement in the protection of those rights. By observing the transformation of a sectional party born in the 1850s into the "Grand Old Party" by the 1870s, the authors demonstrate that no modern political party, even the one that claims descent from Lincoln, has surpassed the accomplishments of the first generation of Republicans.

Contributors—
Jean H. Baker, Professor of History at Goucher College, Maryland, is author of Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography.

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is author of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, winner of the Bancroft Prize.

Michael F. Holt, Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia, is author of The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War.

James M. McPherson, Professor of History at Princeton University, is author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Mark E. Neely, Jr., McCabe-Greer Professor in the American Civil War Era at Pennsylvania State University, is author of The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Phillip Shaw Paludan, Naomi Lynn Professor of Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield, is author of The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, winner of the Lincoln Prize.

Brooks D. Simpson, Professor of History at Arizona State University, is author of Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822-1865.

In this book, Massimiliano Vitiello situates the life and career of the Ostrogothic queen Amalasuintha (c. 494/5-535), daughter of Theoderic the Great, in the context of the transitional time, after the fall of Rome, during which new dynastic regimes were experimenting with various forms of political legitimation. A member of the Gothic elite raised in the Romanized palace of Ravenna, Amalasuintha married her father's chosen successor and was set to become a traditional Gothic queen—a helpmate and advisor to her husband, the Visigothic prince Eutharic—with no formal political role of her own. But her early widowhood and the subsequent death of her father threw her into a position unprecedented in the Gothic world: a regent mother who assumed control of the government.

During her regency, Amalasuintha clashed with a conservative Gothic aristocracy who resisted her leadership, garnered support among her Roman and pro-Roman subjects, defended Italy from the ambitions of other kings, and negotiated the expansionistic designs of Justinian and Theodora. When her son died unexpectedly at a young age, she undertook her most dangerous political enterprise: forming an unmarried coregency with her cousin, Theodahad, whom she raised to the throne. His final betrayal would cost Amalasuintha her rule and her life.

Vitiello argues that Amalasuintha's story reveals a key phase in the transformation of queenship in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, a time in which royal women slowly began exercising political power. Assessing the ancient sources for Amalasuintha's biography, Cassiodorus, Procopius, Gregory of Tours, and Jordanes, Vitiello demonstrates the ways in which her life and public image show the influence of late Roman and Byzantine imperial models on the formation of female political power in the post-Roman world.

Rituals have always been a focus of ethnographies of Melanesia, providing a ground for important theorizing in anthropology. This is especially true of the male initiation rituals that until recently were held in Papua New Guinea. For the most part, these rituals have been understood as all-male institutions, intended to maintain and legitimate male domination. Women's exclusion from the forest space where men conducted most such rites has been taken as a sign of their exclusion from the entire ritual process.

Women as Unseen Characters is the first book to examine the role of females in Papua New Guinea male rituals, and the first systematic treatment of this issue for any part of the world. In this volume, leading Melanesian scholars build on recent ethnographies that show how female kin had roles in male rituals that had previously gone unseen. Female seclusion and the enforcement of taboos were crucial elements of the ritual process: forms of presence in their own right.

Contributors here provide detailed accounts of the different kinds of female presence in various Papua New Guinea male rituals. When these are restored to the picture, the rituals can no longer be interpreted merely as an institution for reproducing male domination but must also be understood as a moment when the whole system of relations binding a male person to his kin is reorganized. By dealing with the participation of women, a totally neglected dimension of male rituals is added to our understanding.

In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance made the Ohio River the dividing line between slavery and freedom in the West, yet in 1861, when the Civil War tore the nation apart, the region failed to split at this seam. In Slavery's Borderland, historian Matthew Salafia shows how the river was both a physical boundary and a unifying economic and cultural force that muddied the distinction between southern and northern forms of labor and politics.

Countering the tendency to emphasize differences between slave and free states, Salafia argues that these systems of labor were not so much separated by a river as much as they evolved along a continuum shaped by life along a river. In this borderland region, where both free and enslaved residents regularly crossed the physical divide between Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, slavery and free labor shared as many similarities as differences. As the conflict between North and South intensified, regional commonality transcended political differences. Enslaved and free African Americans came to reject the legitimacy of the river border even as they were unable to escape its influence. In contrast, the majority of white residents on both sides remained firmly committed to maintaining the river border because they believed it best protected their freedom. Thus, when war broke out, Kentucky did not secede with the Confederacy; rather, the river became the seam that held the region together.

By focusing on the Ohio River as an artery of commerce and movement, Salafia draws the northern and southern banks of the river into the same narrative and sheds light on constructions of labor, economy, and race on the eve of the Civil War.

We do not have many definitions of Christianity from late antiquity, but among the few extant is the brief statement of Gregory of Nyssa (335-395 CE) that it is "mimesis of the divine nature." The sentence is both a historical gem and theologically puzzling. Gregory was the first Christian to make the infinity of God central to his theological program, but how could he intend for humans to imitate the infinite? If the aim of the Christian life is "never to stop growing towards what is better and never to place any limit on perfection," how could mimesis function within this endless pursuit?

In Imitations of Infinity, Michael A. Motia situates Gregory among Platonist philosophers, rhetorical teachers, and early Christian leaders to demonstrate how much of late ancient life was governed by notions of imitation. Questions both intimate and immense, of education, childcare, or cosmology, all found form in a relationship of archetype and image. It is no wonder that these debates demanded the attention of people at every level of the Roman Empire, including the Christians looking to form new social habits and norms. Whatever else the late ancient transformation of the empire affected, it changed the names, spaces, and characters that filled the imagination and common sense of its citizens, and it changed how they thought of their imitations.

Like religion, imitation was a way to organize the world and a way to reach toward new possibilities, Motia argues, and two earlier conceptions of mimesis—one centering on ontological participation, the other on aesthetic representation—merged in late antiquity. As philosophers and religious leaders pondered how linking oneself to reality depended on practices of representation, their theoretical debates accompanied practical concerns about what kinds of objects would best guide practitioners toward the divine. Motia places Gregory within a broader landscape of figures who retheorized the role of mimesis in search of perfection. No longer was imitation a marker of inauthenticity or immaturity. Mimesis became a way of life.

What was considered a good, normal, or healthy voice in the nineteenth century?

In 1854, singing master Manuel Garcia became the first person to see the vocal cords at work in a human throat. Less than a decade later, surgeon Paul Broca identified what he called a speech center in the brain. The almost simultaneous invention of the laryngoscope and the discovery of Broca’s area present important turning points for how medical, musical, and other experts understood how the human voice works.

These developments did not occur in a vacuum, however. In Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting, Josephine Hoegaerts describes the ambitious attempts, throughout the nineteenth century, to observe, understand, and manage human voices, as well as the host of more traditional, domestic, and stereotypical beliefs about the voice that continued to exist alongside these new insights. She peers into the stammering therapist’s office, over the singing teacher’s shoulder, and occasionally into the laryngoscope to see how something so simple—the sound Europeans produced when they opened their mouths—changed over the course of the nineteenth century.

Combining insights from medical and musical histories with methods from the fields of sound studies and the history of experience, Hoegaerts traces how people imagined human voices in the nineteenth century and how they used them. Rather than focusing on the great singers and orators of the age, the book looks at the mundane daily practices of singers, speakers, and stammerers and the people who trained and studied them. What did it take, according to all these increasingly specialized professionals, to have a normal voice in nineteenth-century Europe?

Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward critically reflects on the past fifteen years of international efforts aimed at improving health, alleviating poverty, diminishing gender inequality, and promoting human rights. The volume includes essays by leading scholars and practitioners that are centered on the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and its resulting Programme of Action. ICPD, an agreement among 179 governments, UN agencies, and NGOs, was intended to shape population and development policy—reinterpreted and redefined as "reproductive health." More than a decade after the enthusiasm that accompanied ICPD, there is growing concern about its effectiveness in the context of global health and development. Reproductive Health and Human Rights addresses that concern.

The book grapples with fundamental questions about the relationships among population, fertility decline, reproductive health, human rights, poverty alleviation, and development and assesses the various arguments—demographic, public health, human rights-based, and economic—for and against ICPD today.

A number of the chapters address institutional challenges to ICPD and consider how the changing political, religious, academic, and disciplinary contexts matter. Other chapters engage operational and conceptual issues and whether ICPD has been able to move the reproductive health agenda forward on topics such as maternal mortality, abortion, HIV/AIDS, adolescents, reproductive technologies, and demography. Finally, several chapters examine how ICPD has been sidelined by emerging health and development agendas and what could be done in response. Unlike any book yet published, Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward examines the state of the arguments for reproductive health and rights from a multidisciplinary perspective that provides policymakers, scholars, and activists with a better understanding of how reproductive health and rights have developed, their place in the global policy agenda, and how they might evolve most effectively in the future.

Over the course of the twelfth century, the county of Champagne grew into one of the wealthiest and most important of French principalities, home to a large and established aristocracy, the site of international trade fairs, and a center for artistic, literary, and intellectual production. It had not always been this way, notes Theodore Evergates, who charts the ascent of Champagne under the rule of Count Henry the Liberal.

Tutored in the liberal arts and mentored in the practice of lordship from an early age, Henry commanded the barons and knights of Champagne on the Second Crusade at twenty and succeeded as count of Champagne at twenty-five. Over the next three decades Henry immersed himself in the details of governance, most often in his newly built capital in Troyes, where he resolved disputes, confirmed nonlitigious transactions, and monitored the disposition of his fiefs. He was a powerful presence beyond the county as well, serving in King Louis VII's military ventures and on diplomatic missions to the papacy and the monarchs of England and Germany.

Evergates presents a chronicle of the transformation of the lands east of Paris as well as a biography of one of the most engaging princes of twelfth-century France. Count Henry was celebrated for balancing the arts of governance with learning and for his generosity and inquisitive mind, but his enduring achievement, Evergates makes clear, was to transform the county of Champagne into a dynamic principality within the emerging French state.

The Penn School of Social Policy and Practice enjoys a reputation as Penn's social justice school, for its faculty actively strives to translate the highest ideals into workable programs that better people's lives. In this election year, as Americans debate issues like immigration, crime, mass incarceration, policing, and welfare reform, and express concerns over increasing inequality, tax policy, and divisions by race, sex, and class, "SP2," as the school is colloquially known, offers its expertise in addressing the pressing matters of our day. The practical solutions on offer in this volume showcase the judgment and commitment of the school's scholars and practitioners, working to change politics from blood sport to common undertakings.

Contributors: Cindy W. Christian, Cynthia A. Connolly, Dennis Culhane, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Malitta Engstrom, Kara Finck, Nancy Franke, Antonio Garcia, Toorjo Ghose, Johanna Greeson, Chao Guo, David Hemenway, Amy Hillier, Roberta Iversen, Alexandra Schepens, Phyllis Solomon, Susan B. Sorenson, Mark Stern, Allison Thompson, Debra Schilling Wolfe.

Like the United States, Mexico is a country of profound cultural differences. In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), these differences became the subject of intense government attention as the Republic of Mexico developed ambitious social and educational policies designed to integrate its multitude of ethnic cultures into a national community of democratic citizens. To the north, Americans were beginning to confront their own legacy of racial injustice, embarking on the path that, three decades later, led to the destruction of Jim Crow. Backroads Pragmatists is the first book to show the transnational cross-fertilization between these two movements.

In molding Mexico's ambitious social experiment, postrevolutionary reformers adopted pragmatism from John Dewey and cultural relativism from Franz Boas, which, in turn, profoundly shaped some of the critical intellectual figures in the Mexican American civil rights movement. The Americans Ruben Flores follows studied Mexico's integration theories and applied them to America's own problem, holding Mexico up as a model of cultural fusion. These American reformers made the American West their laboratory in endeavors that included educator George I. Sanchez's attempts to transform New Mexico's government agencies, the rural education campaigns that psychologist Loyd Tireman adapted from the Mexican ministry of education, and anthropologist Ralph L. Beals's use of applied Mexican anthropology in the U.S. federal courts to transform segregation policy in southern California.

Through deep archival research and ambitious synthesis, Backroads Pragmatists illuminates how nation-building in postrevolutionary Mexico unmistakably influenced the civil rights movement and democratic politics in the United States.

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.

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.

Based on three hundred civil and criminal cases over four centuries, Elizabeth W. Mellyn reconstructs the myriad ways families, communities, and civic and medical authorities met in the dynamic arena of Tuscan law courts to forge pragmatic solutions to the problems that madness brought to their households and streets. In some of these cases, solutions were protective and palliative; in others, they were predatory or abusive. The goals of families were sometimes at odds with those of the courts, but for the most part families and judges worked together to order households and communities in ways that served public and private interests.

For most of the period Mellyn examines, Tuscan communities had no institutions devoted solely to the treatment and protection of the mentally disturbed; responsibility for their long-term care fell to the family. By the end of the seventeenth century, Tuscans, like other Europeans, had come to explain madness in medical terms and the mentally disordered were beginning to move from households to hospitals. In Mad Tuscans and Their Families, Mellyn argues against the commonly held belief that these changes chart the rise of mechanisms of social control by emerging absolutist states. Rather, the story of mental illness is one of false starts, expedients, compromise, and consensus created by a wide range of historical actors.

Little remains of the rich visual culture of late medieval English piety. The century and a half leading up to the Reformation had seen an unparalleled growth of devotional arts, as chapels, parish churches, and cathedrals came to be filled with images in stone, wood, alabaster, glass, embroidery, and paint of newly personalized saints, angels, and the Holy Family. But much of this fell victim to the Royal Injunctions of September 1538, when parish officials were ordered to remove images from their churches.

In this highly insightful book Sarah Stanbury explores the lost traffic in images in late medieval England and its impact on contemporary authors and artists. For Chaucer, Nicholas Love, and Margery Kempe, the image debate provides an urgent language for exploring the demands of a material devotional culture—though these writers by no means agree on the ethics of those demands. The chronicler Henry Knighton invoked a statue of St. Katherine to illustrate a lurid story about image-breaking Lollards. Later John Capgrave wrote a long Katherine legend that comments, through the drama of a saint in action, on the powers and uses of religious images. As Stanbury contends, England in the late Middle Ages was keenly attuned to and troubled by its "culture of the spectacle," whether this spectacle took the form of a newly made queen in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale or of the animate Christ in Norwich Cathedral's Despenser Retable. In picturing images and icons, these texts were responding to reformist controversies as well as to the social and economic demands of things themselves, the provocative objects that made up the fabric of ritual life.

Since the financial meltdown of 2008, political protests have spread around the world like chain lightning, from the "Occupy" movements of the United States, Great Britain, and Spain to more destabilizing forms of unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Russia, Thailand, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Ukraine. In Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest, commentator and political scientist Ivan Krastev proposes a provocative interpretation of these popular uprisings—one with ominous implications for the future of democratic politics.

Challenging theories that trace the protests to the rise of a global middle class, Krastev proposes that the insurrections express a pervasive distrust of democratic institutions. Protesters on the streets of Moscow, Sofia, Istanbul, and São Paulo are openly suspicious of both the market and the state. They reject established political parties, question the motives of the mainstream media, refuse to recognize the legitimacy of any specific leadership, and reject all formal organizations. They have made clear what they don't want—the status quo—but they have no positive vision of an alternative future.

Welcome to the worldwide libertarian revolution, in which democracy is endlessly disrupted to no end beyond the disruption itself.

In San Francisco, the St. James Infirmary (SJI) and the California Prostitutes Education Project (CAL-PEP) provide free, nonjudgmental medical care, counseling, and other health and social services by and for sex workers—a radical political commitment at odds with government policies that criminalize prostitution. To maintain and expand these much-needed services and to qualify for funding from state, federal, and local authorities, such organizations must comply with federal and state regulations for nonprofits. In Sex Work Politics, Samantha Majic investigates the way nonprofit organizations negotiate their governmental obligations while maintaining their commitment to outreach and advocacy for sex workers' rights as well as broader sociopolitical change.

Drawing on multimethod qualitative research, Majic outlines the strategies that CAL-PEP and SJI employ to balance the conflicting demands of service and advocacy, which include treating sex work as labor with legitimate occupational health and safety concerns, empowering their clients with civic skills to advance their political commitments outside the nonprofit organization, and conducting and publishing research and analysis to inform the public and policymakers of their constituents' needs. Challenging the assumption that activists must "sell out" and abandon radical politics to manage formal organizations, Majic comes to the surprising conclusion that it is indeed possible to maintain effective advocacy and key social movement values, beliefs, and practices, even while partnering with government agencies. Sex Work Politics significantly contributes to studies of transformational politics with its nuanced portrait of nonprofits as centers capable of sustaining political and social change.

An ethnographic study of the everyday lives of religious minorities near Turkey’s border with Syria

How do people coexist in a world shaped by longstanding differences, political instability, and recurrent displacement? In Under the Same Sky, Seçil Daǧtaș addresses this question by exploring the everyday politics of religious difference among minority communities in Turkey’s southern borderlands.

In a region often portrayed through the lens of conflict and division, this ethnography brings to life the subtle, often overlooked negotiations occurring in social spaces such as bustling city bazaars, shared worship sites, interfaith unions, home gatherings, and a multireligious choir. Set against the backdrop of major political upheavals in Turkey and Syria before the 2023 earthquakes devastated the region, the book demonstrates how Arab ‘Alawis, Christians, and Jews, alongside their Sunni Muslim neighbors, use familiar social idioms—kinship, hospitality, love, and companionship—to reproduce religious differences.

Daǧtaș argues that religious difference is more than an identity marker for these communities, as it is often treated in studies focused on statecraft or political movements. It is a dynamic aspect of social relations which is constantly redefined by race, class, citizenship, and gender, and unsettled by overlapping practices and multireligious belonging. Under the Same Sky focuses on religious difference as lived and reworked in daily encounters—within the larger context of a majoritarian Turkish Sunni state—inviting readers to reconsider secularism, religious plurality, and the nature of political life.

Few issues in the relations between China and the West invoke as much passion as human rights. At stake, however, are much more than moral concerns and hurt national feelings. To Washington, the undemocratic nature of the Chinese government makes it ultimately suspect on all issues. To Beijing, the human rights pressure exerted by the West on China seems designed to compromise its legitimacy. As China's economic power grows and its influence on the politics of developing countries continues, an understanding of the place of human rights in China's foreign relations is crucial to the implementation of an effective international human rights agenda.

In Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Relations, Ming Wan examines China's relations with the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and the United Nations human rights institutions.

Wan shows that, after a decade of persistent external pressure to reform its practices, China still plays human rights diplomacy as traditional power politics and deflects pressure by mobilizing its propaganda machine to neutralize Western criticism, by making compromises that do not threaten core interests, and by offering commercial incentives to important nations to help prevent a unified Western front. Furthermore, at the UN, China has largely succeeded in rallying developing nation members to defeat Western efforts at censure.

In turn, it is apparent to Wan that, while the idea of human rights matters in Western policy, it has seldom prevailed over economic considerations or concerns about national security. Western governments have not committed as many policy resources to pressuring Beijing on human rights as to other issues, and the differing degrees of commitment to human rights-related foreign policy explain why Japan, Western Europe, and the United States, in that order, have gradually retreated from confronting China on human rights issues.

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

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

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

"We believe by blood only," said a Cherokee resident of Oklahoma, speaking to reporters in 2007 after voting in favor of the Cherokee Nation constitutional amendment limiting its membership. In an election that made headlines around the world, a majority of Cherokee voters chose to eject from their tribe the descendants of the African American freedmen Cherokee Indians had once enslaved. Because of the unique sovereign status of Indian nations in the United States, legal membership in an Indian nation can have real economic benefits. In addition to money, the issues brought forth in this election have racial and cultural roots going back before the Civil War.

Race and the Cherokee Nation examines how leaders of the Cherokee Nation fostered a racial ideology through the regulation of interracial marriage. By defining and policing interracial sex, nineteenth-century Cherokee lawmakers preserved political sovereignty, delineated Cherokee identity, and established a social hierarchy. Moreover, Cherokee conceptions of race and what constituted interracial sex differed from those of blacks and whites. Moving beyond the usual black/white dichotomy, historian Fay A. Yarbrough places American Indian voices firmly at the center of the story, as well as contrasting African American conceptions and perspectives on interracial sex with those of Cherokee Indians.

For American Indians, nineteenth-century relationships produced offspring that pushed racial and citizenship boundaries. Those boundaries continue to have an impact on the way individuals identify themselves and what legal rights they can claim today.

In a distant corner of the late antique world, along the Atlantic river valleys of western Iberia, local elite populations lived through the ebb and flow of empire and kingdoms as historical agents with their own social strategies. Contrary to earlier historiographical accounts, these aristocrats were not oppressed by a centralized Roman empire or its successor kingdoms; nor was there an inherent conflict between central states and local elites. Instead, Damián Fernández argues, there was an interdependency of state and local aristocracies. The upper classes embraced state projects to assert their ascendancy within their communities. By doing so, they enacted statehood at the local level, bringing state presence to the remotest corners of Iberia, both under Roman rule and during the later Suevic and Visigothic kingdoms.

Aristocrats and Statehood in Western Iberia, 300-600 C.E. combines archaeological and literary sources to reconstruct the history of late antique Iberian aristocracies, facilitating the study of a social class that has proved elusive when approached through the lens of a single type of evidence. This is the first study of Iberian elites that covers both the late Roman and the post-Roman periods in similar depth, and the chronological approach allows for a new perspective on social agency of late antique nobility. While the end of the Roman empire changed the political, economic, and social strategies of local aristocrats, the book also demonstrates a considerable degree of continuity that lasted until the late sixth century.

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.

Among the dramatists who wrote for the professional playhouses of early modern London was a small group of writers who were neither members of the commercial theater industry writing to make a living nor aristocratic amateurs dipping their toes in theatrical waters for social or political prestige. Instead, they were largely working- and middle-class amateurs who had learned most of what they knew about drama from being members of the audience.

Using a range of familiar and lesser-known print and manuscript plays, as well as literary accounts and documentary evidence, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater shows how these playgoers wrote and revised to address what they assumed to be the needs of actors, readers, and the Master of the Revels; how they understood playhouse materials and practices; and how they crafted poetry for theatrical effects. The book also situates them in the context of the period's concepts of, and attitudes toward, playgoers' participation in the activity of playmaking.

Plays by playgoers such as the rogue East India Company clerk Walter Mountfort or the highwayman John Clavell invite us into the creative imaginations of spectators, revealing what certain audience members wanted to see and how they thought actors might stage it. By reading Shakespeare's theater through these playgoers' works, Matteo Pangallo contributes a new category of evidence to our understanding of the relationships between the early modern stage, its plays, and its audiences. More broadly, he shows how the rise of England's first commercialized culture industry also gave rise to the first generation of participatory consumers and their attempts to engage with mainstream culture by writing early modern "fan fiction."

Located at the junction of North America and the Caribbean, the vast territory of colonial Louisiana provides a paradigmatic case study for an Atlantic studies approach. One of the largest North American colonies and one of the last to be founded, Louisiana was governed by a succession of sovereignties, with parts ruled at various times by France, Spain, Britain, and finally the United States. But just as these shifting imperial connections shaped the territory's culture, Louisiana's peculiar geography and history also yielded a distinctive colonization pattern that reflected a synthesis of continent and island societies.

Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World offers an exceptional collaboration among American, Canadian, and European historians who explore colonial and antebellum Louisiana's relations with the rest of the Atlantic world. Studying the legacy of each period of Louisiana history over the longue durée, the essays create a larger picture of the ways early settlements influenced Louisiana society and how the changes in sovereignty and other circulations gave rise to a multiethnic society. Contributors examine the workings of empire through the examples of slave laws, administrative careers or on-the-ground political negotiations, cultural exchanges among landowners, slave holders, and slaves, and the construction of race through sexuality, marriage, and household formation. As a whole, the volume makes the compelling argument that one cannot write Louisiana history without adopting an Atlantic perspective, or Atlantic history without referring to Louisiana.

Contributors: Guillaume Aubert, Emily Clark, Alexandre Dubé, Sylvia R. Frey, Sylvia L. Hilton, Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, Cécile Vidal, Sophie White, Mary Williams.

In 1213, Pope Innocent III issued his letter Vineam Domini, thundering against the enemies of Christendom—the "beasts of many kinds that are attempting to destroy the vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth"—and announcing a General Council of the Latin Church as redress. The Fourth Lateran Council, which convened in 1215, was unprecedented in its scope and impact, and it called for the Fifth Crusade as what its participants hoped would be the final defense of Christendom. For the first time, a collection of extensively annotated and translated documents illustrates the transformation of the crusade movement.

Crusade and Christendom explores the way in which the crusade was used to define and extend the intellectual, religious, and political boundaries of Latin Christendom. It also illustrates how the very concept of the crusade was shaped by the urge to define and reform communities of practice and belief within Latin Christendom and by Latin Christendom's relationship with other communities, including dissenting political powers and heretical groups, the Moors in Spain, the Mongols, and eastern Christians. The relationship of the crusade to reform and missionary movements is also explored, as is its impact on individual lives and devotion. The selection of documents and bibliography incorporates and brings to life recent developments in crusade scholarship concerning military logistics and travel in the medieval period, popular and elite participation, the role of women, liturgy and preaching, and the impact of the crusade on western society and its relationship with other cultures and religions.

Intended for the undergraduate yet also invaluable for teachers and scholars, this book illustrates how the crusades became crucial for defining and promoting the very concept and boundaries of Latin Christendom. It provides translations of and commentaries on key original sources and up-to-date bibliographic materials.

In the midst of great expansion and economic growth in the eighteenth century, Ireland was deeply divided along racial, religious, and economic lines. More than two thirds of the population were Catholic, but nearly all the landowners were Anglican. The minority also comprised practically the entire body of lawyers, officers in the army and navy, and holders of political positions. At the same time, a growing middle class of merchants and manufacturers sought to reform Parliament to gain a real share in the political power monopolized by the aristocracy and landed gentry.

Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution remains one of the few in-depth studies of the effects of the Revolution on Ireland. Focusing on nine important years of Irish history, 1775 to 1783, from the outbreak of war in colonial America to the year following its conclusion, the book details the social and political conditions of a period crucial to the development of Irish nationalism. Drawing extensively on the Dublin press of the time, Maurice R. O'Connell chronicles such important developments as the economic depression in Britain and the Irish movement for free trade, the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, the rise of the Volunteers, the formation of the Patriot group in the Irish Parliament, and the Revolution of 1782.

Since the 1970s, understanding of the effects of trauma, including flashbacks and withdrawal, has become widespread in the United States. As a result Americans can now claim that the phrase posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is familiar even if the American Psychiatric Association's criteria for diagnosis are not. As embedded as these ideas now are in the American mindset, however, they are more widely applicable, this volume attempts to show, than is generally recognized. The essays in Culture and PTSD trace how trauma and its effects vary across historical and cultural contexts.

Culture and PTSD examines the applicability of PTSD to other cultural contexts and details local responses to trauma and the extent they vary from PTSD as defined in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Investigating responses in Peru, Indonesia, Haiti, and Native American communities as well as among combat veterans, domestic abuse victims, and adolescents, contributors attempt to address whether PTSD symptoms are present and, if so, whether they are a salient part of local responses to trauma. Moreover, the authors explore other important aspects of the local presentation and experience of trauma-related disorder, whether the Western concept of PTSD is known to lay members of society, and how the introduction of PTSD shapes local understandings and the course of trauma-related disorders.

By attempting to determine whether treatments developed for those suffering PTSD in American and European contexts are effective in global settings of violence or disaster, Culture and PTSD questions the efficacy of international responses that focus on trauma.

Contributors: Carmela Alcántara, Tom Ball, James K. Boehnlein, Naomi Breslau, Whitney Duncan, Byron J. Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Jesse H. Grayman, Bridget M. Haas, Devon E. Hinton, Erica James, Janis H. Jenkins, Hanna Kienzler, Brandon Kohrt, Roberto Lewis-Fernández, Richard J. McNally, Theresa D. O'Nell, Duncan Pedersen, Nawaraj Upadhaya, Carol M. Worthman, Allan Young.

In a groundbreaking study of the relationship between chemistry and literary history, Helen Thompson explores the ways in which chemical conceptions of matter shaped eighteenth-century British culture. Although the scientific revolution championed experimental, sense-based knowledge, chemists claimed that perceptible bodies were made of invisible particles or "corpuscles." Neither modern elements nor classical atoms, corpuscles were reactive, divisible units of matter. Imperceptible but real, the corpuscle transformed empirical knowledge in early modern science and the novel.

Thompson offers new analyses of the chemistry, alchemy, color theory, physiology, environmental science, and medicine pioneered by Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hales, John Mitchell, John Arbuthnot, and Thomas Sydenham to argue that they shaped cultural conceptions of racial, class, sex, and species identity. Juxtaposing science with readings of novels by Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, William Rufus Chetwood, and Penelope Aubin, she shows how, at the level of form as well as character, novels represent perceptual knowledge that refers not to innate essence but to dynamic and unstable relations.

The realist narrative mode that experimental science bequeaths to literary history, Fictional Matter argues, does not transparently mirror perceptible objects. Instead, novels represent the forms and relations through which imperceptible particles stimulate sensory experience. In this lucid, revisionary analysis of corpuscular chemistry, Thompson advances a new account of the influence of experimental science and empirical knowledge on the emergent realist novel.

In People Must Live by Work, Steven Attewell presents the history of an idea—direct job creation—that transformed the role of government in ameliorating unemployment by hiring the unemployed en masse to prevent widespread destitution in economic crises. For ten years, between 1933 and 1943, direct job creation was put into practice, employing more than eight million Americans and making the federal government the largest single employer in the country. Yet in 2008, when the most dramatic economic crisis since the Depression occurred, the idea of direct job creation was nowhere to be found on the list of policies deemed feasible or advisable for government at any level.

People Must Live by Work traces the rise and fall of direct job creation policy—how it was put into practice, how it came within a hairbreadth of becoming a permanent feature of American economic and social administration, and why it has been largely forgotten or discounted today. Contrary to more conventional arguments, Attewell reveals that the New Deal ended the Great Depression before the United States entered World War II and its jobs programs continued to influence policy debates over the Employment Act of 1946. He examines the deliberations surrounding the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act that was signed into law in 1978 and demonstrates the ways in which direct job creation played a significant and polarizing role in dividing the economic establishment and the Democratic party in the 1970s. People Must Live by Work not only chronicles the ambition, constraints, and achievements of direct job creation policy in the past but also proposes a framework for understanding its enduring significance and promise for today.

John Locke described the mind as a cabinet; Robert Hooke called it a repository; Joseph Addison imagined a drawer of medals. Each of these philosophers was an avid collector and curator of books, coins, and cultural artifacts. It is therefore no coincidence that when they wrote about the mental work of reason and imagination, they modeled their powers of intellect in terms of collecting, cataloging, and classification.

The Mind Is a Collection approaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century metaphors of the mind from a material point of view. Each of the book's six chapters is organized as a series of linked exhibits that speak to a single aspect of Enlightenment philosophies of mind. From his first chapter, on metaphor, to the last one, on dispossession, Sean Silver looks at ways that abstract theories referred to cognitive ecologies—systems crafted to enable certain kinds of thinking, such as libraries, workshops, notebooks, collections, and gardens. In doing so, he demonstrates the crossings-over of material into ideal, ideal into material, and the ways in which an idea might repeatedly turn up in an object, or a range of objects might repeatedly stand for an idea. A brief conclusion examines the afterlife of the metaphor of mind as collection, as it turns up in present-day cognitive studies. Modern cognitive theory has been applied to the microcomputer, and while the object is new, the habit is as old as the Enlightenment.

By examining lived environments and embodied habits from 1660 to 1800, Silver demonstrates that the philosophical dualism that separated mind from body and idea from thing was inextricably established through active engagement with crafted ecologies.

How middle-class families in Nepal pursue “well-being” in a rapidly changing social landscape

Modern Dharma asks how middle-class Nepalis pursue an ethical, good life in a rapidly evolving society. In the aftermath of a decade-long civil war that raged between 1996 and 2006, social change accelerated in Nepal as the shift to a market economy and the spread of education and media built the foundation for a new middle class to form. As it did, tension built between the expression of individual will and the expectation to submit to traditional social hierarchies. Today, people in Nepal are confronted by the need to restructure moral codes and to care for their families, while at the same time, they face intense pressure to keep up with the cost of education and to find work in an increasingly competitive labor market. Amidst these changes, people often describe their choices as falling under the broader goal of pursuing well-being.

Modern Dharma investigates how and why—amidst often conflicting priorities—people make choices in pursuit of well-being. Anthropologist Paola Tiné investigates why many large families separate into smaller nuclei, while others maintain intra-generational homes. She asks why and how young people seek the support of their friends, while often hiding private desires from their parents. And she investigates the ways that marriage choices and friendship relationships help people navigate the ongoing tangible difficulties engendered by socioeconomic change. By delving into the intricacies of domestic lives among a growing middle class, Modern Dharma works to center the household and kinship relationships as the places where broader global transitions are reflected, resisted, and negotiated. Providing a new perspective on moral personhood in South Asia, this book ultimately sheds new light on the centrality of kinship relationships in initiating and shaping social change.

When visitors travel to Pennsylvania Dutch Country, they are encouraged to consume the local culture by way of "regional specialties" such as cream-filled whoopie pies and deep-fried fritters of every variety. Yet many of the dishes and confections visitors have come to expect from the region did not emerge from Pennsylvania Dutch culture but from expectations fabricated by local-color novels or the tourist industry. At the same time, other less celebrated (and rather more delicious) dishes, such as sauerkraut and stuffed pork stomach, have been enjoyed in Pennsylvania Dutch homes across various localities and economic strata for decades.

Celebrated food historian and cookbook writer William Woys Weaver delves deeply into the history of Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine to sort fact from fiction in the foodlore of this culture. Through interviews with contemporary Pennsylvania Dutch cooks and extensive research into cookbooks and archives, As American as Shoofly Pie offers a comprehensive and counterintuitive cultural history of Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine, its roots and regional characteristics, its communities and class divisions, and, above all, its evolution into a uniquely American style of cookery. Weaver traces the origins of Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine as far back as the first German settlements in America and follows them forward as New Dutch Cuisine continues to evolve and respond to contemporary food concerns. His detailed and affectionate chapters present a rich and diverse portrait of a living culinary practice—widely varied among different religious sects and localized communities, rich and poor, rural and urban—that complicates common notions of authenticity.

Because there's no better way to understand food culture than to practice it, As American as Shoofly Pie's cultural history is accompanied by dozens of recipes, drawn from exacting research, kitchen-tested, and adapted to modern cooking conventions. From soup to Schnitz, these dishes lay the table with a multitude of regional tastes and stories.

Hockt eich hie mit uns, un esst eich satt—Sit down with us and eat yourselves full!

In Precarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, multiple circumstances of precarity give rise to a sense of hopelessness, shared visions of a futureless tomorrow, widespread home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and a growth of incivilities. On the other, daydreaming and hope, as well as civility and solidarity in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements, continue to persist. Young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in purposelessness and forced to endure endless waiting, and they are also aware that they are perceived as unproductive and a burden on their society. Despite the aspirations and inspiration they possess, they find themselves forced into petrifying social and spatial immobility. Uncertainty in the present, a seemingly futureless tomorrow: these are the circumstances that Khosravi explores in Precarious Lives.

Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran. Precarious Lives is a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.

While the traffic in human organs stirs outrage and condemnation, donations of such material are perceived as highly ethical. In reality, the line between illicit trafficking and admirable donation is not so sharply drawn. Those entangled in the legal, social, and commercial dimensions of transplanting organs must reconcile motives, bureaucracy, and medical desperation. Matching Organs with Donors: Legality and Kinship in Transplants examines the tensions between law and practice in the world of organ transplants—and the inventive routes patients may take around the law while going through legal processes.

In this sensitive ethnography, Marie-Andrée Jacob reveals the methods and mindsets of doctors, administrators, gray-sector workers, patients, donors, and sellers in Israel's living kidney transplant bureaus. Matching Organs with Donors describes how suitable matches are identified between donor and recipient using terms borrowed from definitions of kinship. Jacob presents a subtle portrait of the shifting relationships between organ donors/sellers, patients, their brokers, and hospital officials who often accept questionably obtained organs.

Jacob's incisive look at the cultural landscapes of transplantation in Israel has wider implications. Matching Organs with Donors deepens our understanding of the law and management of informed consent, decision-making among hospital professionals, and the shadowy borders between altruism and commerce.

In A Right to Lie?, legal scholar Catherine J. Ross addresses the urgent issue of whether the nation's highest officers, including the president, have a right to lie under the Speech Clause, no matter what damage their falsehoods cause. Does freedom of expression protect even factual falsehoods? If so, are lies by candidates and public officials protected? And is there a constitutional path, without violating the First Amendment, to stop a president whose persistent lies endanger our lives and our democracy?

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the general answer to each question is "yes." Drawing from dramatic court cases about defamers, proponents of birtherism, braggarts, and office holders, Ross reveals the almost insurmountable constitutional and practical obstacles to legal efforts to rein in public deception. She explains the rules that govern the treatment of lies, while also demonstrating the incalculable damage presidential mendacity may lead to, as revealed in President Trump's lies about the COVID-19 pandemic and the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Falsehoods have been at issue in every presidential impeachment proceeding from Nixon to Trump. But, until now, no one has analyzed why public lies might be impeachable offenses, and whether the First Amendment would provide a defense. Noting that speech by public employees does not receive the same First Amendment protection as the speech of ordinary citizens, Ross proposes the constitutionally viable solution of treating presidents as public employees who work for the people. Charged with oversight of the Executive, Congress may—and should—put future presidents on notice that material lies to the public on substantial matters will be deemed a "high crime and misdemeanor" subject to censure and even impeachment. A Right to Lie? explains how this approach could work if the political will were in place.

In the 1840s, Philadelphia was poised to join the ranks of the world's great cities, as its population grew, its manufacturing prospered, and its railroads reached outward to the West. Yet epidemics of riot, disease, and labor conflict led some to wonder whether growth would lead to disintegration. As slavery and territorial conquest forced Americans to ponder a similar looming disunion at the national level, Philadelphians searched for ways to hold their city together across internal social and sectional divisions—a project of consolidation that reshaped their city into the boundaries we know today.

A bold new interpretation of a crucial period in Philadelphia's history, In Union There Is Strength examines the social and spatial reconstruction of an American city in the decades on either side of the American Civil War. Andrew Heath follows Philadelphia's fortunes over the course of forty years as industrialization, immigration, and natural population growth turned a Jacksonian-era port with a population of two hundred thousand into a Gilded Age metropolis containing nearly a million people.

Heath focuses on the utopian socialists, civic boosters, and municipal reformers who argued that the path to urban greatness lay in the harmonious consolidation of jarring interests rather than in the atomistic individualism we have often associated with the nineteenth-century metropolis. Their rival visions drew them into debates about the reach of local government, the design of urban space, the character of civic life, the power of corporations, and the relations between labor and capital—and ultimately became entangled with the question of national union itself. In tracing these links between city-making and nation-making in the mid-nineteenth century, In Union There Is Strength shows how its titular rallying cry inspired creative, contradictory, and fiercely contested ideas about how to design, build, and live in a metropolis.

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

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

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

In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a "great man" who urged him to awaken from his slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking his old faith. Abner tells the story in fantastic detail in the opening to his Hebrew-language but anti-Jewish polemical treatise, Teacher of Righteousness.

In the religiously plural context of the medieval Western Mediterranean, religious conversion played an important role as a marker of social boundaries and individual identity. The writers of medieval religious polemics such as Teacher of Righteousness often began by giving a brief, first-person account of the rejection of their old faith and their embrace of the new. In such accounts, Ryan Szpiech argues, the narrative form plays an important role in dramatizing the transition from infidelity to faith.

Szpiech draws on a wide body of sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the place of narrative in the representation of conversion. Making a firm distinction between stories told about conversion and the experience of religious change, his book is not a history of conversion itself but a comparative study of how and why it was presented in narrative form within the context of religious disputation. He argues that between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, conversion narratives were needed to represent communal notions of history and authority in allegorical, dramatic terms. After considering the late antique paradigms on which medieval Christian conversion narratives were based, Szpiech juxtaposes Christian stories with contemporary accounts of conversion to Islam and Judaism. He emphasizes that polemical conflict between Abrahamic religions in the medieval Mediterranean centered on competing visions of history and salvation. By seeing conversion not as an individual experience but as a public narrative, Conversion and Narrative provides a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious disputes.

The Maoist insurgency in Nepal lasted from 1996 to 2006, and at the pinnacle of their armed success the Maoists controlled much of the countryside. Maoists at the Hearth, which is based on ethnographic research that commenced more than a decade before the escalation of the civil war in 2001, explores the daily life in a hill village in central Nepal, during the "People's War." From the everyday routines before the arrival of the Maoists in the late 1990s through the insurgency and its aftermath, this book examines the changing social relationships among fellow villagers and parties to the conflict.

War is not an interruption that suspends social processes. Life in the village focused as usual on social challenges, interpersonal relationships, and essential duties such as managing agricultural work, running households, and organizing development projects. But as Judith Pettigrew shows, social life, cultural practices, and routine activities are reshaped in uncertain and dangerous circumstances. The book considers how these activities were conducted under dramatically transformed conditions and discusses the challenges (and, sometimes, opportunities) that the villagers confronted.

By considering local spatial arrangements and their adaptation, Pettigrew explores people's reactions when they lost control of the personal, public, and sacred spaces of the village. A central consideration of Maoists at the Hearth is an exploration of how local social tensions were realized and renegotiated as people supported (and sometimes betrayed) each other and of how villager-Maoist relationships (and to a lesser extent villager-army relationships), which drew on a range of culturally patterned preexisting relationships, were reforged, transformed, or renegotiated in the context of the conflict and its aftermath.

Inflation is an economic phenomenon that has profound implications for lawyers and jurists, because the great bulk of our laws and legal doctrines have been formulated on the assumption that the value of money remains relatively stable. Inasmuch as such an assumption is no longer tenable in much of the world, it threatens the operation of our most basic legal institutions.

In this book, Keith Rosenn shows how inflation affects legal documents like contracts—how it distorts credit transactions, suits for damages, and laws of taxation—and he tells how current economic practices can be adapted to reduce or eliminate the impact. He explores the possibility of using a comprehensive indexation scheme for coping with inflation. Although Rosenn recognizes the deficiencies of price indexes, he considers the practical and theoretical implications of indexation. His analysis is firmly grounded in a detailed examination of the experience of countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, and Italy in adapting their legal institutions to the fact of inflation.

From the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001 to the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2014, Pakistan's military cooperation was critical to the United States. Yet Pakistani politics remain a source of anxiety for American policymakers. Despite some progress toward democratic consolidation over the last ten years, Pakistan's military still asserts power over the country's elected government. Pakistan's western regions remain largely ungoverned and home to the last remnants of al-Qaeda's original leadership as well as multiple militant groups that have declared war on the Pakistani state. The country's economy is in shambles, and continuing tensions with India endanger efforts to bring a durable peace to a region haunted by the distant threat of nuclear war.

Pakistan's Enduring Challenges surveys the political and economic landscape of Pakistan in the wake of U.S. military withdrawal. Experts in the domestic and international affairs of the region consider the country's prospects from a variety of angles, including security issues and nuclear posture, relations with Afghanistan, India, and the United States, Pakistan's Islamist movements, and the CIA's use of drone warfare in Pakistan's tribal areas. This timely volume offers a concise, accessible, and expert guide to the currents that will shape the country's future.

Contributors: Christopher Clary, C. Christine Fair, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Karl Kaltenthaler, Feisal Khan, William J. Miller, Aparna Pande, Paul Staniland, Stephen Tankel, Tara Vassefi, Sarah J. Watson, Joshua T. White, Huma Yusef.

In the early modern period, England radically expanded its participation in an economy that itself was becoming increasingly global. Yet less than twenty years after the highly profitable English East India Company made its first voyage, England was suffering from an economic depression, blamed largely on the shortage of coin necessary to exploit those very same profitable routes. How could there be profit in the face of so much loss, and loss in the face of so much profit?

In Tragicomic Redemptions, Valerie Forman contends that three seemingly unrelated domains—the development of new economic theories and practices, especially those related to global trade; the discourses of Christian redemption; and the rise of tragicomedy as the stage's most popular genre—were together crucial to the formulation of a new and paradoxical way of thinking about loss and profit in relationship to one another.

Forman reads plays—including Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale, Fletcher's The Island Princess, Massinger's The Renegado, and Webster's The Devil's Law-Case—alongside a range of historical materials that provide a fuller picture of England's participation in a global economy: the writings of the country's earliest economic theorists, narrative accounts of merchants and captives in the Spice Islands and the Ottoman Empire, and documents that detail the development of the English East India Company, the Levant Company, and even the very idea of the joint-stock company. Unique in its dual focus on literary form and economic practices, Tragicomic Redemptions both shows how concepts fundamental to capitalism's existence, such as "free trade," and "investment," develop within a global context and reveals the exceptional place of dramatic form as a participant in the newly emerging, public discourse of economic theory.

Despite constitutional limitations, the points of contact between religion and politics have deeply affected all aspects of American political development since the founding of the United States. Within partisan politics, federal institutions, and movement activism, religion and politics have rarely been truly separate; rather, they are two forms of cultural expression that are continually coevolving and reconfiguring in the face of social change.

Faithful Republic explores the dynamics between religion and politics in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Rather than focusing on the traditional question of the separation between church and state, this volume touches on many other aspects of American political history, addressing divorce, civil rights, liberalism and conservatism, domestic policy, and economics. Together, the essays blend church history and lived religion to fashion an innovative kind of political history, demonstrating the pervasiveness of religion throughout American political life.

Contributors: Lila Corwin Berman, Edward J. Blum, Darren Dochuk, Lily Geismer, Alison Collis Greene, Matthew S. Hedstrom, David Mislin, Bethany Moreton, Andrew Preston, Bruce J. Schulman, Molly Worthen, Julian E. Zelizer.

For over seven hundred years, bodies of writing in vernacular languages served an indispensable role in the religious and intellectual culture of medieval Christian England, yet the character and extent of their importance have been insufficiently recognized. A longstanding identification of medieval western European Christianity with the Latin language and a lack of awareness about the sheer variety and quantity of vernacular religious writing from the English Middle Ages have hampered our understanding of the period, exercising a tenacious hold on much scholarship.

Bringing together work across a range of disciplines, including literary study, Christian theology, social history, and the history of institutions, Balaam's Ass attempts the first comprehensive overview of religious writing in early England's three most important vernacular languages, Old English, Insular French, and Middle English, between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. Nicholas Watson argues not only that these texts comprise the oldest continuous tradition of European vernacular writing, but that they are essential to our understanding of how Christianity shaped and informed the lives of individuals, communities, and polities in the Middle Ages.

This first of three volumes lays out the long post-Reformation history of the false claim that the medieval Catholic Church was hostile to the vernacular. It analyzes the complicated idea of the vernacular, a medieval innovation instantiated in a huge body of surviving vernacular religious texts. Finally, it focuses on the first, long generation of these writings, in Old English and early Middle English.

In 1866 Patrick Manson, a young Scottish doctor fresh from medical school, left London to launch his career in China as a port surgeon for the Imperial Chinese Customs Service. For the next two decades, he served in this outpost of British power in the Far East, and extended the frontiers of British medicine. In 1899, at the twilight of his career and as the British Empire approached its zenith, he founded the London School of Tropical Medicine. For these contributions Manson would later be called the "father of British tropical medicine."

In Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease Douglas M. Haynes uses Manson's career to explore the role of British imperialism in the making of Victorian medicine and science. He challenges the categories of "home" and "empire" that have long informed accounts of British medicine and science, revealing a vastly more dynamic, dialectical relationship between the imperial metropole and periphery than has previously been recognized. Manson's decision to launch his career in China was no accident; the empire provided a critical source of career opportunities for a chronically overcrowded profession in Britain. And Manson used the London media's interest in the empire to advance his scientific agenda, including the discovery of the transmission of malaria in 1898, which he portrayed as British science.

The empire not only created a demand for practitioners but also enhanced the presence of British medicine throughout the world. Haynes documents how the empire subsidized research science at the London School of Tropical Medicine and elsewhere in Britain in the early twentieth century. By illuminating the historical enmeshment of Victorian medicine and science in Britain's imperial project, Imperial Medicine identifies the present-day privileged distribution of specialist knowledge about disease with the lingering consequences of European imperialism.

The Spanish-American War marked the emergence of the United States as an imperial power. It was when the United States first landed troops overseas and established governments of occupation in the Philippines, Cuba, and other formerly Spanish colonies. But such actions to extend U.S. sovereignty abroad, argues Katharine Bjork, had a precedent in earlier relations with Native nations at home. In Prairie Imperialists, Bjork traces the arc of American expansion by showing how the Army's conquests of what its soldiers called "Indian Country" generated a repertoire of actions and understandings that structured encounters with the racial others of America's new island territories following the War of 1898.

Prairie Imperialists follows the colonial careers of three Army officers from the domestic frontier to overseas posts in Cuba and the Philippines. The men profiled—Hugh Lenox Scott, Robert Lee Bullard, and John J. Pershing—internalized ways of behaving in Indian Country that shaped their approach to later colonial appointments abroad. Scott's ethnographic knowledge and experience with Native Americans were valorized as an asset for colonial service; Bullard and Pershing, who had commanded African American troops, were regarded as particularly suited for roles in the pacification and administration of colonial peoples overseas. After returning to the mainland, these three men played prominent roles in the "Punitive Expedition" President Woodrow Wilson sent across the southern border in 1916, during which Mexico figured as the next iteration of "Indian Country."

With rich biographical detail and ambitious historical scope, Prairie Imperialists makes fundamental connections between American colonialism and the racial dimensions of domestic political and social life—during peacetime and while at war. Ultimately, Bjork contends, the concept of "Indian Country" has served as the guiding force of American imperial expansion and nation building for the past two and a half centuries and endures to this day.

Many Americans hold fast to the notion that gay men and women, more often than not, have been ostracized from disapproving families. Not in This Family challenges this myth and shows how kinship ties were an animating force in gay culture, politics, and consciousness throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

Historian Heather Murray gives voice to gays and their parents through an extensive use of introspective writings, particularly personal correspondence and diaries, as well as through published memoirs, fiction, poetry, song lyrics, movies, and visual and print media. Starting in the late 1940s and 1950s, Not in This Family covers the entire postwar period, including the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the establishment of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Ending her story with an examination of contemporary coming-out rituals, Murray shows how the personal that was once private became political and, finally, public.

In exploring the intimate, reciprocal relationship of gay children and their parents, Not in This Family also chronicles larger cultural shifts in privacy, discretion and public revelation, and the very purpose of family relations. Murray shows that private bedrooms and consumer culture, social movements and psychological fashions, all had a part to play in transforming the modern family.

The first martyr to the cause of American liberty was Major General Joseph Warren, a well-known political orator, physician, and president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts. Shot in the face at close range at Bunker Hill, Warren was at once transformed into a national hero, with his story appearing throughout the colonies in newspapers, songs, pamphlets, sermons, and even theater productions. His death, though shockingly violent, was not unlike tens of thousands of others, but his sacrifice came to mean something much more significant to the American public.

Sealed with Blood reveals how public memories and commemorations of Revolutionary War heroes, such as those for Warren, helped Americans form a common bond and create a new national identity. Drawing from extensive research on civic celebrations and commemorative literature in the half-century that followed the War for Independence, Sarah Purcell shows how people invoked memories of their participation in and sacrifices during the war when they wanted to shore up their political interests, make money, argue for racial equality, solidify their class status, or protect their personal reputations. Images were also used, especially those of martyred officers, as examples of glory and sacrifice for the sake of American political principles.

By the midnineteenth century, African Americans, women, and especially poor white veterans used memories of the Revolutionary War to articulate their own, more inclusive visions of the American nation and to try to enhance their social and political status. Black slaves made explicit the connection between military service and claims to freedom from bondage. Between 1775 and 1825, the very idea of the American nation itself was also democratized, as the role of "the people" in keeping the sacred memory of the Revolutionary War broadened.

In 1948, the Orioles, a Baltimore-based vocal group, recorded "It's Too Soon to Know." Combining the sound of Tin Pan Alley with gospel and blues sensibilities, the Orioles saw their first hit reach #13 on the pop charts, thus introducing the nation to vocal rhythm & blues and paving the way for the most successful groups of the 1950s.

In the first scholarly treatment of this influential musical genre, Stuart Goosman chronicles the Orioles' story and that of myriad other black vocal groups in the postwar period. A few, like the Orioles, Cardinals, and Swallows from Baltimore and the Clovers from Washington, D.C., established the popularity of vocal rhythm & blues nationally. Dozens of other well-known groups (and hundreds of unknown ones) across the country cut records and performed until about 1960. Record companies initially marketed this music as rhythm & blues; today, group harmony continues to resonate for some as "doo-wop."

Focusing in particular on Baltimore and Washington and drawing significantly from oral histories, Group Harmony details the emergence of vocal rhythm & blues groups from black urban neighborhoods. Group harmony was a source of empowerment for young singers, for it provided them with a means of expression and some aspect of control over their lives where there were limited alternatives. Through group harmony, young black males celebrated and musically confounded, when they could not overcome, complex issues of race, separatism, and assimilation during the postwar period.

Group harmony also became a significant resource for the popular music industry. Goosman interviews dozens of performers, deejays, and industry professionals to examine the entrepreneurial promise of midcentury popular music and chronicle the convergence of music, place, and business, including the business of records, radio, promotion, and song writing.

Featured in the book's account of the black urban roots of rhythm & blues are the recollections of singers from groups such as the Cardinals, Clovers, Dunbar Four, Four Bars of Rhythm, Five Blue Notes, Hi Fis, Plants, Swallows, and many others, including Jimmy McPhail, a well-known Washington vocalist; Deborah Chessler, the manager and songwriter for the original Orioles; Jesse Stone, the writer and arranger from Atlantic Records; Washington radio personality Jackson Lowe; and seminal black deejays Al ("Big Boy") Jefferson, Maurice ("Hot Rod") Hulbert, and Tex Gathings.

Across four centuries, Apache (Ndé) peoples in the North American West confronted enslavement and forced migration schemes intended to exploit, subjugate, or eliminate them. While many Indigenous groups in the Americas lived through similar histories, Apaches were especially affected owing to their mobility, resistance, and proximity to multiple imperial powers. Spanish, Comanche, Mexican, and American efforts scattered thousands of Apaches across the continent and into the Caribbean and deeply impacted Apache groups that managed to remain in the Southwest.

Based on archival research in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, as well Apache oral histories, The Apache Diaspora brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated. Paul Conrad charts Apaches' efforts to survive or return home from places as far-flung as Cuba and Pennsylvania, Mexico City and Montreal. As Conrad argues, diaspora was deeply influential not only to those displaced, but also to Apache groups who managed to remain in the West, influencing the strategies of mobility and resistance for which they would become famous around the world.

Through its broad chronological and geographical scope, The Apache Diaspora sheds new light on a range of topics, including genocide and Indigenous survival, the intersection of Native and African diasporas, and the rise of deportation and incarceration as key strategies of state control. As Conrad demonstrates, centuries of enslavement, warfare, and forced migrations failed to bring a final solution to the supposed problem of Apache independence and mobility. Spain, Mexico, and the United States all overestimated their own power and underestimated Apache resistance and creativity. Yet in the process, both Native and colonial societies were changed.

At the height of the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s, John Paton Davies, Jr., was summoned to the State Department one morning and fired. His offense? The career diplomat had counseled the U.S. government during World War II that the Communist forces in China were poised to take over the country—which they did, in 1949. Davies joined the thousands of others who became the victims of a political maelstrom that engulfed the country and deprived the United States of the wisdom and guidance of an entire generation of East Asian diplomats and scholars.

The son of American missionaries, Davies was born in China at the turn of the twentieth century. Educated in the United States, he joined the ranks of the newly formed Foreign Service in the 1930s and returned to China, where he would remain until nearly the end of World War II. During that time he became one of the first Americans to meet and talk with the young revolutionary known as Mao Zedong. He documented the personal excesses and political foibles of Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. As a political aide to General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, the wartime commander of the Allied forces in East and South Asia, he traveled widely in the region, meeting with colonial India's Nehru and Gandhi to gauge whether their animosity to British rule would translate into support for Japan. Davies ended the war serving in Moscow with George F. Kennan, the architect of America's policy toward the Soviet Union. Kennan found in Davies a lifelong friend and colleague. Neither, however, was immune to the virulent anticommunism of the immediate postwar years.

China Hand is the story of a man who captured with wry and judicious insight the times in which he lived, both as observer and as actor.

Cultivating Empire charts the connections between missionary work, capitalism, and Native politics to understand the making of the American empire in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. It presents American empire-building as a negotiated phenomenon that was built upon the foundations of earlier Atlantic empires, and it shows how U.S. territorial and economic development went hand-in-hand. Lori. J. Daggar explores how Native authority and diplomatic protocols encouraged the fledgling U.S. federal government to partner with missionaries in the realm of Indian affairs, and she charts how that partnership borrowed and deviated from earlier imperial-missionary partnerships.

Employing the terminology of speculative philanthropy to underscore the ways in which a desire to do good often coexisted with a desire to make profit, Cultivating Empire links eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century U.S. Indian policy—often framed as benevolent by its crafters—with the emergence of racial capitalism in the United States. In the process, Daggar argues that Native peoples wielded ideas of philanthropy and civilization for their own purposes and that Indian Country played a critical role in the construction of the U.S. imperial state and its economy. Rather than understand civilizing missions simply as tools for assimilation, then, Cultivating Empire reveals that missions were hinges for U.S. economic and political development that could both devastate Indigenous communities and offer Native peoples additional means to negotiate for power and endure.

What is the force in art, C. Stephen Jaeger asks, that can enter our consciousness, inspire admiration or imitation, and carry a reader or viewer from the world as it is to a world more sublime? We have long recognized the power of individuals to lead or enchant by the force of personal charisma—and indeed, in his award-winning Envy of Angels, Jaeger himself brilliantly parsed the ability of charismatic teachers to shape the world of medieval learning. In Enchantment, he turns his attention to a sweeping and multifaceted exploration of the charisma not of individuals but of art.

For Jaeger, the charisma of the visual arts, literature, and film functions by creating an exalted semblance of life, a realm of beauty, sublime emotions, heroic motives and deeds, godlike bodies and actions, and superhuman abilities, so as to dazzle the humbled spectator and lift him or her up into the place so represented. Charismatic art makes us want to live in the higher world that it depicts, to behave like its heroes and heroines, and to think and act according to their values. It temporarily weakens individual will and rational critical thought. It brings us into a state of enchantment.

Ranging widely across periods and genres, Enchantment investigates the charismatic effect of an ancient statue of Apollo on the poet Rilke, of the painter Dürer's self-portrayal as a figure of Christ-like magnificence, of a numinous Odysseus washed ashore on Phaeacia, and of the black-and-white projection of Fred Astaire dancing across the Depression-era movie screen. From the tattoos on the face of a Maori tribesman to the haunting visage of Charlotte Rampling in a film by Woody Allen, Jaeger's extraordinary book explores the dichotomies of reality and illusion, life and art that are fundamental to both cultic and aesthetic experience.

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.

Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story—the history of which encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King—that ends with a question rather than an answer. The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity. As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the "metaphysical detective story," in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world.

Detecting Texts includes an introduction by the editors that defines the metaphysical detective story and traces its history from Poe's classic tales to today's postmodernist experiments. In addition to the editors, contributors include Stephen Bernstein, Joel Black, John T. Irwin, Jeffrey T. Nealon, and others.

There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house.

In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands.

Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the legitimacy of American capitalism seems unchallenged. The link between open markets, economic growth, and democratic success has become common wisdom, not only among policy makers but for many intellectuals as well. In this instance, however, the past has hardly been prologue to contemporary confidence in the free market. American Capitalism presents thirteen thought-provoking essays that explain how a variety of individuals, many prominent intellectuals but others partisans in the combative world of business and policy, engaged with anxieties about the seismic economic changes in postwar America and, in the process, reconfigured the early twentieth-century ideology that put critique of economic power and privilege at its center.

The essays consider a broad spectrum of figures—from C. L. R. James and John Kenneth Galbraith to Peter Drucker and Ayn Rand—and topics ranging from theories of Cold War "convergence" to the rise of the philanthropic Right. They examine how the shift away from political economy at midcentury paved the way for the 1960s and the "culture wars" that followed. Contributors interrogate what was lost and gained when intellectuals moved their focus from political economy to cultural criticism. The volume thereby offers a blueprint for a dramatic reevaluation of how we should think about the trajectory of American intellectual history in twentieth-century United States.

Why did hagiographers of the late Middle Ages praise mothers for abandoning small children? How did a group of female mystics come to define themselves as "apostles to the dead" and end by challenging God's right to damn? Why did certain heretics around 1300 venerate a woman as the Holy Spirit incarnate and another as the Angelic Pope?

In From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, Barbara Newman asks these and other questions to trace a gradual and ambiguous transition in the gender strategies of medieval religious women. An egalitarian strain in early Christianity affirmed that once she asserted her commitment to Christ through a vow of chastity, monastic profession, or renunciation of family ties, a woman could become "virile," or equal to a man. While the ideal of the "virile woman" never disappeared, another ideal slowly evolved in medieval Christianity. By virtue of some gender-related trait—spotless virginity, erotic passion, the capacity for intense suffering, the ability to imagine a feminine aspect of the Godhead—a devout woman could be not only equal, but superior to men; without becoming male, she could become a "womanChrist," imitating and representing Christ in uniquely feminine ways.

Rooted in women's concrete aspirations and sufferings, Newman's "womanChrist" model straddles the bounds of orthodoxy and heresy to illuminate the farther reaches of female religious behavior in the Middle Ages. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist will generate compelling discussion in the fields of medieval literature and history, history of religion, theology, and women's studies.

In Communists and Their Victims, Roman David identifies and examines four classes of justice measures—retributive, reparatory, revelatory, and reconciliatory—to discover which, if any, rectified the legacy of human rights abuses committed during the communist era in the Czech Republic. Conducting interviews, focus groups, and nationwide surveys between 1999 and 2015, David looks at the impact of financial compensation and truth-sharing on victims' healing and examines the role of retribution in the behavior and attitudes of communists and their families. Emphasizing the narratives of former political prisoners, secret collaborators, and former Communist Party members, David tests the potential of justice measures to contribute to a shared sense of justice and their ability to overcome the class structure and ideological divides of a formerly communist regime.

Complementing his original research with analysis of legal judgments, governmental reports, and historical records, David finds that some justice measures were effective in overcoming material and ideological divides while others obstructed victims' healing and inhibited the transformation of communists. Identifying "justice without reconciliation" as the primary factor hampering the process of overcoming the past in the Czech Republic, Communists and Their Victims promotes a transformative theory of justice that demonstrates that justice measures, in order to be successful, require a degree of reconciliation.

Few Sunbelt cities burned brighter or contributed more to the conservative movement than Phoenix. In 1910, eleven thousand people called Phoenix home; now, over four million reside in this metropolitan region. In Sunbelt Capitalism, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer tells the story of the city's expansion and its impact on the nation. The dramatic growth of Phoenix speaks not only to the character and history of the Sunbelt but also to the evolution in American capitalism that sustained it.

In the 1930s, Barry Goldwater and other members of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce feared the influence of New Deal planners, small businessmen, and Arizona trade unionists. While Phoenix's business elite detested liberal policies, they were not hostile to government action per se. Goldwater and his contemporaries instead experimented with statecraft now deemed neoliberal. They embraced politics, policy, and federal funding to fashion a favorable "business climate," which relied on disenfranchising voters, weakening unions, repealing regulations, and shifting the tax burden onto homeowners and consumers. These efforts allied them with executives at the helm of the modern conservative movement, whose success partially hinged on relocating factories from the Steelbelt to the kind of free-enterprise oasis that Phoenix represented. But the city did not sprawl in a vacuum. All Sunbelt boosters used the same incentives to compete at a fever pitch for investment, and the resulting drain of jobs and capital from the industrial core forced Midwesterners and Northeasterners into the brawl. Eventually this "Second War Between the States" reoriented American politics toward the principle that the government and the citizenry should be working in the interest of business.

In Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition, R. D. Perry reveals how poetic coteries formed and maintained the English literary tradition. Perry shows that, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Edmund Spenser, the poets who bridged the medieval and early modern periods created a profusion of coterie forms as they sought to navigate their relationships with their contemporaries and to the vernacular literary traditions that preceded them.

Rather than defining coteries solely as historical communities of individuals sharing work, Perry reframes them as products of authors signaling associations with one another across time and space, in life and on the page. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s associations with both his fellow writers in London and with his geographically distant French contemporaries, to Thomas Hoccleve’s emphatic insistence that he was “aqweyntid” with Chaucer even after Chaucer’s death, to John Lydgate’s formations of “virtual coteries” of a wide range of individuals alive and dead who can only truly come together on the page, the book traces how writers formed the English literary tradition by signaling social connections.

By forming coteries, both real and virtual, based on shared appreciation of a literary tradition, these authors redefine what should be valued in that tradition, shaping and reshaping it accordingly. Perry shows how our notion of the English literary tradition came to be and how it could be imagined otherwise.

Known for his ultraconservatism and eccentricity, Gu Hongming (1857-1928) remains one of the most controversial figures in modern Chinese intellectual history. A former member of the colonial elite from Penang who was educated in Europe, Gu, in his late twenties, became a Qing loyalist and Confucian spokesman who also defended concubinage, footbinding, and the queue. Seen as a reactionary by his Chinese contemporaries, Gu nevertheless gained fame as an Eastern prophet following the carnage of World War I, often paired with Rabindranath Tagore and Leo Tolstoy by Western and Japanese intellectuals.

Rather than resort to the typical conception of Gu as an inscrutable eccentric, Chunmei Du argues that Gu was a trickster-sage figure who fought modern Western civilization in a time dominated by industrial power, utilitarian values, and imperialist expansion. A shape-shifter, Gu was by turns a lampooning jester, defying modern political and economic systems and, at other times, an avenging cultural hero who denounced colonial ideologies with formidable intellect, symbolic performances, and calculated pranks. A cultural amphibian, Gu transformed from an "imitation Western man" to "a Chinaman again," and reinterpreted, performed, and embodied "authentic Chineseness" in a time when China itself was adopting the new identity of a modern nation-state.

Gu Hongming's Eccentric Chinese Odyssey is the first comprehensive study in English of Gu Hongming, both the private individual and the public cultural figure. It examines the controversial scholar's intellectual and psychological journeys across geographical, national, and cultural boundaries in new global contexts. In addition to complicating existing studies of Chinese conservatism and global discussions on civilization around the World War I era, the book sheds new light on the contested notion of authenticity within the Chinese diaspora and the psychological impact of colonialism.

The study of ancient Greek urbanism has moved from examining the evidence for town planning and the organization of the city-state, or polis, to considerations of "everyday life." That is, it has moved from studying the public (fortifications, marketplaces, council houses, gymnasiums, temples, theaters, fountain houses) to studying the private (the physical remains of Greek houses). But what of those buildings that housed activities neither public nor private—brothels, taverns, and other homes of illicit activity? Can they be distinguished from houses? Were businesses like these run from homes? Classical Athenian writers attest to a diverse urban landscape that included tenement houses (sunoikiai), inns (diaitai, pandokeia), factories (ergasteria), taverns (kapelia), gambling dens (skirapheia), training schools (didaskaleia), and brothels (porneia), yet, despite our knowledge of specific terms, associating them with actual physical remains has not been easy. One such writer, Isaeus, mentions tenement houses that hosted prostitutes and wine sellers, while his contemporary Aeschines refers to doctors, smiths, fullers, carpenters, and pimps renting space. Were tenement houses not simply multi-inhabitant spaces but also multipurpose ones?

Houses of Ill Repute is the first book to focus on the difficulties of distinguishing private and semiprivate spaces. While others have studied houses or brothels, this volume looks at both together. The chapters, by leading scholars in the field, address such questions as "What is a house?" and "Did the business of prostitution leave behind a unique archaeological record?" Presenting several approaches to identifying and studying distinctions between domestic residences and houses of ill repute, and drawing on the fields of literature, history, and art history and theory, the volume's contributors provide a way forward for the study of domestic and entertainment spaces in the Hellenic world.

Contributors: Bradley A. Ault, Allison Glazebrook, Mark L. Lawall, Kathleen M. Lynch, David Scahill, Amy C. Smith, Monika Trümper, Barbara Tsakirgis.

Theodore Evergates provides the first systematic analysis of the aristocracy in the county of Champagne under the independent counts. He argues that three factors—the rise of the comital state, fiefholding, and the conjugal family—were critical to shaping a loose assortment of baronial and knightly families into an aristocracy with shared customs, institutions, and identity. Evergates mines the rich, varied, and in some respects unique collection of source materials from Champagne to provide a dynamic picture of a medieval aristocracy and its evolving symbiotic relationship with the counts.

Count Henry the Liberal (1152-81) began the process of transforming a quasi-independent baronage accustomed to collegial governance into an elite of landholding families subordinate to the count and his officials. By the time Countess Jeanne married the future King Philip IV of France in 1284, the fiefholding families of Champagne had become a distinct provincial nobility. Throughout, it was the conjugal community, rather than primogeniture or patrilineage, that remained the core familial institution determining the customs regarding community property, dowry, dower, and partible inheritance. Those customs guaranteed that every lineage would survive, but frequently through a younger son or daughter. The life courses of women and men, influenced not only by social norms but also by individual choice and circumstance, were equally unpredictable. Evergates concludes that imposed models of "the aristocratic family" fail to capture the diversity of individual lives and lineages within one of the more vibrant principalities of medieval France.

A political, legal, intellectual, and social history of employment in America

In the present age of temp work, telecommuting, and outsourcing, millions of workers in the United States find themselves excluded from the category of "employee"—a crucial distinction that would otherwise permit unionization and collective bargaining. Tracing the history of the term since its entry into the public lexicon in the nineteenth century, Jean-Christian Vinel demonstrates that the legal definition of "employee" has always been politically contested and deeply affected by competing claims on the part of business and labor. Unique in the Western world, American labor law is premised on the notion that "no man can serve two masters"—workers owe loyalty to their employer, which in many cases is incompatible with union membership.

The Employee: A Political History historicizes this American exception to international standards of rights and liberties at work, revealing a little known part of the business struggle against the New Deal. Early on, progressives and liberals developed a labor regime that, intending to restore amicable relations between employer and employee, sought to include as many workers as possible in the latter category. But in the 1940s this language of social harmony met with increasing resistance from businessmen, who pressed their interests in Congress and the federal courts, pushing for an ever-narrower definition of "employee" that excluded groups such as foremen, supervisors, and knowledge workers. A cultural and political history of American business and law, The Employee sheds historical light on contemporary struggles for economic democracy and political power in the workplace.

Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim "frontier peasants," "savage mountaineers," and Christian "ethnic minorities," suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences.

Jungle Passports recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape the life-worlds of deportees, refugees, farmers, smugglers, migrants, bureaucrats, lawyers, clergy, and border troops, she reveals how reciprocity and kinship and the enforcement of state violence, illegality, and border infrastructures shape the margins of life and death. Combining years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, her thoughtful and evocative book is a poignant testament to the force of life in our era of closed borders, insularity, and "illegal migration."

At supermarkets across the nation, customers waiting in line—mostly female—flip through magazines displayed at the checkout stand. What we find on those magazine racks are countless images of food and, in particular, women: moms preparing lunch for the team, college roommates baking together, working women whipping up a meal in under an hour, dieters happy to find a lowfat ice cream that tastes great. In everything from billboards and product packaging to cooking shows, movies, and even sex guides, food has a presence that conveys powerful gender-coded messages that shape our society.

Kitchen Culture in America is a collection of essays that examine how women's roles have been shaped by the principles and practice of consuming and preparing food. Exploring popular representations of food and gender in American society from 1895 to 1970, these essays argue that kitchen culture accomplishes more than just passing down cooking skills and well-loved recipes from generation to generation. Kitchen culture instructs women about how to behave like "correctly" gendered beings. One chapter reveals how juvenile cookbooks, a popular genre for over a century, have taught boys and girls not only the basics of cooking, but also the fine distinctions between their expected roles as grown men and women.

Several essays illuminate the ways in which food manufacturers have used gender imagery to define women first and foremost as consumers. Other essays, informed by current debates in the field of material culture, investigate how certain commodities like candy, which in the early twentieth century was advertised primarily as a feminine pleasure, have been culturally constructed. The book also takes a look at the complex relationships among food, gender, class, and race or ethnicity-as represented, for example, in the popular Southern black Mammy figure. In all of the essays, Kitchen Culture in America seeks to show how food serves as a marker of identity in American society.

In Dynamics of Difference in Australia, Francesca Merlan examines relations between indigenous and nonindigenous people from the events of early exploration and colonial endeavors to the present day. From face-to-face interactions to national and geopolitical affairs, the book illuminates the dimensions of difference that are revealed by these encounters: what indigenous and nonindigenous people pay attention to, what they value, what preconceived notions each possesses, and what their responses are to the Other. Basing her analysis on her extensive fieldwork in northern Australia, Merlan highlights the asymmetries in the exchanges between the settler majority and the indigenous minority, looking at everything from forms of violence and material transactions, to indigenous involvement in resource development, to governmental intervention in indigenous affairs.

Merlan frames the book within the current debate in Australian society concerning the constitutional recognition of indigenous people by the nation-state. Surveying the precursors to this question and its continuing and unresolved nature, she chronicles the ways in which an indigenous minority can remain culturally different while simultaneously experiencing the transformative forces of domination, constraint, and inequality. Conducting an investigation of long-term change against the backdrop of a highly salient and timely public debate surrounding indigenous issues, Dynamics of Difference has far-reaching implications both for public policy and for current theoretical debates about the nature of sociocultural continuity and change.

At first glance, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of a 1950s wife and mother. Married at eighteen, Barbara lived with her husband and two daughters in a California suburb, where she was president of the Parent-Teacher Association. At a PTA training conference in San Francisco, Barbara met Pearl, another PTA president who also had two children and happened to live only a few blocks away from her. To Barbara, Pearl was "the most gorgeous woman in the world," and the two began an affair that lasted over a decade.

Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor's Wife traces the stories of hundreds of women, like Barbara Kalish, who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States. In doing so, Lauren Jae Gutterman draws our attention away from the postwar landscape of urban gay bars and into the homes of married women, who tended to engage in affairs with wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: through work, at church, or in their neighborhoods.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the lesbian feminist movement and the no-fault divorce revolution transformed the lives of wives who desired women. Women could now choose to divorce their husbands in order to lead openly lesbian or bisexual lives; increasingly, however, these women were confronted by hostile state discrimination, typically in legal battles over child custody. Well into the 1980s, many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, therefore complicating a simple interpretation of their lives and relationship choices. By revealing the extent to which marriage has historically permitted space for wives' relationships with other women, Her Neighbor's Wife calls into question the presumed straightness of traditional American marriage.