University of Pennsylvania Press

Whether man-made or naturally occurring, large-scale disasters can cause fatalities and injuries, devastate property and communities, savage the environment, impose significant financial burdens on individuals and firms, and test political leadership. Moreover, global challenges such as climate change and terrorism reveal the interdependent and interconnected nature of our current moment: what occurs in one nation or geographical region is likely to have effects across the globe. Our information age creates new and more integrated forms of communication that incur risks that are difficult to evaluate, let alone anticipate. All of this makes clear that innovative approaches to assessing and managing risk are urgently required.

When catastrophic risk management was in its inception thirty years ago, scientists and engineers would provide estimates of the probability of specific types of accidents and their potential consequences. Economists would then propose risk management policies based on those experts' estimates with little thought as to how this data would be used by interested parties. Today, however, the disciplines of finance, geography, history, insurance, marketing, political science, sociology, and the decision sciences combine scientific knowledge on risk assessment with a better appreciation for the importance of improving individual and collective decision-making processes.

The essays in this volume highlight past research, recent discoveries, and open questions written by leading thinkers in risk management and behavioral sciences. The Future of Risk Management provides scholars, businesses, civil servants, and the concerned public tools for making more informed decisions and developing long-term strategies for reducing future losses from potentially catastrophic events.

Contributors: Mona Ahmadiani, Joshua D. Baker, W. J. Wouter Botzen, Cary Coglianese, Gregory Colson, Jeffrey Czajkowski, Nate Dieckmann, Robin Dillon, Baruch Fischhoff, Jeffrey A. Friedman, Robin Gregory, Robert W. Klein, Carolyn Kousky, Howard Kunreuther, Craig E. Landry, Barbara Mellers, Robert J. Meyer, Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Robert Muir-Wood, Mark Pauly, Lisa Robinson, Adam Rose, Paul J. H. Schoemaker, Paul Slovic, Phil Tetlock, Daniel Västfjäll, W. Kip Viscusi, Elke U. Weber, Richard Zeckhauser.

Since 1978, the end of the Mao era, economic growth in China has outperformed every previous economic expansion in modern history. While the largest Western economies continue to struggle with the effects of the deepest recession since World War II, the People's Republic of China still enjoys growth rates that are massive in comparison. In the country's smog-choked cities, a chaotic climate of buying and selling prevails. Tireless expansion and inventiveness join forces with an attitude of national euphoria in which anything seems possible. No longer merely the "workshop of the world," China is poised to become a global engine for innovation.

In China's Capitalism, Tobias ten Brink considers the history of the socioeconomic order that has emerged in the People's Republic. With empirical evidence and a theoretical foundation based in comparative and international political economy, ten Brink analyzes the main characteristics of China's socioeconomic system over time, identifies the key dynamics shaping this system's structure, and discusses current trends in further capitalist development. He argues that hegemonic state-business alliances mostly at the local level, relative homogeneity of party-state elites, the maintenance of a low-wage regime, and unanticipated coincidences between domestic and global processes are the driving forces behind China's rise. He also surveys the limits to the state's influence over economic and social developments such as industrial overcapacity and social conflict.

Ten Brink's framework reveals how combinations of three heterogeneous actors—party-state institutions, firms, and workers—led to China's distinctive form of capitalism. Presenting a coherent and historically nuanced portrait, China's Capitalism is essential reading for anyone interested in the socioeconomic order of the People's Republic and the significant challenges facing its continuing development.

While Christian conservatives had been active in national politics for decades and had achieved a seat at the table by working with the Republican Party, the 1980s and 1990s saw them make significant strides by injecting issues of moral traditionalism into U.S. House races across the country. Christian conservative activists worked diligently to nominate friendly candidates and get them elected. These moral victories transformed the Republican House delegation into one that was much more culturally conservative and created a new Republican majority. In Moral Victories, Marty Cohen seeks to chronicle this significant political phenomenon and place it in both historical and theoretical contexts. This is a story not only of the growing importance of moral issues but also of the way party coalitions change, and how this particular change began with religiously motivated activists determined to ban abortion, thwart gay rights, and restore traditional morality to the country.

Beginning in the early 1980s, and steadily building from that point, religious activists backed like-minded candidates. Traditional Republican candidates, more concerned about taxes and small government, resisted the newcomers and were often defeated. As a result, increasing numbers of House Republican nominees were against abortion and gay rights. Voters responded by placing moral issues above their interests in economic policies, which led to the election of ever more socially conservative representatives. As a result, the House Republican caucus evolved from a body that advocated largely for low taxes and small government to one equally invested in moral and social issues, especially abortion and gay rights. The new moralistic Republican candidates were able to win in districts where traditional business Republicans could not, thereby creating the foundation for a durable Republican majority in the House and reshaping the American political landscape.

Ven. Fulton J. Sheen, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Rev. Jerry Falwell—religious leaders who popularized theology through media campaigns designed to persuade the public

In Religion in the Public Square, James M. Patterson considers religious leaders who popularized theology through media campaigns designed to persuade the public. Ven. Fulton J. Sheen, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Rev. Jerry Falwell differed profoundly on issues of theology and politics, but they shared an approach to public ministry that aimed directly at changing how Americans understood the nature and purpose of their country. From the 1930s through the 1950s, Sheen was an early adopter of paperbacks, radio, and television to condemn totalitarian ideologies and to defend American Catholicism against Protestant accusations of divided loyalty. During the 1950s and 1960s, King staged demonstrations and boycotts that drew the mass media to him. The attention provided him the platform to preach Christian love as a political foundation in direct opposition to white supremacy. Falwell started his own church, which he developed into a mass media empire. He then leveraged it during the late 1970s through the 1980s to influence the Republican Party by exhorting his audience to not only ally with religious conservatives around issues of abortion and the traditional family but also to vote accordingly.

Sheen, King, and Falwell were so successful in popularizing their theological ideas that they won prestigious awards, had access to presidents, and witnessed the results of their labors. However, Patterson argues that Falwell's efforts broke with the longstanding refusal of religious public figures to participate directly in partisan affairs and thereby catalyzed the process of politicizing religion that undermined the Judeo-Christian consensus that formed the foundation of American politics.

In 2011, the United States launched its third regime-change attempt in a decade. Like earlier targets, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi had little hope of defeating the forces stacked against him. He seemed to recognize this when calling for a cease-fire just after the intervention began. But by then, the United States had determined it was better to oust him than negotiate and thus backed his opposition. The history of foreign-imposed regime change is replete with leaders like Qaddafi, overthrown after wars they seemed unlikely to win. From the British ouster of Afghanistan's Sher Ali in 1878 to the Soviet overthrow of Hungary's Imre Nagy in 1956, regime change has been imposed on the weak and the friendless.

In Toppling Foreign Governments, Melissa Willard-Foster explores the question of why stronger nations overthrow governments when they could attain their aims at the bargaining table. She identifies a central cause—the targeted leader's domestic political vulnerability—that not only gives the leader motive to resist a stronger nation's demands, making a bargain more difficult to attain, but also gives the stronger nation reason to believe that regime change will be comparatively cheap. As long as the targeted leader's domestic opposition is willing to collaborate with the foreign power, the latter is likely to conclude that ousting the leader is more cost effective than negotiating.

Willard-Foster analyzes 133 instances of regime change, ranging from covert operations to major military invasions, and spanning over two hundred years. She also conducts three in-depth case studies that support her contention that domestically and militarily weak leaders appear more costly to coerce than overthrow and, as long as they remain ubiquitous, foreign-imposed regime change is likely to endure.

In 1974, the International Congress on World Evangelization met in Lausanne, Switzerland. Gathering together nearly 2,500 Protestant evangelical leaders from more than 150 countries and 135 denominations, it rivaled Vatican II in terms of its influence. But as David C. Kirkpatrick argues in A Gospel for the Poor, the Lausanne Congress was most influential because, for the first time, theologians from the Global South gained a place at the table of the world's evangelical leadership—bringing their nascent brand of social Christianity with them.

Leading up to this momentous occasion, after World War II, there emerged in various parts of the world an embryonic yet discernible progressive coalition of thinkers who were embedded in global evangelical organizations and educational institutions such as the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians. Within these groups, Latin Americans had an especially strong voice, for they had honed their theology as a religious minority, having defined it against two perceived ideological excesses: Marxist-inflected Catholic liberation theology and the conservative political loyalties of the U.S. Religious Right.

In this context, transnational conversations provoked the rise of progressive evangelical politics, the explosion of Christian mission and relief organizations, and the infusion of social justice into the very mission of evangelicals around the world and across a broad spectrum of denominations. Drawing upon bilingual interviews and archives and personal papers from three continents, Kirkpatrick adopts a transnational perspective to tell the story of how a Cold War generation of progressive Latin Americans, including seminal figures such as Ecuadorian René Padilla and Peruvian Samuel Escobar, developed, named, and exported their version of social Christianity to an evolving coalition of global evangelicals.

In The Spatial Reformation, Michael J. Sauter offers a sweeping history of the way Europeans conceived of three-dimensional space, including the relationship between Earth and the heavens, between 1350 and 1850. He argues that this "spatial reformation" provoked a reorganization of knowledge in the West that was arguably as important as the religious Reformation. Notably, it had its own sacred text, which proved as central and was as ubiquitously embraced: Euclid's Elements. Aside from the Bible, no other work was so frequently reproduced in the early modern era. According to Sauter, its penetration and suffusion throughout European thought and experience call for a deliberate reconsideration not only of what constitutes the intellectual foundation of the early modern era but also of its temporal range.

The Spatial Reformation contends that space is a human construct: that is, it is a concept that arises from the human imagination and gets expressed physically in texts and material objects. Sauter begins his examination by demonstrating how Euclidean geometry, when it was applied fully to the cosmos, estranged God from man, enabling the breakthrough to heliocentrism and, by extension, the discovery of the New World. Subsequent chapters provide detailed analyses of the construction of celestial and terrestrial globes, Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia, the secularization of the natural history of the earth and man, and Hobbes's rejection of Euclid's sense of space and its effect on his political theory. Sauter's exploration culminates in the formation of a new anthropology in the eighteenth century that situated humanity in reference to spaces and places that human eyes had not actually seen. The Spatial Reformation illustrates how these disparate advancements can be viewed as resulting expressly from early modernity's embrace of Euclidean geometry.

At the end of the fourteenth and into the first half of the fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate translated and revised stories with long pedigrees in Latin, Italian, and French. Royals and gentry alike commissioned lavish manuscript copies of these works, copies whose images were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language. Yet despite the significance of these images, manuscript illuminators are seldom discussed in the major narratives of the development of English literary culture.

The newly enlarged scale of English manuscript production generated a problem: namely, a need for new images. Not only did these images need to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration, they also had to express novel concepts, including ones as foundational as the identity and suitable representation of an English poet. In devising this new corpus, manuscript artists harnessed visual allusion as a method to articulate central questions and provide at times conflicting answers regarding both literary and cultural authority.

Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques—assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.

In The Israeli Radical Left, Fiona Wright traces the dramatic as well as the mundane paths taken by radical Jewish Israeli leftwing activists, whose critique of the Israeli state has left them uneasily navigating an increasingly polarized public atmosphere. This activism is manifested in direct action solidarity movements, the critical stances of some Israeli human rights and humanitarian NGOs, and less well-known initiatives that promote social justice within Jewish Israel as a means of undermining the overwhelming support for militarism and nationalism that characterizes Israeli domestic politics. In chronicling these attempts at solidarity with those most injured by Israeli policy, Wright reveals dissent to be a fraught negotiation of activists' own citizenship in which they feel simultaneously repulsed and responsible.

Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, The Israeli Radical Left provides a nuanced account of various kinds of Jewish Israeli antioccupation and antiracist activism as both spaces of subversion and articulations of complicity. Wright does not level complicity as an accusation, but rather recasts the concept as an analysis of the impurity of ethical and political relations and the often uncomfortable ways in which this makes itself felt during moments of attempted solidarity. She imparts how activists persistently underline their own feelings of complicity and the impossibility of reconciling their principles with the realities of their everyday lives, despite the fact that the activism in which they engage specifically aims to challenge Jewish Israeli citizens' participation in state violence. The first full ethnographic account of the Israeli radical left, Wright's book explores the ethics and politics of Jewish Israeli activists who challenge the violence perpetrated by their state and in their name.

Although most Americans attribute shifting practices in the financial industry to the invisible hand of the market, Mark H. Rose reveals the degree to which presidents, legislators, regulators, and even bankers themselves have long taken an active interest in regulating the industry.

In 1971, members of Richard Nixon's Commission on Financial Structure and Regulation described the banks they sought to create as "supermarkets." Analogous to the twentieth-century model of a store at which Americans could buy everything from soft drinks to fresh produce, supermarket banks would accept deposits, make loans, sell insurance, guide mergers and acquisitions, and underwrite stock and bond issues. The supermarket bank presented a radical departure from the financial industry as it stood, composed as it was of local savings and loans, commercial banks, investment banks, mutual funds, and insurance firms. Over the next four decades, through a process Rose describes as "grinding politics," supermarket banks became the guiding model of the financial industry. As the banking industry consolidated, it grew too large while remaining too fragmented and unwieldy for politicians to regulate and for regulators to understand—until, in 2008, those supermarket banks, such as Citigroup, needed federal help to survive and prosper once again.

Rose explains the history of the financial industry as a story of individuals—some well-known, like Presidents Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton; Treasury Secretaries Donald Regan and Timothy Geithner; and JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon; and some less so, though equally influential, such as Kennedy's Comptroller of the Currency James J. Saxon, Citicorp CEO Walter Wriston, and Bank of America CEOs Hugh McColl and Kenneth Lewis. Rose traces the evolution of supermarket banks from the early days of the Kennedy administration, through the financial crisis of 2008, and up to the Trump administration's attempts to modify bank rules. Deeply researched and accessibly written, Market Rules demystifies the major trends in the banking industry and brings financial policy to life.

In Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the idea of law as a form of political fiction: a body of literature that blurs the lines generally drawn between the legal and literary genres. She argues that for jurists of thirteenth-century Wales, legal writing was an intensely imaginative genre, one acutely responsive to nationalist concerns and capable of reproducing them in sophisticated symbolic form. She identifies narrative devices and tropes running throughout successive revisions of legal texts that frame the body as an analogy for unity and for the court, that equate maleness with authority and just rule and femaleness with its opposite, and that employ descriptions of internal and external landscapes as metaphors for safety and peril, respectively.

Historians disagree about the context in which the lawbooks of medieval Wales should be read and interpreted. Some accept the claim that they originated in a council called by the tenth-century king Hywel Dda, while others see them less as a repository of ancient custom than as the Welsh response to the general resurgence in law taking place in western Europe. Stacey builds on the latter approach to argue that whatever their origins, the lawbooks functioned in the thirteenth century as a critical venue for political commentary and debate on a wide range of subjects, including the threat posed to native independence and identity by the encroaching English; concerns about violence and disunity among the native Welsh; abusive behavior on the part of native officials; unwelcome changes in native practice concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance; and fears about the increasing political and economic role of women.

Throughout his life, Niccolò Machiavelli was deeply invested in Florentine culture and politics. More than any other priority, his overriding central concerns, informed by his understanding of his city's history, were the present and future strength and independence of Florence. This volume highlights and explores this underappreciated aspect of Machiavelli's intellectual preoccupations.

Transcending a narrow emphasis on his two most famous works of political thought, The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, Mark Jurdjevic and Meredith K. Ray instead present a wide sample of the many genres in which he wrote—not only political theory but also letters, poetry, plays, comedy, and, most substantially, history. Throughout his writing, the city of Florence was at the same time his principal subject and his principal context. Florentine culture and history structured his mental landscape, determined his idiom, underpinned his politics, and endowed everything he wrote with urgency and purpose.

The Florentine particulars in Machiavelli's writing reveal aspects of his psyche, politics, and life that are little known outside of specialist circles—particularly his optimism and idealism, his warmth and humor, his capacity for affection and loyalty, and his stubborn, enduring republicanism. Machiavelli: Political, Historical, and Literary Writings has been carefully curated to reveal those crucial but lesser known aspects of Machiavelli's thought and to show how his major arguments evolved within a dynamic Florentine setting.

Despite the remarkable achievements of free markets—their rapid spread around the world and success at generating economic growth—they tend to elicit anxiety. Creative destruction and destabilizing change provoke feelings of powerlessness in the face of circumstances that portend inevitable catastrophe. Thus, from the beginning, capitalism has been particularly stimulative for the growth of critics and doomsayers. While early analysts such as Karl Marx primarily emphasized an impending economic disaster, in recent years the economic critique of capitalism has receded in favor of moral and environmental concerns.

At the heart of this collection of original essays lies the question: does morality demand that we adopt a primarily supportive or critical stance toward capitalism? Some contributors suggest that the foundational principles of the capitalist system may be at odds with the central requirements of morality, while others wonder whether the practical workings of markets slowly erode moral character or hinder the just distribution of goods. Still others consider whether morality itself does not demand the economic freedom constitutive of the capitalist system. The essays in Are Markets Moral? represent a broad array of disciplines, from economics to philosophy to law, and place particular emphasis on the experiences of non-Western countries where the latest chapters in capitalism's history are now being written.

Contributors: Andrew S. Bibby, Gurcharan Das, Richard A. Epstein, Fonna Forman, Robert P. George, Steven J. Kautz, Peter Augustine Lawler, Steven Lukes, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Peter McNamara, Arthur M. Melzer, John Tomasi.

In early fifteenth-century Prague, disagreements about religion came to be shouted in the streets and taught to the laity in the vernacular, giving rise to a new kind of public engagement that would persist into the early modern era and beyond. The reforming followers of Jan Hus brought theological learning to the people through a variety of genres, including songs, poems, tractates, letters, manifestos, and sermons. At the same time, university masters provided the laity with an education that enabled them to discuss contentious issues and arrive at their own conclusions, emphasizing that they held the freedom to make up their own minds about important theological issues. This marketplace of competing religious ideas in the vernacular emerged in Bohemia a full hundred years before the Reformation.

In Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion, Marcela K. Perett examines the early phases of the so-called Hussite revolution, between 1412, when Jan Hus first radicalized his followers, and 1436, the year of the agreement at the Council of Basel granting papal permission for the ritual practice of the Utraquist, or moderate Hussite, faction to continue. These were years during which the leaders of competing reform movements needed to garner the laity's support and employed the vernacular for that purpose, translating and simplifying basic theological arguments about the Bible, the church's ritual practice, and authority in the church. Perett illustrates that the vernacular discourse, even if it revolved around the same topics, was nothing like the Latin debates on the issues, often appealing to emotion rather than doctrinal positions. In the end, as Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion demonstrates, the process of vernacularization increased rather than decreased religious factionalism and radicalism as agreement about theological issues became impossible.

On July 7, 2005, at the end of the morning rush hour, three near-simultaneous explosions tore apart the London Underground. Within an hour, the entire subway network was evacuated, and a fourth explosion in a bus underscored that this was a terrorist operation. The bombings shattered the British counterterrorism services' assumptions about the global neojihadi threat to Britain. Authorities pondered whether al Qaeda was a loose coalition with no clear leadership or a highly structured group with international reach that posed a clear threat to the United Kingdom. These two perspectives are not just academic disputes but raise important issues with real consequences in terms of counterterrorism strategy. What sorts of distinct measures are needed to combat these opposing forms of terrorism? What can we learn from the ways in which the London terror attacks were planned and executed—and from Britain's response?

In The London Bombings, counterterrorism expert Marc Sageman seeks to answer these questions through a new detailed account and analysis of the Underground bombings as well as three other attacks directed at Britain between 2004 and 2006. Drawing on previously unavailable trial transcripts and law enforcement records, terrorists' self-documentation, and his own government experience in counterterrorism, Sageman makes the case that "top down" and "bottom up" conceptions of terror organizations need not be incompatible and that, in part because of this binary thinking, the West has tended to overreact to the severity of the threat. He stresses the fluid, chaotic ways that terrorist events unfold: spontaneously and gradually with haphazard planning—as the perpetrators are often worldly, educated, and not particularly religious before becoming engaged in neojihadi activities. The London Bombings is a vital, persuasive account of events that have not yet been properly presented to the public and are critical to the foundation of an effective counterterrorism strategy.

In 1860, Milton Bradley invented The Checkered Game of Life. Having journeyed from Springfield, Massachusetts, to New York City to determine interest in this combination of bright red ink, brass dials, and character-driven decision-making, Bradley exhausted his entire supply of merchandise just two days after his arrival in the city; within a few months, he had sold forty thousand copies. That same year, Walt Whitman left Brooklyn to oversee the printing of the third edition of his Leaves of Grass in Massachusetts. In Slantwise Moves, Douglas A. Guerra sees more than mere coincidence in the contemporary popularity of these superficially different cultural productions. Instead, he argues, both the book and the game were materially resonant sites of social experimentation—places where modes of collectivity and selfhood could be enacted and performed.

Then as now, Guerra observes, "game" was a malleable category, mediating play in various and inventive ways: through the material forms of pasteboard, paper, and india rubber; via settings like the parlor, lawn, or public hall; and by mutually agreed-upon measurements of success, ranging from point accumulation to the creation of humorous narratives. Recovering the lives of important game designers, anthologists, and codifiers—including Anne Abbot, William Simonds, Michael Phelan, and the aforementioned Bradley—Guerra brings his study of commercially produced games into dialogue with a reconsideration of iconic literary works. Through contrapuntal close readings of texts and gameplay, he finds multiple possibilities for self-fashioning reflected in Bradley's Life and Whitman's "Song of Myself," as well as utopian social spaces on billiard tables and the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance alike.

Highlighting meaningful overlap in the production and reception of books and games, Slantwise Moves identifies what the two have in common as material texts and as critical models of the mundane pleasures and intimacies that defined agency and social belonging in nineteenth-century America.

In the early twentieth century, a new generation of liberal professors sought to prove Christianity's compatibility with contemporary currents in the study of philosophy, science, history, and democracy. These modernizing professors—Arthur Cushman McGiffert at Union Theological Seminary, George LaPiana at Harvard Divinity School, and Shirley Jackson Case at the University of Chicago Divinity School—hoped to equip their students with a revisionary version of early Christianity that was embedded in its social, historical, and intellectual settings. In The Fathers Refounded, Elizabeth A. Clark provides the first critical analysis of these figures' lives, scholarship, and lasting contributions to the study of Christianity.

The Fathers Refounded continues the exploration of Christian intellectual revision begun by Clark in Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America. Drawing on rigorous archival research, Clark takes the reader through the professors' published writings, their institutions, and even their classrooms—where McGiffert tailored nineteenth-century German Protestant theology to his modernist philosophies; where LaPiana, the first Catholic professor at Harvard Divinity School, devised his modernism against the tight constraints of contemporary Catholic theology; and where Case promoted reading Christianity through social-scientific aims and methods. Each, in his own way, extricated his subfield from denominationally and theologically oriented approaches and aligned it with secular historical methodologies. In so doing, this generation of scholars fundamentally altered the directions of Catholic Modernism and Protestant Liberalism and offered the promise of reconciling Christianity and modern intellectual and social culture.

Countess Marie of Champagne is primarily known today as the daughter of Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine and as a literary patron of Chrétien de Troyes. In this engaging biography, Theodore Evergates offers a more rounded view of Marie as a successful ruler of one of the wealthiest and most vibrant principalities in medieval France.

From the age of thirty-four until her death, Marie ruled almost continuously, initially for her husband, Henry the Liberal, during his journey to Jerusalem, then for her underage son, Henry II, and after his majority, during his absence on the Third Crusade and extended residence in the Levant. Presiding at the High Court of Champagne and attending to the many practical duties of governance, Marie acted with the advice of her court officers but without limitation by either the king or a regency council. If Henry the Liberal created the county of Champagne as a dynamic and prosperous state, it was Marie who expertly preserved and sustained it.

Evergates mines Marie's letters patent and the literary and religious texts associated with her to glean a fuller picture of her life and work. He situates Marie within the regional institutions and external events that influenced her life as well as within her extended families of royal half-siblings—including King Philip II of France and her Plantagenet brothers—and her many in-laws, including the queen mother Adele and Archbishop William of Reims. Those who knew Marie best describe her as determined, gracious, and pious, as well as an effective ruler in the face of several external threats.

In Singing in a Foreign Land, Karen A. Weisman examines the uneasy literary inheritance of British cultural and poetic norms by early nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish authors. Focusing on a range of subgenres, from elegies to pastorals to psalm translations, Weisman shows how the writers she studies engaged with the symbolic resources of English poetry—such as the land of England itself—from which they had been historically alienated.

Weisman looks at the self-conscious explorations of lyric form by Emma Lyon; the elegies for members of the British royal family penned by Hyman Hurwitz; the ironic reflections on hybrid identities written by sisters Celia and Marion Moss; and the poems of Grace Aguilar that explicitly join lyric effusion to Jewish historical concerns. These poets were well-versed in both Jewish texts and mainstream literary history, and Weisman argues that they model an extreme example of Romantic self-reflexivity: they implicitly lament their own inability fully to appropriate inherited Romantic ideals about nature and transcendence even while acknowledging that those ideals are already deeply ironized by such figures as Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth. And because they do not possess a secure history binding them to the landscape of British hearth and home, they recognize the need to create in their lyric poetry a stable narrative of identity within England and within the King's English even as they gesture toward the impossibility—and sometimes even the undesirability—of doing so.

Singing in a Foreign Land reveals how these Anglo-Jewish poets, caught between their desire to enter the English lyric tradition and their inability as Jews to share in the full religious and cultural Romantic heritage, asserted a subtle cultural authority in their poems that recognized an alienation from their own expressive resources.

On February 15, 2003, millions of people around the world demonstrated against the war that the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies were planning to wage in Iraq. Despite this being the largest protest in the history of humankind, the war on Iraq began the next month. That year, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged from the global antiwar movement that had mobilized against the invasion and subsequent occupation. Like the earlier tribunal on Vietnam convened by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the WTI sought to document—and provide grounds for adjudicating—war crimes committed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allied forces during the Iraq war.

For the Love of Humanity builds on two years of transnational fieldwork within the decentralized network of antiwar activists who constituted the WTI in some twenty cities around the world. Ayça Çubukçu illuminates the tribunal up close, both as an ethnographer and a sympathetic participant. In the process, she situates debates among WTI activists—a group encompassing scholars, lawyers, students, translators, writers, teachers, and more—alongside key jurists, theorists, and critics of global democracy.

WTI activists confronted many dilemmas as they conducted their political arguments and actions, often facing interpretations of human rights and international law that, unlike their own, were not grounded in anti-imperialism. Çubukçu approaches this conflict by broadening her lens, incorporating insights into how Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Iraqi High Tribunal grappled with the realities of Iraq's occupation. Through critical analysis of the global debate surrounding one of the early twenty-first century's most significant world events, For the Love of Humanity addresses the challenges of forging global solidarity against imperialism and makes a case for reevaluating the relationships between law and violence, empire and human rights, and cosmopolitan authority and political autonomy.

After a restrained 2017 term in which the Supreme Court muddled through most of its work with just eight justices, the court roared back to life with a momentous term in 2018. With Donald Trump's first appointment to the bench, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, finding his footing and swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy preparing for retirement at the close of the term, the Court took on a series of cases that touched on some of the most contentious issues in contemporary American life—and in almost every case gave Americans a glimpse of where the court is likely to keep shifting over the coming years: further to the right.

In American Justice 2018, journalist Todd Ruger examines the most monumental of these controversial decisions—including those involving religious freedom and minority rights, partisan gerrymandering, President Trump's travel ban, privacy in the digital era, sales tax for online retailers, and apparent tensions between the First Amendment and the collection of union dues. Ruger deftly analyzes how each of these decisions fits into the history of the court—and what the opinions and dissents reveal about the shifting ideological configuration of the institution. Along the way, Ruger reflects on how the term's polarizing docket will shape the future of the Supreme Court and the legacy of individual justices.

A Monster with a Thousand Hands makes visible a figure that has been largely overlooked in early modern scholarship on theater and audiences: the discursive spectator, an entity distinct from the actual bodies attending early modern English playhouses. Amy J. Rodgers demonstrates how the English commercial theater's rapid development and prosperity altered the lexicon for describing theatergoers and the processes of engagement that the theater was believed to cultivate. In turn, these changes influenced and produced a cultural projection—the spectator—a figure generated by social practices rather than a faithful recording of those who attended the theater. The early modern discursive spectator did not merely develop alongside the phenomenological one, but played as significant a role in shaping early modern viewers and viewing practices as did changes to staging technologies, exhibition practices, and generic experimentation.

While audience and film studies have theorized the spectator, these fields tend to focus on the role of twentieth-century media (film, television, and the computer) in producing mass-culture viewers. Such emphases lead to a misapprehension that the discursive spectator is modernity's creature. Fearing anachronism, early modern scholars have preferred demographic studies of audiences to theoretical engagements with the "effects" of spectatorship. While demographic work provides an invaluable snapshot, it cannot account for the ways that the spectator is as much an idea as a material presence. And, while a few studies pursue the dynamics that existed among author, text, and audience using critical tools sharpened by film studies, they tend to obscure how early modern culture understood the spectator. Rather than relying exclusively on historical or theoretical methodologies, A Monster with a Thousand Hands reframes spectatorship as a subject of inquiry shaped both by changes in entertainment technologies and the interaction of groups and individuals with different forms of cultural production.

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

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

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

In The Psychology of Inequality, Michael Locke McLendon looks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought for insight into the personal and social pathologies that plague commercial and democratic societies. He emphasizes the way Rousseau appropriated and modified the notion of self-love, or amour-propre, found in Augustine and various early modern thinkers. McLendon traces the concept in Rousseau's work and reveals it to be a form of selfish vanity that mimics aspects of Homeric honor culture and, in the modern world, shapes the outlook of the wealthy and powerful as well as the underlying assumptions of meritocratic ideals.

According to McLendon, Rousseau's elucidation of amour-propre describes a desire for glory and preeminence that can be dangerously antisocial, as those who believe themselves superior derive pleasure from dominating and even harming those they consider beneath them. Drawing on Rousseau's insights, McLendon asserts that certain forms of inequality, especially those associated with classical aristocracy and modern-day meritocracy, can corrupt the mindsets and personalities of people in socially disruptive ways.

The Psychology of Inequality shows how amour-propre can be transformed into the demand for praise, whether or not one displays praiseworthy qualities, and demonstrates the ways in which this pathology continues to play a leading role in the psychology and politics of modern liberal democracies.

Tourists to Ouidah, a city on the coast of the Republic of Bénin, in West Africa, typically visit a few well-known sites of significance to the Vodún religion—the Python Temple, where Dangbé, the python spirit, is worshipped, and King Kpasse's sacred forest, which is the seat of the Vodún deity known as Lokò. However, other, less familiar places, such as the palace of the so-called supreme chief of Vodún in Bénin, are also rising in popularity as tourists become increasingly adventurous and as more Vodún priests and temples make themselves available to foreigners in the hopes of earning extra money.

Timothy R. Landry examines the connections between local Vodún priests and spiritual seekers who travel to Bénin—some for the snapshot, others for full-fledged initiation into the religion. He argues that the ways in which the Vodún priests and tourists negotiate the transfer of confidential, sacred knowledge create its value. The more secrecy that surrounds Vodún ritual practice and material culture, the more authentic, coveted, and, consequently, expensive that knowledge becomes. Landry writes as anthropologist and initiate, having participated in hundreds of Vodún ceremonies, rituals, and festivals.

Examining the role of money, the incarnation of deities, the limits of adaptation for the transnational community, and the belief in spirits, sorcery, and witchcraft, Vodún ponders the ethical implications of producing and consuming culture by local and international agents. Highlighting the ways in which racialization, power, and the legacy of colonialism affect the procurement and transmission of secret knowledge in West Africa and beyond, Landry demonstrates how, paradoxically, secrecy is critically important to Vodún's global expansion.

The revolution in digital communications has altered the relationship between citizens and political elites, with important implications for democracy. As new information ecosystems have evolved, as unforeseen examples of their positive and negative consequences have emerged, and as theorizing, data, and research methods have expanded and improved, the central question has shifted from if the digital information environment is good or bad for democratic politics to how and in what contexts particular attributes of this environment are having an influence. It is only through the careful analysis of specific cases that we can begin to build a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the role of digital media in democratic theory and practice.

The essays in Digital Media and Democratic Futures focus on a variety of information and communication technologies, politically relevant actors, substantive issues, and digital political practices, doing so from distinct theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. Individually, each of these case studies provides deep insights into the complex and context-dependent relationship between media and democracy. Collectively, they show that there is no single outcome for democracy in the digital age, only a range of possible futures.

Contributors: Rena Bivens, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Jennifer Earl, Thomas Elliott, Deen Freelon, Kelly Gates, Philip N. Howard, Daniel Kreiss, Ting Luo, Helen Nissenbaum, Beth Simone Noveck, Jennifer Pan, Lisa Poggiali, Daniela Stockmann.

Nestled between the Rocky Mountains to the west and the High Plains to the east, Denver, Colorado, is nicknamed the Mile High City because its official elevation is exactly one mile above sea level. Over the past ten years, it has also been one of the country's fastest-growing metropolitan areas. In Denver's early days, its geographic proximity to the mineral-rich mountains attracted miners, and gold and silver booms and busts played a large role in its economic success. Today, its central location—between the west and east coasts and between major cities of the Midwest—makes it a key node for the distribution of goods and services as well as an optimal site for federal agencies and telecommunications companies.

In Metropolitan Denver, Andrew R. Goetz and E. Eric Boschmann show how the city evolved from its origins as a mining town into a cosmopolitan metropolis. They chart the foundations of Denver's recent economic development—from mining and agriculture to energy, defense, and technology—and examine the challenges engendered by a postwar population explosion that led to increasing income inequality and rapid growth in the number of Latino residents. Highlighting the risks and rewards of regional collaboration in municipal governance, Goetz and Boschmann recount public works projects such as the construction of the Denver International Airport and explore the smart growth movement that shifted development from postwar low-density, automobile-based, suburban and exurban sprawl to higher-density, mixed use, transit-oriented urban centers.

Because of its proximity to the mountains and generally sunny weather, Denver has a reputation as a very active, outdoor-oriented city and a desirable place to live and work. Metropolitan Denver reveals the purposeful civic decisions made regarding tourism, downtown urban revitalization, and cultural-led economic development that make the city a destination.

In chronicling the life and career of Albert Gore, Sr., historian Anthony J. Badger seeks not just to explore the successes and failures of an important political figure who spent more than three decades in the national eye—and whose son would become Vice President of the United States—but also to explain the dramatic changes in the South that led to national political realignment.

Born on a small farm in the hills of Tennessee, Gore served in Congress from 1938 to 1970, first in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate. During that time, the United States became a global superpower and the South a two party desegregated region. Gore, whom Badger describes as a policy-oriented liberal, saw the federal government as the answer to the South's problems. He held a resilient faith, according to Badger, in the federal government to regulate wages and prices in World War II, to further social welfare through the New Deal and the Great Society, and to promote economic growth and transform the infrastructure of the South.

Gore worked to make Tennessee the "atomic capital" of the nation and to protect the Tennessee Valley Authority, while at the same time cosponsoring legislation to create the national highway system. He was more cautious in his approach to civil rights; though bolder than his moderate Southern peers, he struggled to adjust to the shifting political ground of the 1960s. His career was defined by his relationship with Lyndon Johnson, whose Vietnam policies Gore bitterly opposed. The injection of Christian perspectives into the state's politics ultimately distanced Gore's worldview from that of his constituents. Altogether, Gore's political rise and fall, Badger argues, illuminates the significance of race, religion, and class in the creation of the modern South.

Human rights are increasingly described as being in crisis. But are human rights really on the verge of disappearing? Human Rights Transformation in Practice argues that it is certainly the case that human rights organizations in many parts of the world are under threat, but that the ideals of justice, fairness, and equality inherent in human rights remain appealing globally—and that recognizing the continuing importance and strength of human rights requires looking for them in different places. These places are not simply the Human Rights Council or regular meetings of monitoring committees but also the offices of small NGOs and the streets of poor cities.

In Human Rights Transformation in Practice, editors Tine Destrooper and Sally Engle Merry collect various approaches to the questions of how human rights travel and how they are transformed, offering a corrective to those perspectives locating human rights only in formal institutions and laws. Contributors to the volume empirically examine several hypotheses about the factors that impact the vernacularization and localization of human rights: how human rights ideals become formalized in local legal systems, sometimes become customary norms, and, at other times, fail to take hold. Case studies explore the ways in which local struggles may inspire the further development of human rights norms at the transnational level. Through these analyses, the essays in Human Rights Transformation in Practice consider how the vernacularization and localization processes may be shaped by different causes of human rights violations, the perceived nature of violations, and the existence of networks and formal avenues for information-sharing.

Contributors: Sara L. M. Davis, Ellen Desmet, Tine Destrooper, Mark Goodale, Ken MacLean, Samuel Martínez, Sally Engle Merry, Charmain Mohamed, Vasuki Nesiah, Arne Vandenbogaerde, Wouter Vandenhole, Johannes M. Waldmüller.

Between 1780 and 1800, authors of imaginative literature in the new United States wanted to assert that their works, which bore obvious connections to anglophone literature on the far side of the Atlantic, nevertheless constituted a properly "American" tradition. No one had yet figured out, however, what it would mean to write like an American, what literature with an American origin would look like, nor what literary characteristics the elusive quality of Americanness could generate. Literature, American Style returns to this historical moment—decades before the romantic nationalism of Cooper, the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, or the iconoclastic poetics of Whitman—when a fantasy about the unique characteristics of U.S. literature first took shape, and when that notion was linked to literary style.

While late eighteenth-century U.S. literature advertised itself as the cultural manifestation of a radically innovative nation, Ezra Tawil argues, it was not primarily marked by invention or disruption. In fact, its authors self-consciously imitated European literary traditions while adapting them to a new cultural environment. These writers gravitated to the realm of style, then, because it provided a way of sidestepping the uncomfortable reality of cultural indebtedness; it was their use of style that provided a way of departing from European literary precedents. Tawil analyzes Noah Webster's plan to reform the American tongue; J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's fashioning of an extravagantly naïve American style from well-worn topoi; Charles Brockden Brown's adaptations of the British gothic; and the marriage of seduction plots to American "plain style" in works such as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette. Each of these works claims to embody something "American" in style yet, according to Tawil, remains legible only in the context of stylistic, generic, and conceptual forms that animated English cultural life through the century.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of the world's best-known and most translated documents. When it was presented to the United Nations General Assembly in December in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the writing group, called it a new "Magna Carta for all mankind." The passage of time has shown Roosevelt to have been largely correct in her prediction as to the declaration's importance. No other document in the world today can claim a comparable standing in the international community.

Roosevelt and French legal expert René Cassin have often been represented as the principal authors of the declaration. But in fact, it resulted from a collaborative effort involving a number of individuals in different capacities. One of the declaration's most important authors was the vice chairman of the Human Rights Commission, Peng Chun Chang (1892-1957), a Chinese diplomat and philosopher whose contribution has been the focus of growing attention in recent years. Indeed, it is Chang who deserves the credit for the universality and religious ecumenism that are now regarded as the declaration's defining features. Despite this, Chang's extraordinary contribution has been overlooked by historians.

Peng Chun Chang was a modern-day Renaissance man—teacher, scholar, university chancellor, playwright, diplomat, and politician. A true cosmopolitan, he was deeply involved in the cultural exchange between East and West, and the dramatic events of his life left a profound mark on his intellectual and political work. P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first biography of this extraordinary actor on the world stage, who belonged to the same generation as Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. Drawing on previously unknown sources, it casts new light on Chang's multifaceted life and involvement with one of modern history's most important documents.

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

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

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

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

Over the past three decades, China has transformed itself from a stagnant, inward, centrally planned economy into an animated, outward-looking, decentralized market economy. Its rapid growth and trade surpluses have caused uneasiness in Western governments, which perceive this growth to be a result of China's rejection of international protocols that protect intellectual property and its widespread theft and replication of Western technology and products. China's major trading partners, particularly the United States, persistently criticize China for delivering, at best, half-hearted enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) norms. Despite these criticisms, Zhenqing Zhang argues that China does respect international intellectual property rights, but only in certain cases. In Intellectual Property Rights in China, Zhang addresses the variation in the effectiveness of China's IPR policy and explains the mechanisms for the uneven compliance with global IPR norms.

Covering the areas of patent, copyright, and trademark, Zhang chronicles how Chinese IPR policy has evolved within the legacy of a planned economy and an immature market mechanism. In this environment, compliance with IPR norms is the result of balancing two factors: the need for short-term economic gains that depend on violating others' IPR and the aspirations for long-term sustained growth that requires respecting others' IPR. In case studies grounded in theoretical analysis as well as interviews and fieldwork, Zhang demonstrates how advocates for IPR, typically cutting-edge Chinese companies and foreign IPR holders, can be strong enough to persuade government officials to comply with IPR norms to achieve the country's long-term economic development goals. Conversely, he reveals the ways in which local governments protect IPR infringers because of their own political interests in raising tax revenues and creating jobs.

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, classical dogma and royal censorship worked together to prevent French plays from commenting on, or even worse, reenacting current political and judicial affairs. Criminal trials, meanwhile, were designed to be as untheatrical as possible, excluding from the courtroom live debates, trained orators, and spectators. According to Yann Robert, circumstances changed between 1750 and 1800 as parallel evolutions in theater and justice brought them closer together, causing lasting transformations in both.

Robert contends that the gradual merging of theatrical and legal modes in eighteenth-century France has been largely overlooked because it challenges two widely accepted narratives: first, that French theater drifted toward entertainment and illusionism during this period and, second, that the French justice system abandoned any performative foundation it previously had in favor of a textual one. In Dramatic Justice, he demonstrates that the inverse of each was true. Robert traces the rise of a "judicial theater" in which plays denounced criminals by name, even forcing them, in some cases, to perform their transgressions anew before a jeering public. Likewise, he shows how legal reformers intentionally modeled trial proceedings on dramatic representations and went so far as to recommend that judges mimic the sentimental judgment of spectators and that lawyers seek private lessons from actors. This conflation of theatrical and legal performances provoked debates and anxieties in the eighteenth century that, according to Robert, continue to resonate with present concerns over lawsuit culture and judicial entertainment.

Dramatic Justice offers an alternate history of French theater and judicial practice, one that advances new explanations for several pivotal moments in the French Revolution, including the trial of Louis XVI and the Terror, by showing the extent to which they were shaped by the period's conflicted relationship to theatrical justice.

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.

During the U.S. Civil War, a combination of innovative technologies and catastrophic events stimulated the development of news media into a central cultural force. Reacting to the dramatic increases in news reportage and circulation, poets responded to an urgent need to make their work immediately relevant to current events. As poetry's compressed forms traveled more quickly and easily than stories, novels, or essays through ephemeral print media, it moved alongside and engaged with news reports, often taking on the task of imagining the mental states of readers on receiving accounts from the war front. Newspaper and magazine poetry had long editorialized on political happenings—Indian wars, slavery and abolition, prison reform, women's rights—but the unprecedented scope of what has been called the first modern war, and the centrality of the issues involved for national futures, generated a powerful sense of single-mindedness among readers and writers that altered the terms of poetic expression.

In Battle Lines, Eliza Richards charts the transformation of Civil War poetry, arguing that it was fueled by a symbiotic relationship between the development of mass media networks and modern warfare. Focusing primarily on the North, Richards explores how poets working in this new environment mediated events via received literary traditions. Collectively and with a remarkable consistency, poems pulled out key features of events and drew on common tropes and practices to mythologize, commemorate, and ponder the consequences of distant battles. The lines of communication reached outward through newspapers and magazines to writers such as Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville, who drew their inspiration from their peers' poetic practices and reconfigured them in ways that bear the traces of their engagements.

Daniel O'Quinn investigates the complex interpersonal, political, and aesthetic relationships between Europeans and Ottomans in the long eighteenth century. Bookmarking his analysis with the conflict leading to the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz on one end and the 1815 bid for Greek independence on the other, he follows the fortunes of notable British, Dutch, and French diplomats to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire as they lived and worked according to the capitulations surrendered to the Sultan.

Closely reading a mixed archive of drawings, maps, letters, dispatches, memoirs, travel narratives, engraved books, paintings, poems, and architecture, O'Quinn demonstrates the extent to which the Ottoman state was not only the subject of historical curiosity in Europe but also a key foil against which Western theories of governance were articulated. Juxtaposing narrative accounts of diplomatic life in Constantinople, such as those contained in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the English ambassador, with visual depictions such as those of the costumes of the Ottoman elite produced by the French-Flemish painter Jean Baptiste Vanmour, he traces the dissemination of European representations and interpretations of the Ottoman Empire throughout eighteenth-century material culture.

In a series of eight interlocking chapters, O'Quinn presents sustained and detailed case studies of particular objects, personalities, and historical contexts, framing intercultural encounters between East and West through a set of key concerns: translation, mediation, sociability, and hospitality. Richly illustrated and provocatively argued, Engaging the Ottoman Empire demonstrates that study of the Ottoman world is vital to understanding European modernity.

In Ensuring Poverty, Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink assess the gendered history of welfare reform. They foreground arguments advanced by feminists for a welfare policy that would respect single mothers' rights while advancing their opportunities and assuring economic security for their families. Kornbluh and Mink consider welfare policy in the broad intersectional context of gender, race, poverty, and inequality. They argue that the subject of welfare reform always has been single mothers, the animus always has been race, and the currency always has been inequality. Yet public conversations about poverty and welfare, even today, rarely acknowledge the nexus between racialized gender inequality and the economic vulnerability of single-mother families.

Since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) by a Republican Congress and the Clinton administration, the gendered dimensions of antipoverty policy have receded from debate. Mink and Kornbluh explore the narrowing of discussion that has occurred in recent decades and the path charted by social justice feminists in the 1990s and early 2000s, a course rejected by policy makers. They advocate a return to the social justice approach built on the equality of mothers, especially mothers of color, in policies aimed at poor families.

The postwar United States has experienced many forms of populist politics, none more consequential than that of the blue-collar white ethnics who brought figures like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump to the White House. Blue-Collar Conservatism traces the rise of this little-understood, easily caricatured variant of populism by presenting a nuanced portrait of the supporters of Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo.

In 1971, Frank Rizzo became the first former police commissioner elected mayor of a major American city. Despite serving as a Democrat, Rizzo cultivated his base of support by calling for "law and order" and opposing programs like public housing, school busing, affirmative action, and other policies his supporters deemed unearned advantages for nonwhites. Out of this engagement with the interwoven politics of law enforcement, school desegregation, equal employment, and urban housing, Timothy J. Lombardo argues, blue-collar populism arose.

Based on extensive archival research, and with an emphasis on interrelated changes to urban space and blue-collar culture, Blue-Collar Conservatism challenges the familiar backlash narrative, instead contextualizing blue-collar politics within postwar urban and economic crises. Historian and Philadelphia-native Lombardo demonstrates how blue-collar whites did not immediately abandon welfare liberalism but instead selectively rejected liberal policies based on culturally defined ideas of privilege, disadvantage, identity, and entitlement. While grounding his analysis in the postwar era's familiar racial fissures, Lombardo also emphasizes class identity as an indispensable driver of blue-collar political engagement. Blue-Collar Conservatism ultimately shows how this combination of factors created one of the least understood but most significant political developments in recent American history.

William Livingston's American Revolution explores how New Jersey's first governor experienced the American Revolution and managed a state government on the war's front lines. A wartime bureaucrat, Livingston played a pivotal role in a pivotal place, prosecuting the war on a daily basis for eight years. Such second-tier founding fathers as Livingston were the ones who actually administered the war and guided the day-to-day operations of revolutionary-era governments, serving as the principal conduits between the local wartime situation and the national demands placed on the states.

In the first biography of Livingston published since the 1830s, James J. Gigantino's examination is as much about the position he filled as about the man himself. The reluctant patriot and his roles as governor, member of the Continental Congress, and delegate to the Constitutional Convention quickly became one, as Livingston's distinctive personality molded his office's status and reach. A tactful politician, successful lawyer, writer, satirist, political operative, gardener, soldier, and statesman, Livingston became the longest-serving patriot governor during a brutal war that he had not originally wanted to fight or believed could be won. Through Livingston's life, Gigantino examines the complex nature of the conflict and the choice to wage it, the wartime bureaucrats charged with administering it, the constant battle over loyalty on the home front, the limits of patriot governance under fire, and the ways in which wartime experiences affected the creation of the Constitution.

A constant feature of Jewish culture in the medieval Mediterranean was the dedication of panegyric texts in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and other languages to men of several ranks: scholars, communal leaders, courtiers, merchants, patrons, and poets. Although the imagery of nature and eroticism in the preludes to these poems is often studied, the substance of what follows is generally neglected, as it is perceived to be repetitive, obsequious, and less aesthetically interesting than other types of poetry from the period. In Dominion Built of Praise, Jonathan Decter demurs. As is the case with visual portraits, panegyrics operate according to a code of cultural norms that tell us at least as much about the society that produced them as the individuals they portray. Looking at the phenomenon of panegyric in Mediterranean Jewish culture from several overlapping perspectives—social, historical, ethical, poetic, political, and theological—he finds that they offer representations of Jewish political leadership as it varied across geographic area and evolved over time.

Decter focuses his analysis primarily on Jewish centers in the Islamic Mediterranean between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and also includes a chapter on Jews in the Christian Mediterranean through the fifteenth century. He examines the hundreds of panegyrics that have survived: some copied repeatedly in luxurious anthologies, others discarded haphazardly in the Cairo Geniza. According to Decter, the poems extolled conventional character traits ascribed to leaders not only diachronically within the Jewish political tradition but also synchronically within Islamic and, to a lesser extent, Christian civilization and political culture. Dominion Built of Praise reveals more than a superficial and functional parallel between Muslim and Jewish forms of statecraft and demonstrates how ideas of Islamic political legitimacy profoundly shaped the ways in which Jews conceptualized and portrayed their own leadership.

Borders traditionally served to insulate nations from other states and to provide bulwarks against intrusion by foreign armies. In the age of terrorism, borders are more frequently perceived as protection against threats from determined individuals arriving from elsewhere. After a deadly terrorist attack, leaders immediately encounter pressure to close their borders. As Nazli Avdan observes, cracking down on border crossings and policing migration enhance security. However, the imperatives of globalization demand that borders remain open to legal travel and economic exchange. While stricter border policies may be symbolically valuable and pragmatically safer, according to Avdan, they are economically costly, restricting trade between neighbors and damaging commercial ties. In Visas and Walls, Avdan argues that the balance between economics and security is contingent on how close to home threats, whether actual or potential, originate. When terrorist events affect the residents of a country or take place within its borders, economic ties matter less. When terrorist violence strikes elsewhere and does not involve its citizens, the unaffected state's investment in globalization carries the day.

Avdan examines the visa waiver programs and visa control policies of several countries in place in 2010, including Turkey's migration policies; analyzes the visa issuance practices of the European Union from 2003 until 2015; and explores how terrorism and trade affected states' propensities to build border walls in the post-World War II era. Her findings challenge the claim that border crackdowns are a reflexive response to terrorist violence and qualify globalists' assertions that economic globalization makes for open borders. Visas and Walls encourages policymakers and leaders to consider more broadly the effects of economic interdependence on policies governing borders and their permeability.

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.

As of September 2017, the United Nations alone deployed 110,000 uniformed personnel from 122 countries in fifteen peacekeeping operations worldwide. Soldiers in these missions are important actors who not only have considerable responsibility for implementing peace and stability operations but also have a concomitant influence on their goals and impact. Yet we know surprisingly little about the factors that prompt soldiers' behavior. Despite being deployed on the same mission under similar conditions, various national contingents display significant, systematic differences in their actions on the ground.

In Military Cultures in Peace and Stability Operations, Chiara Ruffa challenges the widely held assumption that military contingents, regardless of their origins, implement mandates in a similar manner. She argues instead that military culture—the set of attitudes, values, and beliefs instilled into an army and transmitted across generations of those in uniform —influences how soldiers behave at the tactical level. When soldiers are abroad, they are usually deployed as units, and when a military unit deploys, its military culture goes with it. By investigating where military culture comes from, Ruffa demonstrates why military units conduct themselves the way they do.

Between 2007 and 2014, Ruffa was embedded in French and Italian units deployed under comparable circumstances in two different kinds of peace and stability operations: the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Based on hundreds of interviews, she finds that while French units prioritized patrolling and the display of high levels of protection and force—such as body armor and weaponry—Italian units placed greater emphasis on delivering humanitarian aid. She concludes that civil-military relations and societal beliefs about the use of force in the units' home country have an impact on the military culture overseas, soldiers' perceptions and behavior, and, ultimately, consequences for their ability to keep the peace.

In the 1830s and '40s, a new preoccupation with the housing of the poor emerged in British print and visual culture. In response to cholera outbreaks, political unrest, and government initiatives, commentators evinced a keen desire to document housing conditions and agitate for housing reform. Consistently and strikingly, these efforts focused on opening the domestic interiors of the poor to public view. In Open Houses, Barbara Leckie addresses the massive body of print materials dedicated to convincing the reader of the wretchedness, unworthiness, and antipoetic quality of the living conditions of the poor and, accordingly, the urgent need for architectural reform. Putting these exposés into dialogue with the Victorian novel and the architectural idea (the manipulation of architecture and the built environment to produce certain effects), she illustrates the ways in which "looking into" the house animated new models for social critique and fictional form.

As housing conditions failed to improve despite the ubiquity of these documentary and fictional exposés, commentators became increasingly skeptical about the capacity of print to generate change. Focusing on Bleak House, Middlemarch, and The Princess Casamassima, Leckie argues that writers offered a persuasive counterargument for the novel's intervention in social debates. Open Houses returns the architectural idea to the central position it occupied in nineteenth-century England and reconfigures how we understand innovations in the genre of the novel, the agitation for social reform, and the contours of nineteenth-century modernity.

In America's early national period, Meriwether Lewis was a towering figure. Selected by Thomas Jefferson to lead the expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase, he was later rewarded by Jefferson with the governorship of the entire Louisiana Territory. Yet within three years, plagued by controversy over administrative expenses, Lewis found his reputation and career in tatters. En route to Washington to clear his name, he died mysteriously in a crude cabin on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Was he a suicide, felled by his own alcoholism and mental instability? Most historians have agreed. Patricia Tyson Stroud reads the evidence to posit another, even darker, ending for Lewis.

Stroud uses Lewis's find, the bitterroot flower, with its nauseously pungent root, as a symbol for his reputation as a purported suicide. It was this reputation that Thomas Jefferson promulgated in the memoir he wrote prefacing the short account of Lewis's historic expedition published five years after his death. Without investigation of any kind, Jefferson, Lewis's mentor from boyhood, reiterated undocumented assertions of Lewis's serious depression and alcoholism.

That Lewis was the courageous leader of the first expedition to explore the continent from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean has been overshadowed by presuppositions about the nature of his death. Stroud peels away the layers of misinformation and gossip that have obscured Lewis's rightful reputation. Through a retelling of his life, from his resourceful youth to the brilliance of his leadership and accomplishments as a man, Bitterroot shows that Jefferson's mystifying assertion about the death of his protégé is the long-held bitter root of the Meriwether Lewis story.

The Black Death of 1348-50 devastated Europe. With mortality estimates ranging from thirty to sixty percent of the population, it was arguably the most significant event of the fourteenth century. Nonetheless, its force varied across the continent, and so did the ways people responded to it. Surprisingly, there is little Jewish writing extant that directly addresses the impact of the plague, or even of the violence that sometimes accompanied it. This absence is particularly notable for Provence and the Iberian Peninsula, despite rich sources on Jewish life throughout the century.

In After the Black Death, Susan L. Einbinder uncovers Jewish responses to plague and violence in fourteenth-century Iberia and Provence. Einbinder's original research reveals a wide, heterogeneous series of Jewish literary responses to the plague, including Sephardic liturgical poetry; a medical tractate written by the Jewish physician Abraham Caslari; epitaphs inscribed on the tombstones of twenty-eight Jewish plague victims once buried in Toledo; and a heretofore unstudied liturgical lament written by Moses Nathan, a survivor of an anti-Jewish massacre that occurred in Tàrrega, Catalonia, in 1348.

Through elegant translations and masterful readings, After the Black Death exposes the great diversity in Jewish experiences of the plague, shaped as they were by convention, geography, epidemiology, and politics. Most critically, Einbinder traces the continuity of faith, language, and meaning through the years of the plague and its aftermath. Both before and after the Black Death, Jewish texts that deal with tragedy privilege the communal over the personal and affirm resilience over victimhood. Combined with archival and archaeological testimony, these texts ask us to think deeply about the men and women, sometimes perpetrators as well as victims, who confronted the Black Death. As devastating as the Black Death was, it did not shatter the modes of expression and explanation of those who survived it—a discovery that challenges the applicability of modern trauma theory to the medieval context.

In late medieval and early modern Europe, definitions of blood in medical writing were slippery and changeable: blood was at once the red fluid in human veins, a humor, a substance governing crucial Galenic models of bodily change, a waste product, a cause of corruption, a source of life, a medical cure, a serum appearing under the guise of all other bodily secretions, and—after William Harvey's discovery of its circulation—the cause of one of the greatest medical controversies of the premodern period. Figurative uses of "blood" are even more difficult to pin down. The term appeared in almost every sphere of life and thought, running through political, theological, and familial discourses.

Blood Matters explores blood as a distinct category of inquiry and draws together scholars who might not otherwise be in conversation. Theatrical and medical practice are found to converge in their approaches to the regulation of blood as a source of identity and truth; medieval civic life intersects with seventeenth-century science and philosophy; the concepts of class, race, gender, and sexuality find in the language of blood as many mechanisms for differentiation as for homogeneity; and fields as disparate as pedagogical theory, alchemy, phlebotomy, wet-nursing, and wine production emerge as historically and intellectually analogous. The volume's essays are organized within categories derived from medieval and early modern understanding of blood behaviors—Circulation, Wounds, Corruption, Proof, and Signs and Substances—thereby providing the terms through which interdisciplinary and cross-period conversations can take place.

Contributors: Helen Barr, Katharine Craik, Lesel Dawson, Eleanor Decamp, Frances E. Dolan, Elisabeth Dutton, Margaret Healy, Dolly Jørgensen, Helen King, Bonnie Lander Johnson, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Joe Moshenska, Tara Nummedal, Patricia Parker, Ben Parsons, Heather Webb, Gabriella Zuccolin.

Terrorist groups with a shared enemy or ideology have ample reason to work together, even if they are primarily pursuing different causes. Although partnering with another terrorist organization has the potential to bolster operational effectiveness, efficiency, and prestige, international alliances may expose partners to infiltration, security breaches, or additional counterterrorism attention. Alliances between such organizations, which are suspicious and secretive by nature, must also overcome significant barriers to trust—the exposure to risk must be balanced by the promise of increased lethality, resiliency, and longevity.

In Why Terrorist Groups Form International Alliances, Tricia Bacon argues that although it may seem natural for terrorist groups to ally, groups actually face substantial hurdles when attempting to ally and, when alliances do form, they are not evenly distributed across pairs. Instead, she demonstrates that when terrorist groups seek allies to obtain new skills, knowledge, or capacities for resource acquisition and mobilization, only a few groups have the ability to provide needed training, safe haven, infrastructure, or cachet. Consequently, these select few emerge as preferable partners and become hubs around which other groups cluster. According to Bacon, shared enemies and common ideologies do not cause alliances to form but create affinity to bind partners and guide partner selection.

Bacon examines partnerships formed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Al-Qaida, and Egyptian jihadist groups, among others, in a series of case studies spanning the dawn of international terrorism in the 1960s to the present. Why Terrorist Groups Form International Alliances advances our understanding of the motivations of terrorist alliances and offers insights useful to counterterrorism efforts to disrupt these dangerous relationships.

In New Legends of England, Catherine Sanok examines a significant, albeit previously unrecognized, phenomenon of fifteenth-century literary culture in England: the sudden fascination with the Lives of British, Anglo-Saxon, and other native saints. Embodying a variety of literary forms—from elevated Latinate verse, to popular traditions such as the carol, to translations of earlier verse legends into the medium of prose—the Middle English Lives of England's saints are rarely discussed in relation to one another or seen as constituting a distinct literary genre. However, Sanok argues, these legends, when grouped together were an important narrative forum for exploring overlapping forms of secular and religious community at local, national, and supranational scales: the monastery, the city, and local cults; the nation and the realm; European Christendom and, at the end of the fifteenth century, a world that was suddenly expanding across the Atlantic.

Reading texts such as the South English Legendary, The Life of St. Etheldrede, the Golden Legend, and poems about Saints Wenefrid and Ursula, Sanok focuses especially on the significance of their varied and often experimental forms. She shows how Middle English Lives of native saints revealed, through their literary forms, modes of affinity and difference that, in turn, reflected a diversity in the extent and structure of medieval communities. Taking up key questions about jurisdiction, temporality, and embodiment, New Legends of England presents some of the ways in which the Lives of England's saints theorized community and explored its constitutive paradox: the irresolvable tension between singular and collective forms of identity.

Modern studies of the religious reform movement of the central Middle Ages have often relied on contemporary accounts penned by Cistercian monks, who routinely exaggerated the importance of their own institutions while paying scant attention to the remarkable expansion of abbeys of Cistercian women. Yet by the end of the thirteenth century, Constance Hoffman Berman contends, there were more houses of Cistercian nuns across Europe than of monks. In The White Nuns, she charts the stages in the nuns' gradual acceptance by the abbots of the Cistercian Order's General Chapter and describes the expansion of the nuns' communities and their adaptation to a variety of economic circumstances in France and throughout Europe. While some sought contemplative lives of prayer, the ambition of many of these religious women was to serve the poor, the sick, and the elderly.

Focusing in particular on Cistercian nuns' abbeys founded between 1190 and 1250 in the northern French archdiocese of Sens, Berman reveals the frequency with which communities of Cistercian nuns were founded by rich and powerful women, including Queen Blanche of Castile, heiresses Countess Matilda of Courtenay and Countess Isabelle of Chartres, and esteemed ladies such as Agnes of Cressonessart. She shows how these founders and early patrons assisted early abbesses, nuns, and lay sisters by using written documents to secure rights and create endowments, and it is on the records of their considerable economic achievements that she centers her analysis.

The White Nuns considers Cistercian women and the women who were their patrons in a clear-eyed reading of narrative texts in their contexts. It challenges conventional scholarship that accepts the words of medieval monastic writers as literal truth, as if they were written without rhetorical skill, bias, or self-interest. In its identification of long-accepted misogynies, its search for their origins, and its struggle to reject such misreadings, The White Nuns provides a robust model for historians writing against received traditions.

The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary on "Piers Plowman" places the allegorical dream-vision of the poem within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the work, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement with its social world is unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful.

The Penn Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature, possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others, with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought about its intricacy and poetic achievements.

Covering passūs C.15-19 and B.13-17, Volume 4 of the Penn Commentary on "Piers Plowman" creates a complete vade mecum for readers, identifying and translating all Latin quotations, uncovering allusions, providing full cross-reference to other parts of the poem, drawing in relevant scholarship, and unraveling difficult passages. Like the other commentaries in the series, this volume contains an extensive overview and analysis of each passus, and the subdivisions within, large and small, and discusses all differences between the two versions. It pays careful attention to the poem at the literal level as well as to Latin texts that are analogues or even possible sources of Langland's thought and it emphasizes the comedy of the poem, of which these passūs offer a number of examples.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order.

In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Beiner contends that Nietzsche's hatred and critique of bourgeois, egalitarian societies has engendered new disciples on the populist right who threaten to overturn the modern liberal consensus. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche, thoroughly rejected the moral and political values that arose during the Enlightenment and came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. Understanding Heideggerian dissatisfaction with modernity, and how it functions as a philosophical magnet for those most profoundly alienated from the reigning liberal-democratic order, Beiner argues, will give us insight into the recent and unexpected return of the far right.

Beiner does not deny that Nietzsche and Heidegger are important thinkers; nor does he seek to expel them from the history of philosophy. But he does advocate that we rigorously engage with their influential thought in light of current events—and he suggests that we place their severe critique of modern liberal ideals at the center of this engagement.

One evening in 1980, a group of white friends, drinking at the Duke of Edinburgh pub on East Ham High Street, made a monstrous five-pound wager. The first person to kill a "Paki" would win the bet. Ali Akhtar Baig, a young Pakistani student who lived in the east London borough of Newham, was their chosen victim. Baig's murder was but one incident in a wave of antiblack racial attacks that were commonplace during the crisis of race relations in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. Ali Akhtar Baig's death also catalyzed the formation of a grassroots antiracist organization, Newham Monitoring Project (NMP) that worked to transform the racist victimization of African, African Caribbean and South Asian communities into campaigns for racial justice and social change.

In addition to providing a 24-hour hotline and casework services, NMP activists worked to mitigate the scourge of racial injustice that included daily racial harassment, hate crimes and antiblack police violence. Since the advent of the War on Terror, NMP widened its approach to support victims of the state's counterterror policies, which have contributed to an unfettered surge in Islamophobia.

These realities, as well as the many layers of gendered racism in contemporary Britain come to life through intimate ethnographic storytelling. The reader gets to know a broad range of east Londoners and antiracist activists whose intersecting experiences present a multifaceted portrait of British racism. Mohan Ambikaipaker examines the life experiences of these individuals through a strong theoretical lens that combines critical race theory and postcolonial studies. Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain shows how the deep processes of everyday political whiteness shape the state's failure to provide effective remedies for ethnic, racial, and religious minorities who continue to face violence and institutional racism.

In the wake of World War II, a number of institutions designed to promote a liberal global economic and geopolitical order were established—the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (forerunner of the World Trade Organization), and the World Bank in the economic sphere, and the United Nations in the geopolitical realm. Although these organizations were far from perfect, their actions promoted rising living standards and political freedoms for all. Liberalism thus reengineered represented a fundamental bet on the supremacy of democracy and the market economy, and spurred the transformation of North America, Western Europe, and Japan into prosperous societies, each with a large and vibrant middle class and a social safety net.

Now, however, this liberal geopolitical and economic order is under attack. The free movement of goods, services, money, people, and information that once formed the recipe for progress under liberalism is blamed by many for rising inequality, mass migrations, and the declining legitimacy of political parties, as well as the fragmentation of global superpower relations. Nationalism, xenophobia, and populism continue to advance at the right and left ends of the political spectrum, eroding the moderate middle ground.

In Rude Awakening, Mauro F. Guillén argues for an improved international arrangement to provide for stability and prosperity. He offers key considerations that a reinvented global liberal order must address—from finding a balance between markets and governments to confronting present realities, such as rapid technological change and social inequality, to recognizing that Europe and the United States can no longer attempt by themselves to steer the global economy. Rude Awakening affirms the potential of liberalism still to provide a flexible framework for governments, businesses, workers, and citizens to explore and make necessary compromises and coalitions for a better future.

The last decade has been a transformative period in Kashmir, the hotly contested and densely militarized border territory located high in the Himalayan mountains between India and Pakistan. Suppressed and unheard, Kashmiri political aspirations were subordinated to larger geopolitical concerns—by opposing governments laying claim to Kashmir, by security experts promoting bilateral peace settlements in the region, and by academic researchers studying the conflict. But since 2008, Kashmiris who grew up in the midst of armed insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare have been deploying new strategies for challenging India's state and military apparatus and projecting their legal and political claims for freedom from Indian rule to global audiences. Resisting Occupation in Kashmir analyzes the social and legal logic of India's occupation of Kashmir in relation to colonialism, militarization, power, democracy, and sovereignty. It also traces how Kashmiri youth are drawing on the region's long history of armed rebellion against Indian domination to reimagine the freedom struggle in the twenty-first century.

Resisting Occupation in Kashmir presents new ways of thinking and writing about Kashmir that cross conventional boundaries and point toward alternative ways of conceptualizing the past, present, and future of the region. The volume brings together junior and senior scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds who have conducted extensive fieldwork during the past decade in various regions of Kashmir. The contributors, many of whom were born and raised during the peak of the conflict in the 1990s, offer ethnographically grounded perspectives on contemporary social, legal, and political life in ways that demonstrate the multiplicity of experiences of Kashmiri communities. The essays highlight the ways in which this scholarly orientation—built through collaboration and dialogue across different kinds of borders—offers a new critical approach to Kashmir studies at this transformative and generative moment.

Contributors: Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, Farrukh Faheem, Gowhar Fazili, Bruce Hoffman, Mohamad Junaid, Seema Kazi, Ershad Mahmud, Cynthia Mahmood, Saiba Varma, Ather Zia.

They helped conquer the greatest armies ever assembled. Yet no sooner had they tasted victory after World War II than American generals suddenly found themselves governing their former enemies, devising domestic policy and making critical economic decisions for people they had just defeated in battle. In postwar Germany and Japan, this authority fell into the hands of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, along with a cadre of military officials like Lucius Clay and the Detroit banker Joseph Dodge.

In Sovereign Soldiers, Grant Madsen tells the story of how this cast of characters assumed an unfamiliar and often untold policymaking role. Seeking to avoid the harsh punishments meted out after World War I, military leaders believed they had to rebuild and rehabilitate their former enemies; if they failed they might cause an even deadlier World War III. Although they knew economic recovery would be critical in their effort, none was schooled in economics. Beyond their hopes, they managed to rebuild not only their former enemies but the entire western economy during the early Cold War.

Madsen shows how army leaders learned from the people they governed, drawing expertise that they ultimately brought back to the United States during the Eisenhower Administration in 1953. Sovereign Soldiers thus traces the circulation of economic ideas around the globe and back to the United States, with the American military at the helm.

As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX, intellectual superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the phenomenon known as the "suffering scholar" reached its apotheosis, a phenomenon illustrated by the popularity of works such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé des gens de lettres, first published in 1768. Though hardly limited to French-speaking Europe, the link between mental endeavor and physical disorder was embraced with particular vigor there, as was the tendency to imbue intellectuals with an aura of otherness and detachment from the world. Intellectuals and artists were portrayed as peculiarly susceptible to altered states of health as well as psyche—the combination of mental intensity and somatic frailty proved both the privileges and the perils of knowledge-seeking and creative endeavor.

In Suffering Scholars, Anne C. Vila focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that developed around great intellectuals during the French Enlightenment. Beginning with Tissot's work, which launched a subgenre of health advice aimed specifically at scholars, she demonstrates how writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mme de Staël, responded to the "suffering scholar" syndrome and helped to shape it. She traces the ways in which this syndrome influenced the cultural perceptions of iconic personae such as the philosophe, the solitary genius, and the learned lady. By showing how crucial the so-called suffering scholar was to debates about the mind-body relation as well as to sex and sensibility, Vila sheds light on the consequences book-learning was thought to have on both the individual body and the body politic, not only in the eighteenth century but also into the decades following the Revolution.

Struggles to define the soul of America roil the nation's politics. Debates over the roles of gays, lesbians, women, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and disputes over reproductive and abortion rights serve as rallying points for significant electoral groups and their representatives in government. Although the American family lies at the core of these fierce battles, the alignment of family with social or cultural issues is only a partial picture—a manifestation of the new right's late twentieth-century success in elevating "family values" over family economics.

Gwendoline Alphonso makes a significant contribution to the prevailing understanding of party evolution, contemporary political polarization, and the role of the family in American political development by placing family at the center of political and cultural clashes. She demonstrates how regional ideas about family in the twentieth century have continually shaped not only Republican and Democratic policy and ideological positions concerning race and gender but also their ideals concerning the economy and the state. Drawing on extensive data from congressional committee hearings, political party platforms, legislation sponsorship, and demographic data from the Progressive, post-World War II, and late twentieth-century periods in the United States, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties offers an intricate and sophisticated analysis of how deliberations around the ideal family became critical to characterizations of party politics. By revealing the deep historical interconnections between family and the two parties' ideologies and policy preferences, Alphonso reveals that American party development is more than a story of the state and its role in the economy but also, at its core, a debate over the political values of family and the social fabric it embodies.

Pentecostalism—Africa’s fastest growing form of Christianity—is known for displacing that which came before. Yet anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana witnessed neither massive growth nor dramatic rupture in the part of Mozambique where he worked. His research opens a new paradigm for the study of global Christianity, one centered on religious fluidity and existential mobility, and on how indigenous traditions remain vibrant and influential—even in the lives of converts.

In Faith in Flux, Premawardhana narrates a range of everyday hardships faced by a rural Makhuwa-speaking people—snakebites and elephant invasions, chronic illnesses and recurring wars, disputes within families and conflicts with the state—to explore how wellbeing sometimes entails not stability but mobility. In their ambivalent response to Pentecostalism, as in their historical resistance to sedentarization and other modernizing projects, the Makhuwa reveal crucial insights about what it is to be human: about changing as a means of enduring, becoming as a mode of being, and converting as a way of life.

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.

Pentecostalism—Africa’s fastest growing form of Christianity—is known for displacing that which came before. Yet anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana witnessed neither massive growth nor dramatic rupture in the part of Mozambique where he worked. His research opens a new paradigm for the study of global Christianity, one centered on religious fluidity and existential mobility, and on how indigenous traditions remain vibrant and influential—even in the lives of converts.

In Faith in Flux, Premawardhana narrates a range of everyday hardships faced by a rural Makhuwa-speaking people—snakebites and elephant invasions, chronic illnesses and recurring wars, disputes within families and conflicts with the state—to explore how wellbeing sometimes entails not stability but mobility. In their ambivalent response to Pentecostalism, as in their historical resistance to sedentarization and other modernizing projects, the Makhuwa reveal crucial insights about what it is to be human: about changing as a means of enduring, becoming as a mode of being, and converting as a way of life.

The city of Hebron is important to Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions as home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the burial site of three biblical couples: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. Today, Hebron is one of the epicenters of the Israel-Palestine conflict, consisting of two unequal populations: a traditional Palestinian majority without citizenship, and a fundamentalist Jewish settler minority with full legal rights. Contemporary Jewish settler practices and sensibilities, legal gray zones, and ruling complicities have remade Hebron into a divided Palestinian city surrounded by a landscape of fragmented, militarized strongholds.

In Settling Hebron, Tamara Neuman examines how religion functions as ideology in Hebron, with a focus on Jewish settler expansion and its close but ambivalent relationship to the Israeli state. Neuman presents the first critical ethnography of the Jewish settler populations in Kiryat Arba and the adjacent Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Hebron,considered by many Israelis as the most "ideological" of settlements. Through extensive fieldwork, interviews with settlers, soldiers, displaced Palestinian urban residents and farmers as well as archival research, Neuman challenges dismissive portraits of settlers as rigid, fanatical adherents of an anachronistic worldview. At the same time, she reveals the extent of disconnection between these settler communities and mainstream Modern Orthodox Judaism, both of which interpret written sources on the sacredness of land—biblical texts, rabbinic commentary, and mystical traditions—in radically different ways. Neuman also traces the violent results of a settler formation, Palestinian responses to settler encroachment, and the connection between ideological settlement and economic processes. Settling Hebron explores the complexity of Hebron's Jewish settler community in its own right—through its routine practices and rituals, its most extreme instances of fundamentalist revision and violence, and its strategic relationships with successive Israeli governments.

During the Middle Ages, female monasteries relied on priests to provide for their spiritual care, chiefly to celebrate Mass in their chapels but also to hear the confessions of their nuns and give last rites to their sick and dying. These men were essential to the flourishing of female monasticism during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, yet they rarely appear in scholarly accounts of the period. Medieval sources are hardly more forthcoming. Although medieval churchmen consistently acknowledged the necessity of male spiritual supervision in female monasteries, they also warned against the dangers to men of association with women. Nuns' Priests' Tales investigates gendered spiritual hierarchies from the perspective of nuns' priests—ordained men (often local monks) who served the spiritual needs of monastic women.

Celibacy, misogyny, and the presumption of men's withdrawal from women within the religious life have often been seen as markers of male spirituality during the period of church reform. Yet, as Fiona J. Griffiths illustrates, men's support and care for religious women could be central to male spirituality and pious practice. Nuns' priests frequently turned to women for prayer and intercession, viewing women's prayers as superior to their own, since they were the prayers of Christ's "brides." Casting nuns as the brides of Christ and adopting for themselves the role of paranymphus (bridesman, or friend of the bridegroom), these men constructed a triangular spiritual relationship in which service to nuns was part of their dedication to Christ. Focusing on men's spiritual ideas about women and their spiritual service to them, Nuns' Priests' Tales reveals a clerical counter-discourse in which spiritual care for women was depicted as a holy service and an act of devotion and obedience to Christ.

In 1872, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Science does not know its debt to imagination," words that still ring true in the worlds of health and health care today. The checklists and clinical algorithms of modern medicine leave little space for imagination, and yet we depend on creativity and ingenuity for the advancement of medicine—to diagnose unusual conditions, to innovate treatment, and to make groundbreaking discoveries. We know a great deal about the empirical aspects of medicine, but we know far less about what the medical imagination is, what it does, how it works, or how we might train it.

In The Medical Imagination, Sari Altschuler argues that this was not always so. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doctors understood the imagination to be directly connected to health, intimately involved in healing, and central to medical discovery. In fact, for physicians and other health writers in the early United States, literature provided important forms for crafting, testing, and implementing theories of health. Reading and writing poetry trained judgment, cultivated inventiveness, sharpened observation, and supplied evidence for medical research, while novels and short stories offered new perspectives and sites for experimenting with original medical theories.

Such imaginative experimentation became most visible at moments of crisis or novelty in American medicine, such as the 1790s yellow fever epidemics, the global cholera pandemics, and the discovery of anesthesia, when conventional wisdom and standard practice failed to produce satisfying answers to pressing questions. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, health research and practice relied on a broader complex of knowing, in which imagination often worked with and alongside observation, experience, and empirical research. In reframing the historical relationship between literature and health, The Medical Imagination provides a usable past for contemporary conversations about the role of the imagination—and the humanities more broadly—in health research and practice today.

Pirandello, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a little known to most English readers. Too few of his plays and stories have been translated. This hook, therefore, serves the double purpose of introducing the Italian genius through a summary of all his dramatic work and interpreting his accomplishments fron an artistic viewpoint.

As a background for his criticism, the Domenico Vittorini shows first how Pirandello's compassionate pessimism and tragic mockery resulted from his own tortured existence and in what way his art is relates to Italian literary tradition and contemporary thought. Proceeding chronologically, Pirandello's growth is traced from the elementary naturalism of his early writing, through his more reflective plays, to the crowning achievements of later years in which dramatic situations are approached from a highly intellectualized point of view.

Suburban sprawl has been the prevailing feature—and double-edged sword—of metropolitan America's growth and development since 1945. The construction of homes, businesses, and highways that were signs of the nation's economic prosperity also eroded the presence of agriculture and polluted the environment. This in turn provoked fierce activism from an array of local, state, and national environmental groups seeking to influence planning and policy. Many places can lay claim to these twin legacies of sprawl and the attendant efforts to curb its impact, but, according to John H. Spiers, metropolitan Washington, D.C., in particular, laid the foundations for a smart growth movement that blossomed in the late twentieth century.

In Smarter Growth, Spiers argues that civic and social activists played a key role in pushing state and local officials to address the environmental and fiscal costs of growth. Drawing on case studies including the Potomac River's cleanup, local development projects, and agricultural preservation, he identifies two periods of heightened environmental consciousness in the early to mid-1970s and the late 1990s that resulted in stronger development regulations and land preservation across much of metropolitan Washington.

Smarter Growth offers a fresh understanding of environmental politics in metropolitan America, giving careful attention to the differences between rural, suburban, and urban communities and demonstrating how public officials and their constituents engaged in an ongoing dialogue that positioned environmental protection as an increasingly important facet of metropolitan development over the past four decades. It reveals that federal policies were only one part of a larger decision-making process—and not always for the benefit of the environment. Finally, it underscores the continued importance of grassroots activists for pursuing growth that is environmentally, fiscally, and socially equitable—in a word, smarter.

At the time of its collapse in 2001, Enron was one of the largest companies in the world, boasting revenue of over $100 billion. During the 1990s economic boom, the Houston, Texas-based energy company had diversified into commodities and derivatives trading and many other ventures—some more legal than others. In the lead-up to Enron's demise, it was revealed that the company's financial success was sustained by a creatively planned and well-orchestrated accounting fraud. The story of Enron and its disastrous aftermath has since become a symbol of corporate excess and negligence, framed as an exceptional event in the annals of American business.

With Risk and Ruin, Gavin Benke places Enron's fall within the larger history and culture of late twentieth-century American capitalism. In many ways, Benke argues, Enron was emblematic of the transitions that characterized the era. Like Enron, the American economy had shifted from old industry to the so-called knowledge economy, from goods to finance, and from national to global modes of production.

Benke dives deep into the Enron archives, analyzing company newsletters, board meeting minutes, and courtroom transcriptions to chart several interconnected themes across Enron's history: the changing fortunes of Houston; the shifting attitudes toward business strategy, deregulation, and the function of the market among policy makers and business leaders; and the cultural context that accompanied and encouraged these broader political and economic changes. Considered against this backdrop, Enron takes on new significance as a potent reminder of the unaddressed issues still facing national and global economies.

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

What does the keyword "continence" in Love's Labor's Lost reveal about geopolitical boundaries and their breaching? What can we learn from the contemporary identification of the "quince" with weddings that is crucial for A Midsummer Night's Dream? How does the evocation of Spanish-occupied "Brabant" in Othello resonate with contemporary geopolitical contexts, wordplay on "Low Countries," and fears of sexual/territorial "occupation"? How does "supposes" connote not only sexual submission in The Taming of the Shrew but also the transvestite practice of boys playing women, and what does it mean for the dramatic recognition scene in Cymbeline?

With dazzling wit and erudition, Patricia Parker explores these and other critical keywords to reveal how they provide a lens for interpreting the language, contexts, and preoccupations of Shakespeare's plays. In doing so, she probes classical and historical sources, theatrical performance practices, geopolitical interrelations, hierarchies of race, gender, and class, and the multiple significances of "preposterousness," including reversals of high and low, male and female, Latinate and vulgar, "sinister" or backward writing, and latter ends both bodily and dramatic.

Providing innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives on Shakespeare, from early to late and across dramatic genres, Parker's deeply evocative readings demonstrate how easy-to-overlook textual or semantic details reverberate within and beyond the Shakespearean text, and suggest that the boundary between language and context is an incontinent divide.

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.

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.

When the Thai state violently suppressed a massive prodemocracy protest in "Black May," 1992, it initiated an unprecedented period in Thailand. The military, shamed and chagrined, withdrew from political life, and the democracy movement had more latitude than ever before in Thailand's history, gaining an institutional presence previously unseen. This extraordinary moment created a unique opportunity for the human rights movement to emerge, for the first time, on a national scale in Thailand.

Don F. Selby examines this era of Thai political history to determine how and why the time was ripe for such developments. By placing greater emphasis on human rights as an anthropological concern, he focuses on the understandings that social actors draw from human rights struggles. He concludes that what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories are the ways that advocates engaged, contested, or reworked debates around Buddhism in its relationship to rule and social structure; political struggle in relation to a narrative of Thai democracy that disavowed egalitarian movements; and traditional standards of social stratification and face-saving practices. In this way, human rights ideals in Thailand emerge less from global-local translation and more as a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics.

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

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

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

With the death of associate justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court was plunged into crisis. Refusing to hold hearings or confirm the nominee of a Democratic president almost a year away from a presidential election, the Republican-controlled Senate held the court hostage, forcing it to do its work through nearly the entire term ending in June 2017 with just eight justices. In American Justice 2017: The Supreme Court in Crisis, Kimberly Robinson examines the way individual justices and the institution as a whole reacted to this unprecedented, politically fraught situation.

In public, the justices put on brave faces, waiting for the confirmation battle to play itself out, while indicating in occasional statements that the court would muddle through just fine. In private, though, things appear to have been more complicated. Narrow decisions, lackluster choice of cases, and odd bedfellows teaming up on the same sides of opinions and dissents give us a hint of the strenuous effort the eight justices made to uphold the integrity of the institution in the face of hurricane-force partisan gales.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain saw the proposal of so many endeavors called "projects"—a catchphrase for the daring, sometimes dangerous practice of shaping the future—that Daniel Defoe dubbed his era a "Projecting Age." These ideas spanned a wide variety of scientific, technological, and intellectual interventions intended for the betterment of England. But for all the fanfare surrounding them, few such schemes actually materialized, leaving scores of defunct visions, from Defoe's own attempt to farm cats for perfume, to Mary Astell's proposal to charter a college for women, to countless ventures for improving land, streamlining government, and inventing new consumer goods. Taken together, these failed plans form a compelling alternative history of a Britain that might have been.

The Wreckage of Intentions offers a comprehensive and critical account of projects, exploring the historical memory surrounding these concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society during a period defined by revolutions in finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy. Using methods of literary analysis, David Alff shows how projects began as written proposals, circulated as print objects, spurred physical undertakings, and provoked responses in the realms of poetry, fiction, and drama. Mapping this process discloses the ways in which eighteenth-century authors applied their faculties of imagination to achieve finite goals and, in so doing, devised new ways of seeing the world through its future potential. Approaching old projects through the language, landscapes, data, and personas they left behind, Alff contends this vision was, and remains, vital to the functions of statecraft, commerce, science, religion, and literature.

Why would the sprawling thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle have been attributed to Walter Map, a twelfth-century writer from the Anglo-Welsh borderlands known for his stinging satire, religious skepticism, ghost stories, and irrepressible wit? And why, though the attribution is spurious, is it not, in some ways, implausible?

Joshua Byron Smith sets out to answer these and other questions in the first English-language monograph on Walter Map—and in so doing, he offers a new explanation for how narratives about the pre-Saxon inhabitants of Britain, including King Arthur and his knights, first circulated in England. Smith contends that it was inventive clerics like Walter, and not traveling minstrels or professional translators, who popularized these stories. Smith examines Walter's only surviving work, the De nugis curialium, to demonstrate that it is not the disheveled text that scholars have imagined but rather five separate works in various stages of completion. This in turn provides new evidence to support his larger contention, that ecclesiastical networks of textual exchange played a major role in exporting Welsh literary material into England.

Medieval readers incorrectly envisioned Walter withdrawing ancient Latin documents about the Holy Grail from a monastery and compiling them in order to compose the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. In this detail they were wrong, Smith acknowledges, but a model of literary transmission that is not vernacular and popular but Latinate and ecclesiastical demands our serious consideration.

The ruthless military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 betrayed the country's people, presiding over massive disappearances of its citizenry and, in the process, destroying the state's trustworthiness as the guardian of safety and well-being. Desperate relatives risked their lives to find the disappeared, and one group of mothers defied the repressive regime with weekly protests at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. How do societies cope with human losses and sociocultural traumas in the aftermath of such instances of political violence and state terror?

In Argentina Betrayed, Antonius C. G. M. Robben demonstrates that the dynamics of trust and betrayal that convulsed Argentina during the dictatorship did not end when democracy returned but rather persisted in confrontations over issues such as the truth about the disappearances, the commemoration of the past, and the guilt and accountability of perpetrators. Successive governments failed to resolve these debates because of erratic policies made under pressure from both military and human rights groups. Mutual mistrust between the state, retired officers, former insurgents, and bereaved relatives has been fueled by recurrent revelations and controversies that prevent Argentine society from conclusively coming to terms with its traumatic past.

With thirty years of scholarly engagement with Argentina—and drawing on his extensive, fair-minded interviews with principals at all points along the political spectrum—Robben explores how these ongoing dynamics have influenced the complicated mourning over violent deaths and disappearances. His analysis deploys key concepts from the contemporary literature of human rights, transitional justice, peace and reconciliation, and memory studies, including notions of trauma, denial, accountability, and mourning. The resulting volume is an indispensable contribution to a better understanding of the terrible crimes committed by the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s and their aftermath.

In the nineteenth century, politicians transformed a disease-infested bog on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan into an intensively managed waterscape supporting the life and economy of Chicago, now America's third-most populous city. In Liquid Capital, Joshua A. T. Salzmann shows how, through a combination of entrepreneurship, civic spirit, and bareknuckle politics, the Chicago waterfront became a hub of economic and cultural activity while also the site of many of the nation's precendent-setting decisions about public land use and environmental protection. Through the political saga of waterfront development, Salzmann illuminates Chicago's seemingly paradoxical position as both a paragon of buccaneering capitalism and assertive state power.

The list of actions undertaken by local politicians and boosters to facilitate the waterfront's success is long: officials reversed a river, built a canal to fuse the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds, decorated the lakeshore with parks and monuments, and enacted regulations governing the use of air, land, and water. With these feats of engineering and statecraft, they created a waterscape conducive to commodity exchange, leisure tourism, and class harmony—in sum, an invaluable resource for profit making. Their actions made the city's growth and the development of its western hinterlands possible. Liquid Capital sheds light on these precedent-making policies, their effect on Chicago's development as a major economic and cultural force, and the ways in which they continue to shape legislation regarding the use of air and water.

In 2007, after serving almost fifteen years on the Philadelphia City Council, Michael A. Nutter became the ninety-eighth mayor of his hometown of Philadelphia. From the time he was sworn in until he left office in 2016, there were triumphs and challenges, from the mundane to the unexpected, from snow removal, trash collection, and drinkable water, to the Phillies' World Series win, Hurricane Irene, Occupy Philadelphia, and the Papal visit. By the end of Nutter's tenure, homicides were at an almost fifty-year low, high-school graduation and college-degree attainment rates increased significantly, and Philadelphia's population had grown every year. Nutter also recruited businesses to open in Philadelphia, motivating them through tax reforms, improved services, and international trade missions.

Mayor begins with Nutter's early days in politics and ultimate run for mayor, when he formed a coalition from a base of support that set the stage for a successful term. Transitioning from campaigning to governing, Nutter shares his vast store of examples to depict the skills that enable a city politician to lead effectively and illustrates how problem-solving pragmatism is essential for success. With a proven track record of making things work, Nutter asserts that mayoring promises more satisfaction and more potential achievements—for not only the mayor but also the governed—than our fractious political system would have us believe.

Detailing the important tasks that mayoral administrations do, Nutter tells the compelling story of a dedicated staff working together to affect positively the lives of the people of Philadelphia every day. His anecdotes, advice, and insights will excite and interest anyone with a desire to understand municipal government.

Warner Mifflin—energetic, uncompromising, and reviled—was the key figure connecting the abolitionist movements before and after the American Revolution. A descendant of one of the pioneering families of William Penn's "Holy Experiment," Mifflin upheld the Quaker pacifist doctrine, carrying the peace testimony to Generals Howe and Washington across the blood-soaked Germantown battlefield and traveling several thousand miles by horse up and down the Atlantic seaboard to stiffen the spines of the beleaguered Quakers, harried and exiled for their neutrality during the war for independence. Mifflin was also a pioneer of slave reparations, championing the radical idea that after their liberation, Africans in America were entitled to cash payments and land or shared crop arrangements. Preaching "restitution," Mifflin led the way in making Kent County, Delaware, a center of reparationist doctrine.

After the war, Mifflin became the premier legislative lobbyist of his generation, introducing methods of reaching state and national legislators to promote antislavery action. Detesting his repeated exercise of the right of petition and hating his argument that an all-seeing and affronted God would punish Americans for "national sins," many Southerners believed Mifflin was the most dangerous man in America—"a meddling fanatic" who stirred the embers of sectionalism after the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. Yet he inspired those who believed that the United States had betrayed its founding principles of natural and inalienable rights by allowing the cancer of slavery and the dispossession of Indian lands to continue in the 1790s.

Writing in beautiful prose and marshaling fascinating evidence, Gary B. Nash constructs a convincing case that Mifflin belongs in the Quaker antislavery pantheon with William Southeby, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet.

Rebecca Lemon illuminates a previously-buried conception of addiction, as a form of devotion at once laudable, difficult, and extraordinary, that has been concealed by the persistent modern link of addiction to pathology. Surveying sixteenth-century invocations, she reveals how early moderns might consider themselves addicted to study, friendship, love, or God. However, she also uncovers their understanding of addiction as a form of compulsion that resonates with modern scientific definitions. Specifically, early modern medical tracts, legal rulings, and religious polemic stressed the dangers of addiction to alcohol in terms of disease, compulsion, and enslavement. Yet the relationship between these two understandings of addiction was not simply oppositional, for what unites these discourses is a shared emphasis on addiction as the overthrow of the will.

Etymologically, "addiction" is a verbal contract or a pledge, and even as sixteenth-century audiences actively embraced addiction to God and love, writers warned against commitment to improper forms of addiction, and the term became increasingly associated with disease and tyranny. Examining canonical texts including Doctor Faustus, Twelfth Night, Henry IV, and Othello alongside theological, medical, imaginative, and legal writings, Lemon traces the variety of early modern addictive attachments. Although contemporary notions of addiction seem to bear little resemblance to its initial meanings, Lemon argues that the early modern period's understanding of addiction is relevant to our modern conceptions of, and debates about, the phenomenon.

In the thirty-five years before the Civil War, it became increasingly difficult for Americans outside the world of politics to have frank and open discussions about the institution of slavery, as divisive sectionalism and heated ideological rhetoric circumscribed public debate. To talk about slavery was to explore—or deny—its obvious shortcomings, its inhumanity, its contradictions. To celebrate it required explaining away the nation's proclaimed belief in equality and its public promise of rights for all, while to condemn it was to insult people who might be related by ties of blood, friendship, or business, and perhaps even to threaten the very economy and political stability of the nation.

For this reason, Paul D. Naish argues, Americans displaced their most provocative criticisms and darkest fears about the institution onto Latin America. Naish bolsters this seemingly counterintuitive argument with a compelling focus on realms of public expression that have drawn sparse attention in previous scholarship on this era. In novels, diaries, correspondence, and scientific writings, he contends, the heat and bluster of the political arena was muted, and discussions of slavery staged in these venues often turned their attention south of the Rio Grande.

At once familiar and foreign, Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and the independent republics of Spanish America provided rhetorical landscapes about which everyday citizens could speak, through both outright comparisons or implicit metaphors, what might otherwise be unsayable when talking about slavery at home. At a time of ominous sectional fracture, Americans of many persuasions—Northerners and Southerners, Whigs and Democrats, scholars secure in their libraries and settlers vulnerable on the Mexican frontier—found unity in their disparagement of Latin America. This displacement of anxiety helped create a superficial feeling of nationalism as the country careened toward disunity of the most violent, politically charged, and consequential sort.

The era of the Roman Empire was distinguished by an explosion of images and texts in a variety of media—metal, papyrus, mosaic, gemstone—all designed to protect, heal, or grant some abstract benefit to the persons who wore them on their bodies or placed them in their homes. In the past scholars have explained this proliferation of readily identifiable amulets by a sudden need for magic or by a precipitous rise in superstition or anxiety in this period, connected, perhaps, with the internal breakdown of Greek rationalism or the migration of superstitious peoples from the East.

Christopher A. Faraone argues, instead, that these amulets were not invented in this period as a result of an alteration in the Roman worldview or a tidal wave of "oriental" influence, but rather that they only become visible to us in the archaeological record as a result of a number of technical innovations and transformations: the increased epigraphic habit of the Imperial period, the miniaturization of traditional domestic amulets, like the triple-faced Hecate, on durable gems, or the utilization of newly crafted Egyptianizing iconography. In short, it is only when explicitly protective or curative texts, or strange new images, are added to traditional Greek amulets, that modern observers realize that these objects were thought to have the power to protect or heal all along. The real question addressed by the book, then, is not why we can identify so many amulets in the Roman Imperial period but, rather, why we have failed to identify them in artifacts of the preceding centuries.

Featuring more than 120 illustrations, The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times is not only a tremendous resource for those working in the fields of ancient magic and religion but also an essential reference for those interested in the religion, culture, and history of the ancient Mediterranean.

Explains how various Islamists have endorsed human rights, democracy, and justice to gain influence and mobilize supporters

Islamist political parties and groups are on the rise throughout the Muslim world and in Muslim communities in the West. Owing largely to the threat of terrorism, political Islam is often portrayed as a monolithic movement embodying fundamentalism and theocracy, an image magnified by the rise of populism and xenophobia in the United States and Europe. Reality, however, is far more complicated. Political Islam has evolved considerably since its spectacular rise decades ago, and today it features divergent viewpoints and contributes to discrete but simultaneous developments worldwide. This is a new political Islam, more global in scope but increasingly local in action.

Emmanuel Karagiannis offers a sophisticated analysis of the different manifestations of contemporary Islamism. In a context of global economic and social changes, he finds local manifestations of Islamism are becoming both more prevalent and more diverse. Many Islamists turn to activism, still more participate formally in the democratic process, and some, in far fewer numbers, advocate violence—a wide range of political persuasions and tactics that reflects real and perceived political, cultural, and identity differences.

Synthesizing prodigious research and integrating insights from the globalization debate and the literature on social movements, The New Political Islam seeks to explain the processes and factors leading to distinctive fusions of "the global" and "the local" across the landscape of contemporary political Islam. Examining converts to Islam in Europe, nonviolent Islamists with global reach, Islamist parties in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia, and militant Shia and Sunni groups in Syria and Iraq, Karagiannis demonstrates that Islamists have embraced ideas and practices from the global marketplace and have attempted to implement them locally. He looks closely at the ways in which Islamist activists, politicians, and militants have utilized the language of human rights, democracy, and justice to gain influence and popular support and to contend for power.

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.

Histories of the German Dominican order have long presented a grand narrative of its origin, fall, and renewal: a Golden Age at the order's founding in the thirteenth century, a decline of Dominican learning and spirituality in the fourteenth, and a vibrant renewal of monastic devotion by Dominican "Observants" in the fifteenth. Dominican nuns are presumed to have moved through a parallel arc, losing their high level of literacy in Latin over the course of the fourteenth century. However, unlike the male Dominican friars, the nuns are thought never to have regained their Latinity, instead channeling their spiritual renewal into mystical experiences and vernacular devotional literature. In Ruling the Spirit, CJ Jones revises this conventional narrative by arguing for a continuous history of the nuns' liturgical piety. Dominican women did not lose their piety and literacy in the fifteenth century, as is commonly believed, but instead were urged to reframe their devotion around the observance of the Divine Office.

Jones grounds her research in the fifteenth-century liturgical library of St. Katherine's in Nuremberg, which was reformed to Observance in 1428 and grew to be one of the most significant convents in Germany, not least for its library. Many of the manuscripts owned by the convent are didactic texts, written by friars for Dominican sisters from the fourteenth through the fifteenth century. With remarkable continuity across genres and centuries, this literature urges the Dominican nuns to resume enclosure in their convents and the strict observance of the Divine Office, and posits ecstatic experience as an incentive for such devotion. Jones thus rereads the "sisterbooks," vernacular narratives of Dominican women, long interpreted as evidence of mystical hysteria, as encouragement for nuns to maintain obedience to liturgical practice. She concludes that Observant friars viewed the Divine Office as the means by which Observant women would define their communities, reform the terms of Observant devotion, and carry the order into the future.

In the early twenty-first century, the citizens of many Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, elected left-wing governments, explicitly rejecting and attempting to reverse the policies of neoliberal structural economic adjustment that had prevailed in the region during the 1990s. However, in other countries such as Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru continuity and even extension of the neoliberal agenda have been the norm.

What were the consequences of rejecting the neoliberal consensus in Latin America? Why did some countries stay on the neoliberal course? Contributors to Latin America Since the Left Turn address these questions and more as they frame the tensions and contradictions that currently characterize Latin American societies and politics. Divided into three sections, the book begins with an examination of the political economy, from models of development, to taxation and spending patterns, to regionalization of trade and human migration. The second section analyzes the changes in democracy and political identities. The last part explores the themes of citizenship, constitutionalism, and new forms of civic participation. With essays by the foremost scholars in the field, Latin America Since the Left Turn not only delves into the cases of specific countries but also surveys the region as a whole.

Contributors: Isabella Alcañiz, Sandra Botero, Marcella Cerrutti, George Ciccariello-Maher, Tula G. Falleti, Roberto Gargarella, Adrian Gurza Lavalle, Juliet Hooker, Evelyne Huber, Ernesto Isunza Vera, Nora Lustig, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Emilio A. Parrado, Claudiney Pereira, Thamy Pogrebinschi, Irina Carlota Silber, David Smilde, John D. Stephens, Maristella Svampa, Oscar Vega Camacho, Gisela Zaremberg.

How does a country in the process of becoming a world power prepare its citizens for the responsibilities of global leadership? In Improvised Continent, Richard Cándida Smith answers this question by illuminating the forgotten story of how, over the course of the twentieth century, cultural exchange programs, some run by the government and others by philanthropies and major cultural institutions, brought many of the most important artists and writers of Latin America to live and work in the United States.

Improvised Continent is the first book to focus on cultural exchange inside the United States and how Americans responded to Latin American writers and artists. Moving masterfully between the history of ideas, biography, institutional history and politics, and international relations, and engaging works in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, Cándida Smith synthesizes over seventy years of Pan-American cultural activity in the United States.

The stories behind Diego Rivera's murals, the movies of Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, the photography of Genevieve Naylor, and the novels of Carlos Fuentes—these works and artists, along with many others, challenged U.S. citizens about their place in the world and about the kind of global relations the country's interests could allow. Improvised Continent provides a profoundly compassionate portrayal of the Latin American artists and writers who believed their practices might create a more humane world.

During the thirty years following ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the first American novelists carried on an argument with their British counterparts that pitted direct democracy against representative liberalism. Such writers as Hannah Foster, Isaac Mitchell, Royall Tyler, Leonore Sansay, and Charles Brockden Brown developed a set of formal tropes that countered, move for move, those gestures and conventions by which Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and others created their closed worlds of self, private property, and respectable society. The result was a distinctively American novel that generated a system of social relations resembling today's distributed network. Such a network operated counter to the formal protocols that later distinguished the great tradition of the American novel.

In Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse show how these first U.S. novels developed multiple paths to connect an extremely diverse field of characters, redefining private property as fundamentally antisocial and setting their protagonists to the task of dispersing that property—its goods and people—throughout the field of characters. The populations so reorganized proved suddenly capable of thinking and acting as one. Despite the diverse local character of their subject matter and community of readers, the first U.S. novels delivered this argument in a vernacular style open and available to all. Although it differed markedly from the style we attribute to literary authors, Armstrong and Tennenhouse argue, such democratic writing lives on in the novels of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and James.

Werner Scholem never took the easy path. Born in 1895 into the Berlin Jewish middle class, he married a young non-Jewish woman of proletarian background. He was the youngest member of the Prussian Parliament in the 1920s, one of the leaders of the German Communist Party, and the editor of the influential journal The Red Flag. As an outspoken critic of Stalin, he was soon expelled from the party, only to take up a position at the head of a revolutionary Trotskyite faction in the years before 1933. Reviled by the National Socialists as a Communist and a Jew, he was among the first to be arrested when Hitler rose to power and, after a long incarceration, was murdered in Buchenwald.

In Werner Scholem: A German Life Mirjam Zadoff has written a book that is at once a biography of an individual, a family chronicle, and the story of an entire era. It is an account of the ruptures within a society and of the growing insecurity in which German Jews lived between the two world wars—and especially of two brothers who chose opposing paths out of the shared conviction that there was no future for Jews in Germany after the First World War. While Werner pinned his hopes on a universal revolution he would never see, the younger Gerhard emigrated to Palestine where, as Gershom, he would choose revolutionary Zionism and the reanimation of ancient strains of Jewish mysticism.

From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against this background, Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. In the two centuries since, her masterpiece has been celebrated as a Gothic classic and its symbolic resonance has driven the global success of its publication, translation, and adaptation in theater, film, art, and literature. However, in Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Frankenstein is more than an original and paradigmatic work of science fiction—it is a profound reflection on a radical moral and political question: do children have rights?

Botting contends that Frankenstein invites its readers to reason through the ethical consequences of a counterfactual premise: what if a man had used science to create a human life without a woman? Immediately after the Creature's "birth," his scientist-father abandons him and the unjust and tragic consequences that follow form the basis of Frankenstein's plot. Botting finds in the novel's narrative structure a series of interconnected thought experiments that reveal how Shelley viewed Frankenstein's Creature for what he really was—a stateless orphan abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by law. The novel, therefore, compels readers to consider whether children have the right to the fundamental means for their development as humans—namely, rights to food, clothing, shelter, care, love, education, and community.

In Botting's analysis, Frankenstein emerges as a conceptual resource for exploring the rights of children today, especially those who are disabled, stateless, or genetically modified by medical technologies such as three-parent in vitro fertilization and, perhaps in the near future, gene editing. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child concludes that the right to share love and community, especially with parents or fitting substitutes, belongs to all children, regardless of their genesis, membership, or social status.

Adherence to basic human rights norms has become an expected feature of states throughout the world. In Europe, the promotion and protection of human rights through national governments has been enhanced by the diversity of intergovernmental organizations committed to this cause. The latest addition to the continent's rights organizations arrived ten years ago when, based on the EU's Lisbon Treaty, the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) was created as a functional institution to highlight and improve human rights within EU member states. In contrast to other regulatory agencies in the EU, the FRA provides a research-based advisory function for EU institutions and legislation and performs a public-diplomacy function in promoting fundamental rights across EU member states.

The linking of civil society with internal rights policies has yet produced very little scholarship. Markus Thiel's European Civil Society and Human Rights Advocacy not only fills this vacuum: it also offers a timely analysis in the context of Europe's proliferating human rights challenges, like the current refugee crises and the nationalist responses that geopolitical changes have provoked. European Civil Society and Human Rights Advocacy examines the interaction between the FRA and hundreds of transnational civil society organizations working with and on behalf of vulnerable populations in EU member states and probes the high normative standards of human rights attainment and transnational participatory governance in the EU.

Thiel surveys how networking among civil society organizations takes place, to what extent they are able to set the agenda or insert themselves into EU decision-making procedures, and how they are able to exploit the opportunity structure presented by the FRA's institutionalization of a voice for civil society. Thiel draws conclusions for the larger issues of human rights promotion, transnational citizenship, and participatory governance in the region, reflecting broadly and critically on the legitimacy of EU human rights norms through a political sociology perspective.

A fresh interpretation of U.S. relations with the Muslim world since 1979

Americans' concerns about women's human rights in Muslim countries were triggered by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and have evolved within the context of long-standing Western stereotypes about Muslims, as well as transnational feminism and the global human rights movement. As these frameworks simultaneously competed against and reinforced one another, U.S. public conversations about Muslim women intensified, culminating in feminist campaigns and U.S. policies that aimed to defend women's rights in Islamic countries—such was the case with the Clinton administration's decision not to recognize the Taliban regime after they seized control of Afghanistan in 1996.

U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights provides a fresh interpretation of U.S. relations with the Muslim world and, more broadly, U.S. foreign relations history and the history of human rights. Kelly J. Shannon argues that, as U.S. attention to the Middle East and other Muslim-majority regions became more focused and sustained, the issue of women's human rights in Islamic societies was one that Americans gradually identified as vitally important to U.S. foreign policy. Based on an analysis of a wide range of sources—including U.S. government and United Nations documents, oral histories, NGO archival records, news media, scholarship, films and television, and novels—and a wide range of actors including journalists, academics, activists, NGOs, the public, Muslim women, Islamic fundamentalists, and U.S. policymakers—the book challenges traditional interpretations of U.S. foreign policy that assert the primacy of "hard power" concerns in U.S. decision making. By reframing U.S.-Islamic relations with respect to women's rights, and revealing faulty assumptions about the drivers of U.S. foreign policy, Shannon sheds new light on U.S. identity and policy creation and alters the standard narratives of the U.S. relationship with the Muslim world in the closing years of the Cold War and the emergence of the post-Cold War era.

In the past decade, debates over immigrant rights and family rights, and accompanying concerns over birthright citizenship, have taken center stage in popular media and mainstream political debates. These debates, however, frequently overlook the role of the public child welfare system in the United States—the agency charged with protecting children and maintaining the integrity of families. Based on research conducted in the San Diego-Tijuana region between 2008 and 2012, Fragile Families tells the stories of children, parents, social workers, and legal actors enmeshed in the child welfare system, and sheds light on the particular challenges faced by the children of detained and deported non-U.S. citizen parents who are simultaneously caught up in the immigration system in this border region.

Many families come into contact with child welfare services because of the precariousness of their lives—unsafe housing, unstable employment, and the conditions of violence, drug use, and domestic violence made visible by the heightened police presence in impoverished communities. Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez examines the character of child welfare decision-making processes and how discretionary decisions constitute the central avenue through which race, citizenship, and other cultural processes inflect child welfare practice in a manner that disproportionately impacts Latina/o families—both undocumented and U.S. citizens. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork to look at how immigration enforcement and child welfare play central roles in the ongoing production of citizenship, race, and national belonging, Fragile Families focuses on the everyday experiences of Latina/o families whose lives are shaped at the nexus of child welfare services and immigration enforcement.

Not much can be known about the life of Maximianus, who has been called "the last of the Roman poets," beyond what can be inferred from his poetry. He was most likely a native of Tuscany, probably lived until the middle of the sixth century, and, at an advanced age, went as a diplomat to the emperor's court at Constantinople.

A. M. Juster has translated the complete elegies of Maximianus faithfully but not literally, resulting in texts that work beautifully as poetry in English. Replicating the feel of the original Latin verse, he alternates iambic hexameter and pentameter in couplets and imitates Maximianus's pronounced internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. The first elegy is the longest and establishes the voice of the speaker: a querulous old man, full of the indignities of aging, which he contrasts with the vigor and prestige he enjoyed in his youth. The second elegy similarly focuses on the contrast between past happiness and present misery but, this time, for the specific experience of a long-term relationship. The third through fifth elegies depict episodes from the poet's amatory career at different stages of his life, from inexperienced youth to impotent old man. The last poem concludes with a desire for the release of death and, together with the first, form a coherent frame for the collection.

This comprehensive volume includes an introduction by renowned classicist Michael Roberts, a translation of the elegies with the Latin text on facing pages, the first English translation of an additional six poems attributed to Maximianus, an appendix of Latin and Middle English imitative verse that illustrates Maximianus's long reception in the Middle Ages, several related texts, and the first commentary in English on the poems since 1900. The imminence of death and the sadness of growing old that form the principal themes of the elegies signal not only the end of pagan culture and its joy in living but also the turn from a classical to a medieval sensibility in Late Antiquity.

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."

How did educated and cultivated men in early modern France and Britain perceive and value their own and women's cognitive capacities, and how did women in their circles challenge those perceptions, if only by revaluing the kinds of intelligence attributed to them? What was thought to distinguish the "manly mind" from the feminine mind? How did awareness of these questions inform various kinds of published and unpublished texts, including the philosophical treatise, the dialogue, the polite essay, and the essay in literary criticism?

The Labor of the Mind plumbs the social and cultural logic of the Enlightenment's trope of the manly mind; offers new readings of the textual representations of it; and examines the ways in which the trope was subverted or at least subtly questioned. With close readings of the writings of well-known and less familiar men and women, including Poullain de la Barre, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Madeleine de Scudéry, David Hume, Antoine-Léonard Thomas, Suzanne Curchod Necker, Denis Diderot, and Louise d'Epinay, and tracing their social networks and friendships, Anthony J. La Vopa explores the problematic opposition between mental labor as concentrated and sustained work, a labor of abstraction and judgment for which only men had the strength, and an aesthetic of effortless and tasteful play in polite conversation in which women were thought to excel. Covering nearly a century and a half of cultural and intellectual life from France to England and Scotland and then back again, La Vopa locates, beneath the tenacity of assumed natural differences, a lexicon imbued with ambivalence, ambiguity, and argument. The Labor of the Mind reveals the legacy for modernity of a fraught gendering of intellectual labor.