University of Pennsylvania Press

Emotions were central to the ways that slaveholders perpetuated slavery, as well as to the ways that enslaved people survived and challenged bondage and experienced freedom. Mastering Emotions examines the interactions between slaveholders and enslaved people, and between White people and free Black people, to expose how emotions such as love, terror, happiness, and trust functioned as social and economic capital for slaveholders and enslaved people alike.

The daily interactions that occurred between slaveholders and enslaved people around emotions, in conjunction with larger debates about race and freedom, form the backbone of what Erin Austin Dwyer calls the emotional politics of slavery. Race and status determined which emotions were permissible or punishable, which should be restrained, and by whom. As a result, mastering emotions, one's ability to control one's own feelings and those of others, was paramount for slaveholders and enslaved. The emotional politics of slavery were thus fashioned by enslaved people and slaveholders together through the crucible of slavery.

Emancipation was a seismic shift in the affective landscape of the antebellum South. Though the end of the Civil War rendered moot the debate over how to emotionally maintain slavery, the lingering conflict over whether the emotional strictures governing the South would be based on race or free status had serious repercussions, particularly for free Black people. The postwar rise of legal and extralegal attempts to affectively control free Black people underscored the commitment of elite White Southerners to preserving the power dynamics of the emotional politics of slavery, by any means necessary. Mastering Emotions concludes by detailing how the long-term legacy of those emotional politics reverberated through Reconstruction and the Jim Crow eras.

Refuting the common perception that the American left has a religion problem, Vaneesa Cook highlights an important but overlooked intellectual and political tradition that she calls "spiritual socialism." Spiritual socialists emphasized the social side of socialism and believed the most basic expression of religious values—caring for the sick, tired, hungry, and exploited members of one's community—created a firm footing for society. Their unorthodox perspective on the spiritual and cultural meaning of socialist principles helped make leftist thought more palatable to Americans, who associated socialism with Soviet atheism and autocracy. In this way, spiritual socialism continually put pressure on liberals, conservatives, and Marxists to address the essential connection between morality and social justice.

Cook tells her story through an eclectic group of activists whose lives and works span the twentieth century. Sherwood Eddy, A. J. Muste, Myles Horton, Dorothy Day, Henry Wallace, Pauli Murray, Staughton Lynd, and Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke and wrote publicly about the connection between religious values and socialism. Equality, cooperation, and peace, they argued, would not develop overnight, and a more humane society would never emerge through top-down legislation. Instead, they believed that the process of their vision of the world had to happen in homes, villages, and cities, from the bottom up.

By insisting that people start treating each other better in everyday life, spiritual socialists transformed radical activism from projects of political policy-making to grass-roots organizing. For Cook, contemporary public figures such as Senator Bernie Sanders, Pope Francis, Reverend William Barber, and Cornel West are part of a long-standing tradition that exemplifies how non-Communist socialism has gained traction in American politics.

In the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, nature and culture swirled in people's minds to produce fantastic images. In the South of France, a cloister's painted wooden panels greeted parishioners with vivid depictions of unicorns, dragons, and centaurs, while Mayans in the Yucatan created openings to buildings that resembled a fierce animal's jaws, known to archaeologists as serpent-column portals.

In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans, as well as original use of spectacular manuscript atlases, paintings that depict on-the-spot European representations of nature, and texts that circulated imperfectly across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions of individuals.

This inspired work of Atlantic, European, and American history begins with medieval concepts of nature and ends in an age when the printed book became the primary avenue for the dissemination of scientific information. Throughout the sixteenth century, the borders between the natural world and the supernatural were more porous than modern readers might realize. Native Americans and Europeans alike thought about monsters, spirits, and insects in considerable depth. In Mancall's vivid narrative, the modern world emerged as a result of the myriad encounters between peoples who inhabited the Atlantic basin in this period. The centuries that followed can be comprehended only by exploring how culture in its many forms—stories, paintings, books—shaped human understanding of the natural world.

Introducing a dramatic new chapter to American Indian literary history, this book brings to the public for the first time the complete writings of the first known American Indian literary writer, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (her English name) or Bamewawagezhikaquay (her Ojibwe name), Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky (1800-1842). Beginning as early as 1815, Schoolcraft wrote poems and traditional stories while also translating songs and other Ojibwe texts into English. Her stories were published in adapted, unattributed versions by her husband, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a founding figure in American anthropology and folklore, and they became a key source for Longfellow's sensationally popular The Song of Hiawatha.

As this volume shows, what little has been known about Schoolcraft's writing and life only scratches the surface of her legacy. Most of the works have been edited from manuscripts and appear in print here for the first time. The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky presents a collection of all Schoolcraft's extant writings along with a cultural and biographical history. Robert Dale Parker's deeply researched account places her writings in relation to American Indian and American literary history and the history of anthropology, offering the story of Schoolcraft, her world, and her fascinating family as reinterpreted through her newly uncovered writing. This book makes available a startling new episode in the history of American culture and literature.

The Black Death that arrived in the spring of 1348 eventually killed nearly half of England's population. In its long aftermath, wages in London rose in response to labor shortages, many survivors moved into larger quarters in the depopulated city, and people in general spent more money on food, clothing, and household furnishings than they had before. Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how this increased consumption reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.

Grounding her analysis in both the study of surviving household artifacts and extensive archival research, Katherine L. French examines the accommodations that Londoners made to their bigger houses and the increasing number of possessions these contained. The changes in material circumstance reshaped domestic hierarchies and produced new routines and expectations. Recognizing that the greater number of possessions required a different kind of management and care, French puts housework and gender at the center of her study. Historically, the task of managing bodies and things and the dirt and chaos they create has been unproblematically defined as women's work. Housework, however, is neither timeless nor ahistorical, and French traces a major shift in women's household responsibilities to the arrival and gendering of new possessions and the creation of new household spaces in the decades after the plague.

Discover how Japan’s new leadership model has transformed its top companies and created a new paradigm for business success

In Resolute Japan, Waseda University’s Jusuke J. J. Ikegami and the Wharton School’s Harbir Singh and Michael Useem reveal a new leadership model that has led Japan’s corporations to make a stunning comeback. In the process, they share what they have learned from interviews with more than 100 CEOs and top executives of Japan’s largest and most influential companies, including Hitachi, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, NTT, and Panasonic.

In this book, you will discover:
+ How Japan’s new leadership model has led to superior performance in the stock market and beyond;
+ The core principles and practices that characterize Japan’s new leadership model and how they differ from the old models;
+ How Japan’s new leadership model enables companies to balance multiple and often conflicting objectives, such as shareholder value and social responsibility, short-term results and long-term growth, and agility and stability;
+ How Japan’s new leadership model fosters innovation, resilience, and competitiveness in a rapidly changing global environment;
+ Why, even in an environment of macroeconomic stagnation due to economic policies at the national level, individual companies can achieve sustainable development through this new leadership model; and
+ How Japan’s new leadership model can inspire and inform business leaders in the West and elsewhere who are facing similar challenges and opportunities.

Resolute Japan offers a rare and insightful perspective on the new corporate fabric of Japan, one that is sure to both challenge and enlighten leaders around the world.

Explores the information and communication practices of the Portuguese empire in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India

Empire of Contingency explores the information and communication practices of the Portuguese empire in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India—a period during which Portuguese imperial ambitions were struggling for survival, while the Mughal empire was at the height of its power and influence. Jorge Flores uncovers the tenuous but ingenious apparatuses of intelligence through which the Estado da Índia (the “State of the Indies,” the name given to the Portuguese political administrative unit in the region between the Cape of Good Hope and East Asia) endeavored to survive in a vast Indo-Persian world shaped by the influence and power of the Mughal empire.

Detailing the complex relations that the officials of the Portuguese empire, particularly in Goa, the capital of the Estado da Índia, maintained with the Mughal empire as well as the sultanates of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur in the Deccan region—through information gathering, record-keeping, interpreting, and diplomatic correspondence—the book demonstrates how the Portuguese territories along the western coast of India were substantially incorporated into the vast Persianate cultural sphere spanning from Iran to Southeast Asia. The process of empire-building on the fringes of the Persianate world and the prolonged interaction with the Mughal empire, Ahmadnagar, and Bijapur, Flores argues, led to the irregular, non-linear, and incomplete assimilation of the Portuguese empire into Persianate India.

Overturning teleological narratives that portray the workings of (European) empire as the unilateral imposition of power dynamics by a dominant, omniscient actor, Flores reveals how Portuguese imperial administrators were vulnerable participants in a network of relations involving multiple political powers—relations that required enormous bureaucratic and diplomatic effort to understand and successfully navigate. Showing how a European empire was drawn into the political practices and rituals of the Indo-Persian world, Flores decenters the lenses conventionally used to observe the Portuguese empire in Asia and helps us rethink its nature while questioning the boundaries of the Indo-Persian world.

In The Other Presidency, Patrick Spero resurrects an overlooked but essential part of Thomas Jefferson’s life. For nearly seventeen years, Jefferson served as President of the American Philosophical Society (APS), the nation’s first learned society and one dedicated to promoting new research in the young republic, especially in the sciences. He did so while also serving as Vice President and President of the United States. As Spero shows in this short but important work, Jefferson used his various positions to solidify the Society’s foundation and, in turn, shape the course of American science.

Through a deep dive into APS Archives and Jefferson’s papers, Spero demonstrates how the Society became a thoroughly Jeffersonian institution—that is, the APS, the largest and most powerful scientific body in the nation, advanced an agenda that comported with Jefferson’s own priorities. While Jefferson juggled affairs of state, he also remained deeply involved in the Society. In fact, the two complemented each other. He helped draft the institution’s first collection development policy, making clear the items and material he thought most important for the nation’s posterity. He also used his international network to introduce European intellectuals to the Society, and he called on these same networks to help build the Society’s collection. Jefferson himself received direct support from the Society to conduct his own research, including funding for an expedition with James Madison, and as President of the United States, he would often call on the APS and its members for advice. In short, Spero shows that Jefferson was integral to the development of the APS—and, perhaps more unexpectedly, the APS and the scientific community it fostered were integral to Jefferson and his vision for the young United States.

A resource for students, history buffs, and Jefferson aficionados, the book includes a chronology of Thomas Jefferson's contributions to the APS, with references to major events in Jefferson's life.

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

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

Between 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Hundreds if not thousands were executed from Aragon and southern France into the eastern regions of the German-speaking lands. But if the well-poisoning accusations against the Jews during these plague years are the most frequently cited of such cases, they were not unique. The first major wave of accusations came in France and Aragon in 1321, and it was lepers, not Jews, who were the initial targets. Local authorities, and especially municipal councils, promoted these charges so as to be able to seize the property of the leprosaria, Tzafrir Barzilay contends. The allegations eventually expanded to describe an international conspiracy organized by Muslims, and only then, after months of persecution of the lepers, did some nobles of central France implicate the Jews, convincing the king to expel them from the realm.

In Poisoned Wells Barzilay explores the origins of these charges of well poisoning, asks how the fear took root and moved across Europe, which groups it targeted, why it held in certain areas and not others, and why it waned in the fifteenth century. He argues that many of the social, political, and environmental factors that fed the rise of the mass poisoning accusations had already appeared during the thirteenth century, a period of increased urbanization, of criminal poisoning charges, and of the proliferation of medical texts on toxins. In studying the narratives that were presented to convince officials that certain groups committed well poisoning and the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms that moved rumors into officially accepted and prosecutable crimes, Barzilay has written a crucial chapter in the long history of the persecution of European minorities.

In early modern England, wood scarcity was a widespread concern. Royal officials, artisans, and common people expressed their fears in laws, petitions, and pamphlets, in which they debated the severity of the problem, speculated on its origins, and proposed solutions to it. No Wood, No Kingdom explores these conflicting attempts to understand the problem of scarcity and demonstrates how these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of England's earliest colonies.

Popular accounts have often suggested that deforestation served as a "push" for English colonial expansion. Keith Pluymers shows that wood scarcity in England, rather than a problem of absolute supply and demand, resulted from social conflict over the right to define and regulate resources, difficulties obtaining accurate information, and competing visions for trade, forestry, and the English landscape. Domestic scarcity claims did encourage schemes to develop wood-dependent enterprises in the colonies, but in practice colonies competed with domestic enterprises rather than supplanting them. Moreover, close studies of colonial governments and the actions of individual landholders in Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados demonstrate that colonists experimented with different, often competing approaches to colonial woods and trees, including efforts to manage them as long-term resources, albeit ones that nonetheless brought significant transformations to the land.

No Wood, No Kingdom explores the efforts to knot together woods around the Atlantic basin as resources for an English empire and the deep underlying conflicts and confusion that largely frustrated those plans. It speaks to historians of early modern Europe, early America, and the Atlantic World but also offers key insights on early modern resource politics, forest management, and political ecology of interest to readers in the environmental humanities and social sciences as well as those interested in colonialism or economic history.

The United States has been a space power since its founding, Gordon Fraser writes. The white stars on its flag reveal the dream of continental elites that the former colonies might constitute a "new constellation" in the firmament of nations. The streets and avenues of its capital city were mapped in reference to celestial observations. And as the nineteenth century unfolded, all efforts to colonize the North American continent depended upon the science of surveying, or mapping with reference to celestial movement. Through its built environment, cultural mythology, and exercise of military power, the United States has always treated the cosmos as a territory available for exploitation.

In Star Territory Fraser explores how from its beginning, agents of the state, including President John Adams, Admiral Charles Henry Davis, and astronomer Maria Mitchell, participated in large-scale efforts to map the nation onto cosmic space. Through almanacs, maps, and star charts, practical information and exceptionalist mythologies were transmitted to the nation's soldiers, scientists, and citizens.

This is, however, only one part of the story Fraser tells. From the country's first Black surveyors, seamen, and publishers to the elected officials of the Cherokee Nation and Hawaiian resistance leaders, other actors established alternative cosmic communities. These Black and indigenous astronomers, prophets, and printers offered ways of understanding the heavens that broke from the work of the U.S. officials for whom the universe was merely measurable and exploitable.

Today, NASA administrators advocate public-private partnerships for the development of space commerce while the military seeks to control strategic regions above the atmosphere. If observers imagine that these developments are the direct offshoots of a mid-twentieth-century space race, Fraser brilliantly demonstrates otherwise. The United States' efforts to exploit the cosmos, as well as the resistance to these efforts, have a history that starts nearly two centuries before the Gemini and Apollo missions of the 1960s.

In late medieval Catholicism, mourners employed an array of practices to maintain connection with the deceased—most crucially, the belief in purgatory, a middle place between heaven and hell where souls could be helped by the actions of the living. In the early sixteenth century, the Reformation abolished purgatory, as its leaders did not want attention to the dead diminishing people's devotion to God. But while the Reformation was supposed to end communication between the living and dead, it turns out the result was in fact more complicated than historians have realized. In the three centuries after the Reformation, Protestants imagined continuing relationships with the dead, and the desire for these relations came to form an important—and since neglected—aspect of Protestant belief and practice.

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders. This prodigious research reveals how sermons, elegies, and epitaphs portrayed the dead as speaking or being spoken to, how ghost stories and Gothic fiction depicted a permeable boundary between this world and the next, and how parlor songs and funeral hymns encouraged singers to imagine communication with the dead. Speaking with the Dead in Early America thus boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

A thousand years before Isaac Asimov set down his Three Laws of Robotics, real and imagined automata appeared in European courts, liturgies, and literary texts. Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, and silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed disciplinary or surveillance functions. Variously ascribed to artisanal genius, inexplicable cosmic forces, or demonic powers, these marvelous fabrications raised fundamental questions about knowledge, nature, and divine purpose in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Robots recovers the forgotten history of fantastical, aspirational, and terrifying machines that captivated Europe in imagination and reality between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. E. R. Truitt traces the different forms of self-moving or self-sustaining manufactured objects from their earliest appearances in the Latin West through centuries of mechanical and literary invention. Chronicled in romances and song as well as histories and encyclopedias, medieval automata were powerful cultural objects that probed the limits of natural philosophy, illuminated and challenged definitions of life and death, and epitomized the transformative and threatening potential of foreign knowledge and culture. This original and wide-ranging study reveals the convergence of science, technology, and imagination in medieval culture and demonstrates the striking similarities between medieval and modern robotic and cybernetic visions.

"Do not think of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a business enterprise," Forbes magazine informed its readers in May 1936. "Think of it as a nation." At the end of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest privately owned business corporation in the world. In 1914, the PRR employed more than two hundred thousand people—more than double the number of soldiers in the United States Army. As the self-proclaimed "Standard Railroad of the World," this colossal corporate body underwrote American industrial expansion and shaped the economic, political, and social environment of the United States. In turn, the PRR was fundamentally shaped by the American landscape, adapting to geography as well as shifts in competitive economics and public policy. Albert J. Churella's masterful account, certain to become the authoritative history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, illuminates broad themes in American history, from the development of managerial practices and labor relations to the relationship between business and government to advances in technology and transportation.

Churella situates exhaustive archival research on the Pennsylvania Railroad within the social, economic, and technological changes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, chronicling the epic history of the PRR intertwined with that of a developing nation. This first volume opens with the development of the Main Line of Public Works, devised by Pennsylvanians in the 1820s to compete with the Erie Canal. Though a public rather than a private enterprise, the Main Line foreshadowed the establishment of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1846. Over the next decades, as the nation weathered the Civil War, industrial expansion, and labor unrest, the PRR expanded despite competition with rival railroads and disputes with such figures as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. The dawn of the twentieth century brought a measure of stability to the railroad industry, enabling the creation of such architectural monuments as Pennsylvania Station in New York City. The volume closes at the threshold of American involvement in World War I, as the strategies that PRR executives had perfected in previous decades proved less effective at guiding the company through increasingly tumultuous economic and political waters.

Despite all recent challenges to stage-oriented histories, the idea of a division between a "medieval" and a "modern" period has survived, even flourished, in academia. Periodization and Sovereignty demonstrates that this survival is no innocent affair. By examining periodization together with the two controversial categories of feudalism and secularization, Kathleen Davis exposes the relationship between the constitution of "the Middle Ages" and the history of sovereignty, slavery, and colonialism.

This book's groundbreaking investigation of feudal historiography finds that the historical formation of "feudalism" mediated the theorization of sovereignty and a social contract, even as it provided a rationale for colonialism and facilitated the disavowal of slavery. Sovereignty is also at the heart of today's often violent struggles over secular and religious politics, and Davis traces the relationship between these struggles and the narrative of "secularization," which grounds itself in a period divide between a "modern" historical consciousness and a theologically entrapped "Middle Ages" incapable of history. This alignment of sovereignty, the secular, and the conceptualization of historical time, which relies essentially upon a medieval/modern divide, both underlies and regulates today's volatile debates over world politics.

The problem of defining the limits of our most fundamental political concepts cannot be extricated, Davis argues, from the periodizing operations that constituted them, and that continue today to obscure the process by which "feudalism" and "secularization" govern the politics of time.

An exploration of how the widespread circulation of pictures reshaped a nineteenth-century US culture that was accustomed to printed and spoken words

When and how did pictures start to permeate everyday lives in the United States? What happened to those daily lives when they did? And what happened to pictures in the process? In this full-color, heavily illustrated book, Michael Leja traces the beginnings of a transformation in cultural life in the United States: when the widespread circulation of pictures reshaped a culture accustomed to printed and spoken words.

In the three decades before the Civil War, the ordinary experiences of a large segment of the population came to include pictures of many kinds, including illustrations in books, pamphlets, and newspapers; photographs on cards; full-sheet printed pictures collected in scrapbooks or albums or hung on walls; posters and broadsheets; spectacular paintings displayed in theatrical venues; and more. Pictures supplemented verbal texts—and in some cases overshadowed them—for conveying news and information; portraying people, places, and events; focusing public discourse; selling things; educating and instructing; generating excitement and aesthetic gratification; promoting and disguising political agendas; shaping social identities; and building and undermining social bonds.

A Flood of Pictures recovers a time before successful pictorial formulas for mass appeal were established, before an audience habituated to consumption of pictures existed, and before pictures had become thoroughly commodified. Through its exploration of these nineteenth-century developments, the book reveals the foundations of our picture-saturated twenty-first century.

Companies have more data at their fingertips than ever before. Yet, studies show that many executives and organizations fail to extract real value from it.

Challenging the conventional wisdom of data-driven decision-making, marketing professors and behavioral scientists Bart De Langhe and Stefano Puntoni argue that many analytics efforts flounder because data analyses are disconnected from the decisions to be made. In their important book, they offer a new approach they call decision-driven analytics. Counterintuitively, they argue that the key to making good decisions with data is to start by putting data in the background.

Drawing from their own research and teaching, as well as real-world business cases, De Langhe and Puntoni offer four pillars of decision-driven analytics and guide you around common mistakes that have held back many organizations from using data for impact.

In Decision-Driven Analytics, you will learn how to:

+ Avoid common pitfalls in data-driven decision-making;
+ Close the gap between managers and decision-making on one side, and data scientists and data analytics on the other;
+ Enhance the impact of data analytics on business outcomes;
+ Think without data to make better decisions;
+ Prepare for artificial intelligence’s impact on data analytics; and
+ Evaluate the costs and benefits of decision-driven analytics.


A must-read for anyone who wants to harness the power of data for competitive advantage, Decision-Driven Analytics will equip you with the skills and tools you need to more effectively use data for business outcomes and to make better decisions in today’s complex and data-rich world.

How Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping political and social experience in the early Ottoman Empire

Occasions for Poetry is a history of how Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping political and social experience in the early Ottoman Empire. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman elites at the imperial court turned to poetry to craft distinctive modes of expression in order to articulate their own place within the Ottoman sultanate.

Placing Ottoman court poetry in its social and historical context, Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano argues that poetry functioned as a political act. Aguirre-Mandujano examines the occasions that compelled the Ottomans to compose poetry, to present it to their superiors, to share it with their peers, and to spend considerable efforts and time to make poetry often and to make it well. He explores how scholars and bureaucrats interacted with each other through poetic imagery, revealing how literary language affected bureaucratic practice. Poetry was not only an artistic activity, but also a means to advance or save one’s own political or bureaucratic career.

For the Ottoman elite, poetry was more than a creative activity or a flattering description of Ottoman power and expansion; it was a vehicle to shape and mold their social reality. The language and genres created and used by these early modern Ottomans would define both a literary tradition and the shape of imperial politics and power for almost six centuries, until the end of the empire in the twentieth century.

In Only a Few Blocks to Cuba, Mauricio Castro shows how the U.S. government came to view Cuban migration to Miami as a strategic asset during the Cold War, in the process investing heavily in the city’s development and shaping its future as a global metropolis.

When Cuban refugees fleeing Communist revolution began to arrive in Miami in 1959, the city was faced with a humanitarian crisis it was ill-equipped to handle and sought to have the federal government solve what local politicians clearly viewed as a Cold War geopolitical problem. In response, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and their successors, provided an unprecedented level of federal largesse and freedom of transit to these refugees. The changes to the city this investment wrought were as impactful and permanent as they were unintended. What was meant to be a short-term geopolitical stratagem instead became a new reality in South Florida. A growing and increasingly powerful Cuban community contested their place in Miami and navigated challenges like bilingualism, internal political disputes, socioeconomic polarization, and ongoing struggles and negotiations with Washington and Havana in the decades that followed. This contested process, argues Mauricio Castro, not only transformed South Florida, but American foreign policy and the calculus of national politics.

Castro uses extensive archival research in local and national sources to demonstrate that the Cuban diaspora and Cold War refugee policy made South Florida a key space to understanding the shifting landscape of the late twentieth century. In this way, Miami serves as an example of both the lived effects of defense spending in urban spaces and of how local communities can shape national politics and international relations. American politics, foreign relations, immigration policy, and urban development all intersected on the streets of Miami.

This book explores the question: How did the rabbis of the first two centuries CE approach bodies that are born with variant genitals—bodies that they could not identify as definitely male or female? The rabbis had constructed a system in which every behavior was governed by one’s sex/gender, posing a conundrum both for people who did not fit into that model and for the rabbinic enterprise itself. Despite this, their texts contain dozens of references to intersex.

And the Sages Did Not Know examines the rabbis’ legal texts and concludes that they had multiple approaches to intersex people. Sarra Lev analyzes seven different rabbinic responses to this conflict of their own making. Through their rulings on how intersex people should conduct themselves in multiple circumstances, the early rabbis treat intersex people as unidentifiable males or females, as indeterminate, as male, as non-gendered, as sui generis, as part-male/part-female, as a sustainable paradox, and, finally, as a way for them to think about gender, having nothing to do with intersex people themselves.

This is the first such work that concentrates primarily on the potential effects of these rabbinic texts on intersex persons themselves rather than focusing on what the texts offer readers whose interest is rabbinic approaches to sex and gender or gender diversity. Although the rabbinic texts do not include the voices of known intersex people, these materials do offer us a window into how one small group of people approached intersex bodies, and how those approaches were both similar to and different from those we recognize today.

Artificial Life After Frankenstein brings the insights born of Mary Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.

What are the obligations of humanity to the artificial creatures we make? And what are the corresponding rights of those creatures, whether they are learning machines or genetically modified organisms? In seeking ways to respond to these questions, so vital for our age of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, we would do well to turn to the capacious mind and imaginative genius of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). Shelley's novels Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man (1826) precipitated a modern political strain of science fiction concerned with the ethical dilemmas that arise when we make artificial life—and make life artificial—through science, technology, and other forms of cultural change.

In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Eileen Hunt Botting puts Shelley and several classics of modern political science fiction into dialogue with contemporary political science and philosophy, in order to challenge some of the apocalyptic fears at the fore of twenty-first-century political thought on AI and genetic engineering. Focusing on the prevailing myths that artificial forms of life will end the world, destroy nature, and extinguish love, Botting shows how Shelley modeled ways to break down and transform the meanings of apocalypse, nature, and love in the face of widespread and deep-seated fear about the power of technology and artifice to undermine the possibility of humanity, community, and life itself.

Through their explorations of these themes, Mary Shelley and authors of modern political science fiction from H. G. Wells to Nnedi Okorafor have paved the way for a techno-political philosophy of living with the artifice of humanity in all of its complexity. In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Botting brings the insights born of Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.

Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a "collected works" of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men, the project ran into trouble. In an attempt to salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. The deception worked for nearly three hundred years, until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentieth century. The discovery of these "Pavier Quartos," as they became known, was a landmark success for the New Bibliography and played an important role in establishing the validity and authority of that method of analysis. While more recent scholars have reassessed the traditional narrative that the New Bibliographers wrote, no one has gone back to look at the primary evidence: the quartos themselves.

In Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes Zachary Lesser undertakes a completely fresh study of these playbooks. Through an intensive bibliographical analysis of over three hundred surviving quartos, Lesser reveals evidence that has gone entirely unseen before: "ghosts" (faint, oily impressions produced when one book is bound next to another); "holes" (the tiny remains of the first simple stitching that held pamphlets together); and "rips and scrapes" (post-production alterations of title pages). This new evidence—much of it visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic methods—suggests that the "Pavier Quartos" are far more mysterious, with far more consequential ramifications for book history and Shakespeare scholarship than we have thought.

It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children.

Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

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

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

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

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

Living with the Law explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000–1250), relating medieval gossip, marital woes, and the voices of men and women of a world long gone. Probing the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in a Cairo synagogue, the book recovers the life stories of Jewish women and men working through their marital problems at home, with their families, in the streets of old Cairo, and in Jewish and Muslim courts. Despite a voluminous literature on Jewish law, the everyday practice of Jewish courts has only recently begun to be investigated systematically. The experiences of those at a legal, social, and cultural disadvantage allow us to go beyond the image propagated by legal institutions and offer a view “from below” of Jewish communal life and Jewish law as it was lived.

Examining the interactions between gender and law in medieval Jewish communities under Islamic rule, Oded Zinger considers how women experienced Jewish courts and the pressure they faced to relinquish their monetary rights. The tactics with which women countered this pressure—ranging from exploiting family ties to appealing to Muslim courts—expose the complex relationship between individual agency, gendered expectations, and communal authority. Zinger concludes that, more than money, education, or lineage, it was the maintenance of a supportive network of social relations with men that protected women at different stages of their lives.

In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied important roles in medieval English society. England’s Jews revisits this neglected chapter of English history—one whose remembrance is more important than ever today, as antisemitism and other forms of racism are on the rise.

Historian John Tolan tells the story of the thousands of Jews who lived in medieval England. Protected by the Crown and granted the exclusive right to loan money with interest, Jews financed building projects, provided loans to students, and bought and rented out housing. Historical texts show that they shared meals and beer, celebrated at weddings, and sometimes even ended up in bed with Christians.

Yet Church authorities feared the consequences of Jewish contact with Christians and tried to limit it, though to little avail. Royal protection also proved to be a double-edged sword: when revolts broke out against the unpopular king Henry III, some of the rebels, in debt to Jewish creditors, killed Jews and destroyed loan records. Vicious rumors circulated that Jews secretly plotted against Christians and crucified Christian children. All of these factors led Edward I to expel the Jews from England in 1290. Paradoxically, Tolan shows, thirteenth-century England was both the theatre of fruitful interreligious exchange and a crucible of European antisemitism.

Although the Enlightenment had seemed to bring an end to the widely held belief that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, charges of the so-called blood libel were surprisingly widespread in central and eastern Europe on either side of the turn to the twentieth century. Well over one hundred accusations were made against Jews in this period, and prosecutors and government officials in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia broke with long established precedent to bring six of these cases forward in sensational public trials. In Blood Inscriptions Hillel J. Kieval examines four cases—the prosecutions that took place at Tiszaeszlár in Hungary (1882-83), Xanten in Germany (1891-92), Polná in Austrian Bohemia (1899-1900), and Konitz, then Germany, now in Poland (1900-1902)—to consider the means by which discredited beliefs came to seem once again plausible.

Kieval explores how educated elites took up the accusations of Jewish ritual murder and considers the roles played by government bureaucracies, the journalistic establishment, forensic medicine, and advanced legal practices in structuring the investigations and trials. The prosecutors, judges, forensic scientists, criminologists, and academic scholars of Judaism and other expert witnesses all worked hard to establish their epistemological authority as rationalists, Kieval contends. Far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, these ritual murder trials were in all respects a product of post-Enlightenment politics and culture. Harnessed to and disciplined by the rhetoric of modernity, they were able to proceed precisely because they were framed by the idioms of scientific discourse and rationality.

In July 2013, Detroit became the largest city in U.S. history to declare bankruptcy. The underlying causes were decades of deindustrialization, white flight, and financial mismanagement. More recently it has been heralded a comeback city as wealthy white residents resettle there. Yet, as Kyle T. Mays argues, we cannot understand the current state of Detroit without also understanding the longer history of Native American and African American dispossession that has defined the city since its founding.

How has dispossession impacted the development of modern U.S. cities? And how does comparing the historical experiences of Native Americans and African Americans in an urban context help us comprehend histories of race, sovereignty, and colonialism? Using archives, oral and family histories, and community documents, City of Dispossessions is a cultural, intellectual, and social history that argues that physical and symbolic forms of dispossession of Native Americans and African Americans, and their reactions to dispossession, have been central to Detroit's modern development.

The book begins with the first settlement by the Frenchman Cadillac in 1701 and chronicles how the logic of dispossession has continued into the present, through a wide range of forms that include memorialization of the "disappearing Indian," the physical dispossession of African Americans through urban renewal, and gentrification. Mays also chronicles the wide-ranging forms of expression through which Black and Indigenous Detroiters have contested dispossession, such as the Red and Black Power movements and culturally relevant education.

Through lively, accessible prose as well as historical and contemporary examples, City of Dispossessions will be of interest to readers of urban studies, Indigenous Studies, and critical ethnic studies.

Just as the Reformation was a movement of intertwined theological and political aims, many individual authors of the time shifted back and forth between biblical interpretation and political writing. Two foundational figures in the history of the Renaissance Bible, Desiderius Erasmus and William Tyndale, are cases in point, one writing in Latin, the other in the vernacular. Erasmus undertook the project of retranslating and annotating the New Testament at the same time that he developed rhetorical approaches for addressing princes in his Education of a Christian Prince (1516); Tyndale was occupied with biblically inflected works such as his Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) while translating and annotating the first printed English Bibles.

In The Book of Books, Thomas Fulton charts the process of recovery, interpretation, and reuse of scripture in early modern England, exploring the uses of the Bible as a supremely authoritative text that was continually transformed for political purposes. In a series of case studies linked to biblical translation, polemical tracts, and works of imaginative literature produced during the reigns of successive English rulers, he investigates the commerce between biblical interpretation, readership, and literary culture. Whereas scholars have often drawn exclusively on modern editions of the King James Version, Fulton turns our attention toward the specific Bibles that writers used and the specific manner in which they used them. In doing so, he argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others were in conversation not just with the biblical text itself, but with the rich interpretive and paratextual structures that accompanied it, revolving around sites of social controversy as well as the larger, often dynastically oriented conditions under which particular Bibles were created.

In the fourth century, clerics began to distinguish themselves from members of the laity by virtue of their augmented claims to holiness. Because clerical celibacy was key to this distinction, religious authorities of all stripes—patristic authors, popes, theologians, canonists, monastic founders, and commentators—became progressively sensitive to sexual scandals that involved the clergy and developed sophisticated tactics for concealing or dispelling embarrassing lapses. According to Dyan Elliott, the fear of scandal dictated certain lines of action and inaction, the consequences of which are painfully apparent today. In The Corrupter of Boys, she demonstrates how, in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy, scandal-averse policies at every conceivable level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy have enabled the widespread sexual abuse of boys and male adolescents within the Church.

Elliott examines more than a millennium's worth of doctrine and practice to uncover the origins of a culture of secrecy and concealment of sin. She charts the continuities and changes, from late antiquity into the high Middle Ages, in the use of boys as sexual objects before focusing on four specific milieus in which boys and adolescents would have been especially at risk in the high and later Middle Ages: the monastery, the choir, the schools, and the episcopal court.

The Corrupter of Boys is a work of stunning breadth and discomforting resonance, as Elliott concludes that the same clerical prerogatives and privileges that were formulated in late antiquity and the medieval era—and the same strategies to cover up the abuses they enable—remain very much in place.

An impressively learned and beautifully illustrated review of medieval ideas about Paradise

Did Adam and Eve need to eat in Eden in order to live? If so, did human beings urinate and defecate in paradise? And since people had no need for clothing, transportation, or food, what purpose did animals serve? Would carnivorous animals have preyed on other creatures? These were but a few of the questions that plagued medieval scholars for whom the idea of Eden proved an endless source of contemplation. As theologians attempted to reconcile their own experiences with the realities of the prelapsarian paradise, they crafted complex answers that included explanations of God's interaction with creation, the existence of death, and man's dominion over nature.

In From Eden to Eternity, Alastair Minnis examines accounts of the origins of the human body and soul to illustrate the ways in which the schoolmen thought their way back to Eden to discover fundamental truths about humanity. He demonstrates how theologians sought certainty in matters of orthodox Christian thought and also engaged in speculation about matters that, they freely admitted, were not susceptible to firm proof. Moreover, From Eden to Eternity argues that the preoccupation with paradise belonged not only to the schools but to society as a whole, and it traces how lay writers and artists also attempted to interpret the origins of human society. Eden transcended human understanding, yet it afforded an extraordinary amount of creative space to late medieval theologians, painters, and poets as they tried to understand the place that God had deemed worthy of the creature made in His image.

Severine Brock's first language was Ga, yet it was not surprising when, in 1842, she married Edward Carstensen. He was the last governor of Christiansborg, the fort that, in the eighteenth century, had been the center of Danish slave trading in West Africa. She was the descendant of Ga-speaking women who had married Danish merchants and traders. Their marriage would have been familiar to Gold Coast traders going back nearly 150 years. In Daughters of the Trade, Pernille Ipsen follows five generations of marriages between African women and Danish men, revealing how interracial marriage created a Euro-African hybrid culture specifically adapted to the Atlantic slave trade.

Although interracial marriage was prohibited in European colonies throughout the Atlantic world, in Gold Coast slave-trading towns it became a recognized and respected custom. Cassare, or "keeping house," gave European men the support of African women and their kin, which was essential for their survival and success, while African families made alliances with European traders and secured the legitimacy of their offspring by making the unions official.

For many years, Euro-African families lived in close proximity to the violence of the slave trade. Sheltered by their Danish names and connections, they grew wealthy and influential. But their powerful position on the Gold Coast did not extend to the broader Atlantic world, where the link between blackness and slavery grew stronger, and where Euro-African descent did not guarantee privilege. By the time Severine Brock married Edward Carstensen, their world had changed. Daughters of the Trade uncovers the vital role interracial marriage played in the coastal slave trade, the production of racial difference, and the increasing stratification of the early modern Atlantic world.

On the great influence of a valiant lord: "The companions, who see that good warriors are honored by the great lords for their prowess, become more determined to attain this level of prowess."

On the lady who sees her knight honored: "All of this makes the noble lady rejoice greatly within herself at the fact that she has set her mind and heart on loving and helping to make such a good knight or good man-at-arms."

On the worthiest amusements: "The best pastime of all is to be often in good company, far from unworthy men and from unworthy activities from which no good can come."

Enter the real world of knights and their code of ethics and behavior. Read how an aspiring knight of the fourteenth century would conduct himself and learn what he would have needed to know when traveling, fighting, appearing in court, and engaging fellow knights.

Composed at the height of the Hundred Years War by Geoffroi de Charny, one of the most respected knights of his age, A Knight's Own Book of Chivalry was designed as a guide for members of the Company of the Star, an order created by Jean II of France in 1352 to rival the English Order of the Garter.

This is the most authentic and complete manual on the day-to-day life of the knight that has survived the centuries, and this edition contains a specially commissioned introduction from historian Richard W. Kaeuper that gives the history of both the book and its author, who, among his other achievements, was the original owner of the Shroud of Turin.

Paris in the Middle Ages was home to royalty, mountebanks, Knights Templar, merchants, prostitutes, and canons. Bursting outward from the encompassing wall, it was Europe's largest, most cosmopolitan city. Simone Roux chronicles the lives of Parisians over the course of a dozen generations as Paris grew from a military stronghold after the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 to a city recovering from the Black Death of the 1390s.

Roux peers into the private lives of people within their homes and chronicles the public world of affairs and entertainments, filling the pages of her book with laborers, shopkeepers, magistrates, thieves, and prelates. She examines the varied populations living within their own realms but sharing the streets of the metropolis, in the Latin Quarter, where the university dominated; in the precincts of Notre Dame, with its large number of clerical inhabitants; the mercantile Right Bank; and in the area surrounding the royal palace of the Louvre, with its attendant palaces for the king's satellites. She breathes life into dusty documents by explicating the lingo of street insults, making sense of the cults of saints—Sebastian, who was riddled with arrows, became the patron saint of tapestry workers—and entering the courtrooms and confessionals to tell how people actually ate, slept, dressed, fought, worked, and worshipped in the later Middle Ages.

In 1821, at the age of seventy-seven, Thomas Jefferson decided to "state some recollections of dates and facts concerning myself." His ancestors, Jefferson writes, came to America from Wales in the early seventeenth century and settled in the Virginia colony. Jefferson's father, although uneducated, possessed a "strong mind and sound judgement" and raised his family in the far western frontier of the colony, an experience that contributed to his son's eventual staunch defense of individual and state rights.

Jefferson attended the College of William and Mary, entered the law, and in 1775 was elected to represent Virginia at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, an event that propelled him to all of his future political fortunes. Jefferson's autobiography continues through the entire Revolutionary War period, and his insights and information about persons, politics, and events—including the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, his service in France with Benjamin Franklin, and his observations on the French Revolution—are of immense value to both scholars and general readers. Jefferson ends this account of his life at the moment he returns to New York to become secretary of state in 1790.

Complementing the other major autobiography of the period, Benjamin Franklin's, The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, reintroduced for this edition by historian Michael Zuckerman, gives us a glimpse into the private life and associations of one of America's most influential personalities. Alongside Jefferson's absorbing narrative of the way compromises were achieved at the Continental Congress are comments about his own health and day-to-day life that allow the reader to picture him more fully as a human being. Throughout, Jefferson states his opinions and ideas about many issues, including slavery, the death penalty, and taxation. Although Jefferson did not carry this autobiography further into his eventual presidency, the foundations for all of his thoughts are here, and it is in these pages that Jefferson lays out what to him was his most important contribution to his country, the creation of a democratic republic.

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

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

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

The Migration Age is still envisioned as an onrush of expansionary "Germans" pouring unwanted into the Roman Empire and subjecting it to pressures so great that its western parts collapsed under the weight. Further developing the themes set forth in his classic Barbarians and Romans, Walter Goffart dismantles this grand narrative, shaking the barbarians of late antiquity out of this "Germanic" setting and reimagining the role of foreigners in the Later Roman Empire.

The Empire was not swamped by a migratory Germanic flood for the simple reason that there was no single ancient Germanic civilization to be transplanted onto ex-Roman soil. Since the sixteenth century, the belief that purposeful Germans existed in parallel with the Romans has been a fixed point in European history. Goffart uncovers the origins of this historical untruth and argues that any projection of a modern Germany out of an ancient one is illusory. Rather, the multiplicity of northern peoples once living on the edges of the Empire participated with the Romans in the larger stirrings of late antiquity. Most relevant among these was the long militarization that gripped late Roman society concurrently with its Christianization.

If the fragmented foreign peoples with which the Empire dealt gave Rome an advantage in maintaining its ascendancy, the readiness to admit military talents of any social origin to positions of leadership opened the door of imperial service to immigrants from beyond its frontiers. Many barbarians were settled in the provinces without dislodging the Roman residents or destabilizing landownership; some were even incorporated into the ruling families of the Empire. The outcome of this process, Goffart argues, was a society headed by elites of soldiers and Christian clergy—one we have come to call medieval.

The branding bible for today's globalized world

Today, brands have become even more important than the products they represent: their stories travel with lightning speed through social media and the Internet and across countries and diverse cultures. A brand must be elastic enough to allow for reasonable category and product-line extensions, flexible enough to change with dynamic market conditions, consistent enough so that consumers who travel physically or virtually won't be confused, and focused enough to provide clear differentiation from the competition. Strong brands are more than globally recognizable; they are critical assets that can make a significant contribution to your company's bottom line.

In Global Brand Power, Kahn brings brand management into the 21st century, addressing how branding contributes to the purchase process and how to position a strong global brand, from identifying the appropriate competitive set, offering a sustainable differential advantage, and targeting the right strategic segment. This essential guide also covers how customer ownership of your brand affects marketing strategy, methods for assessing brand value, how to manage a brand for long-term profitability, effective brand communications and repositioning strategies, and how to manage a brand in a world of total transparency—where one slip-up can go around the world via social media instantaneously.

Filled with stories about how Coca-Cola, The Estée Lauder Companies Inc., Marriott, Apple, Starbucks, Campbell Soup Company, Southwest Airlines, and celebrities like Lady Gaga are leveraging their brands, Global Brand Power is the only book you will need to implement an effective brand strategy for your firm.

How universities have become increasingly contentious since the Sixties, from the viewpoint of a former Princeton provost and Harvard president

From his days at Princeton University as a member of the faculty, dean, and provost, and his time as a faculty member and president at Harvard University, Neil L. Rudenstine has been uniquely positioned to observe the changes that have occurred in higher education over the past few decades. In this book, he draws on his various roles to present an educator’s inside account of the modern university. More than that, Our Contentious Universities is a personal history of how our current campus climate of antagonism evolved, beginning with the late 1960s and up to our contemporary moment.

Starting with his perceptions of the anti-Vietnam War events at Columbia, Princeton, and Berkeley, as well as descriptions of what occurred at Harvard, Michigan, and other institutions, Rudenstine identifies a pattern that was characterized by students protesting against institutions because of purported university support for the Vietnam War. Not surprisingly, once the Vietnam War ended, the protests ceased. In contrast, Rudenstine reveals how contemporary campus conflicts essentially differ in nature from the Sixties protests. Since the issues that spark these present protests—such as climate change, conservative judicial opinions, lack of gun control legislation, the Hamas-Israeli war—are clearly not readily soluble problems, there can be no easily defined end to the action. Rudenstine also depicts how universities themselves have changed substantially over the past few decades. The institutions have not only evolved into a collection of decentralized quasi-autonomous departments in competition with other centers and initiatives for resources but also nurtured a highly diverse population of faculty and students with a variety of backgrounds and perspectives already at odds before they even encounter each other on campus.

Combining an analysis of how universities transformed with an examination of how protests changed, the book argues that, opposed to the external causes of student protest in the Sixties, it is actually the internal sources of division and conflict that now characterize our universities that are at the root of their contentious campus environments.

The first book to shed light on what caused corporate executives to pursue a pro-globalization agenda over the last eight decades

Crusading for Globalization tells the story of an extraordinarily influential group of business executives at the helms of the largest US multinational corporations and their quest to drive globalization forward over the last eight decades. Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl argues that the spectacular expansion of international investment, trade, and production after 1945 cannot be understood without considering the role played by these corporate globalizers and the organization they created, the US Council (today’s United States Council for International Business). By shaping governmental policy through their congressional lobbying and close connections to successive presidential administrations, US Council members, including executives from General Electric, Coca Cola, and IBM, among others, consistently fought for ever more market deregulation, culminating in the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995.

Crusading for Globalization is also a book about those who opposed the growing might of multinationals. In the years immediately after World War II, resistance came from business protectionists, before labor and policymakers from the Global South joined the effort in the early 1970s. Schaufelbuehl breaks new ground by offering a panorama of this early anti-globalization movement, and by showing how the leaders of multinationals organized to limit its political influence. She also examines continuities between this early movement and the opposition to globalization that emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century from the left and the populist right and discusses how business responded by promoting corporate social responsibility and voluntary guidelines.

The first book to shed light on what caused corporate executives to pursue a pro-globalization agenda and to examine their methods for dealing with their opponents, Crusading for Globalization reveals the historical roots of today’s disparities in wealth and income distribution.

The final volume of Jonathan Sumption’s epic and prize-winning history of the Hundred Years War

Triumph and Illusion is the final volume of Jonathan Sumption’s epic history of the Hundred Years War. It tells the story of the collapse of the English dream of conquest from the opening years of the reign of Henry VI, when the battles of Cravant and Verneuil consolidated their control of most of northern France, until the loss of all their continental dominions except Calais thirty years later.

This sudden reversal of fortune was a seminal event in the history of two of the principal nation-states of western Europe. It brought an end to four centuries of the English dynasty’s presence in France, separating two countries whose fortunes had once been closely intertwined. It created a new sense of national identity in both countries. The legacy of these events would influence their divergent fortunes for centuries to come.

Behind the clash of arms stood some of the most remarkable personalities of the age: the Duke of Bedford, the English Regent who ruled much of France from Paris and Rouen; Charles VII of France, underrated in both countries, who patiently rebuilt his kingdom after the disasters of his early years; the captains who populate the pages of Shakespeare—Fastolf, Montagu, Talbot, Dunois; and, above all, the extraordinary figure of Joan of Arc who changed the course of the war in a few weeks at the age of seventeen.

How Muslims integrated themselves into the Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in the wake of the First Crusade

In Plain Sight draws from a wide array of interdisciplinary sources to show how Muslims, seemingly hostile to the entire crusading enterprise, integrated themselves into the kingdom founded in the wake of the First Crusade. The book examines how Muslims, whether Sunni or Shi‘a or Druze, fit into society in the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, uncovering the daily reality of their experience. Exploring how and to what extent Muslims interacted with the Frankish ruling elite, historian Ann E. Zimo presents a new vantage point from which to reconsider the popularly accepted notion that the crusades, and by extension the crusader states, were a locus of a monolithic clash between West and East or between Christianity and Islam. By untangling the relations between the Muslim communities and their rulers, Zimo offers a more fully realized image of a society too multifaceted to be reasonably reduced to a black-and-white binary opposition.

Zimo not only re-reads the well-known Frankish sources, including narrative chronicles, letters, charters, and legal treatises, but combines them with an investigation of the Arabic documentary base, including chronicles, biographies, fatwa literature, pilgrimage guides, and treaties which are not translated and largely inaccessible to most historians of the crusades. She also draws from the enormous and growing body of scholarship generated by archaeologists whose work can often provide insights into the aspects of the past not recorded in the historical record. By casting such a wide evidentiary net, In Plain Sight sheds new light on Frankish society and how Muslims fit into it, offering major revisions to the current conception of population distribution within the kingdom and the nature of the Frankish polity itself.

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

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

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

"Few people have more experience guiding organizational change than Greg Shea and Cassie Solomon." —Adam Grant, New York Times-bestselling author, Originals and Give and Take

Featured on CNBC and in Harvard Business Review and Fast Company, Leading Successful Change is now updated for 2020 and beyond to help leaders successfully navigate the ever-increasing pace of change.

When Jack Dorsey returned to Twitter as CEO in 2015, the company was in trouble. But unlike so many other social media platforms that have crumbled under tough conditions, Twitter is still alive—and thriving.

How did Twitter turn itself around in one of the most turbulent and competitive industries? The change management approach of authors Gregory P. Shea and Cassie A. Solomon guided a significant area of the organization's turnaround effort.

In this revised and updated edition of Leading Successful Change, Shea and Solomon share success stories from a host of companies including Twitter, Viacom, and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, offering a tested method for leading successful change, which they have developed over a combined 50 years of helping organizations do just that.

In Leading Successful Change, Shea and Solomon share:
Why most change efforts failThe two key tenets for making successful changeHow to create a scene that will provide a vision of the futureThe 8 Levers of Change, a tried-and-true method for designing the work environment to support the changesHow winning companies—from IKEA to Whirlpool—are successfully implementing change
Change is not optional and it is difficult—but it is also not impossible—with Leading Successful Change.

"A must-use guide for anyone who is faced with leading others to a future that is better than today."
—Annie McKee, author, How to Be Happy at Work.

"Greg Shea and Cassie Solomon have written a novel and valuable resource for leaders of change."
—Michael Useem, Professor of Management, The Wharton School, and author, The Leader's Checklist

"Wonderfully concise."
—Richard J. Green, Board Chairman and CEO, Firstrust Bank

"The handbook for positive disruption for any leader in any industry in the 2020s."
—Stephen K. Klasko, President and CEO, Thomas Jefferson University; Distinguished Fellow for the Future of Health, World Economic Forum

In The Black Republic, Brandon R. Byrd explores the ambivalent attitudes that African American leaders in the post-Civil War era held toward Haiti, the first and only black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Following emancipation, African American leaders of all kinds—politicians, journalists, ministers, writers, educators, artists, and diplomats—identified new and urgent connections with Haiti, a nation long understood as an example of black self-determination. They celebrated not only its diplomatic recognition by the United States but also the renewed relevance of the Haitian Revolution.

While a number of African American leaders defended the sovereignty of a black republic whose fate they saw as intertwined with their own, others expressed concern over Haiti's fitness as a model black republic, scrutinizing whether the nation truly reflected the "civilized" progress of the black race. Influenced by the imperialist rhetoric of their day, many African Americans across the political spectrum espoused a politics of racial uplift, taking responsibility for the "improvement" of Haitian education, politics, culture, and society. They considered Haiti an uncertain experiment in black self-governance: it might succeed and vindicate the capabilities of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination or it might fail and condemn the black diasporic population to second-class status for the foreseeable future.

When the United States military occupied Haiti in 1915, it created a crisis for W. E. B. Du Bois and other black activists and intellectuals who had long grappled with the meaning of Haitian independence. The resulting demand for and idea of a liberated Haiti became a cornerstone of the anticapitalist, anticolonial, and antiracist radical black internationalism that flourished between World War I and World War II. Spanning the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras, The Black Republic recovers a crucial and overlooked chapter of African American internationalism and political thought.

The Renaissance, scholars have long argued, was a period beset by the loss of philosophical certainty. In Possible Knowledge, Debapriya Sarkar argues for the pivotal role of literature—what early moderns termed poesie—in the dynamic intellectual culture of this era of profound incertitude. Revealing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, Sarkar offers a defense of poiesis, or literary making, as a vital philosophical endeavor.

Working across a range of genres, Sarkar theorizes “possible knowledge” as an intellectual paradigm crafted in and through literary form. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton marshalled the capacious concept of the “possible,” defined by Philip Sidney as what “may be and should be,” to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality. These early modern thinkers mobilized the imaginative habits of thought constitutive to major genres of literary writing—including epic, tragedy, romance, lyric, and utopia—in order to produce knowledge divorced from historical truth and empirical fact by envisioning states of being untethered from “nature” or reality.

Approaching imaginative modes such as hypothesis, conjecture, prediction, and counterfactuals as instruments of possible knowledge, Sarkar exposes how the speculative allure of the “possible” lurks within scientific experiment, induction, and theories of probability. In showing how early modern literary writing sought to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world, Possible Knowledge also highlights its most audacious intellectual ambition: its claim that while natural philosophy, or what we today term science, might explain the physical world, literature could remake reality. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, Possible Knowledge suggests that what we have termed a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.

The Violence of Recognition offers an unprecedented firsthand account of the operations of Hindu nationalists and their role in sparking the largest incident of anti-Christian violence in India’s history. Through vivid ethnographic storytelling, Pinky Hota explores the roots of ethnonationalist conflict between two historically marginalized groups—the Kandha, who are Adivasi (tribal people considered indigenous in India), and the Pana, a community of Christian Dalits (previously referred to as “untouchables”). Hota documents how Hindutva mobilization led to large-scale violence, culminating in attacks against many thousands of Pana Dalits in the district of Kandhamal in 2008.

Bringing indigenous studies as well as race and ethnic studies into conversation with Dalit studies, Hota shows that, despite attempts to frame these ethnonationalist tensions as an indigenous population’s resistance against disenfranchisement, Kandha hostility against the Pana must be understood as anti-Christian, anti-Dalit violence animated by racial capitalism. Hota’s analysis of caste in relation to race and religion details how Hindu nationalists exploit the singular and exclusionary legal recognition of Adivasis and the putatively liberatory, anti-capitalist discourse of indigeneity in order to justify continued oppression of Dalits—particularly those such as the Pana. Because the Pana lost their legal protection as recognized minorities (Scheduled Caste) upon conversion to Christianity, they struggle for recognition within the Indian state’s classificatory scheme. Within the framework of recognition, Hota shows, indigeneity works as a political technology that reproduces the political, economic, and cultural exclusion of landless marginalized groups such as Dalits. The Violence of Recognition reveals the violent implications of minority recognition in creating and maintaining hierarchies of racial capitalism.

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

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

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

In this book, renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson draws on philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the meanings and affordances of friendship—a relationship just as significant as, yet somehow different from, kinship and love. Beginning with Aristotle’s accounts of friendship as a political virtue and Montaigne’s famous essay on friendship as a form of love, Jackson examines the tension between the political and personal resonances of friendship in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the biography of the Indian historian Brijen Gupta, and the oral narratives of a Kuranko storyteller, Keti Ferenke Koroma. He offers reflections on childhood friends, imaginary friends, lifelong friendships, and friendships with animals. He ruminates particularly on the complications of friendship in the context of anthropological fieldwork, exploring the contradiction between the egalitarian spirit of friendship on the one hand and, on the other, the power imbalance between ethnographers and their interlocutors.

Through these stories, Jackson explores the unpredictable interplay of mutability and mutuality in intimate human relationships, and the critical importance of choice in forming friendship—what it means to be loyal to friends through good times and bad, and even in the face of danger. Through a blend of memoir, theory, ethnography, and fiction, Jackson shows us how the elective affinities of friendship transcend culture, gender, and age, and offer us perennial means of taking stock of our lives and getting a measure of our own self-worth.

Hospital City, Health Care Nation recasts the story of the U.S. health care system by emphasizing its economic, social, and medical importance in American communities. Focusing on urban hospitals and academic medical centers, the book argues that the country’s high level of health care spending has allowed such institutions to become vital, if often problematic, economic anchors for communities. Yet that spending has also constrained possibilities for comprehensive health care reform over many decades, even after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. At the same time, the role of hospitals in urban renewal, in community health provision, and as employers of low-wage workers has contributed directly to racial health disparities.

Guian A. McKee explores these issues through a detailed historical case study of Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital while also tracing their connections across governmental scales—local, state, and federal. He shows that health care spending and its consequences, rather than insurance coverage alone, are core issues in the decades-long struggle over the American health care system. In particular, Hospital City, Health Care Nation points to the increased role of financial capital after the 1960s in shaping not only hospital growth but also the underlying character of these vital institutions. The book shows how hospitals’ quest for capital has interacted with structural racism and inequality to shape and constrain the U.S. health care system. Building on this reassessment of the hospital system, its politics, and its financing, Hospital City, Health Care Nation offers ideas for the next steps in health care reform.

William of Norwich is the name of a young boy purported to have been killed by Jews in or about 1144, thus becoming the victim of the first recorded case of such a ritual murder in Western Europe and a seminal figure in the long history of antisemitism. His story is first told in Thomas of Monmouth's The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, a work that elaborates the bizarre allegation, invented in twelfth-century England, that Jews kidnapped Christian children and murdered them in memory and mockery of the crucifixion of Christ.

In Inventing William of Norwich Heather Blurton resituates Thomas's account by offering the first full analysis of it as a specifically literary work. The second half of the twelfth century was a time of great literary innovation encompassing an efflorescence of saints' lives and historiography, as well as the emergence of vernacular romance, Blurton observes. She examines The Life and Miracles within the framework of these new textual developments and alongside innovations in liturgical and devotional practices to argue that the origin of the ritual murder accusation is imbricated as much in literary culture as it is in the realities of Christian-Jewish relations or the emergence of racially based discourses of antisemitism. Resisting the urge to interpret this first narrative of the blood libel with the hindsight knowledge of later developments, she considers only the period from about 1150-1200. In so doing, Blurton redirects critical attention away from the social and economic history of the ritual murder accusation to the textual genres and tastes that shaped its forms and themes and provided its immediate context of reception. Thomas of Monmouth's narrative in particular, and the ritual murder accusation more generally, were strongly shaped by literary convention.

The usefulness of time and place as defining categories would seem to be baked into the very notion of nineteenth-century American literary studies, yet they have challenged scholars practically since the field's inception. In Neither the Time nor the Place seventeen critics consider how the space-time dyad has both troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades and make explicit how time and place are best considered in tandem, interrogating each other.

Taken together, the essays challenge depictions of place and time as bounded and linear, fixed and teleological, or mere ideological constructions. They address both familiar and unexpected objects, practices, and texts, including a born-digital Melville, documents from the construction of the Panama Canal, the hollow earth, the desiring body, textual editing, marble statuary, the sound of frogs, spirit photography, and twentieth-century Civil War fiction. The essays draw on an equally wide variety of critical methodologies, integrating affect studies, queer theory, book history, information studies, sound studies, environmental humanities, new media studies, and genre theory to explore the unexpected dimensions that emerge when time and place are taken as a unit. The pieces are organized around considerations of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and bodies—five political, cultural, and/or methodological foci for some of the most provocative new work being done in American literary studies.

Neither the Time nor the Place is a book not only for scholars and students already well grounded in the study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture, but for anyone, scholar or student, looking for a roadmap to some of the most vibrant work in the field.

Contributors: Wai Chee Dimock, Stephanie Foote, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Coleman Hutchison, Rodrigo Lazo, Caroline Levander, Robert S. Levine, Christopher Looby, Dana Luciano, Timothy Marr, Dana D. Nelson, Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo, Mark Storey, Matthew E. Suazo, and Edward Sugden.

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

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

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

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

Before 1882, the U.S. federal government had never formally deported anyone, but that year an act of Congress made Chinese workers the first group of immigrants eligible for deportation. Over the next forty years, lawmakers and judges expanded deportable categories to include prostitutes, anarchists, the sick, and various kinds of criminals. The history of that lengthening list shaped the policy options U.S. citizens continue to live with into the present.

Deportation covers the uncertain beginnings of American deportation policy and recounts the halting and uncoordinated steps that were taken as it emerged from piecemeal actions in Congress and courtrooms across the country to become an established national policy by the 1920s. Usually viewed from within the nation, deportation policy also plays a part in geopolitics; deportees, after all, have to be sent somewhere. Studying deportations out of the United States as well as the deportation of U.S. citizens back to the United States from abroad, Torrie Hester illustrates that U.S. policy makers were part of a global trend that saw officials from nations around the world either revise older immigrant removal policies or create new ones.

A history of immigration policy in the United States and the world, Deportation chronicles the unsystematic emergence of what has become an internationally recognized legal doctrine, the far-reaching impact of which has forever altered what it means to be an immigrant and a citizen.

From Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to Glenn Beck and Matt Drudge, Americans are accustomed to thinking of right-wing media as integral to contemporary conservatism. But today's well-known personalities make up the second generation of broadcasting and publishing activists. Messengers of the Right tells the story of the little-known first generation.

Beginning in the late 1940s, activists working in media emerged as leaders of the American conservative movement. They not only started an array of enterprises—publishing houses, radio programs, magazines, book clubs, television shows—they also built the movement. They coordinated rallies, founded organizations, ran political campaigns, and mobilized voters. While these media activists disagreed profoundly on tactics and strategy, they shared a belief that political change stemmed not just from ideas but from spreading those ideas through openly ideological communications channels.

In Messengers of the Right, Nicole Hemmer explains how conservative media became the institutional and organizational nexus of the conservative movement, transforming audiences into activists and activists into a reliable voting base. Hemmer also explores how the idea of liberal media bias emerged, why conservatives have been more successful at media activism than liberals, and how the right remade both the Republican Party and American news media. Messengers of the Right follows broadcaster Clarence Manion, book publisher Henry Regnery, and magazine publisher William Rusher as they evolved from frustrated outsiders in search of a platform into leaders of one of the most significant and successful political movements of the twentieth century.

In the wake of the New Deal, U.S. politics has been popularly imagined as an ongoing conflict between small-government conservatives and big-government liberals. In practice, narratives of left versus right or government versus the people do not begin to capture the dynamic ways Americans pursue civic goals while protecting individual freedoms. Brian Balogh proposes a new view of U.S. politics that illuminates how public and private actors collaborate to achieve collective goals. This "associational synthesis" treats the relationship between state and civil society as fluid and challenges interpretations that map the trajectory of American politics solely along ideological lines. Rather, both liberals and conservatives have extended the authority of the state but have done so most successfully when state action is mediated through nongovernmental institutions, such as universities, corporations, interest groups, and other voluntary organizations.

The Associational State provides a fresh perspective on the crucial role that the private sector, trade associations, and professional organizations have played in implementing public policies from the late nineteenth through the twenty-first century. Balogh examines key historical periods through the lens of political development, paying particular attention to the ways government, social movements, and intermediary institutions have organized support and resources to achieve public ends. Exposing the gap between the ideological rhetoric that both parties deploy today and their far less ideologically driven behavior over the past century and a half, The Associational State offers one solution to the partisan gridlock that currently grips the nation.

There were 26—not 13—British colonies in America in 1776. Of these, the six colonies in the Caribbean—Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, Grenada and Tobago, St. Vincent; and Dominica—were among the wealthiest. These island colonies were closely related to the mainland by social ties and tightly connected by trade. In a period when most British colonists in North America lived less than 200 miles inland and the major cities were all situated along the coast, the ocean often acted as a highway between islands and mainland rather than a barrier.

The plantation system of the islands was so similar to that of the southern mainland colonies that these regions had more in common with each other, some historians argue, than either had with New England. Political developments in all the colonies moved along parallel tracks, with elected assemblies in the Caribbean, like their mainland counterparts, seeking to increase their authority at the expense of colonial executives. Yet when revolution came, the majority of the white island colonists did not side with their compatriots on the mainland.

A major contribution to the history of the American Revolution, An Empire Divided traces a split in the politics of the mainland and island colonies after the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765-66, when the colonists on the islands chose not to emulate the resistance of the patriots on the mainland. Once war came, it was increasingly unpopular in the British Caribbean; nonetheless, the white colonists cooperated with the British in defense of their islands. O'Shaughnessy decisively refutes the widespread belief that there was broad backing among the Caribbean colonists for the American Revolution and deftly reconstructs the history of how the island colonies followed an increasingly divergent course from the former colonies to the north.

Although the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, has been a text central and vital to the Jewish canon since the Middle Ages, the context in which it was produced has been poorly understood. Delving deep into Sasanian material culture and literary remains, Shai Secunda pieces together the dynamic world of late antique Iran, providing an unprecedented and accessible overview of the world that shaped the Bavli.

Secunda unites the fields of Talmudic scholarship with Old Iranian studies to enable a fresh look at the heterogeneous religious and ethnic communities of pre-Islamic Iran. He analyzes the intercultural dynamics between the Jews and their Persian Zoroastrian neighbors, exploring the complex processes and modes of discourse through which these groups came into contact and considering the ways in which rabbis and Zoroastrian priests perceived one another. Placing the Bavli and examples of Middle Persian literature side by side, the Zoroastrian traces in the former and the discursive and Talmudic qualities of the latter become evident. The Iranian Talmud introduces a substantial and essential shift in the field, setting the stage for further Irano-Talmudic research.

The small and remote island of Barbados seems an unlikely location for the epochal change in labor that overwhelmed it and much of British America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, by 1650 it had become the greatest wealth-producing area in the English-speaking world, the center of an exchange of people and goods between the British Isles, the Gold Coast of West Africa, and the New World. By the early seventeenth century, more than half a million enslaved men, women, and children had been transported to the island. In A New World of Labor, Simon P. Newman argues that this exchange stimulated an entirely new system of bound labor.

Free and bound labor were defined and experienced by Britons and Africans across the British Atlantic world in quite different ways. Connecting social developments in seventeenth-century Britain with the British experience of slavery on the West African coast, Newman demonstrates that the brutal white servant regime, rather than the West African institution of slavery, provided the most significant foundation for the violent system of racialized black slavery that developed in Barbados. Class as much as race informed the creation of plantation slavery in Barbados and throughout British America. Enslaved Africans in Barbados were deployed in radically new ways in order to cultivate, process, and manufacture sugar on single, integrated plantations. This Barbadian system informed the development of racial slavery on Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, as well as in South Carolina and then the Deep South of mainland British North America. Drawing on British and West African precedents, and then radically reshaping them, Barbados planters invented a new world of labor.

An Infinity of Nations explores the formation and development of a Native New World in North America. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, indigenous peoples controlled the vast majority of the continent while European colonies of the Atlantic World were largely confined to the eastern seaboard. To be sure, Native North America experienced far-reaching and radical change following contact with the peoples, things, and ideas that flowed inland following the creation of European colonies on North American soil. Most of the continent's indigenous peoples, however, were not conquered, assimilated, or even socially incorporated into the settlements and political regimes of this Atlantic New World. Instead, Native peoples forged a New World of their own. This history, the evolution of a distinctly Native New World, is a foundational story that remains largely untold in histories of early America.

Through imaginative use of both Native language and European documents, historian Michael Witgen recreates the world of the indigenous peoples who ruled the western interior of North America. The Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples of the Great Lakes and Northern Great Plains dominated the politics and political economy of these interconnected regions, which were pivotal to the fur trade and the emergent world economy. Moving between cycles of alliance and competition, and between peace and violence, the Anishinaabeg and Dakota carved out a place for Native peoples in modern North America, ensuring not only that they would survive as independent and distinct Native peoples but also that they would be a part of the new community of nations who made the New World.

When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become the enslaved property of the mother's master. In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe, Laboring Women traverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners' expectations for reproductive labor, and women's lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery.

Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women's gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women's actual lives—from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations—she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women's reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life.

Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery, Laboring Women is a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women.

A Nation of Women chronicles changing ideas of gender and identity among the Delaware Indians from the mid-seventeenth through the eighteenth century, as they encountered various waves of migrating peoples in their homelands along the eastern coast of North America.

In Delaware society at the beginning of this period, to be a woman meant to engage in the activities performed by women, including diplomacy, rather than to be defined by biological sex. Among the Delaware, being a "woman" was therefore a self-identification, employed by both women and men, that reflected the complementary roles of both sexes within Delaware society. For these reasons, the Delaware were known among Europeans and other Native American groups as "a nation of women."

Decades of interaction with these other cultures gradually eroded the positive connotations of being a nation of women as well as the importance of actual women in Delaware society. In Anglo-Indian politics, being depicted as a woman suggested weakness and evil. Exposed to such thinking, Delaware men struggled successfully to assume the formal speaking roles and political authority that women once held. To salvage some sense of gender complementarity in Delaware society, men and women redrew the lines of their duties more rigidly. As the era came to a close, even as some Delaware engaged in a renewal of Delaware identity as a masculine nation, others rejected involvement in Christian networks that threatened to disturb the already precarious gender balance in their social relations.

Drawing on all available European accounts, including those in Swedish, German, and English, Fur establishes the centrality of gender in Delaware life and, in doing so, argues for a new understanding of how different notions of gender influenced all interactions in colonial North America.

Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature explores the crucial role of paper in the early history of books and of English literature. Taking up four paradigms of literary scholarship—authorship, composition, form, and reuse—Georgina Wilson shows how the material affordances of paper shaped the work of readers, writers, and critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Looking past the surface of printed texts to less legible forms of labor, Wilson models literary critical readings of paper’s physical aspects, from watermarks to rotatable paper dials, in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall and George Wither’s emblems, sheets, and fragments. Turning from paper's specific physical attributes to authors who were preoccupied with its imaginative potential, Wilson explores how paper’s tangible qualities intervened in what readers and writers did with it, tracing formalist, legal, and political debates on the textual and nontextual uses of paper through the works of John Taylor and eighteenth-century “it-narratives.”

Drawing upon examples from early modern drama, poetry, and prose to consider the real and imagined women and men who made and used paper, Wilson demonstrates how early modern paper was both the product of embodied labor and of the early modern imagination. Bringing together close reading, critical bibliography, archival research, and literary theory, Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature shows how paper makes literature not only as a physical object but also as a discipline.

The first scholarly collection devoted to Shirley Graham Du Bois and her legacy as an artist and activist

Shirley Graham Du Bois centers her cultural, intellectual, and political significance as a Black radical woman during the twentieth century. The volume traces Graham Du Bois’s travels across the United States and around the world to places like France, Ghana, Egypt, China, and Russia. Contributors not only chronicle her creativity as a theatrical composer, novelist, journalist, and public intellectual but also present the wide range of her political impact as a civil rights and radical peace activist, international feminist, Black nationalist, socialist, and Pan-Africanist.

While prevailing accounts of Graham Du Bois’s life often emphasize her significance in relation to the prominent men with whom she associated, including her husband W.E.B. Du Bois, the essays in this volume engage with her thought on her own terms and in her own voice. Contributors examine how African and African American culture infused her artistry as a musician, dramatist, editor, and author of historical biographies; and they analyze how her creative intellect shaped the evolution of her expansive, radical political commitments across the global Black freedom struggle.

The first scholarly collection devoted to Shirley Graham Du Bois, the book explores key moments in her life, revealing the critical importance of her endeavors as an artist, her efforts as an activist, and her productivity as an author across the African Diaspora. Taken together, the essays highlight the Black radical legacy of liberation that Shirley Graham Du Bois left behind while underscoring the vitality of her international voice in freedom movements of Black and oppressed populations across the globe.

Contributors: Bettina Aptheker, Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Lauren Eglen, Mjiba Frehiwot, Tsitsi Jaji, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Denise Lynn, Phillip Luke Sinitiere.

A new account of premodern education that offered non-elite readers lessons in navigating the premodern marketplace

Learning to Talk Shop explores the phrasebooks and guides to conversations that flooded the marketplace in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, making a virtual classroom available to an audience who could not afford or did not have access to formal education. Privileging market share and mercantile savvy over moral instruction and linguistic mastery, these mischievous little books offered readers lessons in the pragmatic, and murky, ethics of the premodern marketplace, teaching them bargaining tactics, insults, pick up lines, and strategies for welching on debts.

Revealing what happens when language learning itself undergoes a translation out of the classroom, into the marketplace and further down the social ladder, Susan E. Phillips offers a new account of premodern education, not through erudite tombs and schoolmaster sovereigns, but through these practical books that enabled non-elite readers to thrive in an environment not particularly conducive to their success. Phillips asks what we learn and whom we can see when we look at premodern education from this humbler, more mischievous perspective, telling the tales of resourceful chambermaids, savvy black stableboys, and arithmetically adept barmaids as well as the story of a schoolgirl who compiled a textbook of her own and the narrative of a black schoolmaster teaching in Shakespeare’s London.

In these stories, Phillips finds the liberatory potential in a discourse that has previously been read as upholding traditional social hierarchies in the premodern period. If we expand our archive beyond the Latin textbooks of the grammar school classroom to include these bestselling bi- and multilingual vernacular textbooks, Phillips contends, we can see a radically different set of possibilities—a premodern pedagogy that is more expansive, more flexible, and more inclusive.

A cultural history of speech in medieval Italy

The Unruly Tongue, a cultural history of speech in medieval Italy, offers a new account of how the power of words changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that ushered in the era of modern democracies, historian Melissa Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in Europe’s monarchies but rather in Italy’s republics. Exploring the cultural process through which science and medicine, politics, law, literature, and theology together informed a new political ethics of speech, Vise uncovers the formation of a moral code where the regulation of the tongue became an integral component of republican values in medieval Europe.

The medieval citizens of Italy’s republics understood themselves to be wholly subject to the power of words not because they lived in an age of persecution or doctrinal rigidity, but because words had furnished the grounds for their political freedom. Speech-making was the means for speaking the republic itself into existence against the opposition of aristocracy, empire, and papacy. But because words had power, they could also be deployed as weapons. Speech contained the potential for violence and presented a threat to political and social order, and thus needed to be controlled. Vise shows how the laws that governed and curtailed speech in medieval Italy represented broader cultural understandings of human susceptibility to speech. Tracing anthropologies of speech from religious to political discourse, from civic courts to ecclesiastical courts, from medical texts to the works of Dante and Boccaccio, The Unruly Tongue demonstrates that the thirteenth century marked a major shift in how people perceived the power, and the threat, of speech: a change in thinking about “what words do.”

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

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

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

Examines the politics of expertise in the practices of peacemaking in post–civil war Lebanon

Based on multi-sited ethnographic research centering on Beirut, but tracing international peace work as far as Switzerland and the United States, Master Peace examines the politics of expertise in the application of metropolitan theories of violence and practices of peacemaking in post–civil war Lebanon. Through ethnographic encounters, archival research, and interviews that shed light on the worlds of academic research, UN agencies, NGOs, and think tanks, Nikolas Kosmatopoulos argues that so-called experts, from violence researchers to peace professionals, have often misrepresented and exacerbated the violence they claim to be tackling, through their deployment of racialized tropes of conflict and communalizing peace practices.

The assemblage of these tropes and practices, which Kosmatopoulos calls “master peace,” naturalizes social and structural inequalities by collapsing them into supposedly innate cultural and sectarian divisions. Master peace installs unequal relations of domination through the work of metropolitan theories, as in “ethnic conflict” and “failed state,” and practices, such as conflict resolution workshops and crisis reports, converting the radical demand for just peace into a postcolonial regime of dependence on technocratic tools, unaccountable experts, and external donors.

Kosmatopoulos shows how master peace has been framing debates, designing interventions of peace and war, and defining the problem of violence in Lebanon and the Middle East for decades, to deleterious effect. As the supposed moral high ground that justifies external intervention and precludes political solutions or democratic forms of action, master peace has obscured the geopolitical and ideological nature of violence in the region, substituting democratic notions of peace for an elitist antipolitics of expertise characterized by dependence, domination, and epistemic violence.

What early modern and Shakespeare studies have to offer contemporary thinking about the future

What do early modern and Shakespeare studies have to offer contemporary thinking about the future? Joining a series of urgent conversations about “the future” as an object of analysis and theorization in early modern history, art history, literature, science, theology, and law, Histories of the Future addresses this question directly. This volume brings together essays that draw on early modern modes of “thinking ahead” to reconsider the ways in which the teaching and reading of Shakespeare help shape how one imagines the future from the vantage point of today.

By stressing the importance of understanding how future-oriented thinking in the past informs perceptions of possibility in the present—with special attention to contemporary issues of climate change, economic inequality, race and indigeneity, queer lives, physical and mental health crises, academic precarity, conditions of scholarly labor, and the ongoing disastrous effects of settler colonialism—Histories of the Future contributes to a rich and expanding field of scholarship on temporality in pre- and early modern literatures and cultures. In the process, it also engages with key insights of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory in reexamining historical issues ranging from the imagined inevitability of progress or apocalypse to fraught conditions of succession, chronology, catastrophe, influence, prophecy, and risk.

With essays by J. K. Barret, Urvashi Chakravarty, Drew Daniel, John Garrison, Margreta de Grazia, Jean E. Howard, Jeffrey Masten, Marissa Nicosia, Vimala Pasupathi, Kathryn Vomero Santos, and Scott Manning Stevens, Histories of the Future explores the possibilities and limits of early modern futures for “thinking ahead” today.

Argues that the foundation of Israel was a trauma that destabilized the kibbutz’s conceptual grounding

State of Shock decodes one of the most iconic images of Zionism and Israel: the kibbutz. Lior Libman offers original theoretical and historiographical insights into the imagery and the history of the kibbutz, and, through them, of Hebrew literature and Israeli culture more broadly. Arguing that the establishment of the State of Israel was a rupture that destabilized the kibbutz’s deepest conceptual ground and shifted its history, the book uncovers the seemingly surprising Hasidic resonances in the identity of the kibbutz and its self-perception as fulfilling the metaphysical in the physical.

By interrogating the changes and upheavals brought about by Jewish sovereignty, their impact on the kibbutz, and its response to them, Libman defines the kibbutz’s transition into Israeli statehood as a cultural trauma which robbed it of its familiar frames for interpreting historical experience. Disoriented, the kibbutz reacted in shock: it was unable to reimagine itself in the new conditions. Libman charts how the demise of the kibbutz, originally avant-garde—a political and aesthetic form that acts in history—began in 1948. Turning from its origin as a breakaway human-creation engaged in a constant process of becoming—of history-making—the kibbutz, Libman shows, transformed into a fetish in the early years of the State of Israel: a sanctified, substitutional, fossilized political and aesthetic object of compulsive metaphysical longing, frozen in time and detached from history.

An ethnographic exploration of anthropological failure through the Mapuche archetypes of witch, clown, and usurper

How do we learn what failure looks like? During the years anthropologist Magnus Course spent living with Indigenous Mapuche people in southern Chile, he came to understand failure—both his own and those of the discipline of anthropology—through Mapuche narratives of the witch, the clown, and the usurper. In a context of enduring poverty and racism, increasing state repression, and his own disintegration, he began to realize that these figures of failure, and their insatiable appetites for destruction, greed, and property, reflected as much upon his own failings as on anybody else’s, but also showed the way forward to a better way to live.

Set amidst the stunning natural beauty and political tragedies of southern Chile, Three Ways to Fail is the story of what it means to become a part of other people’s lives, of what it means to fail them, and of what it means to live well when everything falls apart. Grounded in three decades of work and collaboration with Mapuche people, Three Ways to Fail sheds new light on Indigenous lifeways in the Americas while grappling with broader questions about the nature of ethnographic writing and the future of anthropology.

How important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy to fight slavery

In Fighting for the Higher Law, Peter Wirzbicki explores how important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy that fired the radical struggle against American slavery.

In the cauldron of the antislavery movement, antislavery activists, such as William C. Nell, Thomas Sidney, and Charlotte Forten, and Transcendentalist intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, developed a "Higher Law" ethos, a unique set of romantic political sensibilities—marked by moral enthusiasms, democratic idealism, and a vision of the self that could judge political questions from "higher" standards of morality and reason. The Transcendentalism that emerges here is not simply the dreamy philosophy of privileged white New Englanders, but a more populist movement, one that encouraged an uncompromising form of politics among a wide range of Northerners, black as well as white, working-class as well as wealthy. Invented to fight slavery, it would influence later labor, feminist, civil rights, and environmentalist activism.

African American thinkers and activists have long engaged with American Transcendentalist ideas about "double consciousness," nonconformity, and civil disobedience. When thinkers like Martin Luther King, Jr., or W. E. B. Du Bois invoked Transcendentalist ideas, they were putting to use an intellectual movement that black radicals had participated in since the 1830s.

The two-state solution is doomed; the one-state reality is here to stay

Why have Israelis and Palestinians failed to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict that has cost so much and lasted so long? In Paradigm Lost, Ian S. Lustick brings fifty years as an analyst of the Arab-Israeli dispute to bear on this question and offers a provocative explanation of why continued attempts to divide the land will have no more success than would negotiations to establish a one-state solution.

Basing his argument on the decisiveness of unanticipated consequences, Lustick shows how the combination of Zionism's partially successful Iron Wall strategy for dealing with Arabs, an Israeli political culture saturated with what the author calls "Holocaustia," and the Israel lobby's dominant influence on American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict scuttled efforts to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Yet, he demonstrates, it has also unintentionally set the stage for new struggles and "better problems" for both Israel and the Palestinians. Drawing on the history of scientific ideas that once seemed certain but were ultimately discarded, Lustick encourages shifting attention from two-state blueprints that provide no map for realistic action to the democratizing competition that arises when different subgroups, forced to be part of the same polity, redefine their interests and form new alliances to pursue them.

Paradigm Lost argues that negotiations for a two-state solution between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River are doomed and counterproductive. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs can enjoy the democracy they deserve but only after decades of struggle amid the unintended but powerful consequences of today's one-state reality.

A provocative, sobering analysis of twenty-first century court cases that undermine the very idea of constitutional government

As the 2000 decision by the Supreme Court to effectively deliver the presidency to George W. Bush recedes in time, its real meaning comes into focus. If the initial critique of the Court was that it had altered the rules of democracy after the fact, the perspective of distance permits us to see that the rules were, in some sense, not altered at all. Here was a "landmark" decision that, according to its own logic, was applicable only once and that therefore neither relied on past precedent nor lay the foundation for future interpretations.

This logic, according to scholar Jack Jackson, not only marks a stark break from the traditional terrain of U.S. constitutional law but exemplifies an era of triumphant radicalism and illiberalism on the American Right. In Law Without Future, Jackson demonstrates how this philosophy has manifested itself across political life in the twenty-first century and locates its origins in overlooked currents of post-WWII political thought. These developments have undermined the very idea of constitutional government, and the resulting crisis, Jackson argues, has led to the decline of traditional conservatism on the Right and to the embrace on the Left of a studiously legal, apolitical understanding of constitutionalism (with ironically reactionary implications).

Jackson examines Bush v. Gore, the post-9/11 "torture memos," the 2005 Terri Schiavo controversy, the Republican Senate's norm-obliterating refusal to vote on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, and the ascendancy of Donald Trump in developing his claims. Engaging with a wide array of canonical and contemporary political thinkers—including St. Augustine, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King Jr., Hannah Arendt, Wendy Brown, Ronald Dworkin, and Hanna Pitkin—Law Without Future offers a provocative, sobering analysis of how these events have altered U.S. political life in the twenty-first century in profound ways—and seeks to think beyond the impasse they have created.

Ten years ago a groundbreaking cross-generational study revealed that greater freedom and new constraints were leading fewer young people to choose parenthood. In the intervening years, the decision to have a family has not gotten easier.

Stew Friedman, founding director of The Wharton School's Work/Life Integration Project, studied two generations of Wharton college students as they graduated: Gen Xers in 1992 and Millennials in 2012. The cross-generational study produced a stark discovery—the rate of graduates who planned to have children had dropped by nearly half over those 20 years. While some might wonder what this privileged group can tell us about broader trends in the United States, Friedman argues that they were “the canaries in the coal mine. . . . if they could not see a way to make their careers and families work, how could those with fewer opportunities and resources square this circle?”

In a new preface to this 10th anniversary edition of Baby Bust, Friedman observes that the birth rate in the United States has continued to decline in the years since. He offers new insights into why fewer people are choosing to have children, how the pandemic affected these trends, and what can be done about it.

In this book, Friedman addresses:

+ How views about work and family have changed;
+ Why men and women have different reasons for opting out of parenthood;
+ How family has been redefined;
+ What choices we face in our social and educational policy; and
+ How organizations and individuals—especially men—can spur cultural change.

In the debates on work and family, people of all generations are calling for a reasoned, thoughtful, research-driven contribution to the discussion. In Baby Bust, Friedman offers just that: an astute assessment of how far we have come and where we go from here.

In 2002, we learned that President George Washington had eight (and, later, nine) enslaved Africans in his house while he lived in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797. The house was only one block from Independence Hall and, though torn down in 1832, it housed the enslaved men and women Washington brought to the city as well as serving as the country's first executive office building. Intense controversy erupted over what this newly resurfaced evidence of enslaved people in Philadelphia meant for the site that was next door to the new home for the Liberty Bell. How could slavery best be remembered and memorialized in the birthplace of American freedom? For Marc Howard Ross, this conflict raised a related and troubling question: why and how did slavery in the North fade from public consciousness to such a degree that most Americans have perceived it entirely as a "Southern problem"?

Although slavery was institutionalized throughout the Northern as well as the Southern colonies and early states, the existence of slavery in the North and its significance for the region's economic development has rarely received public recognition. In Slavery in the North, Ross not only asks why enslavement disappeared from the North's collective memories but also how the dramatic recovery of these memories in recent decades should be understood. Ross undertakes an exploration of the history of Northern slavery, visiting sites such as the African Burial Ground in New York, Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the ports of Rhode Island, old mansions in Massachusetts, prestigious universities, and rediscovered burying grounds. Inviting the reader to accompany him on his own journey of discovery, Ross recounts the processes by which Northerners had collectively forgotten 250 years of human bondage and the recent—and continuing—struggles over recovering, and commemorating, what it entailed.

Today the history of ancient Egypt is known around the world, recognisable in precious museum collections and countless retellings from popular culture. Yet for hundreds of years, from the late Roman Empire to the 19th century, the wonders of this ancient civilisation were frozen in time, locked in artefacts that could not be understood due to the loss of the ancient Egyptian language. In 1799 the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a slab inscribed in three scripts, hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, changed the course of history, unlocking thousands of years of ancient culture and eventually becoming one of the world’s most famous museum artefacts.

Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt tells the story of the Rosetta Stone and of countless other objects that were central to efforts to decode the hieroglyphs dating back to the Islamic Golden Age. Featuring fascinating objects from the British Museum and international lenders, the book shows how the presence of a written language was crucial to understanding life in ancient Egypt, from everyday business affairs to the sacred secrets of the afterlife. Interweaving the story of decipherment with colonial history, the book takes readers up to the present day, revealing what researchers are doing now to tell us more about one of the world’s longest surviving civilizations through the understanding of their writing.

Published to coincide with the bicentenary of Jean-François Champollion’s breakthrough in decipherment, this beautifully illustrated book shows how an unassuming grey stone was the key to the secrets of ancient Egypt and led to one of the most significant code breaking moments in history.

Contributors: Susanne Beck, Monica Berti, Willy Clarysse, Fayza Haikal, Cary Martin, Franziska Naether, Richard Parkinson, Daniela Picchi, John Taylor, Patricia Usick, Pascal Vernus.

Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism reveals how political and literary dialogues and conflicts between the Hebrew literature of the Hasidism, the Jewish Enlightenment, and Zionism interacted with each other in the nineteenth century. Hannan Hever uses postcolonial theories and theories of nationality to analyze how Jews used literature to make sense of hostility directed toward Jews from their European “host” countries and to set forth their own ideas and preferences regarding their status, control, and treatment. In doing so, Hever theorizes the Enlightenment’s intellectual aims and cultural influences, tracking how the models of integration crucial to Haskalah gave way to Jewish nationalism in the twentieth century.

The readings in this book are theoretically informed, setting forward novel claims based on detailed textual analyses of hasidic tales, Haskalah satires, and Zionist narratives. Thus, this book tackles a major interpretative problem visible at the core of modern Hebrew literature—its radical difficulty in distinguishing between the theological components of modern Jewish discourse and its national identity.

In the Gospel of Truth, a second-century text associated with the Christian Platonist Valentinus, a crucified Jesus is depicted as wrapped in a scroll and reading aloud the contents of his heart as he dies. This is just one of many strange appearances of the physical book in this text and in the surviving fragments of Valentinus. Through its representations of the written word, Anne Kreps argues, the Gospel of Truth promoted a living document perspective on the holy book, encouraging the generation of religious books as new sources of revelatory authority.

The Crucified Book locates the Gospel of Truth in a broader ancient debate about books and their attendant authority. Roman and Jewish texts exhibit similar efforts to equate holy persons with holy texts, while Christian heresiologists exhibit awareness of the phenomenon even as they condemn it. Although the Gospel of Truth is often set apart from mainstream Christianity in scholarship, its ideas about the nature of authoritative writing engaged with Greco-Roman culture and cohered with Jewish and Christian ideas about books in antiquity. Valentinus' views about the relationship between the oral and the written dovetailed with thinking on the nature of the sacred book that gradually became the trademark of Rabbinic Judaism, Kreps contends. Ultimately, because the Gospel of Truth reflects a mind that was at the center of the discursive debates that formed Judaism and Christianity, her book demonstrates the usefulness of so-called heretical texts for discussions on the parting of the ways between the two traditions.

In Won in Translation Roger Chartier, one of the world's leading historians of books, publishing, and reading, considers the mobility of the early modern text and the plurality of circulating versions of the same work. The agent for both is translation, for through their lexical, aesthetic, and cultural decisions, translators always assign new meaning or new status to what they translate.

Won in Translation proceeds by way of four case studies, three dedicated to works originally in Spanish, the fourth to a Portuguese dramatic adaptation of Don Quixote. Bartolomé de Las Casas' Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, first printed in 1552, was a powerful instrument for the construction of what was later called the "black legend" of Spanish monarchy. Baltasar Gracián's Oráculo Manual, published in 1647, became the most famous courtier's manual in Europe. Both traveled more widely and were translated more often than any other books of their era. For Chartier they illustrate the great power of translation, which allowed Las Casas' account to be placed in multiple and successive contexts and enabled Gracián's book to take on a range of meanings it had not originally had. Chartier's next two chapters are devoted to plays, one by Lope de Vega, the other by Antônio José da Silva. In the case of Lope's Fuente Ovejuna, the "translation" was one from historical chronicle to dramatic performance. In Antônio José da Silva's Vida do Grande D. Quixote, the textual migration is twofold, as Cervantes' hero moves from Spanish to Portuguese and from novel to play.

In an Epilogue, Chartier moves three centuries forward to consider the paradox that it is the absolute immobility of the text, "reinvented" word for word, that creates its mobility in Jorge Luis Borges' fiction "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Works are transformed through changes of genre or language, to be sure; but even when the texts remain fixed, their readers give them different or inverted meaning.

Asylum Ways of Seeing is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films.

This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient—as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital—that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.

After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Sephardi Jews such as Isaac Abravanel, Abraham Saba, and Isaac Arama wrote biblical commentaries that stressed the significance of land. They interpreted Judaism as a tradition whose best expression and ultimate fulfillment took place away from cities and in rural settings. Iberian-Jewish authors rooted their moral teachings in an ethical treatment of the natural world, elucidating ancient agricultural laws and scrutinizing the physical context and built environments of Bible stories. The Land Is Mine asks what inspired this and suggests that the answer lies not in timeless exegetical or theological trends, but in the material realities of late medieval and early modern Iberia, during a period of drastic changes in land use.

The book uses a highly traditional source base in a decidedly untraditional way. In Jewish Studies, Andrew D. Berns observes, biblical commentary is typically studied as an intramural activity. Though scholars have conceded that Jewish scriptural exegesis welcomes material and ideas from other fields and traditions, little to no work treats premodern Hebrew Bible commentary as also drawing upon Classical and Christian sources as well as contemporary writings on land management and political economy. Abravanel, Saba, and Arama were engaged with questions that had broad resonance during their lives: the proper way to treat the land, the best occupations to pursue, and the ideal setting for human community. Scriptural commentary was the forum in which they addressed these problems and posed solutions to them.

A work of intellectual history,The Land Is Mine demonstrates that it is impossible to understand Jewish culture without considering the physical realities on which it depended.

The Black Death that arrived in the spring of 1348 eventually killed nearly half of England's population. In its long aftermath, wages in London rose in response to labor shortages, many survivors moved into larger quarters in the depopulated city, and people in general spent more money on food, clothing, and household furnishings than they had before. Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how this increased consumption reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.

Grounding her analysis in both the study of surviving household artifacts and extensive archival research, Katherine L. French examines the accommodations that Londoners made to their bigger houses and the increasing number of possessions these contained. The changes in material circumstance reshaped domestic hierarchies and produced new routines and expectations. Recognizing that the greater number of possessions required a different kind of management and care, French puts housework and gender at the center of her study. Historically, the task of managing bodies and things and the dirt and chaos they create has been unproblematically defined as women's work. Housework, however, is neither timeless nor ahistorical, and French traces a major shift in women's household responsibilities to the arrival and gendering of new possessions and the creation of new household spaces in the decades after the plague.

Engineering Expansion examines the U.S. Army's role in U.S. economic development from the nation's founding to the eve of the Civil War. William D. Adler starts with a simple question: if the federal government was weak in its early years, how could the economy and the nation have grown so rapidly?

Adler answers this question by focusing on the strongest part of the early American state, the U.S. Army. The Army shaped the American economy through its coercive actions in conquering territory, expanding the nation's borders, and maintaining public order and the rule of law. It built roads, bridges, and railroads while Army engineers and ordnance officers developed new technologies, constructed forts that encouraged western settlement and nurtured nascent communities, cleared rivers, and created manufacturing innovations that spread throughout the private sector. Politicians fought for control of the Army, but War Department bureaucracies also contributed to their own development by shaping the preferences of elected officials.

Engineering Expansion synthesizes a wide range of historical material and will be of interest to those interested in early America, military history, and politics in the early United States.

In the spring of 1576, the Health Office of Venice, fearful of a growing outbreak of plague, imposed a quarantine upon the city. The move was controversial, with some in power questioning the precise nature of the disease and concerned about the economic and political impact of the closure. A tribunal of physicians was summoned by the Doge, among them Girolamo Mercuriale, professor of medicine in nearby Padua and perhaps the most famous physician in all of Europe. Whatever the disease was that was affecting Venice, Mercuriale opined, it was not and could not be plague, for it was neither fast-moving nor widespread enough for that diagnosis. Following Mercuriale's advice and against the objections of the Health Office of the Republic, the quarantine was lifted. The rejoicing of the Venetian populace was short-lived. By July 1577, when the outbreak had run its course, the plague had killed an estimated 50,000 Venetians, or approximately a third of the city's population.

In January 1577, in the midst of a plague he now recognized he had misdiagnosed, Mercuriale offered a series of lectures from his seat in Padua. Published under the title On Pestilence, the work surveyed past epidemics, including the Justinianic Plague of the sixth century and the Black Death of the fourteenth, and accounts of plague in Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and other sources. Plague, Mercuriale pronounced, was characterized by its lethal nature and the rapidity with which it spread. He contended it was primarily airborne and was not caught through microbial transmission, but because the air itself became pestiferous and promoted putrefaction. Using his observations, he evaluated recently developed theories of contagion and concluded that pestiferous vapors could also emanate from the diseased bodies of its victims, and that one might also contract the disease from the contaminated clothing or bedding of the ill.

In Craig Martin's translation, On Pestilence appears for the first time in English, accompanied by an introduction that places the work within the context of sixteenth-century Italy, the history of medicine, and our own responses to epidemic disease.

Economic corridors—ambitious infrastructural development projects that newly liberalizing countries in Asia and Africa are undertaking—are dramatically redefining the shape of urbanization. Spanning multiple cities and croplands, these corridors connect metropolises via high-speed superhighways in an effort to make certain strategic regions attractive destinations for private investment. As policy makers search for decentralized and market-oriented means for the transfer of land from agrarian constituencies to infrastructural promoters and urban developers, the reallocation of property control is erupting into volatile land-based social conflicts.

In Shareholder Cities, Sai Balakrishnan argues that some of India's most decisive conflicts over its urban future will unfold in the regions along the new economic corridors where electorally strong agrarian propertied classes directly encounter financially powerful incoming urban firms. Balakrishnan focuses on the first economic corridor, the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, and the construction of three new cities along it. The book derives its title from a current mode of resolving agrarian-urban conflicts in which agrarian landowners are being transformed into shareholders in the corridor cities, and the distributional implications of these new land transformations.

Shifting the focus of the study of India's contemporary urbanization away from megacities to these in-between corridor regions, Balakrishnan explores the production of uneven urban development that unsettles older histories of agrarian capitalism and the emergence of agrarian propertied classes as protagonists in the making of urban real estate markets. Shareholder Cities highlights the possibilities for a democratic politics of inclusion in which agrarian-urban encounters can create opportunities for previously excluded groups to stake new claims for themselves in the corridor regions.

The right to privacy is a pivotal concept in the culture wars that have galvanized American politics for the past several decades. It has become a rallying point for political issues ranging from abortion to gay liberation to sex education. Yet this notion of privacy originated not only from legal arguments, nor solely from political movements on the left or the right, but instead from ambivalent moderates who valued both personal freedom and the preservation of social norms.

In The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac, Clayton Howard chronicles the rise of sexual privacy as a fulcrum of American cultural politics. Beginning in the 1940s, public officials pursued an agenda that both promoted heterosexuality and made sexual privacy one of the state's key promises to its citizens. The 1944 G.I. Bill, for example, excluded gay veterans and enfranchised married ones in its dispersal of housing benefits. At the same time, officials required secluded bedrooms in new suburban homes and created educational campaigns designed to teach children respect for parents' privacy. In the following decades, measures such as these helped to concentrate middle-class families in the suburbs and gay men and lesbians in cities.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the gay rights movement invoked privacy to attack repressive antigay laws, while social conservatives criticized tolerance for LGBTQ+ people as an assault on their own privacy. Many self-identified moderates, however, used identical rhetoric to distance themselves from both the discriminatory language of the religious right and the perceived excesses of the gay freedom struggle. Using the Bay Area as a case study, Howard places these moderates at the center of postwar American politics and shows how the region's burgeoning suburbs reacted to increasing gay activism in San Francisco. The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac offers specific examples of the ways in which government policies shaped many Americans' attitudes about sexuality and privacy and the ways in which citizens mobilized to reshape them.

Dilip da Cunha integrates history, art, cultural studies, hydrology, and geography to tell the story of how rivers have been culturally constructed as lines granted a special role in defining human habitation and everyday practice. What we take to be natural features of the earth's surface, according to da Cunha, are products of human design and a particular way of seeing that has roots stretching as far back as ancient Greek cartography. Although Alexander the Great never saw the Ganges, he conceived of it as a flowing body of water, with sources, destinations, and banks that marked the separation of land from water. This Alexandrine view of the river, da Cunha argues, has been pursued and adopted across time and around the world. With ever more sophisticated mappings of its form and characteristics, the river's essential features are refined and standardized: its source identified by a point; its course depicted as a stroke; and its propensity to flood imagined as the erasure of the boundary between water and land.

While da Cunha's vision of rivers is a global one, he takes an especially close look at the Ganges, as he traces the ways in which it has been pictured, mapped, surveyed, explored, and measured across the millennia. He argues that the articulation of the river Ganges has placed it at odds with Ganga, a "rain terrain" that does not conform to the line of separation, containment, and calibration that are the formalities of a river landscape. By calling rivers into question, da Cunha depicts an ecosystem that is neither land nor water but one of ubiquitous wetness in which rain is held in soil, aquifers, glaciers, snowfields, building materials, agricultural fields, air, and even plants and animals.

Printed in full color and featuring more than 150 illustrations, The Invention of Rivers proposes rain, or "the rainscape," as an alternative starting point for imagining, understanding, and designing human habitation.

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.

In a work based on a meticulous analysis of sources, many of them previously unexplored, Catherine M. Mooney upends the received account of Clare of Assisi's founding of the Order of San Damiano, or Poor Clares. Mooney offers instead a stark counternarrative: Clare, her sisters of San Damiano, and their allies struggled against a papal program bent on regimenting, enriching, and enclosing religious women in the thirteenth century, a program that proved largely successful.

Mooney demonstrates that Clare (1194-1253) established a single community that was soon cajoled, perhaps even coerced, into joining an order previously founded by the papacy. Artfully renaming it after Clare's San Damiano with Clare as its putative mother, Pope Gregory IX enhanced his order's cachet by associating it also with Clare's famous friend, Francis of Assisi. Mooney traces how Clare and her allies in other houses attempted to follow Francis's directives rather than the pope's, divested themselves of property against the pope's orders, and organized in an attempt to change papal rule; and she shows how, after Francis's death, the women's relationships with the Franciscans themselves grew similarly fraught. Clare's pursuit of her vision proved relentless: at the time of her death, she newly identified her community as the Order of Poor Sisters and allied it unambiguously with Francis and his friars.

Overturning another myth, Mooney reveals how only in the late nineteenth century did Clare come to be known as the sole author of a rule she had written collaboratively with others. Throughout, the story of Clare and her sisters emerges as a chapter in the long history of women who tried to define their religious identities within a Church more committed to unity and conformity than to diversity and difference.

Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean, Intimate Bonds explores how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period. As race-based slavery became entrenched in French laws, all household members in the French Atlantic world —regardless of their status, gender, or race—negotiated increasingly stratified legal understandings of race and gender.

Through her focus on household relationships, Jennifer L. Palmer reveals how intimacy not only led to the seemingly immutable hierarchies of the plantation system but also caused these hierarchies to collapse even before the age of Atlantic revolutions. Placing families at the center of the French Atlantic world, Palmer uses the concept of intimacy to illustrate how race, gender, and the law intersected to form a new worldview. Through analysis of personal, mercantile, and legal relationships, Intimate Bonds demonstrates that even in an era of intensifying racial stratification, slave owners and slaves, whites and people of color, men and women all adapted creatively to growing barriers, thus challenging the emerging paradigm of the nuclear family. This engagingly written history reveals that personal choices and family strategies shaped larger cultural and legal shifts in the meanings of race, slavery, family, patriarchy, and colonialism itself.

From workplace accidents to polio epidemics and new waves of immigration to the returning veterans of World War II, the first half of the twentieth century brought the issue of disability—what it was, what it meant, and how to address it—into national focus. Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America explores the history of disability activism, concentrating on the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), a national, cross-disability organization founded during World War II to address federal disability policy. Unlike earlier disability groups, which had been organized around specific disabilities or shared military experience, AFPH brought thousands of disabled citizens and veterans into the national political arena, demanding equal access to economic security and full citizenship. At its core, the AFPH legislative campaign pushed the federal government to move disabled citizens from the margins to the center of the welfare state.

Through extensive archival research, Audra Jennings examines the history of AFPH and its enduring legacy in the disability rights movement. Counter to most narratives that place the inception of disability activism in the 1970s, Jennings argues that the disability rights movement is firmly rooted in the politics of World War II. In the years immediately following the war, leaders in AFPH worked with organized labor movements to advocate for an ambitious political agenda, including employer education campaigns, a federal pension program, improved access to healthcare and education, and an affirmative action program for disabled workers. Out of the Horrors of War extends the arc of the disability rights movement into the 1940s and traces how its terms of inclusion influenced the movement for decades after, leading up to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Liberty's Prisoners examines how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the United States. The first penitentiary was founded in Philadelphia in 1790, a period of great optimism and turmoil in the Revolution's wake. Those who were previously dependents with no legal standing—women, enslaved people, and indentured servants—increasingly claimed their own right to life, liberty, and happiness. A diverse cast of women and men, including immigrants, African Americans, and the Irish and Anglo-American poor, struggled to make a living. Vagrancy laws were used to crack down on those who visibly challenged longstanding social hierarchies while criminal convictions carried severe sentences for even the most trivial property crimes.

The penitentiary was designed to reestablish order, both behind its walls and in society at large, but the promise of reformative incarceration failed from its earliest years. Within this system, women served a vital function, and Liberty's Prisoners is the first book to bring to life the e xperience of African American, immigrant, and poor white women imprisoned in early America. Always a minority of prisoners, women provided domestic labor within the institution and served as model inmates, more likely to submit to the authority of guards, inspectors, and reformers. White men, the primary targets of reformative incarceration, challenged authorities at every turn while African American men were increasingly segregated and denied access to reform.

Liberty's Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a repository for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.

Deepens our understanding of Black women’s anti-rape activism by attending to how their tactics shifted in response to the federal War on Crime

Beginning in the 1970s, a series of government agencies established to carry out the federal “war on crime” offered financial and ideological support to the fledgling feminist movement against sexual violence. These entities promoted the carceral tactics of policing, prosecution, and punishment as the only viable means of controlling rape, and they expected anti-rape organizers to embrace them. Yet Black women anti-rape organizers viewed police as a source of violence within their communities, not a solution to it.

Between the Street and the State examines how Black anti-rape organizers critically engaged both the feminist movement against sexual violence and the federal War on Crime between 1974 and 1994. In Philadelphia, Washington, DC, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and Atlanta, activists inflected Black women’s longstanding tradition of community-based caring labor with the Black feminist condemnation of patriarchal and state violence. Their multifaceted and adaptable brand of anti-rape advocacy was premised on sustaining the survival of Black women and girls individually and Black communities more broadly. In this way, Black anti-rape activists countered the growing emphasis within the feminist movement on controlling rape through carceral collaborations. They acted subversively, redirecting state funds and state-funded research premised on rape control to projects that offered care to Black victims. In public education, social welfare, and public health, they instituted preventative education and emotional healing as modes of justice. At times, they outspokenly resisted carceral legislation that displaced their caring labor with punitive programs of rape control.

Spotlighting Black anti-rape organizers’ enduring commitment to care work shows that the cooptation of the feminist movement against sexual violence by law enforcement entities was never total. Between the Street and the State deepens our historical understanding of Black women’s tradition of anti-rape activism by attending to how their tactics shifted in response to the political realignments of the post–civil rights era.

How French and American colonizers created systems of enslavement in the Middle Mississippi Valley

The Centrality of Slavery examines how French and American colonizers used the powers of various imperial regimes to create slave societies in present-day Missouri and Illinois from the 1720s through the 1820s. The first book-length study of slavery and empire in both Illinois and Missouri, it begins with the origins of Native American and African American enslavement in the region. It then traces how successive French, Spanish, British, and American regimes shaped the development of slavery over the course of a century, examines the significance of the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery in Illinois, and then analyzes the diverging histories of slavery in Illinois and Missouri in the early 1800s. The book concludes with an analysis of the Missouri Crisis and the compromise of 1820, along with the Middle Mississippi Valley’s significance in the road towards disunion and civil war in the late 1850s.

More broadly, The Centrality of Slavery argues that the Middle Mississippi Valley sat astride the crossroads of imperial North America. The practices of empire and enslavement forged and fought over there exerted an outsized influence on the history of slavery in North America and the United States. Rather than treating the region’s eighteenth-century past as a prologue to the rise of the United States, John Craig Hammond analyzes the colonial history of the region on its own terms, through the European colonizers, American settlers, and enslaved people of Indigenous and African descent who shaped the development of slavery in the Middle Mississippi Valley.

Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the money economy, and the functioning state collapsed. Many of the most quotidian and fundamental elements of Roman-style material culture ceased to be manufactured. Skills related to iron and copper smelting, wooden board and plank making, stone quarrying, commercial butchery, horticulture, and tanning largely disappeared, as did the knowledge standing behind the production of wheel-thrown, kiln-fired pottery and building in stone. No other period in Britain's prehistory or history witnessed the loss of so many classes of once-common skills and objects. While the reasons for this breakdown remain unclear, it is indisputable the collapse was foundational in the making of a new world we characterize as early medieval.

The standard explanation for the emergence of the new-style material culture found in lowland Britain by the last quarter of the fifth century is that foreign objects were brought in by "Anglo-Saxon" settlers. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming argues instead that not only Continental immigrants, but also the people whose ancestors had long lived in Britain built this new material world together from the ashes of the old, forging an identity that their descendants would eventually come to think of as English. As with most identities, she cautions, this was one rooted in neither birth nor blood, but historically constructed, and advanced and maintained over the generations by the shared material culture and practices that developed during and after Rome's withdrawal from Britain.

In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself.

Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.