Sunday, November 30, 2014

"Nontaxation and Representation"

New from Cambridge University Press: Nontaxation and Representation: The Fiscal Foundations of Political Stability by Kevin M. Morrison.

About the book, from the publisher:
Does oil make countries autocratic? Can foreign aid make countries democratic? Does taxation lead to representation? In this book, Kevin M. Morrison develops a novel argument about how government revenues of all kinds affect political regimes and their leaders. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Morrison illustrates that taxation leads to instability, not representation. With this insight, he extends his award-winning work on nontax revenues to encompass foreign aid, oil revenue, and intergovernmental grants and shows that they lead to decreased taxation, increased government spending, and increased political stability. Looking at the stability of democracies and dictatorships as well as leadership transitions within those regimes, Morrison incorporates cross-national statistical methods, formal modeling, a quasi-experiment, and case studies of Brazil, Kenya, and Mexico to build his case. This book upends many common hypotheses and policy recommendations, providing the most comprehensive treatment of revenue and political stability to date.
Kevin M. Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the co-author of The Future of Development Assistance: Common Pools and International Public Goods (1999).

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 29, 2014

"Failed Statebuilding"

New from Yale University Press: Failed Statebuilding: Intervention, the State, and the Dynamics of Peace Formation by Oliver Richmond.

About the book, from the publisher:
Western struggles—and failures—to create functioning states in countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan have inspired questions about whether statebuilding projects are at all viable, or whether they make the lives of their intended beneficiaries better or worse. In this groundbreaking book, Oliver Richmond asks why statebuilding has been so hard to achieve, and argues that a large part of the problem has been Westerners’ failure to understand or engage with what local peoples actually want and need. He interrogates the liberal peacebuilding industry, asking what it assumes, what it is getting wrong, and how it could be more effective.
Oliver Richmond is a Research Professor in Internationl Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. He is also International Professor, College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tromso.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 28, 2014

"Snow and Steel"

New from Oxford University Press: Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45 by Peter Caddick-Adams.

About the book, from the publisher:
Between December 16, 1944 and January 15, 1945, American forces found themselves entrenched in the heavily forested Ardennes region of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg defending against an advancing German army amid freezing temperatures, deep snow, and dense fog. Operation Herbstnebel--Autumn Mist--was a massive German counter-offensive that stunned the Allies in its scope and intensity. In the end, the 40-day long Battle of the Bulge, as it has come to be called, was the bloodiest battle fought by U.S. forces in World War II, and indeed the largest land battle in American history. Before effectively halting the German advance, some 89,000 of the 610,000 American servicemen committed to the campaign had become casualties, including 19,000 killed.

The engagement saw the taking of thousands of Americans as prisoners of war, some of whom were massacred by the SS--but it also witnessed the storied stand by U.S. forces at Bastogne as German forces besieged the region and culminated in a decisive if costly American victory. Ordered and directed by Hitler himself--against the advice of his generals--the Ardennes offensive was the last major German offensive on the Western Front. In the wake of the defeat, many experienced German units were left severely depleted of men and equipment. Its last reserve squandered, these irreplaceable losses would hasten the end of the war.

In Snow and Steel, Peter Caddick-Adams draws on interviews with over 100 participants of the campaign, as well as archival material from both German and US sources, to offer an engagingly written and thorough reassessment of the historic battle. Exploring the failings of intelligence that were rife on both sides, the effects of weather, and the influence of terrain on the battle's outcome, Caddick-Adams deftly details the differences in weaponry and doctrine between the US and German forces, while offering new insights into the origins of the battle; the characters of those involved on both the American and German sides, from the general staff to the foot soldiers; the preparedness of troops; and the decisions and tactics that precipitated the German retreat and the American victory. Re-examining the SS and German infantry units in the Bulge, he shows that far from being deadly military units, they were nearly all under-strength, short on equipment, and poorly trained; kept in the dark about the attack until the last minute, they fought in total ignorance of their opponents or the terrain. Ultimately, Caddick-Adams concludes that the German assault was doomed to failure from the start.

Aided by an intimate knowledge of the battlefield itself and over twenty years of personal battlefield experience, Caddick-Adams has produced the most compelling and complete account of the Bulge yet written.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 27, 2014

"The Hundred Years War: A People's History"

New from Yale University Press: The Hundred Years War: A People's History by David Green.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Hundred Years War (1337–1453) dominated life in England and France for well over a century. It became the defining feature of existence for generations. This sweeping book is the first to tell the human story of the longest military conflict in history. Historian David Green focuses on the ways the war affected different groups, among them knights, clerics, women, peasants, soldiers, peacemakers, and kings. He also explores how the long war altered governance in England and France and reshaped peoples’ perceptions of themselves and of their national character.

Using the events of the war as a narrative thread, Green illuminates the realities of battle and the conditions of those compelled to live in occupied territory; the roles played by clergy and their shifting loyalties to king and pope; and the influence of the war on developing notions of government, literacy, and education. Peopled with vivid and well-known characters—Henry V, Joan of Arc, Philippe the Good of Burgundy, Edward the Black Prince, John the Blind of Bohemia, and many others—as well as a host of ordinary individuals who were drawn into the struggle, this absorbing book reveals for the first time not only the Hundred Years War’s impact on warfare, institutions, and nations, but also its true human cost.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

"Being German, Becoming Muslim"

New from Princeton University Press: Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe by Esra Özyürek.

About the book, from the publisher:
Every year more and more Europeans, including Germans, are embracing Islam. It is estimated that there are now up to one hundred thousand German converts—a number similar to that in France and the United Kingdom. What stands out about recent conversions is that they take place at a time when Islam is increasingly seen as contrary to European values. Being German, Becoming Muslim explores how Germans come to Islam within this antagonistic climate, how they manage to balance their love for Islam with their society’s fear of it, how they relate to immigrant Muslims, and how they shape debates about race, religion, and belonging in today’s Europe.

Esra Özyürek looks at how mainstream society marginalizes converts and questions their national loyalties. In turn, converts try to disassociate themselves from migrants of Muslim-majority countries and promote a denationalized Islam untainted by Turkish or Arab traditions. Some German Muslims believe that once cleansed of these accretions, the Islam that surfaces fits in well with German values and lifestyle. Others even argue that being a German Muslim is wholly compatible with the older values of the German Enlightenment.

Being German, Becoming Muslim provides a fresh window into the connections and tensions stemming from a growing religious phenomenon in Germany and beyond.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

"The Political Spirituality of Cesar Chavez"

New from the University of California Press: The Political Spirituality of Cesar Chavez: Crossing Religious Borders by Luís D. León.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Political Spirituality of Cesar Chavez: Crossing Religious Borders maps and challenges many of the mythologies that surround the late iconic labor leader. Focusing on Chavez's own writings, León argues that La Causa can be fruitfully understood as a quasi-religious movement based on Chavez’s charismatic leadership, which he modeled after Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. Chavez recognized that spiritual prophecy, or political spirituality, was the key to disrupting centuries-old dehumanizing narratives that conflated religion with race. Chavez’s body became emblematic for Chicano identity and enfleshed a living revolution. While there is much debate and truth-seeking around how he is remembered, through investigating the leader’s construction of his own public memory, the author probes the meaning of the discrepancies. By refocusing Chavez's life and beliefs into three broad movements—mythology, prophecy, and religion—León brings us a moral and spiritual agent to match the political leader.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 24, 2014

"Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics"

New from Princeton University Press: Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics by Marie Gottschalk.

About the book, from the publisher:
The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders today, yet reforms to reduce the number of people in U.S. jails and prisons have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, a carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country’s vast archipelago of jails and prisons but also the growing range of penal punishments and controls that lie in the never-never land between prison and full citizenship, from probation and parole to immigrant detention, felon disenfranchisement, and extensive lifetime restrictions on sex offenders. As it sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship, this ever-widening carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge.

In this book, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state, with its growing number of outcasts, remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies—one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism.

In this bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform, Gottschalk exposes the broader pathologies in American politics that are preventing the country from solving its most pressing problems, including the stranglehold that neoliberalism exerts on public policy. She concludes by sketching out a promising alternative path to begin dismantling the carceral state.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 23, 2014

"Artists Under Hitler"

New from Yale University Press: Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany by Jonathan Petropoulos.

About the book, from the publisher:
“What are we to make of those cultural figures, many with significant international reputations, who tried to find accommodation with the Nazi regime?” Jonathan Petropoulos asks in this exploration of some of the most acute moral questions of the Third Reich. In his nuanced analysis of prominent German artists, architects, composers, film directors, painters, and writers who rejected exile, choosing instead to stay during Germany’s darkest period, Petropoulos shows how individuals variously dealt with the regime’s public opposition to modern art. His findings explode the myth that all modern artists were anti-Nazi and all Nazis anti-modernist.

Artists Under Hitler closely examines cases of artists who failed in their attempts to find accommodation with the Nazi regime (Walter Gropius, Paul Hindemith, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Barlach, Emil Nolde) as well as others whose desire for official acceptance was realized (Richard Strauss, Gustaf Gründgens, Leni Riefenstahl, Arno Breker, Albert Speer). Collectively these ten figures illuminate the complex cultural history of Nazi Germany, while individually they provide haunting portraits of people facing excruciating choices and grave moral questions.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 22, 2014

"Broad Is My Native Land"

New from Cornell University Press: Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia's Twentieth Century by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch.

About the book, from the publisher:
Whether voluntary or coerced, hopeful or desperate, people moved in unprecedented numbers across Russia's vast territory during the twentieth century. Broad Is My Native Land is the first history of late imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia through the lens of migration. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch tell the stories of Russians on the move, capturing the rich variety of their experiences by distinguishing among categories of migrants—settlers, seasonal workers, migrants to the city, career and military migrants, evacuees and refugees, deportees, and itinerants. So vast and diverse was Russian political space that in their journeys, migrants often crossed multiple cultural, linguistic, and administrative borders. By comparing the institutions and experiences of migration across the century and placing Russia in an international context, Siegelbaum and Moch have made a magisterial contribution to both the history of Russia and the study of global migration.

The authors draw on three kinds of sources: letters to authorities (typically appeals for assistance); the myriad forms employed in communication about the provision of transportation, food, accommodation, and employment for migrants; and interviews with and memoirs by people who moved or were moved, often under the most harrowing of circumstances. Taken together, these sources reveal the complex relationship between the regimes of state control that sought to regulate internal movement and the tactical repertoires employed by the migrants themselves in their often successful attempts to manipulate, resist, and survive these official directives.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 21, 2014

"Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America"

New from Cambridge University Press: Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America by Deana A. Rohlinger.

About the book, from the publisher:
Weaving together analyses of archival material, news coverage, and interviews conducted with journalists from mainstream and partisan outlets as well as with activists across the political spectrum, Deana A. Rohlinger reimagines how activists use a variety of mediums, sometimes simultaneously, to agitate for – and against – legal abortion. Rohlinger's in-depth portraits of four groups – the National Right to Life Committee, Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women, and Concerned Women for America – illuminates when groups use media and why they might choose to avoid media attention altogether. Rohlinger expertly reveals why some activist groups are more desperate than others to attract media attention and sheds light on what this means for policy making and legal abortion in the twenty-first century.
Deana A. Rohlinger is an associate professor in the department of sociology and a research associate at the Pepper Institute of Aging and Public Policy at Florida State University.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 20, 2014

"Material Goods, Moving Hands"

New from Manchester University Press: Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700-1830 by Kate Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:
In eighteenth-century Britain, greater numbers of people entered the marketplace and bought objects in ever-greater quantities. As consumers rather than producers, how did their understandings of manufacturing processes and the material world change? Material goods and moving hands combines material culture and visual culture approaches to explore the different ways in which manufacturers and retailers presented production to consumers during the eighteenth century. It shows how new relationships with production processes encouraged consumers, retailers, designers, manufacturers and workers to develop conflicting understandings of production. Objects then were not just markers of fashion and taste, they acted as important conduits through which people living in Georgian Britain could examine and discuss their material world and the processes and knowledge that rendered it.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

"Robust Ethics"

New from Oxford University Press: Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism by Erik J. Wielenberg.

About the book, from the publisher:
Erik J. Wielenberg draws on recent work in analytic philosophy and empirical moral psychology to defend non-theistic robust normative realism and develop an empirically-grounded account of human moral knowledge. Non-theistic robust normative realism has it that there are objective, non-natural, sui generis ethical features of the universe that do not depend on God for their existence. The early chapters of the book address various challenges to the intelligibility and plausibility of the claim that irreducible ethical features of things supervene on their non-ethical features as well as challenges from defenders of theistic ethics who argue that objective morality requires a theistic foundation. Later chapters develop an account of moral knowledge and answer various recent purported debunkings of morality, including those based on scientific research into the nature of the proximate causes of human moral beliefs as well as those based on proposed evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

"Confronting Political Islam"

New from Princeton University Press: Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West's Past by John M. Owen IV.

About the book, from the publisher:
How should the Western world today respond to the challenges of political Islam? Taking an original approach to answer this question, Confronting Political Islam compares Islamism’s struggle with secularism to other prolonged ideological clashes in Western history. By examining the past conflicts that have torn Europe and the Americas—and how they have been supported by underground networks, fomented radicalism and revolution, and triggered foreign interventions and international conflicts—John Owen draws six major lessons to demonstrate that much of what we think about political Islam is wrong.

Owen focuses on the origins and dynamics of twentieth-century struggles among Communism, Fascism, and liberal democracy; the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contests between monarchism and republicanism; and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. Owen then applies principles learned from the successes and mistakes of governments during these conflicts to the contemporary debates embroiling the Middle East. He concludes that ideological struggles last longer than most people presume; ideologies are not monolithic; foreign interventions are the norm; a state may be both rational and ideological; an ideology wins when states that exemplify it outperform other states across a range of measures; and the ideology that wins may be a surprise.

Looking at the history of the Western world itself and the fraught questions over how societies should be ordered, Confronting Political Islam upends some of the conventional wisdom about the current upheavals in the Muslim world.
Visit John M. Owen IV's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Clash of Ideas in World Politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 17, 2014

"Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II"

New from Yale University Press: Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II by Geoffrey Parker.

About the book, from the publisher:
Philip II is not only the most famous king in Spanish history, but one of the most famous monarchs in English history: the man who married Mary Tudor and later launched the Spanish Armada against her sister Elizabeth I. This compelling biography of the most powerful European monarch of his day begins with his conception (1526) and ends with his ascent to Paradise (1603), two occurrences surprisingly well documented by contemporaries. Eminent historian Geoffrey Parker draws on four decades of research on Philip as well as a recent, extraordinary archival discovery—a trove of 3,000 documents in the vaults of the Hispanic Society of America in New York City, unread since crossing Philip’s own desk more than four centuries ago. Many of them change significantly what we know about the king.

The book examines Philip’s long apprenticeship; his three principal interests (work, play, and religion); and the major political, military, and personal challenges he faced during his long reign. Parker offers fresh insights into the causes of Philip’s leadership failures: was his empire simply too big to manage, or would a monarch with different talents and temperament have fared better?
Winner of the 2012 Heineken Prize for History, Geoffrey Parker is a renowned British historian who taught at the University of St Andrews, the University of Illinois, the University of British Columbia and Yale University before becoming Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at The Ohio State University.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 16, 2014

"Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina"

New from Stanford University Press: Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina by Raanan Rein.

About the book, from the publisher:
If you attend a soccer match in Buenos Aires of the local Atlanta Athletic Club, you will likely hear the rival teams chanting anti-Semitic slogans. This is because the neighborhood of Villa Crespo has long been considered a Jewish district, and its soccer team, Club Atlético Atlanta, has served as an avenue of integration into Argentine culture. Through the lens of this neighborhood institution, Raanan Rein offers an absorbing social history of Jews in Latin America.

Since the Second World War, there has been a conspicuous Jewish presence among the fans, administrators and presidents of the Atlanta soccer club. For the first immigrant generation, belonging to this club was a way of becoming Argentines. For the next generation, it was a way of maintaining ethnic Jewish identity. Now, it is nothing less than family tradition for third generation Jewish Argentines to support Atlanta. The soccer club has also constituted one of the few spaces where both Jews and non-Jews, affiliated Jews and non-affiliated Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists, have interacted. The result has been an active shaping of the local culture by Jewish Latin Americans to their own purposes.

Offering a rare window into the rich culture of everyday life in the city of Buenos Aires created by Jewish immigrants and their descendants, Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina represents a pioneering study of the intersection between soccer, ethnicity, and identity in Latin America and makes a major contribution to Jewish History, Latin American History, and Sports History.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 15, 2014

"The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union"

New from the University of California Press: The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest by Stephen Tuck.

About the book, from the publisher:
Less than three months before he was assassinated, Malcolm X spoke at the Oxford Union—the most prestigious student debating organization in the United Kingdom. The Oxford Union regularly welcomed heads of state and stars of screen and served as the training ground for the politically ambitious offspring of Britain’s better classes. Malcolm X, by contrast, was the global icon of race militancy. For many, he personified revolution and danger. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the debate, this book brings to life the dramatic events surrounding the visit, showing why Oxford invited Malcolm X, why he accepted, and the effect of the visit on Malcolm X and British students.

Stephen Tuck tells the human story behind the debate and also uses it as a starting point to discuss larger issues of Black Power, the end of empire, British race relations, immigration, and student rights. Coinciding with a student-led campaign against segregated housing, the visit enabled Malcolm X to make connections with radical students from the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia, giving him a new perspective on the global struggle for racial equality, and in turn, radicalizing a new generation of British activists. Masterfully tracing the reverberations on both sides of the Atlantic, Tuck chronicles how the personal transformation of the dynamic American leader played out on the international stage.
The Page 99 Test: We Ain't What We Ought To Be.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 14, 2014

"Heaven Can Wait"

New from Oxford University Press: Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture by Diana Walsh Pasulka.

About the book, from the publisher:
After purgatory was officially defined by the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century, its location became a topic of heated debate and philosophical speculation: Was purgatory located on the earth, or within it? Were its fires real or figurative?

Diana Walsh Pasulka offers a groundbreaking historical exploration of spatial and material concepts of purgatory, beginning with scholastic theologians William of Auvergne and Thomas Aquinas, who wrote about the location of purgatory and questioned whether its torments were physical or solely spiritual. In the same period, writers of devotional literature located purgatory within the earth, near hell, and even in Ireland. In the early modern era, a counter-movement of theologians downplayed purgatory's spatial dimensions, preferring to depict it in abstract terms--a view strengthened during the French Enlightenment, when references to purgatory as a terrestrial location or a place of real fire were ridiculed by anti-Catholic polemicists and discouraged by the Church.

The debate surrounding purgatory's materiality has never ended: even today members of post-millennial ''purgatory apostolates'' maintain that purgatory is an actual, physical place. Heaven Can Wait provides crucial insight into the theological problem of purgatory's materiality (or lack thereof) over the past seven hundred years.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 13, 2014

"A Hercules in the Cradle"

New from The University of Chicago Press: A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783-1867 by Max M. Edling.

About the book, from the publisher:
Two and a half centuries after the American Revolution the United States stands as one of the greatest powers on earth and the undoubted leader of the western hemisphere. This stupendous evolution was far from a foregone conclusion at independence. The conquest of the North American continent required violence, suffering, and bloodshed. It also required the creation of a national government strong enough to go to war against, and acquire territory from, its North American rivals.

In A Hercules in the Cradle, Max M. Edling argues that the federal government’s abilities to tax and to borrow money, developed in the early years of the republic, were critical to the young nation’s ability to wage war and expand its territory. He traces the growth of this capacity from the time of the founding to the aftermath of the Civil War, including the funding of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Edling maintains that the Founding Fathers clearly understood the connection between public finance and power: a well-managed public debt was a key part of every modern state. Creating a debt would always be a delicate and contentious matter in the American context, however, and statesmen of all persuasions tried to pay down the national debt in times of peace. A Hercules in the Cradle explores the origin and evolution of American public finance and shows how the nation’s rise to great-power status in the nineteenth century rested on its ability to go into debt.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

"Against Immediate Evil"

New from Cornell University Press: Against Immediate Evil: American Internationalists and the Four Freedoms on the Eve of World War II by Andrew Johnstone.

About the book, from the publisher:
In Against Immediate Evil, Andrew Johnstone tells the story of how internationalist Americans worked between 1938 and 1941 to convince the U.S. government and the American public of the need to stem the rising global tide of fascist aggression. As war approached, the internationalist movement attempted to arouse the nation in order to defeat noninterventionism at home and fascism overseas. Johnstone's examination of this movement undermines the common belief that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor wrenched an isolationist United States into global armed conflict and the struggle for international power.

Johnstone focuses on three organizations—the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Fight For Freedom—that actively promoted a more global role for the United States based on a conception of the "four freedoms" later made famous by FDR. The desire to be free from fear was seen in concerns regarding America’s immediate national security. The desire to be free from want was expressed in anxieties over the nation’s future economic prosperity. The need for freedom of speech was represented in concerns over the potential loss of political freedoms. Finally, the need for freedom of worship was seen in the emphasis on religious freedoms and broader fears about the future of Western civilization. These groups and their supporters among the public and within the government characterized the growing global conflict as one between two distinct worlds and in doing so, set the tone of American foreign policy for decades to come.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

"Divided Sovereignty"

New from Oxford University Press: Divided Sovereignty: International Institutions and the Limits of State Authority by Carmen Pavel.

About the book, from the publisher:
The question of how to constrain states that commit severe abuses against their own citizens is as persistent as it is vexing. States are imperfect political forms that in theory possess both a monopoly on coercive power and final jurisdictional authority over their territory. These twin elements of sovereignty and authority can be used by state leaders and political representatives in ways that stray significantly from the interests of citizens. In the most extreme cases, when citizens become inconvenient obstacles in the pursuit of the self-serving ambitions of their leaders, state power turns against them. Genocide, torture, displacement, and rape are often the means of choice by which the inconvenient are made to suffer or vanish.

In Divided Sovereignty, Carmen Pavel explores new institutional solutions to this abiding problem. She argues that coercive international institutions can stop these abuses and act as an insurance scheme against the possibility of states failing to fulfill their most basic sovereign responsibilities. She thus challenges the longstanding assumption that collective grants of authority from the citizens of a state should be made exclusively for institutions within the borders of that state. Despite worries that international institutions such as the International Criminal Court could undermine domestic democratic control, citizens can divide sovereign authority between state and international institutions consistent with their right of democratic self-governance. Pavel defends universal, principled limits on state authority based on jus cogens norms, a special category of norms in international law that prohibit violations of basic human rights. Against skeptics, she argues that many of the challenges of building an additional layer of institutions can be met if we pay attention to the conditions of institutional success, which require experimentation with different institutional forms, limitations on the scope of authority for coercive international institutions, and an appreciation of the limits of existing knowledge on institutional design.

Thoughtfully conceived and forcefully argued, Divided Sovereignty will challenge what we think we know about the relationship between international institutions and the pursuit of the fundamental requirements of justice.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 10, 2014

"Between Two Worlds"

New from Basic Books: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans by Malcolm Gaskill.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the 1600s, over 350,000 intrepid English men, women, and children migrated to America, leaving behind their homeland for an uncertain future. Whether they settled in Jamestown, Salem, or Barbados, these migrants—entrepreneurs, soldiers, and pilgrims alike—faced one incontrovertible truth: England was a very, very long way away.

In Between Two Worlds, celebrated historian Malcolm Gaskill tells the sweeping story of the English experience in America during the first century of colonization. Following a large and varied cast of visionaries and heretics, merchants and warriors, and slaves and rebels, Gaskill brilliantly illuminates the often traumatic challenges the settlers faced. The first waves sought to recreate the English way of life, even to recover a society that was vanishing at home. But they were thwarted at every turn by the perils of a strange continent, unaided by monarchs who first ignored then exploited them. As these colonists strove to leave their mark on the New World, they were forced—by hardship and hunger, by illness and infighting, and by bloody and desperate battles with Indians—to innovate and adapt or perish.

As later generations acclimated to the wilderness, they recognized that they had evolved into something distinct: no longer just the English in America, they were perhaps not even English at all. These men and women were among the first white Americans, and certainly the most prolific. And as Gaskill shows, in learning to live in an unforgiving world, they had begun a long and fateful journey toward rebellion and, finally, independence
Visit Malcolm Gaskill's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 9, 2014

"Giant's Causeway"

New from the University of Virginia Press: Giant's Causeway: Frederick Douglass's Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary by Tom Chaffin.

About the book, from the publisher:
In 1845, seven years after fleeing bondage in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was in his late twenties and already a celebrated lecturer across the northern United States. The recent publication of his groundbreaking Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave had incited threats to his life, however, and to place himself out of harm's way he embarked on a lecture tour of the British Isles, a journey that would span seventeen months and change him as a man and a leader in the struggle for equality.

In the first major narrative account of a transformational episode in the life of this extraordinary American, Tom Chaffin chronicles Douglass’s 1845-47 lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England. It was, however, the Emerald Isle, above all, that affected Douglass--from its wild landscape ("I have travelled almost from the hill of ‘Howth’ to the Giant’s Causeway") to the plight of its people, with which he found parallels to that of African Americans. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, critic David Kipen has called Chaffin a "thorough and uncommonly graceful historian." Possessed of an epic, transatlantic scope, Chaffin’s new book makes Douglass’s historic journey vivid for the modern reader and reveals how the former slave’s growing awareness of intersections between Irish, American, and African history shaped the rest of his life.

The experience accelerated Douglass's transformation from a teller of his own life story into a commentator on contemporary issues--a transition discouraged during his early lecturing days by white colleagues at the American Anti-Slavery Society. ("Give us the facts," he had been instructed, "we will take care of the philosophy.") As the tour progressed, newspaper coverage of his passage through Ireland and Great Britain enhanced his stature dramatically. When he finally returned to America he had the platform of an international celebrity.

Drawn from hundreds of letters, diaries, and other primary-source documents--many heretofore unpublished--this far-reaching tale includes vivid portraits of personages who shaped Douglass and his world, including the Irish nationalists Daniel O'Connell and John Mitchel, British prime minister Robert Peel, abolitionist John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln.

Giant’s Causeway--which includes an account of Douglass's final, bittersweet, visit to Ireland in 1887--shows how experiences under foreign skies helped him hone habits of independence, discretion, compromise, self-reliance, and political dexterity. Along the way, it chronicles Douglass’s transformation from activist foot soldier to moral visionary.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 8, 2014

"Waking, Dreaming, Being"

New from Columbia University Press: Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy by Evan Thompson.

About the book, from the publisher:
A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of the mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain.

Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the “I” as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate—either in the waking state or in a lucid dream—we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as “me.” We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self.

Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness the dissolution of the self with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life’s profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives.
Visit Evan Thompson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 7, 2014

"The Deluge"

New from Viking: The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze.

About the book, from the publisher:
A searing and highly original analysis of the First World War and its anguished aftermath

In the depths of the Great War, with millions dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. The heart of the financial system shifted from London to New York. The infinite demands for men and matériel reached into countries far from the front. The strain of the war ravaged all economic and political assumptions, bringing unheard-of changes in the social and industrial order.

A century after the outbreak of fighting, Adam Tooze revisits this seismic moment in history, challenging the existing narrative of the war, its peace, and its aftereffects. From the day the United States enters the war in 1917 to the precipice of global financial ruin, Tooze delineates the world remade by American economic and military power.

Tracing the ways in which countries came to terms with America’s centrality—including the slide into fascism—The Deluge is a chilling work of great originality that will fundamentally change how we view the legacy of World War I.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 6, 2014

"The Yaquis and the Empire"

New from Yale University Press: The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico by Raphael Brewster Folsom.

About the book, from the publisher:
This important new book on the Yaqui people of the north Mexican state of Sonora examines the history of Yaqui-Spanish interactions from first contact in 1533 through Mexican independence in 1821. The Yaquis and the Empire is the first major publication to deal with the colonial history of the Yaqui people in more than thirty years and presents a finely wrought portrait of the colonial experience of the indigenous peoples of Mexico's Yaqui River Valley. In examining native engagement with the forces of the Spanish empire, Raphael Brewster Folsom identifies three ironies that emerged from the dynamic and ambiguous relationship of the Yaquis and their conquerors: the strategic use by the Yaquis of both resistance and collaboration; the intertwined roles of violence and negotiation in the colonial pact; and the surprising ability of the imperial power to remain effective despite its general weakness.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

"Imperial Apocalypse"

New from Oxford University Press: Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire by Joshua A. Sanborn.

About the book, from the publisher:
Imperial Apocalypse describes the collapse of the Russian Empire during World War One. Drawing material from nine different archives and hundreds of published sources, this study ties together state failure, military violence, and decolonization in a single story. Joshua Sanborn excavates the individual lives of soldiers, doctors, nurses, politicians, and civilians caught up in the global conflict along the way, creating a narrative that is both humane and conceptually rich.

The volume opens by laying out the theoretical relationship between state failure, social collapse, and decolonization, and then moves chronologically from the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 through the fierce battles and massive human dislocations of 1914-16 to the final collapse of the empire in the midst of revolution in 1917-18. Imperial Apocalypse is the first major study which treats the demise of the Russian Empire as part of the twentieth-century phenomenon of modern decolonization, and provides a readable account of military activity and political change throughout this turbulent period of war and revolution. Sanborn argues that the sudden rise of groups seeking national self-determination in the borderlands of the empire was the consequence of state failure, not its cause. At the same time, he shows how the destruction of state institutions and the spread of violence from the front to the rear led to a collapse of traditional social bonds and the emergence of a new, more dangerous, and more militant political atmosphere.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

"¡Tequila! Distilling the Spirit of Mexico"

New from Stanford University Press: ¡Tequila!: Distilling the Spirit of Mexico by Marie Sarita Gaytán.

About the book, from the publisher:
Italy has grappa, Russia has vodka, Jamaica has rum. Around the world, certain drinks—especially those of the intoxicating kind—are synonymous with their peoples and cultures. For Mexico, this drink is tequila. For many, tequila can conjure up scenes of body shots on Cancún bars and coolly garnished margaritas on sandy beaches. Its power is equally strong within Mexico, though there the drink is more often sipped rather than shot, enjoyed casually among friends, and used to commemorate occasions from the everyday to the sacred. Despite these competing images, tequila is universally regarded as an enduring symbol of lo mexicano.

¡Tequila! Distilling the Spirit of Mexico traces how and why tequila became and remains Mexico's national drink and symbol. Starting in Mexico's colonial era and tracing the drink's rise through the present day, Marie Sarita Gaytán reveals the formative roles played by some unlikely characters. Although the notorious Pancho Villa was a teetotaler, his image is now plastered across the labels of all manner of tequila producers—he's even the namesake of a popular brand. Mexican films from the 1940s and 50s, especially Western melodramas, buoyed tequila's popularity at home while World War II caused a spike in sales within the whisky-starved United States. Today, cultural attractions such as Jose Cuervo's Mundo Cuervo and the Tequila Express let visitors insert themselves into the Jaliscan countryside—now a UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site—and relish in the nostalgia of pre-industrial Mexico.

Our understanding of tequila as Mexico's spirit is not the result of some natural affinity but rather the cumulative effect of U.S.-Mexican relations, technology, regulation, the heritage and tourism industries, shifting gender roles, film, music, and literature. Like all stories about national symbols, the rise of tequila forms a complicated, unexpected, and poignant tale. By unraveling its inner workings, Gaytán encourages us to think critically about national symbols more generally, and the ways in which they both reveal and conceal to tell a story about a place, a culture, and a people. In many ways, the story of tequila is the story of Mexico.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 3, 2014

"Inventing the Way of the Samurai"

New from Oxford University Press: Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan by Oleg Benesch.

About the book, from the publisher:
Inventing the Way of the Samurai examines the development of the 'way of the samurai' - bushido - which is popularly viewed as a defining element of the Japanese national character and even the 'soul of Japan'. Rather than a continuation of ancient traditions, however, bushido developed from a search for identity during Japan's modernization in the late nineteenth century. The former samurai class were widely viewed as a relic of a bygone age in the 1880s, and the first significant discussions of bushido at the end of the decade were strongly influenced by contemporary European ideals of gentlemen and chivalry. At the same time, Japanese thinkers increasingly looked to their own traditions in search of sources of national identity, and this process accelerated as national confidence grew with military victories over China and Russia.

Inventing the Way of the Samurai considers the people, events, and writings that drove the rapid growth of bushido , which came to emphasize martial virtues and absolute loyalty to the emperor. In the early twentieth century, bushido became a core subject in civilian and military education, and was a key ideological pillar supporting the imperial state until its collapse in 1945. The close identification of bushido with Japanese militarism meant that it was rejected immediately after the war, but different interpretations of bushido were soon revived by both Japanese and foreign commentators seeking to explain Japan's past, present, and future. This volume further explores the factors behind the resurgence of bushido, which has proven resilient through 130 years of dramatic social, political, and cultural change.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 2, 2014

"Northern Men with Southern Loyalties"

New from Cornell University Press: Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis by Michael Todd Landis.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the decade before the Civil War, Northern Democrats, although they ostensibly represented antislavery and free-state constituencies, made possible the passage of such proslavery legislation as the Compromise of 1850 and Fugitive Slave Law of the same year, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the Lecompton Constitution of 1858. In Northern Men with Southern Loyalties, Michael Todd Landis forcefully contends that a full understanding of the Civil War and its causes is impossible without a careful examination of Northern Democrats and their proslavery sentiments and activities. He focuses on a variety of key Democratic politicians, such as Stephen Douglas, William Marcy, and Jesse Bright, to unravel the puzzle of Northern Democratic political allegiance to the South. As congressmen, state party bosses, convention wire-pullers, cabinet officials, and presidents, these men produced the legislation and policies that led to the fragmentation of the party and catastrophic disunion.

Through a careful examination of correspondence, speeches, public and private utterances, memoirs, and personal anecdotes, Landis lays bare the desires and designs of Northern Democrats. He ventures into the complex realm of state politics and party mechanics, drawing connections between national events and district and state activity as well as between partisan dynamics and national policy. Northern Democrats had to walk a perilously thin line between loyalty to the Southern party leaders and answering to their free-state constituents. If Northern Democrats sought high office, they would have to cater to the "Slave Power." Yet, if they hoped for election at home, they had to convince voters that they were not mere lackeys of the Southern grandees.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 1, 2014

"Technology as Human Social Tradition"

New from University of California Press: Technology as Human Social Tradition: Cultural Transmission among Hunter-Gatherers by Peter Jordan.

About the book, from the publisher:
Technology as Human Social Tradition outlines a novel approach to studying variability and cumulative change in human technology—prominent research themes in both archaeology and anthropology. Peter Jordan argues that human material culture is best understood as an expression of social tradition. In this approach, each artifact stands as an output of a distinctive operational sequence with specific choices made at each stage in its production. Jordan also explores different material culture traditions that are propagated through social learning, factors that promote coherent lineages of tradition to form, and the extent to which these cultural lineages exhibit congruence with one another and with language history.

Drawing on the application of cultural transmission theory to empirical research, Jordan develops a descent-with-modification perspective on the technology of Northern Hemisphere hunter-gatherers. Case studies from indigenous societies in Northwest Siberia, the Pacific Northwest Coast, and Northern California provide cross-cultural insights related to the evolution of material culture traditions at different social and spatial scales. This book promises new ways of exploring some of the primary factors that generate human cultural diversity in the deep past and through to the present.
--Marshal Zeringue