Thursday, March 31, 2016

"The Treasures of Alexander the Great"

New from Oxford University Press: The Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man's Wealth Shaped the World by Frank L. Holt.

About the book, from the publisher:
War, the most profitable economic activity in the ancient world, transferred wealth from the vanquished to the victor. Invasions, sieges, massacres, annexations, and mass deportations all redistributed property with dramatic consequences for kings and commoners alike. No conqueror ever captured more people or property in so short a lifetime than Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BC.

For all its savagery, the creation of Alexander's empire has generally been hailed as a positive economic event for all concerned. Even those harshly critical of Alexander today tend to praise his plundering of Persia as a means of liberating the moribund resources of the East. To test this popular interpretation, The Treasures of Alexander the Great investigates the kinds and quantities of treasure seized by the Macedonian king, from gold and silver to land and slaves. It reveals what became of the king's wealth and what Alexander's redistribution of these vast resources can tell us about his much-disputed policies and personality.

Though Alexander owed his vast fortune to war, battle also distracted him from competently managing his spoils and much was wasted, embezzled, deliberately destroyed, or idled unprofitably. The Treasures of Alexander the Great provides a long-overdue and accessible account of Alexander's wealth and its enormous impact on the ancient world.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

"Why Busing Failed"

New from the University of California Press: Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation by Matthew F. Delmont.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the decades after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, busing to achieve school desegregation became one of the nation’s most controversial civil rights issues. Why Busing Failed is the first book to examine the pitched battles over busing on a national scale, focusing on cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and Pontiac, Michigan. This groundbreaking book shows how school officials, politicians, the courts, and the media gave precedence to the desires of white parents who opposed school desegregation over the civil rights of black students.

This broad and incisive history of busing features a cast of characters that includes national political figures such as then-president Richard Nixon, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, and antibusing advocate Louise Day Hicks, as well as some lesser-known activists on both sides of the issue—Boston civil rights leaders Ruth Batson and Ellen Jackson, who opposed segregated schools, and Pontiac housewife and antibusing activist Irene McCabe, black conservative Clay Smothers, and Florida governor Claude Kirk, all supporters of school segregation. Why Busing Failed shows how antibusing parents and politicians ultimately succeeded in preventing full public school desegregation.
Learn more about the book and author at Matthew F. Delmont's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Nicest Kids in Town.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Irish Nationalists in America"

New from Oxford University Press: Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798-1998 by David Brundage.

About the book, from the publisher:
In this important work of deep learning and insight, David Brundage gives us the first full-scale history of Irish nationalists in the United States. Beginning with the brief exile of Theobald Wolfe Tone, founder of Irish republican nationalism, in Philadelphia on the eve of the bloody 1798 Irish rebellion, and concluding with the role of Bill Clinton's White House in the historic 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, Brundage tells a story of more than two hundred years of Irish American (and American) activism in the cause of Ireland.

The book, though, is far more than a narrative history of the movement. Brundage effectively weaves into his account a number of the analytical themes and perspectives that have transformed the study of nationalism over the last two decades. The most important of these perspectives is the "imagined" or "invented" character of nationalism. A second theme is the relationship of nationalism to the waves of global migration from the early nineteenth century to the present and, more precisely, the relationship of nationalist politics to the phenomenon of political exile. Finally, the work is concerned with Irish American nationalists' larger social and political vision, which sometimes expanded to embrace causes such as the abolition of slavery, women's rights, or freedom for British colonial subjects in India and Africa, and at other times narrowed, avoiding or rejecting such "extraneous" concerns and connections. All of these themes are placed within a thoroughly transnational framework that is one of the book's most important contributions.

Irish nationalism in America emerges from these pages as a movement of great resonance and power. This is a work that will transform our understanding of the experience of one of America's largest immigrant groups and of the phenomenon of diasporic or "long-distance" nationalism more generally.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

"Educational Reconstruction"

New from Fordham University Press: Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 by Hilary Green.

About the book, from the publisher:
Tracing the first two decades of state-funded African American schools, Educational Reconstruction addresses the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians, and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War.

Hilary Green proposes a new chronology in understanding postwar African American education, examining how urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city and state partners. Revealing the significant gains made after the departure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, this study reevaluates African American higher education in terms of developing a cadre of public school educator-activists and highlights the centrality of urban African American protest in shaping educational decisions and policies in their respective cities and states.
Hilary N. Green is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 28, 2016

"Dreams of a Great Small Nation"

New from PublicAffairs: Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe by Kevin J. McNamara.

About the book, from the publisher:
“The pages of history recall scarcely any parallel episode at once so romantic in character and so extensive in scale.” —Winston S. Churchill

In 1917, two empires that had dominated much of Europe and Asia teetered on the edge of the abyss, exhausted by the ruinous cost in blood and treasure of the First World War. As Imperial Russia and Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary began to succumb, a small group of Czech and Slovak combat veterans stranded in Siberia saw an opportunity to realize their long-held dream of independence.

While their plan was audacious and complex, and involved moving their 50,000-strong army by land and sea across three-quarters of the earth’s expanse, their commitment to fight for the Allies on the Western Front riveted the attention of Allied London, Paris, and Washington.

On their journey across Siberia, a brawl erupted at a remote Trans-Siberian rail station that sparked a wholesale rebellion. The marauding Czecho-Slovak Legion seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and with it Siberia. In the end, this small band of POWs and deserters, whose strength was seen by Leon Trotsky as the chief threat to Soviet rule, helped destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire and found Czecho-Slovakia.

British prime minister David Lloyd George called their adventure “one of the greatest epics of history,” and former US president Teddy Roosevelt declared that their accomplishments were “unparalleled, so far as I know, in ancient or modern warfare.”
Visit Kevin J. McNamara's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lost White Tribe"

New from Oxford University Press: The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent by Michael F. Robinson.

About the book, from the publisher:
In 1876, in a mountainous region to the west of Lake Victoria, Africa--what is today Ruwenzori Mountains National Park in Uganda--the famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley encountered Africans with what he was convinced were light complexions and European features. Stanley's discovery of this African "white tribe" haunted him and seemed to substantiate the so-called Hamitic Hypothesis: the theory that the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah, had populated Africa and other remote places, proving that the source and spread of human races around the world could be traced to and explained by a Biblical story.

In The Lost White Tribe, Michael Robinson traces the rise and fall of the Hamitic Hypothesis. In addition to recounting Stanley's "discovery," Robinson shows how it influenced encounters with the Ainu in Japan; Vilhjalmur Stefansson's tribe of "blond Eskimos" in the Arctic; and the "white Indians" of Panama. As Robinson shows, race theory stemming originally from the Bible only not only guided exploration but archeology, including Charles Mauch's discovery of the Grand Zimbabwe site in 1872, and literature, such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, whose publication launched an entire literary subgenre ded icated to white tribes in remote places. The Hamitic Hypothesis would shape the theories of Carl Jung and guide psychological and anthropological notions of the primitive.

The Hypothesis also formed the foundation for the European colonial system, which was premised on assumptions about racial hierarchy, at whose top were the white races, the purest and oldest of them all. It was a small step from the Hypothesis to theories of Aryan superiority, which served as the basis of the race laws in Nazi Germany and had horrific and catastrophic consequences. Though racial thinking changed profoundly after World War Two, a version of Hamitic validation of the "whiter" tribes laid the groundwork for conflict within Africa itself after decolonization, including the Rwandan genocide.

Based on painstaking archival research, The Lost White Tribe is a fascinating, immersive, and wide-ranging work of synthesis, revealing the roots of racial thinking and the legacies that continue to exert their influence to this day.
Visit Michael Robinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, March 27, 2016

"China's Hidden Children"

New from the University of Chicago Press: China's Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy by Kay Ann Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children—mostly girls—have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States. It’s generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China’s approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story—a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter.

Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China’s Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country’s stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed—from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China’s so-called abandoned children have increasingly become “stolen” children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally—but illegally—adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages.

The image of the “unwanted daughter” remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China’s Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one’s child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China’s birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.
--Marshal Zeringue

"The Big Rig"

New from the University of California Press: The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream by Steve Viscelli.

About the book, from the publisher:
Long-haul trucks have been described as sweatshops on wheels. The typical long-haul trucker works the equivalent of two full-time jobs, often for little more than minimum wage. But it wasn’t always this way. Trucking used to be one of the best working-class jobs in the United States.

The Big Rig explains how this massive degradation in the quality of work has occurred, and how companies achieve a compliant and dedicated workforce despite it. Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews and years of extensive observation, including six months training and working as a long-haul trucker, Viscelli explains in detail how labor is recruited, trained, and used in the industry. He then shows how inexperienced workers are convinced to lease a truck and to work as independent contractors. He explains how deregulation and collective action by employers transformed trucking’s labor markets--once dominated by the largest and most powerful union in US history--into an important example of the costs of contemporary labor markets for workers and the general public.
Visit Steve Viscelli's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, March 26, 2016

"The Right’s First Amendment"

New from Stanford University Press: The Right’s First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech & the Return of Conservative Libertarianism by Wayne Batchis.

About the book, from the publisher:
Not so long ago, being aggressively "pro–free speech" was as closely associated with American political liberalism as being pro-choice, pro–affirmative action, or pro–gun control. With little notice, this political dynamic has been shaken to the core. The Right's First Amendment examines how conservatives came to adopt and co-opt constitutional free speech rights.

In the 1960s, free speech on college campuses was seen as a guarantee for social agitators, hippies, and peaceniks. Today, for many conservatives, it represents instead a crucial shield that protects traditionalists from a perceived scourge of political correctness and liberal oversensitivity. Over a similar period, free market conservatives have risen up to embrace a once unknown, but now cherished, liberty: freedom of commercial expression. What do these changes mean for the future of First Amendment interpretation?

Wayne Batchis offers a fresh entry point into these issues by grounding his study in both political and legal scholarship. Surveying six decades of writings from the preeminent conservative publication National Review alongside the evolving constitutional law and ideological predispositions of Supreme Court justices deciding these issues, Batchis asks the conservative political movement to answer to its judicial logic, revealing how this keystone of our civic American beliefs now carries a much more complex and nuanced political identity.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, March 25, 2016

"Trouble in the Tribe"

New from Princeton University Press: Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel by Dov Waxman.

About the book, from the publisher:
Trouble in the Tribe explores the increasingly contentious place of Israel in the American Jewish community. In a fundamental shift, growing numbers of American Jews have become less willing to unquestioningly support Israel and more willing to publicly criticize its government. More than ever before, American Jews are arguing about Israeli policies, and many, especially younger ones, are becoming uncomfortable with Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Dov Waxman argues that Israel is fast becoming a source of disunity for American Jewry, and that a new era of American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of solidarity.

Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with American Jewish leaders and activists, Waxman shows why Israel has become such a divisive issue among American Jews. He delves into the American Jewish debate about Israel, examining the impact that the conflict over Israel is having on Jewish communities, national Jewish organizations, and on the pro-Israel lobby. Waxman sets this conflict in the context of broader cultural, political, institutional, and demographic changes happening in the American Jewish community. He offers a nuanced and balanced account of how this conflict over Israel has developed and what it means for the future of American Jewish politics.

Israel used to bring American Jews together. Now it is driving them apart. Trouble in the Tribe explains why.
Visit Dov Waxman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, March 24, 2016

"Frederick the Great: King of Prussia"

New from Random House: Frederick the Great: King of Prussia by Tim Blanning.

About the book, from the publisher:
The definitive biography of the legendary autocrat whose enlightened rule transformed the map of Europe and changed the course of history

Few figures loom as large in European history as Frederick the Great. When he inherited the Prussian crown in 1740, he ruled over a kingdom of scattered territories, a minor Germanic backwater. By the end of his reign, the much larger and consolidated Prussia ranked among the continent’s great powers. In this magisterial biography, award-winning historian Tim Blanning gives us an intimate, in-depth portrait of a king who dominated the political, military, and cultural life of Europe half a century before Napoleon.

A brilliant, ambitious, sometimes ruthless monarch, Frederick was a man of immense contradictions. This consummate conqueror was also an ardent patron of the arts who attracted painters, architects, musicians, playwrights, and intellectuals to his court. Like his fellow autocrat Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick was captivated by the ideals of the Enlightenment—for many years he kept up lively correspondence with Voltaire and other leading thinkers of the age. Yet, like Catherine, Frederick drew the line when it came to implementing Enlightenment principles that might curtail his royal authority.

Frederick’s terrifying father instilled in him a stern military discipline that would make the future king one of the most fearsome battlefield commanders of his day, while deriding as effeminate his son’s passion for modern ideas and fine art. Frederick, driven to surpass his father’s legacy, challenged the dominant German-speaking powers, including Saxony, Bavaria, and the Habsburg Monarchy. It was an audacious foreign policy gambit, one at which Frederick, against the expectations of his rivals, succeeded.

In examining Frederick’s private life, Blanning also carefully considers the long-debated question of Frederick’s sexuality, finding evidence that Frederick lavished gifts on his male friends and maintained homosexual relationships throughout his life, while limiting contact with his estranged, unloved queen to visits that were few and far between.

The story of one man’s life and the complete political and cultural transformation of a nation, Tim Blanning’s sweeping biography takes readers inside the mind of the monarch, giving us a fresh understanding of Frederick the Great’s remarkable reign.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

"Choosing Our Religion"

New from Oxford University Press: Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America's Nones by Elizabeth Drescher.

About the book, from the publisher:
To the dismay of religious leaders, study after study has shown a steady decline in affiliation and identification with traditional religions in America. By 2014, more than twenty percent of adults identified as unaffiliated--up more than seven percent just since 2007. Even more startling, more than thirty percent of those under the age of thirty now identify as "Nones"--answering "none" when queried about their religious affiliation. Is America losing its religion? Or, as more and more Americans choose different spiritual paths, are they changing what it means to be religious in the United States today?

In Choosing Our Religion, Elizabeth Drescher explores the diverse, complex spiritual lives of Nones across generations and across categories of self-identification as "Spiritual-But-Not-Religious," "Atheist," "Agnostic," "Humanist," "just Spiritual," and more. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews conducted across the United States, Drescher opens a window into the lives of a broad cross-section of Nones, diverse with respect to age, gender, race, sexual orientation, and prior religious background. She allows Nones to speak eloquently for themselves, illuminating the processes by which they became None, the sources of information and inspiration that enrich their spiritual lives, the practices they find spiritually meaningful, how prayer functions in spiritual lives not centered on doctrinal belief, how morals and values are shaped outside of institutional religions, and how Nones approach the spiritual development of their own children.

These compelling stories are deeply revealing about how religion is changing in America--both for Nones and for the religiously affiliated family, friends, and neighbors with whom their lives remain intertwined.
Visit Elizabeth Drescher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

"Jimmy Carter in Africa"

New from Stanford University Press: Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War by Nancy Mitchell.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the mid-1970s, the Cold War had frozen into a nuclear stalemate in Europe and retreated from the headlines in Asia. As Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter fought for the presidency in late 1976, the superpower struggle overseas seemed to take a backseat to more contentious domestic issues of race relations and rising unemployment. There was one continent, however, where the Cold War was on the point of flaring hot: Africa.

Jimmy Carter in Africa opens just after Henry Kissinger's failed 1975 plot in Angola, as Carter launches his presidential campaign. The Civil Rights Act was only a decade old, and issues of racial justice remained contentious. Racism at home undermined Americans' efforts to "win hearts and minds" abroad and provided potent propaganda to the Kremlin. As President Carter confronted Africa, the essence of American foreign policy—stopping Soviet expansion—slammed up against the most explosive and raw aspect of American domestic politics—racism.

Drawing on candid interviews with Carter, as well as key U.S. and foreign diplomats, and on a dazzling array of international archival sources, Nancy Mitchell offers a timely reevaluation of the Carter administration and of the man himself. In the face of two major tests, in Rhodesia and the Horn of Africa, Carter grappled with questions of Cold War competition, domestic politics, personal loyalty, and decision-making style. Mitchell reveals an administration not beset by weakness and indecision, as is too commonly assumed, but rather constrained by Cold War dynamics and by the president's own temperament as he wrestled with a divided public and his own human failings. Jimmy Carter in Africa presents a stark portrait of how deeply Cold War politics and racial justice were intertwined.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 21, 2016

"Northern Armageddon"

New from Alfred A. Knopf: Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the Making of the American Revolution by D. Peter MacLeod.

About the book, from the publisher:
A huge, ambitious re-creation of the eighteenth-century Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the pivotal battle in the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) to win control of the trans-Appalachian region of North America, a battle consisting of the British and American colonists on one side and the French and the Iroquois Confederacy on the other, and leading directly to the colonial War of Independence and the creation of Canada.

It took five years of warfare fought on three continents—Europe, Asia, and North America—to bring the forces arrayed against one another—Britain, Prussia, and Hanover against France, Austria, Sweden, Saxony, Russia, and Spain (Churchill called it “the first world war”)—to the plateau outside Quebec City, on September 13, 1759, on fields owned a century before by a fisherman named Abraham Martin . . . It was the final battle of a three-month siege by the British Army and Navy of Quebec, the walled city that controlled access to the St. Lawrence River and the continent’s entire network of waterways; a battle with the British utilizing 15,000 soldiers, employing 186 ships, with hundreds of colonists aboard British warships and transports from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with France sending in a mere 400 reinforcements in addition to its 3,500 soldiers.

The battle on the Plains of Abraham lasted twenty minutes, and at its finish the course of a continent was changed forever . . . New military tactics were used for the first time against standard European formations . . . Generals Wolfe and Montcalm each died of gunshot wounds . . . France surrendered Quebec to the British, setting the course for the future of Canada, paving the way for the signing of the Treaty of Paris that gave the British control of North America east of the Mississippi, and forcing France to relinquish its claims on New Orleans and to give the lands west of the Mississippi to Spain for surrendering Florida to the British.

After the decisive battle, Britain’s maritime and colonial supremacy was assured, its hold on the thirteen American colonies tightened. The American participation in ousting the French as a North American power spurred the confidence of the people of New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, who began to agitate for independence from Great Britain. Sixteen years later, France, still bitter over the loss of most of its colonial empire, intervened on behalf of the patriots in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783).

In Northern Armageddon, Peter MacLeod, using original research—diaries, journals, letters, and firsthand accounts—and bringing to bear all of his extensive knowledge and grasp of warfare and colonial North American history, tells the epic story on a human scale. He writes of the British at Quebec through the eyes of a master’s mate on one of the ships embroiled in the battle. And from the French perspective, as the British bombarded Quebec, of four residents of the city—a priest, a clerk, a nun, and a notary—caught in the crossfire.

MacLeod gives us as well the large-scale ramifications of this clash of armies, not only on the shape of North America, but on the history of Europe itself.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, March 20, 2016

"In Nelson's Wake: The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars"

New from Yale University Press: In Nelson's Wake: The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars by James Davey.

About the book, from the publisher:
Horatio Nelson’s celebrated victory over the French at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 presented Britain with an unprecedented command of the seas. Yet the Royal Navy’s role in the struggle against Napoleonic France was far from over. This groundbreaking book asserts that, contrary to the accepted notion that the Battle of Trafalgar essentially completed the Navy’s task, the war at sea actually intensified over the next decade, ceasing only with Napoleon’s final surrender.

In this dramatic account of naval contributions between 1803 and 1815, James Davey offers original and exciting insights into the Napoleonic wars and Britain’s maritime history. Encompassing Trafalgar, the Peninsular War, the War of 1812, the final campaign against Napoleon, and many lesser known but likewise crucial moments, the book sheds light on the experiences of individuals high and low, from admiral and captain to sailor and cabin boy. The cast of characters also includes others from across Britain—dockyard workers, politicians, civilians—who made fundamental contributions to the war effort, and in so doing, both saved the nation and shaped Britain’s history.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, March 19, 2016

"Japanese Confucianism"

New from Cambridge University Press: Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History by Kiri Paramore.

About the book, from the publisher:
For more than 1500 years, Confucianism has played a major role in shaping Japan's history - from the formation of the first Japanese states during the first millennium AD, to Japan's modernization in the nineteenth century, to World War II and its still unresolved legacies across East Asia today. In an illuminating and provocative new study, Kiri Paramore analyses the dynamic history of Japanese Confucianism, revealing its many cultural manifestations, as religion and as a political tool, as social capital and public discourse, as well as its role in international relations and statecraft. The book demonstrates the processes through which Confucianism was historically linked to other phenomenon, such as the rise of modern science and East Asian liberalism. In doing so, it offers new perspectives on the sociology of Confucianism and its impact on society, culture and politics across East Asia, past and present.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, March 18, 2016

"Making Immigrant Rights Real"

New from Cornell University Press: Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco by Els de Graauw.

About the book, from the publisher:
More than half of the 41 million foreign-born individuals in the United States today are noncitizens, half have difficulty with English, a quarter are undocumented, and many are poor. As a result, most immigrants have few opportunities to make their voices heard in the political process. Nonprofits in many cities have stepped into this gap to promote the integration of disadvantaged immigrants. They have done so despite notable constraints on their political activities, including limits on their lobbying and partisan electioneering, limited organizational resources, and dependence on government funding. Immigrant rights advocates also operate in a national context focused on immigration enforcement rather than immigrant integration. In Making Immigrant Rights Real, Els de Graauw examines how immigrant-serving nonprofits can make impressive policy gains despite these limitations.

Drawing on three case studies of immigrant rights policies—language access, labor rights, and municipal ID cards—in San Francisco, de Graauw develops a tripartite model of advocacy strategies that nonprofits have used to propose, enact, and implement immigrant-friendly policies: administrative advocacy, cross-sectoral and cross-organizational collaborations, and strategic issue framing. The inventive development and deployment of these strategies enabled immigrant-serving nonprofits in San Francisco to secure some remarkable new immigrant rights victories, and de Graauw explores how other cities can learn from their experiences.
Visit Els de Graauw's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, March 17, 2016

"From Village to City"

New from the University of California Press: From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat by Andrew B. Kipnis.

About the book, from the publisher:
Between 1988 and 2013, the Chinese city of Zouping transformed from an impoverished town of 30,000 people to a bustling city of over 300,000, complete with factories, high rises, parks, shopping malls, and all the infrastructure of a wealthy East Asian city. From Village to City paints a vivid portrait of the rapid changes in Zouping and its environs and in the lives of the once-rural people who live there.

Despite the benefits of modernization and an improved standard of living for many of its residents, Zouping is far from a utopia; its inhabitants face new challenges and problems such as alienation, class formation and exclusion, and pollution. As he explores the city’s transformation, Andrew B. Kipnis develops a new theory of urbanization in this compelling portrayal of an emerging metropolis and its people.
Andrew B. Kipnis is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Culture, History and Language of the College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

"States of Dependency"

New from Cambridge University Press: States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972 by Karen M. Tani.

About the book, from the publisher:
Who bears responsibility for the poor, and who may exercise the power that comes with that responsibility? Amid the Great Depression, American reformers answered this question in new ways, with profound effects on long-standing practices of governance and entrenched understandings of citizenship. States of Dependency traces New Deal welfare programs over the span of four decades, asking what happened as money, expertise and ideas travelled from a federal administrative epicenter in Washington, DC, through state and local bureaucracies, and into diverse and divided communities. Drawing on a wealth of previously un-mined legal and archival sources, Karen Tani reveals how reformers attempted to build a more bureaucratic, centralized and uniform public welfare system; how traditions of localism, federalism and hostility toward the 'undeserving poor' affected their efforts; and how, along the way, more and more Americans came to speak of public income support in the powerful but limiting language of law and rights. The resulting account moves beyond attacking or defending Americans' reliance on the welfare state to explore the complex network of dependencies undergirding modern American governance.
Karen Tani is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

"Chinese Economic Statecraft"

New from Cornell University Press: Chinese Economic Statecraft: Commercial Actors, Grand Strategy, and State Control by William J. Norris.

About the book, from the publisher:
In Chinese Economic Statecraft, William J. Norris introduces an innovative theory that pinpoints how states employ economic tools of national power to pursue their strategic objectives. Norris shows what Chinese economic statecraft is, how it works, and why it is more or less effective. Norris provides an accessible tool kit to help us better understand important economic developments in the People's Republic of China. He links domestic Chinese political economy with the international ramifications of China’s economic power as a tool for realizing China’s strategic foreign policy interests. He presents a novel approach to studying economic statecraft that calls attention to the central challenge of how the state is (or is not) able to control and direct the behavior of economic actors.

Norris identifies key causes of Chinese state control through tightly structured, substate and crossnational comparisons of business-government relations. These cases range across three important arenas of China’s grand strategy that prominently feature a strategic role for economics: China’s efforts to secure access to vital raw materials located abroad, Mainland relations toward Taiwan, and China’s sovereign wealth funds. Norris spent more than two years conducting field research in China and Taiwan during which he interviewed current and former government officials, academics, bankers, journalists, advisors, lawyers, and businesspeople. The ideas in this book are applicable beyond China and help us to understand how states exercise international economic power in the twenty-first century.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 14, 2016

"Crossing the Kingdom"

New from the University of California Press: Crossing the Kingdom: Portraits of Saudi Arabia by Loring M. Danforth.

About the book, from the publisher:
For many people, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia evokes images of deserts, camels, and oil, along with rich sheikh in white robes, oppressed women in black veils, and terrorists. But when Loring Danforth traveled through the country in 2012, he found a world much more complex and inspiring than he could have ever imagined.

With vivid descriptions and moving personal narratives, Danforth takes us across the Kingdom, from the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, the country’s national oil company on the Persian Gulf, to the centuries-old city of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast with its population of undocumented immigrants from all over the Muslim world. He presents detailed portraits of a young woman jailed for protesting the ban on women driving, a Sufi scholar encouraging Muslims and Christians to struggle together with love to know God, and an artist citing the Quran and using metal gears and chains to celebrate the diversity of the pilgrims who come to Mecca.

Crossing the Kingdom paints a lucid portrait of contemporary Saudi culture and the lives of individuals, who like us all grapple with modernity at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, March 13, 2016

"The Nature of Soviet Power"

New from Cambridge University Press: The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History by Andy Bruno.

About the book, from the publisher:
During the twentieth century, the Soviet Union turned the Kola Peninsula in the northwest corner of the country into one of the most populated, industrialized, militarized, and polluted parts of the Arctic. This transformation suggests, above all, that environmental relations fundamentally shaped the Soviet experience. Interactions with the natural world both enabled industrial livelihoods and curtailed socialist promises. Nature itself was a participant in the communist project. Taking a long-term comparative perspective, The Nature of Soviet Power sees Soviet environmental history as part of the global pursuit for unending economic growth among modern states. This in-depth exploration of railroad construction, the mining and processing of phosphorus-rich apatite, reindeer herding, nickel and copper smelting, and energy production in the region examines Soviet cultural perceptions of nature, plans for development, lived experiences, and modifications to the physical world. While Soviet power remade nature, nature also remade Soviet power.
Andy Bruno is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Faculty Associate in Environmental Studies at Northern Illinois University.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, March 12, 2016

'"I Love Learning; I Hate School"'

New from Cornell University Press: "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College by Susan D. Blum.

About the book, from the publisher:
Frustrated by her students' performance, her relationships with them, and her own daughter’s problems in school, Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology, set out to understand why her students found their educational experience at a top-tier institution so profoundly difficult and unsatisfying. Through her research and in conversations with her students, she discovered a troubling mismatch between the goals of the university and the needs of students.

In "I Love Learning; I Hate School," Blum tells two intertwined but inseparable stories: the results of her research into how students learn contrasted with the way conventional education works, and the personal narrative of how she herself was transformed by this understanding. Blum concludes that the dominant forms of higher education do not match the myriad forms of learning that help students—people in general—master meaningful and worthwhile skills and knowledge. Students are capable of learning huge amounts, but the ways higher education is structured often leads them to fail to learn. More than that, it leads to ill effects. In this critique of higher education, infused with anthropological insights, Blum explains why so much is going wrong and offers suggestions for how to bring classroom learning more in line with appropriate forms of engagement. She challenges our system of education and argues for a “reintegration of learning with life.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, March 11, 2016

"The Aztec Economic World"

New from Cambridge University Press: The Aztec Economic World: Merchants and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica by Kenneth G. Hirth.

About the book, from the publisher:
This study explores the organization, scale, complexity, and integration of Aztec commerce across Mesoamerica at Spanish contact. The aims of the book are threefold. The first is to construct an in-depth understanding of the economic organization of precolumbian Aztec society and how it developed in the way that it did. The second is to explore the livelihoods of the individuals who bought, sold, and moved goods across a cultural landscape that lacked both navigable rivers and animal transport. Finally, this study models Aztec economy in a way that facilitates its comparison to other ancient and premodern societies around the world. What makes the Aztec economy unique is that it developed one of the most sophisticated market economies in the ancient world in a society with one of the worse transportation systems. This is the first book to provide an updated and comprehensive view of the Aztec economy in thirty years.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, March 10, 2016

"Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11"

New from Oxford University Press: Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 by Harriet F. Senie.

About the book, from the publisher:
Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 traces the evolution and consequences of a new hybrid paradigm, which grants a heroic status to victims of national tragedies, and by extension to their families, thereby creating a class of privileged participants in the permanent memorial process. Harriet F. Senie suggests that instead the victims' families be able to determine the nature of an interim memorial, one that addresses their needs in the critical time between the murder of their loved ones and the completion of the permanent memorial. She also observes that the memorials discussed herein are inadvertently based on strategies of diversion and denial that direct our attention away from actual events, and reframe tragedy as secular or religious triumph. In doing so, they camouflage history, and seen as an aggregate, they define a nation of victims, exactly the concept they and their accompanying celebratory narratives were apparently created to obscure.
Visit Harriet F. Senie's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Priests of Prosperity"

New from Cornell University Press: Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World by Juliet Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:
Priests of Prosperity explores the unsung revolutionary campaign to transform postcommunist central banks from command-economy cash cows into Western-style monetary guardians. Juliet Johnson conducted more than 160 interviews in seventeen countries with central bankers, international assistance providers, policymakers, and private-sector finance professionals over the course of fifteen years. She argues that a powerful transnational central banking community concentrated in Western Europe and North America integrated postcommunist central bankers into its network, shaped their ideas about the role of central banks, and helped them develop modern tools of central banking.

Johnson's detailed comparative studies of central bank development in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan take readers from the birth of the campaign in the late 1980s to the challenges faced by central bankers after the global financial crisis. As the comfortable certainties of the past collapse around them, today's central bankers in the postcommunist world and beyond find themselves torn between allegiance to their transnational community and its principles on the one hand and their increasingly complex and politicized national roles on the other. Priests of Prosperity will appeal to a diverse audience of scholars in political science, finance, economics, geography, and sociology as well as to central bankers and other policymakers interested in the future of international finance, global governance, and economic development.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

"One True Life"

New from Yale University Press: One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions by C. Kavin Rowe.

About the book, from the publisher:
In this groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary work of philosophy and biblical studies, New Testament scholar C. Kavin Rowe explores the promise and problems inherent in engaging rival philosophical claims to what is true. Juxtaposing the Roman Stoics Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius with the Christian saints Paul, Luke, and Justin Martyr, and incorporating the contemporary views of Jeffrey Stout, Alasdair McIntyre, Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Pierre Hadot, and others, the author suggests that in a world of religious pluralism there is negligible gain in sampling from separate belief systems. This thought-provoking volume reconceives the relationship between ancient philosophy and emergent Christianity as a rivalry between strong traditions of life and offers powerful arguments for the exclusive commitment to a community of belief and a particular form of philosophical life as the path to existential truth.
C. Kavin Rowe is professor of New Testament at Duke University Divinity School and the author of Early Narrative Christology: The Lord in the Gospel of Luke and World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Science and Sensibility"

New from the University of California Press: Science and Sensibility: Negotiating an Ecology of Place by Michael Vincent McGinnis.

About the book, from the publisher:
If humans are to understand and discover ways of addressing complex social and ecological problems, we first need to find intimacy with our particular places and communities. Cultivating a relationship to place often includes a negotiating process that involves both science and sensibility. While science is one key part of an adaptive and resilient society, the cultivation of a renewed sense of place and community is essential as well.

Science and Sensibility argues for the need for ecology to engage with philosophical values and economic motivations in a political process of negotiation, with the goal of shaping humans' treatment of the natural world. Michael Vincent McGinnis aims to reframe ecology so it might have greater “trans-scientific” awareness of the roles and interactions among multiple stakeholders in socioecological systems, and he also maintains that deep ecological knowledge of specific places will be crucial to supporting a sustainable society. He uses numerous specific case studies from watershed, coastal, and marine habitats to illustrate how place-based ecological negotiation can occur, and how reframing our negotiation process can influence conservation, restoration, and environmental policy in effective ways.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

"Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China"

New from Cambridge University Press: Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China by Louise Edwards.

About the book, from the publisher:
In this compelling new study, Louise Edwards explores the lives of some of China's most famous women warriors and wartime spies through history. Focusing on key figures including Hua Mulan, Zheng Pingru and Liu Hulan, this book examines the ways in which these extraordinary women have been commemorated through a range of cultural mediums including film, theatre, museums and textbooks. Whether perceived as heroes or anti-heroes, Edwards shows that both the popular and official presentation of these women and their accomplishments has evolved in line with China's shifting political values and circumstances over the past one hundred years. Written in a lively and accessible style with illustrations throughout, this book sheds new light on the relationship between gender and militarisation and the ways that women have been exploited to glamorise war both historically in the past and in China today.
Louise Edwards is Professor of Chinese History and Asian Studies Convener at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She publishes on women and gender in China and Asia. Her most recent sole-authored book is Women Politics and Democracy: Women's Suffrage in China (2008).

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 7, 2016

"Bonds of Union"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland by Bridget Ford.

About the book, from the publisher:
This vivid history of the Civil War era reveals how unexpected bonds of union forged among diverse peoples in the Ohio-Kentucky borderlands furthered emancipation through a period of spiraling chaos between 1830 and 1865. Moving beyond familiar arguments about Lincoln's deft politics or regional commercial ties, Bridget Ford recovers the potent religious, racial, and political attachments holding the country together at one of its most likely breaking points, the Ohio River.

Living in a bitterly contested region, the Americans examined here--Protestant and Catholic, black and white, northerner and southerner--made zealous efforts to understand the daily lives and struggles of those on the opposite side of vexing human and ideological divides. In their common pursuits of religious devotionalism, universal public education regardless of race, and relief from suffering during wartime, Ford discovers a surprisingly capacious and inclusive sense of political union in the Civil War era. While accounting for the era's many disintegrative forces, Ford reveals the imaginative work that went into bridging stark differences in lived experience, and she posits that work as a precondition for slavery's end and the Union's persistence.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, March 6, 2016

"Slow Fade to Black"

New from the University of California Press: Slow Fade to Black: The Decline of RKO Radio Pictures by Richard B. Jewell.

About the book, from the publisher:
Slow Fade to Black completes Richard B. Jewell’s richly detailed two-part history of the RKO film studio, which began with RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan Is Born, published in 2012. This second volume charts the studio’s fortunes, which peaked during World War II, declined in the postwar period, and finally collapsed in the 1950s. Drawing on hard-to-access archival materials, Jewell chronicles the period from 1942 to the company’s demise in 1957. Towering figures associated with the studio included Howard Hughes, Orson Welles, Charles Koerner, Val Lewton, Jane Russell, and Robert Mitchum. In addition to featuring an extraordinary cast of characters, the RKO story describes key aspects of entertainment history: Hollywood’s collaboration with Washington, film noir, censorship, HUAC, the rise of independent film production, and the impact of television on film. Taken as a whole, Jewell’s two-volume study represents the most substantial and insightful exploration of the Hollywood studio system to date.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, March 5, 2016

"The Naked Result"

New from Oxford University Press: The Naked Result: How Exotic Dance Became Big Business by Jessica Berson.

About the book, from the publisher:
We have grown accustomed to corporate influence in retail outlets, restaurants, and even higher education-but what happens when corporations take over desire? The Naked Result: How Exotic Dance Became Big Business explores the changing world of striptease, tracing its path from the unruly underground to brightly lit, branded 'gentlemen's clubs.' Drawing on her own experience as an exotic dancer, Jessica Berson examines the ways that striptease embodies conflicting notions of race, class, and female sexuality, and how the exotic dance industry deploys these differences to codify and commodify our erotic imagination. Chain clubs, fitness programs, and music videos are moving exotic dance into the mainstream, stripping its historical potential to embody and express subversive desires-erotic and otherwise-and generate resistant modes of female erotic subjectivity. Through case studies including Boston's Combat Zone in the 1970s-80s, the development of lap dancing in London in the 1990s, and the triumph of corporate striptease in post-Giuliani New York City in the last decade, The Naked Result reveals an industry that increasingly eradicates individuality and agency in order to increase profits. Ultimately, The Naked Result argues that corporatization has cheerfully smothered the diversity of desire and expression for both dancers and customers, repackaging the most mysterious human emotions into easily branded experiences no more personal or powerful than those to be found in any themed restaurant or coffee mega-chain.
Visit Jessica Berson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Things Stick"

New from the University of California Press: Making Things Stick: Surveillance Technologies and Mexico's War on Crime by Keith Guzik.

About the book, from the publisher:
With Mexico’s War on Crime as the backdrop, Making Things Stick offers an innovative analysis of how surveillance technologies impact governance in the global society. More than just tools to monitor ordinary people, surveillance technologies are imagined by government officials as a way to reform the national state by focusing on the material things—cellular phones, automobiles, human bodies—that can enable crime. In describing the challenges that the Mexican government has encountered in implementing this novel approach to social control, Keith Guzik presents surveillance technologies as a sign of state weakness rather than strength and as an opportunity for civic engagement rather than retreat.
Keith Guzik is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado, Denver. He is the author of Arresting Abuse and the co-editor of The Mangle in Practice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, March 4, 2016

"Blood Year"

New from Oxford University Press: Blood Year: The Unraveling of Western Counterterrorism by David Kilcullen.

About the book, from the publisher:
2014 has the potential to go down as a crucial year in modern world history. A resurgent and bellicose Russia took over Crimea and fueled a civil war in Eastern Ukraine. Post-Saddam Iraq, in many respects a creature of the United States because of the war that began in 2003, lost a third of its territory to an army of hyper-violent millennialists. The peace process in Israel seemed to completely collapse. Finally, after coalescing in Syria as a territorial entity, the Islamic State swept into northern Iraq and through northeastern Syria, attracting legions of recruits from Europe and the Middle East. In short, the post-Cold War security order that the US had constructed after 1991 seemed to be coming apart at the seams.

David Kilcullen was one of the architects of America's strategy in the late phases of the second Gulf War, and also spent time in Afghanistan and other hotspots. In Blood Year, he provides a wide-angle view of the current situation in the Middle East and analyzes how America and the West ended up in such dire circumstances. Whereas in 2008 it appeared that the U.S. might pull a modest stalemate from the jaws of defeat in Iraq, six years later the situation had reversed. After America pulled out of Iraq completely in 2011, the Shi'ite president cut Sunnis out of the power structure and allowed Iranian influence to grow. And from the debris of Assad's Syria arose an extremist Sunni organization even more radical than Al Qaeda. Unlike Al Qaeda, ISIS was intent on establishing its own state, and within a remarkably short time they did. Interestingly, Kilcullen highlights how embittered former Iraqi Ba'athist military officers were key contributors to ISIS's military successes.

Kilcullen lays much of the blame on Bush's initial decision to invade Iraq (which had negative secondary effects in Afghanistan), but also takes Obama to task for simply withdrawing and adopting a "leading from behind" strategy. As events have proven, Kilcullen contends, withdrawal was a fundamentally misguided plan. The U.S. had uncorked the genie, and it had a responsibility to at least attempt to keep it under control. Instead, the U.S. is at a point where administration officials state that the losses of Ramadi and Palmyra are manageable setbacks. Kilcullen argues that the U.S. needs to re-engage in the region, whether it wants to or not, because it is largely responsible for the situation that is now unfolding. Blood Year is an essential read for anyone interested in understanding not only why the region that the U.S. invaded a dozen years ago has collapsed into utter chaos, but also what it can do to alleviate the grim situation.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, March 3, 2016

"The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention"

New from Oxford University Press: The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention by Rajan Menon.

About the book, from the publisher:
With the end of the Cold War has come an upsurge in humanitarian interventions-military campaigns aimed at ending mass atrocities. These wars of rescue, waged in the name of ostensibly universal norms of human rights and legal principles, rest on the premise that a genuine "international community" has begun to emerge and has reached consensus on a procedure for eradicating mass killings. Rajan Menon argues that, in fact, humanitarian intervention remains deeply divisive as a concept and as a policy, and is flawed besides. The advocates of humanitarian intervention have produced a mountain of writings to support their claim that human rights precepts now exert an unprecedented influence on states' foreign policies and that we can therefore anticipate a comprehensive solution to mass atrocities.

In The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, Menon shows that this belief, while noble, is naïve. States continue to act principally based on what they regard at any given time as their national interests. Delivering strangers from oppression ranks low on their list of priorities. Indeed, even democratic states routinely embrace governments that trample the human rights values on which the humanitarian intervention enterprise rests.

States' ethical commitment to waging war to end atrocities remains episodic and erratic-more rhetorical than real. And when these missions are undertaken, the strategies and means used invariably produce perverse, even dangerous results. This, in no small measure, stems from the hubris of leaders-and the acolytes of humanitarian intervention-who have come to believe that they possesses the wisdom and wherewithal to bestow freedom and stability upon societies about which they know little.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

"The Petro-Developmental State in Africa"

New from Hurst: The Petro-Developmental State in Africa: Making Oil Work in Angola, Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea by Jesse Salah Ovadia.

About the book, from the publisher:
Focusing on local content in the oil and oil service sectors and the changing accumulation strategies of the domestic elite, this book questions what kinds of development are possible through natural resource extraction and argues that a new form of developmental state-the 'petro- developmental state'-may now be emerging in the Gulf of Guinea, allowing states to capitalize on a resource that has traditionally been thought of as a 'curse'. In a new moment for the extraction of oil created by a changed domestic context in Angola and Nigeria and changed geopolitical realities, new possibilities exist for state-led economic and social development and capitalist transformation.

Ovadia contends that ultimately whether development or underdevelopment results from the transformation depends not only on historical conditions, but also on power relations and struggles at the level of civil society. Local content is perhaps the single most important innovation in energy policy in the Global South in recent decades. Expanding debates about state- led development and the developmental state, the concept of a petro-developmental state offers an explanation for how some of the most strategically significant countries in Africa can achieve meaningful economic and social progress.
--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cuban Missile Crisis"

New from Edinburgh University Press: The Cuban Missile Crisis: Origins, Course and Aftermath by Jonathan Colman.

About the book, from the publisher:
October 1962, The Cuban Missile Crisis: the confrontation that brought the world closer to nuclear catastrophe than ever before or since. Both John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were determined to avoid nuclear war, but events could easily have spiraled out of control with cataclysmic results.

Drawing on an extensive body of research, including primary sources released only in the last few years, this work places the crisis in a broader international and chronological context than previously possible. Discover how America was responsible for causing the conflict and Cuba's role as an important actor rather than a superpower pawn.
Jonathan Colman teaches international and US history at the University of Central Lancashire, England. He is the author of A 'Special Relationship'? Harold Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson and Anglo-American Relations 'at the Summit', 1964-68 (2004), and The Foreign Policy of Lyndon B. Johnson: The United States and the World, 1963-69 (2010).

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

"Courting Peril"

New from Oxford University Press: Courting Peril: The Political Transformation of the American Judiciary by Charles Gardner Geyh.

About the book, from the publisher:
The rule of law paradigm has long operated on the premise that independent judges disregard extralegal influences and impartially uphold the law. A political transformation several generations in the making, however, has imperiled this premise. Social science learning, the lessons of which have been widely internalized by court critics and the general public, has shown that judicial decision-making is subject to ideological and other extralegal influences. In recent decades, challenges to the assumptions underlying the rule of law paradigm have proliferated across a growing array of venues, as critics agitate for greater political control of judges and courts. With the future of the rule of law paradigm in jeopardy, this book proposes a new way of looking at how the role of the American judiciary should be conceptualized and regulated. This new, "legal culture paradigm" defends the need for an independent judiciary that is acculturated to take law seriously but is subject to political and other extralegal influences. The book argues that these extralegal influences cannot be eliminated but can be managed, by balancing the needs for judicial independence and accountability across competing perspectives, to the end of enabling judges to follow the "law" (less rigidly conceived), respect established legal process, and administer justice.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Benjamin Franklin in London"

New from Yale University Press: Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America's Founding Father by George Goodwin.

About the book, from the publisher:
For more than one-fifth of his life, Benjamin Franklin lived in London. He dined with prime ministers, members of parliament, even kings, as well as with Britain’s most esteemed intellectuals—including David Hume, Joseph Priestley, and Erasmus Darwin—and with more notorious individuals, such as Francis Dashwood and James Boswell. Having spent eighteen formative months in England as a young man, Franklin returned in 1757 as a colonial representative during the Seven Years’ War, and left abruptly just prior to the outbreak of America’s War of Independence, barely escaping his impending arrest.

In this fascinating history, George Goodwin gives a colorful account of Franklin’s British years. The author offers a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most remarkable figures in U.S. history, effectively disputing the commonly held perception of Franklin as an outsider in British politics. It is an enthralling study of an American patriot who was a fiercely loyal British citizen for most of his life—until forces he had sought and failed to control finally made him a reluctant revolutionary at the age of sixty-nine.
Visit George Goodwin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue