Sunday, December 31, 2017

"The Monk's Cell"

New from Oxford University Press: The Monk's Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity by Paula Pryce.

About the book, from the publisher:
The call to contemplative Christianity is not an easy one. Those who answer it set themselves to the arduous task of self-reformation through rigorous study and practice, learned through the teachings of monks and nuns and the writings of ancient Christian mystics, often in isolation from family and friends. Those who are dedicated can spend hours every day in meditation, prayer, liturgy, and study. Why do they come? Indeed, how do they find their way to the door at all?

Based on nearly four years of research among semi-cloistered Christian monastics and a dispersed network of non-monastic Christian contemplatives across the United States and around the globe, The Monk's Cell shows how religious practitioners in both settings combined social action and intentional living with intellectual study and intensive contemplative practices in an effort to modify their ways of knowing, sensing, and experiencing the world. Organized by the metaphor of a seeker journeying towards the inner chambers of a monastic chapel, The Monk's Cell uses innovative "intersubjective fieldwork" methods to study these opaque, interiorized, often silent communities, in order to show how practices like solitude, chant, contemplation, attention, and a paradoxical capacity to combine ritual with intentional "unknowing" develop and hone a powerful sense of communion with the world.
--Marshal Zeringue

"How Places Make Us"

New from the University of Chicago Press: How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities by Japonica Brown-Saracino.

About the book, from the publisher:
We like to think of ourselves as possessing an essential self, a core identity that is who we really are, regardless of where we live, work, or play. But places actually make us much more than we might think, argues Japonica Brown-Saracino in this novel ethnographic study of lesbian, bisexual, and queer individuals in four small cities across the United States.

Taking us into communities in Ithaca, New York; San Luis Obispo, California; Greenfield, Massachusetts; and Portland, Maine; Brown-Saracino shows how LBQ migrants craft a unique sense of self that corresponds to their new homes. How Places Make Us demonstrates that sexual identities are responsive to city ecology. Despite the fact that the LBQ residents share many demographic and cultural traits, their approaches to sexual identity politics and to ties with other LBQ individuals and heterosexual residents vary markedly by where they live. Subtly distinct local ecologies shape what it feels like to be a sexual minority, including the degree to which one feels accepted, how many other LBQ individuals one encounters in daily life, and how often a city declares its embrace of difference. In short, city ecology shapes how one “does” LBQ in a specific place. Ultimately, Brown-Saracino shows that there isn’t one general way of approaching sexual identity because humans are not only social but fundamentally local creatures. Even in a globalized world, the most personal of questions—who am I?—is in fact answered collectively by the city in which we live.
The Page 99 Test: A Neighborhood That Never Changes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, December 30, 2017

"The Fracking Debate"

New from Columbia University Press: The Fracking Debate: The Risks, Benefits, and Uncertainties of the Shale Revolution by Daniel Raimi.

About the book, from the publisher:
Over roughly the past decade, oil and gas production in the United States has surged dramatically—thanks largely to technological advances such as high-volume hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as “fracking.” This rapid increase has generated widespread debate, with proponents touting economic and energy-security benefits and opponents highlighting the environmental and social risks of increased oil and gas production. Despite the heated debate, neither side has a monopoly on the facts. In this book, Daniel Raimi gives a balanced and accessible view of oil and gas development, clearly and thoroughly explaining the key issues surrounding the shale revolution.

The Fracking Debate directly addresses the most common questions and concerns associated with fracking: What is fracking? Does fracking pollute the water supply? Will fracking make the United States energy independent? Does fracking cause earthquakes? How is fracking regulated? Is fracking good for the economy? Coupling a deep understanding of the scholarly research with lessons from his travels to every major U.S. oil- and gas-producing region, Raimi highlights stories of the people and communities affected by the shale revolution, for better and for worse. The Fracking Debate provides the evidence and context that have so frequently been missing from the national discussion of the future of oil and gas production, offering readers the tools to make sense of this critical issue.
Visit Daniel Raimi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Domestic Colonies"

New from Oxford University Press: Domestic Colonies: The Colonial Turn Inward by Barbara Arneil.

About the book, from the publisher:
Modern colonization is generally defined as a process by which a state settles and dominates a foreign land and people. This book argues that through the nineteenth and into the first half of the twentieth centuries, thousands of domestic colonies were proposed and/or created by governments and civil society organizations for fellow citizens as opposed to foreigners and within their own borders rather than overseas. Such colonies sought to solve every social problem arising within industrializing and urbanizing states.

Domestic Colonies argues that colonization ought to be seen during this period as a domestic policy designed to solve social problems at home as well as foreign policy designed to expand imperial power. Three kind of domestic colonies are analysed in this book: labour colonies for the idle poor, farm colonies for the mentally ill and disabled, and utopian colonies for racial, religious, and political minorities. All of them were justified by an ideology of colonialism that argued if people were segregated in colonies located on empty land and engaged in agrarian labour, this would improve both the people and the land. Key domestic colonialists analysed in this book include Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Peter Kropotkin, Robert Owen, and Booker T. Washington. The turn inward to colony thus requires us to rethink the meaning and scope of colonization and colonialism in modern political theory and practice.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, December 29, 2017

"Thieving Three-Fingered Jack"

New from Rutgers University Press: Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015 by Frances R. Botkin.

About the book, from the publisher:
The fugitive slave known as “Three-Fingered Jack” terrorized colonial Jamaica from 1780 until vanquished by Maroons, self-emancipated Afro-Jamaicans bound by treaty to police the island for runaways and rebels. A thief and a killer, Jack was also a freedom fighter who sabotaged the colonial machine until his grisly death at its behest. Narratives about his exploits shed light on the problems of black rebellion and solutions administered by the colonial state, creating an occasion to consider counter-narratives about its methods of divide and conquer. For more than two centuries, writers, performers, and storytellers in England, Jamaica, and the United States have “thieved" Three Fingered Jack's riveting tale, defining black agency through and against representations of his resistance.

Frances R. Botkin offers a literary and cultural history that explores the persistence of stories about this black rebel, his contributions to constructions of black masculinity in the Atlantic world, and his legacies in Jamaican and United States popular culture.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy"

New from Princeton University Press: Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy by Katherine Ludwig Jansen.

About the book, from the publisher:
Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with peace. Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is the first book to examine how civic peacemaking in the age of Dante was forged in the crucible of penitential religious practice.

Focusing on Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an era known for violence and civil discord, Katherine Ludwig Jansen brilliantly illuminates how religious and political leaders used peace agreements for everything from bringing an end to neighborhood quarrels to restoring full citizenship to judicial exiles. She brings to light a treasure trove of unpublished evidence from notarial archives and supports it with sermons, hagiography, political treatises, and chronicle accounts. She paints a vivid picture of life in an Italian commune, a socially and politically unstable world that strove to achieve peace. Jansen also assembles a wealth of visual material from the period, illustrating for the first time how the kiss of peace—a ritual gesture borrowed from the Catholic Mass—was incorporated into the settlement of secular disputes.

Breaking new ground in the study of peacemaking in the Middle Ages, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of Italian culture in this turbulent age by showing how peace was conceived, memorialized, and occasionally achieved.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, December 28, 2017

"The Gestation of German Biology"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling by John H. Zammito.

About the book, from the publisher:
The emergence of biology as a distinct science in the eighteenth century has long been a subject of scholarly controversy. Michel Foucault, on the one hand, argued that its appearance only after 1800 represented a fundamental rupture with the natural history that preceded it, marking the beginnings of modernity. Ernst Mayr, on the other hand, insisted that even the word "biology" was unclear in its meaning as late as 1800, and that the field itself was essentially prospective well into the 1800s.

In The Gestation of German Biology, historian of ideas John Zammito presents a different version of the emergence of the field, one that takes on both Foucault and Mayr and emphasizes the scientific progress throughout the eighteenth century that led to the recognition of the need for a special science. The embrace of the term biology around 1800, Zammito shows, was the culmination of a convergence between natural history and human physiology that led to the development of comparative physiology and morphology—the foundations of biology. Magisterial in scope, Zammito’s book offers nothing less than a revisionist history of the field, with which anyone interested in the origins of biology will have to contend.
--Marshal Zeringue

"The Power and Politics of Art in Postrevolutionary Mexico"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: The Power and Politics of Art in Postrevolutionary Mexico by Stephanie J. Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:
Stephanie J. Smith brings Mexican politics and art together, chronicling the turbulent relations between radical artists and the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The revolution opened space for new political ideas, but by the late 1920s many government officials argued that consolidating the nation required coercive measures toward dissenters. While artists and intellectuals, some of them professed Communists, sought free expression in matters both artistic and political, Smith reveals how they simultaneously learned the fine art of negotiation with the increasingly authoritarian government in order to secure clout and financial patronage. But the government, Smith shows, also had reason to accommodate artists, and a surprising and volatile interdependence grew between the artists and the politicians.

Involving well-known artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as some less well known, including Tina Modotti, Leopoldo Méndez, and Aurora Reyes, politicians began to appropriate the artists’ nationalistic visual images as weapons in a national propaganda war. High-stakes negotiating and co-opting took place between the two camps as they sparred over the production of generally accepted notions and representations of the revolution’s legacy—and what it meant to be authentically Mexican.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

"Magic's Reason"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy by Graham M. Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:
In Magic’s Reason, Graham M. Jones tells the entwined stories of anthropology and entertainment magic. The two pursuits are not as separate as they may seem at first. As Jones shows, they not only matured around the same time, but they also shared mutually reinforcing stances toward modernity and rationality. It is no historical accident, for example, that colonial ethnographers drew analogies between Western magicians and native ritual performers, who, in their view, hoodwinked gullible people into believing their sleight of hand was divine.

Using French magicians’ engagements with North African ritual performers as a case study, Jones shows how magic became enshrined in anthropological reasoning. Acknowledging the residue of magic’s colonial origins doesn’t require us to dispense with it. Rather, through this radical reassessment of classic anthropological ideas, Magic’s Reason develops a new perspective on the promise and peril of cross-cultural comparison.
The Page 99 Test: Trade of the Tricks.

--Marshal Zeringue

"China and the Geopolitics of Rare Earths"

New from Oxford University Press: China and the Geopolitics of Rare Earths by Sophia Kalantzakos.

About the book, from the publisher:
Rare earths are elements that are found in the Earth's crust, and are vital ingredients for the production of a wide variety of high tech, defense, and green technologies-everything from iPhones and medical technologies to wind turbines, efficiency lighting, smart bombs, and submarines. While they are not particularly "rare" in availability, they are difficult and expensive to mine. Yet, China has managed to gain control over an estimated 97 percent of the rare earth industry since the 1990s through cheap production, high export taxes, and artificial limitations of supply.

Rare earths, and China's monopoly over them, became international news after China "unofficially" curtailed exports to Japan, the United States, and Europe in 2010. This embargo followed a collision between Chinese and Japanese boats in the East China Sea, a locus of geopolitical and economic tension between the two countries. Although the World Trade Organization forced China to scrap its restrictions, it still holds a stranglehold over these elements that are so critical to the economic and security interests of the United States and its allies.

In this book, Sophia Kalantzakos argues that the 2010 rare earth crisis signaled more than just a trade dispute. Rather, it raises questions about China's use of economic statecraft, and must be regarded as a part of the larger discourse of global power relations. Importantly, she also argues that the failure of political actors in major industrial nations to enact comprehensive and effective policy solutions, or the scientific and business communities to devise sustainable rare earth production outside of China, points to future resource competition. Focusing on China's monopoly over the rare earth industry, China and the Geopolitics of Rare Earths examines the impacts of growing worldwide resource competition and the complexities policymakers face as they develop strategies and responses in an increasingly globalized world.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

"Democracy and Displacement in Colombia's Civil War"

New from Cornell University Press: Democracy and Displacement in Colombia's Civil War by Abbey Steele.

About the book, from the publisher:
Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War is one of few books available in English to provide an overview of the Colombian civil war and drug war. Abbey Steele draws on her own original field research as well as on Colombian scholars’ work in Spanish to provide an expansive view of the country’s political conflicts. Steele shows how political reforms in the context of Colombia’s ongoing civil war produced unexpected, dramatic consequences: democratic elections revealed Colombian citizens’ political loyalties and allowed counterinsurgent armed groups to implement political cleansing against civilians perceived as loyal to insurgents.

Combining evidence collected from remote archives, more than two hundred interviews, and quantitative data from the government’s displacement registry, Steele connects Colombia’s political development and the course of its civil war to purposeful displacement. By introducing the concepts of collective targeting and political cleansing, Steele extends what we already know about patterns of ethnic cleansing to cases where expulsion of civilians from their communities is based on nonethnic traits.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Artist as Reporter"

New from the University of California Press: Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture by Jason E. Hill.

About the book, from the publisher:
Active from 1940 to 1948, PM was a progressive New York City daily tabloid newspaper committed to the politics of labor, social justice, and antifascism—and it prioritized the intelligent and critical deployment of pictures and their perception as paramount in these campaigns. With PM as its main focus, Artist as Reporter offers a substantial intervention in the literature on American journalism, photography, and modern art. The book considers the journalistic contributions to PM of such signal American modernists as the curator Holger Cahill, the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, the photographers Weegee and Lisette Model, and the filmmaker, photographer, and editor Ralph Steiner. Each of its five chapters explores one dimension of the tabloid’s complex journalistic activation of modernism’s potential, showing how PM inserted into daily print journalism the most innovative critical thinking in the fields of painting, illustration, cartooning, and the lens-based arts. Artist as Reporter promises to revise our own understanding of midcentury American modernism and the nature of its relationship to the wider media and public culture.
Jason E. Hill is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware. He is the coeditor of Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of News.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, December 25, 2017

"Habeas Corpus in Wartime"

New from Oxford University Press: Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay by Amanda L. Tyler.

About the book, from the publisher:
Habeas Corpus in Wartime unearths and presents a comprehensive account of the legal and political history of habeas corpus in wartime in the Anglo-American legal tradition. The book begins by tracing the origins of the habeas privilege in English law, giving special attention to the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which limited the scope of executive detention and used the machinery of the English courts to enforce its terms. It also explores the circumstances that led Parliament to invent the concept of suspension as a tool for setting aside the protections of the Habeas Corpus Act in wartime. Turning to the United States, the book highlights how the English suspension framework greatly influenced the development of early American habeas law before and after the American Revolution and during the Founding period, when the United States Constitution enshrined a habeas privilege in its Suspension Clause. The book then chronicles the story of the habeas privilege and suspension over the course of American history, giving special attention to the Civil War period. The final chapters explore how the challenges posed by modern warfare during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have placed great strain on the previously well-settled understanding of the role of the habeas privilege and suspension in American constitutional law, particularly during World War II when the United States government detained tens of thousands of Japanese American citizens and later during the War on Terror. Throughout, the book draws upon a wealth of original and heretofore untapped historical resources to shed light on the purpose and role of the Suspension Clause in the United States Constitution, revealing all along that many of the questions that arise today regarding the scope of executive power to arrest and detain in wartime are not new ones.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, December 24, 2017

"Sinn Féin and the IRA"

New from Edinburgh University Press: Sinn Féin and the IRA: From Revolution to Moderation by Mathew Whiting.

About the book, from the publisher:
IRA violence and Sinn Féin's revolutionary politics plagued Northern Ireland for 30 years. Today, however, violence is (mostly) a tactic of the past and Sinn Féin is a major political player in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. This is one of the most startling transformations of a radical violent movement in recent times.

What exactly changed within Irish republicanism? What has stayed the same? And, crucially what caused this transformation? By examining republicanism's electoral participation and engagement in democratic bargaining, together with the role of Irish-America and British government policy, Mathew Whiting argues that moderation was a long-term process of concessions by republicanism in return for increased inclusion within the political system.
Mathew Whiting is Fellow in Comparative Politics at the University of Reading.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, December 23, 2017

"Religion vs. Science"

New from Oxford University Press: Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think by Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher P. Scheitle.

About the book, from the publisher:
At the end of a five-year journey to find out what religious Americans think about science, Ecklund and Scheitle emerge with the real story of the relationship between science and religion in American culture. Based on the most comprehensive survey ever done-representing a range of religious traditions and faith positions-Religion vs. Science is a story that is more nuanced and complex than the media and pundits would lead us to believe.

The way religious Americans approach science is shaped by two fundamental questions: What does science mean for the existence and activity of God? What does science mean for the sacredness of humanity? How these questions play out as individual believers think about science both challenges stereotypes and highlights the real tensions between religion and science. Ecklund and Scheitle interrogate the widespread myths that religious people dislike science and scientists and deny scientific theories.

Religion vs. Science is a definitive statement on a timely, popular subject. Rather than a highly conceptual approach to historical debates, philosophies, or personal opinions, Ecklund and Scheitle give readers a facts-on-the-ground, empirical look at what religious Americans really understand and think about science.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, December 22, 2017

"Being Christian in Vandal Africa"

New from the University of California Press: Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West by Robin Whelan.

About the book, from the publisher:
Being Christian in Vandal Africa investigates conflicts over Christian orthodoxy in the Vandal kingdom, the successor to Roman rule in North Africa, ca. 439 to 533 c.e. Exploiting neglected texts, author Robin Whelan exposes a sophisticated culture of disputation between Nicene (“Catholic”) and Homoian (“Arian”) Christians and explores their rival claims to political and religious legitimacy. These contests—sometimes violent—are key to understanding the wider and much-debated issues of identity and state formation in the post-imperial West.
Robin Whelan is Departmental Lecturer in Early Medieval History at Balliol and Brasenose, University of Oxford.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, December 21, 2017

"Children of Uncertain Fortune"

New from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press: Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 by Daniel Livesay.

About the book, from the publisher:
By tracing the largely forgotten eighteenth-century migration of elite mixed-race individuals from Jamaica to Great Britain, Children of Uncertain Fortune reinterprets the evolution of British racial ideologies as a matter of negotiating family membership. Using wills, legal petitions, family correspondences, and inheritance lawsuits, Daniel Livesay is the first scholar to follow the hundreds of children born to white planters and Caribbean women of color who crossed the ocean for educational opportunities, professional apprenticeships, marriage prospects, or refuge from colonial prejudices.

The presence of these elite children of color in Britain pushed popular opinion in the British Atlantic world toward narrower conceptions of race and kinship. Members of Parliament, colonial assemblymen, merchant kings, and cultural arbiters--the very people who decided Britain’s colonial policies, debated abolition, passed marital laws, and arbitrated inheritance disputes--rubbed shoulders with these mixed-race Caribbean migrants in parlors and sitting rooms. Upper-class Britons also resented colonial transplants and coveted their inheritances; family intimacy gave way to racial exclusion. By the early nineteenth century, relatives had become strangers.
--Marshal Zeringue

"College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics"

New from Oxford University Press: College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics: The Lives and Longings of Emerging Adults by Jennifer Beste

About the book, from the publisher:
Today's Christian adolescents and young adults have grown up with fiercely competing narratives about sex, relationships, and fulfillment. Within a Christian world of church services and formal religious education, they have been warned repeatedly about the dangers (or sinfulness) of premarital sex. At the same time, popular culture has inundated them with a very different message: casual sex is fun, thrilling, expected, and no big deal. Jennifer Beste calls into question the widespread assumption that the media's narrative of sex is positively liberating, while a Christian theological account is repressive, sex-negative, and altogether irrelevant. Her argument is based on a qualitative analysis of college students' own accounts of their social and sexual culture. She draws on the reflections of 126 undergraduate students who set out as sober ethnographers to observe and analyze peers at college parties. Overwhelmingly, undergraduates' perspectives challenge a neutral or even benevolent view of hookup culture embraced by some sociologists, "sex-positive" feminists, and popular culture in general. Beste goes on to share her own and her students' theological and ethical reflections as they explored the intersection between their social reality, the Christian tradition, and other academic disciplines, and sought to discern more deeply: what it means to become fully human; what constitutes happiness and fulfillment; and how to envision and create more socially and sexually just communities.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

"Losing Hearts and Minds"

New from Cornell University Press: Losing Hearts and Minds: American-Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War by Matthew K. Shannon.

About the book, from the publisher:
Matthew K. Shannon provides readers with a reminder of a brief and congenial phase of the relationship between the United States and Iran. In Losing Hearts and Minds, Shannon tells the story of an influx of Iranian students to American college campuses between 1950 and 1979 that globalized U.S. institutions of higher education and produced alliances between Iranian youths and progressive Americans.

Losing Hearts and Minds is a narrative rife with historical ironies. Because of its superpower competition with the USSR, the U.S. government worked with nongovernmental organizations to create the means for Iranians to train and study in the United States. The stated goal of this initiative was to establish a cultural foundation for the official relationship and to provide Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with educated elites to administer an ambitious program of socioeconomic development. Despite these goals, Shannon locates the incubation of at least one possible version of the Iranian Revolution on American college campuses, which provided a space for a large and vocal community of dissident Iranian students to organize against the Pahlavi regime and earn the support of empathetic Americans. Together they rejected the Shah’s authoritarian model of development and called for civil and political rights in Iran, giving unwitting support to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

"Empire in the Hills"

New from Oxford University Press: Empire in the Hills: Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund, and Mount Abu, 1820-1920 by Queeny Pradhan.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the early phase of imperial domination, hill stations such as Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund, and Mount Abu were developed by the British to reflect a quintessentially European culture and ethos. Serving as recuperation sites for the sick and wounded, these hill spaces provided respite from the harsh climate of the plains. Adorned with sprawling bungalows and lush gardens, imposing churches and stately public buildings, the topography of such spaces was refashioned to reflect the multiple visions of this burgeoning empire.

Moving away from the history of the plains, in Empire in the Hills Pradhan lays bare the yet untold narrative of resistance of the hills people against British domination. The book focuses on the three-point agenda of the colonizers: erasing indigenous histories, marginalizing hill inhabitants, and foisting a culture of leisure. In doing so, it also dwells on the ways in which an exercise of benevolent paternalism was carried out to recast the hill communities vis-a-vis their usefulness to the colonial capitalist enterprise. Drawn from a vast repertoire of oral and archival sources, this work probes the linkages between empire, space, and culture as it positions the poignant presence of the locals and puts forth a telling narrative of their world view.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Her Father’s Daughter"

New from Cornell University Press: Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms by Lucy K. Pick.

About the book, from the publisher:
In Her Father’s Daughter, Lucy K. Pick considers a group of royal women in the early medieval kingdoms of the Asturias and of León-Castilla; their lives say a great deal about structures of power and the roles of gender and religion within the early Iberian kingdoms. Pick examines these women, all daughters of kings, as members of networks of power that work variously in parallel, in concert, and in resistance to some forms of male power, and contends that only by mapping these networks do we gain a full understanding of the nature of monarchical power.

Pick’s focus on the roles, possibilities, and limitations faced by these royal women forces us to reevaluate medieval gender norms and their relationship to power and to rethink the power structures of the era. Well illustrated with images of significant objects, Her Father’s Daughter is marked by Pick’s wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, which encompasses liturgy, art, manuscripts, architecture, documentary texts, historical narratives, saints’ lives, theological treatises, and epigraphy.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, December 18, 2017

"The Myths of Tet"

New from the University Press of Kansas: The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War by Edwin Moïse.

About the book, from the publisher:
Late in 1967, American officials and military officers pushed an optimistic view of the Vietnam War. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) said that the war was being won, and that Communist strength in South Vietnam was declining. Then came the Tet Offensive of 1968. In its broadest and simplest outline, the conventional wisdom about the offensive—that it was a military defeat for the Communists but a political victory for them, because it undermined support for the war in the United States—is correct. But much that has been written about the Tet Offensive has been misleading. Edwin Moïse shows that the Communist campaign shocked the American public not because the American media exaggerated its success, but because it was a bigger campaign—larger in scale, much longer in duration, and resulting in more American casualties—than most authors have acknowledged.

MACV, led by General William Westmoreland, issued regular estimates of enemy strength in South Vietnam. During 1967, intelligence officers at MACV were increasingly required to issue low estimates to show that the war was being won. Their underestimation of enemy strength was most extreme in January 1968, just before the Tet Offensive. The weak Communist force depicted in MACV estimates would not have been capable of sustaining heavy combat month after month like they did in 1968.

Moïse also explores the errors of the Communists, using Vietnamese sources. The first wave of Communist attacks, at the end of January 1968, showed gross failures of coordination. Communist policy throughout 1968 and into 1969 was wildly overoptimistic, setting impossible goals for their forces.

While acknowledging the journalists and historians who have correctly reported various parts of the story, Moïse points out widespread misunderstandings in regard to the strength of Communist forces in Vietnam, the disputes among American intelligence agencies over estimates of enemy strength, the actual pattern of combat in 1968, the effects of Tet on American policy, and the American media’s coverage of all these issues.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Contraband Corridor"

New from Stanford University Press: Contraband Corridor: Making a Living at the Mexico--Guatemala Border by Rebecca Berke Galemba.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Mexico–Guatemala border has emerged as a geopolitical hotspot of illicit flows of both goods and people. Contraband Corridor seeks to understand the border from the perspective of its long-term inhabitants, including petty smugglers of corn, clothing, and coffee. Challenging assumptions regarding security, trade, and illegality, Rebecca Berke Galemba details how these residents engage in and justify extralegal practices in the context of heightened border security, restricted economic opportunities, and exclusionary trade policies. Rather than assuming that extralegal activities necessarily threaten the state and formal economy, Galemba's ethnography illustrates the complex ways that the formal, informal, legal, and illegal economies intertwine. Smuggling basic commodities across the border provides a means for borderland peasants to make a living while neoliberal economic policies decimate agricultural livelihoods. Yet smuggling also exacerbates prevailing inequalities, obstructs the possibility of more substantive political and economic change, and provides low-risk economic benefits to businesses, state agents, and other illicit actors, often at the expense of border residents.

Galemba argues that securitized neoliberalism values certain economic activities and actors while excluding and criminalizing others, even when the informal and illicit economy is increasingly one of the poor's only remaining options. Contraband Corridor contends that security, neoliberalism, and illegality are interdependent in complex ways, yet how they unfold depends on negotiations between diverse border actors.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, December 17, 2017

"Sex, Love, and Migration"

New from Cornell University Press: Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic by Alexia Bloch.

About the book, from the publisher:
Sex, Love, and Migration goes beyond a common narrative of women’s exploitation as a feature of migration in the early twenty-first century, a story that features young women from poor countries who cross borders to work in low paid and often intimate labor. Alexia Bloch argues that the mobility of women is marked not only by risks but also by personal and social transformation as migration fundamentally reshapes women’s emotional worlds and aspirations.

Bloch documents how, as women have crossed borders between the former Soviet Union and Turkey since the early 1990s, they have forged new forms of intimacy in their households in Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, but also in Istanbul, where they often work for years on end. Sex, Love, and Migration takes as its subject the lives of post-Soviet migrant women employed in three distinct spheres—sex work, the garment trade, and domestic work. Bloch challenges us to decouple images of women on the move from simple assumptions about danger, victimization, and trafficking. She redirects our attention to the aspirations and lives of women who, despite myriad impediments, move between global capitalist centers and their home communities.
Alexia Bloch is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Red Ties and Residential Schools and The Museum at the End of the World.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Black Flags and Social Movements"

New from Manchester University Press: Black Flags and Social Movements: A sociological analysis of movement anarchism by Dana M. Williams.

About the book, from the publisher:
Anarchism may be the most misunderstood political ideology of the modern era, and one of the least studied social movements by English-speaking scholars. Black flags and social movements addresses this deficit with an in-depth analysis of contemporary anarchist movements as interpreted by social movement theories and political sociology. Using unique data gathered by anarchists themselves, Williams presents longitudinal and international analyses that focus upon who anarchists are, and where they may be found.

Social movement ideas including political opportunity, new social movements, and social capital theory, are relevant and adaptable to understanding anarchist movements. Due to their sometimes limited numbers and identities as radical anti-authoritarians, anarchists often find themselves collaborating with numerous other social movements, bringing along their values, ideas and tactics.
Dana M. Williams is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at California State University, Chico.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, December 16, 2017

"They Will Have Their Game"

New from Cornell University Press: They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen.

About the book, from the publisher:
In They Will Have Their Game, Kenneth Cohen explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Pairing previously unexplored financial records with a wide range of published reports, unpublished correspondence, and material and visual evidence, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional managers and performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these "sporting" activities as stages for securing economic and political advantage over others.

They Will Have Their Game tracks the evolution of this fight for power from 1760 to 1860, showing how its roots in masculine competition and risk-taking gradually developed gendered and racial limits and then spread from leisure activities to the consideration of elections as "races" and business as a "game." Compelling narratives about individual participants illustrate the processes by which challenge and conflict across class, race, and gender lines produced a sporting culture that continued to grant unique freedoms to a wide range of society even as it also provided a basis for the normalization of systematic inequality. The result reorients the standard narrative about the rise of commercial popular culture to question the influence of ideas such as "gentility" and "respectability," and to put men like P. T. Barnum at the end instead of the beginning of the process, unveiling a new take on the creation of the white male republic of the early nineteenth century in which sporting activities lie at the center and not the margins of economic and political history.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Britannia's Auxiliaries"

New from Oxford University Press: Britannia's Auxiliaries: Continental Europeans and the British Empire, 1740-1800 by Stephen Conway.

About the book, from the publisher:
Britannia's Auxiliaries provides the first wide-ranging attempt to consider the continental European contribution to the eighteenth-century British Empire. The British benefited from many European inputs--financial, material, and, perhaps most importantly, human. Continental Europeans appeared in different British imperial sites as soldiers, settlers, scientists, sailors, clergymen, merchants, and technical experts. They also sustained the empire from outside--through their financial investments, their consumption of British imperial goods, their supply of European products, and by aiding British imperial communication. Continental Europeans even provided Britons with social support from their own imperial bases.

The book explores the means by which continental Europeans came to play a part in British imperial activity at a time when, at least in theory, overseas empires were meant to be exclusionary structures, intended to serve national purposes. It looks at the ambitions of the continental Europeans themselves, and at the encouragement given to their participation by both private interests in the British Empire and by the British state.

Despite the extensive involvement of continental Europeans, the empire remained essentially British. Indeed, the empire seems to have changed the Europeans who entered it more than they changed the empire. Many of them became at least partly Anglicized by the experience, and even those who retained their national character usually came under British direction and control.

This study, then, qualifies recent scholarly emphasis on the transnational forces that undermined the efforts of imperial authorities to maintain exclusionary empires. In the British case, at least, the state seems, for the most part, to have managed the process of continental involvement in ways that furthered British interests. In this sense, those foreign Europeans who involved themselves in or with the British Empire, whatever their own perspective, acted as Britannia's auxiliaries.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, December 15, 2017

"Artisanal Enlightenment"

New from Yale University Press: Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France by Paola Bertucci.

About the book, from the publisher:
A groundbreaking work that places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment

What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, Paola Bertucci places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France’s colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations.

Artisanal Enlightenment provides the first in-depth study of the Société, and demonstrates its legacy in scientific programs, academies, and the making of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Through insightful analysis of textual, visual, and material sources, Bertucci provides a groundbreaking perspective on the politics of writing on the mechanical arts and the development of key Enlightenment concepts such as improvement, utility, and progress.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, December 14, 2017

"Heroic Shaktism"

New from Oxford University Press: Heroic Shaktism: The Cult of Durga in Ancient Indian Kingship by Bihani Sarkar.

About the book, from the publisher:
Heroic Saktism is the belief that a good king and a true warrior must worship the goddess Durga, the form and substance of kingship. This belief formed the bedrock of ancient Indian practices of cultivating political power. Wildly dangerous and serenely benevolent at one and the same time, the goddess's charismatic split nature promised rewards for a hero and king and success in risky ventures.

This book is the first expansive historical treatment of the cult of Durga and the role it played in shaping ideas and rituals of heroism in India between the 3rd and the 12th centuries CE. Within the story of ancient Indian kingship, two critical transitions overlapped with the rise of heroic Saktism: the decline of the war-god Skanda-Mahasena as a military symbol, and the concomitant rise of the early Indian kingdom. As the rhetoric of kingship once strongly linked to the older war god shifted to the cultural narratives of the goddess, her political imagery broadened in its cultural resonance. And indigenous territorial deities became associated with Durga as smaller states unified into a broader conception of civilization.

By assessing the available epigraphic, literary and scriptural sources in Sanskrit, and anthropological studies on politics and ritual, Bihani Sarkar demonstrates that the association between Indian kingship and the cult's belief-systems was an ancient one based on efforts to augment worldly power.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Claiming Crimea"

New from Yale University Press: Claiming Crimea: A History of Catherine the Great’s Southern Empire by Kelly O'Neill.

About the book, from the publisher:
Russia’s long-standing claims to Crimea date back to the eighteenth-century reign of Catherine II. Historian Kelly O’Neill has written the first archive-based, multi-dimensional study of the initial “quiet conquest” of a region that has once again moved to the forefront of international affairs. O’Neill traces the impact of Russian rule on the diverse population of the former khanate, which included Muslim, Christian, and Jewish residents. She discusses the arduous process of establishing the empire’s social, administrative, and cultural institutions in a region that had been governed according to a dramatically different logic for centuries. With careful attention to how officials and subjects thought about the spaces they inhabited, O’Neill’s work reveals the lasting influence of Crimea and its people on the Russian imperial system, and sheds new light on the precarious contemporary relationship between Russia and the famous Black Sea peninsula.
Kelly O’Neill is associate professor of history at Harvard University and a faculty associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

"Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times"

New from Cambridge University Press: Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times by Alison McQueen.

About the book, from the publisher:
From climate change to nuclear war to the rise of demagogic populists, our world is shaped by doomsday expectations. In this path-breaking book, Alison McQueen shows why three of history's greatest political realists feared apocalyptic politics. Niccolò Machiavelli in the midst of Italy's vicious power struggles, Thomas Hobbes during England's bloody civil war, and Hans Morgenthau at the dawn of the thermonuclear age all saw the temptation to prophesy the end of days. Each engaged in subtle and surprising strategies to oppose apocalypticism, from using its own rhetoric to neutralize its worst effects to insisting on a clear-eyed, tragic acceptance of the human condition. Scholarly yet accessible, this book is at once an ambitious contribution to the history of political thought and a work that speaks to our times.
Alison McQueen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought.

--Marshal Zeringue

"India and the Patent Wars"

New from ILR Press: India and the Patent Wars: Pharmaceuticals in the New Intellectual Property Regime by Murphy Halliburton.

About the book, from the publisher:
India and the Patent Wars contributes to an international debate over the costs of medicine and restrictions on access under stringent patent laws showing how activists and drug companies in low-income countries seize agency and exert influence over these processes. Murphy Halliburton contributes to analyses of globalization within the fields of anthropology, sociology, law, and public health by drawing on interviews and ethnographic work with pharmaceutical producers in India and the United States.

India has been at the center of emerging controversies around patent rights related to pharmaceutical production and local medical knowledge. Halliburton shows that Big Pharma is not all-powerful, and that local activists and practitioners of ayurveda, India’s largest indigenous medical system, have been able to undermine the aspirations of multinational companies and the WTO. Halliburton traces how key drug prices have gone down, not up, in low-income countries under the new patent regime through partnerships between US- and India-based companies, but warns us to be aware of access to essential medicines in low- and middle-income countries going forward.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

"Listening In"

New from Yale University Press: Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age by Susan Landau.

About the book, from the publisher:
A cybersecurity expert and former Google privacy analyst’s urgent call to protect devices and networks against malicious hackers?

New technologies have provided both incredible convenience and new threats. The same kinds of digital networks that allow you to hail a ride using your smartphone let power grid operators control a country’s electricity—and these personal, corporate, and government systems are all vulnerable. In Ukraine, unknown hackers shut off electricity to nearly 230,000 people for six hours. North Korean hackers destroyed networks at Sony Pictures in retaliation for a film that mocked Kim Jong-un. And Russian cyberattackers leaked Democratic National Committee emails in an attempt to sway a U.S. presidential election.

And yet despite such documented risks, government agencies, whose investigations and surveillance are stymied by encryption, push for a weakening of protections. In this accessible and riveting read, Susan Landau makes a compelling case for the need to secure our data, explaining how we must maintain cybersecurity in an insecure age.
Susan Landau is Bridge Professor in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, at Tufts University and Visiting Professor at University College London. She was previously a Senior Staff Privacy Analyst at Google and a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. She is an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, a Cybersecurity Hall of Fame inductee, and an American Association for Advancement of Science Fellow.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In Search of the Phoenicians"

New from Princeton University Press: In Search of the Phoenicians by Josephine Quinn.

About the book, from the publisher:
Who were the ancient Phoenicians, and did they actually exist?

The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the “Phoenicians” never actually existed. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies—and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources.

Josephine Quinn shows how the belief in this historical mirage has blinded us to the compelling identities and communities these people really constructed for themselves in the ancient Mediterranean, based not on ethnicity or nationhood but on cities, family, colonial ties, and religious practices. She traces how the idea of “being Phoenician” first emerged in support of the imperial ambitions of Carthage and then Rome, and only crystallized as a component of modern national identities in contexts as far-flung as Ireland and Lebanon.

In Search of the Phoenicians delves into the ancient literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and artistic evidence for the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians, ranging from the Levant to the Atlantic, and from the Bronze Age to late antiquity and beyond. A momentous scholarly achievement, this book also explores the prose, poetry, plays, painting, and polemic that have enshrined these fabled seafarers in nationalist histories from sixteenth-century England to twenty-first century Tunisia.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, December 11, 2017

"A Bloodless Victory"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: A Bloodless Victory: The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memory by Joseph F. Stoltz III.

About the book, from the publisher:
Once celebrated on par with the Fourth of July, January 8th—the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans—is no longer a day of reverence for most Americans. Although the United States’ stunning 1815 defeat of the British army south of New Orleans gave rise to the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party, and the legend of Jean Laffite, the battle has not been a national holiday since 1861.

Joseph F. Stoltz III explores how generations of Americans have consciously revised, reinterpreted, and reexamined the memory of the conflict to fit the cultural and social needs of their time. Combining archival research with deep analyses of music, literature, theater, and film across two centuries of American popular culture, Stoltz highlights the myriad ways in which politicians, artists, academics, and ordinary people have rewritten the battle’s history. While these efforts could be nefarious—or driven by political necessity or racial animus—far more often they were simply part of each generations’ expression of values and world view.

From Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaign to the occupation of New Orleans by the Union Army to the Jim Crow era, the continuing reinterpretations of the battle alienated whole segments of the American population from its memorialization. Thus, a close look at the Battle of New Orleans offers an opportunity to explore not just how events are collectively remembered across generations but also how a society discards memorialization efforts it no longer finds necessary or palatable.
Visit Joseph F. Stoltz III's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Hippie Trail"

New from Manchester University Press: The Hippie Trail: A history by Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland.

About the book, from the publisher:
This is the first history of the hippie trail. It records the joys and pains of budget travel to Kathmandu, India, Afghanistan and other 'points east' in the 1960s and 1970s. It's written in a clear, simple style, yet provides detailed analysis of the motivations and the experiences of those hundreds of thousands of who travelled eastwards.

The work is structured around four key debates: were the travellers simply motivated by a search for drugs? Did they encounter love or sexual freedom on the road? Were they basically just tourists? Did they resemble pilgrims? Finally a fifth chapter considers how the travellers have been represented in films, novels and autobiographical accounts.

This book has two main audiences in mind: firstly, a broad audience of those interested in the trail or the 1960s counterculture; secondly, students taking courses concerning the 1960s.
Sharif Gemie is Professor in Modern and Contemporary History at the University of South Wales. Brian Ireland is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of South Wales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, December 10, 2017

"Secession and Security"

New from Cornell University Press: Secession and Security: Explaining State Strategy against Separatists by Ahsan I. Butt.

About the book, from the publisher:
In Secession and Security, Ahsan I. Butt argues that states, rather than separatists, determine whether a secessionist struggle will be peaceful, violent, or genocidal. He investigates the strategies, ranging from negotiated concessions to large-scale repression, adopted by states in response to separatist movements. Variations in the external security environment, Butt argues, influenced the leaders of the Ottoman Empire to use peaceful concessions against Armenians in 1908 but escalated to genocide against the same community in 1915; caused Israel to reject a Palestinian state in the 1990s; and shaped peaceful splits in Czechoslovakia in 1993 and the Norway-Sweden union in 1905.

Using more than one hundred interviews and extensive archival data, Butt focuses on two main cases—Pakistani reactions to Bengali and Baloch demands for independence in the 1970s and India’s responses to secessionist movements in Kashmir, Punjab, and Assam in the 1980s and 1990s. Butt’s deep historical approach to his subject will appeal to policymakers and observers interested in the last five decades of geopolitics in South Asia, the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and ethno-national conflict, separatism, and nationalism more generally.
Visit Ahsan Butt's homepage.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Place of Words"

New from Oxford University Press: The Place of Words: The Académie Française and Its Dictionary during an Age of Revolution by Michael P. Fitzsimmons.

About the book, from the publisher:
As the tricolor rose over revolutionary France, language, with its ability to define ideals and allegiances, was both a threat to authority and weapon to be wielded. In the early years of the Republic, the Académie Française, the royal body responsible for the French language, was suppressed by the National Convention at the urging of the Abbé Grégoire and the artist Jacques-Louis David. However, by 1795, the National Convention recognized that language could be used to its advantage, leading it to commission a fifth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, which would unquestionably become the most controversial edition in the Académie's history.

The National Convention expected this dictionary to champion the ideals of Revolution and Republic, but when it appeared three years later it did quite the opposite. Instead, the fifth edition virtually ignored the Revolution and the linguistic innovations that had transformed the French language, even omitting two of the most famous and enduring neologisms spawned by the Revolution--ancien régime and Terror. Present-tense definitions of abolished institutions and anachronistic values dominated the work and the Revolution was consigned to a brief and hastily-prepared supplement at the end of the second volume. Because of its failure to capture the current state of the French language, most contemporaries judged it harshly, and its deficiencies led the Parisian publisher Nicolas Moutardier to publish a competing dictionary in 1802. The dictionary became the focus of protracted litigation that Napoleon Bonaparte's government increasingly used to assert its control over language. Indeed, Bonaparte met personally with the commission of the Institut National (the republican successor to the Académie) and made clear his desire that the new edition not contain revolutionary neologisms. Eager to see the new edition appear, the Bonapartist regime committed financial resources and established a timetable for its completion within five years. However, it was only in 1835, after the fall of Bonaparte and the Bourbons, that the sixth edition would appear.

Although the Académie was one of the most prominent institutions under the Old Regime, scholarship on the Académie remains largely neglected. Drawing on previously untapped sources in the Archives de l'Institut and Archives Nationales, The Place of Words is the first book-length study of the controversial fifth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. Spanning more than half a century of changing regimes, this study provides unique insight into the ways in which each government, from the publication of the fourth edition in 1762 to the sixth in 1835, viewed the role of language as an instrument of control.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, December 9, 2017

"Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology"

New from Manchester University Press: Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology: Birds, book and business by Henry McGhie.

About the book, from the publisher:
This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838-1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is largely based on unpublished correspondence and diaries. Dresser travelled widely and spent time in Texas during the American Civil War. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds from Europe, North America and Asia, which formed the basis of over 100 publications, including some of the finest bird books of the late nineteenth century. Dresser was a leading figure in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement; his correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists.

This book is aimed at anyone interested in birds, history and natural history.
--Marshal Zeringue

"The Military Enlightenment"

New from Cornell University Press: The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon by Christy Pichichero.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Military Enlightenment brings to light a radically new narrative both on the Enlightenment and the French armed forces from Louis XIV to Napoleon. Christy Pichichero makes a striking discovery: the Geneva Conventions, post-traumatic stress disorder, the military "band of brothers," and soldierly heroism all found their antecedents in the eighteenth-century French armed forces. From Louis XIV through Napoleon, from Canada to the Caribbean and India, the military was one of the few institutions of the Old Regime to transform progressive theories into practice, actually operationalizing the Enlightenment.

Pichichero isolates and examines a crisis in consciousness that has characterized attitudes toward war from the eighteenth century until today. The demands of global political power warrant an ever more formidable and efficient fiscal-military state, and at the same time, awareness of the "human factor" generates the desire to minimize the devastation of war on cities and landscapes, and civilians, as well as the mind, body, and heart of the soldier. Readers of The Military Enlightenment will be startled to learn of the many ways in which French military officers, administrators, and medical personnel advanced ideas of human and political rights, military psychology, and social justice.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, December 8, 2017

"Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire"

New from Yale University Press: Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire: Ideology, the Bible, and the Early Christians by David Wheeler-Reed.

About the book, from the publisher:
A New Testament scholar challenges the belief that American family values are based on “Judeo-Christian” norms by drawing unexpected comparisons between ancient Christian theories and modern discourses

Challenging the long-held assumption that American values—be they Christian or secular—are based on “Judeo-Christian” norms, this provocative study compares ancient Christian discourses on marriage and sexuality with contemporary ones, maintaining that modern family values owe more to Roman Imperial beliefs than to the bible.

Engaging with Foucault’s ideas, Wheeler-Reed examines how conservative organizations and the Supreme Court have misunderstood Christian beliefs on marriage and the family. Taking on modern cultural debates on marriage and sexuality, with implications for historians, political thinkers, and jurists, this book undermines the conservative ideology of the family, starting from the position that early Christianity, in its emphasis on celibacy and denunciation of marriage, was in opposition to procreation, the ideological norm in the Greco-Roman world.
--Marshal Zeringue