Search results for ""University of Pennsylvania Press""

Under the Skin investigates the role of cross-cultural body modification in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century North America, revealing that the practices of tattooing and scalping were crucial to interactions between Natives and newcomers. These permanent and painful marks could act as signs of alliance or signs of conflict, producing a complex bodily archive of cross-cultural entanglement. Indigenous body modification practices were adopted and transformed by colonial powers, making tattooing and scalping key forms of cultural and political contestation in early America. Although these bodily practices were quite distinct—one a painful but generally voluntary sign of accomplishment and affiliation, the other a violent assault on life and identity—they were linked by growing colonial perceptions that both were crucial elements of “Nativeness.” Tracing the transformation of concepts of bodily integrity, personal and collective identities, and the sources of human difference, Under the Skin investigates both the lived physical experience and the contested metaphorical power of early American bodies. Struggling for power on battlefields, in diplomatic gatherings, and in intellectual exchanges, Native Americans and Anglo-Americans found their physical appearances dramatically altered by their interactions with one another. Contested ideas about the nature of human and societal difference translated into altered appearances for many early Americans. In turn, scars and symbols on skin prompted an outpouring of stories as people debated the meaning of such marks. Perhaps paradoxically, individuals with culturally ambiguous or hybrid appearances prompted increasing efforts to insist on permanent bodily identity. By the late eighteenth century, ideas about the body, phenotype, and culture were increasingly articulated in concepts of race. Yet even as the interpretations assigned to inscribed flesh shifted, fascination with marked bodies remained.

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In The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis (Peoria) tells the stories of the many smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of the Gulf South. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Ellis’s narrative chronicles how diverse Indigenous peoples—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—influenced and often challenged the growth of colonial Louisiana. The book centers on questions of Native nation-building and international diplomacy, and it argues that Native American migration and practices of offering refuge to migrants in crisis enabled Native nations to survive the violence of colonization. Indeed, these practices also made them powerful. When European settlers began to arrive in Indigenous homelands at the turn of the eighteenth century, these small nations, or petites nations as the French called them, pulled colonists into their political and social systems, thereby steering the development of early Louisiana. In some cases, the same practices that helped Native peoples withstand colonization in the eighteenth century, including frequent migration, living alongside foreign nations, and welcoming outsiders into their lands, have made it difficult for their contemporary descendants to achieve federal acknowledgment and full rights as Native American peoples. The Great Power of Small Nations tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South.

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For decades, Latin America has been plagued by civil wars, dictatorships, torture, legacies of colonialism, racism, and inequality. The region has also experienced dramatic—if uneven—human rights improvements, shedding light on the politics of transformation. The accounts of how Latin America’s people have dealt with the persistent threats to their fundamental rights offer lessons for people around the world. Human Rights in Latin America provides a comprehensive introduction to the human rights issues facing an area that constitutes more than half of the Western Hemisphere. This second edition brings together regional case studies and thematic chapters to explore cutting-edge issues and developments in the field. From historical accounts of abuse to successful transnational campaigns and legal battles, Human Rights in Latin America explores the dynamics underlying a vast range of human rights initiatives. In addition to surveying the roles of the United States, relatives of the disappeared, and truth commissions, Sonia Cardenas and Rebecca Root cover newer ground in addressing the colonial and ideological underpinnings of human rights abuses, emerging campaigns for gender and sexuality rights, and regional dynamics relating to the International Criminal Court. Engagingly written and fully illustrated, Human Rights in Latin America fills an important niche among human rights and Latin American textbooks. Ample supplementary resources—including discussion questions, interdisciplinary reading lists, filmographies, online resources, internship opportunities, and instructor assignments—make this an especially valuable text for use in human rights courses.

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The growth and maturity of life-writing, especially in the works of Johnson and Boswell, with an incidental picture of the times.

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This book presents an ethnopoetic translation and an interpretation of an evening of story­telling which took place in rural Afghanistan in 1975. Three years before the Marxist coup, two Muslim elders from Herat province were asked by a Marxist subgovernor to spend an evening telling traditional stories to an American woman. The storytellers wittily integrated themes of sense and nonsense, gender and sexuality, religion and public and private social control in thirteen recorded stories, here translated in full. In interpreting texts, Margaret A. Mills argues for a rhetorical sophistication among adept traditional performers which enables them to mount performances of traditional materials which are highly, and in this case slyly, sensitive to the political and social identities of self and audience. Such identities are in part negotiated and constructed via the performances. Noting that Afghan culture has traditionally posited noninstitutional religious authority against central government institutions, Mills points out certain ironies and tensions which recur as the stories unfold in the presence of the government bureaucrat. Using this evening of stories as an example, the author asserts that the creation of narrative meaning makes use of both intertextual and interpersonal relationships. This extended performance suggests Afghan perspectives on the integration of narrative and social critique, of religious authority and private ethics, of the real and the fantastic, the serious and the ludicrous, which challenge common western notions about genres of literary production (written and oral) and social interaction.

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In this volume, seven historians of science examine the historical creation and meaning of a range of scientific textual forms from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. They consider examples from the fields of chemistry, medicine, physics, zoology, physiology, and mathematics, exposing the rich possibilities for a new, historically rooted approach to our scientific cultural heritage. Peter Dear presents the case for "taking texts seriously"—asking historians of science to confront issues and techniques moving to the forefront in a number of disciplines, and asking literary scholars and literary-minded intellectual historians not to "put science quietly to one side," or treat it as a mere source of cultural metaphors, but to understand it in terms of historically specific textual construction. The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument will interest historians, philosophers, and sociologists, as well as literary scholars concerned with science.

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Otto Brunner contends that prevailing notions of medieval social and constitutional history had been shaped by the nineteenth-century nation state and its "liberal" order. Whereas a sharp distinction between the public and the private might be appropriate to descriptions of contemporary society, such a dichotomy could not be projected back onto the Middle Ages. Focusing particularly on forms of lordship in late medieval Austria, Brunner found neither a "state" in the modern sense nor any distinction between the public and private spheres. Behind the apparent disorder of late medieval political life, however, Brunner discovered a coherent legal and constitutional order rooted in the the rights and obligations of noble lordship. In carefully reconstructing this order, Brunner's study weaves together social, legal, constitutional, and intellectual history.

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At the same time as modern capitalism became an engine of progress and a source of inequality, the United States rose to global power. Hence diplomacy and the forces of capitalism have continually evolved together and shaped each other at different levels of international, national, and local transformations. Diplomacy and Capitalism focuses on the crucial questions of wealth and power in the United States and the world in the twentieth century. Through a series of wide-ranging case studies on the history of international political economy and its array of state and non-state actors, the volume's authors analyze how material interests and foreign relations shaped each other. How did the rising and then disproportionate power of the United States and the actions of corporations, creditors, diplomats, and soldiers shape the twentieth-century world? How did officials in the United States and other nations understand the relationship between foreign investment and the state? How did people outside of the United States respond to and shape American diplomacy and political-economic policy? In detailed discussions of the exchanges and entanglements of capitalism and diplomacy, the authors answer these crucial questions. In doing so, they excavate how different combinations of material interest, geopolitical rivalry, and ideology helped create the world we live in today. The book thus analyzes competing and shared visions of international capitalism and U.S. diplomatic influence in chapters that bring the book's readers from the dawn of the twentieth century to its end, from Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. Contributors: Abou Bamba, Giulia Crisanti, Christopher R. W. Dietrich, Max Paul Friedman, Joseph Fronczak, Alec Hickmott, Jennifer M. Miller, Alanna O'Malley, Nicole Sackley, Jayita Sarkar, Erum Sattar, Jason Scott Smith.

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In July 2013, Detroit became the largest city in U.S. history to declare bankruptcy. The underlying causes were decades of deindustrialization, white flight, and financial mismanagement. More recently it has been heralded a comeback city as wealthy white residents resettle there. Yet, as Kyle T. Mays argues, we cannot understand the current state of Detroit without also understanding the longer history of Native American and African American dispossession that has defined the city since its founding. How has dispossession impacted the development of modern U.S. cities? And how does comparing the historical experiences of Native Americans and African Americans in an urban context help us comprehend histories of race, sovereignty, and colonialism? Using archives, oral and family histories, and community documents, City of Dispossessions is a cultural, intellectual, and social history that argues that physical and symbolic forms of dispossession of Native Americans and African Americans, and their reactions to dispossession, have been central to Detroit's modern development. The book begins with the first settlement by the Frenchman Cadillac in 1701 and chronicles how the logic of dispossession has continued into the present, through a wide range of forms that include memorialization of the "disappearing Indian," the physical dispossession of African Americans through urban renewal, and gentrification. Mays also chronicles the wide-ranging forms of expression through which Black and Indigenous Detroiters have contested dispossession, such as the Red and Black Power movements and culturally relevant education. Through lively, accessible prose as well as historical and contemporary examples, City of Dispossessions will be of interest to readers of urban studies, Indigenous Studies, and critical ethnic studies.

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It is a sign of the accepted evidentiary status of photographs that historians regularly append them to their accounts, Amos Morris-Reich observes. Very often, however, these photographs are treated as mere illustrations, simple documentations of the events that transpired. Scholars of photography, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the photographs themselves, relegating the historical contexts to the background. For Morris-Reich, however, photography exists within reality; it partakes in and is very much a component of the history it records. Morris-Reich examines how photography affects categories of history and experience, how it is influenced by them, and the ways in which our understanding of the relationship between history and photography can be theorized and reoriented. Morris-Reich here turns to five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect: Albert Kahn’s utopian attempt to establish a photographic archive in Paris in order to advance world peace; the spectacular failed project of Helmar Lerski, the most prominent photographer in British Mandate Jewish Palestine; photography in the long career of Eugen Fischer, a Nazi professor of genetics; the street photography of Robert Frank; and the first attempt to introduce photography into the study of Russian Jewry prior to World War I, as seen from the post-Holocaust perspective of the early twenty-first century. Illustrated with nearly 100 images, Photography and Jewish History moves beyond a focus on Jewish photographers or the photographic representation of Jews or Jewish visibility to plumb the deeper and more significant registers of twentieth-century Jewish political history.

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William of Norwich is the name of a young boy purported to have been killed by Jews in or about 1144, thus becoming the victim of the first recorded case of such a ritual murder in Western Europe and a seminal figure in the long history of antisemitism. His story is first told in Thomas of Monmouth's The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, a work that elaborates the bizarre allegation, invented in twelfth-century England, that Jews kidnapped Christian children and murdered them in memory and mockery of the crucifixion of Christ. In Inventing William of Norwich Heather Blurton resituates Thomas's account by offering the first full analysis of it as a specifically literary work. The second half of the twelfth century was a time of great literary innovation encompassing an efflorescence of saints' lives and historiography, as well as the emergence of vernacular romance, Blurton observes. She examines The Life and Miracles within the framework of these new textual developments and alongside innovations in liturgical and devotional practices to argue that the origin of the ritual murder accusation is imbricated as much in literary culture as it is in the realities of Christian-Jewish relations or the emergence of racially based discourses of antisemitism. Resisting the urge to interpret this first narrative of the blood libel with the hindsight knowledge of later developments, she considers only the period from about 1150-1200. In so doing, Blurton redirects critical attention away from the social and economic history of the ritual murder accusation to the textual genres and tastes that shaped its forms and themes and provided its immediate context of reception. Thomas of Monmouth's narrative in particular, and the ritual murder accusation more generally, were strongly shaped by literary convention.

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Contracting Freedom is the first relational study of the origins of twentieth-century U.S. guestworker programs from Mexico and the Caribbean, focusing on their shared origins. It investigates these government-sponsored programs as the unexplored consequence of the history of enslaved labor, Japanese American incarceration, the New Deal, the long civil rights movement, and Caribbean decolonization. In the World War II era, U.S. lawmakers and activists alike celebrated guestworker agreements with Mexico and the Caribbean as hallmarks of anti-imperialism and worker freedom. A New Deal-based conception of racial liberalism inspired many of these government officials and labor advocates to demand a turn toward state-sponsored labor contracts across the hemisphere to protect migrant workers' welfare and treatment in the postwar world. Their view of liberalism emphasized the value of formal labor contracts, bilateral agreements between nation-states, state power, and equal rights, all of which they described as advances beyond older labor arrangements forged under colonialism and slavery. Eighty years later, their conceptions of guestworker programs continue to shape political understandings of the immigration debate, as these programs are often considered a solution to offset the deportation regime, and as a response to increasingly rigid racist measures to close U.S. borders to migrants. Maria Quintana's compelling history shifts the focus on guestworker programs to the arena of political conflict, revealing how fierce debates over the bracero program and Caribbean contract labor programs extended and legitimated U.S. racial and imperial domination into the present era. It also unearths contract workers' emerging visions of social justice that challenged this reproduction of race and empire, giving freedom new meanings that must be contemplated.

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In this age of near-perpetual disaster, from the Coronavirus epidemic and mass incarceration to hurricanes and earthquakes, spiritual care has become an essential component of the disaster-response toolkit. In Experts in the Age of Anxiety, Joshua Moses chronicles the rise of disaster-related spiritual expertise in the years following the attacks of 9/11. What emerges are approaches to trauma that encompass everything from meditation and acupuncture to trauma therapy and restorative justice. In this way, the ascent of spiritual expertise in response to post-9/11 disasters represents an extension of historical tensions between secular health practice and proponents of religious and spiritual care. The book also provides a lens through which to understand the historical dimensions of disaster-related trauma, its treatment, and the ways that therapeutic and spiritual practices imply politics. By studying the intersection of mental health and spirituality in the context of disaster, we gain essential insight into apocalyptic and dystopic beliefs that are prevalent today throughout the United States—and beyond. We learn not only about the role of particular forms of expertise in defining meaning but also the consequences this concept of meaning may have for how we imagine our relations to other humans and nonhumans, the climate crisis—and ultimately the kind of future we might imagine. This variety of therapeutic and spiritual practices, now deployed in the face of disaster, will be tested as humanity faces growing threats from the climate crisis and other cascading disasters. But it is not at all clear whether the particular kinds of knowledge we have managed to patch together will provide the resources we require to instill the capacities to face the repercussions of future disasters.

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In the years between the independence of the colonies from Britain and the start of the Jacksonian age, American readers consumed an enormous number of literary texts called "fragments." American Fragments recovers this archive of the romantic period to raise a set of pressing questions about the relationship between aesthetic and national realities: What kind of artistic creation was a fragment?, And how and why did deliberately unfinished writing emerge alongside a country that was itself still unfinished? Through discussions of eighteenth-century transatlantic aesthetics, the Revolutionary War, seduction novels, religious culture, and the construction of authorship, Daniel Diez Couch argues that the literary fragment was used as a means of representing individuals who did not fit neatly into the social fabric of the nation: beggars, prostitutes, veterans, and other ostracized figures. These individuals did not have a secure place in designs for the country's future, yet writers wielded the artistic form of the fragment as an apparatus for surveying their disputed positionality. Time and again, fragments asked what kind of identity marginalized individuals had, and how fictionalized versions of their life stories influenced the sociopolitical circumstances of the emergent nation. In their most progressive moments, the writers of fragments depicted their subjects as being "in process," opting for a fluid version of the self instead of the bounded and coherent one typically hailed as the liberal individual. Traversing aesthetics, political philosophy, material culture, and history, American Fragments gives new life to a literary form that at once played a significant role in the print ecology of the early republic, and that endures in the works of modernist and postmodernist writers and artists.

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Historians and literary historians alike recognize David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829-1830) as one of the most politically radical and consequential antislavery texts ever published, yet the pamphlet's significant impact on North American nineteenth-century print-based activism has gone under-examined. In The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal" Marcy J. Dinius offers the first in-depth analysis of Walker's argumentatively and typographically radical pamphlet and its direct influence on five Black and Indigenous activist authors, Maria W. Stewart, William Apess, William Paul Quinn, Henry Highland Garnet, and Paola Brown, and the pamphlets that they wrote and published in the United States and Canada between 1831 and 1851. She also examines how Walker's Appeal exerted a powerful and lasting influence on William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and other publications by White antislavery activists. Dinius contends that scholars have neglected the positive, transnational, and transformative effects of Walker's Appeal on print-based political activism and literary and book history—that is, its primarily textual effects—due to an enduringly narrow focus on the violence that the pamphlet may have occasioned. She offers as an alternative a broadened view of activism and resistance that centers the works of Walker, Stewart, Apess, Quinn, Garnet, and Brown within an exploration of radical forms of authorship, publication, civic participation, and resistance. In doing so, she has written a major contribution to African American literary studies and the history of the book in antebellum America.

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After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Sephardi Jews such as Isaac Abravanel, Abraham Saba, and Isaac Arama wrote biblical commentaries that stressed the significance of land. They interpreted Judaism as a tradition whose best expression and ultimate fulfillment took place away from cities and in rural settings. Iberian-Jewish authors rooted their moral teachings in an ethical treatment of the natural world, elucidating ancient agricultural laws and scrutinizing the physical context and built environments of Bible stories. The Land Is Mine asks what inspired this and suggests that the answer lies not in timeless exegetical or theological trends, but in the material realities of late medieval and early modern Iberia, during a period of drastic changes in land use. The book uses a highly traditional source base in a decidedly untraditional way. In Jewish Studies, Andrew D. Berns observes, biblical commentary is typically studied as an intramural activity. Though scholars have conceded that Jewish scriptural exegesis welcomes material and ideas from other fields and traditions, little to no work treats premodern Hebrew Bible commentary as also drawing upon Classical and Christian sources as well as contemporary writings on land management and political economy. Abravanel, Saba, and Arama were engaged with questions that had broad resonance during their lives: the proper way to treat the land, the best occupations to pursue, and the ideal setting for human community. Scriptural commentary was the forum in which they addressed these problems and posed solutions to them. A work of intellectual history,The Land Is Mine demonstrates that it is impossible to understand Jewish culture without considering the physical realities on which it depended.

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Lethal autonomous weapons are weapon systems that can select and destroy targets without intervention by a human operator. Fighting Machines explores the relationship between lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS), the concept of human dignity, and international law. Much of this analysis speaks to three fundamental and related problems: When a LAWS takes a human life, is that killing a violation of human dignity? Can states and non-state actors use LAWS in accordance with international law? And are there certain responsibilities of human decision-making during wartime that we should not delegate to machines? In the book, Dan Saxon argues that the use of LAWS to take human life constitutes a violation of human dignity. Rather than concentrating on the victims of the use of lethal force, Saxon instead focuses on the technology and relevant legal principles and rules to advance several propositions. First, as LAWS operate at increasingly greater speeds, their use will undermine the opportunities for, and the value of, human reasoning and judgment. Second, by transferring responsibility for reasoning and judgment about the use of lethal force to computer software, the use of LAWS violates the dignity of the soldiers, commanders, and law enforcement officers who historically have made such decisions, and, therefore, breaches international law. Third, weapon designs that facilitate teamwork between humans and autonomous systems are necessary to ensure that humans and LAWS can operate interdependently so that individuals can fulfil their obligations under international law—including the preservation of their own dignity—and ensure that human reasoning and judgment are available for cognitive functions better suited to humans than machines. Fighting Machines speaks to the fields of international humanitarian law, human rights, criminal law, and legal philosophy. It will also be of interest to non-lawyers, especially military officers, government policy makers, political scientists, and international relations scholars, as well as roboticists and ethicists.

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The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is one of the most important and debated sociopolitical documents of the twentieth century. A leading authority on the UDHR, Johannes Morsink is the author of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (2000) and Inherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration (2009). With this new book, Morsink has now written a volume for a new generation of human rights students and activists, one that presents an article-by-article account of the formulation of each article in the UDHR. The author comments perceptively on how they have been argued, argued over, and used in a wide range of political discourses. Comprised of short essays on each of the Declaration's thirty articles, this book constitutes the most accessible and comprehensive approach to this document and explicates the UDHR's continued relevance in contemporary times. Throughout the book, Morsink explains how this 1948 iconic text can help us in the twenty-first century. He shows us the high moral ground we need to fight evils perpetuated during and after World War II that now present themselves in new garb and does so in a clear and concise manner.

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The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of political violence, its histories, and its traces. Reverberations aims to redress this problem by methodologically and conceptually placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. The volume generates a new framework for the study of political violence and its protracted aftermath by attending, through innovative ethnographic and historical studies, to its distribution, extension, and endurance across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and imaginations. Collectively, in the study of political violence, the contributions focus on human agencies and experiences in engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, fields, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. In a variety of contexts, the scholars herein ask the crucial question: What can be learned about political violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? How are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings entwined in histories of political violence? And vice versa—how are histories of political violence implicated in nonhuman things?

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The Americas have been the site of two distinct waves of human migration, each associated with human-caused extinctions. The first occurred during the late Pleistocene era, some ten to thirty thousand years ago; the other began during the time of European settler-colonization and continues to this day. In Extinction and the Human Timothy Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them. He focuses especially on the force of human impact on megafauna—mammoths, whales, and the North American bison—beginning with the moments that these species' extinction or endangerment began to generate significant print archives: transcriptions of traditional Indigenous oral narratives, historical and scientific accounts, and literary narratives by Indigenous American and Euro-American authors. "If the Sixth Extinction is a hyperobject, an event so massively distributed in space and time that it cannot be experienced directly," he writes, "these cases of particular megafauna have nevertheless consistently commanded our focus and attention. They form a starting point for a coherent, approachable history." Reflecting on questions of agency, responsibility, and moral assessment, Sweet engages with the consequences of thinking of humans as fundamentally separate from the rest of the natural world. He investigates stories of a lost race of giants at the time of the first encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Americans; culturally distinct ways of understanding the extinction of the mammoths; the impact of the Euro-American whaling industry and the controversial revitalization of Native American whaling traditions; and the bison's near-extermination at the hands of white market hunters and today's Euro-American and Native American efforts on behalf of the animal's preservation. He reflects on humans' relations with animals through models of divine preservation, competitive extermination, evolutionary determination, biophilia, and treaties with animals. Ultimately, he argues, it is the critical assessment of ideas of human exceptionalism that provides a necessary counterpoint both to apologies for human mastery over nature and deep ecology's attempts to erase the human.

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Emotions were central to the ways that slaveholders perpetuated slavery, as well as to the ways that enslaved people survived and challenged bondage and experienced freedom. Mastering Emotions examines the interactions between slaveholders and enslaved people, and between White people and free Black people, to expose how emotions such as love, terror, happiness, and trust functioned as social and economic capital for slaveholders and enslaved people alike. The daily interactions that occurred between slaveholders and enslaved people around emotions, in conjunction with larger debates about race and freedom, form the backbone of what Erin Austin Dwyer calls the emotional politics of slavery. Race and status determined which emotions were permissible or punishable, which should be restrained, and by whom. As a result, mastering emotions, one's ability to control one's own feelings and those of others, was paramount for slaveholders and enslaved. The emotional politics of slavery were thus fashioned by enslaved people and slaveholders together through the crucible of slavery. Emancipation was a seismic shift in the affective landscape of the antebellum South. Though the end of the Civil War rendered moot the debate over how to emotionally maintain slavery, the lingering conflict over whether the emotional strictures governing the South would be based on race or free status had serious repercussions, particularly for free Black people. The postwar rise of legal and extralegal attempts to affectively control free Black people underscored the commitment of elite White Southerners to preserving the power dynamics of the emotional politics of slavery, by any means necessary. Mastering Emotions concludes by detailing how the long-term legacy of those emotional politics reverberated through Reconstruction and the Jim Crow eras.

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How, Barbara Newman asks, did the myth of the separable heart take such a firm hold in the Middle Ages, from lovers exchanging hearts with one another to mystics exchanging hearts with Jesus? What special traits gave both saints and demoniacs their ability to read minds? Why were mothers who died in childbirth buried in unconsecrated ground? Each of these phenomena, as diverse as they are, offers evidence for a distinctive medieval idea of the person in sharp contrast to that of the modern "subject" of "individual." Starting from the premise that the medieval self was more permeable than its modern counterpart, Newman explores the ways in which the self's porous boundaries admitted openness to penetration by divine and demonic spirits and even by other human beings. She takes up the idea of "coinherence," a state familiarly expressed in the amorous and devotional formula "I in you and you in me," to consider the theory and practice of exchanging the self with others in five relational contexts of increasing intimacy. Moving from the outside in, her chapters deal with charismatic teachers and their students, mind-reading saints and their penitents, lovers trading hearts, pregnant mothers who metaphorically and literally carry their children within, and women and men in the throes of demonic obsession. In a provocative conclusion, she sketches some of the far-reaching consequences of this type of personhood by drawing on comparative work in cultural history, literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, and ethics. The Permeable Self offers medievalists new insight into the appeal and dangers of the erotics of pedagogy; the remarkable influence of courtly romance conventions on hagiography and mysticism; and the unexpected ways that pregnancy—often devalued in mothers—could be positively ascribed to men, virgins, and God. The half-forgotten but vital idea of coinherence is of relevance far beyond medieval studies, however, as Newman shows how it reverberates in such puzzling phenomena as telepathy, the experience of heart transplant recipients who develop relationships with their deceased donors, the phenomenon of psychoanalytic transference, even the continuities between ideas of demonic possession and contemporary understandings of obsessive-compulsive disorder. In The Permeable Self Barbara Newman once again confirms her status as one of our most brilliant and thought-provoking interpreters of the Middle Ages.

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In this sweeping international perspective on reparations, Time for Reparations makes the case that past state injustice—be it slavery or colonization, forced sterilization or widespread atrocities—has enduring consequences that generate ongoing harm, which needs to be addressed as a matter of justice and equity. Time for Reparations provides a wealth of detailed and diverse examples of state injustice, from enslavement of African Americans in the United States and Roma in Romania to colonial exploitation and brutality in Guatemala, Algeria, Indonesia, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe. From many vantage points, contributing authors discuss different reparative strategies and the impact they would have on the lives of survivor or descent communities. One of the strengths of this book is its interdisciplinary perspective—contributors are historians, anthropologists, human rights lawyers, sociologists, and political scientists. Many of the authors are both scholars and advocates, actively involved in one capacity or another in the struggles for reparations they describe. The book therefore has a broad and inclusive scope, aided by an accessible and cogent writing style. It appeals to scholars, students, advocates and others concerned about addressing some of the most profound and enduring injustices of our time.

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This book announces the new, interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies. Unlike most existing approaches to disaster, critical disaster studies begins with the idea that disasters are not objective facts, but rather are interpretive fictions—and they shape the way people see the world. By questioning the concept of disaster itself, critical disaster studies reveals the stakes of defining people or places as vulnerable, resilient, or at risk. As social constructs, disaster, vulnerability, resilience, and risk shape and are shaped by contests over power. Managers and technocrats often herald the goals of disaster response and recovery as objective, quantifiable, or self-evident. In reality, the goals are subjective, and usually contested. Critical disaster studies attends to the ways powerful people often use claims of technocratic expertise to maintain power. Moreover, rather than existing as isolated events, disasters take place over time. People commonly imagine disasters to be unexpected and sudden, making structural conditions appear contingent, widespread conditions appear local, and chronic conditions appear acute. By placing disasters in broader contexts, critical disaster studies peels away that veneer. With chapters by scholars of five continents and seven disciplines, Critical Disaster Studies asks how disasters come to be known as disasters, how disasters are used as tools of governance and politics, and how people imagine and anticipate disasters. The volume will be of interest to scholars of disaster in any discipline and especially to those teaching the growing number of courses on disaster studies.

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In A Right to Lie?, legal scholar Catherine J. Ross addresses the urgent issue of whether the nation's highest officers, including the president, have a right to lie under the Speech Clause, no matter what damage their falsehoods cause. Does freedom of expression protect even factual falsehoods? If so, are lies by candidates and public officials protected? And is there a constitutional path, without violating the First Amendment, to stop a president whose persistent lies endanger our lives and our democracy? Perhaps counter-intuitively, the general answer to each question is "yes." Drawing from dramatic court cases about defamers, proponents of birtherism, braggarts, and office holders, Ross reveals the almost insurmountable constitutional and practical obstacles to legal efforts to rein in public deception. She explains the rules that govern the treatment of lies, while also demonstrating the incalculable damage presidential mendacity may lead to, as revealed in President Trump's lies about the COVID-19 pandemic and the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Falsehoods have been at issue in every presidential impeachment proceeding from Nixon to Trump. But, until now, no one has analyzed why public lies might be impeachable offenses, and whether the First Amendment would provide a defense. Noting that speech by public employees does not receive the same First Amendment protection as the speech of ordinary citizens, Ross proposes the constitutionally viable solution of treating presidents as public employees who work for the people. Charged with oversight of the Executive, Congress may—and should—put future presidents on notice that material lies to the public on substantial matters will be deemed a "high crime and misdemeanor" subject to censure and even impeachment. A Right to Lie? explains how this approach could work if the political will were in place.

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Captives of Conquest is one of the first books to examine the earliest indigenous slave trade in the Spanish Caribbean. Erin Woodruff Stone shows that the indigenous population of the region did not simply collapse from disease or warfare. Rather, upwards of 250,000 people were removed through slavery, a lucrative business sustained over centuries that formed the foundation of economic, legal, and religious policies in the Spanish colonies. The enslavement of and trade in indigenous peoples was central to the processes of conquest, as the search for new sources of Indian slaves propelled much of the early Spanish exploration into Central and South America. Once captured, some indigenous slaves were shipped to various islands, or as far away as Spain, to be sold for immediate profit. Others became military auxiliaries, guides, miners, pearl divers, servants, or, in the case of women, unwilling sexual partners. In all these roles indigenous slaves helped mold the greater Spanish Caribbean. Even as the number of African slaves grew in the Americas, enslaved Indians did not disappear. On the contrary, African and Indian slaves worked side by side, the methods and practices of both types of slavery influencing one another throughout the centuries. Together the two forms of slavery helped create the greater Spanish Caribbean, a space and economy founded upon the bondage and coerced labor of both indigenous and African peoples.

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The overwhelming majority of Jews who laid the foundations of the Israeli state during the first half of the twentieth century came from the Polish lands and the Russian Empire. This is a fact widely known, yet its implications for the history of Israel and the Middle East and, reciprocally, for the history of what was once the demographic heartland of the Jewish diaspora remain surprisingly ill-understood. Through fine-grained analyses of people, texts, movements, and worldviews in motion, the scholars assembled in From Europe's East to the Middle East—hailing from Europe, Israel, Japan, and the United States—rediscover a single transnational Jewish history of surprising connections, ideological cacophony, and entangled fates. Against the view of Israel as an outpost of the West, whether as a beacon of democracy or a creation of colonialism, this volume reveals how profoundly Zionism and Israel were shaped by the assumptions of Polish nationalism, Russian radicalism, and Soviet Communism; the unique ethos of the East European intelligentsia; and the political legacies of civil and national strife in the East European "shatter-zone." Against the view that Zionism effected a complete break from the diaspora that had birthed it, the book sheds new light on the East European sources of phenomena as diverse as Zionist military culture, kibbutz socialism, and ultra-Orthodox education for girls. Finally, it reshapes our understanding of East European Jewish life, from the Tsarist Empire, to independent Poland, to the late Soviet Union. Looking past siloed histories of both Zionism and its opponents in Eastern Europe, the authors reconstruct Zionism's transnational character, charting unexpected continuities across East European and Israeli Jewish life, and revealing how Jews in Eastern Europe grew ever more entangled with the changing realities of Jewish society in Palestine.

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Who governs political parties? Recent insurgent campaigns, such as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have thrust this critical question to the center of political debate for casual observers and scholars alike. Yet the dynamics of modern party politics remain poorly understood. Assertions of either elite control or interest group dominance both fail to explain the Trump victory and the surprise of the Sanders insurgency and their subsequent reverberations through the American political landscape. In True Blues, Adam Hilton tackles the question of who governs parties by examining the transformation of the Democratic Party since the late 1960s. Reconceiving parties as "contentious institutions," Hilton argues that Democratic Party change was driven by recurrent conflicts between groups and officeholders to define and control party identity, program, and policy. The outcome of this prolonged struggle was a wholly new kind of party—an advocacy party—which institutionalized greater party dependence on outside groups for legitimacy and organizational support, while also, in turn, fostering greater group dependency on the presidency for the satisfaction of its symbolic and substantive demands. Consequently, while the long conflict between party reformers and counter-reformers successfully opened the Democratic Party to new voices and identities, it also facilitated the growth of presidential power, rising inequality, and deepening partisan polarization. Tracing the rise of the advocacy party from the fall of the New Deal order through the presidency of Barack Obama, True Blues explains how and why the Democratic Party has come to its current crossroads and suggests a bold new perspective for comprehending the dynamics driving American party politics more broadly.

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In the spring of 1971, the largest mass arrest in Massachusetts history unfolded at a site nationally celebrated as the birthplace of freedom and democracy. With peace efforts at a standstill, the New England chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War had organized an event to rouse public support for their cause. Over the course of the long Memorial Day weekend, a band of more than two hundred young, fatigue-clad veterans sounded the alarm for peace and patriotism by marching—in reverse—the path Paul Revere had taken two centuries earlier when he called on the American colonists to rise against their British oppressors. Enacting the parts of colonial militiamen, the veterans set off in patrol formation along the famed Battle Road, a route calculated to take them past Concord's Old North Bridge, onto Lexington's Battle Green, and up to Bunker Hill. Determined to reanimate the patriotic sentiments expressed by the area's many Revolutionary War memorials, they revealed how far the nation had veered from its ideals by staging reenactments of the brutal atrocities they had witnessed and perpetrated in the name of freedom on the other side of the world. "With an ironic twist," the fliers they distributed explained, "our presence in Indochina as viewed by a native of an occupied village easily coincides with the British army in America." To the selectmen of the town of Lexington who ordered their mass arrest, the veterans were defiling spaces sacred to the nation's Revolutionary past; to the hundreds of bystanders who fed, sheltered, and committed civil disobedience with them, they were an inspiration. Elise Lemire tells this extraordinary story from the perspective of six men who played central roles in the events of May 1971. Based on more than one hundred interviews with participants and accompanied by nearly forty photographs and maps, Battle Green Vietnam demonstrates the power of mobilizing history, myth, and memorials to effect revolutionary change.

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Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal. Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

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Art and religion are both well-attested and much-studied aspects of ancient Greek life, yet their relationship is not perfectly understood. Religion in the Art of Archaic and Classical Greece presents an important rethinking of these two categories. The book examines not only how and where religious activity is presented visually at particular moments and in certain forms, but also what objects and images can tell us about the experiences and impressions of Greek religion. Through an exploration of portable or relatively small-scale art forms—vases, figurines, gems, plaques—Tyler Jo Smith focuses on the visual and material evidence for religious life and customs in Archaic and Classical Greece (sixth to fourth centuries BC). The book introduces its readers to categories of religious practice (e.g., sacrifices, votive offerings, funerals), to the pertinent artistic evidence for them, and to a range of scholarly approaches. Smith combines the study of iconography and the examination of material objects with theoretical perspectives on ritual and performance. When given visual form, religion holds much in common with other ancient Greek modes of artistic expression, including dance and drama. Religion is viewed here as a dynamic performative act, as an expression of connectivity, and as a mechanism of communication. While the complexities of Greek religion cannot be discerned through the visual or material record alone, Religion in the Art of Archaic and Classical Greece frames a more nuanced reading of the artistic evidence than has been previously available. Richly illustrated with 216 halftones and sixteen color plates of mostly small-scale objects, the book is much more than a gathering of images and information in a single place. Taken as a whole, it argues for a visual and material tradition that is intended to express the ritualized practices and shared attitudes of religious life, a story that large public works alone are simply never going to tell.

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Created in a world of empires, the United States was to be something new: an expansive republic proclaiming commitments to liberty and equality but eager to extend its territory and influence. Yet from the beginning, Native powers, free and enslaved Black people, and foreign subjects perceived, interacted with, and resisted the young republic as if it was merely another empire under the sun. Such perspectives have driven scholars to reevaluate the early United States, as the parameters of early American history have expanded in Atlantic, continental, and global directions. If the nation’s acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands in 1898 traditionally marked its turn toward imperialism, new scholarship suggests the United States was an empire from the moment of its creation. The essays gathered in The Early Imperial Republic move beyond the question of whether the new republic was an empire, investigating instead where, how, and why it was one. They use the category of empire to situate the early United States in the global context its contemporaries understood, drawing important connections between territorial conquests on the continent and American incursions around the globe. They reveal an early U.S. empire with many different faces, from merchants who sought to profit from the republic’s imperial expansion to Native Americans who opposed or leveraged it, from free Black colonizationists and globe-trotting missionaries to illegal slave traders and anti-imperial social reformers. In tracing these stories, the volume’s contributors bring the study of early U.S. imperialism down to earth, encouraging us to see the exertion of U.S. power on the ground as a process that both drew upon the example of its imperial predecessors and was forced to grapple with their legacies. Taken together, they argue that American empire was never confined to one era but is instead a thread throughout U.S. history. Contributors:Brooke Bauer, Michael A. Blaakman, Eric Burin, Emily Conroy-Krutz, Kathleen DuVal, Susan Gaunt Stearns, Nicholas Guyatt, Amy S. Greenberg, M. Scott Heerman, Robert Lee, Julia Lewandoski, Margot Minardi, Ousmane Power-Greene, Nakia D. Parker, Tom Smith

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European exploration and conquest expanded exponentially in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and as the horizons of imperial experience grew more distant, strategies designed to convey the act of witnessing came to be a key source of textual authority. From the relación to the captivity narrative, the Hispanic imperial project relied heavily on the first-person authority of genres whose authenticity undergirded the ideological armature of national consolidation, expansion, and conquest. At the same time, increasing pressures for religious conformity in Spain, as across Europe, required subjects to bare themselves before external authorities in intimate confessions of their faith. Emerging from this charged context, the unreliable voice of the pícaro poses a rhetorical challenge to the authority of the witness, destabilizing the possibility of trustworthy representation precisely because of his or her intimate involvement in the narrative. In Knowing Fictions, Barbara Fuchs seeks at once to rethink the category of the picaresque while firmly centering it once more in the early modern Hispanic world from which it emerged. Venturing beyond the traditional picaresque canon, Fuchs traces Mediterranean itineraries of diaspora, captivity, and imperial rivalry in a corpus of texts that employ picaresque conventions to contest narrative authority. By engaging the picaresque not just as a genre with more or less strictly defined boundaries, but as a set of literary strategies that interrogate the mechanisms of truth-telling itself, Fuchs shows how self-consciously fictional picaresque texts effectively encouraged readers to adopt a critical stance toward the truth claims implicit in the forms of authoritative discourse proliferating in Imperial Spain.

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According to accepted historical wisdom, the goal of the African Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 to return freed slaves to Africa, was borne of desperation and illustrated just how intractable the problems of race and slavery had become in the nineteenth-century United States. But for Brandon Mills, the ACS was part of a much wider pattern of national and international expansion. Similar efforts on the part of the young nation to create, in Thomas Jefferson's words, an "empire of liberty," spanned Native removal, the annexation of Texas and California, filibustering campaigns in Latin America, and American missionary efforts in Hawaii, as well as the founding of Liberia in 1821. Mills contends that these diverse currents of U.S. expansionism were ideologically linked and together comprised a capacious colonization movement that both reflected and shaped a wide range of debates over race, settlement, citizenship, and empire in the early republic. The World Colonization Made chronicles the rise and fall of the colonization movement as a political force within the United States—from its roots in the crises of the Revolutionary era, to its peak with the creation of the ACS, to its ultimate decline with emancipation and the Civil War. The book interrogates broader issues of U.S. expansion, including the progression of federal Indian policy, the foundations and effects of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, and the growth of U.S. commercial and military power throughout the Western hemisphere. By contextualizing the colonization movement in this way, Mills shows how it enabled Americans to envision a world of self-governing republics that harmonized with racial politics at home.

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In contemporary discourse, much of the discussion of U.S. border politics focuses on the Southwest. In Bootlegged Aliens, however, Ashley Johnson Bavery considers the North as a borderlands region, demonstrating how this often-overlooked border influenced government policies toward illegal immigration, business and labor union practices around migrant labor, and the experience of being an illegal immigrant in early twentieth-century industrial America. Bavery examines how immigrants, politicians, and employers helped shape national policies toward noncitizen laborers. In the process, she uncovers the northern industrial origins of an exploitative system that emerged on America's border with Canada, whose legacy remains central to debates about America's borders today. Bavery begins in the 1920s to explore how that decade's immigration restrictions launched an era of policing and profiling that excluded America's foreign born from the benefits of citizenship. On the border between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, this process turned certain Europeans into undocumented immigrants, a group the press and policymakers referred to as bootlegged aliens. Over the next decade, deportation and policing practices stigmatized entire communities of ethnic Europeans regardless of their legal status. Moreover, restrictive laws allowed manufacturers to exploit workers in new ways. By the Great Depression, citizenship had become an invisible boundary that excluded hundreds of thousands of laborers from New Deal entitlements. Accepted wisdom suggests that the 1924 Immigration Act had allowed ethnic Europeans to shed ties to their homelands and assimilate into the "melting pot" of American culture by the 1930s. Bavery challenges this perspective, finding that, instead of forging a common culture with their fellow workers, European immigrants coming through Canada to Detroit faced statewide registration drives, exclusion from key labor unions, and disqualification from the Works Progress Administration, the cornerstone of America's nascent welfare state. In the heart of industrial America, Bootlegged Aliens reveals, citizenship was highly contingent.

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The past twenty-five years have brought a dramatic expansion of scholarship in maritime history, including new research on piracy, long-distance trade, and seafaring cultures. Yet maritime history still inhabits an isolated corner of world history, according to editors Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Benton and Perl-Rosenthal urge historians to place the relationship between maritime and terrestrial processes at the center of the field and to analyze the links between global maritime practices and major transformations in world history. A World at Sea consists of nine original essays that sharpen and expand our understanding of practices and processes across the land-sea divide and the way they influenced global change. The first section highlights the regulatory order of the seas as shaped by strategies of land-based polities and their agents and by conflicts at sea. The second section studies documentary practices that aggregated and conveyed information about sea voyages and encounters, and it traces the wide-ranging impact of the explosion of new information about the maritime world. Probing the political symbolism of the land-sea divide as a threshold of power, the last section features essays that examine the relationship between littoral geographies and sociolegal practices spanning land and sea. Maritime history, the contributors show, matters because the oceans were key sites of experimentation, innovation, and disruption that reflected and sparked wide-ranging global change. Contributors: Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, Xing Hang, David Igler, Jeppe Mulich, Lisa Norling, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Carla Rahn Phillips, Catherine Phipps, Matthew Raffety, Margaret Schotte.

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The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.

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Eric J. Goldberg traces the long history of early medieval hunting from the late Roman Empire to the death of the last Carolingian king, Louis V, in a hunting accident in 987. He focuses chiefly on elite men and the changing role that hunting played in articulating kingship, status, and manhood in the post-Roman world. While hunting was central to elite lifestyles throughout these centuries, the Carolingians significantly altered this aristocratic activity in the later eighth and ninth centuries by making it a key symbol of Frankish kingship and political identity. This new connection emerged under Charlemagne, reached its high point under his son and heir Louis the Pious, and continued under Louis's immediate successors. Indeed, the emphasis on hunting as a badge of royal power and Frankishness would prove to be among the Carolingians' most significant and lasting legacies. Goldberg draws on written sources such as chronicles, law codes, charters, hagiography, and poetry as well as artistic and archaeological evidence to explore the changing nature of early medieval hunting and its connections to politics and society. Featuring more than sixty illustrations of hunting imagery found in mosaics, stone sculpture, metalwork, and illuminated manuscripts, In the Manner of the Franks portrays a vibrant and dynamic culture that encompassed red deer and wild boar hunting, falconry, ritualized behavior, female spectatorship, and complex forms of specialized knowledge that united kings and nobles in a shared political culture, thus locating the origins of courtly hunting in the early Middle Ages.

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More than two millennia ago, Aristotle is said to have compiled a collection of ancient constitutions that informed his studies of politics. For Aristotle, constitutions largely distilled and described the varied and distinctive patterns of political life established over time. What constitutionalism has come to mean in the modern era, on the other hand, originates chiefly in the late eighteenth century and primarily with the U.S. Constitution—written in 1787 and made effective in 1789—and the various French constitutions that first appeared in 1791. In the last half century, more than 130 nations have adopted new constitutions, half of those within the last twenty years. These new constitutions are devoted to many of the same goals found in the U.S. Constitution: the rule of law, representative self-government, and protection of rights. But by canvassing constitutional developments at the national and state level in the United States alongside modern constitutions in Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, and Asia, the contributors to Modern Constitutions—all leading scholars of constitutionalism—show that modern constitutions often seek to protect social rights and to establish representative institutions, forms of federalism, and courts charged with constitutional review that depart from or go far beyond the seminal U.S. example. Partly because of their innovations, however, many modern constitutional systems now confront mounting authoritarian pressures that put fundamental commitments to the rule of law in jeopardy. The contributions in this volume collectively provide a measure of guidance for the challenges and prospects of modern constitutions in the rapidly changing political world of the twenty-first century. Contributors: Richard R. Beeman, Valerie Bunce, Tom Ginsburg, Heinz Klug, David S. Law, Sanford Levinson, Jaime Lluch, Christopher McCrudden, Kim Lane Scheppele, Rogers M. Smith, Mila Versteeg, Emily Zackin.

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A detailed study of seventeenth century farming practices and their relevance for today We are today grappling with the consequences of disastrous changes in our farming and food systems. While the problems we face have reached a crisis point, their roots are deep. Even in the seventeenth century, Frances E. Dolan contends, some writers and thinkers voiced their reservations, both moral and environmental, about a philosophy of improvement that rationalized massive changes in land use, farming methods, and food production. Despite these reservations, the seventeenth century was a watershed in the formation of practices that would lead toward the industrialization of agriculture. But it was also a period of robust and inventive experimentation in what we now think of as alternative agriculture. This book approaches the seventeenth century, in its failed proposals and successful ventures, as a resource for imagining the future of agriculture in fruitful ways. It invites both specialists and non-specialists to see and appreciate the period from the ground up. Building on and connecting histories of food and work, literary criticism of the pastoral and georgic, histories of elite and vernacular science, and histories of reading and writing practices, among other areas of inquiry, Digging the Past offers fine-grained case studies of projects heralded as innovations both in the seventeenth century and in our own time: composting and soil amendment, local food, natural wine, and hedgerows. Dolan analyzes the stories seventeenth-century writers told one another in letters, diaries, and notebooks, in huge botanical catalogs and flimsy pamphlets, in plays, poems, and how-to guides, in adages and epics. She digs deeply to assess precisely how and with what effect key terms, figurations, and stories galvanized early modern imaginations and reappear, often unrecognized, on the websites and in the tour scripts of farms and vineyards today.

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In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive—individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another—some 11,000 to 12,000 of these artifacts pre-1701 survive, though many others have undoubtedly been lost. Since 2003, Patricia Fumerton and a team of associates at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been finding, digitizing, cataloging, and recording these materials to create the English Broadside Ballad Archive. In this magisterial and long-awaited volume, Fumerton presents a rich display of the fruits of this work. She tracks the fragmentary assembling and disassembling of two unique extant editions of one broadside ballad and examines the loose network of seventeenth-century ballad collectors who archived what were essentially ephemeral productions. She pays particular attention to Samuel Pepys, who collected and bound into five volumes more than 1,800 ballads, and whose preoccupations with black-letter print, gender, and politics are reflected in and extend beyond his collecting practices. Offering an extensive and expansive reading of an extremely popular and sensational ballad that was printed at least 37 times before 1701, Fumerton highlights the ballad genre's ability to move audiences across time and space. In a concluding chapter, she looks to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to analyze the performative potential ballads have in comparison with staged drama. A broadside ballad cannot be "read" without reading it in relation to its images and its tune, Fumerton argues. To that end, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England features more than 80 illustrations and directs its readers to a specially constructed online archive where they can easily access 48 audio files of ballad music.

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A fascinating portrait of Jewish life in Suriname from the 17th to 19th centuries Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society explores the political and social history of the Jews of Suriname, a Dutch colony on the South American mainland just north of Brazil. Suriname was home to the most privileged Jewish community in the Americas where Jews, most of Iberian origin, enjoyed religious liberty, were judged by their own tribunal, could enter any trade, owned plantations and slaves, and even had a say in colonial governance. Aviva Ben-Ur sets the story of Suriname's Jews in the larger context of Atlantic slavery and colonialism and argues that, like other frontier settlements, they achieved and maintained their autonomy through continual negotiation with the colonial government. Drawing on sources in Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Spanish, Ben-Ur shows how, from their first permanent settlement in the 1660s to the abolition of their communal autonomy in 1825, Suriname Jews enjoyed virtually the same standing as the ruling white Protestants, with whom they interacted regularly. She also examines the nature of Jewish interactions with enslaved and free people of African descent in the colony. Jews admitted both groups into their community, and Ben-Ur illuminates the ways in which these converts and their descendants experienced Jewishness and autonomy. Lastly, she compares the Jewish settlement with other frontier communities in Suriname, most notably those of Indians and Maroons, to measure the success of their negotiations with the government for communal autonomy. The Jewish experience in Suriname was marked by unparalleled autonomy that nevertheless developed in one of the largest slave colonies in the New World.

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A collection of essays that demonstrate how LGBT people played critical roles in local, state, and national politics In the 1970s, queer Americans demanded access not only to health and social services but also to mainstream Democratic and Republican Party politics. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s made the battles for access to welfare, health care, and social services for HIV-positive Americans, many of them gay men, a critically important story in the changing relationship between sexual minorities and the government. The 1980s and 1990s marked a period in which religious right attacks on the civil rights of minorities, including LGBT people, offered opportunities for activists to create campaigns that could mobilize a base in mainstream politics and contribute to the gradual legitimization of sexual minorities in American society. Beyond the Politics of the Closet features essays by historians whose work on LGBT history delves into the decades between the mid-1970s and the millennium, a period in which the relationship between activist networks, the state, capitalism, and political parties became infinitely more complicated. Examining the crucial relationship between sexuality, race, and class, the volume highlights the impact gay rights politics and activism have had on the wider American political landscape since the rights revolutions of the 1960s. The three sections of Beyond the Politics of the Closet conceptualize LGBT politics both chronologically and thematically. The first section highlights the ways in which the immediate post-rights revolution period created new demands on the part of sexual minorities for social services, especially in health care and housing. The second examines the impact of the AIDS crisis on different aspects of national and local LGBT politics. The last section considers how analyzing LGBT politics can reorient our understanding of "the closet" and illuminate the challenges for those seeking to integrate questions of sexual rights into broader political narratives, whether of the left or the right. Contributors: Ian M. Baldwin, Katie Batza, Jonathan Bell, Julio Capó, Jr., Rachel Guberman, Clayton Howard, Kevin Mumford, Dan Royles, Timothy Stewart-Winter

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After humble beginnings as faltering British colonies, the United States acquired astonishing wealth and power as the result of what we now refer to as modernization. Originating in England and Western Europe, transplanted to the Americas, then copied around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this process locked together science and technology, political democracy, economic freedom, and competitive capitalism. This has produced for some populations unimagined wealth and material comfort, yet it has also now brought the global environment to a tipping point beyond which life as we know it may not be sustainable. How did we come to endanger the very future of life on earth in our heedless pursuit of wealth and happiness? In Laid Waste!, John Lauritz Larson answers that question with a 350-year review of the roots of an American "culture of exploitation" that has left us free, rich, and without an honest sense of how this crisis came to be. Larson undertakes an ambitious historical synthesis, seeking to illuminate how the culture of exploitation grew out of the earliest English settlements and has continually undergirded U.S. society and its cherished myths. Through a series of meditations on key concepts, the story moves from the starving times of early Jamestown through the rise of colonial prosperity, the liberation of the revolutionary generation, the launching of the American republic, and the emergence of a new global industrial power by the end of the nineteenth century. Through this story, the book explores the rise of an American sense of righteousness, entitlement, and destiny that has masked any recognition that our wealth and success has come at expense to anyone or anything. Part polemic, part jeremiad, and part historical overview, Laid Waste! is a provocative and bracing account of how the development of American culture itself has led us to today's crises.

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A corrective to the contemporary idea that Buddhism has always been an environmentally friendly religion In the current popular imagination, Buddhism is often understood to be a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment. The Dharma, the name given to Buddhist teachings by Buddhists, states that all things are interconnected. Therefore, Buddhists are perceived as extending compassion beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself out of a concern for the total living environment. In The Buddha's Footprint, Johan Elverskog contends that only by jettisoning this contemporary image of Buddhism as a purely ascetic and apolitical tradition of contemplation can we see the true nature of the Dharma. According to Elverskog, Buddhism is, in fact, an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources. Elverskog surveys the expansion of Buddhism across Asia in the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, when Buddhist institutions were built from Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south. He examines the prosperity theology at the heart of the Dharma that declared riches to be a sign of good karma and the means by which spritiual status could be elevated through donations bequeathed to Buddhist institutions. He demonstrates how this scriptural tradition propelled Buddhists to seek wealth and power across Asia and to exploit both the people and the environment. Elverskog shows the ways in which Buddhist expansion not only entailed the displacement of local gods and myths with those of the Dharma—as was the case with Christianity and Islam—but also involved fundamentally transforming earlier social and political structures and networks of economic exchange. The Buddha's Footprint argues that the institutionalization of the Dharma was intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the monumentalization of Buddhism itself.

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A dynamic social history of shadow capitalism spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries Observers see free markets, the relentless pursuit of profit, and the unremitting drive to commodify everything as capitalism's defining characteristics. These most visible economic features, however, obscure a range of other less evident, often unmeasured activities that occur on the margins and in the concealed corners of the formal economy. The range of practices in this large and diverse hidden realm encompasses traders in recycled materials and the architects of junk bonds and shadow banking. It includes the black and semi-licit markets that allow wealthy elites to avoid taxes and the unmeasured domestic and emotional labor of homemakers and home care workers. By some estimates, the unmeasured economic activity that occurs within the household, informal market, and underground economy amounts to a substantial portion of all economic activity in the world, as much as 30 percent in some countries. Capitalism's Hidden Worlds sheds new light on this shadowy economic landscape by reexamining how we think about the market. In particular, it scrutinizes the missed connections between the official, visible realm of exchange and the uncounted and invisible sectors that border it. While some hidden markets emerged in opposition to the formal economy, much of the obscured economy described in this volume operates as the other side of the legitimate, state-sanctioned marketplace. A variety of historical actors—from fortune tellers and forgers to tax lawyers and black market consumers—have constructed this unseen world in tandem with the observable public world of transactions. Others, such as feminist development economists and government regulators, have worked to bring the darkened corners of the economy to light. The essays in Capitalism's Hidden Worlds explore how the capitalist marketplace sustains itself, how it acquires legitimacy and even prestige, and how the marginalized and the dispossessed find ways to make ends meet. Contributors: Bruce Baker, Eileen Boris, Eli Cook, Hannah Frydman, James Hollis, Owen Hyman, Anna Kushkova, Christopher McKenna, Kenneth Mouré, Philip Scranton, Bryan Turo.

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In Subjects of Advice, Ivan Lupić uncovers the rich interconnectedness of dramatic art and the culture of counsel in the early modern period. While counsel was an important form of practical knowledge, with concrete political consequences, it was also an ingrained cultural habit, a feature of obligatory mental, moral, and political hygiene. To be a Renaissance subject, Lupić claims, one had to reckon with the advice of others. Lupić examines this reckoning in a variety of sixteenth-century dramatic contexts. The result is an original account of the foundational role that counsel played in the development of Renaissance drama. Lupić begins by considering the figure of Thomas More, whose influential argument about counsel as a form of performance in Utopia set the agenda for the entire century. Resisting linear narratives and recovering, instead, the simultaneity of radically different kinds of dramatic experience, he shows the vitality of later dramatic engagements with More's legacy through an analysis of the moral interlude staged within Sir Thomas More, a play possibly coauthored by Shakespeare. More also helps explain the complex use of counsel in Senecan drama, from the neo-Latin plays of George Buchanan, discussed in connection with Buchanan's political writings, to the historical tragedies of the mid-sixteenth century. If tyranny and exemplarity are the keywords for early Elizabethan drama of counsel, for the plays of Christopher Marlowe it is friendship. Lupić considers Marlowe's interest in friendship and counsel, most notably in Edward II, alongside earlier dramatic treatments, thus exposing the pervasive fantasy of the ideal counselor as another self. Subjects of Advice concludes by placing King Lear in relation to its dramatic sources to demonstrate Shakespeare's deliberate dispersal of counsel throughout his play. Counsel's customary link to plain and fearless speech becomes in Shakespeare's hands a powerful instrument of poetic and dramatic expression.

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Throughout the pharaonic period, hieroglyphs served both practical and aesthetic purposes. Carved on stelae, statues, and temple walls, hieroglyphic inscriptions were one of the most prominent and distinctive features of ancient Egyptian visual culture. For both the literate minority of Egyptians and the vast illiterate majority of the population, hieroglyphs possessed a potent symbolic value that went beyond their capacity to render language visible. For nearly three thousand years, the hieroglyphic script remained closely bound to indigenous notions of religious and cultural identity. By the late antique period, literacy in hieroglyphs had been almost entirely lost. However, the monumental temples and tombs that marked the Egyptian landscape, together with the hieroglyphic inscriptions that adorned them, still stood as inescapable reminders that Christianity was a relatively new arrival to the ancient land of the pharaohs. In Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination, Jennifer Westerfeld argues that depictions of hieroglyphic inscriptions in late antique Christian texts reflect the authors' attitudes toward Egypt's pharaonic past. Whether hieroglyphs were condemned as idolatrous images or valued as a source of mystical knowledge, control over the representation and interpretation of hieroglyphic texts constituted an important source of Christian authority. Westerfeld examines the ways in which hieroglyphs are deployed in the works of Eusebius and Augustine, to debate biblical chronology; in Greek, Roman, and patristic sources, to claim that hieroglyphs encoded the mysteries of the Egyptian priesthood; and in a polemical sermon by the fifth-century monastic leader Shenoute of Atripe, to argue that hieroglyphs should be destroyed lest they promote a return to idolatry. She argues that, in the absence of any genuine understanding of hieroglyphic writing, late antique Christian authors were able to take this powerful symbol of Egyptian identity and manipulate it to serve their particular theological and ideological ends.

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