Seasons's greetings! With the holidays rapidly approach, and with academic semesters winding down, you may find yourself with some downtime to enjoy a few of our new titles—or maybe one of them will make the perfect last-minute gift for the scholar in your life! Read on to enjoy our latest titles in American History, Anthropology, Literature, Political Science, and more!
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FEATURED TITLES
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The stories gathered here explore the vagaries of sexual desire, gender identity, and erotic attachment, revealing the surprising queerness of nineteenth-century American literature. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 344 pages | 6 x 9 |
"The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman" and Other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short StoriesAMERICAN HISTORY
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"With Capital Gains, the scholarly push to revive political economy and craft a new history of 20th century business, politics, and capitalism has found its vehicle. No longer can we cast 'business elites' as the thoughtless tools of the capitalist machine. Through rich, compelling archival research and authoritative historiographical analysis, these sophisticated essays make a powerful case for business as a multi-dimensional, ideologically diverse set of historical actors—just as eager to wield governing power as to limit it. To understand how capital gains influence today's global political economy, there is no better place to begin than with this exciting new history of capitalism in the United States."—Benjamin Waterhouse, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill "What is the most productive way to study the history of capitalism? The authors in this volume pursue a multidisciplinary approach and believe in the importance of institutions and public policy. For these reasons, Capital Gains is a valuable contribution to the historiography of the twentieth-century United States."—Kenneth Lipartito, Florida International University Appealing to historians working in the fields of business history, political history, and the history of capitalism, Capital Gains highlights the causes, character, and consequences of business activism and underscores the centrality of business to any full understanding of the politics of the twentieth century—and today. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 312 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"Taming Lust expands our knowledge of a little-known facet of the history of sexuality—the extensive record of human-animal intercourse—and makes an intriguing contribution to an emerging thesis that the revolutionary era unleashed a sexual revolution that both seduced and terrified those who lived through it."—Journal of American History "A valuable contribution to the histories of both sexuality and the early republic."—Law and History Review "Taming Lust performs a remarkable double feat of historical reconstruction. On the one hand, it uncovers the tangled roots of a pair of highly anomalous trials for bestiality in late eighteenth-century New England. On the other, it unfolds a broad panorama of the social, political, and sexual culture of an entire era. These paired objectives inform a writing that is strongly constructed, elegantly expressed, and larded with fascinating detail."—John Demos, author of The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic "Strange sexual perversities can provide a window into basic values of ordinary people at a particular time and place. Taming Lust does just that, offering a perceptive peek at New England near the end of the eighteenth century, and doing so in prose that almost sings."—Joseph J. Ellis, author of Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence "Impeccably researched, vividly narrated, and persuasively argued, Taming Lust opens up a compelling prospect of a society in crisis, at once attracted and repelled by the seductions of a modern, cosmopolitan world fast advancing all over the new American republic. The conflict between old and new ways briefly erupted in the two fascinating cases at the heart of this immensely readable book, when judicial authorities took the rare step of prosecuting ancient men on the margins of their communities for a capital offense that had not occupied the courts since the last days of Puritan rule."—Robert A. Gross, author of The Minutemen and Their World This fascinating history examines the circumstances of two elderly New Englanders who were prosecuted and sentenced to death for bestiality at the turn of the eighteenth century. Their astonishing cases become a springboard to examine the Enlightenment Era political and religious turmoil of the region. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 216 pages | 6 x 9 | 21 illus. |
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"A timely and important collection of essays on a subject of vital interest to historians of the early modern Atlantic world. By decisively moving away from an earlier generation of scholars who seemed to see slavery and urban life as incompatible, this substantial and original volume makes a major contribution to the ways in which we study Atlantic history and the African diaspora."—Vincent Brown, Harvard University In The Black Urban Atlantic, eleven original essays by leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Latin America chronicle the black experience in Atlantic ports, providing a rich and diverse portrait of the ways in which Africans experienced urban life during the era of plantation slavery. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 384 pages | 6 x 9 | 4 illus. > |
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"In Cutting Along the Color Line, Quincy Mills offers an unprecedented assessment of the complexities of black barbers and barbershops in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America." "Quincy T. Mills's important book provides fascinating insight into the history of African American barbers. He vividly captures their culture, traditions, and perseverance to succeed against tremendous odds. A brilliant overview of this prestigious tradition."—Zariff, barber to President Barack Obama "Cutting Along the Color Line is a singular achievement. Quincy Mills has taken a familiar institution, the neighborhood barbershop, and revealed an unknown history that utterly transforms our understanding of what we thought it was. Unpacking the economic, social, cultural, and political history of black barbering from slavery to the present contributes new insights to African American studies, American history, and black masculinities. Cutting Along the Color Line will have a permanent place on my syllabus."—Melissa Harris-Perry, Professor of Political Science at Tulane University and host of MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry "Cutting Along the Color Line is a rich and illuminating study of the role of barbers and barbershops in African American life. Through meticulous research and nuanced historical analysis, Quincy T. Mills vividly depicts how barbers navigated Jim Crow segregation in ways that were sophisticated as well as politically and culturally powerful. This imaginative book deeply enriches our understanding of how African American entrepreneurs were critical agents in the fight for racial equality."—Suzanne E. Smith, author of To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death Cutting Along the Color Line chronicles the cultural history of barber shops as businesses and civic institutions, demonstrating their central role in civil rights struggles throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 336 pages | 6 x 9 | 19 illus. |
Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America
ANTHROPOLOGY
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"Creative Urbanity is an artful rendering of ethnography's versatility and nuance, its multi-sited and multi-vocal possibilities. Guano uncovers dramatic transformations of urban space, class-culture, gender politics and aesthetics as they are refracted through the political-economic history of Genoa. Her subjects—newly fashioned tour-guides, entrepreneurs, and cultural brokers—embody resilience, creativity and precarious insecurity. An evocative narrative and sophisticated analysis, Creative Urbanity will be a must-read by all students of contemporary neoliberalism."—Carla Freeman, Emory University "Creative Urbanity is an extremely thoughtful and elegant work that connects to important dialogues of both anthropological analysis and urban theory in its identification of creative middle classes as agents in urban change. Moreover, it speaks eloquently to current literatures on European and Mediterranean cities but amplifies them in both scale and location, revealing an important and interesting case study that interrogates received wisdom."—Gary McDonogh, Bryn Mawr College Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Genoa, Italy, Creative Urbanity argues for an understanding of contemporary urban life that refuses scholarly condemnation of urban lifestyles and consumption and casts a fresh light on an oft-neglected social group—the middle class. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 248 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus. |
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"An important theoretical contribution to the social sciences, religion, philosophy, and critical legal studies, The Economy of Hope is not aiming to be a phenomenology of hope—indeed, it seems consciously to avoid pinning hope down that way—yet the combined essays very clearly lead us to consider the vectors, spaces, and reflexivities of hope as method."—Nancy Ries, Colgate University In The Economy of Hope, hope becomes not only a method of knowledge but also an essential framework for the sociocultural analysis of economic phenomena. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 208 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus. |
Creative Urbanity: An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization
The Economy of HopeLITERATURE
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"With its fascinating blend of poetics, historical prosody, and media history, Romantic Marks and Measures transforms the landscape of Romantic studies. Julia Carlson breaks new ground as she traces Wordsworth's poetic response to contemporary cartographers' efforts to inscribe the nation's terrain onto two-dimensional maps and contemporary elocutionists' efforts to draw sound out of books' printed pages. Scholars of Romantic poetry—and scholars of print culture more generally—will be grateful for the erudition, rigor, and stylistic flair of this book."—Deidre Lynch, Harvard University "A very fine, erudite, and useful book. Julia S. Carlson offers an acute, sustained reading of Wordsworth with a double focus by examining the material features of Wordsworth's verse in the peculiar context of the print culture of his time together with a consideration of the importance of maps for the conception, visualization, and writing of locales and the nation. The two reinforce each other in revelatory ways."—Ian Balfour, York University, Toronto "Romantic Marks and Measures is an unusually original and solid piece of scholarship—a significant intervention in British Romantic literary studies and in the study of print culture more generally. Julia S. Carlson is an exceptional writer, communicating a challenging and multifaceted argument through clear, vivid, and expressive prose."—Joshua Wilner, The Graduate Center, CUNY In Romantic Marks and Measures, Julia S. Carlson examines Wordsworth's poetry of "speech" and "nature" as a poetry of print, written and read in the midst of topographic and typographic experimentation and change. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 368 pages | 6 x 9 | 31 illus. |
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"An intellectually and imaginatively riveting book. Helen Thompson's original and erudite study of the 'chymical' underpinnings of the ostensibly modern representational practices that were reified in the eighteenth-century novel dramatically reorients our understanding not just of that genre but of the conditions of its existence."—Jayne Lewis, University of California, Irvine "The intellectual qualities of Fictional Matter are formidable: dense yet highly articulate writing, a deep understanding of Boyle's, Locke's, and Newton's thought, conceptual precision, and analytic brilliance. This is required reading for anyone thinking about the relationship between science and literature."—Wolfram Schmidgen, Washington University in St. Louis Fictional Matter argues that chemical definitions of particulate matter shaped eighteenth-century British science and literature. In this lucid, revisionary analysis of corpuscular science, Helen Thompson advances a new account of how the experimental production of empirical knowledge defined the emergent realist novel. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 368 pages | 6 x 9 | 12 illus. |
Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth's Poetry in Fields of Print
Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the NovelMEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES
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"Ingrid Nelson's Lyric Tactics is a vital and brilliant contribution to the new lyric studies. While hardly leaving behind formalist concerns, Nelson demonstrates the embeddedness of lyric form within specific cultural and institutional practices in original and eye-opening ways. The book breathes new life into Middle English lyric and sets the standard for future work in this still understudied genre."—Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia "The medieval lyric remains an uncodified form, an open topic demanding fresh perspectives and new tools of analysis. Ingrid Nelson accepts this challenge, shifting consideration from lyric form to lyric practice and, in the process, opening multiple new avenues of consideration. Noting that these poems are variously read and heard and spoken and sung, she offers new ways of thinking about vocality and voice. She shows herself a highly creative scavenger among fragments, partial and accidental survivals, self-thematized and unprofessional performances—crafting exemplary case studies that throw new light on medieval lyrical practice."—Paul Strohm, Columbia University "A sophisticated, painstaking, and original book. The thoughtfulness of its readings, and the sheer intellectual zest of Lyric Tactics make a significant impact on what we have come to call 'the new medieval lyric studies.'"—Ardis Butterfield, Yale University In Lyric Tactics, Ingrid Nelson argues that the lyric poetry of later medieval England is a distinct genre defined not by its poetic features—rhyme, meter, and stanza forms—but by its modes of writing and performance, which are ad hoc, improvisatory, and situational. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 224 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus. |
Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval EnglandPOLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
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"Stimulating and learned, Faces of Moderation displays the virtue of moderation in the very act of highlighting exemplary cases of the virtue in action from throughout the twentieth-century, granting readers a grounded understanding of its uses and limits. Aurelian Craiutu's conclusion, with its call for moderation in a hyperpartisan age, is intellectually moving and lyrically written."—Samuel Moyn, Harvard University "Aurelian Craiutu is devoted to rehabilitating what he believes to be, correctly in my view, the forgotten virtue of moderation. He demonstrates a considerable mastery of the topic and his knowledge of the central figures is impeccable."—Steven Smith, Yale University Examining the writings of twentieth-century thinkers such as Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Norberto Bobbio, Michael Oakeshott, and Adam Michnik, Faces of Moderation argues that moderation remains crucial for today's encounters with new forms of extremism. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914-24 is diplomatic history at its best."—Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut "Robert E. Hannigan presents a fresh perspective on long-familiar events that will cause readers to rethink what they have often taken for granted."—Justus Doenecke, author of Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America's Entry into World War I In The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914-1924, Robert E. Hannigan challenges the conventional belief that the United States entered World War I only because its hand was forced and disputes the claim that Washington was subsequently driven by a desire "to make the world safe for democracy." Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 368 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"What distinguishes Berel Lang's work is its rare combination of philosophical sophistication and nuance coupled with what can only be called moral sensitivity."—Michael L. Morgan, University of Toronto Berel Lang's Genocide: The Act as Idea analyzes and defends the distinctiveness of the concept of genocide as a notable advance in the history of moral and political thinking and practice. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 224 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 |
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Human Rights or Global Capitalism examines the application of neoliberal policies from a human rights perspective and asks whether states, by outsourcing to the private sector many services with a direct impact on human rights, abdicate their responsibilities to uphold human rights and violate international law. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 256 pages | 6 x 9 |
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"Jenna Reinbold explores the role of mythology in the assertion of human rights discourse and offers an original, profound, and provocative contribution to debates on foundationalism in human rights, on the politics of human rights, and on the relationship between the sacred and the secular in international politics."—Bronwyn Leebaw, University of California, Riverside "Seeing the Myth in Human Rights is an important work that is sharp but open-minded. Jenna Reinbold links the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the notion of myth, not to debunk the human rights project but to illuminate the best-known legal, moral, and political document of the twentieth century."—Alexandre Lefebvre, University of Sydney Seeing the Myth in Human Rights explores the role of myth in the creation and propagation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Drawing on records, publications, and speeches from the Declaration's creators as well as current scholarship on human rights, Jenna Reinbold sees the Declaration as an exemplar of modern mythmaking. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 208 pages | 6 x 9 |
Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes
The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914-24
Genocide: The Act as Idea
Human Rights or Global Capitalism: The Limits of Privatization
Seeing the Myth in Human RightsRELIGIOUS AND JEWISH STUDIES
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"This is a well-conceived and compelling volume that contributes beyond the sum of its component parts. The range of topics considered makes a strong case for the distinctive 'color' of the thirteenth-century Jewish experience."—Jeremy Cohen, Tel Aviv University "In very large measure, the studies that comprise Entangled Histories are innovative and impressive; often they are genuinely exceptional. The perspective, quality, and originality of these essays will render the book important and attractive even to scholars who are thoroughly conversant with the literature."—David Berger, Yeshiva University Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century provides a multifaceted account of Jewish life in Europe and the Mediterranean basin at a time when economic, cultural, and intellectual encounters coincided with heightened interfaith animosity. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 368 pages | 6 x 9 | 25 illus. |
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"In this masterful biography, Ismar Schorsch brings to life arguably the greatest of the nineteenth-century pioneers of Jewish scholarship. The portrait of Zunz that emerges is of a deeply learned, courageous, and visionary scholar whose work remains the starting point for many areas of inquiry. We are indebted to Schorsch for this loving and critical appraisal of a true giant."—Jay M. Harris, Harvard University "In this gripping and elegantly written book, Ismar Schorsch illuminates not only the contours of Leopold Zunz's remarkable life and scholarship but also what was politically and intellectually at stake in the academic study of Judaism in the nineteenth century. These are issues that endure beyond their original German context, and anyone interested in Jewish Studies, modern Judaism, or the challenges of modernity more generally will learn a tremendous amount from this thoughtful study."—Leora Batnitzky, Princeton University "Using an abundance of archival sources absent from the existing literature, Ismar Schorsch presents not only a biography of the most important figure in the nineteenth-century development of the academic study of Judaism but also an unparalleled depiction of his historical context. The book expands our understanding of both Leopold Zunz and modern Jewish Studies."—Michael A. Meyer, Hebrew Union College In 1818, with a single essay of vast scope and stunning detail, Leopold Zunz launched the turn to history in modern Judaism. In Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity, Ismar Schorsch, a distinguished scholar of German Jewish culture, has written the first full-fledged biography of this remarkable man. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 344 pages | 6 x 9 | 8 illus. |
Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century
Leopold Zunz: Creativity in AdversityUNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
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Between 2007 and 2012, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology conducted excavations at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat in the Sultanate of Oman under the direction of the late Gregory L. Possehl. The focus of these years was on the monumental stone towers of the third millennium B.C.E., looking at the when, how, and why of their construction through large-scale excavation, GIS-aided survey, and the application of radiocarbon dates. This has been the most comprehensive study of nonmortuary Bronze Age monuments ever conducted on the Oman Peninsula, and the results provide new insight into the formation and function of these impressive structures that surely formed the social and political nexus of Magan's kingdom. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 360 pages | 8 1/2 x 11 | 9 color, 242 b/w illus. |
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The Pre-Columbian Maya were organized into a series of independent kingdoms or polities rather than unified into a single state. The vast majority of studies of Maya states focus on the apogee of their development in the classic period, ca. 250-850 C.E. As a result, Maya states are defined according to the specific political structures that characterized classic period lowland Maya society. The Origins of Maya States is the first study in over 30 years to examine the origins and development of these states specifically during the preceding preclassic period, ca. 1000 B.C.E. to 250 C.E. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 704 pages | 6 x 9 | 124 illus. |
The Bronze Age Towers at Bat, Sultanate of Oman: Research by the Bat Archaeological Project, 2007-12
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