Contested Currents presents a new perspective on the history of New England by following its many rivers—tracing how the changes Native Americans and European colonists made to rivers drove the dramatic environmental and social transformation of the region.

Focusing on the relations between Uruguay and the United States in the context of World War II, Forgotten Neighbors emphasizes Uruguay’s important role in the era’s inter-American affairs and in the evolving US security matrix, highlighting both the vast reach and limits of US power.

In Necessary Inventions, E. R. Truitt uses thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon—and his characterization as a prophetic figure of scientific modernity—to reveal the medieval thinking that enabled modern science to tell a story of scientific development that erased non-Christian texts, actors, and cultures from the history of science.

Rethinking the relationship of current literary criticism to the discipline’s past, Reading the Literary Past presents an interpretive approach to literary criticism grounded in critical histories rather than methods, attentive to the idiosyncrasy of reading and the contingencies influencing it.

Tacit Textuality is an ethnography about the practice of kombe in Zanzibar, in which Qurʾanic verses are liquefied and consumed as medicine across religious divides. Hanna Nieber investigates three foci: kombe’s materiality, its social context that includes interreligious relations, and how the materiality of the book becomes part of the story.

Hunch explores ten issues in geology and astronomy—among them what causes the heating of the sun’s surface and whether Palaeolithic people sailed across oceans—where the accepted scientific answers to these questions were challenged, and how following one’s intuition can often lead to great intellectual rewards.

Dyan Elliott demonstrates how scandal-averse policies in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy resulted in the widespread sexual abuse of boys from late antiquity through the later Middle Ages, and argues that the same clerical prerogatives and strategies for the cover-up of abuse remain in place today.

Pepperpot City, a lavishly illustrated collection of seventeen thematic essays ranging from memoir to investigative history written by veteran food writer and Philadelphian William Woys Weaver, provides an engaging and accessible tour of Old Philadelphia cuisine as well as modernized re-creations of historical dishes, including pepperpot soup.

This pioneering ethnography of the UN Human Rights Committee reveals how perpetual reporting, driven by hope and belief in rights, paradoxically reinforces state power. A compelling study for scholars, students, and practitioners of human rights, international law, and the anthropology of international organizations.

Music and Noise examines the practice of controversial Protestant parading in present-day Northern Ireland. Refraining from common categorizations of parading as straightforwardly political or apolitically “cultural,” anthropologist Sean French’s ethnographic study instead asks: political in what way?