Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Suja A. Thomas, a professor of law at the University of Illinois College of Law, has written The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries (Cambridge University Press, 2016)–a book comprising history, political science, and constitutional jurisprudence. Her topic is the history of the jury in American law and its decline over the last century and a half. Thomas argues that the jury should be considered a branch of the government, its own powers and authority under the Constitution. Her argument is premised upon the original understanding of the constitutional provisions regarding the jury’s role in not only the judiciary, but the governance of the United States. She traces the gradual decline of the jury’s power over the course of the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. Today, judges perform many of the tasks that were originally in the province of the jury, often reducing the jury to an advisory body. Thomas contends that this state of affairs harms all actors in the American system: the traditional three branches of government, judges, juries, citizens, and parties to civil and criminal lawsuits. She urges reforms that will enhance juries power to not only decide cases, but to check the power of prosecutors and legislatures. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

In The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Asif Siddiqi approaches the history of the Soviet space program as a combination of engineering and imagination, both necessary to achieve the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Beginning in the late 19th century,...

Teenagers get a lot of bad press. Whether it’s how they look, how they dress, the things they say, the way they say it – it sometimes seems as if they can’t get anything right. And when it comes to language, it’s clear that teenagers are special. But though anecdotal evidence abounds, just how special, and in what ways, has rarely been the subject of detailed empirical research. Sali Tagliamonte’s book Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is the first step towards filling that gap. Using a variety of data sources and approaches, the book zooms in on some of the “funky features” that set teen language apart. In this interview, we discuss several of the words and structures featured in the book: “just”, “stuff”, “weird”, “awesome”, and the much-maligned “like.” We also discuss the special ecological niche that teen language has in the process of language change.

In his shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divinity School, charts the institutional and intellectual history of hospitals or bimaristans in medieval Egypt and the Levant. A central argument of this book is that hospitals in Islamdom were more than just institutions where the sick were treated; hospitals also served as important sites of communal services and congregation, as urban architectural monuments, and as symbols and expressions of a rulers political authority. By exploring an astonishing variety and number of sources, Ragab provides an unparalleled window into the aspirations and operations that defined the medieval Islamic hospital. This splendid new book will be of great interest to students of medieval Islamic history, religion and science, medical history, and the study of Islam and religion more broadly.

Prerna Singh has written How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Singh is the Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University and faculty fellow at the Watson Institute. How do sub-units of government meet the everyday needs of their residents? Do they vary in how well they provide basic health and education services? Singhs book makes a novel argument about these questions with extensive original data collection. How Solidarity Works suggests that sub-national units, states and provinces, can develop solidarity between residents. When this solidarity is high it is associated with developing strong regimes of social welfare programs. Conversely, when sub-national solidarity is low, there is little basis around which to provide for those in greatest need. This intricately argued book marshals an enormous amount of original information about several states in India. The empirical findings and larger theoretical argument are remarkable and worthy of replication outside of India.

Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Marc-William Palen challenges this commonplace. Instead, he notes, American adherents to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy faced off against and ultimately lost to a powerful version of protectionist economic nationalism inspired by German-American economic theorist Friedrich List. The success of Listian protectionism spurred closed-door, aggressive US expansionism and also challenged free-trade orthodoxies in Britain, where political-economic policy also shifted toward protectionism by the end of the nineteenth century.

Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016), William Cavert examines how Londoners first grappled with the problem of air pollution created by the burning of coal. With concerns expressed for the dwindling supply of wood in England, Londoners in the 16th and 17th centuries increasingly turned to coal to heat their homes and power their businesses. As the amount of smoke produced by burning coal grew it prompted a variety of responses, from crown-directed efforts to prevent it from contaminating the royal space to its adoption in poems and plays as a symbol of modern urban life. As Cavert reveals, these efforts to grapple with the problem of coal smoke presaged the reaction to the much larger issue of industrial pollution throughout England during the Industrial Revolution and, in the process, framed many of these issues in ways with which people are familiar today.

If you want to know how to bring future mass atrocities to an end, the best place to start is to examine how past mass atrocities have ended. This simple piece of logic is at the heart of Bridget Conley-Zilkic’s new edited collection titled How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala, Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2016). As Conley points out in her introduction, leaders choose to engage in mass atrocities because the rewards for doing so seem greater than the cost. They end either because they have achieved their goal or because the balance of rewards and costs has changed. So, for people interested in preventing or stopping mass atrocities, the challenge lies in changing that balance. This book, then, examines a variety of different case studies to understand how the changing calculus of rewards and cots has occurred historically. The case studies are superb, the range of cases broad and the analysis perceptive. It is a sobering book to read, one that avoids easy answers or platitudes. But behind it lies a determination to make a difference. This is one of an occasional series of podcasts that address the question of preventing or responding to mass atrocities. Earlier this summer I interviewed Scott Straus about his book Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. In the next couple months I’ll also speak with Jim Waller and Carrie Booth Walling.

Kieko Matteson’s Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an impressive study of the economic and political vitality of the forest, from the reign of Louis XIV through the middle of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Franche-Comte region, the book explores the meanings and values of the forest to a range of stakeholders– the state, landowners, manufacturers, and peasants–all of whom sought varying modes and degrees of control over Frances woodland resources and spaces. Examining key moments in the states attempt to manage the forest, the book pays close attention to local forms of response and resistance to interventions such as the Ordinance of 1669 and the Forest Code of 1827. Revealing the deeply political significance of environmental resources and concerns throughout a period of revolutionary upheaval, including shifts from monarchy to republic to empire, and back again, Forests in Revolutionary France is a book that reminds us of the connections and tensions between the histories of central authorities and everyday lives, between private and public interests, and between tradition and modernity in the discourses and practices of conservation, community, and property over two centuries. Examining the long and complex history that notions of preservation and degradation have had in France, as elsewhere, the book also contributes to our understanding of contemporary concerns over the uses and abuses of the forest in an era of increasing awareness of climate change and the need for more sustainable alternatives to existing/previous approaches to the natural environment.

In The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Jack Jacobs, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center, investigates how the Jewish backgrounds of major Critical Theorists, and the ways in which they related to their origins, impacted upon their work, the history of the Frankfurt School, and differences that emerged among them over time. Jacobs builds an in depth picture of these theorists, particularly in relation to their theorization of antisemitism and their attitudes towards Israel. This book is a definitive history of the topic which will be referenced for many years to come. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at [email protected].

Miranda Brown‘s new book takes a sustained look at the role and significance of the medical fathers in the historiography of Chinese medicine. Paying careful attention to the ubiquity and persistence of figures including Bian Que, Chunyu Yi, Liu Xiang, Zhang Ji, and more, The Art of Medicine in Early...

Working against the tendency to conflate the analytic categories “rule of law,” and “law and order,” Nick Cheesman’s Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order (Cambridge University Press, 2015) makes a significant two-fold contribution, one as “the first serious attempt for half a century to situate Myanmar’s courts in its politics;” and the other, that rather than reproduce the binaried, linear thinking inherent to terms like “rule by law,” Cheesman exposes and repairs a significant conceptual weakness in rule of law scholarship through the analytic lens of law and order. Martin Krygier writes, “Opposing the Rule of Law combines three elements rarely seen in one place: fine-grained, indeed masterly, unravelling of Myanmar criminal laws social and political history, character and significance; an original and sophisticated account of the rule of law and its enemies in Myanmar, generally, and in principle; and uncommonly fine prose. It is a tour de force, instructive–indeed illuminating–and a pleasure to read.” Eve Darian-Smith highlights the study’s rich empirical research and assesses the book as “an extraordinary achievement.” Engaging with Opposing the Rule of Law’scareful and nuanced analysis reveals that this praise, from leading scholars of rule of law, social theory, legal anthropology, and socio-legal studies, is well deserved. Jothie Rajah is Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago. She writes on rule of law discourses and can be reached at [email protected].

What role does Bangalore’s private news culture play in shaping the southern Indian metropolis’ ongoing urban transformation? Sahana Udupa‘s new book Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015) answers this question through a fascinating and fine grained ethnography of the city’s bi-lingual news media. Exploring differences amongst the English language and local language press, class-based civic activism, novelties in news room practices and layers of journalistic identities the book shows the ways in which a certain type of aspiration that has come to characterize some news outlets, conflicts and contends with the visibility of local urban cultures and the struggle for dominance amongst different actors in the news field.

The Chinese Revolution was a profoundly theatrical event. Brian James DeMare’s new book explores the relationship between drama and political action in China, from the earliest era of communist Red Drama to the establishment of Mao’s cultural army and beyond. Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in Chinas Rural Revolution (Cambridge...

Peter K. Enns is the author of Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Enns is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University. The rise of mass incarceration in the United States is one of the most critical outcomes of the last half-century. Incarceration Nation combines close analysis of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon’s presidential campaigns with 60 years of data analysis. In contrast to conventional wisdom, Enns shows that over this time period, politicians responded to an increasingly punitive public by pushing policy in a more punitive direction. The book also shows that media coverage of rising crime rates fueled the public’s attitudes. More recently, a decline in public punitiveness helps explain the current bipartisan calls for criminal justice reform.

Michael Goebel‘s Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) thinks globally while focusing on the local, everyday histories of non-Europeans in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Examining the myriad ways that Paris functioned as a hatchery or clearinghouse for the development of anti-imperial ideas and movements, the book argues that the social history of migration is central to any understanding of the political and intellectual histories of nationalism, from the interwar years through the period of decolonizations that followed the Second World War. Anti-Imperial Metropolis traces the experiences and statuses of different categories of non-Europeans in the city, groups identified variously as French citizens, colonial subjects, and foreigners. Interested in how non-European students, workers, and activists from various parts of the globe met and interacted in Paris, the book details how politicization happened when it did, and how differences between communities revealed crucial inconsistencies and contradictions in the ideological underpinnings and workings of imperialism itself. Moving from the private worlds of non-Europeans as they lived day-to-day in the city, to the work of mutual aid associations, to the impact these communities and their exchanges could have on international diplomacy, the book reveals much about the imbrication of culture and politics. Drawing on a wealth of archival material from several countries, Anti-Imperial Metropolis offers readers new perspective on Paris’ interwar past while making a significant contribution to the transnational history of empires and their undoings.

A village terrorized by a man eating tiger and a state struggling to implement possibly the largest social security program in the world coalesce in this wonderful ethnography of bureaucracy by Nayanika Mathur. Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is a detailed account of paper that reveals the unintended consequences of reforms, the problems with implementing new programs and the inability of state officials to act when faced with crises. Rich, lively, and theoretically compelling Paper Tiger pushes us to rethink how the state operates in India and beyond. Ian M. Cook is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on small cities, rhythms and everyday life in south India. His publications can be accessed at ceu.academia.edu/IanCook. He can be reached at [email protected].

The plight of Afghanistan remains as relevant a question as ever in 2016. Just what did the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the international occupation of this country accomplish? Will an Afghan government ever exercise effective control over its territory and build a modern, prosperous integrated nation-state? How will Afghanistan evolve in light of the Taliban’s enduring strength and the rise of groups like the Islamic State? What role can regional powers like Pakistan and China play in the future of this nation? Timothy Nunan (Harvard Academy Scholar for International and Area Studies) offers news ways to think about these questions in his book Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Unlike many existing works, Nunan does not limit his analysis to how Afghanistan became an important aspect of great power politics or Cold War rivalries. Instead, he offers a fascinating history of how ideas about international development and humanitarianism played out in this nation from the beginning of the Cold War to the start of the Taliban’s rule. Drawing on wide array of archival research and oral interviews conducted in multiple languages, Nunan describes how Americans, Soviets, and Europeans failed to “modernize” Afghanistan in ways that made sense to them. He also explains how events in Afghanistan help elucidate larger changes in the fields of international development and humanitarianism. As the failure to produce a modernized “third-world state” became more obvious, NGOs such asMedecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan deployed new ideas about humanitarianism to justify their interventions in Afghanistan on the behalf of helpless victims.While Nunan deserves credit for exploring the motivations and assumptions of foreign actors, he also never loses sight of how Afghanistan’s complex history shaped events on the ground. In particular, he excels at describing how the idea of Afghanistan as a Pashtun nation-state influenced the way actors conceived of development and humanitarian intervention. Timely and well-written, Humanitarian Intervention stands out as a thought-provoking international history that elucidates the difficulties involved in building a “modern” nation. It also raises important questions about just how much the “humanitarian interventions” of NGOs can accomplish in a world where the existence of “failed states” often results in mass killing and violence.

In The People’s Game: Football, State and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Alan McDougall looks at football from the top-down and bottom-up: as a tool of the state, as forming regional identities in East Germany and in a reunified Germany, and as a popular pastime. Although characterized by mediocrity compared to other sports in East Germany, McDougall demonstrates the ways in which football gave people a means of expressing identities that were separated from and even opposed to that endorsed by the state. At the same time, he argues, this was a “constrained autonomy,” one that was shaped by the tensions between Eigen-Sinn and conformity. The East German state has been viewed as a monolith, but recent scholarship – including this book – reveals its fractures. McDougall’s analysis exposes the limits and dysfunctionalities of the state and the communist party’s leadership. The People’s Game not only adds to our understanding of communist Eastern Europe, it also contributes to the growing field of sports history. Amanda Jeanne Swain is executive director of the Humanities Commons at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Russian and East European history at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the intersections of national, Soviet and European identities in the Baltic countries. Recent publications include articles in Ab Imperio and Cahiers du Monde Russe.

The competition seems to be a crucial part of the classical music world. In Performing Civility: International Competitions in Classical Music (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Dr. Lisa McCormick, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh, offers a unique insight into the history, function and meaning of the classical music competition. The book offers both a rich history of competitions along with a detailed ethnography of competitors, juries and audiences. McCormick uses a detailed engagement with contemporary cultural sociology to grapple with one of the core questions facing the study of culture, of how performances can be measured, codified and judgements ultimately made. The book also engages with gender, comportment and the body, to think through the interaction of performer, judges and audiences, giving an insight into not only the classical competition, but the nature and function of culture in contemporary society. The book will be important reading beyond sociology, for music scholars and anyone interested in arts and culture.

Calling into question common assumptions regarding the supposedly antagonist relationship between literary criticism and psychoanalytic reading, Jean-Michel Rabatepaints a picture of reconciliation rather than rift. Drawing from a vast store of cultural incident–from Sophie Calle’s modern art to the novels of Henry James–The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 2014) argues that psychoanalysis and active literary reading are both implicated in the same process, one which engages the unconscious and makes one an “ambassador” thereto. In our interview, Rabate holds court on various issues, including the similarities between Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung, as well as the status of James Joyce as sinthome of literature. Moving beyond the textual, he also captivatingly considers not only the relationship between trauma and perversion but also the ways in which Lacan and Derrida differed in their interpretation of the “public intellectual” role and its responsibilities. A startling intellectual himself, Rabate illuminates and enthralls in his conversation as much as in his writing. Michael Mungiello is interested in the implications psychoanalysis has on broader cultural studies, ranging from literature to politics to television and film. He lives in Washington, DC and is originally from New Jersey.

Some books fly high above the field, making sweeping generalizations about big questions. Other books circle over a specific problem, analyzing it in great detail to say something important about a single subject. Joshua Zimmerman‘s The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) shows how important and valuable books that adopt the latter approach can be. The book is an exceptionally rich account of the attitudes, politics, policies and actions of the Polish Underground regarding Polish Jews during the Second World War. Zimmerman, Associate Professor of History at Yeshiva University in New York, spent years exploring archives, memoirs and secondary sources in preparing the book. Nearly every page of the book displays this research, with extensive quotes from newspapers, internal communications and leaders within the army. Zimmerman is well-aware of the historical and political stakes involved in his question. His answers are careful, nuanced and balanced. I can imagine people disagreeing with his conclusions (although I personally am convinced), but it’s hard to imagine a more thorough attempt to approach the question. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the interaction of Polish Jews and Polish institutions and individuals during the war. Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas. His research and teaching concentrates on the history of violence and human rights, focusing especially on the history of genocide. His writing centers around a pedagogy titled Reacting to the Past. Here he has written, among others, The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. He can be reached at [email protected].

Samara Klar and Yanna Krupnikov are the authors of Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Klar is assistant professor of political science at the University of Arizona; Krupnikov is assistant professor of political science at Stony Brook University. Independents voters number up into 40% range in some elections, but are largely misunderstood. Are they apathetic? Centrist? Or undecided voters? Klar and Krupnikov suggest something quite different. They argue that many independent voters are partisans in disguise, hiding partisan-leanings because of a perceived social stigma. Through a series of experiments and related studies, they show that the social desirability of independence prevents many from declaring a party affiliation, but also diminishes other forms of political participation.

Parsis, also known as Zoroastrians, were deeply entwined with the colonial legal system of British India and Burma, far beyond what one might expect from their relativity small numbers. Mitra Sharafi, in her wonderful new book Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), explores this anomaly and how – as legislators, lawyers, litigants, judges and lobbyists – they managed to maintain the contours of their distinctive ethno-religious community. With fascinating legal cases, lively personalties and a deep discussion of how identity and litigation interact, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia is a compelling and engaging account of a community with a unique and intriguing relationship with colonial rule.

For most of recorded history, single rulers such a kings, queens, chiefs, and emperors exercised authority over human populations. Jeroen Duindam (Professor of Early Modern History, Leiden University) examines an important part of this story in his new book Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He employs an easy-to-follow, four-level comparative framework that explains how dynastic power evolved in kingdoms as diverse as the Qing Empire, Mughal Empire, France, and Dahomey in Africa. The use of this framework allows Duindam to move beyond the pitfalls of many comparative works. With careful attention to detail, he recounts how “divergent practices” of dynastic rule “can be seen as part of the same pattern,” as well as how “striking similarities hide profound differences (14).” This approach allows him to illustrate the tendency of scholars to overstate the differences between “Eastern” and “Western” dynasties; it also puts him in a strong position to make astute observations about the role women played in the functioning of dynastic power. Just as important, Duindam’s analysis of dynastic power raises important questions about how modern governments maintain their authority and how the “masses” view the exercise of power over them. Whatever one thinks of Duindam’s specific arguments, he has authored a well-crafted, thought-provoking work that should be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about global history and the exercise of power.

Shana Kushner Gadarian and Bethany Albertson are the authors of Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World (Cambridge UP, 2015). Gadarian is assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University; Albertson is assistant professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin. Anxious Politics explores the emotional side of politics. Albertson and Gadarian argue that political anxiety triggers politics engagement in ways that are potentially both promising and harmful for democracy. Using public health, immigration, terrorism, and climate change, the book demonstrates that anxiety affects how we consume political news, who we trust, and what politics we support. Anxiety about politics triggers coping strategies in the political world, where these strategies are often shaped by partisan agendas.

When former Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas traveled to Havana in 1959 to celebrate the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Fidel Castro in front of a crowd of thousands, providing the early sketches of an image of unquestioned Mexican support for revolutionary Cuba that would...

Erica Fox Brindley‘s new book is a powerful study of the history of conceptions of ethnicity in early China that focuses on the Hua-xia and the peoples associated with its southern frontier (Yue/Viet). Informed by a careful accounting of extant textual, linguistic, and archaeological forms of evidence, Ancient China and the...

Hildegard of Bingen was many things: a religious leader, a prolific letter-writer, a visionary prophet, possibly a compiler of medical lore, and certainly one of the most important composers of the 12th century. In recent years, Hildegard’s reception in academic circles has, for good and compelling reasons, focused on her status as a powerful, educated, and brilliantly creative woman in an era when few women were afforded such opportunities. But this has not been Hildegard’s only legacy. Jennifer Bain‘s recent book, Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of Medieval Composer (Cambridge University Press,2015), charts the 19th-century reception of Hildegard’s life and music, and in doing so provides valuable perspective on the version of Hildegard that we know and love today. As Bain demonstrates, Hildegard has been in an almost constant state of revival since the early 19th century, and at every turn she has meant something different: depending on the interests of the scholars who were reviving her (who were, themselves, grappling with very specific historical circumstances, including the long-term fallout of the Napoleonic wars and the very long-term fallout of the Protestant Reformation), Hildegard has been important as a German, a Catholic, a Benedictine, and a mystic, as well as as a woman. Further reading/listening: For listeners who are unfamiliar with Hildegard’s music, here is LaReverdie’s recording of one of the melodies mentioned in the interview: O virga ac diadema. There are also three publications by Prof. Bain which expand on issues that we discussed in this interview: “Hildegard on 34th Street: Chant in the Marketplace.” Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 6, no. 1 (2004). “Hildegard, Hermannus, and Late Chant Style.” Journal of Music Theory 52, no. 1 (2008). “Hooked on Ecstasy: Performance ‘Practice’ and the Reception of the Music of Hildegard of Bingen,” in The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Medieval and Renaissance Music: Essays in Honour of Timothy J. McGee, ed. Brian Power and Maureen Epp (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 253-273.

Christopher Phelps is an associate professor at the University of Nottingham and co-author of Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Phelps and Howard Brick have written a comprehensive history of the American left. Beginning with the multiple strands of radicalism prior to 1940, the book traces its development to recent movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Queer Nation, and Earth First! As a heterogeneous group the left has sought to expand personal freedom, and social, economic and political equality through the broad distribution of power. Instead of progressive reforms of existing systems radicals have called for a change in the structures of society. Under a large ideological tent the movement has included socialist, communist, labor activist, anarchist, and pacifists working against the hierarchies of class, race, and sex. From the New Left of the 1960s to the sanctuary movement of the religious left, as activist they have challenged all forms of inequality, militarization, capitalism, and ecological disaster. Radicals have continually struggled with factional disputes, cooptation by the mainstream, and a lack of a coherent and unifying political strategy. Currently at low ebb, radicalism is facing extremes form of capitalism, police states, resource scarcity, and a dystopian future calling for a new realism and for reaching out to a wider constituency. The authors argue that the effectiveness of radical movements must reflect egalitarian and democratic values while retaining a concern for the rights of the individual.

In Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press 2015), Peter Thorsheim explores the role of waste and recycling in Britain under conditions of total war. Thorsheim argues wartime salvage efforts linked civilians socially as well as materially to the war. Salvage drives served to focus people’s efforts and helped them make sense of the events around them and their role in the conflict. The ebb and flow of resource scarcity served as a metric in which to measure changing military and strategic concerns against the Axis, but also complicated the wartime alliance between the British Empire and the United States. Although essential for national survival, Thorsheim shows how wartime salvage tended to alienate as much as unite the British public. Vigorous, but often ill-conceived, salvage efforts led to infringements of civil liberties, destroyed historical artifacts, and damaged private property. Some materials were never recycled and left to languish in enormous dumps long after the end of the war. The national salvage effort angered thousands and left many without compensation for their losses, souring a generation on recycling. Unlike the environmental movement of the 1970s, Waste into Weapons shows recycling was a means to further destruction rather than conservation. Thorsheim’s book sheds light on a little known episode in environmental history and provides alternative genealogy of recycling in the twentieth century.

Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopher’s stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this fascinating account of the historical conceptual framework of magic, Copenhaver, who is distinguished professor of philosophy and history at UCLA, explains the difference between good and bad magic, why Catholic Church fathers endorsed some magical beliefs (but drew the line at amulets and talismans), and how the rise of mechanistic philosophy transformed magic from being reputable to being a joke.

The new edited volume by Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black and Dagmar Schafer is a wonderfully interdisciplinary global history of rice, rooted in specific local cases, that spans 15 chapters written by specialists in the histories of Africa, the Americas, and several regions of Asia. Rice: Global Networks and...

Today, sustainability is all the rage. But when and why did the idea of sustainable development emerge, and how has its meaning changed over time? Stephen Macekura’s new book, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015) explores this question by connecting three of the most important aspects of the twentieth century: decolonization, the rise of environmentalism, and the pursuit of economic development and modernization in the Third World. Macekura, who is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Indiana University, demonstrates how environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) attempted to promote environmental protection in the post-colonial world, then, after failing to do so, challenged the economic development approaches of the United States, World Bank, and United Nations. The book reveals how environmental activists initially conceived of “sustainable development” as a way to link environmental protection with Third World concerns about equality and justice in the global economy, but how, over time, the phrase’s meaning moved far away from this initial conception. In addition to exploring the idea of “sustainable development,” Macekura also examines the growth and limits of the environmental movement’s power. He pays close attention to how international political disputes have scuttled major global treaties over issues such as climate change; he also documents the evolution of international development politics and policy since 1945. In sum, Of Limits and Growth offers a new history of sustainability by elucidating the global origins of environmental activism, the ways in which environmental activists challenged development approaches worldwide, and how environmental non-state actors reshaped the United States’ and World Bank’s development policies.

In her shining new book Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Hina Azam, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, explores the diversity and complexity of pre-modern Muslim legal discourses on rape and sexual violation. The reader of this book is treated to a thorough and delightful analysis of the range of attitudes, assumptions, and hermeneutical operations that mark the Muslim legal tradition on the question of sexual violation. Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of this book is the way it showcases the staggering range and diversity of approaches to defining and adjudicating rape that populate the Muslim legal tradition. Focusing primarily on the Maliki and Hanafi schools of law, Azam convincingly demonstrates that Muslim legal discourses on rape were animated and informed by competing ways of imagining broader categories such as sovereignty, agency, property, and rights. In our conversation, we talked about problems of translation involved in using the category of rape in relation to pre-modern discursive archives, proprietary and theocentric approaches to sexual ethics in medieval Islam, the differences between the Maliki and Hanafi school on defining and punishing male-female rape, and the implications and significance of this study to the contemporary legal landscape in Muslim societies. This meticulously researched and lucidly written book will be of much interest to students of Islam, Islamic Law, Gender and Sexuality, and Muslim intellectual history. It will also make a great contribution to upper level undergraduate and graduate seminars on these topics.

In Gender Hierarchy in the Qur’an: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Dr. Karen Bauer tackles one of the foremost hot-button questions of the day: What is the role of gender in the Qur’an? Dr. Bauer’s adroit study will leave the reader informed but perhaps also disrupted, given the vast spectrum of competing, sometimes contradictory, interpretive paradigms that she explores. A key strength of the text, moreover, is that in addition to its meticulous investigation of primary texts from medieval and modern traditions of Qur’anic exegesis, Dr. Bauer also conducts numerous in-person interviews with prominent scholars across the Muslim world, including Iran and Syria. Thus, from a literary perspective, the text presents the reader with a compelling style seldom found in Qur’anic studies publications, seamlessly weaving together close textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork. Notably, Bauer also gives attention to Sunni as well as Shi’i perspectives on her study, thus offering provocative comparison and breadth of analysis. Given the careful scholarship of the book combined with its equally careful presentation, Bauer’s masterful monograph will almost certainly become standard reading for anyone interested in questions related to the Qur’an and gender. It will also interest scholars, more broadly, in the fields of Qur’anic studies, gender studies, law, political science, and the history of Islamic thought.

Eitan Hersh is the author of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Hersh is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University. We’ve come to think of political campaigns as highly sophisticated data-processing machines, capable of precisely targeting voters based on the last item they bought on Amazon. Hacking the Electorate suggests something very different about how campaigns actually target voters. Hersh argues that political campaigns vary greatly in how detailed their data actually are, at the whim of whether the state collects detailed or more general information about voters. Campaigns typically use the best available public data to design targeting strategies. As a result, strategies vary across the country based on how campaigns perceive voters in different information environments. If you just haven’t had enough podcasting for the day, click over to my good friends at the Scholar Strategy Network and their new podcast, No Jargon. Listen to their first podcast featuring my new book, Tea Party Divided (Praeger, 2015) and learn about how the Tea Party is shaping the contentious politics of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail.

In YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Cecile E. Kuznitz, Associate Professor of Jewish History and Director of Jewish Studies at Bard College, offers the first book-length history of YIVO, the center for Yiddish scholarship founded in the 1920s by a group of Eastern European Jewish intellectuals. Could scholarship serve as the foundation for a diaspora nationalism? Kuznitz traces the ups and downs of YIVO, using unpublished documents from the center’s archives.

Malick Ghachem‘s recent book The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012) takes a long look at Haiti’s colonial history on the legal questions around slavery. In particular, he traces the implementation of the Code Noir, France’s earliest attempt to impose a legal structure on its American...

Douglas L. Kriner and Andrew Reeves have written The Particularistic President: Executive Branch Politics and Political Inequality (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Kriner is associate professor of political science at Boston University; Reeves is assistant professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis In the midst of a presidential election in which every candidate claims to want to serve the entire country, can we believe them? Are presidents servants of the nation or do they pursue much more narrow constituencies? Kriner and Reeves argue that, rather than governing as universalists, presidents are particularistic, adhering to the electoral and partisan goals of re-election and advancing their party. They show this with evidence on presidential decisions on base closure, trade, and disaster relief.

The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge UP, 2015) is a new contribution to the study of Islam and more specifically to the history of Islamic Law and its development. Guy Burak, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies librarian at New York University, explores the Ottomans’ adoption of one branch of the Hanafi legal tradition as the official school (madhhab) of the dynasty. The period of time in which this process occurred was during the 15th to 18th centuries, and Burak focuses on the lands of Greater Syria. What Burak seeks to illustrate is that through the adoption of an official school of law, the Ottoman hierarchy played a significant role in how the school of law was shaped. Examples Burak provides to demonstrate this phenomenon are the institutionalization of the position of mufti, the formalization of genealogical literature (tabaqat), and the canonization process of books essential to the school. In addition to examining the propagators of official Ottoman positions, Burak also examines how scholars not part of the Ottoman mainstream branch functioned and responded to these changes. Overall, this work represents and important contribution to the study of Islam, the history of Islamic Law, and Ottoman Studies.

A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is the latest book by Gyanendra Pandey. The book analyses prejudice and democracy through a comparison of African Americans and Indian Dalits. Pandey’s method of exploring these disparate populations and enormously complex themes, is to focus on particular case studies that are at once both very private and public, and thus allow for a truly unique, subtle and delicate analysis of what would be unwieldy topics in another’s hands. Simultaneously small and large, the book’s protagonists and author’s questions remain in the reader’s mind, long after putting down the book.

In the historiography on South Asian Islam, the creation of Pakistan is often approached as the manifestation of a vague loosely formulated idea that accidentally emerged as a nation-state in 1947. In his magisterial new book Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Venkat Dhulipala, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, thoroughly and convincingly debunks such a narrative. Creating a New Medina is an encyclopedic masterpiece. Through a careful reading of a range of sources, including the religious writings of important 20th-century Muslim scholars, Dhulipala shows ways in which Pakistan was crafted and imagined as “The New Medina” that was to represent the leader and protector of the global Muslim community. What emerges from this thorough examination is a nuanced and complicated picture of the interaction of nationalism, religion, and politics in modern South Asian Islam. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues including the rise of Muslim nationalism in late colonial India, the contribution of B.R. Ambedkar to the public discussions and debates on Pakistan, ‘Ulama’ discourses and debates on Pakistan, and the partition and its afterlives. This wonderfully written and painstakingly researched book will be of tremendous interest to students and scholars of Muslim politics, nationalism and religion, and South Asian Islam.

Korea presents a fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity. For instance, the first continuous Christian community in the peninsula was founded by Koreans themselves without any missionaries coming into the country. In their new book, A History of Korean Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2014),Sebastian C. H. Kim and Kirsteen Kim provide the first English-language study that covers the history of Christianity, including Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy, from its beginnings in the peninsula to the present day. This thoroughly-researched work skillfully weaves together such subjects as church-state relations, spirituality, and the global impact of Korean Christianity, into a narrative that is easy for someone unfamiliar with the subject to follow, but deep enough that experts in the field will gain much from a careful reading.

In this podcast I talk with Laura F. Edwards, Peabody Family Professor of History at Duke University about her book, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (Cambridge University Press 2015). Per the book’s introduction, “[a]lthough hundreds of thousands of people died fighting in the Civil War, perhaps the war’s biggest casualty was the nation’s legal order. A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction explores the implications of this major change by bringing legal history into dialogue with the scholarship of other historical fields. Federal policy on slavery and race, particularly the three Reconstruction Amendments, are the best-known legal innovations of the era. Change, however, permeated all levels of the legal system, altering American’s relationship to the law and allowing them to move popular conceptions of justice into the ambit of government policy. The results linked Americans to the nation through individual rights, which were extended to more people and, as a result of new claims, were reimagined to cover a wider array of issues. But rights had limits in what they could accomplish, particularly when it came to the collective goals that so many ordinary Americans advocated. Ultimately, Laura F. Edwards argues, this new nation of rights offered up promises that would prove difficult to sustain.” Some of the topics we cover are: –The way, in the lead up to the Civil War, all arguments came back to the Constitution. –How wartime policies in both the Confederacy and the states that remained in the Union fundamentally remade the –legal authority of the nation. –Why the Confederacy’s legal order was at odds with its stated governing principles. –Popular conceptions of Reconstruction-era legal change.

Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling across Eurasia in a cannabis-induced haze? Or slow-moving but inexorable farmers from Anatolia? These are just some of the many possibilities discussed in the scholarly literature. But in 2012, a New York Times article announced that the problem had been solved, by a team of innovative biologists applying computational tools to language change. In an article published in Science, they claimed to have found decisive support for the Anatolian hypothesis. In their book, The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis make the case that this conclusion is premature, and based on unwarranted assumptions. In this interview, Asya and Martin talk to me about the history of the Indo-European homeland question, the problems they see in the Science article, and the form that a good theory of Indo-European origins needs to take.

Sarah S. Bush is the author of The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Dunn is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Temple University. Bush’s book examines the assortment of strategies countries use to promote democracy abroad. She tracks a change in strategy over the last several decades that are increasingly compatible to existing regimes. Rather than the approaches taken in the 1980s, which often threatened regime change, more recent attempts to spread democracy have become much tamer. The turn to non-governmental organizations to deliver these programs has changed the nature of democracy assistance. The book ends with two interesting illustrative case studies drawn from Tunisia and Jordan.

When the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery in Haiti and established its independence from France, it affected surrounding colonies in profound and unexpected ways. Ada Ferrer‘s new book Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2015) centers on the tension between the abolition of slavery...

Americans believe they have a number of protections on the job, which are common in other democracies (free speech and privacy, defense against capricious firing, etc.). They are wrong. And in her fascinating new book The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the legal historian Sophia Z. Lee wants to understand why. She explores two major campaigns, stretching roughly from the 1920’s to the 1980’s, to establish constitutional safeguards in the workplace, uncovers their remarkable successes, and ultimate failures. It is a story of unlikely bedfellows: black, pro-union labor activists like C.W. Rice and Charles Houston fighting if not quite alongside then at least parallel to anti-union, right-to-work corporate leaders like Cecil B. DeMille and William T. Harrison for a similar goal to contrary ends. Lee finds that, contrary to what many think, civil rights groups like the NAACP were actively pursuing employment safeguards in the postwar era, using the “exclusive representation” granted by the New Deal to unions to make creative arguments for “state action” on the basis of the “duty of fair representation.” At the same time, conservatives sought to roll back the dramatic expansion of organized labor during the late 1930’s and especially World War II (to a third of the non-agricultural workforce) by arguing that “closed shop” rules forced men to join unions and to pay for such things as lobbying. Initially, the courts rejected these latter petitions, during a time when corporations suffered from its Great Depression reputation. But in the late 1950’s, as Congress uncovered corruption in select unions and the civil rights movement steadily grew, businessmen and liberal Republicans had far more success allying themselves with discrimination cases. The Supreme Court, for its part, was caught between not wanting to uphold segregation in labor, or to establish safeguards that would force integration on the entire private sector. Free marketers had nightmares about the racial and economic implications of a workplace Constitution, and unions did, too, for different reasons. With this deadlock, administrative agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission became fertile arenas for legal expansions. The result is a tale of absorbing complexity–thankfully, lucidly and beautifully written.

Dealing with moral issues in a fair and balanced way is never easy. This is especially true since many contemporary moral questions are of such a highly personal nature. However, in his book An Introduction to Catholic Ethics Since Vatican II (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Dr. Andrew Kim does an excellent job of sensitively introducing the Catholic Church’s teachings on moral issues and the reasoning behind them. Through his deep knowledge of Catholic moral theology and an ability to explain difficult concepts through easy-to-understand metaphors, Dr. Kim has written a rich and thought-provoking book that will be useful for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of Catholic ethics, as well as for those who have to teach it to undergraduates.