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The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France

Ronen Steinberg

This book examines how those who lived through the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution struggled to come to terms with it. It shows that, contrary to claims that are made often in the ... More

This book examines how those who lived through the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution struggled to come to terms with it. It shows that, contrary to claims that are made often in the literature, there were complicated, painful, and often honest debates about how to deal with the effects of mass violence on self and society after the Terror. Revolutionary leaders, relatives of victims, and ordinary citizens argued about how to hold those responsible for the violence accountable, how to offer some sort of relief to the victims, and how to commemorate this controversial episode in the politically charged climate of post-revolutionary France. Their solutions were not perfect, but their debates were innovative. The dilemmas that they struggled with, dilemmas around retribution, redress, and remembrance, derived from the democratizing impulses of the Revolution. Drawing on the concept of transitional justice and on the literature about the major traumas of the twentieth century, this book argues that the modern question of what to do with difficult pasts was born out of the social and political upheavals of the 18th century’s Age of Revolutions. Less

Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia

Wen-Qing Ngoei

This book recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from the Pacific War through the end of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. It argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast ... More

This book recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from the Pacific War through the end of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. It argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with pre-existing local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism into U.S. hegemony. Between the late 1940s and 1960s, Britain and its indigenous collaborators in Malaya and Singapore overcame the mostly Chinese communist parties of both countries by crafting a pro-West nationalism that was anticommunist by virtue of its anti-Chinese bent. London’s neocolonial schemes in Malaya and Singapore prolonged its influence in the region. But as British power waned, Malaya and Singapore’s anticommunist leaders cast their lot with the United States, mirroring developments in the Philippines, Thailand and, in the late 1960s, Indonesia. In effect, these five anticommunist states established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of containment that encircled China and its regional allies. Southeast Asia’s imperial transition from colonial order to U.S. empire, through the tumult of decolonization and the Cold War, was more characteristic of the region’s history after 1945 than Indochina’s embrace of communism.Less

Architects: Portraits of a Practice

Thomas Yarrow

In a large room, on the third floor of an old woollen mill in the South West of England, nine architects spend most of their working lives, designing buildings and overseeing their construction. ... More

In a large room, on the third floor of an old woollen mill in the South West of England, nine architects spend most of their working lives, designing buildings and overseeing their construction. Asked where these come from, architects admit a kind of ignorance: 'Total magic!' as one puts it, 'Something comes from nothing!' Focusing on the everyday lives of architects, the book explores how buildings are assembled through an intimate and elusive choreography of people, materials, places, tools and ideas. Through these interactions, it asks and answers some questions of wider interest: What is the relationship between a working and a personal life? What is creativity? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? What does it mean to claim to know with authority? Most basically but most fundamentally the book is concerned with the question of what it is like to be an architect, and what lessons others might learn from the example their experience provides. Amongst other things, these have to do with the nature of expert knowledge, design, creativity and the central but less celebrated arts of administration.Less

Civil Vengeance: Literature, Culture, and Early Modern Revenge

Emily L. King

Civil Vengeance offers a new way of conceptualizing early modern revenge and its relationship to civility. In its attention to what constitutes vengeance, the book makes visible a more comprehensive ... More

Civil Vengeance offers a new way of conceptualizing early modern revenge and its relationship to civility. In its attention to what constitutes vengeance, the book makes visible a more comprehensive spectrum of retaliation and examines quotidian acts of revenge that support sociality and enhance the power of civil institutions. Rather than relegating vengeance to the social periphery, the book uncovers how facets of civil society—church, law, and education—rely on the dynamic of revenge to augment their power. Through its innovative readings of conduct manuals, medical tracts, legal writings, and sermons, the book proposes a revised lineage of revenge literature and places these texts alongside traditional revenge plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. Shifting attention from episodic revenge to quotidian forms, Civil Vengeance theorizes anew the manner in which retaliation informs identity formation, interpersonal relationships, and the construction of the social body.Less

Courting Sanctity: Holy Women and the Capetians

Sean L. Field

Courting Sanctity traces the shifting relationship between holy women and the French royal court across the long thirteenth century. It argues that during the reign of Louis IX (r. 1226-70) holy ... More

Courting Sanctity traces the shifting relationship between holy women and the French royal court across the long thirteenth century. It argues that during the reign of Louis IX (r. 1226-70) holy women were central to the rise of the Capetian self-presentation as uniquely favored by God, that such women’s influence was questioned and reshaped under Philip III (r. 1270-85), and that would-be holy women were increasingly assumed to pose physical, spiritual, and political threats by the death of Philip IV (r. 1285-1314). Six holy women lie at the heart of the analysis. The saintly reputations of Isabelle of France and Douceline of Digne helped to crystalize the Capetians’ claims of divine favor by 1260. In the 1270s, the French court faced a crisis that centered on the testimony of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, a visionary holy woman from the Low Countries. After 1300, the arrests of Paupertas of Metz, Margueronne of Bellevillette, and Marguerite Porete formed key links in the chain of attacks launched by Philip IV against supposed spiritual dangers threatening the most Christian kingdom of France.Less

The Day After: Why America Wins the War but Loses the Peace

Brendan Gallagher

This book explores why, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, we initially mopped the floor with our enemies only to discover we had no coherent plan to manage the “day after.” The ensuing postwar ... More

This book explores why, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, we initially mopped the floor with our enemies only to discover we had no coherent plan to manage the “day after.” The ensuing postwar debacles had staggering consequences that continue to reverberate today. How did this happen? This book argues there is a tension between our desire to create a democracy and our competing desire to pullout as soon as possible. Our leaders often use magical thinking to try to accomplish both aims and keep everyone happy – but such an incoherent approach is likely to sow chaos. This book incorporates new interviews with dozens of civilian and military officials, ranging from U.S. cabinet secretaries to four-star generals. It also sheds light on how, in Kosovo, we lowered our postwar aims to quietly achieve a surprising partial success. Overall, this book seeks to help us learn from our recent past, and thereby avoid further disasters.Less

The Democracy Development Machine: Neoliberalism, Radical Pessimism, and Authoritarian Populism in Mayan Guatemala

Nicholas Copeland

What forces hinder decolonization efforts on the neoliberal terrain? In the aftermath of a genocidal scorched earth campaign, Mayas in the town of San Pedro Necta encountered a formidable ... More

What forces hinder decolonization efforts on the neoliberal terrain? In the aftermath of a genocidal scorched earth campaign, Mayas in the town of San Pedro Necta encountered a formidable democracy-development machine designed to displace radical class politics into private market advancement and local, indigenous-led electoral politics. Sampedranos regarded neoliberal democracy and development not as empty, depoliticized forms or colonial impositions, but as hard-won victories that met immediate needs and echoed revolutionary and local struggles. This historical ethnography examines how these governmentalized spaces fell short, simultaneously enabling and disfiguring an ethnic resurgence that fractured in a dispiriting atmosphere of pessimism, self-interest, deception, and mistrust. These dynamics fueled authoritarian populism but also radical reimaginings of democracy and development from below. These findings shed new light on rural politics in Guatemala and across neoliberal and post-conflict settings.Less

Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

Glenn Albrecht

'Earth Emotions' is an invitation to the reader to participate in the emergent global drama between the emotionally charged forces of creation and destruction. Both sets of emotions are needed for ... More

'Earth Emotions' is an invitation to the reader to participate in the emergent global drama between the emotionally charged forces of creation and destruction. Both sets of emotions are needed for the survival and the flourishing of the species, however, we live in an epoch where the forces of destruction are overwhelming positive or creative emotions. The name for this period of human dominance is the 'Anthropocene'. The book promotes an antidote to the Anthropocene in the form of the 'Symbiocene', a future era where positive earth emotions will flourish. Through these two master concepts, both types of emotions are systematically examined in the context of nature and life. Starting with a recently defined negative earth emotion, 'solastalgia', the reader is taken on a psycho-terratic (psyche-earth) journey through all of the earth emotions and feelings in use in the public and academic literature. The book culminates in the affirmation of positive emotional relationships to the Earth for current and future generations. As a relentlessly optimistic manifesto for living in the future, this book addresses the emotional, cultural, ethical, political, spiritual and practical aspects of positive earth emotions and the defeat of those that are destructive of people and the planet.Less

Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World

D. Noorlander

Heaven’s Wrath explores the religious thought and religious rites of the early Dutch Atlantic world. The book argues that the Reformed Church and the West India Company forged and maintained a close ... More

Heaven’s Wrath explores the religious thought and religious rites of the early Dutch Atlantic world. The book argues that the Reformed Church and the West India Company forged and maintained a close union, with considerable consequences. Merchants, officers, sailors, and soldiers found in their faith an ideology and justification for mercantile, martial activities. The company, on the other hand, supported the church financially in Europe and helped spread Calvinism to other continents. Calvinist employees and colonists both benefitted from the familiar, comforting aspects of religious instruction and public worship. But the church-company union had a destructive side, too: Calvinists became the instruments of divine wrath in fighting Catholic enemies and punishing sinners and non-conformers in colonial courts, all of which imposed costs that the small Dutch Republic and its people-strapped colonies could not afford. At the same time, the Reformed Church in the Netherlands contributed to problems later blamed on the West India Company because the church kept an iron grip on colonial hires, publications, and organization. Heaven’s Wrath shows that the expense of the Calvinist-backed war and the church’s meticulous, worried management of colonial affairs hampered the mission and reduced the size and import of the Dutch Atlantic world.Less

Hope and History: A Memoir of Tumultuous Times

William vanden Heuvel

This book is the memoir of Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel. It weaves together his most important public speeches and writings, compiled over a lifetime of public service, with anecdotes of his ... More

This book is the memoir of Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel. It weaves together his most important public speeches and writings, compiled over a lifetime of public service, with anecdotes of his adventures as a second-generation American, a soldier, a lawyer, a political activist and a diplomat. The chapters touch upon themes that resonate as much today as they did when he first encountered them: the impact of heroes and mentors, the problem of racism in America, tackling the crisis in America's prisons, the plight and promise of the United Nations, America and the Holocaust, and the legacy of FDR. He describes how individuals, himself among them, have tackled some of America's most intractable problems with ingenuity and goodwill. Along the way, he shares his journey with some of the great characters of American history: Eleanor Roosevelt, William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Harry S. Truman, Jimmy Carter. With wisdom and humor, he argues for embracing all the challenges and opportunities that life in America can offer.Less

The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II

Ethan Schrum

This book argues that Clark Kerr, Gaylord P. Harnwell, and other post-World War II academic leaders set the American research university on a new course by creating the instrumental university. With ... More

This book argues that Clark Kerr, Gaylord P. Harnwell, and other post-World War II academic leaders set the American research university on a new course by creating the instrumental university. With its emphasis on procedural rationality, organized research, and project-based funding by external patrons, the instrumental university would provide technical and managerial knowledge to shape the social order. Its leaders hoped that by solving the nation’s pressing social problems, the research university would become the essential institution of postwar America. On this view, the university’s leading purposes included promoting economic development and coordinating research from many fields in order to attack social problems. Reorienting institutions to prioritize these activities had numerous consequences. One was to inject more capitalistic and managerial tendencies into universities. Today, those who decry universities’ corporatizing and market-driven tendencies often trace them to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. This book suggests that a fuller explanation of these tendencies must highlight their deeper roots in the technocratic progressive tradition that originated in the 1910s, particularly the organizational changes within universities that this tradition spawned from the 1940s onward as part of the instrumental university.Less

Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria

Joshua Cole

This book explores the history of an anti-Jewish riot in 1934 in t Constantine, French Algeria, in which 25 Jews and 3 Muslims died. Understood at the time as the result of long-standing tensions ... More

This book explores the history of an anti-Jewish riot in 1934 in t Constantine, French Algeria, in which 25 Jews and 3 Muslims died. Understood at the time as the result of long-standing tensions between Muslims and Jews in North Africa, the riot was closely related to contemporary debates about reforming the colonial regime in Algeria. These debates divided the population and their political representatives, leaving Constantine vulnerable to acts of provocation by French nationalist extremists who appear to have been responsible for the majority of the murders. Although the police and some local officials were aware of these acts of provocation, the story was successfully covered up in the subsequent trials and in the official reports. The book sets these events in a broad chronological context, considering the ways that the history of colonialism in Algeria recast the relationship between Muslims, Jews, and Europeans in North Africa.Less

The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings

Liberty Hyde Bailey

John Stempien and John Linstrom (eds)

The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings collects the best and most accessible literary garden writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey, the Father of Modern Horticulture and founder ... More

The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings collects the best and most accessible literary garden writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey, the Father of Modern Horticulture and founder of the New Agrarianism. Despite Bailey's huge influence as a journalistic popularizer of amateur gardening from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth, and despite the rise in recent years of widespread interest in gardening, such an anthology has never been compiled until now. The essays and poems that make up the collection include work from Bailey's most beautiful literary and philosophical books about plants and people, as well as essays from periodicals that have never been published in book form, and even an essay that Bailey read over nationalized radio in 1930 and has never before appeared in print. The result of about a decade of research and collecting on the part of the editors, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion will provide the best introduction available to those unfamiliar with Bailey's writing, and for the seasoned Bailey enthusiast it will offer a trove of delightful and unexpected marvels.Less

Nature Rx: Improving College-Student Mental Health

Donald Rakow and Gregory T. Eells

College students today display disturbing levels of stress, depression, and other psychological conditions. The reasons for this rise in mental health problems are many, from increased reliance on ... More

College students today display disturbing levels of stress, depression, and other psychological conditions. The reasons for this rise in mental health problems are many, from increased reliance on electronic technology, the related prevalence of social isolation, and anxiety regarding societal ills. College and university counselling centers are challenged to address student demand for psychological services, with many counseling directors having to reduce the number of visits for non-crisis patients to cope with the increasing number of clients. While more serious mental health problems will continue to be addressed through intensive counseling, medications and, in extreme cases, hospitalization, the majority of young people can positively impact their mental well-being by simply spending time outside in nature. A large body of scientific evidence verifies that time spent in natural settings can lower young people's stress levels, anxiety, blood pressure and heart rate, and improve memory and cognitive functions. College Nature Rx programs encourage students to spend time in nature and to develop greater appreciation for the natural world. We present a step-by-step formula for how such programs can be constructed, sustained, and evaluated, and profile four progressive Nature Rx programs at American colleges. In a final chapter, we argue for the need for such programs to the future health and strength of such institutions.Less

No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class

Christopher Martin

Workers in the U.S. have been increasingly invisible since the late 1960s, as the news media shifted their focus to upscale audiences and lost sight of the American working class. This bookcharts the ... More

Workers in the U.S. have been increasingly invisible since the late 1960s, as the news media shifted their focus to upscale audiences and lost sight of the American working class. This bookcharts the decline of labor reporting and the shift in worker news narratives from a labor-based to a consumer-based perspective during the twentieth century. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most American newspapers became part of large, publicly traded media companies and refocused their target market from a mass audience to upscale readership. America’s white working class, a segment of the broader working class cut adrift from mainstream journalism, eventually found the rising conservative media – right-wing newspapers, Christian television, vitriolic talk radio, Fox News, and later a host of conservative web sites that specialize in stoking white, working class grievances. The newspaper industry’s upscale turn resulted in a momentous fallout: the decline of labor reporting, changing narratives about workers, the popular deployment of frames tagging labor unions and pro-worker policies as “job killers,” the loss of political voice for the working class, the rise of conservative media, and the conditions for a Donald Trump presidency.Less

The Nuclear Spies: America's Atomic Intelligence Operation against Hitler and Stalin

Vince Houghton

The subject of this book is the US atomic intelligence effort against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the period 1942-1949. Both of these intelligence efforts operated within the framework ... More

The subject of this book is the US atomic intelligence effort against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the period 1942-1949. Both of these intelligence efforts operated within the framework of an entirely new field of intelligence: scientific intelligence. Because of the atomic bomb, for the first time in history a nation’s scientific resources became a key consideration in assessing a potential national security threat. In September 1949, US intelligence was shocked to discover that the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb. Coming just four years after the United States had become the world’s first nuclear power, the Soviet atomic bomb was produced in half the time American intelligence had predicted. Compounding the confusion was the fact that American intelligence had engaged in an effort against Nazi Germany that had correctly assessed the status of the German atomic bomb program. This book explores the following: Considering how successfully the US conducted the atomic intelligence effort against the Germans in the Second World War, why was the US Government unable to create an effective atomic intelligence apparatus to monitor Soviet scientific and nuclear capabilities?Less

The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation: Immigrants and Trade Unions in the European Context

Heather Connolly, Miguel Martínez Lucio, and Stefania Marino

The book explores the question of social inclusion and trade union responses to immigration in the European context, comparing the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. Drawing on in-depth ... More

The book explores the question of social inclusion and trade union responses to immigration in the European context, comparing the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research the book focuses on how trade unions - particularly more established and institutionalised trade unions - respond to immigrant workers and what they perceive to be the important points of renewal and change that are required for a more integrated and supported immigrant community to emerge. The book also considers the role of European level trade union relations on the question of immigration and how trade unionists have attempted to deal with very different national configurations of trade union action. The book argues that we need to appreciate the complexity of trade union traditions, paths to renewal and competing trajectories of solidarity. While trade union organisations remain wedded to specific trajectories, trade union renewal remains an innovative if at times problematic set of choices and aspirations.Less

Poppies, Politics, and Power: Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy

James Tharin Bradford

This book explores the history of the Afghan drug trade during the 20th century, detailing how, and why, Afghan rulers struggled to balance the benefits of the Afghan drug trade, both legal and ... More

This book explores the history of the Afghan drug trade during the 20th century, detailing how, and why, Afghan rulers struggled to balance the benefits of the Afghan drug trade, both legal and illicit forms, with external pressures to conform to international drug control regimes and more tightly regulate drugs. This book explores why, over time, drug control became a key component of Afghan state formation and diplomacy; by embracing more coercive forms of drug control Afghanistan gained greater access to foreign aid and investment, especially from the United States. And yet, drug control efforts continually failed and the illicit drug trade expanded. This book complicates contemporary analyses of the Afghan drug trade, which depict drugs as juxtaposed with Afghan governance. The longer historical analysis details how the illicit drug trade emerged in response to a series of factors, including coercive forms of drug control, broader policy failures of the Afghan state, as well as, external forces such as the globalization of the illicit drug trade. In this way, drug control, as a component of Afghan governance and diplomacy, was fundamental in shaping the conditions of statelessness and lawlessness that are commonly thought to characterize the Afghan opium industry today.Less

Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution

John McCurdy

This book examines the quartering of British soldiers in North America in the eighteenth century, using ideas of place to understand the political and social history of quartering. In colonial ... More

This book examines the quartering of British soldiers in North America in the eighteenth century, using ideas of place to understand the political and social history of quartering. In colonial America, quartering in houses was common, but this practice was challenged with the arrival of the British army during the French and Indian War. Eager to keep British regulars out of private homes, the colonists built barracks and planted military geography in the heart of their cities. The Quartering Act emerged after the war as an attempt to extend British rights and responsibilities to the colonies, but the size and diversity of British North America inhibited this effort and fractured the empire. As quartering in Canada and the backcountry diverged from that in the American colonies, friction emerged between the colonists and the British army. Following the Boston Massacre, quartering became a divisive issue that encouraged the Americans to contemplate forming their own nation.Less

The Racial Politics of Division: Interethnic Struggles for Legitimacy in Multicultural Miami

Monika Gosin

The Politics of Division deconstructs antagonistic discourses that circulated in local Miami press between African-Americans, “white” Cubans, and “black” Cubans during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift and ... More

The Politics of Division deconstructs antagonistic discourses that circulated in local Miami press between African-Americans, “white” Cubans, and “black” Cubans during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift and the 1994 Balsero Crisis. In its challenge to discourses which pit these groups against one another, the book examines the nuanced ways that identities such as “black,” “white,” and “Cuban” have been constructed and negotiated in the context of Miami’s historical multi-ethnic tensions. The book argues that dominant race-making ideologies of the white establishment regarding “worthy citizenship” shape inter-minority conflict as groups negotiate their precarious positioning within the nation. The book contends that the lived experiences of the African-Americans, white Cubans, and Afro-Cubans involved disrupt binary frames of worthy citizenship narratives, illuminating the greater complexity of racialized identities. Foregrounding the oft-neglected voices of Afro-Cubans, the book highlights how their specific racial positioning offers a challenge to white Cuban-American anti-blackness and complicates narratives that placed African-American “natives” in opposition to (white) Cuban “foreigners,” while revealing also how Afro-Cubans and other Afro-Latinos negotiate racial meanings in the United States. Focusing on the intricacy of interminority tensions in Miami, the book adds dimension to modern debates about race, blackness, immigration, interethnic relations, and national belonging.Less