America's Inequality Trap (University of Chicago Press, 2020) focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and American politics. Nathan J. Kelly, Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, argues that the increasing concentration of economic power effects political power, thus allowing the gap between the rich and everyone else to become more acute and more rigid. The increasing level of inequality, according to Kelly, also tends to be reinforced by public policies. This then creates a self-perpetuating plutocracy because those with more economic resources will have more political power or the capacity to influence those with political power and the kinds of policies that are being made. Thus, we have the theory of the inequality trap. Kelly’s analysis is fairly specific to the United States, since the inequality trap itself combines aspects of the American political system that are rather unique, but he notes that the trip is not exclusive to the U.S., it is part of a “more general phenomenon.” In order to understand this inequality trap, Kelly’s research links politics, policy, and income inequality. He then explores different pathways that contribute to establishing and perpetuating this system, which concentrates more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Each chapter assesses a different pathway: public opinion, elections, inegalitarian policy convergence, and policy stagnation, all of which contribute to economic inequality in the United States and how it operates within the political system. Public opinion and elections center around political attitudes and behavior while inegalitarian policy convergence and policy stagnation focus on policy-making institutions and processes. Each pathway shares the same outcome that they contribute to the inequality trap in which only those who are wealthy benefit from it. In analyzing the effects of high inequality on each of the pathways, Kelly exposes the pattern of political response, or non-response, to the problem of inequality and the role of partisan politics within these dynamics. Kelly also emphasizes that racial bias and economic inequality play a substantial role in political decision making, especially in public opinion and elections. These distinct areas often have some overlap in terms of voter engagement and political behavior and choices and, according to the research, this also helps us understand the outcome in the 2016 presidential election. America’s Inequality Trap concludes with a discussion about economic inequality before the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Both events occurred during times of high economic inequality but there were distinct differences in the political response to that inequality and the economic collapses that followed. Kelly explains how and why the political responses differed, and by comparing the two, he suggests possible strategies for escaping the ongoing inequality trap. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others, who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today. Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) professor of history at Stanford University. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right, The Enlightenment, and On the Spirit of Rights, all published by the University of Chicago Press. Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2018), his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump (with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, and The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can we understand computerization as a social process? Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is a timely and welcome edited volume in which a set of interdisciplinary contributors explore how people make automated processes work, and how these systems reciprocally transform everyday life. From farming to finance—not to mention schools to prisons—the volume amounts to an urgent plea to remove the veil of corporate and government secrecy shrouding technologies that subtly restructure our social and material worlds without any semblance of democratic oversight. I spoke with the book’s editors, Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, about how to do the anthropology of algorithms, and what they learned from bringing these accounts together. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and numbers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, U.S. history, and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation. New Books Network listeners can purchase The Nature of the Future for 25% off using the coupon code PAWLEY here. Emily Pawley is Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College. Twitter. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of Tōhoku made it through. Smaller earthquakes and tsunamis have killed far more people in nearby China and India. What accounts for the exceptionally high survival rate? And why is it that some towns and cities in the Tōhoku region have built back more quickly than others? Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters (University of Chicago Press) illuminates two critical factors that had a direct influence on why survival rates varied so much across the Tōhoku region following the 3/11 disasters and why the rebuilding process has also not moved in lockstep across the region. Individuals and communities with stronger networks and better governance, Daniel P. Aldrich shows, had higher survival rates and accelerated recoveries. Less-connected communities with fewer such ties faced harder recovery processes and lower survival rates. Beyond the individual and neighborhood levels of survival and recovery, the rebuilding process has varied greatly, as some towns and cities have sought to work independently on rebuilding plans, ignoring recommendations from the national government and moving quickly to institute their own visions, while others have followed the guidelines offered by Tokyo-based bureaucrats for economic development and rebuilding. The datasets Daniel mentions in the podcast are available here. Daniel P. Aldrich is director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program and professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University. You can find him on twitter @DanielPAldrich Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of Chicago police officers routinely tortured criminal suspects in their custody, while fellow cops, state attorneys and elected officials looked the other way. In his book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements For Police Accountability in Chicago (University of Chicago Press), Andrew Baer explains how the eponymous detective and others hid their violence, and the arduous struggle to get Burge fired and win reparations for survivors. He blends legal and social history with ethnography to chronicle the labyrinthine legal system that concealed this torture, and the challenges of political coalition-building across class, race, and prison walls. The result is a history of the fraying reform discourse with which we live. Andrew S. Baer is assistant professor of history with a secondary appointment in African American studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Patrick Reilly studies US history, race, and civilian cooperation with police at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Kaiser is a truly unique scholar: he is simultaneously a physics researcher and a historian of science whose writing beautifully melds the past and future of science. As a historian, he studies mostly 20th-century physics, and in particular the history of quantum mechanics, Feynman diagrams, physics in the counterculture era, and much more. As a physicist, he studies particle physics and theories of cosmology, focused mostly on the early expansion of the universe. In this New Books Network podcast, I speak to David Kaiser about his new book, Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (University of Chicago Press, 2020). It’s a collection of essays, many of them adapted from magazine and newspaper articles he’s penned over the years. The book paints intimate portraits of some incredible luminaries—Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Paul Dirac, among many others—explains how physics has changed as a discipline in the last century, and demonstrates how science is inseparable from its social context. David Kaiser is an incredible ambassador for physics and its history, and it was a delight to speak with him. David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Matthew Jordan is an instructor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the place of classical music in contemporary society? In Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Marianna Ritchey, an assistant professor of music history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explores the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and classical music, showing how many of the democratizing and innovative elements of the genre go hand-in-hand with corporate power. Using detailed social and musicological studies of key composers, movements, opera companies, and tech advertising, the book offers a critical but sympathetic analysis of the potential, but also the limits, of classical music. Accessibly written, blending critical theory with contemporary case studies the book will be essential reading across arts and social sciences, as well as for business and technology scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Ruth Leys (she/hers), Professor Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, on The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2017). In recent years, emotions have become a major, vibrant topic of research not merely in the biological and psychological sciences but throughout a wide swath of the humanities and social sciences as well. Yet, surprisingly, there is still no consensus on their basic nature or workings. Ruth Leys’s brilliant, much anticipated history, therefore, is a story of controversy and disagreement. The Ascent of Affect focuses on the post–World War II period, when interest in emotions as an object of study began to revive. Leys analyzes the ongoing debate over how to understand emotions, paying particular attention to the continual conflict between camps that argue for the intentionality or meaning of emotions but have trouble explaining their presence in non-human animals and those that argue for the universality of emotions but struggle when the question turns to meaning. Addressing the work of key figures from across the spectrum, considering the potentially misleading appeal of neuroscience for those working in the humanities, and bringing her story fully up to date by taking in the latest debates, Leys presents here the most thorough analysis available of how we have tried to think about how we feel. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book Feminisms: A Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This outstanding work, available later this year, takes a thematic approach to the topic of global feminist history to provide a unified vision that maintains appropriate nuance. Delap is a gender historian, writ large. Her first book, The Feminist Avant Garde (Cambridge 2007), examined the development of feminism in the Anglo-American context, tracing the ideas as developed in trans-Atlantic discourse. She then directed her gaze back to her homeland in subsequent publications, including Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford 2011) and the 2013 Palgrave release, Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Britain since 1890, Delap explore another expression of gender altogether. The breadth of her scholarship – women and men, intellectual elites and domestic servants, adults and children – prepared her to write this broad but fairly concise work of history. Enjoy our lively discussion! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, has been ranked as one of the most violent cities in the world. In Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Robert Samet undertakes ethnography with crime journalists on their reporting practices to offer a compelling argument about the relationship between populist politics and the news. Samet participates with and observes a group of crime reporters as they traverse the city, investigating crimes, recording interviews with victims, and writing up their stories. Reporters commonly collected and publicized denuncias, victims’ accusations or denouncements of wrongdoing that can also include calls for justice. Samet details the substance and variation of such denuncias to demonstrate how the ubiquity and prevalence of these pronouncements articulate a popular will. This book contributes to studies of media and journalism, Latin American politics and society, and political anthropology in order to expand our understanding of the role of journalism in amplifying the will of the people. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his sixth thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin wrote, “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.” Edgar Garcia is one such historian…and if you’re not yet convinced of Benjamin’s dictum, you should listen to this interview. In Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2019) Garcia sets sparks flying by inviting us to explore the literature and theory created by 20th and 21st century writers who deploy sign systems that, according to the creation myth of European hegemony, alphabetized thought supposedly superseded and destroyed. Akin to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic in ambition and originality, Signs of the Americas not only pries open a fascinating archive but also forces us to question the organizational principles that govern intellectual history and cultural criticism in this hemisphere. In this interview, we discuss work by Jaime de Angulo, Cecilia Vicuña, John Borrows, and Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as Garcia’s own Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019), which serves as a kind of poetic companion to Signs. David Gutherz is a Teaching Fellow in Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research deals with the history of the human sciences, with a special interest in how intellectuals have aided and undermined authoritarian movements. You can find out more about his work at www.davidmaxgutherz.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Pippin's book Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form (University of Chicago Press, 2020) is a work in the philosophy of film published in 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. Each chapter in Filmed Thought treats a film in-depth, including works by Hitchcock, Ray, Malick, Sirk, Almodovar, Polanski, and the Dardenne brothers. The book is written in an accessible style that does not seize upon films as merely convenient illustrations of already established philosophical ideas. Instead, Pippindevotes as much energy to analysing the expressive capacities of cinema as he does to articulating the philosophical themes and questions of social context he sees reflected in each of the films treated. This gives his writing a delicacy and sensitivity that lovers of cinema may find surprising in a professional philosopher. Nonetheless, there are plenty of ideas worked through in the text, many inspired by Pippin’s reading of Hegel and Cavell, including the limits of moral judgement, the dimensions of cinematic irony, the critical possibilities of genre films, the relation between interiority and bodily expression, and the intriguing problem of ‘unknowingness’. Robert Pippin is a philosopher known principally for his work in the area of German Idealism, particularly Hegel, although he has previously published widely in film-philosophy, including the Western genre, film noir, and Hitchcock. Bill Schaffer is a lecturer in film studies. He is currently a scholar of no fixed institution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2019) investigates the Colombian government’s campaign to turn Marxist guerrilla fighters in the FARC into consumer citizens. In this ethnography, Alexander L. Fattal explores the ways marketing became a tactic of counterinsurgency as a means of a humanitarian intervention, which has proven stunning and illusory. The work draws on archival research and extensive fieldwork with Colombian Ministry of Defense, former rebels, political exiles, and peace negotiators in Colombia, Sweden, and Cuba. Alex. Fattal is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of California at San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sonali Chakravarti, Associate Professor of Political Science at Wesleyan University, has written a thoughtful analysis of the role of the jury in American democracy, with specific attention to the way that the jury experience can provide the structure for more substantive civic engagement. Part of the impetus for this study comes out of the more recent controversial decisions made by juries in a variety of high-profile cases in the United States. The research also evolved out of Chakravarti’s earlier work on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and how citizens were incorporated into the process of transitional justice and engagement in democratic spaces. In Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Chakravarti argues that the jury room is an important democratic space that is generally ignored as an opportunity to engage citizens in active participation in and with the law. Because we generally are not trained or taught about the actual process we will encounter as jurors, outside of popular culture renderings, we rarely enter into the process with knowledge about either the law itself, or the role that juries can play in their decisions, not only with regard to the case in front of them but also in regard to the legitimacy of the laws themselves. Chakravarti follows up on Alexis de Tocqueville’s praise of the American jury system, while pushing beyond Tocqueville’s admiration to suggest that the jurors themselves can be radically enfranchised as citizens on the jury. Jurors can be better prepared to serve and thus can more fully engage this democratic space if they had more education about the process itself and their capacities inside the jury room. Chakravarti charts both the history of the jury process in the United States, and the various ways that juries have changed how they operate and behave within the parameters of the legal system. This is a fascinating examination of an often obscured but important democratic space. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historians, musicologists, and sociologists have long studied the relationship between politics and music. Peter La Chapelle’s new book, I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music (University of Chicago Press, 2019) traces interactions between country music and politics beginning with two late nineteenth-century politicians who fiddled to their supporters and ending with the 2016 election season. He establishes some long-standing associations between celebrity candidates, populist insurgents, outsider politics and country music. La Chapelle also does not shy away from exposing the ways that racist and anti-Semitic political figures have used country music to support their beliefs. While today many people think of country music as a politically conservative genre, La Chapelle brings to light a more complex story of politicians across the spectrum looking to country music to support their beliefs, publicize their campaigns, and establish their authenticity with their constituents. Peter La Chapelle is a professor of history at Nevada State College. A cultural historian, his research centers on the intersections between country music, politics, and national identity in the United States. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. But, as Owen Whooley’s sweeping new book tells us, peering deep into the human mind is, well, really hard. On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing (University Chicago Press, 2019) begins with psychiatry’s formal inception in the United States in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to define and redefine mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley’s book is no anti-psychiatric screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving. On the Heels of Ignorance draws from intellectual history and the sociology of professions to portray an ongoing human effort to make sense of complex mental phenomena using an imperfect set of tools, with sometimes tragic results. In this interview, Dr. Whooley and I discuss the sociology of knowledge and ignorance that guide this book. We then discuss the changing identity of the field of psychiatry, how the DSM affected the legitimacy and perception of the discipline, and ways of managing ignorance. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in sociology of knowledge, health and illness and medical sociology, historical sociology, and mental health. Dr. Owen Whooley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Mexico and Senior Fellow, UNM Center for Health Policy. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In contemporary Manila, slums and squatter settlements are peppered throughout the city, often pushing right up against the walled enclaves of the privileged, creating the complex geopolitical pattern of what sociologist Marco Garrido calls the “patchwork city.” Synthesizing literature in political sociology and urban studies, Garrido shows how experiences along the housing divide in Manila constitute political subjectivities and shape the very experience of democracy in contemporary Philippines. The Patchwork City: Class, Space and Politics in Metro Manila (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is a beautifully written ethnography is divided into two parts. In the first part, Garrido documents the fragmentation of Manila into a mélange of spaces defined by class, particularly slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. He calls the pattern of urban fragmentation “interspersion” and persuasively argues that it is a spatial form distinct to cities in the Global South. This distinction is marked not by increasing segregation (as is the case with cities in the Global North) but by increasing proximity and dependence. For enclave residents, the proximity of slums is a source of insecurity, compelling them to impose spatial boundaries on slum residents. For slum residents, the regular imposition of these boundaries creates a pervasive sense of discrimination. Within this everyday, and almost normalized, sense of discrimination, the urban poor and middle class emerge not as labor and capital but as “squatters” and “villagers,” Manila’s name for subdivision residents. In other words, economic identities are unflinchingly spatialized. In the second part, Garrido looks beyond urban fragmentation to delineate its effects on class relations and politics, arguing that the proliferation of these slums and enclaves and their subsequent proximity have intensified class relations. Going beyond the realm of “the urban”, Garrido examines the politicization of this socio-spatial divide with the specific case of the populist president Joseph Estrada. The book ultimately argues that the two sides – middle-class and urban poor – are drawn into contention over not just the right to the city, but the nature of democracy itself. In all, The Patchwork City illuminates how segregation, class relations, and democracy are all intensely connected. It makes clear, ultimately, that class as a social structure is as indispensable to the study of Manila—and of many other cities of the Global South—as race is to the study of American cities. Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Seegel’s Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an insightful contribution to the history of map making which is written through and by individual geographers/cartographers/map men. The book focuses primarily on four countries: Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. When guiding his reader through the entanglements of transnational endeavors of making maps, Seegel zeroes in on personal stories of five, what he calls, characters/protagonists: Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pal Teleki. An individual story is an archive of biographical data and statistics, but it also opens up an entire world of history and geography that provides an insight into geopolitical decisions which eventually change and impact lives of those who happen to be part of this map journey. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Map Men offers a personalized version of how maps are drawn and made. At first glance, maps may seem stable and crystalized. However, as Seegel insightfully shows, this is an illusion: maps are fantasies, as he puts it in this interview. This understanding of maps does not in any way minimize the science that lies behind the map creating. However, what Map Men does is show the making of maps in their multiple and at times complex and intertwined processes: maps are points of references, but maps are also texts which invite a diversity of stories and interpretations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his dazzling new book The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Spencer Dew treats his readers to a riveting and often counterintuitive account of the interaction of law, race, and citizenship in the discourses of the Moorish Science Temple and other movements inspired by Noble Drew Ali. How do theological visions of democracy serve as critiques of racism and exclusionary politics? In what ways does a notion of sovereignty as located in faith and outside history mobilize popular sovereignty to critique modern state sovereignty? What are the complicated mechanisms through which legal institutions, texts, and theaters are engaged and negotiated to make space for a notion of citizenship grounded in the entanglement of law, love, and social transformation? These are among the central questions that animate this sparkling study, situated at the intersection of legal studies, African American Religion, and American Islam. Lucidly composed, theoretically charged, and discursively playful, The Aliites is sure to transform the way we look at Noble Drew Ali and his profound and complex legacy. This book will also generate important and productive conversations in various undergraduate and graduate seminars on American Islam, American Religion, Political Studies, History, and Law. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Departing from the bold and compelling claim that we cannot fully understand the histories of decolonization and the so-called “sexual revolution” apart from one another, Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is a complex analysis of the lasting impact of the Algerian Revolution through the cultural politics of sex, gender, and power in France. Shepard tracks the figure of the “Arab” man from Algerian independence to the Iranian Revolution. Just as the “Arab” man’s pathologized sexuality played a key role in discussions of French defeat in Algeria as a “failure” of French masculinity on the political “Right,” so too did he become a “heroic” figure for the post-decolonization “Left.” From gay liberation to feminism, debates about sexual norms, prostitution, and rape, the “Arab” man appeared again and again in forms that replayed and riffed off of the sexual orientalism of the colonial period. Drawing attention to the ways the “erotics of Algerian difference” shaped the terrain of what could and couldn’t be thought in terms of sex post-1962, the book highlights the ideas and work of a number of authors from North Africa and elsewhere, voices that have been written out of histories that understand the sexual revolution as a strictly trans-Atlantic phenomenon. The “vanilla” narratives that have resulted have left out sites such as North Africa, failing to see the role of anti-colonialism in the history of the sexual revolution. At the same time, conventional histories have also regularly refused to deal with sex itself, eliding the significance of discussions of sex acts (like sodomy) as sites of politics and power. As Shepard shows, the Arab man and the legacies of the Algerian Revolution were all over the field of “sex talk” in France through the 1960s and 70s. During this period, then, the war did not vanish from view as other histories have suggested. And the end of this era that was linked to the Iranian Revolution brought a shoring up of Western notions of sexual liberation in response to the oppression and violence (of women and homosexuals in particular) deemed inherent to Arab/Muslim societies. A book that brings together an impressive research corpus with killer historical and political analysis, Sex, France, and Arab Men will captivate readers interested in the (global) history of sex, as well as anyone seeking to better understand the cultural and political landscape of post-decolonization France. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Lomazoff has written a kind of detective novel about the national bank controversy during the early years of the new republic. Lomazoff poses, in the introduction, and at the start of each chapter, the general understanding that many scholars and citizens have about the bank controversy itself and the constitutional decision in McCulloch vs. Maryland. And Lomazoff notes that these contours are generally accurate but that they elide significant components of the controversy that is actually spread out over an extended period of time. Given this more extensive time frame, Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2018) does exactly what the title promises, in compiling different aspects of our understanding of the controversy, and integrating key shifts in the political and economic landscape that also changed parts of the actual controversy itself. Lomazoff takes the reader through the general understanding of the National Bank controversy, untangling different threads of the argument and the changing political and economic dynamics in the United States. Because the bank controversy is often collapsed into the debate over either a strict or broad interpretation of the Necessary and Proper clause of the Constitution, many aspects of American political development are generally pushed into the background—these ignored or obscured aspects of the controversy are the focus of Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic, and rightly so, since they trace a deeper and more complex understanding of changing monetary policy, banking regulation, and congressional and executive fiscal power in the new republic. This is an action-packed discussion of the general understanding of the early American Republic, and the real controversy around the establishment of the national bank. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as author of The Politics of Military Base Closings: Not in My District (Peter Lang Publishers, 2003). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that would become known as the father of evolution. Sponsel is the author Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Why—against his mentor’s exhortations to publish—did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection? In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, Alistair Sponsel argues that Darwin adopted this cautious approach to atone for his provocative theorizing as a young author spurred by that mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell. While we might expect him to have been tormented by guilt about his private study of evolution, Darwin was most distressed by harsh reactions to his published work on coral reefs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, judging himself guilty of an authorial “sin of speculation.” It was the battle to defend himself against charges of overzealous theorizing as a geologist, rather than the prospect of broader public outcry over evolution, which made Darwin such a cautious author of Origin of Species. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How should we understand humanitarian NGOs? In Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Shai M. Dromi, a lecturer in sociology at Harvard University, uses insights from cultural sociology to reframe the history of the Red Cross. The book blends a detailed historical analysis with field theory and the strong programme in cultural sociology to show the longstanding influence of key individuals and texts, as well as accounting for influences of nationalism and Christianity. The historical analysis of the Red Cross presents crucial lessons for our current context, as well as providing the basis for comparisons with other approaches to humanitarian interventions. The book is both an excellent example of the strengths of the strong programme, along with a fascinating analysis of a key element of our modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Radio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006). The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition in 1845 turned the Arctic into an object of fascination. By the end of the century, it had become an ‘Arctic Fever.’ Fox is the host of the radio program Geographical Imaginations for RadioFabrik in Salzburg, which is also available on iTunes as a podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of the Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is the first history of the ideological and political forces that led to the idea of partition—that is, a division of territory and sovereignty—in British mandate Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Inverting the spate of narratives that focus on how the idea contributed to, or hindered, the development of future Israeli and Palestinian states, Penny Sinanoglou asks instead what drove and constrained British policymaking around partition, and why partition was simultaneously so appealing to British policymakers yet ultimately proved so difficult for them to enact. Taking a broad view not only of local and regional factors, but also of Palestine’s place in the British empire and its status as a League of Nations mandate, Sinanoglou deftly recasts the story of partition in Palestine as a struggle to maintain imperial control. After all, British partition plans imagined space both for a Zionist state indebted to Britain and for continued British control over key geostrategic assets, depending in large part on the forced movement of Arab populations. With her detailed look at the development of the idea of partition from its origins in the 1920s, Sinanoglou makes a bold contribution to our understanding of the complex interplay between internationalism and imperialism at the end of the British empire and reveals the legacies of British partitionist thinking in the broader history of decolonization in the modern Middle East. Penny Sinanoglou is an associate professor of history at Wake Forest University, where she teaches British and European imperial and international history. Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Nick Yablon traces the birth of the time capsule in the United States. Starting with the Gilded Age, Yablon explores the way Americans from diverse backgrounds constructed memories of their present through the creation of time capsules. Examining the ephemera included in the time capsules, including writing texts, photographs, phonographic records, films, and other artifacts, Yablon details the way these capsules not only created records of their time periods, but also how they show the ways in which their creators and contributors imagined the future. Remembrance of Things Present not only allows readers a glimpse into the history of time capsules, but also the ways in which politics, social justice, and American values were all represented in these buried treasures. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book A History of America in 100 Maps (University of Chicago Press 2018), historian Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. Schulten’s “visual tour of American history” considers the different purposes for which maps are created—maps as tools of statecraft and diplomacy, maps made to amuse and entertain, and maps made as instruments of social reform. Some of the maps she discusses document journeys, others strategize for war. Some trace the spread of disease, others the pathways of rivers or the decline of endangered species. Some are produced by trained cartographers, others by amateurs, one by a young schoolgirl. Together, they offer a compelling—and at times quite beautiful—case for the power of maps to shape our world and the ways we navigate through it. You can preview some of the maps in the book here. Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger (University of Chicago Press 2019) is a study of the kinds of experimentation and creative engagements that young men in the urban public spaces of Niger undertake when confronted with the precarity and boredom of unemployed adult life. “The sitting that kills the pants” as a reflection of the space of the fada seeks to present a counterpoint to the ‘crisis of youth’ that is widely discussed and regulated in the global south. Adeline Masquelier offers a compelling ethnography of the possibilities of the fada, a space where young men gather, faced with the anxiety of being ‘good at being a man’ (Herzfeld 1985). The fada becomes a productive site to establish regimes, friendships and alternate practices of self-realization through music and dance, drinking tea and making conversation, discussing and practicing romantic courtship, pursuing zigzag politics and cultivating sartorial choices. These solidarities and the possibilities which coalesce around it situate the fada with the resources to counteract the anxieties that the elderly have about the ‘inversion of the inter-generational contract’ (Roth 2008). It does so by providing a set of repertoires that make adulthood meaningful in the absence of employment and state support. Adeline joins us for a conversation about her book on the history of the fada as a masculine-urban space, the study of ‘generation’ as an analytic for the study of kinship and change particularly in the study of so-called traditional societies in Africa and its bearings on the current field of ‘youth studies’, the possibilities of heterosexual love and romance imagined homosocialy and the practice of a visual language in ethnography. Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Dave Tell (he/him/his)--Professor of Communication at The University of Kansas--on the insightful Remembering Emmett Till (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book takes a rhetorical approach on the commemoration of Emmett Till by looking at acts of remembering Emmett following his brutal murder in the 1960s until the present day. Tell persuasively demonstrates the way in which the act of commemorating has saturated the physical landscape of the Mississippi Delta. In addition to a fascinating discussion of Till’s legacy and the current commemoration of racial tragedy in the American South, Dave also introduces listeners to the Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), which, among other things, offers a free app through which all of us can calibrate our relationship to Emmett to civil rights as an ongoing collective project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1800s, explorers and whalers returning home from the Arctic described a cold, desolate world, one that could swallow up expeditions without leaving a trace. But this did not describe the Arctic of the Inuit, who called this world their home. Karen Routledge tells the story of Baffin Island’s Inuit community as they came into contact with western whalers and explorers in the nineteenth century. Even though the Inuit worked closely with outsiders, their views of the Arctic world, their ideas about meaning of home, even their concept of time itself remained very different from the men they encountered. Routledge is a historian for Parks Canada. Her book, Do You See Ice?: Inuit and Americans at Home and Away, was recently published by University of Chicago Press (2018). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A fortune teller, cotton prophet, and a weather forecaster walk into a bar—probably a more common occurrence than you might think in the Gilded Age United States! Jamie Pietruska’s Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017) assesses how different varieties of forecasting created an often-contradictory “culture of prediction” during the rise of modern bureaucracies. Looking to the countryside, her book engages histories of capitalism to think about how everyday rural Americans engaged with the rise of probability, and how private and state forecasters competed for authority and audiences for their figures. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used discrimination statistics to argue about rights in 1970s America, and what this means for histories of bureaucracy, quantification, law, politics, and race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) challenges the commonsensical notion that the Japanese empire granted its subjects no religious freedom—that, despite the legal provision in the Meiji Constitution of 1890 affirming freedom of worship, “State Shinto” was the law of the land—and that it was the American-led occupation which finally granted freedom of conscience and worship to the benighted Japanese. Thomas shows first that this vision of history obscures internal debates about religious freedom in both Japanese and American circles, but also that while the narrative in which religious freedom was bestowed upon Japan by the US was in fact strategic and deeply embedded in a particular historical moment and geopolitical context, it has had a long tail of consequences for our understandings of religion after 1945. Faking Liberties is divided into two deliberately paralleled parts, the first treating what Thomas calls the Meiji Constitutional Period (1890-1945), the second examining the occupation (1945-1952) and the long-term consequences of the rhetorical moves made by the occupiers for the way that religion has been understood in the postwar period. The book argues that the particular political circumstance of the Japanese occupation was instrumental in defining the religious-secular and “good-bad” religion binaries, as well as the idea of religious freedom as a human right that has become hegemonic in much of the postwar West. Faking Liberties is a challenging intervention into not only the historiography of modern Japan, but religious studies more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this installment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Benjamin Kahan, Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at LSU, about his newest work, The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Despite countless dropped calls, Jana and Benjamin have a delightful conversation about what Eve Sedgwick called “the great paradigm shift,” in which all sexual deviancy fell out of discussion to make way for the homo-hetero binary. The conversation covers major changes in the cultural discourse around sexual identity, but still makes time for conversation about sexual magicians and wanderlust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bryan Jones, Sean Theriault, and Michelle Whyman are out with a big book on with a provocative thesis. In The Great Broadening: How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019), the authors argue that there are dimensions to the broadening of the US federal government into new areas of public life largely overlooked by previous scholars. Rather than public opinion or changes in the party system, they claim that it is the social movement system that is an underappreciated driver of the broadening of government in the 1960s. They continue that polarization and the growth of interest groups are each a consequence of this transformation of government, not a primary cause. The Great Broadening is rooted in a massive exploration of data connected with the Policy Agendas Projects. Culling data across nearly a century of American politics and government, the book raises as many new questions as it conclusively answers. The authors are candid that they are expanding the conversation about American political development, not necessarily refuting previous claims. They do so with a heap of quantitative measures on agenda setting in congress, federal expenditures, and the size of the administrative state. This is a must read for students of American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages played in creating modern conceptions of travel and travel writing. Legassie is an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Medieval Invention of Travel (University of Chicago, 2017). Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Elison's The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai(University of Chicago Press, 2018) explores how slum residents, tribal people, and members of other marginalized groups use religious icons to mark urban spaces in Mumbai. Interestingly, not all of Elison's interview subjects identify as Hindu, which bolsters has argument that sacred space in Mumbai is created by visual and somatic practices performed across religious boundaries. Join as as we discuss Elison's rich fieldwork in the streets, slums, and movie studios of Mumbai. For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scholars of US history have treated trade policy in less than enthusiastic ways. One economic historian described tariffs as “extraordinarily uninteresting things unless related to the political events which give them meaning.” While another historian said the tariff has caused “narcolepsy” among his colleagues. One piece of evidence of this sentiment is that the last comprehensive history of of US trade policy was published in the the late 19th century! Despite the seemingly soporific qualities of the subject, Douglas Irwin wrote a 900-page tome on trade policy. The book, Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is remarkably erudite and surprisingly entertaining. Irwin shows how trade policy was at the heart of so many of the major crises and transitions in US history, everything from the Revolution of 1776 to the post-Cold War moment. Indeed, Irwin fashions a focus on tariffs into a new history of the republic itself. Douglas Irwin is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the relationship between the form of writing and what can be thought? How is a writer’s thinking shaped by form? How is a reader’s? Does this matter for philosophy? In Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2018), John T. Lysaker explores the importance of the praxis of writing for philosophy. Essaying a variety of forms, the book invites the reader to investigate the volume in their hands as a performance. It engages with, among others, the work of Plato, Emerson, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Cavell, not only to show how form matters for thought, but also how thought is always made possible by what has come before. The book argues for philosophy to reconsider academic articles as the dominant mode of writing in the profession and offers an example of the creative ways in which philosophy can unfold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (U Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust. This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.” Lukas Rieppel teaches history at Brown University. His new book, Assembling the Dinosaur, has recently been published by Harvard University press. You can find him online at https://sites.google.com/view/lukasrieppel/ or on twitter @lrieppel.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration(University of Chicago Press, 2019). During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking. Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The dawn of the new millennium bore witness to an unprecedented transformation of the population in the Southeastern United States as evidenced by Dr. Jennifer A. Jones in her new book The Browning of the New South (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Jones, an Assistant Professor of Sociology as well as Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the evolution of race relations in the face of rapid demographic change as Mexican immigrants move into the traditionally biracial American South. Employing a community-based ethnographic approach, Jones vividly illustrates shifting Southern race relations through the case study of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Browning of the New South contributes to the scholarship on immigration and racial formation by revealing the mechanisms that spur collaboration (rather than division) between Latino immigrants and African Americans in a process that Jones calls “minority linked fate.” Counter to a generally national conception of racial formation, Jones emphasizes its local nature, not simply based on preexisting racial hierarchies or phenotype but instead on personal experiences of discrimination, unique social pressures, and local political dynamics. Ultimately, this study of the newly triracial South has immense implications for the future of U.S. politics and our understanding of how race is made. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Allison Davis (1902-1983) was a pioneering anthropologist who did ground-breaking fieldwork in the Jim Crow south, challenged the racial bias of IQ tests, and became the first African American to be tenured at the University of Chicago. And yet despite these contributions Davis's work is little read today. The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought(University of Chicago Press, 2018) is the first full-length biography of Davis ever written. In it, historian David Varel documents Davis's remarkable life. In this episode in New Books in Anthropology we talk about Davis's collaboration with authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Edward Sapir, John Dollard, W. Lloyd Warner Warner, St. Clair Drake, and many others. We also discuss how Davis pioneered concepts such as structural racism and explored the relationship between race and class. David Varel talks about the choices he made as a White academic writing about an African American life, and the importance of widening intellectual genealogies by including 'lost' figures such as Davis. David Varel earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Lost Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is his first book. Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develop a cancer vaccine drew more money than the Human Genome Project. In his first book, MIT historian of science Robin Wolfe Scheffler takes readers through the twists and turns of the American effort to identify human cancer viruses— a search which made fundamental contributions to molecular biology. In this podcast, we discuss how this was an effort which raises fundamental questions regarding how we think about disease in the laboratory and the legislature. Dr. Robin Scheffler’s book is called A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine(University of Chicago Press, 2019). Dr. Dorian Deshauer is a psychiatrist, historian, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He is associate editor for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada’s leading peer-reviewed general medical journal and is one of the hosts of CMAJ Podcasts, a medical podcast for doctors and researchers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With thorny topics in Asian international relations, sovereignty, territory and borders in the news more or less daily, understanding what is at stake in this vitally important region, and why there are so many disagreements here, has never been more important. But while it is widely known that ‘modern’ bounded sovereign statehood is a pretty new and a historically contingent phenomenon in much of the world, the afterlives of the political orders that came before this are usually less appreciated. Timothy Brook, Michael van Walt van Praag and Miek Boltjes’ part co-edited, part co-authored book Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan (University of Chicago Press, 2018) thus fills a vital gap. Multidisciplinary and vast in scope, this uniquely structured volume presents writing from the junctures of history, international relations, international law and many other adjacent subject areas, arguing forcefully and in rich detail for the relevance of longstanding Mongolian, Tibetan, Chinese, Manchu and other political practices to the contemporary world. Appreciating the enduring relevance of layered, relational and non-exclusive ties which dominated this part of Asia before the arrival of Euro-derived political ‘modernity’ may help us see what is afoot when the Chinese Communist Party intercedes in matters of Buddhist reincarnation. Still more optimistically, such an understanding may also help to resolve some of the globe’s most intractable and consequential conflicts. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include. In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same. Matthew Edney is the Osher Professor in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine. In addition to Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (University of Chicago Press, 2019) he is the author of Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Since 2005, Matthew has directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-editor with Mary S. Pedley of Cartography in the European Enlightenment, a massive compilation (at 1,920 pages!) now in press as Volume Four of Chicago’s The History of Cartography series. (Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 6 are already available on open access. Matthew also run a personal blog, Mapping as Process, which features his commentary on the study of map production, circulation, and consumption. Steven Seegel is a Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rule-making may rarely make headlines, but the significance of this largely hidden process cannot be underestimated. Rachel Augustine Potter makes the case in Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy (University of Chicago Press, 2019) that rulemaking is incredibly important, but also political in ways that are misunderstood. Potter is assistant professor at the University of Virginia. With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be, but rather is an intensely political activity. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often in conjunction with interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices