[Cross-posted from New Books in Law] In Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Vintage Books, 2004), Melvin Ely uses a trove of documents primarily found in the county court records of Prince Edward County, Virginia to unravel a rich story about the free blacks who inhabited “the gentle slope of [...]
[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today? Kara W. Swanson’s wonderful new book traces the history of body [...]
[Cross-posted from New Books in Geography] Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. Author Matthew Huber shows the crucial role oil and housing policy played in the New Deal and how, in subsequent decades, [...]
[Cross-posted from New Books in Christian Studies] The death penalty is a subject that can easily inflame emotions. However, in his book, Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty (Northeastern University Press, 2013), Dr. Anthony Sant0ro does an amazing job of objectively presenting opposition to and support of the death penalty and explaining his own opposition to it. [...]
[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Andrea Louise Campbell is the author of Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Campbell is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trapped in America’s Safety Net sheds light on the reality of means-tested programs in the United States. Following an accident that [...]
[Cross-posted from New Books in World Affairs] Any person who turns on CNN or Fox News today will see that the United States faces a number of critical problems in the Middle East. This reality should surprise few. Stunned by the Al-Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, the George W. Bush administration sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan as [...]
[Cross-posted from New Books in African American Studies] Adam Ewing acknowledges the enduring, if reductive, image of Garveyism – “the parades and shipping lines and colonization schemes” – in its early, Harlem-based incarnation, but focuses The Age Of Garvey: How A Jamaican Activist Created A Mass Movement And Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014) on tracing the myriad [...]
[Cross-posted from New Books in Intellectual History] Prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States did not have a national system of taxation—it had a regional system, a system linked to political parties, and a system that, in many instances, preserved and protected trade. In his superbly written and thoughtful book Making the Modern [...]
[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Philip Kretsedemas is the author of Migrants and Race in the US: Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside (Routledge, 2014). Kretsedemas is associate professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts-Boston. This is the second time he has been featured on New Books in Political Science podcast. In Migrants and Race in the US, Kretsedemas [...]
[Cross-posted from New Books in African American Studies] Co-founded in 1962 by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the National Farm Workers Association would eventually become the United Farm Workers (UFW), the landmark labor union dedicated to achieving better wages and working conditions for rural California agricultural workers. In To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the [...]
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