This book develops an original theory of group and organizational behavior that cuts across disciplinary lines and illustrates the theory with empirical and historical studies of particular organizations. Applying economic analysis to the subjects of the political scientist, sociologist, and economist, Mancur Olson examines the extent to which the individuals that share a common interest find it in their individual interest to bear the costs of the organizational effort.

The theory shows that most organizations produce what the economist calls “public goods”—goods or services that are available to every member, whether or not he has borne any of the costs of providing them. Economists have long understood that defense, law, and order were public goods that could not be marketed to individuals, and that taxation was necessary. They have not, however, taken account of the fact that private as well as governmental organizations produce public goods.

The services the labor union provides for the worker it represents, or the benefits a lobby obtains for the group it represents, are public goods: they automatically go to every individual in the group, whether or not he helped bear the costs. It follows that, just as governments require compulsory taxation, many large private organizations require special (and sometimes coercive) devices to obtain the resources they need. This is not true of smaller organizations for, as this book shows, small and large organizations support themselves in entirely different ways. The theory indicates that, though small groups can act to further their interest much more easily than large ones, they will tend to devote too few resources to the satisfaction of their common interests, and that there is a surprising tendency for the “lesser” members of the small group to exploit the “greater” members by making them bear a disproportionate share of the burden of any group action.

All of the theory in the book is in Chapter 1; the remaining chapters contain empirical and historical evidence of the theory’s relevance to labor unions, pressure groups, corporations, and Marxian class action.

The Logic of Disorder presents for the first time to the English-speaking world the writings of seminal Mexican contemporary artist Abraham Cruzvillegas. Renowned for his sculptures and drawings, Cruzvillegas’s artistic practice ranges from pedagogy to performance. It is through his writings, however, that we can best recognize the impressive depth of knowledge and theoretic clarity of an artist whose work never ceases to impress audiences across the globe.

Each of the texts included in this volume is fully annotated and is accompanied by a number of critical studies by leading curators and scholars, including Claudio Lomnitz of Columbia University and Mark Godfrey from Tate Modern.

“A remarkable book capable of reshaping what one takes philosophy to be.”
—Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita, University of Virginia

Could there be a logical alien—a being whose ways of talking, inferring, and contradicting exhibit an entirely different logical shape than ours, yet who nonetheless is thinking? Could someone, contrary to the most basic rules of logic, think that two contradictory statements are both true at the same time? Such questions may seem outlandish, but they serve to highlight a fundamental philosophical question: is our logical form of thought merely one among many, or must it be the form of thought as such?

From Descartes and Kant to Frege and Wittgenstein, philosophers have wrestled with variants of this question, and with a range of competing answers. A seminal 1991 paper, James Conant’s “The Search for Logically Alien Thought,” placed that question at the forefront of contemporary philosophical inquiry. The Logical Alien, edited by Sofia Miguens, gathers Conant’s original article with reflections on it by eight distinguished philosophers—Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Martin Gustafsson, Arata Hamawaki, Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan, and Charles Travis. Conant follows with a wide-ranging response that places the philosophical discussion in historical context, critiques his original paper, addresses the exegetical and systematic issues raised by others, and presents an alternative account.

The Logical Alien challenges contemporary conceptions of how logical and philosophical form must each relate to their content. This monumental volume offers the possibility of a new direction in philosophy.

This latest volume in the longest-standing and most influential series in the field of the philosophy of science extends and expands on the discipline’s recent historical turn. These essays take up the historical, sociological, and philosophical questions surrounding the particular intellectual movement of logical empiricism—both its emigration from Europe to North America in the 1930s and 1940s and its development in North America through the 1940s and 1950s. With an introduction placing them in their philosophical and historical context, these essays bear witness to the fact that the history of the philosophy of science, far more than a mere repository of anecdote and chronology, might be able to produce a decisive transformation in the philosophy of science itself.

Contributors: Richard Creath, Arizona State U; Michael Friedman, Stanford U; Rudolf Haller, U of Graz; Don Howard, Notre Dame; Diederick Raven, U of Utrecht; George Reisch; Thomas Ricketts, Northwestern U; Friedrich K. Stadler, U of Vienna; Thomas E. Uebel, U of Manchester. 

A critical look at the globally dominant development strategy of “empowerment”

Celebratory news features about India’s thriving middle class tell only part of the story of the country’s recent economic rise, frequently glossing over the 300 million Indians who live on the margins and struggle to survive under economic liberalization. How do those cast out of their country’s successes perceive and respond to their position and mobilize against disempowerment?

The Lokaprakāśa by well-known Kashmirian author Kṣemendra (fl. 1050 CE) is a unique Sanskrit text that deals with details of public administration, from the king down to the village level. It includes private sale and mortgage documents as well as marriage contracts—documents that are little attested outside medieval Kashmir.

In the first decade of the 20th century, famous explorer and Kashmiri specialist Sir M. Aurel Stein asked his friend, learned Kashmiri Pandit Sahaja Bhaṭṭa, to prepare an edition of this significant text with commentary explaining many otherwise obscure terms. The manuscript was originally projected to be published by Stein and Charles Lanman in the early 1930s, in a facsimile edition. Long lost, the manuscript has been recovered in the Société Asiatique in Paris and is now published here. The text fills a large gap in our knowledge of private life and public administration in medieval India and will greatly interest Sanskritists and historians alike.

The Lokaprakāśa by well-known Kashmirian author Kṣemendra (fl. 1050 CE) is a unique Sanskrit text that deals with details of public administration, from the king down to the village level. It includes private sale and mortgage documents as well as marriage contracts—documents that are little attested outside medieval Kashmir.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, famous explorer and Kashmiri specialist Sir M. Aurel Stein asked his friend, learned Kashmiri Pandit Sahaja Bhaṭṭa, to prepare an edition of this significant text with commentary explaining many otherwise obscure terms. The manuscript was originally projected to be published by Stein and Charles Lanman in the early 1930s, in a facsimile edition. Long lost, the manuscript has been recovered in the Société Asiatique in Paris and is now published here with all available additional manuscripts. The text fills a large gap in our knowledge of private life and public administration in medieval India and will greatly interest Sanskritists and historians alike.

During World War II more than one thousand Filipinas were kidnapped by the Imperial Japanese Army. Lolas’ House tells the stories of sixteen surviving Filipino “comfort women.”

M. Evelina Galang enters into the lives of the women at Lolas’ House, a community center in metro Manila. She accompanies them to the sites of their abduction and protests with them at the gates of the Japanese embassy. Each woman gives her testimony, and even though the women relive their horror at each telling, they offer their stories so that no woman anywhere should suffer wartime rape and torture.

Lolas’ House is a book of testimony, but it is also a book of witness, of survival, and of the female body. Intensely personal and globally political, it is the legacy of Lolas’ House to the world.

Called “the flour of Cities all,” London has long been understood through the poetry it has inspired. Now poet Mark Ford has assembled the most capacious and wide-ranging anthology of poems about London to date, from Chaucer to Wordsworth to the present day, providing a chronological tour of urban life and of English literature.

Nearly all of the major poets of British literature have left some poetic record of London: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and T. S. Eliot. Ford goes well beyond these figures, however, to gather significant verse of all kinds, from Jacobean city comedies to nursery rhymes, from topical satire to anonymous ballads. The result is a cultural history of the city in verse, one that represents all classes of London’s population over some seven centuries, mingling the high and low, the elegant and the salacious, the courtly and the street smart. Many of the poems respond to large events in the city’s history—the beheading of Charles I, the Great Fire, the Blitz—but the majority reflect the quieter routines and anxieties of everyday life through the centuries.

Ford’s selections are arranged chronologically, thus preserving a sense of the strata of the capital’s history. An introductory essay by the poet explores in detail the cultural, political, and aesthetic significance of the verse inspired by this great city. The result is a volume as rich and vibrant and diverse as London itself.

This dazzling and yet intimate book is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern colossus. Roy Porter paints a detailed landscape--from the grid streets and fortresses of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror to the medieval, walled "most noble city" of churches, friars, and crown and town relationships. Within the crenelated battlements, manufactures and markets developed and street-life buzzed.

London's profile in 1500 was much as it was at the peak of Roman power. The city owed its courtly splendor and national pride of the Tudor Age to the phenomenal expansion of its capital. It was the envy of foreigners, the spur of civic patriotism, and a hub of culture, architecture, great literature, and new religion. From the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, London experienced a cruel civil war, raging fires, enlightenment in thought, government, and living, and the struggle and benefits of empire. From the lament that "London was but is no more" to "you, who are to stand a wonder to all Years and ages...a phoenix," London became an elegant, eye-catching, metropolitan hub. It was a mosaic, Porter shows, that represented the shared values of a people--both high and low born--at work and play.

London was and is a wonder city, a marvel. Not since ancient times has there been such a city--not eternal, but vibrant, living, full of a free people ever evolving. In this transcendent book, Roy Porter touches the pulse of his hometown and makes it our own, capturing London's fortunes, people, and imperial glory with brio and wit.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Telegraph Editor’s Choice
An Evening Standard “Best Books about London” Selection

In popular imagination, London is a city of fog. The classic London fogs, the thick yellow “pea-soupers,” were born in the industrial age of the early nineteenth century. Christine L. Corton tells the story of these epic London fogs, their dangers and beauty, and their lasting effects on our culture and imagination.

“Engrossing and magnificently researched…Corton’s book combines meticulous social history with a wealth of eccentric detail. Thus we learn that London’s ubiquitous plane trees were chosen for their shiny, fog-resistant foliage. And since Jack the Ripper actually went out to stalk his victims on fog-free nights, filmmakers had to fake the sort of dank, smoke-wreathed London scenes audiences craved. It’s discoveries like these that make reading London Fog such an unusual, enthralling and enlightening experience.”
—Miranda Seymour, New York Times Book Review

“Corton, clad in an overcoat, with a linklighter before her, takes us into the gloomier, long 19th century, where she revels in its Gothic grasp. Beautifully illustrated, London Fog delves fascinatingly into that swirling miasma.”
—Philip Hoare, New Statesman

Everyone knows Jack London for his tales of adventure in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. With his work translated into more than 100 languages, London is one of the most popular American writers in the world, alongside Mark Twain. Yet for the reader tackling The Call of the Wild or White Fang, or perhaps his most often-anthologized short story “To Build a Fire,” many misconceptions about his life confuse his legacy.

London in His Own Time is based on Jeanne Reesman’s nearly thirty-five years of archival research. The book offers surprising perspectives on Jack London’s many sides by family, friends, fellow struggling young writers, business associates, high school and college classmates, interviewers, editors, coauthors, visitors to his Sonoma Valley Beauty Ranch in Glen Ellen, California, and more.

People who have commented on and discussed the mercurial genius include Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Ambrose Bierce, and Mary Austin, as well as his half-sister, Eliza London Shepard, and his first wife, Elizabeth Bess “Bessie” Maddern London. There are a few Klondike pals he kept in touch with, and some fellow writers such as Cloudesley Johns, but many of those closest to him truly demonstrate his wide range of friends: barman Johnny Heinold; his second wife, Charmian, whom he called “Mate Woman”; his daughters, Joan and Becky; his lover, Anna Strunsky; his closest friends, especially the poet George Sterling; his former crewmate on the Snark, Martin Johnson; and his valet/memoirist, Yoshimatsu Nakata. Reesman also includes dozens of entries from Bay-area socialists, friends in Hawai’i and the South Seas, fellow war correspondents, neigh­bors like Luther Burbank, and his long-time editor at Macmillan, George Brett.

Texas has always staked a large claim on the nation's imagination, and its mystery literature is no exception. Hundreds of crime novels are set within the state, most of which have been published in the last twenty years. From the highest point atop the Guadalupe Mountains in West Texas to the Piney Woods of East Texas, from the High Plains of the Panhandle to the subtropical climate of the lower Rio Grande Valley, mystery writers have covered every aspect of Texas's extraordinarily diverse geography.

The first book to emphasize the wealth of Texas's mystery writers and the images they convey of the state's wide range of regions and cultures, Lone Star Sleuths is a noteworthy introduction not only to the literary genre but also to a sense of Texas as a place in fiction. Celebrating a genre that has expanded to include women and an increasing diversity of cultures, the book features selections from the works of such luminaries as Kinky Friedman and Mary Willis Walker, lesser-known stars in the making, and even some outsiders like Nevada Barr and Carolyn Hart who have succumbed to the allure of the state's weather, geography, and colorful history.

Lone Star Sleuths captures the sense of place that distinguishes much of the great literature set in Texas, and is a must-read for mystery lovers.

Every place is a product of the stories we tell about it—stories that do not merely describe but in fact shape geographic, social, and cultural spaces. Lone Star Vistas analyzes travelogues that created the idea of Texas. Focusing on the forty-year period between Mexico’s independence from Spain (1821) and the beginning of the US Civil War, Astrid Haas explores accounts by Anglo-American, Mexican, and German authors—members of the region’s three major settler populations—who recorded their journeys through Texas. They were missionaries, scientists, journalists, emigrants, emigration agents, and military officers and their spouses. They all contributed to the public image of Texas and to debates about the future of the region during a time of political and social transformation. Drawing on sources and scholarship in English, Spanish, and German, Lone Star Vistas is the first comparative study of transnational travel writing on Texas. Haas illuminates continuities and differences across the global encounter with Texas, while also highlighting how individual writers’ particular backgrounds affected their views on nature, white settlement, military engagement, Indigenous resistance, African American slavery, and Christian mission.

From frontier times in the Republic of Texas until today, Texans have been making gorgeous quilts. Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes documented the first 150 years of the state's rich heritage of quilt art in Lone Stars: A Legacy of Texas Quilts, 1836–1936 and Lone Stars II: A Legacy of Texas Quilts, 1936–1986. Now in Lone Stars III, they bring the Texas quilt story into the twenty-first century, presenting two hundred traditional and art quilts that represent "the best of the best" quilts created since 1986.

The quilts in Lone Stars III display the explosion of creativity that has transformed quilting over the last quarter century. Some of the quilts tell stories, create landscapes, record events, and memorialize people. Others present abstract designs that celebrate form and color. Their makers have embraced machine quilting, as well as hand sewing, and they often embellish their quilts with buttons, beads, lace, ribbon, and even more exotic items. Each quilt is pictured in its entirely, and some entries also include photographs of quilt details. The accompanying text describes the quilt's creation, its maker, and its physical details.

With 16.3 million American quilters who spend $3.6 billion annually on their pastime, the quilting community has truly become a force to reckon with both artistically and socially. Lone Stars III is the perfect introduction to this world of creativity.

It began in late winter of 2004. Almost 100 years had passed since the last spotting of a wild wolverine in Michigan when coyote hunters caught a glimpse of one of the animals in a frozen farm field in the northern thumb region. For the next six years, Jeff Ford, a local science teacher and amateur naturalist, devoted himself to locating and filming the wolverine that had unexpectedly and inexplicably appeared in the Wolverine State. By the time hikers found the animal dead in early 2010, Ford had taken hundreds of rare live action photos and shot numerous hours of video, with the story of the "Wolverine Guy" attracting national attention through countless newspaper and magazine articles and appearances on Animal Planet and PBS Nature.

This is the tale of Ford's quest as he uncovered answers to mysteries surrounding the animal's territory and movement patterns, while sparking a flurry of controversy surrounding the elusive predator's origin, much of which remains unresolved today. It's an intimate look at research in the raw, from DNA samples stuck on barbed wire to a sophisticated, motion-sensing infrared camera unit strategically placed to observe nocturnal behavior.

The Lone Wolverine brings to vivid life this unforgettable piece of American wildlife lore, using candid interviews, public records, and Ford's own vast storehouse of notes, personal writings, correspondence, and images, offering an extraordinary chronicle of a wild wolverine in its natural habitat, at play and in fierce competition for food and survival. This is a wildlife detective story, recounting years of study and fierce debate as researchers pondered the riddles of Michigan's last wolverine---her origins, habits, and ultimately the cause of her untimely death.

“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds.

A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower.

Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

Drawing on personal interviews and rich archival material from the Grand Ole Opry, Kristine M. McCusker examines the gendered politics of the images through the lives and careers of six women performers: Linda Parker, the Girls of the Golden West (Milly and Dolly Good), Lily May Ledford, Minnie Pearl, and Rose Lee Maphis.

Sharply intelligent, often personal reflections on the global crises of 2020 that are still ongoing

By all accounts, 2020 was the longest year in recent memory, as people in the United States and across the globe careened from one unfolding catastrophe to another. The consequences of this devastating year are sure to impact the planet for decades, if not centuries, to come. This collection considers the question of that long 2020 from the perspective of the lived experience of the year, its long and deep roots in various human and nonhuman pasts, and the transformation of our sense of the future.

The Long 2020 assembles a strikingly interdisciplinary group of scholars and thinkers to address how the many crises of 2020—epidemiological, political, ecological, and social—have unfolded, examining both their origins as well as their ongoing effects. The contributors address questions of time, history, and scale as they have played out, and continue to play out; the relationship between home and environment, with a focus on architecture, breathing, and human–nonhuman relations; and the experience of cultural, political, and social life, deploying cultural and political theory to explore questions of race, gender and sexuality, and democracy.

The global pandemic has still not abated, reflecting the need to rethink our interrelatedness to viruses and other species. In bringing together this diverse group of authors, The Long 2020 offers a variety of perspectives on the impacts of that fraught year, the effects of which continue to permeate daily life.

Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Oregon; Elisabeth Anker, George Washington U; Janelle Baker, Athabasca U, Alberta, Canada; Daniel A. Barber, U of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design; Adia Benton, Northwestern U; Levi R. Bryant, Collin College; Beatriz Colomina, Princeton U; William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins U; Cary Gabriel Costello, U of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Megan Craig, Stony Brook U; Wai Chee Dimock, Harvard U; Paulla Ebron, Stanford U; Nirmala Erevelles, U of Alabama; Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale U; Rosa E. Ficek, U of Puerto Rico at Cayey; Stefanie Fishel, U of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland; Jonathan Flatley, Wayne State U; Jennifer Gabrys, U of Cambridge;  David Gissen, Parsons School of Design and the New School, New York; Dehlia Hannah, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; Karen Ho, U of Minnesota; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Frédéric Keck, Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS Paris); Eben Kirksey, Deakin Institute in Melbourne, Australia; Bernard C. Perley, U of British Columbia, Vancouver; Tom Rademacher; Renya Ramirez, U of California, Santa Cruz; Zoe Todd (Métis); Anna Tsing, U of California, Santa Cruz; Sarah E. Vaughn, U of California, Berkeley; Rebecca Wanzo, Washington U; McKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College, New York City.

“Keith Hebert has thoroughly mined the primary source record in one Georgia county to uncover a complex story of divided community identities, shifting economic tides, wartime destruction, and deep social change. Even more, Hebert has helped clarify the differences between the Appalachian and Southern Civil War experiences.”—Aaron Astor, author of Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri

Civil War historians have long noted that support for the Confederacy in the antebellum South tended to align with geography: those who lived in towns, along railroads, and on land suited for large-scale farming tended to side with the Confederacy, while those who lived a more isolated existence and made their livings by subsistence farming and bartering usually remained Unionist. Bartow County in northwest Georgia, with its distinctive terrain of valley, piedmont, and Appalachian hill country, is an ideal microcosm to examine these issues.

Keith S. Hébert examines the rise and precipitous fall of Confederate nationalism in Bartow County, a shared experience among many counties in the upland South. Hébert’s story tells us much about the war’s origins, Confederate defeat, and the enduring legacy of white supremacy in these rural areas. Although no major battles were fought in Bartow County, Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign saw Federal troops occupying the area, testing the loyalties of Bartow County soldiers serving in the Army of Tennessee and elsewhere. As the home front collapsed, they had to decide if they should remain in the army and fight or return home to protect their families and property. Locals hardly knew whom to trust as Unionists and Confederates—from both home and afar—engaged in guerilla warfare, stole resources from citizens, and made the war a confusing trap rather than a struggle for an emergent nation.

Drawing on the primary source record of newspapers, letters, diaries, and official documents from the county, Hébert compellingly works personalized vignettes into a scholarly study of developments from the advent of war through Reconstruction and the decades following. The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains solidifies recent scholarship about the war in southern Appalachia and opens a window into a community deeply divided by civil war.

KEITH S. HÉBERT, assistant professor of history at Auburn University, was formerly state historian at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Historic Preservation Division. His writing has appeared in The Georgia Historical Quarterly and Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s Aftermath.

On a long dark road in deep East Texas, James Byrd Jr. was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck one summer night in 1998. The brutal modern-day lynching stunned people across America and left everyone at a loss to explain how such a heinous crime could possibly happen in our more racially enlightened times. Many eventually found an answer in the fact that two of the three men convicted of the murder had ties to the white supremacist Confederate Knights of America. In the ex-convict ringleader, Bill King, whose body was covered in racist and satanic tattoos, people saw the ultimate monster, someone so inhuman that his crime could be easily explained as the act of a racist psychopath. Few, if any, asked or cared what long dark road of life experiences had turned Bill King into someone capable of committing such a crime.

In this gripping account of the murder and its aftermath, Ricardo Ainslie builds an unprecedented psychological profile of Bill King that provides the fullest possible explanation of how a man who was not raised in a racist family, who had African American friends in childhood, could end up on death row for viciously killing a black man. Ainslie draws on exclusive in-prison interviews with King, as well as with Shawn Berry (another of the perpetrators), King's father, Jasper residents, and law enforcement and judicial officials, to lay bare the psychological and social forces—as well as mere chance—that converged in a murder on that June night. Ainslie delves into the whole of King's life to discover how his unstable family relationships and emotional vulnerability made him especially susceptible to the white supremacist ideology he adopted while in jail for lesser crimes.

With its depth of insight, Long Dark Road not only answers the question of why such a racially motivated murder happened in our time, but it also offers a frightening, cautionary tale of the urgent need to intervene in troubled young lives and to reform our violent, racist-breeding prisons. As Ainslie chillingly concludes, far from being an inhuman monster whom we can simply dismiss, "Bill King may be more like the rest of us than we care to believe."

Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process—a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women.

“Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States… The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.”
—Edward E. Baptist, New York Times Book Review

The conflict in Afghanistan looms large in the collective consciousness of Americans. What has the United States achieved, and how will it withdraw without sacrificing those gains? The Soviet Union confronted these same questions in the 1980s, and Artemy Kalinovsky’s history of the USSR’s nine-year struggle to extricate itself from Afghanistan and bring its troops home provides a sobering perspective on exit options in the region.

What makes Kalinovsky’s intense account both timely and important is its focus not on motives for initiating the conflict but on the factors that prevented the Soviet leadership from ending a demoralizing war. Why did the USSR linger for so long, given that key elites recognized the blunder of the mission shortly after the initial deployment?

Newly available archival material, supplemented by interviews with major actors, allows Kalinovsky to reconstruct the fierce debates among Soviet diplomats, KGB officials, the Red Army, and top Politburo figures. The fear that withdrawal would diminish the USSR’s status as leader of the Third World is palpable in these disagreements, as are the competing interests of Afghan factions and the Soviet Union’s superpower rival in the West. This book challenges many widely held views about the actual costs of the conflict to the Soviet leadership, and its findings illuminate the Cold War context of a military engagement that went very wrong, for much too long.

Long Lost Blues exposes for the first time the full scope and importance of early popular blues to mainstream American culture in the early twentieth century. Closely analyzing sheet music and other print sources that have previously gone unexamined, Muir revises our understanding of the evolution and sociology of blues at its inception.

During a distinguished military career, in which he rose to the rank of brigadier general and twice won the Medal of Honor, Frank Baldwin saw service in the Civil War, the Indian wars on the Great Plains, and the Spanish-American War. His wife, Alice Blackwood Baldwin, shared the "long march" with him, from his Plains service onward. In this first biography of the Baldwins, Robert Steinbach combines military and personal history to vividly portray a marriage that survived both the harshness of frontier army life and the restrictive Victorian concept of "separate spheres" for husband and wife.

Drawing on a wealth of diaries, letters, and other family papers, Steinbach re-creates the Baldwins' life on the Plains. Moving from post to post in Kansas, New Mexico, Montana, North Dakota, and Texas, they faced danger, excitement, separations, poverty, and many other hardships. Frequently they clashed over Alice's desire to be something more than "an ornament to society"—a wish eventually granted as Frank's long absences and chronic ill health required Allie to take responsibility for herself and their daughter.

With insights into military campaigns on the Great Plains in the years 1865–1890 and a revealing look at the human side of those campaigns, A Long March will appeal to a wide audience.

We have seen these children—the shy and the sociable, the cautious and the daring—and wondered what makes one avoid new experience and another avidly pursue it. At the crux of the issue surrounding the contribution of nature to development is the study that Jerome Kagan and his colleagues have been conducting for more than two decades. In The Long Shadow of Temperament, Kagan and Nancy Snidman summarize the results of this unique inquiry into human temperaments, one of the best-known longitudinal studies in developmental psychology. These results reveal how deeply certain fundamental temperamental biases can be preserved over development.

Identifying two extreme temperamental types—inhibited and uninhibited in childhood, and high-reactive and low-reactive in very young babies—Kagan and his colleagues returned to these children as adolescents. Surprisingly, one of the temperaments revealed in infancy predicted a cautious, fearful personality in early childhood and a dour mood in adolescence. The other bias predicted a bold childhood personality and an exuberant, sanguine mood in adolescence. These personalities were matched by different biological properties. In a masterly summary of their wide-ranging exploration, Kagan and Snidman conclude that these two temperaments are the result of inherited biologies probably rooted in the differential excitability of particular brain structures. Though the authors appreciate that temperamental tendencies can be modified by experience, this compelling work—an empirical and conceptual tour-de-force—shows how long the shadow of temperament is cast over psychological development.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the United States contended with a state-run biological warfare program, bioterrorism, and a pandemic. Together, these threats spurred large-scale government demand for new vaccines, but few have materialized. A new anthrax vaccine has been a priority since the first Gulf War, but twenty years and a billion dollars later, the United States still does not have one. This failure is startling.

Historically, the United States has excelled at responding to national health emergencies. World War II era programs developed ten new or improved vaccines, often in time to meet the objectives of particular military missions. Probing the history of vaccine development for factors that foster timely innovation, Kendall Hoyt discovered that vaccine innovation has been falling, not rising, since World War II. This finding is at odds with prevailing theories of market-based innovation and suggests that a collection of nonmarket factors drove mid-century innovation. Ironically, many late-twentieth-century developments that have been celebrated as a boon for innovation—the birth of a biotechnology industry and the rise of specialization and outsourcing—undercut the collaborative networks and research practices that drove successful vaccine projects in the past.

Hoyt’s timely investigation teaches important lessons for our efforts to rebuild twenty-first-century biodefense capabilities, especially when the financial payback for a particular vaccine is low, but the social returns are high.

A runaway circus lion haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages. A junket to Cuba and an ambassador’s dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. “I’ve always had a knife,” says the unstable stepson to his parents. Inventive, dark, and absurd, the stories in The Long Swim capture Terese Svoboda’s clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Her characters strive for escape—through romance, travel, or more self-destructive pursuits—and collide with the constraints of family and home, their longing for freedom and autonomy often at odds with the desire for safety and harmony.

Cynical, irreverent, and formally daring, Svoboda’s stories in The Long Swim are a deft exploration of womanhood and humanity. Waves of provocation and wonder toss the reader and leave them wanting more.

A multifaceted portrait of the great Japanese director

For years, Akira Kurosawa resisted writing about himself. “It would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies,” he said. “In other words, take myself, subtract movies, and the result is zero.” The memoir he finally started serializing in 1978, Something like an Autobiography, ended with Rashomon, the film that launched him on the world’s stage in 1950. Long Take, first published in Japan shortly after Kurosawa’s death in 1998, at last tells the story of the rest of his life.

By turns intimate, provocative, and revealing, Long Take creates a dynamic portrait of Kurosawa from his own writings; his conversations with writer Inoue Hisashi and director Yamada Yōji; and essays by his daughter and colleague Kurosawa Kazuko, who details the collaborative history of the “Kurosawa crew.” It features a wealth of industry lore, cultural reference points, inside jokes with other filmmakers and writers, and backstories for his own productions, from the earliest to the last. Of particular interest to all cinephiles is an annotated list of Kurosawa’s 100 favorite films.

A survey of Kurosawa’s prodigious career, this book situates the visionary in the media milieu of his youth, in the literature and performing arts of twentieth-century Japan and Hollywood, and among the myriad films he loved, admired, and referenced, including Japanese silent film and comedy as well as productions from India, Iran, and Soviet-era Russia. Now available to English readers for the first time, Long Take offers a lasting picture of the peerless filmmaker in his element.

Critic, poet, editor, chronicler of the “lost generation,” and elder statesman of the Republic of Letters, Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) was an eloquent witness to much of twentieth-century American literary and political life. These letters, the vast majority previously unpublished, provide an indelible self-portrait of Cowley and his time, and make possible a full appreciation of his long and varied career.

Perhaps no other writer aided the careers of so many poets and novelists. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac, Tillie Olsen, and John Cheever are among the many authors Cowley knew and whose work he supported. A poet himself, Cowley enjoyed the company of writers and knew how to encourage, entertain, and when necessary scold them. At the center of his epistolary life were his friendships with Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, and Edmund Wilson. By turns serious and thoughtful, humorous and gossipy, Cowley’s letters to these and other correspondents display his keen literary judgment and ability to navigate the world of publishing.

The letters also illuminate Cowley’s reluctance to speak out against Stalin and the Moscow Trials when he was on staff at The New Republic—and the consequences of his agonized evasions. His radical past would continue to haunt him into the Cold War era, as he became caught up in the notorious “Lowell Affair” and was summoned to testify in the Alger Hiss trials.

Hans Bak supplies helpful notes and a preface that assesses Cowley’s career, and Robert Cowley contributes a moving foreword about his father.

In a wide-ranging constitutional history of presidential war decisions from 1945 to the present, Stephen M. Griffin rethinks the long-running debate over the “imperial presidency” and concludes that the eighteenth-century Constitution is inadequate to the challenges of a post-9/11 world.

The Constitution requires the consent of Congress before the United States can go to war. Truman’s decision to fight in Korea without gaining that consent was unconstitutional, says Griffin, but the acquiescence of Congress and the American people created a precedent for presidents to claim autonomy in this arena ever since. The unthinking extension of presidential leadership in foreign affairs to a point where presidents unilaterally decide when to go to war, Griffin argues, has destabilized our constitutional order and deranged our foreign policy. Long Wars and the Constitution demonstrates the unexpected connections between presidential war power and the constitutional crises that have plagued American politics.

Contemporary presidents are caught in a dilemma. On the one hand are the responsibilities handed over to them by a dangerous world, and on the other is an incapacity for sound decisionmaking in the absence of interbranch deliberation. President Obama’s continuation of many Bush administration policies in the long war against terrorism is only the latest in a chain of difficulties resulting from the imbalances introduced by the post-1945 constitutional order. Griffin argues for beginning a cycle of accountability in which Congress would play a meaningful role in decisions for war, while recognizing the realities of twenty-first century diplomacy.

The Texas Longhorn made more history than any other breed of cattle the world has known. These wiry, intractable beasts were themselves pioneers in a harsh land, moving elementally with drouth, grass, Arctic blizzards, and burning winds. Their story is the bedrock on which the history of the cow country of America is founded.

J. Frank Dobie was a tale spinner who appreciated the proper place of legend and folklore in history. In The Longhorns, he tells of the Spanish conquistadors, who brought their cattle with them; of ranching in the turbulent colonial times; of the cowboy, whose abandon, energy, insolence, and pride epitomized the booming West. He writes of terrifying stampedes, titantic bull fights on the range, ghost steers, and encounters with Indians.

A tireless prospector of the history and legends of the Southwest, Dobie spent most of his life preparing to write this book. He was born in the Texas brush country where the Longhorns made their last stand; he back-trailed them into Mexico; he pursued the vivid lore of Texas cowboys and Mexican vaqueros. No historian or naturalist has ever so related an animal to the land, its people, and its history.

A comparative analysis of both formal and informal long-term care in ten of the world’s wealthiest countries.

Nations throughout the world are in the midst of an enormous demographic transition, with life expectancy increasing and fertility falling, leading to a rapidly aging population and critical implications for long-term care around the world. This volume documents and compares long-term care programs in ten wealthy countries.

Analyses of survey data and government statistics show that the costs of long-term care are beyond the financial means of a large fraction of the elderly population in most countries, particularly the oldest and most disabled. As a result, public systems bear most of the cost of formal long-term care, such as care in an institution or paid home care. Most countries spend more on nursing homes than on home care, but this relationship varies widely as does the mix of care needs and resources used to define eligibility for public funding. At the same time, most care is provided informally through family or unpaid caregivers. The costs of informal care, including the foregone earnings of caregivers, are estimated to account for at least one-third of all long-term care spending in every country. Thus, any estimate of the social costs of long-term care must account for the implicit costs of informal care.

Thomas Wolfe, one of the giants of twentieth-century American fiction, is also one of the most misunderstood of our major novelists. A man massive in his size, his passions, and his gifts, Wolfe has long been considered something of an unconscious genius, whose undisciplined flow of prose was shaped into novels by his editor, the celebrated Maxwell Perkins.

In this definitive and compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Herbert Donald dismantles that myth and demonstrates that Wolfe was a boldly aware experimental artist who, like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos, deliberately pushed at the boundaries of the modern novel. Donald takes a new measure of this complex, tormented man as he reveals Wolfe’s difficult childhood, when he was buffeted between an alcoholic father and a resentful mother; his “magical” years at the University of North Carolina, where his writing talent first flourished; his rise to literary fame after repeated rejection; and the full story of Wolfe’s passionate affair with Aline Bernstein, including their intimate letters.

How the classic aesthetic of 1960s pulp comics influenced art, culture, and politics.

As a form of visual art, comic books rely on a distinct and eye-catching aesthetic. This is especially true of the iconic comics, graphic novels, and illustrations of the 1960s and 1970s. The Look of the 1960s explores the sources of inspiration that influenced the world of comics, beginning with the well-known French comics series Barbarella.

Noted comics scholars Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey analyze the impacts of the often-provocative images featured in the comics of the 1960s, which pushed back against French censorship in a politically tense time, and detail how women resisted their objectification in the comic book industry. Barbarella left its mark on the world and gained international attention, inspiring a movie adaptation and changing the look and content of other popular comics. The “Pulp Pop” movement remains relevant today, continuing to influence the art and political world. With new information about artists and an astute analysis of sociopolitical influence, The Look of the 1960s offers deep insights, making it a must read for comics fans all over the world.

Allan Jacobs has written a city planning book for everyone with a passion for urban environments. His message--conveyed in word and vivid image--is that the people who make changes in cities base their decisions upon what they see, and that their visions and actions, which affect the lives of millions, have too often been faulty. This book is about how to look at and understand urban environments.

In order to plan sensitively, the city and regional planner must walk in, look at, wonder about, and simply enjoy cities. Careful observation is a crucial tool for the kind of analysis and questioning necessary to achieve good planning. Through observation the city planner and urban activist can learn when an area was built, for whom it was built, who lives there now, how it has changed, and how it might be improved for present and future inhabitants.

Jacobs shows us how to read cities by identifying and discussing the many visual clues and their various meanings in different environments. Case studies of American and European cities--San Jose, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Bologna, Rome--and over two hundred striking photographs, drawings, and maps by the author present ways to read the environment that will prove indispensable for urban planners and will delight all city watchers.

In Looking Away, Rei Terada revisits debates about appearance and reality in order to make a startling claim: that the purpose of such debates is to police feelings of dissatisfaction with the given world.

Focusing on romantic and post-romantic thought after Kant, Terada argues that acceptance of the world “as is” is coerced by canonical epistemology and aesthetics. In guilty evasions of this coercion, post-Kantian thinkers cultivate fleeting, aberrant appearances, perceptual experiences that do not present themselves as facts to be accepted and therefore become images of freedom. This “phenomenophilia,” she suggests, informs romanticism and subsequent philosophical thought with a nascent queer theory.

Through graceful readings of Coleridge’s obsession with perceptual ephemera, or “spectra,” recorded in his Notebooks; of Kant’s efforts in his First and Third Critiques to come to terms with the given world; of Nietzsche’s responses to Kant and his meditations on ephemeral phenomenal experiences; and of Adorno’s interpretations of both Nietzsche and Kant, Terada proposes that the connection between dissatisfaction and ephemeral phenomenality reveals a hitherto-unknown alternative to aesthetics that expresses our right to desire something other than experience “as is,” even those parts of it that really cannot be otherwise.

If your childhood friends were Agapito, the bombastic, bilingual lion; Campamocha, the fix-it man; Caracoles, the restaurant owner; Uncle Andy, the shoe seller; Berta and Dyana, the life-size dolls; and Señorita Barrera, then you grew up watching Carrascolendas. This award-winning show, which originally aired on PBS in the 1970s and was subsequently broadcasted throughout the country in the 1980s and 1990s, was the first Spanish and English children's educational television program broadcast to national audiences in the United States.

In this engagingly written memoir, creator-producer Aida Barrera describes how the mythical world of Carrascolendas grew out of her real-life experiences as a Mexican American child growing up in the Valley of South Texas. She recalls how she drew on those early experiences to create television programming that specifically addressed the needs of Hispanic children, even as it remained accessible and entertaining to children of other cultural backgrounds.

In addition to her personal story, Barrera recounts the long-term struggles for network acceptance and funding that made the production of Carrascolendas something of a miracle. This off-camera story adds an important chapter to the history of Anglo-Mexican cultural politics during the 1970s. Given the fact that Latino characters are still under- and stereotypically represented on network television, Carrascolendas remains an important reminder of what is possible and what has been lost in authentically multicultural television programming.