In Stateless Commerce, Barak Richman uses the colorful case study of the diamond industry to explore how ethnic trading networks operate and why they persist in the twenty-first century. How, for example, does the 47th Street diamond district in midtown Manhattan—surrounded by skyscrapers and sophisticated financial institutions—continue to thrive as an ethnic marketplace that operates like a traditional bazaar? Conventional models of economic and technological progress suggest that such primitive commercial networks would be displaced by new trading paradigms, yet in the heart of New York City the old world persists. Richman’s explanation is deceptively simple. Far from being an anachronism, 47th Street’s ethnic enclave is an adaptive response to the unique pressures of the diamond industry.

Ethnic trading networks survive because they better fulfill many functions usually performed by state institutions. While the modern world rests heavily on lawyers, courts, and state coercion, ethnic merchants regularly sell goods and services by relying solely on familiarity, trust, and community enforcement—what economists call “relational exchange.” These commercial networks insulate themselves from the outside world because the outside world cannot provide those assurances.

Extending the framework of transactional cost and organizational economics, Stateless Commerce draws on rare insider interviews to explain why personal exchange succeeds, even as most global trade succumbs to the forces of modernization, and what it reveals about the limitations of the modern state in governing the economy.

The story of how a much-contested legal category—statelessness—transformed the international legal order and redefined the relationship between states and their citizens.

Two world wars left millions stranded in Europe. The collapse of empires and the rise of independent states in the twentieth century produced an unprecedented number of people without national belonging and with nowhere to go. Mira Siegelberg’s innovative history weaves together ideas about law and politics, rights and citizenship, with the intimate plight of stateless persons, to explore how and why the problem of statelessness compelled a new understanding of the international order in the twentieth century and beyond.

In the years following the First World War, the legal category of statelessness generated novel visions of cosmopolitan political and legal organization and challenged efforts to limit the boundaries of national membership and international authority. Yet, as Siegelberg shows, the emergence of mass statelessness ultimately gave rise to the rights regime created after World War II, which empowered the territorial state as the fundamental source of protection and rights, against alternative political configurations.

Today we live with the results: more than twelve million people are stateless and millions more belong to categories of recent invention, including refugees and asylum seekers. By uncovering the ideological origins of the international agreements that define categories of citizenship and non-citizenship, Statelessness better equips us to confront current dilemmas of political organization and authority at the global level.

A pathbreaking new genealogy of statelessness

Just as the modern state and the citizenship associated with it are commonly thought of as a European invention, so too is citizenship’s negation in the form of twentieth-century diaspora and statelessness. Statelessness sets forth a new genealogy, suggesting that Europe first encountered mass statelessness neither inside its own borders nor during the twentieth century, as Hannah Arendt so influentially claimed, but outside of itself—in the New World, several hundred years earlier.

Through close readings of political philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau to Kant, Tony C. Brown argues that statelessness became a central problem for political thought early on, with far-reaching implications for thinking both on the state and on being human. What Europeans thought they saw among the “savages” of the Americas was life without political order, life less than human. Lacking almost everything those deemed clearly human had achieved, the stateless existed in a radically precarious, almost inhuman privation.

And yet this existence also raised the unsettling possibility that state-based existence may not be inevitable, necessary, or even ideal.  This possibility, as Brown shows, prompts the response—as defensive as it was aggressive—that we call Enlightenment political philosophy, which arguably still orders much thinking on being stateless today, including our discourses concerning migrants and Indigenous peoples.

Unlike most books about the Civil War, which address individual battles or the war at the national level, States at War: A Reference Guide for Michigan in the Civil War chronicles the actions of an individual state government and its citizenry coping with the War and its ramifications, from transformed race relations and gender roles, to the suspension of habeas corpus, to the deaths of over 10,000 Michigan fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers who had been in action. The book compiles primary source material—including official reports, legislative journals, executive speeches, special orders, and regional newspapers—to provide an exhaustive record of the important roles Michigan and Michiganders had in the War. Though not burdened by marching armies or military occupation like some states to the southeast, Michigan nevertheless had a fascinating Civil War experience that was filled with acute economic anxieties, intense political divisions, and vital contributions on the battlefield. This comprehensive volume will be the essential starting point for all future research into Michigan’s Civil War-era history.
 

The cultural reverberations of Central America’s failed revolutions on US intellectual thought

The thwarted Central American revolutions during the latter half of the twentieth century marked a watershed in what had become a global anti-imperialist movement striving for a more egalitarian future. Examining a range of documentary, literary, and artistic works, States of Defeat looks at how left-wing intellectuals in the United States reckoned with the fallout from these defeats through wide-ranging creative expressions of indignation, cynicism, and grief.

As he argues for the historical significance of Central America in the transition out of the Cold War, Eric A. Vázquez shows how the unfulfilled revolutionary ambitions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala prompted intellectuals in the United States to reexamine their desires for radical transformation. Analyzing novels, memoirs, anthropological writings, documentary film, and archival materials from the 1980s and 1990s, he demonstrates how these texts prefigured later anxieties about secrecy and securitization, the rise of nongovernmental organizational forms, and state failure.

Examining the legacies of unfulfilled anti-imperialist political ideals and their implications for the global left in the twenty-first century, States of Defeat offers a renewed perspective on the function of Central America in the US imagination. Amid a resurgence of crackdowns on public protest and a rise in virulent anti-immigrant campaigns throughout the United States and globally, Vázquez presents urgent and valuable insights into the viability of political solidarity and state power.

The process of nation-building in Latin America transformed the relations between the state, the economy, and nature. Between 1760 and 1940, the economies of most countries in the Spanish Caribbean came to depend heavily on the export of plant products, such as coffee, tobacco, and sugar. After the mid-nineteenth century, this model of export-led economic growth also became a central tenet of liberal projects of nation-building. As international competition grew and commodity prices fell over this period, Latin American growers strove to remain competitive by increasing agricultural production. By the turn of the twentieth century, their pursuit of export-led growth had generated severe environmental problems, including soil exhaustion, erosion, and epidemic outbreaks of crop diseases and pests.

This book traces the history of the intersections between nature, economy, and nation in the Spanish Caribbean through a history of the agricultural and botanical sciences. Growers and governments in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, and Costa Rica turned to scientists to help them establish practical and ideological control over nature. They hoped to use science to alleviate the pressing environmental and economic stresses, without having to give up their commitment to export-led growth. Starting from an overview of the relationship among science, nature, and development throughout the export boom of 1760 to 1930, Stuart McCook examines such topics as the relationship between scientific plant surveys and nation-building, the development of a "creole science" to address the problems of tropical agriculture, the ecological rationalization of the sugar industry, and the growth of technocratic ideologies of science and progress. He concludes with a look at how the Great Depression of the 1930s changed the paradigms of economic and political development and the role of science and nature in these paradigms.

On politics, pleasure, and poetry.

Plato, the great philosopher of Athens, was born in 427 BC. In early manhood an admirer of Socrates, he later founded the famous school of philosophy in the grove Academus. Much else recorded of his life is uncertain; that he left Athens for a time after Socrates’ execution is probable; that later he went to Cyrene, Egypt, and Sicily is possible; that he was wealthy is likely; that he was critical of “advanced” democracy is obvious. He lived to be 80 years old. Linguistic tests including those of computer science still try to establish the order of his extant philosophical dialogues, written in splendid prose and revealing Socrates’ mind fused with Plato’s thought.

In Laches, Charmides, and Lysis, Socrates and others discuss separate ethical conceptions. Protagoras, Ion, and Meno discuss whether righteousness can be taught. In Gorgias, Socrates is estranged from his city’s thought, and his fate is impending. The Apology (not a dialogue), Crito, Euthyphro, and the unforgettable Phaedo relate the trial and death of Socrates and propound the immortality of the soul. In the famous Symposium and Phaedrus, written when Socrates was still alive, we find the origin and meaning of love. Cratylus discusses the nature of language. The great masterpiece in ten books, the Republic, concerns righteousness (and involves education, equality of the sexes, the structure of society, and abolition of slavery). Of the six so-called dialectical dialogues Euthydemus deals with philosophy; metaphysical Parmenides is about general concepts and absolute being; Theaetetus reasons about the theory of knowledge. Of its sequels, Sophist deals with not-being; Politicus with good and bad statesmanship and governments; Philebus with what is good. The Timaeus seeks the origin of the visible universe out of abstract geometrical elements. The unfinished Critias treats of lost Atlantis. Unfinished also is Plato’s last work, Laws, a critical discussion of principles of law which Plato thought the Greeks might accept.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plato is in twelve volumes.

A long-overdue guide on how to use statistics to bring clarity, not confusion, to policy work.

Statistics are an essential tool for making, evaluating, and improving public policy. Statistics for Public Policy is a crash course in wielding these unruly tools to bring maximum clarity to policy work. Former White House economist Jeremy G. Weber offers an accessible voice of experience for the challenges of this work, focusing on seven core practices: 

• Thinking big-picture about the role of data in decisions
• Critically engaging with data by focusing on its origins, purpose, and generalizability
• Understanding the strengths and limits of the simple statistics that dominate most policy discussions
• Developing reasons for considering a number to be practically small or large  
• Distinguishing correlation from causation and minor causes from major causes
• Communicating statistics so that they are seen, understood, and believed
• Maintaining credibility by being right (or at least respectably wrong) in every setting

Most new law is statutory law; that is, law enacted by legislators. An important question, therefore, is how should this law be interpreted by courts and agencies, especially when the text of a statute is not entirely clear. There is a great deal of scholarly literature on the rules and legal materials courts should use in interpreting statutes. This book takes a fresh approach by focusing instead on what judges should do once the legal materials fail to resolve the interpretive question. It challenges the common assumption that in such cases judges should exercise interstitial lawmaking power. Instead, it argues that--wherever one believes the interpretive inquiry has failed to resolve the statutory meaning--judges can and should use statutory default rules that are designed to maximize the satisfaction of enactable political preferences; that is, the political preferences of the polity that are shared among enough elected officials that they could and would be enacted into law if the issue were on the legislative agenda.

These default rules explain many recent high-profile cases, including the Guantánamo detainees case, the sentencing guidelines case, the decision denying the FDA authority to regulate cigarettes, and the case that refused to allow the attorney general to criminalize drugs used in physician-assisted suicide.

Since the 1950s, television flooded the American soundscape with not just pictures but sounds, a constant aural stream infiltrating domestic life. In Stay Tuned, Patrick Sullivan treats network-era television sound not as background noise or auxiliary signal but as a formative texture of aesthetic life in postwar America. He theorizes how television’s sonic forms—asynchronous audiovisuals, noises, affective rhythms, what he collectively terms “network aurality”—trouble traditional aesthetic theory. Stay Tuned takes up critiques of television sound and repurposes them as evidence of a deeper philosophical discomfort: namely, that television sound does something to aesthetic categories that they weren’t built to handle. From the laugh track to the cartoon “boinks,” from noises to the jingle, Sullivan reads television sounds not as cultural detritus but as formal interventions—forcing a redefinition of what aesthetics means when form is mass-produced, commercial, and built for syndication. What emerges is not just a new theory and history of television sound, but a reimagined account of aesthetic experience itself—expanded, recalibrated, and a little wacky.

Staying sober is a daily struggle for many men living in Mexico City, one of the world's largest, grittiest urban centers. In this engaging study, Stanley Brandes focuses on a common therapeutic response to alcoholism, Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), which boasts an enormous following throughout Mexico and much of Latin America.

Over several years, Brandes observed and participated in an all-men's chapter of A.A. located in a working class district of Mexico City. Employing richly textured ethnography, he analyzes the group's social dynamics, therapeutic effectiveness, and ritual and spiritual life. Brandes demonstrates how recovering alcoholics in Mexico redefine gender roles in order to preserve masculine identity. He also explains how an organization rooted historically in evangelical Protestantism has been able to flourish in Roman Catholic Latin America.

On the night of the presidential election in 1876, a gang of counterfeiters out of Chicago attempted to steal the entombed embalmed body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. The custodian of the tomb was so shaken by the incident that he willingly dedicated the rest of his life to protecting the president’s corpse.

In a lively and dramatic narrative, Thomas J. Craughwell returns to this bizarre, and largely forgotten, event with the first book to place the grave robbery in historical context. He takes us through the planning and execution of the crime and the outcome of the investigation. He describes the reactions of Mary Todd Lincoln and Robert Todd Lincoln to the theft—and the peculiar silence of a nation. He follows the unlikely tale of what happened to Lincoln’s remains after the attempted robbery, and details the plan devised by the Lincoln Guard of Honor to prevent a similar abominable recurrence.

Along the way, Craughwell offers entertaining sidelights on the rise of counterfeiting in America and the establishment of the Secret Service to combat it; the prevalence of grave robberies; the art of nineteenth-century embalming; and the emergence among Irish immigrants of an ambitious middle class—and a criminal underclass.

This rousing story of hapless con men, intrepid federal agents, and ordinary Springfield citizens who honored their native son by keeping a valuable, burdensome secret for decades offers a riveting glimpse into late-nineteenth-century America, and underscores that truth really is sometimes stranger than fiction.

“Bucar’s sharp insights, shot through with humor and self-awareness, are exactly what we need the next time we reach over to borrow from someone else’s religion for our own therapeutic, political, or educational needs.”
—Gene Demby, cohost and correspondent for NPR’s Code Switch

“So finely written, so intelligent and fair, and laced with such surprising discoveries that it deserves a reader’s full attention…As the act of walking a religious pilgrimage does invite greater self-awareness…Stealing My Religion is now an essential part of that worthy endeavor.” —Kurt Caswell, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Lively in style and backed by solid, unobtrusive scholarship.” —Jonathan Benthall, Times Literary Supplement

“With interpretive subtlety and ethical vision, Liz Bucar explores the moral risk of intercultural theft. Stealing My Religion is a powerful intervention by a leading scholar of religion into the illiberal results of everyday religious exploitation. Highly recommended." —Kathryn Lofton, author of Consuming Religion

Liz Bucar unpacks the ethical dilemmas of a messy form of cultural appropriation: the borrowing of religious doctrines, rituals, and dress for political, economic, and therapeutic reasons. Does borrowing from another’s religion harm believers? Who can consent to such borrowings? Bucar sees religion as an especially vexing arena for appropriation debates because faiths overlap and imitate each other and because diversity within religious groups scrambles our sense of who is an insider and who is not. Indeed, if we are to understand why some appropriations are insulting and others benign, we have to ask difficult philosophical questions about what religions really are.

Stealing My Religion guides us through three revealing case studies—the hijab as a feminist signal of Muslim allyship, a study abroad “pilgrimage” on the Camino de Santiago, and the commodification of yoga in the West. We see why the Vatican can’t grant Rihanna permission to dress up as the pope, yet it’s still okay to roll out our yoga mats. Reflecting on her own missteps, Bucar comes to a surprising conclusion: the way to avoid religious appropriation isn’t to borrow less but to borrow more—to become deeply invested in learning the roots and diverse meanings of our enthusiasms.

What led to the breakdown of the Soviet Union? Steven Solnick argues, contrary to most current literature, that the Soviet system did not fall victim to stalemate at the top or to a revolution from below, but rather to opportunism from within. In three case studies--on the Communist Youth League, the system of job assignments for university graduates, and military conscription--Solnick makes use of rich archival sources and interviews to tell the story from a new perspective, and to employ and test Western theories of the firm in the Soviet environment. He finds that even before Gorbachev, mechanisms for controlling bureaucrats in Soviet organizations were weak, allowing these individuals great latitude in their actions. Once reforms began, they translated this latitude into open insubordination by seizing the very organizational assets they were supposed to be managing. Thus, the Soviet system, Solnick argues, suffered the organizational equivalent of a colossal bank run. When the servants of the state stopped obeying orders from above, the state's fate was sealed.

By incorporating economic theories of institutions into a political theory of Soviet breakdown and collapse, Stealing the State offers a powerful and dynamic account of the most important international political event of the later twentieth century.

Through a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the Danube. The Danube route integrated the two principalities into a dense network of European roads and waterways. From the 1830s to the 1860s, steamboat transport transformed time and space for the areas that benefited from regular services. River traffic accelerated urban development along the Lower Danube and contributed directly to institutional modernization in one of Europe’s peripheries.

Beyond technological advances and the transportation of goods on a trans-imperial waterway, steamboat travel revolutionized human interactions, too. The book offers a fascinating insight into the social and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century, drawing on first-hand accounts of Danube cruising. Describing the story of travelers who interacted, met, and visited the places they stopped, Constantin Ardeleanu creates a transnational history of travel up and down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople. The pleasures and sometimes the travails of the travelers unfold against a backdrop of technical and economic transformation in the crucial period of modernization.

With the overwhelming amount of new information that bombards us each day, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when the widespread availability of the printed word was a novelty. In early nineteenth-century Britain, print was not novel—Gutenberg’s printing press had been around for nearly four centuries—but printed matter was still a rare and relatively expensive luxury. All this changed, however, as publishers began employing new technologies to astounding effect, mass-producing instructive and educational books and magazines and revolutionizing how knowledge was disseminated to the general public.

Iron ore is widely distributed over the world and has been mined from ancient times, but Mexico, with a good supply of ore, was a relative newcomer to the ranks of iron- and steel-producing nations. This distinctive book offers a history of the Mexican iron and steel industry through the 1960s.

Archaeological evidence, the author states, shows that the indigenous peoples of Mexico had developed a technology of metallurgy—relying on gold, silver, copper, tin and bronze—before the arrival of the Spaniards, but those same peoples had no knowledge of iron. That knowledge and accompanying technology arrived with the conquistadores.

Extremely slow development characterized the progress of iron mining in Mexico and until the twentieth century ore mining and metal forging continued to be handled on a small scale.

By the turn of the century two occurrences had combined to give Mexico an embryonic steel market: the railroad grid had come to link Mexico’s diverse regions and Porfirio Díaz had used his personal power to eliminate interstate tariff barriers to trade. In 1900 the first integrated steel mill in Latin America was established in Monterrey—the city that was to become the capital of Mexico’s manufacturing sector.

Forty years later, shortages of steel imports provided the motivation for the second stage of growth of the steel industry. Much of the book is devoted to the study of this period of growth.

William E. Cole tells the whole story in this scholarly study, which has as its twofold purpose a complete examination of the iron and steel industry of Mexico and an assessment of the impact of that industry on other sectors of the economy. Much space is devoted to an analysis of the role of the Mexican government in promoting and regulating the steel industry and to discussion of the efficiency of the promotional tools employed by the government. Further, he studies the status of the industry in the 1960s, its production and its consumption, and presents a projection for the future.

Personal and simple, earthy and warm—recipes and stories from the Steger Wilderness Center in Minnesota’s north woods
 

The Steger Homestead Kitchen is an inspiring and down-to-earth collection of meals and memories gathered at the Homestead, the home of the Arctic explorer and environmental activist Will Steger, located in the north woods near Ely, Minnesota. Founded in 1988, the Steger Wilderness Center was established to model viable carbon-neutral solutions, teach ecological stewardship, and address climate change. In her role as the Homestead’s chef, Will’s niece Rita Mae creates delicious and hearty meals that become a cornerstone experience for visitors from all over the world, nourishing them as they learn and share their visions for a healthy and abundant future. 

Now, with this new book, home chefs can make Rita Mae’s simple, hearty meals to share around their own homestead tables. Interwoven with dozens of mouth-watering recipes—for generous breakfasts (Almond Berry Griddlecakes), warming lunches (Northwoods Mushroom Wild Rice Soup), elegant dinners (Spatchcock Chicken with Blueberry Maple Glaze), desserts (Very Carrot Cake), and snacks (Steger Wilderness Bars)—are Will Steger’s exhilarating stories of epic adventures exploring the Earth’s most remote and endangered regions.

The Steger Homestead Kitchen opens up the Wilderness Center’s hospitality, its heart and hearth, providing the practical advice and inspiration to cook up a good life in harmony with nature.

A road trip through Steinbeck’s America—revisited, reimagined, and reinterpreted.

Steinbeck’s Uneasy America is the first collection of critical scholarship devoted to Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck’s best-selling, late-career travel memoir. In 1960, Steinbeck was a renowned man of American letters. Many considered him America’s troubadour of ordinary people, the conscience of the country. But weakened by two small strokes and anxious that he had lost touch with America, he embarked on a cross-country road trip accompanied by his wife’s standard poodle, Charley. Two years later, he published Travels with Charley to popular acclaim and robust sales.

Throughout this narrative, Steinbeck insists that all of our perceptions are “warped” by personality, history, and society. And while this hybrid and experimental book has long been accepted as an accurate account of his journey, journalists and scholars agree that the narrative is part factual, part fiction—America as seen through Steinbeck’s particular “warp.” The work is long overdue for scholarly assessment.

Steinbeck’s Uneasy America explores three main topics. Part 1 explores genre and form to consider the degree to which the work is fiction or nonfiction. Part 2 assesses Steinbeck’s increasingly bleak assessment of America—almost a jeremiad that warns citizens of ecological excess and political apathy. Part 3 focuses on Travels with Charley as a road text, travel adventure, and literary influence.

This volume’s authors offer rich scholarly insights and a wealth of stories, facts, and anecdotes about Steinbeck and the adventures and misadventures he and Charley met on the road. Lively and groundbreaking, the collection both enlightens and enlivens discussions of Steinbeck and of the twentieth-century American book world.
 

With the exception of Poe, no American writer has proven as challenging to biographers as the author of The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Crane’s short, compact life—“a life of fire,” he called it—continues to be surrounded by myths and half-truths, distortions and outright fabrications. Mindful of the pitfalls that have marred previous biographies, Paul Sorrentino has sifted through garbled chronologies and contradictory eyewitness accounts, scoured the archives, and followed in Crane’s footsteps. The result is the most complete and accurate account of the poet and novelist written to date.

Whether Crane was dressing as a hobo to document the life of the homeless in the Bowery, defending a prostitute against corrupt New York City law enforcement, or covering the historic charge up the San Juan hills as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War, his adventures were front-page news. From Sorrentino’s layered narrative of the various phases of Crane’s life a portrait slowly emerges. By turns taciturn and garrulous, confident and insecure, romantic and cynical, Crane was a man of irresolvable contradictions. He rebelled against tradition yet was proud of his family heritage; he lived a Bohemian existence yet was drawn to social status; he romanticized women yet obsessively sought out prostitutes; he spurned a God he saw as remote yet wished for His presence.

Incorporating decades of research by the foremost authority on Crane’s work, Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire sets a new benchmark for biographers.

Stephen Douglas and the old Union lived out their last years together. It was the most critical time in the life of both the Illinois senator and his country. During most of the period 1857–1861 the American nation could still choose between adjustment of its sectional differences and civil war, and the man they called the Little Giant seemed the one statesman most likely to lead the country onto a course of compromise and reconciliation.

But Douglas’ intense involvement with the American political scene—his great accomplishments in enacting the Compromises of 1850 and 1854, and his victory in the senatorial campaign of 1858—tended at times to disguise a growing alienation from the mainstream of American political life. By 1857 that alienation had reached acute proportions. In part, Douglas fell victim to his own virtues. He sought to be a nationalist in an age of sectionalism; he preached the value of compromise when most Americans questioned its worth.

In other respects, Douglas’ political failures are less excusable. His attempt to convert an apparently amoral attitude toward slavery into a principle—popular sovereignty—found him dismissed by antislavery citizens as immoral and by proslavery citizens as unreliable. For too long, Douglas, professing to “care not” about the future of slavery, overlooked how much Americans could care once their consciences had been aroused or their way of life supposedly threatened.

Douglas failed to win the presidential campaign of 1860 largely because he could satisfy neither the proponents nor the enemies of slavery. Yet if the last years of Douglas’ life were marred by failure, he was not ultimately the tragic figure some historians have suggested. During the campaign of 1860 a profound change began to take place in Stephen Douglas. The outmoded nationalism he had preached for so long began to give way to Unionism. In his eventual support of Lincoln and his defense of the Union, Douglas at last found a policy worthy of his great talents.

Damon Wells first became interested in Stephen Douglas in 1959 after seeing a Broadway dramatization of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Later, his studies convinced him that playwright and historian alike were often unfair to Douglas. If Lincoln was to be a hero, then Douglas had to be cast as a villain.

This study fills the need for a fresh and dispassionate look at Douglas and provides a fairer assessment than can be reached by simply endorsing contradictory views of apologists and critics. It places particular emphasis on the Little Giant’s struggle with President James Buchanan, the debates with Lincoln, the presidential campaign of 1860, Douglas’ complex relationship with the South, and a careful analysis of the elusive and at times exasperating principle of popular sovereignty.

In this follow up to Stephen King on the Big Screen, Mark Browning turns his critical eye to the much-neglected subject of the best-selling author’s work in television, examining what it is about King’s fiction that makes it particularly suitable for the small screen.

By focusing on this body of work, from the highly successful The Stand and The Night Flier to the lesser-known TV films Storm of the Century, Rose Red, Kingdom Hospital, and the 2004 remake of Salem’s Lot, Browning is able to articulate how these adaptations work and, in turn, suggest new ways of viewing them. This book is the first written by a film specialist to consider King’s television work in its own right, and it rejects previous attempts to make the films and books fit rigid thematic categories. Browning examines what makes a written or visual text successful at evoking fear on a case-by-case basis, in a highly readable and engaging way. He also considers the relationship between the big and small screen. Why, for instance, are some TV versions more effective than movie adaptations and vice versa? In the process, Stephen King on the Small Screen is able to shed new light on what it is that makes King’s novels so successful and reveal the elements of style and approach that have helped make King one of the world’s best-selling authors.

Despite Taiwan's rise as an economic force in the world, modernity has not led to a Weberian process of disenchantment or curbed religiosity. To the contrary, other factors—social, economic, political—have stimulated religion. How and why this has happened are central issues in this book.

One part of Taiwan's flourishing religious culture is the elaborate and colorful procession of local gods accompanied by troupes of musicians and dancers. Among them are performers with outlandishly painted faces portraying underworld generals who serve the gods and punish the living. Through their performances, these troupes claim to exorcise harmful forces from the community.

In conducting fieldwork among these troupes, Donald Sutton confronted their claims to a long history—when all evidence indicated that the troupes had been insignificant until the 1970s—and their assertions of devotion to tradition given the diversity of performances. Concentrating on the stylistic variations in performances, the author describes the troupes as organizations shaped by the "market forces" of supply and demand in the culture of religious festivals. By focusing on performances as the nexus of market and art, he shows how bodily performance is the site where religious statements are made and the power of the gods made visible.

Understand the purpose and background of the new The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition project

Our understanding of the textual history of the Hebrew Bible has been transformed in the wake of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hendel explores and refines this new knowledge and formulates a rationale for a new edition of the Hebrew Bible. The chapters situate The Hebrew Bible; A Critical Edition project in a broad historical context, from the beginnings of textual criticism in late antiquity and the Renaissance to the controversies in contemporary theory and practice. This book combines close analysis with broad synthesis, yielding new perspectives on the text of the Hebrew Bible.

• Theory and practice of textual criticism
• Textual history of the Hebrew Bible
• History of text-critical scholarship

A Hollywood director who blends substance with the mainstream

Steven Soderbergh's feature films present a diverse range of subject matter and formal styles: from the self-absorption of his breakthrough hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape to populist social problem films such as Erin Brockovich, and from the modernist discontinuity of Full Frontal and filmed performance art of Gray's Anatomy to a glossy, star-studded action blockbuster such as Ocean's Eleven. Using a combination of realism and expressive stylization of character subjectivity, Soderbergh's films diverge from the contemporary Hollywood mainstream through the statements they offer on issues including political repression, illegal drugs, violence, environmental degradation, the empowering and controlling potential of digital technology, and economic inequality.

Arguing that Soderbergh practices an eclectic type of moviemaking indebted both to the European art cinema and the Hollywood genre film, Aaron Baker charts the common thematic and formal patterns present across Soderbergh's oeuvre. Almost every movie centers on an alienated main character, and Soderbergh has repeatedly emphasized place as a major factor in his narratives. Formally, he represents the unconventional thinking of his outsider protagonists through a discontinuous editing style. Including detailed analyses of major films as well as two interviews with the director, this volume illustrates Soderbergh's hybrid flexibility in bringing an independent aesthetic to wide audiences.

A fast-paced, behind-closed-doors account of the Federal Reserve’s decision making during the 2008 financial crisis, showing how Fed policymakers overcame their own assumptions to contain the disaster.

The financial crisis of 2008 led to the collapse of several major banks and thrust the US economy into the deepest recession since the Great Depression. The Federal Reserve was the agency most responsible for maintaining the nation’s economic stability. And the Fed’s Open Market Committee was a twelve-member body at the epicenter, making sense of the unfolding crisis and fashioning a response. This is the story of how they failed, learned, and staved off catastrophe.

Drawing on verbatim transcripts of the committee’s closed-door meetings, Mitchel Abolafia puts readers in the room with the Federal Reserve’s senior policymaking group. Abolafia uncovers what the Fed’s policymakers knew before, during, and after the collapse. He explores how their biases and intellectual commitments both helped and hindered as they made sense of the emergency. In an original contribution to the sociology of finance, Stewards of the Market examines the social and cultural factors that shaped the Fed’s response, one marked by missed cues and analytic failures but also by successful improvisations and innovations.

Ideas, traditions, and power all played their roles in the Fed’s handling of the crisis. In particular, Abolafia demonstrates that the Fed’s adherence to conflicting theories of self-correcting markets contributed to the committee’s doubts and decisions. A vivid portrait of the world’s most powerful central bank in a moment of high stakes, Stewards of the Market is rich with insights for the next financial downturn.

Funny happenings.

The rollicking comedies of Plautus, who brilliantly adapted Greek plays for Roman audiences ca. 205–184 BC, are the earliest Latin works to survive complete and are cornerstones of the European theatrical tradition from Shakespeare and Molière to modern times. This fifth volume of a new Loeb edition of all twenty-one of Plautus’ extant comedies presents Stichus, Three-Dollar Day, Truculentus, The Tale of a Traveling-Bag, and fragments with freshly edited texts, lively modern translations, introductions, and ample explanatory notes.

Plautus (Titus Maccius), born about 254 BCE at Sarsina in Umbria, went to Rome, engaged in work connected with the stage, lost his money in commerce, then turned to writing comedies.

Twenty-one plays by Plautus have survived (one is incomplete). The basis of all is a free translation from comedies by such writers as Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon. So we have Greek manners of Athens about 300–250 BCE transferred to the Roman stage of about 225–185, with Greek places, people, and customs, for popular amusement in a Latin city whose own culture was not yet developed and whose manners were more severe. To make his plays live for his audience, Plautus included many Roman details, especially concerning slavery, military affairs, and law, with some invention of his own, notably in management of metres. The resulting mixture is lively, genial and humorous, with good dialogue and vivid style. There are plays of intrigue (Two Bacchises, The Haunted House, Pseudolus); of intrigue with a recognition theme (The Captives, The Carthaginian, Curculio); plays which develop character (The Pot of Gold, Miles Gloriosus); others which turn on mistaken identity (accidental as in the Menaechmi; caused on purpose as in Amphitryon); plays of domestic life (The Merchant, Casina, both unpleasant; Trinummus, Stichus, both pleasant).

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plautus is in five volumes.

Adept at capturing the experience of the upper-middle-class African-American, Diamond lays out two families' worth of secrets in this precise play. With only six characters, she constructs a vivid weekend of crossed pasts and uncertain but optimistic futures. On Martha's Vineyard, an affluent African-American family gathers in their vacation home, joined by the housekeeper's daughter, who is filling in for her mother. The family patriarch is a philandering physician; one of his sons has followed in his footsteps, while the other, after numerous false starts in a variety of careers, is a struggling novelist. Both bring along their current girlfriends, to meet the family for the first time. With such highly--perhaps over--educated vacationers, the conversation and the barbs fly, on subjects ranging from race to economics to politics. But there is also more than enough human drama, which reaches its climax when an old family secret comes out. Through lively exchanges and simmering wit, the family tackles a history filled with complications both within the family and in the outer world.

Still Points is a collection of remarkable and evocative still photographs taken by award-winning nonfiction filmmaker and author Robert Gardner during his anthropological and filming expeditions around the world. Thousands of his original photographic transparencies and negatives from the Kalahari Desert, New Guinea, Colombia, India, Ethiopia, Niger, and other remote locations are now housed in the Photographic Archives of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. This elegantly produced volume presents a curated selection of more than 70 color and black-and-white images made by Gardner between the 1950s and the 1980s. Edited by Adele Pressman, Gardner's wife and literary executor, and with a foreword by Eliot Weinberger, Still Points both honors an important and influential artist and reveals new dimensions in his work.

“There at the end of the endless cycles of time and the loops of film is stillness, and these still photos.”—From the foreword by Eliot Weinberger

A staff photographer for the Ketchikan Daily News, Hall Anderson counted among his early influences photographers like Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who understood the visual bounty to be found in photographing the candid side of life. For more than twenty-five years, Anderson has brought this perspective to his photographic endeavors, both personal and professional, in the small town of Ketchikan in southeast Alaska.

Still Rainin' Still Dreamin' showcasesone hundred of Anderson's prize-winning black-and-white images, which collectively chronicle three decades of life in Ketchikan, spanning its transition from a timber- and fishing-based economy to one built on a booming tourism industry. From timber carnivals to election coverage to Fourth of July parades, Still Rainin' Still Dreamin' is a poignant celebration of the uncanny juxtapositions found in everyday life.