John Hildebidle reintroduces us to Thoreau as natural history writer, bringing fresh insight to Walden, Cape Cod, and the later nature pieces--both published and unpublished--and the tradition of nature writing as well.

Hildebidle examines Thoreau's attitude toward history and science, demonstrating that he manages to use "secondhand" material while insisting that only firsthand experience has any value. Although sharing the naturalist's eye and methods, Thoreau never rests in the role of observer and collector. Hildebidle sees Thoreau as representative of a long-standing American tendency simultaneously to reject and to use the past, and shows how, as naturalist, he brought together science and literary aims. This gracefully written analysis of Thoreau's thinking and style will well serve all readers of Thoreau and those interested in natural history as a genre.

In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier. The sights and sounds that Thoreau experienced on his daily walks through nineteenth-century Concord were those of rolling farmland, small woodlands, and farmers endlessly working the land. As Foster explored the New England landscape, he discovered ancient ruins of cellar holes, stone walls, and abandoned cartways--all remnants of this earlier land now largely covered by forest. How had Thoreau's open countryside, shaped by ax and plough, divided by fences and laneways, become a forested landscape?

Part ecological and historical puzzle, this book brings a vanished countryside to life in all its dimensions, human and natural, offering a rich record of human imprint upon the land. Extensive excerpts from the journals show us, through the vividly recorded details of daily life, a Thoreau intimately acquainted with the ways in which he and his neighbors were changing and remaking the New England landscape. Foster adds the perspective of a modern forest ecologist and landscape historian, using the journals to trace themes of historical and social change.

Thoreau's journals evoke not a wilderness retreat but the emotions and natural history that come from an old and humanized landscape. It is with a new understanding of the human role in shaping that landscape, Foster argues, that we can best prepare ourselves to appreciate and conserve it today.

From the journal:

"I have collected and split up now quite a pile of driftwood--rails and riders and stems and stumps of trees--perhaps half or three quarters of a tree...Each stick I deal with has a history, and I read it as I am handling it, and, last of all, I remember my adventures in getting it, while it is burning in the winter evening. That is the most interesting part of its history. It has made part of a fence or a bridge, perchance, or has been rooted out of a clearing and bears the marks of fire on it...Thus one half of the value of my wood is enjoyed before it is housed, and the other half is equal to the whole value of an equal quantity of the wood which I buy."

--October 20, 1855

An essential study of the rule of law by one of the world’s leading liberal political and legal philosophers.

The meaning and value of the rule of law have been debated since antiquity. For many, the rule of law has become the essence of good government. But Jeremy Waldron takes a different view, arguing that it is but one star in a constellation of ideals that define our political morality, ranking alongside democracy, human rights, economic freedom, and social justice.

This timely essay collection, from one of the most respected political philosophers of his generation, is a brief on behalf of thoughtfulness: the intervention of human intelligence in the application of law. Waldron defends thoughtfulness against the claim that it threatens to replace the rule of law with the arbitrary rule of people. To the contrary, he argues, the rule of law requires thoughtfulness: it is impossible to apply a standard such as “reasonableness” on the basis of rules alone, and common legal activities like arguing in court and reasoning from precedents are poorly served by algorithmic logics. This rich compilation also addresses the place of law in protecting human dignity, the relation between rule of law and legislation, and whether vagueness in the law is at odds with law’s role in guiding action.

Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law emphasizes the value of procedures rather than the substance or outcome of legal decisions. Challenging the view that predictability and clarity are cardinal virtues, Waldron shows that real-world controversies often are best approached using a relatively thin concept of the rule of law, together with the thoughtfulness that a legal system frames and enables.

In November, countless families across Texas head out for the annual deer hunt, a ritual that spans generations, ethnicities, socioeconomics, and gender as perhaps no other cultural experience in the state. Rick Bass’s family has returned to the same hardscrabble piece of land in the Hill Country—“the Deer Pasture”—for more than seventy-five years. In A Thousand Deer, Bass walks the Deer Pasture again in memory and stories, tallying up what hunting there has taught him about our need for wildness and wilderness, about cycles in nature and in the life of a family, and particularly about how important it is for children to live in the natural world.

The arc of A Thousand Deer spans from Bass’s boyhood in the suburbs of Houston, where he searched for anything rank or fecund in the little oxbow swamps and pockets of woods along Buffalo Bayou, to his commitment to providing his children in Montana the same opportunity—a life afield—that his parents gave him in Texas. Inevitably this brings him back to the Deer Pasture and the passing of seasons and generations he has experienced there. Bass lyrically describes his own passage from young manhood, when the urge to hunt was something primal, to mature adulthood and the waning of the urge to take an animal, his commitment to the hunt evolving into a commitment to family and to the last wild places.

In this first comprehensive overview of the intersection of immigration law and the First Amendment, a lawyer and historian traces ideological exclusion and deportation in the United States from the Alien Friends Act of 1798 to the evolving policies of the Trump administration.

Beginning with the Alien Friends Act of 1798, the United States passed laws in the name of national security to bar or expel foreigners based on their beliefs and associations—although these laws sometimes conflict with First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and association or contradict America’s self-image as a nation of immigrants. The government has continually used ideological exclusions and deportations of noncitizens to suppress dissent and radicalism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the War on Anarchy to the Cold War to the War on Terror.

In Threat of Dissent—the first social, political, and legal history of ideological exclusion and deportation in the United States—Julia Rose Kraut delves into the intricacies of major court decisions and legislation without losing sight of the people involved. We follow the cases of immigrants and foreign-born visitors, including activists, scholars, and artists such as Emma Goldman, Ernest Mandel, Carlos Fuentes, Charlie Chaplin, and John Lennon. Kraut also highlights lawyers, including Clarence Darrow and Carol Weiss King, as well as organizations, like the ACLU and PEN America, who challenged the constitutionality of ideological exclusions and deportations under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court, however, frequently interpreted restrictions under immigration law and upheld the government’s authority.

By reminding us of the legal vulnerability foreigners face on the basis of their beliefs, expressions, and associations, Kraut calls our attention to the ways that ideological exclusion and deportation reflect fears of subversion and serve as tools of political repression in the United States.

“Suspicion of foreigners goes back to the earliest days of the republic…Kraut traces how different ideologies would be considered intolerably dangerous according to the dominant fears of a given era. Anarchism gave way to communism; communism gave way to Islamic radicalism.”
—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

“Magisterial and well written…A gripping, expansive story that traces the consequences of suspicions of ‘un-American’ ideologies and loyalties in federal jurisprudence from the War of 1812 through the still-raging War on Terror.”
—Rachel Ida Buff, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“An original, comprehensive history of one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of political repression in the United States—one few Americans know anything about.”
—Michael Kazin, author of War Against War

Beginning with the Alien Friends Act of 1798, the United States has passed laws in the name of national security to bar or expel foreigners based on their beliefs and associations. From the War on Anarchy to the War on Terror, the government repeatedly turns to ideological exclusions and deportations to suppress radicalism and dissent.

Threat of Dissent delves into major legislation and court decisions at the intersection of immigration and the First Amendment without losing sight of the people involved. We follow the cases of foreign-born activists and artists such as Emma Goldman and Carlos Fuentes, meet determined civil rights lawyers like Carol Weiss King, and discover how the ACLU and PEN challenged the constitutionality of exclusions and deportations. While sensitively capturing the particular legal vulnerability of foreigners, Julia Rose Kraut reminds us that deportations are not just a tool of political repression but a deliberate instrument of demagogic grandstanding.

The Threat of Liberation returns to the tumultuous years of the Cold War, when, in a striking parallel with today, imperialist powers were seeking to institute ‘regime change’ and install pliant governments.

Using iconic photographs, declassified US and British documents, and in-depth interviews, Amrit Wilson examines the role of the Umma Party of Zanzibar and its leader, the visionary Marxist revolutionary, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu. Drawing parallels between US paranoia about Chinese Communist influence in the 1960s with contemporary fears about Chinese influence, it looks at the new race for Africa’s resources, the creation of AFRICOM and how East African politicians have bolstered US control. The book also draws on US cables released by Wikileaks showing Zanzibar's role in the ‘War on Terror’ in Eastern Africa today.

The Threat of Liberation reflects on the history of a party which confronted imperialism and built unity across ethnic divisions, and considers the contemporary relevance of such strategies.

Palestinian prisoners charged with security-related offences are immediately taken as a threat to Israel's security. They are seen as potential, if not actual, suicide bombers. This stereotype ignores the political nature of the Palestinian prisoners' actions and their desire for liberty.

By highlighting the various images of Palestinian prisoners in the Israel-Palestine conflict, Abeer Baker and Anat Matar chart their changing fortunes. Essays written by prisoners, ex-prisoners, Human rights defenders, lawyers and academic researchers analyse the political nature of imprisonment and Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian prisoners. These contributions deal with the prisoners' status within Palestinian society, the conditions of their imprisonment and various legal procedures used by the Israeli military courts in order to criminalise and de-politicise them. Also addressed are Israel's breaches of international treaties in its treatment of the Palestinian prisoners, practices of torture and solitary confinement, exchange deals and prospects for release.

This is a unique intervention within Middle East studies that will inspire those working in human rights, international law and the peace process.

As a young anthropologist, Sidney Mintz undertook fieldwork in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Fifty years later, the eminent scholar of the Caribbean returns to those experiences to meditate on the societies and on the island people who befriended him. These reflections illuminate continuities and differences between these cultures, but even more they exemplify the power of people to reveal their own history.

Mintz seeks to conjoin his knowledge of the history of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico—a dynamic past born of a confluence of peoples of a sort that has happened only a few times in human history—with the ways that he heard people speak about themselves and their lives. Mintz argues that in Jamaica and Haiti, creolization represented a tremendous creative act by enslaved peoples: that creolization was not a passive mixing of cultures, but an effort to create new hybrid institutions and cultural meanings to replace those that had been demolished by enslavement. Globalization is not the new phenomenon we take it to be.

This book is both a summation of Mintz's groundbreaking work in the region and a reminder of how anthropology allows people to explore the deep truths that history may leave unexamined.

Boilerplate language in contracts tends to stick around long after its origins and purpose have been forgotten. Usually there are no serious repercussions, but sometimes it can cause unexpected problems. Such was the case with the obscure pari passu clause in cross-border sovereign debt contracts, until a novel judicial interpretation rattled international finance by forcing a defaulting sovereign—for one of the first times in the market’s centuries-long history—to repay its foreign creditors. Though neither party wanted this outcome, the vast majority of contracts subsequently issued demonstrate virtually no attempt to clarify the imprecise language of the clause.

As a philosophical and social concept, alienation covers a broad range of mental states, both normal and abnormal. Correspondingly, a wide range of literary forms has been employed to deal with this important theme. In Three Authors of Alienation, an exploration of the literary expression of alienation, M. Ian Adams discusses the works of three contemporary Latin American authors.

The fiction of María Luisa Bombal, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Alejo Carpentier reflects alienation, disgust with life, and a feeling of nothingness arising from the conditions of modern society. However, each author treats the theme differently. In La última niebla, María Luisa Bombal uses poetic imagery to create the emotional life of the protagonist. Juan Carlos Onetti portrays the schizoid extreme of alienation with a complex of symbols based on changes of vision caused by the mental states of his characters. In Los pasos perdidos, Alejo Carpentier presents the problem of the modern alienated artist who attempts to rid himself of his social alienation by changing times and cultures.

In his close analysis of the works discussed, Adams considers each literary element in its context and also in terms of its relation to the larger artistic vision of the author. In addition, he places the works of the three authors in the greater perspective of modern social problems by discussing the concepts of social alienation proposed by Erich Fromm and Erich Kahler. His conclusion is that, although disgust with life and feelings of meaninglessness are at the heart of the experiences of the characters of all three authors, only in Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos are social conditions the major cause of alienation. In the works of Bombal and Onetti, alienation is a result not of social conditions, but of factors unique to the characters’ personalities and circumstances.

Three Authors of Alienation is a solid contribution to criticism of contemporary Latin American narrative. Adams’s projection of a social problem into the realm of aesthetic experience yields intriguing interpretations of both the problem and the literature.

Here are the traditions of harpsichord making as they might have been taught to young apprentices in five countries where the craft once flourished: Italy, Flanders, France, England, and Germany. The period covered ranges from approximately 1500, when concrete data became available, to 1800, after which the nature of the instrument is no longer of musicological significance.

The author’s aim is to “give enough information to make it possible for builders of harpsichords to base their work on certain knowledge of the designs and methods of earlier makers; to guide players of the harpsichord in their search for appropriate instruments, dispositions, and registrations in recreating the music of the past; and to serve as a useful body of information for historians and editors of early keyboard music.”

A chapter each is devoted to the five most important schools of harpsichord making. Over forty plates illustrate the most typical harpsichords of each country. Each set of drawings includes a plan drawn to scale, the interior of the instrument, and interesting details of action and construction. These are supplemented by reproductions of illustrations taken from early sources. The appendixes contain texts of relevant documents, including inventories of the shops of some prominent French makers and contemporary descriptions of instruments.

Frank Hubbard has drawn material from contemporary descriptions of instruments and the mechanical arts such as those found in encyclopedias, technical treatises, books on music theory, and manuals for craftsmen. In addition he has examined hundreds of instruments in European and American collections. His exceptional position as an internationally known harpsichord maker as well as a student of harpsichord history allows him to discuss technical as well as historical matters that would be outside the competence of a musicologist.

This one-volume history of Harvard is not so much a summary of Samuel Eliot Morison’s monumental work [The Tercentennial History of Harvard College and University, 1636–1936] as it is an entirely fresh handling of his vast material.

With a mind saturated in the lore and tradition at his command, Professor Morison has sat down to tell the whole story of Harvard informally and briefly. Documentation and all the learned apparatus of scholarly research are therefore omitted; but the same genial humor, the same ability to see the human implications of past events, that characterize his larger, multi-volume series on Harvard are preserved in this. The result is a marvelously entertaining volume, the history of Harvard that everyone has been waiting for, a model of vitalized historical writing.

Winner, 2023 SAH Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award

Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.

Roy Bedichek, J. Frank Dobie, and Walter Prescott Webb—a naturalist, a folklorist, and a historian—all taught at the University of Texas, lived only a few blocks apart, and saw each other almost every day. The true cement of their friendship, however, was the correspondence that makes up much of this book. They wrote not to exchange information, but to communicate ideas, to nail down the generalities of conversation, and, above all, to challenge, encourage, and stimulate one another.

William A. Owens, who knew all three personally, has tied their letters together with his own observations and with transcripts of tape interviews with the men. The result is a unique book, a combination of biography and personal history that portrays not only the three friends, but the land they loved as well.

Since the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, Germany has been in a continual state of turmoil and reinvention. In Three Germanies, Michael Gehler explores the political rollercoaster Germany has been riding since the Yalta Conference, which split postwar Germany into separate zones controlled by the Soviets, Americans, French, and British. Peace, however, was short lived; from 1948 to 1949 Stalin blockaded Berlin in an attempt to gain control over the largest city in Germany. Though the blockade was finally broken in May of 1949, soon after, Germany was officially split into the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, and the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. From then on, Germany became two very different countries with opposite political ideals, splitting families down the middle ideologically—and soon physically, with the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. 

Though the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and Germany was reunified, its problems were far from over: to this day Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Grand Coalition struggle to implement reform. Gehler’s timely and relevant study will appeal to readers interested in postwar diplomacy and the future of Germany, as it examines Germany’s attempts to find a government and a leader that will create a stable and secure country in the twenty-first century.