The history of the modern social sciences can be seen as a series of attempts to confront the challenges of social disorder and revolution wrought by the international expansion of capitalist social relations. In Capital, the State, and War, Alexander Anievas focuses on one particularly significant aspect of this story: the inter-societal or geo-social origins of the two world wars, and, more broadly, the confluence of factors behind the Thirty Years’ Crisis between 1914 and 1945.

Anievas presents the Thirty Years’ Crisis as a result of the development of global capitalism with all its destabilizing social and geopolitical consequences, particularly the intertwined and co-constitutive nature of imperial rivalries, social revolutions, and anti-colonial struggles. Building on the theory of “uneven and combined development,” he unites geopolitical and sociological explanations into a single framework, thereby circumventing the analytical stalemate between “primacy of domestic politics” and “primacy of foreign policy” approaches.

Anievas opens new avenues for thinking about the relations among security-military interests, the making of foreign policy, political economy and, more generally, the origins of war and the nature of modern international order.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, archaeologists Earl and Ann Axtell Morris discovered an abundance of sandals from the Basketmaker II and III through Pueblo III periods while excavating rockshelters in northeastern Arizona. These densely twined sandals made of yucca yarn were intricately crafted and elaborately decorated, and Earl Morris spent the next 25 years overseeing their analysis, description, and illustration. This is the first full published report on this unusual find, which remains one of the largest collections of sandals in Southwestern archaeology. This monograph offers an integrated archaeological and technical study of the footwear, providing for the first time a full-scale analysis of the complicated weave structures they represent. Following an account by anthropologist Elizabeth Ann Morris of her parents' research, textile authority Ann Cordy Deegan gives an overview of prehistoric Puebloan sandal types and of twined sandal construction techniques, revealing the subtleties distinguishing Basketmaker sandals of different time periods. Anthropologist Kelley Ann Hays-Gilpin then discusses the decoration of twined sandals and speculates on the purpose of such embellishment.

A journalist, diplomat, and writer, William Christian Bullitt (1891–1967) negotiated with Lenin and Stalin, Churchill and de Gaulle, Chiang Kai-shek and Goering. He took part in the talks that ended World War I and those that failed to prevent World War II. While his former disciples led American diplomacy into the Cold War, Bullitt became an early enthusiast of the European Union. From his early (1919) proposal of disassembling the former Russian Empire into dozens of independent states, to his much later (1944) advice to land the American troops in the Balkans rather than in Normandy, Bullitt developed a dissenting vision of the major events of his era. A connoisseur of American politics, Russian history, Viennese psychoanalysis, and French wine, Bullitt was also the author of two novels and a number of plays. A friend of Sigmund Freud, Bullitt coauthored with him a sensational biography of President Wilson. A friend of Bullitt, Mikhail Bulgakov depicted him as the devil figure in The Master and Margarita. Taking seriously Bullitt’s projects and foresights, this book portrays him as an original thinker and elucidates his role as a political actor. His roads were not taken, but the world would have been different if Bullitt’s warnings had been heeded. His experience suggests powerful though lost alternatives to the catastrophic history of the twentieth century.
            Based on Bullitt’s unpublished papers and diplomatic documents from the Russian archives, this new biography presents Bullitt as a truly cosmopolitan American, one of the first politicians of the global era. It is human ideas and choices, Bullitt’s projects and failures among them, that have brought the world to its current state.