In Ukraine, War, Love, Olena Stiazhkina depicts day-to-day developments in and around her beloved hometown Donetsk during Russia’s 2014 invasion and occupation of the Ukrainian city. An award-winning fiction writer, Stiazhkina chronicles an increasingly harrowing series of events with sarcasm, anger, humor, and love.

The diary opens on March 2, 2014, as the first wave of pro-Russian protest washes over eastern Ukraine in the wake of Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, and it closes on August 18, 2014, the day a convoy of civilian Ukrainian refugees is deliberately slaughtered by Russian forces. Early on, Stiazhkina is captured by pro-Russian forces while she browses for books but is freed when one of her captors turns out to be a former student. Vignettes from her personal life intermingle with current events, and she examines ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. We walk with local dogs and their owners; we meet a formidable apartment building manager who shames occupiers and dismantles their artillery from the roof of her building; we follow a family evacuated to Kyiv whose young son builds checkpoints out of Legos. Olena Stiazhkina’s Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary is a fierce love letter to her country, her city, and her people.

Easily the most controversial antislavery novel written in antebellum America, and one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is often credited with intensifying the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. In his introduction, David Bromwich places Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel in its Victorian contexts and reminds us why it is an enduring work of literary and moral imagination.The John Harvard Library text follows the first American edition, published by John P. Jewett & Company.

Why do police officers turn against the people they are hired to protect? This question seems all the more urgent in the wake of recent global protests against police brutality. Historical criminologist Paul Bleakley addresses this by examining a series of intersecting cases of police corruption in Queensland, Australia. The protection and extortion of illegal gambling operators and sex workers were only the most visible features of a decades-long, pervasive culture of corruption in the state’s law enforcement agency. Even more dangerous—and far harder to prosecute—was the corrupt bargain between the police and the state’s conservative government, which gave law enforcement free rein to profit from criminalized vice in return for supporting the government’s repression and persecution of its political enemies, from punk music fans to gay men to left-wing protestors. While intimidating members of the political opposition, the police also protected friends and allies from criminal prosecution, even for offenses as serious as child sex abuse. When journalists and investigators revealed this corrupt bargain in 1987, the premier was forced from office and the police commissioner went to prison. But untangling politics from policing proved—and continues to prove—far more difficult in societies around the world. This true crime story goes beyond the everyday violations of law and ethics to underscore how central honest, equitable policing is to a truly democratic society.

What is a deacon? More than fifty years since the restoration of the permanent diaconate by the Second Vatican Council, the office of deacon is still in need of greater specificity about its purpose and place within the mission and organizational structure of the Church. While the Church is more than a social reality, the Church nonetheless has a social reality. Our understanding of the diaconate therefore benefits from a theological discussion of the divine element of the Church and a sociological examination of the human element. Understanding the Diaconate adds the resources of sociology and anthropology to the theological sources of scripture, liturgy, patristic era texts, theologians, and magisterial teachings to conclude that the deacon can be understood as “social intermediary and symbol of communitas” who serves the participation of the laity in the life and mission of the Church. This research proposes the deacon as a servant of the bond of communion within the Church (facilitating the relationship between the bishop/priest and his people), and between the People of God and the individual in need. Thus authentic diaconal ministry includes a vast array of many concrete contexts of pastoral importance where one does more than simply serve at Mass.

“Here, Mr. Split-Foot, do as I do!” exclaimed the child, and the spirits obeyed her command. Thus, in 1848, thirteen-year-old Margaret Fox inaugurated the age of spiritualism. Those early spirit manifestations in a humble New York farmhouse were “but the beginning of a grand seance which for the next half century was to see persons returned from the dead walking upon the earth, mingling freely with mortal Americans. Ceremonies were performed which united in wedlock the living and the dead; ghostly schoolboys returned from the land of the spirits to revisit their old schoolhouses, upsetting the dignity of earthly classrooms . . . Drivers of owl horsecars . . . were intrigued by beautiful female spirits who rode their cars at night and promptly vanished if approached for a fare.”

The colorful career of Margaret Fox, the most famous medium of the era and the “fountainhead” of the cult of spiritualism, attracted the attention of the most prominent public figures of the day. For P. T. Barnum, this phenomenon was another novelty to present to the American public. Horace Greeley took a personal interest in Margaret and her sister; he gave the movement extensive publicity. Lincoln often invited Margaret Fox and other mediums to the White House for seances, during which attempts were made to invoke the spirit of the Lincolns’ dead son. Members of Congress, judges, and intellectuals of the day were well acquainted with her and with the spiritualist movement.

The course of this spirit invasion and the many and varied means by which men communicated with dwellers of the other world are the subjects of this volume. With Margaret Fox the spirits spoke by rapping on floor and furniture. With others they communicated by writing on slates, by touching with ghostly hands, by moving furniture (one medium was so popular that his furniture followed him about like a pack of dogs). Some spirits spoke directly through the mouths of entranced mediums. And some were so bold—or so talented—that they were able to materialize in the flesh before properly receptive groups of people—and happy indeed was the devotee who received a warm embrace from a lovely young spirit lady or a handsome ghostly gentleman during such a materialization.

The spirits who thus displayed their interest in this mortal world soon came to have a considerable influence over whole segments of the American population. For some, spiritualism was a comforting means of maintaining contact with loved ones now departed. For others it was a religion, a blessed aid on the road to salvation. For still others it provided practical assistance with more earthly problems. Many found in it intriguing puzzles for scientific investigation. And for the whole country it provided a constant source of excitement, interest, and entertainment.

Written in spritely prose and permeated with a grave humor, this account of nineteenth-century spiritualism will be equally satisfying to the casual reader interested in a good story, and to the scholar seeking serious social history.

A captivating and wide-ranging interpretation of accidental dismounting.
 
In Pascal Quignard’s writing, philology hunts for wild game in a dark forest. The Unsaddled, which features horses as its central figure, is no exception. Taking off from puns, multifarious imagery, and metaphorical meanings—“to be baffled,” “to be thrown”—that the book’s title provides, Quignard focuses on life-changing moments. We meet George Sand (whose father died after being thrown from his horse), Saint Paul, Abelard, Agrippa d’Aubigné, and countless other writers, philosophers, theologians, or kings who fell off their horses—not to forget Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was knocked over by a dog. Being “unsaddled” can also be associated, as Quignard shows in regard to Nietzsche, with an “overturning” of values. Scenes of war, hunting, “fleeing” or sexuality—“When lovers have a horse ride, they gallop in another world”—come before our eyes, each time from those unsettling vantage points that Quignard knows how to find. As ever, he ranges far and wide in his intense quest, taking examples from across human history, from the neolithic age to his own childhood memories of postwar Le Havre in northern France.
 

Since the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., has personified black leadership with his use of direct action protests against white authority. A century ago, in the era of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington pursued a different strategy to lift his people. In this compelling biography, Norrell reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. He urged black people to acquire economic independence and to develop the moral character that would ultimately gain them full citizenship. Although widely accepted as the most realistic way to integrate blacks into American life during his time, Washington’s strategy has been disparaged since the 1960s.

The first full-length biography of Booker T. in a generation, Up from History recreates the broad contexts in which Washington worked: He struggled against white bigots who hated his economic ambitions for blacks, African-American intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois who resented his huge influence, and such inconstant allies as Theodore Roosevelt. Norrell details the positive power of Washington’s vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination. Indeed, his ideas have since inspired peoples across the Third World that there are many ways to struggle for equality and justice. Up from History reinstates this extraordinary historical figure to the pantheon of black leaders, illuminating not only his mission and achievement but also, poignantly, the man himself.

Urban Infrastructures creates space for an encounter between historians, humanists, and social scientists who seek new methodological approaches to the history of urban infrastructure. It draws on recent work across history, anthropology, science and technology studies, geography, resilience/sustainability, and other disciplines to explore the social effects of infrastructure. The volume rejects narrow conceptions of infrastructure history as only the history of public works, and instead expands the definition to all business enterprises and public bodies that provide the goods and services essential for the day-to-day lives of most people. Essays examine traditional artifacts such as roads, highways, and waterworks, as well as nontraditional topics like regimes of heating and cooling, the processing and distribution of food, and even the metaphysics of electromagnetic infrastructure. Contributors reveal both the material grounding of urban social relations and the social life of material infrastructure. In the end, they show that infrastructure profoundly reshapes urban life even as residents fight to reshape infrastructure to their own ends.