Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2011
Although popularly conceived as a relatively recent phenomenon, patterns of immigrant smuggling and undocumented entry across American land borders first emerged in the late nineteenth century. Ingenious smugglers and immigrants, long and remote boundary lines, and strong push-and-pull factors created porous borders then, much as they do now.
Historian Patrick Ettinger offers the first comprehensive historical study of evolving border enforcement efforts on American land borders at the turn of the twentieth century. He traces the origins of widespread immigrant smuggling and illicit entry on the northern and southern United States borders at a time when English, Irish, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Lebanese, Japanese, Greek, and, later, Mexican migrants created various "backdoors" into the United States. No other work looks so closely at the sweeping, if often ineffectual, innovations in federal border enforcement practices designed to stem these flows.
From upstate Maine to Puget Sound, from San Diego to the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas, federal officials struggled to adapt national immigration policies to challenging local conditions, all the while battling wits with resourceful smugglers and determined immigrants. In effect, the period saw the simultaneous "drawing" and "erasing" of the official border, and its gradual articulation and elaboration in the midst of consistently successful efforts to undermine it.
Tracing the development of monistic interest from its origins in Reformation political theory and theology through late-twentieth-century neoliberalism, Engelmann reconceptualizes the history of liberalism as consisting of phases in the history of monistic interest or economic government. He describes how monistic interest, as formulated by Bentham, is made up of the individual’s imagined expectations, which are constructed by the very regime that maximizes them. He asserts that this construction of interests is not the work of a self-serving manipulative state. Rather, the state, which is itself subject to strict economic regulation, is only one cluster of myriad "public" and "private" agencies that produce and coordinate expectations. In place of a liberal vision in which government appears only as a protector of the free pursuit of interest, Engelmann posits that the free pursuit of interest is itself a mode of government, one that deploys individual imagination and choice as its agents.
With an empire stretching across central Mexico, unmatched in military and cultural might, the Aztecs seemed poised on the brink of a golden age in the early sixteenth century. But the arrival of the Spanish changed everything. Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture chronicles this violent clash of two empires and shows how modern Mestizo culture evolved over the centuries as a synthesis of Old and New World civilizations.
Colin MacLachlan begins by tracing Spain and Mesoamerica’s parallel trajectories from tribal enclaves to complex feudal societies. When the Spanish laid siege to Tenochtitlán and destroyed it in 1521, the Aztecs could only interpret this catastrophe in cosmic terms. With their gods discredited and their population ravaged by epidemics, they succumbed quickly to Spanish control—which meant submitting to Christianity. Spain had just emerged from its centuries-long struggle against the Moors, and zealous Christianity was central to its imperial vision. But Spain’s conquistadors far outnumbered its missionaries, and the Church’s decision to exclude Indian converts from priesthood proved shortsighted. Native religious practices persisted, and a richly blended culture—part Indian, part Christian—began to emerge.
The religious void left in the wake of Spain’s conquests had enduring consequences. MacLachlan’s careful analysis explains why Mexico is culturally a Mestizo country while ethnically Indian, and why modern Mexicans remain largely orphaned from their indigenous heritage—the adopted children of European history.
Although much has already been written about the rise and fall of Enron, four important questions remain unanswered: What management behavior and practices led Enron down the path from truly innovative to fraudulent management? How could Enron’s board of directors have failed to detect the business, ethical, and legal risks embedded in the company’s aggressive financial strategies and accounting practices? Why did Enron’s external watchdogs—security analysts, credit-rating agencies, and regulatory agencies—fail to bark? What actions can prevent Enron-type breakdowns in the future? Innovation Corrupted addresses each of these questions.
In contrast to the time-line narratives of previous books on Enron that offer interesting but largely unsystematic insight into individual actions and organizational processes, Innovation Corrupted pursues a more methodical analysis of the causes and lessons of Enron’s collapse. Based upon newly available sources, Salter identifies the social pathologies and administrative failures that fostered the company’s ethical drift and inhibited the board of directors from exercising effective governance and control. Salter also goes beyond the work of previous books by proposing practical recommendations for preventing future Enron-type disasters. These prescriptions relate to board oversight, financial incentives for executives, and, most importantly, the maintenance of ethical discipline when operating in the murky borderlands of the law. It was in this shadowed space that Enron’s senior executives lost their way.
On March 4, 1789, New York City's church bells pealed, cannons fired, and flags snapped in the wind to celebrate the date set for the opening of the First Federal Congress. In many ways the establishment of Congress marked the culmination of the American Revolution as the ship of state was launched from the foundation of the legislative system outlined in Article I of the Constitution.
Inventing Congress presents the latest scholarship on the interrelated intellectual, institutional, cultural, and political antecedents of the formation of the First Federal Congress. The first section covers the origins of the body, ranging in discussion from the question of how the founders' understanding of classical Greek and Roman republican precedent shaped their thinking, to the political lessons learned during the Continental and Confederation Congresses.
The second section concerns itself with the establishment of the First Federal Congress, examining several heretofore little-treated aspects of the most important Congress in history, including its relationship to the press, morality, the arts and sciences, and economic philosophy.
Inventing Congress represents the papers from the first two conferences sponsored by the United States Capitol Historical Society in its series, “Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1789-1801.”
On Boston Common stands a monument dedicated to the Oneida Football Club. It honors the site where, in the 1860s, sixteen boys played what was then called the “Boston game”—an early version of football in the United States. The boys were largely the sons of upper-class Boston Brahmins, and they lived through the transformative periods of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Later as they grew old, in the 1920s, a handful of them orchestrated a series of commemorative events about their boyhood game. Benefitting from elite networks developed through the city’s social and educational institutions, including Harvard University, they donated artifacts (such as an oddly shaped, battered black ball) to museums, deposited self-penned histories into libraries and archives, and erected bronze and stone memorials, all to elevate themselves as the inventors of American football (and later, by extension, soccer). But was this origin story of what, by then, had become one of America’s favorite games as straightforward as they made it seem or a myth-making hoax?
In Inventing the Boston Game, Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin investigate the history of the Oneida Football Club and reveal what really happened. In a compelling, well told narrative that is informed by sports history, Boston history, and the study of memory, they posit that these men engaged in self-memorialization to reinforce their elite cultural status during a period of tremendous social and economic change, and particularly increased immigration. This exploration of the Club’s history provides fascinating insight into how and why origin stories are created in the first place.
Here, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism’s usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the Church.
“It is a magnificent work of intellectual, psychological, and spiritual history. It is hard to decide which is more remarkable: the breadth of learning displayed on almost every page, the infectious enthusiasm that suffuses the whole book, the riveting originality of the central argument, or the emotional power and force with which it is deployed.”
—David Marquand, New Republic
“Larry Siedentop has written a philosophical history in the spirit of Voltaire, Condorcet, Hegel, and Guizot…At a time when we on the left need to be stirred from our dogmatic slumbers, Inventing the Individual is a reminder of some core values that are pretty widely shared.”
—James Miller, The Nation
“In this learned, subtle, enjoyable and digestible work [Siedentop] has offered back to us a proper version of ourselves. He has explained us to ourselves…[A] magisterial, timeless yet timely work.”
—Douglas Murray, The Spectator
“Like the best books, Inventing the Individual both teaches you something new and makes you want to argue with it.”
—Kenan Malik, The Independent
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