On the 150th anniversary of the death of the English historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, Robert Sullivan offers a portrait of a Victorian life that probes the cost of power, the practice of empire, and the impact of ideas.

His Macaulay is a Janus-faced master of the universe: a prominent spokesman for abolishing slavery in the British Empire who cared little for the cause, a forceful advocate for reforming Whig politics but a Machiavellian realist, a soaring parliamentary orator who avoided debate, a self-declared Christian, yet a skeptic and a secularizer of English history and culture, and a stern public moralist who was in love with his two youngest sisters.

Perhaps best known in the West for his classic History of England, Macaulay left his most permanent mark on South Asia, where his penal code remains the law. His father ensured that ancient Greek and Latin literature shaped Macaulay’s mind, but he crippled his heir emotionally. Self-defense taught Macaulay that power, calculation, and duplicity rule politics and human relations. In Macaulay’s writings, Sullivan unearths a sinister vision of progress that prophesied twentieth-century genocide. That the reverent portrait fashioned by Macaulay’s distinguished extended family eclipsed his insistent rhetoric about race, subjugation, and civilizing slaughter testifies to the grip of moral obliviousness.

Devoting his huge talents to gaining power—above all for England and its empire—made Macaulay’s life a tragedy. Sullivan offers an unsurpassed study of an afflicted genius and a thoughtful meditation on the modern ethics of power.

“Machiavellian”—used to describe the ruthless cunning of the power-obsessed and the pitiless—is never meant as a compliment. But the man whose name became shorthand for all that is ugly in politics was more engaging and nuanced than his reputation suggests. Christopher S. Celenza’s Machiavelli: A Portrait removes the varnish of centuries to reveal not only the hardnosed political philosopher but the skilled diplomat, learned commentator on ancient history, comic playwright, tireless letter writer, and thwarted lover.

Machiavelli’s hometown was the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century, a place of unparalleled artistic and intellectual attainments. But Florence was also riven by extraordinary violence. War and public executions were commonplace—Machiavelli himself was imprisoned and brutally tortured at the behest of his own government. These experiences left a deep impression on this keen observer of power politics, whose two masterpieces—The Prince and The Discourses—draw everywhere on the hard-won wisdom gained from navigating a treacherous world. But like many of Machiavelli’s fellow Florentines, he also immersed himself in the Latin language and wisdom of authors from the classical past. And for all of Machiavelli’s indifference to religion, vestiges of Christianity remained in his thought, especially the hope for a redeemer—a prince who would provide the stability so rare in Machiavelli’s worldly experience.

Hardly more than a decade old, the twenty-first century has already been dubbed the Asian Century in recognition of China and India’s increasing importance in world affairs. Yet discussions of Asia seem fixated on economic indicators—gross national product, per capita income, share of global trade. Makers of Modern Asia reorients our understanding of contemporary Asia by highlighting the political leaders, not billionaire businessmen, who helped launch the Asian Century.

The nationalists who crafted modern Asia were as much thinkers as activists, men and women who theorized and organized anticolonial movements, strategized and directed military campaigns, and designed and implemented political systems. The eleven thinker-politicians whose portraits are presented here were a mix of communists, capitalists, liberals, authoritarians, and proto-theocrats—a group as diverse as the countries they represent.

From China, the world’s most populous country, come four: Mao Zedong, leader of the Communist Revolution; Zhou Enlai, his close confidant; Deng Xiaoping, purged by Mao but rehabilitated to play a critical role in Chinese politics in later years; and Chiang Kai-shek, whose Kuomintang party formed the basis of modern Taiwan. From India, the world’s largest democracy, come three: Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Indira Gandhi, all of whom played crucial roles in guiding India toward independence and prosperity. Other exemplary nationalists include Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, and Pakistan’s Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. With contributions from leading scholars, Makers of Modern Asia illuminates the intellectual and ideological foundations of Asia’s spectacular rise to global prominence.

Modern India is the world's largest democracy, a sprawling, polyglot nation containing one-sixth of all humankind. The existence of such a complex and distinctive democratic regime qualifies as one of the world's bona fide political miracles. Furthermore, India's leading political thinkers have often served as its most influential political actors—think of Gandhi, whose collected works run to more than ninety volumes, or Ambedkar, or Nehru, who recorded their most eloquent theoretical reflections at the same time as they strove to set the delicate machinery of Indian democracy on a coherent and just path.

Out of the speeches and writings of these thinker-activists, Ramachandra Guha has built the first major anthology of Indian social and political thought. Makers of Modern India collects the work of nineteen of India's foremost generators of political sentiment, from those whose names command instant global recognition to pioneering subaltern and feminist thinkers whose works have until now remained obscure and inaccessible. Ranging across manifold languages and cultures, and addressing every crucial theme of modern Indian history—race, religion, language, caste, gender, colonialism, nationalism, economic development, violence, and nonviolence—Makers of Modern India provides an invaluable roadmap to Indian political debate.

An extensive introduction, biographical sketches of each figure, and guides to further reading make this work a rich resource for anyone interested in India and the ways its leading political minds have grappled with the problems that have increasingly come to define the modern world.

Winner of the Russell P. Strange Memorial Book Award

This sweeping narrative presents an original and compelling explanation for the triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States prior to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's election as the first antislavery president was hardly preordained. From the country's inception, Americans had struggled to define slavery's relationship to freedom. Most Northerners supported abolition in the North but condoned slavery in the South, while most Southerners denounced abolition and asserted slavery's compatibility with whites' freedom. On this massive political fault line hinged the fate of the nation.

Graham A. Peck meticulously traces the conflict over slavery in Illinois from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to Lincoln's defeat of his archrival Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election. Douglas's attempt in 1854 to persuade Northerners that slavery and freedom had equal national standing stirred a political earthquake that brought Lincoln to the White House. Yet Lincoln's framing of the antislavery movement as a conservative return to the country's founding principles masked what was in fact a radical and unprecedented antislavery nationalism. It justified slavery's destruction but triggered the Civil War.

Presenting pathbreaking interpretations of Lincoln, Douglas, and the Civil War's origins, Making an Antislavery Nation shows how battles over slavery paved the way for freedom's triumph in America.

This book reasserts the importance of the French Revolution to an understanding of the nature of modern European politics and social life. Scholars currently argue that the French Revolution did not significantly contribute to the development of modern political values. They no longer hold that the study of the Revolution offers any particular insight into the dynamics of historical change. James Livesey contends that contemporary historical study is devalued through this misinterpretation of the French Revolution and offers an alternative approach and a new thesis.

Livesey argues that the European model of democracy was created in the Revolution, a model with very specific commitments that differentiate it from Anglo-American liberal democracy. The fundamental argument in the book is that these democratic values were created by identifiable actors seeking to answer political, economic, and social problems. The book traces the development of this democratic idea within the structures of the French Republic and the manner in which the democratic aspiration moved beyond formal politics to become embedded in institutions of economic and cultural life. This innovative work rewrites the history of French politics between 1795 and 1799.

In Ecuador, as in all countries, archaeology and history play fundamental roles in defining national identity. Connecting with the prehistoric and historic pasts gives the modern state legitimacy and power. But the state is not the only actor that lays claim to the country's archaeological patrimony, nor is its official history the only version of the story. Indigenous peoples are increasingly drawing on the past to claim their rights and standing in the modern Ecuadorian state, while the press tries to present a "neutral" version of history that will satisfy its various publics.

This pathfinding book investigates how archaeological knowledge is used for both maintaining and contesting nation-building and state-hegemony in Ecuador. Specifically, Hugo Benavides analyzes how the pre-Hispanic site of Cochasquí has become a source of competing narratives of Native American, Spanish, and Ecuadorian occupations, which serve the differing needs of the nation-state and different national populations at large. He also analyzes the Indian movement itself and the recent controversy over the final resting place for the traditional monolith of San Biritute. Offering a more nuanced view of the production of history than previous studies, Benavides demonstrates how both official and resistance narratives are constantly reproduced and embodied within the nation-state's dominant discourses.

The surprising story of how Minnesota politicians helped redirect the course of American politics. How did a largely white state like Minnesota become a springboard for leadership in civil rights? Why did it produce a generation of liberals-Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Donald Fraser, Orville Freeman, and Eugene McCarthy-whose ideals transformed the Democratic Party? In Making Minnesota Liberal, Jennifer A. Delton delves into the roots of Minnesota politics for the answer, tracing the change from the regional, third-party, class-oriented politics of the Farmer-Labor Party to the national, two-party, pluralistic liberalism of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). While others have examined how anticommunism and the Cold War shaped this transformation, Delton takes a new approach, showing the key roles played by antiracism and the civil rights movement. In telling this story, Delton contributes to our understanding not only of Minnesota's political history but also of the relationship between antiracism and American politics in the twentieth century. Making Minnesota Liberal combines political history with a discussion of the symbolic role played by race in political battles between whites. Delton recounts the creation of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party, its merger with the Democrats, and the acrimonious battle for control of the DFL just after World War II. She argues that the Humphrey liberals won this battle in part because antiracism activities enabled previously antagonistic groups, divided by ethnicity, religion, and class, to unify around a common cause. Delton contends that although liberal Minnesotans' concern for racial justice was genuine, it also provided them with national political relevance and imbued their bid for power with a sense of morality. Ultimately the language of tolerance and diversity that emerged from antiracism prepared Minnesotans for Humphrey's vision of a pluralistic and state-centered liberalism, which eventually became the model for Democratic politics nationwide. Making Minnesota Liberal is an absorbing and trenchant account of a key moment in American history, one that continues to resonate in our time. Jennifer A. Delton is assistant professor of history at Skidmore College.

On August 4, 1983, Captain Thomas Sankara led a coalition of radical military officers, communist activists, labor leaders, and militant students to overtake the government of the Republic of Upper Volta. Almost immediately following the coup’s success, the small West African country—renamed Burkina Faso, or Land of the Dignified People—gained international attention as it charted a new path toward social, economic, cultural, and political development based on its people’s needs rather than external pressures and Cold War politics. James E. Genova’s Making New People: Politics, Cinema, and Liberation in Burkina Faso, 1983–1987 recounts in detail the revolutionary government’s rise and fall, demonstrating how it embodied the critical transition period in modern African history between the era of decolonization and the dawning of neoliberal capitalism. It also uncovers one of the revolution’s most enduring and significant aspects: its promotion of film as a vehicle for raising the people’s consciousness, inspiring their efforts at social transformation, and articulating a new self-generated image of Africa and Africans. Foregrounding film and drawing evocative connections between Sankara’s political philosophy and Frantz Fanon, Making New People provides a deeply nuanced explanation for the revolution’s lasting influence throughout Africa and the world.

    Texas, for years, was a one-party state controlled by white democrats. In 1962, a young eighteen-year-old heard the first rumblings of Chicano community organization in the barrios of Cristal. The rumor in the town was that five Mexican Americans were going to run for all five seats on the city council. But first, poor citizens had to find a way to pay the $1.75 poll tax. Money had to be raised—through bake sales of tamales, cake walks, and dances. So began the political activism of José Angel Gutiérrez.
    Gutiérrez's autobiography, The Making of a Chicano Militant, is the first insider's view of the important political and social events within the Mexican American communities in South Texas during the 1960s and 1970s. A controversial and dynamic political figure during the height of the Chicano movement, Gutiérrez offers an absorbing personal account of his life at the forefront of the Mexican-American civil rights movement—first as a Chicano and then as a militant.
    Gutiérrez traces the racial, ethnic, economic, and social prejudices facing Chicanos with powerful scenes from his own life: his first summer job as a tortilla maker at the age of eleven, his racially motivated kidnapping as a teenager, and his coming of age in the face of discrimination as a radical organizer in college and graduate school. When Gutiérrez finally returned to Cristal, he helped form the Mexican American Youth Organization and, subsequently the Raza Unida Party to confront issues of ethnic intolerance in his community. His story is soon to be a classic in the developing literature of Mexican American leaders.

Raymond Telles was the first Mexican American mayor of El Paso, Texas, and the most significant Mexican American of his time. This book details his political career from 1948, when he won a hotly contested election for county clerk, to his ambassadorship to Costa Rica.

In an extraordinary display of the historical imagination at work, Ernest May has reinterpreted the genesis of the Monroe Doctrine and written an exceptional study of the relationship of policymakers to political structure. The author shows how domestic politics, more especially the upcoming 1824 presidential election, dictated the content and meaning of the Monroe Doctrine. May accomplishes his task by systematically examining the ideological perceptions of American policymakers and the foreign policies of Great Britain, France, and Russia. He concludes that the policymakers had wide freedom of choice. He then makes a searching study of United States internal politics and finds that there were no interest group pressures influencing decision-makers—it was an era of non-issues. Effectively eliminating the usual forces that shape foreign policy, the author develops a subtle and sophisticated case for the controlling power of presidential politics. May builds a case of relentless logic, giving us a historical reconstruction that is as fascinating in its unfolding as it is convincing in its assumptions and conclusions.

There has never been a phenomenon in American life to equal the invasion of Washington by the young New Dealers—hundreds of men and women still in their twenties and thirties, brilliant and dedicated, trained in the law, economics, public administration, technology, pouring into public life to do nothing less than restructure American society. They proposed new programs, drafted legislation, staffed the new agencies. They were active in the Administration, the Congress, the courts, the news media. They fanned out all over America to discover the facts, plan ways of easing the pain of their foundering country, and report on the results. Many of them went on to be rich, famous, and powerful, but their early experience in Washington was perhaps the most inspiriting of their lives.

Katie Louchheim was among those who arrived in Washington in the 1930s, and being a keen writer as well as the wife of a member of the SEC, she had a front-row seat for the spectacle of social progress. Now, a half-century later, she has gathered reminiscences from her old friends and colleagues, interviewed others, and woven them together into a lively, informal word-picture of that exciting time. Among the many insiders who recount their views are Alger Hiss, Robert C. Weaver, Paul A. Freund, James H. Rowe, Wilbur J. Cohen, Abe Fortas, David Riesman, and Joseph L. Rauh. This book, a singular and uplifting primary document of an extraordinary period, is destined to appeal across a wide spectrum of readers of American history.

The functioning of the U.S. government is a bit messier than Americans would like to think. The general understanding of policymaking has Congress making the laws, executive agencies implementing them, and the courts applying the laws as written—as long as those laws are constitutional. Making Policy, Making Law fundamentally challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that no dominant institution—or even a roughly consistent pattern of relationships—exists among the various players in the federal policymaking process. Instead, at different times and under various conditions, all branches play roles not only in making public policy, but in enforcing and legitimizing it as well. This is the first text that looks in depth at this complex interplay of all three branches.

The common thread among these diverse patterns is an ongoing dialogue among roughly coequal actors in various branches and levels of government. Those interactions are driven by processes of conflict and persuasion distinctive to specific policy arenas as well as by the ideas, institutional realities, and interests of specific policy communities. Although complex, this fresh examination does not render the policymaking process incomprehensible; rather, it encourages scholars to look beyond the narrow study of individual institutions and reach across disciplinary boundaries to discover recurring patterns of interbranch dialogue that define (and refine) contemporary American policy.

Making Policy, Making Law provides a combination of contemporary policy analysis, an interbranch perspective, and diverse methodological approaches that speak to a surprisingly overlooked gap in the literature dealing with the role of the courts in the American policymaking process. It will undoubtedly have significant impact on scholarship about national lawmaking, national politics, and constitutional law. For scholars and students in government and law—as well as for concerned citizenry—this book unravels the complicated interplay of governmental agencies and provides a heretofore in-depth look at how the U.S. government functions in reality.

The British government had few imperial administrators in the American colonies and perhaps fewer ways to exert its authority by force, yet Americans rarely questioned that authority until the eve of the American Revolution. The empire worked and Americans accepted British rule not because they feared the government, but rather because they had effective methods for influencing it to their own benefit.

Alison Olson reveals a source of that influence in networks of interest groups working cooperatively in England and America. Between 1640 and 1790 voluntary interest groups emerged in English politics. They began in London and gradually formed loose connections with smaller but similar interests in the English and American provinces. When the London groups became capable of lobbying the national government, they were willing to use their influence on behalf of the provincials as well. This “representation” of the Americans, though never official, was crucial to keeping the colonists content within the empire.

The type of interest group that could accommodate colonial participation was the associational, identified by the voluntary character of its membership. It included religious and ethnic communities—Presbyterians, Jews, Lutherans, Quakers, Baptists, Huguenots—and merchant groups. London lobbyists, acting as intermediaries between the colonies and the imperial government, gave American interests a vitally important role in the making of English imperial decisions and gave the English government a key source of information on just what decisions would and would not provoke American resistance. When these connections collapsed, the dissolution of the first British empire was not far away.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2023

Large numbers of Latino migrants began to arrive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. They joined a small but established Spanish-speaking community of people from Texas, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Delia Fernández-Jones merges storytelling with historical analysis to recapture the placemaking practices that these Mexicans, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans used to create a new home for themselves. Faced with entrenched white racism and hostility, Latinos of different backgrounds formed powerful relationships to better secure material needs like houses and jobs and to recreate community cultural practices. Their pan-Latino solidarity crossed ethnic and racial boundaries and shaped activist efforts that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change. In time, this interethnic Latino alliance exploited cracks in both overt and structural racism and attracted white and Black partners to fight for equality in social welfare programs, policing, and education.

Groundbreaking and revelatory, Making the MexiRican City details how disparate Latino communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges.

In the reign of James II, minority groups from across the religious spectrum, led by the Quaker William Penn, rallied together under the Catholic King James in an effort to bring religious toleration to England. Known as repealers, these reformers aimed to convince Parliament to repeal laws that penalized worshippers who failed to conform to the doctrines of the Church of England. Although the movement was destroyed by the Glorious Revolution, it profoundly influenced the post-revolutionary settlement, helping to develop the ideals of tolerance that would define the European Enlightenment.

Based on a rich array of newly discovered archival sources, Scott Sowerby’s groundbreaking history rescues the repealers from undeserved obscurity, telling the forgotten story of men and women who stood up for their beliefs at a formative moment in British history. By restoring the repealer movement to its rightful prominence, Making Toleration also overturns traditional interpretations of King James II’s reign and the origins of the Glorious Revolution. Though often depicted as a despot who sought to impose his own Catholic faith on a Protestant people, James is revealed as a man ahead of his time, a king who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution, Sowerby finds, was not primarily a crisis provoked by political repression. It was, in fact, a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained.

This report examines Mali’s counterterrorism requirements in light of recent evolutions in the country’s security environment: The terrorist threat in Mali is growing, but Mali’s military remains largely ineffective. It is not possible to strengthen Mali’s counterterrorism capabilities in isolation from its general military capabilities, which are in need of fundamental reform.

In 1992, at the end of a twelve-year civil war, El Salvador was poised for a transition to democracy. Yet, after longstanding dominance by a small oligarchy that continually used violence to repress popular resistance, El Salvador’s democracy has proven to be a fragile one, as social ills (poverty chief among them) have given rise to neighborhoods where gang activity now thrives. Mano Dura examines the ways in which the ruling ARENA party used gang violence to solidify political power in the hands of the elite—culminating in draconian “iron fist” antigang policies that undermine human rights while ultimately doing little to address the roots of gang membership.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and policy analysis, Mano Dura examines the activities of three nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have advocated for more nuanced policies to eradicate gangs and the societal issues that are both a cause and an effect of gang proliferation. While other studies of street gangs have focused on relatively distant countries such as Colombia, Argentina, and Jamaica, Sonja Wolf’s research takes us to a country closer to the United States, where forced deportation has brought with it US gang culture. Charting the limited success of NGOs in influencing El Salvador’s security policies, the book brings to light key contextual aspects—including myopic media coverage and the ironic populist support for ARENA, despite the party’s protection of the elite at the expense of the greater society.

The second Red Scare was a charade orchestrated by a tyrant with the express goal of undermining the New Deal—so argues Stephen M. Underhill in this hard-hitting analysis of J. Edgar Hoover’s rhetorical agency. Drawing on Classification 94, a vast trove of recently declassified records that documents the longtime FBI director’s domestic propaganda campaigns in the mid-twentieth century, Underhill shows that Hoover used the growing power of his office to subvert the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and redirect the trajectory of U.S. culture away from social democracy toward a toxic brand of neoliberalism. He did so with help from Republicans who opposed organized labor and Southern Democrats who supported Jim Crow in what is arguably the most culturally significant documented political conspiracy in U.S. history, a wholesale domestic propaganda program that brainwashed Americans and remade their politics. Hoover also forged ties with the powerful fascist leaders of the period to promote his own political ambitions. All the while, as a love letter to Clyde Tolson still preserved in Hoover’s papers attests, he strove to pass for straight while promoting a culture that demonized same-sex love. The erosion of democratic traditions Hoover fostered continues to haunt Americans today.

The Maoist state’s dominance over Chinese society, achieved through such watersheds as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, is well known. Maoism at the Grassroots reexamines this period of transformation and upheaval from a new perspective, one that challenges the standard state-centered view. Bringing together scholars from China, Europe, North America, and Taiwan, this volume marshals new research to reveal a stunning diversity of individual viewpoints and local experiences during China’s years of high socialism.

Focusing on the period from the mid-1950s to 1980, the authors provide insights into the everyday lives of citizens across social strata, ethnicities, and regions. They explore how ordinary men and women risked persecution and imprisonment in order to assert personal beliefs and identities. Many displayed a shrewd knack for negotiating the maze-like power structures of everyday Maoism, appropriating regime ideology in their daily lives while finding ways to express discontent and challenge the state’s pervasive control.

Heterogeneity, limited pluralism, and tensions between official and popular culture were persistent features of Maoism at the grassroots. Men had gay relationships in factory dormitories, teenagers penned searing complaints in diaries, mentally ill individuals cursed Mao, farmers formed secret societies and worshipped forbidden spirits. These diverse undercurrents were as representative of ordinary people’s lives as the ideals promulgated in state propaganda.

Observers have been predicting the demise of China’s political system since Mao Zedong’s death over thirty years ago. The Chinese Communist state, however, seems to have become increasingly adept at responding to challenges ranging from leadership succession and popular unrest to administrative reorganization, legal institutionalization, and global economic integration. What political techniques and procedures have Chinese policymakers employed to manage the unsettling impact of the fastest sustained economic expansion in world history?

As the authors of these essays demonstrate, China’s political system allows for more diverse and flexible input than would be predicted from its formal structures. Many contemporary methods of governance have their roots in techniques of policy generation and implementation dating to the revolution and early PRC—techniques that emphasize continual experimentation. China’s long revolution had given rise to this guerrilla-style decisionmaking as a way of dealing creatively with pervasive uncertainty. Thus, even in a post-revolutionary PRC, the invisible hand of Chairman Mao—tamed, tweaked, and transformed—plays an important role in China’s adaptive governance.

Sensational headlines have publicized the drug trafficking, brutal violence, and other organized crime elements associated with Central America's mara gangs, but there have been few clear-eyed analyses of the history, hierarchies, and future of the mara phenomenon. The first book to look specifically at the Central American gang problem by drawing on the perspectives of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, Maras: Gang Violence and Security in Central America provides much-needed insight.

These essays trace the development of the gangs, from Mara Salvatrucha to the 18th Street Gang, in Los Angeles and their spread to El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua as the result of members' deportation to Central America; there, they account for high homicide rates and threaten the democratic stability of the region. With expertise in areas ranging from political science to law enforcement and human rights, the contributors also explore the spread of mara violence in the United States. Their findings comprise a complete documentation that spans sexualized violence, case studies of individual gangs, economic factors, varied responses to gang violence, the use of intelligence gathering, the limits of state power, and the role of policy makers.

Raising crucial questions for a wide readership, these essays are sure to spark productive international dialogues.

Among all the fifty-six men who have served as New York’s governor, none was more complicated, self-righteous, pugilistic, and exasperating than Mario Cuomo.

As governor, Mario Cuomo is remembered most for his advocacy of the “personally-opposed-but” position on abortion that led to confrontations with Catholic Church hierarchy, and for dithering about his presidential ambitions, that led the media to dub him the “Hamlet on the Hudson.” His political style reminded many of Machiavelli; Cuomo styled himself a successor to St. Thomas More.

In this political profile, George J. Marlin sets the record straight on Mario Cuomo.

Marlin traces Cuomo’s political rise and documents how and why he abandoned his public opposition to abortion to be elected New York’s chief executive.

In great detail, Marlin describes the protracted conflict between Cuomo and his church on abortion and refutes the governor’s claim that his “position on abortion is absolutely theologically sound.”

Marlin critiques Cuomo’s famous 1984 Democratic convention speech as nothing more than the usual high-toned partisan liberal bromides that offered little, if anything, that hadn’t been touted by his party for half a century.

The book also uncovers New York State’s fiscal, economic, and social decline during Cuomo’s 12 years as governor. It explains why voters repudiated Cuomo’s version of a welfare state when he sought a fourth term in 1994 and why, in the words of his son, Governor Andrew Cuomo, his father was “more accomplished as a speech-giver than as a governor.”

Marlin skillfully separates the Cuomo “Public Intellectual” myth from the political man.


Mario Cuomo, three times Governor of New York, an eloquent hard edged Catholic from Queens, dominated not only his home state but national liberal politics in the age of Reagan. Whether the subject was police or theology, Cuomo rhetorically overpowered the reporters who covered him.  But he’s finally met his match in George Marlin’s Mario Cuomo The Myth and the Man. Marlin’s extraordinary equipment; a former candidate for Mayor of N.Y.C., former executive director of the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, author of books on Catholic voters and the Archbishops of New York, has made him the ideal author of what’s sure to be seen as the definitive political biography of Mario Cuomo. — Fred Siegel, Author, The Prince of the City:  Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life and The Future Once Happened Here:  New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities.

“It’s easy to forget what an important and fascinating figure Mario Cuomo was during New York’s raucous political heyday of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, when the likes of Hugh Carey, Ed Koch, Al D’Amato, and Rudy Giuliani strode the political stage. Thankfully, George Marlin’s wonderful new Cuomo biography will help everyone remember both the good and bad of the remarkable man who served three terms as governor, turned down a seat on the Supreme Court and rejected the chance to run for President. Here are both Cuomo’s successes and failures — and of the latter there were many.  An important work that helps restore our collective memory. — Fredric U. Dicker, the New York Post’s longtime state editor and a TV and radio commentator, covered six governors during 40 years at the state Capitol in Albany.

George Marlin is virtually peerless in blending high principle with knowledge of street-level politics and the nuts-and-bolts of otherwise mundane governance to produce readable, yet deeply insightful, social and political portraits. Mario Cuomo: The Myth and the Man, examines in fine detail one of one of New York state’s most consequential, if also deeply flawed, 20th-century gubernatorial incumbencies. Plus, readers get a bonus: Insight into what shaped the career of Mario Cuomo’s Democratic superstar son, Andrew. Marlin has been in the trenches himself and thus can separate blarney from beefsteak – which this fine volume once again demonstrates. —Bob McManus, Contributing Editor, The City Journal, was the New York Post’s Editorial Page Editor (2000-2013), and The Albany Times Union’s Executive City Editor (1975-1981).

“George Marlin not only captures the political life and journey of Mario Cuomo, but details his policy approach that led to the near demise of the Empire State. Fortunately, the Conservative Party of New York was there to carry the torch and provide the margin of victory for George Pataki ending the senior Cuomo’s reign.” —Michael Long, State Chairman, Conservative Party of New York (1988-2019)
 
“For both better and worse, Mario Cuomo was the quintessential American Catholic politician of an entire postwar generation: ambitious, brilliant, articulate, serious about his faith, and flexible in how and where he applied it. George Marlin is a writer of considerable skill, and he uses here it to produce a provocative, absorbing portrait of the man and his career. —Francis X. Maier, Senior Fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
 

Like most empires, the Ming court sponsored grand displays of dynastic strength and military prowess. Covering the first two centuries of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Martial Spectacles of the Ming Court explores how the royal hunt, polo matches, archery contests, equestrian demonstrations, and the imperial menagerie were represented in poetry, prose, and portraiture. This study reveals that martial spectacles were highly charged sites of contestation, where Ming emperors and senior court ministers staked claims about rulership, ruler-minister relations, and the role of the military in the polity. Simultaneously colorful entertainment, prestigious social events, and statements of power, martial spectacles were intended to make manifest the ruler’s personal generosity, keen discernment, and respect for family tradition. They were, however, subject to competing interpretations that were often beyond the emperor’s control or even knowledge. By situating Ming martial spectacles in the wider context of Eurasia, David Robinson brings to light the commensurability of the Ming court with both the Mongols and Manchus but more broadly with other early modern courts such as the Timurids, the Mughals, and the Ottomans.

In fourteen essays that speak to the full breadth of George L. Mosse’s intellectual horizons and scholarly legacy, Masses and Man explores radical nationalism, fascism, and Jewish modernity in twentieth-century Europe. Breaking from the conventions of historical analysis, Mosse shows that “secular religions” like fascism cannot be understood only as the products of socioeconomic or intellectual histories but rather must be approached first and foremost as cultural phenomena.

Masses and Man comprises three parts. The first lays out a cultural history of nationalism, essentially the first of its kind, emphasizing the importance of sacred expressions like myths, symbols, and rituals as appropriated in a political context. The second zeroes in on fascism’s most dramatic irruptions in European history in the rise of Italian Fascism and the Nazi Party in Germany, elucidating these as not just political movements but also cultural and even aesthetic ones. The third part considers nationalism and fascism from the particular standpoint of German Jews.

Taken in full, the volume offers an eloquent summation of Mosse’s groundbreaking insights into European nationalism, fascism, and Jewish history in the twentieth century. A new critical introduction by Enzo Traverso helpfully situates Mosse’s work in context and exposes the many ways in which Masses and Man, first published in 1980, remains relevant today.

An examination of planning, place, and the politics of repair in post-genocide Rwanda.

Master Plans and Minor Acts examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation?

Through extended ethnographic and qualitative research in Rwanda in the decades after the genocide of 1994, this book questions how repair after conflict is realized amidst large-scale urban transformation. Bridging African studies, urban studies, and human geography in its scope, this work ties Rwanda’s transformation to contexts of urban change in other post-conflict spaces, bringing to the fore critical questions about the ethics of planning in such complex geographies. 
 

A riveting account of the conquest of the vast American heartland that offers a vital reconsideration of the relationship between Native Americans and European colonists, and the pivotal role of the mighty Mississippi.

America’s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication. Cutting a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River meant wealth, knowledge, and power for those who could master it. In this ambitious and elegantly written account of the conquest of the West, Jacob Lee offers a new understanding of early America based on the long history of warfare and resistance in the Mississippi River valley.

Lee traces the Native kinship ties that determined which nations rose and fell in the period before the Illinois became dominant. With a complex network of allies stretching from Lake Superior to Arkansas, the Illinois were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers—fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette—made their way down the Mississippi. Over the next century, a succession of European empires claimed parts of the midcontinent, but they all faced the challenge of navigating Native alliances and social structures that had existed for centuries. When American settlers claimed the region in the early nineteenth century, they overturned 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans.

Masters of the Middle Waters shows that the Mississippi and its tributaries were never simply a backdrop to unfolding events. We cannot understand the trajectory of early America without taking into account the vast heartland and its waterways, which advanced and thwarted the aspirations of Native nations, European imperialists, and American settlers alike.

Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war culminated in peace accords in 1996, but the postwar transition has been marked by continued violence, including lynchings and the rise of gangs, as well as massive wage-labor exodus to the United States. For the Mam Maya municipality of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, inhabited by a predominantly indigenous peasant population, the aftermath of war and genocide resonates with a long-standing tension between state techniques of governance and ancient community-level power structures that incorporated concepts of kinship, gender, and generation. Showing the ways in which these complex histories are interlinked with wartime and enduring family/class conflicts, Maya after War provides a nuanced account of a unique transitional postwar situation, including the complex influence of neoliberal intervention.

Drawing on ethnographic field research over a twenty-year period, Jennifer L. Burrell explores the after-war period in a locale where community struggles span culture, identity, and history. Investigating a range of tensions from the local to the international, Burrell employs unique methodologies, including mapmaking, history workshops, and an informal translation of a historic ethnography, to analyze the role of conflict in animating what matters to Todosanteros in their everyday lives and how the residents negotiate power. Examining the community-based divisions alongside national postwar contexts, Maya after War considers the aura of hope that surrounded the signing of the peace accords, and the subsequent doubt and waiting that have fueled unrest, encompassing generational conflicts. This study is a rich analysis of the multifaceted forces at work in the quest for peace, in Guatemala and beyond.

Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala marks a new era in Guatemalan studies by offering an up-to-the-minute look at the pan-Maya movement and the future of the Maya people as they struggle to regain control over their cultural destiny. The successful emergence of what is in some senses a nationalism grounded in ethnicity and language has challenged scholars to reconsider their concepts of nationalism, community, and identity.

Editors Edward F. Fischer and R. McKenna Brown have brought together essays by virtually all the leading U.S. experts on contemporary Maya communities and the top Maya scholars working in Guatemala today. Supplementing scholarly analysis of Mayan cultural activism is a position statement originating within the movement and more wide-ranging and personal reflections by anthropologists and linguists who have worked with the Maya over the years. Among the broader issues that come in for examination are the complex relations between U.S. Mayanists and the Mayan cultural movement, efforts to promote literacy in Mayan languages, the significance of woven textiles and native dress, the relations between language and national identity, and the cultural meanings that the present-day Maya have encountered in ancient Mayan texts and hieroglyphic writing.

Rather than view the contours of Late Classic Maya social life solely from towering temple pyramids or elite sculptural forms, this book considers a suite of small anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and supernatural figurative remains excavated from household refuse deposits. Maya Figurines examines these often neglected objects and uses them to draw out relationships between the Maya state and its subjects.

These figurines provide a unique perspective for understanding Maya social and political relations; Christina T. Halperin argues that state politics work on the microscale of everyday routines, localized rituals, and small-scale representations. Her comprehensive study brings together archeology, anthropology, and art history with theories of material culture, performance, political economy, ritual humor, and mimesis to make a fascinating case for the role politics plays in daily life. What she finds is that, by comparing small-scale figurines with state-sponsored, often large-scale iconography and elite material culture, one can understand how different social realms relate to and represent one another. In Maya Figurines, Halperin compares objects from diverse households, archeological sites, and regions, focusing especially on figurines from Petén, Guatemala, and comparing them to material culture from Belize, the northern highlands of Guatemala, the Usumacinta River, the Campeche coastal area, and Mesoamerican sites outside the Maya zone. Ultimately, she argues, ordinary objects are not simply passive backdrops for important social and political phenomena. Instead, they function as significant mechanisms through which power and social life are intertwined.

How did the ancient Maya rule their world? Despite more than a century of archaeological investigation and glyphic decipherment, the nature of Maya political organization and political geography has remained an open question. Many debates have raged over models of centralization versus decentralization, superordinate and subordinate status—with far-flung analogies to emerging states in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But Prudence Rice asserts that neither the model of two giant "superpowers" nor that which postulates scores of small, weakly independent polities fits the accumulating body of material and cultural evidence.

In this groundbreaking book, Rice builds a new model of Classic lowland Maya (AD 179-948) political organization and political geography. Using the method of direct historical analogy, she integrates ethnohistoric and ethnographic knowledge of the Colonial-period and modern Maya with archaeological, epigraphic, and iconographic data from the ancient Maya. On this basis of cultural continuity, she constructs a convincing case that the fundamental ordering principles of Classic Maya geopolitical organization were the calendar (specifically a 256-year cycle of time known as the may) and the concept of quadripartition, or the division of the cosmos into four cardinal directions. Rice also examines this new model of geopolitical organization in the Preclassic and Postclassic periods and demonstrates that it offers fresh insights into the nature of rulership, ballgame ritual, and warfare among the Classic lowland Maya.

In 1983, Harold Washington made history by becoming Chicago's first African American mayor. The racially charged campaign and election heralded an era of bitter political divisiveness that obstructed his efforts to change city government.

Roger Biles's sweeping biography provides a definitive account of Washington and his journey. Once in City Hall, Washington confronted the backroom deals, aldermanic thuggery, open corruption, and palm greasing that fueled the Chicago machine's autocratic political regime. His alternative: a vision of fairness, transparency, neighborhood empowerment, and balanced economic growth at one with his emergence as a dynamic champion for African American uplift and a crusader for progressive causes. Biles charts the countless infamies of the Council Wars era and Washington's own growth through his winning of a second term--a promise of lasting reform left unfulfilled when the mayor died in 1987.

Original and authoritative, Mayor Harold Washington redefines a pivotal era in Chicago's modern history.

Media Power in Central America explores the political and cultural interplay between the media and those in power in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Nicaragua. Highlighting the subtle strangulation of opposition media voices in the region, the authors show how the years since the guerrilla wars have not yielded the free media systems that some had expected.

Rick Rockwell and Noreene Janus examine the region country by country and deal with the specific conditions of government-sponsored media repression, economic censorship, corruption, and consumer trends that shape the political landscape. Challenging the notion of the media as a democratizing force, Media Power in Central America shows how governments use the media to block democratic reforms and outlines the difficulties of playing watchdog to rulers who use the media as a tool of power.

In 1537, Florentine Duke Alessandro dei Medici was murdered by his cousin and would-be successor, Lorenzino dei Medici. Lorenzino's treachery forced him into exile, however, and the Florentine senate accepted a compromise candidate, seventeen-year-old Cosimo dei Medici. The senate hoped Cosimo would act as figurehead, leaving the senate to manage political affairs. But Cosimo never acted as a puppet. Instead, by the time of his death in 1574, he had stabilized ducal finances, secured his borders while doubling his territory, attracted an array of scholars and artists to his court, academy, and universities, and, most importantly, dissipated the perennially fractious politics of Florentine life.

Gregory Murry argues that these triumphs were far from a foregone conclusion. Drawing on a wide variety of archival and published sources, he examines how Cosimo and his propagandists successfully crafted an image of Cosimo as a legitimate sacral monarch. Murry posits that both the propaganda and practice of sacral monarchy in Cosimo's Florence channeled preexisting local religious assumptions as a way to establish continuities with the city's republican and renaissance past. In The Medicean Succession, Murry elucidates the models of sacral monarchy that Cosimo chose to utilize as he deftly balanced his ambition with the political sensitivities arising from existing religious and secular traditions.

The Medici controlled fifteenth-century Florence. Other Italian rulers treated Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449–1492) as an equal. To his close associates, he was “the boss” (“master of the workshop”). But Lorenzo liked to say that he was just another Florentine citizen. Were the Medici like the kings, princes, and despots of contemporary Italy? Or were they just powerful citizens? The Medici: Citizens and Masters offers a novel, comparative approach to answering these questions. It sets Medici rule against princely states such as Milan and Ferrara. It asks how much the Medici changed Florence and contrasts their supremacy with earlier Florentine regimes. Its contributors take diverse perspectives, focusing on politics, political thought, social history, economic policy, religion and the church, humanism, intellectual history, Italian literature, theater, festivals, music, imagery, iconography, architecture, historiography, and marriage. The book will interest students of history, Renaissance studies, Italian literature, and art history as well as anyone keen to learn about one of history’s most colorful, influential, and puzzling families.

In Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea Namhee Lee explores memory construction and history writing in post-1987 South Korea. The massive neoliberal reconstruction of all aspects of society shifted public discourse from minjung (people) to simin (citizen), from political to cultural, from collective to individual. This shift reconstituted people as Homo economicus, rights-bearing and rights-claiming individuals, even in social movements. Lee explains this shift in the context of simultaneous historical developments: South Korea’s transition to democracy, the end of the Cold War, and neoliberal reconstruction understood as synonymous with democratization. By examining memoirs, biographies, novels, and revisionist conservative historical scholarship, Lee shows how the dominant discourse of a “complete break with the past” erases the critical ethos of previous emancipatory movements foundational to South Korean democracy.