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An eye-opening journey through fifty maps that ask what, exactly, the people who made our world were thinking, and what that says about our past and future.

Everyone loves a good map. As writer Nicholas Danforth is keen to remind us, maps tell stories about the world and its history—but not always the ones their makers intend. In 50 Maps That Can't Explain the World, Danforth gives us a whirlwind tour of a wide variety of maps, illustrating what they can—and can't—teach us about the world.

Witty and irreverent, the pieces take on many cartographic topics of current political interest, including Russian imperialism, the misunderstood appeal of Greenland, and where Canada came from. Others concern mapmaking itself, exploring why north is “up” and how to map time. In doing so, these pieces show that places as varied as Khiva, Atlantis, and even Arkansas matter for addressing big questions, including the best way to draw borders or the future of America’s foreign policy. Featuring a wide array of unique and forgotten maps, all these pieces regale readers with their interesting tales, such as how the Near East became the Middle East or what the US would look like if it lost World War I.

Throughout, Danforth’s entertaining, thoughtful commentary reveals that while maps may not solve all the world’s woes, they can show us where we’ve been and point us to where we’re trying to go.

American foreign policy is the subject of extensive debate. Many look to domestic factors as the driving forces of bad policies. Benjamin Miller instead seeks to account for changes in US international strategy by developing a theory of grand strategy that captures the key security approaches available to US decision-makers in times of war and peace.

Grand Strategy from Truman to Trump makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of competing grand strategies that accounts for objectives and means of security policy. Miller puts forward a model that is widely applicable, based on empirical evidence from post-WWII to today, and shows that external factors—rather than internal concerns—are the most determinative.

Should we draw an analogy between Shakespeare’s tyrants—Richard III, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and King Lear—and Donald Trump? In Shakespeare and Trump, Jeffrey Wilson applies literary criticism to real life, examining plot, character, villainy, soliloquy, tragedy, myth, and metaphor to identify the formal features of the Trump phenomenon, and its hidden causes, structure, and meanings.

Wilsonapproaches his comparison prismatically. He first considers two high-concept (read: far-fetched) Shakespeare adaptations penned by Trump’s former chief political strategist Steve Bannon. He looks at University of Pennsylvania students protesting Trump by taking down a monument to Shakespeare. He reads Trump’s first 100 days in office against Netflix’s House of Cards. Wilson also addresses the summer 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar wherein an assassination of a Trump-ian leader caused corporations to withdraw sponsorship. 

These stories reveal a surprising—and bizarre—relationship between the provincial English playwright and the billionaire President of the United States, ostensibly a medieval king living in a modern world. The comparison reveals a politics that blends villainy and comedy en route to tragedy.

A penetrating look into the hidden networks of wartime capture, circulation, and detainment by United States military personnel

The Capture Chain offers a detailed history of the United States’ detention practices and the evolving infrastructure designed for the apprehension, control, and transportation of people during times of war. Spanning eight decades and several major conflicts, this work examines the hidden spaces and logistical networks connecting the front lines and prisoner-of-war camps—sites that exist at the fraught intersection of life maintenance and death distribution.

Detailing the routes, protocols, research methods, and technical systems that constitute what Richard Nisa terms the global capture chain, this book underscores how such military architectures have become increasingly sophisticated and technologically advanced since the dawn of the Cold War. Drawing on declassified military documents, diplomatic records from the Geneva Conventions, and memoirs written by soldiers and prisoners, The Capture Chain offers unprecedented insight into this shifting geography of psychological and physical violence.

Using archival research to draw links between behavioral science studies during the Korean War, Vietnam-era computation, and post-9/11 rendition networks and digital biometrics, The Capture Chain introduces new ways of understanding urgent contemporary debates around autonomous warfare, mass surveillance, and detainment. By introducing the capture chain as both a historical object and a methodological lens, Nisa highlights the legal and moral grey area that constitutes the ongoing militarized maintenance of human life.

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