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No one expected the girl from a small town in Alaska to make history, but Elizabeth Peratrovich saw discrimination and refused to stay silent. Fairness became the driving force of her life. She helped change Alaska so everyone, no matter what race, would be treated equally under the law. This is her story.

A Bright Light of Hope: The Elizabeth Peratrovich Story is the first picture biography for young people that tells the true story of the remarkable Alaska Native woman whose fight, alongside other Alaska leaders, guaranteed equal treatment under Alaska law, regardless of race. It was a right that took the rest of the country nearly twenty more years to realize with the US Civil Rights Act of 1964. Beautifully illustrated by Yup’ik artist Apay’uq Moore and adapted from Fighter in Velvet Gloves: Alaska Civil Rights Hero Elizabeth Peratrovich for grade school students, A Bright Light of Hope is just that—a light of hope. Published at a time when stories of Indigenous people are being actively suppressed by the federal government, the Elizabeth Peratrovich story brings hope to young people that they can make real change in their communities.

An accompanying study guide that features a scripted theatrical adaptation of the book intended for student performance as well as a variety of classroom activities is also available.

The renowned historian Ivan T. Berend discusses populist demagoguery through the presentation of eighteen politicians from twelve European countries spanning World War I to the present. Berend defines demagoguery, reflects on its connections with populism, and examines the common features and differences in the demagogues’ programs and language.

Mussolini and Hitler, the “model demagogues,” are only briefly discussed, as is the election of Donald Trump in the United States and its impact on Europe. The eighteen detailed portraits include two communists, two fascists, and several right-wing and anti-EU politicians, extending across the full range of demagoguery. The author covers Béla Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, weaving through Codreanu and Gömbös from the 1930s, on to Stahremberg and Haider in Austria, and then more broadly throughout Europe from Ceaușescu, Milošević, Tuđjman, Izetbegović, Berlusconi, Wilders, to the two Le Pens, Farage, and Boris Johnson, Orbán and the two Kaczyńskis. Each case includes an analysis of the time and place and is illustrated with quotations from the demagogues’ speeches.

This book is a warning about the continuing threat of populist demagogues both for their subjects and for history itself. Berend insists on the crucial importance for Europe to understand the reality behind their promises and persuasive language as imperative to impeding their success.

While the literature of hybrid regimes has given up the presumption that post-communist countries must democratize, its language and concepts still mostly relate to Western democracies. Magyar and Madlovics strongly argue for a vocabulary and grammar tailored to the specifics of the region. In 120 theses they unfold a conceptual framework with (1) a typology of post-communist regimes and (2) a detailed presentation of ideal-type actors and the political, economic, and social phenomena in these regimes. The book is a more digestible companion to the 800-page The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020), which was a detailed theoretical study with plenty of empirical illustrations.

Each of the 120 theses contains a statement and its concise discussion supported by illustrative tables, figures, and QR-codes that connect the interested reader to the more detailed analysis in the Anatomy. In a condensed variety, this book has kept the holistic approach of the Anatomy and treats the spheres of political, market, and communal action as parts of a single, coherent whole. The endeavor to synthesize a vast range of ideas does not, however, result in a too complicated text. On the contrary, freed from the implicit presumptions of democracy theory, the new terminology yields a readily usable toolkit of unambiguous means of expression to speak about post-communism.

A major, new, and comprehensive look at six decades of macroeconomic policies across the region

What went wrong with the economic development of Latin America over the past half-century?  Along with periods of poor economic performance, the region’s countries have been plagued by a wide variety of economic crises. This major new work brings together dozens of leading economists to explore the economic performance of the ten largest countries in South America and of Mexico. Together they advance the fundamental hypothesis that, despite different manifestations, these crises all have been the result of poorly designed or poorly implemented fiscal and monetary policies. 

Each country is treated in its own section of the book, with a lead chapter presenting a comprehensive database of the country’s fiscal, monetary, and economic data from 1960 to 2017. The chapters are drawn from one-day academic conferences—hosted in all but one case, in the focus country—with participants including noted economists and former leading policy makers. Cowritten with Nobel Prize winner Thomas J. Sargent, the editors’ introduction provides a conceptual framework for analyzing fiscal and monetary policy in countries around the world, particularly those less developed. A final chapter draws conclusions and suggests directions for further research.

A vital resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics and for economic researchers and policy makers, A Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America, 1960–2017 goes further than any book in stressing both the singularities and the similarities of the economic histories of Latin America’s largest countries.

Contributors: Mark Aguiar, Princeton U; Fernando Alvarez, U of Chicago; Manuel Amador, U of Minnesota; Joao Ayres, Inter-American Development Bank; Saki Bigio, UCLA; Luigi Bocola, Stanford U; Francisco J. Buera, Washington U, St. Louis; Guillermo Calvo, Columbia U; Rodrigo Caputo, U of Santiago; Roberto Chang, Rutgers U; Carlos Javier Charotti, Central Bank of Paraguay; Simón Cueva, TNK Economics; Julián P. Díaz, Loyola U Chicago; Sebastian Edwards, UCLA; Carlos Esquivel, Rutgers U; Eduardo Fernández Arias, Peking U; Carlos Fernández Valdovinos (former Central Bank of Paraguay); Arturo José Galindo, Banco de la República, Colombia; Márcio Garcia, PUC-Rio; Felipe González Soley, U of Southampton; Diogo Guillen, PUC-Rio; Lars Peter Hansen, U of Chicago; Patrick Kehoe, Stanford U; Carlos Gustavo Machicado Salas, Bolivian Catholic U; Joaquín Marandino, U Torcuato Di Tella; Alberto Martin, U Pompeu Fabra; Cesar Martinelli, George Mason U; Felipe Meza, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México; Pablo Andrés Neumeyer, U Torcuato Di Tella; Gabriel Oddone, U de la República; Daniel Osorio, Banco de la República; José Peres Cajías, U of Barcelona; David Perez-Reyna, U de los Andes; Fabrizio Perri, Minneapolis Fed; Andrew Powell, Inter-American Development Bank; Diego Restuccia, U of Toronto; Diego Saravia, U de los Andes; Thomas J. Sargent, New York U; José A. Scheinkman, Columbia U; Teresa Ter-Minassian (formerly IMF); Marco Vega, Pontificia U Católica del Perú; Carlos Végh, Johns Hopkins U; François R. Velde, Chicago Fed; Alejandro Werner, IMF.

How the police in Minneapolis used electoral politics to accrue power and avoid accountability.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd made Minneapolis synonymous with unjust policing and the pain and outrage left in its wake. The city became ground zero for police reform in the United States—even though liberal politicians in Minnesota had promised, and delivered, police reforms for decades. Centered on professionalization, these changes inadvertently exacerbated injustice. Better training and higher standards broadened the influence of the police, who then claimed expertise in public safety. They deployed it to bargain for governmental support, even when they treated residents unfairly. Though Black, Indigenous, and gay residents resisted, the political power amassed by the police rendered real change almost impossible.

In A Police State, historian and fourth-generation Minneapolis resident Michael J. Lansing chronicles how the police became a political force in one of the nation’s most liberal cities. Lansing shows how, in the years after World War II, public safety policies that appealed to voters in the overwhelmingly white city protected and expanded police discretion. As union members, administrators, and citizens, officers shaped these policies to shield themselves and their violent actions from scrutiny. They campaigned for better wages, secured legal safeguards, resisted race-neutral policing, and elected one of their own to the mayor’s office. Ultimately, they used democratic institutions to cultivate and sustain a police state that protected white people and harmed people of color. Lansing uncovers this dysfunctional relationship between a city and its cops while illuminating a larger American story about reform, resistance, and democracy.

A significant exploration of policing politics, this book helps us understand the history that led to George Floyd’s murder—and insists that the future of community safety depends on reenvisioning the role of police in our society.

A data-rich examination of the US Supreme Court's unprecedented detachment from the democratic processes that buttress its legitimacy.

Today’s Supreme Court is unlike any other in American history. This is not just because of its jurisprudence but also because the current Court has a tenuous relationship with the democratic processes that help establish its authority. Historically, this “democracy gap” was not nearly as severe as it is today. Simply put, past Supreme Courts were constructed in a fashion far more in line with the promise of democracy—that the people decide and the majority rules.

Drawing on historical and contemporary data alongside a deep knowledge of court battles during presidencies ranging from FDR to Donald Trump, Kevin J. McMahon charts the developments that brought us here. McMahon offers insight into the altered politics of nominating and confirming justices, the shifting pool of Supreme Court hopefuls, and the increased salience of the Court in elections. A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other is an eye-opening account of today’s Court within the context of US history and the broader structure of contemporary politics.

Examining anticorruption battles and transparency laws to ask: what makes for good governance, and can it limit liberal democratic politics as much as encourage it?
 

Good governance is meant to empower citizens, increase democratic participation, and make states transparent and accountable, yet this liberal democratic imperative can also promote populist authoritarian rule. Bringing together discourses on ethical goodness with the technicalities of governance as expressed in laws and policies, Aradhana Sharma develops the concept of “technomoral politics” to navigate this fraught topic. With a focus on the work of activists, citizens, and state officials, she offers an ethnographic account of the contradictions and dangers of good-governance politics in twenty-first-century India.

A Technomoral Politics follows the evolution of a group of activists in New Delhi led by Arvind Kejriwal from 2008 to 2014 as they morphed from a protransparency NGO to a mass movement against state corruption to a populist party that promised to change the political system through laws and policies. Sharma explores the technomoral framing of state opacity and corruption as well as the limits of the law in resolving these issues, probing such themes as the contradictory relationship between transparency and bureaucracy and the classed and gendered nature of democratic state institutions.

By examining scalar dimensions of good-governance politics, from the hyperlocal work of activists to global trends, A Technomoral Politics illuminates the paradoxes, limits, and risks of a system that is meant to spread liberal democratic principles but that also ends up promoting antidemocratic, populist-authoritarian forms of rule.

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It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilisation. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system.

Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their own fields explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a 'clash of civilisations', as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilisation itself.

This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world and shows how catastrophe can be avoided.

lbert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” It is in this vein that Sholeh Wolpé’s mesmerizing memoir in verse unfolds. In this lyrical and candid work, her fifth collection of poems, Wolpé invokes the abacus as an instrument of remembering. Through different countries and cultures, she carries us bead by bead on a journey of loss and triumph, love and exile. In the end, the tally is insight, not numbers, and we arrive at a place where nothing is too small for gratitude.

One of the few books of its kind, Acting Up and Getting Down brings together seven African American literary voices that all have a connection to the Lone Star state. Covering Texas themes and universal ones, this collection showcases often-overlooked literary talents to bring to life inspiring facets of black theatre history.

Capturing the intensity of racial violence in Texas, from the Battle of San Jacinto to a World War I–era riot at a Houston training ground, Celeste Bedford Walker’s Camp Logan and Ted Shine’s Ancestors provide fascinating narratives through the lens of history. Thomas Meloncon’s Johnny B. Goode and George Hawkins’s Br’er Rabbit explore the cultural legacies of blues music and folktales. Three unflinching dramas (Sterling Houston’s Driving Wheel, Eugene Lee’s Killingsworth, and Elizabeth Brown-Guillory’s When the Ancestors Call) examine homosexuality, a death in the family, and child abuse, bringing to light the private tensions of intersections between the individual and the community.

Supplemented by a chronology of black literary milestones as well as a playwrights’ canon, Acting Up and Getting Down puts the spotlight on creative achievements that have for too long been excluded from Texas letters. The resulting anthology not only provides new insight into a regional experience but also completes the American story as told onstage.

An in-depth study of contemporary novels through the lens of affect theory and ideology critique. 

Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment offers a comparative critical study of contemporary fiction. It intervenes in discussions about contemporary fiction in its literary-historical relationship to postmodernism and in its socio-historical relationship to neoliberalism, arguing that contemporary literature is dominated by affective questions that are rooted in neoliberalism. Whereas previous research focused on either a literary-historical or a socio-historical approach, this study examines eighteen novels from various parts of the world in both their diachronic relation to postmodernism and in their synchronic relation to neoliberal society.

Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa.

A key source for Helen Tilley’s analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.