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Focusing primarily on the Catholic doctrinal view of the Jews and its ramifications, Egal Feldman traces the historicalroots of anti-Semitism, examining tenacious Catholic beliefsincluding the idea that the Jews lost their place as the chosen people with the coming of Christianity, deicide, and the conviction that their purported responsibility for the Crucifixion justified subsequent Jewish misery.

A new era of Catholic-Jewish relations opened in 1962 with Vatican II’s Declaration on the Jews, reversing the theology of contempt. Feldman explores the strides made in improving relations, such as the Vatican’s diplomatic recognition of the Jewish state, as well as a number of recent issues.

No work has documented in such vivid and illuminating detail the socio-political world of sixteenth-century Algiers, Cervantes's life in the prison-house, his four escape attempts, and the conditions of his final ransom. Garces's portrait of a sophisticated multi-ethnic culture in Algiers, moreover, is likely to open up new discussions about early modern encounters between Christians and Muslims. By bringing together evidence from many different sources, historical and literary, Garces reconstructs the relations between Christians, Muslims, and renegades in a number of Cervantes's writings.

The idea that survivors of captivity need to repeat their story in order to survive (an insight invoked from Coleridge to Primo Levi to Dori Laub) explains not only Cervantes's storytelling but also the book that theorizes it so compellingly. As a former captive herself (a hostage of Colombian guerrillas), the author reads and listens to Cervantes with another ear.

This book is about the Americanization of Yugoslav culture and everyday life during the nineteen-sixties. After falling out with the Eastern bloc, Tito turned to the United States for support and inspiration. In the political sphere the distance between the two countries was carefully maintained, yet in the realms of culture and consumption the Yugoslav regime was definitely much more receptive to the American model. For Titoist Yugoslavia this tactic turned out to be beneficial, stabilising the regime internally and providing an image of openness in foreign policy.

Coca-Cola Socialism addresses the link between cultural diplomacy, culture, consumer society and politics. Its main argument is that both culture and everyday life modelled on the American way were a major source of legitimacy for the Yugoslav Communist Party, and a powerful weapon for both USA and Yugoslavia in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds.

Radina Vučetić explores how the Party used American culture in order to promote its own values and what life in this socialist and capitalist hybrid system looked like for ordinary people who lived in a country with communist ideology in a capitalist wrapping. Her book offers a careful reevaluation of the limits of appropriating the American dream and questions both an uncritical celebration of Yugoslavia’s openness and an exaggerated depiction of its authoritarianism.

A gripping history of FBI surveillance, political repression, and the fight for Puerto Rican independence
 
In the 1940s, with the construction of a naval base and a bombing range, Puerto Rico became a major geo-political military outpost for the United States. For a power claiming global leadership in a decolonizing world, however, the archipelago’s colonial condition underscored the dissonance between American democratic rhetoric and its imperial reality. The solution was a deal that, in 1952, gave Puerto Rico a degree of self-government without changing its legal status as an “unincorporated” US territory. The US then publicly claimed Puerto Rico was now more autonomous while using repressive tactics such as FBI surveillance, arrests, destabilization, and other methods developed in Washington to silence activists and political parties pushing for full independence.

In Cold War Puerto Rico, Steve Howell examines how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI targeted Puerto Rican communists as part of an offensive against pro-independence parties and activists generally. Howell’s US-born father, who fell afoul of Hoover for producing radical cartoons while working in San Juan in the 1940s, remained on the FBI’s watch list long after exiling himself in Britain. His close friends, the Puerto Rican author César Andreu Iglesias and Jane Speed de Andreu, were meanwhile arrested and imprisoned three times during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, including interviews and FBI files, Howell tells their stories along with those of other activists who battled indictment in 1954 under the Smith Act, challenged the jurisdiction of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Juan in 1959, and revived the Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1960s, despite the FBI deploying the covert tactics of COINTELPRO against them.

Puerto Rico is virtually invisible in histories of what is generally called McCarthyism, yet anti-communist repression was in many ways more intense there than in the mainland US. Now, with Puerto Rico’s future currently hanging in the balance, Howell’s compelling history demonstrates why we need to understand the long enforcement of its colonial status.
 

Nicholas J. Schlosser draws on broadcast transcripts, internal memoranda, listener letters, and surveys by the U.S. Information Agency to profile RIAS. Its mission: to undermine the German Democratic Republic with propaganda that, ironically, gained in potency by obeying the rules of objective journalism. Throughout, Schlosser examines the friction inherent in such a contradictory project and propaganda's role in shaping political culture. He also portrays how RIAS's primarily German staff influenced its outlook and how the organization both competed against its rivals in the GDR and pushed communist officials to alter their methods in order to keep listeners.

From the occupation of Berlin through the airlift to the construction of the Berlin Wall, Cold War on the Airwaves offers an absorbing view of how public diplomacy played out at a flashpoint of East-West tension.

Explores how perceptions and depictions of the physical landscape both reflected and influenced the history of the British colonial Caribbean

In Colonizing Paradise, historian Jefferson Dillman charts the broad spectrum of sentiments that British citizens and travelers held regarding their colonial possessions in the West Indies. Myriad fine degrees of ambivalence separated extreme views of the region as an idyllic archipelago or a nest of Satanic entrapments. Dillman shows the manner in which these authentic or spontaneous depictions of the environment were shaped to form a narrative that undergirded Britain’s economic and political aims in the region.

Because British sentiments in the Caribbean located danger and evil not just in indigenous populations but in Spanish Catholics as well, Dillman’s work begins with the arrival of Spanish explorers and conquistadors. Colonizing Paradise spans the arrival of English ships and continues through the early nineteenth century and the colonial era. Dillman shows how colonial entrepreneurs, travelers, and settlers engaged in a disquieted dialogue with the landscape itself, a dialogue the examination of which sheds fresh light on the culture of the Anglophone colonial Caribbean.

Of particular note are the numerous mythical, metaphorical, and biblical lenses through which Caribbean landscapes were viewed, from early views of the Caribbean landscape as a New World paradise to later depictions of the landscape as a battleground between the forces of Christ and Satan. The ideal of an Edenic landscape persisted, but largely, Dillman argues, as one that needed to be wrested from the forces of darkness, principally through the work of colonization, planting, cataloguing, and a rational ordering of the environment.

Ultimately, although planters and their allies continued to promote pastoral and picturesque views of the Caribbean landscape, the goal of such narratives was to rationalize British rule as well as to mask and obscure emerging West Indian problems such as diseases, slavery, and rebellions. Colonizing Paradise offers much to readers interested in Caribbean, British, and colonial history.

Contributing to the historiography of transnational and global transmission of ideas, Connections after Colonialism examines relations between Europe and Latin America during the tumultuous 1820s. 

In the Atlantic World, the 1820s was a decade marked by the rupture of colonial relations, the independence of Latin America, and the ever-widening chasm between the Old World and the New. Connections after Colonialism, edited by Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette, builds upon recent advances in the history of colonialism and imperialism by studying former colonies and metropoles through the same analytical lens, as part of an attempt to understand the complex connections—political, economic, intellectual, and cultural—between Europe and Latin America that survived the demise of empire.

Historians are increasingly aware of the persistence of robust links between Europe and the new Latin American nations. This book focuses on connections both during the events culminating with independence and in subsequent years, a period strangely neglected in European and Latin American scholarship. Bringing together distinguished historians of both Europe and America, the volume reveals a new cast of characters and relationships including unrepentant American monarchists; compromise-seeking liberals in Lisbon and Madrid who envisioned transatlantic federations; British merchants in the River Plate who saw opportunity where others saw risk; public moralists whose audiences spanned from Paris to Santiago de Chile; and plantation owners in eastern Cuba who feared that slave rebellions elsewhere in the Caribbean would spread to their island.

Contributors
Matthew Brown / Will Fowler / Josep M. Fradera / Carrie Gibson / Brian Hamnett / Maurizio Isabella / Iona Macintyre / Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy / Gabriel Paquette / David Rock / Christopher Schmidt-Nowara / Jay Sexton / Reuben Zahler

An essential analysis of the ways consumerism and globalization intersect with political power.

In Consumers and Citizens, Néstor García Canclini, the best-known and most innovative cultural studies scholar in Latin America, maps the critical effects of urban sprawl and global media and commodity markets on citizens-and shows at the same time that the complex results mean not only a shrinkage of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare or client state) but also new openings for expanding citizenship.

García Canclini focuses on the diverse ways in which democratic societies recognize markets of citizen opinions, however heterogeneous and dissonant, as in the fashion and entertainment industries. He shows how identity issues, brought to the fore by the aligning of citizenship and consumption, can no longer be understood strictly within the purview of territory or nation. Rather, the postmodern citizen-consumer inhabits a transterritorial and multilingual space, structured more along the lines of markets than states. Defining this space, García Canclini seeks to formulate a participatory and critical approach to consumption in which national culture, far from being extinguished, is reconstituted in transnational, cultural interactions.

A history of the Chicano community cannot be complete without taking into account the United States' domination of the Mexican economy beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Gilbert G. González. For that economic conquest inspired U.S. writers to create a "culture of empire" that legitimated American dominance by portraying Mexicans and Mexican immigrants as childlike "peons" in need of foreign tutelage, incapable of modernizing without Americanizing, that is, submitting to the control of U.S. capital. So powerful was and is the culture of empire that its messages about Mexicans shaped U.S. public policy, particularly in education, throughout the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first.

In this stimulating history, Gilbert G. González traces the development of the culture of empire and its effects on U.S. attitudes and policies toward Mexican immigrants. Following a discussion of the United States' economic conquest of the Mexican economy, González examines several hundred pieces of writing by American missionaries, diplomats, business people, journalists, academics, travelers, and others who together created the stereotype of the Mexican peon and the perception of a "Mexican problem." He then fully and insightfully discusses how this misinformation has shaped decades of U.S. public policy toward Mexican immigrants and the Chicano (now Latino) community, especially in terms of the way university training of school superintendents, teachers, and counselors drew on this literature in forming the educational practices that have long been applied to the Mexican immigrant community.