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Back when SOS or Adam and Eve on a raft were things to order if you were hungry but a little short on time and money, nearly one-fourth of all waitresses belonged to unions. By the time their movement peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, the women had developed a distinctive form of working-class feminism, simultaneously pushing for equal rights and pay and affirming their need for special protections.

Dorothy Sue Cobble shows how sexual and racial segregation persisted in wait work, but she rejects the idea that this was caused by employers' actions or the exclusionary policies of male trade unionists. Dishing It Out contends that the success of waitress unionism was due to several factors: waitresses, for the most part, had nontraditional family backgrounds, and most were primary wage-earners. Their close-knit occupational community and sex-separate union encouraged female assertiveness and a decidedly unromantic view of men and marriage. Cobble skillfully combines oral interviews and extensive archival records to show how waitresses adopted the basic tenets of male-dominated craft unions but rejected other aspects of male union culture. The result is a book that will expand our understanding of feminism and unionism by including the gender conscious perspectives of working women.

A compelling inquiry into the rhetorical and aesthetic techniques that subvert contemporary regimes of digital surveillance, embodiment, and control.

The contemporary world bristles with tools of observation and manipulation. Security cameras, social media, data mining, biometric scans, and other instruments ensnare the individual in a web of surveillance. In Disobedient Aesthetics, Anthony Stagliano exposes the use of human lives as sites of data exploitation and outlines paths of resistance. From the thermal-vision systems used on military drones, which use human body heat itself as a media object, to facial recognition platforms that use human faces as data mines, and from law enforcement tools of DNA analysis to data-driven urban governance, the realm of algorithmic surveillance and control is wide and subtle.

Disobedient Aesthetics outlines interventions into the technical systems subtending data-driven surveillance and control. Stagliano maps not only the surveillant regimes afforded by recent networked technologies, but also the inventive, artistic research into ways of undermining, upending, or redirecting such technologies. The concluding chapter examines creative, critical, and collective efforts to democratize access to the technology that undergirds such scrutiny and enables ways to detect and contest its power.

In a fascinating epilogue, Stagliano revisits current theories of control and offers an alternative reading of Gilles Deleuze’s oft-cited thesis on control societies: namely that it is not a matter of “finding new weapons” to undermine control but developing new techniques, new designs, new prototypes, and new modes of creative escape.
 

‘Usher ... does the best foreign on-the-spot reporting from Palestine.’ Edward Said, London Review of Books

‘The reader vicariously experiences what will become great moments of popular oral history that official historians will forget in the great scheme of things.’ Middle East International

How the memory of military dictatorship shapes Brazil's political divides and the far-right's rise.

Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985, but its history still looms large over the country. Since the restoration of democracy, national politics have been shaped by heated contestation over the dictatorship’s legacy. Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako examine how the state, the military, and civil society have variously mourned, celebrated, and suppressed memories of Brazil’s violent past—and to what ends.

As the dictatorship faltered under pressure from the opposition in the streets and in Congress, popular opinion favored democracy, which often meant forgetting. Today, the Brazilian left contends that the past has been silenced, paving the way for Jair Bolsonaro and the far right. Yet the past has been intensely contested: media outlets, social movements, and official commissions have long documented the dictatorship and spurred reparations. Disputed Pasts argues that the conservative ascendency is a reaction to these efforts of remembrance. The right seeks to rehabilitate the violent past by discrediting victims and elevating the dictatorship’s anti-communist ideology. Far from forgetting the past, Bolsonaro and Bolsonarismo actively remember and celebrate it.

Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes: Truth, Justice, and Reparations reveals how people of non-normative genders and sexualities fight for truth, justice, and reparations in the aftermath of armed conflict and authoritarian regimes in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. A focus on body politics flips the transitional justice model that focuses on nation-states to investigate massive human rights violations. How and why are harms against people of non-normative genders and sexualities included or excluded in Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Colombian transitional justice efforts? What strategies do activists use in the ongoing struggle for the recognition of their humanity through truth, justice and reparations? To answer these questions, Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes focuses on activists and their embodied knowledge.

Yielding pivotal new perspectives on the indigenous women of Mexico, Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas presents a diverse collection of voices exploring the human rights and gender issues that gained international attention after the first public appearance of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in 1994.

Drawing from studies on topics ranging from the daily life of Zapatista women to the effect of transnational indigenous women in tipping geopolitical scales, the contributors explore both the personal and global implications of indigenous women's activism. The Zapatista movement and the Women's Revolutionary Law, a charter that came to have tremendous symbolic importance for thousands of indigenous women, created the potential for renegotiating gender roles in Zapatista communities. Drawing on the original research of scholars with long-term field experience in a range of Mayan communities in Chiapas and featuring several key documents written by indigenous women articulating their vision, Dissident Women brings fresh insight to the revolutionary crossroads at which Chiapas stands—and to the worldwide implications of this economic and political microcosm.

The Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III and one of the most beautiful women ever to grace a throne, was the victim of her own inconstant mind. A daughter of an aristocratic Spanish family, she had a natural reverence for legitimate monarchy; yet her high-spirited temperament and chivalric outlook made her admire instinctively the boldness and aura of glory that she associated with the Napoleonic empire. The incongruous principles of Legitimism and Bonapartism battling within the Empress produced in her a double-mindedness that had tragic consequences.

The Empress has always been a controversial figure. Her enemies have blamed her the fall of the Second Empire and the defeat of France; her admirers have disclaimed for her any part in the mistakes that led to the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870. To determine the actual role that Eugénie played, Barker, using material from public and private European archives and a wide range of published works, examines in Distaff Diplomacy the development of the Empress' views on foreign affairs and ascertains their effect on the formation of the policies of the Second Empire.

Eugénie's influence fluctuated widely over the years. As a bride she was neither interested in nor knowledgable about foreign matters; as a middle-aged woman, in the late years of the Empire, she was discredited by her past errors, but she continued to pull strings outside of normal diplomatic channels. Her most sustained and effective work, from 1861 to 1863, was largely the inspiration for a grand design to remake the map to assure French hegemony in Europe and to establish an empire in Mexico. The success of this design rested on an Austro-French alliance; but the design itself, reflecting the Empress' incoherent thinking, contained the fatal inconsistencies that made Austrian rejection of it inevitable. Since the Mexican expedition and the diplomatic muddle of 1863 were the watershed from which the subsequent troubles of the Empire flowed, the Empress must be held responsible for seriously undermining the foreign policy of the Empire. Despite Eugénie's many fine qualities—her generosity of spirit, her splendid courage, and her moral integrity—her diplomatic efforts, affected as they were by her background, temperament, state of health, and changing moods, did not amount to statesmanship. This first systematic examination of the Empress' influence on foreign policy delves deeply and carefully into the subject.

Jacques Rancière’s work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the “politics of aesthetics” and the “aesthetics of politics”? Specifically, the book explores the implications of Rancière’s rethinking of the relationship of aesthetic to political democracy from a wide range of critical perspectives.

Distributions of the Sensible contains original essays by leading scholars on topics such as Rancière’s relation to political theory, critical theory, philosophical aesthetics, and film. The book concludes with a new essay by Rancière himself that reconsiders the practice of theory between aesthetics and politics.

Winner of the 2024 Society of the Cincinnati Prize from the American Revolution Institute

Winner of the 2023 American Revolution Round Table of Philadelphia book award

In this eye-opening account, Eli Merritt reveals the deep political divisions that almost tore the Union apart during the American Revolution. So fractious were the founders’ political fights that they feared the War of Independence might end in disunion and civil war.

Instead of disbanding into separate regional confederacies, the founders managed to unite for the sake of liberty and self-preservation. In so doing, they succeeded in holding the young nation together. To achieve this, they forged grueling compromises, in­cluding Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Mississippi-Fisheries Compromise of 1779, and the ratification of the Articles of Confederation in 1781.

In addition to bringing new insights to the history of the American Revolution, Disunion Among Ourselves has inevitable resonances with our present era of political hyperpolarization and serves as a touchstone for contemporary politics, reminding us that the founders overcame far tougher times than our own through commitment to ethical constitutional democracy and compromise.

 

A manifesto for liberating desire from the grip of capital and colonial violence in Palestine

Could a psychoanalytic theory of masochism help us to understand the politics of protest? A socially engaged psychoanalysis of 2024’s widespread student uprisings in support of Palestine, Divest posits that masochism, as theorized by Freud in his later years, is a fundamental structure at the heart of anticapitalist and anticolonial resistance. Conceptualizing masochism as a radical form of divestment, Steven Swarbrick theorizes the affective economies of solidarity, self-sacrifice, and collective struggle. Through vivid film readings and sharp critique of state and university violence, Swarbrick explores the emancipatory potential of masochism in the protest movement and the sadistic machinery of capitalist governance it has laid bare.

Divest is both a politically urgent manifesto and a theoretical companion to the global movement for Palestinian liberation. Asserting that the politics of left-wing solidarity must reckon with the libidinal investments that sustain both power and resistance, this bold volume argues that divestment from global capitalism may begin with a revolution in our psychic attachments.

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Despite dramatic increases in poverty, unemployment, and social inequalities, the Central and Eastern European transitions from communism to market democracy in the 1990s have been remarkably peaceful. This book proposes a new explanation for this unexpected political quiescence. It shows how reforming governments in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have been able to prevent massive waves of strikes and protests by the strategic use of welfare state programs such as pensions and unemployment benefits.

Divide and Pacify explains how social policies were used to prevent massive job losses with softening labor market policies, or to split up highly aggrieved groups of workers in precarious jobs by sending some of them onto unemployment benefits and many others onto early retirement and disability pensions. From a narrow economic viewpoint, these policies often appeared to be immensely costly or irresponsibly populist. Yet a more inclusive social-scientific perspective can shed new light on these seemingly irrational policies by pointing to deeper political motives and wider sociological consequences.

Drawing on nearly a century of legislative history, this careful account invites readers to think anew about when, why, and how leaders of divided parties wield power in Congress.

For decades, legislative scholars have viewed party divisions as critical constraints on congressional leadership. The more a party’s rank and file disagree with one another, the weaker their leaders are predicted to be; as member preferences converge, leader power is thought to increase.

In a powerful corrective to this prevailing view, Ruth Bloch Rubin argues that party divisions are not inherently limiting. Divided Parties, Strong Leaders highlights and examines variation in how members of party factions choose to work together. She shows that leaders of divided parties are well positioned to overcome, and even draw strength from, their divided ranks when the collaborative efforts of their coalitions’ competing factions are evenly matched. By contrast, their capacity to get what they want is more limited when one faction has out-collaborated its competition. Presenting detailed case studies of some of the most storied leaders of the postwar Congress, including Speakers Sam Rayburn and Nancy Pelosi, Bloch Rubin analyzes the factional configuration each leader encountered and explains why it mattered for their exercise of power.

What role does religion play in the tech industry? Based on nearly one hundred interviews, Divine Meets Digital uncovers the ways tech workers engage with religion and make sense of their work through religious and spiritual worldviews. While most identify as nonreligious, they are far from antireligious. Instead, they navigate competing religious and nonreligious views, often distinguishing between what they see as the controversial elements of religion—such as belief in the supernatural in China and its politicized and dogmatic aspects in the United States—and its more noncontroversial aspects. In doing so, they justify their religious engagement by embracing religion's noncontroversial elements while distancing themselves from its controversial features. This book offers a powerful new lens for understanding one of the most influential industries of our time, inviting readers to better understand the people who live and work at the intersection between science, religion, and technology.

Divined Intervention provides an innovative institutionalist account for why religion enables political activism in some settings, but not others. Christopher W. Hale argues that decentralized religious institutions facilitate grassroots collective action, and he uses a multimethod approach to test this explanation against several theoretical alternatives. Utilizing nationally representative Mexican survey data, the book’s statistical analyses demonstrate that decentralization by the Catholic Church is positively associated with greater individual political activism across the country. Using case studies centered in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Yucatán, and Morelos, the author shows that religious decentralization encourages reciprocal cooperative interactions at a local level. This then increases the ability of religion to provide goods and services to its local adherents. These processes then prompt the growth of organizational capacities at the grassroots, enabling secular political activism.

Because this theoretical framework is grounded in human behavior, it shows how local institutions politically organize at the grassroots level. Divined Intervention also offers an improved understanding of religion’s relationship with political activism, a topic of ever-increasing significance as religion fuels political engagement across the globe. The book further synthesizes seemingly disparate approaches to the study of collective action into a cohesive framework. Finally, there is some debate as to the impact of ethnic diversity on the provision of public goods, and this study helps us understand how local institutional configurations can enable collective action across ethnic boundaries.

Methodism in the public and private lives of the politician

After more than forty contentious years in the public eye, Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the best-known political figures in the nation. Yet the strong religious faith at the heart of her politics and personal life often remains confounding, if not mysterious, to longtime observers. Even many of her admirers would be surprised to hear Clinton state that her Methodist outlook has “been a huge part of who I am and how I have seen the world, and what I believe in, and what I have tried to do in my life.” 

Gary Scott Smith’s biography of Clinton’s journey in faith begins with her Methodist upbringing in Park Ridge, Illinois, where she faithfully attended worship services, Sunday school, and youth group meetings. Like many mainline Protestants, Clinton’s spiritual commitment developed gradually throughout childhood, while her combination of missionary zeal and impressive personal talents has informed her career from the time of her pro bono work at Yale on behalf of children to the present.

Her Methodist faith has been very important to many of Clinton’s high-profile endeavors and in helping her cope with the prominent travails brought on by two presidential campaigns, never-ending conservative rancor, and her husband’s infidelity. Smith’s account examines Clinton’s faith in the context of work ranging from her 1990s pursuit of healthcare reform to a “Hillary doctrine” of foreign policy focused on her longtime goal of providing basic human rights for children and women--a project she saw as essential to United States security. The result is an enlightening reconsideration of an extraordinary political figure who has defied private doubts and public controversy to live by John Wesley’s dictum: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”