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Using philosophical and scientific work to engage the perennial question of human nature
 

This book takes a look at the formation, and edges, of states: their breakdowns and attempts to repair them, and their encounters with non-state peoples. It draws upon anthropology, political philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, child developmental psychology, and other fields to look at states as projects of constructing “bodies politic,” where the civic and the somatic intersect. John Protevi asserts that humans are predisposed to “prosociality,” or being emotionally invested in social partners and patterns. With readings from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James C. Scott; a critique of the assumption of widespread pre-state warfare as a selection pressure for the evolution of human prosociality and altruism; and an examination of the different “economies of violence” of state and non-state societies, Edges of the State sketches a notion of prosocial human nature and its attendant normative maxims.

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead 

Where is censorship in the age of digital technology?

Not long ago it would have been an absurd idea to purchase a television, CD or MP3 or DVD player, computer software, or game console with the intention of limiting its capabilities. However, as Raiford Guins demonstrates in Edited Clean Version, today’s media technology is marketed and sold for what it does not contain and what it will not deliver.

A grounded and instructive analysis of the ways globalization affects a border city

Every marker of social difference can be easily interpreted in the fashionable language of “borderlands”—and if so, as Victor M. Ortiz-Gonzalez reveals, the practical reality of the border region is often grossly misrepresented and its people woefully served. He argues that amid the tantalizing abstractions generated by the sweeping reconfigurations of globalization, people in cities like El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, on the U.S.–Mexican border, are actually living the gritty realities of a new world order.

El Salvador Reborn examines the nation’s efforts to reshape its identity after the Peace Accords amid declining Cold War tensions. The book explores the criminalization of abortion and environmental activism in postwar El Salvador by focusing on two key organizations, Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto and Foro del Agua, highlighting their political strategies during a critical moment in El Salvador’s formation.

Author Mellissa Linton-Villafranco critically analyzes the political shift under the right-wing party, which sought to redefine notions of life and sovereignty. Historically associated with death squads, the right repositioned itself as a pro-life force by criminalizing abortion, amending the constitution to declare life begins at conception, and imposing penalties of up to thirty years. These measures marginalized women’s autonomy, creating a repressive legal environment centered on fetal rights. In response, feminist groups mobilized through protests, online campaigns, transnational alliances, and public art, advocating for reproductive justice that encompasses gender-based violence, health, and environmental sustainability.

Linton-Villafranco makes the case for a holistic conception of life that integrates land, body, and community sovereignty, weaving reproductive justice with environmental activism to promote a broader, interconnected understanding of life and rights in El Salvador.

The image of a prison with a revolving door helped George Bush win the presidency in 1988, but did negative advertising damage the electoral process itself? Why did campaign ’88 represent an all-time low in the minds of many voters? These are some of the questions that impel this thought-provoking analysis of the 1988 presidential election, sponsored by the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation.

Using extensive empirical studies of the candidates, the media, and the voters, Bruce Buchanan, executive director of the Markle Commission on the Media and the Electorate, traces the roots of popular dissatisfaction with the 1988 election. Buchanan argues that the campaign drifted too far from popular ideals of how democratic processes ought to work—that the substitution of negative advertising and quickie “sound bites” for reasoned debate on national problems and issues alienated much of the electorate, causing the lowest voter turnout in sixty-four years.

Negative campaigning, however, cannot bear the full blame for the 1988 election. While the Markle Commission offers specific recommendations for improvements in candidate and media performance, the great need, says Buchanan, is for voters to reclaim the electoral process, to insist that candidates and the media give enough information about positions and programs for voters to make informed choices. Voters need to be educated out of the idea that democratic elections and representative government can somehow occur without the participation of ordinary citizens.

At a time when the American democratic process is being used as a model by newly independent nations around the world, it is particularly appropriate to ask how well it works at home. Electing a President does just that.

Today, political leaders and candidates for office must campaign in a multimedia world through traditional forums—newspapers, radio, and television—as well as new digital media, particularly social media. Electoral Campaigns, Media, and the New World of Digital Politics chronicles how Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, email, and memes are used successfully and unsuccessfully to influence elections. Each of these platforms have different affordances and reach various audiences in different ways. Campaigns often have to wage different campaigns on each of these mediums. In some instances, they are crucial in altering coverage in the mainstream media. In others, digital media remains underutilized and undeveloped. As has always been the case in politics, outcomes that depend on economic and social conditions often dictate people’s readiness for certain messages. However, the method and content of those messages has changed with great consequences for the health and future of democracy. 

This book answers several questions: How do candidates/parties reach audiences that are preoccupied, inattentive, amorphous, and bombarded with so many other messages? How do they cope with the speed of media reporting in a continuous news cycle that demands instantaneous responses? How has media fragmentation altered the campaign styles and content of campaign communication, and general campaign discourse? Finally and most critically, what does this mean for how democracies function?

Media and scholastic accounts describe a strong public opinion backlash—a sharply negative and enduring opinion change—against attempts to advance gay rights. Academic research, however, increasingly questions backlash as an explanation for opposition to LGBT rights. Elite-Led Mobilization and Gay Rights argues that what appears to be public opinion backlash against gay rights is more consistent with elite-led mobilization—a strategy used by anti-gay elites, primarily white evangelicals, seeking to prevent the full incorporation of LGBT Americans in the polity in order to achieve political objectives and increase political power. This book defines and tests the theory of Mass Opinion Backlash and develops and tests the theory of Elite-Led Mobilization by employing a series of online and natural experiments, surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Obergefell v. Hodges and United States v. Windsor, and President Obama’s position change on gay marriage. To evaluate these theories, the authors employ extensive survey, voting behavior, and campaign finance data, and examine the history of the LGBT movement and its opposition by religious conservatives, from the Lavender Scare to the campaign against Trans Rights in the defeat of Houston’s 2015 HERO ordinance. Their evidence shows that opposition to LGBT rights is a top-down process incited by anti-gay elites rather than a bottom-up reaction described by public opinion backlash.

This book is a detailed comparative analysis of development politics in four urban regions of Latin America, two in Mexico and two in Colombia. John Walton has based his studies on the assumption that the problems of economic growth are essentially political, that is, are problems of choice, decision-making, and the exercise of power. His fundamental purpose has been to discover how elites of different kinds are more and less successful in the promotion of economic development, which he defines as a process in the organization of a society leading not only to higher levels of efficient output but also to a more equitable distribution of benefits.

At the time, the four cities compared were the second- and third-largest metropolitan areas in each country, Guadalajara and Monterrey in Mexico, Medellín and Cali in Colombia. This selection allows the author to pair, across countries, cases of early and large-scale industrialization (Monterrey and Medellín) with cases of more recent industrial growth in agricultural-commercial centers (Guadalajara and Cali). Walton presents historical introductions to each of the regions and integrates these with original fieldwork and interviews with more than three hundred members of the political and economic elites.

The findings are extensive, but in general they demonstrate that where political and economic power is more broadly distributed, where elites are more open and accessible, and where organizational life is more active and coordinated, regions tend to develop qualitatively as well as quantitatively, showing increases both in productivity and in such benefits as public services, housing, education, and a more balanced distribution of income. If these characteristics are absent, regions may be industrialized but do not provide a broad sharing of the benefits. Walton places a good deal of emphasis on the role of foreign investments, demonstrating that the more penetrated regions are also the less developed.

Finally, the results of these studies are used to evaluate and advance theories of underdevelopment and particularly of economic dependency.

The United States detains and deports several hundred thousand migrants every year. Many spend significant amounts of time in immigration detention as they await adjudication of their immigration cases. The Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey is located in a converted warehouse, managed by a private, for-profit prison company. Over three decades, migrants and asylum seekers have been brought to EDC directly from Newark Airport or have been transferred to the site from elsewhere in the United States, including from the US-Mexico border region.

Through a longitudinal, site-specific study unique in its kind, this volume unites the voices and perspectives of formerly detained migrants, scholars, journalists, lawyers, and social and faith movement leaders, who share their experiences of Elizabeth Detention Center and reconstruct its social history and its location in New Jersey's political economy and in the changing legal landscapes of immigration detention in the United States.

 "A magisterially written, well-researched, informative, and entertaining biography of a woman who helped throw open the doors to broader participation and power for women in the Republican Party and American politics."
---Dave Dempsey, author of William G. Milliken: Michigan's Passionate Moderate

"Elly Peterson will be a text to which historians and researchers turn for insight into the yin and yang of mainstream politics in the mid-century."
---Patricia Sullivan, past president, Journalism and Women Symposium

"This lively portrait of a leading woman in the Republican Party between 1952 and 1982 also charts the party's shift to the right after 1964, revealingly viewed through the eyes of liberal Republican women. Intensively researched with ethnographic attention to the subtleties of political culture, Fitzgerald's book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the Republican Party changed during the turbulent decades after 1960 and how women and women's issues shaped those changes."
---Kathryn Kish Sklar, Distinguished Professor of History, State University of New York, Binghamton

"Sara Fitzgerald tells Peterson's story in this superb and timely biography. It carries a message that deserves the widest audience as the nation struggles to find needed consensus on critical issues amid poisonous political partisanship that has made it increasingly difficult for public officials to bridge their differences. I hope that every American reads it."
---Pulitzer Prize winner Haynes Johnson, from the Foreword

"To understand the quest for equal rights in America you really need to meet those women who were active at the time of transition. In this gripping biography we meet one woman who entered a male dominated world and triumphed."
---Francis X. Blouin Jr., Director, Bentley Historical Library

"Sara Fitzgerald's writing is as intelligent as it is entertaining."
---Best-selling novelist Diane Chamberlain

Elly Peterson was one of the highest ranking women in the Republican Party. In 1964 she ran for a Michigan seat in the U.S. Senate and became the first woman to serve as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. During the 1960s she grew disenchanted with the increasing conservatism of her party, united with other feminists to push for the Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive choice, battled Phyllis Schlafly to prevent her from gaining control of the National Federation of Republican Women, and became an independent.

Elly Peterson's story is a missing chapter in the political history of Michigan, as well as the United States. This new biography, written by Sara Fitzgerald (a Michigan native and former Washington Post editor), finally gives full credit to one of the first female political leaders in this country.

When Peterson resigned in 1970 as assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, David Broder of the Washington Post wrote that "her abilities would have earned her the national chairmanship, were it not for the unwritten sex barrier both parties have erected around that job."

Elsewhere argues that you can make all of the “smart” food choices you want and follow Michael Pollan to the letter, but that won’t end the violence in the food system. Eating is an act of violence. With every life-sustaining meal and food purchase, we shorten the lives of farmers, laborers, animals, the planet, and ourselves. This isn’t a symptom of a broken food system, but a feature of a working one: our capitalist food system doesn’t cause harm accidentally, it does so because it has to. To keep generating wealth, the system moves its violence around, away from privileged producers and consumers and into forgettable elsewheres: reservations, prisons, distant islands, killing floors, inner cities, rural hinterlands, and war-torn countries. 

     This shell-game is not new. Elsewhere examines the 250-year history of the US food system to uncover how the country used abundance to enrich some and exploit others; how it captured, colonized, and reorganized territory to conceal its harms; and why decades of technological innovation, environmental awareness, and consumer consciousness haven’t staunched these self-inflicted wounds. Elsewhere invites us to ask different questions about the food system: where does its violence come from, where does it go, and how can we nurture a food system that first does no harm.

Inside the Illinois showdown that derailed the Equal Rights Amendment

In this gripping account of one of the most consequential political battles of the twentieth century, Mark R. DePue takes readers inside the fight that halted the Equal Rights Amendment. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of original oral history interviews, DePue reconstructs the drama, strategy, and emotion of the ERA showdown in Illinois, the state that became the amendment’s most critical battleground.

First introduced in Congress in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment has endured for more than a century as one of the most debated yet still unratified proposals in American constitutional history. Its ratification seemed closer than ever when Congress passed the ERA in 1972 and sent it to the states with a seven-year deadline, but in Illinois, a constitutional quirk stalled its momentum. Optimism faltered, and what followed was a political war like no other the state had ever seen. Illinois’ state legislature in Springfield became the epicenter of a national struggle over gender, power, and the future of the Constitution.

At the center of the storm stood Phyllis Schlafly, the formidable conservative activist from Alton, Illinois, whose STOP ERA movement transformed a faltering amendment into a rallying cry for the New Right. Opposing her and her allies was an array of feminist organizers, legislators, celebrities, clergy, union members, and grassroots activists—often divided among themselves—who believed that equality under the law was within reach. Bringing creativity, passion, and persistence to the cause, they staged inventive demonstrations, lobbied relentlessly, and fought for every vote.

What sets this book apart are its extraordinary cast of characters and the chance DePue gives them to speak for themselves. Through vivid first-person testimony gathered at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and the University of Illinois Springfield, supporters and opponents alike reflect on their motivations, fears, strategies, and regrets. Their voices bring to life the packed committee hearings, late-night strategy sessions, and personal sacrifices behind the headlines.

By 1982, the amendment fell three states short of ratification nationwide. Illinois never delivered the votes that might have changed history.

More than a political chronicle, this is a story of conviction and conflict, ambition and compromise. It is the story of how a century-old amendment came tantalizingly close to becoming law—and how, in one state capitol, the battle over women’s equality reshaped a movement and left a constitutional promise still unfinished.