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This provocative book begins with a question about the Vietnam War. How is it, asks Robert D. Dean, that American policymakers—men who prided themselves on “hardheaded pragmatism” and shunned “fuzzy idealism”—could have committed the nation to such a ruinous, costly, and protracted war? The answer, he argues, lies not simply in the imperatives of anticommunist ideology or in any reasonable calculation of national interest. At least as decisive in determining the form and content of American Cold War foreign policy were the common background and shared values of its makers, especially their deeply ingrained sense of upper-class masculinity.

Dean begins by examining the institutions that shaped the members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment—all-male prep schools, Ivy League universities, collegiate secret societies, and exclusive men's clubs—that instilled stoic ideals of competition, duty, and loyalty. Service in elite military units during World War II further reinforced this pattern of socialization, eventually creating an “imperial brotherhood” imbued with a common global vision. More than that, according to Dean, the commitment to tough-minded masculinity shared by these men encouraged the pursuit of policies that were aggressively interventionist abroad and intolerant of dissent at home.

Applying his gendered analysis to the McCarthy era, Dean reveals how the purge of suspected homosexuals in the State Department not only paralleled the repression of the political left, but also reflected a bitter contest for power between the foreign policy elite and provincial Congressional conservatives. He then shows how issues of manliness similarly influenced the politics and policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Just as programs like the Peace Corps were grounded in ideals of masculine heroism, decisions about intervention in Vietnam were inextricably bound up with ideas about male strength and power. In the end, Dean makes a persuasive case that these elite constructions of male identity fundamentally shaped the course of American foreign policy during the early decades of the Cold War.

Studies bronze icons of Hindu and Buddhist deities to better understand the flow of ideas across the sea routes of Maritime Asia in the first millennium.

While the great temples of Southeast Asia have inspired research in the past, the careful study of their smaller and more portable counterparts—bronze icons of Hindu and Buddhist deities—gives us a more dynamic understanding of the movement of beliefs and practices across Asia. These sacred images—found across Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Sulawesi—rank alongside monumental temple complexes like Borobudur as among the most significant artistic and religious achievements of the region. Yet they have too often been treated as mere antiquities, prized for their beauty but stripped of their deeper historical meaning. 

Mechling recovers what these bronzes can actually tell us. By tracing their distribution patterns alongside their artistic style, iconography, fabrication techniques, and metal compositions, she reconstructs the shared cults, ritual practices, and technological relationships that linked communities across the western Indonesian archipelago and beyond from the sixth to the tenth century. The picture that emerges overturns a long-held scholarly paradigm—inherited from the colonial era—of passive Southeast Asian reception of Indian cultural influence. In its place, Indonesian Buddhist Bronzes in the Making of Maritime Asia reveals a world of multi-directional exchange among active, cosmopolitan participants whose networks of creativity and devotion shaped one of history's most dynamic cultural crossroads.

From the stone quarries of Sing Sing that supplied marble for early New York City landmarks, to twenty-first-century construction projects staffed by formerly incarcerated workers, Inside Jobs traces the relationship between prison work and the labor market over the past two hundred years. Sociologist Adam Reich demonstrates how prison labor has repeatedly been used to solve economic problems—disciplining workers, lowering labor costs, managing unemployment—revealing unexpected connections that challenge our assumptions about freedom, coercion, and labor itself.

Reich examines the history of work in prisons to understand how it has related to the free labor market. He finds that the organization of prison work, and debates over it, have changed dramatically over time. In the mid to late nineteenth century, prisons helped shape the emerging factory system as the apprentice-based labor market gave way to industrial production. Labor unions opposed prison labor as immoral, and in the early to mid-twentieth century, the moral character of the workforce became central to economic life within the prison and without. Therapeutic professionals worked in prisons to rehabilitate the incarcerated and determine what motivated them to work. Following prison uprisings in the late twentieth century, prison work became a tool of population control. Yet, paradoxically, work programs were remodeled to mirror the free labor market, requiring applications and hiring processes. 

Blending archival research, political economy, and sociological theory, Inside Jobs offers a powerful new framework for understanding mass incarceration and reentry today. Reich examines how the dynamics of mass incarceration have begun to shift. He explores how the "mark of a criminal record"—the stigma traditionally associated with felony convictions—has given way to a "market" for criminal records, as employers discover advantages in hiring disadvantaged, dependent, and disciplined workers recently released from prison. Looking toward the future, Reich focuses on promising efforts to transform this system.

Inside Jobs is an illuminating examination of prison work's history, its relationship to work outside prison walls, and how the criminal justice system disempowers workers both behind bars and beyond.