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While welfare has been subject to pronounced criticism throughout the twentieth century, social insurance has consistently enjoyed the overwhelming support of European policy makers and citizens. This volume argues that the emergence of social insurance represents a paradigmatic shift in modern understandings of health, work, political participation, and government. By institutionalizing compensation, social insurance transformed it into a right that the employed population quickly came to assume. Theoretically informed and based on intensive archival research on disability insurance records, most of which have never been used by historians, the book considers how social science and political philosophy combined to give shape to the idea of a "social" insurance in the nineteenth century; the process by which social insurance gave birth to modern notions of "disability" and "rehabilitation"; and the early-twentieth-century development of political action groups for the disabled. Most earlier histories of German social insurance have been legislative histories that stressed the system's coercive features and functions. Making Security Social, by contrast, emphasizes the administrative practices of everyday life, the experience of consumers, and the ability of workers not only to resist, but to transform, social insurance bureaucracy and political debate. It thus demonstrates that social insurance was pivotal in establishing a general attitude of demand, claim, and entitlement as the primary link between the modern state and those it governed. In addition to historians of Germany, Making Security Social will attract researchers across disciplines who are concerned with public policy, disability studies, and public health.

Meat and the Birth of Rome explores faunal remains from archaeological sites dating to the early Iron Age through early Republican period in Rome and its environs and challenges a prevailing view of Rome’s exceptionalism. Victoria C. Moses tempers the myth by illuminating the roles of meat production, distribution, and consumption and ritual sacrifice in the social hierarchy, economy, and religious practices as Rome grew. During the transformative period around the eighth century BCE, Romans conserved older foodways and their diverse ritual practices. These findings within the broader zooarchaeological data from peninsular Italy show that, despite Rome’s later success, it shared many early characteristics with its neighbors.

This compelling narrative adds to the current archaeological conversations and research on the history of the eternal city.

Although few of his plays exist in full today, the fourth-century BCE Greek dramatist Menander was known far and wide throughout antiquity. He was one of the first to locate his dramas in the common household, rather than the mythic world of gods and heroes, and is now recognized as one of the pioneering figures of ancient Greek “New Comedy.” 

The design of the Greek stage was such that the interiors of houses were almost never shown, which posed difficulties for a playwright interested in staging the domestic lives of ordinary people. Here, Mitch Brown dissects how Menander responded to this challenge. As Brown demonstrates, Menander successfully conjured offstage action and even characters in the audiences’ imaginations; these offstage universes, Brown argues, are fundamental to understanding Menander’s dramaturgy and its reception in later centuries. Menander’s offstage methods and the new type of play (domestic drama) that he inaugurated directly influenced Western theater into the early modern period—and the impact of his innovations can still be seen indirectly today.