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First published in French in 1808 and translated into English two years later under the title An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of the Negroes, this book was a touchstone for nineteenth-century abolitionists in England and the United States. Written by Abbe Henri Gregoire (1750–1831), it argued vigorously against assumptions of black inferiority and in favor of the humanity, equality, and cultural achievements of people of African heritage. His treatise summarized most of the available written thought on race up to that time. A leading activist in the French Revolution, Gregoire reflected in his arguments the spirit of “libertie, egalite, and fraternite” and anticipated twentieth-century race inquiry and theory. Although influential in its time, the first translation of Gregoire's work was incomplete and flawed. This new edition presents a fresh, accurate, and complete text of this key document in the history of Western racial thought. The book includes a substantial biography of Gregoire and analysis of the historical context in which he wrote and the impact of his work.

Delve into Rome’s lost history through the stories of a single city block.

Cutting through the heart of Rome is Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a time-worn street named for the mysterious “shops” said to run beneath it. History lies thick here, a museum atop a convent atop ancient ruins; layered in are traces of artisans and poets, pilgrims and saints, a Fascist deportation, a communist coffee bar, a political assassination, and shopkeepers, too. These stories all rest upon a single city block, the same place where, in 13 BCE, the triumphal Roman general Lucius Cornelius Balbus built a monumental theater complex in his own honor.

Elizabeth Rodini’s On the Street of the Hidden Shops digs deep into this corner of the city, uncovering a set of surprising, often poignant narratives that range across two thousand years. For as the walls of Balbus’s compound decayed and the neighborhood was rebuilt, this block would come to shelter Romans from all walks of life: the daughters of local prostitutes, an earnest young man in search of a bride, an entrepreneur determined to preserve the city’s colorful dialect, a Jewish family recently liberated from the nearby Ghetto, and a band of idealistic archaeologists unearthing a long-forgotten past, as well as a gifted baker, a medieval donkey, and a Renaissance ghost. Their stories survive in archives and artifacts but also in the enduring power of rumor and legend.

On the Street of the Hidden Shops invites us on a captivating journey to one place across many centuries. Its tight urban focus reveals a Rome most visitors miss, while uncovering some of the many Romes that have been largely lost to history.

Delve into Rome’s lost history through the stories of a single city block.

Cutting through the heart of Rome is Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a time-worn street named for the mysterious “shops” said to run beneath it. History lies thick here, a museum atop a convent atop ancient ruins; layered in are traces of artisans and poets, pilgrims and saints, a Fascist deportation, a communist coffee bar, a political assassination, and shopkeepers, too. These stories all rest upon a single city block, the same place where, in 13 BCE, the triumphal Roman general Lucius Cornelius Balbus built a monumental theater complex in his own honor.

Elizabeth Rodini’s On the Street of the Hidden Shops digs deep into this corner of the city, uncovering a set of surprising, often poignant narratives that range across two thousand years. For as the walls of Balbus’s compound decayed and the neighborhood was rebuilt, this block would come to shelter Romans from all walks of life: the daughters of local prostitutes, an earnest young man in search of a bride, an entrepreneur determined to preserve the city’s colorful dialect, a Jewish family recently liberated from the nearby Ghetto, and a band of idealistic archaeologists unearthing a long-forgotten past, as well as a gifted baker, a medieval donkey, and a Renaissance ghost. Their stories survive in archives and artifacts but also in the enduring power of rumor and legend.

On the Street of the Hidden Shops invites us on a captivating journey to one place across many centuries. Its tight urban focus reveals a Rome most visitors miss, while uncovering some of the many Romes that have been largely lost to history.

The proscription against interracial marriage was for many years a flashpoint in American culture. In One Nation, One Blood, Karen Woods Weierman explores this taboo by investigating the traditional link between marriage and property. Her research reveals that the opposition to intermarriage originated in large measure in the nineteenth-century desire for Indian land and African labor. Yet despite the white majority's overwhelming rejection of nonwhite peoples as marriage partners, citizens, and social equals, nineteenth-century reformers challenged the rule against intermarriage. Dismissing the new “race science” that purported to prove white superiority, reformers held fast to the religious notion of a common humanity and the republican rhetoric of freedom and equality, arguing that God made all people “of one blood.”

The years from 1820 to 1870 marked a crucial period in the history of this prejudice. Tales of interracial marriage recounted in fiction, real-life scandals, and legal statutes figured prominently in public discussion of both slavery and the fate of Native Americans. In Part One of this book, Weierman focuses on Indian-white marriages during the 1820s, when Indian removal became a rallying cry for New England intellectuals. 

In Part Two she shifts her attention to black-white marriages from the antebellum period through the early years of Reconstruction. In both cases she finds that the combination of a highly publicized intermarriage scandal, new legislation prohibiting interracial marriage, and fictional portrayals of the ills associated with such unions served to reinforce popular prejudice, justifying the displacement of Indians from their lands and upholding the system of slavery. Even after the demise of slavery, restrictions against intermarriage remained in place in many parts of the country long into the twentieth century. Not until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision did the Supreme Court finally rule that such laws were unconstitutional.

Finishing on a contemporary note, Weierman suggests that the stories Americans tell about intermarriage today—stories defining family, racial identity, and citizenship—still reflect a struggle for resources and power.

Simone Weil was an extraordinary woman whose brief life was intensely devoted to searching for answers to some of the gravest questions inherent in the human condition: the nature of justice, the reasons for human exploitation, the problem of faith. Although debate still lingers about the interpretation of her life and her writings, many contemporary scholars consider her one of the most brilliant, original minds of the twentieth century. This collection of essays by Simone Weil deals with the controversial sociopolitical issues which have confronted us since the time of the French Revolution. The first essay was written in 1932 or 1933 when she was still in her twenties. The last remained unfinished when she died in England at the age of 34, a French-Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied France. 

The essays take a long, close look at Marx and Marxism, and at socialism versus capitalism vis-à-vis labor and the working class. Weil evaluates individuals, ideologies, and institutions with reference to two kinds and uses of power: oppression, which leads ultimately to enslavement or death; and liberty, which leads to humaneness, justice, and charity. 

The collective social history of deaf people in America has yet to be written. While scholars have focused their attention on residential schools for the deaf, leaders in the deaf community, and prominent graduates of these institutions, the lives of “ordinary” deaf individuals have been largely overlooked.

Employing the methods of social history, such as the use of digital history techniques and often-ignored sources like census records, Eric C. Nystrom and R. A. R. Edwards recover the lived experiences of everyday deaf people in late nineteenth century America. Ordinary Lives captures the stories of deaf women and men, both Black and white, describing their family lives, networks of support, educational experiences, and successes and hardships. In this pioneering “deaf social history,” Edwards and Nystrom reconstruct the biographies of a wider range of deaf individuals to tell a richer, more nuanced, and more inclusive history of the larger American deaf community.