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In Paradoxes of Nostalgia Penny M. Von Eschen offers a sweeping examination of the cold war’s afterlife and the lingering shadows it casts over geopolitics, journalism, and popular culture. She shows how myriad forms of nostalgia across the globe—from those that posit a mythic national past to those critical of neoliberalism that remember a time when people believed in the possibility of a collective good—indelibly shape the post-cold war era. When Western triumphalism moved into the global South and former Eastern bloc spaces, many articulated a powerful sense of loss and a longing for stability. Innovatively bringing together diplomatic archives, museums, films, and video games, Von Eschen shows that as the United States continuously sought new enemies for its unipolar world, cold war triumphalism fueled the ascendancy of xenophobic right-wing nationalism and the embrace of authoritarian sensibilities in the United States and beyond. Ultimately, she demonstrates that triumphalist claims that capitalism and military might won the cold war distort the past and disfigure the present, undermining democratic values and institutions.

In the War of the Triple Alliance—the most terrible conflict in South American history—Paraguay was almost annihilated by the armed forces of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. The chaotic postwar decade began with the Allied occupation of Asunción, which lasted seven years, and was marked by Brazilian-Argentine rivalry and interference in Paraguayan affairs and by the efforts of Paraguay’s governments to revive their stricken land, efforts often thwarted by corruption, factionalism, and revolutions. It ended with the arbitral award eliminating Argentina as a claimant to the Chaco Boreal and with the ascendancy of the Colorado Party, which dominated Paraguayan politics for most of the next century.

This is the first book in any language that examines political, economic, and social developments to provide a well-integrated study of this significant and eventful period. It is based on archival resources, largely unused before, in England, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, as well as on newspapers, books, pamphlets, and published documents in many libraries. As one historian has said, the study is “a masterpiece of sleuthing and historical synthesis.” It will be of interest not only to students of Paraguay but also to those concerned with Brazilian, Argentine, and Latin American history.

An engrossing account of the myth and legend of George S. Patton and what his reputation illuminates about American culture and hero worship

Patton’s Shadow by Nathan C. Jones, a leading authority on George S. Patton, offers a definitive account of the creation of the Patton legend and what it illuminates about American culture and the worship of heroes. Jones traces how the persona of Patton, a brash and brilliant general in the European theater of World War II, transcended the individual man and became a cultural icon and byword for triumphal American might.

Patton was a hero lionized and celebrated in his own time. Patton as well as the US Army cultivated his persona during and after the war. His image was used to promote patriotism, commercial goods, and military recruitment. The 1970 Academy Award–winning film starring George C. Scott cemented his iconic image for millions of Americans, further embellishing Patton’s persona and introducing him to entirely new generations of young Americans.

Patton’s Shadow is an intellectually omnivorous tour de force that draws on ideas about heroes from sources as timeless as ancient mythology and as contemporary as Abraham Maslow, Max Weber, and Carl Jung. Jones artfully locates the honored altar that heroes occupy in the human heart and then answers insightful questions about what America’s embrace of Patton in particular as a military hero illuminates about the United States, about Patton’s generation, and about our own.

Jones’s engrossing work will fascinate readers interested in American history, military history, and the psychology of heroism.

The book is about the peace implementation process in Bosnia-Herzegovina viewed, or interpreted reasonably, as a continuation of war by other means. Twenty years after the beginning of the Dayton peace accords, we need to summarize the results: the author shares the general agreement in public opinion, according to which the process is a failure. Pehar presents a broad, yet sufficiently detailed, view of the entire peace agreement implementation that preserves 'the state of war,' and thus encourages the war-prone attitudes in the parties to the agreement. He examines the political and narratological underpinnings to the process of the imposed international (predominantly USA) interpretation of the Dayton constitution and peace treaty as a whole. The key issue is the – perhaps only semi-consciously applied – divide ut imperes strategy. After nearly twenty years, the peace in document was not translated into a peace on the ground because, with regard to the key political and constitutional issues and attitudes, Bosnia remains a deeply divided society. The book concludes that the international supervision served a counter-purpose: instead of correcting the aberration and guarding the meaning that was originally accepted in the Dayton peace treaty, the supervision approved the aberration and imposed it as a new norm under the clout of 'the power of ultimate interpretation.'

Ninety years ago Great Plains archaeologists such as Waldo Wedel and William Duncan Strong made foundational contributions to American archaeology, enabling new discoveries, insights, and interpretations. This volume explores how twenty-first-century archaeologists have built upon, remodeled, and sometimes rejected the inferences of these earlier scholars with updated overviews and analyses.

Contributors highlight how Indigenous Plains groups participated in large-scale social networks in which ideas, symbols, artifacts, and people moved across North America over the last 2,000 years. They also discuss cultural transformation, focusing on key demographic, economic, social, and ceremonial factors associated with change, including colonization and integration into the social and political economies of transatlantic societies. Cultural traditions covered include Woodland-era Kansas City Hopewell, late prehistoric Central Plains tradition, and ancestral and early historic Wichita, Pawnee and Arikara, Kanza, Plains Apache, and Puebloan migrants. As the first review of Plains archaeology in more than a decade, this book brings studies of early Indigenous
peoples of the central and southern Plains into a new era.

The late fifth century BC was the golden age of ancient Athens. Under the leadership of the renowned soldier-statesman Perikles, Athenians began rebuilding the Akropolis, where they created the still awe-inspiring Parthenon. Athenians also reached a zenith of artistic achievement in sculpture, vase painting, and architecture, which provided continuing inspiration for many succeeding generations.

The specially commissioned essays in this volume offer a fresh, innovative panorama of the art, architecture, history, culture, and influence of Periklean Athens. Written by leading experts in the field, the articles cover a wide range of topics, including:

• An evaluation of Perikles' military leadership during the early stages of the Peloponnesian War.
• Iconographical and iconological studies of vase paintings, wall paintings, and sculpture.
• Explorations of the Parthenon and other monuments of the Athenian Akropolis.
• The legacy of Periklean Athens and its influence upon later art.
• Assessments of the modern reception of the Akropolis.

As a whole, this collection of essays proves that even a well-explored field such as Periklean Athens can yield new treasures when mined by perceptive and seasoned investigators.

An examination of the work and influence of historian Pieter Geyl.
 
Pieter Geyl (1887—1966) was undoubtedly one of the most internationally renowned Dutch historians of the twentieth century, but also one of the most controversial. Having come to the United Kingdom as a journalist, he started his academic career at the University of London in the aftermath of World War I and played an important role in the early days of the Institute of Historical Research. Known in this time for his reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt against the Habsburgs that challenged existing historiographies of both Belgium and the Netherlands but was also linked to his political activism in favor of the Flemish movement in Belgium, Geyl left his stamp on the British perception of Low Countries history before moving back to his country of origin in 1935. Having spent World War II in German hostage camps, he famously coined the adage of history being “a discussion without end” and reengaged in public debates with British historians after the war, partly conducted on the airwaves of the BBC. A prolific writer and an early example of a public intellectual, Geyl remains one of the most influential thinkers on history of his time. The present volume reexamines Geyl’s relationship with Britain (and the Anglophone world at large) and sheds new light on his multifaceted work as a historian, journalist, homme de lettres, and political activist.

In Planning the Home Front, Sarah Jo Peterson offers readers a portrait of the American people—industrialists and labor leaders, federal officials and municipal leaders, social reformers, industrial workers, and their families—that lays bare the foundations of community, the high costs of racism, and the tangled process of negotiation between New Deal visionaries and wartime planners. By tying the history of suburbanization to that of the home front, Peterson uncovers how the United States planned and built industrial regions in the pursuit of war, setting the stage for the suburban explosion that would change the American landscape when the war was won.

In Ennead I.5 Plotinus attempts to navigate a well-trodden path of inquiry by directly responding to a wide spectrum of popular theories on human flourishing, and insisting emphatically that well-being belongs to the present moment. Indeed, Aristotle—with his insistence that well-being be measured by “a complete life” (Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16–20) or a life measured by virtue, a modus vivendi sustained via the development of appropriate habits (hexis) and the avoidance of misfortunes—is one of Plotinus’ central targets. Nevertheless, it is also obvious that the Hellenistic schools, with their almost evangelical insistence that happiness is available to practitioners in the immediacy of the “now,” take pride of place in Plotinus’ short treatise on the subject. Layne analyzes in depth Plotinus’ unique conception of the value of the present moment by highlighting his dialogue with Aristotle and Hellenistic conceptions of the soul, pleasure and pain, time and eternity, and so forth.

At the close of 2019, the United States saw a record-low poverty rate. At the start of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to upend that trend and plunge millions of Americans into poverty. However, despite the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, the poverty rate declined to the lowest in modern U.S. history. In Poverty in the Pandemic social policy scholar Zachary Parolin provides a data-driven account of how poverty influenced the economic, social, and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., as well as how the country’s policy response led to historically low poverty rates.
 
Drawing on dozens of data sources ranging from debit and credit card spending, the first national databases of school and childcare center closures in the U.S., and bi-weekly Census-run surveys on well-being, Parolin finds that entering the pandemic in poverty substantially increased a person’s likelihood of experiencing negative health outcomes due to the pandemic, such as contracting and dying from COVID, as well as losing their job. Additionally, he found that students from poor families suffered the greatest learning losses as a result of school closures and the shift to distance learning during the pandemic. 
 
However, unprecedented legislative action by the U.S. government, including the passage of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and the American Rescue Plan (ARP) helped mitigate the economic consequences of the pandemic and lifted around 18 million Americans out of poverty. Based on the success of these policies, Parolin concludes with policy suggestions that the U.S. can implement in more ‘normal’ times to improve the living conditions of low-income households after the pandemic subsides, including expanding access to Unemployment Insurance, permanently expanding the Child Tax Credit, promoting greater access to affordable, high-quality healthcare coverage, and investing more resources into the Census Bureau’s data-collection capabilities. He also details a method of producing a monthly measurement of poverty, to be used in conjunction with the traditional annual measurement, in order to better understand the intra-year volatility of poverty that many Americans experience.
 
Poverty in the Pandemic provides the most complete account to date of the unique challenges that low-income households in the U.S. faced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
 

Powerful Devices studies spiritual warfare performances as an apparatus for disestablishing structures of power and knowledge, and establishing righteousness in their stead. Drawing on performance studies’ emphasis on radicality and breaking of social norms as devices of social transformation, the book demonstrates how Christian groups with dominant cultural power but who perceive themselves as embattled wield the ideas of performance activism. Combining religious studies with ethnography, Powerful Devices explores Nigerian Pentecostals and US Evangelicals’ praxis of transnational spiritual warfare. By closely studying spiritual warfare prayers as a “device,” Powerful Devices shows how the rituals of prayer enable an apprehension of time, paradigms of self-enhancement, and the subversion of politics and authority. A critical intervention, Powerful Devices explores charismatic Christianity’s relationship to science and secular authority, technology and temporality, neoliberalism, and reactionary ideology.

One of the most admired artists of the twentieth century, Max Ernst was a proponent of Dada and founder of surrealism, known for his strange, evocative paintings and drawings. In Prehistoric Future, Ralph Ubl approaches Ernst like no one else has, using theories of the unconscious—surrealist automatism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the concept of history as trauma—to examine how Ernst’s construction of collage departs from other modern artists. Ubl shows that while Picasso, Braque, and Man Ray used scissors and glue to create collages, Ernst employed techniques he himself had forged—rubbing and scraping to bring images forth onto a sheet of paper or canvas to simulate how a screen image or memory comes into the mind’s view. In addition, Ernst scoured the past for obsolete scientific illustrations and odd advertisements to illustrate the rapidity with which time passes and to simulate the apprehension generated when rapid flows of knowledge turn living culture into artifact. Ultimately, Ubl reveals, Ernst was interested in the construction and phenomenology of both collective and individual modern history and memory. Shedding new light on Ernst’s working methods and the reasons that his pieces continue to imprint themselves in viewers’ memories, Prehistoric Future is an innovative work of critical writing on a key figure of surrealism.

The Second Vatican Council is the single most influential event in the 20th century history of the Catholic Church. The book analyzes the relationship between the Council and the "Ostpolitik" of the Vatican through the history of the Hungarian presence at Vatican II. Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958, was a catalyst. The pope thought that his most urgent task was to renew contacts with the Church behind the iron curtain. Hungarian participation at the Council was also made possible by the new, pragmatic model in Hungarian church politics. After the crushing of the 1956 Revolution, churches in Hungary thought that the regime would last and were willing to compromise. Vatican II – in the perspective of Hungary – was not primarily an ecclesial event, but it remained closely joined to the negotiations between the Holy See and the Kádár regime: during the Council Hungary became the experimental laboratory of the Vatican's new eastern policy. Was it a Vatican decision or a Soviet instruction? Fejérdy suggests that it was a decision of the Holy See.

Drawing on twenty years of research, this is the definitive biography of Primo Levi.

Over the last seventy years, Primo Levi (1919–87) has been recognized as the foremost literary witness of the extermination of the European Jews. In Primo Levi: An Identikit, a product of twenty years of research, Marco Belpoliti explores Levi’s tormented life, his trajectory as a writer and intellectual, and, above all, his multifaceted and complex oeuvre.
 
Organized in a mosaic format, this volume devotes a different chapter to each of Levi’s books. In addition to tracing the history of each book’s composition, publication, and literary influences, Belpoliti explores their contents across the many worlds of Primo Levi: from chemistry to anthropology, biology to ethology, space flights to linguistics. If This Is a Man, his initially rejected masterpiece, is also reread with a fresh perspective. We learn of dreams, animals, and travel; of literary writing, comedy, and tragedy; of shame, memory, and the relationship with other writers such as Franz Kafka and Georges Perec, Jean Améry and Varlam Shalamov. Fundamental themes such as Judaism, the camp, and testimony innervate the book, which is complemented by photographs and letters found by the author in hitherto unexplored archives.
 
This will be the definitive book on Primo Levi, a treasure trove of stories and reflections that paint a rich, nuanced composite portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most unique and urgent voices.

Silvio Torres-Saillant’s collected writings examine political contradictions within Latinx identity in the United States.

Since the 1990s Silvio Torres-Saillant’s work has questioned the notion of Latinidad, challenging presumptions of panethnic unity within the US Hispanic population and assessing dominant modes of Latinx representation. The essays in Problematic Paradigms and the Contours of US Latinidad examine the dynamics of a diverse collective of over 65 million people whose cultural heritage, ancestral origins, and belief systems arguably differ as much as they resemble one another. The volume dissects prevailing assumptions, namely the essentializing sense of homogeneity in the Latinx “community,” which mask important nuances and fascinating contradictions. Torres-Saillant also targets the role of marketing and mass communications in shaping popular perceptions of ethnic groups, thereby tracing connections between media rhetoric and the language of scholarship.

Newly revised by editors Nancy Kang and Michael Nieto Garcia, this collection curates Torres-Saillant’s core contributions to Latinx studies over the last two decades and underscores the veteran scholar’s evolving thoughts on key conversations in the field. The epilogue narrates his beginnings in Caribbean studies, acknowledges his ongoing analysis of Dominican blackness, and discourages uncritical views of cultural heritage.

A critical reconsideration of the repeated use of the biblical letters of Paul.
 
The letters of Paul have been used to support and condone a host of evils over the span of more than two millennia: racism, slavery, imperialism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, to name a few. Despite, or in some cases because of, this history, readers of Paul have felt compelled to reappropriate his letters to fit liberal or radical politics, seeking to set right the evils done in Paul’s name. Starting with the language of excrement, refuse, and waste in Paul’s letters, Profaning Paul looks at how Paul’s “shit” is recycled and reconfigured. It asks why readers, from liberal Christians to academic biblical scholars to political theorists and philosophers, feel compelled to make Paul into a hero, mining his words for wisdom. Following the lead of feminist, queer, and minoritized scholarship, Profaning Paul asks what would happen if we stopped recycling Paul’s writings. By profaning the status of his letters as sacred texts, we might open up new avenues for imagining political figurations to meet our current and coming political, economic, and ecological challenges.
 

Bridging landmark territory in film studies, Psycho-Sexual is the first book to apply Alfred Hitchcock’s legacy to three key directors of 1970s Hollywood—Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and William Friedkin—whose work suggests the pornographic male gaze that emerged in Hitchcock’s depiction of the voyeuristic, homoerotically inclined American man. Combining queer theory with a psychoanalytic perspective, David Greven begins with a reconsideration of Psycho and the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much to introduce the filmmaker’s evolutionary development of American masculinity.

Psycho-Sexual probes De Palma’s early Vietnam War draft-dodger comedies as well as his film Dressed to Kill, along with Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Friedkin’s Cruising as reactions to and inventive elaborations upon Hitchcock’s gendered themes and aesthetic approaches. Greven demonstrates how the significant political achievement of these films arises from a deeply disturbing, violent, even sorrowful psychological and social context. Engaging with contemporary theories of pornography while establishing pornography’s emergence during the classical Hollywood era, Greven argues that New Hollywood filmmakers seized upon Hitchcock’s radical decentering of heterosexual male dominance. The resulting images of heterosexual male ambivalence allowed for an investment in same-sex desire; an aura of homophobia became informed by a fascination with the homoerotic. Psycho-Sexual also explores the broader gender crisis and disorganization that permeated the Cold War and New Hollywood eras, reimagining the defining premises of Hitchcock criticism.

Public debate and discussion was overshadowed by the slavery controversy during the period of the U.S. Civil War. Slavery was attacked, defended, amplified, and mitigated. This happened in the halls of Congress, the courts, the political debate, the public platform, and the lecture hall. This volume examines the issues, speakers, and venues for this controversy between 1850 and 1877. It combines exploration of the broad contours of controversy with careful analysis of specific speakers and texts.