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28167 books match the query 'History' and 1297 start with p

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Postfeminist War

Women in the Media-Military-Industrial Complex

Mary Douglas Vavrus

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Media representations and practices that have emerged out of contemporary wars have been well documented by a wide array of books and articles. These treatments, however, have been less attentive to how cultural constructions of military personnel and war itself figure in the depiction of the incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Post-Feminist War, Mary Douglas Vavrus argues that all of these identity categories are integral to our understanding of those fighting, saved, or victimized by war. She considers two important questions: how the construction of gender, race, and class in media are productive of régimes of truth regarding war and military life, and how such constructions may also intensify militarism. By examining news and documentary media produced since September 11, 2001, Vavrus demonstrates that news narratives that include women use feminism selectively in gender equality narratives, which tend to reinforce historically resonant gender, race, and class identity constructions. She ultimately asserts that such reporting advances post-feminism, which, in tandem with banal militarism, subtly pushes military solutions for an array of problems women and girls face.

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Posthegemony

Political Theory and Latin America

Jon Beasley-Murray

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Posthegemony is an investigation into the origins, limits, and possibilities for contemporary politics and political analysis. Jon Beasley-Murray grounds his theoretical discussion with accounts of historical movements in Latin America, from Columbus to Chávez, and from Argentine Peronism to Peru's Sendero Luminoso.

Challenging dominant strains in social theory, Beasley-Murray contends that cultural studies simply replicates the populism that conditions it, and that civil society theory merely nourishes the neoliberalism that it sets out to oppose. Both end up entrenching the fiction of a social contract. In place of hegemony or civil society, Beasley-Murray presents a theory of posthegemony, focusing on affect, habit, and the multitude. This approach addresses an era of biopolitics and bare life, tedium and terror, in which state control is ever more pervasive but something always escapes.

In his thorough examination, Beasley-Murray undoes the dominant narrative of hegemonic projects and counterhegemonic resistance, of civilization and subalternity, to reveal instead a history of failed contracts and unpredicted insurgencies.

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Posthumous Images

Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post–Civil War Lebanon

Chad Elias

Duke University Press, 2018

For almost two decades of its history (1975-90), Lebanon was besieged by sectarian fighting, foreign invasions, and complicated proxy wars. In Posthumous Images, Chad Elias analyzes a generation of contemporary artists who have sought, in different ways, to interrogate the contested memory of those years of civil strife and political upheaval. In their films, photography, architectural projects, and multimedia performances, these artists appropriate existing images to challenge divisive and violent political discourses. They also create new images that make visible individuals and communities that have been effectively silenced, rendered invisible, or denied political representation. As Elias demonstrates, these practices serve to productively unsettle the distinctions between past and present, the dead and the living, official history and popular memory. In Lebanon, the field of contemporary art is shown to be critical to remembering the past and reimagining the future in a nation haunted by a violent and unresolved war.

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Postmodern Advertising in Japan

Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club

Ory Bartal

Dartmouth College Press, 2015

In a study driven by stunning images of Japanese advertisements and the artworks they quote from, Ory Bartal offers a first-of-its-kind interpretation of the “postmodern” genre of advertising in Japan, which both shaped and reflected the new consumer-driven culture that arose during the bubble era of the 1980s and 1990s. Through a fascinating tale of art directors and their works and influences, Bartal shows how this postmodern visual language, like postmodernism in other streams, is distinguished by its mélange of styles, blurring of boundaries between art and design, and reliance on visual and textual quotations from sources past and present, domestic and foreign. Although this advertising culture partakes of global trends, Bartal draws attention to the varied local artistic sensibilities, structures of thought, and underlying practices, challenging the often-simplistic characterization of “Japaneseness” as being rooted in a Zen tradition of aesthetic indirectness and ambiguity. Combining multilingual scholarship with a wealth of information gleaned through years of personal interviews with the principals involved, this is a truly original contribution to the discussion of Japanese art and advertising as well as an insightful reading of more general issues in the study of visual culture and media.

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Postmodern Animal

Steve Baker

Reaktion Books, 2000

An insightful new way of looking at modern and contemporary art and performance that focuses on representations of animals

In The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in modern and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to suggest and shape ideas about identity and creativity. Baker cogently analyses the work of such European and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Paula Rego and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys and other significant late twentieth-century artists. Baker's book draws parallels between the animal's place in postmodern art and poststructuralist theory, drawing on works as diverse as Jacques Derrida's recent analysis of the role of animals in philosophical thought and Julian Barnes's best-selling Flaubert's Parrot.

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Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays

Gandhi in the World and at Home

Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Gandhi, with his loincloth and walking stick, seems an unlikely advocate of postmodernism. But in Postmodern Gandhi, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph portray him as just that in eight thought-provoking essays that aim to correct the common association of Gandhi with traditionalism.

Combining core sections of their influential book Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma with substantial new material, the Rudolphs reveal here that Gandhi was able to revitalize tradition while simultaneously breaking with some of its entrenched values and practices. Exploring his influence both in India and abroad, they tell the story of how in London the young activist was shaped by the antimodern “other West” of Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Thoreau and how, a generation later, a mature Gandhi’s thought and action challenged modernity’s hegemony. Moreover, the Rudolphs argue that Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization in his 1909 book Hind Swaraj was an opening salvo of the postmodern era and that his theory and practice of nonviolent collective action (satyagraha) articulate and exemplify a postmodern understanding of situational truth.

This radical interpretation of Gandhi's life will appeal to anyone who wants to understand Gandhi’s relevance in this century, as well as students and scholars of politics, history, charismatic leadership, and postcolonialism.

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Postmodernism and China

Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang, eds.

Duke University Press, 2000

Few countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China. With a dynamically growing economy and a rapidly changing social structure, China challenges the West to understand the nature of its modernization. Using postmodernism as both a global frame of periodization and a way to break free from the rigid ideology of westernization as modernity, this volume’s diverse group of contributors argues that the Chinese experience is crucial for understanding postmodernism.
Collectively, these essays question the implications of specific phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock music, and film, in a postsocialist society. Some essays address China’s complicity in—as well as its resistance to—the culture of global capitalism. Others evaluate the impact of efforts to redefine national culture in terms of enhanced freedoms and expressions of the imagination in everyday life. Still others discuss the general relaxation of political society in post-Mao China, the emergence of the market and its consumer mass culture, and the fashion and discourse of nostalgia. The contributors make a clear case for both the historical uniqueness of Chinese postmodernism and the need to understand its specificity in order to fully grasp the condition of postmodernity worldwide. Although the focus is on mainland China, the volume also includes important observations on social and cultural realities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose postmodernity has so far been confined—in both Chinese and English-speaking worlds—to their economic and consumer activities instead of their political and cultural dynamism.
First published as a special issue of boundary 2, Postmodernism and China includes seven new essays. By juxtaposing postmodernism with postsocialism and by analyzing China as a producer and not merely a consumer of the culture of the postmodern, it will contribute to critical discourses on globalism, modernity, and political economics, as well as to cultural and Asian studies.

Contributors. Evans Chan, Arif Dirlik, Dai Jinhua, Liu Kang, Anthony D. King, Jeroen de Kloet, Abidin Kusno, Wendy Larson, Chaoyang Liao, Ping-hui Liao, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Wang Ning, Xiaobing Tang, Xiaoying Wang, Chen Xiaoming, Xiaobin Yang, Zhang Yiwu, Xudong Zhang

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Postmodernism and Japan

Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, eds.

Duke University Press, 1989

Postmodernism and Japan is a coherent yet diverse study of the dynamics of postmodernism, as described by Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Guatarri, from the often startling perspective of a society bent on transforming itself into the image of Western “enlightenment” wealth and power. This work provides a unique view of a society in transition and confronting, like its models in the West, the problems induced by the introduction of new forms of knowledge, modes of production, and social relationships.

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Postmortem

New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti

William Young

University of Massachusetts Press, 1985

Over six decades after the polemical Sacco and Vanzetti case, in which the two anarchist Italian immigrants were convicted of first-degree murder and executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Young and Kaiser revisit the case's evidence as well as the key actors who determined its outcome. The authors situate their meticulous reexamination of the court evidence and prosecuting and defense arguments within the long-standing dispute between political leftists and conservatives regarding the integrity of the conviction, edifying the left's accusations of anti-Italianism and anti-anarchism. Their analysis magnifies both the likelihood of contrived evidence and the fallibility of our criminal justice system's impartiality, pointing to important questions concerning the nature of a fair trial and the influence of prejudice and politics in juridical processes. As such, Postmortem functions as a detailed introduction to the infamous 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti trial as well as a meditation on enduring dilemmas of the American judicial branch.

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Postsocialism and Cultural Politics

China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century

Xudong Zhang

Duke University Press, 2008

In Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China’s “long 1990s,” the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 1990s were marked by Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms, the Taiwan missile crisis, the Asian financial crisis, and the end of British colonial rule of Hong Kong. Considering developments including the state’s cultivation of a market economy, the aggressive neoliberalism that accompanied that effort, the rise of a middle class and a consumer culture, and China’s entry into the world economy, Zhang argues that Chinese socialism is not over. Rather it survives as postsocialism, which is articulated through the discourses of postmodernism and nationalism and through the co-existence of multiple modes of production and socio-cultural norms. Highlighting China’s uniqueness, as well as the implications of its recent experiences for the wider world, Zhang suggests that Chinese postsocialism illuminates previously obscure aspects of the global shift from modernity to postmodernity.

Zhang examines the reactions of intellectuals, authors, and filmmakers to the cultural and political conflicts in China during the 1990s. He offers a nuanced assessment of the changing divisions and allegiances within the intellectual landscape, and he analyzes the postsocialist realism of the era through readings of Mo Yan’s fiction and the films of Zhang Yimou. With Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Zhang applies the same keen insight to China’s long 1990s that he brought to bear on the 1980s in Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms.

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Postwar Architecture Between Italy and the UK

Exchanges and Transcultural Influences

Edited by Lorenzo Ciccarelli and Clare Melhuish

University College London, 2021

Explores how cultural exchange after World War II produced twentieth-century British and Italian architecture.

In the aftermath of World War II’s devastation, Italy and the United Kingdom reimagined urban space. Post-war Architecture Between Italy and the UK explores how architects, urbanists, and historians in both countries collaborated around the shared need to rebuild. The authors discuss the far-reaching effects of this cultural exchange, including the influence of historic Italian town centers on British public space and the origin of postmodernism in clashes between British critics and Italian architects. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, this volume offers new insights into architectural history in post-war Europe.

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Postwar Revisited

A Global Art History

Okwui Enwezor and Atreyee Gupta, editors

Duke University Press, 2025

Okwui Enwezor’s 2016 exhibition Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 redefined the history of art produced in those two decades. Nearly a decade later, Postwar Revisited returns to these debates to present an image of a historical period in which Western conceptions of art, aesthetics, and philosophy are all thrown into intense flux after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, while the cultural energies of decolonization generate myriad artistic and intellectual practices across the globe, which re-engage the connections of art to life itself. Focusing on modernist artists, artist collectives, and architects central to dissonant regional traditions, as well as influential exhibitions and patronage systems, the contributors produce a new understanding of emergent postwar global art. Provoking new ways of thinking, engaging, and narrating art history, Postwar Revisited is essential reading for those interested in debates on global art history and global modernism, the intersections between art and decolonization, the cultural aspects of the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, and modern and contemporary art more generally.

Contributors. Iftikhar Dadi, Okwui Enwezor, Patrick Flores, Hal Foster, Boris Groys, Atreyee Gupta, Elizabeth Harney, Jennifer Josten, Vivian Li, Tara McDowell, Alexandra Munroe, Nada Shabout, Terry Smith, Jenni Sorkin, Ming Tiampo

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Postzionism

A Reader

Silberstein, Laurence

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Postzionism first emerged in the mid-1980s in writings by historians and social scientists that challenged the dominant academic versions of Israeli history, society, and national identity. Subsequently, this critique was expanded and sharpened in the writings of philosophers, cultural critics, legal scholars, and public intellectuals.

This reader provides a broad spectrum of innovative and highly controversial views on Zionism and its place in the global Jewish world of the twenty-first century. While not questioning Israel’s legitimacy as a state, many contributors argue that it has yet to become a fully democratic, pluralistic state in which power is shared among all of its citizens. Essays explore current attitudes about Jewish homeland and diaspora as well as the ways that zionist discourse contributes to the marginalization and exclusion of such minority communities as Palestinian citizens, Jews of Middle-Eastern origin (Mizrahim), women, and the queer community.

An introductory essay describes Postzionism and contextualizes each contribution within the broader discourse. The most complete collection of postzionist documents available in English, this anthology is essential reading for students and scholars of Jewish identity, Middle-Eastern conflict, and Israeli history.

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Pot Roast, Politics, and Ants in the Pantry

Missouri's Cookbook Heritage

Carol Fisher & John Fisher

University of Missouri Press, 2008

When is a cookbook more than just a cookbook? When it’s a gateway to our culinary heritage. For well over a hundred years, Missouri’s cookbooks have helped readers serve up tasty dishes to the state’s tables, but these publications also document the evolution of our kitchens and households.

Pot Roast,Politics, and Ants in the Pantry, a treasure trove of anecdotes and nuggets of historical information about cookery in the Show-Me State, draws from more than 150 publications to reveal Missouri’s cookbook heritage and to deliver a generous sampling of recipes. Carol Fisher and John Fisher look back to manuscript cookbooks from 1821 St. Louis, then progress through the years and around Missouri before arriving at today’s online recipes. Along the way, they dish out servings of kitchen medicine, household hints, and cookbook literature gleaned from the state’s cache of culinary gems.

From handwritten family recipe collections and mimeographed publications to glossy color editions, the texts the Fishers have obtained from libraries and historical societies as well as their own extensive cookbook collection include such curiosities as the Julia Clark Household Memoranda Book from the William Clark papers, an 1880 production by the Ladies of St. Louis called My Mother’s Cookbook, Mary Foote Henderson’s Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving, and Albert E. Brumley’s All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground. They tell how various ethnic communities raised money by creating cookbooks, how the state’s Beef Council and Pork Association put recipes on the Internet, and how restaurants like the Blue Owl in Kimmswick and Stephenson’s Apple Farm Restaurant near Kansas City enhanced their reputations with their own cookbooks. Festival cookbooks, company cookbooks, even cookbooks tied to world events—they’re all here in one delightful book.

In this vastly entertaining review, readers will learn where to find recipes for dandelion wine, mock turtle soup (requiring a large calf’s head split open by the butcher), and vinegar pie—as well as the curative properties of potato water, tips for raising chickens in the basement, and even “how to cook a husband.” An extensive bibliography includes information to help readers track down the books discussed and also those on their own wish lists.

Pot Roast, Politics, and Ants in the Pantry: Missouri’s Cookbook Heritage shows how, instead of being just collections of recipes, cookbooks provide history lessons, document changing food ways, and demonstrate the cultural diversity of the state. From Julia Clark’s simple frontier recipes for puddings and preserves to Irma Rombauer’s encyclopedic Joy of Cooking—originally self-published in Missouri—Carol Fisher and John Fisher have laid out a smorgasbord of reading pleasure for cookbook collectors, nostalgia buffs, and gourmands alike.

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Pothole Confidential

My Life as Mayor of Minneapolis

R.T. Rybak

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

A pajama party at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport inadvertently helped launch R.T. Rybak’s political career (imagine a rumba line one hundred protesters long chanting, “We deserve to sleep, hey!”), but his earliest lessons in leadership occurred during his childhood. Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood, attending private school with students who had much more than he did, spending evenings at his family’s store in an area where people lived with much less, he witnessed firsthand the opportunity and injustice of the city he called home.

In a memoir that is at once a political coming-of-age story and a behind-the-scenes look at the running of a great city, the three-term mayor takes readers into the highs and lows and the daily drama of a life inextricably linked with Minneapolis over the past fifty years. With refreshing candor and insight, Rybak describes his path through journalism, marketing, and community activism that led to his unlikely (to him, at least) primary election—on September 11, 2001. His personal account of the challenges and crises confronting the city over twelve years, including the tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge, the rising scourge of youth violence, and the bruising fight over a ban on gay marriage (with Rybak himself conducting the first such ceremony at City Hall on August 1, 2013), is also an illuminating, often funny depiction of learning the workings of the job, frequently on the fly, while trying to keep up with his most important constituency, his family.

As bracing as the “fresh air” campaign that swept him into office, Rybak’s memoir is that rare document from a politician: one more concerned with the people he served and the issues of his time than with burnishing his own credentials. As such, it reflects what leadership truly looks like.

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Potomac Canal

George Washington and the Waterway West

ROBERT J. KAPSCH

West Virginia University Press, 2007

The Potomac Canal: George Washington and the Waterway West is a history of a new nation’s first effort to link the rich western agricultural lands with the coastal port cities of the east. The Potomac Canal Company was founded in 1785, and was active until it was overtaken by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company in 1828. During its operation, the canal system was used to ship flour from mills in the foothills of Appalachia to the tidewater of the Chesapeake, where the flour was shipped to the Caribbean as trade for sugar and other goods. This trade soon became the basis of agricultural wealth in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle and throughout the Appalachian Piedmont. Coal was also shipped via the canal system from the upper reaches of the Potomac River to workshops at Harpers Ferry and beyond. This industrial trade route laid the foundation for what would eventually become the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

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Pottery Analysis, Second Edition

A Sourcebook

Prudence M. Rice

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Just as a single pot starts with a lump of clay, the study of a piece’s history must start with an understanding of its raw materials. This principle is the foundation of Pottery Analysis, the acclaimed sourcebook that has become the indispensable guide for archaeologists and anthropologists worldwide. By grounding current research in the larger history of pottery and drawing together diverse approaches to the study of pottery, it offers a rich, comprehensive view of ceramic inquiry.

This new edition fully incorporates more than two decades of growth and diversification in the fields of archaeological and ethnographic study of pottery. It begins with a summary of the origins and history of pottery in different parts of the world, then examines the raw materials of pottery and their physical and chemical properties. It addresses ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological perspectives on pottery production; reviews the methods of studying pottery’s physical, mechanical, thermal, mineralogical, and chemical properties; and discusses how proper analysis of artifacts can reveal insights into their culture of origin. Intended for use in the classroom, the lab, and out in the field, this essential text offers an unparalleled basis for pottery research.

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Pottery Analysis

A Sourcebook

Prudence M. Rice

University of Chicago Press, 1987

Pottery Analysis is a rich and comprehensive sourcebook that draws together diverse approaches to the study of pottery—archaeological, ethnographic, stylistic, functional, and physicochemical. Using pottery as a starting point for insights into people and culture, Prudence M. Rice examines in detail the methods for studying the fired clay vessels used worldwide from prehistoric times to present.

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Pottery and Chronology at Angel

Sherri Hilgeman

University of Alabama Press, 2000

By analyzing the pottery found at a well-known archaeological site, Hilgeman constructs the long-awaited timeline for the rise and decline of this ancient society.

Located near present-day Evansville, Indiana, the Angel site is one of the important archaeological towns associated with prehistoric Mississippian society. More than two million artifacts were collected from this site during excavations from 1939 to 1989, but, until now, no systematic survey of the pottery sherds had been conducted. This volume, documenting the first in-depth analysis of Angel site pottery, also provides scholars of Mississippian culture with a chronology of this important site.

Angel is generally thought to have been occupied from before A.D. 1200 to 1450, but scholars have been forced to treat this period as one chronological unit without any sense of the growth and decline of the society that occupied it. Using radiocarbon assays and an analysis of its morphological and stylistic attributes of pottery, Sherri Hilgeman is able to divide the occupation of Angel into a series of recognizable stages. She then correlates those stages with similar ones at other archaeological excavations—especially nearby Kincaid—making it possible to compare Angel society with other native cultures of the lower Ohio Valley. Through this important contribution to native pottery studies, Hilgeman opens a window into the lifeways of prehistoric Angel society and places that society in the larger context of Mississippian culture.

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Pound in Purgatory

From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism

Leon Surette

University of Illinois Press, 1999

Pound in Purgatory, available now in paperback, overturns all previous explanations of Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism by uncovering its roots in economic and conspiracy theory. Leon Surette demonstrates that, contrary to popular opinion, Pound was not a life-long anti-Semite and consistently ignored or resisted anti-Semitic comments from his correspondents until after 1931.

From 1931 to 1945 Pound's poetry took a back seat to his activities as an economic reformer and propagandist for the corporate state. Pound believed he had a simple and practical solution for the economic woes of the world brought on by the Great Depression, and he became increasingly preoccupied with capturing political power for the economic reform he envisioned.

As the world spiraled toward war, Pound's program of economic reform foundered and he gradually succumbed to a paranoid belief in a Jewish conspiracy. Through an incisive analysis of Pound's correspondence and writings, much of it previously unexamined, Surette shows how this belief fostered the virulent anti-Semitism that pervades his work-–both poetry and prose-–from this time forward.

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Poverty and Antitheatricality

Form and Formlessness in Latin American Literature, Art, and Theory

Stephen Buttes

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Poverty and Antitheatricality argues that many major analytical approaches today misunderstand the problem of poverty by emphasizing its status as an experience. These experiential models transform poverty from a specific socioeconomic status lived in a particular historical sequence into a transhistorical presence of marginality that is not only inevitable but necessary. Embedded in capitalist, socialist, and populist forms of socioeconomic organization, these models paradoxically suggest that if we want to have a world free of poverty, we must always have the poor and their experience of formlessness. Taking up the paired terms—form and formlessness—Stephen Buttes demonstrates how they sustain not only debates about poverty and its political role within modernity but also the idea of the work of art within the history of modernism. Offering critiques of critical theory alongside new readings of both canonical and little-studied Latin American authors and artists, Poverty and Antitheatricality makes a compelling case that understanding the kind of problem the work of art is opens up overlooked but essential pathways to understanding poverty and the kind of problem it is.

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Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance

Robert Henke

University of Iowa Press, 2015

Whereas previous studies of poverty and early modern theatre have concentrated on England and the criminal rogue, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theatre and Performance takes a transnational approach, which reveals a greater range of attitudes and charitable practices regarding the poor than state poor laws and rogue books suggest. Close study of German and Latin beggar catalogues, popular songs performed in Italian piazzas, the Paduan actor-playwright Ruzante, the commedia dell’arte in both Italy and France, and Shakespeare demonstrate how early modern theatre and performance could reveal the gap between official policy and actual practices regarding the poor.

The actor-based theatre and performance traditions examined in this study, which persistently explore felt connections between the itinerant actor and the vagabond beggar, evoke the poor through complex and variegated forms of imagination, thought, and feeling. Early modern theatre does not simply reflect the social ills of hunger, poverty, and degradation, but works them through the forms of poverty, involving displacement, condensation, exaggeration, projection, fictionalization, and marginalization. As the critical mass of medieval charity was put into question, the beggar-almsgiver encounter became more like a performance. But it was not a performance whose script was prewritten as the inevitable exposure of the dissembling beggar. Just as people’s attitudes toward the poor could rapidly change from skepticism to sympathy during famines and times of acute need, fictions of performance such as Edgar’s dazzling impersonation of a mad beggar in Shakespeare’s King Lear could prompt responses of sympathy and even radical calls for economic redistribution.

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Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire

Peter Brown

Brandeis University Press, 2001

In three magisterial essays, Peter Brown, one of the world's foremost scholars of the society and culture of late antiquity, explores the emergence in late Roman society of "the poor" as a distinct social class, one for which the Christian church claimed a special responsibility. It is the story of how a society came to see itself as responsible for the care of a particular class of people -- a class that had not previously been cared for -- and of who benefited from that shift in interests. In his characteristically elegant and lucid prose, Brown seeks to recover the pre-Christian status of poor people, the actual nature of the relations between the Christian church and the poor, and the true motivations -- sometimes sincere, sometimes self-serving -- behind Christian rhetoric of love for the poor. He draws not only on the standard Greek and Latin sources for the later Roman Empire, but also on Jewish sources to document the interactions between Middle Eastern provincial societies and classical Roman traditions. Brown gracefully illuminates a crucial transition from classical to Christian culture: the emergence of a new understanding of what society -- and the Church -- owes to the poor that continues to resonate.

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Poverty and Society

The Growth of the American Welfare State in International Comparison

Levine, Daniel

Rutgers University Press, 1988

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Poverty and Wealth in East Africa

A Conceptual History

Rhiannon Stephens

Duke University Press, 2022

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

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Poverty in Common

The Politics of Community Action during the American Century

Alyosha Goldstein

Duke University Press, 2012

After the Second World War, the idea that local community action was indispensable for the alleviation of poverty was broadly embraced by US policymakers, social scientists, international development specialists, and grassroots activists. Governmental efforts to mobilize community action in the name of democracy served as a volatile condition of possibility for poor people and dispossessed groups negotiating the tension between calls for self-help and demands for self-determination in the era of the Cold War and global decolonization. In Poverty in Common, Alyosha Goldstein suggests new ways to think about the relationship among liberalism, government, and inequality in the United States. He does so by analyzing historical dynamics including Progressive-era reform as a precursor to community development during the Cold War, the ways that the language of "underdevelopment" articulated ideas about poverty and foreignness, the use of poverty as a crucible of interest group politics, and radical groups' critical reframing of community action in anticolonial terms. During the mid-twentieth century, approaches to poverty in the United States were linked to the racialized and gendered negotiation of boundaries—between the foreign and the domestic, empire and nation, violence and order, and dependency and autonomy.

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Poverty in the Pandemic

Policy Lessons from COVID-19

Zachary Parolin

Russell Sage Foundation, 2023

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.

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Poverty of the Imagination

The Cold War and the Social Science of Development in Latin America

Patrick Iber

University of Chicago Press, 2026

Explores the history of the “science of development” during the Cold War and how experts across the social sciences tried to create the tools to address the problem of poverty across Latin America.

In the mid-twentieth century, Latin America had the world’s starkest internal inequality. In Brazil in 1960, for example, the top 10 percent took upward of 60 percent of the country’s total income, while its entire bottom half took only 10 percent. As Patrick Iber shows in Poverty of the Imagination, this problem of poverty and social inequality focused the attention of social scientists on the task of articulating a “science of development.” In the context of the Cold War, this project drew the attention of the US government and the Ford Foundation, which hoped that peaceful development would prevent revolutions.

This book examines the five central frameworks that emerged to explain poverty: from dependency theory on the Marxist left; to theories of modernization, the culture of poverty, and marginality in the center; to neoliberalism on the right. Iber shows how each rose (and fell) by connecting them to political projects such as the War on Poverty in the United States and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Through vivid portraits of key thinkers, he shows how each was shaped by the environment of the Cold War and the presence of the Ford Foundation. It is a story with surprising turns: What began for Ford as a Cold War project to support university “modernization” changed as dictatorships took control of much of the region. Then, Ford took the side of the dissidents, supporting an antipoverty agenda for the restoration of democracy. A guide to some of the most important ideas in global development and Latin American studies alike, this book also shows how scholars and institutions faced down authoritarian threats—and won.

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Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood

Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France

Christine Adams

University of Illinois Press, 2010

This far-reaching study of maternal societies in post-revolutionary France focuses on the philanthropic work of the Society for Maternal Charity, the most prominent organization of its kind. Administered by middle-class and elite women and financed by powerful families and the government, the Society offered support to poor mothers, helping them to nurse and encouraging them not to abandon their children. In Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood, Christine Adams traces the Society's key role in shaping notions of maternity and in shifting the care of poor families from the hands of charitable volunteers with religious-tinged social visions to paid welfare workers with secular goals such as population growth and patriotism.

Adams plumbs the origin and ideology of the Society and its branches, showing how elite women in Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Rouen, Marseille, Dijon, and Limoges tried to influence the maternal behavior of women and families with lesser financial means and social status. A deft analysis of the philosophy and goals of the Society details the members' own notions of good mothering, family solidarity, and legitimate marriages that structured official, elite, and popular attitudes concerning gender and poverty in France. These personal attitudes, Adams argues, greatly influenced public policy and shaped the country's burgeoning social welfare system.

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Poverty, Law, and Divine Justice in Persian and Hellenistic Judah

Johannes Unsok Ro

SBL Press, 2018

A view of Persian and Hellenistic Judean communities through theological and socioeconomic lenses

Johannes Unsok Ro employs philological, historical, and sociological approaches to investigate the close connections between socioeconomic structures, social inequality, and theological developments in the Judean communities in Persian- and Hellenistic-era Palestine. Ro contends that competing points of view from communities of lay returnees, priestly returnees, and communities of resident Judeans and Samaritans were juxtaposed within the Hebrew Bible, which took shape during the postexilic period. By exploring issues such as the relationship between the shaping of the canon and literacy in the Judean community, the term strangers in the biblical law codes, the socioeconomic structures of Judean communities reflected in the biblical law codes, the development of the theological concept of divine punitive justice, the piety of the poor in certain psalms, and the concept of poverty in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ro illustrates that the communities behind each text and its redactions can be ascertained through sociological and theological lenses.

Features

Demonstration that a theology of the poor materialized orally among the poor but found written expression among Levites

Insight into the socioeconomic and theological concerns of the authorial groups behind various biblical law codes

A case that biblical “poverty” sometimes refers to humility and a theologically reflected consciousness of lowliness toward God

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Power & Persuasion Late Antiquity
Towards A Christian Empire
Peter Brown
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992
Peter Brown, perhaps the greatest living authority on Mediterranean civilization in late antiquity, traces the growing power of Christian bishops as they wrested influence from philosophers, who had traditionally advised the rulers of Graeco-Roman society. In the new “Christian empire,” the ancient bonds of citizen to citizen and of each city to its benefactors were replaced by a common Christianity and common loyalty to a distant, Christian autocrat. This transformation of the Roman empire from an ancient to a medieval society, he argues, is among the most far-reaching consequences of the rise of Christianity.
[more]
Power / Knowledge / Land
Contested Ontologies of Land and Its Governance in Africa
Laura A. German
University of Michigan Press, 2022
The 2008 outcry over the “global land grab” made headlines around the world, leading to a sustained interest in the dynamics and fate of customary land among both academics and development practitioners. In Power/Knowledge/Land, author Laura German profiles the consolidation of a global knowledge regime surrounding land and its governance within international development circles in the decade following this outcry, and the growing enrollment of previously antagonistic actors within it. Drawing theoretical insights on the inseparability of power and knowledge, German reveals the dynamics of knowledge practices that have enabled the longstanding project of commodifying customary land – and the more contemporary interests in acquiring and financializing it – to be advanced and legitimated by capturing the energies of socially progressive forces. By bringing theories of change from the emergent land governance orthodoxy into dialogue with the ethnographic evidence from across the African continent and beyond, concepts masquerading as universal and self-evident truths are provincialized, and their role in commodifying customary land and entrenching colonial futurities put on display. In doing so, the volume brings wider academic debates surrounding productive forms of power into the heart of the land grab debate, while enhancing their accessibility to a wider audience.

Power/Knowledge/Land takes current scholarly debates surrounding land grabs beyond their theoretical moorings in critical agrarian studies, political economy and globalization into contemporary debates surrounding the politics of knowledge—from theories of coloniality to ontological anthropology, thereby enabling new dynamics of the phenomenon to be revealed. The book deploys a pioneering epistemology integrating deconstructionist approaches (to reveal the tactics, truth claims and ontological assumptions of global knowledge brokers), with systematic qualitative reviews and comparative study (to contrast these dominant constructs with the evidence and reveal alternative ways of knowing “land” and practicing “security” from the ethnographic literature). This helps to reveal the Western and modernist biases in the narratives that have been advanced about women, custom, and security, revealing how the coloniality of knowledge works to grease the wheels of land takings by advancing highly provincialized constructs aligned with western interests as universal truths.
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Power Moves
Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston
By Kyle Shelton
University of Texas Press, 2017
Since World War II, Houston has become a burgeoning, internationally connected metropolis—and a sprawling, car-dependent city. In 1950, it possessed only one highway, the Gulf Freeway, which ran between Houston and Galveston. Today, Houston and Harris County have more than 1,200 miles of highways, and a third major loop is under construction nearly thirty miles out from the historic core. Highways have driven every aspect of Houston’s postwar development, from the physical layout of the city to the political process that has transformed both the transportation network and the balance of power between governing elites and ordinary citizens.

Power Moves examines debates around the planning, construction, and use of highway and public transportation systems in Houston. Kyle Shelton shows how Houstonians helped shape the city’s growth by attending city council meetings, writing letters to the highway commission, and protesting the destruction of homes to make way for freeways, which happened in both affluent and low-income neighborhoods. He demonstrates that these assertions of what he terms “infrastructural citizenship” opened up the transportation decision-making process to meaningful input from the public and gave many previously marginalized citizens a more powerful voice in civic affairs. Power Moves also reveals the long-lasting results of choosing highway and auto-based infrastructure over other transit options and the resulting challenges that Houstonians currently face as they grapple with how best to move forward from the consequences and opportunities created by past choices.
[more]
Power Shifts
Congress and Presidential Representation
John A. Dearborn
University of Chicago Press, 2021
That the president uniquely represents the national interest is a political truism, yet this idea has been transformational, shaping the efforts of Congress to remake the presidency and testing the adaptability of American constitutional government.

The emergence of the modern presidency in the first half of the twentieth century transformed the American government. But surprisingly, presidents were not the primary driving force of this change—Congress was. Through a series of statutes, lawmakers endorsed presidential leadership in the legislative process and augmented the chief executive’s organizational capacities.

But why did Congress grant presidents this power? In Power Shifts, John A. Dearborn shows that legislators acted on the idea that the president was the best representative of the national interest. Congress subordinated its own claims to stand as the nation’s primary representative institution and designed reforms that assumed the president was the superior steward of all the people. In the process, Congress recast the nation’s chief executive as its chief representative.

As Dearborn demonstrates, the full extent to which Congress’s reforms rested on the idea of presidential representation was revealed when that notion’s validity was thrown into doubt. In the 1970s, Congress sought to restore its place in a rebalanced system, but legislators also found that their earlier success at institutional reinvention constrained their efforts to reclaim authority. Chronicling the evolving relationship between the presidency and Congress across a range of policy areas, Power Shifts exposes a fundamental dilemma in an otherwise proud tradition of constitutional adaptation.
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Power Ties
Economic Interdependence, Balancing, and War
Paul A. Papayoanou
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Will the growth of economic interdependence since the Second World War help to maintain the peace that we have seen for more than fifty years among the great powers? Some argue that the benefits that come from being integrated into today's world economy make it unlikely that countries will pursue aggressive policies. Others are not so sanguine, arguing that international economic ties have little effect on the making of national security strategies. Power Ties contradicts both arguments. Analyzing the history of the great-power system since the late nineteenth century, Paul Papayoanou shows that international economic relations have a significant impact on states's security strategies. A great power's economic ties generate powerful domestic economic interests that influence a leader's ability to mobilize support and resources for credibly opposing threatening powers in the international system. This accounts for the strength or weakness of alliance commitments and defense expenditures, and in turn, the likelihood that aspiring revisionist powers will be deterred from initiating a military offensive that upsets the territorial status quo. Power Ties also revises much of the conventional wisdom about the pacifying effects of economic interdependence, for it demonstrates that extensive economic ties are not necessarily associated with peace and can make war more likely. Papayoanou's union of theory and history provides a bold new interpretation of the most significant developments in international politics over the past century. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, history, and international relations.
[more]
Power and Everyday Life
The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Dias, Maria Odila Silva
Rutgers University Press, 1995

This important new work is a study of the everyday lives of the inhabitants of São Paulo in the nineteenth century. Full of vivid detail, the book concentrates on the lives of working women--black, white, Indian, mulatta, free, freed, and slaves, and their struggles to survive. Drawing on official statistics, and on the accounts of travelers and judicial records, the author paints a lively picture of the jobs, both legal and illegal, that were performed by women. Her research leads to some surprising discoveries, including the fact that many women were the main providers for their families and that their work was crucial to the running of several urban industries. This book, which is a unique record of women’s lives across social and race strata in a multicultural society, should be of interest to students and researchers in women’s studies, urban studies, historians, geographers, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists.

[more]
Power and Everyday Life
The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Dias, Maria Odila Silva
Rutgers University Press, 1995

This important new work is a study of the everyday lives of the inhabitants of São Paulo in the nineteenth century. Full of vivid detail, the book concentrates on the lives of working women--black, white, Indian, mulatta, free, freed, and slaves, and their struggles to survive. Drawing on official statistics, and on the accounts of travelers and judicial records, the author paints a lively picture of the jobs, both legal and illegal, that were performed by women. Her research leads to some surprising discoveries, including the fact that many women were the main providers for their families and that their work was crucial to the running of several urban industries. This book, which is a unique record of women’s lives across social and race strata in a multicultural society, should be of interest to students and researchers in women’s studies, urban studies, historians, geographers, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists.

[more]
Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain
Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450-1650
Edited by Helen Nader
University of Illinois Press, 2003
The Mendoza family was one of Spain's most prominent Renaissance dynasties, and this collection, a groundbreaking overview of two hundred years of Spanish history, provides in-depth portraits of eight of its female members.

These essays explore the lives of powerful women whose lineage gave them status within a patriarchal society designed to keep women from public life. Each of the influential and literary women discussed in this volume handled her status differently, and their concerns were not dissimilar from the concerns of feminists today: the blurring of the personal and the political, public versus private space, language and voice, and property.

Spanning the two centuries between Juana Pimentel, a widow who manipulated the patronage system to her own ends, and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, who rejected both convent and marriage in favor of missionary work, Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain reveals a complex society in which women were limited by law, and yet their social status made those laws negotiable.

These women found that their personal agendas had a broad societal impact, challenging the laws of the land and patriarchal assumptions about women's inferiority.

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Power and Identity at the Margins of the Ancient Near East
Sara Mohr
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Power and Identity at the Margins of the Ancient Near East rethinks the dichotomy between antiquated terms such as “core” and “periphery,” explores lived realities in the margins of central authority, and centers those margins as places of resistance and power in their own right.

The borderlands of hegemonic entities within the Near East and Egypt pressed against each other, creating cities and societies with influence from several competing polities. The peoples, cities, and cultures that resulted present a unique lens by which to examine how states controlled and influenced the lives, political systems, and social hierarchies of these subjects (and vice versa). This volume addresses the distinct traditions and experiences of areas beyond the core; terminology used when discussing empire, core, periphery, borderlands, and frontiers; conceptualization of space; practices and consequences of warfare, captive-taking, and slavery; identity- and secondary state–formation; economy and society; ritual; diplomacy; and the negotiation of claims to power.

It is imperative that historians and social scientists understand the ways in which these cultures developed, spread, and interacted with others along frontier edges. Using an intersectional approach across disciplines, Power and Identity at the Margins of the Ancient Near East brings together professionals from archaeology, religious studies, history, sociology, and anthropology to make new contributions to the study of the frontier.

Contributors: Alexander Ahrens, Peter Dubovský, Avraham Faust, Daniel E. Fleming, Mahri Leonard-Fleckman, Alvise Matessi, Ellen Morris, Valeria Turriziani, Eric M. Trinka

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Power and Identity in Archaeological Theory and Practice
Case Studies from Ancient Mesoamerica
Eleanor Harrison-Buck
University of Utah Press, 2012

The contributions to this volume represent a diverse array of Mesoamerican archaeological studies that are all theo-retically rooted to larger, global debates concerning issues of power and identity—two logically paired concepts. While social identity has been the focus of more critical analysis in recent years, the concept of power has received far less attention. Most studies focus on large-scale, institutional forms of power and the ruling body. Here, the focus is on relations of power, addressing broader segments of society outside the dominant group, that often are ignored in traditional reconstructions of past societies.

Harrison-Buck has compiled works that address a common criticism of social theory in the field of anthropological archaeology—the lack of strong case studies and corroborating facts supporting the abstract and often complex social theoretical concepts presented by scholars. Each contributor offers innovative method and theory and provides alternative and varied approaches to understanding power and identity in the archaeological record. They draw from a wide range of related disciplines and theoretical frameworks, including feminism, queer theory, cognitive studies, and postcolonial theory. The provocative case studies and exciting theoretical applications presented here will stimulate lively debate among scholars working both in and outside of Mesoamerica.

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Power and Just Transitions
Struggles for a Post-Coal Future in an Appalachian Valley
John Gaventa and Gabe Schwartzman
University of Illinois Press, 2026
Published in 1982, John Gaventa’s award-winning Power and Powerlessness examined the dominance of the absentee coal industry in Central Appalachia. Gaventa and Gabe Schwartzman update the story through coal’s decline and into the present while focusing on how power relations and community mobilizing have changed and evolved during this era of transition. Their analysis tracks the impact on a place where a fossil fuel–based economy shaped political and social structures for over a century. As they show, new forms of power emerged while old ones remained, and both affected the popular struggle for a future that’s both just and more inclusive. Original and timely, Power and Just Transitions merges historical perspective with interviews and engagement to look at how coal’s decline impacted power and resistance in an Appalachian community.
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Power and Knowledge Under Communism
A Political History of Economic and Sociological Research in Hungary
Gyorgy Peteri
Central European University Press, 2026
This book examines the transformation of economic and sociological knowledge under Hungarian state socialism from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. It argues that the fate of the social sciences was determined less by episodic repression than by successive academic regimes asserting political authority through epistemological criteria and professional ethos. We follow the trajectory of economics from the Stalinist imposition of radical class-relativism, through the erosion of this epistemology during the New Course and the restoration of empirical research and professional communities as sources of policy-relevant knowledge. The post-Stalinist academic order was based on patronage, managed pluralism, and selective purges, culminating in the disciplining of both reform economics and critical sociology. The book demonstrates how limited professional autonomy could coexist with political control—and why such autonomy remained structurally fragile. It offers a historically grounded account of how modern states can govern social knowledge without fully suppressing it.
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Power and Powerlessness
Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley
John Gaventa
University of Illinois Press, 1980
Using Clear Fork Valley in central Appalachia as an empirical example, Gaventa attempts to discern the "hidden faces of power" - those forces which shape actions and consciousness in ways not readily apparent in formal American political processes. He seeks to clarify and expand upon past theories (by such writers as Bachrach and Lukes) on the nature and maintenance of power.

The region studied here is characterized by stark incongruity - the co-existence of massive natural wealth (coal and land) with pervasive human poverty attended by high unemployment, limited education, malnutrition, and the prevalent hazards of mining coal: black lung, dismemberment, death, and ecological ruin. This has been the region's status quo under the decades of domination by a British company and its absentee owners. Despite these departure conditions and frequently violent union struggles, culminating in the 1969 murder of UMW reformist Jock Yablonski, acquiescence to this status quo has been maintained. Gaventa searches out the answers to how and why wealth and poverty continue to coexist and the powerless continue to accede to the powerful. His astute analysis poses broader questions about the politics of poverty, working-class consciousness, and corporate power in America.
[more]
Power and Time
Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History
Edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley
University of Chicago Press, 2020
A collection of essays that challenges how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts— “power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies.

Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.
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Power at Sea, Volume 1
The Age of Navalism, 1890-1918
Lisle A. Rose
University of Missouri Press, 2006

The twentieth century was preeminently an age of warring states and collapsing empires. Industrialism brought not peace but the sword. And the tip of that sword was sea power.
In Power at Sea, Lisle A. Rose gives us an unprecedented narrative assessment of modern sea power, how it emerged from the Age of Fighting Sail, how it was employed in war and peace, and how it has shaped the life of the human community over the past century and a quarter. In this first volume, Rose recalls the early twentieth-century world of emerging, predatory industrial nations engaging in the last major scramble for global markets and empire. In such times, an imposing war fleet was essential to both national security and international prestige. Battleship navies became pawns of power politics, and between 1890 and 1914 four of them--Britain’s Royal Navy, the Imperial German Navy, the Japanese Navy, and the U.S. Navy--set the tone and rhythm of international life.
Employing a global canvas, Rose portrays the increasingly frantic naval race between Britain and Germany that did so much to bring about the First World War; he takes us aboard America’s Great White Fleet as it circumnavigated the world between 1907 and 1909, leaving in its wake both goodwill and jealousy; he details Japan’s growing naval and military power and the hunger for unlimited expansion that resulted.
Important naval battles were fought in those days of ostensible peace, and Rose brings to life the encounters of still young and relatively small industrial fighting fleets at Manila Bay and Tsushima. He also takes us into the huge naval factories where the engines of war were forged. He invites us aboard the imperial battleships and battle cruisers, exploring the dramatically divided worlds of the officers’ lordly wardroom with its clublike atmosphere and the often foul and fetid enlisted men’s quarters.
The Age of Navalism climaxed in the epic First World War Battle of Jutland, in which massive guns and maneuvering dreadnoughts determined that Imperial Germany would become the latest in a line of ambitious naval powers that failed to shake Britannia’s rule of the waves. Germany’s subsequent use of a revolutionary new strategy, unrestricted submarine warfare, nearly brought Britain to its knees, reduced the level of naval combat to barbarism, and brought the United States into the war with its own substantial navy, ultimately turning the tide of battle.
Focusing as much on social issues and technological advances as on combat, Power at Sea: The Age of Navalism tells a compelling story of newfound power that is fascinating in its own right. Yet, it is merely a prologue to more startling accounts contained in the author’s succeeding volumes.

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Power at Sea, Volume 2
The Breaking Storm, 1919-1945
Lisle A. Rose
University of Missouri Press, 2006

After 1921, the clouds of suspicion and resentment left by the Great War gradually obscured the strenuous efforts of negotiating statesmen and led to ever greater appetites for power at sea. By the midthirties, worried admiralties around the world were bracing themselves for a new and deadlier round of global violence. In this monumental study, Lisle A. Rose revisits the strategies, battles, ships, planes, weapons, and people of the most destructive war in history to show the decisive influence of sea power upon its outcome.
During the years preceding World War II, Britain’s once dominant Royal Navy, beset by national economic decline and steadily eroding morale within the fleet, pleaded for the appeasement of dictators in Europe and the Far East in an attempt to avoid a three-front maritime war that would surely doom the British Empire. Desperately hoping for time to build a formidable fleet, Hitler’s admirals feverishly tried to rebuild German naval weaponry upon a technological foundation not much improved since 1918. In the end, it was Japan and the United States, facing each other across the broad Pacific, that moved naval history into a new phase by fashioning ultramodern navies based on the integration of sea, air, and amphibious forces.
Rose relates how the strengths and weaknesses of seafaring nations came into play within the crucible of a six-year war during which naval encounters were every bit as critical and frequent as land-based fighting. He recounts the well-known naval battles and operations of World War II from a novel perspective, placing them in the context of daring gambles open to both the Axis and the Allies that were either seized upon or ignored. Once Britain’s survival was assured, and the Allies held on in the North Atlantic and the Pacific, however, the superior industrial culture of the United States doomed the Axis. After 1943, America threw into the deadly battles against the German U-boats and the Japanese fleet more and better ships, more and better citizen sailors, better intelligence, and better strategies than did its antagonists or allies.
Two years later, the United States had not only defeated the Axis, it had also won control of the world’s oceans from its exhausted British ally. In the process, it had begun a revolutionary transition in which power at sea became power from the sea. Whether recounting the heart-stopping action of naval encounters or analyzing the technologies that made victory possible, Rose traces in vigorous, memorable prose the dramatic emergence of a new naval power that would leave all others in its wake.

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Power at Sea, Volume 3
A Violent Peace, 1946-2006
Lisle A. Rose
University of Missouri Press, 2006

Bringing to a close his epic recounting of naval power in the twentieth century, Lisle Rose describes the virtual disappearance after 1945 of all but one great navy, whose existence and operations over the next sixty years guaranteed a freedom of the seas so complete as to be at once universally acknowledged and ignored.
In the first twenty years after World War II, the U.S. Navy continued the revolutionary transformation of sea power begun in the 1930s with the integration of sea, air, and amphibious capabilities. Between 1946 and 1961, the United States placed on, above, and beneath the world’s oceans the mightiest concentration of military power in history. Supercarriers filled with aircraft capable of long-range nuclear strikes were joined by strategic ballistic missile submarines, even one of whose sixteen nuclear-tipped missiles could devastate most of an enemy’s major urban centers together with its industrial and military infrastructure.
Such a fleet was incredibly costly. No ally or adversary in a world recovering slowly from global war could afford to build and maintain such an awesome entity. Its needs constantly had to be balanced against competing requirements of a broader national defense establishment. But the U.S. Navy ensured an unchallenged Pax Americana, and its warships steamed where they wished throughout the globe in support of a policy to contain the influence and threat represented by the Soviet Union and China.
The 1962 Cuban missile crisis, however, galvanized the Soviet leadership to construct a powerful blue-water fleet that within less than a decade began to challenge the United States for global maritime supremacy, even as its own ballistic missile boats posed a massive threat to U.S. national security. While the Soviets enjoyed the luxury of building exclusively against the U.S. Navy and challenging it at almost every point, America’s sailors were increasingly burdened by a broad array of specific missions: fighting two regional wars in Asia, intervening in Lebanon, protecting Taiwan, aiding in the preservation of Israel, and maintaining close surveillance of Cuba, chief among them. Confronting ever-growing Soviet sea power stretched U.S. capabilities to the limit even as the fleet itself underwent revolutionary changes in its social composition.
The abrupt decline and fall of the Soviet Union after 1989 led to another reappraisal of the importance, even necessity, of navies. But the turbulent Middle East and the struggle against international terrorism after 2001 have demanded a projection of sea-air-amphibious power onto coasts and adjacent areas similar to that which America’s fleets had already undertaken in Korea, Vietnam, and Lebanon.
The U.S. Navy now sails on the front line of defense against terrorism—a threat that confronts strategists with the greatest challenge yet to the ongoing relevance of maritime power. This third volume of Rose’s majestic work offers readers an up-close look at the emergence of America’s naval might and establishes Power at Sea as essential in tracing the emergence of U.S. dominance and understanding the continuing importance of ships and sailors in international power plays.

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Power in Colonial Africa
Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870–1960
Elizabeth A. Eldredge
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Even in its heyday European rule of Africa had limits. Whether through complacency or denial, many colonial officials ignored the signs of African dissent. Displays of opposition by Africans, too indirect to counter or quash, percolated throughout the colonial era and kept alive a spirit of sovereignty that would find full expression only decades later.
In Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870–1960, Elizabeth A. Eldredge analyzes a panoply of archival and oral resources, visual signs and symbols, and public and private actions to show how power may be exercised not only by rulers but also by the ruled. The BaSotho—best known for their consolidation of a kingdom from the 1820s to 1850s through primarily peaceful means, and for bringing colonial forces to a standstill in the Gun War of 1880–1881—struggled to maintain sovereignty over their internal affairs during their years under the colonial rule of the Cape Colony (now part of South Africa) and Britain from 1868 to 1966. Eldredge explores instances of BaSotho resistance, resilience, and resourcefulness in forms of expression both verbal and non-verbal. Skillfully navigating episodes of conflict, the BaSotho matched wits with the British in diplomatic brinksmanship, negotiation, compromise, circumvention, and persuasion, revealing the capacity of a subordinate population to influence the course of events as it selectively absorbs, employs, and subverts elements of the colonial culture.

“A refreshing, readable and lucid account of one in an array of compositions of power during colonialism in southern Africa.”—David Gordon, Journal of African History

“Elegantly written.”—Sean Redding, Sub-Saharan Africa

“Eldredge writes clearly and attractively, and her studies of the war between Lerotholi and Masupha and of the conflicts over the succession to the paramountcy are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand those crises.”—Peter Sanders, Journal of Southern African Studies
[more]
Power in Concert
The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance
Jennifer Mitzen
University of Chicago Press, 2013
How states cooperate in the absence of a sovereign power is a perennial question in international relations. With Power in Concert, Jennifer Mitzen argues that global governance is more than just the cooperation of states under anarchy: it is the formation and maintenance of collective intentions, or joint commitments among states to address problems together. The key mechanism through which these intentions are sustained is face-to-face diplomacy, which keeps states’ obligations to one another salient and helps them solve problems on a day-to-day basis.

Mitzen argues that the origins of this practice lie in the Concert of Europe, an informal agreement among five European states in the wake of the Napoleonic wars to reduce the possibility of recurrence, which first institutionalized the practice of jointly managing the balance of power. Through the Concert’s many successes, she shows that the words and actions of state leaders in public forums contributed to collective self-restraint and a commitment to problem solving—and at a time when communication was considerably more difficult than it is today. Despite the Concert’s eventual breakdown, the practice it introduced—of face to face diplomacy as a mode of joint problem solving—survived and is the basis of global governance today.

[more]
Power of Freedom
Hu Shih's Political Writings
Chih-p'ing Chou and Carlos Yu-Kai Lin, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Dr. Hu Shih (1891–1962) was one of China’s top scholars and diplomats and served as the Republic of China’s ambassador to the United States during World War II. As early as 1941, Hu Shih warned of the fundamental ideological conflict between dictatorial totalitarianism and democratic systems, a view that later became the foundation of the Cold War narrative. In the 1950s, after Mao’s authoritarian regime was established, Hu Shih started to analyze the development and nature of Communism, delivering a series of lectures and addresses to reveal what he called Stalin’s “grand strategy” for facilitating the International Communist Movement.

For decades—and today to a certain extent—Hu Shih’s political writings were considered sensitive and even dangerous. As a strident critic of the Chinese Communist Party’s oligarchical practices, he was targeted by the CCP in a concerted national campaign to smear his reputation, cast aspersions on his writings, and generally destroy any possible influence he might have in China. This volume brings together a collection of Hu Shih’s most important, mostly unpublished, English-language speeches, interviews, and commentaries on international politics, China-U.S. relations, and the International Communist Movement. Taken together, these works provide an insider’s perspective on Sino-American relations and the development of the International Communist Movement over the course of the 20th century.
[more]