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In recent years, anthropologists, historians, and others have been drawn to study the profuse and creative usages of digital media by religious movements. At the same time, scholars of Christian Africa have long been concerned with the history of textual culture, the politics of Bible translation, and the status of the vernacular in Christianity. Students of Islam in Africa have similarly examined politics of knowledge, the transmission of learning in written form, and the influence of new media. Until now, however, these arenas—Christianity and Islam, digital media and “old” media—have been studied separately.

Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa is one of the first volumes to put new media and old media into significant conversation with one another, and also offers a rare comparison between Christianity and Islam in Africa. The contributors find many previously unacknowledged correspondences among different media and between the two faiths. In the process they challenge the technological determinism—the notion that certain types of media generate particular forms of religious expression—that haunts many studies. In evaluating how media usage and religious commitment intersect in the social, cultural, and political landscapes of modern Africa, this collection will contribute to the development of new paradigms for media and religious studies.

Contributors: Heike Behrend, Andre Chappatte, Maria Frahm-Arp, David Gordon, Liz Gunner, Bruce S. Hall, Sean Hanretta, Jorg Haustein, Katrien Pype, and Asonzeh Ukah.

Mary Lois Walker Morris was a Mormon woman who challenged both American ideas about marriage and the U.S. legal system. Before the Manifesto provides a glimpse into her world as the polygamous wife of a prominent Salt Lake City businessman, during a time of great transition in Utah. This account of her life as a convert, milliner, active community member, mother, and wife begins in England, where her family joined the Mormon church, details her journey across the plains, and describes life in Utah in the 1880s. Her experiences were unusual as, following her first husband's deathbed request, she married his brother as a plural wife in the Old Testament tradition of levirate marriage.

Mary Morris's memoir frames her 1879 to 1887 diary with both reflections on earlier years and passages that parallel entries in the day book, giving readers a better understanding of how she retrospectively saw her life. The thoroughly annotated diary offers the daily experience of a woman who kept a largely self-sufficient household, had a wide social network, ran her own business, wrote poetry, and was intellectually curious. The years of "the Raid" (federal prosecution of polygamists) led Mary and Elias Morris to hide their marriage on "the underground," and her to perjury during Elias's trial for unlawful cohabitation. The book ends with Mary Lois's arrival at the Salt Lake Depot after three years in exile in Mexico with a polygamist colony.

Relocating Authority examines the ways Japanese Americans have continually used writing to respond to the circumstances of their community’s mass imprisonment during World War II. Using both Nikkei cultural frameworks and community-specific history for methodological inspiration and guidance, Mira Shimabukuro shows how writing was used privately and publicly to individually survive and collectively resist the conditions of incarceration.

Examining a wide range of diverse texts and literacy practices such as diary entries, note-taking, manifestos, and multiple drafts of single documents, Relocating Authority draws upon community archives, visual histories, and Asian American history and theory to reveal the ways writing has served as a critical tool for incarcerees and their descendants. Incarcerees not only used writing to redress the “internment” in the moment but also created pieces of text that enabled and inspired further redress long after the camps had closed.

Relocating Authority highlights literacy’s enduring potential to participate in social change and assist an imprisoned people in relocating authority away from their captors and back to their community and themselves. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic and Asian American rhetorics, American studies, and anyone interested in the relationship between literacy and social justice.

In Remaking Chinese America, Xiaojian Zhao explores the myriad forces that changed and unified Chinese Americans during a key period in American history. Prior to 1940, this immigrant community was predominantly male, but between 1940 and 1965 it was transformed into a family-centered American ethnic community. Zhao pays special attention to forces both inside and outside of the country in order to explain these changing demographics. She scrutinizes the repealed exclusion laws and the immigration laws enacted after 1940. Careful attention is also paid to evolving gender roles, since women constituted the majority of newcomers, significantly changing the sex ratio of the Chinese American population.

As members of a minority sharing a common cultural heritage as well as pressures from the larger society, Chinese Americans networked and struggled to gain equal rights during the cold war period. In defining the political circumstances that brought the Chinese together as a cohesive political body, Zhao also delves into the complexities they faced when questioning their personal national allegiances. Remaking Chinese America uses a wealth of primary sources, including oral histories, newspapers, genealogical documents, and immigration files to illuminate what it was like to be Chinese living in the United States during a period that—until now—has been little studied.

The contributors represent a wide variety of theoretical orientations and a broad spectrum of understandings of what constitutes historical sociology. They address such topics as religion, war, citizenship, markets, professions, gender and welfare, colonialism, ethnicity, bureaucracy, revolutions, collective action, and the modernist social sciences themselves. Remaking Modernity includes a significant introduction in which the editors consider prior orientations in historical sociology in order to analyze the field’s resurgence. They show how current research is building on and challenging previous work through attention to institutionalism, rational choice, the cultural turn, feminist theories and approaches, and colonialism and the racial formations of empire.

Contributors. Julia Adams, Justin Baer, Richard Biernacki, Bruce Carruthers, Elisabeth Clemens, Rebecca Jean Emigh, Russell Faeges, Philip Gorski, Roger Gould, Meyer Kestnbaum, Edgar Kiser, Ming-Cheng Lo, Zine Magubane, Ann Shola Orloff, Nader Sohrabi, Margaret Somers, Lyn Spillman, George Steinmetz

Provocative and laden with eyewitness detail, Remaking Muslim Lives offers a rare sustained look at what it means to be Muslim and live a Muslim life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Governance everywhere is concerned with spatial relationships. Modern states “map” local communities, making them legible for the purposes of control. Ethiopia has gone through several stages of “mapping” in its imperial, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary phases.

In 1986 The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia, a cross-disciplinary collection edited by Don Donham and Wendy James, opened up the study of center/periphery relations in the Ethiopian empire until the fall of the monarchy in 1974. This new volume examines similar themes, taking the story forward through the major changes effected by the socialist regime from the revolution of 1974 to its overthrow in 1991, and then into the current period that has been marked by moves toward local democracy and political devolution.

Topics include the changing fortunes of new and historic towns and cities, the impact of the Mengistu regime’s policies of villagization and resettlement, local aspects of the struggle against Mengistu and its aftermath, and the fate of border regions. Special attention is given to developments since 1991: to new local institutions and forms of autonomy, the links between the international diasporas of Ethiopia and the fortunes of their home areas. The collection draws on the work of established scholars as well as a new generation of Ethiopian and international researchers in the disciplines of anthropology, political science, history, and geography.

Although today he is virtually unknown, during his lifetime Cummings was one of the most famous newspapermen in the United States, in part because of stories like these. Complete with a biographical sketch and historical introduction, A Remarkable Curiosity is an enjoyable read for anybody interested in the American West in the latter half of the nineteenth century.