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Reexamines the contested geopolitical landscape of the lower Mississippi River Valley in 1740s, centering Choctaw perspectives 

Matthew J. Sparacio’s comprehensive history, The Choctaw Civil War: Women, Justice, and Sovereignty in the Native South, delivers a rich portrait of eighteenth-century Choctaw life and recasts the Native South as a region shaped by Choctaw decisions. 

In the 1730s and 1740s, the Choctaw Nation leveraged competing European imperial agendas while establishing reciprocal diplomatic ties with other tribes, including their neighboring “brothers,” the Chickasaws. Choctaws drew strength from their multifaceted understanding of sovereignty: connections to land, contributions to society through work, generosity, respect, kinship obligations, and justice. A series of attacks on Choctaw women, however, tested the limits of justice and obligation within and between Choctaw communities. Mounting pressures from both Louisiana and South Carolina added to this factionalism, ultimately leading to civil war. 

Relying on Chahta anumpa (“Choctaw language”) training and tribal histories, gender theory, and ethnohistorical methods, Sparacio highlights women’s contributions to Choctaw society and governance. Intense eighteenth-century debates over justice, kinship, and responsibility created several Choctaw movements for justice that still inspire efforts in Oklahoma and Mississippi to end the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons’ crisis. Tribal and bodily sovereignty shaped the Native South and will shape its future. 

The Choctaw Civil War is a major reinterpretation of Choctaw history and the colonial South. This will be a must-read for historians, scholars of the Native South, and anyone interested in sovereignty movements today.
 

For generations, migration stories moved in one direction: toward the American Dream. Now, a seismic reversal is underway. For the first time since the Great Depression, more people are leaving the United States than moving in. Jamie D. Brooks and her family are among the many who have fled.

Blending cultural reporting with memoir, The Fleeing Season shares one mother’s story as she considers how and where to raise her family. Brooks recounts her decision to emigrate to the United Kingdom, while reckoning with issues that so many American families face: school shootings, systemic racism, a broken health care system, rising rates of homelessness, and the lack of a social safety net. Intimate and honest, Brooks’s story is not a political polemic. Rather, it maps a path toward reproductive justice.

As the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great has long interested those studying the establishment of Christianity. But Constantine is also notable for his ability to control a sprawling empire and effect major changes. The Justice of Constantineexamines Constantine's judicial and administrative legislation and his efforts to maintain control over the imperial bureaucracy, to guarantee the working of Roman justice, and to keep the will of his subjects throughout the Roman Empire.

John Dillon first analyzes the record of Constantine's legislation and its relationship to prior legislation. His initial chapters also serve as an introduction to Roman law and administration in later antiquity. Dillon then considers Constantine's public edicts and internal communications about access to law, trials and procedure, corruption, and punishment for administrative abuses. How imperial officials relied on correspondence with Constantine to resolve legal questions is also considered. A study of Constantine's expedited appellate system, to ensure provincial justice, concludes the book.

Constantine's constitutions reveal much about the Theodosian Code and the laws included in it. Constantine consistently seeks direct sources of reliable information in order to enforce his will. In official correspondence, meanwhile, Constantine strives to maintain control over his officials through punishment; trusted agents; and the cultivation of accountability, rivalry, and suspicion among them.

"The Justice of Mercy is exhilarating reading. Teeming with intelligence and insight, this study immediately establishes itself as the unequaled philosophical and legal exploration of mercy. But Linda Meyer's book reaches beyond mercy to offer reconceptualizations of justice and punishment themselves. Meyer's ambition is to rethink the failed retributivist paradigm of criminal justice and to replace it with an ideal of merciful punishment grounded in a Heideggerian insight into the gift of being-with-others. The readings of criminal law, Heideggerian and Levinasian philosophy, and literature are powerful and provocative. The Justice of Mercy is a radical and rigorous exploration of both punishment and mercy as profoundly human activities."
---Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking, Bard College

"This book addresses a question both ancient and urgently timely: how to reconcile the law's call to justice with the heart's call to mercy? Linda Ross Meyer's answer is both philosophical and pragmatic, taking us from the conceptual roots of the supposed conflict between justice and mercy to concrete examples in both fiction and contemporary criminal law. Energetic, eloquent, and moving, this book's defense of mercy will resonate with philosophers, legal scholars, lawyers, and policymakers engaged with criminal justice, and anyone concerned about our current harshly punitive legal system." 
---Carol Steiker, Harvard Law School

"Far from being a utopian, soft and ineffectual concept, Meyer shows that mercy already operates within the law in ways that we usually do not recognize. . . . Meyer's piercing insights and careful analysis bring the reader to think of law, justice, and mercy itself in a new and far more profound light."
---James Martel, San Francisco State University

How can granting mercy be just if it gives a criminal less punishment than he "deserves" and treats his case differently from others like it? This ancient question has become central to debates over truth and reconciliation commissions, alternative dispute resolution, and other new forms of restorative justice. The traditional response has been to marginalize mercy and to cast doubt on its ability to coexist with forms of legal justice.

Flipping the relationship between justice and mercy, Linda Ross Meyer argues that our rule-bound and harsh system of punishment is deeply flawed and that mercy should be, not the crazy woman in the attic of the law, but the lady of the house. This book articulates a theory of punishment with mercy and illustrates the implications of that theory with legal examples drawn from criminal law doctrine, pardons, mercy in military justice, and fictional narratives of punishment and mercy.

Linda Ross Meyer is Carmen Tortora Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University School of Law; President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities; and Associate Editor of Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities.

In Corsicana, Texas, Shelley Watkins, the charismatic young wife of Jerry Mack Watkins, disappeared on Labor Day, 1993; her body, tied and taped in plastic and chained to concrete blocks, was found in the Trinity River eight days later. Although a wealth of circumstantial evidence pointed toward Jerry Mack, corruption and its legacy have kept the investigation and legal proceedings in limbo for decades. Now, as DNA evidence offers hope for a long-overdue resolution, author Carol Dawson chronicles both one woman’s tragic story and the history of violence in small-town Texas.

Beginning with Shelley’s life before she arrived in Corsicana, Dawson reveals how her death perpetuates a Gothic history of crime within the town—including a devastating number of murdered women. She also delves into the closed culture of financial control and how the Watkins family became one of the town’s wealthiest, and pulls new details from the witnesses, cops, and prosecutors connected with a case that has haunted her for thirty years. Rooted in the complex history of author Carol Dawson’s hometown, and framed by her family connections to the case, The Labor Day Ghost delivers an arresting narrative that traces the way this tragedy has continued to split Corsicana’s citizenry during the long deferral of justice.

In the United States, the fight to secure full civil rights for African American people has endured for centuries. The movement has included many voices, among them, working people, charismatic activists, musicians and artists, the LGBTQIA community, veterans, suburbanites, and elected officials. Moving from the labor struggles of the 1930s to the sit-ins and boycotts of midcentury, and the Black Lives Matter protests of today, this expansive volume brings together first-person accounts, political documents and speeches, and historical photographs from each region of the country.

Designed for use in courses and engaging for general readers, this new compilation is the most diverse, most inclusive, and most comprehensive resource available for teaching and learning about the civil rights movement. With chronological and geographical depth, The New Civil Rights Movement Reader addresses a range of key topics, including youth activism, regional and local freedom struggles, voting rights, economic inequality, gender, sexuality, and culture, and the movement’s global reach.

Widely regarded as perhaps America's greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards still suffers the stereotype of hellfire preacher obsessed with God's wrath. In this anthology, Gerald McDermott and Ronald Story seek to correct that common view by showing that Edwards was also a compassionate, socially conscious minister of the first order. 

Through a selection of sermons and primary writings, McDermott and Story reveal an Edwards who preached love toward all humanity regardless of belief or appearance; who demanded private and public charity to the poor; who criticized hard-hearted business dealings as impious and socially destructive; and who condemned envy and status-seeking as anti-Christian and anti-community. This “other” Jonathan Edwards preached about grace and the love of God but also about responsive constitutional government, the iniquities of hypocrisy and corruption, and the nature of wise leadership. He acknowledged the need for national defense but left room for popular revolt from tyranny. He anticipated a millennial age of peace and prosperity and believed that people should live in the world as they would live through grace in heaven. 

Jonathan Edwards was, in sum, a worldly as well as spiritual reformer who resisted the materialistic, acquisitive, and individualistic currents of American culture. For these reasons, McDermott and Story think he may have lessons to teach us today.

The Pipeline Is Broken explores the reality of racial exclusion and bias in graduate student education, arguing that the insidious effects of structural and institutional racism substantially chip away at the very pipeline of future BIPOC academics—already limited for other racialized reasons.

A series of letters written by graduate students of color, this collection offers a multifaceted account of the challenges, oppositions, microaggressions, and outright discrimination that these students face in higher education settings. Graduate students describe navigating hostile mentoring relationships and unwelcoming campus cultures and peers and laboring for poverty wages to earn their degrees. Yet these letters celebrate joy, community, and agency, offering a more complete and affirming view of graduate student life. Through these brave personal stories, The Pipeline Is Broken asks readers to interrogate what it means to navigate higher education as a person of color and to understand that the reality of faculty of color’s numerical-minority status is a complicated phenomenon whose genesis rests not at the moment of job interview. Rather, these letters show, this status is an intricate manifestation of a process that begins in elementary schools, is reinforced in high schools and colleges, and is part and parcel of the minefield that is graduate education in America.

Essential reading for anyone who cares about racial equity in education, mentorship, leadership development, or student well-being, The Pipeline Is Broken is a guide, a mirror, and a call to action all in one, challenging graduate programs, faculty, and administrators to examine their complicity in maintaining inequitable systems and offering suggestions for building cultures of care.

The first critical edition of the writings of the prolific radical workers’ newspaper columnist and musician who rode the rails during the Great Depression

The Popular Wobbly brings together a wide selection of writings by T-Bone Slim, the most popular and talented writer belonging to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Slim wrote humorous, polemical pieces, engaging with topics like labor and class injustice, which were mostly published in IWW publications from 1920 until his death in 1942. Although relatively little is known about Slim, editors Owen Clayton and Iain McIntyre coalesce the latest research on this enigmatic character to create a vivid portrait that adds valuable context for the array of writings assembled here.

Known as “the laureate of the logging camps,” Slim also composed numerous songs that have been performed and recorded by Pete Seeger, Utah Phillips, and Candie Carawan, who in 1960 updated Slim’s song “The Popular Wobbly” with Civil Rights–era lyrics. Slim’s witticisms, sayings, and exhortations (“Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack”; “Only the poor break laws—the rich evade them”) were widely discussed among fellow hobos across the “jungle” campfires that dotted the railways, and some even transcribed his commentary on boxcars that traveled the country. Yet despite Slim’s importance and fame during his lifetime, his work disappeared from public view almost immediately after his death.

The Popular Wobbly is the first critical edition of Slim’s work and also a significant contribution to literature about working-class writers, the radical labor movement, and the history and culture of nomadism and precarity. With this publication, Slim’s rediscovered writings can once again inspire artists and activists to march and agitate for a more just and equitable world.

Soul food has played a critical role in preserving Black history, community, and culinary genius. It is also a response to--and marker of--centuries of food injustice. Given the harm that our food production system inflicts upon Black people, what should soul food look like today?

Christopher Carter's answer to that question merges a history of Black American foodways with a Christian ethical response to food injustice. Carter reveals how racism and colonialism have long steered the development of US food policy. The very food we grow, distribute, and eat disproportionately harms Black people specifically and people of color among the global poor in general. Carter reflects on how people of color can eat in a way that reflects their cultural identities while remaining true to the principles of compassion, love, justice, and solidarity with the marginalized.

Both a timely mediation and a call to action, The Spirit of Soul Food places today's Black foodways at the crossroads of food justice and Christian practice.

Thomas Goode Jones of Alabama is the first comprehensive biography of a key Alabama politician and federal jurist whose life and times embody the conflicts and transformations in the Deep South between the Civil War and World War I.
 
A man who both represented and differed from his class, Thomas Goode Jones offers contemporary readers and scholars an ideal subject of study to understand a period of southern history that still shapes American life today. Often overshadowed by the pharaonic antebellum period, the Civil War, and the luminous heights of the civil rights movement, the deceptively placid decades at the turn of the century were, in fact, a period when southerners fiercely debated the course of the South’s future. In tracing Jones’s career, Brent J. Aucoin offers vivid accounts of the great events and trends of that pivotal period: Reconstruction, the birth of the “Solid South,” the Populist Revolt, and the establishment of racial disenfranchisement and segregation.
 
Born in 1844, Jones served in the Confederate army and after the war identified as a conservative “Bourbon” Democrat. He served as Alabama's governor from 1890 to 1894 and as a federal judge from 1901 until his death in 1914. As a veteran, politician, and judge, Jones embodied numerous roles in the shifting political landscape of the South.
 
Jones was not, however, a reflexive conformist and sometimes pursued policies at odds with his party. Jones’s rhetoric and support of African American civil rights were exceptional and earned him truculent criticism from unrepentant racist factions in his party. His support was so fearless that it inspired Booker T. Washington to recommend Jones to Republican president Theodore Roosevelt as a federal judge. On the bench, Jones garnered national attention for his efforts to end peonage and lynching, and yet he also enabled the establishment of legalized segregation in Alabama, confounding attempts easily to categorize him as an odious reactionary or fearless progressive.