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In 1898, the Dreyfus Affair plunged French society into a yearlong frenzy. In Paris and provincial villages throughout the country, angry crowds paraded through the streets, threatening to attack Jews and destroy Jewish-owned businesses. Anger about the imagined power of Jewish capital, as well as fears of treason and racial degeneration, made anti-Semitism a convenient banner behind which social and political factions could fall in line. Anti-Semitic feelings that had been simmering in France for decades came boiling to the surface.

Here Pierre Birnbaum guides readers on a tour of France during this crisis. He shows that in the midst of violence, Jewish citizens bravely and effectively defended themselves and were aided by a police force determined to maintain order. Birnbaum paints a vivid portrait of French Jewish culture at the time and explains why the French state remained strong in this time of widespread unrest.

This book charts the reactions of prominent American writers to the unprecedented prosperity of the decades following World War II. It begins with an examination of Lewis Mumford's wartime call for “democratic” consumption and concludes with an analysis of the origins of President Jimmy Carter's “malaise” speech of 1979. Between these bookends, Daniel Horowitz documents a broad range of competing views, each in its own way reflective of a deep-seated ambivalence toward consumer culture.

It almost goes without saying that the rise in popularity of television has killed the audience for "serious" literature. This is such a given that reading Fitzpatrick's challenge to this notion can be very disconcerting, as she traces the ways in which a small cadre of writers of "serious" literature--DeLillo, Pynchon, and Franzen, for instance--have propagated this myth in order to set themselves up as the last bastions of good writing. Fitzpatrick first explores whether serious literature was ever as all-pervasive as critics of the television culture claim and then asks the obvious question: what, or who, exactly, are these guys defending good writing against?

Fitzpatrick examines the ways in which the anxiety about the supposed death of the novel is built on a myth of the novel's past ubiquity and its present displacement by television. She explores the ways in which this myth plays out in and around contemporary fiction and how it serves as a kind of unacknowledged discourse about race, class, and gender. The declaration constructs a minority status for the "white male author" who needs protecting from television's largely female and increasingly non-white audience. The novel, then, is transformed from a primary means of communication into an ancient, almost forgotten, and thus, treasured form reserved for the well-educated and well-to-do, and the men who practice it are exalted as the practitioners of an almost lost art.

Such positioning serves to further marginalize women writers and writers of color because it makes the novel, by definition, the preserve of the poor endangered white man. If the novel is only a product of a small group of white men, how can the contributions of women and writers of color be recognized? Instead, this positioning abandons women and people of color to television as a creative outlet, and in return, cedes television to them. Fitzpatrick argues that there's a level of unrecognized patronization in assuming that television serves no purpose but to provide dumb entertainment to bored women and others too stupid to understand novels. And, instead, she demonstrates the real positive effects of a televisual culture.

What America’s intervention in Cambodia during the Vietnam War reveals about Cold War–era U.S. national security strategy
 

The Apathy of Empire reveals just how significant Cambodia was to U.S. policy in Indochina during the Vietnam War, broadening the lens to include more than the often-cited incursion in 1970 or the illegal bombing after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. This theoretically informed and thoroughly documented case study argues that U.S. military intervention in Cambodia revealed America’s efforts to construct a hegemonic spatial world order. 

James Tyner documents the shift of America’s post-1945 focus from national defense to national security. He demonstrates that America’s expansionist policies abroad, often bolstered by military power, were not so much about occupying territory but instead constituted the construction of a new normal for the exercise of state power. During the Cold War, Vietnam became the geopolitical lodestar of this unfolding spatial order. And yet America’s grand strategy was one of contradiction: to build a sovereign state (South Vietnam) based on democratic liberalism, it was necessary to protect its boundaries—in effect, to isolate it—through both covert and overt operations in violation of Cambodia’s sovereignty. The latter was deemed necessary for the former. 

Questioning reductionist geopolitical understandings of states as central or peripheral, Tyner explores this paradox to rethink the formulation of the Cambodian war as sideshow, revealing it instead as a crucial site for the formation of this new normal.

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When Nashville became a Catholic diocese in 1837, it was mostly an aspirational exercise. The few Catholics scattered throughout the state were ministered to only occasionally by missionary priests who traveled by horseback from Kentucky. It is believed that Hugh Rogan, who arrived in Middle Tennessee in 1780 after working as a surveyor for the Continental Army, did not see a priest for fifty years.

That all changed when the Italian-born Father Aloysius “Luigi” Orengo arrived in Nashville in 1848. He traveled all over the state, sleeping in the woods, using his saddle for a pillow, and eating cheese and crackers. He’s credited with building churches in Franklin, Columbia, Pulaski, East Nashville, Tracy City, Gallatin, Humboldt, Brownsville, Grand Junction, Covington, Jackson, and McEwen.

But as influential as he was, Father Orengo’s story remained untold—until now.

An engrossing origin story for the personal computer—showing how the Apple II’s software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists’ plaything to essential home appliance.
 
Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. Designed by the brilliant engineer Steve Wozniak and hustled into the marketplace by his Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the Apple II became one of the most prominent personal computers of this dawning industry.
 
The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers—it’s about the rise of everyday users.
 
Recounting a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney offers a new understanding of how the hobbyists’ microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops to long-forgotten disk-cracking utilities, The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu—and why so much of it converged around the pioneering Apple II.
 

A comparative archaeological synthesis examining the spatial, social, and ceremonial logics underpinning circular community formations across the Eastern Woodlands from 10,000 BC to the sixteenth century.

The Archaeology of Arcuate Communities is an edited collection of ten essays that illuminate how Indigenous communities of the Eastern Woodlands, from 10,000 BC to the 1550s, are analyzed and interpreted by archaeologists today. Volume editors Martin Menz, Analise Hollingshead, and Haley Messer define the persistent circular or “arcuate” pattern of Native settlements in this region as a spatial manifestation of community activities that reinforced group identity alongside plazas, mounds, and other architectural features.

The varied case studies in this volume focus on specific communities, how they evolved, and the types of archaeological data that have been used to assess them. Part I, “Defining the Domestic Unit in Arcuate Communities,” reveals social distinctions between households and household clusters in arcuate communities, how they differ in terms of stylistic patterns and exchange, and how they combined to form distinct social groups at different scales within a broader community. Part II, “Organizing Principles of Arcuate Communities,” broadens the scope to identify the organizing principles of entire arcuate communities, such as the central role of plazas in structuring their development, how the distribution of households and central features within communities was contested and reorganized, and the importance of mounds in both delineating arcuate communities and marking their position on the landscape. Part III, “Comparison and Change in Arcuate Communities,” comprises case studies that examine changes in the organization of arcuate communities over time. Rounding out the volume is a concluding chapter that assesses how and why communities around the world formed in circular patterns.

A valuable resource for archaeologists, this collection will also be of interest to those seeking to learn about Native North American settlement, ceremony, and community organization.
 

On a remote mountainside 2,000 meters above sea level in the northern Sierra Madre Oriental, the rockshelter at La Calsada has yielded basic archaeological data for one of the least understood regions of prehistoric North America, the state of Nuevo León in northern Mexico. This comprehensive site report, with detailed information on artifacts and stratigraphy, provides baseline data for further explorations in the region and comparisons with other North American hunter-gatherer groups.

Radiocarbon dating traces the earliest component at the site to 8600-7500 B.C., giving La Calsada arguably the earliest well-dated lithic complex in Mexico. Nance describes some 1,140 recovered stone tools, with comparisons to the archaeology of southern and southwestern Texas, as well as reported sites in Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León, Mexico.

From the lithic and stratigraphic analysis, Nance deduces occupational patterns at the site, beginning with Paleo-Indian cultures that lived in the area until about 7500 B.C. Through changes in tool technology, he follows the rise of the Abasolo tradition around 3000 B.C. and the appearance of a new culture with a radically different lithic industry around 1000 A.D.

How religious institutions used landscapes and architecture to express their religious and social ideologies

The Archaeology of Protestant Landscapes focuses on three religious institutions in the US South in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: St. Paul’s Parish Church in coastal South Carolina, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in central Alabama, and Cane Hill College in Northwest Arkansas. Drawing from archaeological surveys and excavations, artifact analysis, archival research, geophysical testing, and architectural information on religious structures, Kimberly Pyszka offers case studies of these institutions, which were located in developing communities that varied socially, politically, and economically.

Pyszka uses these case studies to demonstrate that select religious institutions used and modified natural landscape features to create cultural landscapes to express their ideology, identity, goals, and social, religious, and political power. She notes that where those structures were constructed, how they sat on the landscape, their architectural style, and their overall visual appearance were well-considered decisions made by religious leaders to benefit their organizations, communities, and, sometimes, themselves.

Pyszka also uses these case studies to highlight the social roles that religious organizations played in the development of communities. She points to landscape decisions—specifically to how the architectural design of religious structures was used, intentionally or not, to unite people, often those of differing religious backgrounds—as contributing to the creation of a common identity among people living in new and still-growing settlements, aiding in community development. This book contributes to the growing body of work within historical archaeology on churches, churchyards, and cemeteries and to the increasing awareness among archaeologists of how these sites contribute to questions of identity, consumerism, trade, and colonialism.