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WINNER OF THE LYMAN BOOK AWARD FOR MARITIME AND NAVAL SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ENVIRONMENT

Argues that the US Navy’s commitment to high-steam propulsion for its World War II fleet was a tactical, technological, and bureaucratic failure

In Too Far on a Whim, Tyler A. Pitrof presents a high-spirited revision of the US Navy’s commitment to high-steam propulsion systems, the mainstay of its World War II fleets. Pitrof’s research persuasively demonstrates that in its war against the Imperial Japanese Navy, the US Navy succeeded despite its high-steam propulsion systems rather than because of them.

War with an aggressive Japan and a resurgent Germany loomed in the dark days of the late 1930s. Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen Sr., head of the US Navy’s Bureau of Engineering, advanced a radical vision: a new fleet based on high-steam propulsion, a novel technology that promised high speeds with smaller engines and better fuel efficiency. High-steam engines had drawbacks—smaller operational ranges and maintenance issues. Nevertheless, trusting its engineers to resolve these issues, the US Navy put high-steam propulsion at the heart of its warship design from 1938 to 1945.

The official record of high-steam technology’s subsequent performance has relied heavily on Bowen’s own memoir, in which he painted high-steam innovation in heroic colors. Pitrof’s empirical review of primary sources such as ship’s maintenance records, however, illuminates the opposite—that the heroism lay in the ability of American seamen to improvise solutions to keep these difficult engines running.

Pitrof artfully explains engineering concepts in layman’s terms and provides an account that extends far beyond technology and into matters of naval hierarchies and bureaucracy, strategic theory, and ego. He offers a cautionary tale—as relevant to any endeavor as it is to military undertakings—about how failures arise when technical experts lack managers who understand their work. Admiral Bowen wielded excessive power because no one else in the US Navy knew enough to countermand him.

Compulsively readable, Too Far on a Whim is a landmark for those interested in naval history and technology but also for readers interested in the interplay between innovation, decision-making, and engineering.
 

Shipwreck stories from along Minnesota’s north shore of Lake Superior and Isle Royale

Against the backdrop of the extraordinary history of Great Lakes shipping, Too Much Sea for Their Decks chronicles shipwrecked schooners, wooden freighters, early steel-hulled steamers, whalebacks, and bulk carriers—some well-known, some unknown or forgotten—all lost in the frigid waters of Lake Superior.

Included are compelling accounts of vessels destined for infamy, such as that of the Stranger, a slender wooden schooner swallowed by the lake in 1875, the sailors’ bodies never recovered nor the wreckage ever found; an account of the whaleback Wilson, rammed by a large commercial freighter in broad daylight and in calm seas, sinking before many on board could escape; and the mysterious loss of the Kamloops, a package freighter that went down in a storm and whose sailors were found on the Isle Royale the following spring, having escaped the wreck only to die of exposure on the island. Then there is the ill-fated Steinbrenner, plagued by bad luck from the time of her construction, when she was nearly destroyed by fire, to her eventual (and tragic) sinking in 1953. These tales and more represent loss of life and property—and are haunting stories of brave and heroic crews.

Arranged chronologically and presented in three sections covering Minnesota's North Shore, Isle Royale, and the three biggest storms in Minnesota’s Great Lakes history (the 1905 Mataafa storm, the 1913 hurricane on the lakes, and the 1940 Armistice Day storm), each shipwreck documented within these pages provides a piece to the history of shipping on Lake Superior.

As director of the Cincinnati Observatory and, later, a civilian in the newly established forecast and storm warning division of the U.S. Army Signal Service, Cleveland Abbe was the first person to issue official, regularly scheduled weather forecasts, or “probabilities,” in the United States. Abbe began his work in forecasting in 1869, earning the nickname “Old Probabilities” and gaining recognition for the reliability of his reports. He would go on to become a leader of the US Weather Bureau—which we know today as the National Weather Service. In establishing a system for creating daily weather forecasts and more, this humble pioneer helped lay the foundation for modern meteorology in the United States.

Set against the backdrop of nineteenth and early twentieth-century international events and scientific advancements, this biography of Abbe explores both his personal life and his scientific career. It illuminates his time spent in Russia in the mid-1860s—as the Civil War was waged and a president was assassinated back home—in part through letters with his mother. Decades of diaries and correspondence from the Cleveland Abbe Papers at the Library of Congress, as well as first-person accounts, illuminate this biography of a mild-mannered family man whose thirst for knowledge drove him to become a giant in an emerging scientific field.

“If Hasidism begins in the life-enhancing spirituality of the Baal Shem Tov, it concludes in the tortuous, elitist and utterly fascinating career of Nahman of Bratslav (1722–1810) whose biography and teaching Arthur Green has set forth in his comprehensive, moving, and subtle study, Tormented Master.

            “Arthur Green has managed to lead us through the thickets of the Bratslaver discourse with a grace and facility thus far unequaled in the English language literature on Hasidism. Tormented Master is a model of clarity and percipience, balancing awed respect and honor for its subject with a ruthless pursuit of documented truth. . . . Tormented Master is sufficiently open to the agonies of religion in general and the issues of modern religion in particular to make Nahman a thinker utterly relevant to our time.

            “Nahman of Bratslav is unique in the history of Judaism, Green emphasizes, for having made the individual’s quest for intimacy with God the center of the religious way. He was a Kierkegaard before his time, believing in the utter abandon of the life of faith and the risk of paradoxicality. . . . He was, more than all others, the predecessor of Kafka, whose tales, like Nahman’s, have no explicit key and rankle, flush and irritate the spirit, compelling us—even in our failure to understand—to acknowledge their potency and challenge.”

—New York Times

Reassessing the role of torture in the context of police violence, mass incarceration, and racial capitalism
 

At the midpoint of a century of imperial expansion, marked on one end by the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902 and on the other by post–9/11 debates over waterboarding, the United States embraced a vision of “national security torture,” one contrived to cut ties with domestic torture and mass racial terror and to promote torture instead as a minimalist interrogation tool. Torture in the National Security Imagination argues that dispelling this vision requires a new set of questions about the everyday work that torture does for U.S. society.

Stephanie Athey describes the role of torture in the proliferation of a U.S. national security stance and imagination: as U.S. domestic tortures were refined in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, then in mid-century counterinsurgency theory and the networks that brought it home in the form of law-and-order policing and mass incarceration.

Drawing on examples from news to military reports, legal writing, and activist media, Athey shows that torture must be seen as a colonial legacy with a corporate future, highlighting the centrality of torture to the American empire—including its role in colonial settlement, American Indian boarding schools, and police violence. She brings to the fore the spectators and commentators, the communal energy of violence, and the teams and target groups necessary to a mass undertaking (equipment suppliers, contractors, bureaucrats, university researchers, and profiteers) to demonstrate that, at base, torture is propelled by local social functions, conducted by networked professional collaborations, and publicly supported by a durable social imaginary.

Reassessing the role of torture in the context of police violence, mass incarceration, and racial capitalism
 

At the midpoint of a century of imperial expansion, marked on one end by the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902 and on the other by post–9/11 debates over waterboarding, the United States embraced a vision of “national security torture,” one contrived to cut ties with domestic torture and mass racial terror and to promote torture instead as a minimalist interrogation tool. Torture in the National Security Imagination argues that dispelling this vision requires a new set of questions about the everyday work that torture does for U.S. society.

Stephanie Athey describes the role of torture in the proliferation of a U.S. national security stance and imagination: as U.S. domestic tortures were refined in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, then in mid-century counterinsurgency theory and the networks that brought it home in the form of law-and-order policing and mass incarceration.

Drawing on examples from news to military reports, legal writing, and activist media, Athey shows that torture must be seen as a colonial legacy with a corporate future, highlighting the centrality of torture to the American empire—including its role in colonial settlement, American Indian boarding schools, and police violence. She brings to the fore the spectators and commentators, the communal energy of violence, and the teams and target groups necessary to a mass undertaking (equipment suppliers, contractors, bureaucrats, university researchers, and profiteers) to demonstrate that, at base, torture is propelled by local social functions, conducted by networked professional collaborations, and publicly supported by a durable social imaginary.

Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows that the use of camps and detention facilities has been a ubiquitous practice in countless wars and genocides in order to achieve the wartime objectives of perpetrators. Although camps have been used for different strategic purposes, their essential functions are always the same: to inflict torture and lasting trauma on the victims.

Torture, Humiliate, Kill develops the author’s collective traumatization theory, which contends that the concentration camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities had the primary purpose of inflicting collective trauma on the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This collective traumatization consisted of excessive use of torture, sexual abuse, humiliation, and killing. The physical and psychological suffering imposed by these methods were seen as a quick and efficient means to establish the Serb “living space.” Karčić argues that this trauma was deliberately intended to deter non-Serbs from ever returning to their pre-war homes. The book centers on multiple examples of experiences at concentration camps in four towns operated by Bosnian Serbs during the war: Prijedor, Bijeljina, Višegrad, and Bileća. Chosen according to their political and geographical position, Karčić demonstrates that these camps were used as tools for the ethno-religious genocidal campaign against non-Serbs. Torture, Humiliate, Kill is a thorough and definitive resource for understanding the function and operation of camps during the Bosnian genocide.

Preserving voices from the back roads—Ruby Pickens Tartt and the folklore of Alabama’s Black Belt.

“You recall the expression ‘toting the lead row’, don’t you? In chopping cotton or corn there is always a leader, one who can chop the fastest of them all. When he finishes his row, he goes back and helps the other choppers finish theirs. The one who totes the lead row takes the lead place in the next row.”—Ruby Pickens Tartt

Toting the Lead Row is a powerful biographical and cultural tribute to Ruby Pickens Tartt, a white woman from Alabama’s Black Belt who devoted her life to preserving the oral traditions of rural Black communities. Born in 1880 in Livingston, Alabama, Tartt witnessed nearly a century of social transformation and made it her mission to document the songs, stories, and life histories of her African American neighbors. She believed that the soul of Sumter County resided not in its institutions, but in its cabins, fields, and voices.

During the Great Depression, Tartt worked with the Federal Writers’ Project, collaborating with renowned folklorists such as Carl Carmer and John Lomax. Her home became a hub for cultural preservation, attracting scholars and artists who recognized the depth of her fieldwork. The book’s title refers to a Southern agricultural phrase—“toting the lead row”—symbolizing leadership and support, a role Tartt embodied in her efforts to elevate the voices of those often overlooked.

This volume is divided into two parts: the first offers a detailed biography of Tartt and her work with the WPA, while the second presents a curated selection of her collected writings, including 18 life histories and 12 slave narratives. Through these stories, Tartt preserved a vital piece of Southern history and gave voice to generations whose experiences might otherwise have been lost.

Toting the Lead Row is both a celebration of a remarkable woman and a vital contribution to the study of folklore, race, and Southern identity.

2026 Society for American Baseball Research Seymour Medal finalist 

Baseball’s relationship to American ideals has long been an object of study across disciplines. In Touching Home, Mary Craig contributes to this ongoing study by relating issues of class, race, and gender to America’s theoretical tradition of liberalism and republicanism established during the nation’s founding era. Specifically, Touching Home traces theories of individualism and civic virtue from the founding era through baseball’s place in American society at the end of the twentieth century.
 
The work also examines the mythologizing of baseball’s pastoralism, racial equality, and inculcation of manliness as a civic virtue. These myths became ingrained in baseball in significant ways, including, for example, the Supreme Court’s granting of an antitrust exemption to Major League Baseball; MLB’s promotion of Jackie Robinson’s career as proof of its leadership in and commitment to desegregation; and the short-lived All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (1943-1954) and subsequent relegation of women to softball.
 
Through the exploration of these and other societal issues, Craig’s work highlights baseball’s development from accessible hobby to multi-billion-dollar corporation, exploring the ways in which the sport has helped shape how individual Americans engage with politics. Indeed, in the pages of Touching Home readers will find a demythologizing of baseball that helps them better understand the results of their efforts to form community through engaging with teams at both the local and national levels. Scholars of American politics, particularly American political thought, will be intrigued to find baseball used as a case study of the effectiveness of the founders’ project of crafting a jointly liberal-republican framework capable of directing Americans toward responsible citizenship.
 
In all of these ways, Touching Home upholds the value of studying popular culture, presenting baseball as a unique and highly interesting lens through which to help us appreciate how individual Americans relate to politics and parties in their respective communities and nationally.

An in-depth, perceptive account of the unconventional life of the Moomins’ beloved creator, now available in the United States

Tove Jansson achieved fame as the creator of the Moomins, beloved by generations of readers around the world. Remarkably, the Moomins were only part of the prodigious creative output of this Finnish-Swedish writer and artist. Jansson’s work also includes short stories and five novels for adults, as well as paintings, murals, and book illustrations. In this acclaimed biography, Boel Westin relies on numerous conversations with Jansson and unprecedented access to her journals, letters, and personal archives to present an engrossing and comprehensive review of the life and world of Scandinavia’s best-loved author.

As Westin’s meticulous research makes clear, Jansson’s artistic and literary works reflected what was most important to her: the love of family and nature and the desire to pursue her art. Guided by her personal motto, “Love and work,” Jansson seized both with uncompromising joy. And while her romantic relationships with men proved unfulfilling, she found those with women—especially with her longtime partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä—both grounding and inspiring.

Westin weaves together the many threads of Jansson’s rich, complex life: an education interrupted to help her family; the bleak war years and her emergence as a painter; the decades of Moominmania across books, newspaper comic strips, merchandise, and adaptations; her later fictions, including her popular The Summer Book; and her time with Pietilä on the solitary island of Klovharu. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words offers fans and admirers around the world the most complete portrait of the writer Philip Pullman described as “a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry.”

In his lead chapter, Dan Yankelovich urges us to move away from a "misleading model of public opinion" that "dominates the expert culture of our society, including journalists, scientists, business leaders, scholars, professional experts, and political leaders." He and the other contributors (Will Friedman, Keith Melville, Robert Kingston, Alison Kadlec, Steven A. Rosell, and Heidi Gantwerk) describe methods used by organizations like Public Agenda, National Issues Forums, and Viewpoint Learning, Inc., to advance the public's learning curve through various forms of civic engagement, education, dialogue and deliberation.

They provide case studies of education reform in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and math and science initiatives in the Kansas City area, and examples of programs that have focused on issues ranging from energy and health care to US-Muslim relations. One chapter is a dialogue between Yankelovich and Friedman.

While our political culture resonates to the public's desire for a stronger voice, it fails to ensure that this voice reflects anything more than the spin, spectacle, and excessive partisanship that dominate today's public discourse. Toward Wiser Public Judgment offers insights and strategies to counteract these troubling trends.