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The Silent Guns of Two Octobers uses new as well as previously under-appreciated documentary evidence to link the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Checkpoint Charlie tank standoff to achieve the impossible—craft a new, thoughtful, original analysis of a political showdown everyone thought they knew everything about. Ultimately the book concludes that much of the Cold War rhetoric the leaders employed was mere posturing; in reality neither had any intention of starting a nuclear war. Theodore Voorhees reexamines Khrushchev’s and Kennedy’s leadership, decision, and rhetoric in light of the new documentary evidence available. Voorhees examines the impact of John F. Kennedy's domestic political concerns about his upcoming first midterm elections on his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis through his use of back-channel dealings with Khrushchev during the lead-up to the crisis and in the closing days when the two leaders managed to reach a settlement.

The Silent Guns of Two Octobers uses new as well as previously under-appreciated documentary evidence to link the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Checkpoint Charlie tank standoff to achieve the impossible—craft a new, thoughtful, original analysis of a political showdown everyone thought they knew everything about. Ultimately the book concludes that much of the Cold War rhetoric the leaders employed was mere posturing; in reality neither had any intention of starting a nuclear war. Theodore Voorhees reexamines Khrushchev’s and Kennedy’s leadership, decision, and rhetoric in light of the new documentary evidence available. Voorhees examines the impact of John F. Kennedy's domestic political concerns about his upcoming first midterm elections on his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis through his use of back-channel dealings with Khrushchev during the lead-up to the crisis and in the closing days when the two leaders managed to reach a settlement.

A deeply researched and definitive account of the climactic battle at the end of the Haitian Revolution 

Among the many rebellions against European colonial empires, the Haitian Revolution against France is among the most dramatic and complex. Having begun in 1791 as France was in the throes of its own young revolution, the conflict reached its dramatic climax when Napoleon dispatched a heavily armed expeditionary force led by his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to re-establish slavery and the sugar economy that had so enriched France. Philippe Girard’s Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon is a deeply researched and engrossing account of this invasion and its spectacular defeat.

For this ambitious account, Philippe Girard has studied not only primary records in Haiti itself but also rare documents from nineteen public and private archives and research libraries in French, U.S., British, and Spanish collections. His more inclusive approach provides a fuller, more accurate and detailed narrative. He reveals not only key military movements, but also less-known aspects like the activities of U.S. merchants, in-fighting within Napoleon’s government, and communication between both sides and other European powers. Girard fills the work with unforgettable stories of those who led or were caught up in the war, people like poorly armed Black soldiers who ambushed Bonaparte’s columns, French child drummers, Jewish bankers in Kingston, weapon smugglers from Quaker Philadelphia, Polish artillerists, and mixed-raced people struggling to preserve their freedom against both Black and white opponents.

Transcending pat ideological and racial categories, the book brings into focus an Atlantic society at the crossroads of African and European influences, where Haitian rebels fought France while embracing its ideals.

Most scholars who write on social contract and classical natural law perceive an irreconcilable tension between them. Social contract theory is widely considered the political-theoretic concomitant of modern philosophy. Against the regnant view, The Social Contract in the Ruins, argues that all attempts to ground political authority and obligation in agreement alone are logically self-defeating. Political authority and obligation require an antecedent moral ground. But this moral ground cannot be constructed by human agreement or created by sheer will—human or divine. All accounts of morality as constructed or made collapse into self-referential incoherence. Only an uncreated, real good can coherently ground political authority and obligation or the proposition that rightful government depends on the consent of the governed. Government by consent requires classical natural law for its very coherence. 

In the early part of the twentieth century, Argentina's Socialist Party became the largest and most effective socialist organization in Latin America. Richard J. Walter's interpretive study begins with the party's origins in the 1890s, traces its development through 1912, and then offers a comprehensive analysis of its activities and programs during the almost two decades of civilian, democratic government that ended with the military coup of 1930. His aim has been to provide a detailed case study of a Latin American political party within a specific historical context.

The work gives particular attention to the nature of party leadership, internal party organization, attempts to win the support of the Argentine working class, party activities in national elections and the National Congress, and internal disputes and divisions. In discussing these topics, Walter draws heavily on government documents, including national and municipal censuses, ministerial reports, and the Argentine Congressional Record. He also makes extensive use of national and party newspapers and journals, political memoirs, and collections of essays by party leaders.

Walter concludes that the party enjoyed relative electoral and legislative success because of efficient organization, capable leadership, and specific, well-reasoned programs. On the other hand, it failed to create a firm working-class base or to extend its influence much beyond Buenos Aires, mainly because of its inability to relate adequately to the needs of the proletariat and to the growth of nationalist sentiment. The analysis of these successes and failures also provides an important background for understanding the rise to power of Juan Perón and Peronism.

Questioning the boundaries between politics and economics

 

Jean-Louis Laville’s large body of work has focused on an intellectual history of the concept of solidarity since the Industrial Revolution. In The Solidarity Economy, his most famous distillation of this work, Laville establishes how the formations of economic solidarities (unions, activism, and other forms of associationalism) reveal that the boundaries between politics and economics are porous and structured such that politics, ideally a pure expression of ethics and values, is instead integrated with economic concerns. 

Exploring the possibilities and long histories of association, The Solidarity Economy identifies the power of contemporary social and solidarity movements and examines the history of postcapitalist practices in which democratic demands invade the heart of the economy. The Solidarity Economy ranges in focus from workers associations in France dating back to the nineteenth century, to associations of African Americans and feminists in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to a Brazilian landless-worker coalition in the twentieth century. 

Studying solidarity associations over time allows us to examine how we can recombine the economic and political spheres to address dependencies and inequalities. Ultimately, The Solidarity Economy has global scope and inspiring examples of associations that deepen democracy.

In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011.

Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research, activist and scholar Carwil Bjork-James provides an up-close history of the indigenous-led protests that changed Bolivia. At the heart of the study is a new approach to the interaction between protest actions and the parts of the urban landscape they claim. These “space-claiming protests” both communicate a message and exercise practical control over the city. Bjork-James interrogates both protest tactics—as experiences and as tools—and meaning-laden spaces, where meaning is part of the racial and political geography of the city.

Taking the streets of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz as its vantage point, The Sovereign Streetoffers a rare look at political revolution as it happens. It documents a critical period in Latin American history, when protests made headlines worldwide, where a generation of pro-globalization policies were called into question, and where the indigenous majority stepped into government power for the first time in five centuries.

The Spanish element in Texas water law is a matter of utmost importance to many landholders whose livelihood is dependent on securing water for irrigation and to many communities particularly concerned about water supply.

Titles to some 280,000 acres of Texas land originated in grants made by the Crown of Spain or by the Republic of Mexico. For these lands, the prevailing law, even today, is the Hispanic American civil law. Thus the question of determining just what water rights were granted by the Spanish Crown in disposing of lands in Texas is more than a matter of historical interest. It is a subject of great practical importance.

Spanish law enters directly into the question of these lands, but its influence is by no means confined to them. Texas water law in general traces its roots primarily to the Spanish law, not to the English common law doctrine of riparian rights or to the Western doctrine of prior appropriation (both of which were, however, eventually incorporated in Texas law). A clear understanding of this background might have saved the state much of the current confusion and chaos regarding its water law.

Dobkins’s book offers an intensive and unusually readable study of the subject. The author has traced water law from its origin in the ancient world to the mid-twentieth century, interpreting the effect of water on the counties concerned, setting forth in detail the development of water law in Spain, and explaining its subsequent adoption in Texas. Copious notes and a complete bibliography make the work especially valuable.

The idea for this book came in the midst of the great seven-year drought in Texas, from 1950 to 1957. The author gave two reasons for her study: “One was my belief that the water problems, crucial to all Texas, can be solved only when Texans become conscious of their imperative needs and only if they become informed and aroused enough to act.

“The second reason came from a realization that water—common, universal, and ordinary as it is—had been overlooked by the historian. It is high time that this oversight be corrected. In American history the significance of land, especially in terms of the frontier, has been spelled out in large letters. The importance of water has been recognized by few.”

The State You See uncovers a racial gap in the way the American government appears in people’s lives. It makes it clear that public policy changes over the last fifty years have driven all Americans to distrust the government that they see in their lives, even though Americans of different races are not seeing the same kind of government.

For white people, these policy changes have involved a rising number of generous benefits submerged within America’s tax code, which taken together cost the government more than Social Security and Medicare combined. Political attention focused on this has helped make welfare and taxes more visible representations of government for white Americans. As a result, white people are left with the misperception that government does nothing for them, apart from take their tax money to spend on welfare. Distrust of government is the result. For people of color, distrust is also rampant but for different reasons. Over the last fifty years, America has witnessed increasingly overbearing policing and swelling incarceration numbers. These changes have disproportionately impacted communities of color, helping to make the criminal legal system a unique visible manifestation of government in these communities.

While distrust of government emerges in both cases, these different roots lead to different consequences. White people are mobilized into politics by their distrust, feeling that they must speak up in order to reclaim their misspent tax dollars. In contrast, people of color are pushed away from government due to a belief that engaging in American elections will yield the same kind of unresponsiveness and violence that comes from interactions with the police. The result is a perpetuation of the same kind of racial inequality that has always been present in American democracy. The State You See is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how the American government engages in subtle forms of discrimination and how it continues to uphold racial inequality in the present day.

The State of Islam tells the story of Pakistan through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the global rise of militant Islam.

Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined ‘political’ realm, Saadia Toor highlights the significance of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. This extra dimension allows Toor to explain how the struggle between Marxists and liberal nationalists was influenced and eventually engulfed by the agenda of the religious right.

Timely and unique, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the roots of modern Pakistan and the likely outcome of current power struggles in the country.

A poignant reckoning with the Marxism of a generation and its militant postcolonial intellectuals.

Arwa Salih was a member of the political bureau of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party, founded in the wake of the Arab–Israeli War and the vibrant Egyptian student movement of the early 1970s. Written more than a decade after Salih quit the party and left political life—and published shortly after she tragically took her own life—The Stillborn offers a devastatingly honest look at the tragic failure of both the national liberation and communist projects in Egypt.

This powerful, unflinching critique speaks not only to and about Salih’s own generation of left-wing activists, but also extends its gaze outward. The Stillborn addresses the broader, still fiercely salient dilemmas of revolutionary politics that continue to echo throughout the developing world in the postcolonial era.

Explore how food shaped humanity in this compelling archaeological journey. 

The Story of Food in the Human Past: How What We Ate Made Us Who We Are uses case studies from recent archaeological research to tell the story of food in human prehistory. Beginning with the earliest members of our genus, Robyn E. Cutright investigates the role of food in shaping who we are as humans during the emergence of modern Homo sapiens and through major transitions in human prehistory such as the development of agriculture and the emergence of complex societies.

This fascinating study begins with a discussion of how food shaped humans in evolutionary terms by examining what makes human eating unique, the use of fire to cook, and the origins of cuisine as culture and adaptation through the example of Neandertals. The second part of the book describes how cuisine was reshaped when humans domesticated plants and animals and examines how food expressed ancient social structures and identities such as gender, class, and ethnicity. Cutright shows how food took on special meaning in feasts and religious rituals and also pays attention to the daily preparation and consumption of food as central to human society.

Cutright synthesizes recent paleoanthropological and archaeological research on ancient diet and cuisine and complements her research on daily diet, culinary practice, and special-purpose mortuary and celebratory meals in the Andes with comparative case studies from around the world to offer readers a holistic view of what humans ate in the past and what that reveals about who we are.

 

In recent decades, sanctions have become the preferred tool for the nonviolent coercion of other nations. The US government employs sanctions and embargoes to pressure not only enemies but sometimes even its friends. Despite their ubiquity, the debate over their efficacy continues. Measuring their success is controversial since many sanctions are economic, while the desired outcomes are political. Under what circumstances can sanctions or embargoes deliver their intended policy objectives at an acceptable cost? How can they best be integrated with other available instruments of national power?

The Strategy of Sanctions uses case studies from antiquity to the present to evaluate the strategic utility of sanctions and embargoes. The authors utilize a blended approach combining earlier definitions of sanctions, concepts from teaching of strategy, as well as terms of their own creation. They apply a common framework for teaching strategy, which disaggregates operational-level from strategic-level goals, and goals from strategies. By examining sanctions in different eras and contexts, the book highlights the circumstances that are most conducive to their efficacy.

A deep dive into the mechanics of national human rights institutions and the forces that make or break their success.

In the years since World War II, the endeavor to promote human rights has gained momentum and become increasingly important within international relations. Yet these efforts often run into serious problems of enforcement.

Many countries formed national human rights institutions (NHRIs) with independent mandates to support and monitor government compliance with international human rights law. Be they commissions, ombudsmen, or tribunals, these institutions vary in their power and impact. For this book, Corina Lacatus surveyed NHRIs in Europe and around the world to determine their effectiveness and explain why some succeed while others fail.

The Strength of Our Commitments explores the relationship between the domestic and international support an institution receives and its ability to secure resources, credibility, and tangibly improve human rights conditions. Lacatus shows that NHRIs can be models of resilience, even in the face of opposition from political elites. Although their impact on human rights is difficult to measure, The Strength of Our Commitments shows how NHRIs’ strength comes from clearly defined formal powers, strong institutional leadership, and independence from political interference.