Mary Ann Fraser
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
Gay Wilson Allen
University of Iowa Press, 1995
Nicholas Popper
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Jeff Halper
Pluto Press, 2015
Edited by M. Hakan Yavuz with Feroz Ahmad
University of Utah Press, 2015
Erica van der Sijpt
Vanderbilt University Press, 2017
Sarah Dry
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Lay, M. G.
Rutgers University Press, 1999
This is the first comprehensive history of the world's roads, highways, bridges, and the people and vehicles that traverse them, from prehistoric times to the present. Encyclopedic in its scope, fascinating in its details, Ways of the World is a unique work for reference and browsing. Maxwell Lay considers the myriad aspects of roads and their users: the earliest pathways, the rise of wheeled vehicles and animals to pull them, the development of surfaced roads, the motives for road and bridge building, and the rise of cars and their influence on roads, cities, and society. The work is amply illustrated, well indexed and cross-referenced, and includes a chronology of road history and a full bibliography.
It is indispensable for anyone interested in travel, history, geography, transportation, cars, or the history of technology.
Sinclair Thomson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
Gary Kynoch
Ohio University Press, 2005
Since the late 1940s, a violent African criminal society known as the Marashea has operated in and around South Africa’s gold mining areas. With thousands of members involved in drug smuggling, extortion, and kidnapping, the Marashea was more influential in the day-to-day lives of many black South Africans under apartheid than were agents of the state. These gangs remain active in South Africa.
In We Are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999, Gary Kynoch points to the combination of coercive force and administrative weakness that characterized the apartheid state. As long as crime and violence were contained within black townships and did not threaten adjacent white areas, township residents were largely left to fend for themselves. The Marashea’s ability to prosper during the apartheid era and its involvement in political conflict led directly to the violent crime epidemic that today plagues South Africa.
Highly readable and solidly researched, We Are Fighting the World is critical to an understanding of South African society, past and present. This pioneering study challenges previous social history research on resistance, ethnicity, urban spaces, and gender in South Africa. Kynoch’s interviews with many current and former gang members give We Are Fighting the World an energy and a realism that are unparalleled in any other published work on gang violence in southern Africa.
Carolyn Holbrook
University of Minnesota Press, 2021
A brilliant and rich gathering of voices on the American experience of this past year and beyond, from Indigenous writers and writers of color from Minnesota
In this significant collection, Indigenous writers and writers of color bear witness to one of the most unsettling years in the history of the United States. Essays and poems vividly reflect and comment on the traumas we endured in 2020, beginning with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, deepened by the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the uprisings that immersed our city into the epicenter of passionate, worldwide demands for justice. In inspired and incisive writing these contributors speak unvarnished truths not only to the original and pernicious racism threaded through the American experience but also to the deeply personal, in essays about family, loss, food culture, economic security, and mental health. Their call and response is united here to rise and be heard.
We Are Meant to Rise lifts up the astonishing variety of BIPOC writers in Minnesota. From authors with international reputations to newly emerging voices, it features people from many cultures, including Indigenous Dakota and Anishinaabe, African American, Hmong, Somali, Afghani, Lebanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Mexican, transracial adoptees, mixed race, and LGBTQ+ perspectives. Most of the contributors have participated in More Than a Single Story, a popular and insightful conversation series in Minneapolis that features Indigenous and people of color speaking on what most concerns their communities.
We Are Meant to Rise meets the events of the day, the year, the centuries before, again and again, with powerful testament to the intrinsic and unique value of the human voice.
Contributors: Suleiman Adan, Mary Moore Easter, Louise Erdrich, Anika Fajardo, Safy-Hallan Farah, Said Farah, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, Pamela R. Fletcher Bush, Shannon Gibney, Kathryn Haddad, Tish Jones, Ezekiel Joubert III, Douglas Kearney, Ed Bok Lee, Ricardo Levins Morales, Arleta Little, Resmaa Menakem, Tess Montgomery, Ahmad Qais Munhazim, Melissa Olson, Alexs Pate, Bao Phi, Mona Susan Power, Samantha Sencer-Mura, Said Shaiye, Erin Sharkey, Sun Yung Shin, Michael Torres, Diane Wilson, Kao Kalia Yang, and Kevin Yang.
Rachel Lara van der Merwe
Rutgers University Press, 2026
We Are Not South African explores how national identity functions as a colonial tool of communication, control, and power. Author Rachel Lara van der Merwe examines how humans and the planet are integrally shaped by the idea of the nation and speculates on how different sociopolitical imaginaries, instead of the nation, could inform ways of being-together in the world.
Linking national identity to colonialism, the book broadens the idea of the nation to include its impact on all forms of life, human and more-than-human. Van der Merwe builds her argument on three central observations: that nations are made up of conflicting and fractured imaginaries, not unified, cohesive ones; the nation is divisive by nature, tracing back to its colonial origins; and the nation, along with the state, exploits both humans and more-than-humans. In order to build a more just and sustainable planetary society, she argues, liberation from such colonial formations is vital. In response, the book asks, How could we reimagine how we organize our societies through values of relationality and mutual care rather than rigid borders? What sociopolitical imaginaries do we need, or already possess, that might inform new configurations of community?
Geo Maher
Duke University Press, 2013
Based on interviews with grassroots organizers, former guerrillas, members of neighborhood militias, and government officials, Ciccariello-Maher presents a new history of Venezuelan political activism, one told from below. Led by leftist guerrillas, women, Afro-Venezuelans, indigenous people, and students, the social movements he discusses have been struggling against corruption and repression since 1958. Ciccariello-Maher pays particular attention to the dynamic interplay between the Chávez government, revolutionary social movements, and the Venezuelan people, recasting the Bolivarian Revolution as a long-term and multifaceted process of political transformation.
Pheng Cheah
Duke University Press, 2016
Yakov M. Rabkin
Pluto Press, 2016
Leigh Raiford
Duke University Press, 2026
Huseyn Aliyev
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Ethan B. Kapstein
Russell Sage Foundation, 2002
Atalia Omer
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Edited by Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez
University of Texas Press, 2005
Since the early twentieth century, technological transfers from the United States to Latin American countries have involved technologies of violence for social control. As the chapters in this book illustrate, these technological transfers have taken various forms, including the training of Latin American military personnel in surveillance and torture and the provision of political and logistic support for campaigns of state terror. The human cost for Latin America has been enormous—thousands of Latin Americans have been murdered, disappeared, or tortured, and whole communities have been terrorized into silence.
Organized by region, the essays in this book address the topic of state-sponsored terrorism in a variety of ways. Most take the perspective that state-directed political violence is a modern development of a regional political structure in which U.S. political interests weigh heavily. Others acknowledge that Latin American states enthusiastically received U.S. support for their campaigns of terror. A few see local culture and history as key factors in the implementation of state campaigns of political violence. Together, all the essays exemplify how technologies of terror have been transferred among various Latin American countries, with particular attention to the role that the United States, as a "strong" state, has played in such transfers.
Fernando Herrera Calderón
University of Arizona Press, 2027
The 1970s in Mexico were turbulent from the start. Insurgent voices converged across cities and rural peripheries. Militant labor, urban popular sectors, and Indigenous collectives erupted in expressions of broad social exhaustion. Rebellion, rooted in the layered betrayals of the postrevolutionary state and the fractures of a deteriorating modernity under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), fermented and boiled over.
At the core of this moment, Mexican youth found their way to political-military organizations, coalescing around shared ecologies of dissent and embedded in broader currents of revolutionary struggle. When Working Class Youth Dreamt in Red reconstructs these insurgent youth cultures and guerrilla imaginaries, reorienting the historiographical lens to center radical working class youth—especially urban students—as protagonists in a wider saga of revolutionary experimentation and political rupture.
At its conceptual core, this book offers a bold new interpretation of a turbulent moment in Mexican history. It shows how class shaped the epistemic horizons through which proletarian youth understood themselves and makes visible their role as central actors at the vanguard of a revolutionary time.
Kelan Lu
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Among all the decentralized authoritarian countries, China is distinctive not only because of its emergence as one of the largest foreign direct investment (FDI) recipient countries with one of the highest levels of fiscal decentralization, but also because of the combination of its fiscal decentralization and the cadre promotion system as incentive institutions for attracting FDI inflows. China is an important case to empirically investigate the impact of fiscal autonomy on adversarial investment because it has become the largest investment destination of its long-term adversary, Taiwan, with Taiwanese FDI being among the largest FDI in mainland China. Given the special role played by local Chinese governments in attracting and hosting Taiwanese FDI, it is important to study the differences between where Taiwanese FDI and other FDI goes.
Given the uniqueness of the China case and that of Taiwanese investment in mainland China, this book explores the following questions. What determines where FDI goes in authoritarian countries like China? Fiscal decentralization has been argued to be a driving force of skyrocketing FDI inflows in China due to its impact on local governments’ incentives. However, is the impact of fiscal autonomy on FDI monolithic with the dynamically changing levels of FDI inflows at the lower administrative levels in China, especially with its special cadre management system? Does the impact of fiscal decentralization on FDI strengthen or weaken or stay the same when attracting FDI inflows from adversarial states? And what are the implications of such adversarial investment—especially as it diffuses from coastal cities to the interior regions, or from key cities to peripheral regions—of decentralized authoritarian countries targeted by this investment?
Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Plenty of books tell you how to do research. This book helps you figure out WHAT to research in the first place, and why it matters.
The hardest part of research isn't answering a question. It's knowing what to do before you know what your question is. Where Research Begins tackles the two challenges every researcher faces with every new project: How do I find a compelling problem to investigate—one that truly matters to me, deeply and personally? How do I then design my research project so that the results will matter to anyone else?
This book will help you start your new research project the right way for you with a series of simple yet ingenious exercises. Written in a conversational style and packed with real-world examples, this easy-to-follow workbook offers an engaging guide to finding research inspiration within yourself, and in the broader world of ideas.
Read this book if you (or your students):
Under the expert guidance of award-winning researchers Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea, you will find yourself on the path to a compelling and meaningful research project, one that matters to you—and the world.
Maud Bracke
Central European University Press, 2007
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1970
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Denis MacShane
Haus Publishing, 2011
Mel Sunquist and Fiona Sunquist
University of Chicago Press, 2002

Robert W. Desmond
University of Iowa Press, 1981
Dean Robbins
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2025
Edited by Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer
Pluto Press, 2017
By Michelle A. Saint-Germain and Cynthia Chavez Metoyer
University of Texas Press, 2008
During the years between 1980 and 1999, in the midst of war and economic crisis, a record number of women were elected to national legislatures in Central American republics. Can quantitative increases in the presence of elected women in Central America produce qualitative political changes?
In this detailed study, Michelle A. Saint-Germain and Cynthia Chavez Metoyer explore the reasons for this unprecedented political rise of women, and what effect it has had on the region. Focusing on Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, the authors analyze national and regional indicators to evaluate various hypotheses concerning the reasons for women's electoral success in the region, as well as to make comparisons with findings from other world regions. They find that the election of more women depends on three things: the presence of a crisis, a pool of politically experienced women, and a culture of gender consciousness. They also compare the characteristics of Central American women legislators to women in other national legislatures around the world.
The authors document how elected women have used their policy-making power to begin to change the lives of all Central Americans, women and men alike. In more than seventy-five in-depth, personal interviews, these women legislators reflect on their lives, political careers, and gender identities in their own words, providing deep insights into recent events in this region.
Gwyn Campbell
Ohio University Press, 2007
Gwyn Campbell
Ohio University Press, 2008
By Victoria E. Rodríguez
University of Texas Press, 2003
Since the mid-1980s, a dramatic opening in Mexico's political and electoral processes, combined with the growth of a new civic culture, has created unprecedented opportunities for women and other previously repressed or ignored groups to participate in the political life of the nation. In this book, Victoria Rodríguez offers the first comprehensive analysis of how Mexican women have taken advantage of new opportunities to participate in the political process through elected and appointed office, nongovernmental organizations, and grassroots activism.
Drawing on scores of interviews with politically active women conducted since 1994, Rodríguez looks at Mexican women's political participation from a variety of angles. She analyzes the factors that have increased women's political activity: from the women's movement, to the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s, to increasing democratization, to the victory of Vicente Fox in the 2000 presidential election. She maps out the pathways that women have used to gain access to public life and also the roadblocks that continue to limit women's participation in politics, especially at higher levels of government. And she offers hopeful, yet realistic predictions for women's future participation in the political life of Mexico.
Patricia White
Duke University Press, 2015
Pedro A. G. dos Santos and Farida Jalalzai
Temple University Press, 2021
In 2010, Dilma Rousseff was the first woman to be elected President in Brazil. She was re-elected in 2014 before being impeached in 2016 for breaking budget laws. Her popularity and controversy both energized and polarized the country. In Women’s Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil, dos Santos and Jalalzai examine Rousseff’s presidency and what it means for a woman to hold (and lose) the country’s highest power.
The authors examine the ways Rousseff exercised dominant authority and enhanced women’s political empowerment. They also investigate the extent her gender played a role in the events of her presidency, including the political and economic crises and her ensuing impeachment. Emphasizing women’s political empowerment rather than representation, the authors assess the effects of women executives to more directly impact female constituencies—how they can empower women by appointing them to government positions; make policies that advance women’s equality; and, through visibility, create greater support for female politicians despite rampant sexism.
Women’s Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil uses Rousseff’s presidency as a case study to focus on the ways she succeeded and failed in using her authority to empower women. The authors’ findings have implications throughout the world.
Sophie Richter-Devroe
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Richter-Devroe's ethnographic approach draws from revealing in-depth interviews and participant observation in Palestine. The result: a forceful critique of mainstream conflict resolution methods and the failed woman-to-woman peacebuilding projects so lauded around the world. The liberal faith in dialogue as core of "the political" and the assumption that women's "nurturing" nature makes them superior peacemakers, collapse in the face of past and ongoing Israeli state violences.
Instead, women confront Israeli settler colonialism directly and indirectly in their popular and everyday acts of resistance. Richter-Devroe's analysis zooms in on the intricate dynamics of daily life in Palestine, tracing the emergent politics that women articulate and practice there. In shedding light on contemporary gendered "politics from below" in the region, the book invites a rethinking of the workings, shapes, and boundaries of the political.
Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds.
Duke University Press, 2009
Such words as security in Brazil, responsibility in Japan, community in Thailand, and hijāb in France changed the societies in which they moved even as the words were changed by them. Some words threatened to launch wars, as injury did in imperial Britain’s relations with China in the nineteenth century. Others, such as secularism, worked in silence to agitate for political change in twentieth-century Morocco. Words imposed or imported from abroad could be transformed by those who wielded them to oppose the very powers that first introduced them, as happened in Turkey, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Taken together, this selection of fourteen essays reveals commonality as well as distinctiveness across modern societies, making the world look different from the interdisciplinary and transnational perspective of “words in motion.”
Contributors. Mona Abaza, Itty Abraham, Partha Chatterjee, Carol Gluck, Huri Islamoglu, Claudia Koonz, Lydia H. Liu, Driss Maghraoui, Vicente L. Rafael, Craig J. Reynolds, Seteney Shami, Alan Tansman, Kasian Tejapira, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Daniel Hoffman
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Willie Thompson
Pluto Press, 2015
Edited by Leon Fink, Joseph A. McCartin, and Joan Sangster
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Since the Industrial Revolution, contributors argue, factors such as race, sex, and state intervention have mediated both the effect of economic depressions on workers' lives and workers' responses to those depressions. Contributors also posit a varying dynamic between political upheaval and economic crises, and between workers and the welfare state.
The volume ends with an examination of today's "Great Recession": its historical distinctiveness, its connection to neoliberalism, and its attendant expressions of worker status and agency around the world. A sobering conclusion lays out a likely future for workers--one not far removed from the instability and privation of the nineteenth century.
The essays in this volume offer up no easy solutions to the challenges facing today's workers. Nevertheless, they make clear that cogent historical thinking is crucial to understanding those challenges, and they push us toward a rethinking of the relationship between capital and labor, the waged and unwaged, and the employed and jobless.
Contributors are Sven Beckert, Sean Cadigan, Leon Fink, Alvin Finkel, Wendy Goldman, Gaetan Heroux, Joseph A. McCartin, David Montgomery, Edward Montgomery, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Melanie Nolan, Bryan D. Palmer, Joan Sangster, Judith Stein, Hilary Wainright, and Lu Zhang.
Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr.
Temple University Press, 2012
The aesthetic politics of social movements turn public life into a public stage, where mutual displays of performance often trump rational debate, and urban streets become sites of festivals and carnival. In his penetrating new book, Workers of the World, Enjoy!, Kenneth Tucker provides a new model for understanding social change in our image-saturated and aesthetically charged world. As emotional and artistic images inform our perceptions and evaluation of politics, art and performance often provide new and creative ways of understanding self and society.
Spanning the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, Workers of the World, Enjoy! uses examples from major social movements that have dramatically changed the dominant capitalist society—often in the name of labor. Tucker investigates how class and culture develop as he raises questions about what it means for public life and social movements when politics and drama come together.
Tucker catalogues how aesthetic politics influences social movements—from French Revolutionary syndicalism and fascism to the selling of the President and the street theater of the contemporary global justice movement. He also discusses the work of political theorists including Jurgen Habermas, Jeffrey Alexander, and Nancy Fraser to critique the ways public sphere has been studied.
C. L. R. James
Duke University Press, 2017
Jonathan GS Koppell
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Dilemmas from climate change to financial meltdowns make it clear that global interconnectedness is the norm in the twenty-first century. As a result, global governance organizations (GGOs)—from the World Trade Organization to the Forest Stewardship Council—have taken on prominent roles in the management of international affairs. These GGOs create and promulgate rules to address a host of pressing problems. But as World Rule reveals, they struggle to meet two challenges: building authority despite limited ability to impose sanctions and maintaining legitimacy while satisfying the demands of key constituencies whose support is essential to a global rulemaking regime.
Through a novel empirical study of twenty-five GGOs, Jonathan GS Koppell provides a clearer picture of the compromises within and the competition among these influential institutions by focusing attention on their organizational design. Analyzing four aspects of GGO organization in depth—representation and administration, the rulemaking process, adherence and enforcement, and interest group participation—Koppell describes variation systemically, identifies patterns, and offers explanations that link GGO design to the fundamental challenge of accountability in global governance.
Gerhard L. Weinberg
Brandeis University Press, 1981
Lindsay Stuart Hill
University of Wisconsin Press, 2025
Robert W. Rydell
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel
University of Arizona Press, 2022