Explore the latest titles in JSTOR’s Path to Open program

Algorithmic Worldmaking: The Rhetorical Craft of Networked Order
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Author: Jeremy David Johnson
Discipline: Communication Studies

Description:
Algorithmic Worldmaking is an urgent exploration of the dynamic relationship between algorithms that encode their human creators’ assumptions and the humans whose choices are shaped by these algorithms in search engines, social media, and other digital spaces. Transcending discussions of one or the other, Jeremy David Johnson traces the corrupting political and social influences that arise from their mutual interaction.Johnson uses the concept of kosmos in its sense of a dynamic order to frame the interplay between algorithms, humans, and their environments. He first shows how algorithms, far from being objective or unbiased, perpetuate human errors. Johnson then suggests a framework of four parts—navigation, exploration, maintenance, and monetization—to map the variety of political consequences to a society influenced by these four factors.Citing controversies at major platforms such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook, Johnson demonstrates how algorithms limit and shape human thought. He makes several persuasive arguments. First, algorithms and humans share agency but humans have exceptional responsibility. Second, the algorithmic kosmos mirrors and shapes social oppression. Third, algorithms incentivize capitalist exploitation. Last, these influences damage democratic deliberation.

Black Movement: African American Urban History since the Great Migration
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Author: Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar
Author Affiliation: University of Connecticut
Discipline: African American Studies

Description:
The massive movement of Black people to, from, and within US cities since 1970 has been as dramatic as its predecessors, the Reconstruction-era first and especially the second “Great Migration” that spanned from the 1910s to about 1970. These earlier migrations fundamentally altered the political, social, cultural, and economic landscapes of cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit, which by the end of the twentieth century had elected Black mayors and sent dozens of African Americans to Congress, state houses, and city councils. In these cities, Black people were at parity or overrepresented in municipal jobs, and all were cultural hubs for Black literature, music, film, and other creative projects. Since the early 1970s, however, Black migration patterns have significantly shifted away from the major urban centers of the Great Migration, leaving iconic black communities mostly non-black. In this anthology, Jeffrey Ogbar and his contributors explore why and where residents of historically Black urban centers go after it’s no longer tenable to remain when economic, demographic, political, and other circumstances of cities change. In Ogbar’s native South-Central Los Angeles, for example, Black people have created new neighborhoods in other parts of the city or left the state altogether, often to southern states and cities such as Atlanta and Charlotte. In turn, these cities and suburbs have developed into dynamic centers of Black life in the 21st century. Many excellent books examine Black urban history in modern America, but most do so through the lens of single cities, and there is no historical overview of Black migration within the US since 1970. This book addresses this gap. It is organized in five sections, where contributors explore the rise of Black municipal power, popular music and social space, suburbanization, grassroots and radical political organizing and movements, and education. Contributors also survey a wide range of cities spanning from New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Dayton to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Memphis, Boston, Camden, and Hartford.

Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Author: Faith Barter
Author Affiliation: University of Oregon
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
Black thinkers of the Antebellum era grappled with what it meant to belong: to a place, to a nation, to a global community, to a racial status. These contentious exchanges happened in public, on the pages of newspapers and pamphlets, and in speeches at political conventions and rallies. In reading Black writers as architects of legal possibility, Faith Barter plays on the coincidental intimacy of “prose” and the legal term pro se, which refers to litigants who represent themselves in legal proceedings. The book studies multiple genres—short stories, novels, freedom narratives, speeches, criminal confessions, periodicals, and pamphlets—reading them alongside legal historical material, including trial transcripts, judicial opinions, and statutes. In this mix of legal and literary history, Barter argues that the Black American literary tradition didn’t just react to the legal frameworks of the time, but transformed them in the forms of appeal, confession, jurisdiction, and citation to precedent. Barter organizes her book on each of those four principles, reading Black writers not as simply witnesses to pain and injustice, but as architects of what the legal system could be, by using those legal forms to challenge existing logics of power.

Chai Noon: Jews and the Cinematic Wild West

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Author: Jonathan L. Friedmann
Author Affiliation: Academy for Jewish Religion; Greenwich School of Theology
Discipline: Film Studies

Description:
In Chai in the Saddle Jonathan L. Friedmann applies some of the central questions of Jewish film studies to the Western, once Hollywood’s most popular genre: What makes a movie “Jewish”? What counts as a “Jewish image” onscreen? What types of Jewish representation are appropriate? How much of a film’s “Jewishness” owes to the filmmakers, and how much to the viewer’s interpretation? It joins other reconsiderations of outsider and minority representations in Westerns to offer a more nuanced view of the genre, and engages larger themes of Jewish identity in popular film; depictions of race, ethnicity, and foreignness in the Western genre; and the production of the imaginary West.

Contested Vision: Captivity, Creativity, and Paris Prisons, 1793-1894
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Author: Gonzalo J. Sánchez
Author Affiliation: Juilliard School; Columbia University; American Philosophical Society; École des hautes études en sciences sociales
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
How to creatively portray the nineteenth-century prison? Presenting original research findings and proposing novel connections between penal and visual history, this book investigates how artists and other inmates attempted to communicate their captivity by pictorial means. The prisons of Paris were characterized by distinctive scopic regimes from 1793 until 1894, especially the ascendant cellular jail, in which visibility was a central element of punitive practices. As authorities imposed increasing invisibility on detainees, artists such as Hubert Robert, Jacques-Louis David, Honoré Daumier, Gustave Courbet, Armand-Désiré Gautier, Maximilien Luce, and Théophile Steinlen, among others, spent time behind bars grappling with representational strategies that almost always required conjoining words and images. The artists’ prison was an ekphrastic site par excellence, a topography whose space could be depicted only when its words—graffiti, inscriptions, regulations—were bestowed legibility as signs. Penitentiary bureaucrats and criminologists analogously seized on the words and images through which inmates contested their invisibility to develop theories on recidivism, graffiti, and the “aesthetics of criminality,” an ersatz study of inmate representations. The visual output scrutinized here is not mere illustration; these creations help fuse an integrated narrative showing how prison, art, and politics shaped each other.

Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Author: Zaid Adhami
Author Affiliation: Williams College
Discipline: Religion

Description:
How does one define an authentic religious faith or practice? This question could be asked of any form of religion, but it looms especially large for today’s American Muslims, among whom a range of secular and religious commentators have described a “crisis of faith” and a growing willingness to doubt, question, or challenge things once considered essential tenets of Islam. But how do those who define themselves to be faithful understand their religious identities amid serious doubts, reservations, anxieties, and critiques of a faith’s creeds and doctrines? And how is the nature of an authentic faith affected by communal and external authorities as well as by individual understanding and experience? Zaid Adhami engages these questions by drawing on an ethnographic study of American Muslims in Boston, Massachusetts—a community that is long established, generally well educated, diverse, and clearly grappling with tensions between conviction, commitment, and doubt. Adhami’s research is full of nuanced insights into the ways self-identified faithful Muslims understand and live in these tensions. For scholars interested in the variety of thought and experience that can contribute to religious identity, Adhami’s arguments will reinforce the extent to which authentic faith resides in things that aren’t encompassed in commonly understood sources of religious authority. For those especially interested in the lived experience of Islam, Adhami’s work helps establish that doubt and dissent are meaningful forms of constructive engagement with the faith and its teachings rather than a sign of crisis or weakness.

Fashioning Inland Communities: Trade and Popular Culture in Central East Africa
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Author: Yaari Felber-Seligman
Author Affiliation: City College of New York
Discipline: African Studies

Description:
When viewed from the economic centers of the Indian Ocean or Atlantic, the Rufiji Ruvuma region of east Africa, crossing what is now Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique, would look like a periphery. But the same factors that marginalize the region historically brought distinct opportunities. In Fashioning Inland Communities, Yaari Felber-Seligman traces the long history—from the first millennium CE into the twentieth century—of Ruvuma trade practices with a changing world. Felber-Seligman argues that Ruvuma trade should be understood fundamentally as a set of voluntary choices undertaken and revised to further communities’ aspirations. Over their long history, Ruvuma used fashion to build varied communities, from local to pan-regional, reflecting the dynamic relationships among inland groups. Examples of Ruvuma popular fashions reveal processes of meaning-making and community building that call for us to expand our attention to the ways in which East African peoples interacted alongside, as well as beyond, trade networks that sourced prestige and commercial goods. Popular culture here emerges as a heterarchic force that shaped lasting multidirectional connections across and between Ruvuma and their neighbors. As both a subject and a strategy for historical analysis, the history of popular fashion enables shifts in how we view histories of small, decentralized societies as they encounter larger economies. Fashioning Inland Communities shows how this history has implications for our understanding not only of trade but of material culture, community, gender, and family.

Illustrating the Victorian Supernatural
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Author: Simon Cooke
Author Affiliation: UK-based independent researcher
Discipline: Art & Art History

Description:
Outlining how supernatural themes were represented through book and magazine illustrations in Victorian culture, this book sheds new light on paranormal, strange, and mysterious subjects. Additionally, it examines the connections between supernatural illustration, women’s ghost story writing, race, social class, and colonialism.

Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Author: María de los Ángeles Picone
Author Affiliation: Boston College
Discipline: Latin American Studies

Description:
In nineteenth-century Latin America, newly formed republics negotiated regional, international, and interior boundaries, and, implicitly, the Indigenous people that inhabited them. Governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders, but to define the physical contours of their respective nations that would give citizens national identities. From Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, crews of cartographers and other experts surveyed the terrain, taking bountiful notes of flora, fauna, weather, soil, and people, and transferred that data to extensive reports and detailed maps that literally and represented the cornerstone of state building in peripheral regions. María de los Ángeles Picone examines border-making in the northern Patagonian Andes, a capacious process that included explorers, migrants, local and national authorities, bandits, and tourists, each of whom made sense of the nation through their everyday lives and relationships to the environment. All of them forged visions of “Chile” or “Argentina” based on the border crossing they did in the space where southeastern Chile meets northwestern Argentina. By repositioning the analytical focus from Santiago and Buenos Aires to northern Patagonia, Picone reveals that different, even contradictory, practices in border spaces contributed to the same nationalizing goals spurred by officials in the capital cities.

No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Author: Deborah Mutnick
Author Affiliation: Long Island University
Discipline: African American Studies

Description:
With the publication of Native Son in 1940, Richard Wright became the best-selling Black American writer in US history domestically and internationally. And while Native Son and Black Boy have remained required reading for generations, the rest of Wright’s prodigious body of work lacks comparable analysis and acclaim awarded to his successors, particularly James Baldwin. This may be due in part to Wright’s expatriation to Paris, membership in and later renunciation of the Communist Party of the USA, his friendship and acrimony with Baldwin, and his surveillance by and later cooperation with the US government against political and race radicals. These numerous contradictions that riddle his canonical stature have limited the number of scholarly and popular works on Wright, which is why Deborah Mutnick’s reassessment of his life, times, and writing is valuable and welcome for a contemporary audience. Neither a conventional biography nor a standard work of literary criticism, Mutnick examines key moments and themes in Wright’s life, including his relationship to the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, the CPUSA, Marxism, and the Cold War. Mutnick demonstrates how Wright’s work reflected, narrated, and changed history, and she offers new insights into the literary and theoretical contributions of his published and unpublished writing. Mutnick brings to light many understudied themes of Wright’s literary corpus, including Black nationalism, gender, Pan-Africanism, Black Power, and natural and social ecologies. Despite a resurgence of Wright scholarship, particularly since the centennial of his birth in 2008 and the publication of The Man Who Lived Underground in 2021, Mutnick’s mission is to deepen knowledge and understandings of who Wright was as a writer, a Black man, and a global American.

Public Loves, Private Troubles: Migration, Technology, and Intimacy in Rural Indigenous Guatemala
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Author: Meghan Farley Webb
Discipline: Gender Studies

Description:
Anthropologist Meghan Farley Webb’s ethnography, Public Loves, Private Troubles, uses the lens of cellphones and other digital technologies to unpack marriage, love, sexuality, and family issues of Kaqchikel Maya women who remain in Guatemala while their husbands are part of the transnational migration workforce. Indigenous intimacy has been underexplored in ethnographic literature, this is among the first books to focus on information technology impact on intimacy and family in the Maya area. Overall, Webb shows how Maya women are empowered with their more autonomous lives when the husbands are absent but also are constrained by social media monitoring of their activities.

Reorienting China: The Landscape of Chinese Civilization
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
Author: Cho-yun Hsu
Translated by: David Ownby
Discipline: History

Description:
This book is an unusual excursion into Chinese cultural history. In a sweeping narrative spanning over five thousand years, Professor Cho-yun Hsu moves beyond accounts that focus solely on the internal evolution of Chinese culture. He revisits early Chinese civilization, integrating recent archaeological discoveries to reshape our understanding of its development. Employing a big history perspective, Hsu reconstructs the dynamic interplay of diverse ethnic groups and cultures within and beyond China, highlighting the constant friction and fusion that shaped its trajectory. This insightful work reveals why Chinese civilization has endured despite numerous internal and external hardships and turmoils. It offers a nuanced and thought-provoking perspective on China’s past and its relevance to the present.

Searching for Memory: Aluízio Palmar and the Shadow of Dictatorship in Brazil
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Author: Jacob Blanc
Author Affiliation: McGill University
Discipline: Latin American Studies

Description:
Jacob Blanc’s biography of Brazilian journalist and activist Aluízio Ferreira Palmar (b. 1943) tells the remarkable story of a revolutionary who, after his incarceration and later banishment as a political prisoner during his country’s military dictatorship of the late 1960s through the 1970s, would go on to devote his life to recovering the memory and documenting the evidence of human rights abuses in Brazil. While there is a plethora of books on the dictatorship, the majority are studies of the military’s violent repression of dissidents, the armed left’s resistance to it, or the memoirs and testimonial literature from both former militants and torture victims. Blanc’s book offers something different by exploring not only what happened during the dictatorship years but also the contested channels through which the memories of these intense and often traumatic events have been sustained, shaped, and retold. Palmar’s recounting of his life, in personal interviews with Blanc as well as from a wide array of source material, offers a valuable window into how former activists view their place in history. More broadly, Blanc argues that the narratives and reflections of activists like Palmar are far from rote, carefully rehearsed narratives but rather the learned, intentional actions of human rights activists working against a dominant culture of impunity and silence. In this context, Blanc initiates the concept of “memory scripts,” which illustrates how scripting and performing a memory can serve as an act of perseverance and power, important for individuals and communities seeking both to heal from and redefine trauma for future activism. Ultimately, Blanc contends, cyclical and repetitive memory scripts, created by “memory entrepreneurs” such as Palmar, are required to break social and political impasses about truth and justice.

Secular Sensibilities: Romance, Marriage, and Contemporary Algerian Immigration to France and Québec
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Author: Jennifer A. Selby
Author Affiliation: Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador
Discipline: Religion

Description:
How do secular politics work to manage the emotional, affective, and embodied nature of religion in the public sphere? Drawing on extensive transnational ethnography in Algeria, France and Québec, Canada, and discourse analysis of contemporary French and Québécois governmental legislation on secularism and immigration, Selby considers expectations for secular bodies and sensibilities among Muslim men and women of Algerian origin. In her subjects’ evocative narratives of longing and belonging, Selby charts how secular sensibilities emerge in her interlocutors’ marriage partner preferences, family relationships, rituals,dress, and more. Selby reveals how these sensibilities develop and respond to legal, policy, and other forms of state authority, with legacies of colonialism in France and Québec playing a substantial role. In demonstrating how secularism is expressed and experienced around intimate relationships and civil marriage, Selby persuasively argues that romance is crucial contact zone for the politics of secularism. Her study invites readers to wrestle with their own entanglements in state and cultural expectations of secular bodies and the liberal fictions of separation between religious and public spheres.

Sister City Diplomacy: Community Engagement in U.S.-Russian Relations from the Cold War to Today
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Author: Douglas C. Nord
Author Affiliation: Umeå University
Discipline: International Relations

Description:
Sister City Diplomacy offers a close look at the relationship between official sister cities Duluth, Minnesota, and Petrozavodsk, Karelia, during the closing decades of the Cold War and until today. With an almost ethnographic level of detail, Sister City Diplomacy investigates the lived experiences of the local officials, university administrators and faculty, and average citizens who drove real and lasting relationships across the Iron Curtain. The result is an impressive contribution to our understanding of successful “citizen diplomacy” and the role individual citizens and organizations can play in global geopolitics.

Social Housing, Antisocial Behaviour and Risk: The Challenges of UK Disability Law
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Author: Leigh Roberts
Discipline: Law

Description:
Analyses empirical findings from the author’s original research with social landlords to illustrate how housing officers’ medicalised and moral understandings of disability and risk affect their decision-making about anti-social behaviour and how these shape different outcomes for perpetrators.

Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Author: Nicholas F. Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis
Discipline: Political Science

Description:
Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney Milkis argue that Trump’s unsettling ascent to the White House was decades in the making, the result of numerous institutional and constitutional changes they call “presidentialism.”

The Contested State: The Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency during the Asian Financial Crisis
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Author: Matthew Busch
Discipline: Asian Studies

Description:
This book provides an in-depth, inside look at an important and controversial piece of Indonesia’s experience during the cataclysmic Asian Financial Crisis (often referred to in this text as “the crisis”) during the years 1997-2004.

The Monkey Chronicles
Publisher: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
Author: Xi Xi
Translated by: Jasmine Tong Man and David Morgan
Edited by: John Minford
Author Affiliation: Grantham College of Education; The Australian National University; Hang Seng University of Hong Kong; Lingnan University
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
After her celebrated The Teddy Bear Chronicles, Xi Xi turns her creative vision towards the world of the primate kingdom. At the age of 73, Xi Xi traveled extensively across Asia, from tropical forests to conservation centers, immersing herself in the natural world of apes and monkeys. Xi Xi then documented 51 endearing ape and monkey puppets that she had sewn, weaving them into a series of insightful dialogues with her friend, the Hong Kong writer Ho Fuk Yan. These discussions cover the depiction of apes and monkeys in Chinese and Western literature, painting, drama, and film, as well as the close relationship between humans and their primate relatives. Xi Xi’s own words, imbued with a profound empathy, reveal the heart of her work: “If there is a common theme to our conversation, it is to respect life and speak for those lives that have been discriminated against in the history of human development, and apes are the starting point for this.”

The Shock of Colonialism in New England: Fragments from a Frontier
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Author: Meghan C. L. Howey
Discipline: American Indian Studies
Description:
Explores the untold impacts of colonialism in New England through diverse colonist lives, Indigenous encounters, and environmental legacies. In The Shock of Colonialism in New England, archaeologist Meghan C. L. Howey uses excavations in the seventeenth-century colonial frontier of the Great Bay Estuary/P8bagok in today’s New Hampshire to trace the connection between European global colonialism and the planetary climate crises. Howey shows how this landscape holds forgotten stories of what it meant to live through the shock of colonialism.These stories reveal an unexpected diversity and dynamism among English colonists, multifaceted encounters with Indigenous peoples, and lasting environmental damage from labor-intensive industries. Early Euro-American maps and stunning archaeological finds, such as a broken pickaxe embedded in a hearth and a historical marker for the Oyster River “Massacre” of 1694, complicate our limited views of a shared past.The reality of English colonialism in the dispossession of Indigenous lands and its wake is not what is seen commemorated. Howey’s work is a powerful corrective that traces the rise of intergenerational colonial wealth made possible by land commodified as property, the increased labor required to work newly opened land, the importation of indentured Scots and enslaved Africans to provide that labor, and the resulting degradation of the natural environment. Through Howey’s insights into the stories they tell, these fragments from a frontier can help contemporary readers better understand the past as they seek a more just and sustainable future.

The Sound of Exile: European Jewish Refugees in Shanghai, 1938-1947
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Author: Tang Yating
Author Affiliation: Shanghai Conservatory of Music
Discipline: Music

Description:
In The Sound of Exile, Tang Yating unveils the vibrant but understudied world of Jewish music-making in Shanghai, focusing on the period between 1938 and 1947. Combining diaspora studies and ethnomusicology, he examines how Central European Jewish refugees employed music as a means of reconstructing cultural identity amid turmoil and displacement. From orchestral arrangements and cabarets to traditional synagogue liturgy, music served as the common thread weaving together the history of Jewish life, thought, and exile; the institutions refugees built to sustain themselves; and personal experiences in both religious and secular settings. As teachers and performers, Jewish immigrants also spurred the development of Western classical music in China. Navigating a Shanghai that was embroiled in its own complicated history and the intricate politics marking its settlements and concessions, the Jewish refugee community made music that embraced survival, salvation, and after the war, gratitude for the city most would leave behind.

The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Author: Justin F. Jackson
Author Affiliation: Bard College
Discipline: History

Description:
On the eve of the Spanish-American War in April 1898, the US Army was minuscule, ill-equipped, and poorly prepared for battle compared to its peers. Yet when the war ended a scant 4 months later, this same military had defeated the Spanish army in Cuba and the Philippines, and by 1905 had pacified and suppressed nationalist insurgencies in both places. Despite its lack of experience in colonial administration, for the next 15 years the army governed more than eight million people in Cuba and the Philippines before ceding these islands to civilian administrations. How was it able to accomplish this massive task? Justin F. Jackson shows that the United States’ capacity to acquire and administer these islands rested to a great degree upon its army’s use of Cubans and Filipinos as workers and the particular ways it interacted with them as workforces. The US Army depended on tens of thousands of Cubans and Filipinos to fight its wars and conduct civil administration. Whether compelled to work for free or voluntarily working for wages, Cubans and Filipinos who served the army variously as interpreters, guides, porters, prostitutes, and laborers became the arms of empire, enabling US foreign rule and altering old cultural hierarchies in ways that endured in subsequent “civilian” regimes. In doing so, Jackson offers new ways to understand not only the rise of American military might during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but how that military power influenced government and culture around the world.

Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance
Publisher: Clemson University Press
Author: Benjamin D. Hagen and Taya Sazama
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance explores the intersection of two fundamental interests of Virginia Woolf, offering to feminist modernist studies cutting-edge readings of primary works, comparative studies of Woolf and other modernist professionals–performers, and fresh accounts of Woolf’s relationship to women’s professional and public labor. The eleven chapters demonstrate the double valence of the volume’s key words: “performance” conveys acts of staging as well as occupational work while “profession” encompasses careers and occupations as well as staged declarations. Moreover, “performance” evokes a sense of the “performative”: speech acts, gestures, and other signifying behaviors that make something so, accomplishing and avowing lived realities as well as ethical values, socio-political positions, aesthetic preferences, and life-securing identities and hopes for the present and future. Beyond this semantic play, the stakes of the entanglement of profession and performance in Woolf’s life and work are far-reaching. Centering a concern with modernist networks, this collection explores women’s labor in literary and other aesthetic fields (e.g., publishing and photography), labor which professes new values and models new methods. Several chapters develop clarifying critiques of gender politics that reward the reproduction of professional status quos, highlighting subversive performances that threaten to unmoor, modify, or discard these politics.

Warfare and the Dynamics of Political Control
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Edited by: Brian R. Billman
Author Affiliation: University of North Carolina
Discipline: Peace & Conflict Studies

Description:
Warfare and the Dynamics of Political Control explores how warfare shapes the establishment, maintenance, and collapse of political institutions across diverse societies and historical periods. The chapters cover a wide range of topics and time periods to bring into focus the material and ideological drivers of conflict, offering deep insights into the complex interplay between violence and political power.

West Virginia’s War: The Civil War in Documents
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Edited by: William Kerrigan
Author Affiliation: Muskingum University
Discipline: History

Description:
This perspective on the creation of West Virginia during the Civil War challenges the conventional historiographical emphasis on military battles by highlighting the significance of transportation networks and citizen allegiances.