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Reading early medieval Spanish documents that are little known to many Anglophone scholars, including records of church councils, sermons, and letters, Santiago Castellanos charts the formation of the Visigothic kingdom in Iberia and how it was later reinvented from the episcopal point of view.

Dyan Elliott demonstrates how scandal-averse policies in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy resulted in the widespread sexual abuse of boys from late antiquity through the later Middle Ages, and argues that the same clerical prerogatives and strategies for the cover-up of abuse remain in place today.

Voting in Indian Country uses conflicts over voting rights to understand the centuries-long fight for Native self-determination, using ethnographic data and weaving together history, politics, and law to provide a robust view of this often-ignored struggle for social justice.

Focusing on the creation of the African Colonization Society (ACS) in the nineteenth century, The World Colonization Made chronicles the rise and fall of the colonization movement-an ideology that enabled Americans to envision a world of self-governing republics that harmonized with the racialized political institutions at home.

Examining the transcripts of nearly two hundred murder trials, The Ecology of Homicide presents the voices of victims and perpetrators of crime, as well as the enforcers of the law, to show how the combined effects of poverty and disinvestment accumulated to sustain and deepen what Eric C. Schneider calls an "ecology of violence."

Subscription Theater asks why turn-of-the-century British and Irish citizens spent so much time, money, and effort joining subscription lists. Matthew Franks argues that subscribers have been responsible for how we value audience and repertoire today, offering a new account of the relationship between ephemera, drama, and democracy.

Claire M. Gilbert develops the notion of "fiduciary translation" and uses it to illuminate the ways in which Arabic-Spanish translators in early modern Spain made themselves indispensable for the administration of the empire, despite the increased animosity Arabic speakers faced in the age of the Inquisition.

In Nuclear Country, Catherine McNicol Stock explores the question of why, between 1968 and 1992, most voters in the Dakotas abandoned their distinctive ideological heritage and came to embrace the New Right. Stock focuses on how this transformation coincided with the coming of the military and national security states to the countryside.

A World at Sea sharpens and expands our understanding of how the maritime world contributed to global transformations in the early modern world, from inventing knowledge-making practices to pioneering new ways of organizing labor to legal experiments that spanned land and sea.

Bootlegged Aliens explores the history of illegal immigration, migrant labor, and the early formation of U.S. immigration policy along the country's northern border, demonstrating how this often-overlooked region influenced the practices and experiences surrounding illegal immigration in early twentieth-century industrial America.

Continuing her earlier work on women free-trade-zone factory workers in Sri Lanka, Sandya Hewamanne here explores the ways in which these women negotiate their social and economic lives once back in their villages and highlights the complex effects of globalization and transnational production on communities in the Global South.

Debra Kaplan offers the first extensive analysis of Jewish poor relief in early modern German cities and towns, exploring the intersections between various sectors of the populations-from wealthy patrons to the homeless and stateless poor-providing an intimate portrait of the early modern Ashkenazic community.

Unearthing personal stories from the archive, Wicked Flesh shows how black women, from Senegambia in West Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans, used intimacy and kinship to redefine freedom in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Their practices laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century.

Bringing together a wide range of literary, historical, and political sources, Jesper Majbom Madsen examines how Pompey's cities in Roman Pontus were initially organized, how they developed over time, and how inhabitants in this part of the Roman Empire defined themselves culturally and politically.

Electoral Capitalism brings new perspective to the crisis of inequality during the Gilded Age. Examining how party leaders governed by accumulating wealth through the spoils system, Broxmeyer places in historical context debates over capitalism and democracy that continue to resonate today.

The world has seen many new constitutions promising social rights and adopting innovative representative institutions. This book presents examples from the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia that show these constitutions face many challenges, especially the rise of authoritarian regimes that endanger the rule of law.

Featuring more than sixty illustrations, In the Manner of the Franks traces the long history of early medieval hunting from the fourth through the tenth centuries. Eric J. Goldberg focuses chiefly on elite men and the changing role that hunting played in articulating kingship, status, and manhood in the post-Roman world.

Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political history to consider not whether African Americans participated in the politics of the long nineteenth century but how, when, and with what lasting effects.

Featuring more than 80 illustrations and easy access to related music files, this magisterial work argues that a ballad cannot be read as a fixed artifact, independent of its illustrations, tune, and movement across time and space.

Landscapes of Law shows that assertions of national culture are not always a retreat from globalism but a way of managing the contested zone between borderless capital and bordered states. A roster of international, interdisciplinary contributors offer innovative, ethnographic analyses of the ways culture works through transnational law.

Life Among Urban Planners explores the practices of professional city-making in a variety of global contexts. Contributors emphasize planners' cultural values and personal assumptions and examine what their commitment to thinking about the future means for the ways in which people live in the present and preserve the past.

Adopting a comparative approach that explores Jewish interactions with Muslim and Christian learning, Mordechai Z. Cohen sheds new light on the key turns in the vibrant medieval tradition of Jewish Bible interpretation, which yielded a conception of peshat exegesis that remains a gold standard in Jewish hermeneutics to this day.

Through in-depth studies of composting and soil amendment, local food, winemaking, and hedgerows, Digging the Past illuminates how the seventeenth century continues to shape both material practices and popular ways of imagining and describing what farming should be and do.

The essays in How Ideas Shape Urban Political Development argue that ideas have been the real drivers behind urban political development and offer as evidence national and international case studies.

In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how early Americans debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. She argues that early advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.

Can the Letters of Two Lovers be the previously lost love letters of Abelard and Heloise? Making Love in the Twelfth Century presents a new literary translation of the collection, along with a full commentary and two extended essays that parse its literary and intellectual contexts and chart the course of the doomed affair.

The American Passport in Turkey demonstrates how U.S. global power manifests in the desires people have for U.S. citizenship, even when they do not live in the States. Based on interviews with more than one hundred individuals, it captures the transnationalized relationship between inequality and citizenship regimes.

The Archaeology of Native Americans in Pennsylvania is the definitive reference to the rich artifacts representing 14,000 years of cultural evolution and includes environmental studies, descriptions and illustrations of artifacts and features, settlement pattern studies, and recommendations for directions of further research.

Laurie Groman and E. Michele Ramsey argue that, in order for our economy and democracy to thrive, we need more humanities majors, not fewer. Major Decisions serves as an informative guide to students and parents-and provides a powerful reminder to employers and university administrators of the true value of an education in the humanities.

In the current popular imagination, Buddhism is often understood to be a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment. The Dharma, the name given to Buddhist teachings by Buddhists, states that all things are interconnected. Therefore, Buddhists are perceived as extending compassion beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself out of a concern for the total living environment. However, in The Buddha''s Footprint, Johan Elverskog contends that only by jettisoning this contemporary image of Buddhism as a purely ascetic and apolitical tradition of contemplation can we see the true nature of the Dharma. According to Elverskog, Buddhism is, in fact, an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources.Elverskog surveys the expansion of Buddhism across Asia in the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, when Buddhist institutions were built from Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south. He examines the prosperity theology at the heart of the Dharma that declared riches to be a sign of good karma and the means by which spritiual status could be elevated through donations bequeathed to Buddhist institutions. He demonstrates how this scriptural tradition propelled Buddhists to seek wealth and power across Asia and to exploit both the people and the environment.Elverskog shows the ways in which Buddhist expansion not only entailed the displacement of local gods and myths with those of the Dharma—as was the case with Christianity and Islam—but also involved fundamentally transforming earlier social and political structures and networks of economic exchange. The Buddha''s Footprint argues that the institutionalization of the Dharma was intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the monumentalization of Buddhism itself.