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New in paperback edition of this classic.

A Broad Revisionist Account of Central Asian History (1500-1800)

Jacob Marcus's The Jews in The Medieval World (1938) has remained an indispensable resource for its comprehensive view of Jewish historical experience from late antiquity through the early modern period using primary source documents in English translation. This new work based on Marcus's book centres the focus squarely on Christian Europe.

The story of the "conflict thesis" between science and religion--the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two--is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811-1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis. Unravelling its origins, James Ungureanu argues that Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for a much larger and more important argument dating back to the Protestant Reformation, where one theological tradition was pitted against another--a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity. By the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of conflict between "science and religion" were largely deployed between contending theological schools of thought. However, these narratives were later appropriated by secularists, freethinkers, and atheists as weapons against all religion. By revisiting its origins, development, and popularization, Ungureanu ultimately reveals that the "conflict thesis" was just one of the many unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation.

Winner of the 2024 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda's Canto general, Lesley Wylie's close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as "nacido de árboles." The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions as well as to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Such a reconfiguration, which persistently draws on indigenous animist ontologies to blur the boundaries between people and plants, anticipates much contemporary ecological thinking about our responsibility towards nonhuman nature and shows how environmental thinking by way of plants has a long history in Latin American literature.

A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press's Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century series.

The botanical drawings of the American naturalist William Bartram.

Staging Buenos Aires centers theater as a source of historical inquiry to understand how nonelites experienced and shaped a city undergoing dramatic transformations. Commercial theater constituted the core of the city's public sphere, one in which middle-class playwrights and audiences assumed the leading role. Audiences and critics often disagreed about what was "acceptable" entertainment. Playwrights used theater to promote their own ideas of sociopolitical change, creating a space for working- and middle-class audiences to identify and push back against imposed regulations and attitudes. Cultural production on the city's stages revealed fissures and social anxieties about the expansion of the political system and of the public sphere as women became increasingly visible in urban spaces. At the same time, theater also gave structure and meaning to these rapid changes, providing the space for the city's playwrights and complex publics to play a key role in identifying, processing, and shaping the transforming nation. Plays helped audience members work through dramatic shifts in societal norms as urbanization and industrialization resulted in the visible decline of patriarchal social structures, made most visible in the urban sphere.

Ayn Rand controversially defended rational egoism, the idea that people should regard their own happiness as their highest goal. Given that numerous scholars in philosophy and psychology alike are examining the nature of human flourishing and an ethics of well-being, the time is ripe for a close examination of Rand's theory. Egoism Without Permission illuminates Rand's thinking about how to practice egoism by exploring some of its crucial psychological dimensions. Tara Smith examines the dynamics among four partially subconscious factors in an individual's well-being: a person's foundational motivation for being concerned with morality; their attitude toward their desires; their independence; and their self-esteem. A clearer grasp of each, Smith argues, sheds light on the others, and a better understanding of the set, in turn, enriches our understanding of self-interest and its sensible pursuit. Smith then traces the implications for a broader understanding of what a person's self-interest genuinely is, and, correspondingly, of what its pursuit through rational egoism involves. By highlighting these previously underexplored features of Rand's conceptions of self-interest and egoism, Smith betters our understanding of how vital these psychological levers are to a person's genuine flourishing.

Guantánamo sits at the center of two of the most vexing issues of US policy of the past century: relations with Cuba and the Global War on Terror. It is a contested, extralegal space. In A New No-Man's-Land, Esther Whitfield explores a multilingual archive of materials produced both at the US naval base and in neighboring Cuban communities and proposes an understanding of Guantánamo as a coherent borderland region, where experiences of isolation are opportunities to find common ground. She analyzes poetry, art, memoirs, and documentary films produced on both sides of the border. Authors and artists include prisoners, guards, linguists, chaplains, lawyers, and journalists, as well as Cuban artists and dissidents. Their work reveals surprising similarities: limited access to power and self-representation, mobility restricted by geography if not captivity, and immersion in political languages that have ascribed them rigid roles. Read together, the work of these disparate communities traces networks that extend among individuals in the Guantánamo region, inward to Cuba, and outward to the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East.

Despite democratization at the national level, local political bosses still govern many municipalities in Latin America. Caudillos and clans often use informal political practices--ranging from clientelism and patronage to harassment of political opposition--to control local political dynamics. These arbitrary and, at times, abusive practices pose important challenges to how Latin American democracy works and how power is exercised after the decentralization reforms in the region. These reforms promised to bring the government closer to the people and to promote popular participation. In many cases, these ideals are unmet, and newly empowered local politicians have been able to turn municipalities into personal fiefdoms. This book explores how local caudillos stay in power and why some are more successful than others in retaining office. Tomás Dosek provides an in-depth analysis of six cases from Chile, Paraguay, and Peru to show the strategies that caudillos pursue to secure power and the mistakes they commit that drive them out.

The Other Border Wars: Conflict and Stasis in Latin American Culture questions bordering as an organizing principle of culture, conflict, and politics. Shannon Dowd argues that Central and South American border conflicts such as the Chaco War, between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932-1935); the Soccer War, between El Salvador and Honduras (1969); and the Falklands/Malvinas War, between Argentina and the United Kingdom (1982); can be considered as stasis, meaning civil strife, rather than polemos, meaning international war. Through analyses of literature, film, and theater, Dowd shows that border conflict is entwined with domestic strife, reinforced by stagnant geographical lines, and magnified under globalization. Deploying a capacious theory of stasis to question modern sovereignty and bordering, Dowd examines border zones from the outbreak of hostilities to the present, highlighting the lasting legacies of enclosure and violence. The Other Border Wars asks readers to consider how cultural expression challenges the purported fixity of Latin American borders, and even the very idea of bordering.

The specialization thesis--the idea that nineteenth-century science fragmented into separate forms of knowledge that led to the creation of modern disciplines--has played an integral role in the way historians have described the changing disciplinary map of nineteenth-century British science. This volume critically reevaluates this dominant narrative in the historiography. While new disciplines did emerge during the nineteenth century, the intellectual landscape was far muddier, and in many cases new forms of specialist knowledge continued to cross boundaries while integrating ideas from other areas of study. Through a history of Victorian interdisciplinarity, this volume offers a more complicated and innovative analysis of discipline formation. Harnessing the techniques of cultural and intellectual history, studies of visual culture, Victorian studies, and literary studies, contributors break out of subject-based silos, exposing the tension between the rhetorical push for specialization and the actual practice of knowledge sharing across disciplines during the nineteenth century.

Before Hungary's transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents demonstrates how Hungary's Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989. But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding.

Mal Goode (1908-1995) became network news's first African American correspondent when ABC News hired him in 1962. Raised in Homestead and Pittsburgh, he worked in the mills, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and went on to become a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier and later for local radio. With his basso profundo voice resonating on the airwaves, Goode challenged the police, politicians, and segregation, while providing Black listeners a voice that captured their experience. Race prevented him from breaking into television until Jackie Robinson dared ABC to give him a chance. Goode was uncompromising in his belief that network news needed Black voices and perspectives if it were to authentically reflect the nation's complexities. His success at ABC initiated the slow integration of network news. Goode's life and work are remarkable in their own right, but his struggles and achievements also speak to larger issues of American life and the African American experience.

Michele Serros (1966-2015) is widely known for her groundbreaking book Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard. Despite her status as a major figure in Chicanx literature, no scholar has written a book-length examination of her body of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction--until now. Cristina Herrera, also from Oxnard, weaves in history, autoethnography, and literary analysis to explore Chicana adolescence and young womanhood with a focus on place-making. Factoring in location, region, and landscape, Herrera asks what it means to grow up Chicana in settings that carry centuries of colonial violence, segregation, and everyday racism against Mexican American communities. She contends that Serros used her hometown to broaden understandings of who and what constitutes Chicanx communities and identities. By reading Serros's work in tandem with her lived experience in the same setting, Herrera uncovers moments of adolescent subjectivity that could only be vocalized and constructed within this particular locale. Herrera pushes against the tendency to separate the author from the text and argues for a spatial understanding of Chicana adolescence, race, class, and young womanhood.

The 499 letters in the fourteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall cover a number of particularly intense and acrimonious disputes. More notably, this volume spans the period of the composition, delivery, and furious reaction to Tyndall's famous--or, more accurately, infamous--Belfast Address. This prestigious lecture, which he delivered as the newly inaugurated president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, has long been heralded as one of the most momentous events of the nineteenth century. The letters in this volume provide a new, and unprecedentedly detailed, account of all aspects of the era-defining address. For Tyndall himself, it afforded a new level of prominence as a public intellectual, and he deployed his position to engage directly with some of the most contentious issues in Victorian society, especially the role of religion in relation to science. But Tyndall's expertise was also required on more practical matters, and the letters in this volume document his extensive role in determining official government policy on urgent questions such as safety at sea and public health. Additionally, they chart a dramatic shift in his personal life, with his initial correspondence with Louisa Hamilton, with whom he had previously communicated only through her family, marking the point where their burgeoning friendship developed into a formal relationship.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903-1988) was a prominent socialist, anticolonial and antiracist activist, champion of women's rights, and advocate for the arts and crafts. Defying the borders of gender, nation, and race, her efforts spanned social movements and played a leading role in the creation of modern India and the development of the Global South. In The Art of Freedom, Nico Slate showcases new archival materials to document Kamaladevi's campaign to become the first woman elected to provincial office; her confrontation with Gandhi that helped open the salt march of 1930 to women; her leadership of the All India Women's Conference and the Congress Socialist Party; her pioneering work with refugees during the Partition of India in 1947; the major impact she had on the arts in postcolonial India; and her own career on the stage and screen. Slate also draws upon underexplored details from her personal life, providing new context for her experiences as a child widow, her remarriage to the mercurial actor/poet Harin Chattopadhyay, and her divorce (among the first civil divorces in modern India). Taken as a whole, Kamaladevi's life offers a uniquely revealing vantage point on the making of modern India--a vantage point that centers the interconnections between struggles often seen as distinct, and that reminds us of the full promise of Indian democracy.

Rhetoric and composition scholar Donna LeCourt combines theoretical inquiry, qualitative research, and rhetorical analysis to examine what it means to write for the "public" in an age when the distinctions between public and private have eroded. Public spaces are increasingly privatized, and individual subjectivities have been reconstructed according to market terms. Part critique and part road map, Social Mediations begins with a critical reading of digital public pedagogies, then turns to developing a new theory that can guide a more effective writing pedagogy. LeCourt offers a theory based in embodied relationality that uses information economies to develop public spheres. She highlights how information commodities generate value through circulation, orchestrate relationships among people, and support unequal power structures. By demonstrating how we can use information capital for social change rather than market expansion, writers and readers are encouraged to seek out encounters with cultural and political impact.

In the two largest countries in South America, successive waves of structural reforms adopted in the name of development invariably have ended in disappointment. The promise of development never seems to materialize. Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina examines why. Instead of looking for policy failures, F. Antunes de Oliveira's focus is on the parameters of the public debate about "development" itself. An unfruitful dispute between neoliberalism and neodevelopmentalism has dominated Brazilian and Argentine political economy debates to the detriment of both countries. Antunes de Oliveira presents a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of the neoliberal and neodevelopmentalist structural reform cycles in Brazil and Argentina and applies insights from dependency theory to craft an alternative political economy framework for the analysis of development challenges.

Panama is a country whose geopolitical importance outweighs its size because of the volume of trade that passes the Central American isthmus through the canal. For nearly a century, the United States occupied and controlled the Panama Canal Zone and its shipping operations. In 1999, control was passed to Panama's Canal Authority. This peaceful transfer was a result of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties. The Weak and the Powerful studies how a weak country negotiated the Cold War and how a strongman navigated between competing power blocs. Omar Torrijos took power in Panama through a 1968 coup d'état and ruled that country until his death in 1981. He committed his country to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which purported to stand for noninterference and against imperialism. Jonathan C. Brown looks at how Torrijos and the NAM were able to mobilize world opinion of the weak against the powerful to pressure the United States to live up to its democratic and international ideals regarding sovereignty of the canal. The author also demonstrates how world opinion was unable to address the problems of ideologically motivated warfare in neighboring Central American states.

The Argentine capital is largely perceived as a middle-class space. Yet in reality, urban poverty and precarious settlements are defining features of the city. Agnese Codebò investigates how slums have produced culture as well as their representation in literature and the visual arts from the 1950s to the present. Looking at government-led urban projects, as well as novels, artworks, films, militant magazines, poems, and music, she tells the story of how villas miseria have mattered culturally and socially as spaces that produce new aesthetics, cultural trends, and social alliances, while offering a vantage point to understand the city and its problems. Slums represent a heterogeneous urban space, and Codebò makes the case for their relevance in Argentine culture, demonstrates the need to rethink spaces of production, and develops a new premise for a decolonial approach to Argentine cultural production.

Philosopher Michel Foucault's cultural criticism crosses disciplines and is well known as an influence on modern conceptions of knowledge and power. Less well known are the five trips he took to Brazil between 1965 and 1976. Although a coup in 1964 had installed a military dictatorship, Foucault kept his opinion on the Brazilian government largely to himself until October 23, 1975. On that date, he delivered a manifesto at a student assembly in São Paulo expressing his solidarity with students and professors protesting a wave of arrests and torture. This manifesto caught the government's attention and became the focal point of the dictatorship's surveillance of Foucault. Foucault in Brazil explores the production of the public antagonism between the philosopher and the dictatorship through a meticulous consideration of each of his visits to Brazil. Marcelo Hoffman connects history, philosophy, and political theory to open new ways of thinking about Foucault as a person and thinker and about Brazil and authoritarianism.

Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother's death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared within each collection, these poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd's work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet. Jericho Brown's introduction provides additional context and insight on the life and work of this complex, groundbreaking figure in American poetry.

Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. In publication since 1970, and under Alejandro de la Fuente's editorial leadership since 2013, this interdisciplinary journal covers all aspects of Cuban history, politics, culture, diaspora, and more.