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53463 results in American studies

Page 2 of 2674

Religion, Writing, and the Shaping of the Classic Maya World
  • Mallory E. Matsumoto
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • The Classic Maya civilization (250–925 CE) in Mesoamerica innovated a hieroglyphic script that was written and read by people spread across hundreds of square kilometers and dozens of autonomous kingdoms over the course of more than a millennium. Yet, unlike other regions of the ancient world where writing was independently invented, the Maya area was never politically unified. In Religion, Writing, and the Shaping of the Classic Maya World, Mallory E. Matsumoto draws on hieroglyphic texts, imagery, and archaeological finds to reconstruct interactions through which the Classic Maya exchanged knowledge about their hieroglyphic script and how to use it. She argues that religion and ritual practice were central contexts for maintaining a coherent, mutually intelligible writing system in the absence of political centralization. The Classic Maya case challenges long-standing assumptions about the social forces underlying the origins of early writing. It also reveals religion's potential to shape human culture and technology. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New Orleans
  • Edited by T. R. Johnson, Matthew Paul Smith
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • This Cambridge Companion offers a rich range of contexts for studying the literary histories of New Orleans. Some of the essays offer a deep focus on the significance of iconic figures such as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Kate Chopin. Other essays detail long traditions of writing not widely known beyond the city but that complicate our understanding of American literary history in new ways, as in the chapters on queer writers or Mardi Gras or the Asian presence in the city's literary imagination or how deadly nineteenth-century epidemics continue to shape the ways the world has come to read the city as a capital of Gothic horror fiction. These fresh perspectives on one of the most storied cities in the world are an essential resource for those who seek to piece together their own understanding of New Orleans as an historic and living flashpoint in the global literary imagination.

Cooking for the Quarters
  • Enslaved Women and the Labor of Care in the Antebellum South
  • Emily West
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Women who prepared food for enslaved people, rather than enslavers, have been neglected in historical scholarship. Their labor within the quarters has been marginalized, belittled, and even ignored, because it fell within the remit of gendered care and nurture. In this book, Emily West illustrates how these mostly older women performed vital roles in slaveholding sites, as their enslavers increasingly tried to regulate food distribution, preparation, and consumption. Enslavers attempted to impose highly efficient, communal food regimes to minimize waste and time lost from work elsewhere. They routinely tasked older women with the feeding and care of infants, but also deployed them to prepare food for children and enslaved adults to eat collectively. Conversely, in the relative privacy of the quarters, where enslaved people preferred to eat, cooking became both a form of gendered exploitation, and an expression of love, empowerment, and pleasure.

Filial Lines
  • Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form
  • Emmy Waldman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • This is the first book to place the autobiographical projects of canonical comics authors Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other, focusing on new and neglected works (and with an epilogue on the Pulitzer Prize-winning tour-de-force debut of Tessa Hulls). The book offers a lively cast of five formal tropes-boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs-through which to model fundamental elements of the comics grammar and its material processes. Built around rich close readings, it shows what makes the comics form particularly suited to negotiate complex familial and creative inheritances and manage layered, relational identities. Interweaving accounts of Jewish identity, female embodiment, legacies of modernism, and feminist practice, the book traces how contemporary graphic memoirists visually work and rework their filiations and affiliations through form, situating the medium as a privileged site and staging ground for arguments about the enabling possibilities of form now.

Elizabeth Bishop's Styles of Writing

Constitutional Law in Contemporary America
  • Institutions, Politics, and Processes
  • Volume 1, 3rd edition
  • David Schultz, John R. Vile, Michelle D. Deardorff
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Students are challenged to stay ahead in today's ever-changing political environment. This third edition comprehensive and accessible casebook, designed specifically for undergraduates, integrates both the political science and legal perspectives of American constitutional law. Covering developments from the constitution's drafting through to the presidency of Donald Trump, the book balances doctrinal analysis with historical and political context. Key updates include expanded discussions of judicial review, judicial power, nationwide injunctions, and the elimination of Chevron deference in administrative law. New material addresses Native American sovereignty, congressional investigatory powers, presidential authority and criminal liability, and the evolving balance of power in foreign affairs and war powers. Additional coverage explores presidential and congressional budget authority, impeachment, and state power within the federal system. The text examines pressing contemporary issues such as public health, property rights, substantive due process, and eminent domain, providing students with the essential tools to critically analyze constitutional law.

Taming the Careerists
  • The Politics of Foreign Policy Implementation
  • Minju Kim
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Over two million bureaucrats serve in the US federal government under various employment contracts. Minju Kim's Taming the Careerists asks how the design of those contracts – specifically, the features that strengthen or weaken job protections – shapes the behavior of bureaucrats and, in turn, American foreign policy. While past studies identify tools that help the president control the bureaucracy, Kim demonstrates that the president can additionally control the behavior of bureaucrats by weakening job protections, which makes bureaucrats more accountable to presidential preferences. The book shows that bureaucrats adjust how they implement policy based on the structure of their job protections, and that weakening these protections can unintentionally disrupt the stability of foreign economic policy. Drawing on administrative data, policy memos, interviews, and computational text analysis, Kim reveals the trade-off between accountability and stability, shedding light on the personnel management rules that quietly sustain the daily work of America's foreign policy bureaucracy.

The Mysteries of Modern Life
  • Mystery Fiction, Popular Narrative, and the Politics of Vision
  • Sara Hackenberg
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Mystery fiction has long been regarded a conservative genre that focuses on crime, surveillance, and the restoration of disrupted social order. Such assessments, however, usually consider only a very small subset of works. We find a very different story if we consider the mysteries of modern life more widely, starting with the international, penny-press phenomenon of the mid-nineteenth century city-mysteries narrative. Expanding and historicizing the genre in this way reveals diverse variants of popular mystery that emerged out of the city mysteries – up to and including the detective story – and that constitute an extraordinarily wide-ranging and socially radical genre. The paradoxical attitudes towards visual powers and problems at the heart of the modern mystery cultivates a form of master-perception concerned more with identification with than identification of and models forms of empathetic vision that work to challenge the very social hierarchies the genre has often been understood to uphold.

The Color of Social Security
  • Race, Retirement, Disability, and Disparity
  • Jon C. Dubin
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • The Color of Social Security traces the myriad ways and interconnected social systems in which racism has been embedded into American social security programs. Drawing on American history, Jon Dubin exposes institutionalized processes undermining racially equitable receipt of retirement and disability benefits. Examples include the 1935 Social Security Act, which excluded Black agricultural and domestic workers in order to protect the postbellum Southern racial economic and political order; the 1972 Supplemental Security Income program's exclusion of persons of color in the U.S. territories, with genesis in 125 years of racialized colonial domination; 1980s criminal justice system restrictions; systemic racial bias in disability decisions in the 1990s; disability eligibility obstacles from “race-norming” in the 2000s; and the misevaluation of Black claimants with sickle cell disease under Social Security Administration regulations since 2015. While exploring these histories, Dubin offers concrete solutions to address racial inequity and create a more equitable future.

Metaphysical Revolutions in the Ancient Andes
  • Ritual, Persons, and Power from 1500 BC until the Conquest
  • Darryl Wilkinson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • The material and visual culture of late precolonial Andean societies-especially the Inka Empire-looked radically different from their predecessors. For millennia, the iconography of the ancient Andes was dominated by warriors, sacrificial rites, apex predators and chimerical beings whose bodies were amalgamations of multiple human and animal species. Yet by AD 1000, these images had almost entirely vanished. This study offers the first ever analysis of these dramatic transformations. Far more than simply a change of aesthetic preferences, or even a shift in ideology, it posits a series of metaphysical revolutions in which Andean sociality was fundamentally altered. The basis of personhood, the creation of value and the nature of political power itself all came to be refigured in far-reaching ways. Specifically, a once-dominant metaphysics focused on the predatory extraction of vitality from enemies disappeared, to be replaced by one grounded in reciprocal exchanges between human and nonhuman beings.

Reckoning the Racial Reckoning
  • From Backlash to Accountability after George Floyd
  • David Dante Troutt
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    06 August 2026
  • The demise of the 'racial reckoning' that followed George Floyd's death in 2020 occurred without definition, scrutiny or attempts to revive it. In this compelling new book, David Dante Troutt explores the 'what,' 'so what' and 'now what' of this period when much of the US sidelined the pandemic to confront racial inequality. It details how a rare focus on embedded racism shifted toward awareness, leaving deep disparities in wealth, health and policing unaddressed, and how this was overpowered by an enduring conservative backlash. Troutt unpacks how legal doctrine favored colorblindness over inequality, and examines government policies that created segregated zones of racial bargaining in health and wealth. The book also exposes deterrence-proof policing rules and explains the problems and promises of DEI. Reckoning the Racial Reckoning argues that democratic struggles over local resources are essential for creating justice and well-being for Black American communities, and ultimately for all Americans.

Destabilized
  • Why White Americans Accept Racist Political Rhetoric
  • Leah Christiani
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • In recent years, the United States has witnessed a resurgence in mainstream acceptance of overt, racist rhetoric from politicians. This increased tolerance arises despite previous evidence suggesting that white Americans reject racist appeals when they are explicit. Destabilized examines this shift and points to a perception of threat to white dominance as the root cause. The book finds that when white Americans feel their dominance in the racial hierarchy is unstable, their prejudice activates, and they seek to 'restabilize' the racial hierarchy by accepting negative, explicit racial appeals. Analyses of survey experiments, observational survey data, and political media demonstrate this phenomenon. Finding that this link exists among both white Republicans and white Democrats, Destabilized speaks broadly to the nature of whiteness as a racial identity rooted in the desire for dominance.
What is Electoral Integrity?

What is Electoral Integrity?
  • Conceptualising Election Quality in an Age of Complexity
  • Toby S. James, Holly Ann Garnett
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • There are worldwide concerns about the quality of elections and democracy. There is also an ambiguity in academia, the international community and popular discourse about how to define and measure good elections. This Element develops an original concept of electoral integrity based on human empowerment. Elections serve a purpose: They should give citizens a voice, empower the everyday citizen against the powerful and act as mechanisms for political equality. Secondly, it argues that there have been major societal 'megatrends,' meaning that the holding of elections has moved from the modern era to an age of complexity. This describes an era of demographic, technological, legal, economic and political complexity and fluidity. The greater connection between nodes of activities in the electoral process means that elections held in one part of the world can be very quickly affected by actors and developments elsewhere. Thirdly, it provides new measurement tools to assess election quality.
Heuristic Inference and the Left-Right

Heuristic Inference and the Left-Right
  • An Experimental Analysis of How Voters Form Their Left-Right Images of Parties
  • Seonghui Lee, Lie Philip Santoso, Randolph Stevenson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • How do voters form left–right images of political parties? This Element applies the theoretical framework of ecologically rational heuristic inference to synthesize insights from the extensive literature on the meaning of left and right in politics. It proposes several hypotheses about cues that voters with varying levels of political sophistication use to infer parties' left–right positions. These expectations are tested through seven conjoint and factorial survey experiments in Germany, Denmark, Canada, and the UK. Findings show that many voters develop sensible left–right perceptions of parties by relying on small sets of highly predictive cues. However, voters differ in how they interpret these cues. Less politically sophisticated voters tend to infer party positions mainly from partisan signals, whereas more sophisticated voters rely on a broader range of indicators, including party policies, ideological values, and social group support. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Majority Opinions
  • The Political Consequences of an Out-of-Step Supreme Court
  • Stephen Jessee, Neil Malhotra, Maya Sen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • The Supreme Court's composition tends to remain stable over time, yet its docket and rulings change, affecting our understanding of the Court's broader political ramifications. In Majority Opinions, Stephen Jessee, Neil Malhotra and Maya Sen examine how the Supreme Court's alignment with public opinion shifts dramatically, shaping its legitimacy, approval, and vulnerability to reform. Introducing an empirical method and framework that systematically compares Americans' preferences on case outcomes with the Court's actual rulings, the authors uncover yawning gaps and unexpected alignments across issues and terms. They show how changes in court composition-Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example-can shift the Court's trajectory rightward, while docket choices can move rulings closer to public sentiment after unpopular rulings. Examining how the Supreme Court navigates a polarized political environment, the authors reveal how its choices have profoundly affect influence, legitimacy, and national policy.

The Cambridge History of War and Society in America
  • Edited by Andrew J. Huebner, Jennifer D. Keene
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • This volume provides the most expansive interrogation to date of the field of war and society, offering a magisterial overview of the American experience of war from the colonial era to the War on Terror. It brings together leading scholars to examine how societies go to war, experience it, and invest it with meaning. Those ideas unfold across three thematic sections entitled 'War Times,' 'War Societies,' and 'War Meanings.' The essays scrutinize the symbiotic relationship between warfare and the armed forces on one side, and broader trends in political, social, cultural, and economic life on the other. They consider the radiating impact of war on individuals, communities, culture, and politics – and conversely, the projection of social patterns onto the military and wartime life. Across three sections, thirty chapters, and a roundtable discussion, the volume illuminates the questions, methodologies, and sources that exemplify war and society scholarship at its very best.

The Constitution of Practice
  • On Law and Tradition
  • Marc O. DeGirolami
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • What is tradition in American constitutional law, and what is its enduring appeal in American culture? In The Constitution of Practice, Marc O. DeGirolami presents and defends his theory of constitutional law, one rooted in our political, legal, and cultural experience. He argues that constitutional traditions are the ways in which we manifest, give concrete form to, and transmit political excellence across time. He explains how traditions also bind us to one another, strengthening the civic affection necessary to a democratic republic. Responding to several criticisms, the author discusses the relationship of constitutional method and American politics, evaluating traditionalism's political adhesion and its prospects in the coming decades. At a time when Americans increasingly do not trust their institutions, DeGirolami explores how a traditionalist approach to the Constitution can begin to repair the disaffection that many now feel for their legal institutions.

In Congress We Trust?
  • Enforcing Voting Rights from the Founding to the Jim Crow Era
  • Franita Tolson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • This book reveals how Congress quietly shaped American elections across more than a century of constitutional development. Far from a passive observer, Congress used its authority to influence key controversies – from the expansion of slavery in new territories to the reconstruction of the post-Civil War electorate. Congress exercised power under the Elections Clause, the Guarantee Clause, and later, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, to combat voter suppression, reimagine representation, and determine who could (and could not) participate in American democracy. Even as Jim Crow laws disenfranchised millions, Congress continued to review and sometimes overturn the elections of its own members, refusing to cede complete control to the states. In doing so, Congress routinely subordinated federalism to politics. In Congress We Trust? provides a new perspective on who truly governs our system of elections by showing that federal authority has been broad, lasting, and decisive.

African American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950
  • Volume 11
  • Edited by Michael Hill
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • 1940s African American literature sits between two of the best-known periods in Black writing. Adding more intricacy to its framing, this decade's literary output commences and ends with watershed creative accomplishments by canonical mainstays in the waiting like Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. However, this book shows that mid-century Black literary productivity is not a matter of a handful of canonical figures and instead, it illuminates overt and implicit collaboration as a hallmark of the age. It identifies perforation, aesthetic plurality, multi-generic virtuosity, and writerly professionalism as signposts for understanding mid-twentieth century Black literary productivity. It engages prior assessments that cast African American literature in the 1940s based on stylistic clashes and technical stasis. It restores Black writing's role as feature of American social progress in the space between the Great Depression and the mature Civil Rights Movement.

The Cambridge Companion to Martin Amis
  • Edited by Gavin Keulks
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Over a career spanning fifteen novels, two short story collections, and eight volumes of nonfiction, Sir Martin Amis helped to define his era. Through his published work and public commentaries, his voice featured prominently in the important socio-literary debates of his time. His work contributes to literary discussions about realism, postmodernism, satire, and comedy, and his core themes range across the Holocaust, nuclear anxiety, apocalyptic millennialism and, more recently, the war on terror. His words were rarely without controversy. This Companion identifies the essential elements of Amis's work and then evaluates their potential for longevity. From his earliest publications in the 1970's to his death as one of England's most well-known writers in 2023, Amis was an outspoken critic of social myopia: how societies – and their citizens – continually choose selfishness over altruism, fatalism over improvement, and blindness over enlightenment.

Page 2 of 2674