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This is the story of Louis Bieral, a nineteenth-century gangster, politician, sportsman, and Civil War hero. Kidnapped from his birthplace in revolutionary South America, he doused fires in Jacksonian New York, battled Sumatran pirates with the US Navy, and panned for California gold. As a crime boss, he raced horses, boxed champions, and ran brothels. Yet Bieral's adventurous life was also steeped in the brutality of his time. He befriended rowdies like 'Butcher' Bill Poole, returned fugitives like Anthony Burns to slavery, and assaulted abolitionists such as Richard Henry Dana. As a Union officer, Bieral won fame in battle. He was a Gilded-age bodyguard for 'Boss' Tweed, William Seward, and Jim Fisk, becoming a suspect in that tycoon's murder. From the docks of Valparaíso to the dining room of Delmonico's to the cells of Auburn Prison, Bieral's remarkable journey illustrates the violence that bound nineteenth-century America together.
The Constitution of 1789 is a new introduction to the Constitution written on the semiquincentennial of American Independence, packed with novel and surprising insights about the Constitution's original meaning. The book takes the reader on an in-depth tour of the Constitution's structure and separation of powers, starting with the nature of written constitutions and the compound nature of the American Union. The book also explores the enumeration of legislative powers and its relation to the historic royal prerogatives, the meaning of executive power, and the distribution of foreign affairs and war powers between Congress and the President. It investigates the nature of judicial power and the Constitution's complex relationship with slavery, before addressing federalism and the scope of national powers. The Constitution of 1789 dismantles several common misconceptions and conventional wisdoms and is suitable for all readers interested in the law, politics, and history of the American Republic.
Demobilising the Far Right focuses on dynamics of mobilisation, counter-mobilisation, and state coercion to offer a new comparative study of far-right demonstration campaigns across Austria, England, and Germany from 1990–2020. With rigorous qualitative comparative analysis and process-tracing case studies, the book explores what factors drive the demobilisation of far-right movements and the critical role of state and societal responses. By examining key far-right groups like the British National Party and the German People's Union, it sheds light on a crucial yet underexplored area of social movement theory. Combining innovative methodology with rich empirical analysis, Demobilising the Far Right provides vital insights for understanding political violence, extremism, and protest movements as well as how states and social actors respond, and the implications for democratic societies.
The two connected Elements—Architecture and Interiors of the Harems in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul and Letters and Gifts in the Harems of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul—center on the lives of royal women during the reign of Selim III. Figures such as Mihrişah Valide Sultan, Sineperver Kadınefendi, and the sultan's sisters shaped Istanbul's urban and social landscape through philanthropy, political engagement, and leisure practices. Focusing on their sub-courts, we argue that these women were key constituents of Selim III's reform initiatives, the nizam-ı cedid. Together, the Elements trace how royal women made their presence visible, incorporating their courts into foreign diplomatic visitation circuits within an expanded Bosphorus network. They also examine the women's prolific correspondence with their kethüdas (stewards). These letters illuminate their material worlds, rivalries, and anxieties, and, most importantly, reveal their central role in shaping courtly decorum and the political culture of reform.
Although the Supreme Court has historically resisted a partisan sorting out of its public legitimacy, today, Republicans and Democrats look at the Court in very different ways. This Element assembles original survey and experimental data to unpack these changes in three ways. First, the authors illustrate the powerful role that partisanship plays in shaping judicial public opinion. Second, they validate a new three-item measure of specific support and show that it reliably predicts perceptions of Supreme Court legitimacy. Finally, they introduce a new, applied measure of support for the rule of law and connect it to specific and diffuse support. Taken as a whole, their work demonstrates that large chunks of the mass public view the Supreme Court critically. Looking ahead, it is unclear whether legitimacy will rebound when citizens perceive that the balance of judicial power within the nation's High Court has fractured along party lines.
The Cambridge History of American Popular Culture is a comprehensive treatment of American popular culture. It is organized around the major time frames for defining American history, as well as genres of popular culture and, pivotally, around historical instances where American popular culture has been a key transformative agent shaping American history, values, and society. This ambitious book by a team of scholarly experts from across the humanities offers unique historical breadth and depth of knowledge about the ongoing power of commercial entertainment. The Cambridge History of American Popular Culture is a fresh, original and authoritative treatment of the aesthetics, producers and artists involved in American popular culture, a phenomena that exerts tremendous cultural power both domestically and internationally.
Set in the postcolonial city of Kinshasa (DR Congo), this ethnography explores how people with disabilities navigate debates about the just distribution of resources where there is little state organised welfare, and public perception of disability swings between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving'. Tracing a historic increase of disability due to polio and its long-term effects, this book examines two controversial livelihood activities that serve as informal alternatives to state support: a specialized form of international border brokerage across the Congo River, and a unique practice of bureaucratized begging that imitates state tax collection and humanitarian fundraising. Clara Devlieger examines how such activities shape ways that disabled people conceive the idea of becoming 'valuable people' in local terms: by supporting loved ones, many achieve high esteem against expectations, while adapting exclusionary models of urban personhood to include disability. Devlieger offers a new understanding of the complex dynamic between the imagined role of the state, international discourses of rights, and local experiences of disability.
During the Great Leap Forward (1958–62), the collectivization of the Chinese countryside had catastrophic results, but how did this short-lived political experiment reshape urban life? In the first English history of urban collectivization, Fabio Lanza explores the most radical attempts to remake cities under Mao. Examining the universalization of production, the collectivization of life, including communal canteens and nurseries, and women's liberation, intended to transform modern urban life along socialist lines, he shows how many residents, and women in particular, struggled to enact a radical change in their everyday lives. He argues that the daily reality of millions of city residents proved the limitations of an effort that tied emancipation to industrial labor and substituted subjugation to the assembly line for subjugation to the stove, confronting some of the crucial contradictions of the socialist revolution.
This Element centers the 'Black Pacific' as a generative site for comparative and intersectional methodologies and transnational frameworks for thinking about racial formations, post-national literary forms, and cultural histories. At the end of the nineteenth century, US overseas expansion into the Pacific brought white supremacy and colonial rule into alignment. It also threw into greater relief the contradictions of US citizenship and national identity as legalized segregation and rising anti-Black violence foreclosed Reconstruction's possibilities. Race accrued dynamic new meanings in the age of new imperialism. Focusing on the earliest of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1900–09) and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–7), this Element examines the formative role of magazine and periodical writings in the development of early Black transpacific internationalism.
The story of American literature and empire goes beyond the broad historical periodization of empire to reimagine that history. The central terms American and literature have always been tied up in US empire as well as other empires in the Americas. The word 'America,' itself the product of inter-imperial intellectual rivalry, claims the name of an entire hemisphere for one country therein. To understand the full history of American literature and empire is to recognize its deep, strategically obscure, and often disavowed imperial contexts that in turn require differentially transatlantic, hemispheric, and global frameworks of analysis. This collection thus takes a sceptical stance toward its own geographical referent. Literature has a long and continuing imperial history as empire's proxy. These essays cover canonical authors such as Cooper, Melville, Whitman, and Baldwin as well as lesser-known writers, including emergent artists focused on world-making with a reparative, speculative attention to the future.
Why do development projects so often fail to deliver progress, yet succeed in strengthening states? Central Margins answers this question by exposing the paradox at the heart of development: economic failure masking political success. Through vivid ethnography and deep archival research, the book shows how Sri Lanka's ambitious programmes – most notably the World Bank–funded Mahaweli Development Scheme – collapsed as projects of prosperity but triumphed as tools of militarisation, demographic engineering, and state consolidation. Introducing the concept of 'hidden state transcripts', it reveals how governments project images of benevolent development while embedding surveillance, displacement, and majoritarian nationalism in everyday life. By analysing state power from the contested margins of the Sinhala-Buddhist state, Central Margins demonstrates how postcolonial regimes weaponise development and environmental governance to remake sovereignty. This original account speaks not only to scholars of South Asia, but to anyone interested in how development reshapes power and politics across the Global South.This title is Open Access.
This book is an attempt at highlighting the intellectual and cultural history of British imperial knowledge production in late-nineteenth-century India, examined through the life and writings of William Wilson Hunter (1840–1900). Tracing Hunter's role as an imperial bureaucrat, historian, and publicist, the book explores how his works sought to shape colonial governance through structured information systems and a rhetoric of 'improvement'; an intellectual enterprise that drew the interests of contemporary stalwarts across the continents, such as Rabindranath Tagore and Charles Darwin. It also examines how Bengali intellectuals, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and others engaged with and contested Hunter's ideas, opening up new directions in nationalist thought and historiography. It strives to offer a new outlook on the mutual entanglements of empire and knowledge, and the political life of texts in colonial Bengal.
While bribery has been extensively studied, the dynamics of personnel corruption in the public sector, often known as 'buying and selling of government offices,' remain underexplored. This form of corruption involves leaders' accepting or soliciting bribes from subordinates to influence recruitment, appointment, and promotion decisions, significantly impacting political selection and governance quality. This Element employs a dual perspective – corruption and elite mobility – to analyze the distribution of office-selling across the Chinese administrative matrix and its various forms and implications. Using two novel self-compiled datasets, it proposes a tripartite framework of performance, patronage, and purchase to reimagine political selection in China, highlighting the coexistence of multiple governance models: a meritocratic state prioritizing competence, a clientelist state emphasizing loyalty, and an investment state bound by money. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Drawing together decades of research, Steve Smith explores the survival and adaptation of folk beliefs in Mao's China in the face of seismic social change and growing political repression. Bringing an oftenneglected aspect of modern Chinese history to the fore, he shows how folk religion maintained a vital presence in everyday life. In myriad ways, through Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, spirit mediums and spirit healing, divination, geomancy, and the reform of traditional marriage and funeral rites, rituals, and beliefs provided resources for adaptation and resistance to the regime. Nevertheless the survival of folk religion must be set against the secularizing forces that the regime unleashed. This unique history gives readers a vivid sense of life under Mao Zedong as vibrant, contentious, and resilient – a far cry from stereotypes of a secular, regimented, and monochrome society.
The Gulf region is a distinct sub-system of the wider Middle East, including the resource-rich states of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and Iran, and commands enduring relevance within the international system. This is the first textbook to provide a focused, comprehensive introduction to Gulf politics, specifically tailored for undergraduate students and newcomers to the subject. It explores the region's political landscape, covering key topics such as state formation, oil and rentierism, regime types, religion and politics, foreign policy and migration. Blending historical context with contemporary analysis, chapters by leading scholars examine the role of oil wealth, tribal structures, regional integration and merchant elites in state-building, as well as the region's strategic importance in global politics. An ideal core text for university courses on the Gulf and GCC, An Introduction to Gulf Politics is essential for understanding the complexities of power, governance and influence in one of the world's most dynamic regions.
One of the largest archives of writing by an eighteenth-century Black individual, this volume not only connects the letters of Ignatius Sancho to their social and historical contexts but also highlights their cultural and aesthetic significance. Offering an interdisciplinary range of perspectives on Sancho and his letters from across literary, historical, and cultural studies, and authored by scholars, archivists, and performers alike, it provides the first authoritative, accessible resource focused exclusively on Sancho's life and writing. Building on established connections to abolitionism and the aesthetics of sentiment, it breaks new ground by considering Sancho's continuing significance for Black British society specifically, and UK literature and history generally.
The presence of Shiʿite communities in Western Europe dates to the late nineteenth century, with Britain as the primary destination for immigration, as well as notable communities developing in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Exploring selected encounters of Twelver Shiʿite Muslims with the European West, this study examines local and transnational religious organization to assess socio-political integration. Its central thesis defines European Shiʿism through peripheral engagement and religious retention. Building on a range of language sources, interviews with Shiʿite spokesmen and fieldwork in Iran, Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany, Matthijs van den Bos identifies European Shiʿism with a religious mode of engagement involving hierarchization of collective self and other identities. Shiʿite parties with greater distance to high politico-religious authorities abroad are seen more likely to engage in cultural exchange with their European milieu. On one side stand ethnically varied Shiʿite organizations with limited engagement of others in Europe. The other shows civic outreach, ritual transformation, and integrationist theology.