History
Spring| Summer 2019
Archaeology
Enduring Alliance
A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order Timothy Andrews Sayle
April 2019 360pp 10 b&w halftones, 2 maps 9781501735509 £27.99 HB CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Born from necessity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has always seemed on the verge of collapse. Even now, some sixty years after its inception, some consider its foundation uncertain and its structure weak. At this moment of incipient strategic crisis, Timothy A. Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post-World War II era. In Enduring Alliance, Sayle recounts how the western European powers, along with the United States and Canada, developed a treaty to prevent encroachments by the Soviet Union and to serve as a first defense in any future military conflict. As the growing and unruly hodgepodge of countries, councils, commands, and committees inflated NATO during the Cold War, Sayle shows that the work of executive leaders, high-level diplomats, and institutional functionaries within NATO kept the alliance alive and strong in the face of changing administrations, various crises, and the flux of geopolitical maneuverings. Resilience and flexibility have been the true hallmarks of NATO.
Identity
The Necessity of a Modern Idea Gerald Izenberg
Intellectual History of the Modern Age March 2019 552pp 3 illus. 9780812224535 £25.99 PB UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of identity as the answer to the question, "who, or what, am I?" It covers the century from the end of World War I, when identity in this sense first became an issue for writers and philosophers, to 2010, when European political leaders declared multiculturalism a failure just as Canada, which pioneered it, was hailing its success. Along the way the book examines Erik Erikson's concepts of psychological identity and identity crisis, which made the word famous; the turn to collective identity and the rise of identity politics in Europe and America; varieties and theories of group identity; debates over accommodating collective identities within liberal democracy; the relationship between individual and group identity; the postmodern critique of identity as a concept; and the ways it nonetheless transformed the social sciences and altered our ideas of ethics.
The African Roots of Marijuana Chris S. Duvall
May 2019 352pp 40 illustrations 9781478003946 £21.99 PB 9781478003618 £87.00 HB DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Arriving in East Africa from South Asia approximately 1000 years ago, cannabis quickly spread throughout the continent. European accounts of cannabis in Africa—often fictionalized and reliant upon racial stereotypes— shaped widespread myths about the plant and were used to depict the continent as a cultural backwater and blacks as predisposed to drug use. These myths continue to influence contemporary thinking about cannabis. In The African Roots of Marijuana Chris S. Duvall corrects common misconceptions while telling an authoritative history of cannabis as it flowed into, throughout, and out of Africa. Duvall shows how preexisting smoking cultures in Africa transformed the plant into a fast-acting and easily dosed drug, and how it later became linked with global capitalism and the slave trade. People often used cannabis to cope with oppressive working conditions under colonialism, as a recreational drug, and in religious and political movements. This expansive look at Africa's importance to the development of human knowledge about marijuana will challenge everything readers thought they knew about one of the world's most ubiquitous plants.
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Zoo Studies
A New Humanities Edited by Tracy McDonald & Daniel Vandersommers May 2019 360pp 9780773556911 £23.99 PB 9780773556904 £99.00 HB
MCGILL-QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY PRESS
Zoo Studies considers the modern zoo from a range of approaches and disciplines, united in a desire to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals. The volume begins with an account of the first modern mental hospital, La Salpêtrière, established in 1656, and the first panoptical zoo, the menagerie at Versailles, created in 1662 by the same royal architect; the final chapter presents a choreographic performance that imagines the Toronto Zoo as a place where the human body can be inspired by animal bodies. From beginning to end, through interdisciplinary collaboration, this volume decentres the human subject and offers alternative ways of thinking about zoos and their inhabitants. This collection immerses readers in the lives of animals and their experiences of captivity and asks us to reflect on our own assumptions about both humans and animals. An original and groundbreaking work, Zoo Studies will change the way readers see nonhuman animals and themselves.