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Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas

By Amy C. Offner

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There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America

By Philip Dray

This book is a history of American labor from the dawn of the industrial age to the present day. From the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, the first real factories in America, to the triumph of unions in the twentieth-century and their waning influence today, the contest between labor and capital for their share of American bounty has shaped our national experience. Here the author's ambition is to show the vital accomplishments of organized labor in that time and illuminate its central role in our social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. This is an epic character-driven narrative that locates this struggle for security and dignity in all its various settings on picket lines and in union halls, jails, assembly lines, corporate boardrooms, the courts, the halls of Congress, and the White House. Here the author demonstrates the urgency of the fight for fairness and economic democracy in a struggle that remains especially urgent today when ordinary Americans are so anxious and beset by economic woes.

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Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity

By Massimiliano Tomba

Scholars commonly take the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the starting point for the modern conception of human rights. According to the Declaration, the rights of man are held to be universal, at all times and all places. But as recent crises around migrants and refugees have made obvious, this idea, sacred as it might be among human rights advocates, is exhausted. This book suggests that we need to think of a different idea of universality that exceeds the juridical universialism of the Declaration. Insurgent Universality investigates alternative trajectories of modernity that have been repressed, hindered, and forgotten. Investigating radical upheavals, Tomba excavates an alternative idea of universality that is based on popular political practices that disrupt and reject the existing political and economic order. The book shows how this tradition builds bridges between European and non-European political and social experiments.

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Intoxicating Zion: A Social History of Hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel

By Haggai Ram

When European powers carved political borders across the Middle East following World War I, a curious event in the international drug trade occurred: Palestine became the most important hashish waystation in the region and a thriving market for consumption. British and French colonial authorities utterly failed to control the illicit trade, raising questions about the legitimacy of their mandatory regimes.

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The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

By Samuel W Franklin

"Samuel Weil Franklin shows that in postwar America, the newfangled term "creativity" was the product of campaigns to harness the power of the individual to the demands of capitalist production and global hegemony. Franklin reveals that the champions of creativity were psychologists, educators, and management consultants who benefited from postwar technological progress yet worried that the resulting society might promote conformity and stifle ingenuity. Against increasingly reified institutions and systems, the "creative individual" took on a wealth of romantic, generative, and democratic associations. Creativity was the motive force behind the postwar individual, the literal spark-and cannon fodder-of progress"--

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Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

By Niall Ferguson

"All disasters are in some sense man-made. " Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe.