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A bold retelling of the 1960s civil rights struggle through its work against police violence—and a prehistory of both the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements that emerged half a century laterPolice Against the Movement shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins in precinct stations, picketing outside department headquarters, and stopping traffic to expose officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression thanks to widespread police surveillance, infiltration by undercover spies, and retaliatory prosecutions aimed at discrediting and derailing the movement.The history of the civil rights era abounds with accounts of physical brutality by sadistic sheriffs and tales of political intrigue and constitutional violations by FBI agents. Turning our attention to municipal officials in both the North and South, Davis reveals how local police bombarded civil rights organizers with an array of insidious weapons. More than just physical violence, these economic, legal, and reputational attacks were designed to project the appearance of color-blind law enforcement.The civil rights struggle against police violence is largely overlooked today, the victim of a willful campaign by local law enforcement to erase their record of repression against the movement. By returning activism against local police abuses to the center of the civil rights story, Police Against the Movement undoes decades of historical erasure surrounding the struggle against state violence that continues to this day.

The first annotated edition of the book that shocked the Victorian world and continues to generate controversy todayWhen Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man was published in 1871, the book was an immediate sensation. It presents Darwin's account of how we evolved from primates and expounds his theory of sexual selection, which he believed accounted for human origins and diversity. James Costa and Elizabeth Yale bring Darwin's Descent to new life in this authoritative annotated edition, shedding light on the cultural context in which the legendary naturalist developed his ideas and exploring how subsequent generations of scientists, scholars, and social reformers adapted them.Informative and in-depth commentaries accompany the text of The Descent of Man, enabling readers to engage with Darwin's ideas and contextualize them in light of our current understanding of human evolution and sexual selection. Costa and Yale show how Darwin's antislavery commitments and his beliefs in European superiority shaped his account of the evolution of human difference, and examine how Victorian beliefs about gender informed the development of his theory of sexual selection. They explain where Darwin's arguments about the origins of human differences line up with modern science—and where they don't.Spanning the boundaries of history and science, this fully annotated edition illuminates the rich cultural and scientific contexts underpinning Darwin's ideas and introduces his landmark book to a new generation of readers.

The consequences of America’s retreat from prosecuting elite-level corporate crimeThe United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate crime wave has gone unprosecuted and unpunished, with those in the C-suites largely escaping accountability. Meanwhile, the country has doubled down on pursuing people accused of street and drug crimes and immigration offenses. Corporate impunity, the financialization of the economy, militarized policing, the burgeoning carceral state, and the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere all have fostered corporate, economic, and state violence in America. In Crime and No Punishment, Marie Gottschalk argues that these developments have undermined the legitimacy of American political and economic institutions. Gottschalk analyzes how the concentration of economic, political, and military power has siphoned off vital resources, preying on the most vulnerable communities and normalizing violence and death. It has kept America from attacking the root causes of violent street crime and curtailing “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses, and chronic diseases. The United States continues to incarcerate more of its people than nearly every other country even as it decriminalizes or turns a blind eye to elite-level corporate crime. Public and scholarly attention, however, remains fixated on violent street crime—although corporate and white-collar crime and state and economic violence directly and indirectly hurt far more people in the United States. Gottschalk contends that the US failure to protect its people from these harms has increased the fragility of democracy in America.

How an enigmatic masterpiece of the French Revolution became a talisman of the revolutionary spirit in our own timeJacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat depicts the painter’s friend and fellow revolutionary, Jean-Paul Marat, collapsed in his bath after being fatally stabbed by a female assassin who stands just outside the frame. In this fascinating book, Thomas Crow traces the radical legacy of a painting that has been called the Pietà of the French Revolution, showing how David’s masterpiece captures the saga of that violent era in the single figure of Marat, and how it reveals itself anew today.Crow begins by describing how the painting’s enduring power came to the fore during the countercultural tumult of the 1960s, discussing how his vocation as a scholar arose out of his own encounter with the work. He then takes readers back to 1793, telling the story of the painting’s creation through the eyes of David, his subject, and Marat’s charismatic assassin, Charlotte Corday. Charting the history of its impact across more than two centuries, Crow shows how this multilayered portrait surfaced in succeeding waves of political dissent as an enduring talisman of popular insurgency.Beautifully illustrated, Murder in the Rue Marat is an art historian’s disarmingly personal account of a painting whose hidden complexities bear witness to the promise and peril of revolution in Marat’s time and our own.

From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near EastIn 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Love, War, and Diplomacy tells the story of the Amarna letters and the dramatic world of the Bronze Age they revealed.Blending scholarly expertise with painstaking detective work, Eric Cline describes the spectacular discovery, the fierce competition among dealers and museums to acquire the tablets, and the race by British and German scholars to translate them. Dating to the middle of the fourteenth century BCE and the time of Tutankhamun’s immediate predecessors, Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, the Amarna letters are the only royal archive from New Kingdom Egypt known to exist. In them, we learn of royal marriages, diplomatic negotiations, gift-giving, intrigue, and declarations of brotherly love between powerful rulers as well as demands made by the petty kings in Canaan who owed allegiance to Egypt’s pharaohs.A monumental achievement, Love, War, and Diplomacy transports readers to the glorious age of the Amarna letters and the colonial era that brought them to light and reveals how the politics, posturing, and international intrigues of the ancient Near East are not so unlike today’s.

From acclaimed folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor, an enchanting collection of the ancient myths that emerged out of the wonders-and disasters-of the natural worldMythopedia is a fun, fact-filled A-Z treasury of myths inspired by natural events. Bringing together fifty legends from antiquity to the present, this delightfully entertaining book takes you around the world to explore sunken kingdoms and lost cities, accursed mountains and treacherous terrains, and lethal lakes and singing sand dunes, explaining the historical background and latest science underlying each tale. As soon as humans invented language, they told stories to explain mysterious things they observed around them-on land, in the seas, and in the skies. Even though these tales are expressed in poetic or supernatural language, they contain surprisingly accurate insights and even eyewitness descriptions of catastrophic events millennia ago. Drawing on her unique insights as a pioneer in the exciting new field of geomythology, Adrienne Mayor describes how cultural memories of tsunamis, volcanic disasters, and other massive geological events can reach back thousands of years as the stories were preserved, elaborated, told, and retold across generations. She shows how geomythology is expanding our understanding of our planet's history over eons, revealing the human desire to explain nature and weave imaginative stories intertwined with keen observation, rational speculation, and memory. With captivating drawings by Michele Angel, Mythopedia is a compendium of many marvels, from the Hindu monkey god Hanuman and his army of bridge-building primates to the terrifying sand demon Shensha shen of China, the gnawing glaciers of Austria, and the vengeful fish-headed snake god Nyami Nyami of Africa's Zambezi River. Features a cloth cover with an elaborate foil-stamped design

A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual viceIntellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths. On Pedantry offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates. Taking readers from the academies of ancient Greece to today's culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us, painting vibrant portraits of some of the most intensely irritating intellectuals ever known, from devious sophists and bossy savants to hypercritical theologians, dry-as-dust antiquarians, and know-it-all professors. He shows how criticisms of pedantry have typically been more about conduct than ideas, and he demonstrates how pedantry served as a weapon in the perennial struggle over ideas, social status, political authority, and belief. Shifting attention away from the self-proclaimed virtues of the learned to their less-than-flattering vice, Visser makes a bold and provocative contribution to the history of Western thought. Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from satire and comedy to essays, sermons, and film, On Pedantry sheds critical light on why anti-intellectual views have gained renewed prominence today and serves as essential reading in an age of rising populism across the globe.

A radical revision-and worker's-eye view-of everything we thought we knew about the ancient Roman economyThe story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor. Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children's toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans' most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status. Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today's laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world.

An innovative study of how and why ancient Greek builders sometimes combined older and contemporary carving styles when making capitalsThe Ionic order of ancient Greek architecture gradually evolved over the course of the sixth century BCE. In Retrospective Columns, Samuel Holzman examines an overlooked group of nine Ionic monuments that are varied in design but have capitals that combine the pillowy, convex volutes of sixth-century Ionia on one side and the crisp concave volutes of more contemporary styles on the other. Such mixed-form capitals had a surprising longevity and range, spanning Greece, Italy, and Turkey between 550 and 250 BCE. Why did ancient Greek builders sometimes revert to older carving styles and combine them with newer ones? One old theory is that mixed-form capitals were a labor-saving shortcut-a notion Holzman puts to rest with a marble carving experiment that recreated the volutes of one capital. Rather, he argues that hybrid capitals represented an important parallel to other trends in Greek art, notably "bilingual" Attic vases, which combined older and newer painting techniques for sheer visual delight. By studying the chiaroscuro carving effects and painted polychrome decoration of hybrid capitals, Holzman shows that ancient viewers were primed to look for differences in such details, which the book illustrates with many original drawings and diagrams. Exploring works of Ionic architecture from different periods in Ionia, the Cyclades, Athens, and the Northern Aegean, Retrospective Columns demonstrates that their builders ultimately returned to outmoded elements to establish continuity with the past, reinforcing community identities and architectural tradition.

A fascinating account of the use and meaning of visual and spatial distortions in seventeenth-century art and architectureDuring the Catholic Reformation, patrons, artists, architects, and viewers, especially in Rome, were strongly drawn to visual and spatial distortions or "deformations"-works of art and architecture that were designed to be visually incomprehensible, at least initially. From Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome to the attention-grabbing prospettiva in the city's Palazzo Spada and the anamorphoses that define the corridors and walls of Minim and Jesuit buildings, The Deformation explores what this intriguing phenomenon reveals about contemporary religious belief, optics, and the natural sciences, as well as wider questions about attention and discernment. Failing to conform to an established ideal, deformations required a "reformation" to achieve that ideal. Anamorphic deformations, for example, could only be reformed into clarity when viewed from a particular angle or through a special mirror. Susanna Berger examines how deformations were experienced by beholders, and how they were embraced or opposed by critics. The book shows how deformations and related works-whether altar tabernacles, ephemeral religious architecture, churches, monumental sundials, colonnades with accelerated perspective, illusionistic frescoes, turned ivories, or painted anamorphoses-focused observers' attention on theological mysteries and the social power and sophistication of patrons. The book's rich illustrations include two gatefolds and some anamorphic images that can be seen without distortion by using an included reflective insert as a mirror. Looking at writings as well as visual works in multiple artistic media not typically considered in relation to each other, The Deformation offers a new interpretation of deformation that highlights the delay between perception and discernment. Susanna Berger is associate professor of art history and philosophy at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton).

Why we need to reconnect with nature's biological rhythms-and rediscover the benefits of a good night's sleepAll of life is profoundly shaped by the daily, monthly, and yearly cycles of our planet, and all creatures have internal timekeeping systems that rely on cues from the surrounding environment. With modern technology, we are changing our environments-and by proxy, the ecosystems around us-to override these innate rhythms of life. But at what cost? Life in Sync reveals how Earth's rotations shape our biology, what human sleep cycles looked like before the advent of artificial light, and why technology can't free us from the constraints of our circadian clocks. Philippa Gander explores the science behind the biological rhythms that animate us and our world, blending captivating storytelling with illuminating examples ranging from migratory birds and hibernating squirrels to jet-lagged pilots and astronauts in space. She shows how genetic circadian clocks are an ancient evolutionary adaptation that we share with all life on the planet, and how our rapidly expanding use of artificial light at night disrupts the time cues for entire ecosystems. Gander explains why cutting back on sleep adversely affects our well-being, safety, and longevity, and how breakthroughs in sleep science offer solutions to bring our lives more in harmony with nature's rhythms. An astonishing journey of scientific discovery, Life in Sync unlocks the mysteries of biological time-and offers new perspectives for anyone who has ever given up a good night's sleep for the sake of their hectic waking hours.

The first biography of an extraordinary woman and architect who left her mark on world capitals and reshaped modern designElla Briggs (1880-1977) was a talented architect, designer, and writer whose influence was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. She trained with the Viennese Secessionists and brought their radical ideas to Gilded Age New York. She designed modernist housing for the masses in Austria, was jailed as a suspected spy in Mussolini's Italy, and thrived in Weimar Germany before suffering persecution under the Nazis. Fleeing to London, she contributed to England's postwar reconstruction. Yet despite a long and prolific career, her name is largely forgotten today. Finding Ella Briggs restores Briggs to her rightful place in the history of modernist design. Despina Stratigakos and Elana Shapira bring together an international team of historians to provide the defining biography of this boldly unconventional designer. Whether she was fighting for integration at Europe's architecture schools or writing about innovative houses for American women's magazines like Good Housekeeping, Briggs embodied the transatlantic flow of modernism. This panoramic book uncovers new findings about Briggs, her networks, and projects, recovering the many facets of a life that spanned global borders and cultures. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished research from archives around the world, Finding Ella Briggs is the inspiring story of a woman who defied all obstacles to pursue her dream of designing for the modern client. With contributions by Megan Brandow-Faller, Celina Kress, Dörte Kuhlmann, Ulrike Matzer, Christine Oertel, Eva B. Ottillinger, Barbara Penner, Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, Monika Platzer, Ursula Prokop, Sabrina Rahman, Katrin Stingl, Carmen Trifina, and Christine Zwingl.

An authoritative, stunningly illustrated guide to every species of social wasp found in North America, Central America, and the CaribbeanSocial wasps like hornets and yellowjackets use the power of teamwork to build complex societies and architectural wonders, and though they comprise only a fraction of the thousands of species in North and Central America, they are almost solely responsible for giving wasps a bad reputation. This beautifully illustrated field guide covers all known species of social wasps from the high arctic of Greenland and Alaska to the tropical forests of Panama and Grenada. Ideal for beginners, experts, and everyone in-between, The Social Wasps of North America, Central America, and the Caribbean is the ultimate guide to these beneficial yet misunderstood insects. Features more than 900 full-color illustrations, more than 300 maps, and dozens of photosCovers more than 200 species, including dozens of regional color formsShows detailed face and body patterns of queens, males, and workersDetailed species accounts describe key identification features, size, nests, and habitatDiscusses everything from ecology, evolution, and taxonomy to anatomy, life cycle, behavior, nest architecture, conservation, and the critical roles wasps play in the environmentShares tips and tricks for identification and to avoiding painful stingsIncludes an extensive glossary and references

How late medieval Middle Eastern peasants adopted Arab cultural identities, and formed village clansDuring the later Middle Ages, peasants in Egypt and Greater Syria came to view themselves as members of Arab clans that had originated in the Arabian Peninsula. They expressed their Arab identity by wearing Arab headgear, adopting an Arab dialect, and circulating a new genre of popular epic that told heroic tales of pre-Islamic Arabia. In Becoming Arab, Yossef Rapoport argues that this proliferation of Arab village clans did not come about through mass migration and displacement but reflected an internal transformation. Drawing on extensive documentary, literary, administrative, and material evidence, Rapoport shows that the widespread formation of Arab village clans in late medieval Egypt and Greater Syria was a gradual process, the result of mass rural conversion to Islam and a new landholding regime in which peasants shifted from being landowners to being tenants. After the eleventh century, Rapoport contends, Middle Eastern villagers were turning Arab. These Arab village clans were not merely administrative regimes imposed from above; villagers enthusiastically embraced their new identities. New converts to Islam adopted Arab lineages to claim status and as a counter-identity to urban-based Turkish elites. Arab identity was used by clans to mobilize rural uprisings against the ruling sultans and to resolve disputes among villagers. Challenging traditional historiography of the Middle East, which views Arab clansmen as pastoralists whose identity separated them from that of the wider peasantry, Rapoport argues that the pervasive establishment of Arab village clans was the most important development in the history of the Middle Eastern countryside in the Islamic era.

The first book-length study of the biblical villain Haman, examining his depiction across Judaism, Christianity, and IslamHaman, infamous as the antagonist in the book of Esther, appears as a villainous figure in virtually all varieties of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this "biography" of Haman, Adam Silverstein traces the evolution of this villainous character from the ancient Near East to modern times, drawing on sources in a variety of languages and from diverse genres. Silverstein considers the evidence for a historical Haman and analyzes the abundance of material that that documents what those who read the Bible and the Qur'an have thought about him over the past two millennia. With this book, Silverstein offers an essential and original account of the rich diversity and openness of Abrahamic civilizations throughout history. Taking Haman as a case study, Silverstein guides the reader through diverse intellectual terrains, covering ancient Near Eastern cultures, pre-Islamic Iranian literature, Abrahamic scriptures and their interpretation, late antiquity, Islamic history, and interfaith relations. He shows how the figure of Haman has both united and divided Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities, who collaborated fruitfully in their efforts to grasp the meaning and significance of their holy books, but who also deployed the "Haman" label polemically against each other. Silverstein also considers Haman's prebiblical origins, raising the possibility that the book of Esther was receiving and reconfiguring Haman no less than later works were, with Esther's villain taking his place in a long line of reimagined Hamans. Haman: A Biography is the first book-length study to contextualize an Abrahamic character not only within Jewish and Christian traditions but also with reference to the character's prebiblical background and reception in Islamic cultures.

The first major biography of a brilliant American artist and the city that shaped himBarnett Newman (1905-1970), a founding member of the abstract expressionist movement, was a contemporary of such figures as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. He left behind only 118 finished paintings, six sculptures, and fewer than 140 drawings, yet is often regarded as the greatest painter to have emerged after the Second World War. Barnett Newman is the definitive biography of a charismatic New Yorker who by defying the rules created an art of the sublime. Drawing on original research conducted over decades, scores of interviews and oral histories, and previously unseen correspondence, this book paints a richly textured portrait of a creative sage who became an exemplar of the artist-citizen. Born in New York to Polish Jewish immigrant parents, he grandly aspired to involve himself in every detail of the city's life. He was a crusader for the civil service, ran against La Guardia for mayor, worked as a teacher, wrote poetry, criticism, and manifestos, produced political plays, and promoted other artists-all before painting a mature work of his own in his early forties. Newman began with none of the qualities once considered indispensable for a master artist, such as training, apprenticeship, or natural facility. But he possessed a galvanizing intellect and a conviction that aesthetic expression is an ecstatic declaration of existence and an assertion of human dignity. Beautifully illustrated and replete with previously unpublished information gleaned from full access to Newman's archives, here is the landmark account of a maverick who became an influential mentor and who created some of the most enduring works of the twentieth century.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice“A comprehensive biography of . . . one of the most acclaimed poets of her generation and a face of American feminism.”—New York TimesA major American writer, thinker, and activist, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of forceful, uncompromising prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as an architect and exemplar of the feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for women writers to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich’s correspondence and in-depth interviews with many people who knew her, Hilary Holladay provides a vividly detailed, full-dimensional portrait of a woman whose work and life continue to challenge and inspire new generations.

From the award-winning author of Revolutionizing the Sciences, a monumental historical account of how of we came to see the world through the lens of scienceScience is the basis of our assumptions about ourselves and our world, from ideas about our evolutionary past to our conceptions of the vast expanses of space and the smallest particles of matter. In this panoramic book, acclaimed historian of science Peter Dear uncovers the roots of such beliefs, revealing how they constitute a natural philosophy that has been developed and refined over the course of centuries—and how the world as we have come to know it was by no means inevitable.In a sweeping, multifaceted narrative, Dear describes some of the most breathtaking accomplishments in the advance of human knowledge, such as Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy, Antoine Lavoisier’s new chemistry, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. Challenging the notion that science is only about “making discoveries,” he shows how our world has been formed by people, institutions, and cultural assumptions, giving rise to disciplines ranging from biology and astrophysics to electromagnetism and the social sciences.Taking readers from the early eighteenth century to today, The World as We Know It reveals how our ideas about our place in the universe were bequeathed to us by individuals, cultures, and a curiosity that knows no bounds.

The mental labor that keeps families afloatand why women do most of itMothers and fathers use their time differently, with women spending roughly twice as many hours on family labor as men. But what about the gendered differences in the ways women and men think? What's on Her Mind provides an illuminating look at the cognitive labor that families depend on and reveals why this essential aspect of family life is disproportionately handled by womeneven in couples that aspire to practice equality.While most accounts of household labor center on how people use their time, Allison Daminger focuses on a less visible and less easily quantifiable aspect of family life. She introduces readers to the concept of cognitive laboranticipating, researching, deciding, and following upand shows how women in different-gender couples do most of this critical work. She argues that cognitive labor has less to do with personality traitsfor example, she's type A while he's laid-backand more to do with learned skills that men and women deploy in distinct ways. Yet not all couples fall into the personality trap. Daminger looks at different-gender couples who achieve a more balanced cognitive allocation while also exploring how queer couples carve out unique relationships to the gender binary.Drawing on original, in-depth interviews with members of different- and same-gender couples, What's on Her Mind points to new ways of understanding the interplay between who we are as individuals and the cognitive work we do on behalf of our families.

Why democracy is under assault across the globe by the leaders entrusted to preserve itDemocracies around the world are getting swept up in a wave of democratic erosion. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, two dozen presidents and prime ministers have attacked their countries' democratic institutions, violating political norms, aggrandizing their own powers, and often trying to overstay their terms in office. The Backsliders offers the first general explanation for this wave. Drawing on a wealth of original research, Susan Stokes shows that increasing income inequality, a legacy of late twentieth-century globalization, left some countries especially at risk of backsliding toward autocracy. Left-behind voters were drawn to right-wing ethnonationalist leaders in countries like the United States, India, and Brazil, and to left-wing populist ones in countries like Venezuela, Mexico, and South Africa. Unlike military leaders who abruptly kill democracies in coups, elected leaders who erode them gradually must maintain some level of public support. They do so by encouraging polarization among citizens and also by trash-talking their democracies: claiming that the institutions they attack are corrupt and incompetent. They tell voters that these institutions should be torn down and replaced by ones under the executive's control. The Backsliders describes how journalists, judges, NGOs, and opposition leaders can put the brakes on democratic erosion, and how voters can do so through political engagement and the power of the ballot box.

"Nan Z. Da, who immigrated to the United States from China as a child, analyzes Shakespeare's King Lear as a way to understand her family's experience in China during and after the Cultural Revolution"--

A spectacularly illustrated history of an enigmatic medieval diagramThe Wound Man-a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases-was reproduced widely across the medieval and early modern globe. In this panoramic book, Jack Hartnell charts the emergence and endurance of this striking image used as a visual guide to the treatment of many ailments, taking readers on a remarkable journey from medieval Europe to eighteenth-century Japan and explaining why the Wound Man continues to intrigue us today. Drawing on a wealth of original research, Hartnell traces the many lives of the Wound Man, from its origins in late medieval Bohemia to its vivid reincarnations in hundreds of manuscripts and printed books over more than three hundred years. Transporting readers beyond the specifics of bodily injury, Hartnell demonstrates how the Wound Man's body was at once an encyclopedic repository of surgical knowledge, a fantastic literary and religious muse, a catalyst for shifting media landscapes, and a cross-cultural artistic feat that reached diverse audiences around the world. The Wound Man, we discover, held profound importance for scribes, students, printmakers, poets, nuns, monks, and both healers and patients alike. Marvelously illustrated, Wound Man sheds light on the entwined histories of art and medicine, showing how premodern medical diagrams represent a unique site of contact between sickness and cure, suffering and sanctity, and painting and print.