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Michael Davis explores the "musical" quality of thinking in the work of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Plato, revealing the complex and profound ways in which they each plumbed the depths of reason's prerational foundations.

The Black Republic explores the critical but overlooked place of Haiti in black thought in the post-Civil War era. Following emancipation, African American leaders considered Haiti a singular example of black self-governance whose fate was inextricably linked to that of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination.

Examining how America's founding generation grappled with the problems posed by prisoners of war, Captives of Liberty reveals a cycle of violence, retaliation, and revenge that spiraled out of control, transforming a struggle for colonial independence into a revolutionary war.

In Pure Filth, Noah D. Guynn argues that the superficial crudeness and predictability of late medieval French farce conceal finely drawn, and sometimes quite radical, perspectives on ethics, politics, and religion.

In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker argues that rhetoric and theology establish blackness and whiteness as metaphors for sin and purity in medieval English and European writing. Whitaker shows how these metaphors came to guide the development of notions of race in the centuries that followed.

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, Erik Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead, from Elizabethan England to the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Through prodigious research and careful analysis, he boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and vernacular language as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains, from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy, and poetics.

Richard Stonley, the earliest known purchaser of Shakespeare's first publication, Venus and Adonis, has hitherto been the merest of footnotes in literary history. Through a combination of book history and biography, Shakespeare's First Reader tells a compelling story of how one early modern gentleman lived in and through his library.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a rebel camp located deep in the Congo forest, Anna Hedlund explores the micropolitics and practices of everyday life in a community of Hutu rebel fighters and their families and attempts to understand why they continue to fight in what appears to be an endless conflict.

Jamie Mayerfeld defends international human rights law as an extension of domestic checks and balances and therefore necessary to constitutional government. The book combines theoretical reflections on democracy and constitutionalism with a case study of the contrasting human rights policies of Europe and the United States.

In Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting contends that Frankenstein is a profound work of speculative fiction designed to engage a radical moral and political question: do children have rights?

Covering decades that included the last major crusades, the birth of the Inquisition, and the unexpected invasion of the Mongols, The Two Powers shows how Popes Gregory and Innocent's battles with Emperor Frederick shaped the political circumstances of the thirteenth-century papacy and its role in the public life of medieval Christendom.

To secure the general welfare in a new century, the future of American unity lies not in monolithic nationalism. Rather, Samuel Goldman suggests we move in the opposite direction: go small, embrace difference as the driving characteristic of American society, and support political projects grounded in local communities.

Free and Natural is a cultural history of nudity offering an in-depth account of how the naked body came to be closely tied to modern ideas about nature and authenticity. Sarah Schrank explores how the "free and natural" lifestyle emerged from the history of the nudist movement, sexual and environmental politics, and consumer capitalism.

Dennis Patrick Halpin argues that Baltimore is key to understanding the trajectory of civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A Brotherhood of Liberty traces the civil rights victories scored by black Baltimoreans that inspired activists throughout the nation and subsequent generations.

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots delineates the differences between the British and Portuguese empires as they struggled with revolutionary tumult, revealing how merchants, smugglers, rogue officials, slave traders, and pirates influenced contentious paths of independence in the United States and Brazil.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Japan, Making Meaningful Lives provides an intimate anthropological account of the existential concerns of elderly Japanese women and men.

Fighting for Dignity explores the impact of a mass deportation campaign on African and Asian migrant workers in Tel Aviv and their Israeli-born children. In this vivid ethnography, Sarah Willen shows how undocumented migrants struggle to craft meaningful, flourishing lives despite the exclusion and vulnerability they endure.

In Paper Monsters, Samuel Fallon charts the striking rise in the 1590's of a new species of textual being: the serial, semifictional persona. He argues that their status as collective fictions, passed among writers, publishers, and readers, positioned personae as the animating figures of what we have come to call "print culture."

Richard M. Freeland reviews how Northeastern University in Boston, historically an access-oriented, private urban university serving commuter students from modest backgrounds and characterized by limited academic ambitions and local reach, transformed itself into a selective, national, and residential research university.

The essays in Digital Media and Democratic Futures provide deep insights into the complex and context-dependent relationship between media and democracy and show that there is no single outcome for democracy in the digital age, only possible futures.

Gu Hongming's Eccentric Chinese Odyssey is the first comprehensive study in English of Gu Hongming, both the private individual and the public cultural figure. An "imitation Western man" who became "a Chinaman again," Hongming was a reactionary to his contemporaries and an Eastern prophet to foreign intellectuals after the carnage of WWI.

In Force and Freedom, Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, abolitionist leaders created the conditions that necessitated the Civil War.

Andrew Heath shows how Philadelphians looked to consolidate their city across internal social and sectional divisions as the republic fell apart in the Civil War era. Rallying to the cry "In Union There Is Strength," their battles over what a modern metropolis ought to be reveals how a city of mobs became a city of neighborhoods.

In its comparative analysis of postcolonial South Africa and Algeria and its examination of narratives of ex-combatants, Making Peace with Your Enemy demonstrates how former adversaries face a similar challenge: how to extricate oneself from colonial domination and the violence of war in order to build relationships based on trust.