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Enlightenment thinkers bequeathed a paradoxical legacy to the modern world: they expanded the purview of equality while simultaneously inventing the modern concept of race. The Color of Equality makes sense of this tension by demonstrating that the same Enlightenment impulse-the naturalization of humanity-underlay both of these trends.

Scholars from seven disciplines, whose work spans five continents, announce a new way of seeing disasters that is essential for making sense of our time: critical disaster studies. Critical Disaster Studies strips away the technocratic veneer that too often makes structural problems appear to be acute emergencies.

No Wood, No Kingdom explores the conflicting attempts to understand the problem of wood scarcity in early modern England and demonstrates how these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of England's earliest colonies.

What does the sublime sound like? Miranda Stanyon traces competing varieties of the sublime, a crucial modern aesthetic category, as shaped by the antagonistic intimacies between music and language. In resounding the history of the sublime over the course of the long eighteenth century, she finds a phenomenon always already resonant.

In Star Territory Gordon Fraser charts how the project of rationalizing the cosmos enabled the nineteenth-century expansion of U.S. territory and explores the alternative and resistant cosmologies of free and enslaved Blacks and indigenous peoples.

Based on more than one hundred interviews with participants and accompanied by nearly forty photographs and maps, Battle Green Vietnam tells the story of the 1971 antiwar protest by Vietnam veterans that resulted in the largest mass arrest in Massachusetts history.

War Is Coming is an ethnographic study that sheds light on the everyday conversations, practices, and experiences of people in Lebanon who live in between moments of political violence, remember past wars, and anticipate future turmoil.

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"-the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction.

The Apache Diaspora brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated. Paul Conrad charts Apaches' efforts to survive or return home from places as far-flung as Cuba and Pennsylvania, Mexico City and Montreal.

Exploring the different configurations of David in biblical and Talmudic commentaries, in Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular literatures across Europe, in liturgy, and in the visual arts, Ruth Mazo Karras offers a rich case study of how ideas and ideals of masculinity could bend to support a variety of purposes within and across medieval cultures.

Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills-swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing-to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

Although lowland Britain in 300 CE had been as Roman as any province in the empire, in the generations on either side of 400, urban life, the economy, and the state collapsed. Marshalling a wealth of archaeological evidence, Robin Fleming charts this collapse, and its foundational role in making the world we characterize as early medieval.

Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of humanistic learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the benefits of relying on alchemy despite its recognized flaws.

Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a "collected works" of William Shakespeare as a series of quarto pamphlets. Zachary Lesser examines more than three hundred surviving copies of these "Pavier Quartos," revealing they are far more mysterious than we thought.

Divorce, American Style contests the frequent claim that marriage has become a more flexible legal status over time. Enduring ideas about marriage and the family continue to have a powerful effect on the structure of a wide range of social programs in the United States.

Between 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, millions of nude photographs of the female form were produced in France. Drawing upon government records, legal decisions, newspaper accounts, and contemporary literature, Raisa Adah Rexer recounts the history of these images and elucidates their immense cultural and artistic reach.

In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer reads nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left behind in their books and defends the value of the physical, circulating collections of nineteenth-century volumes in academic libraries.

In this first biography of Elihu Palmer, Kirsten Fischer depicts a once notorious freethinker who countered Christianity with the idea of an interconnected universe infused with a divine life force. Denounced as "heretical," Palmer's speeches and writings shaped the contest over freedom of religion and of speech in the new United States.

In The Book of Books, Thomas Fulton charts the process of recovery, interpretation, and reuse of scripture in early modern English literary culture, exploring the uses of the Bible as a combination of text and paratext that revolved around sites of social controversy and was continually transformed for political purposes.

Eric Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of three metrical forms as markers of literary periodization: alliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter. Rejecting the traditional division between medieval and modern, Weiskott's analysis of metrical history renegotiates the trajectories of English literary history between 1350 and 1650.

New Towns for the Twenty-First Century considers the ideals behind new-town development, the practice of building them, and their outcomes. Case studies provide histories of new towns in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe and impart lessons learned from practitioners.