Connelly tells the disturbing story of a quest to remake ourselves by policing national borders and breeding better people. With its transnational scope and exhaustive research, this critique uncovers the cost inflicted by a misguided humanitarian movement and urges renewed commitment to the reproductive rights of all people.

In this work drawn from lectures delivered in 1994 a founding figure of cultural studies reflects on the divisive, deadly consequences of our politics of identification. Stuart Hall untangles the power relations that permeate race, ethnicity, and nationhood and shows how oppressed groups broke apart old hierarchies of difference in Western culture.

Elizabeth Cobbs traces the American quest for gender equality back to the Revolution, when the founding principle of equality became a battering ram against hierarchy. These are stories of American women, famous and obscure, who struggled in public and private to secure new rights, defend their freedom, and gain control over their own lives.

Between 1555 and 1870, papal authorities created legal roadblocks to keep Rome’s ghetto-bound Jews from obtaining kosher meat. But Jewish butchers found ways to circumvent canon law by working with their Christian counterparts. Kenneth Stow describes this complex collaboration, which enabled Jews to maintain their traditions in a hostile city.

Festivals and the French Revolution—the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals; Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process.

Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant. Why, then, does fiction continue to pull us in and, more interesting perhaps, how? In this beautiful book Pavel provides a poetics of the imaginary worlds of fiction, their properties, and their reason for being.

Diego Javier Luis tells the story of transpacific Asian movement to and through the Spanish Americas. On arrival in Mexico, diverse Asian peoples became “chinos” subject to the colonial caste system. Tracing Asian resistance and adaptation to New Spanish ideas of race, Luis presents a Pacific-focused narrative of the colonial Americas.

The history of US Catholicism is the history of confession. For I Have Sinned charts the rise of confession as the defining ritual of American Catholic piety and identity—and its fall, as clergy sex-abuse scandals and the cultural shifts of the 1970s decimated interest in a practice that, today, is alien even to most faithful believers.