New Releases

Published Jan. 26, 2018

Professor of dance Judith Hamera’s Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization (Oxford University Press) argues that deindustrialization cannot be understood apart from issues of race, specifically art by African Americans that represents relationships with capitalism in times of economic transition. Hamera discusses how Michael Jackson’s performances and plays featuring Detroit contain valuable lessons about decades of structural changes in the U.S. economy.

History professor Julian Zelizer has gathered leading historians’ writings on the legacy of Barack Obama. The Presidency of Barack Obama (Princeton University Press) delves into the issues that shaped his eight years in office.

Associate professor of French Christy Wampole traces the history of the root as a metaphor in Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (University of Chicago Press). Drawing on many fields, Wampole describes how the evolution of this common metaphor, from the family tree to the rhetoric of nationalism, has had far-reaching political and social consequences.

Published in the Feb. 7, 2018, Issue

2 Responses

Norman Ravitch *62

6 Years Ago

The Source of Nationalism

If we are honest about nationalism and not distracted by religious prejudice and folly, we would realize that nationalism comes from the Jewish Bible.

Norman Ravitch *62

6 Years Ago

Don't Make a Hero of Obama

You and your contributors to your new volume are taking advantage of the fact that every bad president makes the previous one look good. Barack Obama was a disaster for this country. His rise to power is responsible, along with George W. Bush, for the understandable backlash which elected Trump. But just because Trump is about as awful as anyone can be in the Oval, don't make a hero out of Obama, an ambitious man who used race unscrupulously to get elected by his own people and by guilt-ridden white people. His foreign policy was hardly better than Trump's, so far as we can see at this point, and his relations with Congress, pace Republican arrogance, were equally ineffective. Please write about Obama without Trump in your rear-view mirror, or you will crash.