In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the debate between proponents of Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter has been reignited. For proponents of Black Lives Matter, the slogan All Lives Matter is not a call for inclusiveness but a criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement. On the other hand, advocates of All Lives Matter insist their slogan is about diversity and colorblindness. The contributors included in Black Lives Matter vs. All Lives Matter: A Multidisciplinary Primer approach the subject from fields as wide ranging as sociology, mathematics, linguistics, business, politics, and psychology, to name a few. This collection adds complexity and international perspectives to the debate, allowing these seemingly simple quarrels over phrasing to be unpacked from many angles. A refreshing variety of looks at one of the defining social movements of the last decade and the reaction to it, this collection will be valuable to those seeking to understand these movements in ways beyond how they are typically framed.

At least 200,000 people died from hunger or malnutrition-related diseases in Spain during the 1940s. This book provides a political explanation for the famine and brings together a broad range of academics based in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia to achieve this. Topics include the political causes of the famine, the physical and social consequences, the ways Spaniards tried to survive, the regime's reluctance to accept international relief, the politics of cooking at a time of famine, and the memory of the famine. The volume challenges the silence and misrepresentation that still surround the famine. It reveals the reality of how people perished in Spain because the Francoist authorities instituted a policy of food self-sufficiency (or autarky): a system of price regulation which placed restrictions on transport as well as food sales. The contributors trace the massive decline in food production which followed, the hoarding which took place on an enormous scale and the vast and deeply iniquitous black market that subsequently flourished at a time when salaries plunged to 50% below their levels in 1936: all contributing factors in the large-scale atrocity explored fully here for the first time.

The study of Roman society and social relations blossomed in the 1970s. By now, we possess a very large literature on the individuals and groups that constituted the Roman community, and the various ways in which members of that community interacted. There simply is, however, no overview that takes into account the multifarious progress that has been made in the past thirty-odd years. The purpose of this handbook is twofold. On the one hand, it synthesizes what has heretofore been accomplished in this field. On the other hand, it attempts to configure the examination of Roman social relations in some new ways, and thereby indicates directions in which the discipline might now proceed.
The book opens with a substantial general introduction that portrays the current state of the field, indicates some avenues for further study, and provides the background necessary for the following chapters. It lays out what is now known about the historical development of Roman society and the essential structures of that community. In a second introductory article, Clifford Ando explains the chronological parameters of the handbook. The main body of the book is divided into the following six sections: 1) Mechanisms of Socialization (primary education, rhetorical education, family, law), 2) Mechanisms of Communication and Interaction, 3) Communal Contexts for Social Interaction, 4) Modes of Interpersonal Relations (friendship, patronage, hospitality, dining, funerals, benefactions, honor), 5) Societies Within the Roman Community (collegia, cults, Judaism, Christianity, the army), and 6) Marginalized Persons (slaves, women, children, prostitutes, actors and gladiators, bandits). The result is a unique, up-to-date, and comprehensive survey of ancient Roman society.

The first history of schooling gathered as a single and continuous text since the 1980s. It is also the first attempt to put together a history of South African schooling from the perspective of the subjugated people.

It attempts to show, as South Africa moves from a landscape essentially marked by encounters of people at different frontiers – physical, geographical, economic, cultural and psychological (where only the first two have previously received real attention) – how education is conceptualised, mobilised and used by all the players in the emerging country from the colonial Dutch and British periods into apartheid.

This book covers the period of the history of South African schooling from the establishment of the first school in 1658 to 1910 when South Africa became a Union. It approaches the task of narrating this history as a deliberate intervention. The intervention is that of restoring into the narrative the place of the subjugated people in the unfolding of a landscape which they share with a racialised white community. Propelled by a post-colonial framing of South Africa’s history, it offers itself as a deliberate counter to dominant historiographic and systematic privileging of the country’s elites. As such, it works on a larger canvas than simply the school. It deliberately works the story of schooling alongside the bigger socioeconomic history of South Africa, i.e., Dutch settlement of the Cape, the arrival of colonial Britain and the dramatic discovery of gold and diamonds leading to the industrialisation of South Africa. The story of schooling, the text seeks to emphasise, cannot be told independently of what is going on economically, politically and socially in the making of modern South Africa. Modernity, as a consequence, is a major theme of the book.

In telling the story of formal schooling in South Africa, the text, critically, seeks to retrieve the experience of the subjugated to present a wider and larger canvas upon which to describe the process of the making of the South African school. The text works historically with the Dutch East Indian experience up until 1804 when schooling was characterised by its neglect. It shows then how it develops a systematic character through the institutionalisation of a formal system in 1839 and the initiatives of missionaries. It draws the story to a close by looking at how formal systems are established in the colonies, the Boer Republics and the protectorates.

Thematically, the text seeks to thread through the conceits of race and class to show how, contradictorily, they take expression through conflict and struggle. In this conflict and struggle people who are not white (i.e., they do not yet have the racialised labels that apartheid brings in the middle of the 20th century) are systematically marginalised and discriminated against. They work with their discrimination, however, in generative ways by taking opportunity when it arises and exercising political agency.

The book is important because it explains the roots of educational inequality. It shows how inequality is systematically installed in almost every step of the way. For a period, in the middle of the 19th century, attempts were made to forestall this inequality. The text shows how the British administration acceded to eugenicist influences which pushed children of colour out of what were called first-class schools into segregated missionary-run institutions.

In an era haunted by its past, modern Europe sought to break with the old; the future and the new became the ideal. In Italy however, where the remains of the past dominated the landscape, ruins were a token both of decadence and of the inspiring legacy of tradition. Sabrina Ferri proposes a counter-narrative to the European story of progress by focusing on the often-marginalized and distinctive case of Italy. For Italians, ruins uncovered the creative potential of the past, transforming it into an inexhaustible source of philosophical speculation and poetic invention whilst simultaneously symbolizing decay, loss and melancholy. Focusing on the representation of ruins by Italian writers, scientists, and artists between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sabrina Ferri explores the culture of the period and traces Italy's complex relationship with its past. Combining the analysis of major works, from Vico's New science to Leopardi's Canti, with that of archival sources and little-studied materials such as scientific travel journals, letters, and political essays, the author reveals how: the ruin became a figure for Italy's uneasy transition into modernity; the interplay between reflections on the processes of history and speculations on the laws of nature shaped the country's sense of the past and its vision of the future; the convergence of narratives depicting historical and natural change influenced both the creative arts and the emerging sciences of geology, biology, and archaeology; the temporal crisis at the dawn of the nineteenth century called into question traditional models for investigating the past and understanding the present.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024.

The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide

With insight, humour, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thu?t and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICA™. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn M?i, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.

Resonant in its emotions and clear in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.