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This book is about the role of education in shaping rates and patterns of intergenerational social mobility among men and women during the twentieth century. It examines intergenerational class mobility in the United States and seven European countries during this period. Class mobility compares the social class position of men and women with the class of the family they were born into. Mobility trends have been similar in all these countries, with increasing upward mobility among people born up to about 1950 and increasing downward mobility for those born later. The major driver of upward mobility was the massive changes in the occupational structure that took place in the thirty years after the end of World War II. Education was also important in promoting greater openness, not only through the growth of higher education, but also because, in many cases, the relationship between social background and educational attainment weakened.

This work is focused on the abolitionist movement in Rio de Janeiro. It offers a careful reconstruction of the movement’s context and evolution in Rio, and the related formal parliamentary history. An understanding of the nature of the political parties of the Brazilian monarchy, the role of the crown, and the significance of ideology and individual statesmen has been brought to bear in order to comprehend how the regime actually interacted with abolitionism and how both the movement and the regime shaped each other as a consequence. One cannot understand the movement’s history as something apart from the elite political world that it challenged and changed. A central element in this study is an examination of the role of racial identity and racial solidarity in the abolitionist movement’s history. Previous analyses of the movement have always argued that the movement was an urban, middle-class, white movement (with a few significant Afro-Brazilian leaders), one that only gathered Afro-Brazilian mass support over time. A more careful analysis of the evidence transforms our understanding, disclosing Afro-Brazilian middle-class membership and the Afro-Brazilian masses present and mobilized in the movement from its beginning to its end. This study interweaves the imperial capital’s Afro-Brazilian components, its parliament and monarchy, and the nature and evolution of a reformist movement. It explains how the seemingly impossible was made possible: how an urban political movement ended slavery and did so within the confines of a monarchy dominated and maintained by elite

How can Romantic poetry, motivated by the poet’s intense yearning to impart his thoughts and feelings, be so often difficult and the cause of readerly misunderstanding? How did it come to be that a poet can compose a verbal artwork, carefully and lovingly put together, and send it out into the world at the same time that he is adopting a stance against communication? This book addresses these questions by showing that the period’s writers were responding to the beginnings of our networked world of rampant mediated communication. The Connected Condition reveals that major Romantic poets shared a great attraction and skepticism toward the dream of perfectible, efficient connectivity that has driven the modern culture of communication. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats all experimented with their artistic medium of poetry to pursue such ideals of speedy, transparent communication at the same time that they tried out contrarian literary strategies: writing excessively ornate verse, prolonging literary reading with tedious writing, being obscure, and questioning the allure of quickly delivered information. This book shows that the Romantic poets have much to teach us about living in—and living with—the connected condition, as well as the fortunes of literature in it.

The master narrative of Cold War sports describes a two-sided surrogate war, measurable by falsely objective medal counts every four years at the Olympic Games. This approach is as inadequate for sports as it is for the Cold War. Rather than a bipolar, superpower conflict, the Cold War was a competition between the dueling globalization projects of capitalism and Communism composed of far-from-monolithic blocs. While a fragile, fearful peace took shape in the Northern Hemisphere, both sides waged proxy wars that killed tens of millions in the Global South. Alongside other forms of popular culture, sports were deployed to win the sympathies of the world’s citizens, many of them from nations that had emerged in the wake of European decolonization. Sport was the most conspicuous form of popular culture in the period. It offered millions around the world the opportunity to forge identities that both supported and undermined dominant ideologies—racial, gender, local, regional, national, and international. Sport crossed rather than created borders and identities—and it did so in myriad and intricate ways. This book brings together experts working on sports in the United States, USSR, German Democratic Republic, Asia, and the postcolonial world. Their work is theoretically aware and underpinned by extensive archival research. Taken together, they go beyond simple notions of bipolarity and present new insights that should invigorate the study of both international systems and of culture in the Cold War period.

Does leadership targeting work? This question lies at the heart of studies on the efficacy of counterterrorism policy. This book examines whether killing or arresting terrorists is an effective means by which to weaken and degrade a group’s operational capacity. It aims to identify and explain why decapitation works in some cases and not in others. In order to determine whether decapitation is an effective strategy, this project examines nearly one thousand instances of leadership targeting. A group’s susceptibility to leadership targeting is a function of three factors: organizational structure, communal support, and group type or ideology. Leadership decapitation is unlikely to result in the demise of groups that are highly bureaucratized, have high levels of communal support, or are driven by a religious or separatist ideology. Leaders matter less under these conditions, and their removal can have adverse consequences, such as retaliatory attacks or an overall increase in the frequency of attacks. The data reveals that the largest and oldest organizations are highly resistant to destabilization after targeting. Separatist, religious, and especially Islamist groups are unlikely to weaken after the removal of their leaders. In order to develop counterterrorism policies that will degrade and weaken terrorist organizations, it is essential to identify whether our policies are likely to be effective or to have adverse consequences. The book examines the cases of Hamas, al-Qaeda, Shining Path, and ISIS to understand how organizational structure, local support, and ideology contributes to their resilience in the face of repeated leadership attacks.

What is the state? How is it implicated in the reproduction of relations of domination? Theorists from Marx to Weber, from Durkheim to Gramsci, from Abrams to Foucault have pondered these questions. In The Encrypted State, anthropologist David Nugent sheds new light on these questions by focusing on disorder and delusion, rather than order and rationality. Nugent analyzes mid-century Peru, where the government experienced a crisis of rule. Officials believed that their efforts to govern were being systematically thwarted by an underground political party called APRA that remained largely invisible to the naked eye. APRA’s ability to disrupt official processes of rule produced deep paranoia among officials. They concluded that the party had established a vast subterranean polity of remarkable power and potency, to which virtually everyone secretly belonged. This episode of paranoia and delusion is especially puzzling because immediately prior everyday administration had been entirely normal and routine. In seeking to understand how irrationality and disorder could emerge out of rationality and order, Nugent finds that government projects had always been delusional. During periods of apparent order and rationality, however, officials had disguised their delusion—from themselves and others—by employing a series of bureaucratic and documentary mechanisms. The Encrypted State identifies these mechanisms and shows how they operated. The book also explores when these mechanisms succeeded in creating a facade of order and rationality and when they failed. In the process, the volume advances a radically new way of thinking about the state.

Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early “talking records” and their significance for literature from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker, and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot’s experimental readings of “The Wasteland” and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to Modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.

From the Grounds Up is a study of how peripheral places grappled with globalization at the end of the nineteenth century. Through extensive use of local archives in the Soconusco district of Chiapas, Mexico, the book redefines the body of actors who integrated Latin America’s countryside into international markets for agricultural goods. Alongside plantation owners and foreign investors, a dense but little explored web of indigenous and mestizo villagers, migrant workers, and local politicians quickly adopted and adapted to the production of coffee for export. Following their efforts to overcome violence, isolation, and the absence of reliable institutions, the book illustrates the reshaping of rural economic and political life in the context of integrating global markets. By taking up new export crops like coffee and making use of liberal reforms around private property and contract law, smallholders and laborers defended their interests and secured spaces for their own ongoing participation in rural production. Vast swaths of Latin America’s population were sending the fruits of their labor abroad by the turn of the century. Only by taking into account all those who produced for market can we understand rural Latin America’s transformation in this era.

The inviolability of diplomatic personnel and premises is a cornerstone of interstate relations and international law. As epitomized by the murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, host countries are not always willing or capable to protect foreign diplomats and missions, which have become increasingly vulnerable to terrorism and other forms of political violence. Consequently, states with a large diplomatic presence have complemented host countries protection with a host of additional measures ranging from relocating embassies to fortified suburban locations to the deployment of military, police, and private security guards. By increasing the separateness of foreign envoys from local societies and informing local societies’ perceptions of the sending states, however, diplomatic security policies may not simply protect diplomats, but also reshape the institution and practice of diplomacy. In spite of its theoretical and policy relevance, diplomatic security has received very sporadic scholarly attention. This volume fills this gap by providing a comparative analysis of diplomatic protective policies enacted by the US, China, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Israel and Turkey. Moreover, the book investigates the reasons underlying the evolution of diplomatic security policies over time and their variations across countries, examining the factors underlying the choosing of protective actors and arrangements. It then examines the effectiveness of these arrangements analyzing how diplomatic security policies have been reformed in response to major incidents and the extent to which they can secure diplomats without hindering their ability to interact with local society and tarnishing the image of the sending state.

This book begins with the observation that, during the English Reformation, holy things taken from churches and monasteries were on occasion not smashed or burned but instead given to children as toys. Iconoclasm has tended to feature prominently in narratives of modernity as a process of disenchantment, sometimes understood as the cultural diminution of playfulness: this book asks how these narratives might have to change once we recognize that iconoclasm and child’s play were periodically one and the same. Each chapter begins with an example of iconoclastic child’s play in practice--from locations in England, Germany, and East Asia, involving objects from broken crucifixes to wooden sculptures. The chapters then move outward from these starting points to ask what iconoclasm as child’s play can tell us about the ways in which children, their play, and objects more broadly are made to assume meanings. In pursuing these questions the book draws consistently on major and minor sixteenth-century figures--Erasmus, Bruegel, Spenser--but also ranges backward and forward to consider biblical, classical, and patristic understandings of play, as well as more recent thinkers including Walter Benjamin, D. W. Winnicott, T. W. Adorno, Alfred Gell, Ian Hacking, and Michael Taussig. These figures are used not so much to theorize iconoclasm as child’s play as to consider how this phenomenon might inflect the ways in which we seek to interpret and to organize children, play, and the past.