Cornell University Press

12/23/2025

🏙️ DARK CONCRETE is about how the Black Power movement reshaped urban politics in the United States—from expectations to practices. Although the national and international dimensions of the Black Power movement are often focused on, Kimberley Johnson looks at the movement at the local level, highlighting Newark and East Orange, New Jersey, and Oakland and East Palo Alto, California, and three policy areas: housing, education, and policing. She examines how Black Power Urbanism had its own local meanings as it was defined by local activists, neighborhood residents, parents, tenants, and others who sought to repair cities and particularly black neighborhoods that were shattered due to urban renewal and highway construction, as well as ongoing political and economic disinvestment.

Dark Concrete depicts how local conditions influenced the emergence of the Black Power movement and, in turn, the ways in which these local movements reshaped urban politics, institutions, and place.

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Dark Concrete is about how the Black Power movement reshaped urban politics in the United States—from expectations to practices. Although the national and international dimensions of the Black Power...

12/21/2025

🔥 In WHEN REBELS WIN, Kai M. Thaler explores why victorious rebel groups govern in strikingly different ways.

Many assume civil wars destroy state capacity. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and Libya, for instance, victorious rebels perpetuated state weaknesses. Yet elsewhere, like in China and Rwanda, they built strong, capable states.

Kai M. Thaler argues that, to explain post-victory governance, we must look at rebel group ideologies: the ideas and goals around which a group is formed. Where a group's ideology falls along two key dimensions—programmatic versus opportunistic, inclusive versus exclusive—influences how it governs. Programmatic-inclusive groups seek to reach across territory and work with populations to implement goals, building the state to try to transform society. Opportunistic-exclusive groups, by contrast, prioritize personalized power and private wealth, neglecting statebuilding.

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In When Rebels Win, Kai M. Thaler explores why victorious rebel groups govern in strikingly different ways. Many assume civil wars destroy state capacity. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and Libya,...

12/21/2025

A HUDSON VALLEY RECKONING tells the long-ignored story of slavery’s history in upstate through Debra Bruno’s absorbing chronicle that uncovers her ancestors’ slave-holding past and leads to a deep connection with the descendants of the enslaved people her family owned.
Learn more on our website. 🔗Link in bio!

12/19/2025

📚 ALLEGORIES OF FORMAT examines the significance of format to the literary oeuvre of the nineteenth-century Swiss author, Gottfried Keller (1819–1890), best known for his 1855 novel, Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich). Malika Maskarinec understands format as the organization of a media object's relationship to a world of objects and persons; format orders a text's contents or, in the case of literature, what it represents. Maskarinec focuses on three formats of growing prominence in nineteenth-century media culture: the collected-works edition, the document, and the periodical.

The analysis demonstrates that different fictional worlds, characters, and plots in Keller's literary output allegorize the problems that specific print and paper formats pose to literary ideals of literature as an art form and to ideals of creative authorship. As Allegories of Format shows, attending to format allows for false antitheses inherited from the nineteenth century to be dismantled—between high and trivial literature, between the singular artwork and mass media products, and between creative literary works and the supposedly uncreative writing practices of office work.

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Allegories of Format examines the significance of format to the literary oeuvre of the nineteenth-century Swiss author, Gottfried Keller (1819–1890), best known for his 1855 novel, Green Henry (Der...

12/17/2025

❄️Check out some of the books we are publishing this month! 📚 Link in bio🔗

12/17/2025

🌍 AFTER BARBARY explores the connection between the United States and North Africa between the Barbary Wars of the early nineteenth century and the era of European decolonization after World War II. Timothy Mason Roberts offers a new approach to the study of empires, highlighting the significance of Algeria in French-American relations from France's first occupation of the country through the first years of independence of the Republic of Algeria.

As Roberts demonstrates, imperial authorities in Washington, DC; Paris; and Algiers rarely collaborated intentionally in institutional partnerships or alliances. Rather, American, French, and Algerian politicians, soldiers, writers, and revolutionaries—often acting at cross purposes and across political and cultural boundaries—sought power by imagining and constructing Algeria as a fissured, dynamic, transimperial space. Focusing on issues of settler colonialism, irregular warfare, racialized citizenship, territorial incorporation, and pan-African identity, After Barbary shows how French Algeria helped make the American and French empires.

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Cornell University Press fosters a culture of broad and sustained inquiry through the publication of scholarship that is engaged, influential, and of lasting significance.

12/16/2025

🌏 In RETRENCH, DEFEND, COMPETE, Charles L. Glaser advances a thought-provoking strategy for securing vital US interests in the face of China's rise.

Many believe China's ascent will drive it to war with the United States. Yet this is far from inevitable; geography and nuclear weapons should ensure US security. The real danger, Glaser contends, lies in East Asia's territorial disputes, especially over Taiwan.

To reduce the risk of war, Glaser makes a bold case for ending US security commitments to Taiwan and carefully calibrating its policies on protecting South China Sea maritime features. The United States should also strengthen its alliances with Japan and South Korea and eliminate unnecessarily provocative nuclear and conventional weapons policies.

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Cornell University Press fosters a culture of broad and sustained inquiry through the publication of scholarship that is engaged, influential, and of lasting significance.

12/14/2025

🌍 In this second edition of NORMS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Audie Klotz revisits the global struggle against apartheid and considers its impact on how we grapple with race and racism in international relations today.

Originally published in the wake of South Africa's democratic transition, Norms in International Relations documented how sustained international activism transformed apartheid from a domestic injustice into a global problem. Through chapters on multilateral institutions and bilateral pressures, Klotz showed how sanctions campaigns challenged state interests and reshaped global norms.

This second edition retains the original chapters as a historical snapshot of late-Cold War diplomacy, while new material traces the evolving meaning of apartheid itself—from a uniquely racialized regime to a more diffuse symbol of inequality. Klotz cautions that as "apartheid" becomes a generalized moral shorthand, its roots in systemic anti-Blackness risk being obscured.

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In this second edition of Norms in International Relations, Audie Klotz revisits the global struggle against apartheid and considers its impact on how we grapple with race and racism in international...

12/12/2025

🇺🇸 ORCHESTRATING POWER explores how the expansion of the American state for the First World War reshaped the nature of governance. This wartime state expansion is examined through the creation, structure, activities, and impact of the Council of Defense system on the ability of the United States to mobilize for a significant conflict in a foreign land.

Nathan K. Finney focuses on North Carolina's Council of Defense to describe how the council was mediated by specific people at various levels of society and the results of their decisions. The result is a compelling story about how individuals drove dynamic and compelling regional and national events that propelled a massive national wartime mobilization.

Positioned between the national government and the people of North Carolina, the Council of Defense mediated the activities of public, private, and individual efforts in support of mobilization activities. Because of this intermediary positioning, the council was instrumental in expanding state capacity and capability for military and resource mobilization and supporting an increase in the nation's ability to mobilize for the war.

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Orchestrating Power explores how the expansion of the American state for the First World War reshaped the nature of governance. This wartime state expansion is examined through the creation, structure,...

12/10/2025

GHOSTS AND THINGS by Aviva Briefel reveals how spiritualism’s explorations of the borderland between life and death, matter and spirit, produced a strange and seductive combination of wonder and discomfort that allowed participants to experience the possibilities and precarities of industrial modernity in novel ways.
Learn more about this book on our website. 🔗 Link in bio!

12/10/2025

🌏 THE FUTURE IS FOREIGN investigates how elite Japanese firms are responding to this unprecedented challenge. Hilary Holbrow argues that labor shortages push Japanese firms to hire more immigrants and women, and to ease excessive demands on all workers. At the same time, not all employees benefit equally.

Japanese women's enduring overrepresentation in low-status clerical roles reinforces gender biases that hold all women back. In contrast, the small but growing presence of white-collar Asian immigrant workers weakens the ethnic prejudices of their Japanese colleagues. Despite Japan's reputation for xenophobia, white-collar immigrant men disproportionally reap the dividends of Japan's shrinking population.

The Future Is Foreign sheds new light on the processes that perpetuate inequality in Japanese firms, and in organizations worldwide. While managers and policymakers often assume that increasing women and minorities' representation in leadership will erode prejudice, Holbrow reveals that the people we see when we "look down" the organizational hierarchy are more important to the social construction of bias than are the people we see when we "look up."

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Japan is at the forefront of global population decline. The Future Is Foreign investigates how elite Japanese firms are responding to this unprecedented challenge. Hilary Holbrow argues that labor shortages...

12/08/2025

🎭 SHAKESPEARE AND LOSS explores how, in Shakespeare's late tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra), some of the most fundamental forms of understanding and life that bind human communities together—grieving; loving; giving; acting and doing; speaking and being human; marrying, conversing, and judging—can become dangerously, even lethally obscure. These losses, Sarah Beckwith contends, shape the form, plot, and preoccupations that the late tragedies take and define them as a group, which she terms "tragedies of exile."

This unprecedented and searing run of tragedies written between 1601 and 1608 features protagonists who are driven out (or drive themselves out) of family and society, finding themselves banished (or seeking exile) to the edgelands of civilization. Using philosophical insights from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, Shakespeare and Loss shows that the exile of these protagonists is ultimately linguistic. They are exiled from sense and intelligibility, stripping from them vital concepts of human bonding—loving, grieving, giving—that they realize are precious only when it is too late.

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Shakespeare and Loss explores how, in Shakespeare's late tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra), some of the most fundamental forms of understanding...