Trousson, Raymond / Vercruysse, Jeroom (dir.), Dictionnaire general de Voltaire. (Champion classiques, references et dictionnaires 18) 1272 p. 2020:10 (Champion, FR) <670-9>
ISBN 978-2-38096-016-7 paper ¥7,064.- (税込) EUR 38.00

冷戦後の米国と核抑止
Lebovic, James H., The False Promise of Superiority: The United States and Nuclear Deterrence after the Cold War. 284 pp. 2023:2 (Oxford U. Pr., US) <686-887>
ISBN 978-0-19-768086-5 hard ¥21,235.- (税込) US$ 99.00 *
ISBN 978-0-19-768087-2 paper ¥7,505.- (税込) US$ 34.99 *

This political analysis exposes the fanciful logic that the United States can use nuclear weapons to vanquish nuclear adversaries or influence them when employing various coercive tactics. During the Cold War, American policymakers sought nuclear advantages to offset an alleged Soviet edge. Policymakers hoped that US nuclear capabilities would safeguard deterrence, when backed perhaps by a set of coercive tactics. But policymakers also hedged their bets with plans to fight a nuclear war to their advantage should deterrence fail. In The False Promise of Superiority, James H. Lebovic argues that the US approach was fraught with peril and remains so today. He contends that the United States can neither simply impose its will on nuclear adversaries nor safeguard deterrence using these same coercive tactics without risking severe, counterproductive effects. As Lebovic shows, the current faith in US nuclear superiority could produce the disastrous consequences that US weapons and tactics are meant to avoid. This book concludes that US interests are best served when policymakers resist the temptation to use, or prepare to use, nuclear weapons first or to brandish nuclear weapons for coercive effect.

Schiller, Dan, Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of US Telecommunications, From The Post Office To The Internet. 816 pp. 2023:3 (Oxford U. Pr., US) <686-418>
ISBN 978-0-19-763923-8 hard ¥12,441.- (税込) US$ 58.00 *

A sweeping, revisionist historical analysis of telecommunications networks, from the dawn of the republic to the 21st century. Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information-within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today's internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power. In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on US telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary US political economy. Schiller argues that networks have enabled US imperialism through a a recurrent "American system" of cross-border communications. Three other key findings wind through the book. First, business users of networks--more than carriers, and certainly more than residential users--have repeatedly determined how telecommunications systems have developed. Second, despite their current importance for virtually every sphere of social life, networks have been consecrated above all to aiding the circulation of commodities. Finally, although the preferences of executives and officials have broadly determined outcomes, these elites have repeatedly had to contend against the ideas and organizations of workers, social movement activists, and other reformers. This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of US telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominative--and contested--political economy drove the evolution of this critical industry.

Larson, Edward J., American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795. 416 pp. 2023:2 (Norton, US) <686-1579>
ISBN 978-0-393-88220-9 hard ¥6,970.- (税込) US$ 32.50 *

New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinised for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognise the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And we have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. We now have that history in Edward J. Larson's insightful synthesis of the founding. With slavery thriving in Britain's Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement's calls for liberty proved narrow, though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades. Larson's narrative delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: we witness New York's tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Payne, a Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. Indeed, throughout Larson's brilliant history it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.

May, Gregory, A Madman's Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom. 384 pp. 2023:5 (Liveright, US) <686-1581>
ISBN 978-1-324-09221-6 hard ¥6,435.- (税込) US$ 30.00 *

Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773-1833), which-almost inexplicably-freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicised manumissions in American history. So famous is the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates has used it to condemn Randolph's cousin, Thomas Jefferson, for failing to free his own slaves. With this ground-breaking investigation, historian Gregory May now reveals a more surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph's wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves-and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them. Sweeping from the legal spectacle of the contested will through the freedmen's dramatic flight and horrific reception in Ohio, A Madman's Will is an extraordinary saga about the alluring promise of freedom and its tragic limitations.

Rodrigue, John C., Freedom's Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley. (Cambridge Studies on the American South) 2022:12 (Cambridge U. Pr., UK) <686-1582>
ISBN 978-1-108-42409-7 hard ¥26,470.- (税込) GB￡ 94.00 *
ISBN 978-1-108-43934-3 paper ¥7,884.- (税込) GB￡ 28.00 *

The Lower Mississippi Valley is more than just a distinct geographical region of the United States; it was central to the outcome of the Civil War and the destruction of slavery in the American South. Beginning with Lincoln's 1860 presidential election and concluding with the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Freedom's Crescent explores the four states of this region that seceded and joined the Confederacy: Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. By weaving into a coherent narrative the major military campaigns that enveloped the region, the daily disintegration of slavery in the countryside, and political developments across the four states and in Washington DC, John C. Rodrigue identifies the Lower Mississippi Valley as the epicenter of emancipation in the South. A sweeping examination of one of the war's most important theaters, this book highlights the integral role this region played in transforming United States history.

Trigg, Christopher, To Walk the Earth Again: The Politics of Resurrection in Early America. (Religion in America) 320 pp. 2023:2 (Oxford U. Pr., US) <686-203>
ISBN 978-0-19-765275-6 hard ¥21,021.- (税込) US$ 98.00 *

The Protestant conviction that believers would rise again, in bodily form, after death, shaped their attitudes towards personal and religious identity, community, empire, progress, race, and the environment. In To Walk the Earth Again Christopher Trigg explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead, examining texts written between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. By reading histories, epic poetry, funeral sermons, and scientific tracts alongside works of eschatological exegesis, Trigg challenges the conventional scholarly assumption that Protestantism's rejection of purgatory prepared the way for the individualization and secularization of Western attitudes towards mortality. Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, and radicals looked to resurrection to understand their communities' prospects in the uncertain terrain of colonial America. Their belief that political identities and religious duties did not expire with their mortal bodies but were carried over into the next life shaped their positions on a wide variety of issues, including the limits of ecclesiastical and civil power, the relationship of humanity to the natural world, and the emerging rhetoric of racial difference. In the early national and antebellum periods, secular and Christian reformers drew on the idea of resurrection to imagine how American republicanism might transform society and politics and ameliorate the human form itself. By taking early modern Protestant beliefs seriously, Trigg unfolds new perspectives on their mutually constitutive visions of earthly and resurrected existence.

Binasco, Matteo, French Missionaries in Acadia/Nova Scotia, 1654-1755: On a Risky Edge. (Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World) 241 pp. 2022:11 (Palgrave Macmillan, UK) <686-146>
ISBN 978-3-031-10502-9 hard ¥25,527.- (税込) EUR 109.99

This book investigates and assesses how and to what extent the French Catholic missionaries carried out their evangelical activity amid the natives of Acadia/Nova Scotia from the mid-seventeenth century until 1755, the year of the Great Deportation of the Acadians. It provides a new understanding of the role played by the French missionaries in the most peripheral and less populated area of Canada during the colonial period. The decision to focus on this period is dictated by the need to investigate how and to which extent the French missionaries sought to carry out their activity within a contested territory which was exposed to the pressures coming out of both French and British imperial interests.

Brandt, Stefan L., Moveable Designs, Liminal Aesthetics, and Cultural Production in America since 1772. (Renewing the American Narrative) 385 pp. 2022:11 (Palgrave Macmillan, UK) <686-1156>
ISBN 978-3-031-13610-8 hard ¥27,848.- (税込) EUR 119.99

The book explores the liminal aesthetics of U.S. cultural and literary practice. Interrogating the notion of a presumptive unity of the American experience, Moveable Designs argues that inner conflict, divisiveness, and contradiction are integral to the nation's cultural designs, themes, and motifs. The study suggests that U.S. literary and cultural practice is permeated by 'moveable designs'-flexible, yet constant features of hegemonial practice that constitute an integral element of American national self-fashioning. The naturally pervasive liminality of U.S. cultural production is the key to understanding the resilience of American culture. Moveable Designs looks at artistic expressions across various media types (literature, paintings, film, television), seeking to illuminate critical phases of U.S. American literature and culture-from the revolutionary years to the movements of romanticism, realism, and modernism, up to the postmodern era. It combines a wide array of approaches, from cultural history and social anthropology to phenomenology. Connecting an analysis of literary and cultural texts with approaches from design theory, the book proposes a new way of understanding American culture as design. It is one of the unique characteristics of American culture that it creates-or, rather, designs-potency out of its inner conflicts and apparent disunities. That which we describe as an identifiable 'American identity' is actually the product of highly vulnerable, alternating processes of dissolution and self-affirmation.

〔新序文付〕アファーマティヴ・アクションが白かったとき－20世紀米国での人種的不平等の語られざる歴史－
Katznelson, Ira, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. With a new Introduction. 288 pp. 2023 (Liveright, US) <686-1238>
ISBN 978-1-324-05108-4 paper ¥4,064.- (税込) US$ 18.95 *

With this explosive analysis, Ira Katznelson fundamentally recast our understanding of twentieth-century American history, demonstrating that the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal eras were not, as we are so often told, fundamentally equitable or impartial, but discriminatory in the way they deliberately excluded African Americans from benefits. In fact, Katznelson writes, the gap between black and white Americans actually widened following this period, owing, in no small part, to the segregationist designs of southern Democrats. Now featuring a new introduction that situates this saga within the wider context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century history, When Affirmative Action Was White remains, tragically, as salient as ever, providing both a "painful understanding of how politics and race intersect" (Henry Louis Gates Jr.) and a broad justification for continuing affirmative action programs.

Bilic, Viktorija / Efford, Alison Clark (Hrsg.), Radikale Beziehungen: Die Beriefkorrespondenz der Mathilde Franziska Anneke zur Zeit des amerikanischen Buergerkriegs. 248 S. 2022:11 (F. Steiner, GW) <686-1258>
ISBN 978-3-515-13331-9 hard ¥10,212.- (税込) EUR 44.00 *

Diese Briefsammlung enthuellt den bemerkenswerten persoenlichen wie politischen Radikalismus der Mathilde Franziska Anneke. In Preussen war sie eine namhafte Feministin und Demokratin, die allgemeine Bekanntheit erlangte, als sie sich von ihrem ersten Ehemann scheiden liess und an den Revolutionen von 1848/49 teilnahm. Nach ihrer Auswanderung in die Vereinigten Staaten wurde sie eine bekannte Vertreterin von Abolitionismus, Frauenwahlrecht und Maedchenbildung. Den Zeitraum zwischen 1859 und 1865 praegte ihre intensive romantische Freundschaft mit der Abolitionistin Mary Booth. Sieben Jahre lang war Anneke ihrer Freundin eine Stuetze, als deren Ehemann Sherman erst wegen "Verfuehrung" angeklagt und dann wegen seines Abolitionismus inhaftiert war. Die beiden Frauen zogen mit drei ihrer Kinder nach Zuerich, wo sie Antisklaverei-Literatur verfassten, sich mit fuehrenden Radikalen umgaben und den amerikanischen Buergerkrieg verfolgten. Annekes Briefe vermitteln einen neuen Blickwinkel auf eine bedeutende deutschamerikanische Frauenrechtlerin und neue Erkenntnisse zur Geschichte des transatlantischen Radikalismus.

アメリカ西部の環境史　第2版
Dant, Sara, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West. 2nd ed. 240 pp. 2022:10 (Wiley-Blackwell, UK) <686-1045>
ISBN 978-1-119-73422-2 paper ¥6,864.- (税込) US$ 32.00