A sweeping history of global interdependence from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century-with essential lessons for today

In The Capitalist Era, leading global historian Jeremy Adelman puts the world's current unwinding in much-needed historical perspective. Combining political, economic, intellectual, and environmental history, the book tells the epic story of the forces that, since the late eighteenth century, have transformed the world into a single but fractured survival unit that is integrated by exchange and flow, yet divided by suspicion and fear. It is a story of hopes for universal peace, panic over planetary destruction, and debates, policies, and media that have shaped how people view one another across distances and borders.

The Capitalist Era chronicles how global integration compelled people from different parts of the world to reckon with what it means to need each other for resources or recognition without knowing one another, and it describes the confrontations and experiments that have shaped the world through periods of integration and disintegration over the past two centuries. As trade, migration, and new technologies have brought people closer together in search of wealth, security, and survival, there have been huge clashes and collisions involving writers and soldiers, biologists and economists, photographers and missionaries.

Strangers-are they partners or rivals, liberators or oppressors? As The Capitalist Era shows, this is perhaps the biggest question hanging over our past, present, and future. To understand our world, it is essential to grasp how strangers have regarded each other as they decided to welcome or exclude, to respect or dominate. Rejecting simplistic determinisms about inevitable peace or inescapable doom, this book illuminates the brittle unity of today's world.

A personal treatise from distinguished social scientist Sandro Galea on the indelible effects of being an immigrant-and what it means for the greater good.

"I am one of the lucky ones," writes Sandro Galea. Galea left home in Malta at fourteen with his parents and sister as the island was rocked by political turmoil. The family made their way to Canada and Galea, in turn, eventually made his way to the United States. This is the story of Galea's long, surreal journey of forging a life in a series of new and unfamiliar places.

With spare and deeply affecting prose, Alien is a poignant exploration of what it means to build a life across borders-and why it's important for all of us. Galea's intimate and personal story frames the experience of being an immigrant in terms of its indelible lessons on adaptation, identity, belonging, and shared generosity. Galea also captures at once the joys and the uncertainties that define the process of uprooting one life to begin another abroad. His is a reflection on empathy, on precarity, and on the effect of immigrating, in which one becomes keenly aware of how quickly life-and the world-can change.

Blending philosophical inquiry and personal story, Alien bridges the gap between storytelling and scholarship and, in doing so, gifts us an essential aperture on the world not everyone experiences-and the value of having those who do.

A unique collection of sermons, many unique to the Blickling manuscript, predating AElfric and attesting to earlier English religious traditions.

One of the oldest collections of its kind, The Blickling Homilies bears witness to a tradition that existed before the well-known sermons of AElfric. It presents eighteen homilies, preserved in a manuscript written around the year 1000, that reflect an English religious culture that predates the Benedictine reform movement. The anonymous homilists explain major events in salvation history, describe the lives of saints, provide moral admonition, and look ahead to the end of the world and the Day of Judgment. Each prescribed for a particular day in the liturgical year, the texts vary widely in their contents-from exegesis of scripture derived from patristic authors to lengthy narratives drawn from early Christian hagiography and apocrypha. This edition, with a newly edited Old English text and fresh translation, includes ten homilies unique to the Blickling manuscript as well as three others that are not found whole in any other source.

An in-depth look at how one high school addressed racial inequality head-on.

The new superintendent stood before the faculty of "Oakmont High," a large, diverse public school, and spoke a cold truth about American education. He described seeing the vibrant mix of students in the school's hallways disperse into racially segregated classrooms when the bell rang. The fact was that students were sorted into tracks-supposedly race-neutral, "ability-based" pathways-that led to sharply unequal experiences and opportunities throughout high school and often their whole lives. "Why is it fair for white kids to have a better education than Black kids?" the superintendent asked his faculty. "It's racism pure and simple, and it's going to stop!"

Racial inequality persists because racism is systemic, baked into countless interlacing beliefs, practices, and structures that make up the way we do school. Tracking is one of many such practices. In Beautiful Struggle, Sharon M. Chubbuck and Cynthia M. Ellwood examine eleven years of transformation by administrators, teachers, students, and others as they tackled systemic racism head-on, starting with tracking. The people of OHS encountered intense resistance and made extraordinary inroads. They fought inequality with hard conversations and concrete steps. They dramatically increased Black and brown students' access to rich, rigorous learning from the moment students entered as freshmen. They questioned and restructured the interconnected web of policy and practices in every aspect of the school. Students themselves propelled major changes in academic opportunity and the very culture of the school.

Chubbuck and Ellwood argue that taking on racial inequality requires an unrelenting focus on racial justice, challenging systems on every front, broad collective leadership across race and role, and the will to navigate difference and conflict. The story within Beautiful Struggle offers a hopeful though sobering path forward.

Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us traces how Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto wrestled with questions that had troubled them since the occupation began: when will the war end, and what will become of us?

In examining the production and spread of knowledge in the Warsaw Ghetto, Maria Ferenc returns the point of view of the victims to its rightful place. She reveals illusions, imagination, and the social reception of a constructed image of events taking place on the other side of the Ghetto walls.

Individually and together, ghetto inhabitants created a picture of the outside world shaped by access to information and meanings attributed to news from different places. Yet the true fate of those deported "to the East" defied comprehension for most ghetto inhabitants as they desperately navigated the space between information and rumors. In Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us, Ferenc illuminates the victims' painstaking efforts to uncover the truth, as well as, paradoxically, their own resistance to the growing body of knowledge about the Holocaust.

Delve into Rome's lost history through the stories of a single city block.

Cutting through the heart of Rome is Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a time-worn street named for the mysterious "shops" said to run beneath it. History lies thick here, a museum atop a convent atop ancient ruins; layered in are the traces of artisans and poets, pilgrims and saints, a Fascist deportation, a communist coffee bar, a political assassination, and shopkeepers, too. These stories all rest upon a single city block, the same place where, in 13 BCE, the triumphal Roman general Lucius Cornelius Balbus built a monumental theater complex in his own honor.

Elizabeth Rodini's On the Street of the Hidden Shops digs deep into this corner of the city, uncovering a set of surprising, often poignant narratives that range across two thousand years. For as the walls of Balbus's compound decayed and the neighborhood was rebuilt, this block would come to shelter Romans from all walks of life: the daughters of local prostitutes, an earnest young man in search of a bride, an entrepreneur determined to preserve the city's colorful dialect, a Jewish family recently liberated from the nearby Ghetto, a band of idealistic archaeologists unearthing a long-forgotten past, as well as a gifted baker, a medieval donkey, and a Renaissance ghost. Their stories survive in archives and artifacts, but also in the enduring power of rumor and legend.

On the Street of the Hidden Shops invites us on a captivating journey to one place across many centuries. Its tight urban focus reveals a Rome most visitors miss, while uncovering some of the many Romes that have been largely lost to history.

The Forest of Remembrance is the first "biography of a place" to incorporate multiple perspectives of the Nazis and their local supporters murder of 70,000 people on the outskirts of Vilnius, including Jews, members of the Polish underground, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, communists, and Lithuanians who opposed the Nazi regime.

Zigmas Vitkus traces the transformation of the site from July 1944 when the first Soviet military units and Jewish partisans set foot on the former mass killing site to the present day. He not only analyzes the evolution of the memorial's content, the changes in its status, and the development of the physical site itself, but he also uncovers the relationship between the memorial's development and the vicissitudes of memory policy. As Vitkus explores the significance of Paneriai, he reveals it as a symbol of the Holocaust for different commemorative cultures: those of Lithuania, Poland, Israel, and Jews in the United States.

The Hell of Holy War reads Jean de Joinville's famous account of King Louis IX and his Seventh Crusade as a powerful and unique representation of war, memory, and loss during the Middle Ages. In 1248, Joinville, a French nobleman, set out for the Holy Land, having taken the Cross and vowed to follow King Louis IX - Saint Louis (d. 1270) - across the Mediterranean. It would be more than six years before he returned home, having survived devastating military defeat; capture, imprisonment, and ransom; disease and perilous sea voyages. Later, Joinville wrote a riveting, first-person account of the king he admired, the war he survived, and the people he encountered.

Usually read as a hagiography of Saint Louis and a founding myth of the French nation, Joinville's memoir, Irit Kleiman argues, is also a raw, even brutal, meditation on what it means to go to war, survive combat and illness, witness the deaths of almost all of one's companions, then return home again. In a series of capacious, lyrical, and historically grounded close readings, The Hell of Holy War reframes our understanding of Joinville's narrative as one that addresses the hubris of invasion, the friendship between men at arms, and the economic, ecological, and moral violence of war.

The Soviet Afro-Asianists explores Soviet intellectual and cultural history through the prism of postcolonial connections. Julie Hessler focuses on a cohort of writers and artists, mostly non-Russians from the Caucasus and Central Asia, who played a central role in the Soviet Union's cultural outreach to postcolonial countries in Asia and Africa. Interspersing analysis of the creative work with stories of their lives, Hessler considers three key themes: travel and literary and artistic impressions; ideals, particularly those connected to friendship and socialist internationalism; and civic action through organizations for peace, Afro-Asian solidarity, and international friendship.

Born shortly before or after the Russian Revolution, these artists and intellectuals became involved in "Afro-Asian" organizations in the 1950s. They identified passionately with anti-imperialism and with the promise of socialism. Focusing on a particular dimension of the Thaw - the opening of Soviet culture to new influences from the postcolonial world - The Soviet Afro-Asianists traces their path across the second half of the Soviet period, ending with the challenges they faced during the perestroika years.

An ethnography of how people use reproductive practices to transmit and reinvent American Judaism.

In Gestating Judaism, Cara Rock-Singer develops a new analytic technique called ethnodrashy (a combination of rabbinical midrash and sociological ethnography) to explore the centrality of reproductive bodies to the intellectual, political, and spiritual life of American Judaism. She considers how, in reproduction, religious practices like the mikveh combine with secular practices like fertility treatments in ways that challenge the popular idea that religion occupies a separate sphere of life from politics or science. In fact, Rock-Singer shows how Jewish feminists have leveraged the work of reproduction to intervene in important conversations about both politics and theology. Drawing together religious studies, gender studies, and science and technology studies, Gestating Judaism shows how Jewish tradition is transmitted and reinvented through the ongoing labor of reproduction.