A vivid portrait of rural and working-class life that links the dynamics of social ties to far-right political alignments

Rural and working-class voters in France have increasingly supported the politics-and the worldview-of the country's far right. What accounts for this realignment? In Those Who Remain, sociologist Benoit Coquard immerses himself in working class life in the rural and industrialized northeast areas of France, exploring the political allegiances of those left behind after the rural exodus of the last century. Coquard-himself a native of this social milieu-documents the intense friendships and family ties that cement social bonds. He shows how competition for employment, gender discrimination, and the relationships between whites and descendants of immigrants shape new forms of collective consciousness that have found expression in right-wing ideologies.

Coquard moves beyond conventional explanations for the rise of the far right, describing working-class cultural models that run counter to the values of schooling, formal credentials, and idealized visions of social harmony. In this society, reputation is paramount; you may compete with your peers, but you must also help those you think of as your real friends. Central to this world is not "we, the workers" or "we, the locals" but "us first," a claim of precedence over others that echoes the far right's historic slogan "the French first."

Coquard's analysis sheds light on the perennial dilemma-not limited to French politics-of whether it is possible for the left to win back the rural working classes. His account suggests that the problem goes deeper than policy positions and party platforms.

This book reframes urban acupuncture- small, precisely targeted design interventions- as a catalyst for rebuilding place attachment and reinforcing social resilience in gentrifying historic neighborhoods by discovering a newly human-centered approach to heritage regeneration. This book bridges environmental psychology and tactical urbanism, introducing place attachment as the key metric of success. It pairs in-depth theory with hands-on case studies, showing how micro-interventions can restore identity, culture, and community agency.

Scope:

• Foundations of gentrification place attachment, and social resilience.
• Principles and methods of urban acupuncture in heritage settings.
• Rich case studies and cross-case analysis
• A practical framework and policy recommendations for architects, designers, planners and psychologists.

This book is of particular value to urban designers, architects, planners, psychologists, and heritage professionals who are seeking practical and innovative strategies. It is also suitable for graduate students and researchers in the fields of urban studies, architectural studies, and environmental psychology.

A fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at non-religious funerals in contemporary London

An Honest Death is an intimate and moving ethnographic account of funerals for people who don't believe in God or an afterlife. Focusing on secular funeral celebrants of the British Humanist Association (now called Humanists UK), the book examines how their ritual work is geared toward helping realize a secular world. There is a strong ethical commitment behind this effort, which is to face death with honesty based on the belief that this life is all we have. For the humanist celebrants and those they serve, this is what allows for a life with meaning and purpose.

Written in a vivid style, the book centers on the lives and the funerals of particular people, from a three-year-old child to a man in his nineties. Anthropologist Matthew Engelke, who trained as a humanist celebrant as part of his research, describes how these officiants try to craft "sincere" funerals, avoiding language and music that might suggest that the person who died had any religious beliefs. The book also captures the highs and lows for humanist celebrants of working in the funeral business-a business that is, for many of them, a kind of vocational calling.

Above all, An Honest Death draws out the tensions in secular humanist thought and practice between reason and the body, rationalism and materialism. Nothing matters more to the humanists than "daring to know" in the Enlightenment tradition, but nothing is so certainly known as the fact that we are finite and embodied creatures.

An African Approach to Population Ethics offers an important and long-overdue shift away from Western, individualistic models of population ethics, grounding its analysis in Indigenous African communal ethics. The contributors explore a wide range of historical and contemporary issues affecting African population dynamics. They critically examine urgent questions of procreation, resource allocation, and environmental sustainability, from the ethics of climate change to the reinterpretation of traditional fertility proverbs. By prioritizing African voices and experiences, the book establishes a unique and much-needed framework for addressing population challenges with respect for African needs and priorities. It is an essential resource for scholars, policymakers, and all readers focused on Africa's future.

This book offers a history of shyness in France. In particular, it interrogates the seeming strangeness of shyness in the long nineteenth century, positing it as an everyday experience which nonetheless troubled the stories that the nation sought to tell about itself in a period of intense political and social change. Shyness threatened the narratives of natural sociability central to French thought yet could also be seen as a symbol of sensibility and striving.

The book unravels these competing perspectives by analysing a diverse range of sources from etiquette books, medical writing, and life-writing, to popular theatre and canonical fiction. It draws on techniques from the emotion history, literary studies, and the medical humanities. In revealing the neglected history of an often-trivialised experience and those who suffered with it, the book makes a significant contribution both to the history of the emotions in nineteenth-century France and to present-day shyness studies.

This open-access volume explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming STEM education and reshaping teaching and learning for today's world. AI is no longer a distant promise; it is actively redefining classrooms, challenging educators to rethink pedagogy, curriculum, and student engagement. Focusing on the powerful intersection of AI and STEM, the book showcases innovative learning strategies, future-ready curriculum models, and cutting-edge approaches to teacher professional development. It demonstrates how AI can strengthen critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and ethical awareness while offering practical solutions to real-world educational challenges. Combining advanced AI tools with evidence-based instructional design, the volume provides actionable insights that inspire educators, researchers, teachers, and learners. With its inclusive, forward-looking perspective, this book serves as an essential guide for educators, policymakers, and researchers seeking to modernize STEM education and prepare students for an AI-shaped future.

Today, half of Texas's expanding population, including the cities of Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, depends on the Trinity River, a river that has shaped the state's politics, economy, and environment for centuries. From the prairies of North Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, the Trinity established Native nations, foiled Spanish and French imperialism, stood at the center of the Texas plantation system, and fueled the growth of the state's largest cities.

In the first history of this vital river, historian Scot McFarlane illuminates how the Trinity has defined Texas history. Its floods enriched the soil and destroyed crops, its channel served as both a route and barrier to freedom, and its once-polluted waters now sustain a significant portion of the state. McFarlane's captivating narrative brims with stories of the people who called the Trinity home over the centuries: the Comanche, steamboat pilots, enslaved and freed people, sharecroppers, inmates, and millions of urban residents. The result is a fresh perspective on economic development, slavery, and the environment-revealing the Trinity not as a backdrop to Texas history but as a force that shaped it.

Explores the institutional and environmental transformations that occurred during the Reconstruction Era.

While the Reconstruction Era in America saw a paradigmatic realignment of the country's core institutions and values, there was a physical quality to Reconstruction as well: the country was not only rebuilding the South after the Civil War, but flat-out building as it expanded westward.

In Reconstructors, John Dean Davis details how the Army Corps of Engineers and its subcontractors designed and redesigned the infrastructural landscape to support the republic's rebirth. The Corps' projects not only transformed the landscape; they created markets, fostered a distinctive expansionist culture, and-for a time-enacted a less discriminatory economic and social agenda across the South and West. Davis aims to bring federal power, environmentalism, and capitalism into a frame that reveals the landscape's power to further ideology.

Public toilets determine who gets everyday dignity, freedom of movement, and civic belonging-and who doesn't.

Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

For Customers Only is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren't only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.

But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about-provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity.

The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.

Notable historians delve into the brass tacks of launching and sustaining federal agencies.

Critics regularly complain that the United States government can't do big things. While their explanations differ, there is now a growing sense that American institutions are not delivering solutions to the problems of our time. The New Deal offers a striking contrast. During the 1930s, the United States created a wealth of new agencies, departments, offices, and programs-and in very short order.

This illuminating collection brings together leading American historians to offer fifteen detailed accounts of how this remarkable expansion of state capacity actually happened. From the Civilian Conservation Corps to the Rural Electrification Administration to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the authors dig into the nuts and bolts of how exactly the New Dealers did so much all at once. They detail the choices before state builders who, operating under the pressure and immediacy of the era, made decisions that held even greater consequences in the longer term.

In a time when federal agencies are under stress like never before, the contributors offer critical insights about what future administrations can learn from the New Deal's extraordinary achievements and how they can build state capacity and deliver for Americans once again.

Features contributions by W. Tanner Allread, Mary Bridges, Brent Cebul, Sarah E. Igo, Meg Jacobs, Richard R. John, Neil M. Maher, Sharon Ann Musher, Sarah T. Phillips, Kathryn Olmsted and Eric Rauchway, Alex Platt, Jason Scott Smith, Ganesh Sitaraman, Abby Spinak, Chloe Thurston, and Mason B. Williams.

Experience a year in Los Angeles County, in all its glitter and grit, through a unique anthology that pairs essays by acclaimed writers and historians with custom maps.

When many of us picture Los Angeles, we're actually thinking of LA County. Home to roughly ten million people, the county alone is more populous than forty-two US states. Its eighty-eight cities include places made famous by Hollywood glamor and California dreaming-Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Santa Monica-but also working-class municipalities and the self-explanatory City of Industry. With a territory that includes the Pacific coastline, mountain ranges, and the high Mojave Desert, the county's landscapes have been touched by earthquakes, droughts, and, of course, devastating fires. LA County is a place of extremes: progress and injustice, innovation and stagnation.

Visions of the Southland collects essays by writers, journalists, and historians to create a nuanced portrait of LA that's grounded in the county itself-its sites, structures, and stories. Contributors-including Gustavo Arellano, Keri Blakinger, Lynell George, Christopher Hawthorne, Michael Hiltzik, Greg Hise, Carolina Miranda, Becky Nicolaides, Susan Straight, and David L. Ulin-delve into LA's infamous air pollution, movie ranches, prisons, aqueducts, urban forests, SoCal Bohemianism, and more. A custom map by Ezra Rawitsch enriches each piece and grounds the reader in specific locations throughout the county. Unfolding over the course of a year, the book traces the rhythms of politics, sports, weather, and wildlife across this sprawling and enigmatic place.

Sweeping in its scope and gorgeous in its design, Visions of the Southland will delight Angelenos, history buffs, urbanists, and map enthusiasts alike.

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 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, and 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.

In Dead Letters, Halle O'Neal explores how inventive makers in medieval Japan, haunted by love and loss, turned to things left behind in the wake of a loved one's death-specifically, the letters they once exchanged. Since the ninth century, mourners reused and recycled the epistles of the dead for the copying of sacred Buddhist scripture to create what are known as "letter sutras." Although these sutras have punctuated the personal histories and material culture of famous figures throughout Japan's history, as objects they remained largely hidden in plain sight. By foregrounding their production, materiality, and haptic qualities, O'Neal recaptures the vivid tales woven together by the interaction of the maker as mourner and the beloved as original letter writer. She pays careful attention to gender, embodiment, emotions, and invisibility to analyze the multidimensional layers of these palimpsests that offered both an outlet for grief and prayer for salvation.

Through their manifestation, letter sutras bring together multiple layers of religious and cultural significance for mourner and mourned. This beautifully illustrated volume centers the emotional intimacy of used objects and the charged nature of embodiment that lies at the root of private devotional practice even today.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Disability offers the most comprehensive and authoritative resource on disability studies, bringing together leading scholars from across the social sciences, humanities, and allied fields. This interdisciplinary reference work critically examines disability as a social, cultural, political, and embodied phenomenon, providing state-of-the-art perspectives on theory, research, and practice.

Entries span foundational concepts and emerging debates, including disability rights and justice, accessibility, intersectionality, neurodiversity, crip theory, and global perspectives on disability. The encyclopedia addresses key methodological approaches and explores disability in relation to education, health, law, technology, media, literature, and the arts. It also engages with timely topics such as digital inclusion, disability and climate change, and decolonial and feminist frameworks, offering readers a nuanced understanding of how disability intersects with power, identity, and social transformation.

Designed for scholars, students, and practitioners, this volume serves as an indispensable reference for disciplines including disability studies, sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, law, cultural studies, gender studies, and public health. By crossing disciplinary boundaries and centering diverse voices, the encyclopedia provides a vital platform for advancing research and fostering inclusive practices worldwide.

Established in the late fourteenth century in what is now Sindh Province, Pakistan, the Makli necropolis grew over three centuries to a site of more than seventy monumental tombs and mosques, and hundreds, if not thousands, of graves. Makli's distinctive architecture sheds light on the intersection of transregional artistic styles through its accretional building practices by generations of craftspeople. Over its long history, Makli became a site layered with multiple meanings as regional elites and everyday Sufi devotees sought to be buried in the shadow of saints-and as the living visited the necropolis to enact devotions and duty.

Here, Fatima Quraishi uses rarely consulted archives in Pakistan alongside close analysis of Makli's built environment to understand the site as an artistic and architectural palimpsest, mutually established by elite patronage and humble devotions. At Makli, the passage of time merges with changes in religion and society to reveal the vibrant lives and afterlives of tombs integral to the communal life of surrounding areas. By studying what has long been treated as an interstitial space between Central Asia and India, Quraishi's work speaks to wider explorations of borderlands of the premodern past.

The life and work of an American Jewish convert to Islam who became a leading voice of the global Islamic Revival, explored through the lens of emotion in transnational religious identity

Maryam Jameelah (1934-2012)-born Margaret Marcus in White Plains, New York-followed an unlikely journey, from comfortable suburban childhood to influential voice of the twentieth-century global Islamic Revival. Jameelah's more than twenty books and pamphlets, translated into a dozen languages, were notable for their unrelenting critique of modernity and arguments for the superiority of Islam in opposition to the West. In this exploration of her life and work, Justine Howe shows how Jameelah harnessed negative emotions-what Howe calls an "antimodern affect"-to call attention to what she saw as the catastrophes wrought by materialism and secularism. For Jameelah, galvanizing these emotions formed the basis of global Muslim solidarity that could be mobilized for a reinvigorated Islamic future.

Tracing Jameelah's successive incarnations-from Reform Jew to highly mobile spiritual seeker and finally to fervent Muslim polemicist-Howe analyzes how women, gender, and family became the central nodes of Jameelah's vision. Projecting herself as an embodiment of Muslim femininity as she pursued a career as a public intellectual, Jameelah subverted the very boundaries and prescriptions she sought to impose on others. Howe's exploration of the multivalent threads that animated Jameelah's religious imagination reveals unexpected entanglements of American Judaism, global Islam, feminism, and anticolonialism.

The comprehensive volume brings together cutting-edge research and practical insights on language testing, assessment, and evaluation across West and South Asia. Featuring voices in India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, the book offers a rich blend of theory, case studies, and classroom-based evidence-highlighting innovative practices that shape one of the world's most linguistically and culturally diverse regions. The book is structured into five thematic sections and provides logical progression from foundational concepts to innovative applications. It explores vital themes ranging from assessment policy and teacher training to digital innovations and AI-enhanced assessment frameworks.

An essential resource for researchers, educators, administrators, and policymakers, this volume provides actionable strategies for improving English language testing in West and South Asia's multilingual and evolving educational landscape.