Books published by Columbia University Press

A president's work is defined by two challenges: knowing what to do and finding the time to do it. While the first of these has commanded extensive attention, the second has received little to none--until now. The President's Day is a groundbreaking study of the history, theory, and practice of modern presidential time management. Matthew N. Beckmann argues that the seemingly innocuous task of scheduling turns out to be anything but. In choosing what and who will fill their time, presidents determine their value, define their role, and drive their agenda. Combining extensive archival research with interviews spanning administrations from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, Beckmann exposes each president's signature pattern in terms of when to work, how long to work, how much to pack in, what to prioritize, and whom to see along the way. In these ways, The President's Day demystifies what John F. Kennedy called "the secret of the presidential enterprise."

This book is a go-to guide for all families seeking trustworthy information about the science and safety of vaccines. Paul A. Offit and Charlotte A. Moser--scientists and parents with decades of experience--equip readers with the facts they need to navigate vaccine decisions for the whole family, from babies to elders. In straightforward prose, they offer accessible and authoritative answers to today's most common vaccine-related questions. Offit and Moser explain how vaccines work, how they are made, and how they are tested. Chapters examine vaccine safety, ingredients, the workings of the immune system, and practical considerations from the implications of different medical conditions to missed doses. The book covers vaccines that have been available for decades as well as newer vaccines for illnesses such as RSV, COVID-19, and mpox, including both traditional and mRNA vaccines. The second half of the book is a guide to individual vaccines organized by age groups, including the first and second year of life, ages three to six, older children and teenagers, and adults. A timely resource for all families, this book allays unfounded fears and provides a clear, easy-to-understand picture of vaccines and vaccination. Vaccines and Your Family is a revised and updated edition of Vaccines and Your Child (2011) that expands coverage to include all ages and addresses recent scientific progress. It explores the new recommendations and new questions regarding vaccines that have arisen in the intervening years.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Welfare Rights Movement organized at both local and national levels, advocating for poor people's inclusion, dignity, and autonomy. We Are Each Other's Business examines Black women's leadership within the Chicago Welfare Rights Movement, recasting their consumer activism as a form of Black feminist technology. Nicole M. Brown calls for understanding the Black women of the Welfare Rights Movement as sophisticated strategists who engaged the tensions among capitalism, consumerism, and economic liberation. She analyzes Black women's engagement with consumer credit, tracing how they linked consumption with citizenship and critiqued the state's treatment of the poor. Brown offers a radical reframing of the struggle between Black women and the state as a battle of technologies, showing how Black women challenged "algorithmic assemblages of race, class, and gender" and "analog algorithms of poverty." She also shows how racism, sexism, and classism stifled opportunities for alliances: although the Welfare Rights Movement converged with consumer and women's rights movements, white and middle-class activists were unwilling to recognize poor Black women as fellow political actors. Bringing together historical sociology, computational methods, and intersectional Black feminist theory, We Are Each Other's Business offers innovative and generative insights into Black women's struggle for political and economic equity.

In the early twentieth century, wage loans became a major source of cash for workers all over the United States. From Black washerwomen to white foremen, Illinois roomers to Georgia railroad men, workers turned to labor income as collateral for borrowing capital. Networks of companies started profiting from payday and property advances, exposing debtors to the grim prospects of garnishments of their wages and possessions in order to mitigate the risk of default. Progressive and later New Deal reformers sought to eradicate these practices, denouncing "loan sharks" and "financial slavery" as major threats to a new credit democracy. They proposed fair credit as a universal solution to move past industrial poverty and boost consumer freedom--but in doing so, reformers, lenders, and bankers limited credit access to the white middle-class constituencies seen as worthy of protection against extortion. Working for Debt explores how the fight against wage loans divided the American credit market along class, race, and gender lines. Simon Bittmann argues that the moral and political crusades of Progressive Era reformers helped create the exclusionary credit markets that favored white male breadwinners. The politics of credit expansion served to obscure the failures of U.S. capitalism, using the "loan shark" as a scapegoat for larger, deeper depredations. As credit became a core feature of U.S. capitalism, the association of legitimate borrowing with white middle-class households and the financial exclusion of others was entrenched. Blending economic sociology with business, labor, and social history, this book shows how social stratification shaped credit markets, with enduring consequences for class, race, and gender inequalities.

In recent decades, Mexico has been one of the most dangerous democracies for journalists. Their coverage of the war on drugs, abuses of power, and human rights violations has led to harassment, threats, and violence by powerful cartels and corrupt officials. This book provides a ground-level view of how Mexican journalists have navigated this perilous environment, offering insight into how they protect themselves while reporting on the most critical and sensitive subjects. Based on in-depth interviews with reporters, editors, activists, and officials, Mexico's Resilient Journalists examines the strategies that media workers have employed in pursuit of both personal safety and the public interest. Julieta Brambila argues that Mexican journalists have developed innovative forms of resilience, highlighting their power and agency amid violence, censorship, and intimidation. She considers how journalists have banded together to develop coping mechanisms, protect each other, and raise public awareness. These resilient newsmakers have adapted to adversity by redefining their professional values and practices, rethinking their surroundings, and reassessing their role. Brambila also evaluates how various media organizations have learned from incidents of violence and changed their policies to better protect their reporters. Shedding new light on defense of the freedom of the press in Mexico, this book offers crucial lessons for other countries seeing a rise in threats to independent journalism.

The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 was a monumental achievement. Linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, it transformed New York City into a hub of international trade, drove the rise of industrial cities in once sparsely populated areas, and accelerated the westward expansion of the United States. Yet few of the laborers who toiled along the canal shared in the prosperity it brought. Mark S. Ferrara tells the stories of the ordinary people who lived, worked, and died along the banks of the canal, emphasizing the forgotten role of the poor and working class in this epochal transformation. The Raging Erie chronicles the fates of the Native Americans whose land was appropriated for the canal, the European immigrants who bored its route through the wilderness, and the orphan children who drove draft animals that pulled boats around the clock. Ferrara also shows how the canal served as a conduit for the movement of new ideas and religions, a corridor for enslaved people seeking freedom via the Underground Railroad, and a spur for social reform movements that emerged in response to the poverty and suffering along its path. Brimming with vivid characters drawn from the underbelly of antebellum life, The Raging Erie explores the social dislocation and untold hardships at the heart of a major engineering feat, shedding light on the lives of the canallers who toiled on behalf of American expansion.

This book presents the trailblazing political scientist Martin L. Kilson's essays on leading Black intellectuals of the twentieth century. Kilson examines the ideas and careers of several key thinkers, placing their intellectual odysseys in the context of the dynamics that shaped the Black intelligentsia more broadly. He argues that the trajectory of twentieth-century Black intellectuals was determined by the interplay between formal ideas and Black egalitarian struggle. Beginning with the tension between W. E. B. DuBois's civil rights activism and Booker T. Washington's accommodationism, Kilson explores the formation and evolution of Black intellectuals and activists across generations. Chapters consider Horace Mann Bond's career in higher education, political scientist John Aubrey Davis's transition from civil rights activist to federal policy technocrat, Ralph Bunche's writings on European colonial rule in Africa, Harold Cruse's classic polemic The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, E. Franklin Frazier's analysis of the Black bourgeoisie, Adelaide M. Cromwell's studies of the challenges facing elite Black women, and Ishmael Reed and Cornel West's advocacy as public intellectuals amid a conservative turn. Offering timely and engaging insights into the lives and work of pivotal Black intellectuals and activists, this book sheds new light on the abiding questions and debates in Black political thought.

What is contemplation? How is it distinct from meditation? Is contemplation essentially religious or mystical? What should one contemplate, and how? Are there different styles of contemplation, and why should one practice them? Ought we try to lead more contemplative lives? This book offers a philosophical introduction to the theory and practice of contemplation. Kevin Hart examines a variety of religious, aesthetic, and philosophical notions, shedding light on the singular qualities of contemplation. This book spans topics including the spiritual exercises of the ancient Greeks, overlooked aspects of Christian spirituality, and aesthetic contemplation of nature and art. Contemplation ranges from ancient thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus to Aquinas and other medieval theologians as well as modern philosophers like Kant, Husserl, and Wittgenstein. Though focused on Christianity, it also considers contemplation in other religious traditions, among them Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Paganism. Concise and comprehensive, this book provides both religious and nonreligious readers with a foundational understanding of the history and nature of contemplation as well as the benefits of practicing it.

Sinophone studies--the study of Sinitic-language cultures and communities around the world--has become increasingly interdisciplinary over the past decade. Today, it spans not only literary studies and cinema studies but also history, anthropology, musicology, linguistics, art history, and dance. More and more, it is in conversation with fields such as postcolonial studies, settler-colonial studies, migration studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and area studies. This reader presents the latest and most cutting-edge work in Sinophone studies, bringing together both senior and emerging scholars to highlight the interdisciplinary reach and significance of this vital field. It argues that Sinophone studies has developed a distinctive conceptualization of power at the convergence of different intellectual traditions, offering new approaches to questions of plurality, hierarchy, oppression, and resistance. In so doing, this book shows, Sinophone studies has provided valuable conceptual tools for the study of minoritized and racialized communities in diverse global settings. Essays also consider how the rise of China has affected Sinophone communities and the idea of Chineseness around the world, among other timely topics. Showcasing cross-fertilization and diversification that traverse and transcend conventional scholarly boundaries, Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines gives readers an unparalleled survey of the past, present, and future of this inherently interdisciplinary field.

Liberalism holds that individual freedom can be realized under capitalism. "Classical liberalism" tends to focus on excessive state interference as the primary threat to freedom. More recent theorists, however, recognize that capitalism, left to itself, would be characterized by mass social ills and argue that state intervention is necessary to guarantee individual freedom. This book is a Marxist critique of liberalism. Prabhat Patnaik demonstrates that liberalism and Marxism provide vastly differing accounts of individual freedom and the forces that restrict it. In the Marxist view, people, contrary to appearances, lack real agency under capitalism. Competition coerces individuals to act according to the impersonal logic of capitalism, making them mere instruments of the system. In this way, capitalism creates universal alienation, and true individual freedom is possible only through overcoming it. Patnaik argues that socialism can secure individual agency in both economic and political spheres, though actually existing socialism has failed in this respect. He also considers what a socialist society should look like: not a planned economy but a highly decentralized system in which citizens are directly involved in taking decisions affecting their lives and enjoy fundamental economic rights as well as political ones. Readable yet rigorous, Beyond Liberalism brings together political philosophy and political economy to offer a renewed vision of socialism.

Racial experiences vary widely in everyday life and in different social contexts. They range from damaging to fulfilling, spanning discrimination, unquestioned assumptions, and political solidarity. Drawing on years of cross-cultural ethnographic research, Gabriel Alejandro Torres Colón develops an innovative theory to grasp racial experiences in their full sociocultural complexity, with vital implications for both social science and antiracist politics. This book demonstrates how people draw from their experiences to fashion "styles for flourishing"--embodied strategies for survival in racialized societies that can both reproduce and contest racial orders. In performing their styles, individuals embrace their racialized selves and communities, helping them flourish in broader social worlds. They are able to creatively reconfigure racialized existence into desires for recognition, expressions of resistance, and aspirations for alternative political orders. Torres Colón explores how styles develop within "racial niches" through nuanced considerations of a boxing gym in the U.S. Rust Belt, Afro-Puerto Rican community organizing in an ancestral mangrove forest, and Muslim political activism in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa. Each case highlights nuanced dimensions of racial experience to question how local efforts are seen in political ideologies and governance. Bringing together humanistic, social scientific, and biological approaches with compelling ethnographic detail, this interdisciplinary book provides generative theoretical insights regarding race and critical new perspective on racial inequality in liberal democracies.

A screenwriter, novelist, labor leader, Hollywood insider, and feminist, Mary C. McCall Jr. was one of the film industry's most powerful figures in the 1940s and early 1950s. She was elected the first woman president of the Screen Writers Guild after leading the fight to unionize the industry's writers and secured the first contract guaranteeing a minimum wage, credit protection, and pay raises. Her advocacy was not welcomed by all: To screenwriters McCall was an "avenging goddess," but to studio heads she was, in the words of one Hollywood executive, "the meanest bitch in town." And after a clash with the mogul Howard Hughes in the blacklist-era 1950s, she disappeared from the pages of Hollywood history. J. E. Smyth tells McCall's remarkable story for the first time, putting the spotlight on her trailblazing career and crucial influence. She explores McCall's life and work, from her friendships with stars such as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney to her authorship of the hit Maisie series about a working-class showgirl's adventures. Analyzing McCall's deft political maneuvering, Smyth offers new insight on screenwriters' struggle for equality and recognition. She also examines why McCall's legacy is unrecognized, showing how the Hollywood blacklist and entrenched sexism obscured her accomplishments. Colorful and compelling, this biography provides a powerful account of how one extraordinary woman shaped Golden Age Hollywood.

The notion of landscape typically seems innocuous, associated with leisure and contemplation. Likewise, aesthetics is often seen as apolitical, a matter of subjective tastes and preferences. This book challenges the common understanding of these categories as disengaged and demonstrates how uniting landscape studies and philosophical aesthetics opens new ways of addressing both the environmental crisis and the crisis of the humanities. Alberto L. Siani argues that the concept of landscape helps us overcome deeply ingrained oppositions, such as nature and culture, spirit and flesh, or the environment and the human. Landscape represents the intersection of these categories and therefore provides a helpful vantage point on contemporary predicaments that cannot be understood within dualistic frameworks. An engaged aesthetics shows that landscapes are not simply ways of seeing the world but ways of being in the world, offering practical guidance for inhabiting places ethically. Landscape Aesthetics sheds new light on issues spanning art and its interpretation, environmentalism, temporality, lived spaces, justice, education, and interdisciplinarity. Bringing together a wide range of sources across philosophy and other disciplines as well as personal experience, Siani reveals the key role of landscape and aesthetics in responding to the pressing crises we face today.

How are histories of racial oppression dealt with in contexts of diversity? Chana Teeger tackles this question by examining how young South Africans, born into democracy, confront their country's racist apartheid past in high school history lessons. Drawing on extensive observational, interview, and textual data, Distancing the Past vividly chronicles how students learn that racism is a thing of the past, even as they experience it in their everyday lives. Teeger shows how teachers' desire to avoid conflict between students mirrors a national focus on racial reconciliation, leading to the historical distancing of the recent apartheid past. This historical distancing allows schools to present a façade of transformation. Beneath the surface, however, the lessons reproduce unequal power relations at school and legitimize inequality at the societal level. In documenting these processes, Distancing the Past illuminates the subtle reconfiguration of racism in the era of civil liberties. It shows how acknowledging the racist past is not enough. When the past is remembered--but its legacies ignored--racism can continue unabated in the present. Distancing the Past is a timely account of the remaking of race and inequality in the aftermath of de jure discrimination. It offers vital lessons for other societies grappling with their own racist histories.

As competing American, European, and later Japanese imperial and colonial ambitions spread across the ocean in the nineteenth century, Honolulu emerged as a transnational hub for the exchange of ideas. Rumi Yasutake reveals the pivotal role of women's organizing in this era of rapid globalization, tracing how diverse movements intersected and converged in Hawai'i--with worldwide consequences. The Feminist Pacific examines transnational networks in Hawai'i beginning in 1820, with the arrival of American missionary wives, and through the rise of women's internationalism in the interwar years. It follows an array of suffragists, missionaries, maternalists, and antiwar activists in their international campaigns for peace and social justice that culminated in the formation of the Pan-Pacific Women's Association (PPWA) and subsequent conferences. Yasutake explores how these movements radiated from Honolulu and branched out to the United States, Japan, and China. She illuminates their contradictions, showing how women's striving for collective power went at once in the face of and hand in hand with globalization, settler colonialism, and imperialism. Yasutake underscores how the PPWA and the movements that formed it wrestled with the dichotomies of their world: home and public, domestic and foreign, native and settler, white and nonwhite, feminist and antifeminist. Bridging nineteenth-century Protestant churchwomen's evangelism with twentieth-century feminist internationalism, this book recasts women's global organizing from the perspective of the Pacific.

Harun Farocki was one of the world's most celebrated experimental filmmakers at the time of his death in 2014. In a career spanning over fifty years, the German artist produced more than one hundred works, including political cinema, nonfiction film and video, and art installations, which have been exhibited globally. After his early politically engaged films in Super 8 and 16 mm, Farocki spent many years making independent films and commissions for German public television. In the last phase of his career, he transitioned to creating digital and multichannel installations. He also collaborated with the director Christian Petzold on a dozen films. In addition to his prolific media-making career, Farocki was an incisive critic and editor. This groundbreaking book is an incisive and comprehensive analysis of Farocki's oeuvre, shedding new light on his media experimentation and writings across platforms and venues. Nora M. Alter examines how Farocki's work investigates film and media images: their history, nature, manipulation, changing function, and strategic use. Focusing on interconnected ideas surrounding labor, critique, and war, she shows how his politically committed art is informed by pedagogical strategies that drive viewers to perceive how the media world they inhabit functions. Alter also argues that Farocki's career provides a lens on the history of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking amid shifts in materials and exhibition platforms. Tracing the transformations of Farocki's artistic practice and thought, this book offers new insight into the body of work of one of the most significant media makers of the late twentieth century.

Drawing on first-hand experience in the State Department's Office of Religion and Global Affairs during the Obama-Trump transition, David T. Buckley traces how the Trump administration's populism affected the foreign policy bureaucracy.

Drawing on first-hand experience in the State Department's Office of Religion and Global Affairs during the Obama-Trump transition, David T. Buckley traces how the Trump administration's populism affected the foreign policy bureaucracy.

In this groundbreaking book, Matsuoka Shinpei-a leading scholar of noh theater-provides a detailed account of the birth of one of Japan's most celebrated art forms.

Revered by many fundamentalist Shiites and reviled by the West, Hezbollah is considered to be a paradigm for other militant groups wishing to make the promise of Islamic Revolution a reality. Journalist Hala Jaber was granted exclusive and unparalleled access to the inner circle of this organization, and she exposes not only its tactics, but also its history, ideology, and culture.

Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.

I Have No Enemies is the definitive biography of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, offering a meticulously researched account of the twists and turns of a remarkable life.