Stanford University Press Blog

TimeToRead Recommendations

Don't miss the final days of free shipping on online orders through our website with the discount code TIMETOREAD-FM. SUP is helping independent booksellers and bookstores by pledging 5% of its online sales in April and May to The Book Industry Charitable Foundation.

 

 

We asked our editors "what SUP book you'd most like to read, now that we all (in theory) have TimeToRead?" These are their top book recommendations:

 

 

The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook, Vol. 1: To 1877 »

Edited by JOSEPH L. LOCKE and BEN WRIGHT

Recommended by: Alan Harvey, Director

I’m fortunate enough to see every book as it progresses through the Press, and I dip into each one to a greater or lesser degree. But actually relaxing and letting a book soak over me is rare. Our books inform and educate, and I have certainly learned a lot from titles like Artful Design or The Cult of the Constitution. But the current pandemic leads me to want a bigger picture, something foundational, spanning centuries. That leads me to The American Yawp. I’m not embarrassed to admit that American history wasn’t top of the curriculum at school in England, and this book has helped fill in many holes in my understanding of my adopted country.

Why Permanent Revolution?

The heart of modernity and capitalism

WYATT WELLS

The Barrow Hematite Steel Company by unknown - 1877 or earlier. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

The inspiration for Permanent Revolution came from O. Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War, which describes that conflict as a struggle between different versions of “modernity.”  This term connotes the immense transformation of the human condition over the last three hundred years, encompassing not only the extraordinary expansion of wealth, but revolutionary advances in health and education. With modernity also came immense moral progress such as the abolition of slavery.  A French peasant born in 1600 might well have had more in common with an Egyptian peasant of the Old Kingdom than with a twentieth-century Parisian worker.  Though most recognize the phenomenon, few agree on its causes and essentials.  Why did history, starting in northwestern Europe in the seventeenth century, take such a dramatic turn?  Which developments associated with modernity are causal and which are symptomatic?  Did rapid urban growth drive the process, as people moved to new communities and lost touch with traditional ones, or was it a result, as economic change concentrated the work force geographically?  As I wrestled with these questions, I became convinced that capitalism is central the phenomenon.

Capitalism is an economic system, not a religious, political, philosophical, or aesthetic one—the idea of a capitalist opera or religious service is ridiculous. Yet capitalism’s ongoing reorganization of economic life keeps society as a whole in constant flux.

If possible, the word “capitalism” conceals more disagreement than “modernity.”  The level of discourse is often low, even among intellectuals.  Capitalism is part of the fabric of life in Europe, North America, and much of East Asia, and analyzing something that we take for granted is difficult.  Many socialists identify capitalism with greed and exploitation, as if these did not stain every page of human history, capitalist or otherwise.  Economists and other academics often conflate it with free markets, though these existed in Ancient Rome and Classical China, societies no serious historian considers capitalist.  Students of business discuss the distinctions between Japanese, German, and American capitalism in great detail, glossing over what qualifies these all as capitalist in the first place.

Nakba Day Recommended Reading

A girl in a protest on Nakba Day 2010, Hebron, West Bank. Image has been cropped. Photo by Shy Halatzi, CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

 

To reflect on Nakba Day we have composed a recommended reading list focused around Palestinian experience.

 

 

Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine »

By NOURA ERAKAT

Winner of the 2019 Palestine Book Awards, sponsored by the Middle East Monitor (MEMO).

 

Bronze Medal in the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) - Current Events I (Political/Economic/Foreign Affairs) category, sponsored by the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

 

Justice in the Question of Palestine is often framed as a question of law. Yet none of the Israel-Palestinian conflict's most vexing challenges have been resolved by judicial intervention. Occupation law has failed to stem Israel's settlement enterprise. Laws of war have permitted killing and destruction during Israel's military offensives in the Gaza Strip. The Oslo Accord's two-state solution is now dead letter.

Justice for Some offers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle for freedom, told through the power and control of international law. Focusing on key junctures—from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza—Noura Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. Over the past century, the law has done more to advance Israel's interests than the Palestinians'. But, Erakat argues, this outcome was never inevitable.

"Noura Erakat's incisive exploration of the role of law in shaping the development of Israel/Palestine reveals the consistent genuflection of international legal institutions to Israel's reliance on well-established colonial practices. She also forcefully argues that the skillful use of international law as a tool of struggle can be generative of hope and possibility—for Palestine and the world. Justice for Some is precisely the book we need at this time."

—Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

COVID-19 Exposes the Racist Side of Breastfeeding

Understanding the history of formula and Black motherhood

ANDREA FREEMAN

Pet Milk ad featuring the Fultz quadruplets. Their doctor sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company.

“Four Little Babies.” Pet Milk, “Four Little Babies Become Four Little Ladies,” advertisement, Pittsburgh Courier, October 22, 1949, 5. Public Domain.

 

Breastfeeding is one of the defining acts of motherhood—and it is also one of the most controversial. Popular wisdom about its benefits differs drastically when mom is Black from when she is White. These differences represent a longstanding racial gap in breastfeeding rates that has become even more dangerous in the time of Covid-19.

A long history of discouraging Black women from breastfeeding has made their infants more vulnerable to the current formula shortage.

Formula flew off the shelves in the first few days of the pandemic due to panic buying and hoarding. Delays in freight transportation and formula producers’ lack of supply to keep up with increased demand compounded the problem. Now, when retailers restock, families buy more than they need, leaving nothing for those who come after them.

The situation is even worse for parents who get their formula through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food supplement program, where Black women are overrepresented. WIC only allows participants to purchase a certain brand. If that one is not available, they are out of luck. Many program participants lack the transportation, resources, and time to shop at multiple locations. Families with limited or no access to good drinking water may also struggle now to find bottled water to mix with formula in local stores.

When there is no formula, all the options look bad. Watering down formula runs the risk of malnutrition. Some mothers can start or resume breastfeeding past the infant stage but not everyone, especially without help. Cow’s milk is a potential substitute, but it has also all but disappeared from shelves. Breastmilk sharing through informal networks or milk banks is another possibility but may be risky or expensive. Babies cannot digest solid foods until they are several months old.

Our Mothers, Ourselves

Reckoning between the saintly and the monstrous

NATALIE CARNES

Virgin and Child with St Anne by Leonardo da Vinci. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

In the last several years, there has been a surge in writing by women pondering the metamorphosis into mothers. Motherhood is a strange passage that leaves many women wondering how their new, maternal identity sits with their other identities—as lover, maker, reader, athlete, friend, and, especially, writer. Most women at least some of the time experience these roles in tension with one another, and writing mothers have been probing that tension, asking what part of it speaks to the social conditions of motherhood in our world today and what part taps into something deeper and more intractable about motherhood.

The mystery of the tension is one aspect of the strangeness of the passage to motherhood. Another is coming to inhabit such an outsized figure in the cultural imagination—and one outsized in ways that are not always positive. There is a moment in season 2 of that font of earthly wisdom, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, when Kimmy finally realizes that the cause of her anger is her mother’s neglect, and Tina Fey’s therapist confirms her realization, saying, “It’s always the parents.” And most of the time, it’s the mother.

The insight is comical because it speaks a cultural truth. In pop psychology, the mother is the monster behind every malady, the villain lurking in our subconscious. Hers is the reproachful voice that we are not good enough, pretty enough, or thin enough. Insecure attachments to the mother explain the inability to form healthy relationships throughout one’s life. Her emotional comportment puts us at-risk for anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other-harm. It’s always the mother.

When I first watched that episode of Kimmy Schmidt, I thought, somewhat improbably, of a story a teacher told me years ago in a class on ancient Greek theologians. Two monks hiked through the mountains. The older, an abbot, trotted across the craggy precipices with the agility of a mountain goat as the young novice followed behind him. Taught to bring every troubling thought before the abbot, the novice confessed to his mentor, “Father, I have just had the thought that I should push you off this cliff.” The abbot continued spryly along as he replied, “Oh, pay no attention to that thought. That’s just the devil.”

And yet, besides babies, is there any group more sentimentalized than mothers? As Mother’s Day approaches, that sentimentality is on full commercial display.

Arab Angelenos

Routes to the Southland

SARAH M. A. GUALTIERI

Mural depicting the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. Zoot Suit Riots photo by Gareth Simpson. Via Flickr. No changes were made. CC BY 2.0.

 

Last fall, I returned from a trip to an academic conference, landing at the busy Los Angeles International airport. Like thousands of other travelers, I made my way to the ride-share pick up area to meet my driver. He greeted me amicably and we chatted about the new, much flaunted but much criticized, traffic arrangements at the airport. I asked him who was still taking taxis, since Uber and Lyft seemed to have solidified the hold on the ride-share market. He replied without pausing: Middle Easterners. He explained to me that because of their limited English skills, their desire to “stick together,” and their inclination to pay for services with cash, they dominated the ranks of both drivers and passengers. While his tone was not overtly hostile, I recognized immediately the insidiousness of this purported explanation. He had casually grouped Middle Easterners separately , apart  from other kinds of people, and ascribed to them traits that signaled their unassimilability and perpetual foreignness. I had seen this kind of slippage at work so many times before whereby Middle Eastern, and Arab immigrants in particular, were not considered capable of being American. They are, to use the words of anthropologist Suad Joseph, subject to “the hyphen that never ends.”¹

This process of othering pervades not only daily interactions like my drive from the airport, but also academic cultures and institutions. California historiography, for example, has little to say about Arabs in the state, while ethnic studies scholarship tends to view them as recent immigrants. Neither can account for the deeply-rooted presence of Arabs in Southern California or for their vibrant civic life – a vibrancy captured in a 1940 Los Angeles Times article that described an outdoor festival, or mahrajan, as “the biggest event of the year for the more than 15,000 members of the Southland’s Syrian colony.”²

Arab Routes » redresses these absences and charts the complex patterns of movement, multiple homes, and expansive family networks that are central motifs in the history of the Arab communities in Southern California. Long overlooked in the study of Arab migrations, Los Angeles and its environs are the ideal location to trace these histories. Ethnically diverse, economically dynamic, and connected to the Pacific and to Latin America, the city attracted thousands of Syrian migrants in the first half of the 20^th century. Today, it has the largest population of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Arab Routes places their stories at the center of a larger narrative about the mutability of the concept of home, the attachment to multiple national identities, and the impermanence of settlement.