New Books in Foley Library

The Haitian Revolution was a powerful blow against colonialism and slavery, and as its thinkers and fighters blazed the path to universal freedom, they forced anticolonial, antislavery, and antiracist ideals into modern political grammar. The first state in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery, outlaw color prejudice, and forbid colonialism, Haitians established their nation in a hostile Atlantic World. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the rest of the Americas and foreign nations and empires repeatedly attacked Haitian sovereignty. Yet Haitian writers and politicians successfully defended their independence while planting the ideological roots of egalitarian statehood. In Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.

After the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear explosion in Ukraine, scientists believed radiation had created a vast and barren wasteland in which life could never resurface. But the Dead Zone, as the contaminated area is known, doesn't look dead at all. In fact, wildlife seems to be thriving there. The Zone is home to beetles, swallows, catfish, mice, voles, otters, beavers, wild boar, foxes, lynx, deer, moose--even brown bears and wolves. Yet the animals in the Zone are not quite what you'd expect. Every single one of them is radioactive. In Chernobyl's Wild Kingdom, you'll meet the international scientists investigating the Zone's wildlife and trying to answer difficult questions: Have some animals adapted to living with radiation? Or is the radioactive environment harming them in ways we can't see or that will only show up in future generations? Learn more about the fascinating ongoing research--and the debates that surround the findings--in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

This book focuses on the question, what is the relationship between Christianity and politics? The author argues that the De Regno of Thomas Aquinas offers an answer; discusses Aquinas's themes in the history of Christian political thought.

In Crip Colony, Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability that marked Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as lacking in civilization and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. In this way, mestizaje allowed for supposedly superior mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism. By bringing disability studies together with studies of colonialism and queer-of-color critique, Coráñez Bolton extends theorizations of mestizaje beyond the United States and Latin America while considering how Filipinx and Filipinx American thought fundamentally enhances understandings of the colonial body and the racial histories of disability.

If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fault lines of the Age of Revolutions. But the gilded spines and elegant designs that decorate his archive obscure the truth: Moreau's achievements were predicated upon the work of enslaved people and free people of color. Their labor afforded him the leisure to research, think, and write. Their rich intellectual and linguistic cultures filled the pages of his most applauded works. Every beautiful book Moreau produced contains an embedded story of hidden violence. Sara Johnson's arresting investigation of race and knowledge in the revolutionary Atlantic surrounds Moreau with the African-descended people he worked so hard to erase, immersing him in a vibrant community of language innovators, forgers of kinship networks, and world travelers who strove to create their own social and political lives. Built from archival fragments, creative speculation, and audacious intellectual courage, Encyclopédie noire is a communal biography of the women and men who made Moreau's world.

Perpetua's Journey is a graphic history set in Roman Africa in 203 CE that examines issues of power, gender, and religion in the ancient world through the story of the Christian martyr Perpetua.The Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, better known as The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, is the first known prose narrative written by a woman. It is also the first known piece of writing we have from a Christian woman. It is the story of a young mother, Vibia Perpetua, who lived in Roman Africa and, at the age of twenty-two, chose to proclaim publically her Christian faith. She died as a result of her actions. She did not die alone; she was part of a group of Christians martyrs, including several slaves, who were placed in prison and then sentenced to die on March 7 in the year 203 CE. Perpetua's diary contains Perpetua's account of the events in the days leading up to her martyrdom.Perpetua's Journey is a graphic history that occupies a space between the many works designed primarily for specialists and advanced scholars who already know a great deal about Perpetua and the history of the Roman Empire, and more popular projects about the lives of saints. Perpetua's Journey is unique because it contains both a graphic portion and historical and social commentary on the Passio. Because the events recorded in the Passio take place during a time period in which we possess information about the history of the Roman Empire and everyday peoples' lives, the graphic part of this work strives for an authentic and realistic portrayal of events that happened to the persons in the diary.

Wolfram Hogrebe offers a robust, uncompromisingly metaphysical reading of Schelling's unfinished masterpiece, The Ages of the World, to propose a completely contemporary epistemology. By translating Schelling into the language of predicate logic and philosophy of language, Hogrebe also defends its metaphysical claims, equally foregrounding the relevance and challenges that Schelling's work presents to contemporary analytic philosophy. Originally published 35 years ago, Hogrebe's book remains ahead of his time. It masterfully bridges the analytic and continental divide - before most philosophers considered this a possibility - and successfully demonstrates Schelling's contemporary relevance and vitality. Included in this translation is a new author's preface to the English edition, his preface to the Italian translation (2011), an introduction to the philosophical themes of the book by the translators who are prominent Schelling scholars, a Postface by Markus Gabriel, Hogrebe's colleague in Bonn, along with a readers' guide to Hogrebe's major works.

Russian Politics Today: Stability and Fragility provides an accessible and nuanced introduction to contemporary Russian politics at a time of increasing uncertainty. Using the theme of stability versus fragility as its overarching framework, this innovative textbook explores the forces that shape Russia's politics, economy, and society. The volume provides up-to-date coverage of core themes - Russia's strong presidency, its weak party system, the role of civil society, and its dependence on oil and gas revenues - alongside path-breaking chapters on the politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the environment. An international and diverse team of experts presents the most comprehensive available account of the evolution of Russian politics in the post-Soviet era, providing the tools for interpreting the past and the present while also offering a template for understanding future developments.

Five troubled teenagers fall into prostitution as they search for freedom, safety, community, family, and love in this #1 New York Times bestselling novel from Ellen Hopkins. "When all choice is taken from you, life becomes a game of survival." Five teenagers from different parts of the country. Three girls. Two guys. Four straight. One gay. Some rich. Some poor. Some from great families. Some with no one at all. All living their lives as best they can, but all searching...for freedom, safety, community, family, love. What they don't expect, though, is all that can happen when those powerful little words "I love you" are said for all the wrong reasons. Five moving stories remain separate at first, then interweave to tell a larger, powerful story -- a story about making choices, taking leaps of faith, falling down, and growing up. A story about kids figuring out what sex and love are all about, at all costs, while asking themselves, "Can I ever feel okay about myself?" A brilliant achievement from New York Times best-selling author Ellen Hopkins -- who has been called "the bestselling living poet in the country" by mediabistro.com -- Tricks is a book that turns you on and repels you at the same time. Just like so much of life.

This reference resource describes both the scientific background and the economic and social issues that resulted from environmental disasters resulting primarily from human activity. Categorized by the type of tragedy--including coal mine tragedies, dam failures, industrial explosions, and oil spills--this one-stop guide provides students with descriptions of some of the world's most tragic environmental disasters. Entries clearly describe each disaster by defining the cause, the consequences, and the clean-up efforts. Readers will learn who the responsible parties were, the effect on the environment and people living in the immediate area, and the economic impact of each disaster. In addition, the long-term consequences, the likelihood of a repeat disaster in the same area, and the measures that have been taken to prevent a repeat incident are discussed. Entries include the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.