New Books with Miranda Melcher

Conservation Is Not Enough: Rethinking Relationships with Water in the Arid Southwest (University of Wyoming Press, 2025) by Dr. Janine Schipper reconsiders the most basic assumptions about water issues in the Southwest, revealing why conservation alone will not lead to a sustainable water future. The book undertakes a thorough examination of the prevailing “conservation ethos” deeply ingrained in...

Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with land, waters, forests and wildlife. A Land Won From Waste: Scotland AD 400–1400 (John Donald/Birlinn, 2025) by Professor Richard Oram takes the reader from the climatic highs of the Late Iron Age to t...

Satire is a funny, aggressive, and largely oppositional literature which is typically created by people who refuse to participate in a given regime’s perception of itself. Although satire has always been a primary literature of state affairs, and although it has always been used to intervene in ongoing discussions about political theory and practice, there has been no attempt to examine this fasci...

Following a group of US Midwest farmers who purchased tracts of land in the tropical savanna of eastern Brazil, Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Ofstehage investigates industrial farming in the modern developing world. Seeking adventure and profit, the transplanted farmers created what Dr. Ofstehage calls "flexible...

Why did so many rulers throughout history risk converting to a new religion brought by outsiders? In his award-winning Unearthly Powers (2019), Dr. Alan Strathern set out a theoretical framework for understanding the relation between religion and political authority based on a distinction between two kinds of religion - immanentism and transcendentalism - and the different ways they made monarchy...

Tens of millions of children in the United States participate in youth sport, a pastime widely believed to be part of a good childhood. Yet most children who enter youth sport are driven to quit by the time they enter adolescence, and many more are sidelined by its high financial burdens. Until now, there has been little legal scholarly attention paid to youth sport or its reform. In More Than Pla...

Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Aviva Briefel argues that Victorians turned to the dead to understand the material culture of their present. With the rise of spiritualism in Britain in the early 1850s, séances invited participants to contact ghosts using material things, from ordinary household furniture to speciali...

How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian...

Historians have thoroughly documented the vast devastation of the Civil War. In the attention they have paid to aspects of that destruction, however, one of the most obvious ramifications appears routinely overlooked—Confederate widowhood. Dr. Jennifer Lynn Gross’s Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South (LSU Press, 2025) helps rectify that historical omission by supplyin...

Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Ben Jackson examines the material and consumer practices of over 1000 men from the middling and upper ranks of eighteenth-century society, c.1650-1850. It draws upon evidence from over 35 archives and museum collections to detail how material objects were integral for men in forming ident...

Bad Christians and Hanging Toads: Witch Crafting in Northern Spain, 1525–1675 (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Rochelle Rojas tells riveting stories of witchcraft in everyday life in early modern Navarra. Belief in witchcraft not only emerged in moments of mass panic but was woven into the fabric of village life. Some villagers believed witches sickened crops and cows with poisonous powders...

The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed. Yet, new road novels appear every year, tackling unexpected questions and spanning new geographies, from Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia. Why did the road novel emerge and...

A cornerstone of the evangelization of early New Spain was the conversion of Nahua boys, especially the children of elites. They were to be emissaries between Nahua society and foreign missionaries, hastening the transmission of the gospel. Under the tutelage of Franciscan friars, the boys also learned to act with militant zeal. They sermonized and smashed sacred objects. Some went so far as to ki...

In an age of growing wealth disparities, politicians on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm about the fading American Dream. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many still view the United States as the land of opportunity. The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy (Princeton University Press, 2025) addresses this puzzle by exposing the stark reality of to...

For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George...

Linking histories of women, relationships to the natural environment, material culture and art, in Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770 (Lund Humphries, 2023) Dr. Andrea Pappas presents a new, multi-dimensional view of eighteenth-century American culture from a unique perspective. This book investigates how and why women pictured the landsc...

In an era of globalization, international communication constantly takes place across borders, defying sovereign control as it influences opinion. While diplomacy between states is the visible face of international relations, this “informal diplomacy” is usually less visible but no less powerful. Information politics can be found in propaganda, Internet politics, educational exchanges, tourism, an...

Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance Music (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Katie Milestone & Dr. Simon A. Morrison explores the emergence and evolution of nightclubs and electronic dance music from the 1950s onwards. It traces the rhythmic journey of dance music, following the pulse as it bounced between Europe, North America and the Caribbean. Music, dance styles and nightclub spaces are not cr...

While other ancient nonalphabetic scripts—Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs—are long extinct, Chinese characters, invented over three thousand years ago, are today used by well over a billion people to write Chinese and Japanese. In medieval East Asia, the written Classical Chinese language knit the region together in a common intellectual enterprise that encompassed...

Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the effort behind creating screen production locations. Dr. Ipek A. Celik Rappas accounts the rising demand for original and affordable locations for screen projects due to the growth of streaming platforms. As a result, screen professionals are repeatedly tasked with chores such as transforming a former fa...

Both humorous and shocking, Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome (Reaktion, 2025) by Paul Crystal is filled with astonishing facts and stories drawn from ancient Greece and Rome that have rarely been retold in English. It explores ‘the incredible’ as presented by little-known classical writers like Callimachus and Phlegon of Tralles. However, it offers much more: famili...

Whether it's pumping oil, mining resources or shipping commodities across oceans, the global economy runs on extraction. Promises of frictionless trade and lucrative speculation are the hallmarks of our era, but the backbone of globalisation is still low-cost labour and rapacious corporate control. Extractive capitalism is what made - and is still making - our unequal world. In Extractive Capitali...

We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long eighteenth century, Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Mach...

Tattoos are not merely decorative; they contain deep meaning for individuals and communities. They document their wearers' personal histories and position in families or society, and they engage with a communal understanding of symbols. Stories on Skin: A Librarian's Guide to Tattoos as Personal Archives (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Terry Baxter & Libby Coyner-Tsosie makes the case that archivists who wa...

Star. Stjarna. Setareh. Thousands of miles apart, humans look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see. Listen to these English, Icelandic, and Iranian words, and you can hear echoes of one of history's most unlikely, miraculous journeys. For all of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient source. In a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue...