#uwlibraries

A Woman is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe by professors Elisheva Carlebach and Debra Kaplan is one of those rare works that reshapes not only what we know, but how we know. The book uncovers the oversized, often unacknowledged role of Jewish women who fashioned communal and religious life in early modern Europe—not only within the home, but in the broader networks of economy, ritual, and prayer.

This book examines the lives of people who were stigmatized or marginalized in late classical and medieval Japan. Often characterized as beggars, they in fact pursued a wide range of occupations and lifestyles, even while haunted by discrimination and exploitation. Some demanded their rights through litigation and arms, while many pursued professions crucial to society.  Outcast and marginal people formed complex relationships with institutions and individuals of power, and made enduring contributions to medieval culture.

A rich exploration of the everyday lives of Jews in medieval Ashkenaz that demonstrates the value of collaborative research, Beyond the Elite effectively portrays Jewish communities as deeply connected with medieval Christian society, while also emphasizing how Jews sought to differentiate themselves or adapt Christian practices to their own tradition.

This work is the first in English to offer a general introduction to the Ainu people and their contemporary issues, including groundbreaking chapters on the genetic origins of the populations of Japan and an overview of the archaeology of northern Japan, which argue convincingly for the identity of the Ainu as an indisputably distinct ethnic group and Indigenous residents of Hokkaido.

A Most Quiet Murder is a fascinating microhistory that explores the medical, legal, and social worlds of late nineteenth-century France through the details of a little-known murder case. Wilson leaves no stone unturned with her thorough and convincing discussion of medical, legal, and media analyses.

Surviving Rome explores the stress and strains, precarities and strategies of the people—the ordinary men, women, and children, enslaved and free—who shaped the world’s first ‘global’ economy. This is a brilliantly insightful microeconomic history that brings working people and their practices back into the Roman economy. Everyone interested in premodern economies should read this deeply perceptive and engagingly written book.

Celebrated as a democratic space for all Americans, the major league ballpark in fact privileged the middle- and upper-class white male fan while tacitly marginalizing poor urban residents and people of color. Seth S. Tannenbaum examines how the game’s economically and socially stratified system reflected changing understandings of urban space, inclusion, and the body politic.

The Gospel of Work and Money is the first collection to explore forms of coercive labor education as connected global phenomena across modern history and foreground the many ways that ‘work’ remains the primary pedagogical lens of capital in our present era. Contributors link practices of industrial and imperial modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a host of projects across an ostensibly decolonized world. A volume of critical histories, the book is a valuable resource for scholars and instructors of capitalism, empire, education, and labor.