New Books by Dartmouth Authors: Home

An intricate portrayal of the early American settlers who came to be known as Scotch-Irish, who through collusion and bloody conflict acted as the tip of the spear for white colonial expansion into Indian lands, embodying what became the American pioneer spirit.Hard Neighbors highlights stories that have been subsumed by terms such as "English settlers" and "American expansion" and traces shifting relationships involving Scotch-Irish people living on the frontier, neighboring Indian peoples, and more distant governments. It follows the people who came to be known as Scotch-Irish from their genesis on a colonial borderland on one side of the Atlantic to their role in the borderlands of Indian country on the other. It traces their relations with Native Americans over time and across the continent, examines their experiences as marginalized and expendable people living between colonial powers and Indigenous peoples, and demonstrates their roles as protective and disruptive forces on the hard edge of colonialism. The Scotch-Irish fought Indian wars and shaped the frontier, and their experiences living near and fighting against Indians shaped their identity and their attitudes towards government. They influenced national attitudes and policies, and they transformed Indian people into racial others as they transformed themselves into Americans. The story this book tells is less about the Scotch-Irish as a distinct ethnic group than as a people in motion who, in collusion and conflict with colonial authorities, repeatedly inserted themselves on Native land. Instead of a tale of unified westward expansion, it recovers the experiences, encounters, and humanity of groups of people enmeshed in the violence of colonialism and reconstructs the roles of multiple peoples placed as buffers between competing powers. Expansion, and the accompanying expulsion and killing of Indian people, helped to create American unity and identity and, ultimately, made the Scotch-Irish Americans. Once marginalized as little better than Indians, they reaffirmed their reputation as Indian killers and made a place for themselves in America, as Americans.

A fresh examination of political representation in an era of negative partisanship. What does representation look like when politicians focus on "othering" the opposing party rather than the policy interests of their constituents? How do voters react to negative partisan rhetoric? And is policy responsiveness still the cornerstone of American representative democracy? In How Politicians Polarize, Mia Costa draws on survey experiments, analysis of congressional newsletters and tweets, and data on fundraising and media coverage to examine how and why politicians rely so often on negative partisan attacks. Costa shows that most Americans do not like negative rhetoric, and politicians know this. Nonetheless, these kinds of attacks can reap powerful rewards from national media, donors, and party elites. Costa's findings challenge the popular notion that Americans are motivated more by their partisan identities than by policy representation. Her research illuminates how the political ecosystem rewards negative representation and how this affects the quality of American democracy.

A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imaginations of filmmakers and audiences for over a century. In The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film, the only book-length study of the space, author Desirée J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed. Garcia analyzes the backstage film, which spans film history, modes, and genre, to show how dressing rooms have been a useful space for filmmakers to examine the performativity of American life. From the Black maid to the wife and mother to the leading man, dressing rooms navigate, shape, and challenge society's norms. The stakes are high in dressing rooms, Garcia argues, because they rehearse larger questions about identity and its performance, negotiating who can succeed and who cannot and on what terms. 

Forest Lost is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Unlike other forest commodities, forest carbon offsets do not involve resource extraction; instead, they require keeping carbon in place through forest protection. Maron E. Greenleaf explores forest carbon offsets to understand green capitalism--the use of capitalist logics and practices to mitigate environmental damage. She traces cultural, environmental, governmental, material, and multispecies relations involved in making forest carbon valuable as well as how forest carbon's commodification in the Amazon turned it into a source of redistributable public environmental wealth. At the same time, Greenleaf shows how making forest carbon monetarily valuable created an unexpected set of uneven, contingent, and contested social and political relations. While forest carbon in the Amazon demonstrates that green capitalism can be socially inclusive, it also shows that green capitalism can reinforce the marginalization it purportedly seeks to combat. By outlining these complex relations and tensions, Greenleaf elucidates broader efforts to create a capitalism suited to the Anthropocene and those efforts' alluring promises and vexing failures.

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism, Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the "China malls" that has emerged along Johannesburg's former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present. Huang argues that this dynamic reflects the sedimented legacies and continued operation of white supremacy and colonialism, which have been transformed in the shift of capitalism's center of gravity toward China and the Global South. These new forms of racial capitalism and empire layer onto and extend histories of exploitation and racialization in South Africa. Taking a palimpsestic approach, Huang offers tools for understanding this shift and decentering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century.

Is a renaissance of teaching and learning in higher education possible? One may already be underway. The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed how colleges and universities manage teaching and learning. Recentering Learning unpacks the wide-reaching implications of disruptions such as the pandemic on higher education. Editors Maggie Debelius, Joshua Kim, and Edward Maloney assembled a diverse group of scholars and practitioners to assess the impacts of the pandemic, as well as to anticipate the effects of climate change, social unrest, artificial intelligence, financial challenges, changing demographics, and other forms of disruption, on teaching and learning. These contributors are leaders at their institutions and draw on both the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) as well as their lived experiences to draw important lessons for the wider postsecondary ecosystem. The collection features faculty, staff, and student voices from a range of public and private institutions of varying sizes and serving different populations. Covering timely topics such as institutional resiliency, how to create transformational change, digital education for access and equity, and the shifting institutional data landscape, these essays serve as a compelling guide for how colleges and universities can navigate inevitable changes to teaching and learning. Faculty and staff at centers for teaching excellence or centers for innovation, university leaders, graduate students in learning design programs, and anyone interested in the evolution of teaching and learning in the twenty-first century will benefit from this prescient volume. Contributors: Bryan Alexander, Drew Allen, Isis Artze-Vega, Betsy Barre, Randy Bass, MJ Bishop, Derek Bruff, Molly Chehak, Nancy Chick, Cynthia A. Cogswell, Jenae Cohn, Tazin Daniels, Maggie Debelius, David Ebenbach, Megan Eberhardt-Alstot, Kristen Eshleman, Peter Felten, Lorna Gonzalez, Michael Goudzwaard, Sophia Grabiec, Sean Hobson, Kashema Hutchinson, Amanda Irvin, Jonathan Iuzzini, Amy Johnson, Briana Johnson, Matthew Kaplan, Whitney Kilgore, Joshua Kim, Sujung Kim, Suzanna Klaf, Martin Kurzweil, Natalie Landman, Jill Leafstedt, Katie Linder, Sherry Linkon, Edward Maloney, Susannah McGowan, Isabel McHenry, Rolin Moe, Lillian Nagengast, Nancy O'Neill, Adashima Oyo, Matthew Rascoff, Libbie Rifkin, Katina Rogers, Catherine Ross, Annie Sadler, Monique L. Snowden, Elliott Visconsi, Mary Wright

"I'll tell you everything I know. Though there might not be much to tell," confesses the speaker in Strange Hymn by Carlene Kucharczyk, in a meticulously crafted lyrical journey exploring morality and humanity. The poems here grapple with understanding physical loss: "I wanted / to know at once and definitively our animal bodies / were not all we were. It is shameful to be this fragile." They also engage with the more abstract slipping away of memory and time: "Since I was born, I have been forgetting. Forgetting what I have wanted to remember." Kucharczyk's insightful poems blur the lines between history and myth, love and grief, song and silence.   Caught between lamenting the passage of time and rejoicing in small beauties, she writes, "I tell you, I wish we could stay here longer / in this hotel of lost grandeur, this palace of interesting disarray, / and stay here with these pieces of the impersonal past / that have somehow not yet outlasted their small lights." Each moment reflects on our ephemeral lives from musings on art and nature to reflections on the self, asking "Is a mirror a sort of glass house? / And, is there a way to see ourselves besides through the glass?"   As readers traverse this collection, they learn how the body sings, the many iterations of Mary, what sirens truly think of Odysseus, how a Morning Glory unfurls, and lessons in orthodontics, but most importantly, how to live with absence. Kucharczyk is a master of manipulating time and space through her dynamic use of form, creating a narrative that begs, "After I'm gone, don't bury my body-- / Burn it, and turn it into song." 

Gentrification is often considered through a visual lens, where development, progress, and neighborhood change are observed. But what does gentrification sound like? In Intersectional Listening, author Allie Martin engages this question in Washington, DC, asking how Black people experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Drawing from music, interviews, soundscape recordings, and more, Martin argues that gentrification ultimately serves to silence some voices and amplify others. Martin employs a combination of methodologies from ethnomusicology, Black Studies, geography, and digital humanities to make audible the ways in which gentrification disrupts and disturbs community. Throughout, she centers Black feminist listening practices, thinking through digital modes of listening and imagining emancipatory soundscapes. Intersectional Listening benefits from an innovative combination of sources, from interviews and soundwalks to passive acoustic recording and machine learning. Martin shares compelling stories of music and sound in the nation's capital, and in doing so shifts conversations about how we listen to Black life. By foregrounding how processes of gentrification systematically seek to devalue, mishear, and ultimately silence Black possibility, Intersectional Listening posits how we can challenge ourselves to refute the consistent mishearing of Black people in Washington, DC and beyond.

How a concentrated attack on political institutions threatens to disable the essential workings of government In this unsettling book, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum trace how ungoverning--the deliberate effort to dismantle the capacity of government to do its work--has become a malignant part of politics. Democracy depends on a government that can govern, and that requires what's called administration. The administrative state is made up of the vast array of departments and agencies that conduct the essential business of government, from national defense and disaster response to implementing and enforcing public policies of every kind. Ungoverning chronicles the reactionary movement that demands dismantling the administrative state. The demand is not for goals that can be met with policies or programs. When this demand is frustrated, as it must be, the result is an invitation to violence. Muirhead and Rosenblum unpack the idea of ungoverning through many examples of the politics of destruction. They show how ungoverning disables capacities that took generations to build--including the administration of free and fair elections. They detail the challenges faced by officials who are entrusted with running the government and who now face threats and intimidation from those who would rather bring it crashing down--and replace the regular processes of governing with chaotic personal rule. The unfamiliar phenomenon of ungoverning threatens us all regardless of partisanship or ideological leaning. Ungoverning will not be limited to Donald Trump's moment on the political stage. To resist this threat requires that we first recognize what ungoverning is and what it portends.

This book is based on lecture notes originally developed for introductory graduate courses offered by the authors at Dartmouth College and the University of Padova. The first two chapters analyze quantum degenerate gases and various cooling and trapping techniques for atoms. The remaining three chapters discuss ultracold atoms as weakly interacting, strongly interacting, and non-interacting coherent systems.