Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

Today, U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 migrants each night. To do so, they rely on, and pay for, the use of hundreds of local jails. But this is nothing new: the federal government has been detaining migrants in city and county jails for more than 100 years. In The Migrant's Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration (Princeton UP, 2024), Brianna Nofil examines how a century of political, ideological, and economic exchange between the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the world's largest system of migrant incarceration. Migrant detention is not simply an outgrowth of mass incarceration; rather, it has propelled carceral state-building and fostered intergovernmental policing efforts since the turn of the twentieth century.From the incarceration of Chinese migrants in New York in the 1900s and 1910s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in Gulf South lockups of the 1980s and 1990s, federal immigration authorities provided communities with a cash windfall that they used to cut taxes, reward local officials, and build bigger jails--which they then had incentive to fill. Trapped in America's patchwork detention networks, migrants turned to courts, embassies, and the media to challenge the cruel paradox of "administrative imprisonment." Drawing on immigration records, affidavits, protest letters, and a variety of local sources, Nofil excavates the web of political negotiations, financial deals, and legal precedents that allows the United States to incarcerate migrants with little accountability and devastating consequences.

There was nothing inevitable or natural about the rise of US finance capitalism in the early twentieth century. In Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower, Mary Bridges shows how US foreign banking began as a side hustle of Gilded Age tycoons and evolved into a more staid, bureaucratized network for bolstering US influence overseas. The early waves of US bankers built a network of international branch banks that relied on the power of the US government, copied the example of British foreign bankers, and built new alliances with local elites.  Overseas bank branches provided sites for experimentation in how to fuse US political will with local innovations and on-the-ground improvisation. In the process, branch bankers constructed a flexible and durable new infrastructure that supported the growth of US power abroad. Using details from ledger entries and other sources, Bridges shows how these branch bankers divided their local communities into groups of “us” and "them," either as potential clients or local populations. In doing so, they constructed a new architecture of US trade finance that relied on long-standing inequalities and hierarchies of privilege. Thus, ideas developed by wealthy white men became part of the enduring fabric of financial infrastructure. She also shows how bank branches could accommodate these hierarchies to make room for new ideas about serving local markets, in response to financial pressures of the 1920s and after the Great Depression cut off other avenues of growth. Bridges also tells the story of how US bankers created a market based on a new financial asset enabled by the Federal Reserve System called bankers' acceptance and began to collect vast amounts of foreign credit information. Related resources: Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean by Peter James Hudson Infrastructure Is Remaking Geopolitics: How Power Flows from the Systems That Connect the World by Mary Bridges  Author recommended reading:   Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control by Sean H. Vanatta The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives by Ernest Scheyder Hosted by Meghan Cochran 

Academic writing isn’t known for its clarity. While graduate students might see reading and writing turgid academic prose as a badge of honor—a sign of membership in an exclusive community of experts—many readers are left feeling utterly defeated. In his latest book, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter (Princeton University Press, 2024), Fordham University Professor Leonard Cassuto prompts us to think more about the reader. For Cassuto, the key to better academic prose is to anticipate and respect the needs of the reader. Throughout the volume, Cassuto offers a range of advice on how to structure arguments, use metaphor, and integrate narrative. He also provides a thoughtful reflection on the value of academic knowledge for the broader public and how to square a rules-based approach to teaching writing with the inevitable evolution of language. This book will be of interest to graduate students, writing instructors, editors, and anyone who wants to learn how to make their writing clearer and more sympathetic to the needs of the reader.

There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific developments that are revolutionising the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events--and treatments--can affect people in such different ways.In The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health (Princeton UP, 2024), Nord explains how our brain constructs our sense of mental health--actively striving to maintain balance in response to our changing circumstances. While a mentally healthy brain deals well with life's turbulence, poor mental health results when the brain struggles with disruption. But just what is the brain trying to balance? Nord describes the foundations of mental health in the brain--from the neurobiology of pleasure, pain and desire to the role of mood-mediating chemicals like dopamine, serotonin and opioids. She then pivots to interventions, revealing how antidepressants, placebos and even recreational drugs work; how psychotherapy changes brain chemistry; and how the brain and body interact to make us feel physically (as well as mentally) healthy. Along the way, Nord explains how the seemingly small things we use to lift our moods--a piece of chocolate, a walk, a chat with a friend--work on the same pathways in our brains as the latest treatments for mental health disorders.Understanding the cause of poor mental health is one of the crucial questions of our time. But the answer is unique to each of us, and it requires finding what helps our brains rebalance and thrive. With so many factors at play, there are more possibilities for recovery and resilience than we might think.

Princeton University Press publishes some of the best books every year, racking up accolades and launching the careers of thousands of scholars. As an editor at the New Books Network and a frequent host, I love speaking with Princeton UP authors. A striking feature of many PUP books is the quality of writing. Their books are simultaneously detailed and highly readable. No wonder PUP books have found so much success in the past couple years with their push into audio production.One of the key people involved in the creation of these books is Danielle D’Orlando. Danielle has the enviable title of “Curator of Audio,” a strategic and creative role fit for a voracious reader and audiobook listener with a knack for picking scholarly books with a crossover appeal.Danielle began her career at Tantor Media, an audiobook company that helped pioneer and popularize the medium. She cut her teeth turning manuscripts into audio scripts, managing rights and licenses, all while getting a graduate degree in publishing. Soon after, Danielle moved to Yale University Press where she worked for nearly a decade, launching Yale Press Audio in 2020. In 2022, Danielle moved Princeton UP to bring her expertise and experience to another university press.As curator of audio, Danielle selects the books and casts the voice actors. We discuss a new audio recording of Capital, how PUP picks narrators, the changing market for audiobooks, and Spotify’s move to compete with Audible in the audiobook space. Give this interview a listen to learn more about Danielle’s work and the future for university press audiobooks.…Also why The Power Broker by Robert Caro is best read as an audiobook.Find Princeton UP’s audiobooks here.

Join Paul North, a professor focused on German Jewish thought, and Paul Reitter, an expert in translation history, alongside audiobook narrator Simon Vance. They share fascinating insights on the nuances of translating Marx's 'Capital' for modern readers, addressing past translation flaws and the joy of their collaborative process. The discussion highlights the human aspect of Marx's economic theories, linking them to today's issues like worker exploitation. Plus, they explore the booming popularity of audiobooks and what makes narration essential for classics.

The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the dawning of a peaceful and prosperous age of global progress. Examining how the Holy Alliance could figure as both an idea of progress and an emblem of reaction, Dr. Nakhimovsky offers a novel vantage point on the history of federative alternatives to the nation state. The result is a clearer understanding of the recurring appeal of such alternatives—and the reasons why the politics of federation has also come to be associated with entrenched resistance to liberalism’s emancipatory aims.Dr. Nakhimovsky connects the history of the Holy Alliance with the better-known transatlantic history of eighteenth-century constitutionalism and nineteenth-century efforts to abolish slavery and war. He also shows how the Holy Alliance was integrated into a variety of liberal narratives of progress. From the League of Nations to the Cold War, historical analogies to the Holy Alliance continued to be drawn throughout the twentieth century, and Nakhimovsky maps how some of the fundamental political problems raised by the Holy Alliance have continued to reappear in new forms under new circumstances. Time will tell whether current assessments of contemporary federal systems seem less implausible to future generations than initial liberal expectations of the Holy Alliance do to us today.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected the traditional laws of Judaism in favor of new norms established by Sabbetai Zevi, and abandoned reason for the ecstasy of messianic enthusiasm, one man watched in horror. Yaacob Dweck's new book Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas (Princeton University Press, 2019) tells the story of Jacob Sasportas, the Sephardic rabbi who, alone among Jewish leadership, challenged Sabbetai Zevi’s improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers.The story of a lone voice against the crowd, the story of a lonely man of faith who insisted on reason in the face of mass passion, Dissident Rabbi is the revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to articulate the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty. It is a revealing examination of how Sasportas’ life and legacy were rediscovered and appropriated by later generations of Jewish thinkers.Although his name may not be widely known, Sasportas’ impact continues in Jewish life today.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

David Lay Williams, a political theorist and author of "The Greatest of All Plagues," explores the complex relationship between economic inequality and political thought from Plato to Marx. He delves into how these historical thinkers, including Jesus and Rousseau, grappled with wealth concentration and its societal impacts. Williams emphasizes the moral implications of economic disparities and critiques the prevailing meritocratic values, urging a reevaluation of wealth's role in shaping governance and community dynamics today.

One of my talking points when hanging out with my fellow diplomatic historians is the painful absence of scholarship on Hawaii. Too many political histories treat Hawaii’s statehood as a kind of historical inevitability, an event that was bound to pass the moment the kingdom was annexed. As I would frequently pontificate, “nobody has unpacked the imperial history of the islands in sufficient detail, nor the fact that their political fate diverged sharply from a number of other possessions.”For better and for worse, Sarah Miller-Davenport has robbed me of this particular talking point by writing a new book on the process of Hawaiian statehood, American imperialism and its relationship to mainland politics and society shortly after statehood. Gateway State: Hawai’i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire (Princeton University Press, 2019) takes a close look at some of the narratives that have grown up around the islands and unpacks them. She notes that the process of becoming a state was not a foregone conclusion and was in many ways predicated on Hawaii acting as a gatekeeper to Asia. She also notes that while the island’s racism was less fixed in certain ways than mainland racial norms, racism persisted in more subtle forms on the island. What emerges is a close look at how multiculturalism in service of egalitarianism can nevertheless be adapted to imperial norms.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.