Contracts

Born into slavery in Princeton, New Jersey in the waning years of the 18 th century, Betsey Stockton’s life illuminates how many different paths were taken from slavery to freedom. Stories like hers are each remarkable in their own way but very few of them are told. They are overshadowed by the much better known lives of people like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

But that is changing as historians are bringing broader and more nuanced stories to light, as Gregory Nobles does in The Extraordinary Life of Betsey Stockton: An Emancipation Journey from Princeton, Around the World, and Back. Deeply researched and absorbing, the narrative follows Betsey Stockton as she traveled the complicated geography of race in the antebellum North.
Emancipated in her teens, Betsey Stockton left to join a missionary trip, on which she would be the first African American and the first unmarried female missionary to the Sandwich Islands. She would return to Princeton where she worked for thirty years as a teacher and community leader in the African-American community. Her accomplishments serve to highlight the extent of the inequality faced by free people of color in northern cities and college towns, where slavery had ended but racism persisted. The impact of her courageous work went well beyond the community in which she served.

Betsey Stockton is but one of the people who should have a more prominent place in our understanding of the struggle for equality. Though largely written out of history, as were so many women of her time, in The Extraordinary Life of Betsey Stockton, Nobles gives her story the attention it deserves.

Between the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the economic transformations of the twelfth, coined money in western Europe was scarce and high in value, difficult for the majority of the population to make use of. And yet, as Rory Naismith shows in this illuminating study, coined money was made and used throughout early medieval Europe. It was, he argues, a powerful tool for articulating people’s place in economic and social structures and an important gauge for levels of economic complexity. Working from the premise that using coined money carried special significance when there was less of it around, Naismith uses detailed case studies from the Mediterranean and northern Europe to propose a new reading of early medieval money as a point of contact between economic, social, and institutional history.

Naismith examines structural issues, including the mining and circulation of metal and the use of bullion and other commodities as money, and then offers a chronological account of monetary development, discussing the post-Roman period of gold coinage, the rise of the silver penny in the seventh century and the reconfiguration of elite power in relation to coinage in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the process, he counters the conventional view of early medieval currency as the domain only of elite gift-givers and intrepid long-distance traders. Even when there were few coins in circulation, Naismith argues, the ways they were used—to give gifts, to pay rents, to spend at markets—have much to tell us.

In computer science, the word “algorithm” simply refers to a step-by-step procedure for accomplishing a given task: “lather, rinse, repeat.” But as human activity is increasingly electronically mediated, its meaning has deepened, as common experiences of work, leisure, culture, social relationships, and even reality itself are being directed by algorithms that are executed by computers, to significant effect.

We produce so much information today, yet the processes by which it is created and delivered are becoming more opaque. An increasing list of our actions, movements, and most of what we type or photograph is now manipulated, toward ends we cannot see. Software is often designed to collect and sell personal data to be used for advertising, or the software itself is an advertisement intended to produce purchases.

Commercial algorithmic platforms can create complex economic incentives and technical dynamics that routinely lead to situations where the interests of those creating the software systems are at odds with our own. Advertising-driven platforms act against us, under the guise of offering help and guidance. Flashlight apps secretly track and sell your location and Facebook takes your “likes” and places ads on your friends’ pages.

This algorithmic explosion allows for a new level of real-time personalization and content selection on an individual basis that just wasn’t possible before. But rather than use these tools to serve our authentic interests, we have built a system that often works to our disadvantage. In Corrupt Personalization,  Christian Sandvig, professor at the School of Information at University of Michigan explores what happens when algorithms corrupt personalization, allowing it to serve interests other than our own.
Corrupt Personalization is an eye-opening guide to what it means when more and more of our actions, movements, and communication is now logged, sorted, analyzed, republished, and repurposed. It offers a thoughtful look at how we can regain control over how our information is used.