Contracts

At least at first blush, the idea of forgiveness is pretty simple. When society forgives, it makes a judgment that a person should be accepted back into the fold after having violated its norms. But almost everything about this idea is more complex than it seems.
There is more to forgiveness than we may have thought. On the one hand, it is a universal experience, which makes these dilemmas instantly recognizable: everyone has asked to be forgiven, and everyone has been asked to forgive. On the other hand, it is also political. Forgiveness depends on unstated value judgments that society makes without conscious awareness, including our perception of the person who seeks it, the person wronged, the norm violated, etc. Like any social benefit, the prize is doled out unevenly. In Can You Forgive Me? The Politics of Forgiveness in an Angry Age, Joseph Margulies hopes to get people thinking about the hidden politics of a universal experience.

By revealing that there is a politics of forgiveness, Can You Forgive Me? requires us to grapple not only with the idea of forgiveness, but the corollary notion that a person can be unforgiveable and cast permanently beyond the pale. Buy telling stories of people who committed supposedly “unforgiveable” acts, the book compels readers to question what that label means and to consider the transformative potential of looking at forgiveness differently.

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.

Imagine what it would be like to really understand another intelligent species on this planet.

Denise Herzing has long been intrigued by what that would mean. As the director of the Wild Dolphin Project, she has spent thirty years studying the underwater behavior of dolphins in the wild, with a particular interest in their social lives and communication strategies. What are they saying? And, can we humans join in the discussion?

Her new book, Is Anyone Listening?: What Animals Are Saying To Each Other and To Us, begins with her work with dolphins. Their behavior hints at a deep intelligence, their brains are big, they show signs of self-awareness, and some even use tools to help hunt fish. Building from there, she considers what we know about animal intelligence and the ability to communicate across species, looking at animals from prairie dogs to domestic dogs, and from parrots to primates.

Intelligence in animals has typically been measured by comparing their abilities with people. Denise argues that we need to resist the urge to see animals in terms of how we see ourselves and she wants to radically revise the way we define and measure intelligence in other species. Her work with dolphins has taught her that until we devise an approach to intelligence that isn’t human-centered, we don’t have a chance of meaningfully communicating with the animals who share the planet with us.

Denise Herzing’s deep experience with dolphins and her wonder and celebration of the rich variety of life on this planet informs Is Anyone Listening? The book is a eye-opening guide to the opportunities and challenges of understanding other social worlds.