Contracts

The United States has a prison problem. Many of the statistics are, by now, well known: the country’s prison population has grown by more than 500 percent since 1973. Today, more than 2.2 million people are incarcerated in over 6,000 jails, prisons, and detention centers nationwide. Another five million live under some form of correctional supervision or control. Almost everyone who is incarcerated, and millions who once were, cannot vote or access other public services. Most of them are poor, and an overwhelming number of them are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and/or suffering from a physical or mental disability. The United States stands alone among industrialized nations in retaining the death penalty, the widespread use of long-term solitary confinement, and the incarceration of juveniles in adult prisons. From preventable deaths to popular disenfranchisement, this carceral archipelago shapes the whole country.

Prison: An American History tells the story of the country through its enduring use of incarceration. Forced confinement enabled European settlers and their descendants to take Indigenous land, and it was a fundamental component of slavery—both the transatlantic slave trade and its domestic equivalent made widespread use of chains and cages. In the century after the Civil War, incarcerated people industrialized much of the country while prison development strengthened both federal and state local government. Since World War II, successive wars on communism, crime, drugs, gangs, and terror have made the country through prison. Nearly every moment in the country’s history can be understood through its reliance on captivity. From matters of labor discipline to political activism and beyond, prison helps explain the rise of the United States. 

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.