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A Democracy, If We Can Teach It: Educating the Next Generation of Citizens
Rendell, Marjorie O. (Cornell University Press, 2025-12-05)
The Rendell Center for Civics and Civic Engagement advances nonpartisan civic learning by working with K–12 teachers and students. Founded in 2014 by Judge Marjorie O. Rendell and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, the center's programs include statewide read-alouds, where judges, lawyers and other professionals read books to elementary school students across the state, as well as the Citizenship Challenge, an essay contest for fourth- and fifth-graders with prompts based on Pennsylvania civics standards. This book tells the story of how the center equips young people with knowledge about the workings of our constitutional system and prepares them to step into public life as leaders and active, engaged citizens. For this important work, the Rendell Center for Civics and Civic Engagement is the recipient of the 2025 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy.
Allegories of Format: A Media History of Gottfried Keller's Unlikely Oeuvre
Maskarinec, Malika (Cornell University Press, 2025-11-05)
Allegories of Format examines the significance of format to the literary oeuvre of the nineteenth-century Swiss author, Gottfried Keller (1819–1890), best known for his 1855 novel, Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich). Malika Maskarinec understands format as the organization of a media object's relationship to a world of objects and persons; format orders a text's contents or, in the case of literature, what it represents. Maskarinec focuses on three formats of growing prominence in nineteenth-century media culture: the collected-works edition, the document, and the periodical. The analysis demonstrates that different fictional worlds, characters, and plots in Keller's literary output allegorize the problems that specific print and paper formats pose to literary ideals of literature as an art form and to ideals of creative authorship. As Allegories of Format shows, attending to format allows for false antitheses inherited from the nineteenth century to be dismantled—between high and trivial literature, between the singular artwork and mass media products, and between creative literary works and the supposedly uncreative writing practices of office work.
The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia
Martínez, Francisco (Cornell University Press, 2025-11-05)
The Future of Hiding analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment occurs in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in eastern Estonia. It shows that secrets and hiding places are intrinsic to human affairs, while reconsidering the possibilities of relating ethnographically to what appears to be the extraneous. Francisco Martínez highlights how basements, garages, bunkers, holes, and cottages favor alternative forms of sociality, allowing local residents to redesign the terms of their public selves. Shadow spaces in this liminal region, at the border with Russia, are created against the institutional demand to be knowable. People engage in ordinary forms of ambivalence and refusal to negotiate a sense of loss and the consequences of a century of extractive activities. The Future of Hiding invites cross-disciplinary dialogue on topics like mining, transparency, belonging and cultural landscapes, offering insights into infrastructure's reproduction and destruction, recolonizations, and the ecological memory of a sacrificed area.
Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft
Lindsay, Jon R. (Cornell University Press, 2025-09-05)
At the heart of cybersecurity lies a paradox: Cooperation makes conflict possible. In Age of Deception, Jon R. Lindsay shows that widespread trust in cyberspace enables espionage and subversion. While such acts of secret statecraft have long been part of global politics, digital systems have dramatically expanded their scope and scale. Yet success in secret statecraft hinges less on sophisticated technology than on political context. To make sense of this, Lindsay offers a general theory of intelligence performance—the analogue to military performance in battle—that explains why spies and hackers alike depend on clandestine organizations and vulnerable institutions. Through cases spanning codebreaking at Bletchley Park during WWII to the weaponization of pagers by Israel in 2024, he traces both continuity and change in secret statecraft. Along the way, he explains why popular assumptions about cyber warfare are profoundly misleading. Offense does not simply dominate defense, for example, because the same digital complexity that expands opportunities for deception also creates potential for self-deception and counterdeception. Provocative and persuasive, Age of Deception offers crucial insights into the future of secret statecraft in cyberspace and beyond.
Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters
Davidson, Denise Z. (Cornell University Press, 2025-09-05)
Surviving Revolution explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement. Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters. By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity.
The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma
Pauly, Reid B. C. (Cornell University Press, 2025-07-05)
The Art of Coercion presents a fresh explanation for the success—and failure—of coercive demands in international politics. Strong states are surprisingly bad at coercion. History shows they prevail only a third of the time. Reid B. C. Pauly argues that coercion often fails because targets fear punishment even if they comply. In this "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, targets have little reason to obey. Pauly illustrates this logic in nuclear counterproliferation efforts with South Africa, Iraq, Libya, and Iran. He shows that coercers face an "assurance dilemma": When threats are more credible, assurances not to punish are less so. But without credible assurances, targets may defy threats, bracing for seemingly inevitable punishment. For coercion to work, as such, coercers must not only make targets believe that they will be punished if they do not comply, but also that they will not be if they do. Packed with insights for any foreign policy challenge involving coercive strategies, The Art of Coercion crucially corrects assumptions that tougher threats alone achieve results.
Freedom of Conscience in (Post)Soviet Space: Legacies of Michael Bourdeaux and the Keston Archive
(Cornell University Press, 2025-07-05)
Freedom of Conscience in (Post)Soviet Space, a collection of original essays edited by Julie K. deGraffenried, Michael Long, and Xenia Dennen, is inspired by the work of Michael Bourdeaux, the holdings of the Keston Archive, and continuing questions of freedom of conscience. Ranging from England to Siberia and moving chronologically from 1917 to the twenty-first century, this book reveals the unique organization and methodology behind the Keston's collection of materials and the ways those in the West thought about religion and communism during the Cold War, including the connection between religious liberty and human rights. The essays demonstrate the depth and breadth of current research on religion in communist and postcommunist contexts, a much-needed corrective to contemporary political uses of religious freedom. Bourdeaux's activism and preservation of materials influenced many fields of study, as reflected by contributing authors' varied disciplines—history, theology, sociology, languages, and literature. A preface by the theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams comments on Michael Bourdeaux's life and significance.
The Caspian World: Women's Labor and the War in Kachinland
(Cornell University Press, 2025-07-05)
The Caspian World is a wide-ranging exploration of the strategic, political, and commercial significance of the Caspian Sea, a site where empires—Russian, Persian, Ottoman, and British—competed, warred, and collaborated. As with the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, or the Black Sea, the geography of the Caspian Sea creates a sphere of unique political dynamics and possibilities, and the essays in this volume describe the role of the Caspian as a force of connection, as well as a source of threats, to the states on its shores. Rather than narrating history through binary, state-to-state relationships, however, The Caspian World uncovers the sea as a space of multi-sided exchanges and numerous centers, tracing how the Caspian has shaped the commercial, intellectual, diplomatic, and imperial projects throughout the region.
Persistent Illusions: Visual Culture and Historical Memory in Interwar Hungary
Veszprémi, Nóra (Cornell University Press, 2025-06-15)
Persistent Illusions examines the visual representation of history in interwar Hungary, where interpretations of the past were suffused with references to the country's recent territorial loss. In these images of history, nineteenth-century themes and motifs took on new forms to promote twentieth-century political ideas through the new media of modernity. Nóra Veszprémi illustrates how modernization created resilient imagery that persists in cultural memory through a wide range of paintings, prints, stamps, public spectacles, and monuments. In doing so, she challenges the assumption that the official culture of the right-wing, authoritarian regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy was characterized by a superficial revival of historical styles. Instead, she argues that the regime drew on history in complex, modern ways that disseminated motifs and ideological frameworks across political divides. By analyzing how ideology shapes enduring concepts of the past through the evocative power of images, Persistent Illusions encourages the reader to critically examine the legacies of interwar ideas and imagery in the present day.
Reproducing Revolution: Women's Labor and the War in Kachinland
Hedström, Jenny (Cornell University Press, 2025-06-15)
In Reproducing Revolution, Jenny Hedström explores the Kachin revolution in Myanmar from the perspective of female soldiers, female activists, and women displaced by the violence in northern Myanmar. Hedström argues that the household is an inherently gendered, militarized, and political space that impacts, and is in turn impacted by, the external conflict with which it coexists. In this context, women's everyday labor—the gendered work of childcare, farming, fighting, and forging connections both across households and between the household and the army and the nation—is key to revolutionary survival. Hedström calls this labor militarized social reproduction, and in Reproducing Revolution she demonstrates that such labor is critical to the military effort, and that warfare itself is shaped through everyday domestic action.

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