Butterfly Politics

Recent News

• At PRI’s The World, Beth Lew-Williams, author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, recounted the story of her grandfather Lew Din Wing, who in 1930, at 9 years old, was traumatically separated from his family and detained by immigration officials for 34 days.
• Bernardo Zacka, author of When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, explained to Vox’s Sean Illig how bureaucrats who deal directly with the Trump administration’s family separation and detainment policies navigate clear but morally troubling directives versus instructions that are ambiguous, confusing, or logistically impossible to follow.
• Matthew Bowman, author of Christian: The Politics of a Word in America, spoke with Religion & Politics about “Christian republicanism,” the role of Catholics in American Christianity, and the greater meaning behind Jeff Sessions’s citation of Romans 13 to defend controversial Trump administration immigration policies.
• At Gizmodo, Privacy’s Blueprint author Woodrow Hartzog warned against trusting “hiding” technologies—which range from a browser’s “Incognito Mode” to apps like Snapchat that promise to hold data only very temporarily—in a world in which “seeking” behavior is under-regulated and ever-evolving.

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June 6: Ira Berlin (1941-2018)

Towering American historian Ira Berlin passed away yesterday at the age of 77. A preeminent scholar of slavery and African American social history, Berlin was the author of numerous field-shaping works, and founding editor of the pioneering Freedmen and Southern Society Project. We at HUP have had the great good fortune of working with Berlin for decades, and the honor of publishing his magisterial Many Thousands Gone, winner of the Bancroft and Frederick Douglass Prizes; Generations of Captivity, which demonstrated the dramatic making and remaking of slavery across the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries; and, most recently, The Long Emancipation, a slim volume that drew on his lifetime of thinking about slavery to present the story of its long demise. As evidenced b…