In Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution, Sarah L. Swedberg examines how conceptions of mental illness intersected with American society, law, and politics during the early American Republic. Swedberg illustrates how concerns about insanity raised difficult questions about the nature of governance. Revolutionaries built the American government based on rational principles, but could not protect it from irrational actors that they feared could cause the body politic to grow mentally or physically ill. This book is recommended for students and scholars of history, political science, legal studies, sociology, literature, psychology, and public health.

Scandinavian immigrants encountered a strange paradox in 1890s Chicago. Though undoubtedly foreign, these newcomers were seen as Nordics--the "race" proclaimed by the scientific racism of the era as the very embodiment of white superiority. As such, Scandinavians from the beginning enjoyed racial privilege and the success it brought without the prejudice, nativism, and stereotyping endured by other immigrant groups. Erika K. Jackson examines how native-born Chicagoans used ideological and gendered concepts of Nordic whiteness and Scandinavian ethnicity to construct social hegemony. Placing the Scandinavian-American experience within the context of historical whiteness, Jackson delves into the processes that created the Nordic ideal. She also details how the city's Scandinavian immigrants repeated and mirrored the racial and ethnic perceptions disseminated by American media. An insightful look at the immigrant experience in reverse, Scandinavians in Chicago bridges a gap in our understanding of how whites constructed racial identity in America.

The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys: Eros and Environment is the first full-length study to explore a radically queer ecology at work in writings by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as their discussions of nature and the natural consistently link ecology and erotic practice. Initiated by Timothy Morton in 2010 as a hybrid of two schools of thinking about nature, queer ecology combines the alertness of environmentalists to constructions of the "natural" with efforts of sexuality scholars to denaturalize identity and to expose sexuality as a culture-bound construct. Conceptions of place are central to this investigation not only because an attachment to place is traditionally thought to be the ontological basis of all environmental consciousness (e.g. think-globally-act-locally) but because these two Romantic writers underscore the dynamic interaction between a person’s natural surroundings and his/her interpersonal attachments. The poetical and prose writings of the Shelleys claim our special attention because of their unusual conception of the oikos, the etymological root of "ecology," to mean both local grounds and the social, often domestic, places in which people dwell and desire. The overarching thesis of this book asserts that proto-ecological theories in Romantic-era England cannot be understood separately from discourses related to married/family life, and the texts considered demonstrate the comingling of earthly and erotic enjoyment. The issues raised by Eros and Environment are fundamental not only to literary and queer history but to all humanistic studies. They render the study of nature from a queer perspective a matter of intense interest to scholars in numerous disciplines ranging from ecocriticism and the natural sciences, including climate studies, to feminist criticism and sexuality studies.