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From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence how Britons work, how they are educated, the music they listen to, the food they eat, the items in their homes, and even how they remember their own history. This book is the remarkable story of an institution unlike any other—a society for the improvement of everything and anything. The book shows how this vibrant and singularly ambitious organisation has evolved and adapted, constantly having to reinvent itself to keep in step with changing times. The Society has served as a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, purchased and restored an entire village, encouraged the planting of more than sixty million trees, and sought technological alternatives to child labour. But this is more than just a story about unusual public initiatives. It is an engaging and authoritative history of almost three centuries of social reform and competing visions of a better world-the Society's members have been drawn from across the political spectrum, including Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Karl Marx. The book reveals how a society of public-spirited individuals tried to make their country a better place, and draws vital lessons from their triumphs and failures for all would-be reformers today.

Constant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century. This book traces the long and troubling history of the U.S. government's systematic efforts to terrorize and expel immigrants over the past 140 years. The book provides needed historical perspective on one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time. It examines how federal, state, and local officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese and Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century to Central Americans and Muslims today. It reveals how authorities have singled out Mexicans, nine out of ten of all deportees, and removed most of them not by orders of immigration judges but through coercive administrative procedures and calculated fear campaigns. The book uncovers the machine's three primary mechanisms—formal deportations, “voluntary” departures, and self-deportations—and examines how public officials have used them to purge immigrants from the country and exert control over those who remain. Exposing the pervasive roots of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, the book introduces the politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens who have pushed for and profited from expulsion. It chronicles the devastating human costs of deportation and the innovative strategies people have adopted to fight against the machine and redefine belonging in ways that transcend citizenship.

No biblical text has been more central to the politics of modern Israel than the Book of Joshua. Named after a military leader who became the successor to Moses, it depicts the march of the ancient Israelites into Canaan, describing how they subjugated and massacred the indigenous peoples. This book examines the book's centrality to the Israeli occupation today, revealing why nationalist longing and social reality are tragically out of sync in the Promised Land. Though the Book of Joshua was largely ignored and reviled by diaspora Jews, the leaders of modern Israel have invoked it to promote national cohesion. Critics of occupation, meanwhile, have denounced it as a book that celebrates genocide. This book looks at the composition of Joshua, showing how it reflected the fractious nature of ancient Israelite society and a desire to unify the populace under a strong monarchy. The book describes how David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, convened a study group at his home in the late 1950s, where generals, politicians, and professors reformulated the story of Israel's founding in the language of Joshua. The book traces how Ben-Gurion used a brutal tale of conquest to unite an immigrant population of Jews of different ethnicities and backgrounds, casting modern Israelis and Palestinians as latter-day Israelites and Canaanites. Providing an alternative reading of Joshua, the book finds evidence of a decentralized society composed of tribes, clans, and woman-run households, one with relevance to today when diverse peoples share the dwindling resources of a scarred land.

This book explores the history of statistics from the field's origins in the nineteenth century through to the factors that produced the burst of modern statistical innovation in the early twentieth century. The book shows that statistics was not developed by mathematicians and then applied to the sciences and social sciences. Rather, the field came into being through the efforts of social scientists, who saw a need for statistical tools in their examination of society. Pioneering statistical physicists and biologists James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Francis Galton introduced statistical models to the sciences by pointing to analogies between their disciplines and the social sciences. A new preface looks at how the book has remained relevant since its initial publication, and considers the current place of statistics in scientific research.

What accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is desirable in social investigation as a result of its successes in science. This book questions whether such success in the study of stars, molecules, or cells should be an attractive model for research on human societies, and examines why the natural sciences are highly quantitative in the first place. The book argues that a better understanding of the attractions of quantification in business, government, and social research brings a fresh perspective to its role in psychology, physics, and medicine. Quantitative rigor is not inherent in science but arises from political and social pressures, and objectivity derives its impetus from cultural contexts. A new preface sheds light on the current infatuation with quantitative methods, particularly at the intersection of science and bureaucracy.

What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? This book provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. The book describes how Western Europe's post-war democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. The book is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.