New Books in Political Science

In this episode, Matthew Mason (Professor of History at Brigham Young University) interviews Rachel Shelden (Associate Professor of History and Director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University) about her new book, The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History (UNC Press, 2026).
Today’s Supreme Court justices bristle at the label “politicians in robes,” insisting that they operate above the fray of partisan politics. But for the first century of the nation’s history, the Court was unmistakably a political institution, both by design and in practice. Justices were fully expected to engage in partisan politics—there was no concern that such engagement would lead to corruption or undue bias—and they remained deeply involved in civic debate and the electoral process while on the bench. In addition to hearing cases in the capital, each justice spent much of his time “riding circuit” and presiding over federal trial courts. On circuit and in Washington, nineteenth-century justices wrote for partisan newspapers, drafted legislation, advised partisan allies, campaigned for colleagues, and even ran for political offices from the bench. Through these political interactions, members of the Court helped shape debates about the Constitution’s meaning at a time when most Americans did not believe in judicial supremacy.

In this sweeping history, Rachel A. Shelden, one of America’s leading voices on the history of the Court, brings readers inside the social and political world of its justices, recovering their essential role in the era’s turbulent politics. She also charts shifts at the turn of the twentieth century, when members of the Court and the legal community refashioned the judiciary as an apolitical institution, setting the stage for an increasingly more powerful—and more isolated—modern Court. The Political Supreme Court is required reading for anyone interested in the legal and political underpinnings of today’s judicial power.

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Saladin Ambar, a political scientist and senior scholar at the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University Eagleton Institute of Politics, has authored a fascinating and propulsive new book focusing on Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. The book, Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes that Shaped Abraham Lincoln (Diversion Books, 2025), focuses on the violent events that transpired in the 1830s that contributed to Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and this important speech that he gave long before he became a political figure in the United States. The title of the speech, On the Perpetuations of Our Political Institutions, is a bit of an interesting feint, since Lincoln spends most of the speech explaining that American citizens need to understand their own role as the foundation of those very political institutions, and they need to take on what he calls a “civic religion” to imbue the country with a reverence for the laws and the Constitution. Ambar takes a two-pronged approach to the narrative of this book, and both are important to our understanding of the speech itself and Abraham Lincoln’s political thinking. Threaded throughout the book is an ongoing analysis of Lincoln’s thinking in terms of the content of the Young Men’s Lyceum speech, and, in order to best understand that thinking, Ambar also traces the historical incidents, particularly the lawless murders of both black and white individuals, that are going on around Lincoln, in Kentucky, in Illinois, in Missouri, and also further south, in Mississippi. The twin issues of mob violence and slavery shape Lincoln’s words in 1838, but they do so in different ways. This speech is not taking on slavery directly, but slavery haunts the narrative of the speech. Mob violence, on the other hand, drove Lincoln towards writing and delivering this speech, and Ambar takes the reader through the key episodes that shape and contribute to Lincoln’s thinking.
In Murder on the Mississippi, Ambar digs into the various incidents of mob violence, in different places along the Mississippi River. He starts with the five white gamblers who were killed in Vicksburg, Mississippi. This story, along with another group of white individuals murdered in Mississippi—because they may have had a hand in helping a Black insurrection—are among the lesser known events that contributed to Lincoln’s Lyceum speech. In both of these Mississippi incidents, the individuals were white, but they existed on the outside of what was considered appropriate or acceptable behavior within the societies where they were living. Ambar notes that “it is Lincoln’s speech that stands alone for connecting the fears of Black rebellion and moral decline with racial treason.”[1] The next section of the book focuses on the violent lynchings of Francis McIntosh (to whom the book is dedicated) and Elijah P. Lovejoy, and how McIntosh’s gruesome death among a crowd numbering in the hundreds “galvanized the forces of abolition like other.”[2] Lovejoy’s death stems from his protests about McIntosh’s lynching, and these deaths transpired in much closer proximity to Lincoln himself, taking place in southern Illinois and Missouri. These events, detailed in Murder on the Mississippi, help us to understand the various dimensions of Lincoln’s speech in 1838 to the Springfield audience. They also contribute to a broader understanding of Lincoln’s perspective on the American republic, the fragility of the commitment to the law and political institutions as established by the Constitution, and the ways in which race and slavery undergird civil society in the United States.
Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
[1] Saladin Ambar. Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes that Shaped Abraham Lincoln. Diversion Books, 2025, p. xxxiii
[2] Ibid.

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Mao Zedong lived one of the most epic and influential lives of the twentieth century. His impact on the People's Republic of China was vast. Half a century after his passing, he remains a divisive and controversial figure. Kerry Brown's Mao: Power and Contradiction (Reaktion Books, 2026) gives an accessible narrative of his life, from the fall of the Qing in the early part of the twentieth century to the long years in which Mao Zedong struggled not only to ensure the Communist Party of China survived, but that it then came to power after a civil war with the nationalists. Mao's tragic failures as ruler were some of the worst to ever befall a modern society, while his personal life remains a source of intense interest.
Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London.
Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast host Andrea Talabér talked to Marius Turda about his new book, In Search of the Perfect Romanian: National Specificity, Racial Degeneration, and Social Selection in Modern Romania. We discussed the importance of the social and medical sciences in understanding Romanian nationalism, the intellectual sources of Romanian nationalist thought, and the various discussions surrounding biopolitical debates in interwar Romania amongst other topics.
You can purchase a copy here. The book is also available Open Access here.
The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.
Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://www.aup.nl/en/imprint/ceu-press
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When one hears about needs in the context of politics, one might imagine that they are dealing with facts that simply cannot be circumvented. Moving from this idea, Boss sees a tension, one in which politics, a field of negotiated agency, might find itself strangled by a closed concept. Without wanting to contend that people can actually live without having certain basic needs met, Boss wants to ensure that politics itself remains a realm of freedom, and finds in his own reading of Karl Marx a thread of thinking that slowly unwinds social and economic theories that unwittingly create situations they imagine themselves to be mirroring. Reading Marx in dialogue with economics, critical theory and contemporary political theory, Boss seeks to interrogate the ways in which our thinking about politics may not be best thought of as detached reflections on reality but active forms of participation in and creation of reality, a process that locks down what we should be trying to keep open. Marx and the Politics of Need (Routledge, 2026) is slowly but surely throughout the book turned into a need of politics, a careful and methodical reflection on what political thinking itself is.
George Boss is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.

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