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"Familiar Strangers tells the story of a remarkably successful group of ethnic outsiders at the heart of Soviet empire and, in so doing, offers a new interpretation of Russian and Soviet history in the twentieth century. While past scholars have portrayed the Soviet Union as a Russian-led empire composed of separate national republics, Scott makes the case that it was actually an empire of diasporas, forged through the mixing of a diverse array of nationalities. Concealed behind external Soviet borders, internal diasporas from the Soviet republics migrated throughout the socialist empire, leaving their mark on its politics, culture, and economics. Among the Soviet Unions internal diasporas, the Georgians were arguably the most prominent group. The roles they played in the Soviet empires evolution illuminate the opportunities as well as the limitations of the Bolshevik Revolution for ethnic minorities. Looking at the rise and fall of the Soviet Union from a Georgian perspective, this book moves past the typical divide between colonizer and colonized that guides most scholarship on empire and argues for a new theory of diaspora, with implications far beyond the imperial borders of Russia and Eurasia."

"Most people assume that climate change is recent news. A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America shows that we have been debating the science and politics of climate change for a long time, since before the age of industrialization. Focusing on attempts to transform New Englands and Nova Scotias environments from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries, this book explores the ways that early Americans studied and tried to remake local climates according to their plans for colonial settlement and economic development. For officials, landowners, naturalists, and other local elites, the Northeasts frigid, long winters and short, muggy summers were persistent sources of anxiety. They became intensely interested in understanding the regions natural history and, ultimately, in reducing their vulnerability to it. In the short term, European migrants from other northern countries would welcome the cold or, as one Loyalist from New Hampshire argued, the cold would moderate the supposedly fiery temperaments of Jamaicans deported to colonial Nova Scotia. Over the long term, however, the expansion of colonial farms was increasingly tempering the climate itself. A naturalist in Vermont agreed with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson when he insisted that every cultivated part of America was already more temperate, uniform, and equal than before colonization, an eighteenth-century forecast of permanent, global warming they wholeheartedly welcomed. By pointing to such ironies, A Temperate Empire emphasizes the necessarily historical nature of the climate and our knowledge about it."