Emeriti Bookshelf

Sheer Misery Soldiers in Battle in WWII

Mary Lou Roberts. Sheer Misery Soldiers in Battle in WWII. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Marching across occupied France in 1944, American GI Leroy Stewart had neither death nor glory on his mind: he was worried about his underwear, which was engaged in a relentless crawl of its own. Similar complaints of physical discomfort pervade infantrymen’s memories of the European theater, whether the soldiers were British, American, German, or French. Wet, freezing misery with no end in sight—this was life for millions of enlisted men during World War II. Sheer Misery trains a humane and unsparing eye on the corporeal experiences of the soldiers who fought in Belgium, France, and Italy during the last two years of the war. In the horrendously unhygienic and often lethal conditions of the front line, their bodies broke down, stubbornly declaring their needs for warmth, rest, and good nutrition. Feet became too swollen to march, fingers too frozen to pull triggers; stomachs cramped, and diarrhea stained underwear and pants. Turning away from the accounts of high-level military strategy that dominate many WWII chronicles, acclaimed historian Mary Louise Roberts instead relies on diaries and letters to bring to life visceral sense memories like the moans of the “screaming meemies,” the acrid smell of cordite, and the shockingly mundane sight of rotting corpses. As Roberts writes, “For soldiers who fought, the war was above all about their bodies.”

The Making of the Indo-Islamic World c.700–1800 CE

André Wink. The Making of the Indo-Islamic World c.700–1800 CE. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

In a new accessible narrative, Andre Wink presents his major reinterpretation of the long-term history of India and the Indian Ocean region from the perspective of world history and geography. Situating the history of the Indianized territories of South Asia and Southeast Asia within the wider history of the Islamic world, he argues that the long-term development and transformation of Indo-Islamic history is best understood as the outcome of a major shift in the relationship between the sedentary peasant societies of the river plains, the nomads of the great Saharasian arid zone and the seafaring populations of the Indian Ocean. This revisionist work redraws the Asian past as the outcome of the fusion of these different types of settled and mobile societies, placing geography and environment at the centre of human history. Provides a world-historical perspective on the history of South and Southeast Asia. Introduces an environmental and geographical dimension to Indian history. Situates the history of the Indianized territories of South Asia and Southeast Asia within the wider history of the Islamic world.

Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok

Thongchai Winichakul. Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok. University of Hawaii Press, 2020.

The massacre on October 6, 1976, in Bangkok was brutal and violent, its savagery unprecedented in modern Thai history. Four decades later there has been no investigation into the atrocity; information remains limited, the truth unknown. There has been no collective coming to terms with what happened or who is responsible. Thai society still refuses to confront this dark page in its history.Moments of Silence focuses on the silence that surrounds the October 6 massacre. Silence, the book argues, is not forgetting. Rather it signals an inability to forget or remember—or to articulate a socially meaningful memory. It is the “unforgetting,” the liminal domain between remembering and forgetting. Historian Thongchai Winichakul, a participant in the events of that day, gives the silence both a voice and a history by highlighting the factors that contributed to the unforgetting amidst changing memories of the massacre over the decades that followed. They include shifting political conditions and context, the influence of Buddhism, the royal-nationalist narrative of history, the role played by the monarchy as moral authority and arbiter of justice, and a widespread perception that the truth might have devastating ramifications for Thai society. The unforgetting impacted both victims and perpetrators in different ways. It produced a collective false memory of an incident that never took place, but it also produced silence that is filled with hope and counter-history. Moments of Silence tells the story of a tragedy in Thailand—its victims and survivors—and how Thai people coped when closure was unavailable in the wake of atrocity. But it also illuminates the unforgetting as a phenomenon common to other times and places where authoritarian governments flourish, where atrocities go unexamined, and where censorship (imposed or self-directed) limits public discourse. The tensions inherent in the author’s dual role offer a riveting story, as well as a rare and intriguing perspective. Most of all, this provocative book makes clear the need to provide a place for past wrongs in the public memory.

Rituals for the Dead: Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris

William J. Courtenay. Rituals for the Dead: Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris. University of Notrre Dame Press, 2019.

In his fascinating new book, based on the Conway Lectures he delivered at Notre Dame in 2016, William Courtenay examines aspects of the religious life of one medieval institution, the University of Paris, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In place of the traditional account of teaching programs and curriculum, however, the focus here is on religious observances and the important role that prayers for the dead played in the daily life of masters and students. Courtenay examines the university as a consortium of sub-units in which the academic and religious life of its members took place, and in which prayers for the dead were a major element. Throughout the book, Courtenay highlights reverence for the dead, which preserved their memory and was believed to reduce the time in purgatory for deceased colleagues and for founders of and donors to colleges. The book also explores the advantages for poor scholars of belonging to a confraternal institution that provided benefits to all members regardless of social background, the areas in which women contributed to the university community, including the founding of colleges, and the growth of Marian piety, seeking her blessing as patron of scholarship and as protector of scholars. Courtenay looks at attempts to offset the inequality between the status of masters and students, rich and poor, and college founders and fellows, in observances concerned with death as well as rewards and punishments in the afterlife. Rituals for the Dead is the first book-length study of religious life and remembrances for the dead at the medieval University of Paris. Scholars of medieval history will be an eager audience for this title.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources

Thomas Spear. The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources. Oxford University Press, 2019.

The difficulties of exploring African history, especially for earlier periods, have spurred the development of a wide range of methodologies and approaches, such that Wyatt McGaffey once termed it “the decathlon of the social sciences.” Historians have long utilized archaeology, ethnography, historical linguistics, and oral traditions in their study of the continent, but are only beginning to explore the possibilities of genetics or many of the techniques used by modern archaeology and other emerging sciences. And as digital sources-from historical documents and statistics to cartographic, climatic, demographic, and environmental modeling-proliferate, so do the problems in using them. The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources examines how these developments have influenced the scholarship that historians produce. Such methods continue to evolve, demanding that historians develop basic understandings of them. Thus, the two-volume Encyclopedia builds a theoretical foundation for the field, expanding the ways that Africa can be studied, and recovering the histories of the continent that often appear outside of the documentary record.

Inge Morath: An Illustrated Biography

Linda Gordon. Inge Morath: An Illustrated Biography. Prestel Publishing, 2018.

An illustrated biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers, this book looks at the life and work of Inge Morath. The late playwright Arthur Miller, speaking of his wife Inge Morath, said “She made poetry out of people and their places over half a century.” Morath’s curiosity, compassion, and bravery show vividly in this biography featuring stunning images from every stage of her career. Biographer Linda Gordon presents Morath traveling across the globe, often as a woman alone, quietly but firmly defying the conventions for what was appropriate for women at the time. Her photographs show her cosmopolitanism, which arose from her love of literature, her fluency in many languages, and her revulsion against Hitler’s Germany, where she spent her teenage years. Her respect for all the world’s cultures, from Spain to Iran to China, made her a kind of visual ethnographer. One of the first women to join the Magnum collective, Morath was a superb portraitist, particularly drawn to artists, such as painter Saul Steinberg, sculptor Louise Bourgeois, and writer Boris Pasternak. She worked mainly in black-and-white but also used color film exquisitely, even early in her career. Through Magnum assignments to document film sets she met Arthur Miller and their subsequent marriage lasted for forty years. Despite a variety of subject matter, Morath’s work is unified by an intimacy and comfort with the world’s many cultures. Truly a citizen of the world, her images are simultaneously universal and personal.

The Future of Interreligious Dialogue: A Multireligious Conversation on Nostra Aetate

Charles L. Cohen (Co-editor), Paul F. Knitter (Co-editor), and Ulrich Rosenhagen (Co-editor). The Future of Interreligious Dialogue: A Multireligious Conversation on Nostra Aetate. Orbis Books, 2017.

Drawn from a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the landmark Vatican II document, Nostra Aetate (“Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions”), this multi-perspec­tive collection of essays by the world’s leading scholars of theology and interreligious dialogue brings new ferment to the field of interreligious understanding. In addition to the editors, contributors in­clude (among others) John T. Thatamanil, John Borelli, Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Roger Haight, John Pawlikowski, Dwight Hopkins, Shira Lander, and Sallie B. King. Charles L. Cohen is E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions at UW–Madison and former director of the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions. Paul F. Knitter is the Emeritus Paul Tillich Pro­fessor of Theology, World Religions, and Culture at Union Theological Seminary, New York. Ulrich Rosenhagen, formerly associate direc­tor of the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions, is a lecturer in religious studies at UW–Madison.

Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record

Gregg Mitman (Co-editor), and Kelley Wilder (Co-editor). Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that define historical moments and generations: the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. It would be a history, in other words, of just artists’ renderings and the spoken and written word. To inhabitants of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in visual culture, such a history seems insubstantial, imprecise, and even, perhaps, unscientific. Documenting the World is about the material and social life of photographs and film made in the scientific quest to document the world. Drawing on scholars from the fields of art history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, the chapters in this book explore how this documentation—from the initial recording of images, to their acquisition and storage, to their circulation—has altered our lives, our ways of knowing, our social and economic relationships, and even our surroundings. Far beyond mere illustration, photography and film have become an integral, transformative part of the world they seek to show us.

Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science

Kostas Kampourakis (Co-editor). Newton’S Apple and Other Myths about Science. Harvard University Press, 2015.

A falling apple inspired Isaac Newton’s insight into the law of gravity—or so the story goes. Is it true? Perhaps not. But the more intriguing question is why such stories endure as explanations of how science happens. Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science brushes away popular misconceptions to provide a clearer picture of great scientific breakthroughs from ancient times to the present. Among the myths refuted in this volume is the idea that no science was done in the Dark Ages, that alchemy and astrology were purely superstitious pursuits, that fear of public reaction alone led Darwin to delay publishing his theory of evolution, and that Gregor Mendel was far ahead of his time as a pioneer of genetics. Several twentieth-century myths about particle physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and more are discredited here as well. In addition, a number of broad generalizations about science go under the microscope of history: the notion that religion impeded science, that scientists typically adhere to a codified “scientific method,” and that a bright line can be drawn between legitimate science and pseudoscience. Edited by Ronald Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis, Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science debunks the widespread belief that science advances when individual geniuses experience “Eureka!” moments and suddenly comprehend what those around them could never imagine. Science has always been a cooperative enterprise of dedicated, fallible human beings, for whom context, collaboration, and sheer good luck are the essential elements of discovery.

D-Day through French Eyes: Memoirs of Normandy 1944

Mary Lou Roberts. D-Day through French Eyes: Memoirs of Normandy 1944. University of Chicago Press, 2014.

“Like big black umbrellas, they rain down on the fields across the way, and then disappear behind the black line of the hedges.” Silent parachutes dotting the night sky—that’s how one woman in Normandy in June of 1944 learned that the D-Day invasion was under way. Though they yearned for liberation, the French in Normandy nonetheless had to steel themselves for war, knowing that their homes and land and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack. Already battered by years of Nazi occupation, they knew they had one more trial to undergo even as freedom beckoned. With D-Day through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts turns the usual stories of D-Day around, taking readers across the Channel to view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her history from an impressive range of gripping first-person accounts of the invasion as seen by French citizens throughout the region. A farm family notices that cabbage is missing from their garden—then discovers that the guilty culprits are American paratroopers hiding in the cowshed. Fishermen rescue pilots from the wreck of their B-17, only to struggle to find clothes big enough to disguise them as civilians. A young man learns how to estimate the altitude of bombers and to determine whether a bomb was whistling overhead or silently headed straight for them. In small towns across Normandy, civilians hid wounded paratroopers, often at the risk of their own lives. When the allied infantry arrived, they guided soldiers to hidden paths and little-known bridges, giving them crucial advantages over the German occupiers. Through story after story, Roberts builds up an unprecedented picture of the face of battle as seen by grateful, if worried, civilians. As she did in her acclaimed account of GIs in postwar France, What Soldiers Do, Roberts here reinvigorates and reinvents a story we thought we knew. The result is a fresh perspective on the heroism, sacrifice, and achievement of D-Day.

The Embattled Past: Reflections on Military History

Edward Coffman. The Embattled Past: Reflections on Military History. University Press of Kentucky, 2014.

Internationally recognized for having reinvigorated and redefined his field, distinguished military historian Edward M. Coffman is a dedicated and much-admired teacher and mentor. In The Embattled Past, several of his most important essays have been assembled into a collection that serves as an essential reference to the discipline and an initiation to the study of military history for aspiring scholars. Coffman’s introduction to the volume charts his own professional journey and sets the book within the larger context of Americans’ attitudes toward their military, both inside and outside of academia. The essays explore a range of critical issues in military historiography — such as strategies for conducting oral history and research methodologies — and examine questions at the heart of the field. Included are two seminal essays on World War I, which provide a fascinating overview of American war strategies and illuminate the reasons why so many historians have ignored this critical turning point in twentieth-century history. The volume concludes with an unpublished essay detailing Coffman’s experience of interviewing General Douglas MacArthur in 1960. This exciting new book offers readers insights into more than two hundred years of United States military history while also providing a comprehensive overview of Coffman’s stellar contributions to the field. Important and engaging, The Embattled Past is a primer on the profession from one of the most honored scholars of our time.

The French Revolution in Global Perspective

Suzanne Desan (Co-editor), Lynn Hunt (Co-editor), and William Max Nelson (Co-editor). The French Revolution in Global Perspective. Cornell University Press, 2013.

Situating the French Revolution in the context of early modern globalization for the first time, this book offers a new approach to understanding its international origins and worldwide effects. A distinguished group of contributors shows that the political culture of the Revolution emerged out of a long history of global commerce, imperial competition, and the movement of people and ideas in places as far flung as India, Egypt, Guiana, and the Caribbean. This international approach helps to explain how the Revolution fused immense idealism with territorial ambition and combined the drive for human rights with various forms of exclusion. The essays examine topics including the role of smuggling and free trade in the origins of the French Revolution, the entwined nature of feminism and abolitionism, and the influence of the French revolutionary wars on the shape of American empire. The French Revolution in Global Perspective illuminates the dense connections among the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the French Revolution, revealing how new political forms—at once democratic and imperial, anticolonial and centralizing—were generated in and through continual transnational exchanges and dialogues.

The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2 Medieval Science

David C. Lindberg (Co-editor), and Michael H. Shank (Co-editor). The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2 Medieval Science. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

This volume in the highly respected Cambridge History of Science series is devoted to the history of science in the Middle Ages from the North Atlantic to the Indus Valley. Medieval science was once universally dismissed as non-existent – and sometimes it still is. This volume reveals the diversity of goals, contexts, and accomplishments in the study of nature during the Middle Ages. Organized by topic and culture, its essays by distinguished scholars offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of medieval science currently available. Intended to provide a balanced and inclusive treatment of the medieval world, contributors consider scientific learning and advancement in the cultures associated with the Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew languages. Scientists, historians, and other curious readers will all gain a new appreciation for the study of nature during an era that is often misunderstood.

Video and Audio Course: Living the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon

Suzanne Desan. Video and Audio Course: Living the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon. The Great Courses, 2013.

In one of the most pivotal and exciting eras of European history, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire stunned the world and wrenched Europe toward modernity. The Revolution overthrew the monarchy to create a republic, leveled the aristocracy, replaced Catholicism with goddesses of liberty, set up Sister Republics in Europe, and sparked slave revolt in the French Caribbean. This radical experiment in democracy also unleashed the Terror and launched Napoleon Bonaparte, the brilliant politician and general who built an astonishing European Empire. Tracing events from the Old Regime court at Versailles to Napoleon’s fall at Waterloo, this course weaves together political and social analysis with personal stories: Marie-Antoinette, Robespierre, and Napoleon rub shoulders with workers storming the Bastille, women rioting for bread, and soldiers crossing Russia. The lectures also address big questions: Why did the ideals of “liberty and equality” become mired in Terror? How did the Revolution and Napoleonic Empire lay the foundations of modern politics, lead to the restructuring of Europe, and create repercussions from Haiti to India?

In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974

Brenda Gayle Plummer. In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

In Search of Power is a history of the era of civil rights, decolonization, and Black Power. In the critical period from 1956 to 1974, the emergence of newly independent states worldwide and the struggles of the civil rights movement in the United States exposed the limits of racial integration and political freedom. Dissidents, leaders, and elites alike were linked in a struggle for power in a world where the rules of the game had changed. Brenda Gayle Plummer traces the detailed connections between African Americans’ involvement in international affairs and how they shaped American foreign policy, integrating African American history, the history of the African Diaspora, and the history of United States foreign relations. These topics, usually treated separately, not only offer a unified view of the period but also reassess controversies and events that punctuated this colorful era of upheaval and change. Unites African American history with the history of US foreign affairs Presents African American history as transnational Examines the ways in which both dissidents and elites were involved in the pursuit of power

The Weimar Moment Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law

Rudy J. Koshar (Editor). The Weimar Moment Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law. Lexington Books, 2012.

The Weimar Moment’s evocative assault on closure and political reaction, its offering of democracy against the politics of narrow self-interest cloaked in nationalist appeals to Volk and “community”—or, as would be the case in Nazi Germany, “race”—cannot but appeal to us today. This appeal—its historical grounding and content, its complexities and tensions, its variegated expressions across the networks of power and thought—is the essential context of the present volume, whose basic premise is unhappiness with Hegel’s remark that we learn no more from history than we cannot learn from it. The challenge of the papers in this volume is to provide the material to confront the present effectively drawing from what we can and do understand.

Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science

Peter Harrison (Co-editor), and Michael H. Shank (Co-editor). Wrestling With Nature: From Omens to Science. University of Chicago Press, 2011.

When and where did science begin? Historians have offered different answers to these questions, some pointing to Babylonian observational astronomy, some to the speculations of natural philosophers of ancient Greece. Others have opted for early modern Europe, which saw the triumph of Copernicanism and the birth of experimental science, while yet another view is that the appearance of science was postponed until the nineteenth century. Rather than posit a modern definition of science and search for evidence of it in the past, the contributors to Wrestling with Nature examine how students of nature themselves, in various cultures and periods of history, have understood and represented their work. The aim of each chapter is to explain the content, goals, methods, practices, and institutions associated with the investigation of nature and to articulate the strengths, limitations, and boundaries of these efforts from the perspective of the researchers themselves. With contributions from experts representing different historical periods and different disciplinary specializations, this volume offers a fresh perspective on the history of science and on what it meant, in other times and places, to wrestle with nature.

Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State

Leonard V. Kaplan, and Charles L. Cohen. Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State. Lexington Books, 2010.

Rising calls in both the United States and abroad for theologizing national agendas have renewed examinations about whether liberal states can accommodate such programs without either endangering citizens’ rights or trivializing religious concerns. Conventional wisdom suggests that theology is necessarily unfriendly to the liberal state, but neither philosophical analysis nor empirical argument has convincingly established that conclusion. Examining the problem from a variety of perspectives including law, philosophy, history, political theory, and religious studies, the essays in Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State suggest the possibilities for and limits on what theological reflection might contribute to liberal polities across the globe. Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State develops these issues under five headings. Part One explores “The Nature of Religious Argument” as it can inflect discussions of public policy, political theory, jurisprudence, and education. Part Two, “Theologies of the Marketplace,” notes that theology can by turns be highly critical, neutral, or even inordinately supportive of market operations. Part Three, “European Perspectives,” reviews and develops arguments from Abraham Kuyper, Karl Barth, and French post-modernists concerning how one might integrate theological discourse into the public sphere. Part Four offers Israel, Pakistan and Tibet as “Asian Perspectives” on how theology may comport with liberalism in recently created states (or, in the last case, a diasporic government-in-exile) where powerful religious constituencies make “secular” civil action extremely problematic. Finally, Part V, “Religion and Terror,” probes the vexed relationship between conceptions of divine and human justice, where the imperatives of theology and state confront each other most nakedly. Collectively, Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State suggests that the liberal state cannot keep theology out of public discourse and may even benefit from its intervention.

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

Linda Gordon. Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

We all know Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos—the Migrant Mother holding her child, the shoeless children of the Dust Bowl—but now renowned American historian Linda Gordon brings them to three-dimensional life in this groundbreaking exploration of Lange’s transformation into a documentarist. Using Lange’s life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, Gordon masterfully re-creates bohemian San Francisco, the Depression, and the Japanese-American internment camps. Accompanied by more than one hundred images—many of them previously unseen and some formerly suppressed—Gordon has written a sparkling, fast-moving story that testifies to her status as one of the most gifted historians of our time. Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; a New York Times Notable Book; New Yorker’s A Year’s Reading; and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book.

Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room

Judith W. Leavitt. Make Room for Daddy: The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room. University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Using fathers’ first-hand accounts from letters, journals, and personal interviews along with hospital records and medical literature, Judith Walzer Leavitt offers a new perspective on the changing role of expectant fathers from the 1940s to the 1980s. She shows how, as men moved first from the hospital waiting room to the labor room in the 1960s, and then on to the delivery and birthing rooms in the 1970s and 1980s, they became progressively more involved in the birth experience and their influence over events expanded. With careful attention to power and privilege, Leavitt charts not only the increasing involvement of fathers, but also medical inequalities, the impact of race and class, and the evolution of hospital policies. Illustrated with more than seventy images from TV, films, and magazines, this book provides important new insights into childbirth in modern America, even as it reminds readers of their own experiences.

Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany

Lynn K. Nyhart. Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany. University of Chicago Press, 2009.

In Modern Nature,Lynn K. Nyhart traces the emergence of a “biological perspective” in late nineteenth-century Germany that emphasized the dynamic relationships among organisms, and between organisms and their environment. Examining this approach to nature in light of Germany’s fraught urbanization and industrialization, as well the opportunities presented by new and reforming institutions, she argues that rapid social change drew attention to the role of social relationships and physical environments in rendering a society—and nature—whole, functional, and healthy. This quintessentially modern view of nature, Nyhart shows, stood in stark contrast to the standard naturalist’s orientation toward classification. While this new biological perspective would eventually grow into the academic discipline of ecology, Modern Nature locates its roots outside the universities, in a vibrant realm of populist natural history inhabited by taxidermists and zookeepers, schoolteachers and museum reformers, amateur enthusiasts and nature protectionists. Probing the populist beginnings of animal ecology in Germany, Nyhart unites the history of popular natural history with that of elite science in a new way. In doing so, she brings to light a major orientation in late nineteenth-century biology that has long been eclipsed by Darwinism.

Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821—1824

James S. Donnelly, Jr. Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821—1824. University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

Named for its mythical leader “Captain Rock,” avenger of agrarian wrongs, the Rockite movement of 1821–1824 in Ireland was notorious for its extraordinary violence. In Captain Rock, James S. Donnelly, Jr., offers both a fine-grained analysis of the conflict and a broad exploration of Irish rural society after the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Originating in west Limerick, the Rockite movement spread quickly under the impact of a prolonged depression. Before long the insurgency embraced many of the better-off farmers. The intensity of the Rockites’ grievances, the frequency of their resort to sensational violence, and their appeal on such key issues as rents and tithes presented a nightmarish challenge to Dublin Castle—prompting in turn a major reorganization of the police, a purging of the local magistracy, the introduction of large military reinforcements, and a determined campaign of judicial repression. A great upsurge in sectarianism and millenarianism, Donnelly shows, added fuel to the conflagration. Inspired by prophecies of doom for the Anglo-Irish Protestants who ruled the country, the overwhelmingly Catholic Rockites strove to hasten the demise of the landed elite they viewed as oppressors. Drawing on a wealth of sources—including reports from policemen, military officers, magistrates, and landowners as well as from newspapers, pamphlets, parliamentary inquiries, depositions, rebel proclamations, and threatening missives sent by Rockites to their enemies—Captain Rock offers a detailed anatomy of a dangerous, widespread insurgency whose distinctive political contours will force historians to expand their notions of how agrarian militancy influenced Irish nationalism in the years before the Great Famine of 1845–1851.

The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory

David C. Lindberg. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

When it was first published in 1992, The Beginnings of Western Science was lauded as the first successful attempt ever to present a unified account of both ancient and medieval science in a single volume. Chronicling the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from pre-Socratic Greek philosophy to late-Medieval scholasticism, David C. Lindberg surveyed all the most important themes in the history of science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. In addition, he offered an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe. The Beginnings of Western Science was, and remains, a landmark in the history of science, shaping the way students and scholars understand these critically formative periods of scientific development. It reemerges here in a second edition that includes revisions on nearly every page, as well as several sections that have been completely rewritten. For example, the section on Islamic science has been thoroughly retooled to reveal the magnitude and sophistication of medieval Muslim scientific achievement. And the book now reflects a sharper awareness of the importance of Mesopotamian science for the development of Greek astronomy. In all, the second edition of The Beginnings of Western Science captures the current state of our understanding of more than two millennia of science and promises to continue to inspire both students and general readers.

The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Expanded Edition)

Ronald Numbers. The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Expanded Edition). Harvard University Press, 2008.

In light of the embattled status of evolutionary theory, particularly as “intelligent design” makes headway against Darwinism in the schools and in the courts, this now classic account of the roots of creationism assumes new relevance. Expanded and updated to account for the appeal of intelligent design and the global spread of creationism, The Creationists offers a thorough, clear, and balanced overview of the arguments and figures at the heart of the debate. Praised by both creationists and evolutionists for its comprehensiveness, the book meticulously traces the dramatic shift among Christian fundamentalists from acceptance of the earth’s antiquity to the insistence of present-day scientific creationists that most fossils date back to Noah’s flood and its aftermath. Focusing especially on the rise of this “flood geology,” Ronald L. Numbers chronicles the remarkable resurgence of antievolutionism since the 1960s, as well as the creationist movement’s tangled religious roots in the theologies of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Adventists, among others. His book offers valuable insight into the origins of various “creation science” think tanks and the people behind them. It also goes a long way toward explaining how creationism, until recently viewed as a “peculiarly American” phenomenon, has quietly but dynamically spread internationally—and found its expression outside Christianity in Judaism and Islam.

Cuba: contrapuntos de cultura, historia y sociedad

Francisco Scarano. Cuba: Contrapuntos De Cultura, Historia Y sociedad. Ediciones Callejón, 2007.

Cuba: contrapuntos de cultura, historia y sociedad es una nueva e importante colección cuyos ensayos recorren cinco siglos de la realidad cubana. El libro se constituye en un foro dentro del cual plantear asuntos de gran interés para los estudiosos, artistas e intelectuales públicos, así en la Isla como en las comunidades que comprenden la diáspora cubana. Cada ensayo deslinda una imagen profunda de la cultura cubana, entendida aquí simbólicamente como un contrapunto de voces que rebasan los límites de la polarización política y los silencios que suelen acompañarla. Todas las contribuciones abordan asuntos vitales y temas perennes, entre ellos, la ausencia o fragmentación del diálogo crítico; la forma en que los cubanos, no importa dónde se encuentren, dan testimonio acerca de “la condición cubana”; el desplazamiento de la culpa y la responsabilidad, y la búsqueda de principios guías y figuras inspiradoras en la gran cantera de la historia cubana. Cuba: Counterpoints on Culture, History, and Society is a major new collection of essays ranging over five centuries of the Cuban experience. The editors have provided a forum for the current concerns of scholars, artists, and public intellectuals, both in the island and across the communities that constitute the Cuban Diaspora. Each essay confirms a deep image of Cuban culture, symbolically understood in these pages as a musical dialogue of voices reaching beyond the limitations of political polarization and its attending silences. The essays address pressing questions and persistent themes, including the absence or fragmentation of critical dialogue, the manner in which Cubans, wherever they may be, give testimony about “the Cuban condition,” the habitual displacement of blame and responsibility, and the search for guiding principles and inspirational figures in the bedrock of Cuban history.

The Regulars The American Army, 1898–1941

The Regulars The American Army, 1898–1941. Harvard University Press, 2007.

In 1898 the American Regular Army was a small frontier constabulary engaged in skirmishes with Indians and protesting workers. Forty-three years later, in 1941, it was a large modern army ready to wage global war against the Germans and the Japanese. In this definitive social history of America’s standing army, military historian Edward Coffman tells how that critical transformation was accomplished. Coffman has spent years immersed in the official records, personal papers, memoirs, and biographies of regular army men, including such famous leaders as George Marshall, George Patton, and Douglas MacArthur. He weaves their stories, and those of others he has interviewed, into the story of an army which grew from a small community of posts in China and the Philippines to a highly effective mechanized ground and air force. During these years, the U.S. Army conquered and controlled a colonial empire, military staff lived in exotic locales with their families, and soldiers engaged in combat in Cuba and the Pacific. In the twentieth century, the United States entered into alliances to fight the German army in World War I, and then again to meet the challenge of the Axis Powers in World War II. Coffman explains how a managerial revolution in the early 1900s provided the organizational framework and educational foundation for change, and how the combination of inspired leadership, technological advances, and a supportive society made it successful. In a stirring account of all aspects of garrison life, including race relations, we meet the men and women who helped reconfigure America’s frontier army into a modern global force.

Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-1988

Steve J. Stern. Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’S Chile, 1973-1988. Duke University Press, 2006.

Battling for Hearts and Minds is the story of the dramatic struggle to define collective memory in Chile during the violent, repressive dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, from the 1973 military coup in which he seized power through his defeat in a 1988 plebiscite. Steve J. Stern provides a riveting narration of Chile’s political history during this period. At the same time, he analyzes Chileans’ conflicting interpretations of events as they unfolded. Drawing on testimonios, archives, Truth Commission documents, radio addresses, memoirs, and written and oral histories, Stern identifies four distinct perspectives on life and events under the dictatorship. He describes how some Chileans viewed the regime as salvation from ruin by Leftists (the narrative favored by Pinochet’s junta), some as a wound repeatedly reopened by the state, others as an experience of persecution and awakening, and still others as a closed book, a past to be buried and forgotten. In the 1970s, Chilean dissidents were lonely “voices in the wilderness” insisting that state terror and its victims be recognized and remembered. By the 1980s, the dissent had spread, catalyzing a mass movement of individuals who revived public dialogue by taking to the streets, creating alternative media, and demanding democracy and human rights. Despite long odds and discouraging defeats, people of conscience—victims of the dictatorship, priests, youth, women, workers, and others—overcame fear and succeeded in creating truthful public memories of state atrocities. Recounting both their efforts and those of the regime’s supporters to win the battle for Chileans’ hearts and minds, Stern shows how profoundly the struggle to create memories, to tell history, matters. Battling for Hearts and Minds is the second volume in the trilogy The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. The third book will examine Chileans’ efforts to achieve democracy while reckoning with Pinochet’s legacy.

Impounded Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment

Linda Gordon (Editor), and Gary Y Okihiro (Editor). Impounded Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Censored by the U.S. Army, Dorothea Lange’s unseen photographs are the extraordinary photographic record of the Japanese American internment saga. This indelible work of visual and social history confirms Dorothea Lange’s stature as one of the twentieth century’s greatest American photographers. Presenting 119 images originally censored by the U.S. Army—the majority of which have never been published—Impounded evokes the horror of a community uprooted in the early 1940s and the stark reality of the internment camps. With poignancy and sage insight, nationally known historians Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro illuminate the saga of Japanese American internment: from life before Executive Order 9066 to the abrupt roundups and the marginal existence in the bleak, sandswept camps. In the tradition of Roman Vishniac’s A Vanished World, Impounded, with the immediacy of its photographs, tells the story of the thousands of lives unalterably shattered by racial hatred brought on by the passions of war. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2006.

Cuarenta preguntas fundamentales sobre la Guerra Civil

Stanley Payne. Cuarenta Preguntas Fundamentales Sobre La Guerra Civil. La Esfera de los Libros, 2006.

En este nuevo libro, el historiador Stanley G. Payne, autor de El colapso de la República -publicado con gran éxito por esta editorial-, plantea cuarenta preguntas fundamentales para comprender la Guerra Civil, desde su estallido y desarrollo a sus consecuencias. En cada capítulo logra la visión más clara ofrecida hasta ahora sobre el conflicto bélico español, y lo sitúa en un amplio contexto que supera las limitadas perspectivas con las que se ha estudiado hasta ahora. Así da respuestas detalladas, profundas y didácticas a interrogantes que han generado muchísima controversia a lo largo de setenta años, como por ejemplo si realmente fue inevitable la contienda, o qué hubiera pasado en el país si los militares no se hubieran sublevado; cuáles eran los objetivos de Hitler, Mussolini y la URSS cuando se decidieron a intervenir; por qué las democracias occidentales no ayudaron a la República; qué pasó con el oro de Moscú; qué papel jugaron los nacionalismos; cuáles fueron las consecuencias inmediatas y a largo plazo… Y, finalmente, una cuestión que sigue viva en la actualidad política: ¿ha logrado España superar, en pleno siglo XXI, la Guerra Civil, o todavía queda un camino por recorrer? TRANSLATION: In this new book, the historian Stanley G. Payne, author of The Collapse of the Republic -published with great success by this editorial-, asks forty fundamental questions to understand the Civil War, from its outbreak and development to its consequences. In each chapter he achieves the clearest vision offered so far on the Spanish war conflict, and places it in a broad context that goes beyond the limited perspectives with which it has been studied so far. Thus, he gives detailed, profound and didactic answers to questions that have generated a great deal of controversy over seventy years, such as whether the conflict was really inevitable, or what would have happened in the country if the military had not risen in revolt; what were the objectives of Hitler, Mussolini and the USSR when they decided to intervene; why the western democracies did not help the Republic; what happened to the Moscow gold; what role did nationalisms play; What were the immediate and long-term consequences … And finally, a question that is still alive today in politics: has Spain managed to overcome, in the 21st century, the Civil War, or is there still a way to go?

The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France

Suzanne Desan. The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. University of California Press, 2004.

In a groundbreaking book that challenges many assumptions about gender and politics in the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan offers an insightful analysis of the ways the Revolution radically redefined the family and its internal dynamics. She shows how revolutionary politics and laws brought about a social revolution within households and created space for thousands of French women and men to reimagine their most intimate relationships. Families negotiated new social practices, including divorce, the reduction of paternal authority, egalitarian inheritance for sons and daughters alike, and the granting of civil rights to illegitimate children. Contrary to arguments that claim the Revolution bound women within a domestic sphere, The Family on Trial maintains that the new civil laws and gender politics offered many women unexpected opportunities to gain power, property, or independence. The family became a political arena, a practical terrain for creating the Republic in day-to-day life. From 1789, citizens across France—sons and daughters, unhappily married spouses and illegitimate children, pamphleteers and moralists, deputies and judges—all disputed how the family should be reformed to remake the new France. They debated how revolutionary ideals and institutions should transform the emotional bonds, gender dynamics, legal customs, and economic arrangements that structured the family. They asked how to bring the principles of liberty, equality, and regeneration into the home. And as French citizens confronted each other in the home, in court, and in print, they gradually negotiated new domestic practices that balanced Old Regime customs with revolutionary innovations in law and culture. In a narrative that combines national-level analysis with a case study of family contestation in Normandy, Desan explores these struggles to bring politics into households and to envision and put into practice a new set of familial relationships.

Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments

Gregg Mitman (Co-editor), Michelle Murphy (Co-editor), and Christopher Sellers (Co-editor). Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments. University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Bringing together historians of science and medicine with environmental historians, and adding more contemporary vantage points from geography, anthropology, and sociology, Osiris Volume 19: Landscapes of Exposure offers an unprecedented interdisciplinary depiction of how, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists and lay people have generated methods for connecting health and place, disease and ecology, calculation and risk.

The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism

Stanley Payne. The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism. Yale University Press, 2004.

In this compelling book Stanley G. Payne offers the first comprehensive narrative of Soviet and Communist intervention in the revolution and civil war in Spain. He documents in unprecedented detail Soviet strategies, Comintern activities, and the role of the Communist party in Spain from the early 1930s to the end of the civil war in 1939. Drawing on a very broad range of Soviet and Spanish primary sources, including many only recently available, Payne changes our understanding of Soviet and Communist intentions in Spain, of Stalin’s decision to intervene in the Spanish war, of the widely accepted characterization of the conflict as the struggle of fascism against democracy, and of the claim that Spain’s war constituted the opening round of World War II. The author arrives at a new view of the Spanish Civil War and concludes not only that the Democratic Republic had many undemocratic components but also that the position of the Communist party was by no means counterrevolutionary.

A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa

Florence Bernault. A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa. Heinemann, 2003.

Over the last 30 years, a substantial literature on the history of American and European prisons has developed. This collection is among the first in English to construct a history of prisons in Africa. Topics include precolonial punishments, living conditions in prisons and mining camps, ethnic mapping, contemporary refugee camps, and the political use of prison from the era of the slave trade to the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

A History of Civilization, Vol. III: Europe in a Wider World: 1350-1650

Lee Palmer Wandel (Co-editor), and Robin W. Winks (Co-editor). A History of Civilization, Vol. III: Europe in a Wider World: 1350-1650. Oxford University Press, 2003.

This book is a compact, accessible history of the continent, during a time when it did not yet dominate the world in which it was situated. The text discusses the major events of the period, and also seeks to restore interconnections lost by thinkers who divided the period into “The Renaissance” and “The Reformation.” With twenty-five illustrations and nine detailed maps, this short textbook is perfect for students of European history

Al-Hind, Volume 3 Indo-Islamic Society, 14th- 15th Centuries

André Wink. Al-Hind, Volume 3 Indo-Islamic Society, 14th- 15th Centuries. Brill, 2003.

This third volume of Andre Wink’s acclaimed and pioneering Al-Hind:The Making of the Indo-Islamic World takes the reader from the late Mongol invasions to the end of the medieval period and the beginnings of early modern times in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. It breaks new ground by focusing attention on the role of geography, and more specifically on the interplay of nomadic, settled and maritime societies. In doing so, it presents a picture of the world of India and the Indian Ocean on the eve of the Portuguese discovery of the searoute: a world without stable parameters, of pervasive geophysical change, inchoate and instable urbanism, highly volatile and itinerant elites of nomadic origin, far-flung merchant diasporas, and a famine- and disease-prone peasantry whose life was a gamble on the monsoon.

Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914

Samuel Clark (Editor), and James S. Donnelly, Jr. (Editor). Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

“The strength of this volume cannot be conveyed by an itemisation of its contents; for what it provides is an incisive commentary on the newly-recognised landmarks of Irish agrarian history in the modern period. . . . The importance, even indispensability, of this achievement is compounded by exemplary editing.”—Roy Foster, London Times Literary Supplement “As a whole, the volume demonstrates the wealth, complexity, and sophistication of Irish rural studies. The book is essential reading for anyone involved in modern Irish history. It will also serve as an excellent introduction to this rich field for scholars of other peasant communities and all interested in problems of economic and political developments.”—American Historical Review

Innovation in Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Theory: Molecular Vortices, Displacement Current, and Light

Daniel M. Siegel. Innovation in Maxwell’S Electromagnetic Theory: Molecular Vortices, Displacement Current, and Light. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

James Clerk Maxwell’s (1831–1879) contributions to twentieth-century science and technology – in particular, the displacement current and the electromagnetic theory of light – are among the most spectacular innovations in the history of physics, but the technical complexities and thematic subtleties of his work have been difficult to unravel. In considering the historical development of Maxwell’s work, Dr Siegel’s close analysis of the original texts – with careful attention to the equations as well as to the words – reveals that mechanical modeling played a crucial role in Maxwell’s initial conceptualizations of the displacement current and the electromagnetic character of light. Beyond this, Siegel locates Maxwell’s work in the full sweep of nineteenth-century electromagnetic theory – from Oersted, Ampere, and Faraday, through Hertz and Lorentz – and in the context of the methodological traditions and perspectives of early physics research at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge.

When a Flower Is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist

Florencia Mallon. When a Flower Is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

A pathbreaking contribution to Latin American testimonial literature, When a Flower Is Reborn is activist Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef’s chronicle of her leadership within the Mapuche indigenous rights movement in Chile. Part personal reflection and part political autobiography, it is also the story of Reuque’s rediscovery of her own Mapuche identity through her political and human rights activism over the past quarter century. The questions posed to Reuque by her editor and translator, the distinguished historian Florencia Mallon, are included in the text, revealing both a lively exchange between two feminist intellectuals and much about the crafting of the testimonial itself. In addition, several conversations involving Reuque’s family members provide a counterpoint to her story, illustrating the variety of ways identity is created and understood. A leading activist during the Pinochet dictatorship, Reuque—a woman, a Catholic, and a Christian Democrat—often felt like an outsider within the male-dominated, leftist Mapuche movement. This sense of herself as both participant and observer allows for Reuque’s trenchant, yet empathetic, critique of the Mapuche ethnic movement and of the policies regarding indigenous people implemented by Chile’s post-authoritarian government. After the 1990 transition to democratic rule, Reuque collaborated with the government in the creation of the Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) and the passage of the Indigenous Law of 1993. At the same time, her deepening critiques of sexism in Chilean society in general, and the Mapuche movement in particular, inspired her to found the first Mapuche feminist organization and participate in the 1996 International Women’s Conference in Beijing. Critical of the democratic government’s inability to effectively address indigenous demands, Reuque reflects on the history of Mapuche activism, including its disarray in the early 1990s and resurgence toward the end of the decade, and relates her hopes for the future. An important reinvention of the testimonial genre for Latin America’s post-authoritarian, post-revolutionary era, When a Flower Is Reborn will appeal to those interested in Latin America, race and ethnicity, indigenous people’s movements, women and gender, and oral history and ethnography.

Science and Civil Society

Thomas H. Broman (Editor), and Lynn K. Nyhart (Editor). Science and Civil Society. University of Chicago Press, 2002.

This volume explores the varieties of relationships formed between science and civil society, at both the conceptual and institutional levels, since the late seventeenth century. It brings together general historians and historians of science with different national perspectives to confront the various ways sin which science and civil society have shaped one another in different times and places. How, when, and why did science become intertwined in the network of voluntary associations, professional groups and other institutions we understand as comprising “civil society”? How has science affected the ideology of civil society and thus the legitimacy of political authority in historical contexts as different as late eighteenth-century America, mid nineteenth-century Germany, and early twentieth-century China? How have scientists made use of the ideological links between science and civil political discourse to further their own professional ends? In contrast to much recent writing on civil society, this volume does not aim at making normative pronouncements about the role of civil society in promoting democratic polities, nor does it attempt to weigh the role of science in democracy. Instead, the essays examine how the fruitful interplay of beliefs concerning science and civil society has worked to legitimize the institutional forms of civil society and naturalize its ideologies, while at the same time giving to science its overwhelmingly powerful role in public life.

Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence–Boston, 1880-1960

Linda Gordon. Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence–Boston, 1880-1960. University of Illinois Press, 2002.

In this unflinching history of family violence, the historian Linda Gordon traces policies on child abuse and neglect, wife-beating, and incest from 1880 to 1960. Drawing on hundreds of case records from social agencies devoted to dealing with the problem, Gordon chronicles the changing visibility of family violence as gender, family, and political ideologies shifted. From the “discovery” of family violence in the 1870s–-when it was first identified as a social, rather than personal, problem–-to the women’s and civil rights movements of the twentieth century, Heroes of Their Own Lives illustrates how public perceptions of marriage, poverty, alcoholism, mental illness, and responsibility worked for and against the victims of family violence. Powerful, moving, and tightly argued, Heroes of Their Own Lives shows family violence to be an indicator of larger social problems. Examining its sources as well as its treatment, Gordon offers both an honest understanding of the problem and an unromantic view of the difficulties in stopping it.

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies

David J. Sorkin (Editor). The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies. Oxford University Press, 2002.

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies covers all the main areas currently taught and researched as part of Jewish studies in universities throughout the world, especially in Europe, the United States, and Israel. The span of the volume chronologically and geographically is thus enormous, but all international contributors have in common their expertise in the study of the history, literature, religion, and culture of the Jews. Jewish studies is a comparatively young discipline which has grown over the past fifty years in a somewhat undisciplined way. In a period of great upheaval for Jews following the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel, the emergence of new forms of dialogue between Jews and Christians, deepening divisions between secular and religious Jews, and unprecedented assimilation by diaspora Jews to the wider culture, the study of Jewish traditions and history has rarely been dispassionate. There have been some attempts in recent years to encapsulate current conclusions about particular aspects of Jewish studies, but these other works aim to provide compendia of agreed facts rather than a survey of interests and directions such as is found in this text. The book begins with an examination of Jewish studies as an academic discipline in its own right. The first half of the volume is organized chronologically, followed by sections on languages and literature, general aspects of religion, and other branches of Jewish studies which have each accumulated a considerable corpus of scholarship over the past half-century.

Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement

Rosalyn Baxandall (Editor), and Linda Gordon (Editor). Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’S Liberation Movement. Basic Books Publishing, 2001.

New Perspectives on the Haskalah

Shmuel Feiner (Editor), and David J. Sorkin (Editor). New Perspectives on the Haskalah. Littman Library, 2001.

Revises our understanding of the relationship between the Haskalah, Orthodoxy, and hasidism, reassesses the role of key individuals in the movement, and offers a new, more nuanced, definition of the Haskalah. Should be of interest to all students of modern Jewish history, literature, and culture in eighteenth-century Germany and eastern Europe in the nineteenth century.

German Travel Cultures

Rudy J. Koshar. German Travel Cultures. Oxford, 2000.

Travel guidebooks are an important part of contemporary culture, but we know relatively little about their history and importance to the evolution of tourism. Germany not only produced the first international standard for travel handbooks, the Baedeker, but also became a major tourist destination early in the twentieth century. This is the first comprehensive discussion of the history of tourist guidebooks for any modern nation.Selecting representative texts – the first Baedeker to unified Germany, guides to Berlin sex life and sites of Nazi martyrdom, a tour guide for the German worker and American tourbooks to West Germany – this fascinating study relates the history of tourist literature to the formation of distinct ‘travel cultures’ oriented to specific audiences, tastes and ideologies.

Politique africaine: “Pouvoirs sorciers en Afrique”

Florence Bernault (Editor). Politique Africaine: “Pouvoirs Sorciers En Afrique”. Karthala, 2000.

Contrairement aux hypothèses développementalistes des années 60-70, la sorcellerie n’a pas disparu sous la pression conjugée de la modernisation économique et politique. Elle s’affirme aujourd’hui comme une catégorie incontournable de la vie publique et privée en Afrique. Les hommes politiques sont fréquemment accusés de pratiques occultes, le pouvoir restant associé aux “forces de la nuit” ; des rituels spectaculaires réapparaissent dans les contextes de guerre et de violence. L’expansion de la sorcellerie se manifeste aussi dans la vie quotidienne, où les conflits domestiques ou de voisinage prennent souvent la forme d’accusations dans l’ordre de l’invisible. Comment interpréter ces phénomènes ?

Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977

Stanley Payne. Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977. University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977, by celebrated historian Stanley G. Payne, is the most comprehensive history of Spanish fascism to appear in any language. This authoritative study offers treatment of all the major doctrines, personalities, and defining features of the Spanish fascist movement, from its beginnings until after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975. Payne describes and analyzes the development of the Falangist party both prior to and during the Spanish Civil War, presenting a detailed analysis of its transformation into the state party of the Franco regime—Falange Española Tradicionalista—as well as its ultimate conversion into the pseudofascist Movimiento Nacional. Payne devotes particular attention to the crucial years 1939–1942, when the Falangists endeavored to expand their influence and convert the Franco regime into a fully Fascist system. Fascism in Spain helps us to understand the personality of Franco, the way in which he handled conflict within the regime, and the reasons for the long survival of his rule. Payne concludes with the first full inquiry into the process of “defascistization,” which began with the fall of Mussolini in 1943 and extended through the Franco regime’s later efforts to transform the party into a more viable political entity.

The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought

David J. Sorkin. The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought. Vallentine Mitchell, 2000.

The Berlin Haskalah was the Jewish attempt to rearticulate belief to accommodate the new science and philosophy of the Enlightenment. This study argues that the Haskalah should be understood within the context of the wider Central European religious and intellectual changes.

Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603-1640

Johann Sommerville. Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603-1640. Addison Wesley/ Longman, 1999.

The early Stuart age was critical to England’s political and constitutional development, and has been the subject of passionate debate among historians. Some argue that the Civil War had few long-term origins; others discern deeper roots. But how did the men and women of the time see contemporary politics? What were the issues and the principles that mattered to them? And how did this ideological dimension contribute to the turbulent years before 1640? Strangely neglected amidst all the cut-and-thrust of modern historiographical controversy, this is the territory that Johann Sommerville explored in his widely-respected study (first published in 1986 as Politics and Ideology in England 1603-1640), which now appears in this major Second Edition. The result is not only an important contribution for historians; it also throws a vivid light on the political climate and preoccupation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As before, the first part offers a notably clear account of the main political theories current at the time, each located and discussed within its wider historical contexts. These include the Divine Right of Knights, the theory of the ancient constitution, and the idea that government is founded upon the consent of the governed. But political thought is rarely isolated from political practice: ideas have to come to terms with events, and theories are developed to justify concrete positions. In the seconded part, therefore, Johann Sommerville goes on to examine how these major theories were applied in practice to the burning issues of the day. To these ends, he analyses a large body of early seventeenth-century political literature – setting the work of famous theorists like Hobbes, Locke and Hooker against the backcloth of more humble writers, to clarify what was original in their work and what was the common currency of the age. He is then able to unravel the ideas and attitudes that contemporaries brought to such key topics as taxation without consent, the powers of arbitrary arrest, and the government of the Church. He shows how differences in political outlook influenced political practice and fueled the mutual distrust between the king and many of his powerful subjects. Civil War was not inevitable in England; but by dissecting the neglected ideological dimension of politics, Johann Sommerville reveals a major cause of the eventual breakdown of the peace. The Second Edition has been revised throughout to take account of recent research, and it contains an extensive new section reviewing the current state of historiographical debate. The suggestions for Further Reading have been updated; there is a useful new Chronology; and the entire text has been reset in a more readable format.

Reel Nature: America’s Romance With Wildlife on Film

Gregg Mitman. Reel Nature: America’S Romance With Wildlife on Film. Harvard University Press, 1999.

From the early exploits of Teddy Roosevelt in Africa to blockbuster films such as March of the Penguins, Gregg Mitman’s Reel Nature reveals how changing values, scientific developments, and new technologies have come to shape American encounters with wildlife on and off the big screen. Whether crafted to elicit thrills or to educate audiences about the real-life drama of threatened wildlife, nature films then and now have had an enormous impact on how Americans see, think about, consume, and struggle to protect animals across the globe.

East African Expressions: Of Christianity

Isaria N. Kimambo (Editor), and Thomas Spear (Editor). East African Expressions: Of Christianity. Ohio University Press, 1999.

Christianity has been spread in Africa by Africans. It is the story of peoples seizing control of their own spiritual destinies—rather than the commonplace notion that the continent’s Christian churches represent colonial and capitalist powers that helped subdue Africans to European domination. In short, once introduced, Christianity took on a powerful life of its own and spun out of the control of those who would retain ownership of doctrine and practice. East African Expressions of Christianity examines the experiences of African Christians as they explored the new faith, interpreted it in the context of their own values, appropriated it for themselves, and forged their own distinctive churches. Prominent Tanzanian and American historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and church people examine the translation of religious meanings across cultural boundaries; the religious and social appeal of the new faith; and the vital roles played by African evangelists, teachers, and translators in the spread of Christianity and the development of an African church.

Germany’s Transient Pasts: Historical Preservation and National Memory in Twentieth Century Germany

Rudy J. Koshar. Germany’s Transient Pasts: Historical Preservation and National Memory in Twentieth Century Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Germans have venerated and maintained a variety of historical buildings–from medieval fortresses and cathedrals to urban districts and nineteenth-century working-class housing. But the practice of historic preservation has sometimes proven controversial, as different groups of Germans have sought to use historical architecture to represent competing versions of their nation’s history. Transient Pasts is the first book to examine the role that the historic preservation movement has played in German cultural history and memory from the end of the nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Focusing on key public debates over historic preservation, Rudy Koshar charts a trajectory of cultural politics in which historical architecture both facilitated and limited Germans’ efforts to identify as a nation. He demonstrates that historical buildings and monuments have served as enduring symbols of national history in a country scarred by the traumas of two world wars, Nazism, the Holocaust, and political division. His findings challenge both the widely accepted argument that Germans have constantly repressed their past and the contention that Germany’s intense public engagement with history since reunification is unprecedented.

Darwinism Comes to America

Darwinism Comes to America. Harvard University Press, 1998.

In 1997, even as Pope John Paul II was conceding that evolution was “more than just a theory,” local school boards and state legislatures were still wrangling over the teaching of origins—and nearly half of all Americans polled believed in the recent special creation of the first humans. Why do so many Americans still resist the ideas laid out by Darwin in On the Origin of Species? Focusing on crucial aspects of the history of Darwinism in America, Ronald Numbers gets to the heart of this question. Judiciously assessing the facts, Numbers refutes a host of widespread misconceptions: about the impact of Darwin’s work on the religious ideas of scientists, about the character of the issues that exercised scientists of the immediate post-Darwin generation, about the Scopes trial of 1925 and its consequences for American schools, and about the regional and denominational distribution of pro- and anti-evolutionary sentiments. Displaying the expertise that has made Numbers one of the most respected historians of his generation, Darwinism Comes to America provides a much-needed historical perspective on today’s quarrels about creationism and evolution—and illuminates the specifically American nature of this struggle.

An Expanding World: Textiles: Production, Trade and Demand

Maureen Mazzaoui (Editor). An Expanding World: Textiles: Production, Trade and Demand. Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1998.

This volume examines the role of textiles within the expanding global economy in the Age of European Exploration. Major themes include: the opening of new markets and responses to competition in the cloth trade, evolving techniques and modes of production, and changes in the patterns of consumption of local and imported cloth in a comparative, cross-cultural context.

Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health

Judith W. Leavitt (Co-editor). Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health. University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

An invaluable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, this highly regarded and widely used social history of medicine and public health in the United States is now available in a third edition. Extensively revised and updated, it includes twenty-one new essays; graphs illustrating the rise in deaths caused by HIV, homicide, and suicide; and a greatly expanded Guide to Further Reading. Entirely new sections on Sickness and Health, Early American Medicine, Therapeutics, the Art of Medicine, and Public Health and Personal Hygiene have been added, supplementing updated sections on the Science of Medicine, Education, the Allied Health Professions, Image and Income, Institutions, Race and Medicine, Epidemics, Public Health Reform, and Public Health and Medical Theory. An introductory essay and a series of historical photographs complement the articles.

Mountain Farmers: Moral Economies of Land and Agricultural Development in Arusha and Meru

Thomas Spear. Mountain Farmers: Moral Economies of Land and Agricultural Development in Arusha and Meru. University of California Press, 1997.

This work examines the struggle between the Meru and Arusha peoples and their German and British rulers over the issue of land and agricultural development on Mount Meru in northern Tanzania. It shows how the Meru and Arashi, faced with an iron ring of land alienated by European settlers successfully intensified their own irrigated agriculture to bring about what has been termed an indigenous agricultural revolution.

Facing Death

Lee Palmer Wandel. Facing Death. Yale University Press, 1996.

We have learned a great deal in recent years about keeping death at bay through medical technology. We are less well informed, however, about how to face death and how to understand or articulate the emotional and spiritual needs of the dying. This profound and eloquent book brings together medical experts and distinguished authorities in the humanities to reflect on medical, cultural, and religious responses to death. The book helps both medical personnel and patients to view death less as an adversary and more as a defining part of life. In the first half of the book, physicians and the founder of Connecticut Hospice discuss the current clinical setting for dying, with attempts to find the balance between alleviating suffering and providing life support, the problem of finding a peaceful death, and the differences the AIDS epidemic has made in our attitudes toward dying. In the second half of the book, theologians, historians of religion, anthropologists, literary scholars, and pastors describe Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese perceptions of death and rituals of mourning. An epilogue considers the resonances between medicine and the humanities, as well as the essential differences in their approaches to death.

Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature

William Cronon. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. W. W. Norton & Co., 1996.

A controversial, timely reassessment of the environmentalist agenda by outstanding historians, scientists, and critics. In a lead essay that powerfully states the broad argument of the book, William Cronon writes that the environmentalist goal of wilderness preservation is conceptually and politically wrongheaded. Among the ironies and entanglements resulting from this goal are the sale of nature in our malls through the Nature Company, and the disputes between working people and environmentalists over spotted owls and other objects of species preservation. The problem is that we haven’t learned to live responsibly in nature. The environmentalist aim of legislating humans out of the wilderness is no solution. People, Cronon argues, are inextricably tied to nature, whether they live in cities or countryside. Rather than attempt to exclude humans, environmental advocates should help us learn to live in some sustainable relationship with nature. It is our home.

Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health

Judith W. Leavitt. Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’S Health. Beacon Press, 1996.

She was an Irish immigrant cook. Between 1900 and 1907, she infected twenty-two New Yorkers with typhoid fever through her puddings and cakes; one of them died. Tracked down through epidemiological detective work, she was finally apprehended as she hid behind a barricade of trashcans. To protect the public’s health, authorities isolated her on Manhattan’s North Brother Island, where she died some thirty years later. This book tells the remarkable story of Mary Mallon–the real Typhoid Mary. Combining social history with biography, historian Judith Leavitt re-creates early-twentieth-century New York City, a world of strict class divisions and prejudice against immigrants and women. Leavitt engages the reader with the excitement of the early days of microbiology and brings to life the conflicting perspectives of journalists, public health officials, the law, and Mary Mallon herself. Leavitt’s readable account illuminates dilemmas that continue to haunt us. To what degree are we willing to sacrifice individual liberty to protect the public’s health? How far should we go in the age of AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, and other diseases? For anyone who is concerned about the threats and quandaries posed by new epidemics, Typhoid Mary is a vivid reminder of the human side of disease and disease control.

The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform

Judith W. Leavitt. The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform. University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

Between 1850 and 1900, Milwaukee’s rapid population growth also gave rise to high death rates, infectious diseases, crowded housing, filthy streets, inadequate water supplies, and incredible stench. The Healthiest City shows how a coalition of reform groups brought about community education and municipal action to achieve for Milwaukee the title of “the healthiest city” by the 1930s. This highly praised book reminds us that cutting funds and regulations for preserving public health results in inconvenience, illness, and even death.

The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and Middle Ages: Readings from Isis

Michael H. Shank (Editor). The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and Middle Ages: Readings from Isis. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

This stimulating collection of twenty-two articles is intended not only to explore a range of scientific topics but to engage readers in historiographical debates and methodological issues that surround the study of ancient and medieval science. A convenient sampling of classic and contemporary scholarship, it will appeal to students and specialists alike. Contributors include Francesca Rochberg, David Pingree, G. E. R. Lloyd, Heinrich von Staden, Martin Bernal, Alexander Jones, Bernard Goldstein, Alan Bowen, Owsei Temkin, David Lindberg, Steven McCluskey, Linda Voigts, Edward Grant, Bernard Goldstein, Victor Roberts, Lynn Thorndike, Helen Lemay, William Newman, A. Mark Smith, Nancy Siraisi, Michael McVaugh, and Brian P. Copenhaver.

America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present

Rosalyn Baxandall (Editor), and Linda Gordon (Editor). America’S Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present. W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.

A landmark work when it appeared in 1976, America’s Working Women helped form the field of women’s studies and transform labor history. Now the authors have enlarged the dimensions of this important anthology; more than half the selections and all the introductory material are new. Spanning the years from 1600 to the present, selections from diaries, popular magazines, historical works, oral histories, letters, songs, poetry, and fiction show women’s creativity in supporting themselves, their families, and organizations or associations. Slave women recall their field work, family work, and sabotage. We see Indian women farming, and we also see the white culture coercing Indian women to give up farming. We see women in industry playing a central part in the union movement while facing the particular hazards of women’s jobs and working conditions. New selections show the historical origins of today’s important issues: sexual harassment, equal pay, “sex work,” work in the underground economy, work in the home, and shift work. With an expanded focus on women from all racial and ethnic backgrounds and regions, America’s Working Women grounds us in the battles women have fought and the ones they are in the process of winning.

Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru

Florencia Mallon. Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. University of California Press, 1995.

Peasant and Nation offers a major new statement on the making of national politics. Comparing the popular political cultures and discourses of postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Florencia Mallon provides a groundbreaking analysis of their effect on the evolution of these nation states. As political history from a variety of subaltern perspectives, the book takes seriously the history of peasant thought and action and the complexity of community politics. It reveals the hierarchy and the heroism, the solidarity and the surveillance, the exploitation and the reciprocity, that coexist in popular political struggle. With this book Mallon not only forges a new path for Latin American history but challenges the very concept of nationalism. Placing it squarely within the struggles for power between colonized and colonizing peoples, she argues that nationalism must be seen not as an integrated ideology that puts the interest of the nation above all other loyalties, but as a project for collective identity over which many political groups and coalitions have struggled. Ambitious and bold, Peasant and Nation both draws on monumental archival research in two countries and enters into spirited dialogue with the literatures of post-colonial studies, gender studies, and peasant studies.

Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350

Michael Chamberlain. Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Michael Chamberlain focuses on medieval Damascus to develop a new approach to the relationship between the society and culture of the Middle East. The author argues that historians have long imposed European strictures onto societies to which they were alien. Western concepts of legitimate order were inappropriate to medieval Muslim society where social advancement was dependent upon the production of knowledge and religious patronage, and it was the household, rather than the state agency or corporation, that held political and social power. A parallel is drawn between the learned elite and the warriors of Damascus who, through similar strategies, acquired status and power and passed them on in their households. By examining material from the Latin West, Sung China and the Sinicized empires of Inner Asia, the author addresses the nature of political power in the period.

Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800-1900

Lynn K. Nyhart. Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800-1900. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Morphology—the study of form—is often regarded as a failed science that made only limited contributions to our understanding of the living world. Challenging this view, Lynn Nyhart argues that morphology was integral to the life sciences of the nineteenth century. Biology Takes Form traces the development of morphological research in German universities and illuminates significant institutional and intellectual changes in nineteenth-century German biology. Although there were neither professors of morphology nor a morphologists’ society, morphologists achieved influence by “colonizing” niches in a variety of disciplines. Scientists in anatomy, zoology, natural history, and physiology considered their work morphological, and the term encompassed research that today might be classified as embryology, systematics, functional morphology, comparative physiology, ecology, behavior, evolutionary theory, or histology. Nyhart draws on research notes, correspondence, and other archival material to examine how these scientists responded to new ideas and to the work of colleagues. She examines the intertwined histories of morphology and the broader biological enterprise, demonstrating that the study of form was central to investigations of such issues as the relationships between an animal’s structure and function, between an organism and its environment, and between living species and their ancestors.

King James VI and I: Political Writings

Johann Sommerville (Editor). King James VI and I: Political Writings. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

James VI and I united the crowns of England and Scotland. His books are fundamental sources of the principles that underlay the union and among the most influential writings of their period. James’ political philosophy was a moderated absolutism, shedding light on the political climate of Shakespeare’s England and the intellectual background to the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. This edition is the first to draw on all the early texts of James’ books, with an introduction setting them in their historical context.

Correlation and Regression Analysis: A Historian’s Guide

Thomas Archdeacon. Correlation and Regression Analysis: A Historian’s Guide. University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

In Correlation and Regression Analysis: A Historian’s Guide Thomas J. Archdeacon provides historians with a practical introduction to the use of correlation and regression analysis. The book concentrates on the kinds of analysis that form the broad range of statistical methods used in the social sciences. It enables historians to understand and to evaluate critically the quantitative analyses that they are likely to encounter in journal literature and monographs reporting research findings in the social sciences. Without attempting to be a text in basic statistics, the book provides enough background information to allow readers to grasp the essentials of correlation and regression. Correlation analysis refers to the measurement of association between or among variables, and regression analysis focuses primarily on the use of linear models to predict changes in the value taken by one variable in terms of changes in the values of a set of explanatory variables. The book also discusses diagnostic methods for identifying shortcomings in regression models, the use of regression to analyze causation, and the application of regression and related procedures to the study of problems containing categorical as well as numerical data. Archdeacon asserts that knowing how statistical procedures are computed can clarify the theoretical structures underlying them and is essential for recognizing the conditions under which their use is appropriate. The book does not shy away from the mathematics of statistical analysis; but Archdeacon presents concepts carefully and explains the operation of equations step by step. Unlike many works in the field, the book does not assume that readers have mathematical training beyond basic algebra and geometry. In the hope of promoting the role of quantitative analysis in his discipline, Archdeacon discusses the theory and methods behind the most important interpretive paradigm for quantitative research in the social sciences. Correlation and Regression Analysis introduces statistical techniques that are indispensable to historians and enhances the presentation of them with practical examples from scholarly works.

The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County

Jean Lee. The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County. W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.

‘A detailed portrait of colonial and revolutionary times that gradually becomes a convincing miniature.’ —Washington Post ‘An insightful study of the transforming power of revolution and war…. Meticulously organized and lucidly written,… it is from first to last a model of narrative history.’ —Journal of Military History ‘A vivid portrait of a country and a region at war, rich with detail of how the prologue to the war and the conduct of it changed the lives of everyone who lived within the country’s borders—men, women, slaves, merchants, farmers, financiers.’ —Wall Street Journal ‘The price of Nationhood offers us a richly textured portrait of a people struggling to preserve a familiar world even as they created a new one. It is local history as its best.’ —Journal of American History

Puerto Rico: Cinco siglos de historia

Francisco Scarano. Puerto Rico: Cinco Siglos De historia. McGraw-Hill, 2015.

La aparición de la primera edición de Puerto Rico: Cinco Siglos de Historia consolidó a Francisco A. Scarano como uno de los historiadores contemporáneos sobre Puerto Rico más reconocidos y documentados en Latinoamerica y el Caribe. En esta segunda edición, el autor mantiene la esencia del enfoque histórico en sus investyigaciones; analiza el devenir de los acontecimientos en Puerto Rico, remontándose a la llegada de los primeros pobladores del continente americano, para cerrar con el mundo boricua de finales del siglo XX. Su aguda visión nos guía en un recorrido histórico de cinco siglos, realizando una interpretación objetiva de los acontecimientos más relevantes del país caribeño, en los órdenes económico, político, geográfico y social. Con invaluables recursos didácticos y profusamente ilustrada, el lector encontrará en la presente edición una obra intelectual cuyo estudio es indispensable para comprender el Puereto Rico contemporáneo.

Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa

Thomas Spear (Editor), and Richard Waller (Editor). Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa. Ohio University Press, 1993.

Everyone “knows” the Maasai as proud pastoralists who once dominated the Rift Valley from northern Kenya to central Tanzania. But many people who identity themselves as Maasai, or who speak Maa, are not pastoralist at all, but farmers and hunters. Over time many different people have “become” something else. And what it means to be Maasai has changed radically over the past several centuries and is still changing today. This collection by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists examines how Maasai identity has been created, evoked, contested, and transformed from the time of their earliest settlement in Kenya to the present, as well as raising questions about the nature of ethnicity generally.

Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment

Brenda Gayle Plummer. Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment. University of Georgia Press, 1992.

In a prescient remark made at the turn of the century, U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root said that establishing “the right sort of relations” with Haiti must await “the psychological moment.” Indeed, as Brenda Gayle Plummer notes, much of the Haitian-U.S. relationship has turned on matters of perception. For many in the United States, tales of voodoo, political violence, and stark deprivation have made Haiti appear to be a doomed land, beyond comprehension and help. Haitians, meanwhile, have often seen the United States as persistently racist, grossly materialist, and lacking in spiritual values. In Haiti and the United States, Plummer pays special attention to the role of social and cultural factors in the two countries’ views of each other and the manner in which relations have developed as a result of those perceptions. The disparities between the two republics, she notes, are all the more remarkable in that their experiences of anticolonial rebellion and nationhood converged in some striking ways. Despite the parallels, however, the varying cultural and racial identities of Haiti and the United States and the sociohistorical context in which those identities have been construed forced them to confront the challenges of slavery, republicanism, democracy, and economic development quite differently. Stressing the importance of domestic policy and the character of civil society in the formation of foreign policy, Plummer illuminates the various factors that figured in the relationship between the two countries throughout the nineteenth century. She discussed the aspirations of Haiti’s founders in building a self-governing black society, Haitian responses to the transatlantic abolition movement, the development of Haiti’s creole culture, and the country’s shrewd negotiations with the United States over commercial and strategic issues. The late 1800s, Plummer shows, proved a turning point in Haitian-U.S. relations as Washington’s assumption of regional hegemony changed the balance of power for a Haiti long committed to a multilateralist diplomacy. In the twentieth century, tensions between traditional and reformist elements in Haitian society erupted in a crisis that brought U.S. intervention and long-term military occupation. Plummer examines the consequences of this intervention as they were incorporated into the later interactions between the United States and Haiti and shows how these troubled relations contributed to the rise of the repressive Duvalier regime. The recent fall of that regime, Plummer suggests, now presents the “psychological moment” to which Elihu Root referred so many years ago. Haiti and the United States is the first history of the relationship between the two countries to be published since the 1940s. Utilizing a wealth of Haitian sources as well as the voluminous state papers in the National Archives of the United States and the Library of Congress, the book also benefits from methodological and conceptual advances in diplomatic history over the past half-century.

Franco: El perfil de la historia

Stanley Payne. Franco: El Perfil De La historia. Planeta-DeAgostini, 1992.

Sir Robert Filmer: ‘Patriarcha’ and Other Writings

Johann Sommerville (Editor). Sir Robert Filmer: ‘Patriarcha’ And Other Writings. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

This volume contains the political writings of Sir Robert Filmer (1588-1653), an acute defender of absolute monarchy and perhaps the most important patriarchal political theorist of the seventeenth century. The recent explosion of interest in women’s history and the history of the family has greatly enhanced the audience for Filmer’s work, and in this new edition Johann Sommerville provides accurate and accessible texts of his principal writings, accompanied by all the standard series features, including a concise introduction, chronology, guide to further reading and notes on Filmer’s own text.

Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France

Suzanne Desan. Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France. Cornell University Press, 1990.

Reclaiming the Sacred examines the ways in which the new secular political culture of lay people. Focusing on the Yonne, a pro-revolutionary department in Burgundy, Suzann Desan analyzes how the region’s laity responded to the revolutionaries’ attempts to dechristianize France and to replace Christianity with new revolutionary cults. The Revolution, she shows, was a fertile and dynamic period for lay religiosity. Paradoxically, the breakdown of the institutional Church allowed the laity to seize greater initiative in defining and creating the sacred. In the absence of the clergy, lay believers transformed their religious expression and invented new rituals such as lay-led masses. Women in particular often gained new spiritual and communal power as leaders of local religious activism. Desan explores why women were usually the leaders of religious violence and illustrates how, in her view, their activism helped to stake out religion as women’s domain over the longer term. Yet her book is also about the surprisingly revolutionary means by which lay Catholics demanded the right to practice. Desan challenges the traditional assumption that Catholics were necessarily counterrevolutionary by analyzing how religious activists in a republican region assimilated the rhetoric of the Revolution and fused traditional and revolutionary forms of violent collective action. Her book thus sheds light on both the popular uses of revolutionary politics and the nature of French religious practice at this critical turning point in modern history. Reclaiming the Sacred will be of interest to historians of early modern and modern Europe, especially those who work on the French Revolution, popular religion, and the history of women. Desan’s work will also be read by students of political science, and anthropology, historical sociology, and religious studies.

Pivotal Decades The United States, 1900-1920

John M. Cooper. Pivotal Decades The United States, 1900-1920. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1990.

Contemporary American began in the first two decades of this century. These were the years in which two of our greatest presidents—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—transformed the office into the center of power; in which the United States entered the world stage and fought its first overseas war; in which the government’s proper role in the economy became a public question; and in which reform became an imperative for muckraking reporters, progressive politicians, social activists, and writers. It was a golden age in American politics, when fundamental ideas were given compelling expression by thoughtful candidates. It was a trying time, however, for many Americans, including women who fought for the vote, blacks who began organizing to secure their rights, and activists on the Left who lost theirs in the first Red Scare of the century. John Cooper’s panoramic history of this period shows us where we came from and sheds light on where we are.

Capacity and Volition. A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power

William J. Courtenay. Capacity and Volition. A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power. Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina, 1990.

Quodlibet: Richerche e strumenti di filosofia medievale, 8. [Milan lectures]

The Vietnam War: Four American Perspectives

Edward N. Luttwak, George S. McGovern, and William C. Westmoreland. The Vietnam War: Four American Perspectives. Purdue University Press, 1990.

This collection of speeches delivered in 1987 presents the widely diverging opinions of four men: an eminent politician, a professional soldier, a government consultant, and a distinguished scholar. The first contributor, Senator George S. McGovern, ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 1972 on a platform that called for the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. The second speaker, General William C. Westmoreland, commanded American military forces in Vietnam until growing battlefield casualties and economic costs undermined support for the strategy of attrition in the United States. The third essay is by Edward N. Luttwak, a strong advocate for military reform in the United States and a frequent participant in high-level government discussions about American strategic interests throughout the world. The fourth speaker Thomas J. McCormack, is a diplomatic historian at the University of Wisconsin and an astute critic of American foreign policy. Each lecture is followed by a lively question-and-answer session that highlights the key points of agreement and disagreement with respect to the fundamental issues raised in the lectures. In a stimulating foreword, Akira Iriye challenges readers to think about the Vietnam War in relationship to the current debate about the role that the United States should play in world affairs.

Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800-1920

Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800-1920. Temple University Press, 1989.

The recent movement known as ‘New Urbanism’ is attempting to reconcile competing ideas about urbanism that have been evolving in America for over a century. New Urbanism, an urban reform movement that gained prominence in the 1990s, seeks to promote qualities that urban reformers have always sought: vital, beautiful, just, environmentally benign human settlements. The significance of New Urbanism is that it is a combination of these past efforts: the culmination of a long, multi-faceted attempt to define what urbanism in America should be. This revelation only comes to light in view of the history that preceded it. This book puts New Urbanism in historical context and assesses it from that per­spective. Analy tically, my goal is to expose the validity of New Urbanism’s attempt to combine multiple traditions that, though inter-related, often comprise opposing ideals: the quest for urban diversity within a system of order, control that does not impinge freedom, an appreciation of smallness and fine-grained complexity that can coexist with civic prominence, a comprehensive perspective that does not ignore detail. Amidst the apparent complicatedness, history shows that divergences boil down to a few fundamental debates that get repeated over and over again. This means that American urbanism has endured a habitual crisis of definition. The question now is whether New Urbanists have seized upon the only logical, necessarily multi-dimensional definition of what urbanism in American can be.

Unless You Believe, You Shall Not Understand: Logic, University, and Society in Late Medieval Vienna

Michael H. Shank. Unless You Believe, You Shall Not Understand: Logic, University, and Society in Late Medieval Vienna. Princeton University Press, 1988.

Founded in 1365, not long after the Great Plague ravaged Europe, the University of Vienna was revitalized in 1384 by prominent theologians displaced from Paris–among them Henry of Langenstein. Beginning with the 1384 revival, Michael Shank explores the history of the university and its ties with European intellectual life and the city of Vienna. In so doing he links the abstract discussions of university theologians with the burning of John Hus and Jerome of Prague at the Council of Constance (1415-16) and the destruction of the Jewish community of Lower Austria (1421). Like most other scholars of the period, Henry of Langenstein (d. 1397) at one time believed that Aristotle’s syllogistic was universally valid even in Trinitarian theology. In touch with the vibrant Jewish community in Vienna, Langenstein had high hopes of converting its members by logical argument. When he failed in his purpose, he lost his confidence in Aristotle’s syllogistic as a universal tool of apologetics and handmaiden to Trinitarian theology. (“Unless you believe, you shall not understand,” he quoted from Isaiah, in order to express his change of opinion.) During the next generation, the intellectual climate at the university changed from academic openness to increasing rigidity, and theologians turned from argument to persecution. First published in 1988.

Irish Popular Culture 1650-1850

James S. Donnelly, Jr. (Editor), and Kerby A. Miller (Editor). Irish Popular Culture 1650-1850. Irish Academic Press, 1988.

A book edited by two such distinguished historians as James S. Donnelly Jr., and Kerby A. Miller promises to be lively and important: this collection of ten essays fully lives up to the expectations raised by the editorial imprimatur. The articles by an impressive panel of authors are source-based, and the tight editorial control is reflected in the way in which they complement one another.

A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War, 1848-1865

A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War, 1848-1865. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

A well-written, traditional, and brief narrative of the period from the end of the Mexican War to the conclusion of the Civil War… Shows the value of traditional political history which is too often ignored in our rush to reconstruct the social texture of society. — Civil War History

Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries

Steve J. Stern. Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries. University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

This collection of essays challenges our understanding of the history of native Andean rebellion during the last three centuries. The contributors—historians and anthropologists from a number of countries—move beyond the traditional structural analysis of society to a finer understanding of people as actors. Native Andean initiatives and consciousness are clearly placed at the center of this inquiry, which merges the best methods of history an anthropology. Stern begins with a vigorously argued theoretical essay in which he identifies major findings and arguments running throughout the book, demonstrates their pertinence to the more general field of peasant studies, and draws out the implications for theory and method. He reappraises the role of peasant consciousness and political horizons; and the significance of ethnic factors in explaining “peasant” consciousness and revolt. The case studies themselves revamp the history of Andean peasant rebellion and consciousness in Peru and Bolivia. This is accomplished by studying violent uprisings as transitional moments within a long-term trajectory embracing varied forms of resistance, and by scrutinizing closely the ideological and cultural aspects of domination, political legitimacy, and rebellion. The results sharply alter our understanding of three major historical problems: the crisis of Spanish colonial rule and the outbreak of native Andean insurrection in the eighteenth century; the response to peasants to creole wars and nation-building efforts in the nineteenth century; and the political strategies and dilemmas of Andean peasants in the context of populist and radical politics in the twentieth century.

Politics and Ideology in England 1603-1640

Johann Sommerville. Politics and Ideology in England 1603-1640. Longman, London and New York, 1986.

The years before the Civil War were a critical period in England’s political and constitutional development, and have been the subject of vigorous debate. Some historians argue that the Civil War had few long-term origins, while others discern deeper roots. Dr Sommerville here looks at the contemporary view of politics and at the ideologies, both in theory and in action, which contributed to the turbulent years before 1640.

Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950

Judith W. Leavitt. Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950. Oxford University Press, 1986.

The classic work on how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the present. Author of renowned expert on women’s medical history. New to this Edition: New preface for 30th anniversary edition on the state of the fields of women’s history and the history of medicine. Addresses how the history of childbirth and women’s health have developed in the intervening decades.

The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500

Derek Nurse, and Thomas Spear. The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

“The authors, respectively a linguist specializing in Swahili and related Bantu languages and a historian specializing in the history of East Africa, have assembled an impressive array of evidence—linguistic, archaeological, documentary, and oral-traditional—in support of the argument that Swahili culture, often regarded as an Arabian transplant on the East African coast, is actually ‘a dynamic synthesis of African and Arabian ideas within an African historical and cultural context.'”—American Anthropologist “A fine achievement, mixing original material, fresh insights, generally excellent use of sources, conciseness, and a highly readable style. As an introduction to how the history of an African society can be reconstructed from largely nonliterate sources, and to the Swahili in particular, it is almost a model work.”—International Journal of African Historical Studies

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

William Cronon. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill & Wang, 1983.

In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists’ sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, “The people of plenty were a people of waste,” Cronon’s enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.

The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt

John M. Cooper. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Harvard University Press, 1983.

The colossal figures who shaped the politics of industrial America emerge in full scale in this engrossing comparative biography. In both the depth and sophistication of intellect that they brought to politics and in the titanic conflict they waged with each other, Roosevelt and Wilson were, like Hamilton and Jefferson before them, the political architects for an entire century. All previous efforts to treat the philosophies and programs of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom have been partial and episodic. Now John Milton Cooper reconstructs in parallel lines the entire range of their ideologies and their struggles—their social identification in terms of class, education, and regional roots; the origins and evolution of their political thought; their party leadership roles; and their psychological characters. After tracking the shared identities of young manhood, Cooper explains the conflict of their mature years that developed from opposing philosophies of government. Not until 1912, when Wilson ran for president, did they come together partially and briefly on common practical grounds of reform of the political process and efforts to curb big business in the public interest. Later, foreign policy in particular pitted them in a deeper conflict that consumed the rest of their lives.

Statist and Statistician

Victor L. Hilts. Statist and Statistician. Arno Press, 1981.

Kenya’s Past: An Introduction to Historical Methods in Africa

Thomas Spear. Kenya’S Past: An Introduction to Historical Methods in Africa. Addison-Wesley Longman, 1981.

In Time of Storm: Revolution, Civil War, and the Ethnolinguistic Issue in Finland

Pekka K. Hamalainen. In Time of Storm: Revolution, Civil War, and the Ethnolinguistic Issue in Finland. SUNY Press, 1979.

At the end of World War I in many European societies, hitherto hidden or suppressed rivalries and tensions between competing socioeconomic and ethnolinguistic groups burst to the surface in violence, revolution, civil conflict, and civil war. The author of this book attempts to make a contribution toward the unraveling of these phenomena by exploring them within the context of one European society, Finland, and analyzing the complex and intertwining relationships between revolution and civil war on the one hand and ethnolinguistic and socioeconomic cleavages on the other.

Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia

Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia. University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.

Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860

Richard Sewell. Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860. Oxford University Press, 1976.

A Guide to Francis Galton’s English Men of Science

Victor L. Hilts. A Guide to Francis Galton’S English Men of Science. American Philosophical Society, 1975.

Basque Nationalism

Stanley Payne. Basque Nationalism. University of Nevada Press, 1975.

The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789-1860

Stanley Schultz. The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789-1860. Oxford University Press, 1973.

The Spanish Revolution

Stanley Payne. The Spanish Revolution. W. W. Norton & Company, 1970.

Politics and the Military in Modern Spain

Stanley Payne. Politics and the Military in Modern Spain. Stanford University Press, 1967.

The Hilt of the Sword : The Career of Peyton C. March

Edward Coffman. The Hilt of the Sword : The Career of Peyton C. March. University of Wisconsin Press, 1966.

Campaign and battle histories of the role of the United States army in World War I are plentiful, and yet historians have all but ignored the crucial administrative and institutional developments which made possible that army’s contribution to the Allied war effort. This new study by Edward M. Coffman does much to restore a true perspective. Concentrating on the important and controversial career of General Peyton C. March as Army Chief of Staff from 1918 to 1921, he uses the vehicle of biography to achieve a fascinating study of the military arm of the United States government at a time of profound change and drastic reorganization.

Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism

Stanley Payne. Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism. Stanford University Press, 1961.