Faculty Bookshelf

Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave and the Invention of the Modern Corporeality

Pablo F. Gómez. Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave and the Invention of the Modern Corporeality. University of Chicago Press, 2026.

Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, officials, notaries, and ship captains began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the Spanish, Portuguese, and African slave trades used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their probabilities with the brutal aim of protecting their financial interests rather than caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks. A pathbreaking work, Bloody Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, Gómez shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.

Encounters: The Crusades in 50 Objects

Cathleen A. Fleck, Elizabeth Lapina, Richard A. Leson, and Vardit Ruth Shotten. Encounters: The Crusades in 50 Objects. Routledge, 2026.

From the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century, during the existence of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and other crusader states, Latin Christians did not only frequently encounter Muslims on the battlefield, but also engaged in unprecedented commercial and cultural exchanges with the Muslim, Eastern Christian, and Jewish inhabitants of the Middle East. Through a focused analysis of fifty objects, this volume examines what material culture can tell us about interpersonal, interfaith, cross-cultural, and trans-regional encounters during this period. This richly illustrated volume explores a variety of Latin Christian, Eastern Christian, Muslim, and Jewish objects, including sculpture, glassware, metalware, manuscripts, textiles, painting, coins, and seals. Addressing the themes of Belief, Conflict, Exchange, Power, and Memory, the essays examine the conception of these objects and the uses to which they were put throughout their history. As a result, there emerges a picture of the Middle East as a place of profound cultural diversity and of multiplicity of encounters between different communities. The book stands as a valuable resource for students and scholars of the medieval crusades, the medieval Middle East and Europe, as well as all those interested in archaeology, art history, global history, and religious studies more broadly.

Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise

Emily Callaci. Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise. Penguin UK/Seal USA, 2025.

What would women do with their lives if they had more time? The riveting, untold story of a revolutionary campaign to change the way work is valued ‘The women of the world are serving notice. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don’t get what we want, we will simply refuse to work any longer!’ Across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework! Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise. Here historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators, tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades: from the early 1970s, when Selma James, a working-class political organizer, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a scholar-activist, started laying the foundations of Wages for Housework in London and Italy; through philosopher Silvia Federici reframing the campaign in the context of New York City’s fiscal crisis; to Wilmette Brown, lesbian poet and anti-war activist, and Margaret Prescod, community organizer, who brought the insights of Black feminism to the movement. Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism – and beyond. Then as now, Wages for Housework poses profound questions. What would it be like to live in a society that prioritizes care rather than production? How would this change our relationship with the natural world? And what would women do with their lives if they had more time?

Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World

James Sweet. Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Oxford University Press, 2025.

The dramatic story of a mutiny aboard an eighteenth-century British ship and how its owners effectively rallied the power of the British Crown to protect their investment and expand their wealth and political power across multiple generations. In 1768, the British slave ship Black Prince, departed the port of Bristol, bound for West Africa. It never arrived. Before reaching Old Calabar, the crew mutinied, murdering the captain and his officers. The mutineers renamed the ship Liberty, elected new officers, and set out for Brazil. By the time the ship arrived there, the crew had disintegrated into a violent mob and fired into the port city. After the Black Prince wrecked off the coast of Hispaniola, the rebels fled to outposts around the Atlantic world. An eight-year manhunt ensued. This book follows the crew’s turn to piracy and the merchant-owners’ response to the uprising. At the very moment that the American Revolution unfolded in North America, the Black Prince’s owners conducted a “shadow” revolution, mobilizing the power of the British Crown to seek justice and restitution on their behalf. These private merchants used state surveillance, policing, extradition, capital punishment, international diplomacy, and even warfare in order to protect their wealth. During an era of professed liberty and freedom, the privatization of state power was already emerging, replacing monarchies with corporate oligarchies, presaging a new kind of political power in the Atlantic world. The eighteenth-century Bristol slave merchants and subsequent generations of their families accrued great fortunes from the trade and invested it in early British banks, railroads, insurance companies, industrial manufacturing, and even the Anglican Church. Mutiny on the Black Prince narrates the dramatic story of the events onboard and the merchant owners’ efforts to capture the rebels from around the Atlantic world, as well as the way that British slavery shaped the industrializing Atlantic economy and the evolution of the modern corporate state.

Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation

Marla A. Ramírez. Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation. Harvard University Press, 2025.

A moving portrait of a grim period in American immigration history, when approximately one million ethnic Mexicans—mostly women and children who were US citizens—were forced to relocate across the southern border. From 1921 to 1944, approximately one million ethnic Mexicans living in the United States were removed across the border to Mexico. What officials called “repatriation” was in fact banishment: 60 percent of those expelled were US citizens, mainly working-class women and children whose husbands and fathers were Mexican immigrants. Drawing on oral histories, transnational archival sources, and private collections, Marla A. Ramírez illuminates the lasting effects of coerced mass removal on three generations of ethnic Mexicans.

Sailing Away from Byzantium toward East Roman History

Leonora Neville. Sailing Away from Byzantium Toward East Roman History. Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Although the first thing one learns about the ‘Byzantine Empire’ is that it was really the eastern Roman empire, scholars have preferred to call it ‘Byzantine’ in a repudiation of the self-conception and emic vocabulary of the inhabitants of that polity. The terminology of ‘Byzantium’ artificially severs the ‘medieval’ eastern Roman empire from its ‘classical’ roots allowing for the fundamentally Eurocentric schematization of history into ‘ancient,’ ‘medieval,’ and ‘Renaissance’ periods. ‘Byzantine’ is not a benign term of art but has served a variety of political and historiographical agendas including maintaining nationalist visions of ethnic continuity, creating precedents for communism, enabling politics of nostalgia for Orthodox dominion, and constructing visions of western European superiority and masculinity that justify colonialism. By exploring these intellectual legacies of ‘Byzantium,’ and the benefits of conceptualizing Roman history as an unsevered whole, this Element exhorts scholars to let go of the ‘Byzantine’ misnomer.

Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement

Judith A. Houck. Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement. University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Highlights local history to tell a national story about the evolution of the women’s health movement, illuminating the struggles and successes of bringing feminist dreams into clinical spaces. The women’s health movement in the United States, beginning in 1969 and taking hold in the 1970s, was a broad-based movement seeking to increase women’s bodily knowledge, reproductive control, and well-being. It was a political movement that insisted that bodily autonomy provided the key to women’s liberation. It was also an institution-building movement that sought to transform women’s relationships with medicine; it was dedicated to increasing women’s access to affordable health care without the barriers of homophobia, racism, and sexism. But the movement did not only focus on women’s bodies. It also encouraged activists to reimagine their relationships with one another, to develop their relationships in the name of personal and political change, and, eventually, to discover and confront the limitations of the bonds of womanhood. This book examines historically the emergence, development, travails, and triumphs of the women’s health movement in the United States. By bringing medical history and the history of women’s bodies into our emerging understandings of second-wave feminism, the author sheds light on the understudied efforts to shape health care and reproductive control beyond the hospital and the doctor’s office—in the home, the women’s center, the church basement, the bookshop, and the clinic. Lesbians, straight women, and women of color all play crucial roles in this history. At its center are the politics, institutions, and relationships created by and within the women’s health movement, depicted primarily from the perspective of the activists who shaped its priorities, fought its battles, and grappled with its shortcomings.

The Crusades and Nature: Natural and Supernatural Environments in the Middle Ages

Jessalynn Bird (Co-editor), and Elizabeth Lapina (Co-editor). The Crusades and Nature: Natural and Supernatural Environments in the Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

The Crusades and Nature: Natural and Supernatural Environments in the Middle Ages explores the intersection of crusader studies and studies of nature. The volume addresses encounters with, responses to and representations of a broad variety of phenomena: celestial objects and events; familiar and unfamiliar fauna and flora; seascapes and landscapes; the elements and the seasons; etc. It introduces readers to crusaders’ actual, but also largely or entirely imaginary encounters with natural phenomena, as well as literary references to nature in crusader sources more generally (such as, for example, animal metaphors). Finally, this project investigates the relationships between the natural and the supernatural and between nature and human-made environments. The volume will define “crusades” broadly, to include not only crusades to the East, but also crusades to frontier regions such as the Baltic and Iberian peninsula and extends to representations of crusades and nature in later medieval and early modern sources.

Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England

Gloria Whiting. Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England. Penn Press, 2024.

*Winner of the 2025 John Winthrop Prize from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts for the best book on the seventeenth century published in 2024. *Winner of the 2025 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians for the best single-authored historical monograph published in 2024. Explores how Black New Englanders maintained a sense of belonging among their kin in the face of slavery. As winter turned to spring in the year 1699, Sebastian and Jane embarked on a campaign of persuasion. The two wished to marry, and they sought the backing of their community in Boston. Nothing, however, could induce Jane’s enslaver to consent. Only after her death did Sebastian and Jane manage to wed, forming a long-lasting union even though husband and wife were not always able to live in the same household. New England is often considered a cradle of liberty in American history, but this snippet of Jane and Sebastian’s story reminds us that it was also a cradle of slavery. From the earliest years of colonization, New Englanders bought and sold people, most of whom were of African descent. In Belonging, Gloria McCahon Whiting tells the region’s early history from the perspective of the people, like Jane and Sebastian, who belonged to others and who struggled to maintain a sense of belonging among their kin. Through a series of meticulously reconstructed family narratives, Whiting traces the contours of enslaved people’s intimate lives in early New England, where they often lived with those who bound them but apart from kin. Enslaved spouses rarely were able to cohabit; fathers and their offspring routinely were separated by inheritance practices; children could be removed from their mothers at an enslaver’s whim; and people in bondage had only partial control of their movement through the region, which made more difficult the task of maintaining distant relationships. But Belonging does more than lay bare the obstacles to family stability for those in bondage. Whiting also charts Afro-New Englanders’ persistent demands for intimacy throughout the century and a half stretching from New England’s founding to the American Revolution. And she shows how the work of making and maintaining relationships influenced the region’s law, religion, society, and politics. Ultimately, the actions taken by people in bondage to fortify their families played a pivotal role in bringing about the collapse of slavery in New England’s most populous state, Massachusetts.

Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States

Stephen Kantrowitz. Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States. The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

This concise and revealing history reconsiders the Civil War era by centering one Native American tribe’s encounter with citizenship. In 1837, eleven years before Wisconsin’s admission as a state, representatives of the Ho-Chunk people yielded under immense duress and signed a treaty that ceded their remaining ancestral lands to the U.S. government. Over the four decades that followed, as “free soil” settlement repeatedly demanded their further expulsion, many Ho-Chunk people lived under the U.S. government’s policies of “civilization,” allotment, and citizenship. Others lived as outlaws, evading military campaigns to expel them and adapting their ways of life to new circumstances. After the Civil War, as Reconstruction’s vision of nonracial, national, birthright citizenship excluded most Native Americans, the Ho-Chunk who remained in their Wisconsin homeland understood and exploited this contradiction. Professing eagerness to participate in the postwar nation, they gained the right to remain in Wisconsin as landowners and voters while retaining their language, culture, and identity as a people. This history of Ho-Chunk sovereignty and citizenship offer a bracing new perspective on citizenship’s perils and promises, the way the broader nineteenth-century conflict between “free soil” and slaveholding expansion shaped Indigenous life, and the continuing impact of Native people’s struggles and claims on U.S. politics and society.

Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution

Viren Murthy. Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution. The University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to increased attention to the concept of pan-Asianism. Most of that discussion, however, lacks any historical grounding in the thought of influential twentieth-century pan-Asianists. In this book, Viren Murthy offers an intellectual history of the writings of theorists, intellectuals, and activists—spanning leftist, conservative, and right-wing thinkers—who proposed new ways of thinking about Asia in their own historical and political contexts. Tracing pan-Asianist discourse across the twentieth century, Murthy reveals a stronger tradition of resistance and alternative visions than the contemporary discourse on pan-Asianism would suggest. At the heart of pan-Asianist thinking, Murthy shows, were the notions of a unity of Asian nations, of weak nations becoming powerful, and of the Third World confronting the “advanced world” on equal terms—an idea that grew to include non-Asian countries into the global community of Asian nations. But pan-Asianists also had larger aims, imagining a future beyond both imperialism and capitalism. The fact that the resurgence of pan-Asianist discourse has emerged alongside the dominance of capitalism, Murthy argues, signals a profound misunderstanding of its roots, history, and potential.

Russian translation of “Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union”. Translated by Robert Ibatullin

Francine Hirsch. Russian Translation of “Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union". Translated by Robert Ibatullin. NLO, 2022.

Published in English in 2005, The Empire of Nations has already earned the status of a classic study of the history of Soviet nationality politics. Francine Hirsch traces the interaction of power and expertise in the process of state building, showing the contribution of ethnographers, anthropologists, geographers, linguists and other specialists in the formation of Soviet ideas about the nation and race, as well as the development of the very principles of the structure of the USSR as a multinational state. In the 1920s and 1930s, specific forms of state policy towards certain peoples depended on experts who had pre-revolutionary training and relied on Western European ideas. Based on extensive archival research, the author shows how, through planning and conducting censuses, mapping, creating museum exhibitions, the general ideas of the Bolsheviks crystallized into political decisions. The European idea of ​​cultural evolutionism, the Marxist theory of stage development and the Leninist idea of ​​the ability of a revolutionary party to accelerate historical development became the basis of the state policy of integrating different peoples and cultures within the framework of the Soviet project. Francine Hirsch is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (USA).

The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future

Viren Murthy. The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future. Routledge, 2022.

Drawing on a wide range of texts and using an interdisciplinary approach, this volume shows how Chinese and Japanese intellectuals mobilized the past to create a better future. It is especially significant today given a world where, amidst tensions within Asia and the rise of China, East Asian intellectuals and governments constantly find new political meanings in their traditions. The essays illuminate how throughout Chinese and Japanese history, thinkers constantly weaved together nationalism, internationalism, and a politics of time. This volume explores a broad range of subjects such as premodern and early modern attempts to conjure a politics of Confucianism, twentieth-century Japanese Marxist interpretations of Buddhism, and Japanese and Chinese endeavors to imagine a new world order. In sum, this book shows us why understanding East Asian pasts are essential to making sense of ideological trends in contemporary China and Japan. For example, without understanding Confucianism and how modern intellectuals in China grappled with this body of thought, we would be unable to make sense of the Chinese government’s current promotion of the Chinese classics. This book will interest students and scholars of political science, history, Asian studies, sociology, and philosophy.

The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America

Pablo F. Gómez (Editor), and Diego Armus (Editor). The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.

Health practitioners working in gray zones, or between official and unofficial medicines, played a fundamental role in shaping Latin America from the colonial period onward. The Gray Zones of Medicine offers a human, relatable, complex examination of the history of health and healing in Latin America across five centuries. Contributors uncover how biographical narratives of individual actors—outside those of hegemonic biomedical knowledge, careers of successful doctors, public health initiatives, and research and medical institutions—can provide a unique window into larger social, cultural, political, and economic historical changes and continuities in the region. They reveal the power of such stories to illuminate intricacies and resilient features of the history of health and disease, and they demonstrate the importance of escaping analytical constraints posed by binary frameworks of legality/illegality, learned/popular, and orthodoxy/heterodoxy when writing about the past. Through an accessible and story-like format, this book unlocks the potential of historical narratives of healings to understand and give nuance to processes too frequently articulated through intellectual medical histories or the lenses of empires, nation-states, and their institutions.

Páginas libres: breve antología del pensamiento anarquista en Puerto Rico

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo (Editor). Páginas Libres: Breve antología Del Pensamiento Anarquista En Puerto Rico. Editora Educación Emergente, 2021.

Páginas libres. Breve antología del pensamiento anarquista en Puerto Rico (1900-1919), compilado y editado con sensible cuidado por Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, suma hilos a una recuperación histórica imprescindible en nuestro país. Con el junte de textos de Venancio Cruz, Luisa Capetillo, Juan Vilar, Juan José López y Ángel María Dieppa esta nueva entrega de la serie Otra Universidad pone en circulación ideas, conexiones, aciertos y silencios de y sobre nuestrxs anarquistas. Así abona la genealogía de esta ignorada propuesta política en nuestro archipiélago y sus filiaciones tanto locales como internacionales. En cada una de estas Páginas libres… se respira la ilustración radical del anarquismo puertorriqueño, su apuesta por el libre pensamiento, su sospecha por las instituciones al uso y su aspiración insobornable por una mejor existencia para todxs. Para Juan Vilar, “La humanidad vive, porque sueña” y ese soñar se concreta en acciones por la vida. Abre este libro, camina a su lado, ponlo en circulación libre y déjate inspirar por sus luminosos sueños. Son posibles.

Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II

Francine Hirsch. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Organized in the immediate aftermath of World War II to try the former Nazi leaders for war crimes, the Nuremberg trials, known as the International Military Tribunal (IMT), paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this immersive new history of the trials, a central piece of the story has been routinely omitted from standard accounts: the critical role that the Soviet Union played in making Nuremberg happen in the first place. Hirsch’s book reveals how the Soviets shaped the trials–only to be written out of their story as Western allies became bitter Cold War rivals. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers the first full picture of the war trials, illuminating the many ironies brought to bear as the Soviets did their part to bring the Nazis to justice. Everyone knew that Stalin had originally allied with Hitler before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 hung heavy over the courtroom, as did the suspicion among the Western prosecutors and judges that the Soviets had falsified evidence in an attempt to pin one of their own war crimes, the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, on the Nazis. It did not help that key members of the Soviet delegation, including the Soviet judge and chief prosecutor, had played critical roles in Stalin’s infamous show trials of the 1930s. For the lead American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson and his colleagues, Soviet participation in the Nuremberg Trials undermined their overall credibility and possibly even the moral righteousness of the Allied victory. Yet Soviet jurists had been the first to conceive of a legal framework that treated war as an international crime. Without it, the IMT would have had no basis for judgment. The Soviets had borne the brunt of the fighting against Germany–enduring the horrors of the Nazi occupation and experiencing almost unimaginable human losses and devastation. There would be no denying their place on the tribunal, nor their determination to make the most of it. Once the trials were set in motion, however, little went as the Soviets had planned. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg shows how Stalin’s efforts to direct the Soviet delegation and to steer the trials from afar backfired, and how Soviet war crimes became exposed in open court. Hirsch’s book offers readers both a front-row seat in the courtroom and a behind-the-scenes look at the meetings in which the prosecutors shared secrets and forged alliances. It reveals the shifting relationships among the four countries of the prosecution (the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the USSR), uncovering how and why the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg became a Cold War battleground. In the process Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers a new understanding of the trials and a fresh perspective on the post-war movement for human rights.

The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European explorers with centuries of belief and thought in tow. From this foundation of expectation and experience, America and American thought grew in turn, enriched by the bounties of the Enlightenment, the philosophies of liberty and individuality, the tenets of religion, and the doctrines of republicanism and democracy. Crucial to this development were the thinkers who nurtured it, from Thomas Jefferson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. DuBois to Jane Addams, and Betty Friedan to Richard Rorty. The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today. Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism. In engaging and accessible prose, this introduction to American thought considers how notions about freedom and belonging, the market and morality — and even truth — have commanded generations of Americans and been the cause of fierce debate.

On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galapagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden

Elizabeth Hennessy. On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galapagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden. Yale University Press, 2019.

An insightful exploration of the iconic Galápagos tortoises, and how their fate is inextricably linked to our own in a rapidly changing world The Galápagos archipelago is often viewed as a last foothold of pristine nature. For sixty years, conservationists have worked to restore this evolutionary Eden after centuries of exploitation at the hands of pirates, whalers, and island settlers. This book tells the story of the islands’ namesakes—the giant tortoises—as coveted food sources, objects of natural history, and famous icons of conservation and tourism. By doing so, it brings into stark relief the paradoxical, and impossible, goal of conserving species by trying to restore a past state of prehistoric evolution. The tortoises, Elizabeth Hennessy demonstrates, are not prehistoric, but rather microcosms whose stories show how deeply human and nonhuman life are entangled. In a world where evolution is thoroughly shaped by global history, Hennessy puts forward a vision for conservation based on reckoning with the past, rather than trying to erase it.

Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

Simon Balto. Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

In July 1919, an explosive race riot forever changed Chicago. For years, black southerners had been leaving the South as part of the Great Migration. Their arrival in Chicago drew the ire and scorn of many local whites, including members of the city’s political leadership and police department, who generally sympathized with white Chicagoans and viewed black migrants as a problem population. During Chicago’s Red Summer riot, patterns of extraordinary brutality, negligence, and discriminatory policing emerged to shocking effect. Those patterns shifted in subsequent decades, but the overall realities of a racially discriminatory police system persisted. In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression. Balto demonstrates that punitive practices by and inadequate protection from the police were central to black Chicagoans’ lives long before the late-century “wars” on crime and drugs. By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation.

Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea

Charles Kim, Jungwon Kim, Hwasook Nam, and Serk-Bae Suh. Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea. University of Washington Press, 2019.

Suicide and martyrdom are closely intertwined with Korean social and political processes. In this first book-length study of the evolving ideals of honorable death and martyrdom from the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910) to contemporary South Korea, interdisciplinary essays explore the changing ways in which Korean historical agents have considered what constitutes a sociopolitically meaningful death and how the surviving community should remember such events. Among the topics covered are the implications of women’s chaste suicides and men’s righteous killings in the evolving Confucian-influenced social order of the latter half of the Chosŏn Dynasty; changing nation-centered constructions of sacrifice and martyrdom put forth by influential intellectual figures in mid-twentieth-century South Korea, which were informed by the politics of postcolonial transition and Cold War ideology; and the decisive role of martyrdom in South Korea’s interlinked democracy and labor movements, including Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation in 1970, the loss of hundreds of lives during the Kwangju Uprising of 1980, and the escalation of protest suicides in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands

Judd Kinzley. Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’S Borderlands. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang has experienced escalating cycles of violence, interethnic strife, and state repression since the 1990s. In their search for the roots of these growing tensions, scholars have tended to focus on ethnic clashes and political disputes. In Natural Resources and the New Frontier, historian Judd C. Kinzley takes a different approach—one that works from the ground up to explore the infrastructural and material foundation of state power in the region. As Kinzley argues, Xinjiang’s role in producing various natural resources for regional powers has been an important but largely overlooked factor in fueling unrest. He carefully traces the buildup to this unstable situation over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the shifting priorities of Chinese, Soviet, and provincial officials regarding the production of various resources, including gold, furs, and oil among others. Through his archival work, Kinzley offers a new way of viewing Xinjiang that will shape the conversation about this important region and offer a model for understanding the development of other frontier zones in China as well as across the global south.

The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt

Daniel Stolz. The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

An observatory and a lighthouse form the nexus of this major new investigation of science, religion, and the state in late Ottoman Egypt. Astronomy, imperial bureaucrats, traditionally educated Muslim scholars, and reformist Islamic publications, such as The Lighthouse, are linked to examine the making of knowledge, the performance of piety, and the operation of political power through scientific practice. Contrary to ideas of Islamic scientific decline, Muslim scholars in the nineteenth century used a dynamic tradition of knowledge to measure time, compute calendars, and predict planetary positions. The rise of a ‘new astronomy’ is revealed to owe much to projects of political and religious reform: from the strengthening of the multiple empires that exercised power over the Nile Valley; to the ‘modernization’ of Islamic centers of learning; to the dream of a global Islamic community that would rely on scientific institutions to coordinate the timing of major religious duties.

The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

Pablo F. Gómez. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Opening a window on a dynamic realm far beyond imperial courts, anatomical theaters, and learned societies, Pablo F. Gómez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century. Gómez treats the early modern intellectual culture of these mostly black and free Caribbean communities on its own merits and not only as it relates to well-known frameworks for the study of science and medicine. Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources—notably Inquisition records—Gómez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as masters of healing practices and as social and spiritual leaders. He shows how they developed evidence-based healing principles based on sensorial experience rather than on dogma. He elucidates how they nourished ideas about the universality of human bodies, which contributed to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. Both colonial authorities and Caribbean people of all conditions viewed this experiential knowledge as powerful and competitive. In some ways, it served to respond to the ills of slavery. Even more crucial, however, it demonstrates how the black Atlantic helped creatively to fashion the early modern world.

In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power

Alfred W. McCoy. In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power. Haymarket Books, 2017.

Explores the distinctive instruments of American ascent to global domination and hegemony–including covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and surveillance. In a completely original analysis, prize-winning historian Alfred W. McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power—from the 1890s through the Cold War—and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances. McCoy then analyzes the marquee instruments of US hegemony—covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance. Peeling back layers of secrecy, McCoy exposes a military and economic battle for global domination fought in the shadows, largely unknown to those outside the highest rungs of power. Can the United States extend the “American Century” or will China guide the globe for the next hundred years? McCoy devotes his final chapter to these questions, boldly laying out a series of scenarios that could lead to the end of Washington’s world domination by 2030.

The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 8. The Modern World, 1815–2000

Tony Michels (Co-editor), and Mitchell B. Hart (Co-editor). The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 8. The Modern World, 1815–2000. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

The eighth and final volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism covers the period from roughly 1815–2000. Exploring the breadth and depth of Jewish societies and their manifold engagements with aspects of the modern world, it offers overviews of modern Jewish history, as well as more focused essays on political, social, economic, intellectual and cultural developments. The first part presents a series of interlocking surveys that address the history of diverse areas of Jewish settlement. The second part is organized around the emancipation. Here, chapter themes are grouped around the challenges posed by and to this elemental feature of Jewish life in the modern period. The third part adopts a thematic approach organized around the category ‘culture’, with the goal of casting a wide net in terms of perspectives, concepts and topics. The final part then focuses on the twentieth century, offering readers a sense of the dynamic nature of Judaism and Jewish identities and affiliations.

East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories

Viren Murthy (Co-editor), and Joyce C.H. Liu (Co-editor). East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.

In this volume, leading scholars from around the world suggest that radical ideologies have shaped complex historical processes in East Asia by examining how intellectuals and activists interpreted, rethought and criticized Marxism in East Asia. The contributors to this volume ask how we can use Marxism to understand East Asia in a global capitalist world, and where the problems that Marxism highlighted, including imperialism, domination and inequality, are increasingly prevalent. The volume draws on various disciplines to reinterpret Marx, and shed light on the complex dynamics of global capitalism in various historical/national contexts. The distinguished contributors illuminate, rethink and make accessible highly complex Marxist concepts, such as the question of class contradiction, the temporalities of capitalism, real and formal subsumption, relative surplus value and the commodity form, the question of class and the proletariat. At a time when people around the world are struggling to cope with the crises of global capitalism, this volume on regional responses to capitalism is especially welcome. It will be of interest to students and scholars of East Asian studies, social and political theory, sociology and globalization studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies

Cindy I-Fen Cheng (Editor). The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies. Routledge, 2016.

The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the field of Asian American Studies, as a generation of researchers have expanded the field with new paradigms and methodological tools. Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the historical work done in the past decades and the place of Asian Americans in a larger global context, this ground-breaking volume illuminates how research in the field of Asian American Studies has progressed. Previous work in the field has focused on establishing a place for Asian Americans within American history. This volume engages more contemporary research, which draws on new archives, art, literature, film, and music, to examine how Asian Americans are redefining their national identities, and to show how race interacts with gender, sexuality, class, and the built environment, to reveal the diversity of the United States. Organized into five parts, and addressing a multitude of interdisciplinary areas of interest to Asian American scholars, it covers: a reframing of key themes such as transnationality, postcolonialism, and critical race theory U.S. imperialism and its impact on Asian Americans war and displacement the garment industry Asian Americans and sports race and the built environment social change and political participation and many more themes. Exploring people, practice, politics, and places, this cutting-edge volume brings together the best themes current in Asian American Studies today, and is a vital reference for all researchers in the field.

Beer of Broadway Fame: The Piel Family and Their Brooklyn Brewery

Alfred W. McCoy. Beer of Broadway Fame: The Piel Family and Their Brooklyn Brewery. SUNY Press, 2016.

Explores the hundred-year history of Piel Bros., one of the prominent German American brands that once made New York City the brewing capital of America. For more than a century, New York City was the brewing capital of America, with more breweries producing more beer than any other city, including Milwaukee and St. Louis. In Beer of Broadway Fame, Alfred W. McCoy traces the hundred-year history of the prominent Brooklyn brewery Piel Bros., and provides an intimate portrait of the company’s German American family. Through quality and innovation, Piel Bros. grew from Brooklyn’s smallest brewery in 1884, producing only 850 kegs, into the sixteenth-largest brewery in America, brewing over a million barrels by 1952. Through a narrative spanning three generations, McCoy examines the demoralizing impact of pervasive US state surveillance during World War I and the Cold War, as well as the forced assimilation that virtually erased German American identity from public life after World War I. McCoy traces Piel Bros.’s changing fortunes from its early struggle to survive in New York’s Gilded Age beer market, the travails of Prohibition with police raids and gangster death threats, to the crushing competition from the big national brands after World War II. Through a fusion of corporate records with intimate personal correspondence, McCoy reveals the social forces that changed a great city, the US brewing industry, and the country’s economy.

Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World

Claire Taylor (Co-editor), and Kostas Vlassopoulos (Co-editor). Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

This volume examines the diversity of networks and communities in the classical and early Hellenistic Greek world, with particular emphasis on those which took shape within and around Athens. In doing so it highlights not only the processes that created, modified, and dissolved these communities, but shines a light on the interactions through which individuals with different statuses, identities, levels of wealth, and connectivity participated in ancient society. By drawing on two distinct conceptual approaches, that of network studies and that of community formation, Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World showcases a variety of approaches which fall under the umbrella of ‘network thinking’ in order to move the study of ancient Greek history beyond structuralist polarities and functionalist explanations. The aim is to reconceptualize the polis not simply as a citizen club, but as one inter-linked community amongst many. This allows subaltern groups to be seen not just as passive objects of exclusion and exploitation but active historical agents, emphasizes the processes of interaction as well as the institutions created through them, and reveals the interpenetration between public institutions and private networks which integrated different communities within the borders of a polis and connected them with the wider world.

Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America

April Haynes. Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Nineteenth-century America saw numerous campaigns against masturbation, which was said to cause illness, insanity, and even death. Riotous Flesh explores women’s leadership of those movements, with a specific focus on their rhetorical, social, and political effects, showing how a desire to transform the politics of sex created unexpected alliances between groups that otherwise had very different goals. As April R. Haynes shows, the crusade against female masturbation was rooted in a generally shared agreement on some major points: that girls and women were as susceptible to masturbation as boys and men; that “self-abuse” was rooted in a lack of sexual information; and that sex education could empower women and girls to master their own bodies. Yet the groups who made this education their goal ranged widely, from “ultra” utopians and nascent feminists to black abolitionists. Riotous Flesh explains how and why diverse women came together to popularize, then institutionalize, the condemnation of masturbation, well before the advent of sexology or the professionalization of medicine.

Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (Co-editor), James L. Baughman (Co-editor), and James P. Danky (Co-editor). Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865. University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.

The use of print to challenge prevailing ideas and conventions has a long history in American public life. As dissenters in America sought social change, they used print to document, articulate, and disseminate their ideas to others. Protest always begins on the margins, but print is the medium that allows it to reach a larger audience. In Protest on the Page, scholars in multiple disciplines offer ten original essays that examine protest print culture in America since 1865. They explore the surprising range of dissidents who enlisted print in their causes—from vegetarians and anarchists at the advent of the twentieth century, to midcentury evangelicals and tween comic book readers, to GIs and feminists in the 1970s–’80s. Together they demonstrate that print has never been a neutral medium, but rather has been instrumental in shaping the substance of protest and its audiences.

Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003

Richard C. Keller. Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Book Award, 2015 In a cemetery on the southern outskirts of Paris lie the bodies of nearly a hundred of what some have called the first casualties of global climate change. They were the so-called abandoned victims of the worst natural disaster in French history, the devastating heat wave that struck in August 2003, leaving 15,000 dead. They died alone in Paris and its suburbs, and were then buried at public expense, their bodies unclaimed. They died, and to a great extent lived, unnoticed by their neighbors–their bodies undiscovered in some cases until weeks after their deaths. Fatal Isolation tells the stories of these victims and the catastrophe that took their lives. It explores the multiple narratives of disaster–the official story of the crisis and its aftermath, as presented by the media and the state; the life stories of the individual victims, which both illuminate and challenge the ways we typically perceive natural disasters; and the scientific understandings of disaster and its management. Fatal Isolation is both a social history of risk and vulnerability in the urban landscape and a story of how a city copes with emerging threats and sudden, dramatic change.

Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War

Cindy I-Fen Cheng. Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War. NYU Press, 2014.

During the Cold War, Soviet propaganda highlighted U.S. racism in order to undermine the credibility of U.S. democracy. In response, incorporating racial and ethnic minorities in order to affirm that America worked to ensure the rights of all and was superior to communist countries became a national imperative. In Citizens of Asian America , Cindy I-Fen Cheng explores how Asian Americans figured in this effort to shape the credibility of American democracy, even while the perceived “foreignness” of Asian Americans cast them as likely alien subversives whose activities needed monitoring following the communist revolution in China and the outbreak of the Korean War. While histories of international politics and U.S. race relations during the Cold War have largely overlooked the significance of Asian Americans, Cheng challenges the black-white focus of the existing historiography. She highlights how Asian Americans made use of the government’s desire to be leader of the “free world” by advocating for civil rights reforms, such as housing integration, increased professional opportunities, and freedom from political persecution. Further, Cheng examines the liberalization of immigration policies, which worked not only to increase the civil rights of Asian Americans but also to improve the nation’s ties with Asian countries, providing an opportunity for the U.S. government to broadcast, on a global scale, the freedom and opportunity that American society could offer.

The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia

Viren Murthy. The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia. Brill, 2014.

Edited by: Viren Murthy, University of Wisconsin–Madison and Axel Schneider, University of Göttingen The papers collected in this volume congeal around a debate about the ways and extent of the dominance of linear time and progressive history and the concomitant delineation of the nation in Chinese and Japanese historiography. As China and Japan entered the global capitalist system of nation states, the Chinese and Japanese regimes implemented a number of reforms, which resulted in transformations that affected everyday experience. In the face of imperialism and the perceived threat of being split up, the Meiji and late Qing governments radically reoriented policies in order to become wealthy and powerful in the global arena. People not only began to experience time and space in new ways, but elites also were increasingly exposed to Western theories of history and concepts of nationhood, which became dominant. These changes contributed to the production of new types of historical consciousness and collective identity. The essays in this volume each provide a perspective on the complex ways in which imagining national and regional identity in East Asia were and continue to be enmeshed with visions of time and history. This book should be of interest to all those who are interested in nationalism, modernity in China and Japan, global capitalism and the politics of time.

Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History

William Reese. Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History. Harvard University Press, 2013.

Written tests to evaluate students were a radical and controversial innovation when American educators began adopting them in the 1800s. Testing quickly became a key factor in the political battles during this period that gave birth to America’s modern public school system. William J. Reese offers a richly detailed history of an educational revolution that has so far been only partially told. Single-classroom schools were the norm throughout the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. Pupils demonstrated their knowledge by rote recitation of lessons and were often assessed according to criteria of behavior and discipline having little to do with academics. Convinced of the inadequacy of this system, the reformer Horace Mann and allies on the Boston School Committee crafted America’s first written exam and administered it as a surprise in local schools in 1845. The embarrassingly poor results became front-page news and led to the first serious consideration of tests as a useful pedagogic tool and objective measure of student achievement. A generation after Mann’s experiment, testing had become widespread. Despite critics’ ongoing claims that exams narrowed the curriculum, ruined children’s health, and turned teachers into automatons, once tests took root in American schools their legitimacy was never seriously challenged. Testing Wars in the Public Schools puts contemporary battles over scholastic standards and benchmarks into perspective by showcasing the historic successes and limitations of the pencil-and-paper exam.

Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo (Editor). Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies. Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2013.

This volume of collected essays brings together conversations, papers, and debates from the Third Annual North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Nathan Jun and Jorell A. Meléndez aspire to go beyond a simple collection of papers and instead aim to maintain a dialogue among different academic fields with the sole task of comprehending and re-thinking anarchist studies. With over twenty-one chapters written by a diverse range of activists, organizers, musicians, artists, poets, and academics, this book transgresses the apparent simplicity of the study of anarchism with a dynamic and interdisciplinary approach that crystallizes and emulates the heterogeneous nature of the anarchist ideal. From theory and philosophy to historical analyses, methodologies, and perspectives, from different manifestations in the arts, media, and culture to religion, ethics, and spirituality, from the intersectionality of animal liberation and queer struggles to contemporary praxis and organizing, the authors explore different topics from a critical perspective that is often lacking in their respective academic fields. This book is a must-buy for critical teachers, students, and activists interested in studying anarchism and the different ways in which we can transform our reality.

More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic

Stephen Kantrowitz. More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic. Penguin Press, 2012.

Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is generally understood as the moment African Americans became free, and Reconstruction as the ultimately unsuccessful effort to extend that victory by establishing equal citizenship. In More Than Freedom, award-winning historian Stephen Kantrowitz boldly redefines our understanding of this entire era by showing that the fight to abolish slavery was always part of a much broader campaign to establish full citizenship for African Americans and find a place to belong in a white republic. More Than Freedom chronicles this epic struggle through the lived experiences of black and white activists in and around Boston, including both famous reformers such as Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner and lesser-known but equally important figures like the journalist William Cooper Nell and the ex-slaves Lewis and Harriet Hayden. While these freedom fighters have traditionally been called abolitionists, their goals and achievements went far beyond emancipation. They mobilized long before they had white allies to rely on and remained militant long after the Civil War ended. These black freedmen called themselves “colored citizens” and fought to establish themselves in American public life, both by building their own networks and institutions and by fiercely, often violently, challenging proslavery and inegalitarian laws and prejudice. But as Kantrowitz explains, they also knew that until the white majority recognized them as equal participants in common projects they would remain a suspect class. Equal citizenship meant something far beyond freedom: not only full legal and political rights, but also acceptance, inclusion and respect across the color line. Even though these reformers ultimately failed to remake the nation in the way they hoped, their struggle catalyzed the arrival of Civil War and left the social and political landscape of the Union forever altered. Without their efforts, war and Reconstruction could hardly have begun. Bringing a bold new perspective to one of our nation’s defining moments, More Than Freedom helps to explain the extent and the limits of the so-called freedom achieved in 1865 and the legacy that endures today.

Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline

Alfred W. McCoy. Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.

As the American century of global dominion draws to a close, the signs of geopolitical change are gathering like thunderheads on the horizon. Is the United States poised at the brink of decline? What can the downfall of European empires tell us about America’s future as a superpower? Throughout four millennia of recorded history there has been no end to empire, but instead an endless succession of empires. After five centuries of sustained expansion, the half-dozen European powers that ruled half of humanity collapsed with stunning speed after World War II, creating a hundred emerging nations in Asia and Africa. Amid this imperial transition, the United States became the new global hegemon, dominating this world order with an array of power that closely resembled that of its European predecessors. As Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the European Union now rise in global influence, twenty leading historians from four continents take a timely look backward and forward to discover patterns of eclipse in past empires that are already shaping a decline in U.S. global power, including: Erosion of economic and fiscal strength needed for military power on a global scale Misuse of military power through micro-military misadventures Breakdown of alliances among major powers Weakened controls over the subordinate elites critical for any empire’s exercise of global power Insufficient technological innovation to sustain global force projection.

Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios

Leonora Neville. Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Nikephoros Bryennios’ history of the Byzantine Empire in the 1070s is a story of civil war and aristocratic rebellion in the midst of the Turkish conquest of Anatolia. Commonly remembered as the passive and unambitious husband of Princess Anna Komnene (author of the Alexiad), Bryennios is revealed as a skilled author whose history draws on cultural memories of classical Roman honor and proper masculinity to evaluate the politicians of the 1070s and implicitly to exhort his twelfth-century contemporaries to honorable behavior. Bryennios’ story valorizes the memory of his grandfather and other honorable, but failed, generals of the eleventh century while subtly portraying the victorious Alexios Komnenos as un-Roman. This reading of the Material for History sheds new light on twelfth-century Byzantine culture and politics, especially the contested accession of John Komnenos, the relationship between Bryennios’ history and the Alexiad and the function of cultural memories of Roman honor in Byzantium.

Ancient Graffiti in Context

Claire Taylor (Co-editor), and J.A. Baird (Co-editor). Ancient Graffiti in Context. London & New York: Routledge, 2012.

Graffiti are ubiquitous within the ancient world, but remain underexploited as a form of archaeological or historical evidence. They include a great variety of texts and images written or drawn inside and outside buildings, in public and private places, on monuments in the city, on objects used in daily life, and on mountains in the countryside. In each case they can be seen as actively engaging with their environment in a variety of ways. Ancient Graffiti in Context interrogates this cultural phenomenon and by doing so, brings it into the mainstream of ancient history and archaeology. Focusing on different approaches to and interpretations of graffiti from a variety of sites and chronological contexts, Baird and Taylor pose a series of questions not previously asked of this evidence, such as: What are graffiti, and how can we interpret them? In what ways, and with whom, do graffiti communicate? To what extent do graffiti represent or subvert the cultural values of the society in which they occur? By comparing themes across time and space, and viewing graffiti in context, this book provides a series of interpretative strategies for scholars and students of the ancient world. As such it will be essential reading for Classical archaeologists and historians alike.

Who Deserves to Die?: Constructing the Executable Subject

Karl Shoemaker. Who Deserves to Die?: Constructing the Executable Subject. University of Massachusetts Press, 2011.

How do we select those who will be subject to capital punishment? How do we identify the worst of the worst and decide who among them can and should be executed? Today these questions are more pressing than they have ever been. As the number of people sentenced to death and executed declines in the United States, those who are executed stand out as distinctive kinds of criminals, distinctive kinds of people. Does a death sentence affirm or deny their humanity? Is such a sentence an act of revenge or a carefully calculated act of justice? These are more than questions for policy and law. They are one way of getting a handle on how our culture understands what makes life worth preserving and of delving into its complex calculus of punishment and retribution. Who Deserves to Die? brings together a distinguished group of death penalty scholars to assess the forms of legal subjectivity and legal community that are supported and constructed by the doctrines and practices of punishment by death in the United States. They help us understand what we do and who we become when we decide who is fit for execution.

Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World

James Sweet. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Between 1730 and 1750, powerful healer and vodun priest Domingos Álvares traversed the colonial Atlantic world like few Africans of his time–from Africa to South America to Europe–addressing the profound alienation of warfare, capitalism, and the African slave trade through the language of health and healing. In Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, James H. Sweet finds dramatic means for unfolding a history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which healing, religion, kinship, and political subversion were intimately connected.

Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda

Neil Kodesh. Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. University of Virginia Press, 2010.

Winner of the 2011 African Studies Association Herskovits Award, Beyond the Royal Gaze shifts the perspective from which we view early African politics by asking what Buganda, a kingdom located on the northwest shores of Lake Victoria in present-day Uganda, looked like to people who were not of the center but nevertheless became central to its functioning. Drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines—history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology—Neil Kodesh argues that the domains of politics and public healing were intimately entwined in Buganda from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted throughout Buganda, Kodesh demonstrates how efforts to ensure collective prosperity and perpetuity—usually expressed in the language of health and healing—lay at the heart of community-building processes in Buganda. Kodesh’s work offers a novel approach to the use of oral sources and opens up new possibilities for researching and writing histories of more distant periods in Africa’s past. Beyond the Royal Gaze will appeal to students and scholars of health and healing, political complexity, and the production of knowledge in places where limited documentary evidence exists.

Enregistrer les morts, identifier les surmortalités Une comparaison Angleterre, États-Unis et France

Richard C. Keller (Editor), Robert Dingwall (Editor), and Carine Vassy (Editor). Enregistrer Les Morts, Identifier Les surmortalités Une Comparaison Angleterre, États-Unis Et France. Presses de l’EHESP, l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique, 2010.

La canicule de 2003, qui a tué 15 000 personnes en France sans que cette surmortalité ait été identifiée rapidement, a suscité des interrogations sur la capacité des pouvoirs publics à dénombrer les morts avec exactitude, à détecter les crises sanitaires et à prévenir l’apparition de drames semblables. Comment enregistre-t-on les morts ? Quelles sont les informations que l’on cherche ainsi à obtenir et dans quels buts ?Pour répondre à ces questions, qui se posent dans tous les pays industrialisés, quatre sociologues et un historien se sont intéressés aux modalités d’enregistrement de la mortalité en Angleterre, aux États-Unis et en France. Leur étude montre que ces modalités reflètent des choix de société, plus ou moins anciens, qui diffèrent d’un pays à l’autre. Pourquoi les Français sont-ils obsédés par la confidentialité des causes de la mort ? Pourquoi les Anglais pratiquent-ils vingt fois plus d’autopsies qu’en France ? Comment les Américains inscrivent-ils l’enregistrement des morts dans la lutte contre le terrorisme ? En principe, les trois pays produisent des données de mortalité similaires, susceptibles de faire l’objet de comparaisons internationales. En pratique, les modes de construction de l’information sont très variables, et les préoccupations de santé publique sont loin d’être prioritaires.

Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

Alfred W. McCoy. Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day. But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public- private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War.

An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines

Alfred W. McCoy (Editor). An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

Winner of the Philippine National Book Award, this pioneering volume reveals how the power of Filipino family-based oligarchies both derives from and contributes to a weak, corrupt state. From provincial warlords to modern managers, prominent Philippine leaders have fused family, politics, and business to subvert public institutions and amass private wealth—an historic pattern that continues to the present day. Edited by Alfred W. McCoy, An Anarchy of Families explores the pervasive influence of the modern dynasties that have led the Philippines during the past century. From the Osmeñas to the Lopezes and Pardo de Taveras, elite Filipino families have acted as formidable coalitions —controlling capital, dominating national politics, and deploying paramilitary force. Beyond Manila, strong men such as Ramon Durano, Ali Dimaporo, and Justiniano Montano have used “guns, goons, and gold” to accumulate wealth and power in far-flung islands and provinces.

At the Edge of the Forest : Essays on Cambodia, History, and Narrative in Honor of David Chandler

Anne Hansen. At the Edge of the Forest : Essays on Cambodia, History, and Narrative in Honor of David Chandler. Cornell University SEAP Press, 2008.

Inspired by David Chandler’s groundbreaking work on Cambodian attempts to find order in the aftermath of turmoil, these essays explore Cambodian history using a rich variety of sources that cast light on Khmer perceptions of violence, wildness, and order, examining the “forest” and cultured space, and the fraught “edge” where they meet.

Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America

Judith A. Houck. Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America. Harvard University Press, 2008.

How did menopause change from being a natural (and often welcome) end to a woman’s childbearing years to a deficiency disease in need of medical and pharmacological intervention? As she traces the medicalization of menopause over the last 100 years, historian Judith Houck challenges some widely held assumptions. Physicians hardly foisted hormones on reluctant female patients; rather, physicians themselves were often reluctant to claim menopause as a medical problem and resisted the widespread use of hormone therapy for what was, after all, a normal transition in a woman’s lifespan. Houck argues that the medical and popular understandings of menopause at any given time depended on both pharmacological options and cultural ideas and anxieties of the moment. As women delayed marriage and motherhood and entered the workforce in greater numbers, the medical understanding, cultural meaning, and experience of menopause changed. By examining the history of menopause over the course of the twentieth century, Houck shows how the experience and representation of menopause has been profoundly influenced by biomedical developments and by changing roles for women and the changing definition of womanhood.

How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860–1930

Anne Hansen. How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860–1930. University of Hawai’i Press, 2007.

This ambitious cross-disciplinary study of Buddhist modernism in colonial Cambodia breaks new ground in understanding the history and development of religion and colonialism in Southeast Asia.

History, Education, and the Schools

William Reese. History, Education, and the Schools. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

This book grapples with two basic questions. What is history? And How can history help illuminate contemporary concerns about the nature and character of America’s schools? From antiquity to the postmodern present, history has served multiple purposes, including a basic human need to learn from what came before. Americans have long invested considerable time, energy, and emotion in their schools, both private and public, and a knowledge of history helps explain why.

An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology and War

Hasok Chang (Co-editor), and Catherine M. Jackson (Co-editor). An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology and War. British Society for the History of Science, 2007.

“This book is more than an excellent discussion of the various controversies that have surrounded the element chlorine since it was discovered in the 18th century. … Beyond serving as a historical analysis, the book deserves attention because it was created by groups of undergraduate students in a series of classes at University College, London, from 2000 to 2005. Each year the students passed their work along to the next group, so that the final version was a collaborative effort. The result demonstrates not just an excellent historical resource but also a highly successful educational experiment.” –Choice (May 2008)

Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union

Francine Hirsch. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Cornell University Press, 2005.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR’s internal borders, led expeditions to study “the human being as a productive force,” and created ethnographic exhibits about the “Peoples of the USSR.” In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.

America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to ‘No Child Left Behind’

William Reese. America’S Public Schools: From the Common School to ‘No Child Left Behind’. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

In this update to his landmark publication, William J. Reese offers a comprehensive examination of the trends, theories, and practices that have shaped America’s public schools over the last two centuries. Reese approaches this subject along two main lines of inquiry—education as a means for reforming society and ongoing reform within the schools themselves. He explores the roots of contemporary educational policies and places modern battles over curriculum, pedagogy, race relations, and academic standards in historical perspective. A thoroughly revised epilogue outlines the significant challenges to public school education within the last five years. Reese analyzes the shortcomings of “No Child Left Behind” and the continued disjuncture between actual school performance and the expectations of government officials. He discusses the intrusive role of corporations, economic models for enticing better teacher performance, the continued impact of conservatism, and the growth of home schooling and charter schools. Informed by a breadth of historical scholarship and based squarely on primary sources, this volume remains the standard text for future teachers and scholars of education.

Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100

Leonora Neville. Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Acting essentially to maintain power and collect taxes, the emperors of the Byzantine Empire (ca. 950-1100) did not attempt to govern provincial society. As a result, provincial households took advantage of this situation by competing for local control over each other whenever they could. This book describes the power-holders in the central provinces in a detailed comparison of the provincial strength of the imperial government and the mechanics of local authority.

Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770

James Sweet. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Exploring the cultural lives of African slaves in the early colonial Portuguese world, with an emphasis on the more than one million Central Africans who survived the journey to Brazil, James Sweet lifts a curtain on their lives as Africans rather than as incipient Brazilians. Focusing first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves came–Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others–Sweet identifies specific cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the African-Portuguese diaspora, arguing that they did not give way to immediate creolization in the New World but remained distinctly African for some time. Slaves transferred many cultural practices from their homelands to Brazil, including kinship structures, divination rituals, judicial ordeals, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, and secret societies. Sweet demonstrates that the structures of many of these practices remained constant during this early period, although the meanings of the rituals were often transformed as slaves coped with their new environment and status. Religious rituals in particular became potent forms of protest against the institution of slavery and its hardships. In addition, Sweet examines how certain African beliefs and customs challenged and ultimately influenced Brazilian Catholicism. Sweet’s analysis sheds new light on African culture in Brazil’s slave society while also enriching our understanding of the complex process of creolization and cultural survival.

Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy

Alfred W. McCoy. Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

In this innovative book, Alfred W. McCoy takes a new approach to the military and political history of the Philippines. Comparing two generations of graduates from the Philippine Military Academy (PMA)—the classes of 1940 and 1971—McCoy uncovers fundamental differences in their academic socialization and subsequent ascent to power. Viewed through this comparative lens, the story of these two classes becomes the history of the entire Philippine army, offering important insights into the complexities of Filipino involvement in war and peace from the 1930s to the 1990s. Drawing on extensive interviews with these officers, as well as on diaries and memoirs, the book details for the first time activities of the secretive brotherhood that is the Filipino officer corps. Members of the class of 1940, who bonded to one another in PMA training modeled after West Point’s, emerged from heroic battles against Japanese invaders with their belief in civil supremacy over the military affirmed. In postwar decades, they actively blocked coup attempts. By contrast, the class of ’71 emerged from the academy to become the fist of the Marcos dictatorship. Their involvement in torture ruptured the academy’s socialization and inspired them to launch six coup attempts in the late 1980s. The collective biographies of these officers offer insights not only into Philippine history but also into topics of wider global import—the influence of male gender on a distinctly gendered institution, the causes of coup d’état, and the collective trauma of torture.

Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism

Louise Young. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. University of California Press, 1998.

Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War

Susan E. Lederer. Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Long before the U.S. government began conducting secret radiation and germ-warfare experiments, and long before the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, medical professionals had introduced—and hotly debated the ethics of—the use of human subjects in medical experiments. In Subjected to Science, Susan Lederer provides the first full-length history of biomedical research with human subjects in the earlier period, from 1890 to 1940. Lederer offers detailed accounts of experiments—benign and otherwise—conducted on both healthy and unhealthy men, women, and children, including the yellow fever experiments (which ultimately became the subject of a Broadway play and Hollywood film), Udo Wile’s “dental drill” experiments on insane patients, and Hideyo Noguchi’s syphilis experiments, which involved injecting a number of healthy children and adults with the syphilis germ, luetin.

The Social History of American Education

William Reese. The Social History of American Education. University of Illinois Press, 1988.

For over twenty-five years, the History of Education Quarterly has served as the meeting ground for a generation of the leading experts in educational and social history. For scholars and students alike, Edward McClellan and William Reese bring together the major ideas of some of its most prominent contributors. Bridging the span of American education history from the colonial era to the present, these essays offer extensive coverage of such topics as women’s education, the education of minority groups, and the social dimensions of educational reform.