History Book List ·

The Children of Africa Confront AIDS

From Vulnerability to Possibility

AIDS is now the leading cause of death in Africa, where twenty-eight million people are HIV-positive, and where some twelve million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. In Zimbabwe, 45 percent of children under the age of five are HIV-positive, and the epidemic has shortened life expectancy by twenty-two years.…

Writing Women in Central America

Gender and the Fictionalization of History

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past? Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts.…

Fighting the Slave Trade

West African Strategies

While most studies of the slave trade focus on the volume of captives and on their ethnic origins, the question of how the Africans organized their familial and communal lives to resist and assail it has not received adequate attention.…

Tensions of Empire

Japan and Southeast Asia in the Colonial and Postcolonial World

Beginning with the closing decade of European colonial rule in Southeast Asia and covering the wartime Japanese empire and its postwar disintegration, Tensions of Empire focuses on the Japanese in Southeast Asia, Indonesians in Japan, and the legacy of the war in Southeast Asia.…

Wyeth People

Wyeth People is the story of one writer's search for the meaning of artistic creativity, approached from personal contact with the work of one of the world's great artists, Andrew Wyeth. In the 1960s, just beginning his career as a writer, Gene Logsdon read a magazine article about Andrew Wyeth in which the artist commented at length on his own creative impulse.…

Seeking the One Great Remedy

Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform

A radical abolitionist and early feminist, Francis George Shaw (1809-1882) was a prominent figure in American reform and intellectual circles for five decades. He rejected capitalism in favor of a popular utopian socialist movement; during the Civil War and Reconstruction, he applied his radical principles to the Northern war effort and to freedmen's organizations.…

Social History and African Environments

The explosion of interest in African environmental history has stimulated research and writing on a wide range of issues facing many African nations. This collection represents some of the finest studies to date.…

‘Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan’

Chieftaincy and Civic Culture in a Yoruba City

Civil Disorder Is the Disease of the Ibadan is a study of chieftaincy and political culture in Ibadan, the most populous city in Britain’s largest West African colony, Nigeria. Examining the period between 1829 and 1939, it shows how and why the processes through which Ibadan was made into a civic community shifted from the battlefield to a discursive field.…

Lineages of State Fragility

Rural Civil Society in Guinea-Bissau

In Guinea-Bissau, as elsewhere in Africa, there is a disjuncture between the central state and rural civil society. It is this significant and overlooked aspect of Guinea-Bissau's political evolution—the continuing ability of civil society to evade and thwart state power—that is at the heart of Joshua B.…

The Ceramic Career of M. Louise McLaughlin

In 1877 the thirty-year-old artist Mary Louise McLaughlin wrote China Painting, the first manual on the subject in the United States written by a woman for women. Extremely successful, it is now accepted as the book that launched the china painting movement in America.…

The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume VI

The President and His Powers and The United States and Peace

Volume VI of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft follows the career of William Howard Taft upon his leaving the White House. It consists of two short publications from 1914 and 1915. The first, The President and His Powers, is based on a series of lectures delivered at Columbia University and draws on Taft’s experience in the presidency and the executive branch.…

Eurafricans in Western Africa

Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century

Eurafricans in Western Africa traces the rich social and commercial history of western Africa. The most comprehensive study to date, it begins prior to the sixteenth century when huge profits made by middlemen on trade in North African slaves, salt, gold, pepper, and numerous other commodities prompted Portuguese reconnaissance voyages along the coast of western Africa.…

The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume V

Popular Government and The Anti-trust Act and the Supreme Court

The fifth volume of The Complete Works of William Howard Taft presents two publications Taft wrote as Kent Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale University, the position he assumed in 1913 after he was defeated in his bid for re-election as U.…

From Blackjacks to Briefcases

A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States

From the beginning of the Industrial Age and continuing into the twenty-first century, companies faced with militant workers and organizers have often turned to agencies that specialized in ending strikes and breaking unions.…

Traitors & True Poles

Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939

During Poland’s century-long partition and in the interwar period of Poland's reemergence as a state, Polish writers on both sides of the ocean shared a preoccupation with national identity. Polish-American immigrant writers revealed their persistent, passionate engagement with these issues, as they used their work to define and consolidate an essentially transnational ethnic identity that was both tied to Poland and independent of it.…

New Terrains in Southeast Asian History

At a watershed moment in the scholarly approach to the history of this important region, New Terrains in Southeast Asian History captures the richness and diversity of historical discourse among Southeast Asian scholars.…

South Africa’s Environmental History

Cases and Comparisons

Environmental history in southern Africa has only recently come into its own as a distinct field of historical inquiry. While natural resources lie at the heart of all environmental history, the field opens the door to a wide range of inquiries, several of which are pioneered in this collection.…

Cultivating Coffee

The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880–1930

Many scholars of Latin America have argued that the introduction of coffee forced most people to become landless proletarians toiling on large plantations. Cultivating Coffee tells a different story: small and medium-sized growers in Nicaragua were a vital part of the economy, constituting the majority of the farmers and holding most of the land.…

Mau Mau and Nationhood

Arms, Authority, and Narration

Fifty years after the declaration of the state of emergency, Mau Mau still excites argument and controversy, not least in Kenya itself. Mau Mau and Nationhood is a collection of essays providing the most recent thinking on the uprising and its aftermath.…

Eroding the Commons

The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya, 1890s-1963

Colonial Baringo was largely unnoticed until drought and localized famine in the mid-1920s led to claims that its crisis was brought on by overcrowding and livestock mismanagement. In response to the alarm over erosion, the state embarked on a program for rehabilitation, conservation, and development.…