History Book List ·

An Amulet of Greek Earth

Generations of Immigrant Folk Culture

The boys and men who left their Greek valley and mountain villages in the early 1900s for America came with amulets their mothers had made for them. Some were miniature sacks attached to a necklace; more often they were merely a square of fabric enclosing the values of their lives: a piece of a holy book or a sliver of the True Cross representing their belief in Greek Orthodoxy; a thyme leaf denoting their wild terrain; a blue bead to ward off the Evil Eye; and a pinch of Greek earth.…

The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume IV

Presidential Messages to Congress

“A time when panics seem far removed is the best time to prepare our financial system to withstand a storm. The most crying need this country has is a proper banking and currency system. The existing one is inadequate, and everyone who has studied the question admits it.…

Flash Effect

Science and the Rhetorical Origins of Cold War America

The ways science and technology are portrayed in advertising, in the news, in our politics, and in the culture at large inform the way we respond to these particular facts of life. The better we are at recognizing the rhetorical intentions of the purveyors of information and promoters of mass culture, the more adept we become at responding intelligently to them.…

Remapping Ethiopia

Socialism & After

Governance everywhere is concerned with spatial relationships. Modern states “map” local communities, making them legible for the purposes of control. Ethiopia has gone through several stages of “mapping” in its imperial, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary phases.…

American Coverlets and Their Weavers

Coverlets from the Collection of Foster and Muriel McCarl

Coverlets woven in vibrant colors of red, blue, white, and green are as popular today as they were in the nineteenth century.American Coverlets and Their Weavers is a lavishly illustrated guide to one of the premier collections of coverlets in the nation.…

Beyond the Barricades

Nicaragua and the Struggle for the Sandinista Press, 1979–1998

Throughout the 1980s, Barricada, the official daily newspaper of the ruling Sandinista Front, played the standard role of a party organ, seeking the mobilize the Nicaraguan public to support the revolutionary agenda.…

Soldiers, Airmen, Spies, and Whisperers

The Gold Coast in World War II

The fall of France in June 1940 left the Gold Coast surrounded by potentially hostile French colonies that had rejected de Gaulle's call to continue the fight, signaling instead their support for Marshall Pétain's pro-German Vichy regime.…

Surabaya, City of Work

A Socioeconomic History, 1900–2000

Surabaya is Indonesia's second largest city but is not well known to the outside world. Yet in 1900, Surabaya was a bigger city than Jakarta and one of the main commercial centers of Asia. Collapse of sugar exports during the 1930s depression, followed by the Japanese occupation, revolution, and independence, brought on a long period of stagnation and retreat from the international economy.…

Ethnic Conflict

Religion, Identity, and Politics

The outbreak of numerous and simultaneous violent conflicts around the globe in the past decade resulted in immense human suffering and countless lost lives. In part, both results were aided by inactivity or by belated and often misplaced responses by the international community to the embattled groups.…

The House and Senate in the 1790s

Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Development

Amid the turbulent swirl of foreign intrigue, external and internal threats to the young nation’s existence, and the domestic partisan wrangling of the 1790s, the United States Congress solidified its role as the national legislature.…

Flickering Shadows

Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe

Every European power in Africa made motion pictures for its subjects, but no state invested as heavily in these films, and expected as much from them, as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Flickering Shadows is the first book to explore this little-known world of colonial cinema.…

Between the Sea and the Lagoon

An Eco-social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana c. 1850 to Recent Times

This study offers a “social interpretation of environmental process” for the coastal lowlands of southeastern Ghana. The Anlo-Ewe, sometimes hailed as the quintessential sea fishermen of the West African coast, are a previously non-maritime people who developed a maritime tradition.…

A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991

Second Edition

Bounded by Sudan to the west and north, Kenya to the south, Somalia to the southeast, and Eritrea and Djibouti to the northeast, Ethiopia is a pivotal country in the geopolitics of the region. Yet it is important to understand this ancient and often splintered country in its own right.…

Christian Missionaries and the State in the Third World

The fact that many of the leaders in the Third World were educated by Christian missionaries is a decisive factor in world politics today. Christian Missionaries and the State in the Third World provides examples of how these missionaries contributed to the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of state structures in Africa and the Caribbean, through educational activity and attempts at healing and trade, as well as by preaching, prayer, and other sacramental endeavors.…

Creating a Perfect World

Religious and Secular Utopias in Nineteenth-Century Ohio

Powerful currents of religious revival and political and social reform swept nineteenth-century America. Many people expressed their radical religious and social ideals by creating or joining self-contained utopian communities.…

Tropical Pioneers

Human Agency and Ecological Change in the Highlands of Sri Lanka, 1800–1900

In 1800, the highlands of Sri Lanka had some of the most biologically diverse primary tropical rainforest ecosystems in the world. By 1900, only a few craggy corners and mountain caps had been spared the fire stick.…

West African Challenge to Empire

Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War

West African Challenge to Empire examines the anticolonial war in the Volta and Bani region in 1915-16. It was the largest challenge that the French ever faced in their West African colonial empire, and one of the largest armed oppositions to colonialism anywhere in Africa.…

Montgomery C. Meigs and the Building of the Nation’s Capital

At the age of thirty-six, in 1852, Lt. Montgomery Cunningham Meigs of the Army Corps of Engineers reported to Washington, D.C., for duty as a special assistant to the chief army engineer, Gen. Joseph G.…

Environmental Justice in South Africa

Environmental Justice in South Africa provides a systematic overview of the first ten years of postapartheid environmental politics. Written by leading activists and academics in the field, this edited collection offers the first critical perspective of environmental justice theory and practice in South Africa.…

My Dearest Angel

A Virginia Family Chronicle 1895–1947

She was the daughter of a circuit judge and state senator. He was the youngest son of Virginia’s Civil War governor and was a state legislator himself at the age of nineteen. Their courtship and marriage stands as a portrait of a bygone way of life unique to the American South during the first half of the twentieth century.…