History Book List ·

African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1950

This book explores the history of African womanhood in colonial Kenya. By focussing on key sociocultural institutions and practices around which the lives of women were organized, and on the protracted debates that surrounded these institutions and practices during the colonial period, it investigates the nature of indigenous, mission, and colonial control of African women.…

Black Lawyers, White Courts

The Soul of South African Law

In the struggle against apartheid, one often overlooked group of crusaders was the coterie of black lawyers who overcame the Byzantine system that the government established oftentimes explicitly to block the paths of its black citizens from achieving justice.…

African Apocalypse

The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet

The devastating influenza epidemic of 1918 ripped through southern Africa. In its aftermath, revivalist and millenarian movements sprouted. Prophets appeared bearing messages of resistance, redemption, and renewal.…

Divine Expectations

An American Woman in Nineteenth-Century Palestine

Barbara Kreiger's intriguing narrative presents the account of Clorinda Minor, a charismatic American Christian woman whose belief in the Second Coming prompted her to leave a comfortable life in Philadelphia in 1851 and take up agriculture in Palestine.…

The Heritage

A Daughter's Memoir of Louis Bromfield

Louis Bromfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, established one of the most significant homesteads in Ohio on his Malabar Farm. Today it receives thousands of visitors a year from all over the world; once the site of the wedding of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it was a successful prototype of experimental and conservation farming.…

Soliloquy of a Farmer’s Wife

The Diary of Annie Elliott Perrin

Soliloquy of a Farmer's Wife is the bare-bones diary of a Geneva, Ohio, farmer's wife, Annie Perrin, who wrote during the last three weeks of 1917 and all of 1918, that is, during the final battles, climax, and close of World War I.…

Nightmare

The Underside of the Nixon Years

This extraordinary book had an extraordinary genesis. In July 1973, for the first time in its history, The New York Times Magazine devoted a full issue to a single article: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Lukas's account of the Watergate story to date.…

Inventing Congress

Origins and Establishment of the First Federal Congress

On March 4, 1789, New York City's church bells pealed, cannons fired, and flags snapped in the wind to celebrate the date set for the opening of the First Federal Congress. In many ways the establishment of Congress marked the culmination of the American Revolution as the ship of state was launched from the foundation of the legislative system outlined in Article I of the Constitution.…

Every Factory a Fortress

The French Labor Movement in the Age of Ford and Hitler

French trade unions played a historical role in the 1930s quite unlike that of any other labor movement. Against a backdrop of social unrest, parliamentary crisis, and impending world war, industrial unionists in the great metal-fabricating plants of the Paris Region carried out a series of street mobilizations, factory occupations, and general strikes that were virtually unique in Western history.…

Herero Heroes

A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923

The Herero-German war led to the destruction of Herero society. Yet Herero society reemerged, reorganizing itself around the structures and beliefs of the German colonial army and Rhenish missionary activity.…

A Woman of the Times

Journalism, Feminism, and the Career of Charlotte Curtis

A biography of a conflicted feminist and a tough reporter For twenty-five years, Charlotte Curtis was a society/women's reporter and editor and an op-ed editor at the New York Times. As the first woman section editor at the Times, Curtis was a pioneering journalist and one of the first nationwide to change the nature and content of the women's pages from fluffy wedding announcements and recipes to the more newsy, issue-oriented stories that characterize them today.…

Battle of Kosovo

The Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is generally considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating the Serbian Empire’s defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late fourteenth century, these poems and fragments have been known for centuries in Eastern Europe.…

Peasants in Arms

War and Peace in the Mountains of Nicaragua, 1979-1994

Drawing on testimonies from contra collaborators and ex-combatants, as well as pro-Sandinista peasants, this book presents a dynamic account of the growing divisions between peasants from the area of Quilalí who took up arms in defense of revolutionary programs and ideals such as land reform and equality and those who opposed the FSLN.…

El Dorado in West Africa

The Gold Mining Frontier, African Labor, and Colonial Capitalism

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed some of the greatest gold mining migrations in history when dreams of bonanza lured thousands of prospectors and diggers to the far corners of the earth—including the Gold Coast of West Africa.…

A Paris Year

Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931–1932

The Depression that follows the 1929 stock market crash is emptying Paris of many American expatriates. Two exceptions are Dorothy and James T. Farrell, the naïve young couple who have fled their home in Chicago for the fabled liberation that Paris seems to offer.…

East African Expressions of Christianity

Christianity has been spread in Africa by Africans. It is the story of peoples seizing control of their own spiritual destinies—rather than the commonplace notion that the continent's Christian churches represent colonial and capitalist powers that helped subdue Africans to European domination.…

South Africa in Southern Africa

Reconfiguring the Region

South Africa's release of Nelson Mandela from prison in February 1990 and the subsequent independence of nearby Namibia heralded other dramatic political and economic changes in southern Africa that have transformed the region from a global flashpoint to one in which peaceful cooperation and development may become the norm.…

Midwives of the Revolution

Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1917

The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the ensuing communist regime have often been portrayed as a man’s revolution, with women as bystanders or even victims. Midwives of the Revolution examines the powerful contribution made by women to the overthrow of tsarism in 1917 and their importance in the formative years of communism in Russia.…

Kwame Nkrumah

The Father of African Nationalism

The first African statesman to achieve world recognition was Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), who became president of the new Republic of Ghana in 1960. He campaigned ceaselessly for African solidarity and for the liberation of southern Africa from white settler rule.…

The Green Archipelago

Forestry in Preindustrial Japan

This inaugural volume in the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History is the paperback edition of Conrad Totman’s widely acclaimed study of Japan’s environmental policies over the centuries.…