History Book List ·

Ohio Canal Era

A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820–1861

A new paperback edition with a foreword by Lawrence M. Friedman Ohio Canal Era, a rich analysis of state policies and their impact in directing economic change, is a classic on the subject of the pre–Civil War transportation revolution.…

Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s

During the long decade from 1848 to 1861 America was like a train speeding down the track, without an engineer or brakes. The new territories acquired from Mexico had vastly increased the size of the nation, but debate over their status—and more importantly the status of slavery within them—paralyzed the nation.…

Mountains of Injustice

Social and Environmental Justice in Appalachia

Foreword by Donald Edward Davis Afterword by Jedediah Purdy Research in environmental justice reveals that low-income and minority neighborhoods in our nation’s cities are often the preferred sites for landfills, power plants, and polluting factories.…

Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region.…

Our New Husbands Are Here

Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule

In Our New Husbands Are Here, Emily Lynn Osborn investigates a central puzzle of power and politics in West African history: Why do women figure frequently in the political narratives of the precolonial period, and then vanish altogether with colonization? Osborn addresses this question by exploring the relationship of the household to the state.…

The Anatomy of a South African Genocide

The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples

In 1998 David Kruiper, the leader of the ‡Khomani San who today live in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, lamented, “We have been made into nothing.” His comment applies equally to the fate of all the hunter-gatherer societies of the Cape Colony who were destroyed by the impact of European colonialism.…

Irish People, Irish Linen

The story of Irish linen is a story of the Irish people. Many thousands of men and women made Irish linen a global product and an international brand. It is also a story of innovation and opportunity. Irish linen has served its makers as sail cloth of incredible strength and durability for world exploration and trade; it has functioned as watertight containers for farmers and firemen; it has soothed the brows of royalty and absorbed the sweat of the working class.…

Child Slaves in the Modern World

Child Slaves in the Modern World is the second of two volumes that examine the distinctive uses and experiences of children in slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of previously unpublished essays exposes the global victimization of child slaves from the period of abolition of legal slavery in the nineteenth century to the human rights era of the twentieth century.…

Environment at the Margins

Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa

Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers.…

Cultivating the Colonies

Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature reveals the nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exotic nature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally “got their hands dirty” in the business of empire.…

In the Shadow of Freedom

The Politics of Slavery in the National Capital

Few images of early America were more striking, and jarring, than that of slaves in the capital city of the world’s most important free republic. Black slaves served and sustained the legislators, bureaucrats, jurists, cabinet officials, military leaders, and even the presidents who lived and worked there.…

Mad Dogs and Meerkats

A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa

Through the ages, rabies has exemplified the danger of diseases that transfer from wild animals to humans and their domestic stock. In South Africa, rabies has been on the rise since the latter part of the twentieth century despite the availability of postexposure vaccines and regular inoculation campaigns for dogs.…

The Borders of Integration

Polish Migrants in Germany and the United States, 1870–1924

The issues of immigration and integration are at the forefront of contemporary politics. Yet debates over foreign workers and the desirability of their incorporation into European and American societies too often are discussed without a sense of history.…

Pachakutik and the Rise and Decline of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement

The mobilization of militant indigenous politics is one of the most important stories in Latin American studies today. In this critical work, Kenneth J. Mijeski and Scott H. Beck examine the rise and decline of Ecuador’s leading indigenous party, Pachakutik, as it tried to transform the state into a participative democracy.…

Kansas’s War

The Civil War in Documents

When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Kansas was in a unique position. Although it had been a state for mere weeks, its residents were already intimately acquainted with civil strife. Since its organization as a territory in 1854, Kansas had been the focus of a national debate over the place of slavery in the Republic.…

The Return of the Galon King

History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma

In late 1930, on a secluded mountain overlooking the rural paddy fields of British Burma, a peasant leader named Saya San crowned himself King and inaugurated a series of uprisings that would later erupt into one of the largest anti-colonial rebellions in Southeast Asian history.…

The Demographics of Empire

The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge

The Demographics of Empire is a collection of essays examining the multifaceted nature of the colonial science of demography in the last two centuries. The contributing scholars of Africa and the British and French empires focus on three questions: How have historians, demographers, and other social scientists understood colonial populations? What were the demographic realities of African societies and how did they affect colonial systems of power? Finally, how did demographic theories developed in Europe shape policies and administrative structures in the colonies? The essays approach the subject as either broad analyses of major demographic questions in Africa’s history or focused case studies that demonstrate how particular historical circumstances in individual African societies contributed to differing levels of fertility, mortality, and migration.…

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume IV

Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau, 1951–1954

Volume IV of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. covers 1951, the year America entered the Korean War, through 1954, when the NAACP won its Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court declared that segregation was discrimination and thus unconstitutional.…

Resistance on the National Stage

Theater and Politics in Late New Order Indonesia

Resistance on the National Stage analyzes the ways in which, between 1985 and 1998, modern theater prac­titioners in Indonesia contributed to a rising movement of social protest against the long-governing New Order regime of President Suharto.…

Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century

Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution

African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state. Beginning in1969 the biennial Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), held in Burkina Faso, became the major showcase for these films.…