#history books
“From hot-air balloons to perpetual-motion machines, Susan Branson takes us on a delightful tour of the technological marvels of the nineteenth century. More importantly, Scientific Americans offers us a smart analysis of the ways popular amazement translated into the shaping of American national identity. It is a wise and lively book.”
“Salinas is a sensitive yet critical history of how a unique urban-rural place in California navigated its growth as a farming empire and increasingly multiracial community. Long-established and impassioned community historian Carol Lynn McKibben has created a chronicle of Steinbeck Country that inspires fascination, respect, debate, and reflection.”
“Tracking the evolution of a century’s worth of targeted marketing, this history documents the sinister engineering of a Black consumer preference for menthol cigarettes. Wailoo details how Big Tobacco placed billboards in inner-city neighborhoods, strategically funded Black enterprises, and marshalled a vast network of influencers—from Ebony to the N.A.A.C.P.—to yoke ideas of Black authenticity to smoking menthols.”
“Original and meticulously researched, Lobban’s book places the legal politics of detention at the heart of histories of rebellion, protectorates, and martial law. A valuable addition to the legal history of Africa and the British Empire.”
“Freedoms Gained and Lost is a splendid and timely collection of thought-provoking essays on a wide range of issues surrounding Reconstruction in America. These well-written and thoroughly researched essays exemplify the latest advances in the scholarship of Reconstruction and together make a profound contribution to the field.”
“This edited collection of primary sources for the first time gives an insight into the experiences of these ordinary people under German occupation, their everyday life and how this quickly became dominated by shortages (especially of food but also of other necessities such as medicine), the search for supplies and different strategies to fight scarcity. In addressing examples from all European countries under German occupation the collected sources give the first pan-European perspective on the history of shortage, malnutrition and hunger resulting from the war, occupation, and aggressive German exploitation policies.”
“Pathbreaking and important. In this remarkable book, da Costa Meyer provides a refreshing, original view of the many avenues through which modern Paris came to being, weaving compelling visual descriptions of the city in its material reality and in art and literature.”
“Weaving the history of technology and culture together with the history of cross-cultural/religious encounters, Joseph W. Ho tells a great story. Developing Mission sheds new light on the literature of the history of US missionaries in China.”
“Matthew Ehrlich takes what might have been local events and uses serious research to illuminate and elevate them to national and historical significance. His thoughtful weaving of threads such as academic freedom, university governance, student life, and sexual mores becomes a lively story and analysis of higher education that builds suspense, then provides answers. One of the best accounts of campus life and problems in the early 1960s I have read.”
“Costa Rica After Coffee explores the political, social, and economic place occupied by the coffee industry in contemporary Costa Rican history. In this follow-up to the 1986 classic Costa Rica Before Coffee, Lowell Gudmundson delves deeply into archival sources, alongside the individual histories of key coffee-growing families, to explore the development of the co-op movement, the rise of the gourmet coffee market, and the societal transformations Costa Rica has undergone as a result of the coffee industry’s powerful presence in the country.”
“Consisting of 15 cutting-edge articles by leading scholars in the field, it provides versatile approaches to the origins, methods, and recording techniques of various types of miracle narratives. It offers fascinating case studies from across Europe, which show how miracle accounts can be used as a source for various topics such as lived religion, healing, protection, and family and gender.”
“A fascinating examination of the controversial work of Harvey Wiley, the founder of the pure food movement and an early crusader against the use of additives and preservatives in food.”
“A vivid, ambitious and comprehensive history of two crucial decades in the formation of modern London told through fifteen different studies that capture the city as a totality. Waterloo Sunrise is a sensational and extremely compelling work of history, beautifully written and incredibly rich.”
“Buxton’s achievement lies in placing human lives dead center of an accounting of Nisei in Japan during the transwar period. Those lives include not only the infamous (e.g. “Tokyo Rose” figure as persons and symbol), but also the everyday workers who, though born and sometimes raised in the United States, proudly called Japan “home.” Loyalty lies at the core of these Nisei lives, guiding their actions and affiliations. What Buxton makes clear is that this loyalty was neither blood-based nor blind, but instead negotiated, situational, and complexly drawn.”
“Horvath’s highly original study of youth in Budapest is a major contribution to the history of Hungary in the Communist era, and also to the wider social history of Europe in the post-1945 era. His vivid exploration of the state and police archives, as well as his interviews with some of the original participants, skillfully shows how the regime’s clumsy efforts to repress the disorderly actions of a group of young people laid bare the tensions between state and society in post-1956 Hungary as well as the new attitudes of young people in the 1960s.”
“Marcel Gauchet’s intellectual biography of the French Revolution’s most celebrated—or notorious—spokesman brings out all the ambiguities forced upon him by the way the revolution developed. Gauchet’s lucid analysis makes clear why Robespierre’s role in shaping the revolution and its legacy has fueled so much vehement disagreement over two centuries.”
“This wonderful book richly documents the foundational role that beer, and beer-enhanced sociality, has played in human societies around the world for over 10,000 years. Although beer and other chemical intoxicants are too often given short shrift by scholars, Arthur demonstrates that it is impossible to fully understand the technology, economics, health and nutritional outcomes, ritual practices, or social structures of most cultures without understanding how beer is produced, traded, and consumed. Impressively detailed and comprehensive.”
“Jenkins has succeeded, in a manner like none before him, to convey the feel, spirit, energy and texture of these formative years of Indonesia’s making, marked by violence, triumph and calamitous failure, and brutal intrigue. Jenkins’s Soeharto reveals the man… and his long, mostly quiet emergence, in brilliant contextual detail, and shows how he developed his extraordinary capacity for political adroitness and concise, decisive leadership.”
“Shattering the myth of historical inevitability, this meticulously researched and beautifully crafted study is a refreshing corrective to previous interpretations of the Chinese revolution. Esherick’s gripping tale of battling bandits and Bolsheviks in the making of Mao’s wartime sanctuary lays bare the indeterminate and contingent course of one of the most momentous events of the twentieth century. Scholars and general readers alike will learn much from this authoritative work by America’s premier historian of the Chinese revolution.”
“Unequal Encounters: A Reader in Early Latin American Political Thought by Katherine Hoyt is an excellent anthology of "encounter writings” of the Americas. It brings together pre-Columbian and post-encounter documents from indigenous writers and Europeans working at the margins, painting a rich and full picture of the problematic of the European conquest of the New World. Hoyt’s social and political involvement in Latin America spans decades. She is as close as it gets to an organic intellectual working in this field in the US. Her judicious collection is a welcome addition to the literature, filling an existing gap in the area of Latin American thought, history, and culture.“
“Straits is a triumph of biographical writing. With his characteristic vigor and panache, Felipe Fernández-Armesto circumnavigates Magellan’s life and times with a clearer object in mind and far greater success than ever imagined for this subject. He shows us not only the skills and bravado but also the intrigues, the self-deception, and even the insanity that animated Magellan’s quest.”
“In gripping detail built from exclusive interviews and original documents, Heart of Atlanta reveals the saga of the case’s rise to the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected the segregationists. Heart of Atlanta restores the legal cases and their heroes to their proper place in history.”
“Suburban Empire is a riveting, virtually unknown story of modern settler colonialism, war, environmental catastrophe, and the terrible price of the US national security state. But it is also a story of how the people of the Marshall Islands and Kwajalein Atoll have continually resisted occupation, imperialism, and the existential threat of nuclear weapons and the military-industrial assault on the earth. And as Lauren Hirshberg astutely demonstrates, defending their islands means saving the planet. Our survival may depend on what happens in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”
