2023
Nicole Eggers, Unruly Ideas: A History of the Kitawala in Congo (Ohio University Press, 2023) |
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Victor Petrov, Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain (The MIT Press, 2023) |
2022
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Brooke M. Bauer, Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 (University of Alabama Press, 2022)
Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 is the first book-length study of the role Catawba women played in creating and preserving a cohesive tribal identity over three centuries of colonization and cultural turmoil. Bauer, a citizen of the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, weaves ethnohistorical methodologies, family history, cultural context, and the Catawba language together to generate an internal perspective on the Catawbas’ history and heritage in the area now known as the Carolina Piedmont. This unique and important study examines the lives and legacies of women who executed complex decision-making and diplomacy to navigate shifting frameworks of kinship, land ownership, and cultural production in dealings with colonial encroachments, white settlers, and Euro-American legal systems and governments from the mid-sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Personified in the figure of Sally New River, a Catawba cultural leader to whom 500 remaining acres of occupied tribal lands were deeded on behalf of the community in 1796 and which she managed until her death in 1821, Bauer reveals how women worked to ensure the survival of the Catawba people and their Catawba identity, an effort that resulted in a unified nation. |
2021
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Matthew Bryan Gillis, Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia (Trivent, 2021) Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia explores how authorities in western Francia from the 880s through the 920s used horror rhetoric to cast Christian soldiers, who robbed the poor and the church, as monsters that devoured human flesh and drank human blood. Adapting modern literary horror approaches to medieval sources, this study reveals how such rhetoric served as a form of spiritual weaponry in the clergy’s attempts to correct and condemn wayward military men. This investigation, therefore, unearths long-forgotten Carolingian thought about the dreadful spiritual reality of internal enemies during a time of political division and the Northmen’s depredations. Yet such horror also informed a new understanding of Christian heroism that developed in relation to the wars fought against the invaders. This vision of heroic soldiers, which included military martyrs, culminated in ideas about holy war against the pagans. Thus Carolingian religious horror and holy war together belonged to a body of ideas about the spiritual, unseen side of the church’s cosmic conflict against evil that foreshadowed later medieval Crusading thought. |
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Sara Ritchey, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health (Cornell University Press, 2021) Acts of Care demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical. The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women’s health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns. Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women’s therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare. |
2020
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Monica Black, A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (Metropolitan Books, 2020) A revelatory counterhistory of postwar Germany, not as a reborn democracy but as a nation convulsed by apocalyptic visions, witchcraft trials, and supernatural obsessions. In the aftermath of World War II, a succession of mass supernatural events swept through war-torn Germany. A messianic faith healer rose to extraordinary fame, prayer groups performed exorcisms, and enormous crowds traveled to witness apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Most strikingly, scores of people accused their neighbors of witchcraft, and found themselves in turn hauled into court on charges of defamation, assault, and even murder. What linked these events, in the wake of an annihilationist war and the Holocaust, was a widespread preoccupation with evil. While many histories emphasize Germany’s rapid transition from genocidal dictatorship to liberal democracy, A Demon-Haunted Land places in full view the toxic mistrust, profound bitterness, and spiritual malaise that unfolded alongside the economic miracle. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials, acclaimed historian Monica Black argues that the surge of supernatural obsessions stemmed from the unspoken guilt and shame of a nation remarkably silent about what was euphemistically called “the most recent past.” This shadow history irrevocably changes our view of postwar Germany, revealing the country’s fraught emotional life, deep moral disquiet, and the cost of trying to bury a horrific legacy. |
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Ernest Freeberg, A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement (Basic Books, 2020) In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in environments that were dirty and dangerous to man and beast alike. The industrial city brought suffering, but it also inspired a compassion for animals that fueled a controversial anti-cruelty movement. From the center of these debates, Henry Bergh launched a shocking campaign to grant rights to animals. A Traitor to His Species is revelatory social history, awash with colorful characters. Cheered on by thousands of men and women who joined his cause, Bergh fought with robber barons, Five Points gangs, and legendary impresario P.T. Barnum, as they pushed for new laws to protect trolley horses, livestock, stray dogs, and other animals. Raucous and entertaining, A Traitor to His Species tells the story of a remarkable man who gave voice to the voiceless and shaped our modern relationship with animals. |
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Michael E. Woods, Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)
As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks’s frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois’s Stephen Douglas and Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats’ northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been overshadowed by their opposition to Abraham Lincoln. But here, weaving together biography and political history, Michael E. Woods restores Davis and Douglas’s fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats’ internal strife, with fault lines drawn around fundamental questions of property rights and majority rule. Neither belief in white supremacy nor expansionist zeal could reconcile Douglas and Davis’s factions as their constituents formed their own lines in the proverbial soil of westward expansion. The first major reinterpretation of the Democratic Party’s internal schism in more than a generation, Arguing until Doomsday shows how two leading antebellum politicians ultimately shattered their party and hastened the coming of the Civil War. |
2019
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Daniel Feller, Laura-Eve Moss, and Thomas Coens, eds., The Papers of Andrew Jackson: Volume XI, 1833 (University of Tennessee Press, 2019) This volume presents full annotated text of five hundred documents from Andrew Jackson’s fifth presidential year. They include his private memoranda, intimate family letters, presidential message drafts, and correspondence with government and military officers, diplomats, Indian leaders, political friends and foes, and citizens throughout the country. |
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Brandon Winford, John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (University of Kentucky Press, 2020)
John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement’s most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, this biography explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina’s most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state’s Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party’s treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director. Wheeler urged North Carolina’s white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners. |
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Charles Sanft, Literate Community in Early Imperial China The Northwestern Frontier in Han Times (SUNY Press, 2019)
This book examines ancient written materials from China’s northwestern border regions to offer fresh insights into the role of text in shaping society and culture during the Han period (206/2 BCE–220 CE). Left behind by military installations, these documents—wooden strips and other nontraditional textual materials such as silk—recorded the lives and activities of military personnel and the people around them. Charles Sanft explores their functions and uses by looking at a fascinating array of material, including posted texts on signaling across distances, practical texts on brewing beer and evaluating swords, and letters exchanged by officials working in low rungs of the bureaucracy. By focusing on all members of the community, he argues that a much broader section of early society had meaningful interactions with text than previously believed. This major shift in interpretation challenges long-standing assumptions about the limited range of influence that text and literacy had on culture and society and makes important contributions to early China studies, the study of literacy, and to the global history of non-elites. |
2017
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Matthew Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford University Press, 2017)
Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire recounts the history of an exceptional ninth-century religious outlaw, Gottschalk of Orbais. This study reconstructs the career of the Carolingian Empire’s foremost religious dissenter in order to imagine that empire from the perspective of someone who worked to subvert its most fundamental beliefs. Examining the surviving evidence (including his own writings), Matthew Gillis analyzes Gottschalk’s literary and spiritual self-representations, his modes of argument, his prophetic claims to martyrdom and miraculous powers, and his shocking defiance to bishops as strategies for influencing contemporaries in changing political circumstances. |
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William Mercer, Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty (Oklahoma University Press, 2017)
In Diminishing the Bill of Rights, William Davenport Mercer examines the 1833 Supreme Court decision as a turning point in the development of our current conception of individual rights. Since the colonial period, Americans had viewed their rights as springing from multiple sources, including the common law, natural right, and English legal tradition. In explaining how the Court came to reject a multisourced view of human liberties, Mercer shows the ways the decision helped hasten a reconceptualization of rights as located in documents, a legacy that marks the emergence of a distinctly American constitutionalism. |
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Tore Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton University Press, 2017)
In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. Agrarian Crossings tells the story of how these campaigns were conducted in dialogue with one another as reformers in each nation came to exchange models, plans, and strategies with their equivalents across the border. Dismantling the artificial boundaries that can divide American and Latin American history, the book shows how the agrarian histories of both regions share far more than we realize. |
2016
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Daniel Feller, The Papers of Andrew Jackson: Volume X, 1832 (University of Tennessee Press, 2016)
Volume X covers a pivotal year in Jackson’s presidency. In 1832 Jackson vetoed the Bank of the United States, faced down the South Carolina nullifiers, spurned the Supreme Court’s defense of the Cherokees, contended with a national cholera epidemic, and won triumphant reelection to a second term over opposition leader Henry Clay. This thrilling volume presents the private letters, memoranda, and handwritten message drafts that tell the hidden stories behind these events and many more. Volume X won the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government, awarded every two years for an outstanding documentary edition in federal history. |
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Jacob A. Latham, Performance, Memory, and Processions in Ancient Rome: The Pompa Circensis from the Late Republic to Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
The pompa circensis, the procession which preceded the chariot races in the arena, was both a prominent political pageant and a hallowed religious ritual. Traversing a landscape of memory, the procession wove together spaces and institutions, monuments and performers, gods and humans into an image of the city, whose contours shifted as Rome changed. In the late Republic, the parade produced an image of Rome as the senate and the people with their gods – a deeply traditional symbol of the city which was transformed during the empire when an imperial image was built on top of the republican one. In late antiquity, the procession fashioned a multiplicity of Romes: imperial, traditional, and Christian. In this book, Jacob A. Latham explores the webs of symbolic meanings in the play between performance and itinerary, tracing the transformations of the circus procession from the late Republic to late antiquity. |
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Christopher Magra, Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
In his second book on the American Revolution, Christopher Magra presents stunning new evidence that the birth of a nation was deeply moored in events on and around the Atlantic Ocean. The British navy appropriated private property and free labor to support the expansion of Britain’s global seaborne empire. Everywhere, merchants and mariners resented and resisted naval impressment. Yet, Americans were the only people to declare independence from the British Empire because of impressment. This new book explains the shared and unique dimensions of the American Revolution. |
2015
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Margaret Andersen, Regeneration through Empire: French Protonatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic (University of Nebraska Press, 2015) Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71, French patriots feared that their country was in danger of becoming a second-rate power in Europe. Decreasing birth rates had largely slowed French population growth, and the country’s population was not keeping pace with that of its European neighbors. To regain its standing in the European world, France set its sights on building a vast colonial empire while simultaneously developing a policy of pronatalism to reverse these demographic trends. Though representing distinct political movements, colonial supporters and pronatalist organizations were born of the same crisis and reflected similar anxieties concerning France’s trajectory and position in the world. Regeneration through Empire explores the intersection between colonial lobbyists and pronatalists in France’s Third Republic. Margaret Cook Andersen argues that as the pronatalist movement became more organized at the end of the nineteenth century, pronatalists increasingly understood their demographic crisis in terms that transcended the boundaries of the metropole and began to position the French empire, specifically its colonial holdings in North Africa and Madagascar, as a key component in the nation’s regeneration. Drawing on an array of primary sources from French archives, Regeneration through Empire is the first book to analyze the relationship between depopulation and imperialism. |
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Robert J. Norrell, Alex Haley and the Book that Changed a Nation (St. Martin’s Press, 2015)
It is difficult to think of two twentieth century books by one author that have had as much influence on American culture when they were published as Alex Haley’s monumental bestsellers, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), and Roots (1976). They changed the way white and black America viewed each other and the country’s history. Alex Haley and the Book that Changed a Nation follows him from his childhood in relative privilege in deeply segregated small town Tennessee to fame and fortune in high powered New York City. This deeply researched and compelling book by Robert J. Norrell offers the perfect opportunity to revisit Haley’s authorship, his career as one of the first African American star journalists, as well as an especially dramatic time of change in American history. |
2014
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Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Luke Harlow’s Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (2014) shows the influential role of debates over Christian “orthodoxy” in the shaping of American political debates over slavery and abolition. Focusing on the border slave state of Kentucky, which claimed a longstanding antislavery presence and remained with the Union during the Civil War, Harlow explains how theological conservatism compelled the majority of the state’s whites to embrace the Confederate cause after the fact. In so doing, the book shows both the potential and limitations of public discourse about race and slavery throughout the United States before, during, and after the Civil War. Harlow spoke with fellow UTK history professor Monica Black about the book for the New Books in History podcast. |
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Charles Sanft, Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China: Publicizing the Qin Dynasty (State University of New York Press, 2014)
Charles Sanft’s book Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China: Publicizing the Qin Dynasty (2014) challenges longstanding notions of the Qin dynasty, China’s first imperial rulers. Historians have long portrayed the Qin as epitomizing totalitarian government. Communication and Cooperation synthesizes received accounts and new information from archaeology in China with interdisciplinary theory to provide a reconsideration of this key period in China’s history. It shows that rather than ruling solely or even primarily through oppression, the Qin had a sophisticated approach to rule that incorporated significant non-coercive tactics that relied on media to encourage cooperation between the public and the emperor. |
2013
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Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America (Penguin Press, 2013)
In spring 2013, Ernest Freeberg published The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, a history of the social and cultural impact of electric light. The Washington Post has called the book “a captivating intellectual adventure that offers long-forgotten stories of the birth pangs of the electrical age that are amusing, surprising, and tragic.” Freeberg has been sharing his findings with audiences across the country, including appearances on National Public Radio and C-Span. |
2012
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Robert J. Norrell, Eden Rise: A Novel (NewSouth Books, 2012)
Robert Norrell has published a novel, Eden Rise, in which Tom McKee, a white college freshman, returns to his Alabama home in 1965 and becomes embroiled in civil-rights conflict that splits his family, his town, and his own identity. McKee’s powerful family is not prepared for the effects of the Selma march. John Gregory Brown, writer-in-residence at Sweetbriar College, says Eden Rise “offers a dramatic and beautifully written examination of racial injustice and violence in the South during the tumultuous 1960s” and that Norrell “demonstrates that he’s not merely a profoundly insightful historian, he’s a first-class novelist as well.” |
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Denise Phillips, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850 (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
Denise Phillips is the author of Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770–1850 (2012). Phillips’s book offers a history of the concept “science” within German-speaking Europe, exploring how changes in German culture and society affected ideas about scientific knowledge. The Germans started using a modern concept of science several decades in advance of other European nations, and Phillips’s research explains the reasons for their precocious adoption of this category. |