Recent Publications
The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders and American Expansion
Jay Gitlin -
Lecturer and Associate Director of Howard R. Lamar Center on the Study of Frontiers and Borders
(Yale University Press, 2010)
Histories tend to emphasize conquest by Anglo-Americans as the driving force behind the development of the American West. In this fresh interpretation, Jay Gitlin argues that the activities of the French are crucial to understanding the phenomenon of westward expansion.
The Seven Years War brought an end to the French colonial enterprise in North America, but the French in towns such as New Orleans, St. Louis, and Detroit survived the transition to American rule. French traders from Mid-America such as the Chouteaus and Robidouxs of St. Louis then became agents of change in the West, perfecting a strategy of “middle grounding” by pursuing alliances within Indian and Mexican communities in advance of American settlement and reinvesting fur trade profits in land, town sites, banks, and transportation. The Bourgeois Frontier provides the missing French connection between the urban Midwest and western expansion. Courtesy of Yale University Press
1688: The First Modern Revolution
Steven Pincus - Professor of History
(Yale University Press, 2009)
For two hundred years historians have viewed England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 as an un-revolutionary revolution—bloodless, consensual, aristocratic, and above all, sensible. In this brilliant new interpretation Steve Pincus refutes this traditional view.
By expanding the interpretive lens to include a broader geographical and chronological frame, Pincus demonstrates that England’s revolution was a European event, that it took place over a number of years, not months, and that it had repercussions in India, North America, the West Indies, and throughout continental Europe. His rich historical narrative, based on masses of new archival research, traces the transformation of English foreign policy, religious culture, and political economy that, he argues, was the intended consequence of the revolutionaries of 1688–1689.
James II developed a modernization program that emphasized centralized control, repression of dissidents, and territorial empire. The revolutionaries, by contrast, took advantage of the new economic possibilities to create a bureaucratic but participatory state. The postrevolutionary English state emphasized its ideological break with the past and envisioned itself as continuing to evolve. All of this, argues Pincus, makes the Glorious Revolution—not the French Revolution—the first truly modern revolution. This wide-ranging book reenvisions the nature of the Glorious Revolution and of revolutions in general, the causes and consequences of commercialization, the nature of liberalism, and ultimately the origins and contours of modernity itself. Courtesy of Yale University Press
The Last Pharoahs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30 B.C.
Joseph G. Manning - William K. and Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of Classics & History
(Princeton University Press, 2009)
The history of Ptolemaic Egypt has usually been doubly isolated, separated both from the history of other Hellenistic states and from the history of ancient Egypt. The Last Pharaohs, the first detailed history of Ptolemaic Egypt as a state, departs radically from previous studies by putting the Ptolemaic state firmly in the context of both Hellenistic and Egyptian history. More broadly still, J. G. Manning examines the Ptolemaic dynasty in the context of the study of authoritarian and premodern states, shifting the focus of study away from modern European nation-states and toward ancient Asian ones. By analyzing Ptolemaic reforms of Egyptian economic and legal structures, The Last Pharaohs gauges the impact of Ptolemaic rule on Egypt and the relationships that the Ptolemaic kings formed with Egyptian society. Manning argues that the Ptolemies sought to rule through--rather than over--Egyptian society. He tells how the Ptolemies, adopting a pharaonic model of governance, shaped Egyptian society and in turn were shaped by it. Neither fully Greek nor wholly Egyptian, the Ptolemaic state within its core Egyptian territory was a hybrid that departed from but did not break with Egyptian history. Integrating the latest research on archaeology, papyrology, theories of the state, and legal history, as well as Hellenistic and Egyptian history, The Last Pharaohs draws a dramatically new picture of Egypt's last ancient state. Courtesy of Princeton University Press
The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror
John Merriman - Charles Seymour Professor of History
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
The fascinating story of a long-forgotten "war on terror" that has much in common with our own.
On a February evening in 1894, a young radical intellectual named Émile Henry drank two beers at an upscale Parisian restaurant, then left behind a bomb as a parting gift. This incident, which rocked the French capital, lies at the heart of The Dynamite Club, a mesmerizing account of Henry and his cohorts and the war they waged against the bourgeoisie—setting off bombs in public places, killing the president of France, and eventually assassinating President McKinley in 1901.
Paris in the belle époque was a place of leisure, elegance, and power. Newly electrified, the city’s wide boulevards were lined with posh department stores and outdoor cafés. But prosperity was limited to a few. Most lived in dire poverty, and workers and intellectuals found common cause in a political philosophy—anarchism—that embraced the overthrow of the state by any means necessary.
Yet in targeting civilians to achieve their ends, the dynamite bombers charted a new course. Seeking martyrdom, believing fervently in their goal, and provoking a massive government reaction that only increased their ranks, these "evildoers" became, in effect, the first terrorists in modern history.
Surprising and provocative, The Dynamite Club is a brilliantly researched account that illuminates a period of dramatic social and political change—and subtly asks us to reflect upon our own. Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America
Edmund S. Morgan - Sterling Professor Emeritus of History
(W.W. Norton, 2009)
These revelatory stories of American heroes and their undaunted courage will forever alter our understanding of American history.
From the best-selling author of Benjamin Franklin comes a remarkable work that will help redefine our notion of American heroism. As Edmund S. Morgan, the recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize, explains, Americans have long been obsessed with their heroes, but the men and women dramatically portrayed here are not celebrated for the typical banal reasons contained in Founding Fathers hagiography. He reexamines the lives of bona-fide American heroes such as George Washington or Benjamin Franklin, and reevaluates the legacies of religious figures such as Anne Hutchinson, whose trial for heresy and banishment riveted the colonies in 1637. Morgan also plucks from obscurity unknown martyrs such as Mary Easty and Giles Cory, “perhaps as brave a man as any in American history”; both were charged with witchcraft, and both were executed proclaiming their innocence while refusing to name others. Effortlessly challenging those who persist in revering the American history status quo and its tropes and falsehoods, Morgan, now ninety-three, continues to believe that the past is just not the way it seems. Courtesy of W.W. Norton
Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930
John Harley Warner - Avalon Professor and Chair, History of Medicine, Professor of History
and James M. Edmonson
(Blast Books)
Featuring 138 rare, historic photographs, "Dissection" reveals the rite of passage into the mysteries of medicine captured in photography. From the advent of photography in the 19th century and into the 20th century, medical students - often in secrecy - took photographs of themselves with the cadavers that they dissected: their first patients. The photographs were made in a variety of forms, from class portraits to staged dark-humor scenes, from personal documentation to images reproduced on postcards sent in the mail. These photographs were made at a time when Victorian societal taboos against intimate knowledge of the human body were set aside for medical students in pursuit of knowledge that could be gained only in the dissecting room. The gradual passing of state laws, from 1831 to 1947, to govern the business of cadaver supply brought an end to reliance on professional "resurrectionists," grave robbing and dissection as extended punishment for murder and as a consequence of poverty, the authors point out. The book's essays illuminate the social realities of the pursuit of medical knowledge in 19th- and early 20th-century America. Courtesy of Yale Bulletin
The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror
Beverly Gage - Assistant Professor of History
(Oxford University Press, 2009)
Just after noon on September 16, 1920, as hundreds of workers poured onto Wall Street for their lunchtime break, a horse-drawn cart packed with dynamite exploded in a spray of metal and fire, turning the busiest corner of the financial center into a war zone. Thirty-nine people died and hundreds more lay wounded, making the Wall Street explosion the worst terrorist attack to that point in U.S. history.
In The Day Wall Street Exploded, Beverly Gage tells the story of that once infamous but now largely forgotten event. Based on thousands of pages of Bureau of Investigation reports, this historical detective saga traces the four-year hunt for the perpetrators, a worldwide effort that spread as far as Italy and the new Soviet nation. It also takes readers back into the decades-long but little-known history of homegrown terrorism that shaped American society a century ago. The book delves into the lives of victims, suspects, and investigators: world banking power J.P. Morgan, Jr.; labor radical "Big Bill" Haywood; anarchist firebrands Emma Goldman and Luigi Galleani; "America's Sherlock Holmes," William J. Burns; even a young J. Edgar Hoover. It grapples as well with some of the most controversial events of its day, including the rise of the Bureau of Investigation, the federal campaign against immigrant "terrorists," the grassroots effort to define and protect civil liberties, and the establishment of anti-communism as the sine qua non of American politics.
Many Americans saw the destruction of the World Trade Center as the first major terrorist attack on American soil, an act of evil without precedent. The Day Wall Street Exploded reminds us that terror, too, has a history. Courtesy of Oxford University Press
All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World
Stuart B. Schwartz - George Burton Adams Professor of History
(Yale University Press, 2008)
It would seem unlikely that one could discover tolerant religious attitudes in Spain, Portugal, and the New World colonies during the era of the Inquisition, when enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy was widespread and brutal. Yet this groundbreaking book does exactly that. Drawing on an enormous body of historical evidence—including records of the Inquisition itself—the historian Stuart Schwartz investigates the idea of religious tolerance and its evolution in the Hispanic world from 1500 to 1820. Focusing on the attitudes and beliefs of common people rather than those of intellectual elites, the author finds that no small segment of the population believed in freedom of conscience and rejected the exclusive validity of the Church.
The book explores various sources of tolerant attitudes, the challenges that the New World presented to religious orthodoxy, the complex relations between “popular” and “learned” culture, and many related topics. The volume concludes with a discussion of the relativist ideas that were taking hold elsewhere in Europe during this era. Courtesy of Yale University Press
Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny & the Problem of Free Speech
Charles Walton - Assistant Professor of History
(Oxford University Press, 2008)
In the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, French revolutionaries proclaimed the freedom of speech, religion, and opinion. Censorship was abolished, and France appeared to be on a path towards tolerance, pluralism, and civil liberties. A mere four years later, the country descended into a period of political terror, as thousands were arrested, tried, and executed for crimes of expression and opinion.
In Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution, Charles Walton traces the origins of this reversal back to the Old Regime. He shows that while early advocates of press freedom sought to abolish pre-publication censorship, the majority still firmly believed injurious speech--or calumny--constituted a crime, even treason if it undermined the honor of sovereign authority or sacred collective values, such as religion and civic spirit.
With the collapse of institutions responsible for regulating honor and morality in 1789, calumny proliferated, as did obsessions with it. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, from National Assembly debates to local police archives, Walton shows how struggles to set legal and moral limits on free speech led to the radicalization of politics, and eventually to the brutal liquidation of "calumniators" and fanatical efforts to rebuild society's moral foundation during the Terror of 1793-1794.
With its emphasis on how revolutionaries drew upon cultural and political legacies of the Old Regime, this study sheds new light on the origins of the Terror and the French Revolution, as well as the history of free expression. Courtesy of Oxford University Press
The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War
Edward Rugemer - Assistant Professor of History & African American Studies
(Louisiana State University Press, 2008)
While many historians look to internal conflict alone to explain the onset of the American Civil War, in The Problem of Emancipation, Edward Bartlett Rugemer places the origins of the war in a transatlantic context. Addressing a huge gap in the historiography of the antebellum United States, he explores the impact of Britain's abolition of slavery in 1834 on the coming of the war and reveals the strong influence of Britain's old Atlantic empire on the United States' politics. He demonstrates how American slaveholders and abolitionists alike borrowed from the antislavery movement developing on the transatlantic stage to fashion contradictory portrayals of abolition that became central to the arguments for and against American slavery.
In this ground-breaking study, Rugemer examines how southern and northern American newspapers covered three slave rebellions that preceded British abolition—and how American public opinion shifted radically as a result. For example, American slaveholders learned from the Haitian Revolution and a series of West Indian slave rebellions that abolitionist agitation led to insurrection. When American slaves began reacting to antislavery rhetoric, slaveholders feared the Caribbean pattern of agitation and revolt had spread to the United States. In 1822 after the fierce debates over Missouri, several Charleston slaves conspired to seize their city, and in 1831 Nat Turner led a bloody revolt shortly after William Lloyd Garrison published his radical abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. Turning fear into action, American slaveholders seized and burned the publications that abolitionists sent southward in the mail, and in the North, the partisans of slavery mobbed abolitionist meetings and silenced the discussion of slavery in Congress.
Abolitionists, by contrast, took inspiration from the developments abroad. Leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, and William Ellery Channing used the West Indian emancipation to help advance their position, and members of John Tyler's presidential administration pushed for the annexation of Texas. Believing that the British achieved emancipation by mobilizing the British people with a robust public relations campaign, many African Americans, often joined by white allies, staged annual celebrations of the First of August, the day the Parliament enacted abolition. The celebrations grew and spread throughout the North, facilitating the emergence of an antislavery constituency that bolstered the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
Richly researched and skillfully argued, The Problem of Emancipation explores a long-neglected aspect of American slavery and the history of the Atlantic World and bridges a gap in our understanding of the American Civil War. Courtesy of LSU Press
Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Right, 1919-1950
Glenda Gilmore - Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History
(Norton, 2008)
A groundbreaking history of the Southern movement for social justice that gave birth to civil rights.
The civil rights movement that loomed over the 1950s and 1960s was the tip of an iceberg, the legal and political remnant of a broad, raucous, deeply American movement for social justice that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. This contentious mix of home-grown radicals, labor activists, newspaper editors, black workers, and intellectuals employed every strategy imaginable to take Dixie down, from a ludicrous attempt to organize black workers with a stage production of Pushkin—in Russian—to the courageous fight of striking workers against police and corporate violence in Gastonia in 1929. In a dramatic narrative Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore deftly shows how the movement unfolded against national and global developments, gaining focus and finally arriving at a narrow but effective legal strategy for securing desegregation and political rights. Little-known heroes abound in a book that will recast our understanding of the most important social movement in twentieth-century America.
A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
David Blight - Class of 1954 Professor of American History
(Harcourt, 2007)
Slave narratives are extremely rare. Of the one hundred or so of these testimonies that survive, a mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group with the publication of A Slave No More, a major new addition to the canon of American history.
Wallace Turnage was a teenage field hand on an Alabama plantation, John Washington an urban slave in Virginia. They never met. But both men saw opportunity in the chaos of the Civil War, both escaped North, and both left us remarkable accounts of their flights to freedom. Handed down through family and friends—Turnage’s daughter carefully preserved her father’s handwritten manuscript during a lifetime of passing for white—these narratives tell gripping stories of escape.
But this book marks more than just the discovery of two new emancipation stories. It is also the discovery of two lives. Working from an unusual abundance of genealogical material, historian David W. Blight has reconstructed Turnage’s and Washington’s childhoods as sons of white slaveholders, their service as cooks and camp hands during the Civil War, and their climb to black working-class stability in the North, where they reunited their families.
In the lives and narratives of Turnage and Washington, we find a revelatory new answer to the question of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom. In A Slave No More, the untold stories of two ordinary men take their place at the heart of the American experience. Courtesy of HarcourtBooks.com
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy
Peter Gay - Emeritus Professor
(W.W. Norton, 2007)
A celebration of subversives: the first one-volume history of the greatest cultural movement since the Enlightenment.
Peter Gay’s most ambitious endeavor since Freud explores the shocking modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film with its assault on traditional forms. Beginning his epic study with Baudelaire, whose lurid poetry scandalized French stalwarts, Gay traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York. A work unique in its breadth and brilliance, Modernism presents a thrilling pageant of heretics that includes (among others) Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, and D. W. Griffiths; James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot; Walter Gropius, Arnold Schoenberg, and (of course!) Andy Warhol. Finally, Gay examines the hostility of totalitarian regimes to modernist freedom and the role of Pop Art in sounding the death knell of a movement that dominated Western culture for 120 years. Lavishly illustrated, Modernism is a superlative achievement by one of our greatest historians. Courtesy of W.W. Norton
In From the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War
Edited by Gilbert Joseph - Farnam Professor of History and International Studies and Daniela Spenser
(Duke University Press, 2007)
Over the last decade, studies of the Cold War have mushroomed globally. Unfortunately, work on Latin America has not been well represented in either theoretical or empirical discussions of the broader conflict. With some notable exceptions, studies have proceeded in rather conventional channels, focusing on U.S. policy objectives and high-profile leaders (Fidel Castro) and events (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and drawing largely on U.S. government sources. Moreover, only rarely have U.S. foreign relations scholars engaged productively with Latin American historians who analyze how the international conflict transformed the region’s political, social, and cultural life. Representing a collaboration among eleven North American, Latin American, and European historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, this volume attempts to facilitate such a cross-fertilization. In the process, In From the Cold shifts the focus of attention away from the bipolar conflict, the preoccupation of much of the so-called "new Cold War history," in order to showcase research, discussion, and an array of new archival and oral sources centering on the grassroots, where conflicts actually brewed.
The collection’s contributors examine international and everyday contests over political power and cultural representation, focusing on communities and groups above and underground, on state houses and diplomatic board rooms manned by Latin American and international governing elites, on the relations among states regionally, and, less frequently, on the dynamics between the two great superpowers themselves. In addition to charting new directions for research on the Latin American Cold War, In From the Cold seeks to contribute more generally to an understanding of the conflict in the global south.
Courtesy of Duke University Press
The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics
Annping Chin - Senior Lecturer
(Scribner, 2007)
For more than two thousand years, Confucius has been an inseparable part of China's history. Yet despite this fame,Confucius the man has been elusive. Now, in The Authentic Confucius, Annping Chin has worked through the most reliable Chinese texts in her quest to sort out what is really known about Confucius from the reconstructions and the guesswork that muddled his memory.
Chin skillfully illuminates the political and social climate in which Confucius lived. She explains how Confucius made the transition from court advisor to wanderer, and how he reluctantly became a professional teacher as he refined his judgment of human character and composed his vision of a moral political order. The result is an absorbing and original book that shows how Confucius lived and thought: his habits and inclinations, his relation to the people of the time, his work as a teacher and as a counselor, his worries about the world and the generations to come.
In this book, Chin brings the historical Confucius within our reach, so that he can lead us into his idea of the moral and to his teachings on family and politics, culture and learning. The Authentic Confucius is a masterful account of the life and intellectual development of a thinker whose presence remains a powerful force today.
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
Ben Kiernan - Whitney Griswold Professor of History & Director of the Genocide Studies Program
(Yale University Press, 2007)
Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides.
Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial, and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor
Ben Kiernan - Whitney Griswold Professor of History & Director of the Genocide Studies Program
(Transaction Publishers, 2007)
Two modern cases of genocide and extermination began in Southeast Asia in the same year. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, and Indonesian forces occupied East Timor from 1975 to 1999. This book examines the horrific consequences of Cambodian communist revolution and Indonesian anti-communist counterinsurgency. It also chronicles the two cases of indigenous resistance to genocide and extermination, the international cover-ups that obstructed documentation of these crimes, and efforts to hold the perpetrators legally accountable.
The perpetrator regimes inflicted casualties in similar proportions. Each caused the deaths of about one-fifth of the population of the nation. Cambodia's mortality was approximately 1.7 million, and approximately 170,000 perished in East Timor. In both cases, most of the deaths occurred in the five-year period from 1975 to1980. In addition, Cambodia and East Timor not only shared the experience of genocide but also of civil war, international intervention, and UN conflict resolution. U.S. policymakers supported the invading Indonesians in Timor, as well as the indigenous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Both regimes exterminated ethnic minorities, including local Chinese, as well as political dissidents. Yet the ideological fuel that ignited each conflagration was quite different. Jakarta pursued anti-communism; the Khmer Rouge were communists. In East Timor the major Indonesian goal was conquest. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge's goal was revolution. Maoist ideology influenced Pol Pot's regime, but it also influenced the East Timorese resistance to the Indonesia's occupiers.
Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia is significant both for its historical documentation and for its contribution to the study of the politics and mechanisms of genocide. It is a fundamental contribution that will be read by historians, human rights activists, and genocide studies specialists.
Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century
Jonathan Holloway and Ben Keppel (Eds.)
(University of Notre Dame, 2007)
Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century explores the development of American social science by highlighting the contributions of those scholars who were both students and objects of a segregated society. The book asks how segregation has influenced, and continues to influence, the development of American social thought and social science scholarship.
Jonathan Scott Holloway and Ben Keppel present the work of twenty-eight black social scientists whose work was published between the rise of the Tuskegee model of higher education and the end of the Black Power Era. The intellectuals featured here produced scholarship that helped define the contours of the social sciences as they evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Theirs was the work of pioneers, now for the first time gathered in one anthology.
Frontiers: A Short History of the American West
John Mack Faragher - Arthur Unobskey Professor of American History and Robert V. Hine
(Yale University Press, 2007)
In a stirring and enlightening reexamination of the American West, Faragher and Hine gauge the impact of key trends and events—the American Revolution, the multiethnic Gold Rush, the 1867 purchase of Russian America (dubbed Alaska, an Aleut word meaning "the big land"), the U.S.-Mexican War, the New Deal, etc.—in shaping the West's socioeconomic development. The American West of legend, brimming with ruggedly individualistic cowboys, intrepid pioneers and gunslingers, scarcely exists in this myth-shattering history. The real West was and continues to be a land of immigrants and of conflicting and melding cultures. "Manifest destiny," the authors maintain, was not a deeply held folk belief: rather, it was the deliberate creation of political propagandists determined to unyoke the policy of westward expansion from the growing sectional controversy over slavery in the 1830s and '40s. As the book moves from the West of the past to the present, the authors show how the region has become the nation's economic, political and cultural pacesetter: Hollywood became the capital of the U.S. "culture industry"; aerospace and defense industries soared; Silicon Valley booted up; Western states absorbed mass migrations from Mexico, Central America and Asia. A substantial revision and update of standard history, this gripping, wonderfully accessible populist saga deserves a place on the shelf alongside the works of Howard Zinn, William Appleman Williams and Ronald Takaki.
Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919
Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (Eds.)
(Cambridge University Press, 2007)
This ambitious volume marks a huge step in our understanding of the social history of the Great War. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert have gathered a group of scholars of London, Paris and Berlin, who collectively have drawn a coherent and original study of cities at war. The contributors explore notions of well-being in wartime cities—relating to the economy and the question of whether the state of the capitals contributed to victory or defeat. Expert contributors in fields stretching from history, demography, anthropology, economics, and sociology to the history of medicine, bring an interdisciplinary approach to the book, as well as representing the best of recent research in their own fields. Capital Cities at War, one of the few truly comparative works on the Great War, will transform studies of the conflict, and is likely to become a paradigm for research on other wars.
The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919-1932
Patrick O. Cohrs - Assistant Professor
(Cambridge University Press, 2006)
This is a highly original and revisionist analysis of British and American efforts to forge a stable Euro-Atlantic peace order between 1919 and the rise of Hitler. Patrick Cohrs argues that this order was not founded at Versailles but rather through the first 'real' peace settlements after World War I - the London reparations settlement of 1924 and the Locarno security pact of 1925. Crucially, both fostered Germany's integration into a fledgling transatlantic peace system, thus laying the only realistic foundations for European stability. What proved decisive was that key decision-makers drew lessons from the 'Great War' and Versailles' shortcomings. Yet Cohrs also re-appraises why they could not sustain the new order, master its gravest crisis - the Great Depression - and prevent Nazism's onslaught. Despite this ultimate failure, he concludes that the 'unfinished peace' of the 1920s prefigured the terms on which a more durable peace could be founded after 1945.
Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century
Jay Winter - Charles J. Stille Professor of History
(Yale University Press, 2006)
In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the "major utopians" who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century's "Òminor utopias" whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past.
The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.
Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century
Jay Winter - Charles J. Stille Professor of History
(Yale University Press, 2006)
This is a masterful volume on remembrance and war in the twentieth century. Jay Winter locates the fascination with the subject of memory within a long-term trajectory that focuses on the Great War. Images, languages, and practices that appeared during and after the two world wars focused on the need to acknowledge the victims of war and shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. At the core of the "memory boom" is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war, Winter says.
The book begins by tracing the origins of contemporary interest in memory, then describes practices of remembrance that have linked history and memory, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The author also considers "theaters of memory"—film, television, museums, and war crimes trials in which the past is seen through public representations of memories. The book concludes with reflections on the significance of these practices for the cultural history of the twentieth century as a whole.
What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America
Matthew Jacobson & Gaspar González
(University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
Considered by many to be the best political thriller ever made, The Manchurian Candidate is as entertaining, troubling, and relevant today as it was in 1962. Starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, and directed with probing insight by John Frankenheimer, the film was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. Largely out of circulation for the next two decades, it acquired a well-deserved cult following until it was rereleased during the last year of the Reagan presidency, when its pointed satire of political and media manipulation seemed more timely than ever. In What Have They Built You to Do?—a key line of dialogue from the original film—Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González undertake an ambitious reexamination of The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 novel by Richard Condon on which it was based, and critically analyzed here for the first time the 2004 remake directed by Jonathan Demme. Based on close readings of the film and broad investigations into the eras in which it was made and rediscovered, the authors decode the many layers of meaning within and surrounding the film, from the contradictions of the Cold War it both embodies and parodies—McCarthyism and Kennedy liberalism, individualism and conformity—to its construction of Asian villains, overbearing women, and male heroes in a society anxious about race, gender, and sexuality. Through their multifaceted analysis of The Manchurian Candidate (in all its incarnations), Jacobson and González raise provocative questions about power and anxiety in American politics and society from the Cold War to today.
Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America
Matthew Jacobson - Professor
(Harvard University Press, 2006)
In this intriguing and closely argued book, Jacobson tells the story of how it came to be fashionable for white Americans to rediscover their ethnic heritage—be it Italian or Irish, Jewish or Catholic—and how many of them made this into a "usable past" to forge a sense of identity, a quasi backlash to the civil rights movements of the '60s that occurred less on the front page than on the big screen (think Godfather, Rocky, or My Big Fat Greek Wedding). One of the book's strongest assets is the large number of examples and case studies Jacobson provides, including accounts of Michael Dukakis's relentless invocation of his Greek background during his failed presidential campaign and how artist Judy Chicago's "evolving sense of Jewishness" became central to her work. He also discusses books like Portnoy's Complaint and movies like Working Girl. Jacobson's considerable achievement is how he avoids reducing ethnic revival to simple multiculturalism or the inevitable result of the fabled hard-working Ellis Island immigrant.
The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations
Paul Kennedy - J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History
(Random House, 2006)
Historian and political commentator Kennedy here turns his attention to the United Nations, an institution he believes, with reform and sustained effort, can make serious headway in addressing the kinds of problems he documented in Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. The core of the book-six broad and insightful mini-histories of the last sixty years of global security; peacekeeping efforts; economic development; environmental, social, and cultural advancement; human rights; and the creation of an international civil society-is grounded by a strong opening account of the historical factors and motivations shaping the U.N. charter. That document achieved the formidable task of keeping all of the Great Powers involved and is largely responsible for the U.N.'s indispensable role in shaping policy addressing Kennedy's six problem areas. However, Kennedy argues that international changes like widespread corruption in failing postcolonial states and a shifting balance of world power have created an urgent need for moderate structural changes and more radical conceptual ones if the organization is to remain effective and become more so-as, he believes, it must. Concluding with a brisk series of reform proposals that recognizes the limitations of superpower realpolitik, Kennedy offers an impressive, authoritative and sympathetic account of the U.N.'s past contributions and potential for the future.
The Cold War: A New History
John Lewis Gaddis - Robert A. Lovett Professor of History
(Penguin, 2006)
If it's difficult to imagine a history of the Cold War that can be described as thrilling, that should add more luster to Yale historian Gaddis's crown. Gaddis, who's written some half-dozen studies of the Cold War, delivers an utterly engrossing account of Soviet-U.S. relations from WWII to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. The ideological clash between democratic capitalism and communism predated the war, of course, but the emergence of nuclear weapons created a new political situation. Suddenly, it was easy to imagine total war that might destroy not only the enemy but also the victor. Gaddis assesses what he sees as the positive contributions Thatcher, Reagan and Pope John Paul II made to furthering the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. and concludes with a sympathetic portrait of Gorbachev; his refusal to use force ultimately cost him both communism and his country, but, says Gaddis, it also made him "the most deserving recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize." The interpretations on offer are not startlingly original—we've read this before, mostly in other books by Gaddis himself—but a new, concise narration was Gaddis's aim here, and he succeeds royally. His synthesis is sure to reign with general history readers and in undergraduate classrooms.
The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962
Frank Snowden - Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of History
(Yale University Press, 2006)
At the outset of the twentieth century, malaria was Italy's major public health problem. It was the cause of low productivity, poverty, and economic backwardness, while it also stunted literacy, limited political participation, and undermined the army. In this book Frank Snowden recounts how Italy became the world center for the development of malariology as a medical discipline and launched the first national campaign to eradicate the disease.
Snowden traces the early advances, the setbacks of world wars and Fascist dictatorship, and the final victory against malaria after World War II. He shows how the medical and teaching professions helped educate people in their own self-defense and in the process expanded trade unionism, women's consciousness, and civil liberties. He also discusses the antimalarial effort under Mussolini's regime and reveals the shocking details of the German army's intentional release of malaria among Italian civilians—the first and only known example of bioterror in twentieth-century Europe. Comprehensive and enlightening, this history offers important lessons for today's global malaria emergency.
Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968
Marci Shore - Assistant Professor
(Yale University Press, 2006)
"In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a café called Ziemianska." Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the fin de siècle. They sat in Café Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. Caviar and Ashes tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically.
Marci Shore begins with this generation's coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafés to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.
Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age And the Later Roman Empire
Walter Goffart - Senior Research Scholar & Lecturer
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)
The Migration Age is still envisioned as an onrush of expansionary "Germans" pouring unwanted into the Roman Empire and subjecting it to pressures so great that its western parts collapsed under the weight. Further developing the themes set forth in his classic Barbarians and Romans, Walter Goffart dismantles this grand narrative, shaking the barbarians of late antiquity out of this "Germanic" setting and reimagining the role of foreigners in the Later Roman Empire.
The Empire was not swamped by a migratory Germanic flood for the simple reason that there was no single ancient Germanic civilization to be transplanted onto ex-Roman soil. Since the sixteenth century, the belief that purposeful Germans existed in parallel with the Romans has been a fixed point in European history. Goffart uncovers the origins of this historical untruth and argues that any projection of a modern Germany out of an ancient one is illusory. Rather, the multiplicity of northern peoples once living on the edges of the Empire participated with the Romans in the larger stirrings of late antiquity. Most relevant among these was the long militarization that gripped late Roman society concurrently with its Christianization.
If the fragmented foreign peoples with which the Empire dealt gave Rome an advantage in maintaining its ascendancy, the readiness to admit military talents of any social origin to positions of leadership opened the door of imperial service to immigrants from beyond its frontiers. Many barbarians were settled in the provinces without dislodging the Roman residents or destabilizing landownership; some were even incorporated into the ruling families of the Empire. The outcome of this process, Goffart argues, was a society headed by elites of soldiers and Christian clergy—one we have come to call medieval.
Women's Religious Activity in the Roman Republic
Celia Schultz- Assistant Professor
(University of North Carolina University Press, 2006)
Expanding the discussion of religious participation of women in ancient Rome, Celia E. Schultz demonstrates that in addition to observances of marriage, fertility, and childbirth, there were more—and more important—religious opportunities available to Roman women than are commonly considered.
Based on research in ancient literature, inscriptions, and archaeological remains from the fifth to the first century B.C.E., Schultz's study shows that women honored gods unaffiliated with domestic matters, including Hercules and Jupiter; they took part in commercial, military, and political rites; they often worshipped alongside men; and they were not confined to the private sphere, the traditional domain of women. The Vestal Virgins did not stand alone but were instead the most prominent members of a group of women who held high-profile religious positions: priestesses of Ceres, Liber, and Venus; the flaminica Dialis and the regina sacrorum; other cult officials; and aristocratic matrons who often took leading roles in religious observances even though they were not priestesses. Schultz argues that women were vital participants—both professional and nonprofessional—in the religion of the Roman Republic and that social and marital status, in addition to gender, were important factors in determining their opportunities for religious participation in the public sphere.
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
David Brion Davis - Emeritus Professor
(Oxford University Press, 2006)
History professor Davis places American slavery in the broader global context as part of the world's first system of multinational production from which mass markets were served. American slaves from West Africa produced commodities that fueled European expansion and the settlement of America. At its peak, American slave labor helped to maximize production for international markets. Davis emphasizes the dehumanizing nature of American slavery and the reliance on racial differences, i.e., between blacks and Native Americans, to solidify social and economic differences. Exploring the origins of antiblack racism, Davis examines nineteenth-century slave revolts, the Civil War, and emancipation. The Amistad case, involving African slaves who commandeered their slave ship and eventually sued for their freedom, provides the basis of an analysis of multinational charters of the Atlantic slave trade. The broader perspective on American slavery—its social and economic impact on the growth of the U.S.—forces readers to face the contradictions between our democratic ideals and economic impulses.