Recent Publications
Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment; Essays in Honor of Robert Darnton
Edited by Charles Walton - Associate Professor of History
(Penn State University Press, 2012)
The famous clash between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine over the Enlightenment’s “evil” or “liberating” potential in the French Revolution finds present-day parallels in the battle between those who see the Enlightenment at the origins of modernity’s many ills, such as imperialism, racism, misogyny, and totalitarianism, and those who see it as having forged an age of democracy, human rights, and freedom. The essays collected by Charles Walton in Into Print paint a more complicated picture. By focusing on print culture—the production, circulation, and reception of Enlightenment thought—they show how the Enlightenment was shaped through practice and reshaped over time.
These essays expand upon an approach to the study of the Enlightenment pioneered four decades ago: the social history of ideas. The contributors to Into Print examine how writers, printers, booksellers, regulators, police, readers, rumormongers, policy makers, diplomats, and sovereigns all struggled over that broad range of ideas and values that we now associate with the Enlightenment. They reveal the financial and fiscal stakes of the Enlightenment print industry and, in turn, how Enlightenment ideas shaped that industry during an age of expanding readership. They probe the limits of Enlightenment universalism, showing how demands for religious tolerance clashed with the demands of science and nationalism. They examine the transnational flow of Enlightenment ideas and opinions, exploring its domestic and diplomatic implications. Finally, they show how the culture of the Enlightenment figured in the outbreak and course of the French Revolution.
Courtesy of Penn State University Press
Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History
Alan Mikhail - Assistant Professor of History
(Cambridge University Press, 2011)
In one of the first ever environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire, Alan Mikhail examines relations between the empire and its most lucrative province of Egypt. Based on both the local records of various towns and villages in rural Egypt and the imperial orders of the Ottoman state, this book charts how changes in the control of natural resources fundamentally altered the nature of Ottoman imperial sovereignty in Egypt and throughout the empire. In revealing how Egyptian peasants were able to use their knowledge and experience of local environments to force the hand of the imperial state, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt tells a story of the connections of empire stretching from canals in the Egyptian countryside to the palace in Istanbul, from the Anatolian forest to the shores of the Red Sea, and from a plague flea's bite to the fortunes of one of the most powerful states of the early modern world.
Courtesy of Cambridge University Press
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