The Decolonization of Africa

By David Birmingham

This bold, popularizing synthesis presents a readily accessible introduction to one of the major themes of twentieth-century world history. Between 1922, when self-government was restored to Egypt, and 1994, when nonracial democracy was achieved in South Africa, 54 new nations were established in Africa.…

Fighting the Slave Trade

West African Strategies

Edited by Sylviane A. Diouf

While most studies of the slave trade focus on the volume of captives and on their ethnic origins, the question of how the Africans organized their familial and communal lives to resist and assail it has not received adequate attention.…

The African AIDS Epidemic

A History

By John Iliffe

This history of the African AIDS epidemic is a much-needed, accessibly written historical account of the most serious epidemiological catastrophe of modern times. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History answers President Thabo Mbeki’s provocative question as to why Africa has suffered this terrible epidemic.…

Between the Sea and the Lagoon

An Eco-social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana c. 1850 to Recent Times

By Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong

This study offers a “social interpretation of environmental process” for the coastal lowlands of southeastern Ghana. The Anlo-Ewe, sometimes hailed as the quintessential sea fishermen of the West African coast, are a previously non-maritime people who developed a maritime tradition.…

The History of Islam in Africa

Edited by Nehemia Levtzion and Randall Pouwels

The history of the Islamic faith on the continent of Africa spans fourteen centuries. For the first time in a single volume, The History of Islam in Africa presents a detailed historic mapping of the cultural, political, geographic, and religious past of this significant presence on a continent-wide scale.…

Themes in West Africa’s History

Edited by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong

There has long been a need for a new textbook on West Africa’s history. In Themes in West Africa’s History, editor Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and his contributors meet this need, examining key themes in West Africa's prehistory to the present through the lenses of their different disciplines.…

Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid

By Belinda Bozzoli

A compelling study of the origins and trajectory of one of the legendary black uprisings against apartheid, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid draws on insights gained from the literature on collective action and social movements.…

Ouidah

The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892

By Robin Law

Ouidah, an African town in the Republic of Benin, was the principal precolonial commercial center of its region and the second-most-important town of the Dahomey kingdom. It served as a major outlet for the transatlantic slave trade.…

The Practical Shakespeare

The Plays in Practice and on the Page

By Colin Butler

A comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page illuminates for a general audience how and why the plays work so well. Noting in detail the practical and physical limitations the Bard faced as he worked out the logistics of his plays, Colin Butler demonstrates how Shakespeare incorporated those limitations and turned them to his advantage: his management of entrances and exits; his characterization techniques; his handling of scenes off-stage; his control of audience responses; his organization of major scenes; and his use of prologues and choruses.…

Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Ronald E. Salomone and James E. Davis

Shakespeare is a central shaping and defining figure in our culture. His plays are being taught, filmed, and performed every day in many places and in most of the world's languages. At the same time, teachers and students from junior high through the early undergraduate years often struggle with the Bard in discomfort and negativity that can only be counter-productive.…

The Wife of Martin Guerre

By Janet Lewis

Set in 16th century France, this compelling story of Bertrande de Rols is the first of the Cases of Circumstantial Evidence.

The New Short Story Theories

Edited by Charles E. May

The first edition of May’s Short Story Theories (1976) opened with an essay entitled “The Short Story: An Underrated Art.” Almost two decades later, the short story suffers no such slight.…

All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing

An Explanation of Meter and Versification

By Timothy Steele

Perfect for the general reader of poetry, students and teachers of literature, and aspiring poets, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing is a lively and comprehensive study of versification by one of our best contemporary practitioners of traditional poetic forms.…

Blank Verse

A Guide to Its History and Use

By Robert B. Shaw

Blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter—is familiar to many as the form of Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Since its first use in English in the sixteenth century, it has provided poets with a powerful and versatile metrical line, enabling the creation of some of the most memorable poems of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Frost, Stevens, Wilbur, Nemerov, Hecht, and a host of others.…

The Fields

By Conrad Richter

Conrad Richter's trilogy of novels The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town, (1950) traces the transformation of Ohio from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character.…

The Town

By Conrad Richter

In the final novel of Richter’s Awakening Land trilogy, Sayward Wheeler completes her mission and lives to see the transition of her family and her friends, American pioneers, from the ways of wilderness to the ways of civilization.…

The Trees

By Conrad Richter

Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River was an unbroken sea of trees. Beneath them the forest trails were dark, silent, and lonely, brightened only by a few lost beams of sunlight.…

The Man Who Killed the Deer

A Novel of Pueblo Indian Life

By Frank Waters

The story of Martiniano, the man who killed the deer, is a timeless story of Pueblo Indian sin and redemption, and of the conflict between Indian and white laws; written with a poetically charged beauty of style, a purity of conception, and a thorough understanding of Indian values.

J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual

Edited by Jane Poyner

In September 2003 the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, confirming his reputation as one of the most influential writers of our time. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies.…

How Green Were the Nazis?

Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich

Edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller

The Nazis created nature preserves, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature. How Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich is the first book to examine the Third Reich's environmental policies and to offer an in-depth exploration of the intersections between brown ideologies and green practices.…

The Green Archipelago

Forestry in Preindustrial Japan

By Conrad Totman

This inaugural volume in the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History is the paperback edition of Conrad Totman’s widely acclaimed study of Japan’s environmental policies over the centuries.…

How to Identify Grasses and Grasslike Plants

Sedges and Rushes

By H.D. Harrington

There is no easy way to identify grasses. And no one understands this better than H.D. Harrington, who observed thousands of students struggle and learn. His clear, concise, and well-organized guide will continue to be a basic and essential text for use in the classroom or in the field.…

From Blackjacks to Briefcases

A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States

By Robert Michael Smith

From the beginning of the Industrial Age and continuing into the twenty-first century, companies faced with militant workers and organizers have often turned to agencies that specialized in ending strikes and breaking unions.…

The Grasinski Girls

The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made

By Mary Patrice Erdmans

The Grasinski Girls were working-class Americans of Polish descent, born in the 1920s and 1930s, who created lives typical of women in their day. They went to high school, married, and had children.…

The Red Earth

A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation

By Binh Tu Tran
Edited by David G. Marr

Phu Rieng was one of many French rubber plantations in colonial Vietnam; Tran Tu Binh was one of 17,606 laborers brought to work there in 1927, and his memoir is a straightforward, emotionally searing account of how one Vietnamese youth became involved in revolutionary politics.…

The Public and Its Problems

By John Dewey

A classic in social and political philosophy. In his characteristic and provocative dialectic style, John Dewey clarifies the meaning and implications of such concepts as “the public,” “the state,” “government,” and “political democracy”; distinguishes his a posteriori reasoning from a priori reasoning which, he argues, permeates less meaningful discussions of basic concepts; and repeatedly demonstrates the interrelationships between fact and theory.…