History Book List ·

The Borders of Integration

Polish Migrants in Germany and the United States, 1870–1924

By Brian McCook

The issues of immigration and integration are at the forefront of contemporary politics. Yet debates over foreign workers and the desirability of their incorporation into European and American societies too often are discussed without a sense of history.…

Available February 2011 (est.)

Kansas’s War

The Civil War in Documents

Edited by Pearl T. Ponce

When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Kansas was in a unique position. It had been a state for mere weeks, and already its residents were intimately acquainted with civil strife. Since its organization as a territory in 1854, Kansas had been the focus of a national debate over the place of slavery in the Republic.…

Available January 2011 (est.)

In the Shadow of Freedom

The Politics of Slavery in the National Capital

Edited by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon

Few images of early America were more striking, and jarring, than that of slaves in the capital city of the world’s most important free republic. Black slaves served and sustained the legislators, bureaucrats, jurists, cabinet officials, military leaders, and even the presidents who lived and worked there.…

Available December 2010 (est.)

The Demographics of Empire

The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge

Edited by Karl Ittmann, Dennis D. Cordell and Gregory H. Maddox

The Demographics of Empire is a collection of essays examining the multifaceted nature of the colonial science of demography in the last two centuries. The contributing scholars of Africa and the British and French empires focus on three questions: How have historians, demographers, and other social scientists understood colonial populations? What were the demographic realities of African societies and how did they affect colonial systems of power? Finally, how did demographic theories developed in Europe shape policies and administrative structures in the colonies? The essays approach the subject as either broad analyses of major demographic questions in Africa’s history or focused case studies that demonstrate how particular historical circumstances in individual African societies contributed to differing levels of fertility, mortality, and migration.…

Available November 2010 (est.)

Generations Past

Youth in East African History

Edited by Andrew Burton and Hélène Charton-Bigot

Contemporary Africa is demographically characterized above all else by its youthfulness. In East Africa the median age of the population is now a striking 17.5 years, and more than 65 percent of the population is age 24 or under.…

Available September 2010 (est.)

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume IV 1951-1954

Edited by Denton L. Watson

Volume IV of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. covers 1951, the year America entered the Korean War, through 1954, when the NAACP won its Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court declared that segregation was discrimination and thus unconstitutional.…

Available September 2010 (est.)

Trustee for the Human Community

Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization of Africa

Edited by Robert A. Hill and Edmond J. Keller

Ralph J. Bunche (1904–1971), winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, was a key U.S. diplomat in the planning and creation of the United Nations in 1945. In 1947 he was invited to join the permanent UN Secretariat as director of the new Trusteeship Department.…

Nature and History in Modern Italy

Edited by Marco Armiero and Marcus Hall

Is Italy il bel paese—the beautiful country—where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity’s greed and nature’s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator’s vision of Italy.…

Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Edited by Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts and Elizabeth Thornberry

Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa reveals the ways in which domestic space and domestic relationships take on different meanings in African contexts that extend the boundaries of family obligation, kinship, and dependency.…

The Law and the Prophets

Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977

By Daniel R. Magaziner

“No nation can win a battle without faith,” Steve Biko wrote, and as Daniel R. Magaziner demonstrates in The Law and the Prophets, the combination of ideological and theological exploration proved a potent force.…

The Dred Scott Case

Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law

Edited by David Thomas Konig, Paul Finkelman and Christopher Alan Bracey

In 1846 two slaves, Dred and Harriet Scott, filed petitions for their freedom in the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri. As the first true civil rights case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Dred Scott v.…

Making a World after Empire

The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives

Edited by Christopher J. Lee

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world.…

The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy

Edited by M. B. B. Biskupski, James S. Pula and Piotr J. Wróbel

The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy is a series of closely integrated essays that traces the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. It begins with the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland, and continues through changes that marked the postcommunist era of free Poland.…

Do They Miss Me at Home?

The Civil War Letters of William McKnight, Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry

Edited by Donald C. Maness and H. Jason Combs

William McKnight was a member of the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry from September 1862 until his death in June of 1864. During his time of service, McKnight penned dozens of emotion-filled letters, primarily to his wife, Samaria, revealing the struggles of an entire family both before and during the war.…

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr.

Volume Three: NAACP Labor Secretary and Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau, 1946–1950

Edited by Denton L. Watson

Born in Baltimore in 1911, Clarence Mitchell Jr. led the struggle for passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the 1960 Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.…

When Sugar Ruled

Economy and Society in Northwestern Argentina, Tucumán, 1876–1916

By Patricia Juarez–Dappe

Two tropical commodities—coffee and sugar—dominated Latin American export economies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When Sugar Ruled: Economy and Society in Northwestern Argentina, Tucumán, 1876–1916 presents a distinctive case that does not quite fit into the pattern of many Latin American sugar economies.…

African Soccerscapes

How a Continent Changed the World’s Game

By Peter Alegi

From Accra and Algiers to Zanzibar and Zululand, Africans have wrested control of soccer from the hands of Europeans, and through the rise of different playing styles, the rituals of spectatorship, and the presence of magicians and healers, have turned soccer into a distinctively African activity.…

Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College

A Documentary History

By Roland M. Baumann

In 1835 Oberlin became the first institute of higher education to make a cause of racial egalitarianism when it decided to educate students “irrespective of color.” Yet the visionary college’s implementation of this admissions policy was uneven.…

Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic

Edited by Derek R. Peterson

The abolition of the slave trade is normally understood to be the singular achievement of eighteenth-century British liberalism. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic expands both the temporal and the geographic framework in which the history of abolitionism is conceived.…

Sino–Malay Trade and Diplomacy from the Tenth through the Fourteenth Century

By Derek Heng

China has been an important player in the international economy for two thousand years and has historically exerted enormous influence over the development and nature of political and economic affairs in the regions beyond its borders, especially its neighbors.…