History Book List ·

Illinois’s War

The Civil War in Documents

On the eve of the Civil War and after, Illinois was one of the most significant states in the Union. Its history is, in many respects, the history of the Union writ large: its political leaders figured centrally in the war’s origins, progress, and legacies; and its diverse residents made sacrifices and contributions—both on the battlefield and on the home front—that proved essential to Union victory.…

Available January 2013 (est.)

Hero of the Angry Sky

The World War I Diary and Letters of David S. Ingalls, America’s First Naval Ace

Hero of the Angry Sky draws on the unpublished diaries, correspondence, informal memoir, and other personal documents of the U.S. Navy’s only flying “ace” of World War I to tell his unique story.…

Available January 2013 (est.)

Invisible Agents

Spirits in a Central African History

Invisible Agents shows how personal and deeply felt spiritual beliefs can inspire social movements and influence historical change. Conventional historiography concentrates on the secular, materialist, or moral sources of political agency.…

Available November 2012 (est.)

Epidemics

The Story of South Africa’s Five Most Lethal Human Diseases

This is the first history of epidemics in South Africa, lethal episodes that significantly shaped this society over three centuries. Focusing on five devastating diseases between 1713 and today—smallpox, bubonic plague, “Spanish influenza,” polio, and HIV/AIDS—the book probes their origins, their catastrophic courses, and their consequences in both the short and long terms.…

Available September 2012 (est.)

A Brief History of Rights in South Africa

The human rights movement in South Africa’s transition to a postapartheid democracy has been widely celebrated as a triumph for global human rights. It was a key aspect of the political transition, often referred to as a miracle, which brought majority rule and democracy to South Africa.…

Available September 2012 (est.)

Steve Biko

Steve Biko inspired a generation of black South Africans to claim their true identity and refuse to be a part of their own oppression. Through his example, he demonstrated fearlessness and self-esteem, and he led a black student movement countrywide that challenged and thwarted the culture of fear perpetuated by the apartheid regime.…

Available August 2012 (est.)

Spear of the Nation

Umkhonto weSizwe

Umkhonto weSizwe, Spear of the Nation, was arguably the last of the great liberation armies of the twentieth century—but it never got to “march triumphant into Pretoria.” MK—as it was known—was the armed wing of the African National Congress, South Africa’s liberation movement, that challenged the South African apartheid government.…

Available August 2012 (est.)

Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake

Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa

Women and children have been bartered, pawned, bought, and sold within and beyond Africa for longer than records have existed. This important collection examines the ways trafficking in women and children has changed from the aftermath of the “end of slavery” in Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present.…

Available August 2012 (est.)

Standing Our Ground

Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal

Standing Our Ground: Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal examines women’s efforts to end mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. Mountaintop removal coal mining, which involves demolishing the tops of hills and mountains to provide access to coal seams, is one of the most significant environmental threats in Appalachia, where it is most commonly practiced.…

Available August 2012 (est.)

The Untried Life

The Story of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War

Told in unflinching detail, this is the story of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, also known as the Giddings Regiment or the Abolition Regiment, after its founder, radical abolitionist Congressman J.…

Available August 2012 (est.)

Prosperity Far Distant

The Journal of an American Farmer, 1933–1934

Fresh from receiving a doctorate from Cornell University, but unable to find work, Charles Wiltse returned to his family’s 42-acre farm in southern Ohio. There, the Wiltses scratched out a living selling eggs, wood, corn, and other farm goods at prices that were barely enough to keep the farm intact.…

Available August 2012 (est.)

Between the Brown and the Red

Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland

In this study of the relationship of nationalism, communism, authoritarianism, and religion in twentieth-century Poland, Mikołaj Kunicki shows how the country’s communist rulers tried to adapt communism to local traditions, particularly ethnocentric nationalism and Catholicism.…

Available July 2012 (est.)

Justice and Legal Change on the Shores of Lake Erie

A History of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio

Justice and Legal Change on the Shores of Lake Erie explores the many ways that the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio has affected the region, the nation, the development of American law, and American politics.…

Available July 2012 (est.)

Taifa

Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania

Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume.…

Available June 2012 (est.)

Chocolate Islands

Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa.…

A Room of His Own

A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland

In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen’s clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London—the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs.…

African Intellectuals and Decolonization

Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder.…

Degrees of Allegiance

Harassment and Loyalty in Missouri's German-American Community during World War I

Historians have long argued that the Great War eradicated German culture from American soil. Degrees of Allegiance examines the experiences of German-Americans living in Missouri during the First World War, evaluating the personal relationships at the local level that shaped their lives and the way that they were affected by national war effort guidelines.…

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as “indigenous” resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.…

The Jury in Lincoln’s America

In the antebellum Midwest, Americans looked to the law, and specifically to the jury, to navigate the uncertain terrain of a rapidly changing society. During this formative era of American law, the jury served as the most visible connector between law and society.…