History Book List ·

Terrible Swift Sword

The Legacy of John Brown

More than two centuries after his birth and almost a century and a half after his death, the legendary life and legacy of John Brown go marching on. Variously deemed martyr, madman, monster, terrorist, and saint, he remains one of the most controversial figures in America’s history.…

Locating Southeast Asia

Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space

Southeast Asia summons images of tropical forests and mountains, islands and seas, and a multitude of languages, cultures, and religions. Yet the area has never formed a unified political vision nor has it developed cultural unity.…

We Are Fighting the World

A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947-1999

Since the late 1940s, a violent African criminal society known as the Marashea has operated in and around South Africa’s gold mining areas. With thousands of members involved in drug smuggling, extortion, and kidnapping, the Marashea was more influential in the day-to-day lives of many black South Africans under apartheid than were agents of the state.…

African Underclass

Urbanisation, Crime, & Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam

African Underclass examines the social, political, and administrative repercussions of rapid urban growth in Dar es Salaam. The origins of an often coercive response to urbanization in postcolonial Tanzania are traced back to the colonial period.…

Imperial Gullies

Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho

Once the grain basket for South Africa, much of Lesotho has become a scarred and degraded landscape. The nation’s spectacular erosion and gullying have concerned environmentalists and conservationists for more than half a century.…

Coal and Culture

Opera Houses in Appalachia

Opera houses were fixtures of Appalachian life from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s. Most towns and cities had at least one opera house during this golden age. Coal mining and railroads brought travelers, money, and change to the region.…

No Peace, No War

An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts

A rash of small wars erupted after the Cold War ended in Africa, the Balkans, and other parts of the former communist world. The wars were in “inter-zones,” the spaces left where weak states had withdrawn or collapsed.…

Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States 1990—2001

The last decade of the twentieth century brought a maturing of the new racial and ethnic communities in the United States and the emergence of diversity and multiculturalism as dominant fields of discourse in legal, educational, and cultural contexts.…

A Second Voice

A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio

Doctors of osteopathy today practice side by side with medical doctors, employing the same diagnostic and curative tools of scientific—with a difference. A Second Voice: A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio is the story of that difference.…

The History of Ohio Law

History of Ohio Law is a complete sourcebook on the origin and development of Ohio law and its relationship to society. A model for work in this field, it is the starting point for any investigation of the subject.…

The Risks of Knowledge

Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990

In February 1990 assailants murdered Kenya's distinguished Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Robert Ouko. The horror of the attack, the images of his mutilated and burned corpse, the evidence of a notorious cover-up, and the revelations of the pressures, conflicts, and fears he faced in his last weeks have engaged Kenya's publics for years.…

Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa

Conceived by General Sir Robert Baden-Powell as a way to reduce class tensions in Edwardian Britain, scouting evolved into an international youth movement. It offered a vision of romantic outdoor life as a cure for disruption caused by industrialization and urbanization.…

The Exile Mission

The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956

At midcentury, two distinct Polish immigrant groups—those Polish Americans who were descendants of economic immigrants from the turn of the twentieth century and the Polish political refugees who chose exile after World War II and the communist takeover in Poland—faced an uneasy challenge to reconcile their concepts of responsibility toward the homeland.…

Music Hall and Modernity

The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture

The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare.…

Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa

The politics of identity and ethnicity will remain a fundamental characteristic of African modernity. For this reason, historians and anthropologists have joined political scientists in a discussion about the ways in which democracy can develop in multicultural societies.…

The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume VIII

“Liberty under Law” and Selected Supreme Court Opinions

William Howard Taft’s presidency (1909-1913), succeeding Theodore Roosevelt’s, was mired in bitter partisan fighting, and Taft sometimes blundered politically. However, this son of Cincinnati assumed his true calling when President Warren G.…

Islam and the State in Indonesia

Since the unraveling of Western colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, Muslim nations have struggled to reconcile Islamic ideas and political movements with the state. In Indonesia, in particular, Islam and the state have long been at an impasse.…

Portugal and Africa

Portugal was the first European nation to assert itself aggressively in African affairs. David Birmingham's Portugal and Africa, a collection of uniquely accessible historical essays, surveys this colonial encounter from its earliest roots.…

Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid

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.…

American Pantheon

Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol

Like the ancient Roman Pantheon, the U.S. Capitol was designed by its political and aesthetic arbiters to memorialize the virtues, events, and persons most representative of the nation's ideals—an attempt to raise a particular version of the nation's founding to the level of myth.…