History Book List ·

Child Slaves in the Modern World

Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller

Child Slaves in the Modern World is the second of two volumes that examine the distinctive uses and experiences of children in slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of previously unpublished essays exposes the global victimization of child slaves from the period of abolition of legal slavery in the nineteenth century to the human rights era of the twentieth century.…

Environment at the Margins

Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa

Edited by Byron Caminero-Santangelo and Garth Myers

Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers.…

Cultivating the Colonies

Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

Edited by Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen and Karen Oslund

The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature reveals the nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exotic nature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally “got their hands dirty” in the business of empire.…

Mad Dogs and Meerkats

A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa

By Karen Brown

Through the ages, rabies has exemplified the danger of diseases that transfer from wild animals to humans and their domestic stock. In South Africa, rabies has been on the rise since the latter part of the twentieth century despite the availability of postexposure vaccines and regular inoculation campaigns for dogs.…

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.…

Pachakutik and the Rise and Decline of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement

By Kenneth J. Mijeski and Scott H. Beck

The mobilization of militant indigenous politics is one of the most important stories in Latin American studies today. In this critical work, Kenneth J. Mijeski and Scott H. Beck examine the rise and decline of Ecuador’s leading indigenous party, Pachakutik, as it tried to transform the state into a participative democracy.…

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. Although it had been a state for mere weeks, its residents were already 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.…

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.…

The Return of the Galon King

History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma

By Maitrii Aung–Thwin

In late 1930, on a secluded mountain overlooking the rural paddy fields of British Burma, a peasant leader named Saya San crowned himself King and inaugurated a series of uprisings that would later erupt into one of the largest anti-colonial rebellions in Southeast Asian history.…

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.…

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume IV

Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau, 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.…

Resistance on the National Stage

Theater and Politics in Late New Order Indonesia

By Michael H. Bodden

Resistance on the National Stage analyzes the ways in which, between 1985 and 1998, modern theater prac­titioners in Indonesia contributed to a rising movement of social protest against the long-governing New Order regime of President Suharto.…

Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century

Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution

Edited by Mahir Şaul and Ralph A. Austen

African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state. Beginning in1969 the biennial Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), held in Burkina Faso, became the major showcase for these films.…

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.…

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.…