History Book List ·

When Sugar Ruled

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

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.…

Ohio’s Kingmaker

Mark Hanna, Man and Myth

For a decade straddling the turn of the twentieth century, Mark Hanna was one of the most famous men in America. Portrayed as the puppet master controlling the weak-willed William McKinley, Hanna was loved by most Republicans and reviled by Democrats, in large part because of the way he was portrayed by the media of the day.…

African Soccerscapes

How a Continent Changed the World’s Game

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

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.…

Healing the Herds

Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine

During the early 1990s, the ability of dangerous diseases to pass between animals and humans was brought once more to the public consciousness. These concerns continue to raise questions about how livestock diseases have been managed over time and in different social, economic, and political circumstances.…

Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic

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

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.…

The Game of Conservation

International Treaties to Protect the World’s Migratory Animals

The Game of Conservation is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable examination of nature protection around the world. Twentieth-century nature conservation treaties often originated as attempts to regulate the pace of killing rather than as attempts to protect animal habitat.…

Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter

The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914–1939

When an independent Poland reappeared on the map of Europe after World War I, it was widely regarded as the most Catholic country on the continent, as “Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter.” All the same, the relations of the Second Polish Republic with the Church—both its representatives inside the country and the Holy See itself—proved far more difficult than expected.…

The Land beyond the Mists

Essays In Identity & Authority In Precolonial Congo and Rwanda

The horrific tragedies of Central Africa in the 1990s riveted the attention of the world. But these crises did not occur in a historical vacuum. By peering through the mists of the past, the case studies presented in The Land Beyond the Mists illustrate the significant advances to have taken place since decolonization in our understanding of the pre-colonial histories of Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Congo.…

Indiana’s War

The Civil War in Documents

Indiana’s War is a primary source collection featuring the writings of Indiana’s citizens during the Civil War era. Using private letters, official records, newspaper articles, and other original sources, the volume presents the varied experiences of Indiana’s participants in the war both on the battlefield and on the home front.…

Colonial Meltdown

Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression

Historians of colonial Africa have largely regarded the decade of the Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. In Colonial Meltdown, Moses E. Ochonu challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the determined, at times violent, yet instructive responses of Northern Nigeria’s chiefs, farmers, laborers, artisans, women, traders, and embryonic elites to the British colonial mismanagement of the Great Depression.…

Children in Slavery through the Ages

Significant numbers of the people enslaved throughout world history have been children. The vast literature on slavery has grown to include most of the history of this ubiquitous practice, but nearly all of it concentrates on the adult males whose strong bodies and laboring capacities preoccupied the masters of the modern Americas.…

Missouri’s War

The Civil War in Documents

Civil War Missouri stood at the crossroads of America. As the most Southern-leaning state in the Middle West, Missouri faced a unique dilemma. The state formed the gateway between east and west, as well as one of the borders between the two contending armies.…

Recasting the Past

History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa

The study of intellectual history in Africa is in its infancy. We know very little about what Africa’s thinkers made of their times. Recasting the Past brings one field of intellectual endeavor into view.…

Wartime in Burma

A Diary, January to June 1942

This diary, begun after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and covering the invasion of Burma up to June 1942, is a moving account of the dilemmas faced by the well-loved and prolific Burmese author Theippan Maung Wa (a pseudonym of U Sein Tin) and his family.…

Philena’s Friendship Quilt

A Quaker Farewell to Ohio

Chenoweth’s research to discover the story behind a Quaker signature quilt made in Columbiana County, Ohio, in 1853 revealed not only the identity of the quilt recipient and details of her life and community, but also a striking feature of the quilt itself—a “hidden” design element created by the deliberate placement of names on the quilt’s surface. In Philena’s Friendship Quilt, Lynda Salter Chenoweth reveals the value of signature quilts as historic and social documents waiting to be read.

Wanted—Correspondence

Women’s Letters to a Union Soldier

Wanted-Correspondence is a unique collection of more than 150 letters written to an Ohio serviceman during the American Civil War offers glimpses of women’s lives as they waited, worked, and wrote from the Ohio home front.…

Incidental Architect

William Thornton and the Cultural Life of Early Washington, D.C., 1794–1828

While the majority of scholarship on early Washington focuses on its political and physical development, in Incidental Architect Gordon S. Brown describes the intellectual and social scene of the 1790s and early 1800s through the lives of a prominent couple whose cultural aspirations served as both model and mirror for the city’s own.…

Miami University, 1809–2009

Bicentennial Perspectives

From its start in the nineteenth century as a small midwestern college to its transformation into a twenty-first-century international university, Miami University has stood for two centuries as a model of public higher education.…