History Book List ·

An Amulet of Greek Earth

Generations of Immigrant Folk Culture

The boys and men who left their Greek valley and mountain villages in the early 1900s for America came with amulets their mothers had made for them. Some were miniature sacks attached to a necklace; more often they were merely a square of fabric enclosing the values of their lives: a piece of a holy book or a sliver of the True Cross representing their belief in Greek Orthodoxy; a thyme leaf denoting their wild terrain; a blue bead to ward off the Evil Eye; and a pinch of Greek earth.…

The Anatomy of a South African Genocide

The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples

In 1998 David Kruiper, the leader of the ‡Khomani San who today live in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, lamented, “We have been made into nothing.” His comment applies equally to the fate of all the hunter-gatherer societies of the Cape Colony who were destroyed by the impact of European colonialism.…

Apartheid’s Genesis

Apartheid is synonymous in most people's minds with a virulent form of racial ideology and social engineering. Yet ideologies of racial domination and segregation long preceded apartheid, and cannot by themselves explain the shift in racial domination that apartheid involved.…

Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984

Ariel Armony focuses, in this study, on the role played by Argentina in the anti–Communist crusade in Central America. This systematic examination of Argentina’s involvement in the Central American drama of the late 1970s and early 1980s fine–tunes our knowledge of a major episode of the Cold War era.…

Art and Empire

The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860

The subject matter and iconography of much of the art in the U.S. Capitol forms a remarkably coherent program of the early course of North American empire, from discovery and settlement to the national development and westward expansion that necessitated the subjugation of the indigenous peoples.…

Art As Image

Prints and Promotion in Cincinnati, Ohio

Cincinnati was a major printing and publishing center from the earliest days of the Old Northwest Territory. The spectacular technological and artistic developments in the 19th-century printing trade nationally were reflected in the Cincinnati printmakers' achievements, many of which were promotional in nature.…

Athens, Ohio

The Village Years

Two hundred years ago, Rufus Putnam, leader of the Ohio Company, sent eleven men west into the Ohio Country to found what is now the City of Athens. As one of the oldest communities in Ohio, Athens has a heritage rich in history and lore.…

Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979

Few places in the world carry as heavy a burden of history as Auschwitz. Recognized and remembered as the most prominent site of Nazi crimes, Auschwitz has had tremendous symbolic weight in the postwar world.…

Barns of the Midwest

For many, the barn is the symbol of the Midwestern United States. It represents tangible wealth, solid citizenship, industry, stability, and other agrarian values associated with its conservative, Anglo-Saxon settlers.…

The Bassett Women

Grace McClure has created an even-handed account of the Bassets. Drawing on interviews with surviving family, friends and enemies, on memoirs, and on oral and written records from local libraries, newspapers, and archives she presents believable, life-size characters who respond realistically to the demands of pioneer life.…

Battle of Kosovo

The Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is generally considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating the Serbian Empire’s defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late fourteenth century, these poems and fragments have been known for centuries in Eastern Europe.…

Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin

On January 1, 1928, Bazhanov escaped from the Soviet Union and became for many years the most important member of a new breed—the Soviet defector. At the age of 28, he had become an invaluable aid to Stalin and the Politburo, and had he stayed in Stalin’s service, Bazhanov might well have enjoyed the same meteoric careers as the man who replaced him when he left, Georgy Malenkov.…

Being Maasai

Ethnicity and Identity In East Africa

Everyone “knows” the Maasai as proud pastoralists who once dominated the Rift Valley from northern Kenya to central Tanzania. But many people who identity themselves as Maasai, or who speak Maa, are not pastoralist at all, but farmers and hunters.…

Being “Dutch” in the Indies

A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920

Being “Dutch” in the Indies portrays Dutch colonial territories in Asia not as mere societies under foreign occupation but rather as a “Creole empire.” In telling the story of the Creole empire, the authors draw on government archives, newspapers, and literary works as well as genealogical studies that follow the fortunes of individual families over several generations.…

The Benefits of Famine

A Political Economy of Famine & Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983–89

The conflict in Darfur had a precursor in Sudan’s famines of the 1980s and 1990s. David Keen’s The Benefits of Famine presents a new and chilling interpretation of the causes of war-induced famine.…

Between Sea and Sahara

An Algerian Journal

Between Sea and Sahara gives us Algeria in the third decade of colonization. Written in the 1850s by the gifted painter and extraordinary writer Eugene Fromentin, the many-faceted work is travelogue, fiction, stylized memoir, and essay on art.…

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.)

Between the Sea and the Lagoon

An Eco-social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana c. 1850 to Recent Times

This study offers a “social interpretation of environmental process” for the coastal lowlands of southeastern Ghana. The Anlo-Ewe, sometimes hailed as the quintessential sea fishermen of the West African coast, are a previously non-maritime people who developed a maritime tradition.…

The Bewitchment of Silver

The Social Economy of Mining in Nineteenth-Century Peru

Mining was crucial for the development of nineteenth-century Peru. Silver mining in particular was a key to both the export sector and the creation of an internal market and national development. The Bewitchment of Silver is an inquiry into the impact of that mineral on a national economy in a country at the periphery of nineteenth-century capitalism.…

Beyond Hill and Hollow

Original Readings in Appalachian Women’s Studies

Women’s studies unites with Appalachian studies in Beyond Hill and Hollow, the first book to focus exclusively on studies of Appalachia’s women. Featuring the work of historians, linguists, sociologists, performance artists, literary critics, theater scholars, and others, the collection portrays the diverse cultures of Appalachian women.…