Faculty Books
2023
Robin Judd
Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023). An introduction to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war and how these unions helped share the postwar world.
Bart Elmore
Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023). The histories of five southern American firms—Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America— are used to investigate the environmental impact of our have-it-now, fly-by-night, buy-on-credit economy.
David J. Staley & Dominic Endicott
Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). Because colleges attract knowledge workers to a region, the argument is made that we will see a decentralized network of institutions of higher education flourish, acting as cornerstones for the post-pandemic rebuilding of our society and economy.
Heather J. Tanner
Lordship and Governance by the Inheriting Countesses of Boulogne, 1160–1260 (Amsterdam University Press/ARC Humanities Press, 2023). Focusing on the inheriting countesses of Boulogne (1160–1260) and their neighbours in northern France, this monograph investigates the influence of the rise of centralized government on elite women’s power.
David Brakke & David M. Gwynn
The Festal Letters of Athanasius of Alexandria, with the Festal Index and the Historia Acephala (Liverpool University Press, 2023). This book presents the first complete English translation of all the known fragments of the Festal Letters. Written annually to announce the date of Easter, these messages provide a priceless glimpse into how a leading fourth-century bishop confronted the pastoral challenges of a rapidly changing world.
2022
Geoffrey Parker & Colin Martin
Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England's Deliverance in 1588 (Yale University Press, 2022). Looking beyond the events of 1588 to the complex politics which made war between England and Spain inevitable, and at the political and dynastic aftermath, this book deconstructs the many legends to reveal why, ultimately, the bold Spanish mission failed.
Christopher McKnight Nichols & David Milne
Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations, New Histories (Columbia University Press, 2022). This book explores the ideological landscape of international relations from the colonial era to the present and reveals new insights on the role of ideas at the intersection of U.S. foreign and domestic policy and politics.
James E. Genova
Making New, People: Politics, Cinema, and Liberation in Burkina Faso, 1983–1987 (Michigan State University Press, 2022). On August 4, 1983, Captain Thomas Sankara led a coalition to overtake the government of the Republic of Upper Volta, which was renamed Burkina Faso following the coup's success. Genova recounts the revolutionary government’s rise and fall, demonstrating how it embodied the critical transition period in modern African history between the era of decolonization and the dawning of neoliberal capitalism.
Jennifer Eaglin
Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford University Press, 2022). Brazil's sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world. This book offers the first full historical account of the industry's origins and reveals deeper truths about what a global large-scale transition away from fossil fuels might look like and challenges idealized views of green industries.
R. Joseph Parrott
The Tricontinental Revolution: Third World Radicalism and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2022). A major reassessment of the global rise and impact of Tricontinentalism, the militant strand of Third World solidarity that defined the 1960s and '70s as decades of rebellion. Through expert essays, this volume recenters global political debates on the priorities and ideologies of the Global South, providing a new framework, chronology, and tentative vocabulary for understanding the evolution of anti-imperial and decolonial politics.
David J. Staley
Visionary Histories (Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University, 2022). Twenty “histories of the future” that consider a range of topics: the future of artificial intelligence, democracy, capitalism, education, labor and leisure, as well as the future social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. This collection of essays makes the case for the disciplined study of the future via the historical method, and that historians are methodologically well-positioned to anticipate the possible future behaviors of a wide variety of complex systems.
2021
Sarah Van Beurden
Congo en vitrine. Art africain, muséologie et politique. Les musées de Kinshasa et Tervuren (Africamuseum, Tervuren, 2021). A French translation of her book, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture, Van Beurden traces the relationship between the possession, definition, and display of African art and the construction of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy from the late Colonial until the Postcolonial era.
David J. Staley
Historical Imagination (Routledge, 2021). An examination of the threshold between what historians consider to be proper, imagination-free history and the malpractice of excessive imagination. What are the limits of permitted imagination for the historian?
Sara M. Butler
Pain, Penance, and Protest: Peine Forte et Dure in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Using 'strong and hard punishment' as a lens through which to analyze the law and its relationship with Christianity, Butler asks: where do we draw the line between punishment and penance?
Nicholas Breyfogle, David Moon & Alexandra Bekasova
Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (Cambridgeshire: The White Horse Press, 2021). New perspectives on the environmental history of lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule, highlighting the importance of local environments and individual places in understanding the human-nature nexus.
Mytheli Sreenivas
Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (University of Washington Press, 2021). A look at how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform individual bodies and the body politic in India.
Christopher McKnight Nichols, Elizabeth Borgwardt & Andrew Preston
Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021). This collection of leading historians expands the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden strategists as well as strategies.
Bart Elmore
Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021). Elmore unveils the troubling past of Monsanto, the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, and examines how it came to have outsized influence over our food system.
Theodora Dragostinova
The Cold War from the Margins (Cornell University Press, 2021). A reappraisal of the global 1970s from the perspective of a small socialist state―Bulgaria―and its cultural engagements with the Balkans, the West, and the Third World.
David L. Hoffmann
The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2021). An illustration of how the heroic narrative of the war was established in Soviet times and continues to shape war memorialization under Putin, and how that memory is used for political legitimation and patriotic mobilization
Elizabeth Bond
The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2021). Bond offers a novel examination of how French citizens used the information press to form norms of civic discourse and shape the experience of revolution. The result is a nuanced analysis of knowledge production during the Enlightenment.
2020
Nicholas Breyfogle & Peter Mansoor
Nature at War, American Environments and World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2020). World War II was a total and global war that involved the extraction, processing, and use of vast quantities of natural resources. This anthology is the first sustained examination of American involvement in World War II through an environmental lens.
Christopher Otter
Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Otter goes back to the late eighteenth century in Britain, to examine how changing diet choices shifted away from locally produced plant-based nutrition and led to both new types of health problems as well as a large agro-food system that requires more resources than our planet can sustain.
David J. Staley & Stephen M. Gavazzi
Fulfilling the 21st Century Land-Grant Mission: Essays in Honor of The Ohio State University’s Sesquicentennial Commemoration (The Ohio State University Press, 2020). Gathered in honor of The Ohio State University’s sesquicentennial celebration, this collection of essays from authors from many various fields across the university highlights the significant contributions that Ohio State continues to make as part of its twenty-first-century land-grant mission.
Ori Yehudai
Leaving Zion: Jewish Emigration from Palestine and Israel after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Focusing on Jewish out-migration from Palestine and Israel between 1945 and the late 1950s, Yehudai brings to light the ideological, political and social tensions surrounding emigration.
Nicholas Breyfogle & Mark Sokolsky
Readings in Water History (Publisher Cognella Academic Publishing, 2020). These articles illuminate the history of humanity’s relationship with water, waterways, aquatic environments, and ecologies. The text introduces readers to essential questions and themes in water history and provides a wide range of perspectives on how past societies interacted with the waters around them.
Ying Zhang
Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (1368-1644): Creative Environment, Creative Subjects (BRILL, 2020). Approaching the prison as a creative environment and imprisoned officials as creative subjects in Ming China, Zhang introduces important themes at the intersection of premodern Chinese religion, poetry, and visual and material culture.
Jane Hathaway
The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1800, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2020). Hathaway assesses the effects of Ottoman rule on the Arab Lands of Egypt, Greater Syria, Iraq, and Yemen while challenging outmoded perceptions of this period as a demoralizing prelude to the rise of Arab nationalism and Arab nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Scott Levi
The Bukharan Crisis: A Connected History of 18th Century Central Asia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Levi challenges longstanding beliefs that Bukharan Khanate's famine, fiscal downturn, invasions, rebellions and revolution came as a result of the region becoming isolated from early modern globalizing trends.
