A groundbreaking book–the first to look at the critical “long year” of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from December 1773 to mid-April 1775, from the Boston Tea Party and the First Continental Congress to the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

God occupies our nation’s consciousness, even defining to many what it means to be American. Nonbelievers have often had second-class legal status and have had to fight for their rights as citizens.  The authors, Isaac Kramnick and R. Lawrence Moore, demonstrate in their sharp and convincing work, that avowed atheists were derided since the founding of the nation.

This fascinating biography tells the story of nineteenth-century America through the life of one of its most charismatic and influential characters: Sojourner Truth. In an in-depth account of this amazing activist, the author unravels Sojourner Truth's world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation's most significant reform era. (University of Illinois Press, 2009)

Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Haskalah, The Romantic Movement in Judaism, presents a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between the Haskalah and the experience of political and social emancipation. Most importantly, it challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah provided the philosophical mainspring for Jewish liberalism.

My book, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India, examined the political thought of the first generation of British empire-builders in India. It showed how British officials of the English East India Company tried to legitimize their conquests by appropriating forms and styles of rule from the Mughal empire, the Muslim empire which governed large parts of India before the era of British expansion. 

Uncovering previously unknown episodes and analyzing famous events from a fresh perspective, this book illuminates moments when consumer activism intersected with political and civil rights movements. Glickman also sheds new light on activists’ relationship with the consumer movement, which gave rise to lobbies like the National Consumers League and Consumers Union as well as ill-fated legislation to create a federal Consumer Protection Agency.

In this pioneering study of the ways in which the first settlers defined the power, prerogatives, and responsibilities of the sexes, one of our most incisive historians opens a window onto the world of Colonial America. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Mary Beth Norton tells the story of the Pinion clan, whose two-generation record of theft, adultery, and infanticide may have made them our first dysfunctional family. She reopens the case of Mistress Ann Hibbens, whose church excommunicated her for arguing that God had told husbands to listen to their wives.

Partly a history of penal theory, partly an anthropologically-inspired study of the penal ritual, Seeing Justice Done traces the historical roots of modern capital punishment, and sheds light on the fundamental "disconnect" between the theory and practice of punishment which endures to this day, not only in France but in the Western penal tradition more generally.  

Peter Dear's Scientific Practices in European History, 1200-1800:  A Book of Texts presents and situates a collection of extracts from both widely know texts, by such figures as Copernicus, Newton, and Lavoisier, and lesser known but significant items, all chosen to...highlight the emerging technical preoccupations of...the early modern period.The selection of extracts highlights the emerging technical preoccupations of this period, while the accompanying introductions and annotations make these occasionally complex works accessible to students and non-specialists. 

 Professor Judi Byfield co-edited a new volume of essays with Dorothy Hodgson: Global Africa:  Into the Twenty-First Century. 

Published by University of California Press, this volume documents the significant global connections, circulations and contributions that African people, ideas, and goods have made throughout the world-from the United States and South Asia to Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere.

Maria Cristina Garcia has published The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America (Oxford University Press).  Alan M. Kraut, past president of the Organization of American Historians, states that “This volume stands alone as the best history of U.S. refugee policy in post-Cold War America.  Garcia chronicles the struggles of Russian refuseniks, Chinese dissidents, Rwandans fleeing genocide, as well as Haitian and Cuban boat people among those seeking sanctuary from persecution.

Durba Ghosh's new book, Gentlemanly Terrorists, focuses on an underground  radical political movement in early and mid-twentieth century India and the ways in which political violence against the British colonial state became an important, but historically underemphasized, form of protest. While Gandhi's nonviolent protest movements are often seen to be the hallmark of anticolonial protest, the book follows how the colonial state invested in security and emergency legislation to contain what they felt was an active terrorist threat. 

In this groundbreaking book, Sandra E. Greene explores the lives of three prominent West African slave owners during the age of abolition. These first-published biographies reveal personal and political accomplishments and concerns, economic interests, religious beliefs, and responses to colonial rule in an attempt to understand why the subjects reacted to the demise of slavery as they did.

In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand.

• An intellectual history of subaltern education, a critical analysis of the fate of Black Power ideologies in the post-segregation era, and a portrait of African-American self-activity at the neighborhood level.


• Puts forth a groundbreaking explanation of Black Power's preoccupation with forging a new people. Spans the last four decades of the 20th century with a focus on the 1970s.


 

The Hajj is the single largest agglomeration of human beings on the planet; every year, some three million Muslims now head from their homes to Mecca and Medina to pray in the great mosques of the Arabian desert.  This book chronicles their story from a global vantage, looking at geographies, institutions, and aspirations across the Muslim world as these all relate to the holy pilgrimage.

Prince Prisdang Chumsai (1852–1935) served as Siam's first diplomat to Europe during the most dramatic moment of Siam’s political history, when its independence was threatened by European imperialism. Despite serving with patriotic zeal, he suffered irreparable social and political ruin based on rumors about fiscal corruption, sexual immorality, and political treason. Bones around My Neck pursues the truth behind these rumors, which chased Prisdang out of Siam.

Stories of plots, sham plots, and the citizen-informers who discovered them are at the center of this compelling study of the turbulent decade following the Revolution of 1688. By encouraging informers, imposing loyalty oaths, suspending habeas corpus, and delaying the long-promised reform of treason trial procedure, the Williamite regime protected itself from enemies and cemented its bonds with supporters, but also put its own credibility at risk.

Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE explores how Christians in North Africa between the age of Tertullian and the age of Augustine were selective in identifying as Christian, giving salience to their religious identity only intermittently. By shifting the focus from groups to individuals, Rebillard more broadly questions the existence of bounded, stable, and homogeneous groups based on Christianness.

On the shores of medieval North America, two civilizations — Norse and Native — clash. The descendants of the Vikings who had terrorized Europe break and run, quaking in the face of the unknown. Then a lone woman steps in, acting in a most unpredictable way to turn the tide. She is Freydís Eiríksdóttir, the first in a series of bare-sarked warriors whom this book explores. In their darkest hours, as societies teeter on the edge, these paradoxical saviors emerge to perform an alchemical swap: they substitute domesticated, gendered trouble for an unspeakable alien menace.

This volume considers the military, economic, and political significance of Africa during World War II. The essays feature new research and innovative approaches to the historiography of Africa and bring to the fore issues of race, gender, and labor during the war, topics that have not yet received much critical attention.

This volume, with eight chronologically-arranged chapters and two on globalization, follows historical developments in a wide range of health interventions, including propitiation of disease-inflicting spirits, divination, vitality-cultivating disciplines, herbal remedies, and acupuncture. Inserted vignettes bring to life such diverse arenas of health care as childbirth in the Tang period, Yuan state-established medical schools, and the search for sexual potency in the People’s Republic.

In The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701, Jon Parmenter argues that the extensive spatial mobility engaged in by Haudenosaunee people after their first contact with Europeans represented a geographical expression of Haudenosaunee social, political, and economic priorities. Parmenter drew on archival and published documents in several languages, archaeological data, published Haudenosaunee oral traditions, and GIS technology to reconstruct the Haudenosaunee settlement landscape and the paths of human mobility that built and sustained it. 

Citizens of a Christian Nation brings together for the first time African American and Chinese American religious histories through a multitiered local, regional, national, and even transnational analysis of race, nationalism, and evangelical thought and practice.