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Taking History to Heart
The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements
James Green
University of Massachusetts Press, 2000
Deftly blending autobiography and history, James Green here reflects on thirty years as an activist, educator, and historian. He recounts how he became deeply immersed in political protest and in recovering and preserving the history of progressive social movements, and how the two are linked. His book, written in an engaging and accessible style, tells powerful stories of people in struggle, framed by the personal account of his own development. As a historian, Green gives voice to generations of Americans who banded together to fight for social justice. His subjects range from the martyrs of the Haymarket tragedy to the Bread and Roses strikers of 1912, from depression-era struggles for democracy to the civil rights crusaders, from recent Rainbow Coalition campaigns to the latest union organizing drives. As an activist, Green describes how his participation in the civil rights and labor movements of our own time has transformed his life, first as a student and radical scholar in the 1960s, then as a public historian and teacher of working-class students. He also describes his efforts to break free from academic confinement and "tell movement stories in public," in an attempt to offer hope and counsel to those still fighting for equality and fairness. He concludes with a revealing look at how awareness of past social activism has contributed to the revival of the labor movement during the last ten years, an effort in which Green has been vigorously engaged.
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Taking Sides in Revolutionary New Jersey
Caught in the Crossfire
Maxine N. Lurie
Rutgers University Press, 2022
The American Revolution in New Jersey lasted eight long years, during which many were caught in the middle of a vicious civil war. Residents living in an active war zone took stands that varied from “Loyalist” to “Patriot” to neutral and/or "trimmer" (those who changed sides for a variety of reasons). Men and women, Blacks and whites, Native Americans, and those from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, with different religious affiliations all found themselves in this difficult middle ground. When taking sides, sometimes family was important, sometimes religion, or political principles; the course of the war and location also mattered. Lurie analyzes the difficulties faced by prisoners of war, the refugees produced by the conflict, and those Loyalists who remained, left as exiles, or surprisingly later returned. Their stories are interesting, often dramatic, and include examples of those literally caught in the crossfire. They illustrate the ways in which this was an extremely difficult time and place to live. In the end more of the war was fought in New Jersey than elsewhere, resulting in the highest number of casualties, and a great deal of physical damage. The costs were high no matter what side individuals took. Taking Sides uses numerous brief biographies to illustrate the American Revolution’s complexity; it quotes from documents, pamphlets, diaries, letters, and poetry, a variety of sources to provide insight into the thoughts and reactions of those living through it all. It focuses on people rather than battles and provides perspective for the difficult choices we make in our own times.

Supplemental Instructor Resources for Taking Sides in Revolutionary New Jersey:
Questions (https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/19144155/Taking-Sides-Supplementary-Instructor-Resources-Questions.pdf)
Bibliography (https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/19144154/Taking-Sides-Supplementary-Instructor-Resources-Bibliography.pdf)
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Teachers of History in the Universities of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland 2017
Compiled by Lauren De'Ath and Emily Morrell
University of London Press, 2017
Lists over 3,000 people teaching history in United Kingdom and Irish universities and colleges of higher education Gives full degrees and honours for each teacher, with the teaching position held Describes each individual’s teaching area and research interests Supplies the address, telephone and fax number of all departments of history Includes email addresses for the majority of individuals Gives website addresses for all universities with history departments The online version of Teachers of History, available on the IHR website, can be searched to discover all teachers engaged in particular types of history, geographical area and period, or any combination of these.
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Teaching History in the Digital Age
T. Mills Kelly
University of Michigan Press, 2013
Although many humanities scholars have been talking and writing about the transition to the digital age for more than a decade, only in the last few years have we seen a convergence of the factors that make this transition possible: the spread of sufficient infrastructure on campuses, the creation of truly massive databases of humanities content, and a generation of students that has never known a world without easy Internet access.
 
Teaching History in the Digital Age serves as a guide for practitioners on how to fruitfully employ the transformative changes of digital media in the research, writing, and teaching of history. T. Mills Kelly synthesizes more than two decades of research in digital history, offering practical advice on how to make best use of the results of this synthesis in the classroom and new ways of thinking about pedagogy in the digital humanities.

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Technology and the Historian
Transformations in the Digital Age
Adam Crymble
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Charting the evolution of practicing digital history

Historians have seen their field transformed by the digital age. Research agendas, teaching and learning, scholarly communication, the nature of the archive—all have undergone a sea change that in and of itself constitutes a fascinating digital history. Yet technology's role in the field's development remains a glaring blind spot among digital scholars.

Adam Crymble mines private and web archives, social media, and oral histories to show how technology and historians have come together. Using case studies, Crymble merges histories and philosophies of the field, separating issues relevant to historians from activities in the broader digital humanities movement. Key themes include the origin myths of digital historical research; a history of mass digitization of sources; how technology influenced changes in the curriculum; a portrait of the self-learning system that trains historians and the problems with that system; how blogs became a part of outreach and academic writing; and a roadmap for the continuing study of history in the digital era.

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Telling It Like It Wasn’t
The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction
Catherine Gallagher
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasy or as pop culture fodder, but in Telling It Like It Wasn’t, Catherine Gallagher takes the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. She doesn’t take a moral or normative stand on the practice, but focuses her attention on how it works and to what ends—a quest that takes readers on a fascinating tour of literary and historical criticism.

Gallagher locates the origins of contemporary counterfactual history in eighteenth-century Europe, where the idea of other possible historical worlds first took hold in philosophical disputes about Providence before being repurposed by military theorists as a tool for improving the art of war. In the next century, counterfactualism became a legal device for deciding liability, and lengthy alternate-history fictions appeared, illustrating struggles for historical justice. These early motivations—for philosophical understanding, military improvement, and historical justice—are still evident today in our fondness for counterfactual tales. Alternate histories of the Civil War and WWII abound, but here, Gallagher shows how the counterfactual habit of replaying the recent past often shapes our understanding of the actual events themselves. The counterfactual mode lets us continue to envision our future by reconsidering the range of previous alternatives. Throughout this engaging and eye-opening book, Gallagher encourages readers to ask important questions about our obsession with counterfactual history and the roots of our tendency to ask “What if…?”
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Telling Wonders
Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus
Rosaria Munson
University of Michigan Press, 2001

As he explores the causes of the East-West conflict from its most remote antecedents, Herodotus includes conflicting traditions about different historical periods as well as apparently tangential descriptions of the customs of faraway peoples. What was his aim in combining such diverse material? Rosaria Vignolo Munson argues that Herodotus' aim was two-fold: to use historical narrative to illuminate the present and to describe barbarian customs so that the Greeks might understand themselves.

Herodotus assumes the role of advisor to his audience, acting as a master of metaphor and oracular speech and as an intellectual fully aware of new philosophical and political trends. By comparing, interpreting, and evaluating facts through time and space or simply by pointing them out as objects of "wonder," he teaches that correct political action is linked to an appropriate approach to foreigners and additional "others." Munson relies on traditional scholarship and modern studies in narratology and related critical fields to distinguish between narrative and metanarrative, providing a framework for analyzing the construction of Herodotus' discourse and his presentation of himself through it.

Munson's work will be useful to classicists and ancient historians and will also engage anthropologists interested in cultural interaction and notions of ethnicity and literary critics interested in narrative constructions.

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Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire
Creating an Imperial Commons
Antionette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Combining insights from imperial studies and transnational book history, this provocative collection opens new vistas on both fields through ten accessible essays, each devoted to a single book. Contributors revisit well-known works associated with the British empire, including Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Thomas Macaulay's History of England, Charles Pearson's National Life and Character, and Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys. They explore anticolonial texts in which authors such as C. L. R. James and Mohandas K. Gandhi chipped away at the foundations of imperial authority, and they introduce books that may be less familiar to students of empire. Taken together, the essays reveal the dynamics of what the editors call an "imperial commons," a lively, empire-wide print culture. They show that neither empire nor book were stable, self-evident constructs. Each helped to legitimize the other.

Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Elleke Boehmer, Catherine Hall, Isabel Hofmeyr, Aaron Kamugisha, Marilyn Lake, Charlotte Macdonald, Derek Peterson, Mrinalini Sinha, Tridip Suhrud, André du Toit
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Texan Identities
Moving beyond Myth, Memory, and Fallacy in Texas History
Light Townsend Cummins
University of North Texas Press, 2016

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Textual Rivals
Self-Presentation in Herodotus’ Histories
David Branscome
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Textual Rivals studies some of the most debated issues in Herodotean scholarship. One such is Herodotus’ self-presentation: the conspicuousness of his authorial persona is one of the most remarkable features of his Histories. So frequently does he interject first-person comments into the narrative that Herodotus at times almost becomes a character within his own text.

Important issues are tied to Herodotus’ self-presentation. First is the narrator’s relationship to truth: to what extent does he expect readers to trust his narrative? While judgments regarding Herodotus’ overall veracity have often been damning, scholars have begun to concentrate on how Herodotus presents his truthfulness. Second is the precise genre Herodotus means to create with his work. Excluding the anachronistic term historian, exactly what would Herodotus have called himself, as author? Third is the presence of “self-referential” characters, whose actions often mirror Herodotus’ as narrator/researcher, in the Histories.

David Branscome’s investigative text points to the rival inquirers in Herodotus’ Histories as a key to unraveling these interpretive problems. The rival inquirers are self-referential characters Herodotus uses to further his authorial self-presentation. Through the contrast Herodotus draws between his own exacting standards as an inquirer and the often questionable standards of those rivals, Herodotus underlines just how truthful readers should find his own work.

Textual Rivals speaks to those interested in Greek history and historiography, narratology, and ethnography. Those in the growing ranks of Herodotus fans will find much to invite and intrigue.

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Theodore H. White and Journalism As Illusion
Joyce Hoffmann
University of Missouri Press, 1995

In this groundbreaking study, Joyce Hoffmann examines a critical twenty-five-year period in the work of one of the most influential journalists of the twentieth century. Theodore H. White was already a celebrated reporter when Jacqueline Kennedy summoned him for an exclusive interview in the aftermath of her husband's assassination. With her help, White would preserve what the First Lady claimed had been John F. Kennedy's vision of the New Frontier as an incarnation of that wistful, romantic kingdom--Camelot. Over the years, friends and advisers to Kennedy declared that they had never heard the president speak of Camelot. But White's article, which ran in Life magazine, created a myth that still endures in the popular consciousness.

That story was just one of many by Theodore White that had a lasting impact on the nation. As a correspondent for several of the country's most popular magazines, he covered the crucial events of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. His best-selling book The Making of the President 1960 changed political reporting forever.

A gifted and likable man with a remarkable skill for ingratiating himself with others, White earned the confidence of key political, military, and diplomatic leaders. First in the Far East, later in Europe, and finally in Washington, D.C., he became a confidant and adviser rather than an adversary to the figures he covered for the news, following a pattern set by elite journalists. Even as he played the impartial reporter, White kept secrets in order to maintain access to his important sources, and he occasionally allowed his subjects, including John F. Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller, to make changes in his work before publication.

Clinging to the illusion of objectivity, White--like other leading journalists in the postwar years--wrote about the world not as it was but as he believed it ought to be. Hoffmann relates the little-known episode in White's career when he intentionally obscured the truth about Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt and inept Nationalist government because he believed that undermining China's cause would be "a disservice to democracy."

No other book so thoroughly documents how a first-rank journalist can become a political insider and distort the news without losing the gloss of impartiality that is supposed to accompany the profession. Impressively researched, skillfully written, Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion is an unflinching look at a key figure in the history of American journalism and at the profession itself.

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The Theory of German Word Order from the Renaissance to the Present
Aldo Scaglione
University of Minnesota Press, 1981

The Theory of German Word Order from the Renaissance to the Present was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The uniquely systematic character of German word order and sentence structure has long been recognized as an important feature of the language and of its literary uses. This book is the first comprehensive survey of the way theorists and stylists have interpreted these features through the centuries. Aldo Scaglione contends that the story of this theoretical awareness is part of the emerging cultural and literary consciousness of the German nation, as well as a testing ground for contemporary linguistic typology.

German speculation on the nature of a national language is, to Scaglione, best understood as a dialogue with the prevailing models of Latin, Italian, French, and English. His account of the debates over German word order is thus grounded in the complex historical circumstances from which they emerge: Renaissance grammarians took stock of German divergencies from the Latin cultural model, and those in the seventeenth century faced the challenges of French rationalism, nineteenth-century Romanticism and the many linguistic movements of the twentieth century have all cast new light upon the peculiarities of German sentence structure. Readers interested in historical syntax, rhetorical traditions, and the history of the German language will value both Scaglione's wide-ranging knowledge and his lively style.

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These Valiant Dead
Past Shakespeare'S Histories
Robert C. Jones
University of Iowa Press, 1991

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Thinking About History
Sarah Maza
University of Chicago Press, 2017
What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That's the animating question of Sarah Maza’s Thinking About History, a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and controversies that shape it.

Designed for the classroom, Thinking About History is organized around big questions: Whose history do we write, and how does that affect what stories get told and how they are told? How did we come to view the nation as the inevitable context for history, and what happens when we move outside those boundaries? What is the relation among popular, academic, and public history, and how should we evaluate sources? What is the difference between description and interpretation, and how do we balance them? Maza provides choice examples in place of definitive answers, and the result is a book that will spark classroom discussion and offer students a view of history as a vibrant, ever-changing field of inquiry that is thoroughly relevant to our daily lives.
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Thinking in the Past Tense
Eight Conversations
Alexander Bevilacqua and Frederic Clark
University of Chicago Press, 2019
If the vibrancy on display in Thinking in the Past Tense is any indication, the study of intellectual history is enjoying an unusually fertile period in both Europe and North America. This collection of conversations with leading scholars brims with insights from such diverse fields as the history of science, the reception of classical antiquity, book history, global philology, and the study of material culture. The eight practitioners interviewed here specialize in the study of the early modern period (c. 1400–1800), for the last forty years a crucial laboratory for testing new methods in intellectual history. The lively conversations don’t simply reveal these scholars’ depth and breadth of thought; they also disclose the kind of trade secrets that historians rarely elucidate in print. Thinking in the Past Tense offers students and professionals alike a rare tactile understanding of the practice of intellectual history. Here is a collectively drawn portrait of the historian’s craft today.
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The Thirty-Year Genocide
Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924
Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi
Harvard University Press, 2019

A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year
A Spectator Book of the Year


“A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.”
Times Literary Supplement


“Brilliantly researched and written…casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects…Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.”
—Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation.

“A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.”
—Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review

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This Corner of Canaan
Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell
Richard B. McCaslin
University of North Texas Press, 2013

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This Land Was Mexican Once
Histories of Resistance from Northern California
By Linda Heidenreich
University of Texas Press, 2007

The territory of Napa County, California, contains more than grapevines. The deepest roots belong to Wappo-speaking peoples, a group whose history has since been buried by the stories of Spanish colonizers, Californios (today's Latinos), African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Euro Americans. Napa's history clearly is one of co-existence; yet, its schoolbooks tell a linear story that climaxes with the arrival of Euro Americans. In "This Land was Mexican Once," Linda Heidenreich excavates Napa's subaltern voices and histories to tell a complex, textured local history with important implications for the larger American West, as well.

Heidenreich is part of a new generation of scholars who are challenging not only the old, Euro-American depiction of California, but also the linear method of historical storytelling—a method that inevitably favors the last man writing. She first maps the overlapping histories that comprise Napa's past, then examines how the current version came to dominate—or even erase—earlier events. So while history, in Heidenreich's words, may be "the stuff of nation-building," it can also be "the stuff of resistance." Chapters are interspersed with "source breaks"—raw primary sources that speak for themselves and interrupt the linear, Euro-American telling of Napa's history. Such an inclusive approach inherently acknowledges the connections Napa's peoples have to the rest of the region, for the linear history that marginalizes minorities is not unique to Napa. Latinos, for instance, have populated the American West for centuries, and are still shaping its future. In the end, "This Land was Mexican Once" is more than the story of Napa, it is a multidimensional model for reflecting a multicultural past.

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This Vast Book of Nature
Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire's White Mountains, 1784-1911
Pavel Cenkl
University of Iowa Press, 2006
This Vast Book of Nature is a careful, engaging, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the ways in which the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire---and, by implication, other wild places---have been written into being by different visitors, residents, and developers from the post-Revolutionary era to the days of high tourism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on tourist brochures, travel accounts, pictorial representations, fiction and poetry, local histories, journals, and newspapers, Pavel Cenkl gauges how Americans have arranged space for political and economic purposes and identified it as having value beyond the economic. Starting with an exploration of Jeremy Belknap’s 1784 expedition to Mount Washington, which Cenkl links to the origins of tourism in the White Mountains, to the transformation of touristic and residential relationships to landscape, This Vast Book of Nature explores the ways competing visions of the landscape have transformed the White Mountains culturally and physically, through settlement, development, and---most recently---preservation, a process that continues today.
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Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929)
refashioning history for the twentieth century
Edited by Joel T. Rosenthal and Caroline M. Barron
University of London Press, 2019
Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929) was arguably the most prolific English medieval historian of the early twentieth century. The son of an unsuccessful publican, he was described at his Oxford scholarship exam as ‘uncouth and untidy’; however he went on to publish hundreds of books throughout his distinguished career with a legacy that extended well beyond the academy. Tout pioneered the use of archival research, welcomed women into academia and augmented the University of Manchester’s growing reputation for pioneering research. This book presents the first full assessment of Tout’s life and work, from his early career at Lampeter, to his work in Manchester and his wide-ranging service to the study of history. Selected essays take a fresh and critical look at Tout’s own historical writing and discuss how his research shaped, and continues to shape, our understanding of the middle ages, particularly the fourteenth century. The book concludes with a personal reflection on Tout by his grandson, Tom Sharp.
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The Three Axial Ages
Moral, Material, Mental
Torpey, John
Rutgers University Press, 2017
How should we think about the “shape” of human history since the birth of cities, and where are we headed? Sociologist and historian John Torpey proposes that the “Axial Age” of the first millennium BCE, when some of the world’s major religious and intellectual developments first emerged, was only one of three such decisive periods that can be used to directly affect present social problems, from economic inequality to ecological destruction.
 
Torpey’s argument advances the idea that there are in fact three “Axial Ages,” instead of one original Axial Age and several subsequent, smaller developments. Each of the three ages contributed decisively to how humanity lives, and the difficulties it faces. The earliest, or original, Axial Age was a moral one; the second was material, and revolved around the creation and use of physical objects; and the third is chiefly mental, and focused on the technological. While there are profound risks and challenges, Torpey shows how a worldview that combines the strengths of all three ages has the potential to usher in a period of exceptional human freedom and possibility.
 
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The Threshold
The Rhetoric of Historiography in Early Medieval China
Zeb Raft
Harvard University Press, 2023

What happens when historiography—the way historical events are committed to writing—shapes historical events as they occur? How do we read biography when it is truly “life-writing,” its subjects fully engaged with the historiographical rhetoric that would record their words and deeds?

The Threshold, a study of the culture of historiography in early medieval China, explores these questions through the lens of the History of Liu-Song, a dynastic history compiled in 488 and covering the first three-quarters of the fifth century. Rhetoric courses through early medieval historiography: from the way a historian framed history for readers to the political machinations contained within historical narratives, from the active use of rhetorical techniques to the passive effect that embedded discourses exercised on historian, historical actor, and reader alike. Tracing these varied strands of historical argumentation, Zeb Raft shows how history was constructed through rhetorical elements including the narration of officialdom, the anecdote, and, above all, the historical document. The portrait that emerges is of an epideictic historiography where praise was mixed with irony and achievement diluted with ambivalence—and where the most secure positions lay on the threshold of political power and historical interpretation.

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Through a Glass Darkly
Contested Notions of Baptist Identity
Keith Harper
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Through a Glass Darkly is a collection of essays by scholars who argue that Baptists are frequently misrepresented, by outsiders as well as insiders, as members of an unchanging monolithic sect.
 
In contemporary discussions of religious denominations, it is often fashionable and easy to make bold claims regarding the history, beliefs, and practices of certain groups. Select versions of Baptist history have been used to vindicate incomplete or inaccurate assertions, attitudes, and features of Baptist life and thought. Historical figures quickly become saints, and overarching value systems can minimize the unsavory realities that would contribute to a truer interpretation of Baptist life.
 
The essays in this volume use the term Baptist in the broadest sense to refer to those Christians who identify themselves as Baptists and who baptize by immersion as a non-sacramental church rite. Over the past four hundred years, Baptists have grown from a persecuted minority to a significant portion of America’s religious population. They have produced their fair share of controversies and colorful characters that have, in turn, contributed to a multifaceted history.
 
But what does it mean to be a “real Baptist”? Some look to historical figures as heroic exemplars of Baptist core values. Others consider cultural, social, or political issues to be guideposts for Baptist identity. Through a Glass Darkly dives deeper into history for answers, revealing a more complete version of the expansive and nuanced history of one of America’s most influential religious groups.
 
Contributors:
James P. Byrd / John G. Crowley / Edward R. Crowther / Christopher H. Evans / Elizabeth H. Flowers / Curtis W. Freeman / Barry G. Hankins / Paul Harvey / Bill J. Leonard / James A. Patterson / Jewel L. Spangler / Alan Scot Willis
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Thucydides on the Nature of Power
A. Geoffrey Woodhead
Harvard University Press, 1970
The implications of Thucydides' hostility to full democracy have long been avoided by scholars. In this provocative study the author confronts and examines this aspect of Thucydides' thought in detail. A. Geoffrey Woodhead also discusses his controversial interpretation of Thucydides' view of the nature of power: that equally among states and individuals, the impulse toward power follows its own laws, which are not immoral but amoral, and which should be viewed for themselves without ethical or emotional confusion.
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Time Slips
Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History
Jaclyn I. Pryor
Northwestern University Press, 2017
This bold book investigates how performance can transform the way people perceive trauma and memory, time and history. Jaclyn I. Pryor introduces the concept of "time slips," moments in which past, present, and future coincide, moments that challenge American narratives of racial and sexual citizenship.
 
Framing performance as a site of resistance, Pryor analyzes their own work and that of four other queer artists—Ann Carlson, Mary Ellen Strom, Peggy Shaw, and Lisa Kron—between 2001 and 2016. Pryor illuminates how each artist deploys performance as a tool to render history visible, trauma recognizable, and transformation possible by laying bare the histories and ongoing systems of violence woven deep into our society. Pryor also includes a case study that examines the challenges of teaching queer time and queer performance within the academy in what Pryor calls a post-9/11 “homeland” security state.
 
Masterfully synthesizing a wealth of research and experiences, Time Slips will interest scholars and readers in the fields of theater and performance studies, queer studies, and American studies.
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Time’s Monster
How History Makes History
Priya Satia
Harvard University Press, 2020

A New Statesman Best Book of the Year

“Powerful and radically important.”
—Robert Gildea, Times Literary Supplement

“Bracingly describes the ways imperialist historiography has shaped visions of the future as much as the past.”
—Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books

“An account of how the discipline of history has itself enabled the process of colonization…A coruscating and important reworking of the relationship between history, historians, and empire.”
—Kenan Malik, The Guardian

For generations, the history of the British Empire was written by its victors, whose accounts of conquest guided the consolidation of imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. British historians’ narratives of the development of imperial governance licensed the brutal suppression of colonial rebellion. Their reimagining of empire during the two world wars compromised decolonization. In this brilliant work, Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed.

From the imperial histories of John Stuart Mill and Winston Churchill to the works of anticolonial thinkers such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. P. Thompson, Satia captures two opposing approaches to the discipline of history and illuminates the ethical universe that came with them. Against the backdrop of enduring inequalities and a crisis in the humanities, hers is an urgent moral voice.

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Time's Reasons
Philosophies of History Old and New
Leonard Krieger
University of Chicago Press, 1989
This original work caps years of thought by Leonard Krieger about the crisis of the discipline of history. His mission is to restore history's autonomy while attacking the sources of its erosion in various "new histories," which borrow their principles and methods from disciplines outside of history. Krieger justifies the discipline through an analysis of the foundations on which various generations of historians have tried to establish the coherence of their subject matter and of the convergence of historical patterns.

The heart of Krieger's narrative is an insightful analysis of theories of history from the classical period to the present, with a principal focus on the modern period. Krieger's exposition covers such figures as Ranke, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Acton, Troeltsch, Spengler, Braudel, and Foucault, among others, and his discussion involves him in subtle distinctions among terms such as historism, historicism, and historicity. He points to the impact on history of academic political radicalism and its results: the new social history. Krieger argues for the autonomy of historical principles and methods while tracing the importation in the modern period of external principles for historical coherence.

Time's Reasons is a profound attempt to rejuvenate and restore integrity to the discipline of history by one of the leading masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography. As such, it will be required reading for all historiographers and intellectual historians of the modern period.
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Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character
British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland
William H. A. Williams
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Picturesque but poor, abject yet sublime in its Gothic melancholy, the Ireland perceived by British visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not fit their ideas of progress, propriety, and Protestantism. The rituals of Irish Catholicism, the lamentations of funeral wakes, the Irish language they could not comprehend, even the landscapes were all strange to tourists from England, Wales, and Scotland. Overlooking the acute despair in England’s own industrial cities, these travelers opined in their writings that the poverty, bog lands, and ill-thatched houses of rural Ireland indicated moral failures of the Irish character.

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Toward a Geography of Art
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Art history traditionally classifies works of art by country as well as period, but often political borders and cultural boundaries are highly complex and fluid. Questions of identity, policy, and exchange make it difficult to determine the "place" of art, and often the art itself results from these conflicts of geography and culture. Addressing an important approach to art history, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's book offers essays that focus on the intricacies of accounting for the geographical dimension of art history during the early modern period in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Toward a Geography of Art presents a historical overview of these complexities, debates contemporary concerns, and completes its exploration with a diverse collection of case studies. Employing the author's expertise in a variety of fields, the book delves into critical issues such as transculturation of indigenous traditions, mestizaje, the artistic metropolis, artistic diffusion, transfer, circulation, subversion, and center and periphery. What results is a foundational study that establishes the geography of art as a subject and forces us to reconsider assumptions about the place of art that underlie the longstanding narratives of art history.
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Toward a History Beyond Borders
Contentious Issues in Sino–Japanese Relations
Daqing Yang
Harvard University Press, 2011

This volume brings to English-language readers the results of an important long-term project of historians from China and Japan addressing contentious issues in their shared modern histories. Originally published simultaneously in Chinese and Japanese in 2006, the thirteen essays in this collection focus renewed attention on a set of political and historiographical controversies that have steered and stymied Sino-Japanese relations from the mid-nineteenth century through World War II to the present.

These in-depth contributions explore a range of themes, from prewar diplomatic relations and conflicts, to wartime collaboration and atrocity, to postwar commemorations and textbook debates—all while grappling with the core issue of how history has been researched, written, taught, and understood in both countries. In the context of a wider trend toward cross-national dialogues over historical issues, this volume can be read as both a progress report and a case study of the effort to overcome contentious problems of history in East Asia.

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Transatlantic Topographies
Islands, Highlands, Jungles
Ileana Rodriguez
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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Transgressive Typologies
Constructions of Gender and Power in Early Tang China
Rebecca Doran
Harvard University Press, 2016

The exceptionally powerful Chinese women leaders of the late seventh and early eighth centuries—including Wu Zhao, the Taiping and Anle princesses, Empress Wei, and Shangguan Wan’er—though quite prominent in the Chinese cultural tradition, remain elusive and often misunderstood or essentialized throughout history. Transgressive Typologies utilizes a new, multidisciplinary approach to understand how these figures’ historical identities are constructed in the mainstream secular literary-historical tradition and to analyze the points of view that inform these constructions.

Using close readings and rereadings of primary texts written in medieval China through later imperial times, this study elucidates narrative typologies and motifs associated with these women to explore how their power is rhetorically framed, gendered, and ultimately deemed transgressive. Rebecca Doran offers a new understanding of major female figures of the Tang era within their literary-historical contexts, and delves into critical questions about the relationship between Chinese historiography, reception-history, and the process of image-making and cultural construction.

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The Translatability of Revolution
Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture
Pu Wang
Harvard University Press, 2018

The first comprehensive study of the lifework of Guo Moruo (1892–1978) in English, this book explores the dynamics of translation, revolution, and historical imagination in twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer who eventually became Mao Zedong’s last poetic interlocutor; a Marxist historian who evolved into the inaugural president of China’s Academy of Sciences; and a leftist politician who devoted almost three decades to translating Goethe’s Faust. His career, embedded in China’s revolutionary century, has generated more controversy than admiration. Recent scholarship has scarcely treated his oeuvre as a whole, much less touched upon his role as a translator.

Leaping between different genres of Guo’s works, and engaging many other writers’ texts, The Translatability of Revolution confronts two issues of revolutionary cultural politics: translation and historical interpretation. Part 1 focuses on the translingual making of China’s revolutionary culture, especially Guo’s translation of Faust as a “development of Zeitgeist.” Part 2 deals with Guo’s rewritings of antiquity in lyrical, dramatic, and historiographical-paleographical forms, including his vernacular translation of classical Chinese poetry. Interrogating the relationship between translation and historical imagination—within revolutionary cultural practice—this book finds a transcoding of different historical conjunctures into “now-time,” saturated with possibilities and tensions.

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Translated Nation
Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte
Christopher J. Pexa
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

How authors rendered Dakhóta philosophy by literary means to encode ethical and political connectedness and sovereign life within a settler surveillance state

Translated Nation examines literary works and oral histories by Dakhóta intellectuals from the aftermath of the 1862 U.S.–Dakota War to the present day, highlighting creative Dakhóta responses to violences of the settler colonial state. Christopher Pexa argues that the assimilation era of federal U.S. law and policy was far from an idle one for the Dakhóta people, but rather involved remaking the Oyáte (the Očéti Šakówiŋ Oyáte or People of the Seven Council Fires) through the encrypting of Dakhóta political and relational norms in plain view of settler audiences.

From Nicholas Black Elk to Charles Alexander Eastman to Ella Cara Deloria, Pexa analyzes well-known writers from a tribally centered perspective that highlights their contributions to Dakhóta/Lakhóta philosophy and politics. He explores how these authors, as well as oral histories from the Spirit Lake Dakhóta Nation, invoke thióšpaye (extended family or kinship) ethics to critique U.S. legal translations of Dakhóta relations and politics into liberal molds of heteronormativity, individualism, property, and citizenship. He examines how Dakhóta intellectuals remained part of their social frameworks even while negotiating the possibilities and violence of settler colonial framings, ideologies, and social forms. 

Bringing together oral and written as well as past and present literatures, Translated Nation expands our sense of literary archives and political agency and demonstrates how Dakhóta peoplehood not only emerges over time but in everyday places, activities, and stories. It provides a distinctive view of the hidden vibrancy of a historical period that is often tied only to Indigenous survival.

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Transmitting Jewish History
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Conversation with Sylvie Anne Goldberg
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Sylvie Anne Goldberg
Brandeis University Press, 2021
The deeply personal reflections of a giant of Jewish history.
 
Scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009) possessed a stunning range of erudition in all eras of Jewish history, as well as in world history, classical literature, and European culture. What Yerushalmi also brought to his craft was a brilliant literary style, honed by his own voracious reading from early youth and his formative undergraduate studies. This series of interviews paints a revealing portrait of this giant of history, bringing together exceptional material on Yerushalmi’s personal and intellectual journeys that not only attests to the astonishing breakthrough of the issues of Jewish history into “general history,” but also offers profound insight into being Jewish in today's world.  
 
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Traumatic Realism
The Demands of Holocaust Representation
Michael Rothberg
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

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The Tribunal
Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid
John Stauffer
Harvard University Press, 2012

When John Brown led twenty-one men in an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859, he envisioned a biblical uprising of millions of armed bondsmen, thus ridding the nation of the scourge of slavery. The insurrection did not happen, and Brown and the other surviving raiders were quickly captured and executed. This landmark anthology, which collects contemporary speeches, letters, newspaper articles, journals, poems, and songs, demonstrates that Brown’s actions nonetheless altered the course of American history.

John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd have assembled an impressive and wide-ranging collection of responses to Brown’s raid: Brown’s own words, northern and southern reactions, international commentary, and reflections from the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Represented here are all the figures one would expect to see (Lincoln, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass), many surprises (John Wilkes Booth, Karl Marx, Giuseppe Garibaldi), as well as free and enslaved blacks and white citizens. The result is a book that views Brown from multiple vantage points.

The Introduction describes the panic that Harpers Ferry created in the South, splitting the Democratic Party along sectional lines and altering the outcome of the 1860 presidential election. Without Brown, it speculates, the Civil War and emancipation would have been delayed by another four years—probably more—which in turn might have disrupted emancipation movements in Brazil, Cuba, and even Russia. The Tribunal is essential reading for anyone interested in the Civil War era and the history of social protest movements.

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Tributes to John Hope Franklin
Scholar, Mentor, Father, Friend
Edited by Beverly Jarrett
University of Missouri Press, 2003
In 1947 John Hope Franklin, then a professor of history at North Carolina College for Negroes, wrote From Slavery to Freedom. Now in its eighth edition, that book, which redefined our understanding of American history, remains the preeminent record of the African American experience. With it and a dozen other books, Franklin has been established as the intellectual father of black studies.
Tributes to John Hope Franklin focuses on this esteemed scholar’s academic achievements, his humanitarian contributions, and his extraordinary legacy. This collection of comments by Franklin’s students, colleagues, family, and friends captures the man and his work for future generations. Tributes offered by Franklin’s admirers, Walter B. Hill Jr., David Levering Lewis, Alfred A. Moss Jr., Darlene Clark Hine, Loren Schweninger, Daryl Michael Scott, George M. Fredrickson, Mary Frances Berry, and many others, attest to Franklin’s commitment to his intellectual pursuits, to public service, and, most important, to his students.
Franklin’s dedication to mentoring those who sought his help, as well as providing for his family, is beyond compare. In one essay, John W. Franklin offers an inside view of growing up with John Hope and Aurelia Franklin, detailing the travels and associations that were a part of his experience as their son. Alfred Moss, coauthor of the last three editions of From Slavery to Freedom, shares special images of Franklin as mentor to a young Anglican priest.
Genna Rae McNeil shows us the quintessential teacher through the eyes of a passionate young scholar beginning her own voyage into the study of American history. George Fredrickson takes on the challenge of explaining the complexity of the work of this man who has been both a fervent proponent of racial equality and a practitioner of “detached, objective, dispassionate historical scholarship.”
Each of the pieces—by men and by women, by blacks and by whites, by several generations of participants in the twentieth century’s journey toward a better America—recalls for us what a vital role John Hope Franklin has played in that voyage. Tributes to John Hope Franklin is a joy to read and an incredible opportunity to celebrate a life and a body of historical work dedicated to achieving and sharing the wisdom that scholarly excellence provides.
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Truth in History
Oscar Handlin
Harvard University Press, 1979

One of the most eminent historians of our time offers here a perceptive guide to the study of history. Truth in History teaches how to read, how to analyze, how to discriminate. It is as helpful to the reader whose history is created daily in the news as it is to the professional historian whose field is in a crisis of disarray.

A Pulitzer Prize winner and mentor for more than a generation of American historians, Oscar Handlin instructs his readers in the fundamentals of his field. He tells us how to deal with evidence, how to discern patterns amid flux, how to situate ourselves in history, and how to recognize where fact shades subtly into opinion. He combines a historian’s knowledge with a historiographer’s breadth and a philosopher’s temperament. He is concerned with a historian’s limitations and with the ways one can operate honestly within those limitations. He brings a full appreciation of the past to his evaluation of what is modern. And while carefully examining recent developments in his discipline, he culls genuine achievements from the trends that confuse originality with true worth.

Handlin everywhere enlivens his discussion with brilliant details. As he pursues broad definitions of history and its uses, he also attends to specific subjects, showing how they bear directly on each other and on his concerns. He deals with Populism, capitalism, laissez-faire, the two-party system, the New History, ethnicity, and roots, treating all with the flair of an accomplished man of letters. Only a scholar of Handlin’s experience and expertise could have brought such a wealth of particular facts to an issue of such general importance: truth in history.

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The Tutor'd Mind
Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America
Bernd C. Peyer
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997
Part historical narrative, part textual analysis, this book traces the development of American Indian literature from the seventeenth century to the eve of the Civil War. Bernd C. Peyer focuses on the lives and writings of four prominent Indian missionaries—Samson Occom of the Mohegans, William Apess of the Pequots, Elias Boudinot of the Cherokees, and George Copway of the Ojibwa—each of whom struggled to negotiate a secure place between the imperatives of colonial rule and the rights of native peoples.

In the view of the English colonists and their descendants, Indian converts to Christianity were expected to repudiate native traditions and affirm the superiority of European civilization, to serve as role models, and to spread the gospel far into the wilderness. Yet as Bernd C. Peyer shows, Indian missionaries did not always fulfill the expectations of those who trained them. Once the Indians recognized that conversion alone did not guarantee protection from discrimination, they devised a variety of strategies, theological as well as practical, to resist assimilation into the dominant white culture. Making effective use of their literacy and education, they called attention to the discrepancy between the Protestant ideals they had been taught and the Anglo-American practices to which native people were subjected.

By uncovering this subtext of dissent and resistance, Peyer at once alters and enriches our understanding of the evolution of the American Indian literary tradition.
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