Publications
Featured Titles and Awards 2012-2013
This brief profile of most recent publications and awards highlights the diverse scholarly interests of the department's faculty and illustrates the department's commitment to scholarship that advances understanding within the academy and also appeals to a wider audience.
Carol Benedict, Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011).
Prize/Award: American Historical Association 2011 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. Awarded for the best work on the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan since the year 1800.
Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)
Prize/Award: The Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) 2012 Wayne S. Vucinich Book. Awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year.
Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (University of Illinois Press, 1987) (paperback, 1989).
Prize/Award: The Herbert Gutman Award. Awarded for the best book in American history published by University of Illinois Press, 1988.
A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, Anchor paperback, 2007). Main Selection, History Book Club. Named one of the Best Books of 2006 by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Fresh Air (NPR), and several other media outlets. Awarded Order of Merit by Christianity Today and an Editor’s Choice of the New York Times Book Review.
Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, April 2007).
Prize/Award: Winner of Avery O. Craven Award given annually by the Organization of American Historians for best book on any aspect of antebellum, Civil War, or Reconstruction history.
Also:
--Lincoln Prize Honorable Mention, given by the Gilder Lehrman Institute and the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute of Gettysburg College for best book on Lincoln or the Civil War.
--Named one of Best Books of 2007 by Chicago Tribune
--Jefferson Davis Prize Honorable Mention given by the Museum of the Confederacy for the best book on the Civil War South
--Virginia Literary Award Honorable Mention in Nonfiction
--Finalist for Frederick Douglass Award for best book on any aspect of slavery, abolition, or resistance to slavery worldwide.
Bryan McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil (Duke University Press, 2005).
Prize/Award: Woody Guthrie Award, International Association for the Study of Popular Music, for the most distinguished English language monograph in popular music studies published during 2005.
Also:
--Bolton Prize, Honorable Mention, Conference on Latin American History, 2005
--Roberto Reis Prize, Brazilian Studies Association, 2005. Prize recognizes the two best books in Brazilian Studies published in English that contribute significantly to promoting an understanding of Brazil
Joseph McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Prize/Award: Richard A. Lester Award for Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics published in 2011. The award is presented by the faculty of the Princeton University Industrial Relations Section to "the book making the most original and important contribution toward understanding the problems of industrial relations, labor market policies, and the evolution of labor markets.
Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997)
1999 Philip Taft Prize awarded annually for the best book in American labor history and working-class history .
John McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Prize/Award: American Historical Association’s 2011 Albert J. Beveridge given annually for the best book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America or Canada from 1492 to the present. Also awarded the Georgetown University 2012 Distinguished Achievement in Research award.
Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).
Prize/Award: 2001 World History Association Book Prize. Recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of world history.
2000 Forest History Society Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award. Rewards superior scholarship in forest and conservation history.
Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930 (Harvard University Press, 2004).
Prize/Award: American Historical Association 2005 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. Awarded for the best work on the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan since the year.
Also:
--2005 John Whitney Hall Prize, Association for Asian Studies, for 2005 for best English-language scholarly books published on Japan or Korea.
-- 2005Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize, Society of Architectural Historians. Prize recognizes annually the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture published by a North American scholar.
--Finalist, International Conference of Asian Scholars award for the best book in the humanities, 2005
John Tutino, Book: Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajìo and Spanish North America
Prize/Award: The Bolton-Johnson Prize for the best book published in English in 2011 on the history of Latin America. The prize is given by the Conference on Latin American History, an affiliate of the American Historical Association. 2012 Allan Sharlan Memorial Award, and award presented by the Social Science History Association in honor of an outstanding book in social science history.
Also: 2012 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, an award presented annually by the Social Science History Association in honor of an outstanding book in social science history.
Professor Nancy Bernkopf Tucker received Georgetown's 2012 Career Research Achievement Award. Additionally the Wilson Center announced the Nancy Bernkopf Tucker Lecture Series, named of course in her honor. The inaugural lecture will be 2013.
The Journal of World History (23,2 June 2012) featured Professor James Millward's article on 'Chordophone Culture' in China and Spain; Zeinabl abul-Magd's (PhD, Georgetown, 2008) article on the French, jihad, and plague in upper Egypt; and a review of Professor Carol Benedict's recent book Golden Silk-Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010, University of California Press, 2011.
Professor Michael David-Fox, Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945, co-edited with Peter Holquist and Alexander Martin, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
Russia and Germany have had a long history of significant cultural, political, and economic exchange. Despite these beneficial interactions, stereotypes of the alien Other persisted. Germans perceived Russia as a vast frontier with unlimited potential, yet infused with an “Asianness” that explained its backwardness and despotic leadership. Russians admired German advances in science, government, and philosophy, but saw their people as lifeless and obsessed with order.
Fascination and Enmity presents an original transnational history of the two nations during the critical era of the world wars. By examining the mutual perceptions and misperceptions within each country, the contributors reveal the psyche of the Russian-German dynamic and its use as a powerful political and cultural tool.
Professor Emeritus Emmett Curran, ed., John Dooley's Civil War: An Irish American's Journey in the First Virginia Infantry Regiment. University of Tennessee Press, 2012.
Among the finer soldier-diarists of the Civil War, John Edward Dooley first came to the attention of readers when an edition of his wartime journal, edited by Joseph Durkin, was published in 1945. That book, John Dooley, Confederate Soldier, became a widely used resource for historians, who frequently tapped Dooley’s vivid accounts of Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, where he was wounded during Pickett’s Charge and subsequently captured.
As it happens, the 1945 edition is actually a much-truncated version of Dooley’s original journal that fails to capture the full scope of his wartime experience—the oscillating rhythm of life on the campaign trail, in camp, in Union prisons, and on parole.
Professor Emeritus Emmett Curran, Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805-1915, The Catholic University of America Press, 2012.
Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Roger Chickering upon the publication of The Cambridge History of War, Volume 4: War and the Modern World, ed. by Roger Chickering, Georgetown University; Dennis Showalter, Colorado College; and Hans van de Ven, University of Cambridge.
Featured Titles 2011-2012
Gábor Ágoston, Osmanli'da Strateji ve Askerî Güc, Timas Yayinlari, Istanbul 2012.
Strategy and Military Power in the Ottoman Empire. This book is a collection of nine essays on Ottoman strategy and military power from the fifteenth through the late eighteenth centuries. Written originally in English and translated into Turkish (with some modifications for the Turkish readership), the essays examine Ottoman strategies of conquest and rule, information gathering and imperial ideology, military technology and weapons production, and military and fiscal transformations during this time period. The essays question some of the old views of the Eurocentric and Orientalist schools of thought regarding Ottoman “backwardness” and military decline and study the waning of Ottoman military power by comparing Ottoman military, bureaucratic and fiscal developments to those of the Habsburgs and Romanovs.
Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria, Stanford University Press, 2010
Between 1830 and 1870, French army officers serving in the colonial Offices of Arab Affairs profoundly altered the course of political decision-making in Algeria. Guided by the modernizing ideologies of the Saint-Simonian school in their development and implementation of colonial policy, the officers articulated a new doctrine and framework for governing the Muslim and European populations of Algeria. Apostles of Modernity shows the evolution of this civilizing mission in Algeria, and illustrates how these 40 years were decisive in shaping the principal ideological tenets in French colonization of the region.
This book offers a rethinking of 19th-century French colonial history. It reveals not only what the rise of Europe implied for the cultural identities of non-elite Middle Easterners and North Africans, but also what dynamics were involved in the imposition or local adoptions of European cultural norms and how the colonial encounter impacted the cultural identities of the colonizers themselves.
Carol Benedict, Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010, University of California Press, 2011
From the long-stemmed pipe to snuff, the water pipe, hand-rolled cigarettes, and finally, manufactured cigarettes, the history of tobacco in China is the fascinating story of a commodity that became a hallmark of modern mass consumerism. Carol Benedict follows the spread of Chinese tobacco use from the sixteenth century, when it was introduced to China from the New World, through the development of commercialized tobacco cultivation, and to the present day. Along the way, she analyzes the factors that have shaped China's highly gendered tobacco cultures, and shows how they have evolved within a broad, comparative world-historical framework. Drawing from a wealth of historical sources—gazetteers, literati jottings (biji), Chinese materia medica, Qing poetry, modern short stories, late Qing and early Republican newspapers, travel memoirs, social surveys, advertisements, and more—Golden-Silk Smoke not only uncovers the long and dynamic history of tobacco in China but also sheds new light on global histories of fashion and consumption.
Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011
During the 1920s and 1930s thousands of European and American writers, professionals, scientists, artists, and intellectuals made a pilgrimage to experience the "Soviet experiment" personally. Showcasing the Great Experiment explores the reception of these intellectuals and fellow-travelers and their cross-cultural and trans-ideological encounters in order to analyze Soviet attitudes towards the West. Many of the twentieth century's greatest writers and thinkers, including Theodore Dreiser, André Gide, Paul Robeson, and George Bernard Shaw, notoriously defended Stalin's USSR despite the unprecedented violence of its prewar decade. While many visitors were profoundly affected by their Soviet tours, so too was the Soviet system. The early experiences of building showcases and teaching outsiders to perceive the future-in-the-making constitute a neglected international part of the emergence of Stalinism at home. Michael David-Fox contends that each side critically examined the other, negotiating feelings of inferiority and superiority, admiration and enmity, emulation and rejection. By the time of the Great Purges, these tensions gave way to the dramatic triumph of xenophobia and isolationism; whereas in the twenties the new regime assumed it had much to learn from Western modernity, by the Stalinist thirties the Soviet order was declared superior in all respects.
Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.
Several stark premises have long prevailed in our approach to Russian history. It was commonly assumed that Russia had always labored under a highly centralized and autocratic imperial state. The responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs was ultimately assigned to the profoundly agrarian character of Russian society. The countryside, home to the overwhelming majority of the nation’s population, was considered a harsh world of cruel landowners and ignorant peasants, and a strong hand was required for such a crude society. A number of significant conclusions flowed from this understanding. Deep and abiding social divisions obstructed the evolution of modernity, as experienced “naturally” in other parts of Europe, so there was no Renaissance or Reformation; merely a derivative Enlightenment; and only a distorted capitalism. And since only despotism could contain these volatile social forces, it followed that the 1917 Revolution was an inevitable explosion resulting from these intolerable contradictions—and so too were the blood-soaked realities of the Soviet regime that came after. In short, the sheer immensity of its provincial backwardness could explain almost everything negative about the course of Russian history. This book undermines these preconceptions. Through her close study of the province of Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century,
Yvonne Haddad, Becoming American? The Forging of Arab and Muslim Identity in Pluralist America, Baylor University Press, 2011
Countless generations of Arabs and Muslims have called the United States "home." Yet while diversity and pluralism continue to define contemporary America, many Muslims are viewed by their neighbors as painful reminders of conflict and violence. In this concise volume, renowned historian Yvonne Haddad argues that American Muslim identity is as uniquely American it is for as any other race, nationality, or religion.
Becoming American? first traces the history of Arab and Muslim immigration into Western society during the 19th and 20th centuries, revealing a two-fold disconnect between the cultures—America's unwillingness to accept these new communities at home and the activities of radical Islam abroad. Urging America to reconsider its tenets of religious pluralism, Haddad reveals that the public square has more than enough room to accommodate those values and ideals inherent in the moderate Islam flourishing throughout the country. In all, in remarkable, succinct fashion, Haddad prods readers to ask what it means to be truly American and paves the way forward for not only increased understanding but for forming a Muslim message that is capable of uplifting American society.
Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, Knopf, 2011.
A panoramic yet intimate history of the American left—of the reformers, radicals, and idealists who have fought for a more just and humane society, from the abolitionists to Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky—that gives us a revelatory new way of looking at two centuries of American politics and culture.
Michael Kazin—one of the most respected historians of the American left working today—takes us from abolitionism and early feminism to the labor struggles of the industrial age, through the emergence of anarchists, socialists, and communists, right up to the New Left in the 1960s and ’70s. While the history of the left is a long story of idealism and determination, it has also been, in the traditional view, a story of movements that failed to gain support from mainstream America. In American Dreamers, Kazin tells a new history: one in which many of these movements, although they did not fully succeed on their own terms, nonetheless made lasting contributions to American society that led to equal opportunity for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals; the celebration of sexual pleasure; multiculturalism in the media and the schools; and the popularity of books and films with altruistic and antiauthoritarian messages.
Deeply informed, at once judicious and impassioned, and superbly written, American Dreamers is an essential book for our times and for anyone seeking to understand our political history and the people who made it.
Richard Kuisel, The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power (Princeton University Press, 2012).
There are over 1,000 McDonald's on French soil. Two Disney theme parks have opened near Paris in the last two decades. And American-inspired vocabulary such as "le weekend" has been absorbed into the French language. But as former French president Jacques Chirac put it: "The U.S. finds France unbearably pretentious. And we find the U.S. unbearably hegemonic." Are the French fascinated or threatened by America? They Americanize yet are notorious for expressions of anti-Americanism. From McDonald's and Coca-Cola to free markets and foreign policy, this book looks closely at the conflicts and contradictions of France's relationship to American politics and culture. Richard Kuisel shows how the French have used America as both yardstick and foil to measure their own distinct national identity. They ask: how can we be modern like the Americans without becoming like them?
France has charted its own path: it has welcomed America's products but rejected American policies; assailed America's "jungle capitalism" while liberalizing its own economy; attacked "Reaganomics'" while defending French social security; and protected French cinema, television, food, and language even while ingesting American pop culture. Kuisel examines France's role as an independent ally of the United States--in the reunification of Germany and in military involvement in the Persian Gulf and Bosnia--but he also considers the country's failures in influencing the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Whether investigating France's successful information technology sector or its spurning of American expertise during the AIDS epidemic, Kuisel asks if this insistence on a French way represents a growing distance between Europe and the United States or a reaction to American globalization.
Exploring cultural trends, values, public opinion, and political reality, The French Way delves into the complex relationship between two modern nations.
Joseph McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America, Oxford University Press, 2011
In August 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) called an illegal strike. The new president, Ronald Reagan, fired the strikers, establishing a reputation for both decisiveness and hostility to organized labor. As Joseph A. McCartin writes, the strike was the culmination of two decades of escalating conflict between controllers and the government that stemmed from the high-pressure nature of the job and the controllers' inability to negotiate with their employer over vital issues. PATCO's fall not only ushered in a long period of labor decline; it also served as a harbinger of the campaign against public sector unions that now roils American politics.Collision Course sets the strike within a vivid panorama of the rise of the world's busiest air-traffic control system. It begins with an arresting account of the 1960 midair collision over New York that cost 134 lives and exposed the weaknesses of an overburdened system. Through the stories of controllers like Mike Rock and Jack Maher, who were galvanized into action by that disaster and went on to found PATCO, it describes the efforts of those who sought to make the airways safer and fought to win a secure place in the American middle class. It climaxes with the story of Reagan and the controllers, who surprisingly endorsed the Republican on the promise that he would address their grievances. That brief, fateful alliance triggered devastating miscalculations that changed America.
John McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the vector mosquitoes of yellow fever and malaria, and these diseases wrought systematic havoc among armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions to succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to prevent them.
John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajio and Spanish North America, Duke University Press, 2011.
Making a New World is a major rethinking of the role of the Americas in early world trade, the rise of capitalism, and the conflicts that reconfigured global power around 1800. At its center is the Bajío, a fertile basin extending across the modern-day Mexican states of Guanajuato and Querétaro, northwest of Mexico City. The Bajío became part of a new world in the 1530s, when Mesoamerican Otomís and Franciscan friars built Querétaro, a town that quickly thrived on agriculture and trade. Settlement accelerated as regional silver mines began to flourish in the 1550s. Silver tied the Bajío to Europe and China; it stimulated the development of an unprecedented commercial, patriarchal, Catholic society. A frontier extended north across vast expanses settled by people of European, Amerindian, and African ancestry. As mining, cloth making, and irrigated cultivation increased, inequities deepened and religious debates escalated. Analyzing the political economy, social relations, and cultural conflicts that animated the Bajío and Spanish North America from 1500 to 1800, John Tutino depicts an engine of global capitalism and the tensions that would lead to its collapse into revolution in 1810.
revised May 2012
