RESEARCH

Featured Titles

This brief profile of recent publications highlights the diverse scholarly interests of the History Department's faculty. These and other faculty publications illustrate the History Department's commitment to scholarship that advances understanding within academic subfields while also appealing to broader audiences. 

One of the strengths of the History Department is its emphasis on transnational and transregional approaches to history, an emphasis that is reflected in recent and forthcoming faculty publications. This is especially the case in Atlantic history and Pacific history, two exciting new fields of historical research. Professor Patricia O'Brien in The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (University of Washington Press, 2006) makes a significant contribution to Pacific World history. In The Pacific Muse, O'Brien examines how exoticized understandings of femininity shaped colonialism throughout the Pacific World. The scope of O'Brien's work is vast, both geographically and chronologically: The Pacific Muse explores changing Western conceptions of exotic femininity from antiquity to the 20th century even as it traces how these changes shaped the colonial experience in Polynesia, Australia, and the western Pacific. Drawing heavily upon notable depictions of exotic femininity in western art, literature, photography, advertising, and other visual media forms, The Pacific Muse marks a significant contribution to Pacific World history, one that urges readers to consider the gendered aspects of exploration and colonization in the Pacific.

In the field of Atlantic history, Professor Alison Games, a pioneer in the field, is at work on an Atlantic World textbook. A collaborative effort with other leading Atlantic World scholars, The Atlantic World is intended as a textbook for the undergraduate survey and will be the first of its kind in the field of Atlantic history. In addition to this project, Games has teamed up with fellow Georgetown historian Adam Rothman to edit Major Problems in Atlantic History (Houghton Mifflin, Forthcoming 2007). A new addition to Houghton Mifflin's popular Major Problems series, Major Problems in Atlantic History will be the first course reader with documents in the field of Atlantic history. This reader includes chapters on themes ranging from the fifteenth-century origins of the Atlantic World to the contemporary legacies of Atlantic history. Each chapter contains historiographical essays and interpretations written by prominent Atlantic World historians alongside primary sources that offer diverse perspectives from the history of the Atlantic World.

As opposed to the oceanic approach to history on display in the works of O'Brien, Games, and Rothman, Professor James Millward's approach in his recently published Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiangi is more terrestrial, but is every bit as grounded in a transregional conception of history. Eurasian Crossroads is a history of Xinjiang, the vast central Eurasian region comprising one sixth of the People's Republic of China, and bordering on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyszstan, Kazakstan, Russia, and Mongolia. A crossroads for the movement of people, goods, and ideas since antiquity, Xingiang has enjoyed a world historical role as a commercial entrepot linking east and west, a cultural conduit through which Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam entered China. It was at this Eurasian Crossroads that Chinese, Turkic, Tibetan, and Mongol empires communicated and struggled for centuries. Significantly, Millward's Eurasian Crossroads draws upon scholarly research and primary sources in several European and Asian languages to provide the first general account in English of this region, from the time of its earliest inhabitants to the present. Eurasian Crossroads is a work that stresses the importance of the transregional movement of goods, ideas, and people in history.

Professor Aviel Roshwald's recently published The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is another example of the History Department's emphasis on transnational history, although Roshwald's work concerns an idea that is at the very core of modern nation-states: nationalism. In The Endurance of Nationalism, Roshwald contends that the continued salience of nationalism in our own time can be explained by tracing nationalism's antecedents back into ancient history. But in exploring the history of nationalism, Roshwald has approached his subject widely by examining a number of case studies that span historical eras and geographical regions. These case studies include Ancient Jewish nationalism, the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Yugoslav wars, Northern Ireland's Orange Parades, and even the competing memories of the Alamo.

Finally, Professor John Tutino has two forthcoming works that reconsider the questions of Mexican peasant radicalism that drove his early work, placing them in the context of the rise and transformation of an empire and the economic world it helped create. Tutino’s Making a New World: Forging Atlantic Capitalism in the Bajio and Spanish North America (Duke University Press, late 2006) explores the transformations that made the Bajío, the rich agricultural and mineral zone north of Mexico City, the driving engine of Atlantic commerce in the 15th through the 18th centuries. Tutino’s analysis takes into account both the actions of individual landholders and their laborers and the sweeping currents of hemispheric economic change, synthesizing the insights of recent Latin American historiography with his own rich research. His Remaking the New World: Bajio Insurgents, Mexican Independence, and the Transformation of North America, 1800-1860 (Duke University Press, 2008) will carry this story through Mexican Independence in the early nineteenth century.

In addition to the above works focusing on transregional and transnational history, several recent and forthcoming faculty publications offer reinterpretations of major historiographical issues in the field of United States history. Professor Chandra Manning is in the process of completing her first book, a reinterpretation of the Civil War era. In What This Cruel War Was Over: Union and Confederate Soldiers on the Meaning of the Civil War (Knopf, forthcoming, April 2007), Manning contends that both Northern and Southern soldiers overwhelmingly insisted that the issue of slavery caused the war, and that anyone who denied it, in the words of one Confederate, was either “a fool or a liar.”  Manning then sets out to figure out why. What did slavery mean to a white non-slaveholding Southerner, and why would he believe that its survival was so necessary to the interests and safety of his family to fight through four desperate years of hardship and disaster, and then stop fighting in the spring of 1865? Why would an ordinary white northern farmer or laborer who had never even met a slave care enough about an abstract concept called the “Union” to grow convinced that the war must end slavery? And why would nearly 200,000 African Americans fight for the survival of a government that had sanctioned black enslavement for its entire existence? The answers force us to re-examine the Civil War and the place of slavery in the American Republic, and also help to explain how the war could create vast potential for racial change, and then fail to fulfill it.

Michael Kazin’s A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan  (Knopf, 2006) is the biography of a crusading evangelical and a crusading progressive who did much to make the Democratic Party the standard-bearer of liberal politics in the United States. Kazin's book focuses on Bryan’s tremendous popularity, as well as his dual careers in religion and politics, and help explains the contours of American populism. A Godly Hero is both a close study of Bryan, an often misunderstood American political figure, and also offers an examination of the role of religion in American politics and culture. Additionally, working together with Professor Joseph McCartin, Kazin has recently co-edited Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Kazin and McCartin contribute an introduction which argues that American ideals have been a resource for social change in the past and could serve that function again.

Finally, while Manning and Kazin offer reinterpretations of major issues in the history of the United States, Richard Stites's recently published book Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia (Yale University Press, 2005) explores visual and performing arts in the last decades of serfdom, offering an overarching view of popular and elite culture across the Russian empire. Stites’s analysis of both forgotten and famous cultural figures reveals the patterns underlying diverse cultural manifestations: “I have endeavored to capture culture as it was experienced at the time; and so the ephemeral, the mediocre, and the once popular but now doomed-to-oblivion play a role.” In the words of Julie Buckler, professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, “This book is the latest of Stites’s panoramic yet densely detailed studies of Russian culture, and it will undoubtedly prove as invaluable to scholars, students, and general-interest readers as his previous books have done.”