by Alina Scott “We do ourselves no good by hiding from the truth,” a Wampanoag elder told David Silverman as he prepared This Land is Their Land. In upward of 400 pages, Silverman suggests that, by “we” the elder was referring to those who would prefer to cling to heartwarming narratives of turkey and peace, […]
1400s to 1700s
The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World by Cyrus Schayegh (2017)
by Carter Barnett Cyrus Schayegh addresses the spatial formation of the modern world in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World. He uses the history of Bilad al-Sham from 1830 to 1945 as his case study. Bilad al-Sham, also known as the Levant or Greater Syria, is roughly bordered by the Mediterranean […]
Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire by Jeffrey A. Auerbach (2018)
by Amina Marzouk Chouchene | First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum The British Empire has been firmly tied to myth, adventure, and victory. For many Britons, “the empire was the mythic landscape of romance and adventure. It was that quarter of the globe that was colored and included darkest Africa and the mysterious East.”[1] […]
Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution by Ada Ferrer (2014)
by Isabelle Headrick In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cuba was profoundly shaped by its proximity to and multi-layered relationship with Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was called before the 1803 Haitian Revolution. In the decades leading up to Saint-Domingue’s 1791 slave revolt, Cuban planters looked with envy on the booming sugar economy […]
Anxieties, Fear, and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné (2016)
by Amina Marzouk Chouchene First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (August 28, 2019) Twenty-first-century Britain brims with a revival of rosy visions of Britain’s imperial past. Nowhere is such a tendency clearer than in the restless efforts to rehabilitate the empire by prominent conservative historians such as Niall Ferguson. Britain’s imperial glories and its benign […]
Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016)
By Tiana Wilson After reading this book in three different graduate seminar courses, I can confidently argue that Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is one of the most important texts of our time, and a must read for anyone interested in overcoming the limitations of archival research. For many scholars […]
Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019)
By Jesse Ritner The easy correlation contemporary American and British cultures build from sex to pregnancy, pregnancy to birth, and birth to childrearing within a nuclear family is far from uniform throughout history. Mother is not an identity. Not all women will mother during the course of their lives. In Sarah Knott’s words, “mother is […]
Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America by John M. Monteiro (2018)
By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody questioned enslaving Amerindians. In Blacks of the Land (originally published in 1994 as Negros da Terra) Monteiro studies Amerindian slavery in the Capitania de São Vicente, now known as São Paulo, and thus sheds light on practices and debates that took place all over the continent. […]
Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World; Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferreira (2012)
By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Luanda and Benguela became the busiest, most profitable slaving ports in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century precisely because these two ports set up tribunals to hear tens of thousands of enslaved petitioners demand freedom. Paperwork in local tribunals set hundreds of thousands free, even at the risk of bankrupting […]
Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain by Martin Nesvig (2018)
By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Power, he argues, was “promiscuous” in sixteenth-century Michoacán because there were dozens of claimants to overlapping jurisdictions: indigenous nobilities, native commoners, encomenderos (tributary lords responsible for conversion of entrusted indigenous communities), bishops, parish priests, friars, audiencia (high court) magistrates, alcaldes mayores (city mayors), city councils, corregidores (regional authorities), viceroys, general inquisitors, inquisitorial […]
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 9
- Next Page »