by Ben Wright In Eric Remarque’s 1921 novel, The Road Back, a group of veterans (now enrolled as students at a local university in Germany) quietly seethe at the back of a classroom while their professor eulogizes their fallen comrades. The professor’s platitudes cause them to wince, but his romanticism of death makes them boil […]
United States
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 […]
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor (2016)
By Signe Peterson Fourmy In January of 1856, a prolonged period of frigid temperatures in northern Kentucky—the coldest in sixty years—froze the Ohio River creating a bridge to freedom for enslaved people daring enough to cross it. On Sunday, January 27, 1856, Margaret Garner and seven members of her family made the arduous eighteen-mile journey […]
City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)
By Micaela Valadez Austin is a global city, home to some of the most technologically advanced and successful corporations in the world as well as a renowned university system that provides highly trained and educated employees to those same top companies. All the while, Austin’s constant obsession with building a sustainable and environmentally friendly city […]
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon (1983)
By Jesse Ritner Thirty-five years ago William Cronon wrote Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. It has aged well. The continued relevance of the book is likely a result of two things. First, it is eminently readable. Flipping through the pages, one can imagine the forests that Cronon describes and […]
Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico by Shirley Boteler Mock (2010)
by Micaela Valadez This outstanding ethnographic history explores the migration of Black Seminole people across the South and Southwest of the United States, highlighting the survival of cultural and spiritual practices by Black Seminole women. Boteler Mock uses ethnographic research and oral history to weave together the long migratory route that Black Seminoles made since […]
A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America by Grace Elizabeth Hale (2011)
by Ashley Garcia In the works of modern philosophers and novelists and even in the lyrical stylings of folk icon Bob Dylan, the question of authenticity lingers in the background of our search for meaning and truth. In A Nation of Outsiders, Grace Hale seeks to explain how and why white Americans in the second […]
We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)
by Brandon Render Prior to the publication of “The Case for Reparations” in 2013, Ta-Nehisi Coates was a little-known blogger turned Senior Editor of The Atlantic magazine. Today, Coates has emerged as not only the top contemporary black intellectual, but a leading American thinker – regardless of race – with stinging critiques of President Barack […]
Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears (2015)
by John Carranza Clare Sears, associate professor of sociology at San Francisco State University, explores cross dressing and its place in the formation of San Francisco as an urban center in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Sears uses codebooks, arrest records, and court reports to reconstruct the history of cross dressing in an urban setting. […]
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