by Nakia Parker For decades, scholars peered at the painful and complex topic of American slavery through a purely “black-white” lens—in other words, black slaves who had white masters. The sad reality that some Native Americans, (in particular, the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, or “the Five Tribes”) also participated in chattel and race-based […]
No Mere Shadows: Faces of Widowhood in Early Colonial Mexico, by Shirley Cushing Flint (2013)
What would Mexico City—or Tenochtitan as it was known to its indigenous population—have looked like to ten year old Doña Luisa Estrada, when she arrived with her parents in 1524, three years after it fell to Spain?
The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King, by Rich Cohen (2012)
In the first couple pages, Cohen introduces his readers to his compelling protagonist, Samuel Zemurray, a poor Jewish immigrant to the United States who later came to embody the American Dream.
A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552-1610, by R. Po-chia Hsia (2010)
Hsia’s book on Matteo Ricci expands the traditional narratives of the Age of Expansion and transforms our understanding of them. Beyond the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, early modern Europeans, Jesuits among them, also ventured to Asia.
The Israeli Republic, by Jalal Al-e Ahmad (2014)
This book recounts a fascinating journey undertaken by an Iranian intellectual to an Israel that existed primarily in the author’s mind. The kind of utopia Al-e Ahmad saw would strike many Israelis as odd.
The Cross-Cultural Exchange of Atlantic Slavery
The Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas connected merchants, Portuguese colonists, convicts, and slaves in cultural and economic relationships, reconfiguring the space of the southern Atlantic. The work of Mariana Candido and Roquinaldo Ferriera shows how creolization and the economic prosperity created by the slave trade was a two-way street.
Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014)
by Jorge Cañizares Esguerra Two flights had been cancelled in Chicago and I had already waited for seven hours to catch a plane. As temperatures kept dropping and a snowstorm was fast approaching, I just jumped on a bus to go to Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. I plowed my way to the Morris […]
The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)
There is a vast historiography on worker strikes and resistance to economic exploitation in Latin America and Brazil, yet most scholars disregard the environmental backdrop to struggles over land, labor, and resources.
Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)
Stalin’s Genocides provides an in-depth analysis of the horrendous atrocities — forced deportations, collectivization, the Ukrainian famine, and the Great Terror — perpetrated by Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical regime. Norman Naimark argues that these crimes should be considered genocide and that Joseph Stalin should therefore be labeled a “genocidaire.”
George Orwell: A Life in Letters (2013)
Peter Davison’s careful selection and annotation of George Orwell’s personal correspondence in provides an engrossing autobiography of a man whose work continues to resonate globally in significant ways.