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Not Even Past

Arguing about Empire: The Dreyfus Affair and the Fashoda Crisis, 1898

Something of a contrived crisis – or, at least, an avoidable one – Fashoda was also a Franco-British battle of words in which competing claims of imperial destiny, legal rights, ethical superiority, and gentility preserved in the face of provocation belied the local reality of yet more African territory seized by force.

Parenting in Hard Times: Child Abandonment in Early Modern Europe

The practice of child abandonment and efforts to manage it have a long history and I recently encountered a series of surviving artifacts from about 250 years ago that provide us with a rare window into the abandoned and the abandoners.

New Books in Women’s History

We are celebrating Women’s History Month this year with recommendations of new books in Women’s History from some of our faculty and graduate students. From third-century North Africa to sixteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century in Russia and the US, and more…

Enjoy! 

Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees by Peter Sahlins (1989)

To what extent is national identity directed from the political center of a nation? Do individuals living on the periphery of nations have agency in defining their own national identities?

The Politics of the Veil by Joan Wallach Scott

Joan Wallach Scott introduces The Politics of the Veil, about the 2004 headscarf debates in France, with a telling sentence: “This is not a book about French Muslims; it is about the dominant French view of them.”

The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II by Gabrielle Hecht (1998)

The hourglass-shaped towers of the Chinon nuclear plant look out of place so near the Loire Valley’s famous castles. Regardless, nuclear energy generated almost 80 percent of all electricity in France last year, more than any other country, and a sizable surplus for export, too.

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe, by Glynis Ridley (2010)

In late 1774 or early 1775, a woman named Jeanne Baret became the first woman to have circumnavigated the globe, landing in France after nearly a decade of global travel that took her from provincial France to places like Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, and Mauritius. Her story, a fellow traveler noted, should “be included in a history of famous women.”

Failed Enlightenment: Urban Design and French Modernity in Beirut

This year’s John Ferguson Prize for Best Undergraduate Thesis went to Kate Maddox, a history major at the University of Texas at Austin. Her thesis explored the European political, social, and ideological influence in the making of the Lebanese city of Beirut.

The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson (2000)

After finishing the book, the reader will realize that its subtitle, “Explaining World War I,” is far more clever than it appears at first glance. The Pity of War offers not quite a history of the First World War, but rather a history of Great Britain and the First World War; for Ferguson, the two are inseparable.

Contraception – Letters from French Women, 1960s-70s

Radio Luxembourg was a privately-owned radio station; its shows were first produced in Paris and then cabled to and broadcast from Luxembourg. But the program reached deep into France. By 1970, nearly 2.5 million listeners tuned in to listen to Grégoire, and her program displaced the advice-from-experts programs and old-school family radio dramas that Radio Luxembourg had carried since the end of World War Two.

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