February is Black History month. It is a time for remembrance and reflection for all Americans, but for Historians it is also a rich period for study and research. iTunes U, the academic branch of Apple’s iTunes store, is featuring a vast collection of first-hand oral histories, interviews, and lectures on the extensive history of African Americans.
Presidents on NEP for Presidents’ Day
Popular articles from our archive about Presidents and some of the people around them.
History in Motion: The New Archive (No. 4)
Traditional maps can portray people and places at certain moments, but they do not capture the dynamism of movement and change over time. And historical texts can describe change over time but lack the visual element that makes it possible to see the multiple dimensions of change at once.
Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American
How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was the earliest popular, English-language guide to Chinese cooking. First published in 1945 and reprinted several times, it remains in wide use today.
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 Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet by Lawrence J. Friedman (2013)
Perhaps one day some whimsical people with money will get together and honor books for their subtitles. Lawrence Friedman’s new biography of Erich Fromm, subtitled “Love’s Prophet,” wins for getting the total picture; for, in just two words, capturing a imagewhole life. But it couldn’t have been a difficult choice.
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!
The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege (2012)
Flip through the pages of almost any American history textbook. Within the first few sections, you will find paragraphs dedicated to the American Revolution and the ideological groundwork that supported it; the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology that surrounds Abraham Lincoln; the rise of a cotton-based economy in the South and the enslaved manpower that sustained it; the westward expansion of the American population and the lines of communication and transportation that they created in the wake of their migration.
Honorable Mention of 2013 Essay Contest: Covered with Glory: The 26th North Carolina Infantry at Gettysburg by Rod Gragg (2000)
Harry Burgwyn was twenty-one years old when he led more than eight hundred soldiers of the 26th North Carolina Infantry into battle at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. Two and a half days later, after two bloody assaults, fewer than one hundred remained fit for duty.
The Founders and Finance by Thomas K. McGraw (2012)
Thomas McGraw argues that there was something in the background of immigrants to the United States that distinguished them from native born Americans and contributed to their suitability to become Secretaries ofof the Treasury. Including those born in Africa, less than 8% of the population was not native born and yet four of the first 6 Treasury Secretaries were immigrants.