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Haiti and the Uses of America
Post-U.S. Occupation Promises
Verna, Chantalle F.
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Contrary to popular notions, Haiti-U.S. relations have not only been about Haitian resistance to U.S. domination. In Haiti and the Uses of America, Chantalle F. Verna makes evident that there have been key moments of cooperation that contributed to nation-building in both countries.
 
In the years following the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), Haitian politicians and professionals with a cosmopolitan outlook shaped a new era in Haiti-U.S. diplomacy. Their efforts, Verna shows, helped favorable ideas about the United States, once held by a small segment of Haitian society, circulate more widely. In this way, Haitians contributed to and capitalized upon the spread of internationalism in the Americas and the larger world.
 
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The Hall of Fame for Great Americans
A Biography of Stanford White's Forgotten Memorial
Sheila Gerami
University of Tennessee Press, 2024
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans provides a window into the cultural changes taking place in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. This book is the first examination of the institutional and social history of America’s first hall of fame, from its dynamic opening in 1901 through its protracted decline in the late twentieth century and its brief return to relevancy in the early twenty-first century.

It also examines in depth what is arguably the least studied project of Stanford White, one of the most distinguished architects of the Gilded Age. Originally designed for New York University’s new campus in the Bronx, the Hall of Fame once housed ninety-eight bronze busts of men and women deemed “great Americans” within its elegant colonnade, including the likes of George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, and Robert E. Lee.

The Hall was conceived when the Great Man theory dominated American thought. However, as times changed, challenges to ideas concerning greatness and heroism grew, and heroes once celebrated were scrutinized for their flaws. The monument is now a shell of its former glory and largely forgotten, and the NYU campus that once housed the colonnade was eventually sold to Bronx Community College.

In 2017, following the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, by white supremacists attempting to prevent the removal of a monument to General Lee, Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, thrust the Hall of Fame back into the limelight by ordering the busts of Lee and Stonewall Jackson to be removed. This action joined a national trend to remove monuments deemed offensive. Gerami argues that the rise and fall of this institution mirrors the nation’s changing conception of what comprises a hero. This biography of a public art memorial answers questions about the importance of art history and the cultural evolution of what it means to be great in America.
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Hammarskjöld
A Life
Roger Lipsey
University of Michigan Press, 2015

After his mysterious death, Dag Hammarskjöld was described by John F. Kennedy as the "greatest statesman of our century." Second secretary-general of the United Nations (1953 - 61), he is the only person to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. Through extensive research in little explored archives and personal correspondence, Roger Lipsey has produced the definitive biography of Dag Hammarskjöld. Hammarskjöld: A Life provides vivid new insights into the life and mind of a truly great individual. Hammarskjöld the statesman and Hammarskjöld the author of the classic spiritual journal Markings meet in this new biography - and the reader will meet them both in these pages. A towering mid-twentieth-century figure, Hammarskjöld speaks directly to our time.

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Hands Across the Sea?
U.S.-Japan Relations, 1961-1981
Timothy P. Maga
Ohio University Press, 1997
In 1961, the U.S. economy and military remained unassailable in the eyes of the world. Within twenty years, America faced defeat in Vietnam and its economy had been shaken. Japan was now considered the great economic superpower, while the U.S. and Japan reversed roles as surplus and debtor nations. Hands across the Sea? examines this reversal of roles, determining how and why America and Japan became the post-World War II era's most argumentative allies.

Through extensive research in a number of presidential libraries and author interviews with both American and Japanese policy-makers, Professor Maga finds a U.S.-Japan relationship forever troubled by cultural misunderstanding, America's Cold War obsession, Japanese pride, and strangely conflicting goals in both trade and defense. Given the intensity of the arguments over some of these issues, it is remarkable that Washington and Tokyo continued a working dialogue during this critical time.

Hands across the Sea? represents the first in-depth study of the modern U.S.-Japan relationship. It especially discovers how serious the U.S.-Japan disagreements over trade, defense, the direction of the Cold War, nuclear policy, and the environment had become.

Whereas American observers of U.S.-Japan relations are quick to point out their fellow countrymen's ignorance of other cultures and Japan's brilliance in analyzing American policy and life, the evidence suggests otherwise. Steering far away from anyone's political correctness, this book's bottom line involves hard-hitting investigation and analysis.
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Hard Work
The Making of Labor History
Melvyn Dubofsky
University of Illinois Press, 2000

A career-spanning collection of writings by the legendary labor historian

One of American labor history's most prominent scholars, Melvyn Dubofsky curated an accessible style and historical reach that have long marked his work as required reading for students and scholars. 

This collection juxtaposes Dubofsky's early writings with scholarship from the 1990s. Selections include work on western working-class radicalism, U.S. labor history in transnational and comparative settings, and the impact of technological change on American worker’s movements. Throughout, the writings provide an invaluable eyewitness perspective on the academic and political climate of the 1960s and 1970s while tracing the development of labor history as a discipline. 

An exploration of important themes in labor history, Hard Work combines essential scholarship with the story of how past and present interact in the work of historians.

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The Harlan Renaissance
Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns
William H. Turner
West Virginia University Press, 2021
Weatherford Award Winner, Nonfiction

A personal remembrance from the preeminent chronicler of Black life in Appalachia.

The Harlan Renaissance is an intimate remembrance of kinship and community in eastern Kentucky’s coal towns written by one of the luminaries of Appalachian studies, William Turner. Turner reconstructs Black life in the company towns in and around Harlan County during coal’s final postwar boom years, which built toward an enduring bust as the children of Black miners, like the author, left the region in search of better opportunities.

The Harlan Renaissance invites readers into what might be an unfamiliar Appalachia: one studded by large and vibrant Black communities, where families took the pulse of the nation through magazines like Jet and Ebony and through the news that traveled within Black churches, schools, and restaurants. Difficult choices for the future were made as parents considered the unpredictable nature of Appalachia’s economic realities alongside the unpredictable nature of a national movement toward civil rights.

Unfolding through layers of sociological insight and oral history, The Harlan Renaissance centers the sympathetic perspectives and critical eye of a master narrator of Black life.
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Harlem
The Unmaking of a Ghetto
Camilo José Vergara
University of Chicago Press, 2013
For more than a century, Harlem has been the epicenter of black America, the celebrated heart of African American life and culture—but it has also been a byword for the problems that have long plagued inner-city neighborhoods: poverty, crime, violence, disinvestment, and decay.

Photographer Camilo José Vergara has been chronicling the neighborhood for forty-three years, and Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto is an unprecedented record of urban change. Vergara began his documentation of Harlem in the tradition of such masters as Helen Levitt and Aaron Siskind, and he later turned his focus on the neighborhood’s urban fabric, both the buildings that compose it and the life and culture embedded in them. By repeatedly returning to the same locations over the course of decades, Vergara is able to show us a community that is constantly changing—some areas declining, as longtime businesses give way to empty storefronts, graffiti, and garbage, while other areas gentrify, with corporate chain stores coming in to compete with the mom-and-pops. He also captures the ever-present street life of this densely populated neighborhood, from stoop gatherings to graffiti murals memorializing dead rappers to impersonators honoring Michael Jackson in front of the Apollo, as well as the growth of tourism and racial integration.

Woven throughout the images is Vergara’s own account of his project and his experience of living and working in Harlem. Taken together, his unforgettable words and images tell the story of how Harlem and its residents navigated the segregation, dereliction and slow recovery of the closing years of the twentieth century and the boom and racial integration of the twenty-first century. A deeply personal investigation, Harlem will take its place with the best portrayals of urban life.

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Harry Bridges
Labor Radical, Labor Legend
Robert W. Cherny
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Won Honorable Mention for 2023 ILHA Book of the Year (International Labor History Association)

The iconic leader of one of America’s most powerful unions, Harry Bridges put an indelible stamp on the twentieth century labor movement. Robert Cherny’s monumental biography tells the life story of the figure who built the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) into a labor powerhouse that still represents almost 30,000 workers.

An Australian immigrant, Bridges worked the Pacific Coast docks. His militant unionism placed him at the center of the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike and spurred him to expand his organizing activities to warehouse laborers and Hawaiian sugar and pineapple workers. Cherny examines the overall effectiveness of Bridges as a union leader and the decisions and traits that made him effective. Cherny also details the price paid by Bridges as the US government repeatedly prosecuted him for his left-wing politics.

Drawing on personal interviews with Bridges and years of exhaustive research, Harry Bridges places an extraordinary individual and the ILWU within the epic history of twentieth-century labor radicalism.

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Harry Hopkins
Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy
George McJimsey
Harvard University Press, 1987

During America's longest crisis—the Great Depression and the Second World War—one man stood nearest to the president, almost as a partner: Harry Hopkins, trusted and loyal lieutenant and best friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt. From his work on the New Deal through his assignments during the war, Hopkins was the grand planner, expediter, adviser, and negotiator. Here is the first complete modern biography of this remarkable man, based on prodigious primary sources and written with the benefit of historical perspective.

George McJimsey fully records Hopkins's meteoric public career and probes the sources of his creativity and talent. Reared in Iowa with missionary values, he became a professional social worker in New York, pioneering strategies for several health and social service agencies. His special talent for persuasion and conciliation brought him into the New Deal, where as head of the Federal Emergency Relief Agency and the Public Works Administration he led Roosevelt's recovery programs—helping to pump billions of dollars into large projects and into tens of thousands of jobs without any political scandal or great conflict with conservative adversaries or competitors such as Harold Ickes. Later, as Secretary of Commerce, he continued to lead the country out of depression.

The coming of war tested Hopkins in new and unexpected ways. From being democracy's great bureaucrat he became the grand vizier of the arsenal of democracy. Living in the White House (in the Lincoln Room), Hopkins organized Lend-Lease, built the Anglo-American alliance, coordinated military supplies with strategic objectives, negotiated with Stalin, and helped to plan FDR's meetings with Churchill, Stalin, De Gaulle, and Chiang Kai-shek. Intelligent, humane, imaginative yet practical, always loyal to Roosevelt yet operating with his own creative independence, Hopkins played a role in winning the war and shaping the peace that provides an inspiring example of devoted public service. General readers and historians, journalists, and everyone interested in how government works will value and enjoy this book.

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Harry S. Truman versus the Medical Lobby
The Genesis of Medicare
Monte M. Poen
University of Missouri Press, 1996
“I have some bitter disappointments as President,” reflected Harry Truman after leaving office, “but the one that has troubled me the most in a personal way, has been the failure to defeat organized opposition to a national compulsory health-insurance program.”
 
Harry S. Truman versus the Medical Lobby by Monte M. Poen examines proposals for national health insurance from 1914 to 1965 focusing on Truman’s efforts during his presidency.
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Harry's Farewell
Interpreting and Teaching the Truman Presidency
Edited & Intro by Richard S. Kirkendall
University of Missouri Press, 2004
Harry’s Farewell confronts the biggest issue of Truman historiography: the historical significance of Harry S. Truman’s presidency. Exploring the subject from the point of view of Truman’s Farewell Address of January 15, 1953, the book begins by describing the preparation of the address itself by the president and his closest advisers. In it, they challenged the negative view of his presidency that prevailed as he prepared to leave the White House. The book goes on to appraise the presidency in terms of the topics included in the address: the president and the people, the economy, civil rights, the bomb, Containment, Korea, and the end of the Cold War. Four essays follow that cover key topics that Truman did not mention in his speech: the Red Scare, women’s rights, ethnicity, and the environment. The book ends with essays by two major Truman biographers who present their own interpretations of his historical significance.
In addition to interpreting the Truman presidency, the book also deals with the needs of teachers who must bring this subject into their classrooms. Reflecting the importance of education for the Truman Library’s mission, Harry’s Farewell began as a conference at the library that brought researchers and teachers together for four days of conversation about interpretation and teaching. As a result, this book offers documents that teachers can use in their classes and includes an essay, based on the conversations, on ways of teaching the Truman presidency. In addition to being of great value to researchers and teachers, this book provides the general reader with a clearly focused collection of informative and provocative essays on Harry Truman, a man now widely regarded as a great American president.
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Harvest of Despair
Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule
Karel C. Berkhoff
Harvard University Press, 2008

“If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot,” declared Nazi commissar Erich Koch. To the Nazi leaders, the Ukrainians were Untermenschen—subhumans. But the rich land was deemed prime territory for Lebensraum expansion. Once the Germans rid the country of Jews, Roma, and Bolsheviks, the Ukrainians would be used to harvest the land for the master race.

Karel Berkhoff provides a searing portrait of life in the Third Reich’s largest colony. Under the Nazis, a blend of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racist notions about the Slavs produced a reign of terror and genocide. But it is impossible to understand fully Ukraine’s response to this assault without addressing the impact of decades of repressive Soviet rule. Berkhoff shows how a pervasive Soviet mentality worked against solidarity, which helps explain why the vast majority of the population did not resist the Germans. He also challenges standard views of wartime eastern Europe by treating in a more nuanced way issues of collaboration and local anti-Semitism.

Berkhoff offers a multifaceted discussion that includes the brutal nature of the Nazi administration; the genocide of the Jews and Roma; the deliberate starving of Kiev; mass deportations within and beyond Ukraine; the role of ethnic Germans; religion and national culture; partisans and the German response; and the desperate struggle to stay alive. Harvest of Despair is a gripping depiction of ordinary people trying to survive extraordinary events.

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Hattiesburg
An American City in Black and White
William Sturkey
Harvard University Press, 2019

Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize
Benjamin L. Hooks Award Finalist


“An insightful, powerful, and moving book.”
—Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice

“Sturkey’s clear-eyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement.”
New York Times

If you really want to understand Jim Crow—what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it—you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can still see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. Hattiesburg takes us into the heart of this divided town and deep into the lives of families on both sides of the racial divide to show how the fabric of their existence was shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.

“Sturkey’s magnificent portrait reminds us that Mississippi is no anachronism. It is the dark heart of American modernity.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk

“When they are at their best, historians craft powerful, compelling, often genre-changing pieces of history…William Sturkey is one of those historians…A brilliant, poignant work.”
—Charles W. McKinney, Jr., Journal of African American History

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Haunted by Chaos
China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping
Sulmaan Wasif Khan
Harvard University Press, 2018

An American Interest Top Book of the Year

“Khan has unraveled the mystery of Chinese grand strategy, showing why insecurity lies at the root of Chinese power projection… Readers will not find a shrewder analysis as to why the Chinese act as they do.”
—Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Revenge of Geography


Before the Chinese Communist Party came to power, China lay broken and fragmented. Today it is a force on the global stage, and yet its leaders have continued to be haunted by the past. Drawing on an array of sources, Sulmaan Wasif Khan chronicles the grand strategies that have sought not only to protect China from aggression but also to ensure it would never again experience the powerlessness of the late Qing and Republican eras.

The dramatic variations in China’s modern history have obscured the commonality of purpose that binds the country’s leaders. Analyzing the calculus behind their decision making, Khan explores how they wove diplomatic, military, and economic power together to keep a fragile country safe in a world they saw as hostile. Dangerous and shrewd, Mao Zedong made China whole and succeeded in keeping it so, while the caustic, impatient Deng Xiaoping dragged China into the modern world. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao served as cautious custodians of the Deng legacy, but the powerful and deeply insecure Xi Jinping has shown an assertiveness that has raised both fear and hope across the globe.

For all their considerable costs, China’s grand strategies have been largely successful. But the country faces great challenges today. Its population is aging, its government is undermined by corruption, its neighbors are arming out of concern over its growing power, and environmental degradation threatens catastrophe. A question Haunted by Chaos raises is whether China’s time-tested approach can respond to the looming threats of the twenty-first century.

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Haunted by Chaos
China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, With a New Afterword
Sulmaan Wasif Khan
Harvard University Press, 2022

An American Interest Book of the Year

“Readers will not find a shrewder analysis as to why the Chinese act as they do.”
—Robert D. Kaplan


“An outstanding contribution to our understanding of that most urgent of contemporary geopolitical questions: what does China want?”
—Rana Mitter


Before the Chinese Communist Party came to power, China lay broken and fragmented. Today it dominates the global stage, and yet its leaders have continued to be haunted by the past. Analyzing the calculus behind decision making at the highest levels, Sulmaan Wasif Khan explores how China’s leaders have harnessed diplomatic, military, and economic power to keep a fragile country safe in a hostile world. At once shrewd and dangerous, Mao Zedong made China whole and succeeded in keeping it so while the caustic Deng Xiaoping dragged China into the modern world. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were cautious custodians of Deng’s legacy, but Xi Jinping has shown a mounting assertiveness that has raised concern across the globe.

China’s grand strategies, while costly, have been largely successful. But will this time-tested approach be enough to tackle the looming threats of our age?

“Written with verve and insight, this will become the go-to book for anyone interested in the foundations of China’s grand strategy under Communist rule.”
—Odd Arne Westad, author of The Cold War

“Khan’s brilliant analysis will help policymakers understand the critical rise of China…Crucial if we are to avoid conflict with this emerging superpower.”
—Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO

“Khan argues that since before the People’s Republic of China’s founding, Chinese rulers have held remarkably consistent objectives, even as their definition of security has expanded.”
—Mira Rapp-Hooper, War on the Rocks

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Have You Got Good Religion?
Black Women's Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement
AnneMarie Mingo
University of Illinois Press, 2024
What compels a person to risk her life to change deeply rooted systems of injustice in ways that may not benefit her? The thousands of Black Churchwomen who took part in civil rights protests drew on faith, courage, and moral imagination to acquire the lived experiences at the heart of the answers to that question. AnneMarie Mingo brings these forgotten witnesses into the historical narrative to explore the moral and ethical world of a generation of Black Churchwomen and the extraordinary liberation theology they created. These women acted out of belief that what they did was bigger than themselves. Taking as their goal nothing less than the moral transformation of American society, they joined the movement because it was something they had to do. Their personal accounts of a lived religion enacted in the world provide powerful insights into how faith steels human beings to face threats, jail, violence, and seemingly implacable hatred. Throughout, Mingo draws on their experiences to construct an ethical model meant to guide contemporary activists in the ongoing pursuit of justice.

A depiction of moral imagination that resonates today, Have You Got Good Religion? reveals how Black Churchwomen’s understanding of God became action and transformed a nation.

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Havel
Unfinished Revolution
David Gilbreath Barton
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

This is the story of a man who tried to resurrect the spirit of democratic life. He was born into a time of chaos and absurdity, and he took it as his fate to carry a candle into the night. This is his story and the story of many others, the writers, artists, actors, and philosophers who took it upon themselves to remember a tradition that had failed so miserably it had almost been forgotten.

Václav Havel (1936–2011), the famous Czech dissident, intellectual, and playwright, was there when a half million people came to Wenceslas Square to demand an end to Communism in 1989. Many came to hear him call for a free Czechoslovakia, for democratic elections, and a return to Europe. The demonstrators roared when he spoke. “Havel to the castle,” they chanted— meaning Havel for president. And a few weeks later, Havel became a most unusual president. He was sometimes misunderstood and not always popular, but by the time of his death in 2011, the world recognized Havel as one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century.

Born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in Prague, Havel was the constant subject of attention and an artistic eccentric in a family of businessmen. A young Havel and his family were cast by the Communist takeover as class enemies. Havel traveled a dark road that, ironically, provided the experiences he needed to reconnect not only to his own “ground of being” but to the traditions of civic society. This biography is the story of Havel’s inward journey in his underground years and thus the story of how Havel, the outsider, became the ultimate insider as president of the nation.

In this intimate and sweeping portrayal of Havel, David Barton reveals the eccentricities of the last president of Czechoslovakia, and the first president of the Czech Republic.

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Hawaiian Blood
Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity
J. Kauanui Kahaulani
Duke University Press, 2008
In the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) of 1921, the U.S. Congress defined “native Hawaiians” as those people “with at least one-half blood quantum of individuals inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778.” This “blood logic” has since become an entrenched part of the legal system in Hawai‘i. Hawaiian Blood is the first comprehensive history and analysis of this federal law that equates Hawaiian cultural identity with a quantifiable amount of blood. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui explains how blood quantum classification emerged as a way to undermine Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) sovereignty. Within the framework of the 50-percent rule, intermarriage “dilutes” the number of state-recognized Native Hawaiians. Thus, rather than support Native claims to the Hawaiian islands, blood quantum reduces Hawaiians to a racial minority, reinforcing a system of white racial privilege bound to property ownership.

Kauanui provides an impassioned assessment of how the arbitrary correlation of ancestry and race imposed by the U.S. government on the indigenous people of Hawai‘i has had far-reaching legal and cultural effects. With the HHCA, the federal government explicitly limited the number of Hawaiians included in land provisions, and it recast Hawaiians’ land claims in terms of colonial welfare rather than collective entitlement. Moreover, the exclusionary logic of blood quantum has profoundly affected cultural definitions of indigeneity by undermining more inclusive Kanaka Maoli notions of kinship and belonging. Kauanui also addresses the ongoing significance of the 50-percent rule: Its criteria underlie recent court decisions that have subverted the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and brought to the fore charged questions about who counts as Hawaiian.

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Hawker Hunter
the story of a thoroughbred
Sreco Bradic
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The most successful British jet fighter produced was without doubt the sleek and graceful Hawker Hunter. As usual for every new aircraft type it had its share of teething problems, but once these were all adequately solved the U.K. had at that time one of the best jet fighters available. It was built in large numbers and exported to many countries.
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Hayek and the Evolution of Capitalism
Naomi Beck
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Few economists can claim the influence—or fame—of F. A. Hayek. Winner of the Nobel Prize, Hayek was one of the most consequential thinkers of the twentieth century, his views on the free market echoed by such major figures as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
 
Yet even among those who study his work in depth, few have looked closely at his use of ideas from evolutionary science to advance his vision of markets and society. With this book Naomi Beck offers the first full-length engagement with Hayek’s thought from this perspective. Hayek argued that the capitalism we see in advanced civilizations is an unintended consequence of group selection—groups that adopted free market behavior expanded more successfully than others. But this attempt at a scientific grounding for Hayek’s principles, Beck shows, fails to hold water, plagued by incoherencies, misinterpretations of the underlying science, and lack of evidence. As crises around the globe lead to reconsiderations of the place of capitalism, Beck’s excavation of this little-known strand of Hayek’s thought—and its failure—is timely and instructive.
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The Hayloft Gang
The Story of the National Barn Dance
Edited by Chad Berry
University of Illinois Press, 2007
The National Barn Dance was the nation's most popular country music radio show during the 1930s and 1940s. The pioneering radio program defined country and western entertainment until the Grand Ole Opry and rock 'n' roll supplanted it in the 1950s. Broadcast for more than three decades from Chicago on WLS's powerful 50,000-watt signal, the show reached listeners throughout the Midwest, the East Coast, and South, delivering popular entertainment to both rural and urban areas while celebrating the fading folk traditions of an increasingly urbanized America.

The Hayloft Gang draws on the colorful commentary of performers and former listeners to analyze the National Barn Dance, its audience, and its impact. Contributors trace the history of barn dance radio, explore the paradox of a foundational country music program broadcast from a major city, investigate notions of authenticity in the presentation of country music and entertainment, and delve into provocative issues raised by the barn dance phenomenon.

Contributors: Chad Berry, Michael T. Bertrand, Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Don Cusic, Wayne W. Daniel, Loyal Jones, Kristine M. McCusker, Stephen Parry, Susan Smulyan, Paul L. Tyler, and Michael Ann Williams.

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Hazzan Mordecai Gustav Heiser
An Artist, His Art, and the Cantor Tradition in America
Gilya Gerda Schmidt
University of Tennessee Press, 2024
When Gilya Gerda Schmidt met him in 1986, Cantor Heiser had spent forty-six of his eighty-one years as a US citizen and was well-acquainted with mourning. Heiser had assumed the cantorate at Congregation B’nai Israel in the East End of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1942. A master of the cantor’s art, he was renowned for his style, elegant choir and service arrangements, and rich, dolesome voice, which seemed to pass effortlessly into hearers’ hearts.

But this book is more than a memorial to Heiser. Schmidt melds decades of archival research, conservation efforts, family interviews, and trips to Jerusalem and Berlin into a critical reconstruction of the life and vision of Hazzan Mordecai Gustav Heiser in the multiple contexts that shaped him. Coming of age in Berlin in the afterglow of the Second German Empire meant that young Gustav had tasted European Jewish culture in a rare state of refinement and modernity. But by January 30, 1940, when he reached New York with his wife, Elly, and two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Judith, Cantor Heiser had lost nearly all of his living family relations to the extermination programs of the German Reich, after narrowly surviving a brief incarceration at Sachsenhausen.

While Cantor Heiser’s art was steeped in nineteenth-century tradition, Schmidt contends that Heiser’s music was a powerful affirmation of Jewish life in the twentieth century. In a final chapter, Schmidt describes his influence on the American cantorate and American culture and society.
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Healing Our Divided Society
Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report
Fred Harris and Alan Curtis
Temple University Press, 2018

In 1968, the Kerner Commission concluded that America was heading toward “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Today, America’s communities are experiencing increasing racial tensions and inequality, working-class resentment over the unfulfilled American Dream, white supremacy violence, toxic inaction in Washington, and the decline of the nation’s example around the world.

In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, along with Eisenhower Foundation CEO Alan Curtis, re-examine fifty years later the work still necessary towards the goals set forth in The Kerner Report. This timely volume unites the interests of minorities and white working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work—and not work. 

Contributors include: Oscar Perry Abello, Elijah Anderson, Anil N.F. Aranha, Jared Bernstein, Henry G. Cisneros, Elliott Currie, Linda Darling-Hammond, Martha F. Davis, E. J. Dionne, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Delbert S. Elliott, Carol Emig, Jeff Faux, Ron Grzywinski, Michael P. Jeffries, Lamar K. Johnson, Celinda Lake, Marilyn Melkonian, Gary Orfield, Diane Ravitch, Laurie Robinson, Herbert C. Smitherman, Jr., Joseph Stiglitz, Dorothy Stoneman, Kevin  Washburn, Valerie Wilson, Gary Younge,  Julian E. Zelizer, and the editors

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Health and Efficiency
Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body
Steffan Blayney
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

A new model of health emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health.

Under this new “science of work,” fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers’ capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

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Health Care for Some
Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930
Beatrix Hoffman
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In Health Care for Some, Beatrix Hoffman offers an engaging and in-depth look at America’s long tradition of unequal access to health care. She argues that two main features have characterized the US health system: a refusal to adopt a right to care and a particularly American approach to the rationing of care. Health Care for Some shows that the haphazard way the US system allocates medical services—using income, race, region, insurance coverage, and many other factors—is a disorganized, illogical, and powerful form of rationing. And unlike rationing in most countries, which is intended to keep costs down, rationing in the United States has actually led to increased costs, resulting in the most expensive health care system in the world.
While most histories of US health care emphasize failed policy reforms, Health Care for Some looks at the system from the ground up in order to examine how rationing is experienced by ordinary Americans and how experiences of rationing have led to claims for a right to health care. By taking this approach, Hoffman puts a much-needed human face on a topic that is too often dominated by talking heads.

[more]

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Hearing Things
The Work of Sound in Literature
Angela Leighton
Harvard University Press, 2018

Hearing Things is a meditation on sound’s work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing.

An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets—Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald—Leighton’s scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.

[more]

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Heightened Expectations
The Rise of the Human Growth Hormone Industry in America
Aimee Medeiros
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Heightened Expectations is a groundbreaking history that illuminates the foundations of the multibillion-dollar human growth hormone (HGH) industry. Drawing on medical and public health histories as well as on photography, film, music, prose, and other examples from popular culture, Aimee Medeiros tracks how the stigmatization of short stature in boys and growth hormone technology came together in the twentieth century.
 
This book documents how the rise of modern capitalism and efforts to protect those most vulnerable to its harmful effects contributed to the social stigmatization of short statured children. Short boys bore the brunt of this discrimination by the mid-twentieth century, as cultural notions of masculinity deemed smallness a troubling trait in need of remedy. These boys became targets of growth hormone treatment, a trend accelerated by the development of effective HGH therapy in the late 1950s.
 
With a revisionist twist, Medeiros argues that HGH therapy was not plagued by a limited number of sources of the hormone but rather a difficult-to-access supply during the 1960s and 1970s. The advent of synthetic HGH remedied this situation. Therapy was available, however, only to those who could afford it. Very few could, which made short stature once again a mark of the underprivileged class.
 
Today, small boys with dreams of being taller remain the key customer base of the legitimate arm of the HGH industry. As gender and economic class disparities in treatment continue, some medical experts have alluded to patients’ parents as culprits of this trend. This book sheds light on how medicine’s attempt to make up for perceived physical shortcomings has deep roots in American culture.
 
Of interest to historians and scholars of medicine, gender studies, and disability studies, Heightened Expectations also offers much to policy makers and those curious about where standards and therapies originate. 
[more]

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Heir to Empire
United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916-1923
Carl P. Parrini
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969
In this book, Carl P. Parrini examines the evolution of United States economic diplomacy during a critical period in world history. After World War I, leaders were poised to begin “The American Century”, when the United States would assume the dominant role as the world's foremost political, economic and military power. This was to be achieved by establishing harmonic relations with other nations-allowing leverage on minor economic goals, while maintaining U.S. interests on major objectives. This theory of foreign policy is often attributed to president Warren Harding or his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. Yet, Parrini's study determines, nearly all decisions made with respect to international investment, allocation of raw materials, reparations, war debts, and tariffs, were based on earlier principles established by Woodrow Wilson's administration.
[more]

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Hemingway's Wars
Public and Private Battles
Linda Wagner-Martin
University of Missouri Press, 2017
This is a study of the ways various kinds of injury and trauma affected Ernest Hemingway’s life and writing, from the First World War through his suicide in 1961.

Linda Wagner-Martin has written or edited more than sixty books including Ernest Hemingway, A Literary Life. She is Frank Borden Hanes Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a winner of the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement.
[more]

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Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago
Architecture, Institutions, and the Making of a Modern Metropolis
Edward W. Wolner
University of Chicago Press, 2011

When championing the commercial buildings and homes that made the Windy City famous, one can’t help but mention the brilliant names of their architects—Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. But few people are aware of Henry Ives Cobb (1859–1931), the man responsible for an extraordinarily rich chapter in the city’s turn-of-the-century building boom, and fewer still realize Cobb’s lasting importance as a designer of the private and public institutions that continue to enrich Chicago’s exceptional architectural heritage.

Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is the first book about this distinguished architect and the magnificent buildings he created, including the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Athletic Association, the Fisheries Building for the 1893 World’s Fair, and the Chicago Federal Building. Cobb filled a huge institutional void with his inventive Romanesque and Gothic buildings—something that the other architect-giants, occupied largely with residential and commercial work, did not do. Edward W. Wolner argues that these constructions and the enterprises they housed—including the first buildings and master plan for the University of Chicago—signaled that the city had come of age, that its leaders were finally pursuing the highest ambitions in the realms of culture and intellect.

Assembling a cast of colorful characters from a free-wheeling age gone by, and including over 140 images of Cobb’s most creative buildings, Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is a rare achievement: a dynamic portrait of an architect whose institutional designs decisively changed the city’s identity during its most critical phase of development.

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Henry Kissinger and the American Century
Jeremi Suri
Harvard University Press, 2007

What made Henry Kissinger the kind of diplomat he was? What experiences and influences shaped his worldview and provided the framework for his approach to international relations? Jeremi Suri offers a thought-provoking, interpretive study of one of the most influential and controversial political figures of the twentieth century.

Drawing on research in more than six countries in addition to extensive interviews with Kissinger and others, Suri analyzes the sources of Kissinger's ideas and power and explains why he pursued the policies he did. Kissinger's German-Jewish background, fears of democratic weakness, belief in the primacy of the relationship between the United States and Europe, and faith in the indispensable role America plays in the world shaped his career and his foreign policy. Suri shows how Kissinger's early years in Weimar and Nazi Germany, his experiences in the U.S. Army and at Harvard University, and his relationships with powerful patrons--including Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon--shed new light on the policymaker.

Kissinger's career was a product of the global changes that made the American Century. He remains influential because his ideas are rooted so deeply in dominant assumptions about the world. In treating Kissinger fairly and critically as a historical figure, without polemical judgments, Suri provides critical context for this important figure. He illuminates the legacies of Kissinger's policies for the United States in the twenty-first century.

[more]

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Herbert Hoover and Economic Diplomacy
Department of Commerce Policy, 1921-1928
Joseph Brandes
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970
From 1921 to 1928, future president Hoover built the Commerce Department into one of the most influential forces in federal government. During this time, the United States became a major creditor to other nations, which in turn had a significant impact on power relations between nations. The Commerce Department also became a champion of American economic rights and independence from foreign commodities, and in the process became the guiding force in national economic policy.
[more]

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Here to Stay
Uncovering South Asian American History
Geetika Rudra
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Today, South Asians are a rapidly growing demographic in the United States, comprising nearly 2 percent of the population. But there was a time in the not-too-distant past when the United States was far less hospitable to South Asian immigrants. In fact, until 1952, only white immigrants could become naturalized American citizens. Yet in the first half of the twentieth century, many states still had thriving communities of South Asians. 
 
In Here to Stay, Geetika Rudra, a second-generation Indian immigrant and American history buff, takes readers on a journey across the country to unearth the little-known histories of earlier generations of South Asian Americans. She visits storied sites such as Oregon’s “Hindoo Alley,” home to many lumber workers at the turn of the century, and Angel Island, California’s immigration hub. She also introduces readers to such inspiring figures as Bhagat Singh Thind, an immigrant who had enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve his adopted country in World War I, but who was later denied citizenship and took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In turns both serious and joyful, this book vividly reveals how South Asians have always been a vital part of the American tapestry.
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A Hero on Mount St. Helens
The Life and Legacy of David A. Johnston
Melanie Holmes. Foreword by Jeff Renner
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Serendipity placed David Johnston on Mount St. Helens when the volcano rumbled to life in March 1980. Throughout that ominous spring, Johnston was part of a team conducting scientific research that underpinned warnings about the mountain. Those warnings saved thousands of lives when the most devastating volcanic eruption in U.S. history blew apart Mount St. Helens but killed Johnston on the ridge that now bears his name.

Melanie Holmes tells the story of Johnston's journey from a nature-loving Boy Scout to a committed geologist. Blending science with personal detail, Holmes follows Johnston through his encounters with Aleutian volcanoes, his work helping the Portuguese government assess the geothermal power of the Azores, and his dream job as a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Interviews and personal writings reveal what a friend called “the most unjaded person I ever met,” an imperfect but kind and intelligent young scientist passionately in love with his life and work and determined to make a difference.

[more]

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Heterosexual Africa?
The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS
Marc Epprecht
Ohio University Press, 2008

Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS builds from Marc Epprecht’s previous book, Hungochani (which focuses explicitly on same-sex desire in southern Africa), to explore the historical processes by which a singular, heterosexual identity for Africa was constructed—by anthropologists, ethnopsychologists, colonial officials, African elites, and most recently, health care workers seeking to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This is an eloquently written, accessible book, based on a rich and diverse range of sources, that will find enthusiastic audiences in classrooms and in the general public.

Epprecht argues that Africans, just like people all over the world, have always had a range of sexualities and sexual identities. Over the course of the last two centuries, however, African societies south of the Sahara have come to be viewed as singularly heterosexual. Epprecht carefully traces the many routes by which this singularity, this heteronormativity, became a dominant culture. In telling a fascinating story that will surely generate lively debate, Epprecht makes his project speak to a range of literatures—queer theory, the new imperial history, African social history, queer and women’s studies, and biomedical literature on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. He does this with a light enough hand that his story is not bogged down by endless references to particular debates.

Heterosexual Africa? aims to understand an enduring stereotype about Africa and Africans. It asks how Africa came to be defined as a “homosexual-free zone” during the colonial era, and how this idea not only survived the transition to independence but flourished under conditions of globalization and early panicky responses to HIV/AIDS.

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Hidden
A Sister and Brother in Nazi Poland
Fay Walker
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

Of the Rosenbluth family, only the older children, Faiga and Luzer, had gone into hiding before the SS rounded up the Jews of Kanczuga, Poland. Hidden is Faiga and Luzer’s story, a memoir whose intimate and quiet particularity makes the incomprehensible enormity of the Holocaust immediate, human, and devastatingly real.
In alternating first-person narratives, Faiga (Fay) and Luzer (Leo) take readers into their very different but inextricably linked experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. Faiga, the once-dignified young lady from a good home with servants and a seat by the eastern wall of the synagogue, spends two years wandering the perilous countryside, hoping to be taken for a peasant. Mere miles away, knowing nothing of his sister’s fate, Luzer, the leather wholesaler’s only son, lies silent all day in the stifling dark corner of a barn, where the smell of the cows’ warm hides are a piquant reminder of his lost world. Hidden deftly summons that world, as the familiar comforts and squabbles of life in a well-to-do, religious Jewish family are slowly overwhelmed by the grim news coming out of Germany. We follow Faiga and Luzer through the early forebodings and deprivations of the war, into hiding among righteous Poles and erstwhile neighbors-turned-betrayers, and finally, at war’s end, back once more into the world—but not necessarily into safety. Told in a confident, clear, and unsentimental prose, this is a story of heroism and tragedy writ large and small, of two young people coming of age in a world in chaos and then trying to return to "normal" after experiences as unimaginable as they are unforgettable.

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High Wide And Handsome
The River Journals of Norman D. Nevills
edited by Roy Webb
Utah State University Press, 2005

When he started taking paying passengers by boat through the rapids of the Colorado River's canyons, Norman Nevills invented whitewater tourism and the commercial river business. For twelve years, from 1938 until his death in a plane crash in 1949, he safely took, without a single life lost, friends, explorers, and customers down the Colorado, Green, San Juan, Salmon, and Snake Rivers in boats he designed. National media found him and his adventures irresistible and turned him into the personification of river running. Logging seven trips through the Grand Canyon when no one else had completed more than two, he was called the Fast Water Man. Boatmen he trained went on to found their own competing operations. Always controversial, Nevills had important critics and enemies as well as friends and supporters, but no one can dispute his tremendous impact on the history of western rivers and recreation.

Nevills's complete extant journals of those river expeditions are published for the first time in High, Wide, and Handsome. They contain vivid stories and images of still untamed-by-dams rivers and canyons in the Colorado River system and elsewhere, of wild rides in wooden boats, and of the few intrepid pioneers of adventure tourism who paid Nevills so they could experience it all. They have been transcribed and edited by river historian Roy Webb, author of If We Had a Boat: Green River Explorers, Adventurers, and Runners and Call of the
Colorado.

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Highbrow/Lowbrow
The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
Lawrence Levine
Harvard University Press, 1988

In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are.

For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms—Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow—enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America—housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy—now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between “serious” and “popular,” between “high” and “low” culture came to dominate America’s expressive arts.

“If there is a tragedy in this development,” Lawrence Levine comments, “it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period—and many have still not regained—their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.”

In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.

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High-Flying Birds
The 1942 St. Louis Cardinals
Jerome M. Mileur
University of Missouri Press, 2009
1942: Americans suddenly found themselves at war but were not about to be distracted from the National Pastime. The Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees were looking to continue their World Series rivalry from the 1941 season, and a youthful team from St. Louis was determined to stop them.
With only one player older than thirty, the St. Louis Cardinals were the youngest team to win the National League pennant and World Series. Built on good pitching and tremendous speed on the base paths and in the field, the team featured rookie Stan Musial, future Hall of Famer Enos Slaughter, and ace pitcher Mort Cooper, the National League’s Most Valuable Player of 1942. With their winningest season ever, posting 106 victories, the 1942 Redbirds have been called the greatest Cardinal team of all time.
Jerome Mileur was just a kid from downstate Illinois, but he well remembers his view of one game from the left-field grandstand—and the thrill of attending the second game of the World Series. In this book, he brings a sure and loving grasp of his subject to reconstructing one of the most remarkable pennant drives in modern baseball history, with the Cards winning forty-three of their last fifty-one games and clinching first place on the last day of the season.
Mileur provides a game-by-game account of the season with play-by-play action, not only capturing all the thrills on the Cards’ way to the top but also conveying the physical and mental demands that the players endured. Counted out by nearly everyone but themselves in August, the Redbirds caught fire in the season’s final weeks to pass the seemingly unbeatable Dodgers. And by winning four games out of five to defeat the New York Yankees for the championship, they handed Joe DiMaggio his only World Series defeat.
More than a recapitulation of a thrilling season, Mileur’s book is a reminder of how major-league baseball in 1942 differed in so many ways from today’s game—one startling example is Mileur’s account of how the absence of outfield warning tracks contributed to a devastating injury to Brooklyn’s star outfielder, Pete Reiser. The tenor of the times is reflected as well in the juxtaposition of the baseball season with the United States’ first year in the Second World War.
The 1942 Cardinals were not only a remarkable team unto themselves but also the beginning of a new baseball dynasty—1942’s pennant was the first of three in a row for the Cards, as well as the first of three World Series victories in a space of five seasons. This account of that tremendous season is a page-turner for anyone who loves the game and a must-read for Cardinals fans.
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Hillel at Michigan, 1926/27-1945
Struggles of Jewish Identity in a Pivotal Era
Andrei S. Markovits and Kenneth Garner
Michigan Publishing Services, 2016
This book provides the very first in-depth analysis of the founding decades of a major Hillel chapter in the United States. Hillel at the University of Michigan was founded in 1926 as the fourth such chapter in the United States following its establishment at three other public universities in the Midwest: Illinois (1923); Wisconsin (1924); Ohio State (1925).
 
The study analyzes Hillel's challenges as a big-tent, catch-all institution trying to represent all Jewish students on campus regardless of their religious orientation, cultural preferences, and ideological predilections. It looks at Hillel's interactions with the then powerful Jewish fraternities and sororities that provided the main locus of Jewish life on campus at the time, as well as its relations with the University's leadership and many of its cultural and political constituencies. Most of these activities occurred at a time when anti-Semitism was rife in the United States, particularly in the larger Detroit area, home to Henry Ford and Father Charles Edward Coughlin.
[more]

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Hippies American Values
Timothy S. Miller
University of Tennessee Press, 1991
"The sixties' political agenda may have been ground down to ambiguity at best, but moral and spiritual America will never again be quite what it was before the coming of the hippies, and Miller has shown how and why."—Robert S. Ellwood, University of Southern California
The hippies of the late 1960s were cultural dissenters who, among other things, advocated drastic rethinking of certain traditional American values and standards.  In this lucid, lively survey, Timothy Miller traces the movement's ethical innovations and analyzes the impact of its ideas on subsequent American culture.

Dedicated to such tenets as the primacy of love, trust in intuition and direct experience, the rejection of meaningless work, and a disdain for money and materialism, the hippies advocated dropping out of the dominant culture, and proposed new and more permissive ethics in several areas.  They argued that, while some drugs were indeed harmful, others provided useful insights and experiences and therefore should be freely available and widely used.  They endorsed a liberal ethics of sex, in which no sexual act between or among consenting adults would be banned.  They developed an ethics of rock-and-roll music, arguing that rock was the language of a generation and that it helped promote new ways of thinking and living.  They also revived the venerable American tradition of communal living.
In contrast to most available literature on the 1960s, this book deals with the cultural revolutionaries and not the political radicals of the New Left.  And instead of relying on later interviews with persons who were active in the 1960s, Miller draws mainly on underground newspapers of the day, the most important literary creation of the hippies themselves.  The result is a historical encounter of rare immediacy.

Timothy Miller is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas.
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The Hippies and American Values
Timothy S. Miller
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

“Turn on, tune in, drop out,” Timothy Leary advised young people in the 1960s. And many did, creating a counterculture built on drugs, rock music, sexual liberation, and communal living. The hippies preached free love, promoted flower power, and cautioned against trusting anyone over thirty. Eschewing money, materialism, and politics, they repudiated the mainstream values of the times. Along the way, these counterculturists created a lasting legacy and inspired long-lasting social changes.
    The Hippies and American Values uses an innovative approach to exploring the tenets of the counterculture movement. Rather than relying on interviews conducted years after the fact, Timothy Miller uses “underground” newspapers published at the time to provide a full and in-depth exploration. This reliance on primary sources brings an immediacy and vibrancy rarely seen in other studies of the period.
    Miller focuses primarily on the cultural revolutionaries rather than on the political radicals of the New Left. It examines the hippies’ ethics of dope, sex, rock, community, and cultural opposition and surveys their effects on current American values. Filled with illustrations from alternative publications, along with posters, cartoons, and photographs, The Hippies and American Values provides a graphic look at America in the 1960s.
    This second edition features a new introduction and a thoroughly updated, well-documented text. Highly readable and engaging, this volume brings deep insight to the counterculture movement and the ways it changed America. The first edition became a widely used course-adoption favorite, and scholars and students of the 1960s will welcome the second edition of this thought-provoking book.

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The Hirschfeld Archives
Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture
Heike Bauer
Temple University Press, 2017

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin’s Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture? The Hirschfeld Archives answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century. 

Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence—including persecution, death and suicide—shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism. 

The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence.

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His Humble Servant
Sister M. Pascalina Lehnert's Memoirs of Her Years of Service to Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII
M. Pascalina Lehnert
St. Augustine's Press, 2012

This is a personal and insightful portrait of Pope Pius XII, the memories of Sister M. Pascalina Lehnert, who served as his housekeeper for forty years. Her book, most of it written just a few months after the Pope’s death, shares insights into the person, the life, and the thinking of Pius XII, from his time as Nuncio in Munich until his death. Much of Sister’s motivation in writing this work was to correct the many distortions of fact and interpretation regarding this great pope.

This book was a best seller in the original German, as well as in the Italian and French translations. This is the first edition in English.

These reminiscences were written down at the instructions of Sister’s Superior General, but were not made known to the public until 1982, when it was published in German at the express wishes of Pope John Paul II to publish the work without any changes. So the work remained a lively, flowing account of memories and anecdotes in a simple, spontaneous style. It is a powerful and insightful account of Pius’s daily life, his treatment of those around him, and his concern for the upholding of the traditional teaching of the Church in the face of his awesome burden to lead the Church during World War II.

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A Historian and His World
A Life of Christopher Dawson, 1889-1970
Christina Scott
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
The English historian of culture Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was an independent scholar and the author of more than twenty books. He served as assistant lecturer in the History of Culture, University College, Exeter (1925), Forwood Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion, University of Liverpool (1934), Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh (1947-1949), and as Professor of Catholic Studies at Harvard University (1958-1962). He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1943 and edited the Dublin Review during the Second World War. This biography by Christina Scott, Dawson’s daughter, is a sensitive portrait of a complex and fascinating scholar. Unlike other English Christian converts of the twentieth century who excelled in literature, like G. K. Chesterton or C. S. Lewis, Dawson turned to the social sciences. He drew from the new idea of culture as a common way of life emerging from anthropology at the time of the Great War to shape a new approach to history. His study of the intimate relationship between religion and culture throughout world history shaped his trenchant criticisms of his own times. He wrote in 1955 that, “the first step in the transformation of culture is a change in the pattern of culture within the mind, for this is the seed out of which there spring new forms of life which ultimately change the social way of life and thus create a new culture.” Dawson’s engagement with anthropology and the idea of culture marked an important moment of development in the Catholic intellectual tradition. Christina Scott shows that Dawson is best understood as he himself interpreted his historical subjects—in the context of “the spiritual world in which he lived, the ideas that moved him, and the faith that inspired his action.” Dawson was not a historian of ideas for their own sake; he had a passionate belief in their liberating power. A Historian and His World will be of interest to intellectual historians, historians of religion and culture, and students of modern Catholic thought. The Introduction is written by Dawson scholar Joseph T. Stuart and the book is graced by a postscript by Christopher Dawson reflecting upon the meaning of his work.
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History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out
Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History
James R. Barrett
Duke University Press, 2017
In History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out James R. Barrett rethinks the boundaries of American social and labor history by investigating the ways in which working-class, radical, and immigrant people's personal lives intersected with their activism and religious, racial, ethnic, and class identities. Concerned with carving out space for individuals in the story of the working class, Barrett examines all aspects of individuals' subjective experiences, from their personalities, relationships, and emotions to their health and intellectual pursuits. Barrett's subjects include American communists, "blue-collar cosmopolitans"—such as well-read and well-traveled porters, sailors, and hoboes—and figures in early twentieth-century anarchist subculture. He also details the process of the Americanization of immigrant workers via popular culture and their development of class and racial identities, asking how immigrants learned to think of themselves as white. Throughout, Barrett enriches our understanding of working people’s lives, making it harder to objectify them as nameless cogs operating within social and political movements. In so doing, he works to redefine conceptions of work, migration, and radical politics.
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A History in Sum
150 Years of Mathematics at Harvard (1825–1975)
Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau
Harvard University Press, 2013

In the twentieth century, American mathematicians began to make critical advances in a field previously dominated by Europeans. Harvard’s mathematics department was at the center of these developments. A History in Sum is an inviting account of the pioneers who trailblazed a distinctly American tradition of mathematics—in algebraic geometry and topology, complex analysis, number theory, and a host of esoteric subdisciplines that have rarely been written about outside of journal articles or advanced textbooks. The heady mathematical concepts that emerged, and the men and women who shaped them, are described here in lively, accessible prose.

The story begins in 1825, when a precocious sixteen-year-old freshman, Benjamin Peirce, arrived at the College. He would become the first American to produce original mathematics—an ambition frowned upon in an era when professors largely limited themselves to teaching. Peirce’s successors—William Fogg Osgood and Maxime Bôcher—undertook the task of transforming the math department into a world-class research center, attracting to the faculty such luminaries as George David Birkhoff. Birkhoff produced a dazzling body of work, while training a generation of innovators—students like Marston Morse and Hassler Whitney, who forged novel pathways in topology and other areas. Influential figures from around the world soon flocked to Harvard, some overcoming great challenges to pursue their elected calling.

A History in Sum elucidates the contributions of these extraordinary minds and makes clear why the history of the Harvard mathematics department is an essential part of the history of mathematics in America and beyond.

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A History of Modern Russia
From Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin, Revised Edition
Robert Service
Harvard University Press, 2003
Russia had an extraordinary twentieth century, undergoing upheaval and transformation. Updating his acclaimed History of Twentieth-Century Russia through 2002, Robert Service provides a panoramic perspective on a country whose Soviet past encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror, and two world wars. He shows how seven decades of communist rule, which penetrated every aspect of Soviet life, continue to influence Russia today. This new edition also discusses continuing economic and social difficulties at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the military campaign in Chechnya, and Russia's reduced role on the world stage.
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A History of Modern Russia
From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century, Third Edition
Robert Service
Harvard University Press, 2009
Russia had an extraordinary twentieth century, undergoing upheaval and transformation. Updating his acclaimed History of Modern Russia, Robert Service provides a panoramic perspective on a country whose Soviet past encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror, and two world wars. He shows how seven decades of communist rule, which penetrated every aspect of Soviet life, continue to influence Russia today. This new edition takes the story from 2002 through the entire presidency of Vladimir Putin to the election of his successor, Dmitri Medvedev.
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A History of Private Life
Antoine Prost
Harvard University Press

This fifth and final volume in an award-winning series charts the remarkable inner history of our times from the tumult of World War I to the present day, when personal identity was released from its moorings in gender, family, social class, religion, politics, and nationality. Nine brilliant and bold historians present a dynamic picture of cultures in transition and in the process scrutinize a myriad of subjects—the sacrament of confession, volunteer hotlines, Nazi policies toward the family, the baby boom, evolving sexuality, the history of contraception, and ever-changing dress codes. They draw upon many unexpected sources, including divorce hearing transcripts, personal ads, and little-known demographic and consumer data.

Perhaps the most notable pattern to emerge is a polarizing of public and private realms. Productive labor shifts from the home to an impersonal public setting. Salaried or corporate employment replaces many independent, entrepreneurial jobs, and workers of all kinds aggressively pursue their leisure time—coffee and lunch breaks, weekends, vacations. Zoning laws segregate industrial and commercial areas from residential neighborhoods, which are no longer a supportive “theater” of benign surveillance, gossip, and mutual concern, but an assemblage of aloof and anonymous individuals or families. Scattered with personal possessions and appliances, homes grow large by yesterday's standards and are marked by elaborate spatial subdivisions; privacy is now possible even among one's own family. Men and women are obsessed with health, fitness, diet, and appearance as the body becomes the focal point of personal identity. Mirrors, once a rarity, are ubiquitous. In the search for sexual and individualistic fulfillment, romantic love becomes the foundation of marriage. Couples marry at an older age; families are smaller. The divorce rate rises, and with it the number of single-parent households. Women, entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, frequently function as both breadwinner and homemaker. The authors interrelate these dramatic patterns with the changing roles of state and religion in family matters, the socialization of education and elder care, the growth of feminism, the impact of media on private life, and the nature of secrecy.

Comprehensive and astute, Riddles of Identity in Modern Times chronicles a period when the differentiation of life into public and private realms, once a luxury of the wealthy, gradually spread throughout the population. For better or worse, people can now be alone. This fifth volume, differing significantly from the French edition, portrays Italian, German, and American family life in the twentieth century. The authors of these additional chapters—Chiara Saraceno, Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, and Elaine Tyler May—enlarge and enhance the already broad European and Atlantic canvas that depicts the modern identity.

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History of the American Newspaper Publishers Association
Edwin Emery, Editor
University of Minnesota Press, 1950

History of the American Newspaper Publishers Association was first published in 1950. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The dramatic story of the association that for sixty-three years has held a position of major importance in the development of our free press. For the first time the full story of the activities of this influential daily newspaper trade association is told by a scholar who was given access to the association's files of publications.

The story of the ANPA is primarily one of the advancement of the business interests of daily newspapers and of resulting conflicts and adjustments with labor unions, communications competitors, advertisers, newsprint makers, and the government. The author analyzes these areas of activity and integrates the history of the ANPA with the economic, political, and social developments that have transformed America and its daily newspapers since 1887.

Of major interest and importance is the discussion of the labor relations policy of the daily newspapers who are ANPA members.

Other major topics include the association's opposition to federal legislation which the ANPA asserted imperiled the freedom of the press; the association's battles to eliminate tariff charges on newsprint and to maintain favorable postal rates; competition with radio, magazines, and other communications media; business problems of daily newspapers in the field of advertising; and mechanical developments which have revolutionized the printing industry.

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A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 2, Book 1, 1951-1969
Allan H. Meltzer
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Allan H. Meltzer’s critically acclaimed history of the Federal Reserve is the most ambitious, most intensive, and most revealing investigation of the subject ever conducted. Its first volume, published to widespread critical acclaim in 2003, spanned the period from the institution’s founding in 1913 to the restoration of its independence in 1951. This two-part second volume of the history chronicles the evolution and development of this institution from the Treasury–Federal Reserve accord in 1951 to the mid-1980s, when the great inflation ended. It reveals the inner workings of the Fed during a period of rapid and extensive change. An epilogue discusses the role of the Fed in resolving our current economic crisis and the needed reforms of the financial system.

In rich detail, drawing on the Federal Reserve’s own documents, Meltzer traces the relation between its decisions and economic and monetary theory, its experience as an institution independent of politics, and its role in tempering inflation. He explains, for example, how the Federal Reserve’s independence was often compromised by the active policy-making roles of Congress, the Treasury Department, different presidents, and even White House staff, who often pressured the bank to take a short-term view of its responsibilities. With an eye on the present, Meltzer also offers solutions for improving the Federal Reserve, arguing that as a regulator of financial firms and lender of last resort, it should focus more attention on incentives for reform, medium-term consequences, and rule-like behavior for mitigating financial crises. Less attention should be paid, he contends, to command and control of the markets and the noise of quarterly data.

At a time when the United States finds itself in an unprecedented financial crisis, Meltzer’s fascinating history will be the source of record for scholars and policy makers navigating an uncertain economic future.

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A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 2, Book 2, 1970-1986
Allan H. Meltzer
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Allan H. Meltzer’s critically acclaimed history of the Federal Reserve is the most ambitious, most intensive, and most revealing investigation of the subject ever conducted. Its first volume, published to widespread critical acclaim in 2003, spanned the period from the institution’s founding in 1913 to the restoration of its independence in 1951. This two-part second volume of the history chronicles the evolution and development of this institution from the Treasury–Federal Reserve accord in 1951 to the mid-1980s, when the great inflation ended. It reveals the inner workings of the Fed during a period of rapid and extensive change. An epilogue discusses the role of the Fed in resolving our current economic crisis and the needed reforms of the financial system.

In rich detail, drawing on the Federal Reserve’s own documents, Meltzer traces the relation between its decisions and economic and monetary theory, its experience as an institution independent of politics, and its role in tempering inflation. He explains, for example, how the Federal Reserve’s independence was often compromised by the active policy-making roles of Congress, the Treasury Department, different presidents, and even White House staff, who often pressured the bank to take a short-term view of its responsibilities. With an eye on the present, Meltzer also offers solutions for improving the Federal Reserve, arguing that as a regulator of financial firms and lender of last resort, it should focus more attention on incentives for reform, medium-term consequences, and rule-like behavior for mitigating financial crises. Less attention should be paid, he contends, to command and control of the markets and the noise of quarterly data.

At a time when the United States finds itself in an unprecedented financial crisis, Meltzer’s fascinating history will be the source of record for scholars and policy makers navigating an uncertain economic future.

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History of Women in the West
Georges Duby
Harvard University Press, 1992
Has the worst of times for humanity—this century bloodied by wars and revolutions without precedent in history—been the best of times for women? How have the promises of freedom, parity with men, full participation in society, actually been met amid all the transformations and upheavals the twentieth century has witnessed? This fifth volume in the world-acclaimed series brings the history of women up to the present, placing it in the context of momentous events and profound social changes that have marked our time.
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History's Babel
Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Historical Enterprise in the United States, 1880 - 1940
Robert B. Townsend
University of Chicago Press, 2012
From the late nineteenth century until World War II, competing spheres of professional identity and practice redrew the field of history, establishing fundamental differences between the roles of university historians, archivists, staff at historical societies, history teachers, and others.
 
In History’s Babel, Robert B. Townsend takes us from the beginning of this professional shift—when the work of history included not just original research, but also teaching and the gathering of historical materials—to a state of microprofessionalization that continues to define the field today. Drawing on extensive research among the records of the American Historical Association and a multitude of other sources, Townsend traces the slow fragmentation of the field from 1880 to the divisions of the 1940s manifest today in the diverse professions of academia, teaching, and public history. By revealing how the founders of the contemporary historical enterprise envisioned the future of the discipline, he offers insight into our own historical moment and the way the discipline has adapted and changed over time. Townsend’s work will be of interest not only to historians but to all who care about how the professions of history emerged, how they might go forward, and the public role they still can play.
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History's Erratics
Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870-1930
David M. Emmons
University of Illinois Press, 2024

As Ice Age glaciers left behind erratics, so the external forces of history tumbled the Irish into America. Existing both out of time and out of space, a diverse range of these Roman-Catholic immigrants saw their new country in a much different way than did the Protestants who settled and claimed it. These erratics chose backward looking tradition and independence over assimilation and embraced a quintessentially Irish form of subversiveness that arose from their culture, faith, and working-class outlook. David M. Emmons draws on decades of research and thought to plumb the mismatch of values between Protestant Americans hostile to Roman Catholicism and the Catholic Irish strangers among them. Joining ethnicity and faith to social class, Emmons explores the unique form of dissidence that arose when Catholic Irish workers and their sympathizers rejected the beliefs and symbols of American capitalism.

A vibrant and original tour de force, History’s Erratics explores the ancestral roots of Irish nonconformity and defiance in America.

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Hitler in History
Eberhard Jäckel
Brandeis University Press, 1989
A leading interpreter of the Nazi period addresses crucial issues in modern European and contemporary history.
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Hitler Youth
Michael H. Kater
Harvard University Press, 2004

In modern times, the recruitment of children into a political organization and ideology reached its boldest embodiment in the Hitler Youth, founded in 1933 soon after the Nazi Party assumed power in Germany. Determining that by age ten children's minds could be turned from play to politics, the regime inducted nearly all German juveniles between the ages of ten and eighteen into its state-run organization. The result was a potent tool for bending young minds and hearts to the will of Adolf Hitler.

Baldur von Schirach headed a strict chain of command whose goal was to shift the adolescents' sense of obedience from home and school to the racially defined Volk and the Third Reich. Luring boys and girls into Hitler Youth ranks by offering them status, uniforms, and weekend hikes, the Nazis turned campgrounds into premilitary training sites, air guns into machine guns, sing-alongs into marching drills, instruction into indoctrination, and children into Nazis. A few resisted for personal or political reasons, but the overwhelming majority enlisted.

Drawing on original reports, letters, diaries, and memoirs, Kater traces the history of the Hitler Youth, examining the means, degree, and impact of conversion, and the subsequent fate of young recruits. Millions of Hitler Youth joined the armed forces; thousands gleefully participated in the subjugation of foreign peoples and the obliteration of "racial aliens." Although young, they committed crimes against humanity for which they cannot escape judgment. Their story stands as a harsh reminder of the moral bankruptcy of regimes that make children complicit in crimes of the state.

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A Hitler Youth in Poland
The Nazi Children's Evacuation Program During World War II
Jost Hermand
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Jost Hermand's A Hitler Youth in Poland is an invaluable first-hand account of his experience in Nazi education camps for German children, four in Poland. An important addition to the growing record of the childhood experiences of so-called Kriegskinder (children of war) in Germany during the Nazi regime, A Hitler Youth in Poland is a memoir of Germany's Kinderlandverschickung (KLV) program, by which German children were evacuated from large cities to countryside camps designed to toughen and prepare them for future careers in the military.

During the Nazi era, millions of German children between the ages of seven and sixteen were taken from their homes and sent to Hitler Youth paramilitary camps to be toughened up and taught how to be "German." Separated from their families and sent to the far-flung corners of Europe, these children often endured incredible abuse by the adults in charge. In this memoir, Jost Hermand, a cultural critic and historian who spent much of his youth in five different camps, writes about his experiences as a small, unathletic boy thrown into a "wolf pack" governed by brutalization, dreary routine, and sadism.

Intelligent and persuasive, A Hitler Youth in Poland should be read by anyone interested in psychology or the history of everyday life in Hitler's Germany and the mental scars of adults born during the Nazi regime.
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Hmong America
Reconstructing Community in Diaspora
Chia Youyee Vang
University of Illinois Press, 2010
The first scholarly work to come from inside the Hmong community, Hmong America documents Chia Youyee Vang's own migration from Laos to Minnesota at age nine and the transformations she has witnessed in Hmong communities throughout the migration and settlement processes.

Vang depicts Hmong experiences in Asia and examines aspects of community building in America to reveal how new Hmong identities have been formed and how they have challenged popular assumptions about race and ethnicity in multicultural America. Combining participant observation and archival research with personal experience, Vang constructs a nuanced and complex portrait of the more than 130,000 Hmong people who came to the United States as political refugees beginning in the mid-1970s. Her critique of previous representations of the Hmong community provides the sociological underpinnings for a bold reassessment of Hmong history in the greater context of globalization. This new understanding redefines concepts of Hmong homogeneity and characterizes ordinary Hmong migrants not as passive victims but as dynamic actors who have exercised much power over their political and social destinies.

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The Hocking Valley Railway
Edward H. Miller
Ohio University Press, 2024
The Hocking Valley Railway was once Ohio’s longest intrastate rail line, filled with a seemingly endless string of coal trains. Although coal was the main business, the railroad also carried iron and salt. Despite the fact that the Hocking Valley was such a large railroad, with a huge economic and social impact, very little is known about it. The Hocking Valley Railway traces the journey of a company that began in 1867 as the Columbus & Hocking Valley, built to haul coal from Athens to Columbus. Extensions of the line and consolidation of several branches ultimately created the Columbus, Hocking Valley & Toledo. This was a 345-mile railway, extending from the Lake Erie port of Toledo through Columbus and on to the Ohio River port of Pomeroy. The history of the Hocking Valley, like that of other railroads, is one of boom times and depression. By the 1920s, the Hocking coalfields were largely depleted, and the mass of track south of Columbus became a backwater, while the Toledo Division boomed. The corporate name has been gone for more than three-quarters of a century, but the Hocking Valley lives on as an integral part of railroad successor CSX. The Hocking Valley Railway, complete with 150 photographs and illustrations, also documents a historic transformation in midwestern transportation from slow canalboats to fast passenger trains. Historians and railroad enthusiasts will find much to savor in the story of this ever-changing company and the managers who ran it.
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Holocaust
An American Understanding
Lipstadt, Deborah E
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Immediately after World War II, there was little discussion of the Holocaust, but today the word has grown into a potent political and moral symbol, recognized by all.  In Holocaust: An American Understanding, renowned historian Deborah E. Lipstadt explores this striking evolution in Holocaust consciousness, revealing how a broad array of Americans—from students in middle schools to presidents of the United States—tried to make sense of this inexplicable disaster, and how they came to use the Holocaust as a lens to interpret their own history.
 
Lipstadt weaves a powerful narrative that touches on events as varied as the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Stonewall, and the women’s movement, as well as controversies over Bitburg, the Rwandan genocide, and the bombing of Kosovo. Drawing upon extensive research on politics, popular culture, student protests, religious debates and various strains of Zionist ideologies, Lipstadt traces how the Holocaust became integral to the fabric of American life. Even popular culture, including such films as Dr. Strangelove and such books as John Hershey’s The Wall, was influenced by and in turn influenced thinking about the Holocaust. Equally important, the book shows how Americans used the Holocaust to make sense of what was happening in the United States. Many Americans saw the civil rights movement in light of Nazi oppression, for example, while others feared that American soldiers in Vietnam were destroying a people identified by the government as the enemy.   
 
Lipstadt demonstrates that the Holocaust became not just a tragedy to be understood but also a tool for interpreting America and its place in the world. Ultimately Holocaust: An American Understanding tells us as much about America in the years since the end of World War II as it does about the Holocaust itself.
 
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The Holocaust and the Book
Destruction and Preservation
Jonathan Rose
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany systematically destroyed an estimated 100 million books throughout occupied Europe, an act that was inextricably bound up with the murder of 6 million Jews. By burning and looting libraries and censoring "un-German" publications, the Nazis aimed to eradicate all traces of Jewish culture along with the Jewish people themselves.

The Holocaust and the Book examines this bleak chapter in the history of printing, reading, censorship, and libraries. Topics include the development of Nazi censorship policies, the celebrated library of the Vilna ghetto, the confiscation of books from the Sephardic communities in Rome and Salonika, the experience of reading in the ghettos and concentration camps, the rescue of Polish incunabula, the uses of fine printing by the Dutch underground, and the suppression of Jewish books and authors in the Soviet Union. Several authors discuss the continuing relevance of Nazi book burnings to the present day, with essays on German responses to Friedrich Nietzsche and the destruction of Bosnian libraries in the 1990s.

The collection also includes eyewitness accounts by Holocaust survivors and a translation of Herman Kruk's report on the Vilna ghetto library. An annotated bibliography offers readers a concise guide to research in this growing field.
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The Holocaust and the Historians
Lucy S. Dawidowicz
Harvard University Press
The renowned author of The War Against the Jews sets out to solve a historiographical mystery. Why has the mass murder of European Jews been overlooked or trivialized by historians throughout the world? In a forceful, outspoken work, Lucy Dawidowicz looks for explanations.
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The Holocaust and the West German Historians
Historical Interpretation and Autobiographical Memory
Nicolas Berg, Translated and edited by Joel Golb
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
This landmark book was first published in Germany, provoking both acclaim and controversy. In this "history of historiography," Nicolas Berg addresses the work of German and German-Jewish historians in the first three decades of post–World War II Germany. He examines how they perceived—and failed to perceive—the Holocaust and how they interpreted and misinterpreted that historical fact using an arsenal of terms and concepts, arguments and explanations.
            This English-language translation is also a shortened and reorganized edition, which includes a new introduction by Berg reviewing and commenting on the response to the German editions. Notably, in this American edition, discussion of historian Joseph Wulf and his colleague and fellow Holocaust survivor Léon Poliakov has been united in one chapter. And special care has been taken to make clear to English speakers the questions raised about German historiographical writing. Translator Joel Golb comments, "From 1945 to the present, the way historians have approached the Holocaust has posed deep-reaching problems regarding choice of language. . . . This book is consequently as much about language as it is about facts."
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The Holocaust as Culture
Imre Kertész
Seagull Books, 2011
Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical.  
 
In The Holocaust as Culture,Kertész recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self. 
 
The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.
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The Holocaust, Corporations, and the Law
Unfinished Business
Leora Bilsky
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The Holocaust, Corporations, and the Law explores the challenge posed by the Holocaust to legal and political thought by examining issues raised by the restitution class action suits brought against Swiss banks and German corporations before American federal courts in the 1990s. Although the suits were settled for unprecedented amounts of money, the defendants did not formally assume any legal responsibility. Thus, the lawsuits were bitterly criticized by lawyers for betraying justice and by historians for distorting history.

Leora Bilsky argues class action litigation and settlement offer a mode of accountability well suited to addressing the bureaucratic nature of business involvement in atrocities. Prior to these lawsuits, legal treatment of the Holocaust was dominated by criminal law and its individualistic assumptions, consistently failing to relate to the structural aspects of Nazi crimes. Engaging critically with contemporary debates about corporate responsibility for human rights violations and assumptions about “law,” she argues for the need to design processes that make multinational corporations accountable, and examines the implications for transitional justice, the relationship between law and history, and for community and representation in a post-national world. Her novel interpretation of the restitution lawsuits not only adds an important dimension to the study of Holocaust trials, but also makes an innovative contribution to broader and pressing contemporary legal and political debates. In an era when corporations are ever more powerful and international, Bilsky’s arguments will attract attention beyond those interested in the Holocaust and its long shadow.
 
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Holocaust Icons
Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory
Oren Baruch Stier
Rutgers University Press, 2015
The Holocaust has bequeathed to contemporary society a cultural lexicon of intensely powerful symbols, a vocabulary of remembrance that we draw on to comprehend the otherwise incomprehensible horror of the Shoah. Engagingly written and illustrated with more than forty black-and-white images, Holocaust Icons probes the history and memory of four of these symbolic relics left in the Holocaust’s wake.
 
Jewish studies scholar Oren Stier offers in this volume new insight into symbols and the symbol-making process, as he traces the lives and afterlives of certain remnants of the Holocaust and their ongoing impact. Stier focuses in particular on four icons: the railway cars that carried Jews to their deaths, symbolizing the mechanics of murder; the Arbeit Macht Frei (“work makes you free”) sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, pointing to the insidious logic of the camp system; the number six million that represents an approximation of the number of Jews killed as well as mass murder more generally; and the persona of Anne Frank, associated with victimization. Stier shows how and why these icons—an object, a phrase, a number, and a person—have come to stand in for the Holocaust: where they came from and how they have been used and reproduced; how they are presently at risk from a variety of threats such as commodification; and what the future holds for the memory of the Shoah.
 
In illuminating these icons of the Holocaust, Stier offers valuable new perspective on one of the defining events of the twentieth century. He helps readers understand not only the Holocaust but also the profound nature of historical memory itself.
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Holocaust Literature
A History and Guide
David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant
Brandeis University Press, 2013
What is Holocaust literature? When does it begin and how is it changing? Is there an essential core that consists of diaries, eyewitness accounts of the concentration camps, and tales of individual survival? Is it the same everywhere: West and East, in Australia as in the Americas, in poetry as in prose? Is this literature sacred and separate, or can it be studied alongside other responses to catastrophe? What works of Holocaust literature will be read a hundred years from now—and why? Here, for the first time, is a historical survey of Holocaust literature in all genres, countries, and major languages. Beginning in wartime, it proceeds from the literature of mobilization and mourning in the Free World to the vast literature produced in Nazi-occupied ghettos, bunkers and places of hiding, transit and concentration camps. No less remarkable is the new memorial literature that begins to take shape within weeks and months of the liberation. Moving from Europe to Israel, the United States, and beyond, the authors situate the writings by real and proxy witnesses within three distinct postwar periods: “communal memory,” still internal and internecine; “provisional memory” in the 1960s and 1970s, when a self-conscious Holocaust genre is born; and “authorized memory,” in which we live today. Twenty book covers—first editions in their original languages—and a guide to the “first hundred books” show the multilingual scope, historical depth, and artistic range of this extraordinary body of writing.
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Holocaust Memory Reframed
Museums and the Challenges of Representation
Hansen-Glucklich, Jennifer
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Holocaust memorials and museums face a difficult task as their staffs strive to commemorate and document horror. On the one hand, the events museums represent are beyond most people’s experiences.  At the same time they are often portrayed by theologians, artists, and philosophers in ways that are already known by the public. Museum administrators and curators have the challenging role of finding a creative way to present Holocaust exhibits to avoid clichéd or dehumanizing portrayals of victims and their suffering.

In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines representations in three museums: Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She describes a variety of visually striking media, including architecture, photography exhibits, artifact displays, and video installations in order to explain the aesthetic techniques that the museums employ. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel, and the United States. In Yad Vashem, architect Moshe Safdie developed a narrative suited for Israel, rooted in a redemptive, Zionist story of homecoming to a place of mythic geography and renewal, in contrast to death and suffering in exile. In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind’s architecture, broken lines, and voids emphasize absence. Here exhibits communicate a conflicted ideology, torn between the loss of a Jewish past and the country’s current multicultural ethos. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents yet another lens, conveying through its exhibits a sense of sacrifice that is part of the civil values of American democracy, and trying to overcome geographic and temporal distance. One well-know example, the pile of thousands of shoes plundered from concentration camp victims encourages the visitor to bridge the gap between viewer and victim.  

Hansen-Glucklich explores how each museum’s concept of the sacred shapes the design and choreography of visitors’ experiences within museum spaces. These spaces are sites of pilgrimage that can in turn lead to rites of passage.
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The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando
Rebecca Fromer
University of Alabama Press, 1993
A poignant reminder of the ways enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners

In The Holocaust Odyssey, Rebecca Fromer leads us through the experiences of Danny Bennahmias, a Greek Jew of Italian citizenship whose forced labor as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz included the disentangling of hundreds of thousands of gassed men, women, and children. The book is the result of a diligent collaboration. As it unfolds, it becomes a poignant reminder of the manner in which enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners. It is a story of human decency, the spark of which remains against all odds.
 
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The Holocaust
Theoretical Readings
Levi, Neil
Rutgers University Press, 2003
The first anthology to address the relationship between the events of the Nazi genocide and the intellectual concerns of contemporary literary and cultural theory in one substantial and indispensable volume.

This agenda-setting reader brings together both classic and new writings to demonstrate how concerns arising from the Nazi genocide shaped contemporary literary and cultural theory. Wide in its thematic scope, it covers such vital questions as:
- Authenticity and experience
- Memory and trauma
- Historiography and the philosophy of history
- Fascism and Nazi anti-Semitism
- Representation and identity formation
- Race, gender, and genocide
- Implications of the Holocaust for theories of the unconscious, ethics, politics, and aesthetics

The readings, which are fully contextualized by a general introduction, section introductions, and bibliographical notes, represent the work of many influential writers and theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman, Walter Benjamin, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Saul Friedlander, Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Langer, Emmanuel Levinas, Primo Levi, Jean-François Lyotard, Hayden White, and James E. Young. This multidisciplinary anthology will be welcomed by students and scholars of the Holocaust.

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Homer, Troy and the Turks
Heritage and Identity in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1870-1915
Günay Uslu
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Homer's stories of Troy are part of the foundations of Western culture. What's less well known is that they also inspired Ottoman-Turkish cultural traditions. Yet even with all the historical and archaeological research into Homer and Troy, most scholars today rely heavily on Western sources, giving Ottoman work in the field short shrift. This book helps right that balance, exploring Ottoman-Turkish involvement and interest in the subject between 1870, when Heinrich Schliemann began his excavations in search of Troy on Ottoman soil, and the battle of Gallipoli in 1915, which gave the Turks their own version of the heroic epic of Troy.
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Homesickness
Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment
Ryan Hediger
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Introducing a posthumanist concept of nostalgia to analyze steadily widening themes of animality, home, travel, slavery, shopping, and war in U.S. literature after 1945

 
In the Anthropocene, as climate change renders environments less stable, the human desire for place underscores the weakness of the individual in the face of the world. In this book, Ryan Hediger introduces a distinctive notion of homesickness, one in which the longing for place demonstrates not only human vulnerability but also intersubjectivity beyond the human. Arguing that this feeling is unavoidable and characteristically posthumanist, Hediger studies the complex mix of attitudes toward home, the homely, and the familiar in an age of resurgent cosmopolitanism, especially eco-cosmopolitanism.

Homesickness closely examines U.S. literature mostly after 1945, including prominent writers such as Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, and Ernest Hemingway, in light of the challenges and themes of the Anthropocene. Hediger argues that our desire for home is shorthand for a set of important hopes worth defending—serious and genuine relationships to places and their biotic regimes and landforms; membership in vital cultures, human and nonhuman; resistance to capital-infused forms of globalization that flatten differences and turn life and place into mere resources. Our homesickness, according to Hediger, is inevitable because the self is necessarily constructed with reference to the material past. Therefore, homesickness is not something to dismiss as nostalgic or reactionary but is rather a structure of feeling to come to terms with and even to cultivate.

Recasting an expansive range of fields through the lens of homesickness—from ecocriticism to animal studies and disability studies, (eco)philosophy to posthumanist theory—Homesickness speaks not only to the desire for a physical structure or place but also to a wide range of longings and dislocations, including those related to subjectivity, memory, bodies, literary form, and language. 

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Homestead
The Households of a Mill Town (2nd Edition)
Margaret Byington
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

First published in 1910 in the classic Pittsburgh Survey, this pioneering work of American social history, reproduced in its entirety, describes daily life in a community that was dominated economically and physically by the giant Homestead Works of the United States Steel Corporation. The town of Homestead, just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, developed as a completely separate city—a true mill town settled by newer immigrants and shaped in its attitudes by the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892, which significantly set back unionization efforts in the steel industry. Homestead:The Households of a Mill Town not only focuses on the plight of the American steel worker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it also explores the domestic and community aspects of life in that time period.

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Honest John Williams
U.S. Senator from Delaware
Carol E. Hoffecker
University of Delaware Press
John J. Williams was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator James M. Tunnell. Honest John Williams: U.S. Senator from Delaware examines the political career of Williams, a political novice who established himself as an important advocate for fiscal probity and integrity in government during four successive terms in the U.S. Senate between 1947 and 1970. Over the course of those twenty-four years in the Senate, which spanned the administrations of five separate U.S. presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon), Williams positioned himself as an opponent of wasteful government spending and corruption, often working ‘across the aisle’ in order to achieve specific political goals. In Honest John Williams, noted Delaware historian Carol E. Hoffecker offers readers a comprehensive look at the legislative course forged by Delaware’s first four-term senator, a chicken-feed dealer born on a farm near Sussex County who went on to become an important advocate for fiscal probity and integrity in twentieth-century American politics.
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Honored and Dishonored Guests
Westerners in Wartime Japan
W. Puck Brecher
Harvard University Press, 2017

The brutality and racial hatred exhibited by Japan’s military during the Pacific War piqued outrage in the West and fanned resentments throughout Asia. Public understanding of Japan’s wartime atrocities, however, often fails to differentiate the racial agendas of its military and government elites from the racial values held by the Japanese people. While not denying brutalities committed by the Japanese military, Honored and Dishonored Guests overturns these standard narratives and demonstrates rather that Japan’s racial attitudes during wartime are more accurately discerned in the treatment of Western civilians living in Japan than the experiences of enemy POWs.

The book chronicles Western communities in wartime Japan, using this body of experiences to reconsider allegations of Japanese racism and racial hatred. Its bold thesis is borne out by a broad mosaic of stories from dozens of foreign families and individuals who variously endured police harassment, suspicion, relocation, starvation, denaturalization, internment, and torture, as well as extraordinary acts of charity. The book’s account of stranded Westerners—from Tokyo, Yokohama, and Kobe to the mountain resorts of Karuizawa and Hakone—yields a unique interpretation of race relations and wartime life in Japan.

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logo for Harvard University Press
Honored and Dishonored Guests
Westerners in Wartime Japan
W. Puck Brecher
Harvard University Press

The brutality and racial hatred exhibited by Japan’s military during the Pacific War piqued outrage in the West and fanned resentments throughout Asia. Public understanding of Japan’s wartime atrocities, however, often fails to differentiate the racial agendas of its military and government elites from the racial values held by the Japanese people. While not denying brutalities committed by the Japanese military, Honored and Dishonored Guests overturns these standard narratives and demonstrates rather that Japan’s racial attitudes during wartime are more accurately discerned in the treatment of Western civilians living in Japan than the experiences of enemy POWs.

The book chronicles Western communities in wartime Japan, using this body of experiences to reconsider allegations of Japanese racism and racial hatred. Its bold thesis is borne out by a broad mosaic of stories from dozens of foreign families and individuals who variously endured police harassment, suspicion, relocation, starvation, denaturalization, internment, and torture, as well as extraordinary acts of charity. The book’s account of stranded Westerners—from Tokyo, Yokohama, and Kobe to the mountain resorts of Karuizawa and Hakone—yields a unique interpretation of race relations and wartime life in Japan.

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Hoosier Public Enemy
A Life of John Dillinger
John Beineke
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014
During the bleak days of the Great Depression, news of economic hardship often took a backseat to articles on the exploits of an outlaw from Indiana—John Dillinger. For a period of fourteen months during 1933 and 1934 Dillinger became the most famous bandit in American history, and no criminal since has matched him for his celebrity and notoriety. Dillinger won public attention not only for his robberies, but his many escapes from the law. The escapes he made from jails or “tight spots,” when it seemed law officials had him cornered, became the stuff of legends. While the public would never admit that they wanted the “bad guy” to win, many could not help but root for the man who appeared to be an underdog. Although his crime wave took place in the last century, the name Dillinger has never left the public imagination
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HOUSES WITH NAMES
"THE ITALIAN IMMIGRANTS OF HIGHWOOD, ILL
Adria Bernardi
University of Illinois Press, 1990
Combining her other research with interviews of nearly fifty Italian immigrants of her grandparents' generation, Adria Bernardi has crafted a memorable oral history of a community of working-class immigrants. Bernardi tells their story clearly and with care, interspersing transcriptions and translations with her own recollections and interpretations of life among the Italian immigrants of Highwood.
 
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How Comics Travel
Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Winner, 2023 Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work
Honorable Mention, 2023 CSS Charles Hatfield Book Prize


In How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins challenges the clichéd understanding of comics as a “universal” language, circulating without regard for cultures or borders. Instead, she develops a new methodology of reading for difference. Kelp-Stebbins’s anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist analytical framework engages with comics as sites of struggle over representation in a diverse world. Through comparative case studies of Metro, Tintin, Persepolis, and more, she explores the ways in which graphic narratives locate and dislocate readers in every phase of a transnational comic’s life cycle according to distinct visual, linguistic, and print cultures. How Comics Travel disengages from the constrictive pressures of nationalism and imperialism, both in comics studies and world literature studies more broadly, to offer a new vision of how comics depict and enact the world as a transcultural space.
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How Free Is Free?
The Long Death of Jim Crow
Leon F. Litwack
Harvard University Press, 2009

In 1985, a black veteran of the civil rights movement offered a bleak vision of a long and troubled struggle. For more than a century, black southerners learned to live with betrayed expectations, diminishing prospects, and devastated aspirations. Their odyssey includes some of the most appalling examples of terrorism, violence, and dehumanization in the history of this nation. But, as Leon Litwack graphically demonstrates, it is at the same time an odyssey of resilience and resistance defined by day-to-day acts of protest: the fight for justice poignantly recorded in the stories, songs, images, and movements of a people trying to be heard.

For black men and women, the question is: how free is free? Despite two major efforts to reconstruct race relations, injustices remain. From the height of Jim Crow to the early twenty-first century, struggles over racism persist despite court decisions and legislation. Few indignities were more pronounced than the World War II denial of basic rights and privileges to those responding to the call to make the world safe for democratic values—values that they themselves did not enjoy. And even the civil rights movement promise to redeem America was frustrated by change that was often more symbolic than real.

Although a painful history to confront, Litwack’s book inspires as it probes the enduring story of racial inequality and the ongoing fight for freedom in black America with power and grace.

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How Our Days Became Numbered
Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual
Dan Bouk
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Long before the age of "Big Data" or the rise of today's "self-quantifiers," American capitalism embraced "risk"--and proceeded to number our days. Life insurers led the way, developing numerical practices for measuring individuals and groups, predicting their fates, and intervening in their futures. Emanating from the gilded boardrooms of Lower Manhattan and making their way into drawing rooms and tenement apartments across the nation, these practices soon came to change the futures they purported to divine.

How Our Days Became Numbered tells a story of corporate culture remaking American culture--a story of intellectuals and professionals in and around insurance companies who reimagined Americans' lives through numbers and taught ordinary Americans to do the same. Making individuals statistical did not happen easily. Legislative battles raged over the propriety of discriminating by race or of smoothing away the effects of capitalism's fluctuations on individuals. Meanwhile, debates within companies set doctors against actuaries and agents, resulting in elaborate, secretive systems of surveillance and calculation.

Dan Bouk reveals how, in a little over half a century, insurers laid the groundwork for the much-quantified, risk-infused world that we live in today. To understand how the financial world shapes modern bodies, how risk assessments can perpetuate inequalities of race or sex, and how the quantification and claims of risk on each of us continue to grow, we must take seriously the history of those who view our lives as a series of probabilities to be managed.
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How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind
The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality
Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed.
           
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.
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How States Shaped Postwar America
State Government and Urban Power
Nicholas Dagen Bloom
University of Chicago Press, 2019
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

The history of public policy in postwar America tends to fixate on developments at the national level, overlooking the crucial work done by individual states in the 1960s and ’70s. In this book, Nicholas Dagen Bloom demonstrates the significant and enduring impact of activist states in five areas: urban planning and redevelopment, mass transit and highways, higher education, subsidized housing, and the environment. Bloom centers his story on the example set by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose aggressive initiatives on the pressing issues in that period inspired others and led to the establishment of long-lived state polices in an age of decreasing federal power. Metropolitan areas, for both better and worse, changed and operated differently because of sustained state action—How States Shaped Postwar America uncovers the scope of this largely untold story.
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How the Other Half Lives
Studies among the Tenements of New York
Jacob A. Riis
Harvard University Press, 2010

Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.

Jacob Riis’s pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title from Rabelais’s Pantagruel: “One half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of that Country.” An anatomy of New York City’s slums in the 1880s, it vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of “the other half,” who might well have inhabited another country. The book pricked the conscience of its readers and raised the tenement into a symbol of intransigent social difference. As Alan Trachtenberg makes clear in his introduction, it is a book that still speaks powerfully to us today of social injustice.

Except for the modernization of spelling and punctuation, the John Harvard Library edition of How the Other Half Lives reproduces the text of the first published book version of November 1890. For this edition, prints have been made from Riis’s original photographs now in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Endnotes aid the contemporary reader.

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How Things Fall Apart
What Happened to the Cuban Revolution
Elizabeth Dore
Duke University Press, 2023
In How Things Fall Apart Elizabeth Dore reveals the decay of the Cuban political system through the lives of seven ordinary Cuban citizens. Born in the 1970s and 1980s, they recount how their lives changed over a tumultuous stretch of thirty-five years: first when Fidel Castro opened the country to tourism following the fall of the Soviet bloc; then when Raúl Castro allowed market forces to operate; and finally when President Trump’s tightening of the US embargo combined with the COVID-19 pandemic caused economic collapse. With warmth and humanity, they describe learning to survive in an environment where a tiny minority has grown rich, the great majority has been left behind, and inequality has destroyed the very things that used to give meaning to Cubans’ lives. In this book, everyday Cubans illuminate their own stories and the slow and agonizing decline of the Cuban Revolution.
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How We Teach Science
What’s Changed, and Why It Matters
John L. Rudolph
Harvard University Press, 2019

A former Wisconsin high school science teacher makes the case that how and why we teach science matters, especially now that its legitimacy is under attack.

Why teach science? The answer to that question will determine how it is taught. Yet despite the enduring belief in this country that science should be taught, there has been no enduring consensus about how or why.

This is especially true when it comes to teaching scientific process. Nearly all of the basic knowledge we have about the world is rock solid. The science we teach in high schools in particular—laws of motion, the structure of the atom, cell division, DNA replication, the universal speed limit of light—is accepted as the way nature works. Everyone also agrees that students and the public more generally should understand the methods used to gain this knowledge. But what exactly is the scientific method?

Ever since the late 1800s, scientists and science educators have grappled with that question. Through the years, they’ve advanced an assortment of strategies, ranging from “the laboratory method” to the “five-step method” to “science as inquiry” to no method at all. How We Teach Science reveals that each strategy was influenced by the intellectual, cultural, and political circumstances of the time. In some eras, learning about experimentation and scientific inquiry was seen to contribute to an individual’s intellectual and moral improvement, while in others it was viewed as a way to minimize public interference in institutional science.

John Rudolph shows that how we think about and teach science will either sustain or thwart future innovation, and ultimately determine how science is perceived and received by the public.

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The Human Race
Robert Antelme
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Dachau, Robert Antelme recovered his freedom a year later when François Mitterand, visiting the camp in an official capacity, recognized the dying Antelme and had him spirited to Paris. Antelme's story of his experiences in Germany--his only book--indelibly marked an entire generation, "a work written without hatred, a work of boundless compassion such as that is to be found only in the great Russians."
 
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Humanistic Letters
The Irving Babbitt-Paul Elmer More Correspondence
Eric Adler
University of Missouri Press, 2023
Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) and Paul Elmer More (1864–1937) were the leading lights of the New Humanism, a consequential movement of literary and social criticism in America. Through their writings on literary, educational, cultural, religious, and political topics, they influenced countless important thinkers, such as T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Russell Kirk, Benedetto Croce, Werner Jaeger, and George Will. Their work became the source of heated public debates in the 1920s and early 1930s. The belligerent criticisms of Babbitt and More—composed by such famous intellectuals as Ernest Hemmingway and H.L. Mencken—have ensured that the New Humanism has seldom been properly appreciated. Humanistic Letters helps remedy this problem, by providing for the first time the extant correspondence of Babbitt and More, which gets to the heart of their intellectual project.

 
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Hungering for America
Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration
Hasia R. Diner
Harvard University Press, 2003

Millions of immigrants were drawn to American shores, not by the mythic streets paved with gold, but rather by its tables heaped with food. How they experienced the realities of America’s abundant food—its meat and white bread, its butter and cheese, fruits and vegetables, coffee and beer—reflected their earlier deprivations and shaped their ethnic practices in the new land.

Hungering for America tells the stories of three distinctive groups and their unique culinary dramas. Italian immigrants transformed the food of their upper classes and of sacred days into a generic “Italian” food that inspired community pride and cohesion. Irish immigrants, in contrast, loath to mimic the foodways of the Protestant British elite, diminished food as a marker of ethnicity. And East European Jews, who venerated food as the vital center around which family and religious practice gathered, found that dietary restrictions jarred with America’s boundless choices.

These tales, of immigrants in their old worlds and in the new, demonstrate the role of hunger in driving migration and the significance of food in cementing ethnic identity and community. Hasia Diner confirms the well-worn adage, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”

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The Hungry World
America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia
Nick Cullather
Harvard University Press, 2013

Food was a critical front in the Cold War battle for Asia. “Where Communism goes, hunger follows” was the slogan of American nation builders who fanned out into the countryside to divert rivers, remodel villages, and introduce tractors, chemicals, and genes to multiply the crops consumed by millions. This “green revolution” has been credited with averting Malthusian famines, saving billions of lives, and jump-starting Asia’s economic revival. Bono and Bill Gates hail it as a model for revitalizing Africa’s economy. But this tale of science triumphant conceals a half century of political struggle from the Afghan highlands to the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, a campaign to transform rural societies by changing the way people eat and grow food.

The ambition to lead Asia into an age of plenty grew alongside development theories that targeted hunger as a root cause of war. Scientific agriculture was an instrument for molding peasants into citizens with modern attitudes, loyalties, and reproductive habits. But food policies were as contested then as they are today. While Kennedy and Johnson envisioned Kansas-style agribusiness guarded by strategic hamlets, Indira Gandhi, Marcos, and Suharto inscribed their own visions of progress onto the land.

Out of this campaign, the costliest and most sustained effort for development ever undertaken, emerged the struggles for resources and identity that define the region today. As Obama revives the lost arts of Keynesianism and counter-insurgency, the history of these colossal projects reveals bitter and important lessons for today’s missions to feed a hungry world.

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