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EAST AFRICA
AN INTRODUCTORY HISTORY
Robert Maxon
West Virginia University Press, 2009

In this third edition of East Africa: An Introductory History, Robert M. Maxon revisits the diverse eastern region of Africa, including the modern nations of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. With revised sections and a new preface, this comprehensive text surveys East Africa’s political, economic, and social history from pre-colonial to modern times. Maxon reveals the physical movement and societal development of and between ethnic groups before the 1890s; the capitalistic impact of European colonialism in the early nineteenth century; and the achievement and aftermath of independence in East Africa during the later part of this century.

East Africa: An Introductory History, 3rd and Revised Edition offers the student and scholar:

• the only revision of this title in over a decade
• a complete index and glossary of African terms that promote an effortless navigation of the complex history of this region
• over twenty maps and diagrams that provide visual depictions of the development of eastern Africa
• detailed geographical and topographical analysis that supplement the historical scope and investigation of this region
East Africa: An Introductory History documents the transformation of East Africa from the Stone Age to the first decade of the twenty-first century. The book is ideal for any reader interested in unraveling the intricate history of this East Africa, and especially for students coming to the study of this region for the first time.

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East & West
Papers in Ancient History Presented to Glen W. Bowersock
T. Corey Brennan
Harvard University Press, 2008

The papers in this volume are based on a 2006 Princeton University symposium in honor of Glen W. Bowersock on the occasion of his retirement from the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study. Here a distinguished international group of ancient historians explores the classical antiquity that Bowersock has given us over a scholarly career of almost fifty years.

The topics offered in East and West range throughout the ancient world from the second century BCE to late antiquity, from Hellenistic Greece and Republican Rome to Egypt and Arabia, from the Second Sophistic to Roman imperial discourse, from Sulla’s self-presentation in his memoirs to charitable giving among the Manichaeans in Egypt.

This collection of essays represents the first attempt to take in Glen Bowersock’s well-developed scholarly interests as a whole. The contributors open up new avenues that often run well beyond the conventional geographical and temporal boundaries of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, leading to a host of fresh insights into antique thought and life.

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East of East
The Making of Greater El Monte
Romeo Guzmán
Rutgers University Press, 2020
East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history. East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives—stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labor organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who generated a vibrant local culture at dances and dive bars. 
 
 
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East Of Eden, West Of Zion
Essays On Nevada
Wilbur S. Shepperson
University of Nevada Press, 1989

A collection of essays in which a dozen historians and novelists present their impressions and concerns about "end of the century Nevada." Human expectations and illusions are seen as a backdrop for today's Nevada as a new human frontier. As an overview of Nevada society, this study deals with culture as well as economics, with tradition as well as rapid population growth. The essayists inquire whether the friction between acquisition and preservation, quick wealth and refined sensitivity, will build a more humane and enlightened society.

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Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, 1600-1900
Li Guo
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
This ground-breaking volume on early modern inter-Asian translation examines how translation from plain Chinese was situated at the nexus between, on the one hand, the traditional standard of biliteracy characteristic of literary practices in the Sinographic sphere, and on the other, practices of translational multilingualism (competence in multiple spoken languages to produce a fully localized target text). Translations from plain Chinese are shown to carve out new ecologies of translations that not only enrich our understanding of early modern translation practices across the Sinographic sphere, but also demonstrate that the transregional uses of a non-alphabetic graphic technology call for different models of translation theory.
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The Edge of Islam
Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast
Janet McIntosh
Duke University Press, 2009
In this theoretically rich exploration of ethnic and religious tensions, Janet McIntosh demonstrates how the relationship between two ethnic groups in the bustling Kenyan town of Malindi is reflected in and shaped by the different ways the two groups relate to Islam. While Swahili and Giriama peoples are historically interdependent, today Giriama find themselves literally and metaphorically on the margins, peering in at a Swahili life of greater social and economic privilege. Giriama are frustrated to find their ethnic identity disparaged and their versions of Islam sometimes rejected by Swahili.

The Edge of Islam explores themes as wide-ranging as spirit possession, divination, healing rituals, madness, symbolic pollution, ideologies of money, linguistic code-switching, and syncretism and its alternatives. McIntosh shows how the differing versions of Islam practiced by Swahili and Giriama, and their differing understandings of personhood, have figured in the growing divisions between the two groups. Her ethnographic analysis helps to explain why Giriama view Islam, a supposedly universal religion, as belonging more deeply to certain ethnic groups than to others; why Giriama use Islam in their rituals despite the fact that so many do not consider the religion their own; and how Giriama appropriations of Islam subtly reinforce a distance between the religion and themselves. The Edge of Islam advances understanding of ethnic essentialism, religious plurality, spirit possession, local conceptions of personhood, and the many meanings of “Islam” across cultures.

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The Emperor's Clothes
A Personal Viewpoint of Politics and Administration in the Imperial Ethiopian Government, 1941-1974
Gaitachew Bekele
Michigan State University Press, 1993

 . . . An engaging personal account of a public service career n the period leading to the 1974 revolution. It ...persuades and provides real insight into the genuine noblesse oblige of the first generation of technocrats drawn from the social elite of the post- war period.
-James McCann, Boston University

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Enemies from the East?
V. S. Soloviev on Paganism, Asian Civilizations, and Islam
Edited by Vladimir Wozniuk
Northwestern University Press, 2007
As cultural conflicts roil the world, the idea of a “clash of civilizations” has lately taken hold, with commentators from both East and West weighing the religious and political disparities that affect global unity. For all its present currency and urgency, the idea is nothing new.  In various contexts V. S. Soloviev (1853–1900), the most distinguished representative of nineteenth-century Russian religious philosophy, anticipated our current global dilemma by more than a hundred years. These essays, presented together for the first time in English, consider from a number of perspectives how a future clash of cultures between East and West threatens human progress toward the harmonic unity that, for Soloviev, represented the ultimate human telos.

The six essays comprising this book span Soloviev’s publishing career, beginning with “The Mythological Process in Ancient Paganism,” written at the age of twenty, and ending with “Muhammad, His Life and Religious Teaching,” which appeared four years before Soloviev’s death at forty-seven.  Throughout, Soloviev grapples with commonalities and differences apparent in the moral frameworks of civilizations since antiquity; and in religious and cultural practices, from Europe through the Middle East to Asia.   His probing of the sources of religious morality and political authority in human history reinvigorated Russian intellectual interest in the East/West question in his time and still resonates powerfully in our own.
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Eothen
Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East
Alexander William Kinglake
Northwestern University Press, 1997
In the autumn of 1834, Alexander Kinglake and John Savile set out together for Turkey and the Levant. When Savile was summoned home Kinglake, accompanied only by his guide and interpreter, went on by ship to Cyprus and Beirut, then to the Holy Land, Cairo, and Damascus. On his own in a foreign world, Kinglake used the solitary travel for prolonged self-scrutiny, and ultimately for liberation.

Eothen has the freshness of the immediate and the new. Kinglake kept it free of the details of geography, history, science, politics, religion, and statistics; it is far less about the countries and the cities he passes through that it is about himself. This is what makes Eothen a modern travel book, possibly the first and certainly one of the greatest of its kind.
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The Ethiopian Army
From Victory to Collapse, 1977-1991
Fantahun Ayele
Northwestern University Press, 2014

The Ethiopian popular revolution of 1974 ended a monarchy that claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and brought to power a military government that created one of the largest and best-equipped armies in Africa. In his panoramic study of the Ethiopian army, Fantahun Ayele draws upon his unprecedented access to Ethiopian Ministry of Defense archives to study the institution that was able to repel the Somali invasion of 1977 and suppress internal uprisings, but collapsed in 1991 under the combined onslaught of armed insurgencies in Eritrea and Tigray. Besides military operations, The Ethiopian Army discusses tactical areas such as training, equipment, intelligence, and logistics, as well as grand strategic choices such as ending the 1953 Ethio-American Mutual Defense Agreement and signing a treaty of military assistance with the Soviet Union. The result sheds considerable light on the military developments that have shaped Ethiopia and the Horn in the twentieth century.

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Ethiopian Jewish Ascetic Religious Communities
Built Environment and Way of Life of the Betä Ǝsraʾel
Bar Kribus
Arc Humanities Press, 2022
The Betä Ǝsraʾel (Ethiopian Jews) have a unique history and religious tradition, one of the most fascinating aspects of which are the mäloksočč, commonly referred to as monks in scholarly and popular literature. The mäloksočč served as the supreme religious leaders of the Betä Ǝsraʾel and were charged with educating and initiating Betä Ǝsraʾel priests. They lived in separate compounds and observed severe purity laws prohibiting physical contact with the laity. Thus, they are the only known example in medieval and modern Jewry of ascetic communities withdrawing from the secular world and devoting themselves fully to religious life. This book presents the results of the first comprehensive research ever conducted on the way of life and material culture of the ascetic religious communities of the Betä Ǝsraʾel. A major part of this research is an archaeological survey, during which these religious centres were located and documented in detail for the first time.
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Ethnic Federalism
The Ethiopian Experience in Comparative Perspective
David Turton
Ohio University Press, 2006

Since 1991, Ethiopia has gone further than any other country in using ethnicity as the fundamental organizing principle of a federal system of government. And yet this pioneering experiment in “ethnic federalism” has been largely ignored in the growing literature on democratization and ethnicity in Africa and on the accommodation of ethnic diversity in democratic states. Ethnic Federalism brings a much-needed comparative dimension to the discussion of this experiment in Ethiopia.

Ethnic Federalism closely examines aspects of the Ethiopean case and asks why the use of territorial decentralism to accommodate ethnic differences has been generally unpopular in Africa, while it is growing in popularity in the West.

The book includes case studies of Nigerian and Indian federalism and suggests how Ethiopia might learn from both the failures and successes of these older federations. In the light of these broader issues and cases, it identifies the main challenges facing Ethiopia in the next few years, as it struggles to bring political practice into line with constitutional theory and thereby achieve a genuinely federal division of powers.

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Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa
Daren E. Ray
Ohio University Press, 2023
This volume explores how the people of littoral East Africa imagined and reimagined their communities over two millennia of engagement with Indian Ocean transformations—from the settlement of Bantu speakers near the coast around the first century CE to their participation in transoceanic commerce, imperial rivalries, colonial projects, and decolonization movements in the mid-twentieth century. Like other histories of the Indian Ocean, it emphasizes the circulation of people and ideas, but its cis-oceanic approach demonstrates how these littoral communities continued to integrate strategies from those in Africa’s interior as well as from people who traveled the ocean. The book also clarifies the precise relationship between ethnicity and other kinds of identities by expanding the conventional focus on Swahili people to speakers of Sabaki Bantu languages, as well as to Mijikenda, Pokomo, and Elwana communities, whom Indian Ocean scholars often overlook. By examining all these groups’ shared linguistic heritage, the book outlines their forebears’ innovation and transformation of lineages, clans, confederations, councils, title societies, age sets, moieties, religious sects, and tribes. Drawing together evidence from linguistics, archaeology, ethnography, oral traditions, travelers’ accounts, and colonial records, the book explores how the speakers of Sabaki languages continuously reconceptualized their identities in littoral East Africa as the political topography of the Indian Ocean world changed around them. Moving seamlessly across multiple precolonial and colonial eras and beyond, this deep history of collaboration and political imagination leads readers through the transitions of identity that mattered to littoral East Africans. The book fills the need for an updated synthesis of East Africans’ engagements with diasporic communities in Indian Ocean and world history courses. In addition, since most African history publications for classroom use in recent years have focused exclusively on modern times, it satisfies the demand for works that span the early and modern eras. Beyond the classroom, the book will interest specialists in the history of the Indian Ocean, Africa, Islam, imperialism, and ethnohistory. A major contribution of this multidisciplinary work is to present the research of archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and historians to one another in an accessible, jargon-free manner. While Africanists will appreciate how the book expands the boundaries of the Indian Ocean to include oft-ignored communities, Indian Ocean specialists will find models for investigating the construction of ethnicity and other collective identities across multiple centuries.
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Ethno-erotic Economies
Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya
George Paul Meiu
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Ethno-erotic Economies explores a fascinating case of tourism focused on sex and culture in coastal Kenya, where young men deploy stereotypes of African warriors to help them establish transactional sexual relationships with European women. In bars and on beaches, young men deliberately cultivate their images as sexually potent African men to attract women, sometimes for a night, in other cases for long-term relationships.
 
George Paul Meiu uses his deep familiarity with the communities these men come from to explore the long-term effects of markets of ethnic culture and sexuality on a wide range of aspects of life in rural Kenya, including kinship, ritual, gender, intimate affection, and conceptions of aging. What happens to these communities when young men return with such surprising wealth? And how do they use it to improve their social standing locally? By answering these questions, Ethno-erotic Economies offers a complex look at how intimacy and ethnicity come together to shape the pathways of global and local trade in the postcolonial world.
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European Energy Challenge
East and West
George W. Hoffman
Duke University Press, 1985
By examining all of Europe in a single study, an eminent geographer and expert on European development makes, in this volume, a unique contribution to the understanding of the changing energy relations of the European countries, east and west. The book examines the problem of establishing a reliable energy supply base in western Europe through structural changes and alternate and substitute energy sources. The volume also evaluates western European security problems arising from present and future reliance on Soviet energy and relates this to North Sea supplies of gas and oil, indigenous and import supplies, and nuclear power generation.
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The Evolution of Settlement Systems in the Region of Vohémar, Northeast Madagascar
Henry T. Wright, Robert E. Dewar, Chantal Radimilahy, and Lucien Marie Aimé Rakotozafy
University of Michigan Press, 2021
On the northeast coast of Madagascar, near the town of Vohémar, is a large cemetery dating to the fourteenth century. During World War II, French troops excavated the site but left no comprehensive report. University of Michigan archaeologist Henry T. Wright led an intensive archaeological survey in the region, hoping to find evidence of earlier settlements. In four seasons, the researchers found evidence of several settlements dating to different periods: a large port site dating to the same era as the cemetery; early estuarine villages of the 7th and 8th centuries; and a rock shelter with microlithic tools. In this study, Wright presents the survey results in detail, including the evidence for settlements as well as illustrations of the ceramics and stone tools.
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Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany
The Crisis of Leninism and the Revolution of 1989
Steven Pfaff
Duke University Press, 2006
Winner of the Social Science History Association President’s Book Award

East Germany was the first domino to fall when the Soviet bloc began to collapse in 1989. Its topple was so swift and unusual that it caught many area specialists and social scientists off guard; they failed to recognize the instability of the Communist regime, much less its fatal vulnerability to popular revolt. In this volume, Steven Pfaff identifies the central mechanisms that propelled the extraordinary and surprisingly bloodless revolution within the German Democratic Republic (GDR). By developing a theory of how exit-voice dynamics affect collective action, Pfaff illuminates the processes that spurred mass demonstrations in the GDR, led to a peaceful surrender of power by the hard-line Leninist elite, and hastened German reunification. While most social scientific explanations of collective action posit that the option for citizens to emigrate—or exit—suppresses the organized voice of collective public protest by providing a lower-cost alternative to resistance, Pfaff argues that a different dynamic unfolded in East Germany. The mass exit of many citizens provided a focal point for protesters, igniting the insurgent voice of the revolution.

Pfaff mines state and party records, police reports, samizdat, Church documents, and dissident manifestoes for his in-depth analysis not only of the genesis of local protest but also of the broader patterns of exit and voice across the entire GDR. Throughout his inquiry, Pfaff compares the East German rebellion with events occurring during the same period in other communist states, particularly Czechoslovakia, China, Poland, and Hungary. He suggests that a trigger from outside the political system—such as exit—is necessary to initiate popular mobilization against regimes with tightly centralized power and coercive surveillance.

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