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Runner-up, 2025 Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award

Complicating the American Revolution through a microhistory of one Massachusetts town

In 1774, a group of elite men in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, just outside Salem, wrote an address to the royal governor thanking him for his service to the colony, even as town residents began demanding independence from Great Britain. Town meeting records reveal how the town’s patriot majority pressured the signers to withdraw their support for the governor and demanded public recantations and issued damning reports, even forcing some of the signers into exile.

Enemies to Their Country tells the story of the year following the Address, chronicling the town’s struggle to achieve consensus even as the war for American independence started. This microhistory of one vitally important town, the second largest in Massachusetts at the time, with a thriving local economy based on fishing and a robust community of religious and civically engaged citizens, complicates simplistic ideas of the American Revolution. Through compelling stories of neighboring individuals and families, many of which have not been told, it also provides an example of a politically polarized constituency struggling to find consensus at a time of great conflict.

Tracing the Fight Against Malaria and the Making of Modern Argentina.

Enemy in the Blood: Malaria, Environment, and Development in Argentina examines the dramatic yet mostly forgotten history of malaria control in northwest Argentina. Carter traces the evolution of malaria science and policy in Argentina from the disease’s emergence as a social problem in the 1890s to its effective eradication by 1950. Malaria-control proponents saw the campaign as part of a larger project of constructing a modern identity for Argentina. Insofar as development meant building a more productive, rational, and hygienic society, the perceptions of a culturally backwards and disease-ridden interior prevented Argentina from joining the ranks of “modern” nations. The path to eradication, however, was not easy due to complicated public health politics, inappropriate application of foreign malaria control strategies, and a habitual misreading of the distinctive ecology of malaria in the northwest, especially the unique characteristics of the local mosquito vector. Homegrown scientific expertise, a populist public health agenda, and an infusion of new technologies eventually brought a rapid end to malaria’s scourge, if not the cure for regional underdevelopment.

Enemy in the Blood sheds light on the often neglected history of northwest Argentina’s interior, adds to critical perspectives on the history of development and public health in modern Latin America, and demonstrates the merits of integrative social-environmental research.

Colleges and universities in urban centers have often leveraged their locales to appeal to students while also taking a more active role in addressing local challenges. They embrace civic engagement, support service-learning, tailor courses to local needs, and even provide university-community collaborations such as lab schools and innovation hubs. Engaging Place, Engaging Practices highlights the significant role the academy, in general, and urban history, in particular, can play in fostering these critical connections.

The editors and contributors to this volume address topics ranging from historical injustices and affordable housing and land use to climate change planning and the emergence of digital humanities. These case studies reveal the intricate components of a city’s history and how they provide context and promote a sense of cultural belonging.

This timely book appreciates and emphasizes the critical role universities must play as intentional—and humble—partners in addressing the past, present, and future challenges facing cities through democratic community engagement.

In 1999, Venezuela became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognize the socioeconomic value of housework and enshrine homemakers’ social security. This landmark provision was part of a larger project to transform the state and expand social inclusion during Hugo Chávez’s presidency. The Bolivarian revolution opened new opportunities for poor and working-class—or popular—women’s organizing. The state recognized their unpaid labor and maternal gender role as central to the revolution. Yet even as state recognition enabled some popular women to receive public assistance, it also made their unpaid labor and organizing vulnerable to state appropriation.

Offering the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, Engendering Revolution demonstrates that the Bolivarian revolution cannot be understood without comprehending the gendered nature of its state-society relations. Showcasing field research that comprises archival analysis, observation, and extensive interviews, these thought-provoking findings underscore the ways in which popular women sustained a movement purported to exalt them, even while many could not access social security and remained socially, economically, and politically vulnerable.

We celebrate cruise ships as gateways to new cultures. However, over the past half a century, the mass-market cruise industry has increasingly relied on global supply chains, exploited maritime labor, and corporate control over the consumer experience to turn cultural contact into profit.

Shayan S. Lallani uncovers the historical scaffolding behind the cruise industry’s strategic co-opting of global cultures. Tracing the evolution of the modern mega-ship from its roots in postwar ocean liners to the floating cities of the twenty-first century, Lallani demonstrates how cruise lines paired commodified cultural referents with immersive spatial design and international labor to maximize guest spending. This corporate grip extended to Caribbean destinations, where companies steadily gained control of port enclaves and vetted shore excursions to manage contact with local communities while retaining the profits.

A sobering look at a vacation mainstay, <i>Engineered Paradise</i> explores where leisure becomes entangled with culture, capitalism, and power.

Which European and non-European ideas and practices facilitated the shaping of European unity? Or rather, which pursuits led to deadlocks in the cooperation between states?

The book seeks answers to these questions by surveying the historical attempts at realizing supranational patterns of governance in Europe since the Middle Ages. The main focus is on the nineteenth and twentieth century organizational models of European unification.

The analysis draws on an abundance of historical and legal source material. While the author encourages critical thinking about European integration, the exploration is admittedly based on specific values. Éva Bóka claims that the struggle for the humanization of power with its democratic creative force has been the major driver in the development of the system of liberties and the idea of European unity. The analysis of the historical process up to the Lisbon Treaty (2007) with the recognition of common, shared, and supported competences meets the author’s set of values to a great extent. The last part of the book examines whether the European Union can serve as a political and economic organizational model for other parts of the world.

Thorough examination of the antebellum fortifications that formed the backbone of U.S. military defense during the National Period

The system of coastal defenses built by the federal government after the War of 1812 was more than a series of forts standing guard over a watery frontier. It was an integrated and comprehensive plan of national defense developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and it represented the nation’s first peacetime defense policy.

Known as the Third System since it replaced two earlier attempts, it included coastal fortifications but also denoted the values of the society that created it. The governing defense policy was one that combined permanent fortifications to defend seaports, a national militia system, and a small regular army. The Third System remained the defense paradigm in the United States from 1816 to 1861, when the onset of the Civil War changed the standard. In addition to providing the country with military security, the system also provided the context for the ongoing discussion in Congress over national defense through annual congressional debates on military funding.
 

The Lower Danube—the stretch of Europe’s second longest river between the Romanian-Serbian border and the confluence to the Black Sea—was effectively transformed during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In describing this lengthy undertaking, Luminita Gatejel proposes that remaking two key stretches—the Iron Gates and the delta—not only physically altered the river but also redefined it in a legal and political sense. 

Since the late eighteenth century, military conflicts and peace treaties changed the nature of sovereignty over the area, as the expansionist tendencies of the Habsburg and British Empires encountered rival Ottoman and Russian imperial plans. The inconvenience that the river’s physical shape obstructed free navigation and the growth of commercial traffic, was an increasing concern to all parties. This book shows that alongside imperial aspirations, transnational actors like engineers, commissioners and entrepreneurs were the driving force behind the river regulation. In this highly original, deeply researched, and carefully crafted study, Gatejel explores the formation of international cooperation, the emergence of technical expertise and the emergence of engineering as a profession. This constellation turned the Lower Danube into a laboratory for experimenting with new forms of international cooperation, economic integration, and nature transformation.

These misgivings are a powerful undercurrent in much of the literature of the period, even the most ostensibly patriotic works, but it is in the writings on war by soldier poets where they are most clearly pronounced. Fashioning themselves as servants of both Mars and Mercury (the god of war and the god of writing), Elizabethan soldier poets focused their war stories on the gritty realities of military campaigning, the price individuals paid for serving the state, and the difficulties of returning to civilian life. The book reconsiders some familiar writers like John Donne and Ben Jonson in the context of their military experiences and provides comprehensive studies of some important but underappreciated soldier poets like Thomas Churchyard, George Gascoigne, and John Harington.

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel.

A study of Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, widely recognized as the creator of Egyptian nationalism, and his impact on Egyptian culture and history.

Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963) stands among the most creative, impactful intellectuals of modern Egypt and the Middle East. While best known as the architect of Egyptian nationalism, his nationalist endeavor was in fact part of his broader project to bring enlightenment to Egypt under the yoke of British colonialism. Through his articles, editorials, and mentoring, his newspaper al-Jarida became a key forum for the lively debates of the time, ranging from the role of Islam in society to women's inclusion, all toward shaping a unique colonial modernity for his country.

The most comprehensive study of Lutfi, his writing, and his impact, Enlightenment in Colonial Egypt deconstructs the view that he was a covert apologist for empire out of admiration for the liberal aspects of European enlightenment. Lutfi faced this duality head on: He believed it essential to embrace parts of the West’s enlightenment values and to decolonize and Egyptianize them in order to establish an authentic, indigenous, Egyptian civilization, appropriate for modernity. Israel Gershoni and Molly Bernstein argue that Lutfi successfully engaged with these most difficult challenges, shaping a detailed plan to implement enlightenment in the Egyptian national context.

Much has been written about the world’s first democracy, but no book so far has been dedicated solely to the study of enmity in ancient Athens. Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens is a long-overdue analysis of the competitive power dynamics of Athenian honor and the potential problems these feuds created for democracies.

The citizens of Athens believed that harming one’s enemy was an acceptable practice and even the duty of every honorable citizen. They sought public wins over their rivals, making enmity a critical element in struggles for honor and standing, while simultaneously recognizing the threat that personal enmity posed to the community. Andrew Alwine works to understand how Athenians addressed this threat by looking at the extant work of Attic orators. Their speeches served as the intersection between private vengeance and public sanction of illegal behavior, allowing citizens to engage in feuds within established parameters. This mediation helped support Athenian democracy and provided the social underpinning to allow it to function in conjunction with Greek notions of personal honor.

Alwine provides a framework for understanding key issues in the history of democracy, such as the relationship between private and public realms, the development of equality and the rule of law, and the establishment of individual political rights. Serving also as a nuanced introduction to the works of the Attic orators, Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens is an indispensable addition to scholarship on Athens.