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Living the High Life in Minsk looks at the sources of stability and instability in post-Soviet authoritarian states through the case study of President Lukashenka’s firm hold on power in Belarus. In particular, it seeks to understand the role of energy relations, policies, and discourses in the maintenance of this power. The central empirical question Balmaceda seeks to answer is what has been the role of energy policies in the maintenance of Lukashenka’s power in Belarus? In particular, it analyzes the role of energy policies in the management of Lukashenka’s relationship with three constituencies crucial to his hold on power: Russian actors, the Belarusian nomenklatura, and the Belarusian electorate.

In terms of foreign relations, the book focuses on the factors explaining Lukashenka’s ability to project Belarus’ power in its relationship with Russia in such a way as to compensate for its objective high level of dependency, assuring high levels of energy subsidies and rents continuing well beyond the initial worsening of the relationship in c. 2004. In terms of domestic relations, Balmaceda examines Lukashenka’s specific use of those energy rents in such a way as to assure the continuing support of both the Belarusian nomenklatura and the Belarusian electorate. 

The definitive history of how Latin American studies became a major field in American scholarship.

Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850-1975 is the first comprehensive history of the development of Latin American studies as a field of academic inquiry in the United States. In this ambitious and insightful work, historian Helen Delpar traces more than a century of intellectual engagement with Latin America, revealing how generations of historians, anthropologists, geographers, economists, sociologists, and political scientists shaped American understandings of the region and transformed Latin American studies into a recognized academic discipline.

A central contribution of the book lies in its exploration of the relationship between scholarship and historical context. Delpar demonstrates that academic interest in Latin America was never isolated from larger political, economic, and cultural developments in the United States. The expansion of hemispheric trade, the Good Neighbor era, World War II, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution all influenced how American scholars approached the region and what questions they considered important. By examining these intersections, she reveals how academic knowledge is shaped by changing national priorities, international events, and institutional support networks.

Beyond its contributions to Latin American history, Looking South is a major work of intellectual and academic history. It offers a compelling account of how scholarly fields are created, how academic communities develop, and how knowledge about world regions is produced, organized, and disseminated. Delpar's careful attention to both individual scholars and larger institutional structures makes the book an essential resource for understanding the history of area studies, the social sciences, and higher education in the United States.

Looking South remains an indispensable guide to the origins and evolution of Latin Americanist scholarship. It is essential reading for historians, Latin Americanists, anthropologists, political scientists, educators, and anyone interested in the intellectual history of the Americas and the development of knowledge across national and cultural boundaries.

Tracing how shuttered mission schools became contested commemorative landscapes

During the Early Republic and Jacksonian eras, Euro-American colonists and Native nations in the South and Old Northwest established mission schools intended to Christianize Indigenous peoples. In Lost Missions, Sean T. Jacobson recovers the histories and afterlives of these institutions, arguing that they played a far more consequential role in Native–settler relations than scholars have previously acknowledged. Mission schools advanced a spiritual vision of a multiethnic Christian America—one that ultimately collapsed amid the federally sponsored Indian Removal campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s.

Following the closure of these schools, their physical and symbolic landscapes became powerful sites of memory. Euro-American Christians later transformed former missions into commemorative spaces that celebrated “frontier” piety and national expansion. Through monuments, pageantry, and local histories, Protestant and Catholic Americans alike recast missionary labor as a foundational component of American nation-building. In doing so, these narratives framed the Christianization of Native peoples as a benevolent civilizing project, one that implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—sanitized the coercion, dispossession, and violence that accompanied westward expansion and the forced removal of Indigenous nations.

By the late twentieth century, however, these commemorative narratives faded. Suburban development, commercialization, and shifting cultural priorities rendered many mission sites once again “lost,” stripped of the civic meaning they once held. Yet Jacobson shows that these landscapes still speak, especially when viewed from Indigenous perspectives. Reinterpreted through Native histories of endurance and survival, former missions reveal counternarratives of persistence amid profound loss. As tribal nations increasingly engage with these sites today, Lost Missions probes their contested status as places of memory and conscience, illuminating how public history continues to shape and challenge understandings of America’s colonial past. 

After World War II, Europe witnessed the massive redrawing of national borders and the efforts to make the population fit those new borders. As a consequence of these forced changes, both Lviv and Wrocław went through cataclysmic changes in population and culture. Assertively Polish prewar Lwów became Soviet Lvov, and then, after 1991, it became assertively Ukrainian Lviv. Breslau, the third largest city in Germany before 1945, was in turn "recovered" by communist Poland as Wrocław. Practically the entire population of Breslau was replaced, and Lwów's demography too was dramatically restructured: many Polish inhabitants migrated to Wrocław and most Jews perished or went into exile. The forced migration of these groups incorporated new myths and the construction of official memory projects.

The chapters in this edited book compare the two cities by focusing on lived experiences and "bottom-up" historical processes. Their sources and methods are those of micro-history and include oral testimonies, memoirs, direct observation and questionnaires, examples of popular culture, and media pieces. The essays explore many manifestations of the two sides of the same coin—loss on the one hand, gain on the other—in two cities that, as a result of the political reality of the time, are complementary.