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Through incisive analysis of the museum’s five institutions, Greg Dickinson and his coauthors reveal how narratives of Native American heritage, violent colonial settlement, Western art, natural history, and ever‑present gun culture collide to shape a haunted sense of American identity.  By tracing the tensions between what is memorialized, what is mythologized, and what is suppressed, the authors expose the ghosts that linger in contemporary understandings of the West and offer a compelling rethinking of how memory and commemoration continue to influence the nation’s cultural imagination.

A long essay entitled Three Historical Regions of Europe, appearing first in a samizdat volume in Budapest in 1980, instantly put its author into the forefront of the transnational debate on Central Europe, alongside such intellectual luminaries as Milan Kundera and Czesław Miłosz. The present volume offers English-language readers a rich selection of the depth and breadth of the legacy of Jenő Szűcs (1928–1988).

The selection documents Szűcs’s seminal contribution to many contemporary debates in historical anthropology, nationalism studies, and conceptual history. It contains his key texts on the history of national consciousness and patterns of collective identity, as well as medieval and early modern political thought. The works published here, most of them previously unavailable in English, provide a sophisticated analysis of a wide range of subjects from the myths of origins of Hungarians before Christianization to the political and religious ideology of the Dózsa peasant uprising in 1514, the medieval roots of civil society, or the revival of ethnic nationalism during the communist era. The volume, with an introduction by the editors locating Szűcs in a transnational context, offers a unique insight into the complex and sensitive debate on national identity in post-1945 East Central Europe.

The Illuminated Chronicle was composed in 1358 in the international artistic style at the royal court of Louis I of Hungary. Its text, presented here in a new edition and translation, is the most complete record of Hungary's medieval historical tradition, going back to the eleventh century and including the mythical past of its people. The pictures in this manuscript—formerly known as the Vienna Chronicle—are not merely occasional illustrations added to some exemplars, but text and image are closely connected and mutually related to each other, to qualify it as a proper “illuminated chronicle”. The artistic value of the miniatures is quite high, and the characters are drawn with detail and with a knowledge of anatomy. Forty-two of the miniatures are included in the present volume. A full color facsimile will be accessible online.  

The 147 pictures are an invaluable source of information on late medieval cultural history, costume, and court life. In a historiographical context, The Illuminated Chronicle is an attempt at the popularization of the national history and a systematic appeal to circles beyond the old monastic-clerical audience.

The Illuminated Chronicle (Chronica de gestis Hungarorum e codice picto saec. xiv.) is the ninth volume in the Central European Medieval Texts, a Latin–English bilingual series.

A new history of Brazil told through the lens of the often-overlooked interior regions.

In colonial Brazil, observers frequently complained that Portuguese settlers appeared content to remain “clinging to the coastline, like crabs.” From their perspective, the vast Brazilian interior seemed like an untapped expanse waiting to be explored and colonized. This divide between a thriving coastal area and a less-developed hinterland has become deeply ingrained in the nation’s collective imagination, perpetuating the notion of the interior as a homogeneous, stagnant periphery awaiting the dynamic influence of coastal Brazil.

The Interior challenges these narratives and reexamines the history of Brazil using an “interior history” perspective. This approach aims to reverse the conventional conceptual and geographical boundaries often employed to study Brazilian history, and, by extension, Latin America as a whole. Through the work of twelve leading scholars, the volume highlights how the people and spaces within the interior have played a pivotal role in shaping national identities, politics, the economy, and culture. The Interior goes beyond the traditional boundaries of borderland and frontier history, expands on the current wave of scholarship on regionalism in Brazil, and, by asking new questions about space and nation, provides a fresh perspective on Brazil’s history.

A wealth of historical writing dealing with the Maghrib (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) has been published during the roughly forty years since European colonial control ended in the region. This book provides a "state of the field" survey of this postcolonial Maghribi historiography.

The book contains thirteen essays by leading Maghribi and North American scholars. The first section surveys the Maghrib as a whole; the second focuses on individual countries of the Maghrib; and the third explores theoretical issues and case studies. Cutting across chronological categories, the book encompasses historiographical writing dealing with all eras, from the ancient Maghrib to the contemporary period.

Walter Prescott Webb became one of the best known interpreters of the American West following the publication of The Great Plains in 1931. That book remained one of the outstanding studies of the region for decades and attracted considerable attention over the years for its unusual emphasis on the impact of geographic factors on the process of settlement. Using manuscript sources, some of which had not previously been available, Gregory M. Tobin has traced the elements that went into the planning and writing of The Great Plains and that account for its distinctive approach to the writing of a regional history.

Tobin emphasizes two aspects of Webb's life that molded the historian's outlook: his early family life and community connections in West Texas and his admiration for the ideas of scholar Lindley Miller Keasbey. Webb reacted strongly against the assumption that the only cultural values of any real worth emanated from the urban and sophisticated East; he was determined to write the history of his own people in a way that would reveal the scale of their anonymous contribution to American civilization. By reverting to Keasbey's stress on the relationship between natural environment and social institutions, Webb broadened his study to take in what he believed to be a distinct geographic environment. The result was The Great Plains, an assertion of individual and regional identity by a man with a personal stake in establishing the image of a distinctive Plains civilization.

Although The Making of a History is not a full biography of Walter Prescott Webb, it is the first biographically oriented study of a man regarded as one of the twentieth century's major western historians. It places his development within the framework of his intellectual and social setting and, in a sense, subjects his career to the same type of scrutiny that he advocated as the basis of the study of evolving cultures.

Religious history and, in particular, the history of the cult of saints and their miracles has recently become one of the most popular fields of historical investigation. Together with continuing interest in the related ecclesiastic motivations and the well organized craft of hagiography, this new interest might be explained by the marvellously rich details of thousands of witness accounts testifying to the miraculous help they received from the saint in times of desparate need. These accounts provide an unparalleled insight into the history of everyday life and into the various hardships, illnesses, hopes dreams and anxieties during the late medieval and early modern period.

Only two records exist on the history of the medieval Hungarian kingdom- the thirteenth century canonization trial of St. Margaret of Hungary and the miracle collections promoting the canonization of St. John of Capistran, the victorious Crusader at Belgrade in 1456, who died thereafter in Ilok (a city located on the periphery of western Christianity in Croatia). Based on a careful study of the widely scattered manuscripts on Capistranean miracles and with the help of a microscopic philological analysis, the author has managed to reconstruct, for the first time, one of the most complex miracle collections in the history of medieval hagiography.

Covering the recording of the first miracle series by the urban notaries of Ilok, the local hagiographer of Ilok Franciscans (John Geszti), the vicar general of the Hungarian province (Stephen Varsányi), and a number of subsequent editions and amplifications of this material recycling into the canonization campaign of St. John of Capistran and the miracles he himself recorded, The Miracles of St. John of Capistran, is an outstanding debut by a representative of a new generation of Central European medievalists.

In this collection, sixteen scholars explore topics as diverse as the historical debate over black athletic superiority, the selling of sport in society, the eroticism of athletic activity, sexual fears of women athletes, and the marketing of the marathon. 

In line with the changing nature of sport history as a field of study, the essays focus less on traditional topics and more on themes of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and national identity, which also define the larger parameters of social and cultural history. It is the first anthology to situation sport history within the broader fields of social history and cultural studies. 

Contributors are Melvin L. Adelman, William J. Baker, Pamela L. Cooper, Mark Dyreson, Gerald R. Gems, Elliott J. Gorn, Allen Guttmann, Stephen H. Hardy, Peter Levine, Donald J. Mrozek, Michael Oriard, S. W. Pope, Benjamin G. Rader, Steven A. Riess, Nancy L. Struna, and David K. Wiggins.

Short, rigorous intervention on history-writing in public life.

How does the present reshape what a society chooses to remember as its past? Recent interpretations of India's history have replaced careful inquiry with narratives that mirror contemporary anxieties and ambitions, sidelining the evidence, debate, and plurality that once characterized India’s long intellectual tradition. At stake is a shift from understanding history as a method to treating it as a tool of identity and authority. In The Present Colonizes the Past, Romila Thapar asks: How have cultural and religious identities evolved through interaction rather than isolation? How have dissent and accommodation shaped social change? How have education and public discourse influenced what is accepted as knowledge? And, most urgently, how might weakened institutions and selective pasts redefine our heritage and citizenship?