Smoke Signals for the Gods: Ancient Greek Sacrifice from the Archaic through Roman Periods (Oxford University Press 2012)
This 421-page monograph continues Fred Naiden‘s work on ancient sacrifice in the edited volume Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice: Ancient Victims, Modern Observers, published earlier this year by Cambridge. Jan Bremmer of the University of Groningen says that the monograph “. . . transcends older studies. . . . All students will from now on have to start with [t]his book. It is a milestone in the field.”
The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
This wide-ranging monograph, which evolved out of Iqbal Singh Sevea‘s dissertation at Oxford University, provides an innovative new analysis of how Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) developed a critique of modern nationalist ideologies and proposed a new vision of Islam as a religious tradition that could address modern political, social, and economic problems. The book has been attractively produced, and adds important new perspectives for the study of modern South Asian history.
Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture (Palgrave, paperback 2012)
Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and Anna Clark edited the first edition of this book, which appeared in 2008. The idea that citizenship was the right of all humanity emerged during the French Revolution. However, this right was limited by gender, class and race. Studying Europe, its colonies, and the United States, this book analyzes images of masculine citizenship in political rhetoric, culture, and various political struggles from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Russia’s Century of Revolutions: Parties, People, Places: Studies Presented in Honor of Alexander Rabinowitch (Slavica Publishers, 2012)
Don Raleigh‘s new book (with co-editor Michael S. Melancon) is a collection of essays presented in honor of Alexander Rabinowitch, who was Professor Raleigh’s mentor at Indiana University, and brings together an impressive group of Russian historians. It includes essays on modern Russian and Soviet history by eleven notable experts on Russian politics, society, economics, and culture. Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton University and NYU calls this book a “volume for everyone seriously interested in modern Russian history,” and praises the chapters as a series of “pathbreaking essays.”
Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice: Ancient Victims, Modern Observers (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
This book of essays challenges the prevailing view of the most important ritual in Greek and Roman religion, animal sacrifice, and it is the first book on sacrifice to combine the study of Greek and Roman practices while putting the two on a par with one another. Contributors come from the Collège de France and Oxford, Harvard, Chicago and Ohio State Universities as well as from UNC-Chapel Hill. Professor Naiden‘s co-editor, Christopher A. Faraone, is from the University of Chicago.
Contemporary History as Transatlantic Project: The German Problem, 1960–2010, Special issue, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung (HSR) Supplement 24 (2012)
Konrad Jarausch has published a collection that includes 13 of his articles and essays that originally appeared between 1969 and 2010. The collection opens with his autobiographical essay. The articles exemplify the evolving methods of recent historical scholarship, the complexities of transatlantic historical comparisons, and the wide range of Jarausch’s historical interests. This is a remarkable overview of his prolific scholarly career during the last four decades
Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre-Modern World (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)
The book, co-edited by Richard Talbert, Susan E. Alcock and John Bodel, includes Talbert’s introduction and his essay on Roman road systems as well as thirteen other chapters from contributors in North America and Europe. The geographical journey on these roads leads readers from ancient Rome and China across the world to Incan and Mayan societies and into the cultures of India, Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Japan. The volume provides an extraordinary global and chronological perspective on the history of communication networks, or what Nicholas Purcell of Oxford calls a “splendid gallery of ideas about roads of every kind.”
Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (UNC Press, 2012)
Heather Williams follows former slaves who were separated from their families, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations. This disturbing and emotionally-charged historical study features a book-jacket illustration of one of Heather’s quilts, and it provides what William Darity Jr. of Duke calls “a stunning narrative” of “forced separation,” “difficult journeys,” and the long “search for loved ones.”
War Memories: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Modern European Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Karen Hagemann has published a volume with Alan Forrest and Etienne François that explores the memory of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in European culture. This memory was so powerful because the wars constituted a crucial turning point: scarcely a corner of Europe remained untouched by these wars and their political, economic and social legacy. The focus on the various media through which the memories were passed allows the authors to examine the intersection between experience and memory, history and fiction, literature and art, and, most significantly of all, between the memories of individuals, groups, regions, nations, and the continent of Europe.
The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency (UNC Press, 2012)
Miguel La Serna’s book examines the ways in which various social conflicts, power relations, and cultural traditions shaped the evolving support for and opposition to the radical Shining Path movement in twentieth-century Peruvian towns and villages. As Charles Walker (UC-Davis) notes on the book jacket, La Serna’s “strong and confident” writing, “lucid analysis, cutting-edge research, and fascinating topic” place this work “at the forefront of its field.”
Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (UNC Press, 2012)
Emeritus professor Michael Hunt has published a co-authored book (with Steven Levine) on America’s modern wars in Asia. The book offers a detailed account of American conflicts in the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—wars that the authors describe as “a sustained U.S. bid for regional dominance” and a long story of “American ambition, ascendance, and ultimate defeat.” Developing an account that Chen Jian (Cornell University) calls “original, thoughtful, well-documented, and readable,” this new book is a major contribution to the history of modern American and Asian politics, cultures, and transnational conflicts.
Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Tania String and Marcus Bull have put together the first in-depth and wide-ranging academic exploration of the reception of the Tudor period in the modern world. It includes studies by many of the leading scholars in their fields, and considers the modern appropriation of the Tudors and their era in art, music, architecture, design, religion, public history, social history, print, film and television, and internet networking sites. The fourteen papers cumulatively map out the ways in which modern society has utilized the sixteenth-century past as a cultural resource, as a repertoire of quotable designs and styles, as a vantage point from which to frame political and social critiques, as a source of identities, and as a refuge from modern-day anxieties. The volume appears in the prestigious Proceedings of the British Academy series, which since 1905 has been the premier vehicle for British scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.