For tenure-track scholars in history, publishing a book is one of the key parts of earning tenure.1 But many contingent scholars publish books as well, especially those on the job market, where search committees want to see candidates who are engaged and “productive.”2
As few historians make any significant money on their writing, just knowing that people have read their books can mean a lot to an author. Here are some books released in 2020 by historians working off the tenure track that you might consider as you do your end-of-the-year shopping.
Disclosure: Contingent is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and the magazine will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Visit our affiliate page to purchase books by our contributors and see book lists curated by the magazine’s staff.
Michael Brenes, For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy (University of Massachusetts Press)
“For Might and Right traces the story of how Cold War defense spending [produced] a powerful and dynamic political coalition that reached across party lines. Faced with neoliberal austerity and uncertainty surrounding America’s foreign policy after the 1960s, increased military spending became a bipartisan solution to create jobs and stimulate economic growth, even in the absence of national security threats.”
Nimisha Barton, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945 (Cornell University Press)
“In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onward, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. In Reproductive Citizens, Nimisha Barton argues that their relative absence in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight—the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War.”
Eli Bromberg, Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture (Rutgers University Press)
“Unsettling reveals how film, TV, and literature have helped displace once prevalent antisemitic stereotypes onto those who are non-Jewish, nonwhite, and poor. In considering how whiteness functions for an ethnoreligious group with historic vulnerability to incest stereotype as well as contemporary white privilege, Unsettling demonstrates how white Jewish men accused of incest, and even those who defiantly confess it, became improbably sympathetic figures representing supposed white male vulnerability.”
Aaron Carico, Black Market: The Slave’s Value in National Culture after 1865 (University of North Carolina Press)
“. . . from the plight of the Fourteenth Amendment to the myth of the cowboy, Carico breaks open the icons of liberalism to expose the shaping influence of slavery’s political economy in America after 1865. Ultimately, Black Market shows how a radically incomplete and fundamentally failed abolition enabled the emergence of a modern nation-state, in which slavery still determined—and now goes on to determine—economic, political, and cultural life.”
Lindsay M. Chervinsky, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution (Belknap)
“On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his department secretaries . . . for the first cabinet meeting. Why did he wait two and a half years into his presidency to call his cabinet? Because the US Constitution did not create or provide for such a body. Washington was on his own. Faced with diplomatic crises, domestic insurrections, and constitutional challenges–and finding congressional help lacking–Washington decided he needed a group of advisors he could turn to . . . ”
Christopher Chitty, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System (Duke University Press)
“. . . Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie’s attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule.”
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, The Way We Wed: A Global History of Wedding Fashion (Running Press)
“The Way We Wed presents styles and stories from the Renaissance to the present day, chronicling evolving fashions, classes, and expectations. [It] showcases wedding gowns of all colors and styles from around the world . . . and clothes worn by flower girls, bridesmaids, mothers of the bride, and grooms. Same-sex weddings are represented along with royal weddings, wartime brides, White House weddings, remarriage, Hollywood weddings, and more.”
Joseph Clark, News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press)
“When weekly newsreels launched in the early twentieth century, they offered the U.S. public the first weekly record of events that symbolized ‘indisputable evidence. of the news . . . In the age of fake news and the profound changes to journalism brought on by the internet, News Parade demonstrates how new technologies and media reshaped the American public’s relationship with the news in the 1930s—a history that can help us to better understand the transformations happening today.”
Heather G. Cole and R.W.G. Vail. Theodore Roosevelt: A Descriptive Bibliography (Oak Knoll)
“[Roosevelt] published . . . on a wide variety of topics, ranging from a naval history of the War of 1812 to a biography of Oliver Cromwell, from memoirs of time spent ranching in the Dakotas to an essay on Irish theater. His works became collectable during his lifetime, and were frequently repackaged and republished by those hoping to capitalize on the popular president’s success. This is the first complete descriptive bibliography of Roosevelt’s works to be published.”
Elizabeth Clarke and Robert W. Daniel, People and Piety: Protestant Devotional Identities in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press)
“Divided into two sections, the book examines the ‘sites’ where [Protestant devotional] identities were forged (the academy, printing house, household, theatre and prison) and the ‘types’ of texts that expressed them (spiritual autobiographies, religious poetry and writings tied to the ars moriendi), providing a broad analysis of social, material and literary forms of devotion during England’s Long Reformation.”
Donna J. Drucker, Contraception: A Concise History (MIT Press)
“The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam . . . Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs’s clinic to the present . . . [approaching] the subject from the perspective of reproductive justice: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children safely and healthily.”
Richard Kent Evans, MOVE: An American Religion (Oxford University Press)
“In this book, Richard Kent Evans tells . . . a story that has been virtually lost outside of Philadelphia. What was MOVE? Many MOVE members thought of themselves as belonging to a religion, and they sought legal recognition. But to others, including other religious groups like the Quakers and, more importantly, the courts, MOVE was anything but a religion. Evans dives deep into how we decide what constitutes a genuine religious tradition, and the enormous consequences of that decision.”
Rebecca Gibson, The Corseted Skeleton: A Bioarchaeology of Binding (Palgrave Macmillan)
“[The] corset occupies a familiar but exotic space in modern consciousness, created by two sometimes contradictory narrative arcs: the texts that women wrote regarding their own corseting experiences and the recorded opinions of the medical community during the 19th century. [Gibson combines] these texts with skeletal age data and rib and vertebrae measurements from remains at St. Bride’s parish London dating from 1700 to 1900.”
Jamie L.H. Goodall, Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars (The History Press)
“The story of Chesapeake pirates and patriots begins with a land dispute and ends with the untimely death of an oyster dredger at the hands of the Maryland Oyster Navy. From the golden age of piracy to Confederate privateers and oyster pirates, the maritime communities of the Chesapeake Bay are intimately tied to a fascinating history of intrigue, plunder and illicit commerce raiding.”
Joshua R. Greenberg, Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press)
“Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes . . .Greenberg argues Americans, by necessity, developed the ability to analyze the value of paper financial instruments, assess the strength of banking institutions, and even track legislative changes that might alter the rules of currency circulation.”
Rachel Hynson, Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1971 (Cambridge University Press)
“Contrary to claims that socialism opposed the family unit, Hynson argues that the revolutionary Cuban government engaged in social engineering to redefine the nuclear family and organize citizens to serve the state. by 1961, and increasingly throughout this decade, revolutionary citizenship was earned through labor. While men were to work outside the home in state-approved jobs, women found their citizenship tied to affording the state control over their reproduction and sexual labor.”
James Keating, Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 1880–1914 (Manchester University Press)
“In the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote . . . Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, Distant Sisters uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising . . . [D]ocumenting the failures of their expansive vision alongside its successes, this book reveals a more contingent history of international organising and challenges celebratory accounts of fin-de-siècle global connection.”
Jacqueline Klooster and Inger N.I. Kuin, After the Crisis. Remembrance, Re-anchoring, and Recovery in the Ancient Greece and Rome (Bloomsbury)
“Crises resulting from war or other upheavals turn the lives of individuals upside down, and they can leave marks on a community for many years after the event. This volume aims to explore how such crises were remembered in the ancient world, and how communities reconstituted themselves after a crisis. Can crises serve as catalysts for innovation or change, and how does this work?”
Matthew Luckett, Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska, 1850–1890 (University of Nebraska Press)
“Never Caught Twice presents the untold history of horse raiding and stealing on the Great Plains of western Nebraska. By investigating horse stealing by and from four Plains groups—American Indians, the U.S. Army, ranchers and cowboys, and farmers—Matthew S. Luckett clarifies a widely misunderstood crime in Western mythology and shows that horse stealing transformed plains culture and settlement in fundamental and surprising ways.”
John Garrison Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas (University of South Carolina Press)
“Prior to the abolition of slavery, thousands of African-descended people in the Americas lived in freedom . . . In Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery, John Garrison Marks examines how these individuals built lives in freedom for themselves and their families in two of the Atlantic World’s most important urban centers: Cartagena, along the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, and Charleston, in the lowcountry of North America’s Atlantic coast.”
Francisco Gómez Martos, Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England (Routledge)
“Staging Favorites explores theatrical representations of royal favorites in Spanish, French, and English dramatic production during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . While scholars have studied this group partially and separately in national context, Staging Favorites approaches these “dramas about favorites” from a wider European point of view, and performs comparative analyses of a number of plays.”
Vanessa Mongey, Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press)
“When we think of the Age of Revolutions, George Washington, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, or Simón Bolívar might come to mind. But Rogue Revolutionaries recovers the interconnected stories of now-forgotten ‘foreigners of desperate fortune’ who dreamt of overthrowing colonial monarchy and creating their own countries. They were not members of the political and economic elite; rather, they were ship captains, military veterans, and enslaved soldiers.”
Hannah-Rose Murray, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles (Cambridge University Press)
“By sharing their . . . testimony to transatlantic audiences, African American activists galvanised the antislavery movement, which had severe consequences for former slaveholders, pro-slavery defenders, white racists, and ignorant publics . . . Murray explores the radical transatlantic journeys formerly enslaved individuals made to the British Isles, and what light they shed on our understanding of the abolitionist movement.”
Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner)
Exploring the connections among the Civil War, the Indian wars, and western expansion, Nelson reframes the era as one of national conflict–involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals . . . As we learn how [they] fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict.
Eric Nusbaum, Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between (PublicAffairs)
“Dodger Stadium is an American icon. But the story of how it came to be goes far beyond baseball . . . before Dodger Stadium could be built, the city would have to face down the neighborhood’s families—including one, the Aréchigas, who refused to yield their home. The ensuing confrontation captivated the nation—and the divisive outcome still echoes through Los Angeles today.”
Alicia Puglionesi, Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (Stanford University Press)
“Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena [and] Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes . . . Common Phantoms brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences.”
Kyle Riismandel, Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001 (Johns Hopkins University)
“[By] the 1970s, the expected security of suburban life gave way to a sense of endangerment. Perceived, and sometimes material, threats from burglars, kidnappers, mallrats, toxic waste, and even the occult challenged assumptions about safe streets, pristine parks, and the sanctity of the home itself. [Riismandel] examines how suburbanites responded to this crisis by attempting to take control of the landscape and reaffirm their cultural authority.”
Andrea Friederici Ross, Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick (Southern Illinois University Press)
“This thrilling story of a daughter of America’s foremost industrialist, John D. Rockefeller, is complete with sex, money, mental illness, and opera divas—and a woman who strove for the independence to make her own choices. Rejecting the limited gender role carved out for her by her father and society, Edith Rockefeller McCormick forged her own path, despite pushback from her family and ultimate financial ruin.”
Lucy Jane Santos, Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium (Icon Books)
“Lucy Jane Santos – herself the proud owner of a formidable collection of radium beauty treatments – delves into the stories of these products and details the gradual downfall and discredit of the radium industry through the eyes of the people who bought, sold and eventually came to fear the once-fetishized substance. She reveals a new history of radium, one in which the stories of those previously dismissed as quacks and fools are brought to life, as part of a unique examination of the interplay between science and popular culture.”
Tripurdaman Singh, Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India (Penguin)
“Passed in June 1951 in the face of tremendous opposition within and outside Parliament . . . the First Amendment drastically curbed freedom of speech . . . and fashioned a special schedule of unconstitutional laws immune to judicial challenge . . . Sixteen Stormy Days challenges conventional wisdom on iconic figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru . . . and lays bare the vast gulf between the liberal promise of India’s Constitution and the authoritarian impulses of her first government.”
Natalia K. Suit, Qur’anic Matters: Material Mediations and Religious Practice in Egypt (Bloomsbury)
“Qur’anic Matters spans the time between two important technological shifts-the introduction of printed Qur’anic books in Egypt in the early nineteenth century and the digitization of the Qur’an almost two centuries later. [Suit] weaves together the theological, legal, economic, and social ‘presences’ of the Qur’anic books, [arguing] that the message and the materiality of the object are not separate from each other, nor are they separate from the human bodies with which they come in contact.”