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 2022 by historians working off the tenure track that you might consider as you do your end-of-the-year shopping.
Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd, Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South (University of Georgia Press)
[Boyd] explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first . . . In a trio of popular gender rituals . . . young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to “do” white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why?
Katherine L. Carroll, Building Schools, Making Doctors: Architecture and the Modern American Physician (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Between 1893 and 1940, nearly every medical college in the country rebuilt or substantially renovated its facility . . . Carroll reveals how the schools constructed during this fifty-year period did more than passively house a remodeled system of medical training; they actively participated in defining and promoting an innovative pedagogy, modern science, and the new physician. Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, her study moves architecture from the periphery of medical education to the center.
Susan Colbourn, Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell University Press)
Euromissiles is a history of diplomacy and alliances, social movements and strategy, nuclear weapons and nagging fears, and politics. To tell that history, Colbourn takes a long view of the strategic crisis—from the emerging dilemmas of allied defense in the early 1950s through the aftermath of the INF Treaty thirty-five years later. The result is a dramatic and sweeping tale that changes the way we think about the Cold War and its culmination.
David Conrad, Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan (McFarland)
Kurosawa’s films evolved as Japan redefined and reinvented itself, from movies made for the wartime regime to those made amid the trials of American occupation. This detailed study of all 30 of Kurosawa’s films analyzes the links between the thrilling narratives onscreen and the equally remarkable events that occurred in Japan over his long, productive career. This book explores how Kurosawa’s classics depict the political, economic, cultural, sexual and environmental upheavals of a nation at the center of a turbulent century, both directly and through period-piece mythmaking.
Cody Dodge Ewert, Making Schools American: Nationalism and the Origin of Modern Educational Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press)
Despite their divergent political visions and the unique conditions of the states, cities, and individual districts they served, school reformers wielded nationalistic rhetoric that made education a rallying point for Americans across lines of race, class, religion, and region. But ultimately, Making Schools American argues, upholding education as a potential solution to virtually every societal problem has hamstrung broader attempts at social reform while overburdening schools.
Alex D. Ketchum, Engage in Public Scholarship: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication (Concordia University Press)
Engage in Public Scholarship! provides constructive guidance on how to translate research into inclusive public outreach while ensuring that such efforts are accessible for a range of abilities as well as safer for those involved . . . Examining the needs for long-term preservation and impact, Ketchum discusses issues relating to digital sustainability, maintenance, the concept of “openness,” and how to be mindful of exclusionary barriers that impede access.
Patrick Luck, Replanting a Slave Society: The Sugar and Cotton Revolutions in the Lower Mississippi Valley (University of Virginia Press)
Bringing the lower Mississippi valley to the foreground of the history of the early republic, [this] is the first major study to analyze in tandem the sugar and cotton revolutions that took place in the region in the years before and after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. It highlights the far-ranging, at times nation-encompassing, consequences of decisions made by a small elite group of planters and merchants in a remote colonial slave society and their effect on the subsequent course of American history.
Thomas Dixon & Adam R. Shapiro, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press)
Dixon and Shapiro connect historical concepts such as evolution, the heliocentric solar system, and the problem of evil to present-day issues including the politicization of science; debates over mind, body, and identity; and the moral necessity of addressing environmental change . . . Provides a broader worldwide perspective [and] new material on the influences of missionary and colonialist history on science and religion discourses today.
Briana J. Smith, Free Berlin: Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday Life (MIT Press)
In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth.
Jordan E. Taylor, Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America (Johns Hopkins University Press)
The American Revolution was not only a political contest for liberty, equality, and independence (for white men, at least); it was also a contest to define certain accounts of reality to be truthful while defining others as false and dangerous. Misinformation Nation argues that we must also conceive of the American Revolution as a series of misperceptions, misunderstandings, and uninformed overreactions . . . Misinformation Nation will be a valuable prehistory to our current political moment.
Tanzy Ward, Unsung Portraits: Anonymous Images of Black Victorians and Early 20th Century Ancestors (Independently published)
Despite the inaccurate stereotypes and caricatures that plagued African Americans during the Victorian Era & early 20th century, their powerful self portraits emphasized a people of beautiful dignity and distinguished poise. Unsung Portraits . . . features original photographs from the author’s collection and honors how the ancestors chose photography to portray themselves.
E. James West, A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (University of Illinois Press)
In this groundbreaking work, E. James West examines the city’s Black press through its relationship with the built environment. As a house for the struggle, the buildings of publications like Ebony and the Chicago Defender embodied narratives of racial uplift and community resistance. As political hubs, gallery spaces, and public squares, they served as key sites in the ongoing Black quest for self-respect, independence, and civic identity.
E. James West, Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (University of Massachusetts Press)
Journalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr. left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture.Rooted in his role as senior editor of Ebony magazine, but stretching far beyond the boundaries of the Johnson Publishing headquarters in Chicago, Bennett’s work and activism positioned him as a prominent advocate for Black America and a scholar whose writing reached an unparalleled number of African American readers.