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 2023 by historians working off the tenure track that you might consider as you do your end-of-the-year shopping.
Matthew Algeo, When Harry Met Pablo: Truman, Picasso, and the Cold War Politics of Modern Art (Chicago Review Press)
Truman’s meeting with Picasso was quietly arranged by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and an early champion of Picasso. Barr knew that if he could convince these two ideological antipodes, the straight-talking politician from Missouri and the Cubist painter from Málaga, to simply shake hands, it would send a powerful message, not just to reactionary Republicans pushing McCarthyism at home, but to the whole world: modern art was not evil.
Sara Ayres, Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600-1900 (Lund Humphries)
[This book] explores an intersection of three themes trending in early modern studies: portraiture, gender and the court as a centre of cultural exchange . . . The consort’s liminal position between royal houses, territories, languages and sometimes religion, has often been equated with political weakness, but this new work argues that this position endowed the consort with a unique space for innovation in the representation of elite identity.
Chris Blakley, Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World (Louisiana State University Press)
Using the correspondence of the Royal African Company, specimen catalogs and scientific papers of the Royal Society, plantation inventories and manuals, and diaries kept by slaveholders, Blakley describes human–animal networks spanning from Britain’s slave castles and outposts throughout western Africa to plantations in the Caribbean and American Southeast, [combining] approaches from environmental history, history of science, and philosophy…
Zachary Brodt, From the Steel City to the White City: Western Pennsylvania and the World’s Columbian Exposition (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Brodt explores Western Pennsylvania’s representation at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, the first major step in demonstrating that Pittsburgh was more than simply America’s crucible—it was also a region of developing culture and innovation . . . The Chicago fairgrounds provided a lucrative opportunity for area companies not only to provide construction materials but to display the region’s many products.
Brittany R. Clark, Media Representations of Retail Work in America (Lexington Books)
The retail trade has undergone tremendous changes over the course of the twentieth century in the United States, and media narratives have reflected these changes . . . Offering close readings of various texts including films, television shows, advertisements, and internet memes, [Clark] traces the development of the trade as a career opportunity that required a distinct set of skills in the early twentieth century until today, when the job has been deskilled and retail workers struggle with low pay and lack of benefits.
Matthew Guaraglia, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York (Duke University Press)
Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police Department to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States. . . . Campaigns to remake the police department created an urban landscape where power, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, crime, and bodies collided and provided a foundation for the supposedly color-blind, technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today.
Audrey Clare Farley, Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America (Grand Central)
In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health set out to study the genetics of schizophrenia. When they got word that four 24-year-old identical quadruplets in Lansing, Michigan, had all been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe their ears. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission and, thus, a chance to bring international fame to their fledgling institution. The case . . .they soon found, was hardly so straightforward.
Kristin Franseen, Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson UP)
Imagining Musical Pasts considers the ways early twentieth-century musicologists Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson approached gender and sexuality in their scholarly and creative work. This book explores the place of musicology as literature, as well as the role of gossip and speculation in constructing queer music histories.
Erik Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene, eds., Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education (University of Illinois Press)
In the United States today, almost three-quarters of the people teaching in two- and four-year colleges and universities work as contingent faculty. They share the hardships endemic in the gig economy: lack of job security and health care, professional disrespect, and poverty wages that require them to juggle multiple jobs. This collection draws on a wide range of perspectives to examine the realities of the contingent faculty system through the lens of labor history.
Bennett Gilbert and Natan Elgabasi, eds., Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History: A Cross-Cultural Approach (Bloomsbury)
This interdisciplinary volume connects the philosophy of history to moral philosophy with a unique focus on time. Taking in a range of intellectual traditions, cultural, and geographical contexts, the volume provides a rich tapestry of approaches to time, morality, culture, and history . . . the editors disentangle some of the disciplinary tensions between analytical and hermeneutic philosophy of history, cultural theory, meta-ethical theory, and normative ethics.
Janine Giordano Drake, The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement (OUP)
Drake . . . finds that Protestant ministers worked hard to assert their cultural authority over Catholic, Jewish, and religiously-unaffiliated working-class communities. Moreover, they rarely supported the most important demands of labor . . . Despite their heroic narratives of Christian social reform, Protestant reformers’ efforts to assert their authority over industrial affairs directly undermined workers’ efforts to bring about social democracy in the United States.
Carly Goodman, Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction (UNC Press)
[A] lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration.
Christopher Graham, Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church (University of Virginia Press)
[A] new history of Richmond’s famous St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, attended by Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War and a tourist magnet thereafter. Christopher Alan Graham’s narrative—which emerged out of St. Paul’s History and Reconciliation Initiative—charts the congregation’s theological and secular views of race from the church’s founding in 1845 to the present day, exploring the church’s complicity in Lost Cause narratives and racial oppression in Richmond.
Lisa Haushofer, Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition (University of California Press)
Between 1850 and 1950, experts and entrepreneurs in Britain and the United States forged new connections between the nutrition sciences and the commercial realm . . . The resulting food products promised wondrous solutions for what seemed to be both individual and social ills . . . Wonder Foods shows how new products dazzled with visions of modernity, efficiency, and scientific progress even as they perpetuated exclusionary views about who deserved to eat, thrive, and live.
Janiece Johnson, Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture (UNC Press)
Johnson analyzes how sensational media attention used the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre to enflame public sentiment and provoke legal action against Latter-day Saints. Ministers, novelists, entertainers, cartoonists, and federal officials followed suit, spreading anti-Mormon sentiment . . . This troubling episode in American religious history sheds important light on the role of media and popular culture in provoking religious intolerance that continues to resonate in the present.
Marsely Kehoe, Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age (Amsterdam University Press)
This book examines the Dutch so-called “Golden Age” though its artistic and architectural legacy, recapturing the global dimensions of this period . . . Using the tools of art history to approach questions about memory, history, and how cultures define themselves, this book demonstrates the centrality of material and visual culture to understanding history and cultural identity.
Jeremy Land, Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700-1776) (Brill)
Land argues that [Boston, New York, and Philadelphia] developed large, global networks of maritime commerce and exchange that created tension between merchants and the British Empire which sought to enforce mercantilist policies . . . Colonial merchants created and then expanded their mercantile networks well beyond the confines of the British Empire. This trans-imperial trade . . . formed the roots of what became known as the American Revolution.
Ole Birk Laursen, Anarchy or Chaos: M. P. T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom (Hurst)
In this fascinating biography of the Indian revolutionary M. P. T. Acharya (1887–1954), Ole Birk Laursen uncovers the remarkable transnational networks, movements and activities of India’s most important anticolonial anarchist in the twentieth century . . . Drawing on a wealth of archival material, private correspondence and other primary sources, Laursen demonstrates that, among his contemporaries, Acharya’s turn to anarchism was unique and pioneering in the struggle for Indian independence.
Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, eds., American Energy Cinema (West Virginia University Press)
The essays in this collection show how film provides a unique and informative lens to understand perceptions of energy production, consumption, and infrastructure networks. By placing films that prominently feature energy within historical context and analyzing them as historical objects, the contributing authors demonstrate how energy systems of all kinds are both integral to the daily life of Americans and inextricable from larger societal changes and global politics.
Brooks Marmon, Pan-Africanism Versus Partnership: African Decolonisation in Southern Rhodesian Politics, 1950-63 (Springer)
This book takes the transnational history of southern Africa’s liberation struggles in an innovative direction. It provides one of the first targeted studies of the manner in which the wider process of African decolonisation shaped the political struggle for control of Southern Rhodesia . . . It offers an in-depth survey of the repercussions of pan-African developments on national-level political thought amidst one of the most seminal moments of the continent’s history.
Sara Mohr and Shane M. Thompson, eds., Power and Identity at the Margins of the Ancient Near East (University Press of Colorado)
The borderlands of hegemonic entities within the Near East and Egypt pressed against each other, creating cities and societies with influence from several competing polities. The peoples, cities, and cultures that resulted present a unique lens by which to examine how states controlled and influenced the lives, political systems, and social hierarchies of these subjects (and vice versa).
Joshua Nudell, Accustomed to Obedience? Classical Ionia and the Aegan World, 480–294 BCE (University of Michigan Press)
Many histories of Ancient Greece center their stories on Athens, but what would that history look like if they didn’t? There is another way to tell this story, one that situates Greek history in terms of the relationships between smaller Greek cities and in contact with the wider Mediterranean. In this book, author Joshua P. Nudell offers a new history of the period from the Persian wars to wars that followed the death of Alexander the Great, from the perspective of Ionia.
Robert Rakove, Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan Before the Soviet Invasion (Columbia)
Long before the 1979 Soviet invasion, the United States was closely concerned with Afghanistan. Rakove sheds new light on the little-known and often surprising history of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan from the 1920s to the Soviet invasion, tracing its evolution and exploring its lasting consequences, [and] chronicles the battle for influence in Kabul, as Americans contended with vigorous communist bloc competition and the independent ambitions of successive Afghan governments.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus in Modern America (UNC Press)
This book explores the story of how stakeholders in American higher education organized and reacted to challenges to their power from the New Left and Black Power student resistance movements of the late 1960s . . . Shepherd shows how wealthy donors and conservative intellectuals trained future GOP leaders . . . in conservative politics, providing them with tactics to consciously drive American politics and culture further to the authoritarian right and to “reclaim” American higher education.
Angela Sutton, Pirates of the Slave Trade: The Battle of Cape Lopez and the Birth of an American Institution (Rowman & Littlefield)
No one present at the Battle of Cape Lopez off the coast of West Africa in 1722 could have known that they were on the edge of history . . . Sutton outlines the complex network of trade routes spanning the Atlantic Ocean trafficked by agents of empire, private merchants, and brutal pirates alike. Drawing from a wide range of primary historical sources, Sutton offers a new perspective on how a single battle played a pivotal role in reshaping the trade of enslaved people in ways that affect America to this day.
Julie Taddeo and Jo Parnell, eds., Writing Australian History On-Screen: Television and Film Period Dramas “Down Under” (Rowman & Littlefield)
In their analyses and interpretations of the topic, the contributors interrogate the intricacies in Australian history as represented in Australian filmic period drama, taken from an Australian perspective. Individually, and together as a body of authors, they highlight past issues that, despite the society’s changing attitudes over time, still have relevance for the Australia of today.