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 2024 by historians working off the tenure track that you might consider as you do your end-of-the-year shopping.
Ellen Arnold, Medieval Riverscapes: Environmental Meaning and Memory in Northwest Europe, ca. 300-1100 (Cambridge University Press)
Fishermen, monks, saints, and dragons met in medieval riverscapes; their interactions reveal a rich and complex world. Using religious narrative sources to evaluate the environmental mentalities of medieval communities, Ellen F. Arnold . . . argues that rivers provided unique opportunities for medieval communities to understand and respond to ecological and socio-cultural transformations, and to connect their ideas about the shared religious past to hopes about the future.
Jeremy Beer, Beyond the Devil’s Road: Francisco Garcés and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest (University of Oklahoma Press)
The explorations of Francisco Garcés, an intrepid Franciscan friar of the eighteenth century, led to the opening of the first overland route from Mexico to California, produced new knowledge of unmapped terrain and unknown peoples, and revived dreams of Spanish imperial expansion. Beyond the Devil’s Road tells, for the first time, the full story of this extraordinary man’s epic life and journey and his critical place in the history of the American Southwest.
Matthew Bernstein, Team of Giants: The Making of the Spanish-American War (University of Oklahoma Press)
If not for an unlikely alliance among a bespectacled cowboy, a former Confederate general, and a millionaire newspaper publisher, the Spanish-American War might never have been. How these three outsize characters—Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, and William Randolph Hearst—helped ignite the war that established the United States’ offshore empire is the rousing tale that Matthew Bernstein tells . . . a fresh account of the role the martial ambitions of these men played . . .
Lance R. Blyth, Ski, Climb, Fight: The 10th Mountain Division and the Rise of Mountain Warfare (University of Oklahoma Press)
To fight in mountains, armies must overcome this challenge via survival strategies and mobility. But the techniques and technologies for doing so are best found in civilian skiing and mountaineering communities, a situation almost unique to mountain warfare. Ski, Climb, Fight looks at how the 10th Mountain Division of World War II met this challenge and how the U.S. military does so today . . . the book is also the first general history of U.S. mountain warfare.
Marlene Bradford, Scanning the Skies: A History of Tornado Forecasting (University of Oklahoma Press)
[The] U.S. Weather Bureau–fearing public panic and believing tornadoes were too fleeting for meteorologists to predict–forbade the use of the word “tornado” in forecasts until 1938. This book highlights the modern tornado watch system and explains how advancements during the latter half of the twentieth-century–such as computerized data collection and processing systems, Doppler radar . . . and an extensive public education program–have resulted in the drastic reduction of tornado fatalities.
Emily Brooks, Gotham’s War within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II Era New York City (University of North Carolina Press)
Police officers worked to preserve urban order by controlling vice, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and the “disorderly” establishments that officials believed housed these activities . . . The mobilization for World War II introduced new opportunities for the NYPD to intensify policing and criminalize these groups with federal support.
Geoff Burrows, The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration: New Deal Public Works, Modernization, and Colonial Reform (University Press of Florida)
The first institutional history and critical examination of the agency, The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration engages questions about the New Deal’s global reach. It investigates how New Deal agendas refashioned U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico and indirectly contributed to the island’s current debt crisis and response to recent natural disasters such as Hurricane María.
Robyne Calvert, The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art (Yale University Press)
This book presents the updated story of “The Mack,” incorporating for the first time the history of the building during the post-Mackintosh era up to the present day, including the May 2014 fire, reconstruction efforts, and the devastating fire of 2018 that destroyed most of the building. Illustrated with historical and archival images, reconstruction photographs . . . it presents a comprehensive history of the context and creation of this building.
Jesse Chanin, Building Power, Breaking Power: The United Teachers of New Orleans, 1965-2008 (University of North Carolina Press)
From 1965 to 2005, the United Teachers of New Orleans . . . defied the South’s conservative anti-union efforts to become the largest local in Louisiana . . . Chanin argues that UTNO accomplished and maintained its strength through strong community support, addressing a Black middle-class political agenda, internal democracy, and drawing on the legacy and tactics of the civil rights movement by combining struggles for racial and economic justice, all under Black leadership . . .
Caitlin DeAngelis, The Caretakers: War Graves Gardeners and the Secret Battle to Rescue Allied Airmen in World War II (Prometheus)
When World War I ended, hundreds of British veterans stayed in France to work for the newly chartered Imperial War Graves Commission . . . these veteran-gardeners married local women, raised bilingual children, and dedicated themselves to caring for the graves of their fallen comrades . . . Through meticulous research, never-before-published journals and papers, and compassionate storytelling, DeAngelis honors the sacrifices made by War Graves gardeners and their families.
Glenn Dyer, The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Rank-and-File Rebels (University of North Carolina Press)
[A] relatively unknown episode in American labor history took place in New York City between 1965 and 1975. Rank-and-file members of numerous unions caught a “strike fever” as they challenged the entrenched power of some of the country’s most powerful politicians, employers, and union leaders in a wave of contract rejections, wildcat strikes, and electoral campaigns . . . Dyer traces the way workers were met with employer recalcitrance and union attacks that proved too powerful . . .
Richard J. Goodrich, L. A. Birdmen (Prometheus / Rowman & Littlefield)
L.A. Birdmen is the fascinating and forgotten story of America’s first aviators . . . Possessing a rare blend of ingenuity, creativity, and bravery, these pilots captured the world’s attention in 1910 when Los Angeles hosted America’s first international airsho w. . . L.A. Birdmen offers a high-flying account of the West Coast contribution to aviation, a little-recognized chapter in the story of American flight. In the first decade of the twentieth century, these dashing aviators—not the Wrights—were the public face of American aviation.
Jason Heppler, Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High Tech Urbanism (University of Oklahoma Press)
In the half century after World War II, California’s Santa Clara Valley transformed from a rolling landscape of fields and orchards into the nation’s most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. How Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley and came to embody both the triumphs and the failures of a new vision of the American West is the question Heppler explores in this book . . . a case study on the origins of American environmentalism and debates about urban and suburban sustainability.
Chris Holaday, Cracks in the Outfield Wall: The History of Baseball Integration in the Carolinas (University of North Carolina Press)
Chris Holaday offers readers the first book-length history of baseball’s integration in the Carolinas, showing its slow and unsteady progress, narrating the experience of players in a range of distinct communities, detailing the influence of baseball executives at the local and major league levels, and revealing that the changing structure of the professional baseball system allowed the major leagues to control integration at the state level.
Matthew Jagel, Khmer Nationalist:Sơn Ngọc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia (Cornell University Press)
Khmer Nationalist reveals how Cambodian nationalism grew during the twilight of French colonialism and faced new geopolitical challenges during the Cold War. Thành’s story brings greater understanding to the end of French colonialism in Cambodia, nationalism in post-colonial societies, Cold War realities for countries caught between competing powers, and how the United States responded while the Vietnam War intensified.
Christian Long, Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021 (Intellect)
The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds. If the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world, the presence of infrastructure, whether old or retrofitted or new, offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.
Kelly L. Marino, Votes for College Women: Alumni, Students, and the Woman Suffrage Campaign (New York University Press)
Votes for College Women examines archives from the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL) . . . to illustrate the outsize and dynamic role that young women played in the woman suffrage movement. The book vividly illustrates how the CESL’s campaigns served a dual purpose: not only did they invigorate the Nineteenth Amendment campaign at a crucial moment, but they also brought about a profound transformation in the culture of women’s organizing and higher education.
Jorge F. Rivas Pérez, ed., Neocolonial: Inventing Modern Latin American Nations (University of Oklahoma Press)
In essays about countries such as Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Venezuela over more than a half century, Neocolonial: Inventing Modern Latin American Nations presents the ways that artists, architects, and designers adapted to political and aesthetic realities so as to create a renewed visual identity. These explorations . . . showcase a style that sought to define national identities for citizens and international audiences alike.
Trevor Owens, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory (University of Michigan Press)
The digital age is burning out our most precious resources and the future of the past is at stake. In After Disruption . . . Trevor Owens warns that our institutions of cultural memory—libraries, archives, museums, humanities departments, research institutes, and more—have been “disrupted,” and largely not for the better. He calls for memory workers and memory institutions to take back control of envisioning the future of memory from management consultants and tech sector evangelists.
Elizabeth Reese, Marquis de Lafayette Returns: A Tour of America’s National Capital Region (Arcadia Publishing)
Walk in the footsteps of the Marquis de Lafayette as he makes a final trip through the young United States. Against the backdrop of a tumultuous election, a beloved hero of the American Revolution returned to America for the first time in forty years . . . he traveled throughout the United States, welcomed by thousands of admirers at each stop along the way. Although the tour brought him to each state in the Union, the majority of his time was spent in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.
Tommaso Sabbatini, Music, the Market, and the Marvellous: Parisian Parisian Féerie, 1864-1900 (Oxford University Press for the British Academy)
[Sabbatini] examines féerie, the French fairy play, in the last third of the nineteenth century. It is among the first book-length studies on the genre, the first in a language other than French, and the first from a musicological perspective. Sabbatini demonstrates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, féerie was still thriving during the fin de siècle, giving rise to innovations such as composerly féerie and scientific féerie.
Lucy Santos, Chain Reactions: A Hopeful History of Uranium (Simon & Schuster)
From glassworks to penny stocks; from medicines to atomic weapons; from something to be feared to a powerful source of energy, this global history explores the scientific narrative of this unique element, but also shines a light on its cultural and social impact. By understanding our nuclear past, we can move beyond the ideological opposition to technologies and encourage a more nuanced dialogue about whether it is feasible—and desirable—to have a genuinely nuclear-powered future.
Kathleen Sheldon, The Mackerel Years: A Memoir of War, Hunger, and Women’s History in 1980s Mozambique (Africa World Press)
In the early 1980s, Kathleen Sheldon traveled to Mozambique to pursue research for her doctoral dissertation in history, accompanied by her [husband and daughter.] Their travel there was an act of solidarity with the newly independent socialist Frelimo government, which had called for international supporters . . . For many Mozambicans, those years are remembered as the mackerel years . . . referring to the distasteful fish that for many months was the only source of protein available in the markets.
Eram Alam, Dorothy Roberts, and Natalie Shibley, eds. Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science (Columbia University Press)
Ordering the Human presents cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the racialization of science in various global contexts, illuminating how racial logics have been deployed to classify, marginalize, and oppress. Tracing the pernicious consequences of the racialization of science, Ordering the Human shines a light on how the naturalization of racial categories continues to shape health and inequality today.
Alicia Spencer-Hall, Medieval Twitter (Arc Humanities Press)
This pioneering monograph provocatively explodes current research paradigms for the modern and the medieval by showing that Twitter shares key similarities with medieval literary forms, texts, and narrative techniques. Analyzing tweets with medieval texts, and vice versa, Spencer-Hall initiates readers into an innovative methodology of interdisciplinary literary criticism, posing vital questions about the politics of medievalism today . . . The book culminates in a medieval(ist) reading of Twitter’s premature demise, and Elon Musk’s medievalism.
Nina S. Studer, The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
As one of history’s most notorious drinks, absinthe has been the subject of myth, scandal, and controversy. [Studer] explores how this mythologizing led to the creation and fabrication of a vast modern folklore while key historical events, crucial to understanding the story of absinthe, have been neglected or unreported. Mystique and moralizing both arose from the spirit’s relationship with empire . . . Studer provides a panoptic view of the French Empire’s influence on absinthe’s spectacular fall from grace.
Travis A. Weisse, Health Freaks: America’s Diet Champions and the Spectator of Chronic Illness (University of North Carolina Press)
Weisse argues that millions of Americans sought “fad” diets—such as the notorious Atkins program which ushered in the low-carbohydrate craze—to wrest control of their health from pessimistic doctors and lifelong pharmaceutical regimens. Drawing on novel archival sources and a wide variety of popular media, Weisse shows the lengths to which . . . dieters went to heal themselves outside the borders of orthodox medicine and the subsequent political and scientific backlash they received.
Rebecca Wellington, Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption (Univeristy of Oklahoma Press)
Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption . . . Wellington’s timely—and deeply researched—account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States’ adoption industry.
Alexis Wolf, Transnational Women Writers in the Wilmot Coterie, 1798-1840: Beyond Borders and Boundaries (Boydell & Brewer)
[Wolf] explores the collaborative relationships formed by women participating in cosmopolitan networks beyond the typical locations of the Grand Tour. Across their travels, the sisters met, engaged with, and learned from numerous key women of the time . . . Wolf showcases how manuscript circulation, coterie engagement and transnational travel provided avenues for women to engage with the intellectual discourses from which they were often excluded.
Kevin W. Young, The Violent World of Broadus Miller: A Story of Murder, Lynch Mobs, and Judicial Punishment in the Carolinas (University of North Carolina Press)
Young provides a panoramic overview of this turbulent time, telling important contextual histories of events that played into this tragic story, including the horrific prison conditions of the era, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the influx of Black immigrants into North Carolina . . . this book vividly illustrates the stormy race relations in the Carolinas during the early 1900s, reminding us that the legacy of this era lingers . . .
Eric Steven Zimmer, Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement (University of Oklahoma Press)
Spanning Indigenous environmental and political history from the Red Earth People’s creation to the twenty-first century, Red Earth Nation focuses on the Meskwaki Settlement: now comprising more than 8,000 acres, this is sovereign Meskwaki land, not a treaty-created reservation. Currently the largest employer in Tama County, Iowa, the Meskwaki Nation has long used its land ownership and economic clout to resist the forces of colonization and create opportunities for self-determination.