Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2021 -

When two award-winning, powerhouse women historians collaborate, what they produce is nothing short of amazing. Berry (Univ. of Texas, Austin) and Gross (Rutgers Univ.) set out to create an inclusive survey of African American women's history, accessible to students as well as to the general public, focusing on themes of mobility, violence, resistance, activism, labor, and entrepreneurship. They have further succeeded in writing a book that students will be excited to read. The volume is organized in 10 chapters, bookended by an introduction and conclusion. Each chapter, including the introduction and conclusion, opens with a compelling story of a different woman from history whose name is not typically included in history texts. These stories are included chronologically, beginning in the 1600s and ending in 2000 (the conclusion ends with a story from 2018), and cover a broad spectrum of women, including enslaved women, queer women, artists, and activists. The book is supplemented by extensive notes for each chapter and a helpful index.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.

Drawing almost exclusively on primary sources, Root (a legal journalist affiliated with Reason magazine) focuses on Frederick Douglass's constitutional thought and determination to transform the US Constitution into a genuine antislavery document. He considered the Constitution to be "at war with itself" because it could not concurrently support liberty and slavery. During the Civil War Douglass lobbied President Abraham Lincoln hard to pursue a vigorous war against slavery, including emancipating slaves in the District of Columbia and later throughout the 15 slaveholding states. A political abolitionist, Douglass enthusiastically backed Lincoln's suppression of certain civil liberties as war measures, the mobilization of Black soldiers, and the passage and then ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865). Following Appomattox, Douglass observed with alarm the resurgence of proslavery ideas and actions--violence aimed at the freedpeople and repressive local and state ordinances directed against Black persons. Root explains that in the postwar decades (Douglass died in 1895) he championed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth Amendments (1870), and antilynching legislation during the age of Jim Crow. Root champions Douglass as an important legal and political thinker, a determined fighter for full citizenship rights and freedom for all Americans regardless of race.Summing Up: Essential. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. General readers.

"The law, controlled by whites, had upheld the legitimacy of enslavement.... But not all believed what the slaveholders did about the law. Deployed for a higher purpose and in the right hands, those of enslaved people, the law testified to an inheritance of freedom" (p. 301). These sentences capture the abiding spirit of A Question of Freedom. In this wonderful book, historian Thomas (Univ. of Nebraska) tells the human stories of the freedom suits brought by enslaved individuals in Prince George's County, MD, between the 1780s and the Civil War. Thomas's outstanding research shows these were far from isolated, idiosyncratic efforts to challenge pro-slavery laws. Instead, they were extensive, determined undertakings that "probed a glaring vulnerability in the law of slavery," namely that "Maryland's 1776 constitution made no mention of slavery or slaveholding" (p. 5-6). Thomas therefore provides a poignant illustration of the complexities of law and constitutionalism. Ultimately, however, it is how the law was affected by the suits and how the suits were affected by the law that provides the most important reminder, a reminder that law is a fundamentally human (but oftentimes inhumane) institution.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

Numerous volumes have been written about the Civil Rights Movement and the legal history involved in the struggle. Like Tomiko Brown-Nagin's Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (2012), Brown's Alabama Justice adds a much-needed study of state-specific contributions to this "long history." Alabama, long identified with key action points in civil rights history, is again brought to the forefront of legal history. Covering a range of salient cases, from the well-known Powell v. Alabama (1932) decision regarding the Scottsboro Boys, which ended in a landmark ruling on the right to effective counsel, to the somewhat lesser-known Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), which dealt with equal protection and benefits, Brown (political science, Auburn Univ.) adds an important study to the civil rights canon. Examining not only the legacies of these cases but also the historical context in which each emerged, Alabama Justice is an excellent work that combines intense legal examination with a layman's attention to readability.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

Despite mountains of existing material, historians continue devising innovative understandings of the Civil War. This fruitful approach locates familiar events and people in less-familiar ecological context. Browning and Silver (both, Appalachian State Univ.) situate their work globally, connecting extreme 1860s weather patterns (flooding, drought, severe heat/cold) to episodes of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation. They also apply Alfred Crosby's portmanteau biota concept: the congeries of people, plants, animals, and germs constantly accompanying humankind. The Civil War generated volatile mixes of constraints and hazards, notably diseases--this first modern industrial war was resolutely traditional, with twice as many deaths from illness as combat. Chapters include "Sickness," "Weather," "Food," "Animals," "Death and Disability," and "Terrain," and an epilogue explores postwar legacies. Organization is idiosyncratic (each chapter covers several months only), but this corresponds to the rhythm of seasons. It is now possible to understand more clearly and sympathetically the judgment of generals (e.g., Ambrose Burnside's dismal Mud March), dedication of soldiers, and endurance of animals confronted by nature's inexorability. Despite a whiff of determinism, the environment now looms large for Civil War historians, as it surely did for participants. This volume is essential for Civil War collections and widely useful for all libraries.Summing Up: Essential. All levels.

Kenora, a small city in northwest Ontario, rarely makes headlines in Canadian news. However, for six weeks during the summer of 1974 Kenora gained national attention when 150 Anishinaabe "Ojibway Warriors" occupied a city park as part of a decolonizing protest in connection with the American Civil Rights and American Indian Movements, global Marxism, and decolonization efforts happening throughout what was then called the Third World. Rutherford (global development studies and cultural studies, Queen's Univ., Canada) situates this protest within these global influences and highlights the movement's intellectual depth. He thus recalls an event that exemplifies both the persistence of colonialism in Canada and the country's attempt to erase dissent by affirming its multicultural exceptionalism in the face of the US's racial tensions. Kenora is effectively used as a microcosm to analyze racial and class tensions that pervaded and continue to pervade Canada as a whole. This is essential and accessible reading for anyone interested in understanding the continued resurgence of Indigenous protest in the face of an unchanging racist and settler colonial Canadian state and society.Summing Up: Essential. All levels.

Daybreak Woman, also known as Jane Robertson (1810-1904), exemplified the fur trade people who led settlement in northern North America. She was Dakota on her mother's side, and her father and husband were Scots immigrant traders on the US frontier. She lived nearly entirely in Minnesota--Mni Sota Makoce in Dakota. Carroll (St. Catherine Univ.) uses Daybreak Woman as an entry point to chart, and humanize, the 19th-century conquest of midwestern First Nations. Daybreak Woman is the complement to Laura Ingalls, the settler girl who inhabited the same big woods and prairie. The book remarkably winnows obscure local sources to create an actual biography of Mrs. Robertson, always engaged with her family, struggling to make a living in communities of their kind--Dakota women married to European and French-Canadian men. Never denying their Dakota kin, these families were caught in the inexorable push to capitalize on American land by expropriating it from First Nations people. This precipitated Minnesota's Dakota War of 1862, recounted in several suspenseful chapters focused on the tragic suffering of the Dakota and their outmarried relatives. Daybreak Woman, a gripping American drama, is history made real, excellent for colonialism studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

Whether Americans trace their ancestry to Plymouth Rock or a jetliner that recently landed at JFK, they are all immigrants. Szejnert, a Polish writer and social activist, spent 10 years analyzing Ellis Island's records for this "people's history." Beginning with the Lenni Lenape Native Americans who first occupied Kioshk, now Ellis Island, and continuing through Lee Iacocca's Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Commission, Szejnert details how the island, which has witnessed 12 million people pass through over 62 years, has come to symbolize the US's history as a nation of immigrants. During the world wars it served as an internment center and, following WW II, as a displaced persons center before closing in 1954. Ellis Island represents hope among liberals who see it as a symbol exemplifying the Declaration of Independence and fear among conservatives who see the "tired and poor," "the huddled masses yearning to breathe free," mongrelizing the US's Anglo-Saxon heritage. Szejnert highlights the long roots of this division, focusing on the arrivals, the unfortunates not admitted, and the employees who made the encounter as pleasant as possible. This is a must read to understand the place and power of the American Dream.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.

Forever Prisoners is a searing indictment of US immigration policy as revealed through case studies of Chinese incarceration at McNeil Island Prison, the imprisonment of immigrants deemed "insane" during the Progressive Era, the abduction and imprisonment of Japanese-Peruvian citizens by American agents during WW II, the indefinite imprisonment of Cuban Marielito refugees in the 1980s and 1990s, and the criminalization and deportation of undocumented immigrants under the Obama and Trump presidencies. Young (Lewis and Clark College) connects these histories to the "forever prisoners" housed at Guantanamo Bay who were swept up in the war on terror, showing in all examples the lack of basic habeas corpus and due-process rights afforded to those incarcerated. Throughout, Young brings complex legal, institutional, and demographic history to life through individual stories. The book is uniquely situated at the interstice of two subjects that have generated voluminous literature but have been treated separately--undocumented immigration and mass incarceration. Though not to be taken as an analytical explanation for the causes of US immigration policy and its changes over time--Young finds more continuity than change--this moving work humanizes immigration, past and present.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.

Prior to the introduction of sign language in the early 19th century, deaf individuals were often isolated not only from the "normal world" but also from each other. In this thought-provoking book, Virdi (Univ. of Delaware) explores how the expectation for deaf individuals to conform to "normality" spurred myriad treatments and supposed cures. Hearing Happiness examines the history of treatments--ranging from humoral theory to quackery, invasive otological procedures, and fad technologies--each with the goal of curing deafness and conforming its sufferers to society's standards. Employing the trope of "hearing happiness," Virdi describes the effects these "cures" had on deaf individuals, revealing it was society's enforcing of normalcy that led many to believe that hearing would lead to happiness, when in fact they reinforced the stigmatization that society had created. One of the book's greatest strengths is how the author weaves in her personal story and the self-described empowerment she experienced prior to wearing hearing aids. This book makes an important scholarly contribution to the field and will appeal to a general audience as well as academics who are interested in the history of medicine, technology, and D/deaf studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

In this excellent book Strobel (Univ. of Massachusetts, Lowell), who previously wrote The Global Atlantic: 1400-1900 (CH, Aug'15, 52-6528) and The Testing Grounds of Modern Empire (2008), has collected, researched, and interpreted the history of the first peoples of the northeastern US, focusing especially on what is now New England. He investigates the archaeological evidence from the earliest known excavations to present-day digs, as well as all written historical records. He includes all possible sources from these records, even many previously labeled as hoaxes or untruths, and also incorporates the oral traditions of existing Native groups and federally recognized tribes. This synthesis provides a much more complete accounting of the first 10,000 years of New England history. Additionally, such a complete record of survival in great climate swings (from near ice age to moderate warmth) and countless natural disasters serves as a lesson of hope and persistence for the current day. Though the title sounds like another ho-hum history of the Pilgrims and the Native Americans, this reviewer was enthralled from the first page until the last. Illustrations and maps would have been helpful, but even without them this is a must-have purchase for any library and any institution that teaches US history.Summing Up: Essential. All levels.

Scores of Civil War studies focus on intellectual thought in the Union states during the war; fewer highlight the same in the Confederacy. This new volume fills the gap by looking at intellectual development in the wartime South, emphasizing how Southerners thought about their new nation's place in the context of European nationalist movements. Tucker (Univ. of North Georgia) reminds readers that the Confederacy was more complex than many studies suggest. Many in the new Southern nation sought to define the Confederacy as similar to European movements, though this failed to attract hoped-for support in Europe. Further, many Confederate elites embraced an international perspective that allowed them to justify their separation from a union they once held dear and to clarify their own national values. Tucker demonstrates that such bold assumptions were far from monolithic. More liberal and conservative secessionists, along with Southern Unionists, advanced diverse perspectives of international thinking to justify their varied positions on secession and the new nation. This well-written, well-researched, well-organized book is a must read for those who want to expand their understanding of Southern thought during the Civil War and how Southerners believed they were, and should be, perceived by the outside world. It will appeal to a wide audience.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.

This outstanding book addresses Canadian women's consumer culture in comparative perspective, primarily in the 1890s-1930s. Belisle (Univ. of Regina, Canada) meticulously covers issues of consumption, identity, citizenship, status, temperance, and nationalism, alongside the realities of race, class, and gender during this period. She pays special attention to different types of female citizens as some "shop[ped] for victory," some became professional consumers, and home became a business (excluding non-white and non-Western European women). White Canadian women saw consumption as a political responsibility (it was imperative to "shop 'the Canadian Way'"), which in turn cast them as professional consumers and solidified their citizenship status, leading to the right to vote for some--i.e., explicitly white, bourgeois women. The rise of temperance led to the creation of more department stores, which became central to shifting understandings of women's citizenship as certain fashions conveyed norms of responsibility and class privilege, integral to Canadian nationalism of this era. Family-oriented consumer culture marked the middle class and wealth, and women's domestic roles came to demonstrate patriotic duty. Overall, this is a wonderful book that delves deeply into issues of class, gender, and race, considering how these classifications alternatively empower and exclude. This reviewer could not put it down.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.

This volume creatively frames the American South from its birth to the present. Ayers (Univ. of Richmond) has mined amazing veins of data in tracing the movements of peoples from the Atlantic frontier outward in every direction. Insightfully contemporary in its grasp, this study's most recent map illuminates how southern peoples have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The most ironically instructive maps locate those across the entire US who now claim descent from the indigenous peoples whose original homelands lay in the South. All the maps are both visually striking and brilliantly informative. Thankfully, the Fleming Lectures, of which this is one, continue to challenge and educate every generation of researchers, no matter their field. Historians, in particular, are indebted not only to Ayers for this brilliant imagining of the South, but also to Louisiana State University Press for bringing it to the public in such a useful form. This volume should be widely read, not only by historians but in classes on the history of the South, which should include this volume as required reading.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Unlike most collections of essays that combine only loosely related research, this edited volume from historians Gerstle (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) and Isaac (Univ. of Chicago) has a nearly monographic focus on the constitutional question of "states of exception"--ordinarily unconstitutional executive and state actions made legal in order to respond effectively to emergency situations. The US Constitution of 1787, unlike most other more recent national constitutions, makes no provision for employing extraconstitutional action to respond to war, natural disasters, or other emergencies. The volume begins by referencing FDR's May 1941 declaration of an "'unlimited national emergency'" as the US finally realized it had to respond to the challenges of fascism in Europe and Japanese aggression in East Asia. It then moves on to the myriad national and international emergencies with which the US has had to contend since its founding. The chapters are divided into three sections: theoretical issues (especially those specified by the leading Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt), the specifically American experience of emergency powers, and future possibilities. The essays are intelligent, well researched, and very well written, making this a useful and important volume.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

In what may be among the most honored nonfiction books published in 2020, Watts (history, California State Univ., San Marcos) transports the reader back to an age (1930s-40s) when discrimination and segregation were a grim reality. Watts tells the story of the Federal Council of Negro Affairs--informally the "Black cabinet"--a group of African Americans, led by the indefatigable Mary McLeod Bethune, who pressed President Franklin Roosevelt to build into the New Deal, and later WW II policies, reforms designed to give full citizenship to the neglected and oppressed Black minority. Elegant in its prose and vivid in its depiction of key characters, The Black Cabinet captures the challenges faced by these would-be reformers, and tells a story of high idealism mixed with raw pragmatism. With the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, these reformers paved the way for the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. This is a magisterial work, deftly executed and compellingly presented.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

In this beautifully produced and richly illustrated book, Gellman (history, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) offers a compelling history of political activism in Chicago during the early postwar decades. Focusing primarily on African Americans, he covers labor strikes, consumer boycotts, criminal (in)justice, police brutality, the war on poverty, political corruption, Black support of and white resistance to school and housing integration, youth gangs, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and anti-war protests. He laments the loss of opportunities for forging cross-class and multiracial activism and the many ways in which powerful people and institutions define urban disorder to suppress democracy, enhance the wealthy, maintain control of the government, and ignore deepening inequalities. What gives this wonderfully told history even greater impact is the inclusion of the photographs of Art Shay, a photojournalist who seemed to have attended every significant protest that occurred in Chicago from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. Gellman treats Shay's photographs as historical documents equivalent to the extensive archival and secondary sources he mined to research this text. The result is a significant contribution to urban history, presenting a creative model for how it can be written.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

Twilight of the Gods completes Toll's outstanding "Pacific War" trilogy, which includes Pacific Crucible (CH, Jul'12, 49-6430) and The Conquering Tide (CH, Jan'16, 53-2306). Interweaving memoirs, diaries, documents, and secondary sources, Toll, a writer and military historian, covers in great detail all the major events of the last year of the Pacific war--the invasions of the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa; the Battle of Leyte Gulf; the kamikaze attacks off the Philippines and Okinawa; the fire-bombing of Japan; and ending with the dropping of the two atomic bombs. Engaging prose and astute analysis draw the reader into the action, be it on land, sea, or in the air, and impart a feel of the rigors and hazards of combat. Highlights include the critical analysis of the American and Japanese naval leadership at Leyte, the navigation between Japanese and US forces fighting on Iwo Jima, the strange and harrowing odyssey of Bockscar (the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki), and the critical debate among high-ranking Japanese leaders on how to end the war after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This work is enhanced by 32 pages of photographs and 20 maps.Summing Up: Essential. All levels.

Unworthy Republic is a powerful piece of historical writing. Drawing on careful archival analysis and a rich and insightful historiography, Saunt (Univ. of Georgia) synthesizes an impressive body of scholarship and advances a compelling set of arguments about the US policy of Indian Removal that will inspire the next generation of research. In Saunt's hands, the banality of the term "Indian Removal" is replaced with historically accurate language, incorporating words like "expulsion" and "deportation." Indeed, the US government oversaw the expulsion of upwards of 80,000 indigenous people from their homelands east of the Mississippi River during the early 19th century. It was an expulsion driven by political and economic ambitions, racism, and an expansive colonial mentality. The text thus reveals the interconnectedness of slavery's expanding frontiers and the displacement of entire indigenous nations. The book is at its best and most original when highlighting the webs of investment and speculation that drove the deportation of eastern Native nations to Indian territory (modern-day Oklahoma). Unworthy Republic is written in accessible prose, thoroughly researched, and carefully argued. It is a book that warrants a wide readership and is destined to become a touchstone for future historical debate.Summing Up: Essential. All levels.

To coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, Jones (Johns Hopkins Univ.), a historian and legal scholar, spotlights over 200 years of Black women's political history and their struggle for the ballot in Vanguard. From her very own great-great-grandmother Susan Davis's stories of voting to Stacy Abrams, Jones rigorously details how Black women created a movement and their own "spaces from which they began to tell their own stories of what it meant to call for women's rights." Hidden behind the banner of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and the white feminist women's suffrage crusade were multitudes of Black women pushing for liberation in churches, organizations, military stations, clubs, benevolent societies, and institutions of higher learning. Women such as Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anna Julia Cooper, Hallie Quinn Brown, Mary McLeod Bethune, Pauli Murray, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, and Kamala Harris all dealt with the brutal sting of racism and sexism, yet, linked by their shared history, leaned on one another to move forward. Despite the long-standing social injustices Black women face, they continue to struggle to secure equality and dignity for all persons, challenging the status quo. Vanguard offers a new and holistic history of the women's movement in the US.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

As Hudson (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) argues, the struggle against segregation and white supremacy was as great in California as in the Deep South. Reminiscent of John Dittmer's classic Local People (CH, Dec'94, 32-2338), about the hundreds of ordinary, historically unheralded individuals who fought for civil rights in Mississippi, this volume details the sagas of similarly unsung heroes and heroines in the Golden State. Hudson highlights several of these figures, including journalist/historian Delilah Beasley and the indefatigable Ruby McKnight Williams. Chapters on racist images in public entertainment, the all-Black town of Allensworth, the anti-lynching effort, and the California KKK are illuminating, but the most captivating story describes the four-decade effort to desegregate the Pasadena outdoor pool, one of the oldest public pools in the state (opened in 1914), located in the wealthiest city per capita in the country. The epilogue continues this story, recounting how baseball great Jackie Robinson's life intersected with the pool. The author further notes that the NAACP perfected its legal practices and tactics in scores of swimming pool desegregation cases nationally, which preceded the public school integration campaigns that resulted in Brown v. Board (1954). Outstanding history and an absorbing read.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.