News
NEW FACES AROUND THE DEPARTMENT
Additional news can be found in the Fall 2009 Departmental Newsletter
(available here as PDF)
Marni Sandweiss (Professor), is the author or editor of numerous books on American history and photography, including most recently Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. Her courses this fall are entitled “Writing from the Document: Reconstructing the American Past&rdqu
Yale University Press: How was Great Britain made? And what does it mean to be British? This brilliant and seminal book examines how a more cohesive British nation was invented after 1707 and how this new national identity was nurtured through war, religion, trade, and empire.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux:On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet test bomb, dubbed First Lightning, exploded in the deserts of Kazakhstan. The startling event was not simply a technical experiment that confirmed the ability of the Soviet Union to build nuclear bombs during a period when the United States held a steadfast monopoly; it was also an international event that marked the beginning of an arms race that would ultimately lead to nuclear proliferation beyond the two superpowers.
Harvard University Press: Harold James examines the vulnerability and fragility of processes of globalization, both historically and in the present. This book applies lessons from past breakdowns of globalization--above all in the Great Depression--to show how financial crises provoke backlashes against global integration: against the mobility of capital or goods, but also against flows of migration.
The Johns Hopkins University Press: This authoritative study of colonialism in the Spanish empire at the end of the eighteenth century examines how the Spanish metropole attempted to preserve the links to its richest colony in the western Atlantic, New Spain (Mexico), in the face of international developments. Continuing the approach in Silver, Trade, and War and Apogee of Empire, Barbara and Stanley Stein detail Spain's ad hoc efforts to adjust metropolitan and colonial institutions, structures
Princeton University Press: The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today.