Old Is Gold

In eighteenth-century Britain, criminals were routinely whipped, branded, hanged, or transported to America. Only in the last quarter of the century--with the War of American Independence and legal and sociopolitical challenges to capital punishment--did the criminal justice system change, resulting in the reformed prison,...

Demonstrates how policymakers influenced environmental science during the early nuclear age In Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945-1960, Neil S. Oatsvall examines how top officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations used environmental science to develop nuclear strategy at the...

In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if...

Spaniards in Mauthausen is the first study of the cultural legacy of Spaniards imprisoned and killed during the Second World War in the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen. By examining narratives about Spanish Mauthausen victims over the past seventy years, author Sara J. Brenneis provides...

Afghanistan: A Military History from the Ancient Empires to the Great Game covers the military history of a region encompassing Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, and West Asia, over some 2,500 years. This is the first comprehensive study in any language published on the...

From January to July of 1862, the armies and navies of the Union and Confederacy conducted an incredibly complex and remarkably diverse range of operations in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Under the direction of leaders like Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, George McClellan, Joseph E. Johnston,...

Examines the domestic and international use of phenoxy herbicides by the United States in the mid-twentieth century In The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests, Amy M. Hay profiles the attitudes, understandings, and motivations of grassroots activists who rose to fight...

In this intriguing and innovative work, James D. Schmidt examines federal efforts to establish "free labor" in the South during and after the Civil War by exploring labor law in the antebellum North and South and its role in the development of a capitalist...

The civil rights revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the literature on Reconstruction in America by emphasizing the social history of emancipation and the hopefulness that reunification would bring equality. Much of this revisionist work served to counter and correct the racist and...

An in-depth study of non-elite white families in Alabama--from the state's creation through the end of the Civil War The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama examines the evolving position of non-elite white families in Alabama during one of...

There's a pervasive sense of betrayal in areas scarred by mine, mill and factory closures. Steven High's One Job Town delves into the long history of deindustrialization in the paper-making town of Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, located on Canada's resource periphery. Much like hundreds of...

Reimagining the Educated Citizen contends that the constructs of public education and citizenship in the struggle to constitute a U.S. national identity are inseparable from the simultaneous emergence of transatlantic constructs of an educated citizen along transnational and transracial lines. The nineteenth century is...

In Cursed, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir investigates the July 4, 1946, Kielce pogrom, a milestone in the periodization of the Jewish diaspora. This massacre compelled thousands of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust to flee postwar Poland. It remains a negative reference point in the Polish...

The question Americans asked in 1844 was, "Who the hell is James K. Polk?"Polk, of course, was not unknown, but was a highly unlikely presidential candidate given the availability of better-known options. Among the Democrats, this included Martin Van Buren, John C. Calhoun, and...

This new history of Europe spans from the French Revolution to the World War I. It weaves together the political, economic, social and cultural developments of the period and examines themes such as the relationship between state, civil society and the citizen; the emergency...

Why didn't the Hungarian Jews do more to resist the 'Final Solution'? Why didn't the Allies bomb the gas chambers at Auschwitz? Why did the Allies sabotage schemes to save the Jews? In this provocative book, historians from Hungary, Israel, Britain and the United...

The period from 1945 to the present day may not constitute an American century, but it can be seen as the American Moment: the time when, for good or ill, the United States became the predominant political, military, economic and cultural power in the...

Nothing embodied Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign to lastingly embed the New Deal in the major institutions of American government more than his effort to pack the Supreme Court. Vaulting Ambition, the inaugural volume in the Landmark Presidential Decisions series, presents a balanced assessment of...

Originally published in 1985 the English Civil War is a subject which continues to excite enormous interest throughout the world. This atlas consists of over fifty maps illustrating all the major - and many of the minor - bloody campaigns and battles of the...

Lara Douds examines the practical functioning and internal political culture of the early Soviet government cabinet, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), under Lenin. This study elucidates the process by which Sovnarkom's governmental decision-making authority was transferred to Communist Party bodies in the early...