Resources By Department: New Books: History

A Great Disorder by Richard Slotkin
Red America and Blue America are so divided they could be two different countries, with wildly diverging views of why government exists and who counts as American. Their ideologies are grounded in different versions of American history, endorsing irreconcilable visions of patriotism and national identity. Richard Slotkin identifies five myths, born of different eras, that have shaped our conception of what it means to be American: that of the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War (which he breaks into two opposing camps, Emancipation and the Lost Cause), and the Good War, embodied by the multi-ethnic platoon fighting for freedom
Forgotten Warriors by Sarah Percy
From Boudicca's rebellion to the war in Ukraine, battlefields have always contained a surprising number of women. Some formed all-female armies, like the Dahomey Mino of West Africa; some fought disguised as men; some mobilized in times of national survival, like the Soviet flying aces known as the Night Witches. International relations expert Sarah Percy unearths the stories of these forgotten warriors. She sets the historical record straight, revealing that women's exclusion from active combat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a blip in a much longer narrative of female inclusion.
Human Rights in World History by Peter N. Stearns
This book takes a global historical perspective to trace the rise of human rights and their global impact from the 18th century to the present. This fully updated volume examines the complex relationships between Western concepts of human rights and developments in other world regions. After providing background on relevant premodern concepts and constraints, the book explores: regional interactions with human rights; the disastrous impact of imperialism and racism; the recurrent expansion of the range of rights given to those including women and children; and indigenous rights from the 19th century to the present.
Plantation Goods by Seth Rockman
The industrializing North and the agricultural South--that's how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. Using plantation goods--the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South--historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans--white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free--across an expanding nation.
'Tis Not Our War by Paul Taylor
'Tis Not Our War answers the question of why at least 60 percent of eligible Northern men did not fight in the Civil War by focusing on the thoughts, opinions, and beliefs of average civilians and soldiers. Taylor digs deep into primary sources--newspapers, diaries, letters, archival manuscripts, military reports, and published memoirs--to paint a vivid and richly complex portrait of men who questioned military service in the Civil War and to show that the North was never as unified in support of the war as portrayed in much of America's collective memory. This book adds to our understanding of the Civil War and the men who fought--and did not fight--in it.

Bloody Tuesday by John M. Giggie
On Tuesday, June 9, 1964, police attacked more than 600 Black men, women, and children inside First African Baptist Church, where Reverend Martin Luther King had launched the Tuscaloosa campaign for integration three months earlier. As the group gathered to march, they faced over seventy law enforcement officers and hundreds more deputized white citizens and Klansmen eager to end their protests for good. Here this event is recounted through the eyes of locals--a charismatic Black preacher trained by Rev. King, an aging police chief, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Black women who were the backbone of the protests.
Germany 1923 by Volker Ullrich
In Germany 1923, Volker Ullrich draws on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and other sources from the time to present a captivating new history of those explosive twelve months. The crisis began when the French invaded the Ruhr Valley in January. Facing the abyss, many ordinary Germans called for a national messiah, which led to Adolf Hitler launching his infamous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich that November. Other Germans responded to the successive crises by launching a cultural revolution that included new movements such as Dada and Bauhaus, and iconoclasts such as Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, and Franz Kafka.
Nat Turner, Black Prophet by Anthony E. Kaye; Gregory P. Downs
In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. As news of the revolt spread, it became apparent that it was the idea of a single man: Nat Turner. He was an enslaved preacher, but also a prophet, one who claimed to have received visions from the Spirit urging him to act. This book is the fullest recounting to date of Turner's uprising, and the first that refuses to tame or overlook his divine visions. Instead, it takes those visions seriously, tracing their emergence from the world of nineteenth-century Methodism.
Reds by Maurice Isserman
Founded in 1919, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) fought for a just society in America: members organized powerful industrial unions, protested racism, and moved the nation left. At the same time, Communists maintained unwavering faith in the USSR's claims to be a democratic workers' state and came to be regarded as agents of a hostile foreign power. Following Nikita Khrushchev's revelation of Joseph Stalin's crimes, however, doubt in Soviet leadership erupted within the CPUSA, leading to the organization's decline. This is the definitive account of an essential chapter in the history of radical politics in the United States.
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans
2025 Pulitzer Award in Non-Fiction Winner. A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR--and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's Russia. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was 'simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.'

New Books: History

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