New Books: History

For the past five decades Ms. has been the nation's most influential source of feminist ideas. Ms. was the first U.S. magazine to: feature prominent American women demanding the repeal of laws that criminalized abortion, explain and advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment, rate presidential candidates on women's issues, feature domestic violence and sexual harassment on its cover, and commission and publish a national study on date rape. Here is the best reporting, fiction, and advertising, decade by decade, as well as the best photographs and features that reveal and reflect the changes set in motion by Ms., along with its iconic covers.

In roughly five decades, between 1848 and 1899, friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over 'the Chinese Question': would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration? This distinguished history of the Chinese diaspora and global capitalism chronicles how a feverish alchemy of race and money brought Chinese to the West and reshaped the nineteenth-century world, from Europe's subjugation of China to the rise of the international gold standard and the invention of racist, anti-Chinese stereotypes that linger to this day.

Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Moche civilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño to volcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to its knees, climate change and its influences have always been with us.

Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived the brink of being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a tour recounting the rise and fall of the great empires--Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian--the dawn of the modern era, the ravages of Fascism and Communism, as well as Capitalism, the birth of the modern nation-state, and more. A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family's past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity, and eclecticism, and a people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating.

Former Moscow correspondent and investigative journalist Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and his entourage of KGB men seized power in Russia and built a new league of oligarchs. Through exclusive interviews with key inside players, Belton tells how Putin's people conducted their relentless seizure of private companies, took over the economy, siphoned billions, blurred the lines between organized crime and political powers, shut down opponents, and then used their riches and power to extend influence in the West. This is is a gripping and terrifying account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray.

For many Americans, President Gerald Ford was the genial accident of history who controversially pardoned his Watergate-tarnished predecessor, presided over the fall of Saigon, and became a punching bag on Saturday Night Live. Yet as Richard Norton Smith reveals in a book full of surprises, Ford was an underrated leader whose tough decisions and personal decency look better with the passage of time. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, this definitive biography, a decade in the making, will change history's views of a man whose warning about presidential arrogance ("God help the country") is more relevant than ever.

The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was the result of declining active support for the government, and of waste and inefficiency in aid delivery. This book exposes the true factors underpinning Kabul's fall. The Afghan Republic came under relentless attack from Taliban insurgents who depended critically on Pakistani support. The fatal blow came when bored US leaders naively cut an exit deal with the enemy, fatally compromising the operation of the Afghan army and air force and triggering the final collapse, with top leaders at odds over whether to make a final stand.

In 1611, thirty-four-year-old Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and most cherished wife of the Emperor Jahangir. While other wives were secluded behind walls, Nur ruled the vast Mughal Empire alongside her husband, and governed in his stead as his health failed and his attentions wandered from matters of state. Lal uncovers the rich life of Nur Jahan, giving new insight into the lives of women and girls in the Mughal Empire.

Land--whether meadow or mountainside, desert or peat bog, parkland or pasture, suburb or city--is central to our existence. It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Winchester examines what we human beings are doing--and have done--with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet. Land examines in depth how we acquire land, how we steward it, how and why we fight over it, and finally, how we can, and on occasion do, come to share it. Ultimately, Winchester confronts the essential question: who actually owns the world's land--and why does it matter?

Schrad lays bare the shortcomings of the dominant, historical narrative of temperance and prohibitionism as uniquely American developments resulting from a clash of religious and cultural groups. By examining the global history of prohibition, we can shed new light on the American experience. Answering the fundamental question--why prohibition?--this book argues that temperance was a global resistance movement against imperialism, subjugation, and the predatory capitalism of a liquor traffic in which political and economic elites profited handsomely.