Published Books

Co-authored by Luke Elliott-Negri (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology), Isaac Jabola-Carolus (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology), Marc Kagan (Ph.D. candidate, History), Jessica Mahlbacher (Ph.D. '21, Political Science), Manès Weisskircher , and Anna Zhelnina (Ph.D. '20, Sociology)

Presents cutting edge theory about the consequences of social movements and protest while asking what kind of trade-offs protest movements face in trying to change the world around them.

Many scholars have tried to figure out why some social movements have an impact and others do not. By looking inside movements at their component parts and recurrent strategic interactions, the authors of Gains and Losses show that movements usually produce a variety of effects, including recurring packages of gains and losses. They ask what kinds of trade-offs and dilemmas these packages reflect by looking at six empirical cases from around the world: Seattle's conflict over the $15 an hour minimum wage; the establishment of participatory budgeting in New York City; a democratic insurgency inside New York City's Transport Workers' Union; a communist party's struggle to gain votes and also protect citizen housing in Graz, Austria; the internal movement tensions that led to Hong Kong's umbrella occupation; and Russia's electoral reform movement embodied in Alexei Navalny. They not only examine the diverse players in these cases involved in politics and protest, but also the many strategic arenas in which they maneuver. While each of these movements made some remarkable gains, this book shows how many also suffered losses, especially in the longer run.

For centuries, the West has produced stories about the future in which humans use advanced science and technology to transform the earth. Michael Rawson uses a wide range of works that include Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, the science fiction novels of Jules Verne, and even the speculations of think tanks like the RAND Corporation to reveal the environmental paradox at the heart of these narratives: the single-minded expectation of unlimited growth on a finite planet.  

Rawson shows how these stories, which have long pervaded Western dreams about the future, have helped to enable an unprecedentedly abundant and technology-driven lifestyle for some while bringing the threat of environmental disaster to all. Adapting to ecological realities, he argues, hinges on the ability to create new visions of tomorrow that decouple growth from the idea of progress.

At the turn of the early 20th century, Harlem — the iconic Black neighborhood — was predominantly white. The Black real estate entrepreneur Philip Payton played a central role in Harlem's transformation. He founded the Afro-American Realty Company in 1903, vowing to vanquish housing discrimination. Yet this ambitious mission faltered as Payton faced the constraints of white capitalist power structures. 

In this biography, Kevin McGruder explores Payton's career and its implications for the history of residential segregation. Payton stood up for the right of Black people to live in Harlem in the face of vocal white resistance. Through skillful use of print media, he branded Harlem as a Black community and attracted interest from those interested in racial uplift. Yet while Payton "opened" Harlem streets, his business model depended on continued racial segregation. Like white real estate investors, he benefited from the lack of housing options available to desperate Black tenants by charging higher rents. Payton developed a specialty in renting all-Black buildings, rather than the integrated buildings he had once envisioned, and his personal successes ultimately entrenched Manhattan's racial boundaries. McGruder highlights what Payton's story shows about the limits of seeking advancement through enterprise in a capitalist system deeply implicated in racial inequality. 

At a time when understanding the roots of residential segregation has become increasingly urgent, this biography sheds new light on the man and the forces that shaped Harlem.

McGruder received a Ph.D. in History in 2010 from the CUNY Graduate Center.

An award-winning scholar uncovers the guiding principles of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies.

The long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of antislavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. But James Oakes’s brilliant history of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies reveals a striking consistency and commitment extending over many years. The linchpin of antislavery for Lincoln was the Constitution of the United States.

Lincoln adopted the antislavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery, and the federal government could not interfere. It would take state action to achieve the final abolition of American slavery. With this understanding, Lincoln and his antislavery allies used every tool available to undermine the institution. Wherever the Constitution empowered direct federal action—in the western territories, in the District of Columbia, over the slave trade—they intervened. As a congressman in 1849 Lincoln sponsored a bill to abolish slavery in Washington, DC. He reentered politics in 1854 to oppose what he considered the unconstitutional opening of the territories to slavery by the Kansas–Nebraska Act. He attempted to persuade states to abolish slavery by supporting gradual abolition with compensation for slaveholders and the colonization of free Blacks abroad.

President Lincoln took full advantage of the antislavery options opened by the Civil War. Enslaved people who escaped to Union lines were declared free. The Emancipation Proclamation, a military order of the president, undermined slavery across the South. It led to abolition by six slave states, which then joined the coalition to affect what Lincoln called the "King’s cure": state ratification of the constitutional amendment that in 1865 finally abolished slavery.

Fundamental tenets of colonial historiography are challenged by showing that U.S. capital investment into this colony did not lead to the disappearance of the small farmer. Contrary to well-established narratives, quantitative data show that the increasing integration of rural producers within the U.S. market led to differential outcomes, depending on pre-existing land tenure structures, capital requirements to initiate production, and demographics. These new data suggest that the colonial economy was not polarized into landless Puerto Rican rural workers on one side and corporate U.S. capitalists on the other. The persistence of Puerto Rican small farmers in some regions and the expansion of local property ownership and production disprove this socioeconomic model. Other aspects of extant Puerto Rican historiography are confronted in order to make room for thorough analyses and new conclusions on the economy of colonial Puerto Rico during the early 20th century.

A panoramic narrative of the years leading up to the Second World War — a tale of democratic crisis, racial conflict, and a belated recognition of evil, with profound resonance for our own time.

Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history.

Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind the scenes in Berlin, London, Moscow, and Washington, revealing the unsettled politics within each country in the wake of the German dictator’s growing provocations. He reveals the fitful path by which anti-Nazi forces inside and outside Germany came to understand Hitler’s true menace to European civilization and learned to oppose him, painting a sweeping portrait of governments under siege, as larger-than-life figures struggled to turn events to their advantage. 

As in The Death of Democracy, his acclaimed history of the fall of the Weimar Republic, Hett draws on original sources and newly released documents to show how these long-ago conflicts have unexpected resonances in our own time. To read The Nazi Menace is to see past and present in a new and unnerving light.

David Waldstreicher and Van Gosse

Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political history to consider not whether black people participated in the politics of the nineteenth century but how, when, and with what lasting effects. Collectively, its authors insist that historians go beyond questioning how revolutionary the American Revolution was, or whether Reconstruction failed, and focus, instead, on how political change initiated by African Americans and their allies constituted the rule in nineteenth-century American politics, not occasional and cataclysmic exceptions.

The essays in this groundbreaking collection cover the full range of political activity by black northerners after the Revolution, from cultural politics to widespread voting, within a political system shaped by the rising power of slaveholders. Conceptualizing a new black politics, contributors observe, requires reorienting American politics away from black/white and North/South polarities and toward a new focus on migration and local or state structures. Other essays focus on the middle decades of the nineteenth century and demonstrate that free black politics, not merely the politics of slavery, was a disruptive and consequential force in American political development.

From the perspective of the contributors to this volume, formal black politics did not begin in 1865, or with agitation by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass in the 1840s, but rather in the Revolutionary era's antislavery and citizenship activism. As these essays show, revolution, emancipation, and Reconstruction are not separate eras in U.S. history, but rather linked and ongoing processes that began in the 1770s and continued through the nineteenth century.

Lawrence Cappello

You can hardly pass through customs at an airport today without having your picture taken and your fingertips scanned, that information then stored in an archive you’ll never see. Nor can you use your home’s smart technology without wondering what, exactly, that technology might do with all you’ve shared with it: shopping habits, security decisions, media choices. Every day, Americans surrender their private information to entities that claim to have their best interests in mind, in exchange for a promise of safety or convenience. This trade-off has long been taken for granted, but the extent of its nefariousness has recently become much clearer. As Lawrence Cappello’s None of Your Damn Business reveals, the problem is not so much that data will be used in ways we don’t want, but rather how willing we have been to have our information used, abused, and sold right back to us.

In this startling book, Cappello shows that this state of affairs was not the inevitable by-product of technological progress. He targets key moments from the past 130 years of US history when privacy was central to battles over journalistic freedom, national security, surveillance, big data, and reproductive rights. As he makes dismayingly clear, Americans have had numerous opportunities to protect the public good while simultaneously safeguarding our information, and we’ve squandered them every time. The wide range of the debates and incidents presented here shows that, despite America’s endless rhetoric of individual freedom, we actually have some of the weakest privacy protections in the developed world. None of Your Damn Business is a rich and provocative survey of an alarming topic that grows only more relevant with each fresh outrage of trust betrayed.

Cappello received his Ph.D. in history from The Graduate Center in 2017.

In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age.

Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery ""b'hoys""; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.

Elissa Bemporad

This book traces the legacies of the two classical and most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism — pogroms and blood libels — in the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the early 1960s. Closely intertwined in history and memory, pogroms and blood libels were and are considered central to the Jewish experience in late Tsarist Russia. But their persistence and memory under the Bolsheviks — a chapter that is largely overlooked by the existing scholarship — significantly shaped the Soviet Jewish experience. By exploring the phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in the Soviet territories of the interwar period as well as after World War II, in the newly annexed territories, this book studies the social realities of everyday antisemitism through the emergence of communities of violence and memories of violence. The fifty-year-span from the Bolshevik Revolution to the early years of Khrushchev included a living generation of Jews and non-Jews alike, who either experienced or remembered the Beilis Affair, the pogroms of the civil war, and in some cases even the violence of the pre-revolutionary years. By tracing the “afterlife” of pogroms and blood libels in the USSR, this book sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society. And by doing so it tells the story of the solid yet ever changing and at times ambivalent relationship between the Soviet state and the Jewish minority group.

Bemporad holds the Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust and is a professor of history at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Elena Frangakis-Syrett, Thierry Allain, and Sébastien Lupo, eds.​

The articles in this volume analyze the evolution of trade and related sectors in the Mediterranean, from 17th to 20th centuries, privileging the city-port of Smyrna/Izmir and its hinterland in Ottoman Anatolia. Smyrna was the leading commercial center in the region at the time with global market contacts and a symbiotic, though dominant, economic relationship with its hinterland.
 
Different aspects of long-distance trade are examined including business strategies of firms that ranged from small-cap family firms to large-cap limited liability incorporated companies and the role of networks in establishing effective and trustworthy channels of communication amongst economic actors from different ethnicities and religions located in different markets within and beyond the Mediterranean.

This collection of essays inverts the way we see the Cold War by looking at the conflict from the perspective of the so-called developing world, rather than of the superpowers, through the birth and first decades of India's life as a postcolonial nation. Contributors draw on a wide array of new material, from recently opened archival sources to literature and film, and meld approaches from diplomatic history to development studies to explain the choices India made and to frame decisions by its policy makers. Together, the essays demonstrate how India became a powerful symbol of decolonization and an advocate of non-alignment, disarmament, and global governance as it stood between the United States and the Soviet Union, actively fostering dialogue and attempting to forge friendships without entering into formal alliances. Sweeping in its scope yet nuanced in its analysis, this is the authoritative account of India and the Cold War.

Mary Gibson

During a period dominated by the biological determinism of Cesare Lombroso, Italy constructed a new prison system that sought to reconcile criminology with nation building and new definitions of citizenship. Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism, 1861-1914 examines this second wave" of global prison reform between Italian Unification and World War I, providing fascinating insights into the relationship between changing modes of punishment and the development of the modern Italian state. Mary Gibson focuses on the correlation between the birth of the prison and the establishment of a liberal government, showing how rehabilitation through work in humanitarian conditions played a key role in the development of a new secular national identity. She also highlights the importance of age and gender for constructing a nuanced chronology of the birth of the prison, demonstrating that whilst imprisonment emerged first as a punishment for women and children, they were often denied "negative" rights, such as equality in penal law and the right to a secular form of punishment. Employing a wealth of hitherto neglected primary sources, such as yearly prison statistics, this cutting-edge study also provides glimpses into the everyday life of inmates in both the new capital of Rome and the nation as a whole. Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism, 1861-1914 is a vital study for understanding the birth of the prison in modern Italy and beyond.

Since the defeat of the Nazi Third Reich and the end of its horrific eugenics policies, battles over the politics of life, sex, and death have continued and evolved. Dagmar Herzog documents how reproductive rights and disability rights, both latecomers to the postwar human rights canon, came to be seen as competing ― with unexpected consequences.

Bringing together the latest findings in Holocaust studies, the history of religion, and the history of sexuality in postwar ― and now also postcommunist ― Europe, Unlearning Eugenics shows how central the controversies over sexuality, reproduction, and disability have been to broader processes of secularization and religious renewal. Herzog also restores to the historical record a revelatory array of activists: from Catholic and Protestant theologians who defended abortion rights in the 1960s–70s to historians in the 1980s–90s who uncovered the long-suppressed connections between the mass murder of the disabled and the Holocaust of European Jewry; from feminists involved in the militant "cripple movement" of the 1980s to lawyers working for right-wing NGOs in the 2000s; and from a handful of pioneers in the 1940s–60s committed to living in intentional community with individuals with cognitive disability to present-day disability self-advocates.

Herzog is a distinguished professor of history at The Graduate Center.
 

The changing face of the liberal creed from the ancient world to today

The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry―and a term of derision―in today’s increasingly divided public square. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words “liberal” and “liberalism,” revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning.

In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights. She shows that it was the French Revolution that gave birth to liberalism and Germans who transformed it. Only in the mid-twentieth century did the concept become widely known in the United States―and then, as now, its meaning was hotly debated. Liberals were originally moralists at heart. They believed in the power of religion to reform society, emphasized the sanctity of the family, and never spoke of rights without speaking of duties. It was only during the Cold War and America’s growing world hegemony that liberalism was refashioned into an American ideology focused so strongly on individual freedoms.

Today, we still can’t seem to agree on liberalism’s meaning. In the United States, a “liberal” is someone who advocates big government, while in France, big government is contrary to “liberalism.” Political debates become befuddled because of semantic and conceptual confusion. The Lost History of Liberalism sets the record straight on a core tenet of today’s political conversation and lays the foundations for a more constructive discussion about the future of liberal democracy.

Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren
 

The genocides of modern history–Rwanda, Armenia, Guatemala, the Holocaust, and countless others–and their effects have been well documented, but how do the experiences of female victims and perpetrators differ from those of men? In Women and Genocide, human rights advocates and scholars come together to argue that the memory of trauma is gendered and that women's voices and perspectives are key to our understanding of the dynamics that emerge in the context of genocidal violence. The contributors of this volume examine how women consistently are targets for the sexualized violence that serves as an instrument of ethnic cleansing, how female perpetrators take advantage of the new power structures, and how women are involved in the struggle for justice in post-genocidal contexts. By placing women at center stage, Women and Genocide helps us to better understand the nexus existing between misogyny and violence in societies where genocide erupts.

A riveting account of how the Nazi Party came to power and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen.
 
Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time.
 
To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. He would never have come to power if Germany's leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler's hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship.

Benjamin Carter Hett is a leading scholar of twentieth-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today, when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of strongmen sounds ever louder.

Benjamin Carter Hett is a professor of history at The Graduate Center and Hunter College.
 

CNN host Fareed Zakaria named the The Death of Democracy his book of the week shortly after its publication in April 2018. See the clip.

Syed Akbar Hyder and Manu Bhagavan, editors

The essays in this volume examine 'hidden histories' related to gender, religion, and reform in modern South Asia. Chapters from an array of eminent contributors examine Indo-Muslim cultures and political mobilization, literary aesthetics, and education, broadly defined. Dedicated to Gail Minault, a pioneering scholar of women's history, Islamic reformation, and Urdu literature, this volume raises new questions about the role of identity in politics and public life, about memory and historical archives, and about innovative approaches to envisioning egalitarianism. it showcases interdisciplinary methodologies. Timely and thought provoking, this book will interest all who wish to understand how our diverse and plural pasts have informed our cosmopolitan present as we struggle to arrive at a better future for all.

In this succinct dual biography, Laura Chmielewski demonstrates how the lives of two French explorers – Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, and Louis Jolliet, a fur trapper – reveal the diverse world of early America. Following the explorers' epic journey through the center of the American continent, Marquette and Jolliet combines a story of discovery and encounter with the insights derived from recent historical scholarship. The story provides perspective on the different methods and goals of colonization and the role of Native Americans as active participants in this complex and uneven process.

Chmielewski (Ph.D. '06)  is an associate professor American History at State University of New York at Purchase.

We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills." Many factories that operated over the last two centuries―such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn―were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution up to today.

In a major work of scholarship that is also wonderfully accessible, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution and the factory towns of New England to the colossal steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union and on to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam.

The giant factory, Freeman shows, led a revolution that transformed human life and the environment. He traces arguments about factories and social progress through such critics and champions as Marx and Engels, Charles Dickens, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Ford, and Joseph Stalin. He chronicles protests against standard industry practices from unions and workers’ rights groups that led to shortened workdays, child labor laws, protection for organized labor, and much more.

In Behemoth, Freeman also explores how factories became objects of great wonder that both inspired and horrified artists and writers in their time. He examines representations of factories in the work of Charles Sheeler, Margaret Bourke-White, Charlie Chaplin, Diego Rivera, and Edward Burtynsky.

Behemoth tells the grand story of global industry from the Industrial Revolution to the present. It is a magisterial work on factories and the people whose labor made them run. And it offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now.

In this utterly immersive volume, Mike Wallace captures the swings of prosperity and downturn, from the 1898 skyscraper-driven boom to the Bankers' Panic of 1907, the labor upheaval, and violent repression during and after the First World War. Here is New York on a whole new scale, moving from national to global prominence - an urban dynamo driven by restless ambition, boundless energy, immigrant dreams, and Wall Street greed.

Within the first two decades of the twentieth century, a newly consolidated New York grew exponentially. The city exploded into the air, with skyscrapers jostling for prominence, and dove deep into the bedrock where massive underground networks of subways, water pipes, and electrical conduits sprawled beneath the city to serve a surging population of New Yorkers from all walks of life. New York was transformed in these two decades as the world's second-largest city and now its financial capital, thriving and sustained by the city's seemingly unlimited potential. Wallace's new book matches its predecessor in pure page-turning appeal and takes America's greatest city to new heights. 

During the Battle of the Bulge, Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near the Belgian town of Malmedy ?the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War II. The bloody deeds of December 17, 1944, produced the most controversial war crimes trial in American history. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Professor Steven Remy (GC/Brooklyn, History) revisits the massacre ? and the decade-long controversy that followed ? to set the record straight.

After the war, the U.S. Army tracked down 74 of the SS men involved in the massacre and other atrocities and put them on trial at Dachau. All the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Over the following decade, however, a network of Germans and sympathetic Americans succeeded in discrediting the trial. They claimed that interrogators ? some of them Jewish émigrés ? had coerced false confessions and that heat of battle conditions, rather than superiors' orders, had led to the shooting. They insisted that vengeance, not justice, was the prosecution's true objective. The controversy generated by these accusations, leveled just as the United States was anxious to placate its West German ally, resulted in the release of all the convicted men by 1957.

The Malmedy Massacre shows that the torture accusations were untrue, and the massacre was no accident but was typical of the Waffen SS's brutal fighting style. Remy reveals in unprecedented depth how German and American amnesty advocates warped our understanding of one of the war's most infamous crimes through a systematic campaign of fabrications and distortions.

The diary of John Quincy Adams is one of the most extraordinary works in American literature. Begun in 1779 at the age of twelve, kept more or less faithfully until his death almost 70 years later, and totaling some fifteen thousand closely-written manuscript pages, it is both an unrivaled record of historical events and personalities from the nation’s founding to the antebellum era and a masterpiece of American self-portraiture, tracing the spiritual, literary, and scientific interests of an exceptionally lively mind. Now, for the 250th anniversary of Adams’s birth, Library of America and historian David Waldstreicher have prepared a two-volume reader’s edition, presenting selections based for the first time on the original manuscript diaries, restoring personal and revealing passages suppressed in earlier editions.

Volume 1 begins during the American Revolution, with Adams’s first entry, as he prepares to embark on a perilous wartime voyage to Europe with his father, diplomat John Adams, and records his early impressions of Franklin and Jefferson and of Paris on the eve of revolution; it details his abbreviated but eventful years of study at Harvard and his emergence into the world of politics in his own right, as American minister to the Netherlands and to Prussia, and then as a U. S. senator from Massachusetts; and it reveals a young man at war with his passions, before finding love with the remarkable Louisa Catherine Johnson. In passages that form a kind of real-world War and Peace, the diary follows the young married couple to St. Petersburg, where as U.S. minister Adams is a witness to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Its account of the negotiations at Ghent to end the War of 1812, where Adams leads the American delegation, is the perhaps the most detailed and dramatic picture of a diplomatic confrontation ever recorded. Volume 1 concludes with his elevation as Secretary of State under James Monroe, as he takes the fore in a fractious cabinet and emerges as the principal architect of what will become known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Volume 2 opens with the political maneuverings within and outside Monroe’s cabinet to become his successor, a process that culminates in Adams’s election to the presidency by the House of Representatives after the deadlocked four-way contest of 1824. Even as Adams takes the oath of office, rivals Henry Clay, his Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun, his vice president, and an embittered Andrew Jackson, eye the election of 1828. The diary records in candid detail his frustration as his far-sighted agenda for national improvement founders on the rocks of internecine political factionalism, conflict that results in his becoming only the second president, with his father, to fail to secure reelection. After a short-lived retirement, Adams returns to public service as a Congressman from Massachusetts, and for the last seventeen years of his life he leads efforts to resist the extension of slavery and to end the notorious “gag rule” that stifles debate on the issue in Congress. In 1841 he further burnishes his reputation as a scourge of the Slave Power by successfully defending African mutineers of the slave ship Amistad before the Supreme Court. The diary achieves perhaps its greatest force in its prescient anticipation of the Civil War and Emancipation, an “object,” as Adams described it during the Missouri Crisis, “vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue.”

Anne Valk and Leslie Brown and Jacqueline Castledine

In the 1970s, feminist slogans proclaimed “Sisterhood is powerful,” and women’s historians searched through the historical archives to recover stories of solidarity and sisterhood. However, as feminist scholars have started taking a more intersectional approach—acknowledging that no woman is simply defined by her gender and that affiliations like race, class, and sexual identity are often equally powerful—women’s historians have begun to offer more varied and nuanced narratives.  

The ten original essays in U.S. Women's History represent a cross-section of current research in the field. Including work from both emerging and established scholars, this collection employs innovative approaches to study both the causes that have united American women and the conflicts that have divided them. Some essays uncover little-known aspects of women’s history, while others offer a fresh take on familiar events and figures, from Rosa Parks to Take Back the Night marches.

Spanning the antebellum era to the present day, these essays vividly convey the long histories and ongoing relevance of topics ranging from women’s immigration to incarceration, from acts of cross-dressing to the activism of feminist mothers. This volume thus not only untangles the threads of the sisterhood mythos, it weaves them into a multi-textured and multi-hued tapestry that reflects the breadth and diversity of U.S. women’s history.

David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason

n the final years of his political career, President John Quincy Adams was well known for his objections to slavery, with rival Henry Wise going so far as to label him "the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of southern slavery that ever existed." As a young statesman, however, he supported slavery. How did the man who in 1795 told a British cabinet officer not to speak to him of "the Virginians, the Southern people, the democrats," whom he considered "in no other light than as Americans," come to foretell "a grand struggle between slavery and freedom"? How could a committed expansionist, who would rather abandon his party and lose his U.S. Senate seat than attack Jeffersonian slave power, later come to declare the Mexican War the "apoplexy of the Constitution," a hijacking of the republic by slaveholders? What changed? Entries from Adams's personal diary, more extensive than that of any American statesman, reveal a highly dynamic and accomplished politician in engagement with one of his generation's most challenging national dilemmas.

Expertly edited by David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason, John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery offers an unusual perspective on the dramatic and shifting politics of slavery in the early republic, as it moved from the margins to the center of public life and from the shadows to the substance of Adams's politics. The editors provide a lucid introduction to the collection as a whole and frame the individual documents with brief and engaging insights, rendering both Adams's life and the controversies over slavery into a mutually illuminating narrative. By juxtaposing Adams's personal reflections on slavery with what he said-and did not say-publicly on the issue, the editors offer a nuanced portrait of how he interacted with prevailing ideologies during his consequential career and life. John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the complicated politics of slavery that set the groundwork for the Civil War.

Religious thinkers, political leaders, lawmakers, writers, and philosophers have shaped the 1,400-year-long development of the world's second-largest religion. But who were these people? What do we know of their lives and the ways in which they influenced their societies? In Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives, the distinguished historian of Islam Chase F. Robinson draws on the long tradition in Muslim scholarship of commemorating in writing the biographies of notable figures, but he weaves these ambitious lives together to create a rich narrative of Islamic civilization, from the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century to the era of the world conqueror Timur and the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in the fifteenth.

Beginning in Islam's heartland, Mecca, and ranging from North Africa and Iberia in the west to Central and East Asia, Robinson not only traces the rise and fall of Islamic states through the biographies of political and military leaders who worked to secure peace or expand their power, but also discusses those who developed Islamic law, scientific thought, and literature. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of rich and diverse Islamic societies. Alongside the famous characters who colored this landscape--including Muhammad's cousin 'Ali; the Crusader-era hero Saladin; and the poet Rumi--are less well-known figures, such as Ibn Fadlan, whose travels in Eurasia brought fascinating first-hand accounts of the Volga Vikings to the Abbasid Caliph; the eleventh-century Karima al-Marwaziyya, a woman scholar of Prophetic traditions; and Abu al-Qasim Ramisht, a twelfth-century merchant millionaire. An illuminating read for anyone interested in learning more about this often-misunderstood civilization, this book creates a vivid picture of life in all arenas of the pre-modern Muslim world.

Historians, politicians, critics, and readers everywhere have praised Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt as the essential portrait of a woman who towers over the twentieth century. The third and final volume takes us through World War II, FDR's death, the founding of the UN, and Eleanor Roosevelt's death in 1962. It follows the arc of war and the evolution of a marriage, as the first lady realized the cost of maintaining her principles even as the country and her husband were not prepared to adopt them. Eleanor Roosevelt continued to struggle for her core issues -- economic security, New Deal reforms, racial equality, and rescue -- when they were sidelined by FDR while he marshaled the country through war. This is a sympathetic but unblinking portrait of a marriage and of a woman whose passion and commitment has inspired generations of Americans to seek a decent future for all people.

This Norton Critical Edition includes a rich selection of Abraham Lincoln's public and private letters, speeches, eulogies, proposals, debate transcriptions, addresses (including the First and Second Inaugurals), and more, accompanied by explanatory annotations. Following the texts are contemporary responses to Lincoln in poems, songs, and articles; representations of him in modern imaginative and nonfiction writing; and selections from recent cross-disciplinary studies, including discussions of his literary techniques and oratorical style and examinations of his political evolution in new cultural and social contexts. "Lincoln in His Era" selections feature the work of Horace Greeley, Jesse Hutchinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Karl Marx, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, and Walt Whitman; the "Modern Views" section presents sixteen major interpretations of Lincoln's life, work, and legacy carefully chosen to promote discussion, including contributions by Reynolds and James Oakes (Dist. Prof., GC, History). 

Picking up where The Enigma of Capital left off, Harvey examines the internal contradictions within the flow of capital that have precipitated recent crises. He contends that while the contradictions have made capitalism flexible and resilient, they also contain the seeds of systemic catastrophe. Many of the contradictions are manageable, but some are fatal: the stress on endless compound growth, the necessity to exploit nature to its limits, and tendency toward universal alienation. Capitalism has always managed to extend the outer limits through spatial fixes," expanding the geography of the system to cover nations and people formerly outside of its range. Whether it can continue to expand is an open question, but Harvey thinks it unlikely in the medium term future: the limits cannot extend much further, and the recent financial crisis is a harbinger of this. 

RUTH MILKMAN AND ED OTT, EDS.

While New York is the nation's most highly unionized large city, its unions, especially in the private sector, are in steady decline, and the city today is home to a large and growing 'precariat': workers with little or no employment security. In thirteen fine-grained case studies, this book documents the efforts of community-based worker centers to organize this expanding segment of the workforce. These campaigns involve taxi drivers, street vendors, domestic workers, and middle-strata freelancers, all of whom are excluded from basic employment laws, as well as supermarket, retail, and restaurant workers. The book offers a richly detailed portrait of the city's new labor movement and recent efforts to expand it on a national scale. Ruth Milkman is a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center; contributors include doctoral students and alumni from GC programs in sociology, anthropology, earth and environmental sciences, history, political science, and public health.

This book tells the story of India's quest for human rights in the years leading up to its independence from Great Britain and for more than a decade after. Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, and Hansa Mehta all strove to bridge the ideological differences between the East and the West, between capitalist and communist, to forge a common destiny for mankind that would be free of empire, poverty, exploitation, and war. They called their solution One World, in which state power would be checked and the freedom of individuals and groups expanded. Based on seven years of research, this is the first truly international history of newly independent India.

The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression shows no sign of coming to a close, and Marx's work remains key in understanding the cycles that lead to recession. For nearly forty years, Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world's most foremost Marx scholars. Based on his recent lectures, and following his companion to the first volume of Capital, he turns his attention to Volume 2, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and hitherto neglected text. Whereas Volume 1 focuses on production, Volume 2 looks at how the circuits of capital, the buying and selling of goods, realize value. 

Frankfurt am Main, in common with other imperial German cities, enjoyed a large degree of legal autonomy during the early modern period, and produced a unique and rich body of criminal archives. In particular, Frankfurt’s Strafenbuch, which records all criminal sentences between 1562 and 1696, provides a fascinating insight into contemporary penal trends. Drawing on this and other rich resources, Dr. Boes reveals shifting and fluid attitudes towards crime and punishment and how these were conditioned by issues of gender, class, and social standing within the city’s establishment. She attributes a significant role in this process to the steady proliferation of municipal advocates, jurists trained in Roman Law, who wielded growing legal and penal prerogatives. Over the course of the book, it is demonstrated how the courts took an increasingly hard line with select groups of people accused of criminal behavior, and the open manner with which advocates exercised cultural, religious, racial, gender, and sexual-orientation repressions. Parallel with this, however, is identified a trend of marked leniency towards soldiers who enjoyed an increasingly privileged place within the judicial system. In light of this discrepancy between the treatment of civilians and soldiers, the advocates’ actions highlight the emergence and spread of a distinct military judicial culture and Frankfurt’s city council’s contribution to the quasi-militarization of a civilian court. By highlighting the polarized and changing ways the courts dealt with civilian and military criminals, a fuller picture is presented not just of Frankfurt’s sentencing and penal practices, but of broader attitudes within early modern Germany to issues of social position and cultural identity.

Boes is professor emerita at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on early modern Germany.

Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project did not destroy continuities with prerevolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk. Using Minsk as a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers' Bund, circumcision, and kosher slaughter. This pioneering study also illuminates the reshaping of gender relations on the Jewish street and explores Jewish everyday life and identity during the years of the Great Terror.

Western societies remain deeply contentious about the status of Islam in their midst. Countering strident claims on both the right and left, Legal Integration of Islam offers an empirically informed analysis of how four liberal democracies-France, Germany, Canada, and the United States-have responded to the challenge of integrating Islam and Muslim populations. The authors reject the widely held notion that Europe is incapable of accommodating Islam and argue that institutional barriers to Muslim integration are no greater on one side of the Atlantic than the other. But while Muslims have achieved a substantial degree of equality working through the courts, political dynamics increasingly push back against these gains, particularly in Europe. The authors bring to light the successes and the shortcomings of integrating Islam through law without denying the challenges that this religion presents for liberal societies. 

Lead Wars provides an incisive examination of lead poisoning during the past half-century. The authors chronicle the obstacles faced by public health workers in the conservative, probusiness, antiregulatory climate that set in during the Reagan years and highlight the quandaries public health agencies face today in terms of prevention strategies and chronic illness linked to low levels of toxic exposure. The authors use the opinion by Maryland's Court of Appeals-which considered whether researchers at Johns Hopkins University's prestigious Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) engaged in unethical research on 108 African-American children-as a springboard to ask fundamental questions about the practice and future of public health. 

Abrahamian has written a new and revealing history of the August 1953 CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Iran's democratically elected leader and its consequences. When the 1979 Iranian Revolution deposed Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and replaced his puppet government with a radical Islamic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the shift reverberated throughout the Middle East and the world. Drawing from the hitherto closed archives of British Petroleum, the Foreign Office, and the U.S. State Department, as well as from Iranian memoirs and published interviews, the author uncovers little-known documents that challenge conventional interpretations, and sheds new light on how the American role in the coup influenced U.S.-Iranian relations, both past and present. 

This groundbreaking history of emancipation joins the political initiatives of Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress with the courageous actions of Union soldiers and runaway slaves in the South. It upends the widespread conviction that the Civil War was first and foremost a war to restore the Union and only gradually a war to end slavery. Oakes shows that Lincoln's landmark 1863 proclamation marked neither the beginning nor the end of emancipation: it triggered a more aggressive phase of military emancipation, sending Union soldiers onto plantations to entice slaves away and enlist the men in the army. But slavery proved deeply entrenched, with slaveholders determined to re-enslave freedmen, and Lincoln feared that the war could end in Union victory with slavery still intact. The Thirteenth Amendment was thus the final act in a saga of war, social upheaval, and determined political leadership. 

Joseph Patrick Kennedy was the patriarch of America's greatest political dynasty. The father of President John F. Kennedy and senators Robert and Edward Kennedy, “Joe” Kennedy was trained as a banker, but also became a Hollywood mogul, a stock exchange savant, a shipyard manager, the founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and ambassador to London during the Battle of Britain. Yet he has remained shrouded in rumor and prejudice for decades. Drawing on never-before-published material from archives on three continents, Nasaw unearths a man far more complicated than the popular portrait. Though far from a saint, Joseph Kennedy in many ways exemplifies the best in American political, economic, and social life. His rags-to-riches story is one of exclusion and quiet discrimination overcome by entrepreneurship, ingenuity, and unshakable endurance. 

This portrait of the United States shows a nation both galvanized by change and driven by conflict. The economic juggernaut awakened by World War II transformed a country once defined by its regional character into a uniform and cohesive power and set the stage for the United States' rise to global dominance. Yet over the years, Freeman sees a profound tragedy shaping the path of American civic life: after decades of work by the civil rights and labor movements to expand the rights of millions of Americans, power has slipped from the hands of individual citizens into those of private corporations. Freeman's sweeping story of a nation's rise reveals forces at play that will continue to affect American influence and might in the greater world. 

Cities have long been the site of revolutionary politics: they are the centers of capital accumulation and the frontline for struggles over who controls access to urban resources and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the financiers and developers, or the people? Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai and from New York City to São Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways-and how they can become the focus for anticapitalist resistance.

Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of China's Cultural Revolution and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life. While the allure of Maoism actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics, it served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. Wolin examines how Maoism captured the imaginations of France's leading cultural figures, influencing Jean-Paul Sartre's 'perfect Maoist moment'; Michel Foucault's conception of power; Philippe Sollers's chic, leftist intellectual journal Tel Quel; and Julia Kristeva's book on Chinese women, which included a vigorous defense of foot-binding. The paperback edition was named one of the 2012 Best Books in History by the Financial Times.

This new account of the tumultuous history of sexuality in Europe spans the waning of Victorianism, the collapse of Communism, and the rise of European Islam. Although the twentieth century is often seen as an era of increasing liberalization, Herzog emphasizes the complexities and contradictions in sexual desires and behaviors, the ambivalences surrounding sexual freedom, and the difficulties encountered in securing sexual rights. Incorporating the most recent scholarship on a broad range of conceptual problems and national contexts, the book investigates the shifting fortunes of marriage and prostitution, contraception and abortion, queer and straight existence. It analyzes sexual violence in war and peace, the promotion of sexual satisfaction in fascist and democratic societies, the role of eugenics and disability, the politicization and commercialization of sex, and processes of secularization and religious renewal. 

The New York City Teachers Union shares a deep history with the American left, having participated in some of its most explosive battles. Established in 1916, the union maintained an early, unofficial partnership with the American Communist Party, staffing key positions with members who were sympathetic to party goals. Taylor recounts this pivotal relationship and the backlash it created. Through its affiliation with the party, the union pioneered what would later become social movement unionism, solidifying ties with labor groups, civil rights organizations, and black and Latino parents. It also militantly fought to improve working conditions for teachers while championing broader social concerns. For the first time, Taylor reveals the union's early growth and the attempts by the Board of Education to eradicate it, describing how the infamous Red Squad and other undercover agents worked with the board to bring down the union and how the union and its opponents wrestled with charges of anti-Semitism. 

Since the 1960s, most U.S. history has been written as if the civil rights movement were primarily or entirely a Southern history. This book joins a growing body of scholarship that demonstrates the importance of the Northern history of the movement. The contributors make clear that civil rights in New York City (home to the largest population of African Americans in the mid-twentieth century) were contested in many ways, beginning long before the 1960s, and across many groups with a surprisingly wide range of political perspectives. These essays address the role of labor, community organizing campaigns, the pivotal actions of prominent national leaders, the movement for integrated housing, the fight for racial equality in public higher education, and the part played by a revolutionary group that challenged structural societal inequality. 

Winner of the Barzun Prize in Cultural History, Vico and Naples provides an intellectual portrait of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) that reveals the politics and motivations of one of Europe's first scientists of society. Rich with period detail and attentive to Vico's historical, rhetorical, and jurisprudential texts, this work provides a compelling and vivid reconstruction of Vico's life and times and of the origins of his powerful notion of the social. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Vico was a solitary figure, Naddeo recovers a Vico who was keenly attuned to the social changes transforming the political culture of his native city and shows that his experiences of civic crises shaped his inquiry into the origins and development of human society. 

Volume 1 of this series, The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries, surveys the political and cultural history of Islam from its Late Antique origins until the eleventh century, with contributions from leading scholars in the field. The book is divided into four parts: an overview of the physical and political geography of the Late Antique Middle East; the rise of Islam and the emergence of the Islamic political order under the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphs of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries; regionalism, the overlapping histories of the empire's provinces; and a cutting-edge discussion of the sources and controversies of early Islamic history, including a survey of numismatics, archaeology, and material culture. 

Anne Valk and Leslie Brown 

Using first-person narratives collected through oral history interviews, this groundbreaking book collects black women's memories of their public and private lives during the period of legal segregation in the American South.

In May 1927 an inexperienced and unassuming 25-year-old Air Mail pilot from rural Minnesota stunned the world by making the first nonstop transatlantic flight. A spectacular feat of individual daring and collective technological accomplishment, Charles Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris ushered in America's age of commercial aviation. In this book, Kessner takes a fresh look at one of America's greatest moments, showing how new forms of mass media made Lindbergh into the most famous international celebrity of his time. But he also reveals that Lindbergh was closely allied with, and managed by, a group of powerful businessmen who sought to exploit aviation for mass transport and massive profits. This book is the first to fully explore Lindbergh's central role in promoting the airline industry-the rise of which has influenced everything from where we live to how we wage war and do business. 

Taking on decades of received wisdom, David Waldstreicher has written the first book to recognize slavery's place at the heart of the U.S. Constitution. Famously, the Constitution never mentions slavery. And yet, of its eighty-four clauses, six were directly concerned with slaves and the interests of their owners. Five other clauses had implications for slavery that were considered and debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the citizens of the states during ratification. This "peculiar institution" was not a moral blind spot for America's otherwise enlightened framers, nor was it the expression of a mere economic interest. Slavery was as important to the making of the Constitution as the Constitution was to the survival of slavery.

By tracing slavery from before the revolution, through the Constitution's framing, and into the public debate that followed, Waldstreicher rigorously shows that slavery was not only actively discussed behind the closed and locked doors of the Constitutional Convention, but that it was also deftly woven into the Constitution itself. For one thing, slavery was central to the American economy, and since the document set the stage for a national economy, the Constitution could not avoid having implications for slavery. Even more, since the government defined sovereignty over individuals, as well as property in them, discussion of sovereignty led directly to debate over slavery's place in the new republic.

Finding meaning in silences that have long been ignored, Slavery's Constitution is a vital and sorely needed contribution to the conversation about the origins, impact, and meaning of our nation's founding document.

Newly translated into Greek, this book deals with the nature and organization of the commercial and merchant banking industries in the Ottoman city-port of Smyrna. The book is also a contribution to urban history, as it brings to light the economy, society, and cultural milieu of a major international port, poised between East and West. 

Celebrated historian Carol Berkin offers a unique understanding of the tumultuous social and political landscape surrounding the lives of three 'accidental heroes'--women whose marriages provided them with position and influence. Drawing on private and public records, Berkin shows us how Angelina Grimke Weld bravely renounced her Southern family's values when she embraced the anti-slavery movement, only to be silenced within her marriage to fellow reformer Theodore Weld. In Varina Howell Davis, Berkin shows a woman of independent mind and spirit who incurred the disapproval of her husband, Jefferson Davis. The qualities that made her ill-suited for her role as First Lady of the Confederacy served her well when she lobbied for his release from prison. The wife of Ulysses S. Grant, Julia Dent Grant, was a model of genteel domesticity, content with the restrictions of motherhood and with the alternating fame and disgrace, wealth and poverty that her marriage entailed, until late in life when she glimpsed the price of dependency. Bringing these three remarkable women vividly to life, Berkin captures the tensions and animosities of the prewar era and the disruptions and anxieties generated by the war and its aftermath,  and connecting readers to America's national past with rare immediacy and verve. 

Regulated Lives explores the British life insurance industry's changing assessments of the values and risks of human life between 1800 and 1914. By examining how salesmen, actuaries, and doctors utilized their differing conceptions of what the various aspects of people's lives meant, Regulated Lives suggests that the very complexity of modern commercial and social institutions produces spaces where individuality can flourish. Alborn's unique study uses insurance practices to demonstrate how Victorian ideas about the lived experience accommodated and resisted elements of modernity such as statistical thinking, medicalization, and capitalist bureaucracy. 

This work on Afro-Mexican and Spanish-American history examines neglected Mexican archival church records dealing with marriages and religious transgressions. The author focuses on the years 1622-1788, in the process covering a period when New Spain was home to the largest collection of individuals of African descent in the New World. Instead of a weak, individualistic society dealing with the so-called 'social death' caused by slavery, Bennett tells of an urban community where freedmen were in the majority. He describes personal and family dramas, political issues, and disputes between families. By focusing on phenomena related to peoples of African descent in Mexico, rather than providing a conventional history that interweaves the slavery-to-freedom narrative, Colonial Blackness presents the colonial drama in all its untidy detail. 

Over the last four decades, women's history has developed from a novel and marginal approach to history to an established and flourishing area of the discipline. Clio in the Classroom provides concise, up-to-date overviews of American women's history from colonial times to the present and takes into account ethnic, racial, and regional developments. Contributors offer concrete approaches for the classroom, including the use of oral history, visual resources, material culture, and group learning. Sexuality, citizenship, consumerism, religion, and other conceptual frameworks are employed as keys to understanding women's history and American history. Carol Berkin (Baruch College) is professor of history at the Graduate Center. Over the last four decades, women's history has developed from a novel and marginal approach to history to an established and flourishing area of the discipline. Clio in the Classroom provides concise, up-to-date overviews of American women's history from colonial times to the present and takes into account ethnic, racial, and regional developments. Contributors offer concrete approaches for the classroom, including the use of oral history, visual resources, material culture, and group learning. Sexuality, citizenship, consumerism, religion, and other conceptual frameworks are employed as keys to understanding women's history and American history. Carol Berkin (Baruch College) is professor of history at the Graduate Center. Over the last four decades, women's history has developed from a novel and marginal approach to history to an established and flourishing area of the discipline. Clio in the Classroom provides concise, up-to-date overviews of American women's history from colonial times to the present and takes into account ethnic, racial, and regional developments. Contributors offer concrete approaches for the classroom, including the use of oral history, visual resources, material culture, and group learning. Sexuality, citizenship, consumerism, religion, and other conceptual frameworks are employed as keys to understanding women's history and American history. 

The book is a biography of the German lawyer Hans Litten (1903-38) who devoted his legal practice to fighting the Nazis, and on one occasion in 1931 subjected Adolf Hitler to a withering three-hour cross examination. Hitler took his revenge after 1933, and Litten died in the Dachau Concentration Camp in 1938. and on the other a study of the collapse of the rule of law in Germany in the years just before and just after the Nazi takeover. The first full-length biography of this very brave man, the book also explores the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, the collapse of the rule of law in Germany in the years just before and just after the Nazi takeover, and the terror of Nazi rule in Germany after 1933.

In this portrait of a twentieth-century nation, Iran emerges as the product of oil and monarchs, intermittent warfare, outright revolution, and the formation, under clerical direction, of the Islamic Republic. Both regional and international in focus, Abrahamian's study revisits such topics as 'royal despots,' democratic reform, Shiism, Muhammad Reza Shah, and class conflict. 

Only three decades after the legalization of abortion, the broad gains of the feminist movement, and the emergence of the gay rights movement, America has gone frigid. They are not anti-sex, but they're increasingly anxious about it-largely due to the tactics of the Religious Right. How has the Religious Right achieved this ascendancy? Surprisingly, argues Dagmar Herzog, evangelicals have appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a billion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals have crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of 'hot monogamy'-for married, heterosexual couples only, of course. This potent message has enabled them to win elections and seduce souls, with disastrous political consequences. Sex in Crisis wittily and fiercely forces America to confront its national sexual dysfunction and demand a more sophisticated national conversation about the facts of life.

Radical Sisters offers a fresh exploration of the ways that 1960s political movements shaped local, grassroots feminism in Washington, D.C. Rejecting notions of a universal sisterhood, Anne M. Valk argues that activists periodically worked to bridge differences for the sake of alleviating women's plight, even while maintaining distinct political bases. While most historiography on the subject tends to portray the feminist movement as deeply divided over issues of race, Valk presents a more nuanced account, showing feminists of various backgrounds both coming together to promote a notion of "sisterhood" and being deeply divided along the lines of class, race, and sexuality.

In this path-breaking work, Dagmar Herzog situates the birth of German liberalism in the religious conflicts of the nineteenth century. Using insights drawn from Jewish and women's studies, she demonstrates how profoundly liberal, conservative, and radical thought in the pre-revolutionary years was shaped by Christianity's problematic relationships to both Judaism and sexuality. In particular, she reveals how often conflicts over the private sphere and the politics of the personal" determined larger political matters. She also documents the unexpected rise of a politically sophisticated religious right led by conservative Catholics, and explores liberals' ensuing eagerness to advance a humanist version of Christianity. She examines the limitations at the heart of the liberal project, as well as the difficulties encountered by philo-Semitic and feminist radicals as they strove to reconceptualize both classical liberalism and Christianity in order to make room for the claims of Jews and women. 

The story of this ever-deepening American tragedy harbors multiple dramas, including the actions of a DA running for office; the inappropriate charges that should have been apparent to academics at Duke many months before; the local and national media, who were so slow to take account of the publicly available evidence; and the appalling reactions of law enforcement, academia, and many black leaders. Until Proven Innocent is the only book that covers all five aspects of the case (personal, legal, academic, political, and media) in a comprehensive fashion. Based on interviews with key members of the defense team, many of the unindicted lacrosse players, and Duke officials, it is also the only book to include interviews with all three of the defendants, their families, and their legal teams. The context of the Duke case has vast import and contains likable heroes, unfortunate victims, and memorable villains-and in its full telling, it is captivating nonfiction with broad political, racial, and cultural relevance to our times.

Drawing on a fabulous wealth of research, the authors—each an expert in his field—deliver a highly-readable and eye-opening history of love and desire between men in Britain from the late Anglo-Saxon period to the present. The book is chronologically structured in six chapters covering the Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods; the Reformation and Renaissance; the eighteenth century; the nineteenth century; 1914–67; and finally 1967 to the present. Each chapter examines subcultures and concepts of identity, discusses major controversies and scandals, and looks at church and state attempts at regulation. The book also assesses the impact of social and cultural change-the development of railways and the internet-on the way men were able to relate to one another. Broad in its coverage but nuanced in its detail—including never-before-seen illustrations—A Gay History of Britain is the new standard history of the subject. 

This book is an introductory history of racial slavery in the Americas that is also the first work to systemically survey slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the U.S. from comparative perspectives. Brazil and Cuba were among the first colonial societies to establish slavery in the early sixteenth century. Approximately a century later British colonial Virginia was founded, and slavery became an integral part of local culture and society. In all three nations, slavery spread to nearly every region, and in many areas it was the principal labor system utilized by rural and urban elites. Chapters focus on slave narratives, demography, economy, culture, resistance and rebellions, and the causes of abolition. 

On April 27th, 1994, the first democratic election in South Africa ended 46 years of Apartheid. But, at the very moment of transition, the seeds of the world's most catastrophic AIDS epidemic had already been sown. Since the epidemic's onset, more than 1,000,000 South African men, women, and children have died. The national government finally committed itself, in 2003, to making anti-retroviral drugs available to those whose lives hung in the balance and a halting rollout of drug treatment began. Based on interviews from the great urban centers, provincial centers, and rural villages, this book captures the experience of health care workers as they confronted indifference from colleagues, opposition from superiors, unexpected resistance from the country's political leaders, and material scarcity that was both the legacy of Apartheid and a consequence of the global power of the international pharmaceutical industry. 

"My husband considered you a dear friend," Mary Todd Lincoln wrote to Frederick Douglass in the weeks after Lincoln's assassination. The frontier lawyer and the former slave, the cautious politician and the fiery reformer, the president and the most famous black man in America-their lives traced different paths that finally met in the bloody landscape of secession, Civil War, and emancipation. Opponents at first, they gradually became allies, each influenced by and attracted to the other. Their three meetings in the White House signaled a profound shift in the direction of the Civil War, and in the fate of the United States. In this first book to draw the two together, James Oakes has written a masterful narrative history. He brings these two iconic figures to life and sheds new light on the central issues of slavery, race, and equality in Civil War America.

Scholars have increasingly been investigating human sexuality as an important field of social history in particular national cultures. This book reflects the broad variety of such recent research and will be of interest to cultural studies specialists, historians, psychologists, and sociologists. Topics include sex counseling organizations in interwar Vienna; 'foreign encounters' between Austrian women and occupation soldiers during the postwar quadripartite Austrian occupation regime; the 'sexual revolution' of the 1960s and 1970s; the legal penalties for homosexuality in postwar Austria and the liberation of the gay movement after Austria joined the European Union; an analysis of the major influence of the Catholic Church on Austrian sexuality; recent gay and sex abuse scandals in the church hierarchy; and foreign workers (gastarbeiter) in postwar Austria and their sexual contacts with natives. Also included are review essays, book reviews, and the annual review of Austrian politics. 

The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American. In this groundbreaking history, Carol Berkin shows us how women played a vital role throughout the conflict. The women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy as husbands, brothers, and fathers died. Berkin also reveals that it was not just the men who fought on the front lines, as in the story of Margaret Corbin, who was crippled for life when she took her husband's place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. This incisive and comprehensive history illuminates a fascinating and unknown side of the struggle for American independence. 

This major work by David Harvey locates the emergence of modernity, as it is commonly understood, in a particular place and time-Paris, between the failed revolutions of 1848 and 1871. During these days of the Second Empire," Baron Hausmann orchestrated the physical overhaul of Paris, creating the grand boulevards that dominate the city today. Just as importantly, the era saw the rise of a new form of capitalism, dominated by high finance and the beginnings of modern consumer culture. Harvey provides a sweeping panoramic account of this pivotal era-generously illustrated with political cartoons, photographs, and maps-that will stand as a definitive history of the emergence of a modern city. "David Harvey is perhaps the most important urban scholar writing in the English language, and here he is at his best.-Thomas Bender, author of The Unfinished City.

Scientist, abolitionist, revolutionary: that is the Benjamin Franklin we know and celebrate. To this description, the talented young historian David Waldstreicher shows we must add runaway, slave master, and empire builder. But Runaway America does much more than revise our image of a beloved founding father. Finding slavery at the center of Franklin's life, Waldstreicher proves it was likewise central to the Revolution, America's founding, and the very notion of freedom we associate with both.

Franklin was the sole Founding Father who was once owned by someone else and was among the few to derive his fortune from slavery. As an indentured servant, Franklin fled his master before his term was complete; as a struggling printer, he built a financial empire selling newspapers that not only advertised the goods of a slave economy (not to mention slaves) but also ran the notices that led to the recapture of runaway servants. Perhaps Waldstreicher's greatest achievement is in showing that this was not an ironic outcome but a calculated one. America's freedom, no less than Franklin's, demanded that others forgo liberty.

Through the life of Franklin, Runaway America provides an original explanation to the paradox of American slavery and freedom.

One of the most prominent mathematicians of the twentieth century, Robinson discovered and developed nonstandard analysis, a rigorous theory of infinitesimals that he used to unite mathematical logic with the larger body of historic and modern mathematics. In this first biography of Robinson, out of print in the English edition (Princeton University Press, 1995) but now published in China, Joseph Dauben reveals the mathematician's personal life to have been a dramatic one: developing his talents in spite of war and ethnic repression, Robinson personally confronted some of the worst political troubles of our times. With the skill and expertise familiar to readers of Dauben's earlier works, the book combines an explanation of Robinson's revolutionary achievements in pure and applied mathematics with a description of his odyssey from Hitler's Germany to the United States via conflict-ridden Palestine and wartime Europe.

A cultural biography of John Brown,  the controversial abolitionist who used violent tactics against slavery and single-handedly changed the course of American history.  Reynolds brings to life the Puritan warrior who gripped slavery by the throat and triggered the Civil War.  Reynolds demonstrates that Brown’s most violent acts—including his killing of proslavery settlers in Kansas and his historic raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia--were inspired by the slave revolts, guerilla warfare, and revolutionary Christianity of the day.  He shows how Brown seized public attention, polarizing the nation and fueling the tensions that led to the Civil War. Reynolds recounts how Brown permeated American culture during the Civil War and beyond, and how he planted the seeds of the civil rights movement by making a pioneering demand for complete social and political equality for America’s ethnic minorities.

In Egypt as a Woman, Beth Baron examines the influence of gender in shaping the Egyptian nation from the nineteenth century through the revolution of 1919 and into the 1940s. Using rich historical detail, Baron illustrates the importance of women in mobilizing opposition to British authority and in early attempts at modernizing Egypt; she divides her book's compelling narrative into two strands, the first analyzing gendered language and images in the nation and the second considering the political activities of Egyptian women nationalists. Baron's research reveals that, although women were largely excluded from participating in the state in Egypt, they nevertheless pervaded the visual imagery of nationalism in that country. Baron juxtaposes the idealization of the family and the feminine in nationalist rhetoric with transformations in elite households and the work of women activists striving for national independence. 

In pursuit of a more sophisticated and inclusive American history, the contributors to Beyond the Founders propose new directions for the study of the political history of the republic before the Civil War. In ways formal and informal, and symbolic and tactile, this political world encompassed blacks, women, entrepreneurs, and Native Americans, as well as the Adamses, Jeffersons, and Jacksons, all struggling in their own ways to shape the new nation and express their ideas of American democracy. Taking inspiration from the new cultural and social histories, these political historians show that the early history of the United States was not just the product of a few founding fathers," but was also marked by widespread and passionate popular involvement; a print media much more politically active and potent than that of later eras; and political conflicts and influences that crossed lines of race, gender, and class.

Thomas Kessner tells the dramatic story of New York's transformation from port city to financial capital of the world in the course of a generation. No succeeding generation enjoyed the economic power, the open political atmosphere, and the shaping influence available to this group of capitalists," Kessner writes. During this period, money accumulated in New York, as a banking culture emerged, and ambitious men were drawn to the city to make enormous fortunes. Kessner's colorful, epic narrative profiles such figures as J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller, who forged a brave and ruthless new brand of corporate capitalism. In Capital City, Kessner describes the competitive climate that led to New York-rather than Boston, Philadelphia, or any other northern city—becoming the global financial center.

David Harvey one of the most influential geographers of our time, recently published The New Imperialism-a bold, debate-shaping response to the current direction of U.S. foreign policy. (The book is a result of Harvey's Clarendon Lectures, delivered at the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford University in February, 2003, while war against Iraq was imminent.) In The New Imperialism, Harvey builds a conceptual framework to expose the underlying forces at work behind recent momentous shifts in policy and politics. Analyzing the thrust of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, Harvey asks the big questions—What is really at stake in the war against Iraq? Is it really all about oil? And what is the relation between U.S. militarism abroad and domestic policies?-and provides answers in a complex yet clearly argued narrative

The first historical account of the development of civil society in the United States, American Creed by Kathleen McCarthy shows how democracy was linked with philanthropy and voluntarism throughout our nation's beginnings. The volume traces the rise of such activism from its colonial precedents-including Benjamin Franklin's Leather Apron Men," a group of civic leaders, and Franklin's own charitable giving-to the emergence of important women's charities for the sick and poor, to religious benevolent societies, to Northern black congregations-such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church-that played a crucial role in organizing abolitionist activities. Following the "creed" of civic duty through its many tests, McCarthy provides a vital reevaluation of public life during the decades leading up to the Civil War. 

Female benificence-as Islamic activism in Egypt, as religious charities in nineteenth-century Ireland, as secular and non-secular philanthropy in places as diverse as Norway, Brazil, Korea, Israel, and India-has shaped non-governmental political organizations (NGOs), civil society, and women's political culture worldwide. Women, Philanthropy, & Civil Society grew out of a research project by the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at The Graduate Center, of which McCarthy is the director. The study's aims were to elucidate the role of women in building civil society through their gifts of money and time in a variety of countries," with research focusing on religion, on the "maternalist" form of female philanthropy, and on the role of women-started NGOs in weak, decentralized states. 

In this innovative study, David Waldstreicher investigates the importance of political festivals in the early American republic. Drawing on newspapers, broadsides, diaries, and letters, he shows how patriotic celebrations and their reproduction in a rapidly expanding print culture helped connect local politics to national identity. Waldstreicher reveals how Americans worked out their political differences in creating a festive calendar. Using the Fourth of July as a model, members of different political parties and social movements invented new holidays celebrating such events as the ratification of the Constitution, Washington's birthday, Jefferson's inauguration, and the end of the slave trade. They used these politicized rituals, he argues, to build constituencies and to make political arguments on a national scale. While these celebrations enabled nonvoters to participate intimately in the political process and helped dissenters forge effective means of protest, they had their limits as vehicles of democratization or modes of citizenship, Waldstreicher says. Exploring the interplay of region, race, class, and gender in the development of a national identity, he demonstrates that an acknowledgment of the diversity and conflict inherent in the process is crucial to any understanding of American politics and culture.