Bøker av Professor of History

Fifth Sun offers a comprehensive history of the Aztecs, spanning the period before conquest to a century after the conquest, based on rarely-used Nahuatl-language sources written by the indigenous people.

Unconditional not only offers a narrative of the Japanese surrender in its historical moment, but reveals how the policy underlying it poisoned American postwar politics and warped our understanding of World War II for decades.

A study of the ethnocultural youth organizations formed by teenage Nisei girls in the greater Los Angeles area and the endurance of this world of female friendship and comradery from the Jazz Age through internment through the postwar period.

A panoramic study of the vibrant literary and intellectual culture that emerged in seventeenth-century France, drawing on the writings of over 100 men and women of letters, 'the generation of 1630', to understand the rise and refinement of the French language and the development of the literary culture of French classicism.

Making Murder Public explores the emergence, in the sixteenth century, of a formal distinction between murder and manslaughter and the significant reduction in the rates of homicides individuals perpetrated on each other.

Most of the women who ever lived left no trace of their existence on the record of history. In this book, Suzannah Lipscomb recovers the lives and aspirations of ordinary sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French women, using rich source material to show what they thought about their lives, menfolk, friendships, faith, and sex.

A provocative and propulsive look at American history, and the myth that the Civil War's "new birth of freedom" ended oligarchy. It just moved westward.

Mary Thorp, an English governess working for a Belgian-Russian family in German-occupied Brussels, kept a secret war diary from September 1916 to January 1919. This long-forgotten diary sheds light on an important aspect of the First World War: civilian life under military occupation in a transnational conflict.

This book deals with the ways empires affect smaller communities and vice versa. It raises the question how these different types of community were integrated into larger imperial structures, and how tensions between local and central interests affected the development of the post-Roman West, Byzantium and the early Islamic world.

Imperial Boredom offers a radical reconsideration of the British Empire during its heyday in the nineteenth century. Challenging the long-established view that that the Empire was about adventure and excitement, Auerbach draws on personal accounts to argue that boredom was central to the experience of Empire.

Soldier, Priest, and God is the first life of Alexander the Great to explore his religious experience. F. S. Naiden puts Alexander the Great's experience in Egypt and Asia on a par with his Macedonian upbringing and Greek education and explains how the European conqueror became a Muslim saint.

During World War Two, people arrived in Britain from all over the world as troops, war-workers, nurses, refugees, exiles, and prisoners-of-war. Mixing It tells the extraordinary tales of their contributions to the British war effort, and uncovers the forgotten history of the role WWII played in the making of multiethnic Britain.

This book investigates the kinds and quantities of treasure seized by Alexander the Great, from gold and silver to land and slaves. It reveals what became of the king's wealth, and what Alexander's redistribution of these vast resources can tell us today about his much-disputed policies and personality.

Humans versus Nature relates the history of the global environment from the Stone Age to the present, emphasizing the adversarial relations between human societies and the natural environment in all regions of the world and tracing the current environmental crisis to its roots in the deep past.

An overview of the historical and legal roots of halal (permissible) and haram (impermissible) foods in the Islamic tradition and how these are viewed in societies today.

In The Long Reach of the Sixties, legal historian Laura Kalman explores the Supreme Court nomination and confirmation battles of the late 1960s and early 1970s and shows how they have haunted-indeed, scarred-the Supreme Court appointments process ever since.

In 1617, Louis XIII was forced to resort to assassination as punishment, while a century later, Louis XIV needed only to issue a command and the kingdom's most powerful subjects would submit to imprisonment or exile without trial. What were 'politics of disgrace', why did it emerge, what conventions governed its use, and how did France react to it?

A new history of the Russian Revolution, exploring how people experienced it in their own lives, from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to the final shots of the civil war in 1921. The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 focuses on human experience to address key issues of inequality, power, and violence, and ideas of justice and freedom.

The first monograph devoted to the concept of dystopia: redefining the central concepts and chronology of the genre, and offering a theoretical overview and prehistory of the concept; an account of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes as dystopias; and a brief history of the literary dystopia from the early nineteenth century to the present.

First Martyr of Liberty explores how Crispus Attucks's death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led to his achieving mythic significance in the role of African Americans in the mainstream American historical narrative from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

An inside account of the trials and punishments of the Soviet secret police officers who carried out the Great Terror, this book uses the criminal files from Ukraine to take readers inside the operations of the interrogation rooms and execution chambers where Stalin's regime enacted state violence.

In 1868, samurai radicals overthrew the last shogun in the name of ancient Japanese ways. Then they took an opposite course, building a modern Japanese state with the help of Western advisors. This book explains the paradox of the Meiji Restoration: revering the ancient past while embracing the foreign and new.

This book reveals the method by which the British army organized their land forces throughout the empire to make an army of standardized pieces that could be multiplied, expanded, and joined together in time of war; a military coalition that worked throughout the early twentieth century, even as the dominions and India became more autonomous.

Nathan Hale, the celebrated hero, and Moses Dunbar, an unknown loyalist executed for treason, died during the American Revolution for causes they regarded as honorable. The Martyr and the Traitor presents these men's stories for what they reveal about the Revolution's impact on ordinary lives and about the many factors involved in choosing sides in war.

The principal protagonists of this history of the Enlightenment are non-literate, poor, and enslaved colonial litigants who began to sue their superiors in the royal courts of the Spanish empire. With comparative data on civil litigation and close readings of the lawsuits, The Enlightenment on Trial explores how ordinary Spanish Americans actively produced modern concepts of law.

Woodrow Wilson was easily one of the most religious presidents in American history. Yet, his religion has puzzled historians for decades. This book tells the story of Wilson's religion as he moved from the Calvinist orthodoxy of his youth to a progressive, spiritualized religion short on doctrine and long on morality.

In this history of the last year of the war in the Pacific, award-winning historians Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio examine all the issues facing the Allies in their fight against the Japanese, and whether unconditional surrender was inevitable.

In this important and insightful work, David Brundage tells a dramatic story of more two hundred years of American activism in the cause of Ireland, from the 1798 Irish rebellion to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

This study of colonial Mexico's Nahuatl-language annals brings the xiuhpohualli tradition to life. Author Camilla Townsend has deduced the authorship of most of the texts and thus is able to place the works in their rightful contexts and render the stories more accessible to modern ears than they have been before.