New Books in Early Modern History

In her eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North America’s premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschal...

Today I talked to Claire Bellerjeau about her book (co-authored with Tiffany Yecke Brooks) Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth (Lyons Press, 2021). In January 1785, a young African American woman named Elizabeth was put on board the Lucretia in New York Harbor, bound for Charleston, where she would be sold to her fifth master in just twenty-...

Benjamin Franklin grew up in a devout Protestant family with limited prospects for wealth and fame. By hard work, limitless curiosity, native intelligence, and luck (what he called "providence"), Franklin became one of Philadelphia's most prominent leaders, a world recognized scientist, and the United States' leading diplomat during the War for Independence. Along the way, Franklin embodied the Pr...

How much does the average person know about Alexander Hamilton (1755 or 1757 – 1804)? Would we have guessed that this hero of many fiscal conservatives wrote, “A national debt, if it is not excessive will be to us a national blessing; it will be a powerful cement of our union…?” Most of us know that he was killed by his political enemy Aaron Burr in a duel. But long before that fatal encounter, Ha...

Adrienne Mayor is renowned for exploring the borders of history, science, archaeology, anthropology, and popular knowledge to find historical realities and scientific insights--glimmering, long-buried nuggets of truth--embedded in myth, legends, and folklore. Combing through ancient texts and obscure sources, she has spent decades prospecting for intriguing wonders and marvels, historical mysterie...

In Representing Magic in Modern Ireland: Belief, History, Culture (Cambridge UP, 2022), Andrew Sneddon argues that Ireland did not experience a disenchanted modernity, nor a decline in magic. It suggests that beliefs, practices and traditions concerning witchcraft and magic developed and adapted to modernity to retain cultural currency until the end of the twentieth century. This analysis provides...

Telugu Christians: A History (Fortress Press, 2022) narrates the history of Telugu Christians, a faith community located in the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Pondicherry in southern India. A social history of a faith community, this volume analyzes how social aspirations of the community, local worldviews, and historical contingencies shaped the beliefs and practices of Telugu Christian...

Jacob Gotfried Haafner (1754–1809) was one of the most popular European travel writers of the early nineteenth century, writing in the Romantic mode. A Dutch citizen, Haafner spent more than twenty years of his early life living outside of Europe, in India, Ceylon, Mauritius, Java, and South Africa. Books like his popular Travels in a Palanquin were translated into the major European languages, an...

Debates about science and religion are rarely out of the news. Whether it concerns what's being taught in schools, clashes between religious values and medical recommendations, or questions about how to address our changing global environment, emotions often run high and answers seem intractable. Yet there is much more to science and religion than the clash of extremes.  As Thomas Dixon and Adam S...

In Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (U Virginia Press, 2022), Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s—the Age of the Constitution—to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. Bilder finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor. This pathbreaking female educat...

In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson distilled a leading idea in the early American republic and wrote of a wall of separation between church and state. That metaphor has come down from Jefferson to 21st-century Americans through a long history of jurisprudence, political contestation, and cultural influence. Separating Church and State: A History (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the development of the co...

Today I talked to Virginia Reinburg about her book Storied Places: Pilgrim Shrines, Nature, and History in Early Modern France (Cambridge UP, 2019). Pilgrim shrines were places of healing, holiness, and truth in early modern France. By analyzing the creation of these pilgrim shrines as natural, legendary, and historic places whose authority provided a new foundation for post-Reformation Catholic l...

This succinct history of Germany will take you on an incredible journey through time spanning from the 1500s to the present. Focusing on Germany in detail and in a global context, Jeremy Black uncovers the complexity of the country's past as well as the challenges and strengths of its future. The history of Germany is intricately woven. Threaded in time through its struggles and triumphs with reli...

In Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Cornell UP, 2021), Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation s...

“My underlying goal,” writes my guest Tom Misa, “has been to display the variety of technologies, to describe how they changed across time, and to understand how they interacted with diverse societies and cultures. There’s no simple definition of technology that adequately conveys the variety of its forms or sufficiently emphasizes the social and cultural interactions and consequences that I belie...

Richard G. Marks's book Jewish Approaches to Hinduism: A History of Ideas from Judah Ha-Levi to Jacob Sapir (12th-19th Centuries) (Routledge, 2021) explores past expressions of the Jewish interest in Hinduism in order to learn what Hinduism has meant to Jews living mainly in the 12th through the 19th centuries. India and Hinduism, though never at the center of Jewish thought, claim a place in its...

On Black Bartholomew's Day--August 24, 1662--nearly two thousand ministers denied the authority of the Church of England and were subsequently removed from their posts. Mary Franklin was the wife of Presbyterian minister Robert Franklin, one of the dissenting ministers ejected from their pulpits and their livings on that day. She recorded the experience of her persecution in the unused pages of he...

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge UP, 2020) tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking...

In Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Dr. Ashley M. Williard demonstrates how problematics of gender played a central role in defining colonial others, male and female, at the moment when slavery was first introduced in the French-controlled Antilles. The book argues that seventeenth-century French Caribbea...

The Venice Ghetto was founded in 1516 by the Venetian government as a segregated area of the city in which Jews were compelled to live. The world's first ghetto and the origin of the English word, the term simultaneously works to mark specific places and their histories, and as a global symbol that evokes themes of identity, exile, marginalization, and segregation. To capture these multiple meanin...

Textiles were the second-most-traded commodity in world history, preceded only by grain. In the Ottoman Empire, in particular, the sale and exchange of silks, cottons, and woolens generated an immense amount of revenue. They touched every level of society, from rural women tending silkworms to pashas flaunting layers of watered camlet to merchants travelling to Mecca and beyond.  Sea Change: Ottom...

In a mere four years, England’s monastic tradition—one of the richest in all of Europe—came to an end. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, as it’s come to be known, stands in popular consciousness as a token of religious reformation and muscular government. But the Dissolution is wrapped up in partisan narratives that have obscured the role of the religious in their own day, their perception of ev...

Europeans have been writing about China for centuries–ever since The Travels of Marco Polo described it as a faraway and mystical kingdom. European thinkers like Voltaire and Montesquieu used China to support their own theories of political philosophy, then writers in early modernity tried to explain why China was falling behind–and then, with the rise of Maoist China, how it represented true revo...

When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. In An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restorat...

Art historian Catherine McCormack challenges how culture teaches us to see and value women, their bodies, and their lives. Venus, maiden, wife, mother, monster—women have been bound so long by these restrictive roles, codified by patriarchal culture, that we scarcely see them. In Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies (Norton, 2021), Catherine McCormack illuminates the assumpti...