New Books in History

In Contested Continent: The Struggle for America, c.1000-1680 (Oxford University Press, 2026), the newest installment of the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States series, Peter C. Mancall recounts how North America was forged from the experiences of millions of Indigenous women and men as well as Europeans and Africans. This history spans the continent from th...

New Perspectives on Old Princeton, 1812-1929 (Routledge, 2024) focuses on Princeton Theological Seminary and the theologians who taught there from the time of its founding in 1812 to the time of its reorganization in 1929. It confronts the standard assessment of Old Princeton in the historiography of North American evangelicalism and sets out why a new paradigm is needed. The volume critically eng...

Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies (University of South Carolina Press, 2026) counters romantic portrayals of Gullah-Geechee culture as a static, geographically isolated remnant of the past. Across eight interdisciplinary essays, the book’s contributors trace an arc, described in time and space, from pre-Middle Passage Africa through the Caribbean and coast...

Dan Rood’s In the Shadow of the Great House (W.W. Norton & Co., 2026) is one of the first contemporary books to focus on the primary engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country: the plantation. The plantation was invented on the small Atlantic island of São Tomé in the 1500s, and the island also became the site, soon enough, of the first slave revolt. The brutal technology was then per...

Winston Churchill was born in a palace and was given a funeral worthy of a king. His family had enjoyed an intimate association with the British monarchy stretching back centuries. As King Edward VIII said of him, 'I have never met anyone of royal blood who exemplified in such high degree the ideal of the 'good king.' Churchill and the Crown (Oxford University Press, 2026) tells the story of Chur...

What was it like to live in a city experiencing occupation by a foreign army? What did it mean when a family had to quarter an officer in their home? More specifically, how did military occupation affect the women and men who lived in those cities, and alter the gender system? Lauren Duval’s The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omo...

The violence that spread across Harlem on the night of March 19, 1935 was the first large-scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation’s leading Black neighborhood. However, as many observers pointed out, the events were “not a race riot” of the kind that had marked the decades after the Civil War. Racial violence took a new form in 1935....

Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024 (Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Xian Aubin Wang investigates decades of contentious relations between the Communist party-state of China and the Muslim community of southern Yunnan centered on the village of Shadian, site of an incident of state violence in 1975 that resulted in 1600 civilian deaths. Examining th...

Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton University Press, 2026) is the first major new edition of Paine’s works, bringing together all his writings in six breathtaking volumes that dramatically revise our previous understanding of his activities as a writer and his importance as a democratic theorist in the age of revolutions. It includes about 180 new letters and some two hundred works newly...

In May, 1926, nearly three million British workers downed tools to support nearly one million of their countrymen, miners whose employers meant to lengthen their working day and cut their pay. This General Strike brought the country to a grinding halt - which, according to Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, represented a threat not merely to the nation but to the parliamentary system its...

Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Empire: Family, Law and War (Edinburgh UP, 2026) by Dr. Kate Dannies examines the gender and family dimensions of mobilisation for the First World War in the Ottoman Empire, situating the war in a long-nineteenth-century social history of Ottoman military reform for the first time. It focuses on the military legal concept of muinsizlik (sole br...

In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia's progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygie...

What does a 16th century ruler reveal about the nature of power, past and present? Istanbul, 1538. The greatest of the Ottoman Sultans is at the pinnacle of world power, while his family and future are at the mercy of their own dynastic law: whichever of his five sons succeeds him must eventually kill all the others. So why not get a head start? For the next fifteen years, as Suleyman the Magnific...

Fred S. Naiden, professor emeritus of history of at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an authority on the ancient world. In the 1980s in New York City, however, he was New York City Transit Authority Employee number 4046. He cleaned subway platforms and restrooms, drove subways and locomotives, and belonged to Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union. All of these experiences inf...

John Kapusta's Self-Realization Nation: How Artists of the Creative Counterculture Made a New America (U California Press, 2026) is the story of an unexpected group of performing artists who led one of the most influential artistic movements in contemporary American history. After World War II, personal fulfillment emerged as a defining American cultural ideal. Self-realization--the quest to becom...

This is the third time I have the great fortune of interviewing Tom Mullaney. I can hardly think of a more worthy ambassador for the history discipline, and the work we are discussing today, I believe, will serve as the perfect bridge from Tom’s historical scholarship to the wider, reading public. We are discussing Tom’s latest book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W.W. Norton...

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide, including in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Those who claimed children as special objects of investigation were initially spread across a network of imperfectly professionalized scholarly and occupational groups based mostly in the fiel...

During the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), the collectivization of the Chinese countryside had catastrophic results, but how did this short-lived political experiment reshape urban life? In his new book, Urban Revolution: People's Communes in Beijing (Cambridge UP, 2026), Fabio Lanza examines the most radical attempts to remake cities under Mao. This first full-length history in English of China's u...

A striking triptych once displayed in countless African American households, the Trinity typically features Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy. More than decoration, these portraits were deliberate acts of memory and quiet resistance, a medium through which African Americans asserted their own narratives of hope, leadership, and the fight for justice. In this provocative his...

Understanding overlooked dimensions of the Cuban Revolution and its impact on the global left in the 1960s and beyond. This volume, The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family (University of Florida Press, 2026) reconsiders revolutionary Cuba's global influence by shifting the focus from high-level political leaders to perspectives traditionally...

Between the late 1940s and the end of the twentieth century, natural gas became Iran's bedrock energy source. Billed as a futuristic fuel for a future world power, gas became an avenue for the country's developmentalist ambitions. The ability to build technologically sophisticated infrastructures served as a powerful tool of state legitimation, both before and after the 1979 Revolution, and tied t...

Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan, 1950s–1980s (Australian Centre on China in the World, 2025) explores four transformative decades of photography in Taiwan, tracing its evolution amid the island’s emergence from Japanese colonialism and integration into Nationalist China, largely under martial law (1949–87). Through a dozen richly illustrated essays and interviews, the book bridges the gap betwe...

How can we study the late ancient and Byzantine history from ecological perspectives? How might one grapple with the more-than-human in sources and media created by humans? Exploring the diverse ways in which pre-modern texts engaged with the broader natural world, Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2025) presents scholarly ventures into the terrains of the past. From the a...

Mesrob Vartavarian has written a wonderful book. Privileged Minorities: A History of Wealth Concentration on South Africa (Ohio UP, 2026) argues that the rise of privileged minorities – small, exclusive groups that dominate political and economic life – parallels the development of successful anticolonial movements. Vartavarian traces how distinct sociocultural groups in South Africa navigated and...

In his new book The Public House in Central Europe: Inns, Tavern, and Alehouses in Cracow during the Jagiellonian Dynasty (Lexington Books, 2024), Peter Dobek takes us into the daily life of the medieval tavern in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Cracow. This is the ‘Golden Age’ of Poland Lithuania and the crepuscule between the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. The taverns were the public space...