North American History
Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History This award-winning history offers an intimate, ground-level account of the out-break and early years of the Civil War in its bloodiest theater: the Great Valley spanning Virginia and Pennsylvania. It marks a major departure from the view of the Civil War as an inevitable conflict between opposing sections with the North bound to prevail. A magnificent social history, it breathes life back into the people of the time, recovers the uncertainties and possibilities in the prewar crisis, and restores the drama to the shattering events of the war.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History From Booklist
Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History
"Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is a towering figure in American history. A controversial theologian and the author of the famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he ignited the momentous Great Awakening of the eighteenth century." In this biography, Jonathan Edwards emerges as both a great American and a brilliant Christian. George M. Marsden evokes the world of colonial New England in which Edwards was reared - a frontier civilization at the center of a conflict between Native Americans, French Catholics, and English Protestants. Drawing on newly available sources, Marsden demonstrates how these cultural and religious battles shaped Edwards' life and thought. Marsden reveals Edwards as a complex thinker and human being who struggled to reconcile his Puritan heritage with the secular, modern world emerging out of the Enlightenment. In this, Edwards' life anticipated the deep contradictions of our American culture.” –From the publisher Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction Detroit native Boyle (history, Ohio State Univ.) re-creates the racial thinking and tensions that produced the politics, prosecution, and personal tragedy of People v. Ossian Sweet. The 1925 Michigan murder case tried a black physician for shooting and killing a white man in a mob trying to run him out of the home he and his wife had just bought in a previously all-white neighborhood just outside Detroit. Against images of a 10,000-strong KKK rally on Detroit's west side, Boyle makes the Sweet episode a tableau for U.S. justice and race relations. He sketches the time, the place, and the major players, from Sweet to local politicians in a hot mayoral race to NAACP leaders, who hired legendary trial lawyer Clarence Darrow and cast Sweet as a symbol in a crusade against residential racial segregation. This fact-filled, people-focused, readable work complements the growing literature on race in Detroit (e.g., Phyllis Vine's One Man's Castle: Clarence Darrow and the Defense of the American Dream) and in 20th-century U.S. urban development.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Winner of the Albert B. Corey Prize in Canadian and American History
FROM THE PUBLISHER Based on the plant shutdown stories told by over 130 industrial workers, and drawing on extensive archival and published sources as well as songs and poetry from the time, Steven High explores the central issues in the history and contemporary politics of plant closings. In so doing, he poses new questions about group identification and solidarity in the face of often dramatic industrial transformation.
Western and World History
Winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for European History This book is a study of popular responses to the English Reformation. It takes as its subject not the conversion of English subjects to a new religion but rather their political responses to a Reformation perceived as an act of state and hence, like all early modern acts of state, negotiated between government and people.
Winner of the The George Louis Beer Prize for European international history since 1895 FROM THE PUBLISHER "This is a biography of a borderland between Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived side by side. Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. By the 1950s, this "no place" emerged as a Ukrainian heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed." "Brown's study is grounded in the life of the village and shtetl, in the personalities and small histories of everyday life in this area. In impressive detail, she documents how these regimes, bureaucratically and then violently, separated, named and regimented this intricate community into distinct ethnic groups." Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography, and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, A Biography of No Place reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history.
Winner of the James Henry Breasted Prize in Ancient History FROM THE PUBLISHER Although there is constant conflict over its meanings and limits, political freedom itself is considered a fundamental and universal value throughout the modern world. For most of human history, however, this was not the case. In this book, Kurt Raaflaub asks the essential question: when, why, and under what circumstances did the concept of freedom originate? To find out, Raaflaub analyses ancient Greek texts from Homer to Thucydides in their social and political contexts. Archaic Greece, he concludes, had little use for the idea of political freedom; the concept arose instead during the great confrontation between Greeks and Persians in the early fifth century BCE. Raaflaub then examines the relationship of freedom with other concepts, such as equality, citizenship, and law, and pursues subsequent uses of the idea--often, paradoxically, as a tool of domination, propaganda, and ideology. Raaflaub's book thus illuminates both the history of ancient Greek society and the evolution of one of humankind's most important values, and will be of great interest to anyone who wants to understand the conceptual fabric that still shapes our world views.
Winner of the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History Modernization happened in Japan quickly and vividly; but, interfaced with Westernization and the rising consciousness of national identity, it also redefined tradition and reappropriated it, and thus evolved an especially intricate history of domesticity, the central theme of this superb book...The book is staggeringly erudite but also refreshingly literate. Sand mastered a vast bibliography in Japanese and made full use of women's magazines from the period, but his organization of the complex material into well-focused chapters is ingeniously clear. Essential for scholars on Japan but also highly recommended for all historians and sociologists interested in modernism, domesticity, urban culture, and architecture. – Choice Winner of the George L. Moose Prize in European Intellectual and Cultural History FROM THE PUBLISHER "In a tour de force of intellectual history, Siep Stuurman rediscovers the remarkable early Enlightenment figure Francois de Poulain de la Barre. A dropout from theology studies at the Sorbonne, Poulain embraced the philosophy of Descartes, became convinced of the injustice and absurdity of the subjection of women, and assembled an entirely original social philosophy. His writings challenging male supremacy and advocating gender and racial equality are the most radically egalitarian texts to appear in Europe before the French revolution." In exploring Poulain's breakthrough, Stuurman sheds new light on the origins of the Enlightenment, the history of feminism, the emergence of rational Christianity, and the social and political implications of Descartes's philosophy. This work, the first comprehensive study of Poulain, brings to life the men and women of the Radical Enlightenment, who pioneered ideas about equality that would shape humankind to this day.
Winner of the Leo Gershoy Prize in European History Enlightenment writers, revolutionaries, and even Napoleon discussed and wrote about France's tiny Jewish population at great length. Why was there so much thinking about Jews when they were a minority of less than one percent and had little economic and virtually no political power? In this unusually wide-ranging study of representations of Jews in eighteenth-century France--both by Gentiles and Jews themselves--Ronald Schechteroffers fresh perspectives on the Enlightenment and French Revolution, on Jewish history, and on the nature of racism and intolerance. Informed by the latest historical scholarship and by the insights of cultural theory, Obstinate Hebrews is a fascinating tale of cultural appropriation cast in the light of modern society's preoccupation with the "other."
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Library Journal Does the world really need another general history of the Reformation? MacCulloch (history of the Church, Oxford Univ.; Thomas Cranmer: A Life, etc.) thinks so, believing that contemporary scholarship needs wider dissemination. To that end, he has produced the definitive survey for this generation. As in similar studies, religious and political disputes are covered thoroughly. What sets this work apart is the sweep of its coverage, both geographically (from Britain and Ireland in the west to Poland and Lithuania in the east) and chronologically (1490-1700). Also noteworthy is the attention to the movement's social impact on such diverse topics as calendar reform, colonization, family life and sex roles, homosexuality, witchcraft, and more. This well-written book is a joy to read, with new facts and interpretations on nearly every page; still, the work's size and information density will make it slow going for those without a basic knowledge of the subject. With that caveat, this is highly recommended for larger public libraries and academic library collections in European and Christian history. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/03.]-Christopher Brennan, SUNY Coll. at Brockport Lib. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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