Library

2022

Pirajno, Alberto di. A Cure for Serpents. Eland, 2006.

Orientalist, but perspectives you can’t really find elsewhere; take it with a grain of salt.

al-Koni, Ibrahim. Gold Dust. Translated by Elliot Colla. Hoopoe, 2020.

The same satisfying Saharan Sufism, here about what one will do for a non-human companion.

Lewis, Mary Dewhurst. Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881-1938. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

By definition welcome: French attempts to close the extraterritoriality gap inadvertently galvanized Tunisian nationalism.

Gaddafi, Muammar. The Green Book. 2016.

Frankly, Gaddafi is a pretty garbage political theorist, and the political material is nonsense.

Saint-Exupéry de, Antoine. Wind, Sand and Stars. Harvest Books, 2002.

Good vignettes of early flight; you can feel the mythmaking emerge, and I love that.

Ben Hameda, Kamal. Under the Tripoli Sky. Translated by Adriana Hunter. Bath: Peirene Press, 2014.

A window into Tripoli’s gendered women’s spaces; by no means profound, but worth taking time with.

Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif. The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance, 1830-1932. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

A great history of Libya through its genocidal “pacification”; in short, a classic.

Tushnet, Mark V. Why the Constitution Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

The constitution matters by defining how politics are practiced; nothing new, a summary of the widely known.

Ogden, Jane. The Psychology of Eating: From Healthy to Disordered Behavior. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

A scientific survey of the literature as of 2010; not light, but a great primer for further research.

Rollin, Jennifer and Colleen Reichmann. The Inside Scoop on Eating Disorder Recovery: Advice from Two Therapists Who Have Been There. London: Taylor & Francis, 2021.

Interesting and actionable, though I couldn’t help feeling I’m not the audience.

Nicholls, Julia. Revolutionary Thought After the Paris Commune, 1871-1885. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

An excellent study of a supposedly sleepy period: the revolutionary tradition didn’t die with the Commune.

Kim, Diana S. Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Small bureaucratic decisions culminated in opium prohibition; she shows when “global” history does not work.

Casimir, Jean. The Haitians: A Decolonial History. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

A decolonial history of the Revolution as a wholly new lakou-built society; important scholarship.

Burns, Sarah. The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism. University Press of Kansas, 2019.

An enlightening history of expanding executive war prerogative, with Congress just as at fault.

Kamrava, Mehran. A Concise History of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Political science, not history: the three ideal types obscure as much as they illuminate.

Mason, David S. A Concise History of Modern Europe: Liberty, Equality, Solidarity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

The definitive text for a quick overview built out with other materials; not the place for depth.

Brook, Timothy. Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2007.

Great popular history; nothing new for world historians, but I consumed it in one sitting.

Jay, Mike. Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

Narrative commodity history rather than scholarly analysis; worth a read for a glimpse.

Gomez, Michael A. Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

A great entry point to African diaspora history, though nothing new for those already familiar.

Emecheta, Buchi. Second Class Citizen. New York: George Braziller, 1983.

Brief and good on the multifaceted discrimination black immigrant women faced in 1960s Britain.

Green, Toby. A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Hard to get through, but Green’s story makes sense to me; one to come back to.

Zarinebaf, Fariba. Mediterranean Encounters: Trade and Pluralism in Early Modern Galata. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.

Even more interesting than expected: Galata under Ottoman policy; a must-read for the early modern Mediterranean.

Taieb, Emmanuel. Hiding the Guillotine: Public Executions in France, 1870–1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020.

A very French study of why public executions disappeared; the theoretical debates crowd out the more important story.

Hopkins, Benjamin D. Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.

Really dense, but “frontier governmentality” should reframe how I think through colonial history.

Henneberg, Sabina. Managing Transition: The First Post-Uprising Phase in Tunisia and Libya. University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations, 2020.

Provisional governments’ actual actions determine outcomes; a nice pushback against political science’s determinism; recommend.

Griffiths, Richard. France's Purveyors of Hatred: Aspects of the French Extreme Right and Its Influence, 1918-1945. London: Taylor & Francis, 2020.

Essays on aspects of the French extreme right; not the place to start, but great supplementary case studies.

Falck, Susan T. Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi, 1865-1941. University Press of Mississippi, 2019.

Public history at its best: Natchez becoming a Disneyland for Lost Cause partisans; highly recommend.

Edington, Claire E. Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019.

Colonial psychiatry as a technology patients and families actively negotiated; recommend.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

Woof, such a bleak story, made incredibly human; you feel Vladek and Anja’s increasing dread.

Fauvelle, François-Xavier. The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Great short chapters on medieval Africa; the lack of cohesion may be the point.

Carayon, Céline. Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication Among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Shows Indigenous-French sign communication was rich, not basic; a must-read for colonial North America.

Akın, Yiğit. When the War Came Home: The Ottomans' Great War and the Devastation of an Empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.

Historical scholarship at its best on why World War I so devastated the Ottoman Empire.

Antov, Nikolay. The Ottoman 'Wild West': The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Really interesting research on Bulgaria’s Islamization, marred by ludicrously complex sentences.

Burnard, Trevor. The Atlantic in World History, 1490-1830. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

A welcome undergraduate survey of Atlantic history proper, with a standout plantation-system chapter.

Gomez, Michael. African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

A tough read that respects the methodological problems of doing African history immensely.

James, Henry. The Bostonians. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Really beautiful writing, but the main characters are the actual worst and nothing happens at all.

Oates, Joyce Carol, ed. The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Definitely the place to start; the real treasure is Oates’s biographical and contextual material.

Adorno, Rolena. The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

The 16th-century conquest debates still predominate in Latin American literature; dense literary studies, and I’m not the audience.

Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Gross: “declensionist” and “developmentalist” are horribly useless categories, and the whole project an exercise in futility.

Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Once revisionist, now the dominant narrative: colonial religious life was vibrant and central.

Earle, Rebecca. The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Humoral theory made food fundamental to the colonial self; I learned a ton and highly recommend it.

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

A fascinating tome all historians should read, whatever they work on; highest recommendation.

Breen, T.H. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Planter debt primed Virginians for revolution; illuminating, but I’d like more primary-source rigor.

Beeman, Richard. The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

No single colonial political experience, only distinct styles; worth reading, but very slow.

Boxer, Charles Ralph. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. London: Hutchinson, 1969.

Now this is a great book: the second half, on the sinews of empire, is excellent.

Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Limpieza de sangre crossed the Atlantic into the sistema de castas; really theory-heavy, but here it works.

McConville, Brendan. The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Colonial America as the empire’s most royalist part; it made Bailyn click, though McConville overstates his case.

MacCormack, Sabine. Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Impressive on how Andean religion shaped Spanish perception, but it wants readers better grounded in classical philosophy.

Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

A very smart intellectual history of how Spain legitimated its American rule; very much a text for scholars.

Bonomi, Patricia U. Lord Cornbury Scandal the Politics of Reputation in British America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Such a fun book: an illumination of colonial politics’ rough-and-tumble “dark side.”

Bailyn, Bernard. The Origins of American Politics. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.

Why the colonies revolted and Britain didn’t; worth skimming, not particularly comprehensive.

Premo, Bianca. Children of the Father King. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Illuminating material linking law to childhood in colonial Peru, though the overarching arguments stayed unclear to me.

Herzog, Tamar. Upholding Justice: Society, State, and the Penal System in Quito (1650-1750). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Far more fascinating than I had any right to find it; a must-read on state-building and law.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. Ramona. New York: Signet Classics, 2002.

I’m sorry, but Ramona is trite: wooden, entirely stereotyped, without any sense of humanity.

Morgan, Edmund S. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989.

Divine right and popular sovereignty are both fictions; great for the nitty-gritty of political thought.

Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.

Little new to me, but a great introduction to colonial South Carolina’s black majority.

Herzog, Tamar. Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Before citizenship, Spanish identity ran through vecindad and naturaleza, fluid uncodified categories; tough but illuminating.

Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Comparative slavery, Chesapeake against Lowcountry, handled with impressive subtlety; a must-read.

Vinson, Ben and Herbert S. Klein. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

A good introductory synthesis to get your feet on the ground; nothing trailblazing.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. Selected Poems. Edited by Herbert Woodward Martin. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.

The dialect poetry is where he really shines; favorites outdo the famous “Sympathy.”

Lynch, John. Bourbon Spain: 1700-1808. Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Almost entirely dynastic history; an adequate introduction, but the better text hasn’t been written yet.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.

Third read, first that worked: the dialect reads as craft, and Huck’s moral development is beautiful to see.

Kellogg, Susan. Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America's Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

A short, interesting survey of indigenous women in Latin American history; a good starting point, not the end.

Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Ambitious, quasi-Marxist, hard to assess, but useful on the origins of Southern social structures.

Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977.

Probably the oldest truly great history of American slavery, since surpassed but chock-full of detail.

Mangan, Jane E. Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Dives into Potosí’s city itself; markets just don’t interest me as much as labor systems.

Schwartz, Stuart B. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550 1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Big, difficult, nearly comprehensive, but never looking beyond Bahia; not quite what I’d hoped.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Blackstone, 2007.

The gold standard for historical writing on New World slavery; a must-read.

Bakewell, Peter. Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosi, 1545-1650. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.

A good introduction to labor in early Potosí, but largely surpassed; Tandeter is superior.

Breen, T.H. and Stephen Innes. "myne Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Short and fascinating: compelling evidence that anti-black racism was produced, not eternal.

Adelman, Jeremy. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Spanish Americans didn’t initially seek independence, the imperial center imploded; a difficult text, not for newcomers.

Elliott, J.H. Imperial Spain 1469-1716. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Flawed and dated, with the Americas missing, yet one of the best on the market.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.

The creation story from hell, bleak and well told: American liberty and slavery rose together, inextricably linked.

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. London: Penguin Classics, 2012.

The most Protestant American novel I’ve read: heartwarming but so slow and episodic it lacked momentum.

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.

Effectively Generations of Captivity with more regional detail; I may have wasted a bit of time.

Tandeter, Enrique. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining In Colonial Potosi, 1692 1826. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.

Potosí would have been unprofitable without the mita; a slog, but illuminating on the mines’ social structure.

Weber, David J. Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Broke my notions of a homogeneous Spanish America: Bourbon treatment of borderland peoples varied by where and when.

Rodríguez O., Jaime E. The Independence of Spanish America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

A monograph doubling as a really good overview of two realms under one Monarchy; I learned so much.

Pulsipher, Jenny Hale. Subjects Unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

An illuminating study of legitimacy in 17th-century New England that gave me the narrative I lacked; highly recommend.

Brading, David A. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, And The Liberal State, 1492 1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

A leviathan reading independence as creole-peninsular competition; intellectual milieu can’t be the whole story.

Calloway, Colin G. New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

A vision I like but overstated; a useful what-might-have-been that needs supplementing.

Lockhart, James, ed. We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004.

The Florentine Codex in four columns; a good collection of conquest sources from the Mexica perspective.

Dominguez, Jorge I. Insurrection or Loyalty. De Gruyter, 1980.

Interesting if obvious ideas in a structure that almost physically repels me.

Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

The reframing is the contribution, largely successful: I see North American history from Indian perspectives much clearer now.

Smith, Tracy K. Life on Mars. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2011.

Family and social life couched in the language of astronomy, eliciting a real sense of wonder.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Good historically, great theoretically: productive misunderstanding where no power was dominant, grounded spatially.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Myth-busting: English settlers found Natives a “mirror” of their own societies; the religion chapter fascinated me.

Fuente, Alejandro de la. Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

An excellent explanation of how a “mere stop-over” became a critical imperial node.

Merrell, James H. The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Contagious enthusiasm; the Catawbas discovered a “New World” just as much as Europeans did.

Burkholder, Mark A. and Lyman L. Johnson. Colonial Latin America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

I’m sorry, but this book is really bad; do not recommend.

Jacobs, Harriet Ann. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.

Probably the most personally detailed slave narrative I’ve read; Jacobs has zero patience for slaveholders.

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Sets the ground for White’s The Middle Ground; should be recognized as a classic.

Haring, Clarence Henry. Trade and Navigation Between Spain and the Indies: In the Time of the Hapsburgs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918.

A pioneering 1916 study, but trade is a bit of a sleepy topic, far surpassed by recent works.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. The Jamestown Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Disjointed: the Jamestown claim is half-baked, but the analysis of English mental maps is bright and thorough.

Hemming, John. Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500-1760. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Remarkably comprehensive on indigenous peoples in colonial Brazil, but emphasizing disease blinds readers to colonization’s brutality.

Morgan, Edmund S. Puritan Family. New York: Harper Perennial, 1942.

Dated but quite important, though Morgan’s hunt for a “bright side” to involuntary servitude rubs me the wrong way.

Southworth, E.D.E.N. The Hidden Hand: Or, Capitola the Madcap. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

I honestly love this first American million-copy novel, balancing intrigue, action, and character-building at a nice clip.

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Gobbled down in a day; a massive accomplishment that undervalues American pluralism.

Northup, Solomon. 12 Years a Slave. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.

Probably the most interesting slave narrative I’ve read, more thorough than Douglass; a must-read.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.

Profoundly dated lectures with no Spanish or African Atlantic: a serious problem.

Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

A great study of Spanish rule in Yucatan whose most interesting Maya chapters feel like mere addition.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Edited by Richard Kopley. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Poe’s greatness lives in short form; influential, but nearly two centuries on it doesn’t stand up.

Stern, Steve J. Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.

Indian resistance that reads more as anthropology than history; I didn’t really “get it.”

Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Revised ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Woof, a difficult read: not introductory, and it needs supplementing with Edmund Morgan.

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Longman, 1958.

A nice easy read that moved my image of the Puritans toward a far more dynamic people.

Lockhart, James. The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012.

Dated and meant for specialists, but a fascinating cross-section and a really important read for me.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.

Sleep medicine masquerading as a book; Cooper simply is not a good writer.

Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th Anniversary Edition. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

Astounding work that foresaw environmental history; its contents are now received wisdom.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House, 2020.

Race is a meta-language masking caste; a must-read, though the India and Reich comparisons stay skin-deep.

Morgan, Edmund. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965.

The Puritan attempt to shrink the visible church bred a purity obsession that collapsed the whole edifice.

Haig, Matt. The Midnight Library. Viking, 2020.

It didn’t cure my depression but helped some; the questions raised matter more than the story.

Herring, George C. From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

A synthetic text jam-packed with information: the US has almost never been isolationist, despite the rhetoric.

McGhee, Heather. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. New York: Random House, 2021.

Racism destroys opportunities for the racists too; solutions verge on platitudes, but she’s right: required reading.

Erdrich, Louise. The Sentence. New York: Harper, 2021.

A testament to Erdrich’s ability that I rooted for a quite unlikable main character.

Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Enamored by the first third, Robbie’s wonder so lifelike, before it becomes something more mundane.