The Middle Ground Journal
World History and Global Studies
recent posts
- “Politics, Protests, and Popular Culture: The Global Legacy of Akira Toriyama and His Dragon Ball”
- “Underprepared but Overperformed: Explaining the Enigma in Study Abroad”
- Review of Chasing Greatness by Anatoly Reshetnikov
- Review of Black Sun by Julia Kristeva
- The Clash of Trade Ideologies: Revisiting the Battle of Liaoluo Bay through the Lens of Hans Putmans’ Interpretation of Vrijen Handel and the Ming Tributary System
- Pursuing the Global in a Local Setting: Particularistic Silences in the Teaching, Deconstructing, Researching, and Writing of Asian History
- South Asian Migration and Colonial Records: Some Challenges in Reconstructing the Bengali Historical Migration
- The First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises in Cold-War Asia: An Overview
Author: The Middle Ground Journal
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By Alex Elbaz, Normandale Community College/Metropolitan State University student © 2025 The Middle Ground Journal (ISSN: 2155-1103) Number 30, Summer 2025 http://TheMiddleGroundJournal.orgSee Submission Guidelines webpage for the journal’s not-for-profit educational open-access policy.
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By Sumiko Otsubo, Ph.D., Metropolitan State University © 2025 The Middle Ground Journal (ISSN: 2155-1103) Number 30, Summer 2025 http://TheMiddleGroundJournal.orgSee Submission Guidelines webpage for the journal’s not-for-profit educational open-access policy.
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Chasing Greatness: On Russia’s Discursive Interaction with the West over the Past Millennium. Anatoly Reshetnikov. University of Michigan Press, 2024. 272 pp. #34.95. Open Access ISBN: 9780472904389. Paperback ISBN: 9780472056699. Reviewed by Sergei Akopov, Walter Benjamin Research Fellow, Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script,” Freie Universität, Germany. © 2025 The Middle Ground Journal (ISSN:…
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Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Julia Kristeva, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. 240 pp. $24. Paperback ISBN: 9780231561549. Reviewed by Tanya Goyal, M.A., Jawaharlal Nehru University, India © 2025 The Middle Ground Journal (ISSN: 2155-1103) Number 29, Spring 2025 http://TheMiddleGroundJournal.org See Submission Guidelines page for the journal’s not-for-profit…
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By Lap Kan AU, PhD student, National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) Abstract: This paper examines Hans Putmans’ interpretation of vrijen handel (free trade) within the framework of the Dutch East India Company, contrasting it with the Ming Empire’s tributary system. The study argues that Putmans’ concept of vrijen handel must be understood in the context…
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“Historians depend on authorities’ categorizations and frames of reference, but they must not accept these without thoroughly examining and questioning them. Without critically reading government census reports, using these statistics is problematic in writing migration history.”
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“Historians depend on authorities’ categorizations and frames of reference, but they must not accept these without thoroughly examining and questioning them. Without critically reading government census reports, using these statistics is problematic in writing migration history.”
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“the US government made presumptuous miscalculations, believing that they could transform Taiwan into a strong base to counteract communism….examining the protracted conflict in the Taiwan Strait during the 1950s to the 1960s, this paper analyzes the potential for the conflict in the region to escalate to a nuclear level.”
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“Research universities have been essential in preserving power for the US throughout the Cold War.”
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“Anyone looking for a work that is bound to spark discussion in the classroom need look no further than Art of the Grimoire.”
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“illustrates important connections between China and New Spain that were formed as a result of the trans-Pacific trade but that have eluded most studies…There really is no comparable monograph that examines the trans-Pacific silk trade”
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“[T]here is something refreshing about looking at this period and local of history anew. Hungary is put back in its proper place and time.”
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“Food in World History will appeal to new students and well-seasoned scholars of food history alike.”
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“Timothy Walker and his co-authors need to be lauded for bringing the maritime dimension of the underground railroad to the attention the topic deserves as sailing to freedom was an important element of escapes from slavery overall.”
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“several under-researched areas of modern North African history are brought to the forefront, most notably, North Africa as an escape route for European Jewry during World War II.”
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From colonialism to climate change, from gender to genocide, from revolutions to racism, world historians regularly tread ground that is fraught with contro¬versy. In this moment, adroitly navigating these minefields can be as important as the subject matter itself.”
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“[T]hese three books are pointing historiography in a direction that has been a minority view but is increasingly important to the writing of world history and to supporting public policies based on a more informed understanding of the current age.”
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“Bailey has … set out to provide an invaluable guide on how to use films as historical sources in research projects by equipping scholars with the analytical foundation to incorporate visual media into historical research methods”
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“Jensen argues the Persian Wars do not exist in a vacuum of their own time”
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“This book merits attention from students, researchers, and practitioners of the historical profession, as it serves as a salient reminder that technology has long pervaded, transformed, and continually shaped every dimension of our discipline.”
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“Taking a sweeping approach, Seger examines the intellectual development and technological innovations brought about by the knowledge associated with the practical fields of medicine, husbandry, navigation, and military affairs. It is in this discourse that Seger argues that ‘the practical renaissance’ and its innovations ‘laid the foundation for the British Empire.’”
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“Kia demonstrates the fluidity of identity in Mughal literary culture…”
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“Indian Sex Life is a welcome addition and great starting point for any academically minded or historically curious reader to absorb just how critical sexual control was for colonial India and beyond.”
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“Broken Cities invites readers to look beyond archaeology as a method to understand ruins by providing an interrogation into how these ‘cultural objects’ have been used and articulated”
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“this rich and insightful account of the past half century of LGBTQ mobilization…a treasure trove of new material to be appreciated for the more complete picture it offers of LGBTQ history in this small yet consequential Central American nation”
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“The book’s primary intervention is to show how moving the study of whiteness to Liberia offers a fresh perspective on its socially constructed nature.”
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“The edited volume Teaching Difficult Histories in Difficult Times: Stories of Practice by Lauren McArthur Harris, Maia Sheppard, and Sara A. Levy is an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of teacher practice on the most challenging historical content to teach.”
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“In Constantinople: Ritual, Violence, and Memory in the Making of a Christian Imperial Capital, Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos examines the confluence of conflict, communal ritual, and memory as they contributed to changes in the city’s religious structures during the fourth and fifth centuries CE.”
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“Elaine A. Sullivan’s Constructing the Sacred: Visibility and Ritual Landscape at the Egyp-tian Necropolis of Saqqara is a unique addition to the study of royal and elite sacred landscape production in the ancient world.”
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“Ron Harris, a professor of legal history, has undertaken the task of explaining how, why, and where the business corporation became a viable entity.”
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“[Friedman’s] work is extremely important in revealing the legacy of socialism in the Global South and the long-term consequences that the Cold War had on nations struggling to emerge from colonialism.”
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“a robust critique of existing approaches to the topic and a substantial survey of the activities of the Phoenicians and their cultural legacy across the Mediterranean world, with a particular focus on the eighth and seventh centuries BC, traditionally referred to by classicists as the ‘orientalizing period.'”
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“To the scholarly reader, The Undocumented Americans offers an implicit (and occasionally explicit) provocation: portray us in our full humanity.”
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“It is the questions—Did they model themselves on pícaros? What kind of freedom did they seek? What drove them to fraud?—that make Fugitive Freedom great.”
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“The success of this volume is not limited to the fascinating subject matter and its attractive angle on information as a field of inquiry, to the impressive breadth of discussion, or even the quality of the individual contributions.”
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“The contributors to this volume continue to examine global as well as local changes in the Atlantic World and demonstrate the continuing resonance of the second slavery framework and how it might be expanded to include areas beyond the U.S., Cuba, and Brazil.”
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“Contributors with multidisciplinary backgrounds in history, anthropology, and geography examine the Triple Frontier region where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay come together in a profusion of liquid monuments.”
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“Westermann’s work focuses on the use of alcohol by the German SS and police forces in the occupied East [where] alcohol was used to celebrate, bond comrades and built group solidarity, and reinforce masculine identity.”
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“This book seeks to complicate and challenge elite narratives about the 1948 War.”
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“One of the many virtues of Butterwick’s book is that, by complicating the picture on the basis of deep and up-to-date research, the work will facilitate the teaching of eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania to Anglophone students.”
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“Beyond the Steppe Frontier sheds new light on the history of the Sino-Russian border by its effort to consider the varied perspectives of its inhabitants.”
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“They make visible the connecting role that aguardiente or crude rum played between the eastern and western sides of the peninsula during the nineteenth century.”
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“…vividly documenting a complicated woman and her relationships.”
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“Enemy of Mankind is readable, engaging, and demonstrates the uses of contingency in historical writing.”
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“The trials and tribulations surrounding the evolution and erosion of the Chinese streets of Calcutta have hardly received importance in the popular historical narrative of the city, irrespective of the sustained curiosity regarding the lives of the Chinatowns. A street’s role in constructing a spatial identity often separates a locality from another, but it certainly…
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“a restatement of basic principles of long-standing practice”
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“a fitting tribute to Lewis’s scholarship”
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“a new addition to the history of the Partition of India that attempts to demystify the intersectionality of colonial education policy, communal identity formation, class and gender politics, and the rise of religious nationalism in undivided Bengal”
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“Florvil’s coinage of “quotidian intellectual” signifies the importance of challenging what scholars typically think of as “the archive” and broadening what sources, objects, and indeed subjects warrant academic attention.”
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“Ostenaco, Mai, and Reynolds offer three striking examples of the many and varied meanings of empire in the eighteenth-century.”
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