The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Giancarlo Casale. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780195377828 Enter the Ottomans: The Expansion of the Narrative of Exploration It can be argued that the Age of Exploration’s narrative was shanghaied by Western Europe and their interactions in the Atlantic world.  It was nothing personal to the global community as…

Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum. James Cuno. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN 9780226126777 This essay is a part of our series, Graduate Students and The Middle Ground Journal. It is impossible to argue with James Cuno’s title premise: Museums Matter. Of course they do. Museums, especially the big landmark cultural and scientific…

Keeping My Hope. Christopher Huh. Delaware, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013. ISBN: 9781479348831 When I learned that a 14-year-old author had created a graphic novel about the Holocaust I ordered a copy of the book immediately. I doubted, however, that a young person would have enough historical knowledge or possess the emotional maturity to successfully…

Ideas and Art in Asian Civilizations: India, China, and Japan. Kenneth R. Stunkel.  Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2012. ISBN: 9780765625403 This book is designed to serve as a general guide to the cultural history of India, China, and Japan. Following the introduction (pp. ix-xiii), the main part of the book has five sections. Section 1 discusses basic…

The Banana: Empires, Trade Wars, and Globalization. James Wiley. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780803215771 James Wiley provides a much-needed and thorough overview of the so-called “Banana War” of the 1990s. Before Wiley’s publication, scholars lacked any comprehensive work on the subject. In fact, most works on “banana wars” focused upon regional conflicts…

In the Memory of the Map: A Cartographic Memoir. Christopher Norment. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. ISBN: 1609380770 This essay is a part of our series, Graduate Students and The Middle Ground Journal. In the Memory of the Map, Norment writes, “is a ‘cartographic psychology,’” a combination of memoir and map designed to contemplate…

Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania. Beverly C. Tomek. New York and London: New York University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780814783481 The author Beverly C.Tomek is a historian at Wharton County Junior College, Texas and in her book she introduces that Pennsylvania provides a comprehensive lens to view the determinants of the…

Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. Miranda Frances Spieler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780674062870 Miranda Frances Spieler describes French Guiana as a place “where human traces on the land tended to vanish.” (2) In her monograph examining French Guiana’s colonial past from 1789–1871, Spieler attempts to recover those traces that have eluded…

Review of Documentaries: Brad Lichstenstein, As Goes Janesville; Sasha Reuther, Brothers on the Line. As Goes Janesville. Brad Lichstenstein, director. New York: Cinema Guild, 2012. Documentary film. Brothers on the Line. Sasha Reuther, director. New York: Cinema Guild, 2012. Documentary film. This essay is a part of our series, Graduate Students and The Middle Ground Journal. What is…

Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History. Edited by Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. ISBN 9780857452993 “There is a need for a coherent method of approach to the study of massacre in all its ramifications,” write editors Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan in the introduction to…