Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France. Naomi Davidson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. ISBN: 978080147831 In Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France, Naomi Davidson has written a compelling and timely history of the official French attempt to “manage” Islam within France since World War I.  This was achieved through something Davidson names as Islam…

Archaeology of Minnesota: The Prehistory of the Upper Mississippi River Region. Guy E. Gibbon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780816679096 This essay is a part of our series, Graduate Students and The Middle Ground Journal. In this ambitious text, Guy Gibbon offers the first comprehensive survey of Minnesota’s 13,000 years of pre-contact history. Gibbon…

The Family: A World History. Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780195338140 One of the latest volumes in Oxford’s New World History series is The Family: A World History, a slim volume designed for use in classrooms.  Both Maynes and Waltner are well-known historians of gender, childhood and family,…

The Rise of the Atlantic Economies. Ralph Davis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. ISBN: 9780801491436 Before the rise of Atlantic history, there was The Rise of the Atlantic Economies. Forty years ago, long before historians had come together to champion the transatlantic perspective as a way to concurrently analyze the early modern periods in Europe…

An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino Sakuzo and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905-1937. Jung-Sun N. Han. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012. ISBN: 9780674065710 Yoshino Sakuzo is understood  to be  one of the most influential liberal intellectuals of Taisho Japan (1912-1926). As a professor in the Faculty of Law of Tokyo University,…

Dying for the Truth: Undercover Inside the Mexican Drug War. The Fugitive Reporters of Blog del Narco. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2013. ISBN: 9781936239573 This essay is a part of our series, Borders in the Classroom. For Full Article: heiskanenreviewReviews2014TheMiddleGroundJournal.org Edited by Benita Heiskanen, Andrae M. Marak, and Jeanne E. Grant (c) 2014 The Middle Ground Journal, Number 8, Spring,…

A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution.  Jeremy D. Popkin. West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. ISBN: 9781405198219 The Age of Revolutions – beginning in 1775 by dissatisfied American colonials subjects and ending in the defeat of liberal European revolutionaries in 1848 – is an era of world-change sweeping in the Modern Era.  Anchoring this time…

Review of Documentary: Breaking the Taboo, a film produced by Sam Branson, Sundog Pictures, 2011, and Narcotráfico para Inocentes: el Narco en México y Quien lo U.S.A. Rafael Barajas. Mexico City: Nostra Ediciones, 2011. ISBN: 9786077972037 This essay is a part of our series, Borders in the Classroom. For U.S. students, there is no narrative that explains…

Major Problems in the History of North American Borderlands. Pekka Hämäläinen and Benjamin H. Johnson, eds. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012. ISBN 0495916927 This essay is a part of our series, Borders in the Classroom. One of the most recent additions to the long-standing series from Wadsworth Cengage Learning, Major Problems in the History of North…

The Pakistan Garrison State: Origins, Evolutions, Consequences, 1947-2011. Ishtiaq Ahmed. Karachi: Oxford University Press Pakistan, 2013. ISBN: 9780199066360 Ishtiaq Ahmed’s latest book is another outstanding piece of scholarship by an erudite scholar. This intellectually stimulating work is an important addition to the corpus of writings on modern and contemporary Pakistan, which by design and default…

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…

Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural interpretation and social intervention. David C. L. Lim and Hiroyuki Yamamoto. London: Routledge, 2012. ISBN: 9780415617635 This collection of essays fits within Routledge’s Media, Culture, and Social Change in Asia series, with a loose focus on the intersection of local media production and consumption.  The book contains eleven essays that…