The Historian’s Toolbox: A Student’s Guide to the Theory and Craft of History,Third Edition. Robert C. Williams. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2012. 230 p. Cloth ISBN: 9780765633262; Paper ISBN: 9780765633279 The Historian’s Toolbox: A Student’s Guide to the Theory and Craft of History is Robert C. Williams’ third edition of this popular introductory text.…

Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture. R.A.R. Edwards. New York: New York University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780814722435 For nearly two centuries, deaf residential schools have been controversial, celebrated as the core of deaf culture at the same time as being torn by educators’ debates over oralism and sign language in…

Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780674022416 Perhaps no single topic in American history is as controversial as the decision to use atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. While scholars have debated the issue, few have looked at it from…

Understanding Central Asia: Politics and Contested Transformations.  Sally M. Cummings. New York: Routledge, 2012.  ISBN: 9780415297035 In this book, Sally Cummings offers a sociopolitical orientation to Central Asia, focusing on five countries: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. In the introduction, the author is quick to point out that the term Central Asia is defined in…

A History of the Modern Middle East, Fifth Edition. William Cleveland and Martin Bunton. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780813348339 This essay is a part of our new series, Graduate Students and The Middle Ground Journal. The fifth volume of William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton’s History of the Modern Middle East is a comprehensive…

Cross-Cultural History and the Domestication of Otherness. Edited by Michal Jan Rozbicki and George O. Ndege. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ISBN: 9780230339972 Historians have labored to define systems of culture and their shifting meanings when those cultures are exposed to foreign concepts.  Michal Jan Rozbicki and George O. Ndege have edited a collected volume of…

History Hunting: A Guide for Fellow Adventurers. James W. Cortada. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2011. 9780765633224 James Cortada leads a deeply interesting life. His professional career combines an obsessive love for history with a flair for business. Cortada’s academic credentials are impeccable and include a Ph.D. in Modern American and European History. His…

Slaves Tell Tales: And Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient Greece. Sara Forsdyke. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780691140056 The study of ancient Greek history has relied heavily on written literature, most of which record contemporary social and political life from the elite class’s point of view, because education is typically…

Selling the Congo: A History of European Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism. Matthew G. Stanard. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780803237773 This essay is a part of our new series, Graduate Students and The Middle Ground Journal In 1998, Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror,…

Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture.  Ziad Fahmy. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780804772129 With the recent revolution in Egypt, Ziad Fahmy’s Ordinary Egyptians Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture is a timely publication that engages the question of agency in Egypt’s 1919 Revolution.  It begins with the premise…

Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies. Edited by Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011. 344p. ISBN: 9780896802827 The analysis of colonial policy frequently addresses invasions, resistance movements, and cultural change. However, few texts have adequately investigated the ways that colonial governments managed…

By Jerome Teelucksingh,  The University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago Global History has been constructed as a research tool which is interdisciplinary, multinational and cross-cultural. Wolf Schafer believed Global History is “the unwritten history of the twentieth history.”  He sought to distinguish between World History and Global History. The latter was viewed as…

Making the Chinese Mexican Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands. Grace Pena Delgado. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. ISBN 9780804778145 Studies of the US-Mexico borderland often note centuries of mingling interests of colonial powers, various tribes, missionaries and Mexicans who lived in the region. However, the Chinese influence in the region is…

Social Movements in Iran: Environmentalism and Civil Society. Simin Fadaee. London: Routledge, 2012. ISBN: 9780415693578 Since 1990s, social scientists have been increasingly engaged in a discussion of the limits of applicability of mainstream sociological theories. This paradigmatic shift from uncritically accepting Western cases as universal and neutral to a demand for global representativeness appears to be…

Review of Documentary “A Perfect Soldier” by John Severson,  Cinema Guild, 2011. The documentary film “A Perfect Soldier,” directed by John Severson, is an emotionally charged exploration of one man’s mission to deactivate landmines in Cambodia, many of which he himself helped plant as a child soldier under the control of the Khmer Rouge followed by the…

Ways of the World: A Brief Global History with Sources Vol.1: To 1500. Robert W. Strayer. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. ISBN: 9780312489175 For every history teacher, the question of what world history textbook to use remains important in as far as encouraging students to see the big picture.  Bearing in mind the overwhelming breadth of…

Is There a Middle East?: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept. Edited by Michael E. Bonnie, Abbas Amant, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2012. ISBN: 9780804775274 Throughout much of its recent history, the West has attempted describe “the Middle East” as a single ethno-geographic unit. Is There a Middle East?: The…

Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. London: Routledge, 2011. ISBN: 9780415169516 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal provide an excellent study of South Asian history in Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. The book, now in its third edition, is a concise overview of modern South Asian history, focusing on…

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History. Jon Thares Davidann and Marc Jason Gilbert. New York: Pearson, 2013. ISBN: 9780205532667 High school AP and college world history teachers looking for a brief but entertaining supplementary text for their classes may want to consider this innovative, accessible, and well-written paperback. The book is thematic and crosses boundaries of space…

Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances. Edited by Matthew N. Schmalz and Peter Gottschalk. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011. ISBN: 9781438433233 Critical study of any subject requires an equally critical examination of the lenses we use to interpret the world. Engaging South Asian Religions; Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances, edited by …

Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires. Martin Shipway. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2008. ISBN: 9780631199687 To explain the process of decolonization in one nation is a difficult task. To describe clearly the patterns to be found in decolonization across the globe is therefore an impressive accomplishment. Martin Shipway successfully…

African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III. 2nd Edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780195189421When constructing the themes for world and Latin American history courses, instructors consistently return to the subject of slavery. For world historians, slavery facilitates massive comparisons of the institution at the…

Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies. Edited by Ozgen Felek and Alexander D. Knysh. Albany: NY: State University of New York Press, 2012. ISBN: 9781438439938 This essay is a part of our new series, Graduate Students and The Middle Ground Journal An outgrowth of a panel presentation at the annual Middle East Studies Association Conference and…

A History of State and Religion in India. Ian Copland, Ian Mabbett, Asim Roy, Kate Brittlebank, and Adam Bowles. New York: Routledge, 2012. ISBN: 9780415580663 This essay is a part of our new series, Graduate Students and The Middle Ground Journal  As the authors acknowledge at the outset, this book is unusual in the field of South…

The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance. Sarita Echavez See. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780816653195 This essay is a part of our new series, Graduate Students and The Middle Ground Journal In the growing body of scholarship on Filipino American cultural productions, a few names continually appear, their literatures rightfully celebrated both…

Frontier Forts of Iowa: Indians, Traders, and Soldiers, 1682-1862. William E. Whittaker, ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. ISBN 1587298317 This essay is a part of our new series, Graduate Students and The Middle Ground Journal  Frontier Forts of Iowa demonstrates the importance of forts in the establishment of Iowa as a state in 1846.…

China in World History. Paul S. Ropp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780195381955 China’s meteoric rise over the last three decades has alternately provoked admiration, alarm, and awe.  Indeed, it appears to be primed to play a major role in global affairs throughout the twenty-first century.  To cite just the two most obvious facts supporting…

Encounters with Witchcraft: Field Notes from Africa. Norman N. Miller. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. ISBN: 9781438443584 The death of European geologist William Hanning intrigued African specialist Norman H. Miller. In 1960, as Miller arrived in East Africa, he read an article about the geologist Hanning, who had mistakenly disturbed the peace of…

New Terrains in Southeast Asian History. By Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee. Athens, Ohio: Center for International Studies, Ohio University Press. 2003. ISBN: 0896802280 After Orientalism  and the nation-state narrative, what is next for writing history in the Southeast Asian region? New Terrains in Southeast Asian History attempts to answer this question by analysing…

Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society. Valerie K. Orlando. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780896802810 What is ‘Third Cinema?’ This central question at the heart of Orlando’s book, Screening Morocco, is complicated by several issues.  Beginning in the 1960s, this loosely-named film movement is more than just about films made in Third…

City, Country, Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History. Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey, eds. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780822958765 City, Country, Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History is an intriguing collection that grew out of a 2001 conference at the University of New Hampshire. That gathering drew critics interested in the spatial dimensions of…

To the last and the largest Empire, To the map that is half unrolled. —Rudyard Kipling, The Native Born This paper is a synopsis of my current research, which explores the European colonial experience in South East Asia through a comparative examination of previously unpublished documents produced by colonial personnel from 1800 through 1914. During…

Africa and the West: A Documentary History, Volume 2: From Colonialism to Independence, 1875 to the Present, Second Edition. William H. Worger, Nancy L. Clark and Edward A. Alpers, editors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780195373134 In the second edition of the documentary compilation Africa and the West, Worger, Clark and Alpers set out…

“Robert Mugabe…What Happened?” a film by Simon Bright, Cinema Guild, 2011.  ISBN: 0781514029. See also: http://cinemaguild.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TCGS&Product_Code=2416 This powerful documentary is really two films in one.  It’s a political history of Zimbabwe from its formation in 1980 on the ashes of Rhodesia, Britain’s breakaway former colony.  This history is told through the rise of Robert Mugabe, the…

Japan in World History. James L. Huffman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780195368086 James Huffman begins and ends his book with a reference to the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, mythological progenitor of the Imperial line from the mists of prehistory. The first reference at the beginning of the book is appropriate in a treatment of…

Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Brett Rushforth. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780807835586 Brett Rushforth’s Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France is a comparative history that examines the magnitude of 17th and 18th century slavery in the French colonies of the Americas…

This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.  ISBN:  9780807872710 It should have become abundantly clear in the years since 9/11 that the imperialist violence highly characteristic of the Bush era – from preemptive war to torture – was not a shameful exception to…