Books by Fellows

Unearthing the legal history of racial identity, Ariela Gross’s book examines the paradoxical and often circular relationship of race and the perceived capacity for citizenship in American society. This book reminds us that the imaginary connection between racial identity and fitness for citizenship remains potent today and continues to impede racial justice and equality.

The story of Texas’s impact on American sports culture during the civil rights and second-wave feminist movements, this book offers a new understanding of sports and society in the state and the nation as a whole.

Steven W. Hackel’s groundbreaking biography, Junípero Serra: California’s Founding Father, is the first to remove Serra from the realm of polemic and place him within the currents of history. On the three-hundredth anniversary of Junípero Serra’s birth, Hackel’s complex, authoritative biography tells the full story of a man whose life and legacies continue to be both celebrated and denounced. Based on exhaustive research and a vivid narrative, this is an essential portrait of America’s least understood founder.

A storm of illiberalism, building in the United States for years, unleashed its destructive force in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. The attack on American democracy and images of mob violence led many to recoil, thinking “That’s not us.” But now we must think again, for Steven Hahn shows in his startling new history that illiberalism has deep roots in our past. 

This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role in the story of America.

Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida’s Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699.

The book examines six particularly fascinating episodes of scientific inquiry and dispute in sixteenth-century London, bringing to life the individuals involved and the challenges they faced. These men and women experimented and invented, argued and competed, waged wars in the press, and struggled to understand the complexities of the natural world. Together their stories illuminate the blind alleys and surprising twists and turns taken as medieval philosophy gave way to the empirical, experimental culture that became a hallmark of the Scientific Revolution.

The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story.

This book uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing practices of removing limbs, uncovering tense moments in which decisions to operate were made. 

In this sweeping saga that spans empires, peoples, and nations, M. Scott Heerman chronicles the long history of slavery in the heart of the continent and traces its many iterations through law and social practice.

Noah Heringman maintains that British literary culture was fundamentally shaped by many of the same forces that created geology as a science in the period 1770–1820. He shows that landscape aesthetics―the verbal and social idiom of landscape gardening, natural history, the scenic tour, and other forms of outdoor “improvement”―provided a shared vernacular for geology and Romanticism in their formative stages.

Using more than a thousand eyewitness accounts, Liberty Is Sweet explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers.

The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate.

Arguing that the commercial stage depended on the unprecedented demographic growth and commercial vibrancy of London to fuel its own development, Jean E. Howard posits a particular synergy between the early modern stage and the city in which it flourished.

The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. In this Pulitzer prize-winning, critically acclaimed addition to the series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era when the United States expanded to the Pacific and won control over the richest part of the North American continent

Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century—and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today.

Herbert E. Bolton (1870–1953), a leading historian of the American West, Mexico, and Latin America, helped establish the reputation of the University of California and the Bancroft Library in the eyes of the world and was influential among historians during his lifetime, but interest in his ideas waned after his death. Now, more than a century after Bolton began to investigate the Mexican archives, Albert L. Hurtado explores his life against the backdrop of the cultural and political controversies of his day.

The Great Ocean draws on hundreds of documented voyages—some painstakingly recorded by participants, some only known by archeological remains or indigenous memory—as a window into the commercial, cultural, and ecological upheavals following Cook’s exploits, focusing in particular on the eastern Pacific in the decades between the 1770s and the 1840s.

In Priest of Nature, historian Rob Iliffe introduces readers to Newton the religious animal, deepening our understanding of the relationship between faith and science at a formative moment in history and thought.

Aloha America reveals the role of hula in legitimating U.S. imperial ambitions in Hawai’i. Hula performers began touring throughout the continental United States and Europe in the late nineteenth century. These “hula circuits” introduced hula, and Hawaiians, to U.S. audiences, establishing an “imagined intimacy,” a powerful fantasy that enabled Americans to possess their colony physically and symbolically. Meanwhile, in the early years of American imperialism in the Pacific, touring hula performers incorporated veiled critiques of U.S. expansionism into their productions.

In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light.

In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O’odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants’ own accounts, prize-winning author Karl Jacoby brings this perplexing incident and tumultuous era to life to paint a sweeping panorama of the American Southwest, a world far more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous than the traditional portrayals of the Old West.

The range of poetic invention that occurred in Renaissance English literature was vast, from the lyric eroticism of the late sixteenth century to the rise of libertinism in the late 17th century. Heather James argues that Ovid, as the poet-philosopher of literary innovation and free speech, was the galvanizing force behind this extraordinary level of poetic creativity. 

This book argues that sixteenth-century European encounters with the newly discovered Mexicans (in the Aztec Empire) and the newly dominant Ottoman Empire can only be understood in relation to the cultural and intellectual changes wrought by the Reformation. Carina L. Johnson chronicles the resultant creation of cultural hierarchy.