Books by Fellows

Working across a range of genres, Sarkar theorizes “possible knowledge” as an intellectual paradigm crafted in and through literary form. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton marshalled the capacious concept of the “possible,” defined by Philip Sidney as what “may be and should be,” to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality. 

In See America First, Marguerite Shaffer chronicles the birth of modern American tourism between 1880 and 1940, linking tourism to the simultaneous growth of national transportation systems, print media, a national market, and a middle class with money and time to spend on leisure.

In Trying Biology, Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the importance of timing: the Scopes trial occurred at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across the country.

In this book a leading historian reveals how Tudor kings and queens sought to enhance their authority by presenting themselves to best advantage. Kevin Sharpe offers the first full analysis of the verbal and visual representations of Tudor power, embracing disciplines as diverse as art history, literary studies, and the history of consumption and material culture.

From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, slave insurrections have been understood as emblematic rejections of enslavement, the most powerful and, perhaps, the only way for slaves to successfully challenge the brutal system they endured. In The World That Fear Made, Jason T. Sharples orients the mirror to those in power who were preoccupied with their exposure to insurrection. 

In this intricately crafted history, Tamara Venit Shelton chronicles the dynamic systems of knowledge, therapies, and materia medica crossing between China and the United States from the eighteenth century to the present.

The histories told about American Indian and European encounters on the frontiers of North America are usually about cultural conflict. This book takes a different tack by looking at how much Indians and Europeans had in common. In six chapters, this book compares Indian and European ideas about land, government, recordkeeping, international alliances, gender, and the human body.

An unprecedented literary landmark: the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to the present. In a narrative of immense scope and fascination, here are more than 250 female writers, including the famous—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison, among others—and the little known, from the early American bestselling novelist Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan Glaspell.

A brilliant assault on many of our deepest assumptions, Permanent Revolution argues that far from being driven by a new strain of secular philosophy, the British Enlightenment is a story of transformation and reversal of the Protestant tradition from within.

A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas that are a support for the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created the city. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian Carl Smith explores this concept through an insightful examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s.

Through much of the 20th century, federal policy toward Indians sought to extinguish all remnants of native life and culture. That policy was dramatically confronted in the late 1960s when a loose coalition of hippies, civil rights advocates, Black Panthers, unions, Mexican-Americans, Quakers and other Christians, celebrities, and others joined with Red Power activists to fight for Indian rights. In Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power, Sherry Smith offers the first full account of this remarkable story.

In Friends and Strangers, John Smolenski argues that Pennsylvania’s early history can best be understood through the lens of creolization—the process by which Old World habits, values, and practices were transformed in a New World setting. Unable simply to transplant English political and legal traditions across the Atlantic, Quaker leaders gradually forged a creole civic culture that secured Quaker authority in an increasingly diverse colony.

By examining women’s use of language, Terri L. Snyder demonstrates how women resisted and challenged oppressive political, legal, and cultural practices in colonial Virginia. Contending that women’s voices are heard most clearly during episodes of crisis, Snyder focuses on disorderly speech to illustrate women’s complex relationships to law and authority in the seventeenth century.

Translation was central to Old English literature as we know it. Most Old English literature, in fact, was either translated or adapted from Latin sources, and this is the first full-length study of Anglo-Saxon translation as a cultural practice. This ‘culture of translation’ was characterized by changing attitudes towards English: at first a necessary evil, it can be seen developing increasing authority and sophistication.

A revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science.

The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement.

A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science.

Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity.

A microhistory of a never-married English gentlewoman named Elizabeth Isham, this book centres on an extremely rare piece of women’s writing - a recently discovered 60,000-word spiritual autobiography held in Princeton’s manuscript collections that she penned around 1639.

This book examines the cultural impact of neurological experiments on late-Victorian Gothic romances by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells and others. Novels like Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde expressed the deep-seated fears and visionary possibilities suggested by cerebral localization research, and offered a corrective to the linearity and objectivity of late Victorian neurology.

American Aristocrats is a multigenerational biography of the Andersons of Kentucky, a family of strivers who passionately believed in the promise of America. Drawing on a vast store of Anderson family records, Stout reconstructs their journey to great wealth as they rode out the cataclysms of their time, from financial panics to the Civil War and beyond.

John Styles reveals that ownership of new fabrics and new fashions was not confined to the rich but extended far down the social scale to the small farmers, day laborers, and petty tradespeople who formed a majority of the population. The author focuses on the clothes ordinary people wore, the ways they acquired them, and the meanings they attached to them, shedding new light on all types of attire and the occasions on which they were worn.

Nineteenth-century Brazil’s constitutional monarchy credibly committed to repay sovereign debt, borrowing repeatedly in international and domestic capital markets without default. Yet it failed to lay the institutional foundations that private financial markets needed to thrive. This study shows why sovereign creditworthiness did not necessarily translate into financial development.

Abigail L. Swingen’s insightful study provides a new framework for understanding the origins of the British empire while exploring how England’s original imperial designs influenced contemporary English politics and debates about labor, economy, and overseas trade.

Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as “freedom’s swift-winged angels.” In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to the warships seeking protection for their families from the ravages of slavery. The runaways pressured the British admirals into becoming liberators. As guides, pilots, sailors, and marines, the former slaves used their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war.

An innovative work of biography, social history, and literary analysis, this Pulitzer Prize-winning book presents the story of two men, William Cooper and his son, the novelist James Fennimore Cooper, who embodied the contradictions that divided America in the early years of the Republic. Taylor shows how Americans resolved their revolution through the creation of new social forms and new stories that evolved with the expansion of our frontier.

The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history of the nation’s founding.

At the center of Terrall’s study is René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757)—the definitive authority on natural history in the middle decades of the eighteenth century—and his many correspondents, assistants, and collaborators. Through a close examination of Réaumur’s publications, papers, and letters, Terrall reconstructs the working relationships among these naturalists and shows how observing, collecting, and experimenting fit into their daily lives.

In Devices and Desires, Andrea Tone breaks new ground by showing what it was really like to buy, produce, and use contraceptives during a century of profound social and technological change. A down-and-out sausage-casing worker by day who turned surplus animal intestines into a million-dollar condom enterprise at night; inventors who fashioned cervical caps out of watch springs; and a mother of six who kissed photographs of the inventor of the Pill — these are just a few of the individuals who make up this riveting story.

A century ago, U.S. policy aimed to sever the tribal allegiances of Native Americans, limit their ancient liberties, and coercively prepare them for citizenship. At the same time millions of arriving immigrants sought their freedom by means of that same citizenship. In this subtle, eye-opening new work, Alan Trachtenberg argues that the two developments were, inevitably, juxtaposed: Indians and immigrants together preoccupied the public imagination, and together changed the idea of what it meant to be American.