The goal is to record most books written or edited by the Department of History faculty, instructors, and students.There is a WMU Authors section in Waldo Library, where most of these books can be found in print.
With a few exceptions, we do not have the rights to put the full text of the book online, so there will be a link to a place where you can purchase the book.
If you are a faculty member and have a book you would like to include in the WMU book list, please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.edu/
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Sports in American History: From Colonization to Globalization
Gerald R. Gems, Linda J. Borish, and Gertrud Pfister
Sports in American History: From Colonization to Globalization journeys from the early American past to the present to give students a compelling grasp of the historical evolution of American sporting practices. This text provides students with insights that will allow them to develop new and alternative perspectives, examine sport as a social and cultural phenomenon, generate a better understanding of current sport practices, and consider future developments in sport in American life.
This expansive text is the most comprehensive resource on sport history, providing coverage of sport by historical periods—from the indigenous tribes of premodern America, through colonial societies, to the era of sport in the United States today. Unlike previous sport history texts, Sports in American History examines how women, minorities, and ethnic and religious groups have influenced U.S. sporting culture. This gives students a broader knowledge of the complexities of sport, health, and play in the American experience and how historical factors, such as gender, ethnicity, race, and religion, provide a more complete understanding of sports in American history. The easy-to-follow material is divided into nine chronological chapters starting with sporting practices in colonial America and ending with globalized sport today, making it ideal for a semester-long course. Each chapter includes objectives, an introduction, a summary of the points covered, and discussion questions to help students easily identify and remember the key concepts presented. In addition, the text has the following features:
-An extensive time line of significant sport and nonsport events gives students a handy reference point from which to view the past.
-End-of-chapter discussion questions help students comprehend the material and aid instructors in class preparation.
-Sidebars provide alternative perspectives about sport issues and developments, including international differences in the organization, play, and culture of sport. “People and Places” sidebars offer brief glimpses into key institutions and figures that have affected sport during a particular period.
-Primary documents from each historical period—including newspapers, illustrations, photographs, historical writings, quotations, and posters—are integrated into each chapter to bring the time periods to life for students.
-An extensive bibliography features primary and secondary sources in American sport history.
Sports in American History is unique in its level of detail, broad time frame, and focus on sports and the evolving definitions of physical activity and games. In addition, excerpts from primary documents provide firsthand accounts that will not only inform and fascinate readers but also provide a well-rounded perspective on the historical development of American sport. With sidebars offering an international viewpoint, this book will help students understand how historical events have shaped sport differently in the United States than in other parts of the world.
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Gender in Transition
Marion Gray and Ulrike Gleixner
The late Enlightenment saw an acute transformation of gender definitions in the German cultural areas of Europe, leading to a “polarization” of the sexes. Where early modern cultural norms had once affirmed a multitude of differences within society, modernity was founded on an ideal of equality which, although embraced as universal, in practice applied only to white male citizens. The new dichotomies of gender, socioeconomic status, and race created by this disparity between rhetoric and practice held tremendous social implications for all Germans. Law and science inscribed a new set of morals with gendered virtues and social spheres. Masculinity and femininity came to be understood as opposites based in nature. The transformed gender system fueled an epochal social reordering.
Gender in Transition recounts the innumerable ways in which this drama played out in German-speaking Europe during the transitional period between 1750 and 1830. A cast of accomplished scholars examine the effect of gender in numerous realms of German life, including law, urban politics, marriage, religion, literature, natural science, fashion, and personal relationships.
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Productive Men, Reproductive Women
Marion W. Gray
The debate on the origins of modern gender norms continues unabated across the academic disciplines. This book adds an important and hitherto neglected dimension. Focusing on rural life and its values, the author argues that the modern ideal of separate spheres originated in the era of the Enlightenment. Prior to the eighteenth century, cultural norms prescribed active,interdependent economic roles for both women and men. Enlightenment economists transformed these gender paradigms as they postulated a market exchange system directed exclusively by men. By the early nineteenth century, the emerging bourgeois value system affirmed the new civil society and the market place as exclusively male realms. These standards defined women's options largely as marriage and motherhood.
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Cold War America, 1946 to 1990
Ross Gregory
Examining a time of immense change that called into question some of the most accepted and honored standards, principles, and institutions in the United States, this new volume in the Almanacs of American Life series provides a detailed look at everyday life during the second half of the 20thcentury. Cold War America chronicles all aspects of society during this tumultuous era: changes in the economy, from banking and finance to prices and inflation; trends in entertainment, from popular music to college sports; politics, from policy to scandal; the telecommunications revolution, from the post office to the internet; and much more. Tables provide detailed statistics and information on such things as Academy Award[registered] winners, per capita amount of meat consumed, average cost of college tuition, Vietnam casualties, blizzards, and methods of birth control. Excerpts from important documents of the time include the Twenty-second through Twenty-eighth Amendments to the Constitution; Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas; President Elsenhower's explanation of the origins of the Domino Theory; JFK's inaugural address; and Roe v. Wade. This thorough compilation of information on American life covers the major events of the forty-five year period that was the cold war.
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Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas
Sally E. Hadden
Obscured from our view of slaves and masters in America is a critical third party: the state, with its coercive power. This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, the nature, and the extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes governing slaves throughout the South.
Mining a variety of sources, Sally Hadden presents the views of both patrollers and slaves as she depicts the patrols, composed of "respectable" members of society as well as poor whites, often mounted and armed with whips and guns, exerting a brutal and archaic brand of racial control inextricably linked to post-Civil War vigilantism and the Ku Klux Klan. City councils also used patrollers before the war, and police forces afterward, to impose their version of race relations across the South, making the entire region, not just plantations, an armed camp where slave workers were controlled through terror and brutality.
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A Companion to American Legal History
Sally E. Hadden and Alfred L. Brophy
A Companion to American Legal History presents a compilation of the most recent writings from leading scholars on American legal history from the colonial era through the late twentieth century.
- Presents up-to-date research describing the key debates in American legal history
- Reflects the current state of American legal history research and points readers in the direction of future research
- Represents an ideal companion for graduate and law students seeking an introduction to the field, the key questions, and future research ideas
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Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History
Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter
In Signposts, Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's seminal 1984 work, Ambivalent Legacy, inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history.
Contributors to Signposts explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in Signposts show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South.
Contributors: Alfred L. Brophy, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Laura F. Edwards, James W. Ely Jr., Tim Alan Garrison, Sally E. Hadden, Roman J. Hoyos, Thomas N. Ingersoll, Jessica K. Lowe, Patricia Hagler Minter, Cynthia Nicoletti, Susan Richbourg Parker, Christopher W. Schmidt, Jennifer M. Spear, Christopher R. Waldrep, Peter Wallenstein, Charles L. Zelden. -
Darning the Wear of Time
Miranda Howard Haddock
Minimizing the marks of time on clothing is a formidable challenge. Costumes reflect the cultural, religious, and ethnic elements of society. Maintaining and recording them is an important pursuit to many professionals including anthropologists, archeologists, museum curators, designers, and archivists. Textile preservation and restoration includes a variety of subtopics such as fiber properties, weave structures, light and lighting, pests, and synthetic conservation materials. History, analysis, and complete subject coverage are provided in this work, and will engage the beginner as well as those who are more knowledgeable. Scrupulous research is complemented by the author's keen interest in this specialized arena. Careful attention to detail makes Darning the Wear of Time an invaluable resource and worthy addition to collections.
Survey results, an annotated bibliography, and indexes to bibliography entries make this volume comprehensive, yet readily accessible. Inclusion and indexing of illustrations is a unique feature that increases its value as a hands-on tool. Timely information covering specific aspects of costume conservation, restoration, and documentation make this the ideal vehicle for conveying new developments in these fields. Topics receiving limited attention are made available for those interested in future projects. A thorough and dynamic examination of an intriguing field.
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The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction?
Hank Hanegraaff and Paul L. Maier
People are talking. The DaVinci Code has been on the New York Times best seller list for two years and is raising a variety of responses from Christians and non-Christians alike. Some are outraged and upset by the claims of Dan Brown, while others are left utterly confused and don't know what to believe. Now, with the release of the movie, people are sure to ask even more questions. The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction? explodes the myths of the book and shows the reliability of Scripture, the divinity of Christ, and the historical facts about the Priory of Sion and the Knights Templar. This is the only hands-on, accessible reference guide. The DaVinci Code: Fact or Fiction? even helps you turn debate about the book into an evangelistic opportunity.
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A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley
Lynne Heasley
A Thousand Pieces of Paradise is an ecological history of property and a cultural history of rural ecosystems set in one of Wisconsin's most famous regions, the Kickapoo Valley. While examining the national war on soil erosion in the 1930s, a controversial real estate development scheme, Amish land settlement, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dam project, and Native American efforts to assert longstanding land claims, Lynne Heasley traces the historical development of modern American property debates within ever-more-diverse rural landscapes and cultures. Heasley argues that the way public discourse has framed environmental debates hides the full shape our system of property has taken in rural communities and landscapes. She shows how democratic and fluid visions of property--based on community relationships--have coexisted alongside individualistic visions of property rights. In this environmental biography of a landscape and its people lie powerful lessons for rural communities seeking to understand and reconcile competing values about land and their place in it.
Published in association with the Center for American Places, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Staunton, Virginia. www.americanplaces.org "So much for cookie-cutter stereotypes of the rural Midwest! . . . Highly recommended."--Choice
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Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free
Alexander Jefferson and Lewis H. Carlson
This book is a rare and important gift. One of the few memoirs of combat in World War II by a distinguished African-American flier, it is also perhaps the only account of the African-American experience in a German prison camp.Alexander Jefferson was one of 32 Tuskegee Airmen from the 332nd Fighter Group to be shot down defending a country that considered them to be second-class citizens. A Detroit native, Jefferson enlisted in 1942, trained at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, became a second lieutenant in 1943, and joined one of the most decorated fighting units in the War, flying P51s with their legendary-and feared -red tails.Based in Italy, Jefferson flew bomber escort missions over southern Europe before being shot down in France in 1944. Captured, he spent the balance of the war in Luftwaffe prison camps in Sagan and Moosberg, Germany.In this vividly detailed, deeply personal book, Jefferson writes as a genuine American hero and patriot. It's an unvarnished look at life behind barbed wire- and what it meant to be an African-American pilot in enemy hands. It's also a look at race and democracy in America through the eyes of a patriot who fought to protect the promise of freedom.The book features the sketches, drawings, and other illustrations Jefferson created during his nine months as a kriegie(POW) and Lewis Carlson's authoritative background to the man, his unit, and the fight Alexander Jefferson fought so well.
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History of How the Spaniards Arrived in Peru
Catherine Julien
Catherine Julien's new translation of Titu Cusi Yupanqui's Relasçion de como los Españoles Entraron en el Peru--an account of the Spanish conquest of Peru by the last indigenous ruler of the Inca empire--features student-oriented annotation, facing-page Spanish, and an Introduction that sets this remarkably rich source in its cultural, historical, and literary contexts.
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Reading Inca History
Catherine Julien
At the heart of this book is the controversy over whether Inca history can and should be read as history. Did the Incas narrate a true reflection of their past, and did the Spaniards capture these narratives in a way that can be meaningfully reconstructed? In Reading Inca History,Catherine Julien finds that the Incas did indeed create detectable life histories.
The two historical genres that contributed most to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish narratives about the Incas were an official account of Inca dynastic genealogy and a series of life histories of Inca rulers. Rather than take for granted that there was an Inca historical consciousness, Julien begins by establishing an Inca purpose for keeping this dynastic genealogy. She then compares Spanish narratives of the Inca past to identify the structure of underlying Inca genres and establish the dependency on oral sources. Once the genealogical genre can be identified, the life histories can also be detected.
By carefully studying the composition of Spanish narratives and their underlying sources, Julien provides an informed and convincing reading of these complex texts. By disentangling the sources of their meaning, she reaches across time, language, and cultural barriers to achieve a rewarding understanding of the dynamics of Inca and colonial political history.
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Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations
Mitch Kachun
With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many African Americans began calling for "a day of publick thanksgiving" to commemorate this important step toward freedom. During the ensuing century, black leaders built on this foundation and constructed a distinctive and vibrant tradition through their celebrations of the end of slavery in New York State, the British West Indies, and eventually the United States as a whole. In this revealing study, Mitch Kachun explores the multiple functions and contested meanings surrounding African American emancipation celebrations from the abolition of the slave trade to the fiftieth anniversary of U.S. emancipation. Excluded from July Fourth and other American nationalist rituals for most of this period, black activists used these festivals of freedom to encourage community building and race uplift. Kachun demonstrates that, even as these annual rituals helped define African Americans as a people by fostering a sense of shared history, heritage, and identity, they were also sites of ambiguity and conflict. Freedom celebrations served as occasions for debate over black representations in the public sphere, struggles for group leadership, and contests over collective memory and its meaning. Based on extensive research in African American newspapers and oration texts, this book retraces a vital if often overlooked tradition in African American political culture and addresses important issues about black participation in the public sphere. By illuminating the origins of black Americans' public commemorations, it also helps explain why there have been increasing calls in recent years to make the "Juneteenth" observance of emancipation an American―not just an African American―day of commemoration.
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First Martyr of Liberty
Mitch Kachun
First Martyr of Liberty explores how Crispus Attucks's death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led to his achieving mythic significance in African Americans' struggle to incorporate their experiences and heroes into the mainstream of the American historical narrative. While the other victims of the Massacre have been largely ignored, Attucks is widely celebrated as the first to die in the cause of freedom during the era of the American Revolution. He became a symbolic embodiment of black patriotism and citizenship.
This book traces Attucks's career through both history and myth to understand how his public memory has been constructed through commemorations and monuments; institutions and organizations bearing his name; juvenile biographies; works of poetry, drama, and visual arts; popular and academic histories; and school textbooks. There will likely never be a definitive biography of Crispus Attucks since so little evidence exists about the man's actual life. While what can and cannot be known about Attucks is addressed here, the focus is on how he has been remembered--variously as either a hero or a villain--and why at times he has been forgotten by different groups and individuals from the eighteenth century to the present day.
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Struggling with the Communist Legacy
Patricia V. Klein
The collapse of communism in eastern Europe set off an inevitable chain of political transitions. The abruptness of this change resulted in several stable communist societies' rapid deterioration into chaos and crisis. This text is divided into three sections. Firstly it examines Yugoslavia and the underlying forces that led to its disintegration. Then it presents a view of the Balkan countries immediately after the collapse of communism. And thirdly it focuses on various aspects of post-communist Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
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Through the Years
Roger Kullenberg and David Hager
A Companion to "Looking Back" a Pictorial History of Kalamazoo.
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Living by Inches: the Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons
Evan Kutzler
From battlefields, boxcars, and forgotten warehouses to notorious prison camps like Andersonville and Elmira, prisoners seemed to be everywhere during the American Civil War. Yet there is much we do not know about the soldiers and civilians whose very lives were in the hands of their enemies. Living by Inches is the first book to examine how imprisoned men in the Civil War perceived captivity through the basic building blocks of human experience--their five senses. From the first whiffs of a prison warehouse to the taste of cornbread and the feeling of lice, captivity assaulted prisoners' perceptions of their environments and themselves. Evan A. Kutzler demonstrates that the sensory experience of imprisonment produced an inner struggle for men who sought to preserve their bodies, their minds, and their sense of self as distinct from the fundamentally uncivilized and filthy environments surrounding them. From the mundane to the horrific, these men survived the daily experiences of captivity by adjusting to their circumstances, even if these transformations worried prisoners about what type of men they were becoming.
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Prison Pens: Gender, Memory, and Imprisonment in the Writings of Mollie Scollay and Wash Nelson, 1863-1866
Evan Kutzler and Timothy Williams
Prison Pens presents the memoir of a captured Confederate soldier in northern Virginia and the letters he exchanged with his fiancée during the Civil War. Wash Nelson and Mollie Scollay's letters, as well as Nelson's own manuscript memoir, provide rare insight into a world of intimacy, despair, loss, and reunion in the Civil War South. The tender voices in the letters combined with Nelson's account of his time as a prisoner of war provide a story that is personal and political, revealing the daily life of those living in the Confederacy and the harsh realities of being an imprisoned soldier. Ultimately, through the juxtaposition of the letters and memoir, Prison Pens provides an opportunity for students and scholars to consider the role of memory and incarceration in retelling the Confederate past and incubating Lost Cause mythology. This book will be accompanied by a digital component: a website that allows students and scholars to interact with the volume's content and sources via an interactive map, digitized letters, and special lesson plans.
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Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War
Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini
In Four Decades On, historians, anthropologists, and literary critics examine the legacies of the Second Indochina War, or what most Americans call the Vietnam War, nearly forty years after the United States finally left Vietnam. They address matters such as the daunting tasks facing the Vietnamese at the war's end--including rebuilding a nation and consolidating a socialist revolution while fending off China and the Khmer Rouge--and "the Vietnam syndrome," the cynical, frustrated, and pessimistic sense that colored America's views of the rest of the world after its humiliating defeat in Vietnam. The contributors provide unexpected perspectives on Agent Orange, the POW/MIA controversies, the commercial trade relationship between the United States and Vietnam, and representations of the war and its aftermath produced by artists, particularly writers. They show how the war has continued to affect not only international relations but also the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. Most of the contributors take up matters in the United States, Vietnam, or both nations, while several utilize transnational analytic frameworks, recognizing that the war's legacies shape and are shaped by dynamics that transcend the two countries.
Contributors. Alex Bloom, Diane Niblack Fox, H. Bruce Franklin, Walter Hixson, Heonik Kwon, Scott Laderman, Mariam B. Lam, Ngo Vinh Long, Edwin A. Martini, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Christina Schwenkel, Charles Waugh -
Ottumwa
Michael Lemberger and Wilson J. Warren
Long one of Iowa's most important industrial cities, Ottumwa was established on the banks of the Des Moines River in 1843. The river was both a blessing, providing transportation as well as ice for early meatpacking plants, and a curse, inundating the city with periodic floods until it was tamed in the latter half of the 20th century. This collection of vintage photographs highlights the city's industries and laboring people, the river's role in the shaping of the community, and Ottumwa's unique place in history as the location of the Iowa Coal Palace and Industrial Exhibits of 1890 and 1891 and the Ottumwa Naval Air Station during the World War II era.
