History Faculty Books

Follow

• 

  From Biscuits to Lane Cake: Emma Rylander Lane’s Some Good Things to Eat Edited by Evan A. Kutzler.

  Evan A. Kutzler

  When the Lane cake, named after Emma Rylander Lane (1856-1904), appeared in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the boozy Southern dessert was at peak popularity. Yet the culinary artist behind the cake had fallen into obscurity. From Biscuits to Lane Cake recovers Lane's biography, as well as the recipes she published in Some Good Things to Eat (1898) and the Columbus Enquirer-Sun. Born in Americus, Georgia, and left fatherless in the American Civil War, Lane spent most of her life living, studying, and managing a household in Southwest Georgia. While in Clayton, Alabama, and Columbus, Georgia, she drew on the diverse culinary heritage of the U.S. South as she won cooking demonstration competitions, published a cookbook, and taught cooking classes. The family's move from the U.S. South to Mexico, alongside a tragedy there, cut short her fame. By recovering the life story of Emma Rylander Lane, From Biscuits to Lane Cake reveals the Georgia backstory of Alabama's official state dessert. Lane's recipes-from biscuits, wafers, and loaf cakes to salads, cordials, and holiday favorites-show that her expertise went far beyond the bourbon-infused dessert that bears her married name.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  The Kalamazoo Automobilist

  David O. Lyon

  The year is 1891 and Kalamazoo inventor J. B. Rhodes is tinkering with his most impressive creation yet––an operable steam wagon that could be propelled down the streets of Kalamazoo, Michigan without the aid of horses. Steam-powered vehicles had traveled the roads in other towns as early as 1805, but Rhodes‚ wagon holds a special place in history as Kalamazoo's first "horseless carriage," marking the very beginning of a frenzy that some called "horseless-carriageitis." By the turn of the century, new vehicles began arriving in the city that could carry citizens about with the proclaimed "speed of Pegasus." Soon to follow would be the autos of the Blood brothers, the Fuller family, Frank Burtt, and the brothers-in-law, Frank Lay and Henry Lane. The initial success of these men was followed by despair of those that tried and failed in the business and the inevitable fraudulent schemes that spring up in any arena where the stakes are high and there is money to be made.

  Car Histories Included: Barley, Blood, Cannon, Checker, Cornelian, Dort, Greyhound, Handley, Handley-Knight, Kalamazoo trucks, Kalamazoo-Rail, Lane trucks, Michigan, Pennant cab, Reed tractor, Roamer, States, and Wolverine.

  The Kalamazoo Automobilist describes the town's role in this unfolding drama––from Michigan Buggy's rise and fall to the birth and subsequent death of the city‚s reputation as home of the beloved Checker taxi cab––demonstrating that at one time, Kalamazoo was a formidable contender as a hub of automotive power. This is the story of one hundred years in the history of a small Midwestern town, and the part it played in an invention that changed the world: the automobile.

• 

  For Shade and For Comfort: Democratizing Horticulture in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest

  Cheryl Lyon-Jenness

  For Shade and for Comfort explores the unprecedented burst of horticulture interest in the nineteenth-century, and documents its influence on midwestern domestic landscapes. With its careful portrayal of actual ornamental plant use and its examination of nineteenth-century horticultural advice literature and nursery and seed trades, For Shade and for Comfort will appeal to rural, cultural, and environmental historians of the midwest, and those readers who simply love horticulture and gardening.

• 

  More than a Skeleton

  Paul Maier

  Joshua Ben-Yosef attracts a huge following. He was born in Nazareth to parents name Mary and Joseph and speaks more than a dozen languages―fluently and without accent. His words ripple with wisdom and authority. And the crowds that follow him are enthralled as he heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, casts out demons, and even raises the dead.

  Is Dr. Merton, the well-known leader and author of end-times books, correct about the return of Christ? It seems everyone is a believer in this “Messiah”―including Jonathan Weber’s wife, Shannon―especially when Joshua performs the ultimate sign by raising a disciple from the dead. Plagued by skepticism, Jonathan faces the ultimate challenge in uncovering whether this is the actual return of Christ of the most devious betrayal ever carried out.

• 

  Eusebius: The Church History

  Paul L. Maier

  Often called the "Father of Church History," Eusebius was the first to trace the rise of Christianity during its crucial first three centuries from Christ to Constantine. Our principal resource for earliest Chrisitianity, The Church History presents a panorama of apostles, church fathers, emperors, bishops, heroes, heretics, confessors, and martyrs.

  This paperback edition includes Paul L. Maier's clear and precise translation, historical commentary on each book in The Church History, and numerous maps, illustrations, and photographs. Coupled with helpful indexes and the Loeb numbering system, these features promise to liberate Eusebius from previous outdated and stilted works, creating a new standard primary resource for readers interested in the early history of Christianity.

• 

  The Constantine Codex

  Paul L. Maier

  Harvard Professor Jonathan Weber is finally enjoying a season of peace when a shocking discovery thrusts him into the national spotlight once again. While touring monasteries in Greece, Jon and his wife Shannon-a seasoned archaeologist-uncover an ancient biblical manuscript containing the lost ending of Mark and an additional book of the Bible. If proven authentic, the codex could forever change the way the world views the holy Word of God. As Jon and Shannon work to validate their find, it soon becomes clear that there are powerful forces who don't want the codex to go public. When it's stolen en route to America, Jon and Shannon are swept into a deadly race to find the manuscript and confirm its authenticity before it's lost forever.

• 

  At war: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

  Edwin A. Martini

  The country's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its interventions around the world, and its global military presence make war, the military, and militarism defining features of contemporary American life. The armed services and the wars they fight shape all aspects of life--from the formation of racial and gendered identities to debates over environmental and immigration policy. Warfare and the military are ubiquitous in popular culture. At War offers short, accessible essays addressing the central issues in the new military history--ranging from diplomacy and the history of imperialism to the environmental issues that war raises and the ways that war shapes and is shaped by discourses of identity, to questions of who serves in the U.S. military and why and how U.S. wars have been represented in the media and in popular culture.

• 

  Proving Grounds: Militarized Landscapes, Weapons Testing, and the Environmental Impact of U.S. Bases

  Edwin A. Martini

  Proving Grounds brings together a wide range of scholars across disciplines and geographical borders to deepen our understanding of the environmental impact that the U.S. military presence has had at home and abroad. The essays in this collection survey the environmental damage caused by weapons testing and military bases to local residents, animal populations, and landscapes, and they examine the military’s efforts to close and repurpose bases—often as wildlife reserves. Together they present a complex and nuanced view that embraces the ironies, contradictions, and unintended consequences of U.S. militarism around the world. In complicating our understanding of the American military’s worldwide presence, the essayists also reveal the rare cases when the military is actually ahead of the curve on environmental regulation compared to the private sector. The result is the most comprehensive examination to date of the U.S. military’s environmental footprint—for better or worse—across the globe.

• 

  Agent Orange : History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty

  Edwin A. Martini

  Taking on what one former U.S. ambassador called "the last ghost of the Vietnam War," this book examines the far-reaching impact of Agent Orange, the most infamous of the dioxin-contaminated herbicides used by American forces in Southeast Asia. Beginning in the early 1960s, when chemical defoliants were first deployed in Vietnam, Edwin A. Martini looks for answers to a host of still unresolved questions. What did chemical manufacturers and American policymakers know about the effects of dioxin on human beings, and when did they know it? How much do scientists and doctors know even today? Was the use of Agent Orange a form of chemical warfare? What can, and should, be done for U.S. veterans, Vietnamese victims, and others around the world who believe they have medical problems caused by Agent Orange?

• 

  Invisible Enemies : the American War On Vietnam, 1975-2000

  Edwin Anton Martini

  Beginning where most histories of the Vietnam War end, Invisible Enemies examines the relationship between the United States and Vietnam following the American pullout in 1975. Drawing on a broad range of sources, from White House documents and congressional hearings to comic books and feature films, Edwin Martini shows how the United States continued to wage war on Vietnam "by other means" for another twenty-five years. In addition to imposing an extensive program of economic sanctions, the United States opposed Vietnam’s membership in the United Nations, supported the Cambodians, including the Khmer Rouge, in their decade-long war with the Vietnamese, and insisted that Vietnam provide a "full accounting" of American MIAs before diplomatic relations could be established. According to Martini, such policies not only worked against some of the stated goals of U.S. foreign policy, they were also in opposition to the corporate economic interests that ultimately played a key role in normalizing relations between the two nations in the late 1990s.

  Martini reinforces his assessment of American diplomacy with an analysis of the "cultural front"—the movies, myths, memorials, and other phenomena that supported continuing hostility toward Vietnam while silencing opposing views of the war and its legacies. He thus demonstrates that the "American War on Vietnam" was as much a battle for the cultural memory of the war within the United States as it was a lengthy economic, political, and diplomatic campaign to punish a former adversary.

• 

  Brown and Golden Memories: Western Michigan University's First Century

  Larry Massie

• 

  Kalamazoo, the Place Behind the Products

  Larry B. Massie and Peter J. Schmitt

  Kalamazoo: The place behind the Products. In this history's rendering, authors Larry Massie and Peter Schmitt give special attention to wonderfully diverse products of business and industry that have, through the years, flowed "From Kalamazoo-Direct to You," in the words of the old advertising slogan.

• 

  Adeline and Julia

  Robert Meyers and Janet Coryell

  The keeping of journals and diaries became an almost everyday pastime for many Americans in the nineteenth century. Adeline and Julia Graham, two young women from Berrien Springs, Michigan, were both drawn to this activity, writing about the daily events in their lives, as well as their 'grand adventures.' These are fascinating, deeply personal accounts that provide an insight into the thoughts and motivation of two sisters who lived more than a century ago. Adeline began keeping a diary when she was sixteen, from mid-1880 through mid-1884; through it we see a young woman coming of age in this small community in western Michigan. Paired with Adeline's account is her sister Julia's diary, which begins in 1885 when she sets out with three other young women to homestead in Greeley County, Kansas, just east of the Colorado border. It is a vivid and colorful narrative of a young woman's journey into America's western landscape.

• 

  An Introduction to Korean Culture

  Andrew C. Nahm and John H. Koo

  This book is intended to meet the needs of the general reader. Major aspects of traditional, as well as modern Korean culture are discussed reputable scholars specializing in particular fields, and each chapter is prepared specifically to introduce a particular aspect of culture. A brief survey of Korean history and other cultural information are provided to enable the reader to fully appreciate the roots of Korean culture and the ways in which it has grown and transformed throughout the ages. For those who wish to continue their quest for greater knowledge, a selected bibliography is provided at the end of each chapter. Illustrations.

• 

  Between Lipany and White Mountain: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Modern Bohemian History in Modern Czech Scholarship

  James Palmitessa

  This book presents twelve essays by Czech historians on the history of the Czech lands from the middle of the fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, previously published in Czech, which appear here for the first time in English.

• 

  Edge of Empire: Documents of Michilimackinac, 1671-1716

  Joseph L. Peyser and Jose Antonio Brandão.

  Edge of Empire provides both an overview and an intensely detailed look at Michigan's Fort Michilimackinac at a very specific period of history. While the introduction offers an overview of the French fur trade, of the place of Michilimackinac in that network, and of what Michilimackinac was like in the years up to 1716, the body of the book is comprised of sixty-one French-language documents, now translated into English. Collected from archives in France, Canada, and the United States, the documents identify many of the people involved in the trade and reveal a great deal about the personal and professional relations among people who traded.

• 

  The Life And Times Of Goldsworthy

  Dale Porter, O. M. Brack Jr., and Gay W. Brack

  Goldsworthy Gurney trained as a surgeon in Cornwall but moved to London in 1820 to participate in the chemistry revolution led by Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday. Successful as an inventor of laboratory equipment, lighting fixtures, and ventilating systems, he failed to convert his pioneering designs for steam locomotion into commercial success. His career illuminates the social and scientific communities that flourished alongside or under the shadow of Davy, Faraday, and Stephenson.

• 

  Thames Embankment

  Dale H. Porter

  Any large-scale construction project is a complex of contingencies, pitting the volatility of nature against human ingenuity, and setting the discord of human nature against itself. In The Thames Embankment, Dale H. Porter explores the tangled history of a monumental venture in Victorian London, telling with wit and authority the stories of those involved in and affected by this rough-and-tumble process, from mudlarks and wharfingers to prime ministers and lords. The embankment of the Thames River is often considered the final element of the London Main Drainage, a great engineering project that carried the sewage of the crowded metropolis down the valley and reduced the toxic pollution of the river and surrounding neighborhoods. But the Embankment, whose construction took almost fifty years from concept to completion, achieved fame in its own right, as an immense, expensive, and successful event that reflected the cultural ecology of Victorian society. In this richly detailed and multifaceted study, Dale H. Porter reveals the intricate weave of values and practices---environmental, political, economic, technological, and aesthetic---that made possible the planning and building of these structures that altered and became a permanent part of the London riverscape. Above all, The Thames Embankment shows how innovations in technology, in environmental assessment, and in public policy formations not only lead to public works projects but are, in turn, stimulated and shaped by them.

• 

  Traveling the Beaten Trail: Charles Tait's Charges to Federal Grand Juries, 1822-1825

  Paul M. Pruitt Jr., David I. Durham, and Sally E. Hadden

  Preface and acknowledgments --
  Charles Tait : a biographical sketch / Paul M. Pruitt, Jr. and David I. Durham --
  Exhibition, exhortation, example : Judge Tait's antebellum grand jury charges and legal problems on the frontier / Sally E. Hadden --
  1822 grand jury charge / transcribed by Sarah Elizabeth Kelly --
  1824 grand jury charge / transcribed by Samantha Chandler --
  1825 grand jury charge / transcribed by Paul M. Pruitt, Jr. --
  Appendix 1: Facsimile of 1825 grand jury charge --
  Appendix 2: Charles Tait's lawbooks --
  Index

• 

  Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

  Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson

  A penetrating account of how science, perhaps above all other human endeavors, has shaped --and been shaped by --the world that we inhabit today. Servants of Nature explores the fascinating interaction between scientific practice and public life from antiquity to the present. The authors reveal how, in Asia, Europe, and the New World, advances in science have been closely allied to changes in three distinct areas of society: the institutions that sustain science; the moral, religious, political, and philosophical sensibilities of scientists themselves; and the goal of the scientific enterprise. The book proceeds to trace how the bodies that shape scientific tradition and guide innovation have acquired their authority. And in conclusion the authors consider how scientific goals have changed, as they examine the relationship between science, the military, and industry in modern times. Servants of Nature probes the culture of science from its origins to the present and promises to be an indispensable contribution to the history of science.

• 

  With C.S. Nicolăescu-Plopșor through the ages : an archaeological memoir

  Lucian Rosu

• 

  Ancient Roots of Romanian History

  Lucian Rosu and William H. Peck

  Editors:

  Carson Leftwich - Western Michigan University

  Florin Curta - Western Michigan University