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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 --
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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.
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Ancient Roots of Romanian History
Lucian Rosu and William H. Peck
Editors:
Carson Leftwich - Western Michigan University
Florin Curta - Western Michigan University
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Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany
Eli Rubin
Amnesiopolis explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It focuses particularly on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place -- one defined by pure functionality and rationality -- a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism. Eli Rubin employs methodologies from critical geography, urban history, architectural history, environmental history, and everyday life history to ask whether their experience was a radical break with their personal pasts and the German past. Amnesiopolis asks: can a dramatic change in spatial and material surroundings sever the links of memory that tie people to their old life narratives, and if so, does that help build a new socialist mentality in the minds of historical subjects? The answer is yes and no -- as much as the East German state tried to create a completely new socialist settlement, divorced of any links to the pre-socialist past, the massive construction project uncovered the truth buried -- literally -- in the ground, which was that the urge to colonize the outskirts of Berlin was not new at all. Furthermore, the construction of a new city out of nothing, using repeating, identical buildings, created a panopticon-like effect, giving the Stasi the possibility of more complete surveillance than they previously had.
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Synthetic Socialism: Plastics & Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic
Eli Rubin
Eli Rubin takes an innovative approach to consumer culture to explore questions of political consensus and consent and the impact of ideology on everyday life in the former East Germany. Synthetic Socialism explores the history of East Germany through the production and use of a deceptively simple material: plastic. Rubin investigates the connections between the communist government, its Bauhaus-influenced designers, its retooled postwar chemical industry, and its general consumer population. He argues that East Germany was neither a totalitarian state nor a niche society but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens.
To East Germans, Rubin says, plastic was a high-technology material, a symbol of socialism's scientific and economic superiority over capitalism. Most of all, the state and its designers argued, plastic goods were of a particularly special quality, not to be thrown away like products of the wasteful West. Rubin demonstrates that this argument was accepted by the mainstream of East German society, for whom the modern, socialist dimension of a plastics-based everyday life had a deep resonance.
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Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes
John Saillant
Born in Connecticut, Lemuel Haynes was first an indentured servant, then a soldier in the Continental Army, and, in 1785, an ordained congregational minister. Haynes's writings constitute the fullest record of a black man's religion, social thought, and opposition to slavery in the late-18th and early-19th century. Drawing on both published and rare unpublished sources, John Saillant here offers the first comprehensive study of Haynes and his thought.
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Life Behind Barbed Wire: The Secret World War II Photographs of Angelo M. Spinelli
Angelo Spinelli and Lewis H. Carlson
Sergeant Angelo Spinelli was captured in North Africa by the Germans on Valentine's Day, 1943, and shipped to Stalag IIIB near Furstenburg, Germany. Using cigarettes obtained from the Red Cross, Spinelli bribed a camp guard to procure a Voitlander camera and film. Life behind Barbed Wire features photographs Spinelli took during his time in prison camp. Of the more than one thousand photographs Spinelli risked his life to take, more than one hundred appear in this book. The remarkable photographs, enhanced by Lewis H. Carlson's explanatory text, feature prisoners trading with the guards' combating ticks, lice, and other vermin, preparing meager rations on ingenious cooking contraptions, fighting off boredom by playing baseball, soccer, and football, putting on musical and dramatic theatre presentations, and worshiping in a chapel the prisoners themselves built. These snapshots give us a window on camp life, where catastrophe was normal and normalcy was often catastrophic. In addition, there are dramatic shots of liberation from Stalag IIIA, where Spinelli and some thirty-eight thousand other Allied prisoners had been moved during the final months of the war. Mounted as a traveling exhibit by the National Prisoner of War Museum in Andersonville, Georgia, 92 of these photographs are currently on display at the Italian American Museum in New York City.
