Recent publications

April 2021
Joanne Meyerowitz

  A history of U.S. involvement in late twentieth-century campaigns against global poverty and how they came to focus on women.   A War on Global Poverty provides a fresh account of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization...
September 2023
Carlos Eire

  Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal. In this book, Carlos Eire explores how a culture...
May 2021
Abbas Amanat

  This book explores Iran’s dual engagement with modern Europe: a fear of imperial expansion and the reception of European modernity. By reinventing the Persian royal tradition and by hard diplomatic bargaining, but also by absorbing aspects of European (Farangi) culture, Iranians of the Qajar era...
April 2024
Regina Kunzel

  A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people.   In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure.  Drawing on a collection of previously...
November 2021
Joseph Manning

  Climate change over the past thousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impact on past human societies.  This book explores the link between climate and society in ancient worlds, focusing on the ancient economies of western Eurasia and northern Africa from the fourth...
October 2023
Paola Bertucci

  In 1749, the celebrated French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet set out on a journey through Italy to solve an international controversy over the medical uses of electricity. At the end of his nine-month tour, he published a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian...
March 2021
Paul Bushkovitch

  This revisionist history of succession to the throne in early modern Russia, from the Moscow princes of the fifteenth century to Peter the Great, argues that legal primogeniture never existed: the monarch designated an heir that was usually the eldest son only by custom, not by law. Overturning...
May 2024
Isaac Nakhimovsky

  The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In this book, Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the...
March 2021
Paul Bushkovitch

  This revisionist history of succession to the throne in early modern Russia, from the Moscow princes of the fifteenth century to Peter the Great, argues that legal primogeniture never existed: the monarch designated an heir that was usually the eldest son only by custom, not by law. Overturning...
February 2024
Lauren Benton

  In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces ensured an easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of...