UCSB History faculty publish eight new books in 2008.

Alumni and graduate students have been prolific as well.

Update: See also this 10/6/08 UCSB press release.

Update 2: Some 2008 graduate student and alumni publications added at bottom, as well as links to our 2007 and 2009-10 publications.

UCSB History faculty have been busy publishing new and innovative historical research. Here are some of the most recent titles.

(Note about the photo: Prof. Cohen’s book was not available; the photographer inadvertently switched Prof. Miescher’s Africa after Gender and Prof. Sonnino’s Mazarin’s Quest in the 2007 and 2008 photos.)

  • Patricia Cohen‘s latest book (with co-authors Timothy J. Gilfoyle and Helen L. Horowitz) is The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Read more at the Chicago Press web site. The book is reviewed in the June 1, 2008 New York Times Sunday Book Review.
  • Pekka Hamalainen’s new book is The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008). Hamalainen challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Read more at Amazon.com. The Comanche Empire is reviewed in the New York Review of Books.
  • Mary Hancock‘s latest book is The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai (Indiana University Press, 2008). Prof. Hancock, a professor of anthropology and of history, explores the spaces of public memory in the southern Indian city of Chennai, a former colonial port now poised to become a center for India’s new economy of information technology, export processing, and back-office services. She grapples with the questions of how people in Chennai remember and represent their history, and with the political and economic contexts and implications of those memory practices. (from a Nov. 24, 2008 UCSB press release). Read more at the Indiana University Press web site.
  • Toshi Hasegawa has co-edited (with Kazuhiko Togo) the new volume East Asia’s Haunted Present: Historical Memories and the Resurgence of Nationalism (Praeger Security International, 2008). This collection of essays by leading scholars from Japan, China, South Korea, and the United States examines how and why bitter historical memories have resurfaced in recent years as freshly virulent and contentious issues between Japan and its neighbors. Read more at the Praeger web site; amazon.com page.
  • Carol Lansing‘s latest book is Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes (Cornell University Press, 2008). Lansing addresses the emergence of the state and the centrality of gender categories in this wide-ranging and immensely stimulating cultural history of grief in medieval Italian cities. Read more at the Cornell Press web site. This book was awarded the AHA’s Marraro prize (UCSB History News item).
  • Patrick McCray‘s latest book is Keep Watching the Skies!: The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age (Princeton University Press, 2008). McCray examines the citizen-scientists who helped professional astronomers by providing critical and otherwise unavailable information about the first satellites. Download a free excerpt or read more at Amazon.com. McCray’s book was selected as “Book of the Week” by Publisher’s Weekly in May 2008.
  • Paul Sonnino‘s latest book is Mazarin’s Quest: the Congress of Westphalia and the Coming of the Fronde (HarvardUniversity Press, 2008), which examines the diplomatic negotiations that took place in Westphalia from 1643 to 1648, which brought an end to the agonizing civil and religious conflict of the Thirty Years’ War. The publisher writes: Sonnino steps back from myriad historical readings of Westphalia to take the diplomats’ intentions and interactions strictly on their own terms. He places the reader alongside the pivotal figure of French minister Jules Cardinal Mazarin as he maneuvers for gain. The narrative thus offers a firsthand experience of the negotiations as they played out, as well as a penetrating look into the character, personality, and ideas of the crafty cardinal. Although Mazarin acquired the province of Alsace—making him a hero to French nationalists—he had a much more successful peace within his grasp, but lost it when he insisted on annexing the Spanish Low Countries. Sonnino also offers a new interpretation of the origins of the Fronde, linking the French domestic revolt to foreign policy, in Mazarin’s failure to secure peace with Spain.
    Based on unprecedented archival documentation, Mazarin’s Quest provides an original and illuminating look at one of the most complicated diplomatic gatherings of all time. read more at Amazon.com.
  • From the archives: News item about five 2007 faculty publications.


We also have some graduate student and alumni publications to announce:

  • Justin Bengry, “Courting the Pink Pound: Men Only and the Queer Consumer, 1935–39”; History Workshop Journal, 2009. (OUP reprint)
  • Erik Esselstrom just published his first book, Crossing Empire’s Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia (U of Hawai’i Press, 2008). The book explores the role of the consular police in the development of the Japanese empire in Korea and China from 1880 to 1945. amazon.com page Erik is now assistant professor of Japanese history at the University of Vermont. UVM faculty page
  • Mark Hendrickson (PhD 2004, Furner): “Gender Research as Labor Activism: The Women’s Bureau in the New Era,” Journal of Policy Historyl (Fall 2008)
  • Tryntje Helfferich (PhD 2003 Sonnino), Thirty Years War: An Anthology of Sources (Hackett Publishing)
  • Elizabeth Shermer, “Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor,” in: Journal of American History, December 2008 (12/08 JAH preview).
  • Nancy Stockdale (PhD 2000), Colonial Encounters among English and Palestinian Women 1800-1947 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007), with reviews in the American Historical Review, H-Albion (June 2008) and the Arab Studies Quarterly, which writes the following:
    "Nancy L. Stockdale set out to investigate unexplored areas of English encounters with Palestinians in the 19th century and early 20th century. Her main focus is on meanings and representations of the other or how English women "othered" Palestinian women. The British comers to Palestine used their knowledge of the Holy Land and played an active role in the imperial attempt to disseminate a dominant English culture. She explores how English women in their writings about Palestinian girls and women contributed to a larger pseudo-Orientalist imagery of an untrustworthy and backward people. She establishes how English women assisted in mandating British authority in the region. … Palestinian women as biblical characters who needed to be saved from Muslim Ottoman rule. Stockdale explores how English women used harems, sites, festivals, and clothing to reinforce that notion. Finally, she analyses missionaries’ writings that promoted the belief that Palestinians were backward and desperate, thereby needing western models of schools … etc. Thus, for English women the perception of the Other shaped the discourses of representation that penetrated the local society.
    The imperialist powers shaped a colonized space that resulted in a tragic loss of ethnic and religious diversity in Palestine. There is a history of the west removing emotional, intellectual, and spiritual complexity from Middle Eastern peoples through the process of Orientalism. … The book excels in presenting British women as imperial actors. The book provides a dramatic critique of Orientalists during the 1900-1947 period."
  • Leandra Zarnow, "Braving Jim Crow to Save Willie McGee: Bella Abzug, the Legal Left, and Civil Rights Innovation, 1948-51," Law & Social Inquiry, Fall 2008. This article received the 2007 graduate student paper prize from Law & Social Inquiry.

From the archives

jwilee 22.ix.08; hm 10/8/08, hm 11/30/08, 12/3, 12/10, 3/24/09, 9/25/09, 5/3/10, 3/5/12