History / General

Race and Renaissance presents the first history of African American life in Pittsburgh after World War II. It examines the origins and significance of the second Great Migration, the persistence of Jim Crow into the postwar years, the second ghetto, the contemporary urban crisis, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the Million Man and Million Woman marches, among other topics.

When Hegel described the Americas as an inferior continent, he was repeating a contention that inspired one of the most passionate debates of modern times. This thesis drew heated responses from politicians, philosophers, publicists, and patriots on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing polemic reached its apex in the late eighteenth century and is far from extinct today. The Dispute of the New World is the definitive study of this debate.

Maria Bucur explores the interactions between the science of eugenics and modernization efforts in Romania between World Wars I and II.

Sidney Weintraub examines the current relationship of Mexico and the United States as one of sustained dependence and dominance. The chapters examine the consequences of this imbalance in six major policy areas: trade; investment and finance; narcotics; energy; migration; and the border.

Acting as an important historical archive for the Jews of Eastern Europe, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture examines the progress of Yiddish culture from its origins in Tsarist and inter-war Poland to its apex with the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in 1925.

Choice 1990 Outstanding Academic Book, Shadow of the Mills focuses on the private side of industrialization, on how the mills structured the everyday existence of the women, men, and children who lived in their shadows. Through imaginative use of census data, the records of municipal, charitable, and fraternal organizations, and the voices of workers themselves in local newspapers, S.J. Kleinberg builds a detailed picture of the working-class life cycle: marital relationships, the interaction between parents and children, the education and employment prospects of the young, and the lives if the elderly.

Bethlehem Steel presents an original and compelling history of a leading American company, examining the numerous factors contributing to the growth of this titan and those that eventually felled it—along with many of its competitors in the U.S. steel industry.

The first English-language account of the changing role of children in the Russian workforce, from the onset of industrialization until the Communist Revolution of 1917, and an examination of the laws that would establish children’s labor rights.

An original examination of legislative clashes over the singular issue of the glass house boys, who performed menial tasks, received low wages, and had little to say on their own behalf while toiling in glass bottle plants. Flannery reveals the many societal, economic, and political factors at work that allowed for the perpetuation of child labor in this industry and region.

The essays in this collection chronicle the responses of the Soviet state and society to a variety of disabled groups and disabilities.

A study of the Great Purge in the setting of Leningrad Communist University, seen in the rhetoric of the accused and their accusors.

The first scholarly account of BAM (the Baikal-Amur Railway), Russia’s most ambitious public construction project to be attempted in the final decades leading up to the collapse of the USSR. This is a rich social history based on a combination of original scholarly research and interviews with many of those who worked on BAM.

Repositions Peruvian indigenismo as a discourse of and about modernity, in which the movement’s artists and intellectuals used the figure of the Indian to mobilize larger questions about becoming modern.

A history of the role of American society in shaping the policies of the United States Forest Service.

The Age of Smoke provides an original, comparative history of environmental policy development in Germany and the United States from 1880 to 1970, and the rise of civic activism to combat air pollution.