“[Friedman’s] work is extremely important in revealing the legacy of socialism in the Global South and the long-term consequences that the Cold War had on nations struggling to emerge from colonialism.”
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“a robust critique of existing approaches to the topic and a substantial survey of the activities of the Phoenicians and their cultural legacy across the Mediterranean world, with a particular focus on the eighth and seventh centuries BC, traditionally referred to by classicists as the ‘orientalizing period.'”
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“To the scholarly reader, The Undocumented Americans offers an implicit (and occasionally explicit) provocation: portray us in our full humanity.”
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“It is the questions—Did they model themselves on pícaros? What kind of freedom did they seek? What drove them to fraud?—that make Fugitive Freedom great.”
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“The success of this volume is not limited to the fascinating subject matter and its attractive angle on information as a field of inquiry, to the impressive breadth of discussion, or even the quality of the individual contributions.”
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“The contributors to this volume continue to examine global as well as local changes in the Atlantic World and demonstrate the continuing resonance of the second slavery framework and how it might be expanded to include areas beyond the U.S., Cuba, and Brazil.”
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“Contributors with multidisciplinary backgrounds in history, anthropology, and geography examine the Triple Frontier region where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay come together in a profusion of liquid monuments.”
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“Westermann’s work focuses on the use of alcohol by the German SS and police forces in the occupied East [where] alcohol was used to celebrate, bond comrades and built group solidarity, and reinforce masculine identity.”
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“This book seeks to complicate and challenge elite narratives about the 1948 War.”
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“One of the many virtues of Butterwick’s book is that, by complicating the picture on the basis of deep and up-to-date research, the work will facilitate the teaching of eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania to Anglophone students.”
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“Beyond the Steppe Frontier sheds new light on the history of the Sino-Russian border by its effort to consider the varied perspectives of its inhabitants.”
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“They make visible the connecting role that aguardiente or crude rum played between the eastern and western sides of the peninsula during the nineteenth century.”
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“…vividly documenting a complicated woman and her relationships.”
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“Enemy of Mankind is readable, engaging, and demonstrates the uses of contingency in historical writing.”
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“a restatement of basic principles of long-standing practice”
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“a fitting tribute to Lewis’s scholarship”
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“a new addition to the history of the Partition of India that attempts to demystify the intersectionality of colonial education policy, communal identity formation, class and gender politics, and the rise of religious nationalism in undivided Bengal”
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“Florvil’s coinage of “quotidian intellectual” signifies the importance of challenging what scholars typically think of as “the archive” and broadening what sources, objects, and indeed subjects warrant academic attention.”
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“Ostenaco, Mai, and Reynolds offer three striking examples of the many and varied meanings of empire in the eighteenth-century.”
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“The German-born naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller was one of a handful of Western European academics who took part in the Russian Empire’s Second Kamchatka Expedition, 1737-43.”
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“Kugle sets a new academic foray into the historiography of Sufism”
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“a new and fascinating perspective on our understanding of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century hajj”
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“a remarkable new book”
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“a thought-provoking account which hints at how scholars might reconsider the history of capitalism from the perspective of rural or ‘traditional’ Asian peripheries…”
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“[Katarzyna] Person should be commended for providing Holocaust scholars with the fullest account of the Order Service to date and revising our understanding of the diversity of individual attitudes and motivations among policemen.”
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“as a resource for researching secondary literature or the structuring of an undergraduate research seminar, this work certainly possesses great value.”
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“as a resource for researching secondary literature or the structuring of an undergraduate research seminar, this work certainly possesses great value.”
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“Outcaste Bombay is successful in broadening the scope of histories from below by expanding its enquiry into the worlds of the lumpen-proletariat, the petty bourgeois shop keepers, and the sex workers. It offers a glimpse of Bombay as it is lived, reshaped, and appro¬priated by its Dalit inhabitants, and makes a great contribution to the bourgeoning scholarship on Dalit labor and Bombay city.”
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The 1945 Burma Campaign and the Transformation of the British Indian Army. Raymond A. Callahan and Daniel Marston. Kansas University Press, 2021. ISBN: 9780700630417. A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma & Britain, 1941-45. Robert Lyman. Oxford: Osprey, 2021. ISBN: 9781472847140. Reviewed by George Wilton, independent scholar, Member of British Commission for Military History, Managing Editor of British Journal for
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“Colonial Transactions expands our knowledge and refines our understanding of the two themes that stand at its center – witchcraft and colonialism. The book historicizes witchcraft, arguing that history can enhance our understanding of the obsessions and modes of power of modern witchcraft in Africa. It brings closer the allegedly contradictory ideas of the European colonizers and the colonized Africans and discusses them in the same realm.”
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“As an hourglass funnels sand from the top, through its waist, to the bottom, and when turned over shifts that same sand back, Ong Soon Keong portrays the coastal Chinese city of Xiamen as a middle ground funneling people from Fujian to Southeast Asia and back again.”
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“The Library: A Fragile History maintains a quick pace throughout, a fact which is necessitated by the sheer breadth of history which it encompasses.”
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“Hauser provides a nuanced and an enriched environmentally informed history of how that oppression took place and by what means.”
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“[Balloffet] masterfully navigates a wide range of literatures and perspectives including case studies of Middle Eastern migration, comparative studies of migration in the Americas, global studies of South-South migration, and studies of nation-building in Argentina.”
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“Wells-Oghoghomeh offers crucial insights, close analysis, and some surprising findings along the way.”
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“…this elegantly composed and organized book…”
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“…Silvia Mitchell’s book uses a microhistorical approach to comprehend larger questions, such as the political and diplomatic situation of the Spanish Monarchy during the second half of the seventeenth century…”
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“…an interdisciplinary and multifaceted study that spans more than two hundred years and three continents…”
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“…Thomas and Lewis resurrect the words of dissent the Nazis tried so hard to silence. In nearly every story they tell, the authors find the final words of the resistors who were executed, showing the courage these people possessed.”
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“As plague swept the globe at the dawn of the early eighteenth century, ideas about poverty and disease justified new medical geographies and biopolitical schemes for dispossessing poor people. “
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“…those of us who teach Central Asian history can now rejoice—not one, but two accessible and well-written narrative histories of Central Asia in the modern age have been published within a year of each other, accompanied by a sourcebook about the same period.”
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“…This rich and complex story of North Korea’s Third World policies is based upon the author’s extensive archival research, including government documents and newspapers from the West, the East, and the Third World….”
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“…The goals of Abolishing Boundaries are set against our present skepticism about sweeping transformations.”
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“…Sedgewick’s twenty-six brisk chapters introduce the reader to the global history of coffee from a peculiar vantage point, the Las Tres Puertas coffee plantation at the foot of the Santa Ana volcano in El Salvador…”
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“Reese’s work is an extensive treatment of the Russian Army during its last six decades. He places major emphasis on a new view of the final collapse of the army from long term causes…”
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“…this book is an unprecedently clear account of the ways in which Mexico was both uniquely free and at the same time meaningfully limited in its diplomatic relations with the rest of the world…”
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In this smart, concise survey of twentieth-century development ideology and practice, Sara Lorenzini deconstructs what she calls the “global myth of development”…
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Colonialism in Global Perspective. Kris Manjapra. Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN-13: 9781108441360. Reviewed by Joseph Snyder, Southeast Missouri State University Edited by Julie Tanaka © 2022 The Middle Ground Journal (ISSN: 2155-1103) Number 23, Spring 2022. http://TheMiddleGroundJournal.org See Submission Guidelines page for the journal’s not-for-profit educational open-access policy.
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Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy. University of Illinois Press, 2020. ISBN-13: 9780252085062. Reviewed by Zach Sell, Drexel University (now Brown University) Edited by Julie Tanaka © 2022 The Middle Ground Journal (ISSN: 2155-1103) Number 23, Spring 2022. http://TheMiddleGroundJournal.org See Submission Guidelines page for the journal’s not-for-profit educational open-access policy.
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Imperial Peripheries in the Neo-Assyrian Period. Edited by Craig W. Tyson and Virginia R. Hermann. University Press of Colorado, 2019. ISBN: 9781607328223. Reviewed by Alexander Johannes Edmonds, University of Tübingen Edited by Julie Tanaka and Sarah Pesola © 2021 The Middle Ground Journal (ISSN: 2155-1103) Number 22, Fall 2021. http://TheMiddleGroundJournal.org See Submission Guidelines page for the journal’s not-for-profit educational open-access
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