Names can be deceiving. Americans call the area where Moscow’s writ runs “Russia.” But the official name of this place is the “Russian Federation.” Federation of what, you ask? Well, there are a lot of people who live in “Russia” who are in important s...

Richard Candida Smith’s new book Improvised Continent: Pan-American and Cultural Exchange (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), offers a richly detailed cultural history of pan-Americanism and how it was propagated among elites and popular audience...

In Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the contributors challenge the argument that African states lack effective political institutions as these have been und...

In The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2017), Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong argue that a small set of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have acquired an unusually large amount of ...

Civil wars are among the most intractable conflicts in the world. Yet exactly distinguishes civil war from other types of armed struggle? In his book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Vintage Books, 2017), David Armitage examines the evolution of the con...

In his new book, Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Bonny Ibhawoh examines the discourse of human rights in Africa. He challenges some of the dominant narratives that focus on ruthless violators and benevolent activists.

The study of Palestine and Israel has been largely shaped by the politics of the conflict and thus, many scholars start with political history, often using Israeli state sources. Maha Nassar, in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Ar...

Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the cessation of most imperial slave trading activities in the Atlantic World.

As debates on globalization rage in the twenty-first century, many countries and the people within them have been challenged socially, economically, and legally. At the same time, our world is now more bordered geopolitically than ever before.

Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2016), a multi-authored volume co-edited by Catherine Grant and Huib Schippers, examines a range of musical traditions from cultures around the world.

Mark G. Hanna offers a unique perspective on the roles played by piracy in the formation of the British colonial project. In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute o...

Today we talked to Seth Markle about his book, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism 1964-1974, published by Michigan State University Press in 2017 as part of the Ruth Simms Hamilton African Diaspo...

The First World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire,

Harrod Suarez‘s new book The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2017) focuses on the domestic workers that make up around a third of all overseas Filipino/a workers,

Described upon his death in 1887 as the ideal diplomatist, Richard Lyons served Great Britain in a variety of roles over the course of a long and distinguished career. In Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War (McGill-Queen’s Universit...

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Laura Engelstein, Professor Emerita at Yale University. Spanning the pre-revolutionary period immediately...

What can be learned about the Soviet Union by viewing it through an environmental lens? What would an environmental history teach us about power in the Soviet system? What lessons can be drawn from the environmental experience of Soviet communism?

Sir David Cannadine, Professor of History at Princeton University, president of the British Academy, and the general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, narrates the century of Pax Britannica in the Victorious Century: The United Kin...

In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half years of death and destruction had brought the belligerents to new nadirs of attrition and zeniths of...

In her new book, Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Alexandra Dellios, a Lecturer in Heritage Studies at the Australian National University, provides a critical reassessment of Bonegilla,

I was in graduate school during Bosnia and Rwanda. Like everyone else, I watched the video footage and journalistic accounts that came from these two zones of atrocity. Like everyone else, I wondered how humans could do such things to each other.

In Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (UNC Press, 2017), Andrew McKevitt explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese.

The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) is an important and in depth study of American interaction with the intricate concept of Sovereignty, from the Founding Fathers to Donald Trump.

In a perceptive challenge to longstanding assumptions about Dominican anti-Haitianism, April J. Mayes finds fresh ways to think about the production of race in late 19th and 20th century Dominican Republic.

The Syrian Revolution, which began in March 2011, has since resulted in what can be described as a civil war, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the forced migrations of millions of Syrians.