By Richard H. Grove (NHC Fellow, 1995–96) This collection of essays from a pioneering scholar in the field of environmental history vividly demonstrates that concerns about climate change are far from being a uniquely modern phenomenon. Grove traces the origins of present-day environmental debates about soil erosion, deforestation and climate change in the writings of … Continued
Edited by Kathleen DuVal (NHC Fellow, 2008–09) and John DuVal This reader provides students with key documents from colonial American history, including new English translations of non-English documents. The documents in this collection take the reader beyond the traditional story of the English colonies. Readers explore the Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, German, and even Icelandic … Continued
By Laurent Dubois (NHC Fellow, 2008–09; 2016–17) When France both hosted and won the World Cup in 1998, the face of its star player, Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, was projected onto the Arc de Triomphe. During the 2006 World Cup finals, Zidane stunned the country by ending his spectacular career with an … Continued
Edited by Mary Ellis Gibson (NHC Fellow, 2007–08) Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Mary Ellis Gibson … Continued
By Anne Pérotin-Dumon (NHC Fellow, 1980–81)
By Kathryn Burns (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) Writing has long been linked to power. For early modern people on both sides of the Atlantic, writing was also the province of notaries, men trained to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. Thus the first thing Columbus did on American shores in … Continued
By Luise White (NHC Fellow, 1993–94; 2016–17) During the colonial period, Africans told each other terrifying rumors that Africans who worked for white colonists captured unwary residents and took their blood. In colonial Tanganyika, for example, Africans were said to be captured by these agents of colonialism and hung upside down, their throats cut so … Continued
By James L. Hevia (NHC Fellow, 2015–16) Until well into the twentieth century, pack animals were the primary mode of transport for supplying armies in the field. The British Indian Army was no exception. In the late nineteenth century, for example, it forcibly pressed into service thousands of camels of the Indus River basin to … Continued
By David Ringrose (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) This innovative book looks beyond the traditional history of European expansion—which highlights European conquests, empire building, and hegemony—in order to explore the more human and realistic dimensions of European experiences abroad. David Ringrose argues that Early Modern Europe was relatively poor and that its industrial and military technology, while … Continued
By Nicholas Canny (NHC Fellow, 1986–87)