By Cathy N. Davidson (NHC Fellow, 1995–96) Closing explores the meaning of work—what it means when you have it, what it means when you do not. The story of the White Furniture Company—a century-old, family-owned business that was bought out by a huge corporate conglomerate and later closed—puts a human face on an economy in costly … Continued
By Michael Kwass (NHC Fellow, 2001–02) Louis Mandrin led a gang of bandits who brazenly smuggled contraband into eighteenth-century France. Michael Kwass brings new life to the legend of this Gallic Robin Hood and the thriving underworld he helped to create. Decades before the storming of the Bastille, surging world trade excited a revolution in consumption that … Continued
By James Knowlson (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) Damned to Fame is the brilliant and insightful portrait of Nobel Prize–winning author Samuel Beckett, mysterious and reclusive master of twentieth-century literature. Professor James Knowlson, Beckett’s chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly re-creates Beckett’s life from his birth in a rural suburb of Dublin in 1906 to … Continued
By Mieko Nishida (NHC Fellow, 2011–12) São Paulo, Brazil, holds the largest number of Japanese descendants outside Japan, and they have been there for six generations. Japanese immigration to Brazil started in 1908 to replace European immigrants to work in São Paulo’s expanding coffee industry. It peaked in the late 1920s and early 1930s as … Continued
By Akram Fouad Khater (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) Hndiyya al-‘Ujaimi, a young eighteenth-century nun whose faith was matched by her ambition and intellect, lies at the heart of this absorbing history of Middle Eastern Christianity. At the age of twenty-six, Hindiyya left her hometown of Aleppo to establish a convent in the mountains of Lebanon. Her … Continued
Edited by Daina Ramey Berry (NHC Fellow, 2007–08; 2008–09) Slavery in the history of the United States continues to loom large in our national consciousness, and the role of women in this dark chapter of the American past is largely under-examined. This is the first encyclopedia to focus on the daily experiences and roles of … Continued
By Marcus Bull (NHC Fellow, 2014–15) Eyewitness is a familiar label that historians apply to numerous pieces of evidence. It carries compelling connotations of trustworthiness and particular proximity to the lived experience of historical actors. But it has received surprisingly little critical attention. This book seeks to open up discussion of what we mean when … Continued
Edited by Michael Edward Shapiro (NHC Fellow, 1983–84) and Peter H. Hassrick Ballinger traces Remington's life from his earliest travels in the West through his successful career as a magazine illustrator to his profoundly disturbing realization that the West he knew was passing rapidly into legend at the same time that American aesthetic tastes were … Continued
Edited by Karen Hagemann (NHC Fellow, 2011–12) and Sonya Michel Gender and the Long Postwar examines gender politics during the post–World War II period and the Cold War in the United States and East and West Germany. The authors show how disruptions of older political and social patterns, exposure to new cultures, population shifts, and the … Continued
