By Mart A. Stewart (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) “"What Nature Suffers to Groe" explores the mutually transforming relationship between environment and human culture on the Georgia coastal plain between 1680 and 1920. Each of the successive communities on the coast-the philanthropic and imperialistic experiment of the Georgia Trustees, the plantation culture of rice and sea island cotton … Continued
By Kären Wigen (NHC Fellow, 1999–00) Kären Wigen probes regional cartography, choerography, and statecraft to redefine restoration (ishin) in modern Japanese history. As developed here, that term designates not the quick coup d’état of 1868 but a three-centuries-long project of rehabilitating an ancient map for modern purposes. Drawing on a wide range of geographical documents … Continued
By Mab Segrest (NHC Fellow, 2017–18) Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her … Continued
By Joan Thirsk (NHC Fellow, 1986–87) People like to believe in a past golden age of "traditional" English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. Yet crops from the past like flax, hemp, rapeseed, and woad are gradually reappearing in the "modern" countryside. Thirsk reveals how the forces … Continued
By Nigel Smith (NHC Fellow, 2007–08) The seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) is one of the most intriguing figures in English literature. A noted civil servant under Cromwell’s Protectorate, he has been variously identified as a patriot, spy, conspirator, concealed homosexual, father to the liberal tradition, and incendiary satirical pamphleteer and freethinker. But while Marvell’s … Continued
Edited by Gertrud Lenzer (NHC Fellow, 1980–81) Although Auguste Comte is conventionally acknowledged as one of the founders of sociology and as a key representative of positivism, few new editions of his writings have been published in the English language in this century. He has become virtually dissociated from the history of modern positivism and … Continued
By Randal Maurice Jelks (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) In this first full-length biography of Benjamin Mays (1894-1984), Randal Maurice Jelks chronicles the life of the man Martin Luther King Jr. called his "spiritual and intellectual father." Dean of the Howard University School of Religion, president of Morehouse College, and mentor to influential black leaders, Mays had … Continued
Edited by Ben Vinson, III (Board of Trustees Chairman; NHC Fellow, 2005–06) and Matthew Restall The essays in this collection build upon a series of conversations and papers that resulted from "New Directions in North American Scholarship on Afro-Mexico," a symposium conducted at Pennsylvania State University in 2004. The issues addressed include contested historiography, social … Continued
By Lawrence Stone (NHC Fellow, 1990–91; 1991–92) This book offers a set of detailed case studies about how the break-up and dissolution of marriages was contrived before the first Divorce Act in 1857. Individuals in their own words explain their actions and feelings about one another in dramatic court-room confrontations, while behind the scenes they … Continued
By Kenneth Severens (NHC Fellow, 1982–83)