Edited by Luise White (NHC Fellow, 1993–94; 2016–17), Stephen Miescher, and David William Cohen Until the advent of African independence, Africans were not considered fitting subjects for historical research and their words, voices, and experiences were largely absent from the continent's history. In thirteen lively and provocative essays focusing on all areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, … Continued
By R. W. B. Lewis (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) and Nancy Lewis This book brings together 160 famous American figures from Pocahontas to Louis Armstrong, providing visual and verbal portraits that illuminate their place in American life. The portraiture – painting, sculpture, photograph, or cartoon – is paired with literary images taken from eyewitness accounts, memoirs, … Continued
Edited by Theodore Evergates (NHC Fellow, 1994–95) Were aristocratic women in medieval France little more than appendages to patrilineal families, valued as objects of exchange and necessary only for the production of male heirs? Such was the view proposed by the great French historian Georges Duby more than three decades ago and still widely accepted. … Continued
By Marlene L. Daut (NHC Fellow, 2016–17) Focusing on the influential life and works of the Haitian political writer and statesman, Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), in this book Marlene L. Daut examines the legacy of Vastey’s extensive writings as a form of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a discourse devoted to attacking the enlightenment … Continued
By Leonard V. Smith (NHC Fellow, 1993–94) Literary and historical conventions have long painted the experience of soldiers during World War I as simple victimization. Leonard Smith, however, argues that a complex dialogue of resistance and negotiation existed between French soldiers and their own commanders. In this case study of wartime military culture, Smith analyzes … Continued
By Ben Kiernan (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also … Continued
By Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (NHC Fellow, 1984–85)
By Xiaoping Fang (NHC Fellow, 2019–20) Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic famine lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern coastal China. Confronted with a … Continued
By Francis Oakley (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1990–91) In the past decade, criticism of the state of undergraduate education in America has come from many directions and in many and various forms, from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, to Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, to Secretary of Education William J. Bennett's 1984 report "To … Continued
By Temma Kaplan (NHC Fellow, 1992–93) Crazy for Democracy vividly shows, through the lives of six women in the United States and South Africa, just what can be and is being accomplished to change our lives. At a time when we're depressed about democracy, pessimistic about race relations, and anxious about feminism, Crazy for Democracy vividly shows, through … Continued