By Maria Todorova (NHC Fellow, 2000–01) This book is about documenting and analyzing the living archive around the figure of Vasil Levski (1837–1873), arguably the major and only uncontested hero of the Bulgarian national pantheon. The processes described, although with a chronological depth of almost two centuries, are still very much in the making, and … Continued
By Laura Engelstein (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) Of the many sects that broke from the official Russian Orthodox church in the eighteenth century, one was universally despised. Its members were peasants from the Russian heartland skilled in the arts of animal husbandry who turned their knives on themselves to become "eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's … Continued
Edited by John Higham (NHC Fellow, 1987–88; 1988–89) The persistence of racial inequality in a democratic society may be the gravest problem confronting the United States. It has surely been the most intractable. Yet the torrent of scholarship and comment unleashed in recent years by the question of race provides a general reader with little … Continued
Edited by David L. Carlton (NHC Fellow, 1994–95) and Peter A. Coclanis (NHC Fellow, 1996–97) The National Emergency Countil's 1938 "Report on Economic Conditions of the South" caused Franklin Roosevelt to view the south as "the Nation's #1 economic problem" and quickly became a standard part of modern Southern history. This important and out-of-print document … Continued
By Emília Viotti da Costa (NHC Fellow, 1984–85) The night of August 17, 1823 saw the start of one of the most massive slave rebellions in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the uprising in the British colony of Demerara (now Guyana), in which nearly twelve thousand slaves took up arms against their masters. In Crowns … Continued
By Nancy MacLean (NHC Fellow, 2008–09; 2021–22) Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a … Continued
By Lewis M. Dabney (NHC Fellow, 2001–02) From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history … Continued
By Paul Strohm (NHC Fellow, 1996–97) After the dethronement and subsequent murder of Richard II, the usurping Lancastrian dynasty faced an exceptional challenge. Interrupting a long period of Plantagenet rule, Henry IV and Henry V needed not only to establish physical possession of the English throne, but to occupy it symbolically as well. In this … Continued
Edited by Gilbert M. Joseph (NHC Fellow, 1992–93) and Daniel Nugent Everyday Forms of State Formation is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between popular cultures and state formation in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. While most accounts have emphasized either the role of peasants and peasant rebellions or that of state formation in Mexico’s past, these … Continued
By R. Jackson Wilson (NHC Fellow, 1984–85)