Inquiring into Empire: Colonial Commissions and British Imperial Reform, 1819–1833
This is the first history to grapple with the vast project of British imperial investigation between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Great Reform Act.
Faculty Books
View a selection of recently published books by Department of History faculty.
Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative
In Weapons in Space, Aaron Bateman draws from recently declassified American, European, and Soviet documents to give an insightful account of the SDI.
Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York
Acclaimed historian Tyler Anbinder presents for the first time the Famine generation’s individual and collective tales of struggle, perseverance, and triumph.
Mungo Park's Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa
Telling the full story of two failed British expeditions for the first time, Dane Kennedy argues that they provide fresh insight into British ambitions in Africa.
The Tarikh-i Ḥamidi: A Late-Qing Uyghur History
The Tarikh-i Ḥamidi is an epic and tragic history from the region of Xinjiang in northwest China, the homeland of the Muslim-majority Uyghur people.
To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment
To Trust the People with Arms explores the remarkable and complex legal history of how the right to bear arms was widely accepted during the nation's founding, was near extinction in the late...
The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington's Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan's America
Drawing on a rich array of archives and oral history interviews, Gordon K. Mantler offers a bold reexamination of the Harold Washington movement and moment.
History's Joel Blecher co-edited the first English translation of the preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics from the Islamic medieval world.
Community Still Matters: Uyghur Culture and Society in Central Asian Context
Eric Schluessel presents a multidisciplinary overview of Uyghur studies today, highlighting contributions from Uyghur diaspora and exile scholars.
They Believed That?: A Cultural Encyclopedia of Superstitions and the Supernatural around the World
William E. Burns covers a range of superstitious, supernatural, and otherwise unusual beliefs from the ancient world to the early 19th century.