Columbia University
James Tejani (PhD 2009) has published A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America
James Tejani (PhD 2009) has published A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America (W. W. Norton, July 2024), which explores how America’s global gateway – the busiest container port in the Western hemisphere – came to be from mud and salt marsh. The tale spans to Washington, DC, New York City, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia as it follows Mexican ranchers, US frontier explorers, imperialist politicians like Jefferson Davis and Theodore Roosevelt, land speculators (among them Civil War general Edward Ord), and railroad titans like Collis Huntington and Edward H. Harriman.
Kim Phillips-Fein published a review of Luke Nichter’s The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 for The London Review of Books.
Kim Phillips-Fein published a review of Luke Nichter’s The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 for The London Review of Books, exploring the unusual circumstances surrounding the 1968 election, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision to drop out of the race and Richard Nixon’s behind-the-scenes political manuevering.
Angelo Caglioti published an article in Past and Present on the origins of Italian settler colonialism in the perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism.
Angelo Caglioti published an article in Past and Present on the origins of Italian settler colonialism in the perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism. It argues that the Italian project to turn the highlands of the Horn of Africa into a settler colony was an “imperial mirage”: the perception that the momentarily depopulated landscape of Ethiopia, produced by “natural” disasters that were in fact the social products of colonial warfare, would be available to Italian settlers in the future. This mirage was based on a domino effect of environmental catastrophes connecting climate history, animal disease, and the politics of European imperialism. Thus, the article explains the battle of Adwa (1896) as the result of willful ignorance and wishful self-deception that fueled Italian colonization projects.
Susan Pedersen published an article in Granta on Gerald Balfour’s relationship with Winifred Coombe Tennant, a politician, suffragist, and medium whose “automatic writings” predicted that she would birth a child of great historical importance.
Susan Pedersen published an article in Granta on Gerald Balfour’s relationship with Winifred Coombe Tennant, a politician, suffragist, and medium whose “automatic writings” predicted that she would birth a child of great historical importance. Read more here.
2025 Book Releases
Martha Howell, Making Merchants, The Cultural Construction of a Merchant Class in Early Modern Germany. October, 2025: Cambridge University Press.
Mark Mazower, On Antisemitism: A word in History. September, 2025: Penguin Press.
A. Tunç Şen, Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450 – 1600. 2025: Stanford University Press.
Paul Thomas Chamberlin, Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II. 2025: Basic Books.
2024 Book Releases
David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, Building the Worlds that Kill Us: Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History. 2024: Columbia University Press
Manan Ahmed, Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore. 2024: The New Press
Frank Guridy, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play. 2024: Basic Books
Mae Ngai, Chee Wang Ng, and Corky Lee (eds.), Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice. 2024: Clarkson Potter
Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 – 323 BC, 4th Edition. 2024: Wiley-Blackwell.
2023 Book Releases
Catherine Evtuhov, Julia Lajus, and David Moon (eds.), Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally. 2023: Berghahn Books
2022 Book Releases
Hilary Hallett. Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. 2022: Liveright.
Ira Katznelson and Greg Wawro. Time Counts: Quantitative Analysis for Historical Social Science. 2022: Princeton University Press.