Faculty Bookshelf

The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941-2000

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Bradley Simpson, Author

Oxford University Press, 2025Blue and red painting with The First Right written in blue above and Bradley Simpson written in white below.

In The First Right, Brad Simpson narrates the global history of the idea of self-determination in international politics from the 1940s through the end of the twentieth century. He argues that there was no one version of self-determination, but a century-long contest between contending visions of sovereignty and rights. He shows that self-determination’s meaning has often emerged from the claims of movements and peoples on the margins of international society.  Over the course of the 20th Century Pacific Island territories, Indigenous peoples, regional and secessionist movements, and transnational solidarity groups, among others, offered expansive visions of economic, political, and cultural sovereignty ranging far beyond the movement for decolonization with which they are often associated. As they did so, these movements and groups helped to vernacularize self-determination as a language of social justice and rights for people around the world.

An Eoraip: Gaelic Ireland in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

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Red book cover with an image of an old manuscript showing "europe" written in GaelicBrendan Kane and Patrick Wadden, Editors

Brill, 2025

Medieval and early modern Irish scholars thought of themselves as Europeans. As an expression of territorial association, this belief reflects both their familiarity with the geographical traditions of Antiquity and the integration of their society into economic, cultural, and political networks that spanned the continent. But it was also an articulation of a perceived cultural affinity often denied in modern scholarship. The chapters in this volume examine the many and various ways that Gaelic Ireland was integrated into the broader, European world, focusing on literature and learning; real-world politics, economics, and travel; and questions of identity.

Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age

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Sylvia R. Frey, Author, with foreword by Manisha Sinha

Princeton University Press, 2025

 

Abstract:

black and white image of revolutionary figures struggling, with book title and author's name overlaid in contrasting white and yellow text

The American Revolution brought about violent and unpredictable social changes throughout the new nation, particularly in the South. Sylvia Frey reveals how slave resistance gave rise to a Black liberation movement that was central to the revolutionary struggle in the southern colonies, and how Black resistance persisted after the war as a struggle for cultural power that manifested itself in the establishment of separate Black churches with distinctive ritual patterns and moral values. She examines how white Southerners responded to Black resistance amid their own fight for independence from the British, and how they reacted to new movements by African Americans in the postwar period. With an incisive foreword by Manisha Sinha, Water from the Rock shows how the upheavals of war created opportunities for a quiet revolution that laid the foundations for the modern civil rights movement in America.

 

The Politics of Care Work

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Emma Amador, Author

Duke University Press, 2025

 

In The Politics of Care Work, Emma Amador tells the story of Puerto Rican women’s involvement in political activism for social and economic justice in Puerto Rico and the United States throughout the twentieth century. Amador focuses on the experiences and contributions of Puerto Rican social workers, care workers, and caregivers who fought for the compensation of reproductive labor in society and the establishment of social welfare programs. These activists believed conflicts over social reproduction and care work were themselves high-stakes class struggles for women, migrants, and people of color. In Puerto Rico, they organized for women’s rights, socialism, labor standards, and Puerto Rican independence. They continued this work in the United States by advocating for migrant rights, participating in the civil rights movement, and joining Puerto Rican-led social movements. Amador shows how their relentless efforts gradually shifted the field of social work toward social justice and community-centered activism. The profound and enduring impact of their efforts on Puerto Rican communities underscores the crucial role of Puerto Rican women’s caregiving labor and activism in building and sustaining migrant communities.

Black Movement: African American Urban History since the Great Migration

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Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Editor

The University of North Carolina Press, 2025

 

Description:

The Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern and western cities between 1915 and 1970 fundamentally altered the political, social, and cultural landscapes of major urban centers like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and changed the country as well. By the late twentieth century, Black people were mayors, police chiefs, and school superintendents, often at parity and sometimes overrepresented in municipal jobs in these and other cities, which were also hubs for Black literature, music, film, and politics.

Since the 1970s, migration patterns have significantly shifted away from the major sites of the Great Migration, where some iconic Black communities have been replaced by mostly non-Black residents. Although many books have examined Black urban experiences in America, this is the first written by historians focusing on the post–Great Migration era. It is centered on numerous facets of Black life, including popular culture, policing, suburbanization, and political organizing across multiple cities. In this landmark volume, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar and his contributors explore the last half century of African American urban history, covering a landscape transformed since the end of the Great Migration and demonstrating how cities remain dynamic into the twenty-first century.

Contributors are Stefan M. Bradley, Scot Brown, Tatiana M. F. Cruz, Tom Adam Davies, LaShawn Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, Shannon King, Melanie D. Newport, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Brian Purnell, J. T. Roane, Chanelle Rose, Benjamin H. Saracco, and Fiona Vernal.

Primo Levi e i suoi compagni

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Sergio Luzzatto, Author

 

Donzelli Editore, 2024

Book cover of Professor Sergio Luzzatto's book "Primo Levi e i suoi compagni"

Description:

You who live safe/ In your warm houses … Meditate that this came about:/ I commend these words to you”: with unforgettable verses, of Dantesque proportions, Survival in Auschwitzopens, a text that has become over time the definitive book on Auschwitz, on the horror of the twentieth century. But what does Primo Levi mean when he says “you”? What, when he says “I”? And what, when he says “we”? The way in which the author, a master of the Italian language, has strategically employed – and bent – ​​personal pronouns nests the tangle of good and evil, of innocence and shame in the Shoah: the idea, at once, of belonging and of distance, but also the pain of guilt, and the responsibility that derives from it. Starting from these questions, Sergio Luzzatto returns to examine the figure of Primo Levi and reconstruct the story behind his writing, following the path that from leads the characters of Survival in Auschwitzto the real identity of his deportation companions, the European Jews forced “to the bottom” with him. Who were the members of the chemical Kommando of Auschwitz-Monowitz? And who were, in particular, the companions represented by Levi as negative or even abject characters, Luciferian incarnations of evil? Perhaps Primo Levi would have become a writer even if he had not been deported to Auschwitz. Certainly he would have been a different writer, if the history of the twentieth century had not marked the life of the young chemist forever through the experience of that black hole. That is why his books today must be reread today with the tools of historians: to unravel the threads of a continuous – and problematic – fabric, between historical fact and literary transfiguration.

 

Ireland and the Renaissance court: Political culture from the cúirteanna to Whitehall, 1450-1640

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Edited by David Edwards and Brendan Kane

Book Cover for Ireland and the Renaissance court

Manchester University Press, 2024

 

Description

Ireland and the Renaissance court is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring Irish and English courts, courtiers and politics in the early modern period, c. 1450-1650. Chapters are contributed by both established and emergent scholars working in the fields of history, literary studies, and philology. They focus on Gaelic cúirteanna, the indigenous centres of aristocratic life throughout the medieval period; on the regnal court of the emergent British empire based in London at Whitehall; and on Irish participation in the wider world of European elite life and letters. Collectively, they expand the chronological limits of ‘early modern’ Ireland to include the fifteenth century and recreate its multi-lingual character through exploration of its English, Irish and Latin archives. This volume is an innovative effort at moving beyond binary approaches to English-Irish history by demonstrating points of contact as well as contention.

 

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic

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Manisha Sinha, Author

Norton, 2024

Description

We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the victorious North attempted to create an interracial democracy in the unrepentant South. That effort failed—and that failure serves as a warning today about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality.

In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the accepted temporal and spatial bounds of Reconstruction, which is customarily said to have begun in 1865 with the end of the war, and to have come to a close when the "corrupt bargain" of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for the fall of the last southern Reconstruction state governments. Sinha’s startlingly original account opens in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln that triggered the secession of the Deep South states, and take us all the way to 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote—and which Sinha calls the "last Reconstruction amendment."

Within this grand frame, Sinha narrates the rise and fall of what she calls the "Second American Republic." The Reconstruction of the South, a process driven by the alliance between the formerly enslaved at the grassroots and Radical Republicans in Congress, is central to her story, but only part of it. As she demonstrates, the US Army’s conquest of Indigenous nations in the West, labor conflict in the North, Chinese exclusion, women’s suffrage, and the establishment of an overseas American empire were all part of the same struggle between the forces of democracy and those of reaction. The main concern of Reconstruction was the plight of the formerly enslaved, but its fall affected other groups as well: women, workers, immigrants, and Native Americans. From the election of black legislators across the South in the late 1860s to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the colonial war in the Philippines in the 1890s, Sinha narrates the major episodes of the era and introduces us to key individuals, famous and otherwise, who helped remake American democracy, or whose actions spelled its doom.

A sweeping narrative that remakes our understanding of perhaps the most consequential period in American history, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic shows how the great contest of that age is also the great contest of our age—and serves as a necessary reminder of how young and fragile our democracy truly is.

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic book cover

America’s Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy

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Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Author

Basic, 2023

Description

Atlanta is home to some of America’s most prominent Black politicians, artists, businesses, and HBCUs. Yet, in 1861, Atlanta was a final contender to be the capital of the Confederacy. Sixty years later, long after the Civil War, it was the Ku Klux Klan’s sacred “Imperial City.”

America’s Black Capital chronicles how a center of Black excellence emerged amid virulent expressions of white nationalism, as African Americans pushed back against Confederate ideology to create an extraordinary locus of achievement. What drove them, historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar shows, was the belief that Black uplift would be best advanced by forging Black institutions. America’s Black Capital is an inspiring story of Black achievement against all odds, with effects that reached far beyond Georgia, shaping the nation’s popular culture, public policy, and politics.

America's Black Capital book cover