2018 History Publications and Grants

*Indicates student co-author

Bjornlie, Shane. “Ariminum”; “Boethius”; “Bruttii”; “Byzantine invasion and occupation of, Italy”; “Calabria”; “Concordia”; “Consularia Ravennatia”; “Cumae”; “Elephants in Late Antiquity”; “Eugippius”; “Galeata”; “Liber Pontificalis”; “Maximus”; “Odoacer”; “Palazzo Pignano”; “Patrimonium Si. Petri”; “Perugia”; “Pliny the Elder in Late Antiquity”; “Ravenna Papyri”; “Ravenna, See of”; “Rugians”; “San Vincenzo al Volturno”: “Scientia”; “Severinus of Noricum”; “Theudelinda”; “Travelling for Knowledge”; “Verona.” The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity, edited by Oliver Nicholson. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Abstract: The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity is the first comprehensive reference book covering every aspect of history, culture, religion, and life in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East (including the Persian Empire and Central Asia) between the mid-3rd and the mid-8th centuries AD, the era now generally known as Late Antiquity. This period saw the re-establishment of the Roman Empire, its conversion to Christianity and its replacement in the West by Germanic kingdoms, the continuing Roman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Sassanian Empire, and the rise of Islam. Consisting of more than one million words in more than 5,000 A-Z entries, and written by more than 400 contributors, it is the long-awaited middle volume of a series, bridging a significant period of history between those covered by the acclaimed Oxford Classical Dictionary and The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. The scope of the Dictionary is broad and multi-disciplinary; across the wide geographical span covered (from Western Europe and the Mediterranean as far as the Near East and Central Asia), it provides succinct and pertinent information on political history, law, and administration; military history; religion and philosophy; education; social and economic history; material culture; art and architecture; science; literature; and many other areas. Drawing on the latest scholarship, and with a formidable international team of advisers and contributors, The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity aims to establish itself as the essential reference companion to a period that is attracting increasing attention from scholars and students worldwide.


Bjornlie, Shane. “Romans, Barbarians and Provincials in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus.” Transformations of Romanness: Early Medieval Regions and Identities, edited by Cinzia Grifoni, Clemens Gantner, Walter Pohl, and Marianne Pollheimer. DeGruyter, 2018, pp. 71-90.

Abstract: This article surveys the criteria used to designate particular groups as 'Roman' in the late-4th century history of Ammianus Marcellinus. Because the extant portions of Res Gestae covers events that occurred during his career in imperial service and ranges across many of the provinces of the eastern and western Roman Empire, Ammianus' history is particularly useful as a lens for understanding how a member of the educated elite regarded the many different peoples of the Empire. Following Ammianus' own semantic procedure for discussing different peoples, this article develops a typology for who is properly 'Roman' according to Ammianus. The article considers Ammianus' treatment of citizens at Rome, provincials and barbarians (both settled in the Empire and beyond the frontier) and arrives at the conclusion that Ammianus used 'Roman' in the sense of a status assigned to soldiers of the Empire, rather than an ethnic label or marker of citizenship.

Cody, Lisa Forman. “Exhibit 19: A Painting of a Nursing Mother.” Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present, edited by Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell. Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 180-181.

Abstract: An analysis of a Dutch painting showing how breastfeeding was used to represent the Christian family and families' contribution to the health of a rising nation state.


Cody, Lisa Forman. Review of Questioning Nature: British Women’s Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830, by Melissa Bailes. Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 13, issue 1, 2018, pp. 213-216.

Abstract: A book review of a book that examines the modern splitting of intellectual and academic disciplines and women's role in providing related models of understanding the natural world through poetry, prose fiction, and travel writing.


Cody, Lisa Forman. “Test-Tube Babies @40”. Public Books, July 26, 2018.

Abstract: This article examines how ideas about the perfect nuclear, heterosexual, reproductive family in the 1950s and 1960s spurred research on in vitro technology, but the technique's success in 1978 had a revolutionary impact on how Americans and Europeans envisioned the family and led to legislation that protected alternate family models.

Ferguson, Heather. “Heather Ferguson, The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power, and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses (New Texts Out Now).” Interview by Jadaliyya. Jadaliyya, November 16, 2018.


Ferguson, Heather. “Letter from the Editor.” Review of Middle East Studies, vol. 52, issue 1, 2018, pp. 1-4.


Ferguson, Heather L. The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power, and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses. Stanford University Press, 2018.

Abstract: The "natural order of the state" was an early modern mania for the Ottoman Empire. In a time of profound and pervasive imperial transformation, the ideals of stability, proper order, and social harmony were integral to the legitimization of Ottoman power. And as Ottoman territory grew, so too did its network of written texts: a web of sultanic edicts, aimed at defining and supplementing imperial authority in the empire's disparate provinces. With this book, Heather L. Ferguson studies how this textual empire created a unique vision of Ottoman legal and social order, and how the Ottoman ruling elite, via sword and pen, articulated a claim to universal sovereignty that subverted internal challengers and external rivals. The Proper Order of Things offers the story of an empire, at once familiar and strange, told through the shifting written vocabularies of power deployed by the Ottomans in their quest to thrive within a competitive early modern environment. Ferguson transcends the question of what these documents said, revealing instead how their formulation of the "proper order of things" configured the state itself. Through this textual authority, she argues, Ottoman writers ensured the durability of their empire, creating the principles of organization on which Ottoman statecraft and authority came to rest.


Ferguson, Heather. Review of Scholars and Sultans in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, by Abudurrahman Atçil. International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 50, issue 4, 2018, pp. 800-802.

Geismer, Lily. “Conservatives and Counterrevolutionaries: Corey Robin’s ‘The Reactionary Mind.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, January 19, 2018.


Geismer, Lily. “A Crusading Chief Justice and a Cautious President.” Review of Eisenhower vs. Warren: The Battle for Civil Liberties, by James F. Simon. The Washington Post, May 18, 2018.


Geismer, Lily. “How Lyndon Johnson Unmade the Democratic Party.” The Washington Post, March 30, 2018.


Geismer, Lily. “Napoleons in Pinstripes: The Rise of the Business Mogul as Politician.” New Labor Forum, vol. 27, issue 2, 2018, pp. 48-55.


Geismer, Lily. “The Soccer Mom Strikes Back.” The New Republic, August 17, 2018.


Geismer, Lily and Matthew D. Lassiter. “Turning Affluent Suburbs Blue Isn’t Worth the Cost.” The New York Times, June 9, 2018.


External Grant: Geismer, Lily. Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Carnegie Foundation, 2018-2020.


External Grant: Geismer, Lily. Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Faculty, American Council of Learned Society, awarded 2018, deferred to 2020-2021.

Hamburg, Gary. “Religious Toleration in Russian Thought, 1520-1825.” Religious Freedom in Modern Russia, edited by Randall A. Poole and Paul W. Werth. University of Pittsburg Press, 2018, pp. 44 - 80.


Hamburg, Gary. "Writing Russian History in Nazi Germany: the Case of Victor Vladimirovich Leontovitsch (Part I)." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. History, vol. 63, issue 1, 2018, pp. 262 - 285.

Abstract: The distinguished historian Victor Vladimirovich Leontovitsch (1902–1959) was little known before publication in 1957 of his classic book Geschichte des Liberalismus in Russland [A History of Liberalism in Russia]. Since then, Leontovitsch’s capital work has been translated into major European languages: first, into Russian (in 1980), then into French (in 1987), and finally, into English (in 2012). Western historians widely reviewed Leontovitsch’s history of liberalism on its initial publication, but few reviews mentioned Leontovitsch’s previous scholarship, and none endeavored to explain the connections between the earlier work and his study of liberalism. This two-part article, drawing on printed and archival sources, explores Leontovitsch’s intellectual roots, his life and his creative activity from 1902 to 1947. It examines his view of Russian history, particularly his conception of the interplay between law and politics in the reign of Ivan IV; his attitude towards Russian Orthodoxy; his attitude toward the French Revolution; his hostility to National Socialism and Nazi policy. This article also offers new material on the history of the post-1917 Russian emigration in Central Europe: it deals with Leontovitsch’s teachers in the Russian Faculty of Law in Prague, and also discusses his ties in the 1930s and 1940s s with important emigré intellectuals, such as Aleksandr Makarov, Dmitrii Chizhevskii, and Fedor Stepun.


Hamburg, Gary. "Writing Russian History in Nazi Germany: the Case of Victor Vladimirovich Leontovitsch (Part II)." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. History, vol. 63, issue 2, 2018, pp. 572-596.

Abstract: The distinguished historian Victor Vladimirovich Leontovitsch (1902–1959) was little known before the 1957 publication of his classic book Geschichte des Liberalismus in Russland [A History of Liberalism in Russia]. Since then, Leontovitsch’s capital work has been translated into major European languages: first, into Russian (in 1980), then into French (in 1987), and finally, into English (in 2012). Western historians widely reviewed Leontovitsch’s history of liberalism on its initial publication, but few reviews mentioned Leontovitsch’s previous scholarship, and none endeavored to explain the connections between the earlier work and his study of liberalism. This two-part article, drawing on printed and archival sources, explores Leontovitsch’s intellectual roots, his life and his creative activity from 1902 to 1947. It examines his view of Russian history, particularly, his conception of the interplay between law and politics in the reign of Ivan IV; his attitude toward Russian Orthodoxy; his attitude toward the French Revolution; his hostility to National Socialism and Nazi policy. This article also offers new material on the history of the post-1917 Russian emigration in Central Europe: it deals with Leontovitsch’s teachers in the Russian Faculty of Law in Prague, and also discusses his ties in the 1930s and 1940s with important emigré intellectuals, such as Aleksandr Makarov, Dmitrii Chizhevskii, and Fedor Stepun.

Livesay, Daniel. Review of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childbearing, and Slavery in Jamaica, by Sasha Turner. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 11, no. 3, 2018, pp. 461-463.


External grant: Livesay, Daniel. Fred W. Smith Library Research Fellowship, Mount Vernon, 2018.

Abstract: The daily lives of enslaved laborers principally revolved around manual tasks. Individual statuses, relations with fellow workers, and cultural identities among the enslaved derived largely from the routine and often backbreaking chores demanded of them. Among white owners, bondspeople were primarily identified and understood through their labor as well. What happened in an enslaved person's life, however, when her age precluded her from the most strenuous of these burdens? For those few bound workers who did advance to a period of "retirement," how did they mark out new social positions in these systems without immediate connections to labor, and how did white society respond to them in turn? This project examines the experiences of elderly enslaved individuals in order to add greater depth to our understanding of colonial bondage, as well as to the constructions of paternalism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. Scholars of slavery have long been most interested in the labor of enslaved individuals. The reasons for this are clear: much of slave life centered on labor, and most records do not fixate on the small minority of workers who lived to advanced age. Of those historians who mention elderly slaves in North America, they write primarily of their scarcity, advancement into skilled positions, or eventual manumission. More recently, scholars of North American slavery have looked at the medicalization of enslaved health, as well as in the tragically routine occurrence of suicide within unfree communities. But these studies have largely focused on sickness (physical, mental, and spiritual) among enslaved individuals in their younger, working lives. Although a generation of intensive research has yielded significant information on the thickest part of enslaved workers' life-cycles, the tail end of that demographic spectrum remains remarkably unexplored. With an absence of substantial investigation into elderly bondspeople's lives, a more focused examination is needed on the final stage of their experiences. In old age, enslaved individuals acted as historians, midwives, religious figures, and social leaders, as well as fulfilled a host of other positions. They were also considered to be the most trusted laborers on an estate and, as Eugene Genovese noted long ago, their continued health served as a source of pride for enslavers. Thus, not only did unfree African Americans continue to act as vital parts of the community in advanced age, but they also fit into a colonial discourse about the morality and conduct of enslavement. This was especially important during the Age of Revolutions at the end of the long eighteenth century. As slaveholding butted up against abolitionism, many Virginians freed their aged workers in acts of supposed humanity that also benefited their plantations' bottom lines. The wave of emancipation that followed American independence recast the role of enslaved elders, and of slavery generally, in the young republic. This figured prominently into the crafting of paternalistic defenses of enslavement that pushed away from earlier, patriarchal justifications for the system. The Fred W. Smith Library's extensive collection on slavery in North America, and in particular of Mount Vernon, will allow me to complete two crucial investigations into the lives of elderly slaves. In particular, I plan to analyze two different sets of collections within the Library's holdings: plantation account books and correspondence, and enslaved lists and appraisals. First, I will examine the estate papers of several branches of the Washington family, including George, Mary, Bushrod, and Lawrence Washington, as well as Washington Lund and John Custis, and the Lewis household (Lawrence, George, and Robert). These accounts will give some consistent reports about the retired and superannuated enslaved workers on each of the plantations, both in terms of ages and occupations, as well as relationships between the white and black communities on those estates. These extensive sources will provide detailed accounts of the demography and daily experiences of aging workers in the Chesapeake. It will also show how planters managed and oversaw their enslaved laborers' transitions into a semi-retired state. Second, I will read through the Library's collection of slave lists, appraisals, and valuations to determine how elderly workers' places on estates - and in the slave markets - changed over time. These are contained within the manuscript papers of many of the Washington clan, but also in some of the miscellaneous collections, including the "Overseer's Account Book." These will provide a precise sense of the economics of elderly individuals on plantations, and the ways in which their social and financial value transformed in the minds of enslavers. Together, these two sets of sources will enable me to complete a significant portion of my research on the experiences of enslaved people when they reached old age. This research at the Washington Library will also serve as the foundation for further exploration on white attitudes toward elderly slaves from the colonial period, up to the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's enduringly-famous characterization of an old slave, depicted in the figure of Uncle Tom. I believe that one month of research will be sufficient time to read through these sources, by dedicating approximately 20 days to the Washington family archives, and 10 days to the slave appraisal data. With the generous support of the Washington Library, I will be able to make significant progress on my second book project. This broader research agenda will propel the field of slave history into the emerging discipline of geriatric studies, which has become ever more vital as the U.S. population grows increasingly older. Moreover, this project will expand the scope of scholarly work on enslaved people in the Early Republic by broadening our understanding of their lives once their work was, at least nominally, completed.


External grant: Livesay, Daniel. Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies Research Fellowship, Monticello, awarded in 2018, will be undertaken in 2019.

Abstract: This project explores what life was like for elderly enslaved workers in the Early Republic. Using oral histories from the "Getting Word" archive at Monticello, along with Thomas Jefferson's own accounts of his aging workforce, my research will shed light on an almost wholly neglected part of the enslaved lifecycle. Older bondspeople were crucial actors at the turn of the nineteenth century, not only because of the key social positions they took on the plantation, but also because slavery's defenders held them up as evidence of the institution's supposed success and humanity. Indeed, this project seeks to show how notions of paternalism developed out of a fierce debate over aging plantation laborers. With a one-month fellowship from Monticello, I will be able to make significant progress on finishing the research for this project, which forms the base of my second book manuscript, Endless Bondage: Old Age in New World Slavery.


External grant: Livesay, Daniel. Virginia Historical Society Mellon Research Fellowship, 2018.

Abstract: The daily lives of enslaved laborers principally revolved around manual tasks. Individual statuses, relations with fellow workers, and cultural identities among the enslaved derived largely from the routine and often backbreaking chores demanded of them. Among white owners, bondspeople were primarily identified and understood through their labor as well. What happened in an enslaved person's life, however, when her age precluded her from the most strenuous of these burdens? For those few bound workers who did advance to a period of "retirement," how did they mark out new social positions in these systems without immediate connections to labor, and how did white society respond to them in turn? This project examines the experiences of elderly enslaved individuals in order to add greater depth to our understanding of colonial bondage, as well as to the constructions of paternalism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. Scholars of slavery have long neglected aged bondspeople. Of those who mention them, historians write primarily of their scarcity, advancement into skilled positions, or eventual manumission. With an absence of substantial investigation into elderly slaves lives, a focused examination is needed. In old age, enslaved individuals acted as historians, midwives, religious figures, and social leaders, as well as fulfilled a host of other positions. They were also considered to be the most trusted laborers on an estate and their continued health served as a source of pride for enslavers. Thus, not only did unfree African Americans continue to act as vital parts of the community in advanced age, but they also fit into a colonial and early-national discourse about the morality and conduct of enslavement. This was especially important during the Age of Revolutions at the end of the long eighteenth century. The Virginia Historical Society's extensive collection on slavery in North America will allow me to complete a crucial investigation into the lives of elderly slaves. In particular, I plan to analyze six different collections of papers within the Library's holdings: the Eppes, Eggleston, Lee, Massie, Saunders, and Tayloe Family Papers. These accounts will give some consistent reports about the retired and superannuated enslaved workers on each of the plantations, both in terms of ages and occupations, as well as relationships between the white and black communities on those estates. These extensive sources will provide detailed accounts of the demography and daily experiences of aging workers in the Chesapeake, which held the highest proportion of elderly workers in the Americas. They will also show how planters managed and oversaw their enslaved laborers' transitions into a semi-retired state. Together, these family papers will enable me to complete a significant portion of my research on the experiences of enslaved Virginians when they reached old age. This research at the Virginia Historical Society will enable me to make significant progress on my second book project, Endless Bondage: Old Age in New World Slavery. The manuscript will propel the field of slave history into the emerging discipline of geriatric studies, which has become ever more vital as the U.S. population grows increasingly older. It will also serve as the foundation for further exploration on white attitudes toward elderly slaves from the colonial period, up to the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's enduringly-famous characterization of an old slave, depicted in the figure of Uncle Tom. I believe that three weeks of research will be needed in order to read through these sources. With the generous support of the Virginia Historical Society I seek to expand the scope of scholarly work on enslaved people in the Early Republic by broadening our understanding of their lives once their work was, at least nominally, completed.

Lower, Wendy. “Decentering Berlin—Europeanization of Holocaust History.” Journal of Modern European History, vol. 16, 2018, pp. 32-39.

Abstract: This essay critiques two major books on the history of the Holocaust as European history, and analyzes the patterns of the persecution of minorities and forms of antisemitism that countries under Nazi rule or aligned with the Nazis pursued leading to and during the Second World War. It compares the national dimensions that were culturally and historically unique to Nazi Germany's dominant policies. Rather than center the story of the Holocaust as Berlin-driven, it widens the lens to all of Europe and to the parallel developments in other major European capitals of the era. Hitler propagated that he was leading a European crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism, and was the savior of European civilization. Rather than assume that trends toward Europeanization were inherently progressive, the essay problematizes aspects of Europeanization that were negative, and even genocidal.


Lower, Wendy. “German Women and the Holocaust in the Nazi East.” Women in Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, edited by Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren. Indiana University Press, 2018, pp. 111-136.

Abstract: This book chapter focuses on female accomplices and perpetrators in Nazi Germany, and elucidates the blind spots in the historiography and future directions for research. It argues that women have played a key role as operatives and administrators of genocide, and have provided a crucial ideological and moral justification for the violence.


Lower, Wendy. “The History and Future of Holocaust Research.” Tablet, April 26, 2018.

Abstract: How newly opened archives, a wider European scope, transnational narratives, and integrated big data are changing our understanding of the Shoah.


Lower, Wendy. “Holocaust Studies: The Spatial Turn.” A Companion to Nazi Germany, edited by Shelley Baranowski, Armin Nolzen, and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann. Wiley-Blackwell, 2018.

Abstract: In this chapter, I survey recent publications on the Holocaust, particularly those that focus on the mass murder in eastern Europe, and argue that the Europeanization of Holocaust Studies, above all its “spatial turn,” has been the most important recent development in the field. This turn challenges scholars of Nazi Germany to become trans-national comparativists, which entails paradigm shifts, and acquiring additional languages and interdisciplinary methodological approaches. It also forces a rethinking of the distribution of power in the Nazi system, the imperial dynamic of the center and periphery, as well as the relations between the occupier and occupied, and among Axis collaborators. The categories of victims and perpetrators have expanded to include non-Jews and non-Germans. In this essay I focus on four features of the current Holocaust historiography that pertain to the Europeanizing trends: (1) decision-making and proximity (2) biography (3) collaboration and (4) archival sources. In my conclusion, I assess advances and lacunae in the historiography, and suggest future research directions.

Park, Albert L. “Introduction to a Forum on War and Environment on the Korean Peninsula, 1598-1965.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 77, issue 2, 2018, pp. 315-318.

Abstract: This introduction offers an overview of the historiography of environmental issues in Korean history.


Park, Albert L. “The Reshaping of Landscapes: Systems of Mediation, War, and Slow Violence.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 77, issue 2, 2018, pp. 365-368.

Abstract: This essay introduces theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the environment in Korea and elsewhere.


External Grant: Park, Albert. Abe Fellowship, Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, 2018-2019.

The Abe Fellowship is designed to encourage international multidisciplinary research on topics of pressing global concern. The program seeks to foster the development of a new generation of researchers who are interested in policy-relevant topics of long-range importance and who are willing to become key members of a bilateral and global research network built around such topics. It strives especially to promote a new level of intellectual cooperation between the Japanese and American academic and professional communities committed to and trained for advancing global understanding and problem solving.


External Grant: Park, Albert. Senior Fulbright Research Fellowship for Korea, awarded in 2018 for calendar year 2019.

Fellowship allowing for research in Korea.

Petropoulos, Jonathan. “Architecture and the Arts.” The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, edited by Robert Gellately. Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 119-156.

Abstract: An overview of the visual arts (except film) in Germany between 1933 and 1945, where I look at both official artists and those in more oppositional positions. I write about painting, sculpture, music, literature, theatre, and, as the title of the piece indicates, architecture too. I weave together a lot of threads, but it's the kind of piece I'd use in several of my courses.


Petropoulos, Jonathan. “Nazi Policies Forced Jewish Collectors Like Paul Leffmann to Sell Their Art, Whatever the Price.” The Art Newspaper, March 30, 2018.


Petropoulos, Jonathan. Review of Hitlers adliger Diplomat: Der Herzog von Coburg und das Dritte Reich, by Hubertus Büschel. The American Historical Review, vol. 123, issue 1, 2018, pp. 320-321.


External Grant: Petropoulos, Jonathan. Croul Family Foundation, Research Grant, December 2018.

Sarzynski, Sarah. “Reading the Cold War from the Margins: Literatura de Cordel as a Historical Prism.” The Americas, vol. 75, issue 1, 2018, pp. 127-153.

Abstract: This article analyzes literatura de cordel (popular pamphlet poetry) as a site of consent and resistance, a space revealing rural Northeastern Brazilians' perspectives on the Cold War and the political and social struggles in Northeastern Brazil surrounding the 1964 military coup. The study demonstrates that most Northeastern rural workers would have heard debates encouraging them to support or oppose agrarian reform. Arguments often referred to religion and Divine Providence, described rural workers as victims, and portrayed the opposing side as criminals. Rural social movement poets used such characterizations as tools of empowerment, encouraging rural men to fight for their honor and protect their family. Conservative poets painted rural social movements as communist, and portrayed communists as Satanic, liars, and criminals.


Sarzynski, Sarah. Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil. Stanford University Press, 2018.

Abstract: Sarah Sarzynski's cultural history of Cold War–era Brazil examines the influence of revolutionary social movements in Northeastern Brazil during the lead-up to the 1964 coup that would bring the military to power for 21 years. Rural social movements that unfolded in the Northeast beginning in the 1950s inspired Brazilian and international filmmakers, intellectuals, politicians, and journalists to envision a potential social revolution in Brazil. But in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the strength of rural social movements also raised fears about the threat of communism and hemispheric security. Turning to sources including Cinema Novo films, biographies, chapbook literature, and materials from U.S. and Brazilian government archives, Sarzynski shows how representations of the Northeast depended on persistent stereotypes depicting the region as backward, impoverished, and violent. By late March 1964, Brazilian Armed Forces faced little resistance when overthrowing democratically elected leaders in part because of the widely held belief that the violence and chaos in the "backward" Northeast threatened the modern Brazilian nation. Sarzynski's cultural history recasts conventional narratives of the Cold War in Brazil, showing how local struggles over land reform and rural workers' rights were part of broader ideological debates over capitalism and communism, Third World independence, and modernization on a global scale.

Selig, Diana. “Arguing in Love.” Review of Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America, by Nathaniel Frank. Los Angeles Review of Books, November 9, 2018.

Stein, David. “The King Who Carried on the Fight for Economic Justice.” The Washington Post, April 4, 2018.


Stein, David and Ady Barkan. “The New Demand for an Old Idea: Guaranteed Jobs Now.” Dissent Magazine, November 2, 2018.


Theoharis, Jeanne and David Stein. “What Coretta Scott King Can Teach Democrats About a Jobs Guarantee.” The Huffington Post, May 23, 2018.

Venit-Shelton, Tamara. Review of Dirty Deeds: Land, Violence, and the 1856 San Francisco Vigilance Committee, by Nancy J. Taniguchi. Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 37, no. 2, 2018, pp. 103-105.

Wang, Chelsea Zi. Review of Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China, by Hilde De Weerdt. East Asian Publishing and Society, vol. 8, issue 1, 2018, pp. 85-90.