Awards
Continental Reckoning by Elliott West has won Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize!
Reviews
Review in Foreword Reviews:
“A revealing biography, Cast Out of Eden details the hypocrisy, cruelty, and astonishing achievements of John Muir.”
Review in CCAR Journal:
“Few things are more powerful than bringing a voice to the voiceless . . . Our rabbinic community will benefit from [this] masterful work. And future writers have received their next challenge: to continue Rabbi Feldman’s work and to find more biblical women, both named and unnamed—like Chavah, Noah’s wife, Noah’s daughters, Lot’s daughter, Dinah, or Tamar—who are waiting to have their stories created for the modern reader.”
Review in H-Environment:
“The strengths of this book lie in its original focus—the century-old commodification of Antarctica—and the conscientious assembly of commercial ephemera from decades past to recoup that faded, but urgently relevant, history.”
Review in H-Environment:
“. . . this text serves an important purpose in the field of environmental history by connecting seminal texts in unique ways, tackling a huge topic in a way that is highly organized and enjoyable to read, and demonstrating why understanding the environmental history of the US West is as pressing now as ever.”
Review in H-Water:
“Strength from the Waters is an important contribution to Indigenous environmental histories that examine the intersections of white settler colonialism, racial capitalism, environmental racism, water policy, and climate change. Notably, Mestaz demonstrates the significance and necessity of centering Indigenous studies in these analyses . . . Strength from the Waters is a great addition to graduate seminars in Indigenous studies and would pair well with courses on environmental history, hydraulic policy and infrastructure, climate change, environmental racism, and contemporary Mexican history.
Review in H-LatAm:
“[Transimperial Anxieties] offers three major contributions to the study of Syrian-Lebanese Brazilians. First, it reframes the transnational history of Syrian-Lebanese immigration to a transimperial history that explores connections between the nineteenth-century Brazilian and Ottoman Empires. Second, it examines the integration of Arab Ottomans in Brazil within the context of their whiteness in a highly stratified multiracial society. Finally, it highlights the overlooked importance of Syrian-Lebanese women in the socioeconomic upward mobility of Arab Ottoman immigrants.”
Review in H-Environment:
“In The Visible Hands That Feed, Ruzana Liburkina offers essential insights into the characteristics that inform day-to-day operations within the food sector. This work is a valuable contribution to the discipline of ethnography and the literature on sustainable development in the food sector. While uninhibited in offering criticism of the present food sector’s role in the ongoing climate crisis, Liburkina also leaves room for hope for future sustainable development in the everyday work that feeds you and me.”
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“Imperial Zions portrays the complex human landscape of the nineteenth-century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) as racially and ethnically diverse, with porous geographic and cultural boundaries . . . The work breaks new ground in centering Indian and Hawaiian perspectives in the interconnected stories of Mormonism, the American West, and evolving discourses of the American family.”
Russian Colonization of Alaska
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“Owing especially to the paucity of book-length studies on the topic published in English, Grinëv’s synthesis should be read as complement, not competitor, to Ilya Vinkovetsky’s Russian America (2011). The two’s shared scope affords interested students an opportunity for historiographical comparison that did not before exist. At present, non-Russians must also value this and other translated works as imperfect access to archival materials made inaccessible by Russia’s war in Ukraine. War or no, the diligence and depth of Grinëv’s study makes it a welcome addition to Russian America’s comparatively thin historiography.”
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“McKeown effectively demonstrates that Douglas was a citizen justice, and her portrait of his western upbringing, passion for nature, and maverick personality is compelling.”
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“Out Here on Our Own contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship including gender, ethnic, and Indigenous studies, and studies of colonization, the environment, labor, mental health, mining, political economy, and the North American West. It will appeal to a broad audience of leisure readers, especially in the West, and to undergraduate and graduate students in and scholars of history, psychology, and sociology. It includes frank discussions of violence, suicide, and substance abuse.”
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“This reader finds the compilation most poignant, as a new era of environmentalists seek historical context to inform their work; as peoples with ancestral ties to the land battle to claim grounds within Yosemite as their birthright; and as Indigenous Californians throughout the state battle for their rights to perform controlled burns and advise and inform California Fire Policy.”
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“Experts in the field as well as general readers will benefit from approaching the volume as a book to be read, not just as a reference work to be consulted. The book offers a terrific single-volume introduction to the main lines of U.S. Indian policy and the importance of public administration and public administrators throughout U.S. history.”
The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“The Middle Kingdom Under the Big Sky is a compelling diasporic analysis that explores how the lives of Chinese residents in Montana were simultaneously rooted in place and shaped by concerns abroad.”
Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“Williams’s book is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of federal boarding schools. She demonstrates a clear mastery of the insights and methodologies of the field to date, while her own use of their methodologies suggests some important ways in which the field might develop in the future—especially as scholars continue to learn how to produce scholarship that benefits boarding school alumni, their families, and their communities.”
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“We Are Not Animals contains a story that is widely known to California historians but is seldom told with this much attention to Native people’s choices and voices. The author makes excellent use of traditional sources as well as oral histories to flesh out biographies of individuals, from Yokuts leader Malimin, who allied with the Spanish to shore up his own political power, to Yaquenonsat, a Sumu woman who planned the assassination of Quintana. The book’s careful excavation of Native women’s lives is its strongest feature, providing much-needed attention to Indigenous women’s involvement in politics, labor systems, and resistance movements.”
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“In A Country Strange and Far, Michael C. McKenzie blends memoir with Western and religious history to show a region defeating nineteenth-century America’s most successful church. A Washingtonian transplanted to New York’s historical Burned-Over District, McKenzie assesses the failure of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) to transfer its success in the East to the landscape of the Northwest.”
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“Ultimately, in bringing together stories of these shape-shifting individuals, Allmendinger offers crucial insights about the blurred boundaries between fiction and history, the real and the imagined, as well as the copy and the original.”
Country of the Cursed and the Driven
Review in Western Historical Quarterly:
“This book joins a growing body of literature on the different types of slavery that formed one component of violence in the Southwest Borderlands . . . This book’s most significant contribution is the sweeping coverage of two systems—what Barba labels “anti-Indian slavery” and “anti-Black slavery”—that previous historians often treated as monolithic institutions of human bondage.”
Author Interviews
Interview in Faculti
Interview in Faculti
Interview in Faculti
Arnold “Smoke” Elser and Eva-Maria Maggi
Interview in Mountain Journal
Interview in New Books Network
Interview in Faculti
Interview in Faculti
UNP blog 