The Atlanta History Center (AHC) recently hosted Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham in conversation with Dr. Patrick Allitt of the Emory History Department. Meacham spoke about his new book, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union (Penguin Random House, 2026), which “unites centuries of essential American voices to understand our national debates and divisions from 1619 to the present.” David Plazas, opinion editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, published a piece about the AHC event (subscription required) here.
Dr. Benjamin P. Hein, a 2010 Emory History alum and now Assistant Professor at Brown University, has published his first book: The Migrant’s Spirit: How Industrial Modernity Came to the German Lands (Oxford UP, 2025). Weaving economic history and the history of financial institutions with immigration and cultural history, The Migrant’s Spirit locates the impetus for Germany’s industrial modernization in transatlantic exchanges between German society and the expanding German diaspora in nineteenth-century North America.
Hein completed honors in history working with Professors Astrid M. Eckert and Brian Vick. He was awarded the 2010 Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award, given to a graduating student who displays high academic achievement and good works in the community. He received his PhD at Stanford University in 2018.
Read the full description of The Migrant’s Spirit:
When a process popularly known as the Industrial Revolution first took hold in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, many contemporaries were stunned by the scale and ferocity of the transformation. While Germany had long been considered a promising place to industrialize, given its historic ties to New World markets, skilled and educated workforce, and deep pockets of wealth, progress had been slow due to persistent indifference and skepticism across society. That people should have suddenly dropped their reservations and simply embraced the new industrial modernity defied all explanation. Grasping for answers, some concluded that the Germans must have fallen under the spell of the “capitalist spirit.”
Benjamin P. Hein locates the impetus for the abrupt transformation of German society after ca. 1850 in its cultural exchange with the country’s burgeoning diaspora in North America, one of the largest in this century. In correspondence and other “news from America,” the emigrants conveyed to their families, communities, and business associates in Europe a different set of norms and ethics regarding work, entrepreneurship, and commerce. By making it socially acceptable and politically meaningful to frequently change professions or to organize businesses as joint-stock corporations, they inadvertently mobilized an otherwise reluctant population for a more centralized regime of production that served global market forces instead of local needs and corporatist norms. They also helped popularize key institutional pillars of the new economy, like the universal bank, and inspired innovative commercial reforms, most notably the “limited liability partnership” (LLP), or “G.m.b.H.” in German, which became the legal foundation of Germany’s particularly robust small-business economy.
While addressing global trends, The Migrant’s Spirit makes these phenomena comprehensible through the lives of individuals who faced painful choices and moral quandaries as they attempted to navigate a new social and economic order and began to trust countrymen abroad over local sources of guidance. By reconstructing their struggles, Hein sheds new light on the transatlantic dimensions of Germany’s path to industrial modernity.
Junior history major Rafi Escoto recently published a paper in the Central Europe Yearbook, an open-access journal promoting the study of Central Europe among undergraduate students. Titled “Everything Old is New Again: Border Rituals and the Return of History in ‘Green Border,’” Escoto’s paper analyses Agnieszka Holland’s 2023 film about refugees from the Middle East and Africa who attempt to reach the European Union, only to become caught up in a geopolitical crisis triggered by the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko.
This paper argues that Green Border (2023), directed by Agnieszka Holland, transforms the Polish-Belarusian border into a site of moral ritual, where sacred violence replaces humanitarian law. Using Durkheim’s theories, Eastern European memory studies, and analyses of populism and asylum policy, the paper interprets the film as a historical recurrence rather than a modern crisis. Drawing on scholars like Törnquist-Plewa, Exeler, and Krastev, the analysis reveals how Europe’s border politics ritualize exclusion and revive authoritarian patterns under democratic guise. Methods include close film analysis and engagement with secondary literature on EU identity, populism, and the symbolic politics of migration.
Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya, a 2014 doctoral program alum, was recently awarded a competitive, multi-year grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for the project, “Climate Risk Management: A Historical Perspective.” The project investigates the role of financial institutions in the making of climate science, including by engaging financial institutions’ archives from the 18th century onward, and addresses the fundamental question, “Why have we overwhelmingly turned to the market to tackle the climate crisis?” The full abstract of the project follows:
This project explores why market-based tools – such as carbon trading, weather derivatives, parametric insurance, and catastrophe bonds – have become central to managing climate risk. Examining insurance archives from the eighteenth century onward, it analyzes how financial institutions shaped meteorological knowledge, risk measurement tools, underwriting policies and enforcement mechanisms. The research aims to explain how the business of risk management influenced evolving conceptions of climate and why market mechanisms, rather than regulation, dominate current climate-risk governance.
Bhattacharyya is Professor of the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich. She is the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta(Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History. She completed her doctorate under the advisement of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.
Doctoral program alum Dr. Lena Oak Suk (PhD, ’14) has published her first book, In the Darkness of the Cinema: Gender and Moviegoing in Early Twentieth-Century Urban Brazil, with Pittsburgh University Press. Focused on the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Suk’s work offers an innovative analysis of how movies and moviegoers reshaped gendered perceptions and gendered realities in urban Brazil at the beginning of the last century. Rielle Navitski (University of Georgia) praises In the Darkness of the Cinema as “an engaging account of how the movies transformed urban space and women’s participation in public life in Brazil.”
Suk is a research affiliate at the Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Director of Investigator Skill-Building in the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship & Creative Endeavor at UT. She completed her graduate training under the advisement of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.
Read the abstract of Suk’s monograph below, and find more information on Pittsburgh UP’s book page.
Gender and sexual morality, and their intersections with race and class, were central to the formation of urban Brazil in the twentieth century. In the Darkness of the Cinema takes a wide-ranging and innovative approach to gender and moviegoing culture in Brazilian society. By focusing on the flirtations and romances of the movie theater, as well as the intrigue and moral panic that they caused, Suk creates a rich portrait of spectatorship. Where women went to the movies, who they met, and what they did in the darkness were key questions that brewed among overlapping but disparate circles, from film intellectuals and filmmakers to legislators and public health officials, as well as the moviegoers themselves. Amassing sources located traditionally within film culture as well as outside of it, such as film magazines, interviews, comics, literature, and songs, Suk shows that movie theaters and moviegoers made an indelible mark on the urban landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Jim Brophy, Francis H. Squire Professor of History at the University of Delaware, describes The Making of Modern Eating as “a tour de force that promises to be a field-defining work.” Kreklau, he continues, is “a historian with a capacious and bold historical imagination…a rising star in our field.”
Kreklau is Honorary Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews, and she is the three-time prize-winning author of seven academic articles. She completed her PhD in 2018 under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick.
Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently contributed analysis to the article: “Stevie Wonder’s Battle for MLK Day and the New Challenges to King’s Legacy.” Sanders helps to chronicle the critical role that prominent figures like Wonder played in securing the establishment of the federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., which was signed into law in 1983. Sanders also offers fascinating analysis of the struggle to get the holiday observed on state and local levels, including in her hometown of Clayton, North Carolina (see more on this below). A specialist in the twentieth-century history of the U.S., Sanders is the author, most recently, of the multiple prize-winning book A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024).
Read an excerpt from the Capital B News article below and find the full piece here.
“Whether we’re talking about the local, state, or federal level, it took a lot of maneuvering to get this holiday,” Sanders said.
She grew up in Clayton, a small North Carolina town about 15 or 20 minutes from Raleigh. She recalled how her father, the first Black American elected to the Clayton Town Council, basically had to trick the council into recognizing the holiday, even after North Carolina had adopted it as a state holiday in 1983.
“After several failed attempts at getting the holiday recognized, my father introduced a motion that the town would observe all holidays observed by North Carolina,” she said. “And many of his colleagues didn’t think twice. They voted in the affirmative. Later, during that same meeting, an elderly white man said, ‘Wait, did I just vote for the King holiday?’ And my father said, ‘You most certainly did.’”
Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Emory Cahoon Family Professor of American History and a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, recently delivered remarks at the fourth installment of the annual Muscogee teach-in. The event brings representatives of the Muscogee Nation, displaced from the site of Emory’s campus in the early 1800s, to campus to teach Muscogee history and culture and to continue fortifying relationships with the Emory community. Since arriving at Emory in 2021, Lowery has been instrumental in building those relationships, including through programming at Emory’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies and curricular offerings in the History Department and beyond.
Dr. Thomas D. Rogers, Professor of History with specializations in environmental and labor history, has published a new book with co-author Dr. Jeffrey T. Manuel (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville). Titled Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of of Biofuels, the book chronicles the transnational history of ethanol in Brazil and the U.S. (the globe’s largest producers). Ethanol, which is Rogers’s third book,offers “the first full picture of the long history of this renewable fuel that from the beginning offered an imperfect alternative to oil.”
Though ethanol, a liquid fuel made from agricultural byproducts, has generated controversy in recent years—good or bad for the environment? a big-ag boon or boondoggle?—its use goes back more than a century. Tracing the little-known history of this promising and contentious fuel, Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of Biofuels reveals the transnational nature of ethanol’s development by its two biggest producers, the U.S. and Brazil. By drawing the connections between the shifting fortunes of ethanol in these two countries, the book presents the first full picture of the long history of this renewable fuel that from the beginning offered an imperfect alternative to oil.
Though generally presented as parallel stories, the histories of ethanol in the U.S. and Brazil are inextricably linked. Authors Jeffrey T. Manuel and Thomas D. Rogers show how policies in one country shaped those in the other. Brazil patterned its mid-century development on the U.S. model, adopting an automobile- and highway-focused transportation system and a fossil fuel-intensive agricultural sector. U.S. policymakers in turn took note when Brazil responded to the 1970s oil shocks by distributing ethanol nationwide, replacing half of its gasoline consumption. In the 2000s, the nations’ leaders worked together to dramatically expand ethanol production. Today, as a new generation of biofuels meant to power aviation and fight climate change again connects Brazilian and U.S. ethanol, Manuel and Rogers explain how the fuel’s future, like its history, is complicated by technical, scientific, economic, and social questions—about how to calculate carbon emissions, agricultural land use, national security and sovereignty, and the balance between government regulation and market forces. Understanding the future of biofuels demands a reckoning with this extensive, shared history—a reckoning that Manuel and Rogers’s far-reaching, deeply researched book brings into view.
Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor of History, has published his most recent book, The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World, with the University of Chicago Press. Crais foregrounds the role and significance of violence in the development of global capitalism from 1750 to the early 1900s, arguing that the period commonly described as the Anthropocene should, instead, best be understood as the Mortecene, or killing age. During this age, he writes, the new “ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.”
South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee offered the following praise for Crais’s book: “Synoptic in its reach, overwhelming in its detail, The Killing Age leaves one feeling like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, who came to prefer the company of peaceable horses to membership of humankind.”
In the Q&A below, Crais gives us a glimpse into the making of the monograph as part of the History Department’s New Books series.
Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.
In some respects, The Killing Age returned me to questions I have been interested in since graduate school in the mid-1980s when books by scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolf and others called attention to the importance of understanding the world economy and the development of capitalism. But it was only about a decade ago when I decided it was time to undertake a new project, partly inspired by a graduate course Mark Ravina and I taught on comparative empire. I became convinced that the literature on the Anthropocene was inadequate or at least incomplete and that, more generally, we had a poor understanding of the role of violence in the development of capitalism and the making of our contemporary world of planetary peril.
The research, writing and publication took about eight years. There was a lot of climate science and environmental history I had to first learn, and I had to decide on which archives I would delve into. I spent lots of time in England, but also many places across the United States. So, it took longer to research and write than previous books. Plus, The Killing Age is hefty, over 700 pages long, plus an associated website, thekillingage.com.
What was the research process like?
The Killing Age was by far the most difficult project I have undertaken. I had never done research in the histories of South America, Asia, and especially the United States. I also relied on multiple databases, some massive. The total amount of data I have stored and used for the project is more than 1 terabyte, in other words more than a million pages. One of the biggest challenges was how to navigate all the material while producing a book that is narratively driven and accessible to the general public. I ended up going through more than a dozen drafts.
Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?
I was originally trained in the history of Africa, so the chapters covering this part of the world had a certain familiarity; not so with other regions, including the United States. I am partial to the section “The American Ways of Killing” that explores the hunting of whales, beaver, and bison and its connections to economic change and the emergence of the US as a global power. Just learning about the entwined histories of humans and non-humans was fascinating, especially as I wrote some of these chapters during COVID-19.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda (past, present, or future)?
The Killing Age is both a kind of culmination and a departure. I have been thinking about many of the issues I explore for decades. At the same time, the project has convinced me of the importance of writing a global history of the twentieth century, about the possibilities of human progress and how these possibilities were so often subverted. In my next project I will be returning to the issue of violence and especially the redemocratization of the means of destruction, particularly after 1945.
