Category / Publications

by abritt

Three History Majors Recognized in Woodruff Library Undergraduate Research Award Contest

The panel of judges for the 2016 Woodruff Library Undergraduate Research Award recognized the outstanding scholarship of three History Department majors. Samantha Keng and Zixuan (Armstrong) Li each received $500 prizes for undergraduate research papers. Keng’s paper, sponsored by Professor Carol Anderson, is titled “Model Minority Awakenings: Vincent Chin, Asian America’s Emmett Till.” Li’s work, titled “Doner Kebab: Symbol of German Multiculturalism in the Turkish Immigration Question,” was supported by Dr. Astrid Eckert. A third History Department major, Emily Moore received an Honorable Mention. Titled “‘A Casket Full of Precious Memoirs’: The Town of Washington’s Conception of Its Own History,” Moore was sponsored by Dr. Leslie Harris. Congratulations to these students and their advisers on outstanding work. Descriptions of each piece can be found in the Emory Undergraduate Research Journal (EURJ) from pages 66-69. Also see the news release on the Woodruff library’s Scholar Blog.

From left to right: Emily Moore, Zixuan (Armstrong) Li, Samantha Keng, & Hannah ConwayFrom left to right: Emily Moore, Zixuan (Armstrong) Li, Samantha Keng, & Hannah Conway

 

by abritt

Professor Tonio Andrade and his “The Gunpowder Age” Featured by Emory News Center

The Emory News Center recently published a profile of Dr. Tonio Andrade and his newest work, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Intervention, and the Rise of the West in World History. The piece, titled “Emory historian tackles China’s military history with ‘The Gunpowder Age,'” is available in full here. Check out an excerpt below.

Over the past year, China has built artificial islands — with their own airstrips and military facilities — as part of its claim to land in the international trade routes in the seas east and south of the country.

The territorial claims escalated this year when U.S. and Taiwan officials said China had put surface-to-air missiles on one of the disputed islands in the South China Sea.

Is this a new threat from a nation that historians have argued remained a military afterthought in part because of the codes of Confucianism?

Not according to Emory historian Tonio Andrade who shows in his new book, “The Gunpowder Age,” that the idea that China has historically been a peaceful nation, little interested in military matters, is not true.

Gunpowder Age

by abritt

PhD Alumnus Adam T. Rosenbaum Publishes ‘Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950’

Adam T. Rosenbaum, Assistant Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, recently published Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800-1950 with Cambridge University Press. The book was based on Rosenbaum’s dissertation, completed under the supervision of Dr. Astrid M. Eckert. Rosenbaum graduated from Emory in 2011 with a PhD in Modern German History.

Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950

by abritt

Chad R. Fulwider, Emory PhD Alumnus, Publishes ‘German Propaganda and U.S. Neutrality in World War I ‘

Chad R. Fulwider, Associate Professor of History at the Centenary College of Louisiana, recently published German Propaganda and U.S. Neutrality in World War I with the University of Missouri Press. Fulwider graduated from Emory’s PhD program in 2008 with a specialization in Modern European History. Below is a review of Fulwider’s new work.

“Until now, there has been no comprehensive study of German propagandists’ efforts to keep the United States out of the First World War. In this deeply researched book, Chad Fulwider presents a nuanced view of these propaganda operations, exposing many fascinating aspects of these activities and filling a large gap in the historiography of World War I.”—Thomas Boghardt, author of The Zimmerman Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America’s Entry into World War I

by abritt

Andrade’s ‘The Gunpowder Age’ Reviewed in The Wall Street Journal

Tonio Andrade‘s The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton 2016) was reviewed by Jeffrey Wasserstrom in The Wall Street Journal on January 29, 2016. The article, available here, is titled “Flying Rats and Festive Fireworks.” Wasserstrom’s appreciative review describes the The Gunpowder Age as marking “a major contribution to a significant area of academic concern while opening the eyes of non-specialists.”

The description of The Gunpowder Age from Princeton University Press follows:

The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42. What happened? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade offers a compelling new answer, opening a fresh perspective on a key question of world history: why did the countries of western Europe surge to global importance starting in the 1500s while China slipped behind?

Historians have long argued that gunpowder weapons helped Europeans establish global hegemony. Yet the inhabitants of what is today China not only invented guns and bombs but also, as Andrade shows, continued to innovate in gunpowder technology through the early 1700s—much longer than previously thought. Why, then, did China become so vulnerable? Andrade argues that one significant reason is that it was out of practice fighting wars, having enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace, since 1760. Indeed, he demonstrates that China—like Europe—was a powerful military innovator, particularly during times of great warfare, such as the violent century starting after the Opium War, when the Chinese once again quickly modernized their forces. Today, China is simply returning to its old position as one of the world’s great military powers.

By showing that China’s military dynamism was deeper, longer lasting, and more quickly recovered than previously understood, The Gunpowder Age challenges long-standing explanations of the so-called Great Divergence between the West and Asia.
by abritt

Jeffrey Lesser on CNN.com: ‘Brazil Protests: What they Mean’

Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com titled “What Brazil’s Protests Mean.” Lesser, an expert in the history of Brazil and current fellow of the Intercultural Dialogues group at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of São Paulo, discusses recent anti-government demonstrations. Here is an excerpt from the end of the piece:

One of the many joys of being a historian is that I do not have to predict the future. But seeing the weekend’s demonstrations close up, one thing was very clear — the use of the street as a location for making political points looks set to continue. And in doing so, it suggests a healthy democracy in Brazil — even during these times of political, economic, and social uncertainty.

Jeffrey Lesser

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Michael D. Thompson (Ph.D., 2009) Publishes ‘Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port’

Michael D. Thompson (Ph.D., 2009), who recently was tenured and promoted to the rank of UC Foundation Associate Professor of American History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has published Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port (University of South Carolina Press, 2015), a study of waterfront work and workers in Charleston, South Carolina, between 1783-1861.  Thompson’s manuscript for this project was awarded the 2011 Hines Prize from the College of Charleston’s Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW).

book jacket for Working on the Dock of the Bay

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Dr. James V.H. Melton Publishes ‘Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier’

James V.H. Melton, Professor of History, has published a new monograph with Cambridge University Press titled Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier. See below for a description of the new work.

This book tells the story of Ebenezer, a frontier community in colonial Georgia founded by a mountain community fleeing religious persecution in its native Salzburg. This study traces the lives of the settlers from the alpine world they left behind to their struggle for survival on the southern frontier of British America. Exploring their encounters with African and indigenous peoples with whom they had had no previous contact, this book examines their initial opposition to slavery and why they ultimately embraced it. Transatlantic in scope, this study will interest readers of European and American history alike.

Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier

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Daniel LaChance Publishes Article in ‘The Conversation’

Professor LaChance, Assistant Professor in the Emory History Department, published an article in The Conversation titled “Utah’s firing squad plan is another twist in America’s long quest for a perfect execution method.”

Here is an excerpt from the piece:

Shooting people kills them more quickly and reliably than electrocuting, gassing, or poisoning them. But it’s harder to watch or read about than lethal injection.

The raw violence of the act puts it at odds with the aesthetic values that have historically shaped the development of capital punishment in the United States. Guns uncomfortably blur the line between the righteous violence of the state and the lawless violence of the criminal. The gun is, historically speaking, the only instrument of execution that is also commonly used by criminals. Its use in executions reminds us of a past in which there was less of a distinction between the state that carried out the law and those it punished.

Indeed, in its jarring loudness, its bloodiness, and its mutilating effects on the body, execution by firing squad comes much closer to expressing the “eye for an eye” logic that has long stoked Americans’ demand for the death penalty, but that has, since the nineteenth century, been carefully excised from its actual administration.

That, in the end, is what is most newsworthy about Utah’s decision to return to the gun. In the violent imagery it conjures, execution by firing squad has the power to remind Americans of a simple truth that lethal injection has, for a long time, made it easy for them to forget: executions are acts of extreme, body-mutilating violence.