Faculty Books

FSU History faculty members have published more than 75 books on a wide range of subjects and won half a dozen awards in the process. Review the full booklist below and visit the faculty bios to learn more about the authors.

By Rafe Blaufarb

The Revolutionary Atlantic, Republican Visions, 1760-1830: A Documentary History

The Revolutionary Atlantic: Republican Visions, 1760-1830: A Documentary History is the first book to bring together primary sources on the four major revolutions--American, French, Haitian, and Spanish--that comprised the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. 

The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property

What does it mean to own something? What sorts of things can be owned, and what cannot? How does one relinquish ownership? What are the boundaries between private and public property?

Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Graphic History

Inhuman Traffick tells for the first time a story of enslavement and freedom that spans the entire Atlantic world. 

The Politics of Fiscal Privilege in Provence, 1530s-1830s

Rafe Blaufarb examines the interwoven problems of taxation and social privilege in this treatment of the contention over fiscal privilege between the seigneurial nobility and the tax-payers of Provence. 

Napoleonic Foot Soldiers and Civilians

Presenting a unique view of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleonic Foot Soldiers and Civilians highlights the experiences of common soldiers and civilians to explore core civil-military interactions during this time in history, giving you a more in-depth picture of life for a soldier.

Napoleon: A Symbol for an Age: A Brief History with Documents

By calming revolutionary turbulence while preserving fundamental gains of 1789, Napoleon Bonaparte laid the foundations of modern France. But his impact reached beyond France’s borders as well. 

Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835

Bonapartists in the Borderlands recounts how Napoleonic exiles and French refugees from Europe and the Caribbean joined forces with Latin American insurgents, Gulf pirates, and international adventurers to seek their fortune in the Gulf borderlands. 

The French Army, 1750-1820: Careers, Talent, Merit

This is the first book to examine the transformation of the French military profession during the momentous period that saw the death of royal absolutism, the rise and fall of successive revolutionary regimes, the consolidation of Napoleonic rule, and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after the Empire’s final collapse.

By Michael Creswell

A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe

Challenging standard interpretations of American dominance and French weakness in postwar Western Europe, Michael Creswell argues that France played a key role in shaping the cold war order. 

By Annika Culver

Democratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan

Democratizing Luxury explores the interplay between advertising and consumption in modern Japan by investigating how Japanese companies at key historical moments assigned value, or “luxury,” to mass-produced products as an important business model.

Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology

As a transnational history of science, Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology focuses on the political aspects of highly mobile Japanese explorer-scientists, or cosmopolitan gentlemen of science, circulating between Japanese and British/American spaces in the transwar period from the 1920s to 1950s.

Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo

In the 1930s and ’40s, Japanese rulers in Manchukuo enlisted writers and artists to promote imperial Japan’s modernization program.

By Ben Dodds

Myths and Memories of the Black Death

This book explores modern representations of the Black Death, a medieval pandemic. The concept of cultural memory is used to examine the ways in which journalists, writers of fiction, scholars and others referred to, described and explained the Black Death from around 1800 onwards.

Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Richard Britnell

Long dominated by theories of causation involving class conflict and Malthusian crisis, the field of medieval economic history has been transformed in recent years by a better understanding of the process of commercialisation.

Agriculture and Rural Society After the Black Death: Common Themes and Regional Variations

Offering a broad perspective on agrarian problems such as depopulation and social conflict, this collection of essays on agriculture and rural society in the late Middle Ages follows the period of the Black Death.

Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: The Evidence from Tithes, 1270-1536

The peasant economy in north-east England, and indeed throughout the country as a whole, underwent many changes during the later Middle Ages, but owing to the lack of evidence it has been difficult to come to definite conclusions.

By Ronald E. Doel

Exploring Greenland: Cold War Science and Technology on Ice (Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

Using newly declassified documents, this book explores why U.S. military leaders after World War II sought to monitor the far north and understand the physical environment of Greenland, a crucial territory of Denmark.

The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine: Writing Recent Science

As historians of science increasingly turn to work on recent (post 1945) science, the historiographical and methodological problems associated with the history of contemporary science are debated with growing frequency and urgency.

Solar System Astronomy in America: Communities, Patronage, and Interdisciplinary Science, 1920-1960

Between 1920 and 1960 astronomers began working with scientists in other fields in order to better understand the nature of the solar system.

By Andrew Frank

Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami

Formed seemingly out of steel, glass, and concrete, with millions of residents from around the globe, Miami has ancient roots that can be hard to imagine today.

Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier

Creeks and Southerners examines the families created by the hundreds of intermarriages between Creek Indian women and European American men in the southeastern United States during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American South

This book illuminates singular aspects of Southern society and culture and provides justification for thinking about the South as a region unto itself.

By Joseph M. Gabriel

Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry

During most of the nineteenth century, physicians and pharmacists alike considered medical patenting and the use of trademarks by drug manufacturers unethical forms of monopoly.

By Robert Gellately

The Oxford History of the Third Reich

At age thirty in 1919, Adolf Hitler had no accomplishments. He was a rootless loner, a corporal in a shattered army, without money or prospects. A little more than twenty years later, in autumn 1941, he directed his dynamic forces against the Soviet Union, and in December, the Germans were at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad.

Hitler's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis

Understanding Adolf Hitler's ideology provides insights into the mental world of an extremist politics that, over the course of the Third Reich, developed explosive energies culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The Oxford Illustrated History of The Third Reich

At age thirty in 1919, Adolf Hitler had no accomplishments. He was a rootless loner, a corporal in a shattered army, without money or prospects. 

Stalin's Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War

A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West.

Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe

This remarkably ambitious book tells the story of the great social and political catastrophe that enveloped Europe between 1914 and 1945.

The Nuremberg Interviews

During the Nuremberg trials, Leon Goldensohn—a U.S. Army psychiatrist—monitored the mental health of two dozen Germans leaders charged with carrying out genocide.

The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective

Focusing on the twentieth century, this collection of essays by leading international experts offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and analysis of multiple cases of genocide and genocidal acts.

Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

Debate still rages over how much ordinary Germans knew about the concentration camps and the Gestapo's activities during Hitler's reign.

Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany

When Hitler assumed power in 1933, he and other Nazis had firm ideas on what they called a racially pure “community of the people.”

Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History 1789-1989

"Produced by religious intolerance, political fanaticism, or social resentment, denunciation is a modern democratic practice too long neglected by historians. This fascinating book, written by excellent specialists, establishes a first inventory of this practice, leading the reader through the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary cultures of the last two centuries."—Francois Furet

The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945

This book offers an intriguing examination of the everyday operations of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.

The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics: 1890-1914

Intense competition despite an expanding retail market, led German shopkeepers to look for political solutions to their problems. In an epilogue, this work explains why many later looked to the Nazi party for help.

By Jonathan Grant

Between Depression and Disarmament The International Armaments Business, 1919–1939

This business history analyzes the connections between private business, disarmament, and re-armament as they affected arms procurement and military technology transfers in Eastern Europe from 1919 to 1939.

Rulers, Guns, and Money: The Global Arms Trade in the Age of Imperialism

The explosion of the industrial revolution and the rise of imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century served to dramatically increase the supply and demand for weapons on a global scale.

Big Business in Russia: The History of the Putilov Company in Late Imperial Russia, 1868-1917

Jonathan A. Grant has written a highly original study of the Putilov works—the most famous industrial conglomerate in the Russian Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

By Will Hanley

Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria

Nationality is the most important legal mechanism sorting and classifying the world's population today.

By Robinson Herrera

Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth Century Santiago de Guatemala

The first century of Spanish colonization in Latin America witnessed the birth of cities that, while secondary to great metropolitan centers such as Mexico City and Lima, became important hubs for regional commerce.

By Anasa Hicks

Hierarchies at Home: Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution (Afro-Latin America)

Hierarchies at Home traces the experiences of Cuban domestic workers from the abolition of slavery through the 1959 revolution. 

By Maxine D. Jones

Talledega College: The First Century

In 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared separate education inherently unequal, Talladega College was a notable black liberal arts school thriving in rural east Alabama.

African Americans in Florida

Brief essays profile over 50 African Americans during four centuries of Florida history. 

Education for Liberation: The American Missionary Association and African Americans, 1890 to the Civil Rights Movement

Education for Liberation completes the study Dr. Richardson published in 1986 as Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890 by continuing the account of the American Missionary Association (AMA) from the end of Reconstruction to the post-World War II era.

By Jennifer L. Koslow

Public History: An Introduction from Theory to Application

Public History: An Introduction from Theory to Application is the first text of its kind to offer both historical background on the ways in which historians have collected, preserved, and interpreted history with and for public audiences in the United States since the nineteenth century to the present and instruction on current practices of public history.

Exhibiting Health: Public Health Displays in the Progressive Era

In the early twentieth century, public health reformers approached the task of ameliorating unsanitary conditions and preventing epidemic diseases with optimism.

Cultivating Health: Los Angeles Women and Public Health Reform

At the dawn of the Progressive Era, when America was experiencing an industrial boom, many working families often ate contaminated food, lived in decaying urban tenements, and had little access to medical care.

By Claudia Liebeskind

Napoleonic Foot Soldiers and Civilians

Presenting a unique view of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleonic Foot Soldiers and Civilians highlights the experiences of common soldiers and civilians to explore core civil-military interactions during this time in history, giving you a more in-depth picture of life for a soldier.

Piety on Its Knees: Three Sufi Traditions in South Asia in Modern Times

This study analyses religious changes in Sufism in South Asia in the modern period.

By Cathy McClive

The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife's Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant: A Bilingual Edition Volume 98

The extraordinary story of a seventeenth-century French midwife and her treatise on childbirth.

Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France

Early modern bodies, particularly menstruating and pregnant bodies, were not stable signifiers.

By Katherine Mooney

Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey (Black Lives)

Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century.

Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom were made at the Racetrack

Race Horse Men recaptures the vivid sights, sensations, and illusions of nineteenth-century thoroughbred racing, America’s first mass spectator sport.

Ruined By This Miserable War: The Dispatches of Charles Prosper Fauconnet

In March 1863, after Northern general Benjamin F. Butler demanded the recall of the French consul-general, an unabashed Confederate sympathizer, from Union-occupied New Orleans, Charles Prosper Fauconnet assumed the duties of acting consul.

By Nilay Özok-Gündoğan

The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire

This book narrates the rise and fall of Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. Focusing on one noble Kurdish family based in the emirate of Palu, a fortressed town in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, it provides the first systematic analysis of the hereditary nobility in Kurdistan.

By James Palmer

The Chronicle of an Anonymous Roman: Rome, Italy, and Latin Christendom, c. 1325-1360

The Chronicle of an Anonymous Roman is a treasure of history writing and of medieval Italian literature.

The Virtues of Economy: Governance, Power, and Piety in Late Medieval Rome

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city.

By G. Kurt Piehler

A Religious History of the American GI in World War II (Studies in War, Society, and the Military)

A Religious History of the American GI in World War II breaks new ground by recounting the armed forces’ unprecedented efforts to meet the spiritual needs of the fifteen million men and women who served in World War II.

World War II

There are countless books detailing the history of World War II, but none has examined the differences among soldiers’s experiences based on their service branch’s culture.

Remembering War the American Way

Wars do not fully end when the shooting stops.

By Paul Renfro

Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood and the American Carceral State

Beginning with Etan Patz's disappearance in Manhattan in 1979, a spate of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children stoked anxieties about the threats of child kidnapping and exploitation.

Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945

Growing Up America brings together new scholarship that considers the role of children and teenagers in shaping American political life during the decades following the Second World War.

By Maximilian Miguel Scholz

Strange Brethren: Refugees, Religious Bonds, and Reformation in Frankfurt, 1554-1608

In the sixteenth century, German cities and territories welcomed thousands of refugees fleeing the religious persecution sparked by the Reformation.

By Suzanne Sinke

Across Borders: Dutch Migration to North America and Australia

The Association for the Advancement of Dutch-American Studies (AADAS) chose “across borders” as the theme for their 2010 biennial conference in part to reflect the literal passage across borders which this meeting in Canada entailed for AADAS members from the United States.

Letters Across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants

This collection addresses the recent rebirth of interest in immigrant letters.

Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880-1920

In this deftly researched ethnographic portrait, Suzanne M. Sinke skillfully adapts the concept of social reproduction to examine the shifting gender roles of tens of thousands of Dutch Protestant women who crossed the Atlantic from 1880 to 1920 to make new homes in the United States.

A Century of European Migrations 1830-1930

From the Introduction by Rudolph J. Vecoli: "This volume is the outcome of a symposium held at the Spring Hilll Center, Wayzata, Minnesota, November 6-9, 1986 to mark the centennial of the Statue of Liberty and the twentieth anniversary of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.

By Nathan Stoltzfus

The Power of Populism and People: Resistance and Protest in the Modern World

Recent years have seen a disturbing advance in populist and authoritarian styles of rule and, in response, a rise in popular activism.

Women Defying Hitler: Resistance and Rescue under the Nazis

This timely volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to explore the ways that women responded to situations of immense deprivation, need, and victimization under Hitler's dictatorship.

Protest in Hitler's “National Community” Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response

That Hitler’s Gestapo harshly suppressed any signs of opposition inside the Third Reich is a common misconception.

Hitler's Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany

A comprehensive and eye-opening examination of Hitler’s regime, revealing the numerous strategic compromises he made in order to manage dissent.

Nazi Crimes and the Law

This book examines the use of national and international law to prosecute Nazi crimes, the centerpiece of twentieth-century state-sponsored genocide and mass murder crimes, the paradigmatic instance of state-sponsored criminality and genocide in the twentieth century.

Courageous Resistance: The Power of Ordinary People

During times of injustice, some individuals or groups courageously resist maltreatment of all people, regardless of backgrounds.

Shades of Green: Environment Activism Around the Globe

Shades of Green examines the impact of political, economic, religious, and scientific institutions on environmental activism around the world.

Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany

When Hitler assumed power in 1933, he and other Nazis had firm ideas on what they called a racially pure “community of the people.”

Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosentrasse Protest in Nazi Germany

In February 1943, the Nazis began a final roundup of German Jews. The Gestapo swiftly arrested approximately 10,000 Jews remaining in Berlin. Most of them died within days in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. 

By Charles Upchurch

Beyond the Law: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain

In nineteenth-century England, sodomy was punishable by death; even an accusation could damage a man’s reputation for life.

Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform

This book examines changing perceptions of sex between men in early Victorian Britain, a significant yet surprisingly little explored period in the history of Western sexuality.

By George S. Williamson

The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche

Since the dawn of Romanticism, artists and intellectuals in Germany have maintained an abiding interest in the gods and myths of antiquity while calling for a new mythology suitable to the modern age.

By Laurie Wood

Archipelago of Justice: Law in France's Early Modern Empire

This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of the people, such as itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire between 1680 and 1780 in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.