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Browsing Department of History by Content Type "Book"
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- A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French IndiaAgmon, Danna (Cornell University Press, 2017)Early in the eighteenth century, in the French colony of Pondichéry, India, a man’s life was thrust into turmoil. A Tamil commercial broker named Nayiniyappa, the colony’s most powerful local man, was arrested, swiftly convicted of tyranny and sedition, and died in prison while serving out his sentence. But following his death a global mobilization effort on his behalf ensued, and the French King exonerated Nayiniyappa posthumously. The struggle over this man’s guilt or innocence drew into debate merchants of the French trading company, the Compagnie des Indes, Catholic missionaries of various orders, high ranking officials in Paris and Versailles, and local families in Pondichéry. As they fought over Nayiniyappa’s fate, they also articulated radically different visions of the French colonial project in India. This microhistory of the affair and the fault lines it reveals shows that conflicts between and within the projects of trade and religion were a defining feature of the little-known French empire in South Asia.
- Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial PhilippinesLumba, Allan E. S. (Duke University Press, 2022-05)In Monetary Authorities, Allan E. S. Lumba explores how the United States used monetary policy and banking systems to justify racial and class hierarchies, enforce capitalist exploitation, and counter movements for decolonization in the American colonial Philippines. Lumba shows that colonial economic experts justified American imperial authority by claiming that Filipinos did not possess the racial capacities to properly manage money. Financial independence, then, became a key metric of racial capitalism by which Filipinos had to prove their ability to self-govern. At the same time, the colonial state used its monetary authority to police the economic activities of colonized subjects and to curb movements for decolonization. It later offered a conditional form of decolonization that left the Philippines reliant on U.S. financial institutions. By showing how imperial governance was entwined with the racialization and regulation of monetary systems in the Philippines, Lumba illuminates a key mechanism through which the United States securitized the imperial world order.
- Plain paths and dividing lines: navigating native land and water in the seventeenth-century ChesapeakeTaylor, Jessica L. (University of Virginia Press, 2023-08)It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined by connection, Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and into the continent for centuries. As Taylor finds, their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland’s planters erected fences and forts, policed unfree laborers, and dispatched land surveyors. By chronicling English and Algonquian attempts to move along paths and rivers and to enforce boundaries, Taylor casts a new light on pivotal moments in Anglo-Indigenous relations, from the growth of the fur trade to Bacon’s Rebellion. Most important, Taylor traces the ways in which the peoples resisting colonial encroachment and subjugation used Native networks and Indigenous knowledge of the Bay to cross newly created English boundaries. She thereby illuminates alternate visions of power, freedom, and connection in the colonial Chesapeake.
- Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History(VT Publishing, 2018-12-11)This volume of original essays explores the power of network thinking and analysis for humanities research. Contributing authors are all scholars whose research focuses on a medical history topic—from the Black Death in fourteenth-century Provence to psychiatric hospitals in twentieth-century Alabama. The chapters take readers through a variety of situations in which scholars must determine if network analysis is right for their research; and, if the answer is yes, what the possibilities are for implementation. Along the way, readers will find practical tips on identifying an appropriate network to analyze, finding the best way to apply network analysis, and choosing the right tools for data visualization. All the chapters in this volume grew out of the 2018 Viral Networks workshop, hosted by the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (NIH), funded by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and organized by Virginia Tech.
- Virginia Tech, Land-Grant University, 1872–1997: History of a School, a State, a NationWallenstein, Peter (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2021-12)The first edition of this book was published in 1997, at the time of Virginia Tech’s 125th anniversary. Wallenstein, a professor of history at Virginia Tech, situates the story of Virginia Tech firmly in the context of both American history and Virginia’s checkered history of higher education. One reviewer wrote that the book “may well be the most un-parochial history of a college or university that has ever been written.” The new edition features a lengthy new preface as well as other changes in text and images throughout. The book will interest historians, educators, students, and just about anyone who wants to know more about the history of higher education in America.