Welcome to the History Department.

Are walls remnants of ancient and medieval societies, destined to become anachronistic in modern and postmodern times? Or will they persist, shaping as well as adjusting to new conditions? Do walls necessarily constrain and even isolate those who live within them, or can they act as a medium of support and communication for people on both sides?

This volume, a result of a conference held in conjunction with major exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art in Beijing and Buffalo, New York, in 2005, addresses these questions. Fourteen authors from seven disciplines  provide multiple perspectives on various kinds of walls: materials ones around and within states, cities, and towns, as well as virtual ones regulating the administration of justice, the flow of pathogens, and the transmission of information. Cultural and scientific walls between East and West, China and America, prosperity and poverty, and viewer and viewed, are here explored in both their fragility and their endurance.

Told in a series of engrossing narratives, Death in the New World is a landmark study that offers a fresh perspective on the dynamics of cross-cultural encounters and their larger ramifications in the Atlantic world.

"Through an imaginative use of sources and an engaging narrative, Erik Seeman has produced what is sure to become an influential book in early American history. By situating death at the center of an analysis of cross-cultural interactions in the New World, Seeman sheds new light on important questions in current historiography." —Daniel Usner, Vanderbilt University

New Yorker article cites David Herzberg 's book on cultural history of psychiatric drugs

Louis Menand's article in The New Yorker cites Herzberg's Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac in its review of recent scholarship across the disciplines on the question of whether psychiatry can be a science.

New York Times quotes Erik Seeman's article on 18th century coffin found in Manhattan

An article in The New York Times discusses questions over the authenticity of an emblem -- a sankofa -- found on a coffin uncovered during a building excavation in Lower Manhattan in 1991, which was originally believed to be a symbol printed on funereal garments in 18th-century West Africa. The article quotes Erik Seeman, whose new study treats the sankofa claim skeptically.

Award Citation:

This wide-ranging monograph effortlessly traverses regions and genres to study the evolution of a historical memory. The Padmini story of a beautiful queen who is desired by a powerful enemy and who finally immolates herself rather than surrender has been current in South Asian
folk and high literary traditions for over five centuries. In the colonial and post-colonial era it has been appropriated by Hindu nationalists as a narrative of purity and virtue. Rather than accept this recent retelling, Sreenivasan analyzes Padmini's story through its entire narrative trajectory, deploying at once the skills of a historian who combines an understanding of religious thought and social history and those of a literary scholar deeply familiar with gendered tropes in narrative and discourse.

The Padmini story featured largely in Tod's early colonial history. Sreenivasan goes beneath that colonial discourse to recover previous (and parallel) indigenous narratives, and she goes into the archive to  show how James Tod and others actually worked.

She tracks how nationalists -- both religious and secular -- have appropriated the same theme.

Sreenivasan is never reductionist. She consistently locates and situates the texts she analyses in the conjunctures in and for which they were produced, whether by North Indian Sufis, Arakanese kings, Jain businessmen and literati, Rajput lords or Bengali bhadralok. She thereby undercuts the recent heroic narratives of the colonial and post-colonial era that have taken the Padmini story out of context in order to sustain the credibility of Hindu fundamentalism and the discourse of Islamic separatism."

The Forbidden Lands concerns a pivotal surge in frontier violence that engulfed the eastern forests of eighteenth-century Brazil's most populous region, Minas Gerais. The author argues that the key to understanding the colony's internal consolidation resides in the incompatible ways in which Luso-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, and seminomadic indigenous peoples accused of cannibalism sought to territorialize their distinctive societies. He demonstrates that cultural conflict on the frontier was a defining characteristic of Brazil's transition from colony to independent nation and a fundamental consequence of its relationship to a wider world. The study moves Brazil to a prominent place in our understanding of the hemispheric sweep of internal colonization in the Americas.

"The significance of this book is to reveal the intertwined histories of Brazil's eastern Indians and the fate of the Portuguese empire... its success is to have reinvigorated studies of 'the frontier' more generally."—Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"In a dramatic, compelling, and thoroughly researched revision of Brazilian frontier history, The Forbidden Lands recounts the lurching, inconsistent, and contentious story of the conquest and incorporation of Brazil's eastern sertao."—Colonial Latin American Historical Review

Valium. Paxil. Prozac. Prescribed by the millions each year, these medications have been hailed as wonder drugs and vilified as numbing and addictive crutches. Where did this “blockbuster drug” phenomenon come from? What factors led to the mass acceptance of tranquilizers and antidepressants? And how has their widespread use affected American culture?

David Herzberg addresses these questions by tracing the rise of psychiatric medicines, from Miltown in the 1950s to Valium in the 1970s to Prozac in the 1990s. Happy Pills is an invaluable look at how the commercialization of medicine has transformed American culture since the end of World War II.

"Happy Pills in America offers an extraordinary analysis of how tranquilizers and antidepressants were as much a part of the post-World War II consumer society as suburban living and the car culture. Whether Americans bought or sold, advertised or prescribed, embraced or condemned these feel-good pills, they participated in commodifying the 'good life.'"—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar Americ

As Britain's great power status came to be increasingly challenged in the decades before the First World War, one by-product of the resultant uncertainty was the weakening of the Victorian middle-class consensus of what constituted ideal manhood. Not only a source of wealth and power, Britain's empire also provided alternative models of masculinity and nationhold. Consequently, the empire and the commonwealth played an important role in defining imperial gender relations in both Britain and in the colonies and dominions. This groundbreaking book investigates the continual reassessment and reassertion of various masculine ideals associated with sport in the British empire between 1880 and 1935.

"This book is a rare phenomenon in the new imperial history: it combines solid, original scholarship and sheer readability, resulting in a compelling and highly persuasive account of sport in the modern British empire."— Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois

Young explores the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina during the era of slavery.  Analyzing the historical exigencies of slavery and the slave trade that sent not only men and women but also cultural meanings, signs, symbols, and patterns across the Atlantic, Young argues that religion operated as a central form of resistance against slavery and the ideological underpinnings that supported it.

"A signal contribution to our understanding of the African diaspora. The author presents a vision of culture that is fluid and multidimensional, that allows for novelty and transformation, and that avoids ongoing debates over ethnic provenance."— Michael Gomez, Professor of History, NYU

Through compelling biographies of a wide range of historical figures, this engaging text presents a panorama of modern Chinese history that illustrates the great social and political changes that have occurred over the past 500 years. Through the lives of both the famous and the obscure, the contributors explore such enduring themes of the flexibility of the definition of Chinese in an era of imperialism and revolution, the tremendous transformations in gender relations, and the wide gap between the lives of urban and rural Chinese. Richly researched, these biographies are written in an accessible and appealing style that will engage all readers interested in modern China.

In the three decades following the Second World War, the authoritarian and morally austere dictatorship of General Francisco Franco’s Spain became the playground for millions of carefree tourists from Europe’s prosperous democracies. This book chronicles how their presence not only helped to strengthen the Franco regime’s economic and political standing, but also contributed to undermining the dictatorship’s moral austerity and economic autarky. This study looks beneath exotic imagery of bulls and flamenco dancers, and sensationalized stories of Francoist police persecuting bikini-clad foreigners, to examine how the advent of foreign tourism profoundly influenced the regime’s diplomatic and economic policies as early as 1945. In the 1960s, mass tourism provoked important shifts in the national political dynamic, contributing significantly to the conditions in which Spain’s post-Franco democracy was born.

Pack's book was awarded the Society For Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies' Best First Book Award (2004-06).  The committee wrote: "Pack's fine work on tourism and the Franco regime breaks important new ground. Its presentation is exceptional: the author writes with great clarity, moves deftly between narrative and analysis, argues carefully and has an unusual capacity to synthesize. In short, the command is striking in a first book. As a highly innovative and an important addition to 20th century Spanish society and politics, this book will doubtless remain influential for some time.”