The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science Series

This in-depth study of religious tensions in early modern Spain offers a new and enlightening perspective on the era of the Inquisition.   Traditionally, the Spanish Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries has been framed as an epic battle of opposites. The followers of Erasmus were in constant discord with conservative Catholics while the humanists were diametrically opposed to the scholastics. Historian Lu Ann Homza rejects this simplistic view. In Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance, she presents a subtler paradigm, recovering the profound nuances in Spanish intellectual and religious history.   Through analyses of Inquisition trials, biblical translations, treatises on witchcraft and tracts on the episcopate and penance, Homza illuminates the intellectual autonomy and energy of Spain's ecclesiastics.

A look at sugar in 19th-century American culture and how it rose in popularity to gain its place in the nation’s diet today. American consumers today regard sugar as a mundane and sometimes even troublesome substance linked to hyperactivity in children and other health concerns. Yet two hundred years ago American consumers treasured sugar as a rare commodity and consumed it only in small amounts. In Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America, Wendy A. Woloson demonstrates how the cultural role of sugar changed from being a precious luxury good to a ubiquitous necessity. Sugar became a social marker that established and reinforced class and gender differences. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Woloson explains, the social elite saw expensive sugar and sweet confections as symbols of their wealth. As refined sugar became more affordable and accessible, new confections—children’s candy, ice cream, and wedding cakes—made their way into American culture, acquiring a broad array of social meanings. Originally signifying male economic prowess, sugar eventually became associated with femininity and women’s consumerism. Woloson’s work offers a vivid account of this social transformation—along with the emergence of consumer culture in America. “Elegantly structured and beautifully written . . . As simply an explanation of how Americans became such avid consumers of sugar, this book is superb and can be recommended highly.” —Ken Albala, Winterthur Portfolio “An enlightening tale about the social identity of sweets, how they contain not just chewy centers but rich meanings about gender, about the natural world, and about consumerism.” —Cindy Ott, Enterprise and Society

The classic study of resistance to Tsarist Russian colonialism, the genocide that followed, and its connection to the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1916, Tzar Nicholas II began drafting Russian subjects across Central Asia to fight in World War I. By summer, the widespread resistance of Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks turned into an outright revolt. The Russian Imperial Army killed approximately 270,000 of these people, while tens of thousands more died in their attempt to escape into China. Suppressed during the Soviet Era and nearly lost to history, knowledge of this horrific incident is remembered thanks to Edward Dennis Sokol’s pioneering Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia. This wide-ranging and exhaustively researched book explores the Tsarist policies that led to Russian encroachment against the land and rights of the indigenous Central Asian people. It describes the corruption that permeated Russian colonial rule and argues that the uprising was no mere draft riot, but a revolt against Tsarist colonialism in all its dimensions: economic, political, religious, and national. Sokol’s masterpiece also traces the chain reaction between the uprising, the collapse of Tsarism, and the Bolshevik Revolution.

A noted historian explores the development of U.S. State governments from the end of the 19th century to the so-called renaissance of States in the 20th.   It is a common misperception that America’s state governments were lethargic backwaters before suddenly stirring to life in the 1980s. In The Rise of the States, Jon C. Teaford presents a very different picture. Teaford shows how state governments were continually adapting and expanding throughout the past century, assuming new responsibilities, developing new sources of revenue, and creating new institutions.   The Rise of the States examines the evolution of the structure, function, and finances of state government during the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression, the post-World War II years, and into the 1960s. State governments not only played an active role in the creation, governance, and management of the political units that made up the state, but also in dealing with the growth of business, industries, and education. Different states chose different solutions to common problems, and this diversity of responses points to the growing vitality and maturity of state governments as the twentieth century unfolded.

“[A] fascinating perspective on how America’s early voyages of commerce and discovery to the exotic South Seas helped the new nation forge its identity.” —Eric Jay Dolan, bestselling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters  Drawing on private journals, letters, ships’ logs, memoirs, and newspaper accounts, True Yankees traces America’s earliest encounters on a global stage through the exhilarating experiences of five Yankee seafarers. Merchant Samuel Shaw spent a decade scouring the marts of China and India for goods that would captivate the imaginations of his countrymen. Mariner Amasa Delano toured much of the Pacific hunting seals. Explorer Edmund Fanning circumnavigated the globe, touching at various Pacific and Indian Ocean ports of call. In 1829, twenty-year-old Harriett Low reluctantly accompanied her merchant uncle and ailing aunt to Macao, where she recorded trenchant observations of expatriate life. And sea captain Robert Bennet Forbes’s last sojourn in Canton coincided with the eruption of the First Opium War. How did these bold voyagers approach and do business with the people in the region, whose physical appearance, practices, and culture seemed so strange? And how did native men and women—not to mention the European traders who were in direct competition with the Americans—regard these upstarts who had fought off British rule? The accounts of these adventurous travelers reveal how they and hundreds of other mariners and expatriates influenced the ways in which Americans defined themselves, thereby creating a genuinely brash national character—the “true Yankee.” Readers who love history and stories of exploration on the high seas will devour this gripping tale. “The book is informative and entertaining, a rare combination. Highly recommended.” —Choice

This “excellent study” shows how a Spanish archbishop laid the groundwork for the seventeenth-century expulsion of the Moriscos (James B. Tueller, Renaissance Quarterly). In early modern Spain, the monarchy’s policy of converting all subjects to Christianity only created new forms of tension among ethnic religious groups. Those whose families had always been Christian defined themselves in opposition to forcibly baptized Muslims (moriscos) and Jews (conversos). Here historian Benjamin Ehlers studies the relations between Christians and moriscos in Valencia by analyzing the ideas and policies of archbishop Juan de Ribera. Appointed to the diocese of Valencia in 1568, Juan de Ribera encountered a congregation deeply divided between Christians and moriscos. He came to identify with his Christian flock, leading hagiographers to celebrate him as a Valencian saint. But Ribera had a very different relationship with the moriscos, eventually devising a covert campaign to have them banished. His portrayal of the moriscos as traitors and heretics ultimately justified the Expulsion of 1609–1614, which Ribera considered the triumphant culmination of the Reconquest. Ehler’s sophisticated yet accessible study of the pluralist diocese of Valencia is a valuable contribution to the study of Catholic reform, moriscos, Christian-Muslim relations in early modern Spain, and early modern Europe.

This award–winning study examines American Indian communities in Southern New England between the Revolution and Reconstruction. From 1780–1880, Native Americans lived in the socioeconomic margins. They moved between semiautonomous communities and towns and intermarried extensively with blacks and whites. Drawing from a wealth of primary documentation, Daniel R. Mandell centers his study on ethnic boundaries, particularly how those boundaries were constructed, perceived, and crossed. Mandell analyzes connections and distinctions between Indians and their non-Indian neighbors with regard to labor, landholding, government, and religion; examines how emerging romantic depictions of Indians (living and dead) helped shape a unique New England identity; and looks closely at the causes and results of tribal termination in the region after the Civil War. Shedding new light on regional developments in class, race, and culture, this groundbreaking study is the first to consider all Native Americans throughout southern New England. Winner, 2008 Lawrence W. Levine Award, Organization of American Historians

This “carefully argued and well-written study” examines French royal statecraft in the globalizing economy of the early modern Mediterranean (Choice). This is the story of how the French Crown and local institutions accommodated one another as they sought to forge acceptable political and commercial relationships. Junko Thérèse Takeda tells this tale through the particular experience of Marseille, a port the monarchy saw as key to commercial expansion in the Mediterranean. At first, Marseille’s commercial and political elites were strongly opposed to the Crown’s encroaching influence. Rather than dismiss their concerns, the monarchy cleverly co-opted their civic traditions, practices, and institutions to convince the city’s elite of their important role in Levantine commerce. Chief among such traditions were local ideas of citizenship and civic virtue. As the city’s stature throughout the Mediterranean grew, however, so too did the dangers of commercial expansion as exemplified by the arrival of the bubonic plague. During the crisis, Marseille’s citizens reevaluated merchant virtue, while the French monarchy found opportunities to extend its power. Between Crown and Commerce deftly combines a political and intellectual history of state-building, mercantilism, and republicanism with a cultural history of medical crisis. In doing so, the book highlights the conjoined history of broad transnational processes and local political change.

An “enjoyable” history of the French cosmetic industry and the evolution of beauty standards and commercial culture during a revolutionary era (European History Quarterly). As the French citizenry rebelled against the excesses of the aristocracy, there was a parallel shift in consumer beauty practices. Powdered wigs, alabaster white skin, and rouged cheeks disappeared in favor of a more natural and simple style. Selling Beauty challenges expectations about past fashions and offers a unique look into consumer culture and business practices. Morag Martin introduces readers to the social and economic world of cosmetic production and consumption, recounts criticisms against the use of cosmetics from a variety of voices, and examines how producers and retailers responded to quickly evolving fashions. Martin shows that the survival of the industry depended on its ability to find customers among the emerging working and middle classes. But the newfound popularity of cosmetics raised serious questions. Critics—from radical philosophes to medical professionals—complained that the use of cosmetics was a threat to social morals and questioned the healthfulness of products that contained arsenic, mercury, and lead. Cosmetic producers embraced these withering criticisms, though, skillfully addressing these concerns in their marketing campaigns, reassuring consumers of the moral and physical safety of their products. Rather than disappearing along with the Old Regime, the commerce of cosmetics, reimagined and redefined, flourished in the early nineteenth century—as political ideals and Enlightenment philosophies radically altered popular sentiment.