Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization

Yale University Press, May 2023 Harold James, Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies, Professor of History and International Affairs The eminent economic historian Harold James presents a new perspective on financial crises, dividing Continue Reading →

Bhargava, Guenther, Schor and Weisenfeld receive 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships

By Jamie Saxon Four Princeton University faculty members received 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships: Manjul Bhargava, the Robert C. Gunning *55 and R. Brandon Fradd ’83 Professor in Mathematics, was awarded the Guggenheim in the field of Continue Reading →

Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Oxford University Press, Feb. 2022Laura F. Edwards, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status Continue Reading →

Age of intolerance?

Was the medieval period an age of intolerance? Or are scholars ascribing modern conceptions of race to the peoples of the past? Continue Reading →

Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette

University of Chicago Press, 2020 Keith Wailoo, the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs Spanning a century, Pushing Cool reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were Continue Reading →

Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment

Berghahn Books, 2021 Edited by: Angela Creager, the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science, and professor of history, and Jean-Paul Gaudillière, senior researcher at the Institut National de la Santé et de Continue Reading →

Einstein in Bohemia

Princeton University Press, February 2020By Michael Gordin, the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History In the spring of 1911, Albert Einstein moved with his wife and two sons to Prague, the capital of Bohemia, Continue Reading →

Deemed unfit for freedom

Weisenfeld’s research tracks the rise in psychiatry as a field of science and the parallel ascent of the discipline’s racialized theories about African American religious practices and mental health. Continue Reading →

Fragile Fragments: Marina Rustow unpacks daily life in medieval Egypt

Documents hidden for centuries in a Cairo synagogue storeroom help Rustow piece together the past. Continue Reading →

Tera Hunter earns awards for scholarship on slave marriage

By Denise Valenti Tera Hunter, the Edwards Professor of American History and a professor of history and African American studies, received three prizes for her 2017 book, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage Continue Reading →

Four Princeton faculty members win Guggenheim Fellowships

By the Office of Communications Four Princeton faculty members, representing a range of subjects in the humanities, have received Guggenheim Fellowships. Brooke Holmes, the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities and professor of classics, Continue Reading →

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

Author: Beth Lew-Williams, assistant professor of history Publisher: Harvard University Press, February 2018 The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and Continue Reading →

Princeton project explores past ties to slavery

By Catherine Zandonella “TO BE SOLD AT PUBLIC VENUE on the 19th of August next all the personal effects of Revd. Dr. Samuel Finley, consisting of two Negro women, a Negro man, and three Negro children, Continue Reading →

Bound in wedlock: Professor of history explores slavery’s shackles on black families

For her new book, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2017), Tera Hunter, a professor of history and African American studies, meticulously researched court records, legal Continue Reading →

Historian of religion Elaine Pagels awarded National Humanities Medal

PHOTO BY MARK CZAJKOWSKI Elaine Pagels, an authority on the religions of late antiquity and the author of The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, received the 2015 National Humanities Medal. Continue Reading →

Eight win Guggenheim Fellowships

PHOTO CREDITS FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: TOP ROW: JOHN LUCAS, RICHARD SODEN, PETER HURLEY, HANNAH DUNPHY BOTTOM ROW: DAVID BROWN, NINA KATCHADOURIAN, DENISE APPLEWHITE, JILL DOLAN Eight Princeton faculty members have received 2017 Guggenheim Fellowships Continue Reading →

Historian and neuroscientist team up for podcast

By Yasemin Saplakoglu When history professor Julian Zelizer and neuroscientist Sam Wang started the podcast Politics and Polls prior to last year’s presidential election, they never dreamed it would still be going a year later. Continue Reading →

MARINA RUSTOW, historian of the medieval Middle East, wins MacArthur Fellowship

Marina Rustow, the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East and professor of Near Eastern studies and history, has been awarded a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship. Rustow is among 24 scientists, artists, Continue Reading →

Life among strangers: Exile in the Middle Ages

  IN THE 1300s, A ROVING GANG OF THUGS went on a crime spree in France that included robbery, homicide and burial — possibly alive — of a body in a public privy. One of Continue Reading →

Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878 – 1928

It has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler’s son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots. He later Continue Reading →

Found in translation: Scholar locates source of 18th-century Quran

In a London archive, Alexander Bevilacqua found it: a medieval copy of the Muslim holy book, the Quran. Its aging pages, Bevilacqua knew, contained the original source for a highly influential 18th-century English translation of Continue Reading →

Three win Guggenheim Fellowships

Three professors have received 2013 Guggenheim Fellowships for demonstrated excellence in scholarship or creative work. D. Graham Burnett, professor of history; Deana Lawson, lecturer in visual arts and the Lewis Center for the Arts; and Continue Reading →

William G. Bowen and Natalie Davis receive National Humanities Medal

At a White House ceremony, William G. Bowen, Princeton’s 17th president, and Natalie Zemon Davis, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Emerita, were awarded the National Humanities Medal for 2012. The medal recognizes 12 Continue Reading →

360 Sound: The Columbia Records Story by Sean Wilentz

For 125 years, Columbia Records has remained one of the most vibrant and storied names in prerecorded sound, nurturing the careers of legends such as Bessie Smith, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Continue Reading →