Di Luo, Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900 –1945 (Brill, 2022).
Assistant Professor Di Luo’s Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 (Brill, 2022) focuses on the role of literacy in building a modern nation-state by examining the government provision of adult literacy training in early twentieth-century China.
Based on untapped archives and diaries, Dr. Luo uncovers people’s strategic use of literacy and illiteracy in social interactions and explores the impact of daily experiences on the expansion of state power. Highlighting interpersonal and intergroup relations, Beyond Citizenship suggests a new methodology of studying literacy which foregrounds the agentive role of historical actors and so moves away from a more traditional approach that treats literacy itself as the key factor enabling social change.
Erik Peterson and Margaret Peacock, A Deeper Sickness: Journal of America in the Pandemic Year (Penguin Random House, 2022).
In March of 2022, Drs. Margaret Peacock and Erik L. Peterson released their book, A Deeper Sickness: Journal of America in the Pandemic Year. The book took a turn from the traditional writings of modern-day historians and found inspiration from the likes of Daniel Defoe’s fictional reconstructions of the bubonic/pneumonic plague of 1665-1666 London in A Journal of the Plague Year.
While the circumstances were all too similar, Peacock and Peterson sought to document their actual daily experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic as historians who understood that events that seemed unprecedented had long historical determinants.
From combing news channels and TikTok to conducting interviews with epidemiologists and people living with substance abuse disorders, the raw experiences of living through the pandemic are preserved within these pages.
James D. Mixson, ed., The Crusade of 1456: Texts and Documentation in Translation (University of Toronto Press, 2022).
In July 1456, a massive Turkish army settled in before Belgrade, an ancient city at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers. The army’s leader was the twenty-four-year-old Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, “the Conqueror,” who sought to take one of the most strategically important fortifications in southeastern Europe. Three weeks later, Mehmed’s army was driven from Belgrade by a Hungarian warlord and his army, along with a ragtag force of ill-equipped crusaders.
In The Crusade of 1456, Mixson gathers together the key primary sources for understanding the events that led to the siege of Belgrade. These newly translated sources challenge readers with their variety: papal decrees, letters, liturgies, and chronicles from Latin, Byzantine, and Ottoman perspectives. An accessible introduction, time lines, and maps help to illuminate this fascinating yet previously neglected story.
Steven B. Bunker, La creación de la cultura de consumo mexicana en la época de Porfirio Díaz, Ricardo Martín Rubio Ruiz, trans (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2022).
Bunker’s La creación de la cultura de consumo mexicana en la época de Porfirio Díaz, published by the prestigious Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico, is a translation of his award-winning first book: Creating Mexican Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz (2012). The book examines the creation Mexico’s modernizing consumer culture prior to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 by exploring the ways in which being a consumer, especially in urban areas and Mexico City, increasingly defined what it meant to be Mexican.
This edition will now reach readers throughout the Spanish-speaking world as the Fondo the is the largest and best-distributed academic press in the Spanish language.