Here are 100 books that A Peaceful Conquest fans have personally recommended if you like
A Peaceful Conquest.
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I am an associate professor of American Studies and the director of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. My research explores the cultural aspects of international relations, with focus on the United States and West Asia after World War I. Gendered and racialized imaginaries have long shaped US policy in the region as well as local nationalisms. I hope this list will help readers develop a foundation for the exciting research happening at the intersection of gender and foreign policy.
I’ll probably still be citing this book when they drag me into professorial retirement, yelling, “Did you know that popular representations of Israel as a hypermasculine superman helped justify the U.S.-Israeli alliance, particularly after 1967?!” “Obviously,” my colleagues will yell back, “that’s only one of the reasons why we are still assigning this book, even during the great 2051 AI-Robot rebellion!”
McAlister’s Epic Encounters came out around 2001 as many Americans were wondering, “Why do they hate us?” The ones that did not grab the Qur’an (wrong era, peeps!) or rightwing polemics, grabbed this excellent history of U.S. interests in the Middle East. McAlister interprets that word, “interests,” broadly, offering a holistic account of how Americans – not just diplomats – have imagined Southwest Asia and North Africa throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
This book contains significant touchpoints, from 1950s Biblical Epics to Black Power’s connections with…
"Epic Encounters" examines how popular culture has shaped the ways Americans define their 'interests' in the Middle East. In this innovative book - now brought up-to-date to include 9/11 and the Iraq war - Melani McAlister argues that U.S. foreign policy, while grounded in material and military realities, is also developed in a cultural context. American understandings of the region are framed by narratives that draw on religious belief, news media accounts, and popular culture. This remarkable and pathbreaking book skillfully weaves lively and accessible readings of film, media, and music with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy, race…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am an associate professor of history at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, where I teach courses on modern United States history, U.S. foreign relations, and public history, direct our minor in museum studies, and direct the Mellon Initiative for Undergraduate Research in the Arts and Humanities. I am particularly interested in how domestic culture, ideology, and values have informed how the United States has engaged with the world around it. My recent work has explored the influence of conservative religious groups in foreign affairs, and I’m at work on a new book about national security and the congressional debates that unfolded over foreign aid after World War II.
In this absolutely fascinating read, Thomas deftly explodes the myth that the United States brought religious freedom to Japan during the post-World War II occupation. The first part of the book explores pre-war notions of religious freedom in both countries and the second part looks at the various misunderstandings that ensued as the United States sought to impose its conception of religious freedom on Japan. Thomas offers a skilled reading of religious culture in both countries and ably explains the outcomes of U.S. occupation policies.
Religious freedom is a founding tenet of the United States, and it has frequently been used to justify policies towards other nations. Such was the case in 1945 when Americans occupied Japan following World War II. Though the Japanese constitution had guaranteed freedom of religion since 1889, the United States declared that protection faulty, and when the occupation ended in 1952, they claimed to have successfully replaced it with "real" religious freedom.
Through a fresh analysis of pre-war Japanese law, Jolyon Baraka Thomas demonstrates that the occupiers' triumphant narrative obscured salient Japanese political debates about religious freedom. Indeed, Thomas reveals…
I am an associate professor of history at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, where I teach courses on modern United States history, U.S. foreign relations, and public history, direct our minor in museum studies, and direct the Mellon Initiative for Undergraduate Research in the Arts and Humanities. I am particularly interested in how domestic culture, ideology, and values have informed how the United States has engaged with the world around it. My recent work has explored the influence of conservative religious groups in foreign affairs, and I’m at work on a new book about national security and the congressional debates that unfolded over foreign aid after World War II.
Much of the focus in news media and the popular imagination about evangelicals and foreign policy centers on Israel, with many pundits and scholars alike emphasizing the centrality of apocalyptic end-times prophecies to the development of conservative Christian support for Israel. Hummel’s exceptionally researched and beautifully written book provides much-needed nuance to this often one-dimensional narrative. His careful reading of U.S. and Israeli sources sheds new light on the emergence of evangelical Christian Zionism after 1948 and its many permutations throughout the decades that followed. This is a crucial read for understanding the complexities and religious dynamics of modern U.S.-Israeli relations.
Weaving together the stories of activists, American Jewish leaders, and Israeli officials in the wake of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Covenant Brothers portrays the dramatic rise of evangelical Christian Zionism as it gained prominence in American politics, Israeli diplomacy, and international relations after World War II. According to Daniel G. Hummel, conventional depictions of the Christian Zionist movement-the organized political and religious effort by conservative Protestants to support the state of Israel-focus too much on American evangelical apocalyptic fascination with the Jewish people. Hummel emphasizes instead the institutional, international, interreligious, and intergenerational efforts on the…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I am an associate professor of history at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, where I teach courses on modern United States history, U.S. foreign relations, and public history, direct our minor in museum studies, and direct the Mellon Initiative for Undergraduate Research in the Arts and Humanities. I am particularly interested in how domestic culture, ideology, and values have informed how the United States has engaged with the world around it. My recent work has explored the influence of conservative religious groups in foreign affairs, and I’m at work on a new book about national security and the congressional debates that unfolded over foreign aid after World War II.
This is a magisterial work and the perfect starting point for anyone interested in learning about how religious beliefs and religions of all types have played a role in U.S. foreign policy since the colonial era. It is an incredibly comprehensive and deeply researched book, but do not let its heft deter you—Preston is a skilled narrator and you will find yourself immediately immersed in and absorbed by the stories he shares. His ability to illuminate the links between religion and the core ideas that have guided the U.S. engagement with the world over the past four hundred years is a truly impressive achievement.
Winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction Finalist for the Cundhill Prize in History
A richly detailed, profoundly engrossing story of how religion has influenced American foreign relations, told through the stories of the men and women—from presidents to preachers—who have plotted the country’s course in the world.
Ever since John Winthrop argued that the Puritans’ new home would be “a city upon a hill,” Americans’ role in the world has been shaped by their belief that God has something special in mind for them. But this is a story that historians have mostly ignored. Now, in…
I come from a long line of Chinese Christians. My grandfather, the Rev. Lin Pu-chi, was an Ivy League-educated Anglican minister, and my grandmother’s brother was Watchmen Nee, a leading Chinese Christian whose legacy lives on around the world. Library shelves are filled with books by missionaries. But where are the stories of the Chinese people they encountered? That’s the starting point for my family memoir, which spans five generations, starting with the first convert, a fisherman from Fujian. These are the books I relied on to place the family story into the broader context of what was happening in China from the period after the Opium Wars until today.
Fuzhou serves as a perfect microcosm for examining the rise of Christianity in China. It’s less familiar than Shanghai or Beijing and, as a result, this very accessible history book has a freshness to it. Like Bays, Ryan Dunch, a China scholar at the University of Alberta, is an academic who knows how to make history engaging. The story begins in 1857 after the forced opening of Fuzhou as a treaty port after the First Opium War, and ends with anti-western violence that roiled the city in 1927. I owe Dunch a debt of gratitude. Fuzhou was the birthplace of my grandparents and I discovered on the pages of this book that in 1927, an anti-foreign mob attacked the Rev. Lin Pu-chi—a fact unknown to my family. That event was the key to deciphering the psyche of my grandfather.
In this groundbreaking examination of Chinese Protestants and their place in the history of modern China, Ryan Dunch focuses on the Fuzhou area of southeast China from the mid-nineteenth century until 1927, when a national revolutionary government was established. Though accounting for only a small proportion of the population, Protestants occupied a central place in Fuzhou's political, intellectual, and social life, Dunch contends. He shows how Chinese Protestants, with a distinctive vision for constituting China as a modern nation-state, contributed to the dissolution of the imperial regime, enjoyed unprecedented popularity following the 1911 revolution, and then saw their dreams for…
Kevin P. Spicer is a historian of twentieth-century Germany who investigates the relationship between church and state from 1918-1945. I'm fascinated by the choices of Christian leaders as they negotiated the challenges of living and leading under National Socialism. I seek to understand the connections between Christian antisemitism and National Socialist’s racial-based exclusionary ethnonationalism and antisemitism.Rebecca Carter-Chand is a historian of twentieth-century Germany who focuses on Christianity during the Nazi period. I'm particularly interested in the smaller Christian churches on the margins of the German religious landscape, many of which maintained ties with their co-religionists abroad. I seek to understand how religious communities navigate ethical and practical challenges of political upheaval and fascism.
Jantzen has produced a thoroughly engaging study of the German Lutheran pastors under National Socialism. By contrast to the traditional “top down” institutional narratives on the Kirchenkampf(German Church Struggle), Jantzen has produced a “bottom up” work that focuses on the choices made by ordinary parish pastors under Hitler’s rule. As his point of departure, he examines Lutheran pastors working in three Church districts: Nauen, located northwest of Berlin in Brandenburg; Pirna, in southeast of Dresden in Saxony; and Ravensburg, in southern Württemberg. Throughout his work, Jantzen convincingly compares the response of the clergy in these diverse geographic areas. Though there were notable exceptions among these pastors, Jantzen concludes that Protestant clergy “largely failed to resist or even critique the Nazi state.”
An informative glimpse into the world of German Protestantsin the difficult Hitler era, Faith and Fatherland approaches thehistory of the Church Struggle from the "bottom up," usingsources like pastors' correspondence, parish newsletters, localnewspaper accounts, district superintendents' reports, andlocal church statistics.
While Jantzen confirms the general understanding thatGerman Protestants failed to resist or even critique the Naziregime, he reveals a surprising diversity of opinion and varietyof action, including the successful efforts of some Lutheranpastors and parishioners to resist the nazification of theirchurches.
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, co-editor of the English Historical Review, and the author of nine books and over sixty articles on the religious and cultural history of early modern Europe. His authoritative account of the Reformation in England, Heretics and Believers, was awarded the Wolfson History Prize in 2018. Peter is a native of the Orkney Islands, and currently writing a book on the islanders’ experiences in the Reformation era.
Thirty years after its first publication, Patrick Collinson’s elegantly written account of how Protestantism transformed English society remains fresh, challenging and surprising. Focusing on art and culture, urban life, the family and ideas of nationhood, it persuasively argued that it makes more sense to see the Reformation as a drawn-out process rather than a dramatic ‘event’, and as one that was coming to fruition only in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. It is also a triumphant demonstration of how short books can punch above their weight.
'...a masterly study.' Alister McGrath, Theological Book Review '...a splendid read.' J.J.Scarisbrick, TLS '...profound, witty...of immense value.' David Loades, History Today Historians have always known that the English Reformation was more than a simple change of religious belief and practice. It altered the political constitution and, according to Max Weber, the attitudes and motives which governed the getting and investment of wealth, facilitating the rise of capitalism and industrialisation. This book investigates further implications of the transformative religious changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the nation, the town, the family, and for their culture.
As a teenager, I “discovered” the poetry of Emily Dickinson and put her verse to music. Later, at Yale University I delved deeper into the power of rhythms, the beauty of images, the clarity of insights—how they combine to create a genuine poetic voice that reveals an interior world. Politics, of course, define our interactions in the exterior world, and great novels meld these two elements—poetry and politics—into a seamless union. I’ve been inspired to write novels about two poets—Emily Dickinson and John Keats—to bring the reader into the intense, poetic world of their blazing interiors and their unique outward politics.
In contrast to my first pick, My Wars are Laid Away in Books is a calm, scholarly, relentless search for the literal facts of the life of a great but enigmatic poet—Emily Dickinson. Habegger also shows considerable literary acumen in analyzing the context and vigor, and passions of Dickinson’s poetry. Though other biographies of Dickinson are better known, this is the one that gave me the best factual basis for my book, my intensely poetic novel about Dickinson’s personal politics and astonishing genius.
Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography, Alfred Habegger presents the first thorough account of Dickinson’s growth–a richly contextualized story of genius in the process of formation and then in the act of overwhelming production.
Building on the work of former and contemporary scholars, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books brings to light a wide range of new…
Like anyone else who takes an interest in Ireland, I’ve been fascinated by the long and often very difficult history of the island’s experience of religion. Where I live, in county Antrim, religious imagery appears everywhere – in churches and schools, obviously, but also on signboards posted onto trees, and in the colourful rags that are still hung up to decorate holy wells. This book is the fruit of twenty years of thinking about Christian Ireland - its long and difficult history, and its sudden and difficult collapse.
Why, from the 1990s, did the Irish Catholic consensus so suddenly disappear? And what might be the effect of this sudden-onset secularisation? This brilliant account of the recent revolution in Irish religion describes the effects of the clerical scandals that brought down a government, demoralised a denomination, and drove social change on a massive and structural scale. Ganiel shows how the older religious monopolies that did so much to shape the institutions and culture of Ireland, north and south, have given way to a much more fluid religious market, in which individuals can believe without belonging just as much as they might formerly have belonged without believing.
Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland is the first major book to explore the dynamic religious landscape of contemporary Ireland, north and south, and to analyse the island's religious transition. It confirms that the Catholic Church's long-standing 'monopoly' has well and truly disintegrated, replaced by a mixed, post-Catholic religious 'market' featuring new and growing expressions of Protestantism, as well as other religions. It describes how people of faith are developing 'extra-institutional' expressions of religion, keeping their faith alive outside or in addition to the institutional Catholic Church.
Drawing on island-wide surveys of clergy and laypeople, as well as more than 100 interviews, Gladys…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I am a historian of early modern Britain, with particular interests in the cultural and religious history of the English Reformation, as well as in the fields of historical memory and time. I enjoy pursuing these subjects not only through research and reading, but also teaching. I am currently the J. H. Plumb College Lecturer in History at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge.
For all the books about the Protestant Reformation, very few stop to consider what it meant to be Protestant – how it felt, or what daily life was really like. Alec Ryrie tackles these questions both with empathy and analytical rigour, exploring the struggles and triumphs of individuals seeking to live godly lives against a background of ongoing religious change.
This book really foregrounds "ordinary" people and, in doing so, highlights the extraordinary quality of the everyday. It helped me to reach a better understanding of Protestantism as a dynamic and sometimes contradictory movement, and of its emotional resonance for those who embraced the reformed faith.
The Reformation was about ideas and power, but it was also about real human lives. Alec Ryrie provides the first comprehensive account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between 1530 and 1640, drawing on a rich mixture of contemporary devotional works, sermons, diaries, biographies, and autobiographies to uncover the lived experience of early modern Protestantism.
Beginning from the surprisingly urgent, multifaceted emotions of Protestantism, Ryrie explores practices of prayer, of family and public worship, and of reading and writing, tracking them through the life course from childhood through conversion and vocation to…
