Shadow Warrior:

William Colby Egan and the CIA

Randall Woods

World War II commando, Cold War spy, and CIA director under presidents Nixon and Ford, William Egan Colby played a critical role in some of the most pivotal events of the twentieth century. A quintessential member of the greatest generation, Colby embodied the moral and strategic ambiguities of the postwar world, and first confronted many of the dilemmas about power and secrecy that America still grapples with today. 

The Essential West: Collected Essays

Elliott West

Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Elliott West has just published a superb collection of essays with the University of Oklahoma Press: The Essential West. Capitalizing on West’s wide array of interests, this collection of his essays touches on topics ranging from viruses and the telegraph to children, bison, and Larry McMurtry. Drawing from the past three centuries, West weaves the western story into that of the nation and the world beyond, from Kansas and Montana to Haiti, Africa, and the court of Louis XV.

The Ongoing Burden of Southern History:

Politics and Identity in the Twenty-First-Century South

Jeannie Whayne, ed.

Professor Jeannie M. Whayne is co-editor with colleagues in Political Science Professors Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields of a recently released volume from LSU Press on the multidisciplinary legacy of historian C. Vann Woodward:  The Ongoing Burden of Southern History (release date:  November 2012).  More than fifty years after its initial publication, C. Vann Woodward’s landmark work, The Burden of Southern History, remains an essential text on the southern past. Today, a “southern burden” still exists, but its shape and impact on southerners and the world varies dramatically from the one envisioned by Woodward. Recasting Woodward’s ideas on the contemporary South, the contributors to The Ongoing Burden of Southern History highlight the relevance of his scholarship for the twenty-first-century reader and student. 

The Rise to Respectability: Race, Religion, and the Church of God in Christ

Calvin White

The Rise to Respectability (University of Arkansas Press, 2012) documents the history of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and examines its cultural and religious impact on African Americans and on the history of the South. It explores the ways in which Charles Harrison Mason, the son of slaves and founder of COGIC, embraced a Pentecostal faith that celebrated the charismatic forms of religious expression that many blacks had come to view as outdated, unsophisticated, and embarrassing.

Confronting America:

The Cold War between the United States and Communists in France and Italy

Alessandro Brogi

Based primarily on new evidence from communist archives in France and Italy, as well as in the United States, Brogi‘s original study reveals how the United States was forced by political opposition within these two core Western countries to reassess its own anticommunist strategies, its image, and the general meaning of American liberal capitalist culture and ideology. Brogi shows that the resistance to Americanization was a critical test for the French and Italian communists‘ own legitimacy and existence.

Women’s Roles in Latin America and the Caribbean

Kathryn Sloan

This work, part of the ABC-Clio "Women's Roles through History" series, commences with Queen Isabella of Spain (r. 1474-1504) and ends in the present-day, highlighting female political leaders such as Chile’s Michelle Bachelet and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff. Using hagiography, chap books, newspapers, films, literature, and archival documents, Sloan explores a diversity of topics and geographical spaces during this vibrant five-hundred year period including women’s labor, spirituality, and economic power in Latin America, Brazil, and the Spanish Caribbean island nations.

Delta Empire:

Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South

Jeannie Whayne

In Delta Empire, Jeannie Whayne employs the fascinating history of a powerful plantation owner -- Robert E. “Lee” Wilson -- in the Arkansas delta to recount the evolution of southern agriculture from the late nineteenth century through World War II and traces the transition from the labor-intensive sharecropping and tenancy system to the capital-intensive plantations of the post-World War II era. Through Wilson’s story Whayne provides a compelling case study of strategic innovation and the changing economy of the South in the late nineteenth century.

Imperial Endgame:

Britain's Dirty Wars and the End of Empire (Britain and the World)

Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon

In this fresh and controversial account of Britain‘s end of empire, Grob-Fitzgibbon argues that in the years 1945-1960 the British government developed a successful imperial strategy based on devolving power to indigenous peoples within the Commonwealth. This strategy was calculated to allow decolonization to occur on British terms, and to keep soon-to-be former colonies within the British and Western spheres of influence during the Cold War.