Faculty in the Department of History at Stony Brook University are actively engaged in producing original scholarship that advances historical knowledge and shapes academic and public conversations. Their books reflect a wide range of geographic, temporal, and thematic expertise, as well as diverse methodological approaches.
These publications represent years of archival research, critical analysis, and engagement with historical debates. Together, they demonstrate the department’s commitment to rigorous scholarship, interdisciplinary inquiry, and the continued relevance of historical research to understanding the modern world.
The works featured here include monographs, edited volumes, and collaborative projects published by leading academic presses. They are used widely in classrooms, cited across disciplines, and contribute to how historians, students, and the public understand the past.
This page highlights recent and selected faculty books as part of the department’s broader mission to support research excellence and to share historical insight beyond the university.
During the tumultuous years before the Civil War, Irish American John Diamond and
African American William Henry Lane, known as Juba, became internationally famous
as competitors in the art and sport of challenge dancing. April F. Masten’s dual biography
reconstructs the lives and work of these extraordinary dancers, casting fresh light
on their contributions to the history of American popular culture. In Awaiting Their Feast, Lori A. Flores traces the evolution of the United States’
dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor from World War II to the COVID-19
pandemic, using the US Northeast as a microcosm to examine the experiences of Latinx
food workers across the entire food chain, from agriculture to restaurants to labor
activism. The Lettered Indianmaps the moral dilemmas and political stakes involved in the protracted
struggle over Indian literacy and schooling in the Bolivian Andes. Brooke Larson traces
Bolivia's major state efforts to educate its unruly Indigenous masses at key junctures
in the twentieth century. In Anna May Wong, Shirley Jennifer Lim re-evaluates Wong’s life and work as a consummate
artist by mining an historical archive of her efforts outside of Hollywood cinema.
Race and the Greening of Atlanta turns an environmental lens on Atlanta’s ascent to
thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century.Uniquely wide ranging in
scale, from the city’s variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national
political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization
born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser
known one on behalf of “the environment.” Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire,
Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized
way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long
eighteenth century. How mass incarceration and immigration enforcement forged a punitive alliance in the
20th century
This volume considers the interconnection of racial oppression in the U.S. South and
West, presenting thirteen case studies that explore the ways in which citizens and
migrants alike have been caged, detained, deported, and incarcerated, and what these
practices tell us about state building, converging and coercive legal powers, and
national sovereignty. Prof. Eric Zolov's new book, The Walls of Santiago: Social Revolution and Political
Aesthetics in Contemporary Chile, co-authored with Assoc. Professor Terri Gordon-Zolov
(The New School), analyzes the Chilean social revolution of 2019 by focusing on the
political graphics that channeled the demands of a leaderless, grassroots movement.
Professor Paul Gootenberg is General Editor of the newly published Oxford Handbook
of Global Drug History (Oxford Handbooks, 2022). With 36 contributions encompassing
the entire globe, the Handbook is the first major compendium of the "new global drug
history," covering some 5,000 years of intoxicating academic histories. Gray Gold: Lead Mining and it's impact on the natural and cultural environment, 1700-1840
aims to broaden understandings of early colonial and Native American history by turning
attention to the ways that mining—and its scientific, technological, economic, cultural,
and environmental features—shaped intercultural interactions and developments in the
New World. The entwined histories of Blacks and Indians defy easy explanation. From Ghanaian
protests over Gandhi statues to American Vice President Kamala Harris's story, this
relationship--notwithstanding moments of common struggle--seethes with conflicts that
reveal how race reverberates throughout the modern world. Barnhart provides advice and procedures, both for the use of off-the-shelf commercial
simulations and for the instructor who wishes to custom design a simulation from scratch.
These reenactments allow students to step into the past, requiring them to think and
act in ways historical figures might have.
Recent Scholarship from Core Faculty
Order Diamond & Juba
Diamond & Juba; The Raucous World of 19th-Century Challenge Dancing
Order Awaiting Their Feast
Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19
Order The Lettered Indian
The Lettered Indian
Order Anna May Wong
Anna May Wong
Order Race and the Greening of Atlanta
Race and the Greening of Atlanta
Order Strolling Players of Empire
Strolling Players of Empire
Order Caging Boarders & Carceral States
Caging Borders and Carceral States
Order The Walls of Santiago
The Walls of Santiago
Order The Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History
The Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History
Order Gray Gold
Gray Gold
Order An Uneasy Embrace
An Uneasy Embrace
Order Can you beat Churchill?
Can You Beat Churchill?
