In alphabetical order:

Robert Dalzell, George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America, with Lee B. Dalzell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

George Washington's Mount Vernon brings together for the first time the details of Washington's 45-year-long campaign to build and perfect Mount Vernon.  In doing so it reveals a Washington few of his contemporaries knew, and one little noted by historians since – the planter/patriot who also loved building, a man passionately committed to impressing on the physical world around him the stamp of his character and beliefs.  Twice Washington all but completely rebuilt the main house at Mount Vernon, both times reworking the surrounding landscape as well.  And to those changes were added scores of other, smaller projects over the years.

As chief architect and planner of the work done at Mount Vernon, Washington began by imitating accepted models of fashionable taste, but as time passed he increasingly followed his own ideas.  Hence architecturally Mount Vernon blends the orthodox and the innovative, just as the new American nation would.  The books also pays close attention to the process of building at Mount Vernon, and to the people – slave and free – who did the work.  Washington was a demanding master, and in their determination to preserve their independence his workers often clashed with him.  Yet, the authors argue, that experience played a vital role in shaping his hopes for the future of American society – hopes that embraced in full the promise of the revolution in which he led his fellow citizens.

George Washington's Mount Vernon thus combines the two sides of Washington's life – the public and the private – and seeks to use the combination to deepen understanding of both.

 

Deanna Klepper, "Nicholas of Lyra and Franciscan Interest in Hebrew Scholarship," in Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture (Leiden 1999).

 

Francis C. Oakley, Politics and Eternity: Studies in the History of Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought (Leiden, 1999).

 

Patricia Tracy, Biographical entries on Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Stoddard [leading theologians in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century America] in American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 1998).

 

Chris Waters, Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964, co-edited with an introduction by Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters (London: Rivers Oram Press; New York: New York University Press, 1999).

"I think the British have the distinction above other nations of being able to put new wine into old bottles without bursting them."  This was Clement Attlee's assessment of Britain's unique contribution to post-war modernisation.  Moments of Modernity intervenes in the debate about the significance of this period of British history.  It opens fresh discussion about the two decades after the end of the Second World War by approaching them through the prism of modernity.  Drawing on this term historically, the collection brings together the work of leading scholars, questioning standard interpretations and advancing new approaches to the era.  Interdisciplinary in focus, it offers a wide-ranging critique of the existing historiography, transcending the narrow specialisms which have restricted our understanding of early post-war British society.  Topics range from jazz in the 1950s, race and decolonisation, masculinity and politics, advertising and retailing, to the making of the modern homosexual.  The book concludes by re-examining modernism within contemporary architecture and design.  Moments of Modernity begins to reconceptualise the central themes of British history in the crucial post-war years.

 

K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan, eds., Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 1998.

 

James Wood, The King's Army, Warfare, Soldiers and Society During the Early Wars of Religion in France, 1526-76 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).  Winner of the 1998 Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Military History, 1998.

Historians long ignored the military aspects of the Wars of Religion which raged in France during the late sixteenth century, dismissing the conflicts as aimless or hopelessly confused.  By contrast, Professor Wood puts warfare back at the center of the picture with a detailed analysis of the royal army and it's operations during the early civil wars.  He explains the reasons for the initial failure of the monarchy to defeat the Huguenots, and examines how that failure prolonged the conflict.  He argues that the nature and outcome of the civil wars can only be explained by the fusion of religious rebellion and incomplete military revolution.  The book makes an important contribution to the history of military forces, warfare, and society, and in 1998 received the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History.