This powerful book provides the first detailed examination of the law’s response to the crimes of the Holocaust. In vivid prose it offers a fascinating study of five exemplary proceedings—the Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals, the Israeli trials of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk, the French trial of Klaus Barbie, and the Canadian trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. These trials, the book argues, were “show trials” in the broadest sense: they aimed to do justice both to the defendants and to the history and memory of the Holocaust.

Famous among true crime aficionados, Burke and Hare were the first serial killers to capture media attention. The Anatomy Murders is the first book to situate their story against the social and cultural forces that were bringing early nineteenth-century Britain into modernity. In Lisa Rosner's deft treatment, each of the murder victims, from the beautiful, doomed Mary Paterson to the unfortunate "Daft Jamie," opens a window on a different aspect of this world in transition. Tapping into a wealth of unpublished materials, Rosner meticulously portrays the aspirations of doctors and anatomists, the makeshift existence of the so-called dangerous classes, the rudimentary police apparatus, and the half-fiction, half-journalism of the popular press

Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio, Bert Hansen

Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio offers a refreshing portrait of an era when the public excitedly anticipated medical progress and research breakthroughs. This unique study with 130 archival illustrations drawn from newspaper sketches, caricatures, comic books, Hollywood films, and LIFE magazine photography analyzes the relationship between mass media images and popular attitudes. Bert Hansen considers the impact these representations had on public attitudes and shows how media portrayal and popular support for medical research grew together and reinforced each other.

Nurse-Midwifery: The Birth of a New American Profession, Laura E. Ettinger

In a unique and detailed historical study, Nurse-Midwifery: The Birth of a New American Profession, Laura E. Ettinger fills a void with the first book-length documentation of the emergence of American nurse-midwifery. This occupation developed in the 1920s and involved nurses who took advanced training in midwifery. In Nurse-Midwifery, Ettinger shows how nurse-midwives in New York City; eastern Kentucky; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and other places both rebelled against and served as agents of a nationwide professionalization of doctors and medicalization of childbirth.

Ballooning, like the Enlightenment, was a Europe-wide movement and a massive cultural phenomenon. Lynn argues that in order to understand the importance of science during the age of the Enlightenment and Atlantic revolutions, it is crucial to explain how and why ballooning entered and stayed in the public consciousness.   This book offers a cultural and social analysis of ballooning over the first quarter century after their invention. On the one hand, a mass popular culture emerged surrounding balloons, they captured the hearts and imagination of the entire continent and beyond and became a symbol of Enlightenment, state power, and scientific progress; on the other hand, they failed to fulfill their technological potential.

First Prize, Popular Medicine, British Medical Association

Award for Furthering Public Understanding of Science, British Medical Association

This history of the U.S. Public Health Service's efforts to educate Americans about sex makes clear why federally funded sex education has been haphazard, ad hoc, and often ineffectual.  Lord draws on medical research, news reports, the expansive records of the Public Health Service, and interviews with former surgeons general to examine these efforts, from early initiatives through the administration of George W. Bush.

Veiled Empire, Douglas Northrop

Winner of the Heldt Prize (Association for Women in Slavic Studies)
Winner of the 2006 W. Bruce Lincoln Prize (American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies)

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women.  In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls.  Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.

The Life and Legacy of Robert Smalls of South Carolina's Sea Islands, Robert K. Sutton and Luann Jones



This book tells the story of the life of Robert Smalls, an enslaved African American, born in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839. During and after the American Civil War, he became a ship's pilot, a sea captain, and a politician. He freed himself and his family from slavery and was instrumental in the creation of South Carolina's public school system. He wrote in 1895, "My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life."

Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France examines the emergence of a citizen consumer role for women during postwar modernization and reconstruction in France, integrating the history of economic modernization with that of women and the family. This role both celebrated the power of the woman consumer and created a gendered form of citizenship that did not disrupt the sexual hierarchy of home, polity, and marketplace. Redefining needs and renegotiating concepts of taste, value, and thrift, women and their families drove mass consumer society through their demands and purchases at the same time that their very need to consume came to define them.