Here are 100 books that The Dawn Watch fans have personally recommended if you like
The Dawn Watch.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Fiction has a way of capturing people, places, and phenomena that often elude source-bound historians. As I say in my book, you feel the weight of all the terrible things Colonel Kurtz has done in central Africa far more by his whispering “the horror, the horror” than I, as a historian, could possibly convey by listing them out and analyzing them. That feel–especially what contingency feels like–is something historians should seek out and try to pull into their craft of writing. Getting used to and using fiction to help historians see and feel the past is a worthwhile endeavor.
The idea to adapt Conrad’s Heart of Darkness came from my teaching of modern world history every semester. Later in that course, I would have students read Achebe’s novel as a foil or answer to Heart of Darkness. The Congolese in Heart are barely people: they have no names, and they are only really described by parts of their bodies.
This book presents the West African world–the communities, the customs, the emotions, the families–that colonialism destroys. While it is easy to be swept away by the story’s momentum in the last two dozen pages, take some time early in the novel to enjoy the world that Achebe lovingly paints. I think it is among the most human expressions of fiction you can read.
Fiction has a way of capturing people, places, and phenomena that often elude source-bound historians. As I say in my book, you feel the weight of all the terrible things Colonel Kurtz has done in central Africa far more by his whispering “the horror, the horror” than I, as a historian, could possibly convey by listing them out and analyzing them. That feel–especially what contingency feels like–is something historians should seek out and try to pull into their craft of writing. Getting used to and using fiction to help historians see and feel the past is a worthwhile endeavor.
Do you know how many gallons of blood are in a mature seal? That’s one of the many things you’ll find out in this gripping book about the true story that lies behind Herman Melville’s iconic short story, Benito Cereno.
It was the South Pacific in 1805, and a sealing vessel came upon a ship that they discovered was the result of an onboard slave insurrection. What happened, including the gushing of copious amounts of warm seal blood, is for you to discover. This is an amazing piece of history writing.
One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event-an event that…
Fiction has a way of capturing people, places, and phenomena that often elude source-bound historians. As I say in my book, you feel the weight of all the terrible things Colonel Kurtz has done in central Africa far more by his whispering “the horror, the horror” than I, as a historian, could possibly convey by listing them out and analyzing them. That feel–especially what contingency feels like–is something historians should seek out and try to pull into their craft of writing. Getting used to and using fiction to help historians see and feel the past is a worthwhile endeavor.
The American Civil War is everywhere, yet nowhere in William Faulkner’s fiction. This book explores the history of Yoknapatawpha County and the fiction of William Faulkner’s Civil War. It is a fascinating exploration of historical memory, race-making, narrative construction, and the South during and after Sherman.
Like The Dawn Watch, I especially loved it because it was neither a history book nor a work of literary analysis. If you have read Faulkner, this is an essential book that helps you understand how all of this is really about the Civil War, even though you’ll find very little gunfire in those pages. The pain is nowhere because it is everywhere.
Michael Gorra asks provocative questions in this historic portrait of William Faulkner and his world. He explores whether William Faulkner should still be read in this new century and asks what his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the American Civil War, the central quarrel in America's history.
Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works' echo of "Lost Cause"…
Fiction has a way of capturing people, places, and phenomena that often elude source-bound historians. As I say in my book, you feel the weight of all the terrible things Colonel Kurtz has done in central Africa far more by his whispering “the horror, the horror” than I, as a historian, could possibly convey by listing them out and analyzing them. That feel–especially what contingency feels like–is something historians should seek out and try to pull into their craft of writing. Getting used to and using fiction to help historians see and feel the past is a worthwhile endeavor.
Another Melville and another unusual one. Melville died broke and mostly forgotten. Lewis Mumford, a now mostly forgotten literary critic, is largely responsible for resuscitating Melville’s reputation in the early 20th century.
Sachs, an environmental historian who can really write, has penned a very unconventional, twinned biography of Melville and Mumford–the chapters go from one to the other, a style that takes some getting used to–that explores what it was about Melville’s dark vision of human nature, climate change, and capitalism that spoke to Mumford, and what it has to say to us.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography
A double portrait of two of America's most influential writers that reveals the surprising connections between them-and their uncanny relevance to our age of crisis
Up from the Depths tells the interconnected stories of two of the most important writers in American history-the novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891) and one of his earliest biographers, the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford (1895-1990). Deftly cutting back and forth between the writers, Aaron Sachs reveals the surprising resonances between their lives, work, and troubled times-and their uncanny relevance in our own…
I am a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University. I have taught and written on political theory and cultural studies for over thirty years, specializing in theories of capitalism and imperialism. However, my main motivation for writing the books and articles I have published has had more to do with my life-long commitment to progressive social change and the political movements that can bring that change about. First and foremost, I have tried to make sometimes challenging theoretical and political concepts accessible to the informed reader and especially to those on the front lines of progressive political and social movements.
In the build-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a flurry of books were produced on the ‘new imperialism.’ One of the best was by the Canadian Marxist scholar, the late Ellen Meiksins Wood. What distinguishes capitalist imperialism from its predecessors, Wood argues, “is the predominance of the economic, as distinct from direct ‘extra-economic’—political, military, judicial— coercion.”
By relying on the imperatives of the market, capitalist imperialism has been able to shed most of the visible trappings of older forms of empire, including its network of territorially based colonies overseen by regionally based armies and administrators: “Capitalism has extended the reach of imperial domination far beyond the capacities of direct political rule or colonial occupation, simply by imposing and manipulating the operations of the capitalist market.”
Even though capitalist imperialism relies primarily on market-based coercion rather than the direct use of force to police its interests, Wood is…
In this era of globalization, we hear a great deal about a new imperialism and its chief enforcer, the United States. Today, with the US promising an endless war against terrorism and promoting a policy of preemptive defense, this notion seems more plausible than ever. But what does imperialism mean in the absence of colonial conquest and direct imperial rule? In this lucid and lively book Ellen Meiksins Wood explores the new imperialism against the contrasting background of older forms, from ancient Rome, through medieval Europe, the Arab Muslim world, the Spanish conquests, and the Dutch commercial empire. Tracing the…
I am a professor at Georgetown University, and I have long been interested in the promise and peril of global markets and the fundamental question of why some countries are rich and others poor. I've always loved looking at globalization at ground level: My travels to Chinese factories, Washington trade negotiations, and African cocoa farms have been great adventures of both mind and spirit, and I always leave with a new friend who has illuminated my understanding of this complex world. But in a late-life shift (that is not as random as it sounds) my current work revolves around criminal justice in the US. I currently direct the Pivot Program at Georgetown.
Zingales is a brilliant academic economist, but this book leads the reader with both head and heart. Zingales is concerned that the US is on a path to similarities with his native Italy, where markets and politics are both corrupted by cronyism and nepotism. The book’s appeal is that Zingales's compelling argument cannot be put in a left or right box. He lays out evidence to suggest that more open competition will address both the inequality concerns of liberals, as well as the free market priorities of conservatives. Today, Zingales seems to suggest, we have the worst of both worlds.
Born in Italy, University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales witnessed firsthand the consequences of high inflation and unemployment--paired with rampant nepotism and cronyism--on a country's economy. This experience profoundly shaped his professional interests, and in 1988 he arrived in the United States, armed with a political passion and the belief that economists should not merely interpret the world, but should change it for the better. In A Capitalism for the People, Zingales makes a forceful, philosophical, and at times personal argument that the roots of American capitalism are dying, and that the result is a drift toward the more corrupt…
I’ve been trying to understand people’s politics since I was a kid and wondered why my dad, who had been a boy in Sicily under Mussolini, spoke so fondly of “il Duce”—even though Dad was an otherwise independent thinker who believed in people’s inherent dignity, not to mention a man who was an immigrant and an outsider and thus exactly the kind of person fascists hate. I think this background partially explains why I focus my writing on interpreting the significance and appeal of widespread and, in some cases, morally indefensible and contradictory cultural-political ideologies such as neoliberalism and racism.
Folks familiar with the term “neoliberalism” usually describe it as the economic system that tries to unleash the market by getting the government out of the way. I like Globalists because it shows how unleashing the market demands that government gets in the way—of workers’ rights, movements for equality, and, most ominously, democracy itself. Since it’s impossible to understand fascism without tackling capitalism, a book explaining how we got to today’s market principles is vital.
I see this book as a history of the neoliberal economists who encouraged political leaders to use state violence and repression to unleash free trade and shape the global economy. Globalists tell the story of how modern capitalism developed into today’s vast landscape of inequality that makes a fertile ground for fascism and violent extremism to develop.
George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year
"A groundbreaking contribution...Intellectual history at its best." -Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again…
Since 2008, I have conducted research on themes related to International Political Economy. I am currently the co-chair of the research committee on this topic at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and am passionate about making sense of the interplay between material and symbolic factors that shape capitalism and globalisation. Being based in Brazil, I was stuck when the country—which did not have salient identity cleavages in politics—came to be, after 2008, a hotspot of religious-based right-wing populism associated with the defence of trade liberalisation as globalisation started to face meaningful backlash from White-majority constituencies who are relatively losers of the post-Cold War order in the advanced industrialised democracies.
I love Anderson’s narrative about the formation of nations in the 19th Century and what he calls print capitalism, promoted through books and newspapers. A market organised around the same language fosters both the economy and the very much-needed feeling of community required to organise the state and foster industrial capitalism.
More than four decades after its publication, the book remains thought-provoking as it makes me ask whether a single language suffices to hold nations and markets together.
What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these…
I have cross-disciplinary expertise (ethics and moral philosophy, philosophical anthropology and moral psychology), and my work focuses on personalist virtue ethics, moral human development, and the links between ethics and economics; I am a person who loves nature and animals, and I’m thrilled to do good work. I was educated and worked internationally, with academic degrees in different Europe countries and the USA, and 30 years of work and academic experience in Europe, the USA, and SE Asia. I live with my family near London, U.K.. I am passionate about enabling a more sustainable society that however remains rooted in human dignity and avoids instrumentalizing the person
I like that the economic advantages of capitalism have not been underestimated, but also that its social, economic failures (corruption, exclusion/poverty, harmfulness and hubristic behaviours, impersonalism, and environmental degradation).
A solution offered is balancing justice and productivity, is trying to fix capitalism without alienating its elites.
Despite the great economic advantage of capitalism - that it is an efficient system of production and distribution - capitalist societies struggle with its by-products of poverty, exclusion, corruption, and environmental destruction. The essays in "Ethics and Capitalism" address the question of ensuring ethical and just societies within a capitalist system without sacrificing productivity. The introductory essay is a guide to the issues in the emerging field of ethics and capitalism, and refers to recent contributions from several disciplines. The collection as a whole evaluates the morality of capitalism by looking at its foundation in property theory, its relationship to…
Economic history is, quite simply, my job: I write about it, I research it, and I’ve been teaching it for ten years at a small liberal arts college in New England. I’ve always felt that the best way to make sense of economic change is not by studying formal laws but by reading what past actors have left behind. Numbers and statistics are indispensable, but they acquire meaning only in relation to ideas and power. In any case, that’s what I take the books on this list to suggest. I think of these books—and others like them—as trusty companions. Perhaps you will, too.
Quite simply the best survey of 20th-century international political economy out there. I assign it to my students and turn to it whenever I need a brief refresher on things.
How exactly did the classic gold standard collapse? Why again did Latin American countries turn autarkic after World War II? What was the role of foreign direct investment under Bretton Woods? Why did labor suffer in the 1970s, and why did finance boom in the 1980s?
Frieden has the answers, and he presents them in a supple narrative and with a commendably sharp sense of politics.
A wonderful blend of "politics and economics, micro and macro, past and present in an accessible narrative" (The Washington Post), Global Capitalism presents an authoritative history of the twentieth-century global economy. Jeffry A. Frieden's discussion of the financial crisis of 2008 explores its causes, the many warning signals for policymakers and its repercussions: a protracted recovery with accumulating levels of inequality and political turmoil in the European Union and the United States. Frieden also highlights China's dramatic rise as the world's largest manufacturer and trading nation, perhaps the most far-reaching development of the new millennium. Drawing parallels between the current…
