In Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion , Gareth Stedman Jones draws a distinction between Marx’s nineteenth-century views and those of twentieth-century Marxism, which abandoned ideas of Marx that seemed outdated. Stedman Jones’ careful reconstruction of Marx’s philosophical, political, and economic thought in the context of the new social thought of the early nineteenth century, however, reveals aspects of Marx that returned to challenge official Marxism. In this respect, Stedman Jones’ conception of intellectual history as the careful placement of ideas in their historical context conflicts with his actual practice of intellectual history, which discovers challenges to the present in past debates.

“Genocide” provides a useful optic with which to understand and examine purposeful purges of Mesopotamian, Alexandrine, Visogothic, Norman, Mongol, and Spanish (during the Inquisition) people, and those of more modern times. Raphaël Lemkin’s cross-disciplinary arguments, developed in the crucible of an unfolding Holocaust and trimmed and refined at the United Nations, offer new insights into the actions of rulers and ruling classes, into the elimination or forcible assimilation of all manner of groups, and into the kinds of decisions that dominant populations made throughout recorded time to brand, and then discriminate against and persecute, weaker or minority groups.

Historians often leave the comparative analysis of the city-state in Europe to their colleagues in political science and sociology. But two recent volumes—Scott, The City-State in Europe , and Gamberini and Lazzarini (eds.), The Italian Renaissance State —address a number of traditional assumptions about the differences between Italian and transalpine cities and the differences between princely and republican regimes. Both volumes show how historians can make a valuable interdisciplinary contribution to comparative analysis by paying attention to diverse historical trajectories and contingencies—along the way revealing the resilience of urban forms of political life long thought to have declined with the rise of the territorial state.

Winders’ Nashville in the New Millennium is a study of the local effects of the new immigration in areas that had historically experienced a paucity of immigrants and international culture. By employing a methodology based on participant observation, personal interviews, and oral histories, Winders demonstrates that a surge of immigrants in a local community can produce a complex challenge to epistemologies of collective identity based on historically entrenched ethnic categories and popular memories. Her research is a fresh addition to a field of scholarship that has produced illuminating interdisciplinary studies about the effects of the changing flows of immigrants on communities, generations, and minority groups.

What exactly is fame? Is it synonymous with renown, with historical importance, or with historical significance? Do importance and significance have the same meaning in this context? Are the most famous women and men—the “big names”—of past times the persons who contributed the most to propelling or stemming the tides of history? Does being merely remembered matter more or less than accomplishing something that made a difference to the pace of human progress? What is the value of quantifying recognition versus qualifying the value added of a particular individual action or bundle of actions? All of these questions, and more, arise from Skiena and Ward’s novel, bold attempt to compare thousands of human endeavors across time and geography in Who’s Bigger? Where Historical Figures Really Rank. It works, in a sense, but does it improve understanding?

After numerous unremarkable centuries, why did humans start to live longer and reproduce themselves in increasing numbers? What were the proximate causes of this remarkable demographic acceleration? No longer destined everywhere to endure brutish and short life experiences, why did humans, first in northwestern Europe and eventually everywhere else, begin almost abruptly to enjoy enhanced well-being? Did their food intakes become more nutritious and their conflicts less devastating? Or were improvements in potable water sources key factors? Conceivably, too, the world simply grew richer, and its citizens could purchase better lives more easily. Deaton's The Great Escape provides many answers to such questions, and an excellent entry for historians and social scientists into the literature on well-being over time.

The story of Hollywood in Weimar is essential to understanding how the American studios (and thus American culture) dealt with the Nazis. To ignore its impact is to risk misunderstanding the issues of the 1930s, both large and small. Any simple interpretation of the American film studios' connections with the Third Reich belies the actual interactions of those involved. Claims to the contrary, and efforts to slap empty labels on them, inevitably fail to convince.

Sweden became a modern country only in the twentieth century. A major shift in silvicultural practices, plus an emphasis on dairy production, contributed to this national transformation at a time when, paradoxically, rural Sweden was being denuded of people and agriculturally and pastorally driven pursuits were replaced by urban-based industries and services. The introduction of cheap oil and of improvements in agricultural technologies and strategies had more to do with the development of forestry in Sweden during the twentieth century than any of forestry's own achievements did during the same period. The southern third of Sweden benefited more from these innovations than did the two northernmost thirds.

In Economic Origins of Roman Christianity , as in their earlier works, Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., and Robert D. Tollison propose the forcing of history into the once-favored rational-agent template of economics, as an aid to a better understanding. Their terminology of choice amounts to translation, applied in a novel way. In the circle of Ekelund and Tollison, this approach has given rise in recent decades to an active social-scientific sub-specialty. Since, however, in translation much is lost, why resort to it as a tool of science?

Charisma is a social phenomenon, not an individual trait, but using the concept loosely (as we all do) as a catch-all description for magnetism, fame, heroism, or celebrity is both misleading and confusing; all of these terms are analytically distinct from charisma as well as from each other. Loose usage obscures the significance of the interactions between genuinely charismatic men or women—usually political and organizational leaders and gifted mobilizers rather than movie stars and athletic giants—and their believers and followers. Adulation is not necessarily indicative of charisma, nor is popular appeal. Charismatic leaders and their devotees together move barriers and overcome obstacles in order to achieve transformative goals. Charisma is best understood as the inspirational component of the bond between leaders and their followers that allows them to act as if they are genuinely moved to maximize what they presume, or are led to believe, are their own interests.

Map history is fertile interdisciplinary terrain. No longer the preserve of map historians presiding as custodian-interpreters of a simple mimetic truth, map history now involves historians, historians of art and of science, geographers, literary scholars, and, just as important, new forms of curatorial scholarship and responsibility. The purpose and interpretation of the large maps on display in one form or another between c.1450 and 1850 throughout Europe depended greatly upon the physical and social environments of their viewing. Insights from the history of the book and the history of science offer new possibilities for the continued interdisciplinary interrogation of these maps as visual and textual sources.

In recent years, modern scholars have applied various methodologies to the study of local elites in the Roman Empire. Judith Perkins in Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era examines the concept of elite , like many other classicists, through an analysis of written texts—in her case, Greek novels and political writings of the first and second centuries. Models and theories borrowed from cultural anthropology or sociology—such as Michael Mann's sociological theory of power—offer a new way to resolve difficulties of interpretation that traditional methodological tools cannot address.

Consilience refers to the quality of investigations that draw conclusions from forms of evidence that are epistemologically distinct. The term seems particularly apt for conclusions produced by natural-scientific investigations on the one hand and by historical and archaeological studies on the other. Consilience points to areas of underlying unity of humanistic and scientific investigation— a unity arising from that of reality itself; it represents a convergence in parallel but independent investigations that results in deductions that are much more robust than any investigation would be able to produce on its own.

Interpretations of England's Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 fall into two categories. The first views the opposition to James II as a national movement—establishing English religious freedom and political liberty under the auspices of a parliamentary monarchy significantly different from the continental kingdoms in which absolutism held sway. The second posits an international conspiracy involving only a small minority of England's peerage and gentry and culminating in the invasion of William III, Dutch Stadtholder and eventual English king, who wanted to deploy British resources in the struggle against French power. Scholars have recently combined the two positions to form a composite interpretation. Pincus' 1688 , however, sets out to overthrow almost every piece of this established picture and to substitute the interpretation emblazoned in his subtitle; 1688 was nothing less than “The First Modern Revolution.”

Explaining Culture Scientifically , edited by Melissa J. Brown, attempts to rehabilitate the concept of culture from the depravations of postmodernism by reestablishing the relevance of evolutionary science. But it does not attempt to explain postmodernism's phenomenal success in anthropology, history, and other disciplines in which the study of culture is forefront. “Evolutionary science” includes cognitivism, which, like postmodernism and the rest of “the linguistic turn,” has roots in the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Like structuralism (which the authors barely mention) and postmodernism (which they explicitly shun), the “science” deployed in this collection comes across mainly as a brand of creationism unconnected to the legacy of Charles Darwin. Darwin's revolutionary opus inspired a number of brilliant works that pointed toward a science of culture—those of Sigmund Freud, for example—but the promise of those early years remains largely unfulfilled.

Medieval historians composing biographies of kings often have no recourse but to rely on hagiography when other sources about their subjects are lacking. Given this constraint, the most successful medieval biographies tend to concentrate on matters of rulership rather than personality. Yet, two recent books—Gaposchkin's The Making of Saint Louis and Le Goff's Saint Louis —reverse this trend, illuminating Louis IX of France as man and saint but not fully as king. A careful look at the scholarship, as well as the available primary sources, about Louis underscores the need for more study of his kingship and provides a test case for the benefits and limits of medieval biography.

Once the domain of physicians intent on recording and memorializing professional achievements, the history of medicine has become fully interdisciplinary, encompassing myriad topics. Oddly, however, the problems that actually generate medicine, the diseases themselves, have—with such notable exceptions as plague, cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and hiv/aids —attracted relatively little attention until recently. Disease history now appears ready to enter a new phase.

Latin American historians and social scientists have been grappling with the region's experience of crimes against humanity since the 1950s. In recent years, a number of important works have sought to go beyond the concern for “transitional justice” as a frame for writing about how societies grapple with atrocious pasts, examining instead the ties between historiography and the legacies of atrocity—the murky relationship between what is known about and what is known from the past.

Bayly and Harper's Forgotten Wars examines the interrelated events, individuals, and ideologies involved in Britain's re-conquest of Southeast Asia after World War II, as well as its authoritarian attempts to shape the postwar landscape there and to re-assert its political and moral authority in a rapidly shifting global context. British imperial violence and authoritarianism were more pronounced in Southeast Asia during the postwar era than commonly acknowledged. Hence, issues of morality, objectivity, and methodology acquire a new relevance concerning the literature about the end of the British Empire.