Behind the Book

In the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the French Third Republic sought to rebuild its strength to avenge its defeat and secure itself as a major world power. To help achieve these ends, the first professional intelligence services were created to help secure French interests against all possible enemies - both foreign and internal. This gripping story of French intelligence during the late nineteenth century is the subject of Deborah Bauer's Marianne Is Watching: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and the Origins of the French Surveillance State (‎University of Nebraska Press, 2021).

Dr. Deborah Bauer is an associate professor of history at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her research has focused primarily on the cultural, diplomatic, and military history of France and the French Empire at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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In Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (U Nebraska Press, 2023) renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations.

Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West’s extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.

As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.

Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (Liveright, 2013).

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In Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), Giusi Russo focuses on the first decades of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to examine gender politics in the postwar period. The Commission was comprised of a diverse group of women whose ideas about equality often clashed. Shaped by Cold War politics and the process of decolonization, the CSW’s work grappled with issues like polygamy, family planning, FGM, and women’s role in development. Through its interactions with women and women’s bodies in the colonial world, the CSW moved from concerns with law to practice, and from formal public rights like civic equality and political participation to private rights concerning marriage and reproduction. Russo brings in the voices of a range of CSW delegates to highlight how women representing newly independent nations pushed back against narratives that rested on an imperial feminist foundation. Their rhetoric demonstrates how body politics were intertwined with broader geopolitical trends, and recenters prevailing understandings of the CSW that underestimate its influence prior to 1975. Russo argues that women living under colonial and postcolonial systems were key actors in defining the politics of women’s rights at the UN.

Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

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The story of water in the United States is one of ecosystemic disruption and social injustice. From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and Flint, Michigan, to the Appalachian coal and gas fields and the Gulf Coast, low-income communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color face the disproportionate effects of floods, droughts, sea level rise, and water contamination. 

In Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition (U Nebraska Press, 2023) Matthew S. Henry examines cultural representations that imagine a just transition, a concept rooted in the U.S. labor and environmental justice movements to describe an alternative economic paradigm predicated on sustainability, economic and social equity, and climate resilience. Focused on regions of water insecurity, from central Arizona to central Appalachia, Henry explores how writers, artists, and activists have creatively responded to intensifying water crises in the United States and argues that narrative and storytelling are critical to environmental and social justice advocacy. By drawing on a wide and comprehensive range of narrative texts, historical documentation, policy papers, and literary and cultural scholarship, Henry presents a timely project that examines the social movement, just transition, and the logic of the Green New Deal, in addition to contemporary visions of environmental justice.

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In 1990, though no one knew it then, a fearless group of players changed the sport of soccer in the United States forever. Young, bronzed, and mulleted, they were America’s finest athletes in a sport that America loved to hate. Even sportswriters rooted against them. Yet this team defied massive odds and qualified for the World Cup, and made making possible America’s current obsession with the world’s most popular game.

In this era the U.S. Soccer Federation’s preceding head coach had a better-paying day job as a black-tie restaurant waiter. Players earned $20 a day. The crowd at home games cheered for their opponent and the fields were even mismarked.

In Latin America the U.S. team bus had a machine gun turret mounted on the back, locals would sabotage their hotel, and in the stadiums spectators would rain coins, batteries, and plastic bags of urine down on the American players.

The world considered the U.S. team to be total imposters — the Milli Vanilli of soccer. Yet on the biggest stage of all, in the 1990 World Cup, this undaunted American squad and their wise coach earned the adoration of Italy’s star players and their fans in a gladiator-like match in Rome’s deafening Stadio Olimpico.

From windswept soccer fields in the U.S. heartland to the CIA-infested cauldron of Central America and the Caribbean, behind the recently toppled Iron Curtain and into the great European soccer cathedrals, Adam Elder's New Kids in the World Cup: The Totally Late '80s and Early '90s Tale of the Team That Changed American Soccer Forever (U Nebraska Press, 2022) is the origin story of modern American soccer in a time when power ballads were inescapable, and mainstream America was discovering hip-hop. It’s the true adventure of America’s most important soccer team, which made everything possible that’s come since—including America finally falling in love with soccer.

Robert Sherwood is a professor of history at Georgia Military College. He works on Swiss, Swiss-American and Sports History.

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Spencer Segalla’s Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 (U Nebraska Press, 2021) explores natural and anthropogenic disasters during the years of decolonization and Cold War. Four disasters make up the core of the book: the 1954 earthquake in Algeria’s Chélif Valley, just weeks before the onset of the Algerian Revolution; a mass poisoning in Morocco in 1959 caused by toxic substances from an American military base; the 1959 Malpasset dam collapse in Fréjus, France, which devastated the Algerian immigrant community in the town but which was blamed on Algerian sabotage; and the 1960 earthquake in Agadir, Morocco, which set off a public relations war between the United States, France, and the Soviet Union, and which ignited a Moroccan national debate over modernity, identity, architecture, and urban planning. Spencer Segalla argues for the integration of environmental events into narratives of political and cultural decolonization. Empire and Catastrophe will interest environmental historians, North Africa area studies specialists, and historians of France and French imperialism. Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 is available open access online for no charge.

Dr. Segalla, professor of history at the University of Tampa, completed his Ph.D. at Stonybrook in 2003. In addition to Empire and Catastrophe, he has published The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912-1956 with the University of Nebraska Press in 2009.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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When late eighteenth-century New Spanish viceregal administrators installed public lamps in the streets of central Mexico City, they illuminated the bodies of Indigenous, Afro-descended, and plebeian Spanish urbanites. The urban patrolmen, known as guarda faroleros, or “lantern guards,” maintained the streetlamps and attempted to clear the streets of plebeian sexuality, embodiment, and sociability, all while enforcing late colonial racial policies amid frequent violent resistance from the populace.

In The Enlightened Patrolman: Early Law Enforcement in Mexico City (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) Nicole von Germeten guides readers through Mexico City’s efforts to envision and impose modern values as viewed through the lens of early law enforcement, an accelerated process of racialization of urban populations, and burgeoning ideas of modern masculinity. Germeten unfolds a tale of the losing struggle for elite control of the city streets. As surveillance increased and the populace resisted violently, a pause in the march toward modernity ensued. The Enlightened Patrolman presents an innovative study on the history of this very early law enforcement corps, providing new insight into the history of masculinity and race in Mexico, as well as the eighteenth-century origins of policing in the Americas.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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The US military didn't just conquer its way across the US West and the Pacific - it also collected and categorized across these spaces too. In Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers (U Nebraska Press, 2023), Colorado College's Amy Kohout examines the role of soldiers in the construction of imperial knowledge. By examining how soldiers interpreted the people and places they encountered in the West and in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, Kohout explains how science and the military worked hand in hand to define ideas like wilderness and nature in places newly acquired and explored by the growing American empire. The book addresses a range of topics, from birds to the Black Hills to World's Fairs, and shows how following one's sources can lead a historian to some very interesting, as well as messy, places and conclusions. 

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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After the turn of the twentieth century, schools played a pivotal role in the construction of French West Africa. But as this dynamic, deeply researched study reveals, the expanding school system also became the site of escalating conflicts. As French authorities worked to develop truncated schools for colonial "subjects," many African students and young elites framed educational projects of their own. Weaving together a complex narrative and rich variety of voices, Harry Gamble explores the high stakes of colonial education.

With the disruptions of World War II, contests soon took on new configurations. Seeking to forestall postwar challenges to colonial rule, French authorities showed a new willingness to envision broad reforms, in education as in other areas. Exploiting the new context of the Fourth Republic and the extension of citizenship, African politicians demanded an end to separate and inferior schools. 

Harry Gamble's book Contesting French West Africa: Battles Over Schools and the Colonial Order, 1900–1950 (U Nebraska Press, 2017) critically examines the move toward educational integration that took shape during the immediate postwar period. Growing linkages to the metropolitan school system ultimately had powerful impacts on the course of decolonization and the making of postcolonial Africa.

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has always been globally situated, argues Montana State history professor Amanda Hendrix-Komoto in Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific (U Nebraska, 2022). Through mission work, polygamous marriage, and extensive kinship networks, LDS members sought to create Zions - holy Mormon spaces - throughout the world through relationships with Indigenous people from the Intermountain West to Tahiti and the Hawai'ian islands. This process found both successful conversions, as well as pain and violence, since despite LDS insistence that they offered an alternative to American settler colonialism, often church members could be just as imperially-minded as their non-Mormon peers. Nonetheless, Hendrix-Komoto argues that the history of Indigenous people and the LDS Church is complex, and cannot be understood without placing a uniquely Mormon idea of the family at the very center.

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