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This volume captures the main research areas in the field of American Economic History. It consists of 37 chapters divided into five sections. The initial section covers Population and Health. In addition to basic demographic research including disease and sanitation, immigration, and health policy research, this section examines the work on anthropometric history. The second section on Production and Structural Change addresses the three principal sectors of the economy (Agriculture, Manufacturing, and Services). There are chapters on how business has been organized over time and how executives have been compensated. The third section on the Factors of Production emphasizes questions of labor (and retirement), capital, and natural resources. There are separate chapters of physical and human capital (education). The fourth section, Technology and Urbanization, examines three dimensions of each topic. Chapters on innovation and patenting, technology, and energy are joined by chapters on urbanization, housing, and professional team sports. The final section, Government and Economic Policy looks at macroeconomic policy (monetary, fiscal, and trade) and microeconomic policy (property rights, antitrust and regulation, and welfare). In addition, there are separate chapters on the US constitution, business cycles, the environment, the Civil War, the two world wars of the twentieth century, and the New Deal. Each chapter provides a discussion of the important topics in that area of economic history, the relevant literature on those topics, and the author’s opinion as to important topics for future research.

This volume captures the main research areas in the field of American Economic History. It consists of 37 chapters divided into five sections. The initial section covers Population and Health. In addition to basic demographic research including disease and sanitation, immigration, and health policy research, this section examines the work on anthropometric history. The second section on Production and Structural Change addresses the three principal sectors of the economy (Agriculture, Manufacturing, and Services). There are chapters on how business has been organized over time and how executives have been compensated. The third section on the Factors of Production emphasizes questions of labor (and retirement), capital, and natural resources. There are separate chapters of physical and human capital (education). The fourth section, Technology and Urbanization, examines three dimensions of each topic. Chapters on innovation and patenting, technology, and energy are joined by chapters on urbanization, housing, and professional team sports. The final section, Government and Economic Policy looks at macroeconomic policy (monetary, fiscal, and trade) and microeconomic policy (property rights, antitrust and regulation, and welfare). In addition, there are separate chapters on the US constitution, business cycles, the environment, the Civil War, the two world wars of the twentieth century, and the New Deal. Each chapter provides a discussion of the important topics in that area of economic history, the relevant literature on those topics, and the author’s opinion as to important topics for future research.

The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity explores how Americans think of themselves and how science, religion, period of migration, gender, education, politics, intermarriage, and occupational mobility shape both this image and American life. Since the 1965 Immigration Act opened the gates to newer groups, historical writing on immigration and ethnicity has evolved over the years to include numerous immigrant sources and to provide trenchant analyses of American immigration and ethnicity. For the first time, this handbook brings together twenty-nine leading scholars in the field to make sense of all the themes, methodologies, and trends that characterize the debate on American immigration. They examine a wide range of topics, including panethnicity, whiteness, intermarriage, bilingualism, religion, museum ethnic displays, naturalization, regional mobility, immigration legislation and its reception, ethnicity-related crime and gang formation, and the forms of communication with the homeland. The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity focuses on the cutting-edge issues and questions of the field. What are scholars studying, how has the field diverged from earlier works, and where is the field heading? These original essays will set the themes, agendas, and topics for new research.

The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History explores major topics and themes in the Native American past and helps readers to identify major resources for further study and research. The book presents the story of the indigenous peoples who lived—and live—in the territory that became the United States. It describes the major aspects of the historical change that occurred over the past 500 years, with chapters by leading experts, both Native and non-Native, that focus on significant moments of upheaval and change, place-based histories of major centers of indigenous occupation, and overviews of major aspects of Indian community and national life. The Handbook not only substitutes what is “correct” for what is “wrong,” it also offers readers stimulating ideas and guides to the scholarly resources that will enable them to pursue these topics more deeply.

This handbook captures the revival of the study of the American political past that has taken shape over the past few decades. Because this renewal has been the result of an interdisciplinary effort, this volume features the work of historians, political scientists, sociologists, and scholars in such fields as law and communications. Its contributors cover traditional chronological periods along with topics in public policy. Some of traditional topics, such as transportation, tax, and economic policy, have been revitalized through interdisciplinary work. Others, such as the histories of conservatism and religion in politics, reflect political history’s fruitful connections with intellectual, social, and cultural history. Throughout the essays reflect political history’s classic focus on government, institutions, and public life, often now informed by work on gender, region, ideas, race, and culture. Two themes, political participation and statebuilding, recur through these essays. Neither had a straightforward history. The right to vote was not a story of ever-expanding access. If we broaden the category to include all manner of public and even seemingly private actions, the range of political actors and events widens and diversifies considerably. While the rediscovery of “the state” owes much to political sociology and American Political Development, the impact on historical scholarship has been wide and deep. Most essays on policy areas show some of the influence of the careful study of institutions and the tangled process of policy development. Even more, work on the early nineteenth century has reminded historians of an active state: nineteenth-century state and local governments regulated all manner of things, from slave codes to voting rights to alcohol consumption and sale to medical practices, some of which would become federalized and a matter of rights in the late twentieth century. The study of “the state” added new layers of complexity and opened new debates in the histories of sexuality, labor, women, and race. Like political participation, the study of the state promises to spark new debate.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.

Out of the tumult of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s emerged the academic field of Asian American history. Early works focused on the social history of immigrant groups to Hawai’i and the continental United States, with an emphasis on lived experience, resistance, and agency against the backdrop of American racism. More recent scholarship, like the study of United States history as a whole, has taken a transnational and cultural “turn” with empire and war serving key interpretive frames. Propelled by theoretical engagement with other fields and disciplines, intersectional analyses of race, class, gender, and sexuality have come to characterize the historical treatment of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. This project represents a wide-ranging commentary on the state of the field—mapping how the field has emerged over time, its current status, and projections about future directions. The handbook is unique in the existing literature in that no other book has assembled so many specialists to engage such a diversity of topics and issues. While no single work could claim to be comprehensive or exhaustive, this handbook represents the fullest exploration of the field of Asian American history to date.

In 2008 for the first time the majority of the planet's inhabitants lived in cities and towns. Becoming globally urban has been one of mankind's greatest collective achievements over time and raises many questions. How did global city systems evolve and interact in the past? How have historic urban patterns impacted on those of the contemporary world? And what were the key drivers in the roller-coaster of urban change over the millennia — market forces such as trade and industry, rulers and governments, competition and collaboration between cities, or the urban environment and demographic forces? The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History offers a detailed comparative study of urban development from ancient times to the present day. The book explores not only the main trends in the growth of cities and towns across the world — in Asia and the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the Americas — and the different types of cities from great metropolitan centres to suburbs, colonial cities, and market towns, but also many of the essential themes in the making and remaking of the urban world: the role of power, economic development, migration, social inequality, environmental challenge and the urban response, religion and representation, cinema, and urban creativity. Split into three parts covering ancient cities, the medieval and early modern period, and the modern and contemporary era, it begins with an introduction identifying the importance and challenges of research on cities in world history as well as the crucial outlines of urban development since the earliest cities in ancient Mesopotamia to the present.