Best Historical Materials: 2025

African Narratives of Slavery & Abolition: Testimonies from the 19^th – century, Richard Anderson (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). – 240 pp. – $29.95 – ISBN‎ 9781350459649.

To assemble this collection of 32 narratives of slavery and the slave trade from 1820 to 1880, Richard Anderson mined the collections of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the Methodist Missionary Society (MMS), and British Protestant missions in Africa. Two-thirds of the accounts come from West Africa and the Atlantic, but African Narratives also includes testimonies from the Indian Ocean slave trade and from enslaved people who never left the African continent. Liberated Africans educated in missionary schools authored 26 of the accounts; three of the narrators were women.

Anderson carefully provides verbatim transcriptions of primary sources, without editing for spelling and grammar. If words are unclear, Anderson supplies explanations. The testimonies show how individual Africans came to be enslaved, trade routes, how they felt about being separated from their families, and how they coped in new environments.  Narratives reveal factors that determined whether Africans would be held in slavery in Africa or sold into the trans-oceanic trade.

Part One, “West Africa,” presents narratives from Sierra Leone and The Gambia. Part Two, “Africa,” includes testimonies from The Gambia and the Bight of Benin. Part Three, “East Africa,” focuses on Liberated Africans who had been captives on ships crossing the Indian Ocean to reach Bombay. The Introduction provides the historical background of the African slave trade and spotlights prominent narrators. Narrative chapters identify the subject and author of the testimony, providing biographical and bibliographical information. Anderson introduces each testimony, then presents the transcriptions of the texts. 

African Narratives builds upon Philip Curtin’s Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Waveland Press, 1997); Martin Klein’s Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Sandra E. Greene’s West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2011); and Alice Bellagamba’s African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Researchers and students of the history of slavery and the African diaspora will all find African Narratives valuable.

— Nancy C. Dennis, Salem State University 

American Revolutions in the Digital Age, edited by Nora Slonimsky, Mark Boonshoft, and Ben Wright (Cornell University Press, 2025). – 318 pp. – $29.95 – ISBN 9781501771842.

A defining feature of Digital Humanities is the lack of an agreed upon definition for the field, which is why visitors to whatisdigitalhumanities.com are treated to one of 817 different answers each time the page loads.  This volume, edited by Slonimsky, Boonshoft, and Wright, does not try to put forward a definition; however, it does an excellent job of demonstrating the value of digital history methodology.  Containing fifteen studies in four thematic sections, the book illustrates how digital humanities tools and methodologies can be used to examine the Revolutionary period in new, nuanced, and interesting ways. The interdisciplinary approach of the work is also a significant strength, with 22 contributors who draw upon their expertise as museum curators, librarians, lawyers, public historians, computer engineers, archivists, and professors of both History and Computer Science.

The book, through its 15 chapters, touches upon studies in nearly every major field of digital history, including: text mining, database creation, data visualization, GIS mapping, virtual reality and 3-D modeling, language analysis, digitization practices, and copyright/licensing of digital materials. As stand-alone studies, each chapter provides new and important insights into the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States; taken as a collective whole, the work illustrates the value of utilizing digital research tools and methodologies as a means of improving scholarship on the Revolutionary period.  

The broad scope of topics and methodologies included in this book demonstrates the reason there are over 800 definitions listed on whatisdigitalhumanities.com, and the contributors show how different digital tools can be used to undertake new and novel research in an already well-studied field.  The work is most obviously of interest to historians of the Revolutionary period; however, it is equally important to scholars who want to explore the utility and possibilities of digital tools. While the work does not move us closer toward a singular definition of digital humanities or digital history, it does showcase examples of how these methodologies can be used successfully.

— Rick Mikulski, College of William & Mary

Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning, edited by Char Miller (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2024). — 272 pp. — $34.95 — ISBN: 9781962645201. 

When Spanish expeditions reached California in the sixteenth century, their diaries already registered a landscape thick with smoke, the product of generations of Indigenous burning. Burn Scars, environmental historian Char Miller’s documentary history of wildfire policy in the United States, opens with that observation and follows the long, contentious effort to suppress the fires those diarists described, down to the present-day return of the practices they misunderstood. 

The volume's four parts trace this arc chronologically, from colonial sources documenting how Spanish, Mexican, and American authorities moved to outlaw Indigenous burning across the nineteenth century to early twentieth-century and modern arguments to re-adopt Indigenous practices of cultural burning.  

Miller frames this material with an introductory essay and bookends the documentary record with contributions from Indigenous voices—Michael Connolly Miskwish opens the volume and Dawn Blake closes it—making explicit that the fire-suppression paradigm was never merely a technical position. The selected documents repeatedly expose the racist and colonial assumptions underlying this paradigm, even as they trace the slow accumulation of evidence, within and outside the Forest Service, that fire was essential to the very ecosystems suppression claimed to protect. 

Burn Scars is recommended for academic and public libraries supporting research in environmental history, the American West, Indigenous studies, and natural resource policy, and will reward readers seeking historical context for current debates over megafires and wildfire management. 

— Kristen C. Howard, McGill University 

Defining Documents in American History: Censorship, edited by Steven L. Danver (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2025). 2 vols. – 791 pp. – $295.00 – ISBN: 9798891791565.

No matter the time, place, or area, the issue of censorship is ever present in political life. Even within the American context, where free speech and unencumbered expression are valued, censorship is still a pressing problem. In order to assist scholars in understanding how censorship has operated in America, this installment of Defining Documents in American History offers an excellent collection of primary sources from the seventeenth century through today.

Spread across two volumes, the documents are grouped and presented chronologically. The editor splits the documents into seven sections: the colonial era and early United States, the Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras, the era of Industrialization and Reform, the interwar period and World War II, the Cold War, the Civil Rights, Vietnam War, and Culture War eras, and the digital age of 2000 to 2025. Each document is preceded by brief summary and contextual statements and followed by analyses, definitions of keywords, and recommendations on additional reading.

In sum, Defining Documents in American History: Censorship is an outstanding option for public, school, and academic libraries which support historical and political learning. Its design makes it easy to use, and the clarity and uniformity among the documents and their secondary commentary makes it a great resource for undergraduates, high school students, teachers, and independent researchers.

— Nick D’Andrea, Pepperdine University 

Defining Documents in American History: The Underground Railroad, edited by Michael Shally-Jensen (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2025). 2 vols. — 932 pp. — $295. ISBN: 9798891791480. 

This two-volume entry in Salem Press’s long-running Defining Documents series opens not with statute or speech but with narrative voice: its first section gathers slave narratives and freedom songs—from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to “Follow the Drinking Gourd”—establishing the human stakes before the documentary record proper even begins. Editor Michael Shally-Jensen builds the remaining five sections chronologically, moving from the legal “Beginnings” of slavery and abolition in British North America, through the 1800s’ escalating contest between fugitive-slave law and abolitionist resistance, to Reconstruction and Jim Crow. The volume’s final sections, “The Underground Railroad Above Ground” and “Contemporary Parallels,” extend the network’s legacy into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, pairing the dedication of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and the 2021 Juneteenth National Independence Day Act with documents on Black Lives Matter, the Ferguson unrest, and contemporary human trafficking legislation. This is a deliberate argument that the Underground Railroad’s afterlife runs through Reconstruction-era violence and into the present.  

Sources are wide-ranging and well chosen: court decisions (Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Dred Scott, Plessy), legislative acts (the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, the Reconstruction-era Civil Rights Acts), newspaper editorials, and firsthand accounts sit alongside maps, fugitive-slave advertisements, and ephemera such as the 2024 USPS Underground Railroad postage-stamp series.  

As with other titles in this series, each document is paired with a critical essay that models close reading for student researchers and closes with a bibliography for further reading. An appendix profiling allies and conductors of the railroad, a chronological list of documents, web resources, a general bibliography, and an index round out the set. 

This volume is recommended for high school, public, and academic libraries seeking an accessible, well-annotated entry point into primary sources on the Underground Railroad and its long afterlife in American social movements. 

— Kristen C. Howard, McGill University 

Documenting Warfare: Records of the Hundred Years War, Edited and Translated in Honour of Anne Curry, edited and translated by Rémy Ambühl and Andy King (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2024). – 428 pp. – $190.00 – ISBN 9781837650248.

Documenting Warfare is a collaborative volume involving 23 English and French academics who study the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). It is a festschrift intended to honor the life and work of Anne Curry, emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Southampton, and Officer of Arms. Perhaps because the book is intended as a celebration, the tone of the volume conveys excitement and warm appreciation for the person and topic that brought these scholars together as friends and colleagues. 

The volume pays tribute to two sides of Anne Curry’s research interests: her emphasis on editing and translating archival documents, and her focus on the Hundred Years War – indeed, a very rich focus which includes the organization and conduct of war, the experiences of men and women caught up in war, and the culture of war and warfare. The eighteen main chapters are substantial essays that each introduce a specific archival source. These sources are included at the end of each essay, fully transcribed in their original languages and then translated into English. Thus, in this volume, readers may examine documents that have never been published before and at the same time read essays by experts in the field that contextualize and interpret them. Topics include inheritance rights, the equipment of warfare (including arms and horses), the theme of chivalry, rape and other criminal acts committed in times of war, recruitment and logistics, and strategic alliances. The volume concludes with two essays on Anne Curry herself and a substantial bibliography of her work from 1979 to 2024. 

Documenting Warfare demonstrates how interesting and worthwhile it is to bring together the comparative perspectives of historians from both sides of the English Chanel.  It is an excellent addition to Boydell’s “Warfare in History” series and of great interest to scholars and students alike. 

— Anne Good, University of Minnesota

European Racism: A History in Documents, edited by Lisa M. Todd and Gary K. Waite (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2024). – 352 pp. – $27.75 – ISBN 978155481485. 

Concluding the introduction to this timely sourcebook, the editors write, “We see this textbook as part of a multi-faceted and crucial project to mitigate the ongoing effects of systemic racism and respectfully acknowledge the prior and ongoing work of anti-racist activists who work to identify the many causes of bigotry and hatred, and to combat the everyday effects of racialized discrimination” (p. 8). The items included in this volume are wide-ranging and thought-provoking, bringing together discourse on racism from the early Middle Ages through the twenty-first century. 

The 134 primary sources are divided into six sections focused on racism against particular groups: Jewish, Muslim, Black, Asian, Romani, and Indigenous peoples. Each section includes about 20 documents spanning at least 800 years of history. Following the table of contents based on categories of race, the authors also provide a chronological table of contents that remixes the documents by century. This feature helps readers make connections among various strands of thought; it also makes this volume easy to use for instructors preparing classes on particular eras of history. A detailed timeline, suggestions for how to read and interpret primary sources, specific “Questions to Consider” (pp. 21-24), and highlighted marginal definitions of key terms further underline the value of this volume for educational settings.

The authors note that this is not a comprehensive collection, rather they intend “to provide some snapshots or moments that illustrate white European attitudes toward other peoples in particular times and places” (p. 7). The primary sources in this volume are both images and written documents, including religious tracts, government documents, songs, newspapers, legal texts, travel narratives, and excerpts from creative works. Each section begins with an introductory essay, and each item is briefly introduced as well, often with suggestions for connections with other documents, preparing the way for difficult and meaningful discussions.

European Racism: A History in Documents is an important addition to the resources available to those studying and teaching this crucial historical topic that has such profound consequences in our world today. 

— Anne Good, University of Minnesota

Medieval Eastern Europe (500-1300): A Reader, edited by Florin Curta (Toronto: University Toronto Press, 2024). – 361 pp. – $49.95 – ISBN 9781487544904.

In Medieval Eastern Europe (500-1300): A Reader, historian Florin Curta offers a thoughtful selection of 118 primary sources in English translation. This is the first volume in the “Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures” series, published by the University of Toronto Press, that specifically focuses on Eastern Europe, and as such, it fills a gap in available primary source resources for students and researchers.  

The primary sources are organized both chronologically (from late antiquity to the Mongol conquests) and thematically (including, for example, sections on the Crusades, or Economy and Society). Curta’s brief introductions to each primary source document provide helpful context.  Each source is followed by a set of questions that invites critical and comparative engagement with the texts. What is most remarkable about this primary source anthology is its diversity of voices, including Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Byzantine, Latin, Slavic, Magyar, Bulgar, and Mongol authors. 

This sourcebook exposes students of medieval European history to a complex geography where people from very different linguistic and cultural traditions encountered one another.  The collection serves both as a self-contained introduction to the region during the Middle Ages and as a gateway to further independent research.  This valuable anthology concludes with a select bibliography of scholarly resources for further reading.

— Peggy Burge, University of Puget Sound

A New Documentary History of Hong Kong, 1945-1997, edited by Florence Mok and Fung Chi Keung Charles (Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2025). – 428pp. – $40.00 – ISBN: 978988-8876822.

Set in a turbulent time in Hong Kong history, A New Documentary History of Hong Kong, 1945-1997 is a useful contribution to recent debates in the study of Hong Kong society and British colonialism. Starting after the occupation of Japan and moving through the final days of British rule, the Hong Kong studied in this book was a Hong Kong in the midst of great change. Similar to the time and place being studied, recent historical and social research into Hong Kong is in flux as new sources become available and new questions are posed. What is special about this book is not only its selected primary sources, but also the analysis provided by the contributing authors. As historian John M. Carroll writes in the first forward, “This book is far more than a collection of historical documents; it is a new history…”

The contents of the book are divided thematically across 14 chapters, covering themes such as economy and trade, political culture, migration, education, and the arts. Each chapter is written by a different scholar and begins with an introduction of the broader context, followed by presentations of select historical documents. Every document presented, many newly available since the production of earlier sourcebooks, is accompanied by additional commentary from the author. Each chapter also concludes with a list of suggested reading.

Overall, this book is nearly unique in the realm of documentary histories, as few books on this topic are available, and this title publishes sources previously unavailable in similar formats. Additionally, the secondary commentaries from the authors offer students of history opportunities to learn about the acts of interpretation and investigation so common to the field.  For academic libraries serving scholars and students learning about and researching Hong Kong, China, or British colonialism, this title is highly recommended.

— Nick D’Andrea, Pepperdine University

Scottish Witchcraft Trials, edited by Julian Goodare and Liv Helene Willumsen for the Scottish History Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY, USA: Boydell Press, 2025). – 722 pp. – $90.00 – ISBN 9780906245507.  

The Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563, passed by the Scottish Parliament during the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, unleashed a century and half of witchcraft prosecutions. Both the scope and the intensity of the witch-hunting were remarkable. Thousands of people in Scotland were accused and then convicted of practicing witchcraft, eighty-five percent of them women. Religious authorities at the level of the local kirk or presbytery investigated the accusations and then passed evidence to the civil authorities for trial. Convicts were executed, often on the same day as the trial ended. 

Against this grim backdrop, historians Julian Goodare and Liv Helen Willumsen have carefully selected 38 representative primary sources, covering witchcraft trials from 1538 through 1725. Nearly all of these documents are published here for the first time.  Each document has been carefully transcribed, provided with a scholarly introduction, and annotated.  Readers encounter, for example, Isobel Watson of Perthshire who in 1590 gave her interrogators detailed accounts of her visits to fairy land; and Elizabeth Bathgate of Eyemouth, whose legal defenders sharply questioned the evidence and secured her a verdict of not guilty.  Another document is an invoice for the cost of an execution, including the purchase of firewood.  There is also an account of a “witch-pricker,” John Kincaid, who in 1662 testified about his methods for determining if the accused had the Devil’s mark.

This new collection represents a substantial contribution to a growing body of scholarly editions of primary sources related to witch-hunting and witchcraft trials in the early modern period.  For students of this complex phenomenon as it manifested specifically in Scotland, these materials open up additional research pathways and invite new questions.

— Peggy Burge, University of Puget Sound

Tongues of Fire: Black Preaching in the Face of Lynching, edited by Aaron Treadwell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2025). – 260 pp. – $45.00 – ISBN 9780807184905.

In Tongues of Fire, Aaron Treadwell closes a critical gap in the history of Blacks and lynching by highlighting the role historical sermons from African Methodist Episcopal (AME) ministers and laypeople played in combatting lynching. He argues that Black sermons became tools of resistance theology during the post-Reconstruction Black Nadir era of 1877 to 1919. The development of African American theology during this period laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement of the 1930s to the 1970s. 

Tongues of Fire presents 42 sermons written during three theoretical periods: “Radical Theological Protectionism,” “Pious Theological Protectionism,” and “Constitutional Theological Protectionism.” “Radical Theological Protectionism” advocated Black Americans’ use of violence to gain salvation and liberation. “Pious Theological Protectionism” emerged in response to whites’ targeting of radical Black churches. To protect against violent whites, Pious preachers advocated inner reflection and adopting some of the theology of white Christians. In the era of “Constitutional Theological Protectionism,” preachers viewed the Black church as a vehicle for advancing the political status of Blacks. 

Tongues of Fire builds on Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s Revolt Against Chivalry (1974) which exposed white antilynching activists’ inadequate responses to lynching and rape. Treadwell applauds Robert Zangrando’s writings on the NAACP’s antilynching crusade, which underscored the social impacts of Blacks fighting against lynching. Tongues of Fire also expands upon Timothy Fulop’s and Albert Miller’s scholarship about Blacks’ distrust of white theology and the emergence of Black theology in post-Reconstruction.

Tongues of Fire arranges the sermons chronologically under each type of theological protectionism. Entries include the sermon’s citation, historical context, and sermonic response. Tongues of Fire will be very useful to academic and non-academic readers interested in slavery, lynching, Black history, Black theology, and Black rights.

— Nancy C. Dennis, Salem State University

Voices of Antebellum America: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life, edited by John A. Wagner (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). – 288 pp. – $130.00 – ISBN 9798765114339. 

The Antebellum Period marks an age of rapid growth, development, and fundamental change in American history. The population tripled, the size doubled, and many modern features of American society emerged during this period. Despite the importance of this age, many college students experience difficulty while trying to understand Antebellum America. A deceptively “recent” era in historical terms, students often instinctively apply their twenty-first century sensibilities, norms, and expectations to this fundamentally alien time period. Students are further disadvantaged by rushed high school curricula that highlight a few key figures and events in a narrative that seemingly leads inevitably to the Civil War; the very term Antebellum leaves students with an impression that the entire period is merely setting the stage for events later in the century. This work by Wagner is an important effort to introduce students to the Antebellum Period through contextualized historical documents, which offer nuanced windows into life in nineteenth-century America.

Organized into ten thematic sections, this work includes over 70 documents by leading figures of the period, including John Brown, Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, Frederick Douglass, Sarah Grimké, and others.  The work includes a wide range of document types, such as debates, editorials, essays, letters, sermons, and treaties, providing readers with a balanced variety of sources. Importantly, Wagner provides contextual information, guiding questions, suggested readings, and an “ask yourself” section for each document. These are the most significant contributions of the text, as these additions assist students in evaluating and understanding the material in a meaningful way.

This work will be most effective as a companion to a lecture course, or as a document reader paired with traditional narrative histories like Howe’s What Hath God Wrought and Taylor’s American Republics. It is not meant to serve as a sourcebook to support in-depth research projects. The work is, however, an effective pathfinder and introduction to the Antebellum Period, providing foundational knowledge and an appreciation of the period upon which students can build. The work is remarkably successful in filling this important need, and it is an excellent way to introduce students to the Antebellum period.

 — Rick Mikulski, College of William & Mary