Professor Giorgio Riello's book Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World won the 2014 World History Association Bentley Book Prize.

 
Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968, co-edited by Dr Benjamin Smith and Dr Paul Gillingham, has been published by Duke University Press.

In 1910 Mexicans rebelled against an imperfect dictatorship; after 1940 they ended up with what some called the perfect dictatorship. A single party ruled Mexico for over seventy years, holding elections and talking about revolution while overseeing one of the world's most inequitable economies. The contributors to this groundbreaking collection revise earlier interpretations, arguing that state power was not based exclusively on hegemony, corporatism, or violence. Force was real, but it was also exercised by the ruled. It went hand-in-hand with consent, produced by resource regulation, political pragmatism, local autonomies and a popular veto. The result was a dictablanda: a soft authoritarian regime.

This deliberately heterodox volume brings together social historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists to offer a radical new understanding of the emergence and persistence of the modern Mexican state. It also proposes bold, multidisciplinary approaches to critical problems in contemporary politics. With its blend of contested elections, authoritarianism, and resistance, Mexico foreshadowed the hybrid regimes that have spread across much of the globe. Dictablanda suggests how they may endure.

Please also see the Academic Publications section of the website for details of all academic publications by the staff of the Warwick History Department.

Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance by Dr J E Smyth, has been published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Fred Zinnemann directed some of the most acclaimed and controversial films of the twentieth century, yet he has been a shadowy presence in Hollywood history. In Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance, J. E. Smyth reveals the intellectual passion behind some of the most powerful films ever made about the rise and resistance to fascism and the legacy of the Second World War, from The Seventh Cross and The Search to High Noon, From Here to Eternity, and Julia. Smyth's book is the first to draw upon Zinnemann's extensive papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and brings Fred Zinnemann's vision, voice, and film practice to life. In his engagement with the defining historical struggles of the twentieth century, Zinnemann fought his own battles with the Hollywood studio system, the critics, and a public bent on forgetting. Zinnemann's films explore the role of women and communists in the antifascist resistance, the West's support of Franco after the Spanish Civil War, and the darker side of America's national heritage. Smyth reconstructs a complex and conflicted portrait of Zinnemann's cinema of resistance, examining his sketches, script annotations, editing and production notes, and personal letters. Illustrated with seventy black-and-white images from Smyth's collection, Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance discusses the director's professional and personal relationships with Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Audrey Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, and Gary Cooper; the critical reaction to his revisionist Western, High Noon; his battles over the censorship of From Here to Eternity, The Nun's Story, and Behold a Pale Horse; his unrealized history of the communist Revolution in China, Man's Fate; and the controversial study of political assassination, The Day of the Jackal. In this intense, richly textured narrative, Smyth enters the mind of one of Hollywood's master directors, redefining our knowledge of his artistic vision and practice.

Please also see the Academic Publications section of the website for details of all academic publications by the staff of the Warwick History Department.

 
Dr Claudia Stein has been awarded the European History Quarterly (EHQ) 2013 Prize for the article 'Images and Meaning-Making in a World of Resemblance: The Bavarian-Saxon Kidney Stone Affair of 1580'.

Thursday the 21^st of November Dr Laura Schwartz, Associate Professor in the Warwick History Department, launched her new book Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830-1914 (Manchester University Press) at the Bishopsgate Institute Library in East London. She introduced her book together with her former supervisor, Professor Barbara Taylor (QMU), author of the classic Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Virago, 1983).

Infidel Feminism follows the lives and writings of a group of women activists who developed feminist thought in relation to anti-religious and secular ideas during the Victorian and Edwardian period. Dr Laura Schwartz connects the themes of her book to current political debate on religion and the public sphere. The Bishopsgate Institute Library holds a fine book and archive collection on London history, history of socialism, feminism and freethought.

Aspects of Violence in Renaissance Europe, edited by Dr Jonathan Davies, will be published by Ashgate this week.

It includes an introdution by Jonathan and presents a range of contributions that look at various aspects of violence from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, from student violence and misbehaviour in fifteenth-century Oxford and Paris to the depiction of war wounds in the English civil wars. Extracts can be viewed at www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409433415

According to the Health Survey for England, it is generally ethnic minorities in the UK who experience a lower standard of health than the overall population. Evidence suggests that the poorer economic position of BME groups is the main factor driving ethnic health inequalities and yet, despite WHO and NHS initiatives, successive governments have not managed to tackle this issue.

Following on from a series of IDEA-network events held last year, Roberta Bivins and the Industry and Parliamentary Trust co-ordinated a policy event dinner on the 21st March 2012 in order to review the evidence on ethnic minority health and reflect on what can be done by business and government to address the challenges. The report from this dinner has recently been published (many thanks to Martin Moore, PhD student at the Department of History/Centre for the History of Medicine, for his collaboration) and is now available in print and online from the IPT.

The new book by Dr Dan Branch, 'Kenya : Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2011' (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012) is reviewed by allAfrica.com, a multi-media content service provider, systems technology developer and the largest electronic distributor of African news and information worldwide.