Publications

Civil Blood examines the practice of vendetta among civic elites in sixteenth-century Italy, illustrating the complex and integral role that vendetta violence played in civic life and state formation. Amanda G. Madden shows how key phenomena of the period—state centralization, growing bureaucracies, institutional reforms, and the process of state formation—were interpenetrated by, and not simply opposed to, ongoing factional violence among civic elites.

In the half century after World War II, California's Santa Clara Valley transformed from a rolling landscape of fields and orchards into the nation's most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. How Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley and came to embody both the triumphs and the failures of a new vision of the American West is the question Jason A. Heppler explores in this book. A revealing look at the significance of nature in social, cultural, and economic conceptions of place, the book is also a case study on the origins of American environmentalism and debates about urban and suburban sustainability.

By the Numbers explores the ways in which early modern English people interacted with and comprehended numbers in their daily lives, from basic counting and arithmetic to more complex mathematical operations. Jessica Marie Otis examines how numeracy, religion, and the quantitative transformation of early modern England were deeply intertwined, showing how the spread of Hindu-Arabic numerals changed the way people understood both the natural and the divine world.

This co-edited volume brings together scholars and practitioners to examine how digital tools and methods can foster meaningful partnerships between academic institutions and the communities they serve.

A white paper from the Arguing with Digital History working group examining how digital historians make, support, and contest arguments using digital tools and methods.

More than ten years of experience with the web has allowed us to understand what the medium does well and what it does poorly, and how we may improve online historical efforts so they capitalize on the web's strengths while avoiding its weaknesses. This essay explores three possible ways to advance digital history: interaction between historians and their subjects, interoperation of dispersed historical archives, and the analysis of online resources using computationalmethods. Thinking about such possibilities raises important, age-old questions about how we should preserve and chronicle the past.