Bonnie G. Smith Book order (chronological)

Drawing together crucial articles and essays, this extensive reference collection is essential for students and scholars seeking a critical understanding of gender and gender history. It compiles scholarly historical texts from the last 50 years across a wide range of sources, offering a key knowledge resource for the field. The four-volume set is arranged chronologically for ease of use, featuring around 100 essays and papers from pioneering works of the 1960s and 1970s to landmark texts of the recent past and present. With a global scope, it provides insights into the formation and development of gender history and its future study. Volume 1 examines gender history from antiquity to 600 CE, focusing on work, politics, religion, and gender roles. Volume 2 traces the arc of gender history in the medieval period, addressing domesticity, women's networks, and social status. Volume 3 explores the early modern world, emphasizing the significance of imperialism in relation to gender. Volume 4 covers the modern world to the present, discussing nation-states, activism, and societal changes. Each volume includes a substantial introduction contextualizing the field's development. This collection serves as a major scholarly reference work for researchers interested in gender history and gender studies more broadly.

The Making of the West is a story of interactions — cross-cultural exchanges that span the globe, as well as the ongoing interactions between societies, cultures, governments, economies, religions, and ideas. To highlight these interactions and help students grasp the vital connections between political, social, and cultural events, The Making of the West: A Concise History presents a comprehensive picture of each historical era within a brief chronological narrative. The book also situates Europe within a truly global context, facilitating students’ understanding of the events that have shaped their own times. A full-color map and art program deepen students’ understanding of the narrative.

In this pathbreaking study of the gendering of the practices of history, Bonnie Smith resurrects the amateur history written by women in the nineteenth century--a type of history condemned as trivial by "scientific" male historians. She demonstrates the degree to which the profession defined itself in opposition to amateurism, femininity, and alternative ways of writing history. The male historians of the archive and the seminar claimed to be searching for "genderless universal truth," which in reality prioritized men's history over women's, white history over nonwhite, and the political history of Western governments over any other. Meanwhile, women amateurs wrote vivid histories of queens and accomplished women, of manners and mores, and of everyday life.Following the profession up to 1940, The Gender of History traces the emergence of a renewed interest in social and cultural history which had been demeaned in the nineteenth century, when professional historians viewed themselves as supermen who could see through the surface of events to invisible meanings and motives. But Smith doesn't let late twentieth-century historians off the hook. She demonstrates how, even today, the practice of history is propelled by fantasies of power in which researchers imagine themselves as heroic rescuers of the inarticulate lower classes. The professionals' legacy is still with us, as Smith's extraordinary work proves.