In a couple weeks I’ll post my favorite year-in-review lists—on early American history at Junto, and Mormon history at Juvenile Instructor—but today I thought I’d highlight some great sales going on with academic presses. Who could down a holiday discount? (A big shout-out to William Black, who listed a lot of the press sales on twitter.)
First and foremost, if you’re reading this blog, I hope you’ve pre-ordered American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833 (Cambridge University Press), of which I’ve heard great things. Use code “BPARK2017” for 20% off. You’ll be hearing more about this soon—I promise.
Okay, on to the holiday deals.
Perhaps the biggest sale is with Oxford University Press, where you can get 50% off most of their books. Since this year is the big anniversary for the Reformation, I’ve enjoyed Peter Marshall’s 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation and Craig Harline’s A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation. If you’re into the Caribbean, check out Terry Rey’s The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World and Katherine Paugh’s The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition. (And if UPenn starts a sale, make sure to check out Sasha Turner’s Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica.)
For early America, I really enjoyed Michael Klarman’s The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, and have already preordered Christopher Grasso’s Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War. If you haven’t read Rachel Hope Cleves’s Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, then this is your year. And if you pre-order Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey’s Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, it will only cost you one child.
The Omohundro Institute’s series on early America is the most consistently mind-blowing series out there, so it’s a good idea to stock up on their books while you can get the 40% off deal. (Just type in “01Holiday” at checkout.) I recommend Douglas Winiarski’s Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experience Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England, Robert Parkinson’s The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution, and Gideon Mailer’s John Witherspoon’s American Revolution, all of which published in the last couple years.
UNC Press also had a series of great books in American religious history in the past year. Get 40% off on Max Mueller’s Race and the Making of the Mormon People, Rachel McBride Lindsey’s A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, and Tisa Wenger’s Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal.
There’s never a bad time to catch up on some classic texts on American slavery. You can’t go wrong with Robin Blackburn’s The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights for 60% off. Over at LSU Press, if you enter “04Gift,” you can get Caleb McDaniel’s The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery for 40% off.
And then there are Mormon history titles. From Oxford, you should already own Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, Joanna Brooks et. al.’s Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings, and Patrick Mason and John Turner’s Out of Obscurity: Mormonism since 1945, but if you don’t own all of these, now is your time to repent. You can also pre-order Jonathan Stapley’s game-changing The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology and the edited collection Foundational Texts of Mormonism, the latter of which you need the discount to make it fit within your budget.
You can get 30% off of titles at the University of Illinois Press, whose Mormon studies list is an embarrassment of riches. For starters, I recommend this one, this one, this one, and this one. A similarly mind-blowing Mormon history list is found at the University of Oklahoma Press. All history buffs should have a complete set of Kingdom in the West books, some of which are now in paberback for the first time.
If you’re interested in Mormon cultural work, there is plenty to enjoy. The great people at BCC Press, is running a crazy sale on all their titles. I could recommend all of them, but of special note is Rachel Hunt Steenblik’s beautiful collection of poems on heavenly mother (for six dollars on Amazon!) and Tracy McKay’s moving memoir The Burning Point: A Memoir of Addiction, Destruction, Love, Parenting, Survival, and Hope (for eight dollars!). And if you’re into Mormon scriptural studies, Kofford Books is doing a 40%-off sale on all their work in that field, including David Bokovoy on the Old Testament and Michael Austin on Job.
Happy shopping!
Don’t forget The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society, 1870-1940, written by some schlub out in Southern Utah. You can get this one for 20% off by using the code YOUNG2016 on the Cambridge University Press website, now through the end of the year.