 Pen to Paper with Alexander Mikaberidze In his most recent work, historian and OUP author Alexander Mikaberidze turns his expansive, globally minded lens to one of the most familiar episodes in American history—the Louisiana Purchase—and reveals just how far its story reaches beyond a simple land deal. Best known for his work on the Napoleonic Wars, Mikaberidze brings the same cross-border, deeply archival approach to this project, tracing the Purchase through the tangled currents of empire, revolution, and political ambition that connected Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. Here, he reflects on the enduring pull of Napoleonic history, the serendipity of research, and why the Louisiana Purchase still has urgent meaning today. 1. You’ve spent much of your career immersed in the world of the Napoleonic Wars. What was the moment when this period first caught your imagination—and what keeps pulling you back to it?As a kid, I was very susceptible to the romance of the past. The decisive moment came at the start of middle school when I stumbled across a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. I was, quite simply, swept away. Here was this improbable figure—a provincial outsider from a small island—who seemed to bend an entire continent to his will. It read like a romantic saga, the kind that makes you forget about your own problems (and in the turbulent 1990s, there were many problems in the former Soviet republics!). The Napoleonic legend has a way of doing that, as it doesn’t just inform; it recruits. And I responded. What keeps me returning is the complexity of the past. The closer you get, the more it fractures into competing perspectives, new narratives, and additional layers. It’s an inexhaustible subject, and after over two decades studying the Napoleonic Era, I am only just starting to get a good grasp of it. 2. Your work often crosses borders, languages, and archives. When you’re deep in research, what does a good working day actually look like for you—and where do you most often get pleasantly stuck?A good research day begins, as all respectable obsessions do, with a cup of coffee and a false sense of control. When I’m in the archives, I arrive with a plan—a list of dossiers to order, documents to peruse, and old leads to follow up—and within an hour that plan is usually in ruins. Some obscure document opens onto a new set of questions, which leads to a detour into entirely unfamiliar territory. At home, my working day is really a working night. Once lectures are finished, papers graded, and family attended to, I turn to reading and writing, usually well after ten o’clock. So, I tend to work past midnight, when everything has gone quiet and the world, for a few hours at least, stops making demands. I surround myself with piles of books and documents and slowly read through them all, taking notes and creating outlines. I’ve always had a particular fondness for tracing details, especially those included in footnotes. More often than not, those are the threads that unravel something larger. I recall one such instance when an innocent inquiry into a single footnote sent me chasing leads across European archives and auction houses. The trail eventually led me to the Lilly Library, where I found a rare Georgian illuminated manuscript long thought lost. 3. How different did it feel to write about the Louisiana Purchase compared with Napoleon’s Europe? Were there habits you had to unlearn—or new ones you picked up along the way?In some ways, it felt less like a departure than a continuation under a different name. The story of the Louisiana Purchase is so closely intertwined with subjects I had already spent years studying—European colonial empires, the Haitian Revolution, and, of course, Napoleon—that the transition was more seamless than I initially expected. If anything, the shift was one of emphasis rather than method. My earlier focus of tracing connections across borders—which led to the writing of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History—proved just as essential here. The Purchase only really makes sense when placed within those overlapping imperial and revolutionary contexts; taken in isolation, it risks losing a lot of important details. 4. After years of writing big, interconnected histories, what part of the process do you enjoy most now—and what part still gives you pause every time you start a new book?What I enjoy most is the moment when the material begins to “talk back.” After years of research, there comes a point when the documents stop feeling like scattered fragments and begin to form a kind of chorus. Shaping that into a cohesive story feels less like construction and more like listening closely enough to catch the underlying rhythm. What still gives me pause is the beginning… There’s a particular sense of terror of realizing the depth of the subject that you will have to explore and then staring at the blank page knowing how many lives and complexities you’re bound to compress into prose. It’s a useful anxiety, though—it keeps you honest about the challenge, and more importantly, keeps you striving for a deeper understanding of what actually transpired. 5. If readers take away one big idea from The Louisiana Purchase that reframes how they think about global history, what do you hope it will be?If there’s one idea, I’d hope readers carry away, it’s that the Louisiana Purchase was not a neat bilateral transaction—the familiar “greatest real estate deal,” measured out in a few cents per acre. It was (and in many ways, remains) a hinge in a much larger story of imperial rivalry and global entanglement, stretching across both space and time. It is a story that continues to ask something of us—serving as a striking historical precedent, for instance, when the United States recently revisited the idea of acquiring Greenland. I hope the Louisiana Purchase would compel readers to confront the past with candor and to reckon with the tangled complexities of our national story. I think all historians, whether they admit it or not, are engaged in an ongoing conversation, sometimes amicable, sometimes argumentative. In approaching the Louisiana Purchase as a longue durée history, I found myself naturally echoing Fernand Braudel, with his expansive sense of time and structure. He has a way of reminding you that events are only ever the visible surface of much deeper currents. At the same time, scholars like William Dalrymple, Simon Schama, Gordon Wood, and Alan Taylor bring a narrative vitality that makes you want to match their energy, if not quite their eloquence. This book also owes a great deal to recent Louisiana Purchase studies, too many to mention all, but I will highlight a few: to Robert Lee on long-term consequences; to Mark Edward Hay and Larry Neal, whose economic histories of the Purchase have helped shape my own thinking; and to Peter J. Kastor, whose scholarship on the Purchase’s impact on the American identity has influenced many of my conclusions. Featured image by Digital Content Writers India via Unsplash OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 VSI 800: A history in eleven titles Short. Sharp. Inspiring. These are the words that have guided the Very Short Introduction series for over thirty years. With over ten million copies sold worldwide, it’s become a universally accessible way to gain new knowledge (ChatGPT, eat your heart out). To celebrate the publication of our 800thVery Short Introduction, we’ve put together a timeline featuring our series milestones, from our first Introduction co-authored by famed classicist Mary Beard, all the way to our upcoming introduction to rock ‘n’ roll. Check out our interactive timeline below! Featured image: Oxford University Press. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Unbuttoned: an interactive history of the suit To the modern eye, this man in his dark suit probably looks perfectly normal—perhaps even boring. But what if this ubiquitous uniform is actually one of the most powerful and heavily engineered political institutions in Western history? Before the nineteenth century, elite men across the Western world dressed in vibrant silks, rich velvets, and sparkling embroidery, using fashion to display their social rank just as much as women did. However, in the wake of the American Revolution, a massive cultural shift occurred—the “Sartorial Revolution.” Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, men renounced decorative fashion in favor of plain, dark, woolen suits. The Founding Fathers used clothing to enact a new political reality. Men like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson purposefully adopted sober, unadorned suits to visually reject aristocratic luxury and the tyranny of European monarchies. Their new uniform was designed to reflect republican ideals of democracy, equality, and industry. But this equality was an illusion. The suit functioned as a visual boundary that granted civic authority and political power exclusively to white men, while using the language of fashion to cast women, Indigenous men, and Black men as feminine, primitive, or uncivilized, and therefore unfit for political power. Click on the different elements of the suit below to uncover the hidden histories woven into its fabric. From the exploitation of land and labor required to produce its dark dyes and crisp white linens, to the mathematical tailoring that secretly sculpted an idealized male body, you will see how these seemingly mundane garments served as tools of social control. The history of the suit is the history of power, democracy, and the fashioning of modern men. Perhaps the most striking thing about the modern suit is how boring it seems. That is exactly its power. By the mid-19th century, the suit became so plain, uniform, and ubiquitous that it practically turned invisible. It functioned as a “civic uniform” that united white men in a visual brotherhood of democratic equality. But this uniformity was exclusive. By defining serious, rational masculinity through the dark suit, society simultaneously codified anyone who didn’t wear it—women, Indigenous men, and Black men—as frivolous, savage, or unfit for political power. The suit didn’t just reflect social hierarchies; it actively enforced them. Featured image: Thomas Sully, Joseph Dugan, 1810 (detail). National Gallery of Art, Washington. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Pen to Paper with Peter Mancall Writing a volume for the Oxford History of the United States is an exercise in both synthesis and ambition. The series has long set the standard for American historical writing, and to join it is to enter a multigenerational conversation about how the story of the nation’s past should be told. In the interview that follows, Peter Mancall reflects on writing for that tradition, the historians, and reading habits that have inspired and shaped his thinking. 1. You’ve spent decades studying early American history. What first drew you to this period, and what continues to hold your curiosity after all these years?I became an early American historian during graduate school, lured into the field at first by Bernard Bailyn, who became my advisor. I had not studied this period as an undergraduate, but it sparked my interest almost immediately when I got to my PhD program. I found an arena to investigate the issues that drove me to become a historian—the chance to explore the lives of lesser-known people whose actions shaped North America. 2. Your book opens the Oxford History of the United States—a series known for reshaping historical understanding. What does it mean to you to set this foundation for the entire narrative arc of early American history?The OHUS has a long and well-deserved reputation as a source of sparkling narratives about the American past. As a historian who had moved towards writing narrative, which I have previously done in three books that focused on what an individual’s life could tell us about a crucial topic, I could not resist the chance to write a narrative history that stretched across a continent—and beyond. Having now finished this book, I am in awe of those who wrote these earlier volumes. Each is a work of great scholarship, but just as important, compelling style. The art of history, as others have said more elegantly than I can, lies in the telling of the story as much as the contents. It is daunting to think that my book will be the first in a chronological sequence that tells a history of the nation over several thousand pages. But I hope that my emphasis on contingency and agency, the concepts that drive my approach to writing about the past, set the stage for the many unexpected and unpredictable turns told in the luminous books that follow mine. 3. The OHUS series aims to integrate narrative storytelling with rigorous scholarship. This obviously requires both a scholar’s discipline and a storyteller’s instinct. How has your approach to writing evolved over the course of your career?I began to write narrative about 25 years ago for a book about the younger Richard Hakluyt, who, among other things, was an avid promoter of the English colonization of North America. While writing that book, which appeared in 2007, I became increasingly interested in questions central to writing narrative, especially trying to develop characters and scenes to move the story forward. That led me to two tragic figures—the explorer Henry Hudson, not during the years of his glory but instead on his last voyage when he could not escape a world he had created; and Thomas Morton, a lawyer exiled three times from early New England. In these works, I hope I have shown readers how individuals wrestle with the hands they must play, sometimes with cards they have dealt to themselves. 4. Many readers associate early American history with the English colonies, but your work ranges far beyond that. Which non-English actors—Indigenous, African, or European—do you think readers will be most surprised to encounter?Since historians of early America have long been integrating non-English actors into our stories about the colonial era, I am not sure that readers will necessarily be surprised to find Indigenous, African, and European figures jostling in the pages of my book. They may be more surprised by my insistence that we need to tell the stories of everyone who lived in this era, which means a great deal of attention in this volume to Indigenous peoples, who outnumbered everyone else across the centuries I cover in the book. The smaller stories I tell reveal depth and complexity and, I hope, bring to life a narrative that needs to trace the arc of the story from the so-called 30,000-foot perspective. I hope I have succeeded in telling that large history through the accumulation of many intimate moments. 
5. If readers take away one big idea from Contested Continent that reframes how they think about American history, what do you hope it will be—and why is that idea particularly relevant now?I think that those who have looked at early American history have been shaped by three overarching explanations for what happened. The first emerged at the time: Europeans took control over the Americas because this was what the Christian God dictated. The second came later and became associated with scholars like Frederick Jackson Turner: the history of North America, and especially that of the United States, witnessed a clash of civilizations and cultures, with Europeans and Euro-Americans emerging on top because of the advantages they allegedly possessed. The third, the dominant narrative in recent years, emphasizes that European conquest was largely the result of the spread of infectious diseases, part of what the historian Alfred Crosby labeled “the Columbian Exchange.” Each of these narratives presumed European success in the Americas. But as I hope I reveal in Contested Continent, there was no certainty that Europeans would prevail in the contest for the Western Hemisphere. I end my book with a series of events from 1675 to 1680 to suggest that tumult, not stability, defined the American experience, and that it had for centuries. 6. Are there historians, past or present, whose work you feel especially in conversation with in Contested Continent?I hope that my book will be looked at with other wonderful, long-form versions of early American history. I hope that my book is read alongside Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years, a brilliant narrative focused on the experience of people in eastern North America from the time of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the era of rebellion in the 1670s. My geographic and chronological framing is different from Bailyn’s. For example, my story starts much earlier than his. But when he wrote that book near the end of his storied career, I saw it as reflecting his uncertainty about the fate of our society. My book, too, reflects ambivalence about the future and tries to explain the causes for what some would see as our current predicament, namely the dangers that humans pose to our planet and too frequently to each other. 7. What kinds of books—historical or otherwise—do you find yourself returning to for inspiration, whether for craft, perspective, or pleasure?I find inspiration in what many people refer to as creative non-fiction, especially stories focused on individuals or specific moments. The writers who embody this approach for me are people like Jonathan Harr, especially in A Civil Action, and Patrick Radden Keefe in Empire of Pain. Harr once gave me great advice about how to start a book, which I took to heart and have shared with many others over the years. I also turn to great works of fiction that get at issues about human motivation and character. While writing Contested Continent, I looked again at Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—not for their plots but instead for how each, in relatively short works, was able to summon complex portraits of characters in vividly drawn scenes. Even on a large canvas, the small scenes matter. Featured image by Debby Hudson via Unsplash OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Pen to paper with Jonathan Parshall Jon Parshall has spent his career asking big questions about how wars are remembered, argued over, and ultimately understood. Best known for his meticulous work on the Pacific front of World War II, Parshall has long been drawn to the structural questions of how wars are fought and won. His upcoming, highly illustrated book marks the most ambitious project of his career so far, distilling years of research into a single, sweeping year. In the conversation that follows, Parshall reflects on the historians who shaped him, the challenges of thinking on a global scale, and what surprised him most along the way. 1. You’ve spent decades studying World War II. What first drew you to this period, and what continues to hold your curiosity after all these years?I’ve always been interested in ships, and building a kit of a Japanese heavy cruiser as a fifth-grader was sort of the entry point to World War II for me. What remains endlessly fascinating about it is that our understanding is constantly changing. I’m very much of the belief that history is a journey; it’s always dynamic, always evolving. That’s what keeps it fresh and engaging. 2. You’ve written extensively about the Pacific War, including the award-winning Shattered Sword. What drew you to 1942 as a standalone subject, and why do you see it as the pivotal year that defined the global trajectory of World War II?I came out of Shattered Sword mulling the nature of “turning points” and “decisive battles” within the war and wanting to educate myself regarding the larger structure of 1942. The year begins with a global Allied dumpster fire, yet ends with the Allies on the offensive basically everywhere. How did that happen? What was going on “under the hood,” so to speak? It turns out: a LOT. There’s no simple answer. That’s what the book addresses. 3. 1942 is a year in which the balance of power shifted across multiple theaters—Pacific, Eastern Front, North Africa, and the Atlantic. Which theater or campaign did you find most challenging to narrate in a way that made sense as part of a single worldwide story?Without question, the Eastern Front. There are two fundamental problems, the first being a lack of sympathetic characters, as we watch the minions of one horrid despot battling the minions of another horrid despot. Moreover, the enormity of the theater often means reaching for unsatisfying narrative generalities—like one army “slicing” through another army. It’s difficult to construct a story that feels personal or relatable. The solution lies in providing enough micro-views of the situation on the ground to make conveying the larger events comprehensible. 4. 1942 includes hundreds of your own maps and timelines—a rare level of visual narrative in military history. Why was it important for you to build the story of the war year with this kind of granular, visual clarity?I’ve always loved maps. I’m a visual learner. Shaded-relief maps help to convey, even if only subliminally, things like, “Oh, yeah, the Japanese couldn’t advance this way, now could they, because there are some hella big hills over here!” Likewise, the monthly timelines help readers understand not only chronology but also the connection points between different theaters. The war was vast—it was happening everywhere all at once. Seeing events laid out temporally helps create a framework for understanding their relationships.
 5. What was your motivation for making such a comprehensive account? At over 1,200 pages, do you not have concerns about inflicting muscle strain on your readers?The fundamental problem is one of creating an engaging narrative. If you do this story at too high a level, it becomes abstract, generalized, and boring. I wanted to dedicate an appropriate level of detail to the battles. But doing that for every major battle worldwide during the year inexorably leads to more page count than I had originally hoped for! If you’re going to do that to a reader, you have to give them lively dialog, lots of maps and pictures, bits of humor (I hope!), and other Easter eggs. There’s a pertinent quote from Pink Floyd in the book, another from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and a third from J. R. R. Tolkien. Can you find them? 6. Are there historians, past or present, whose work you feel especially in conversation with in 1942?The two that have most influenced my thinking this year are Richard Overy and my friend Richard Frank. Overy and I have similar views regarding the necessity of describing the war in its totality in order to understand its outcome. One theater or battle won’t do. You must look at the whole enchilada. Rich and I share a common understanding, forged over many years and beers, regarding the importance of the Asia-Pacific theater to the overall trajectory of the war, particularly early on when the USSR was on the ropes. 7. If readers take away one big reframing of how to think about World War II from 1942, what do you hope it will be?Allied victory was neither inevitable nor obvious at the beginning of the year. Likewise, there was no single turning point, but rather dozens of inflection points that ultimately reshaped the war’s trajectory from one of Allied ruin to Allied triumph. 8. What kinds of books—historical or otherwise—do you find yourself returning to for inspiration, whether for craft, perspective, or sheer pleasure?Great question! I still re-read The Lord of the Rings almost yearly. I love a good fantasy novel. Other than that, though, it’ll probably be something World War II-related—the “Need-to-Read” pile never seems to get smaller! Featured image by Romain B via Unsplash OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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