HEB's Top Ten Titles for January 2016-June 2016

For the first half of 2016, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is once again at the top of the list of most frequently accessed books in the ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) collection, as has been the case for the past several periods. Clifford Geertz's  The Interpretation of Cultures and Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, this time in second and third place respectively, have also tended to consistently appear near the top.

New to this list are three diverse books: Empires in World History by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, a volume detailing how empires predating the modern nation-state relied on differences among populations in order to wield power, and winner of the 2011 World History Association Bentley Book Prize; Silencing the Past by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Ralph Trouillot, an examination of how history is both written and selectively silenced by historians; and National Book Award Finalist Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross, which investigates an incident in which Jewish citizens in a German-occupied Polish village during World War II were murdered not by the occupiers, but by fellow Poles.

1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)
2. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
3. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
4. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2010)
5. Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2003)
6. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge)
7. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
8. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995, 2015)
9. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton University Press, 2001)
10. Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (University Press of Virginia, 2002)