Europe's imperial projects were often predicated on a series of legal and scientific distinctions that were frequently challenged by the reality of social and sexual interactions between the colonized and the colonizers. When Emmanuelle Saada discovered a 1928 decree defining the status of persons of mixed parentage born in French Indochina - the metis - she found not only a remarkable artifact of colonial rule, but a legal bombshell that introduced race into French law for the first time. The decree was the culmination of a decades-long effort to resolve the "metis question": the educational, social, and civil issues surrounding the mixed population. Operating at the intersection of history, anthropology, and law, "Empire's Children" reveals the unacknowledged but central role of race in the definition of French nationality. Through extensive archival work in both France and Vietnam, and a close reading of primary and secondary material from the Pacific islands and sub-Saharan and North Africa, Saada has created in "Empire's Children" an original and compelling perspective on colonialism, law, race, and culture from the end of the nineteenth century until decolonization.

In The Beggar and the Professor, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie makes the Platter family the nexus of his fascinating exposition of the 16th century. In and of themselves, the Platter men were intriguing fellows; the fact that they were also prolific writers, filling diaries, memoirs, and correspondence with the details of their lives, makes them a godsend to historians. Following the Platters' paper trail, Le Roy Ladurie fashions an engaging portrait of a remarkable family. Thomas Platter Sr., for example, started life as an unlettered shepherd, spent his childhood roaming central Europe in a gang of thieves and panhandlers, and managed to pick up both literacy and a trade in his travels. By turns a printer, landowner, healer, and teacher, Platter was the embodiment of a Renaissance man. His eldest son, Felix, became a well-respected doctor, as did his youngest surviving boy, Thomas Jr.
Using the private lives of the Platters, Le Roy Ladurie illuminates the dangerous times in which they lived. Martin Luther precipitated a violent religious reformation; brigands ran wild through the countryside, and medical students crept into graveyards by night to dig up newly buried bodies for dissection. On this wild ride into history, the author's insightful observations guide the reader unerringly through the customs, practices, and upheavals of the times.