Americans gathering for Thanksgiving this week may assume they are continuing an unbroken chain of tradition that traces directly back to Massachusetts settlers in 1620. In fact, many of our most cherished Thanksgiving traditions are far more recent,

Laurel Elder, Brian Frederick, and Barbara Burrell are the authors of American Presidential Candidate Spouses: The Public’s Perspective (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). Elder is professor of political science at Hartwick College; Frederick is associate prof...

Today we will be talking to Alicia Malone, the author of The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women (Mango Publishing Group, 2018). Malone is a film critic and host on Turner Classic Films who has compiled a list of 52 films directed by women,

With the passage of the Secure Fence Act in 2006, the U.S. Congress authorized funding for what has become the largest domestic construction project in twenty-first century America. The result? Approximately 700 miles of fencing, barricades,

The expansion of democracy in 19th-century America transformed political campaigning in the country. As Mark R. Cheathem demonstrates in The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018),

Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Addressing this lacuna, Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), expands our understanding of freedom by examining...

Billie Holiday is one of the most iconic jazz performers of all time. Her voice is certainly unmistakable but for many her religious sensibilities may be invisible. In Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018),

How does one show empathy towards someone across racial lines?  In her new book Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Dr. Alisha Gaines analyzes the history of sympathetic whites “becoming” temp...

Following a historic election, we return again to the question of turnout. Who turned out in large numbers to shift power in the House back to the Democrats? What we know about the past is that there are substantial gaps in turnout between different gr...

The antebellum South was on the road to agricultural ruin, and the Civil War put a brick on the gas pedal. In Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford University Press, 2018),

Today we are joined by Howard W. Rosenberg, author of Ty Cobb Unleashed: The Definitive Counter-Biography of the Chastened Racist (Tile Books, 2018). In this deeply researched volume, Rosenberg achieves what many biographers have failed to do: to put C...

Kate Parker Horigan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University, and a co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore. In Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative (Universi...

In the era of #MeToo, Brett Kavanaugh, and Donald Trump, masculinity and the harmful effects that follow certain versions of masculinity have become national conversations. Now, like many other times throughout American history,

Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh‘s Pentecostals in America (Columbia University Press, 2018) offers a critical look at the history, key figures, and ideas that make Pentecostalism unique and challenges the narrative gloss offered by its adherents and church his...

Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past (Rutgers University Press, 2018), edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, is a collection of essays about Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit musical, Hamilton.

People of various political stripes in many countries (particularly those countries where various political stripes are allowed) have been arguing about the Vietnam War for a long time. The participants in these debates were (and are) always quick to a...

It’s been an article of faith among scholars and activists alike that poor Americans are ignored in national politics. But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong, and poor people, at least rhetorically, are in fact as commonly referred to by Preside...

In 2016, despite only mixed support from evangelical leaders, Donald Trump won an enormous share of the white evangelical vote. How did Trump manage to overcome the seeming mix-match between his record on social and moral issues and the longstanding vi...

Jehovah’s Witnesses are one of the most successful “new religious movements” to have emerged from the prophetic ferment within later nineteenth-century Protestantism. Always controversial, often persecuted,

What if guns “are not merely carriers of action, but also actors themselves?” That’s the question that animates and unites Jonathan Obert‘s and Andrew Poe‘s, and Austin Sarat‘s unique collection of essays, The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press,

Don Akenson, who is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen’s University, Ontario, is one of the most eminent scholars of Irish history. Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelic...

The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is a well-known topic in American history and has been the subject of countess books and articles. In Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarc...

The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ‘total institutions’—an effort to forestall labor turno...

When talking about the American South in the second half of the twentieth century, popular discourse tended to fall into one of three camps (on occasion, two might coexist simultaneously): the “Vicious South” which was violent and regressive,

One of the major aspects of the popular film industry are the fans who want to collect material related to their favorite films, actors, and actresses. While this has become generally easier in the age of the Internet,