Firesign Theatre co-founder Phil Proctor shares stories from his life and career in his new memoir, Where’s My Fortune Cookie? (Blurb, 2017) co-written with Brad Shreiber. In Where’s My Fortune Cookie? Proctor shares the history of his work with Firesi...

Northern California’s giant redwoods are among the state’s most recognizable natural wonders. These massive trees were also under threat of clear-cut logging for much of the twentieth century, writes Darren Frederick Speece in Defending Giants: The Red...

Although commonly regarded as one of the three or four greatest Presidents and certainly the greatest of the 20th century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt has not had as much attention devoted to his life, as many of the Presidents who came after him.

The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 (Simon & Schuster, 2018), by Marc Ambinder, is a history of US-Soviet Relations under Ronald Reagan and an exploration of nuclear command and control operations.

In the early 20th century, thousands of Haitian men, women and children traveled to Cuba in search of work and wages. In Matthew Casey’s, Empire’s Guestworkers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba During the Age of US Occupation (Cambridge University Press,

In The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Cary Cordova combines urban, political, and art history to examine how the Mission District, a longtime bohemian enclave in San Francisco,

With so much political effort placed into forcing a wall between the US and Mexico, Andrew Selee’s new book shows how the ties that bind the two countries together are much stronger. Selee has been on the podcast before with his book,

Most people’s image of the American frontier does not conjure anything relating to people of African descent. But, as  Anna-Lisa Cox’s points out in her new book The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Eq...

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet,

In cities ravaged by years of bloodshed and warfare, how did black populations, many formerly enslaved, help shape the new world that the Civil War left open for them to mold? In Dr. Hilary Green’s book Educational Reconstruction: African American Scho...

Environmentalists often talk like revolutionaries but agitate like reformers. But however moderate its tactics, environmentalism has led Americans to questions rarely asked: Is economic growth necessary? Must individual freedom and democracy be paramou...

Though many Americans, Republicans especially, regard universities as heavily disposed to the political left, few people understand how much this matters, how it happened, how deeply ideologically siloed the academy is, or what can be done about it.

In Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond (Wayne State University Press, 2016), M. L. Liebler curates an exhaustive collection of essays about Detroit music by a diverse group of music scholars, journalists, and musicians.

Harold Washington’s election as mayor of Chicago in 1983 sent a shockwave through the politics of America’s third largest city, one that reverberated for decades afterward. Yet as Roger Biles describes in his book Mayor Harold Washington: Champion of R...

We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of Terry vs. Ohio, the US Supreme Court case that dramatically expanded the scope under which agents of the state could stop people and search them. Taking advantage of a North Carolina law that required the coll...

Will voters this fall be voting for or against Donald Trump, even though he isn’t on the ballot? Will they be voting on national issues, such as immigration or relations with North Korea, even when the election is for city council or mayor?

Human rights as a concern in U.S. foreign policy and international politics has been well-documented, particularly in studies of the Carter Administration. However, how human rights emerged as an issue in U.S.

If you look at the history of punishment (at least in the West), what you’ll see is that we’ve gone from a penal regime that used (inter alia) physical violence—whipping, beating, branding, amputation, and killing—to one that uses confinement.

In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills: Latino Suburbanization in Postwar Los Angeles (Rutgers University Press, 2018) by Professor Jerry Gonzalez challenges conventional interpretations of postwar U.S. history by focusing on the hidden story of the ce...

In History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), historian M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska examines Americans’ changing relationship to history in the 1960s and 1970s.

The contemporary moment has brought to the forefront the question of what constitutes an American citizen. The legal question in popular understanding stems from the Fourteenth Amendment and its use of birthright citizenship as a central identifier of ...

In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, academia, and national security institutions.

Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines the contexts, programs, and ethics of medical experimentation in the British and Frenc...

The office of the president in the United States is one of the most visible institutions not just in its own country, but around the world as well. The expectations that the office and officeholder carries are considerable,

Coincident with the hundredth anniversary of the first American engagements in the First World War, Andrew J. Huebner joins New Books in Military History to talk about his book, Love and Death in the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2018).