John Mackay’s life began humbly, immigrating as a child from an impoverished Irish household to New York City where he worked selling newspapers in the streets. Within four decades, he was a stakeholder in one of the wealthiest precious metal strikes i...

Several recent guests on New Books in Political Science have talked about the path to political polarization in the US, including Lilliana Mason, Dan and Dave Hopkins, and Sam Rosenfeld. The deep divides between the parties have an obvious geographic d...

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives,

How should we understand our new golden age of television? In New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Martin Shuster, Director of Judaic Studies and Assistant Professor at Goucher College,

The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of a new type of humor, based on sarcasm, improvisation and drugs. From The National Lampoon to Saturday Night Live, many new stars appeared, both as performers and writers. In his book,

In his book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), Pekka Hämäläinen refutes the traditional story that Indians were bit players or unfortunate victims of the white man’s conquest of the American West.

How do we conceptualize religious conservatives and their relationship with sex? And how do Christians use digital media for sexual knowledge and pleasure? In her new book, Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet (Univ...

Diet books are a multi-billion dollar industry and in Diet and the Disease of Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Adrienne Rose Bitar explores the narratives of those books. Bitar looks at the ways in which diet books not only present Americ...

William Kuby is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. His book, Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States (Cambridge University Press, 2018),

Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe has quickly emerged as a crucial voice in twenty-first-century American literature. Her innovative, award-winning works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism capture the complexities of Native American life and interrogate...

The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America (Melville House, 2018) offers a roadmap to reeling progressives, delivers a searing critique of cynical pragmatism and defends identity politics as a galvanizing force for positive s...

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...