Several weeks ago, we had Professor Lilliana Mason on the podcast talking about her book about the process of social sorting that has deepened divides between citizens by aligning race, religion, and region.

Douglas L. Winiarski is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond and winner of the 2018 Bancroft Prize in American history for his book Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth Century N...

In An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (University of California Press, 2018), Rosina Lozano details the entangled relationship between language and notions of individual, community, and national belonging in the U.S.

During his invasion of Creek Indian territory in 1813, future U.S. president Andrew Jackson discovered a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. Moved by an “unusual sympathy,” Jackson sent the child to be adopted into his Tennessee plantation household.

The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants.

Simeon Man‘s book Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the role of Asians who worked within the making of U.S. global power after 1945.

It’s common to place the start of the War on Drugs with the Nixon or Reagan Administrations, but as Matthew Pembleton tells us, those are only phases II and III of a much longer drug war that began in the 1930s with the long-forgotten Federal Bureau of...

To find out what Americans really think about their government, University of Texas-Austin Professor Roderick P. Hart read and analyzed approximately 10,000 letters to the editor, from 12 “ordinary” cities, written between 1948 and the present.

In what ways do middle class students obtain advantages in schools? In her new book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford University Press, 2018), Jessica McCrory Calarco uses ethnographic data to elabora...

Donald Trump famously said “We’re going to win so much you may even get tired of winning.” Tell that to the losers of politics; those who have lost major elections or key political debates. We rarely focus on those who have lost,

A rapidly growing number of Americans are embracing life outside the bounds of organized religion. Although the United States has long been viewed as a fervently religious Christian nation, survey data shows that more and more Americans are identifying...

For all the American media coverage of President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia, what’s rarely heard are the voices of Russians themselves. Russians on Trump: Coverage and Commentary (East View Press, 2018), edited by Laurence Bogoslaw,

A book that strikes at the source of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts‘ Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Pr...

John Munro’s new book, The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a transnational study that traces the persistence and continuities of Black radicalism from the end of ...

The pursuit of a musical career crosses the mind of most children. But, for most, a vocation is nothing more than a farfetched fantasy that will never come true. Music is often considered more appropriate as a leisure activity that need be abandoned wh...

During the 2016, journalist Salena Zito, who is based in Western Pennsylvania, sensed a brewing conservative populist in the white working-class when many thought the election would be determined by other demographic groups.

Jon D. Michaels, a professor of law at UCLA Law School, has written an argument in favor of the administrative state and against recent efforts to shift government functions to private contractors.  In Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the...

Research has demonstrated that women legislators face tougher re-election campaigns, often confronting stiff general election and primary competition. They typically received less favorable media coverage and get less support from their parties.

There’s been something of a revival of interest in the Vietnam War in the past years.  Perhaps it’s the influence of Ken Burns’ documentary miniseries, perhaps it’s just the distance from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  For whatever reason, 2016,

In the 1870s, one of the most popular forms of entertainment attended by American working-class men was variety—a succession of unrelated bawdy acts that preceded its tamer later nineteenth-century cousin, vaudeville. Gillian M. Rodger,

CNN commentator Amanda Carpenter was an early conservative critic of Donald Trump when she was targeted in a smear campaign falsely accusing her of an extramarital affair with Trump’s 2016 Republican primary rival Sen. Ted Cruz. In her words,

Today we are joined by Gregory Snyder, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), and author of Skateboarding LA: Inside Professional Street Skateboarding (New York University Press, 2017).

Most people know that slavery was foundational to the economic development of the United States in the antebellum period. Fewer people are aware that slavery was also important for American foreign policy in the period.

Those looking for deeper understanding of why the socially conservative, evangelical Christian community has been so loyal of Donald Trump will find answers in the book God and Donald Trump (Frontline, 2017).

Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Duke University Press, 2017) engages fields including physics, phenomenology, native storytelling, and queer temporality.