I’ve often asked myself this question: “How do religions begin?” I don’t know about you, but I think I would be very, very skeptical if someone told me that they’d had just received a revelation, communicated with some spiritual “higher power,

An interview with Jeffrey D. Sachs

Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the young stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite millions of words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent,

If you watch old movies or study film history, you may know that early 20th-century Hollywood operated under the Motion Picture Production Code, which dictated what could and couldn’t be portrayed onscreen.

The New Negro Movement is typically seen as a Harlem-based project. Dr. Treva Lindsey’s important book, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C. (University of Illinois Press, 2017), however,

Interviewing one member of Congress is a feat for most researchers. Interviewing nearly 100 and almost every women member of Congress is remarkable. Even more remarkable is what we can learn from that data collection about the perceptions of women memb...

Today we are joined by Jack Gilden, author of the book Collision of Wills: Johnny Unitas, Don Shula, and the Rise of the Modern NFL (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). In this groundbreaking book, Gilden takes the reader back to the Baltimore Colts o...

Dan Ponder’s new book, Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State (Stanford University Press, 2018), is an important and thoughtful exploration of the concept of presidential leverage,

Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) examines how colonists, soldiers, explorers, and American Indians created and circulated knowle...

In the wake of the bloody Civil War, millions of slaves were emancipated. How did those freed slaves, along with African Americans freed before the Civil War, interpret this new post-war world? Dr. Matthew Harper’s The End of Days: African American Rel...

Of all of the departments of the U.S. government you might expect to be implicated in the exercise of imperialism, the Department of the Interior might not be the first one that you would think of. Of course,

Bill Ivey’s Rebuilding an Enlightened World: Folklorizing America (Indiana University Press, 2018) advances the idea that we are entering a post-enlightenment world increasingly characterized by alternative facts, fake news,

The Civil War was even more disastrous than we thought. Joan Cashin, already a distinguished scholar of the period, looks afresh at the war through the lens of environmental history and material culture and finds only more terrors and even greater suff...

In 2018, much attention has been drawn to candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Randy Bryce: candidates for Congress who’ve made a living doing working class jobs. They are unusual because Congressional candidates are almost always drawn from wh...

The links between African Americans and the global struggle for decolonization, particularly in Africa are well-documented. Facing similar kinds of repression that were rooted in systemic racism and the denial of political rights,

Author, journalist and sometime park ranger Ken Ilgunas has written an argument in favor a “right to roam.”  This concept, unfamiliar to most Americans, is one of an ability to traverse public and private property for purposes of enjoying nature.

How are the vulnerabilities of older adults in need of care and their care workers intertwined? In Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care (New York University Press, 2018), Elana Buch considers this question and more.

After the U.S. presidential election in 2016, discussions about white nationalism, supremacists, and neo-Nazis went from being a niche topic to mainstream news. For those who hadn’t been keeping tabs on what we’re now calling the “alt-right,

Surprising to many, white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election at a higher rate than any candidate in the previous four presidential elections. At the same time, the Evangelical community is changing,

John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. American Philosophy: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) won the John Dewey Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Kaag offers a rich history,

Healthcare is extremely expensive for both patients and their employers. The costs of healthcare continue to increase with no end in sight. Dr. Josh Luke is a former Hospital CEO, disruptor, and healthcare futurist who understands the American healthca...

As you’ll hear in this interview with Steven Stoll, his latest book Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017) is “really a book about capitalism.” Specifically, it’s about how the people of the southern mountains––meaning,

Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) is a dramatic and vibrant story of a little-known Kentucky school, the Choctaw Academy. Christina Snyder, McCabe-Greer Professor of History at Penn State University,

American science and empire have a long mutual history. In American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Megan Raby takes us to Caribbean sites that expanded the reach of American ecology and ...

In 1971, a Sri Lankan Sufi arrived in Philadelphia to address a group of spiritual seekers. This trip initiated the career of one of the most influential teachers in the history of North American Sufism. In Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in A...