As a United States senator in the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Vandenberg was one of the leading Republican voices shaping the nation’s foreign policy. Though initially a staunch isolationist, as Hendrik Meijer explains in Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the ...

On May 23, 1957, US Army Sergeant Robert Reynolds was acquitted of murdering Chinese officer Liu Ziran in Taiwan. Reynolds did not deny shooting Liu but claimed self-defense and, like all members of US military assistance and advisory groups,

Lisa Brooks, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018).

In Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017), Eddy Portnoy, Academic Advisor and Exhibitions Curator at the YIVO Institute for Yiddish Research, delves into the archives of the Yiddish press t...

Gregory Laski approaches the concept of democracy in his text, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018) from a variety of dimensions and perspectives, integrating the concept of temporality to considera...

What can we learn about African American life between the world wars if we center our attention on the parks and pleasuring grounds of the urban North? That is what historian Brian McCammack endeavors to find out in his new book,

The Nation of Islam and other black nationalist groups are typically known for their male leaders. Men like the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Minister Malcolm X or Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey are notable examples.

Onigamiising is the Ojibwemowin word for Duluth and the surrounding area. In this book of fifty warm, wise and witty essays, Linda LeGarde Grover tells the story of the four seasons of life, from Ziigwan (Spring) to Biboon (Winter),

Every young generation inspires a host of comparisons—usually negative ones—with older generations. Whether preceding a criticism or punctuating one, “kids these days” is a common utterance. Perhaps because of the ubiquity of the internet and their hea...

For many people today, the name Abraham Lincoln conjures up a mental image of a solemn but kindly statesman. Yet to his contemporaries, one of Lincoln’s defining traits was his humor, which he deployed to great effect throughout his career.

Seth Barrett Tillman, an instructor in the Department of Law at Maynooth University in Ireland, is one of the few scholars to have researched and written about the history of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Prof.

Gretchen Dykstra‘s career to date has been both impressive and wide-ranging. She was the founding President of the Times Square Alliance, the former Commissioner of the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs, and the founding President of the 9/11 Memorial...

In Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (UNC Press, 2017), Andrew McKevitt explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese.

The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) is an important and in depth study of American interaction with the intricate concept of Sovereignty, from the Founding Fathers to Donald Trump.

In the wake of the Alabama Senate election in December, 2017, attention has been drawn to the intersection of religion and politics. This is the subject of God at the Grassroots 2016: The Christian Right in American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield,

Sovereignty is a key concept in Native American and Indigenous Studies, but its also a term that is understood in multiple ways. Working across the boundaries of legal and literary theory, David J. Carlson‘s Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in...

A city in its original state is arbitrary and has no meaning. The act of placemaking is a multifaceted process in the planning, designing, and management of public spaces. The social construction of meaning is a process that capitalizes on the assets,

In their new book Recharging Judaism: How Civic Engagement is Good For Synagogues, Jews and America (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2017), Rabbi Judith Schindler and Judy Seldin-Cohen argue that social action and Jewish action go hand-in-hand.

Much attention has been drawn to the role of white women in the recent Alabama senate election and the earlier election of Donald J. Trump as president. Today’s racial and gender politics have long historic roots, according to Elizabeth McRae,

Alice Echols is a professor of history and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. In her book Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse and a Hidden History of American Banking (New Press...

In her new book, A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2017), Howard University’s Kay Wright Lewis chronicles the history of white and black perspectives on the idea of...

Technology is a form of material culture and is a human activity. The way in which humans view technology is a social construction in which people use social processes of interpretation and negotiation. The mundane rituals that humans carry out when in...

How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian’s art through Cushman’s book, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Unde...

What is it about Black Republicans that makes them fodder for comedy? How do Black Republicans view their participation in their political group? Corey D. Fields answers these questions and more in his new book,

In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the ‘worst of the worst.’ The 1976 decision ushered in the ‘modern’ per...