Over half of Americans approaching retirement age report having no money saved for retirement, but how did we get here as a nation? In his book, Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal (ILR/Cornell Universit...

“Hookup” has become a buzzword, a misleading concept for students, parents and educators alike–one that confuses more than explains the nuances of this complex and pervasive trend. In American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (W. W. Norton,

The tragic Tulsa Race Riots plus a smidgeon of romance equals to a compelling historical saga. Marlene Banks weaves fact and fiction together illustrating how law and culture may change but human nature remains the same in her historical novel series S...

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Beacon Press, 2017) will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations,

An interview with Paul C. Taylor

Charles K. (CK) McClatchy was a towering figure in the making of Sacramento and the inland empire he liked to call Superior California. As editor of the Sacramento Bee from 1883 to 1936, McClatchy was both ardent booster and strident critic,

Seth Barrett Tillman has written “Ex Parte Merryman: Myth, History and Scholarship,” an article about the famous case that is popularly thought to demonstrate a conflict between the President and the federal courts during the American Civil War.

Scott A. Mitchell‘s recent monograph, Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Contexts (Bloomsbury, 2016), provides a much-needed up-to-date overview of Buddhism in the United States. To tackle such a large topic,

One of the rising stars in American politics during the 1930s was Paul Vories McNutt. As governor of Indiana, McNutt refashioned the state government to address its citizens needs during the Great Depression,

From 1927 until his death in 1979, E.F. Joseph documented the daily lives of African Americans in the Bay Area. His images were printed in the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, but not widely published in his home community.

Five charismatic women navigate uneven terrain of racial gender and class stereotypes: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Halle Berry. The quintet charisma, as explored by Dr. Mia Mask in Divas on The Screen: Black Women i...

This week’s podcast is a fraud or at least about a fraud. Edward J. Balleisen has written Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff (Princeton University Press, 2017). Balleisen is associate professor of history and public policy and vice provos...

The Americans by Car is Karl Baden’s latest book. An homage to Robert Frank’s The Americans and Lee Friedlander’s America by Car, Baden’s book “is a personal, more specific answer to the vague question of ‘how are we influenced,

Business. Community. Politics. That’s the making of a barbershop. In Cutting Along the Color Lines: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Dr. Quincy Mills chronicles the history of black barber shops as bus...

Henry and Emily Folger were linked together not just by their love for one another, but their shared passion for the works of William Shakespeare. In Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014),

As I write this, the women’s basketball team for the University of Connecticut is in the midst of a 107 game winning streak. It’s quite reasonable to assert that Geno Auriemma will end his career as the most successful coach in basketball history.

In Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (University of California Press, 2016), Emily K. Hobson challenges conceptions of LGBTQ activism as single-issue analogous to but separate from other activist initiatives.

A number of recent events (the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign) have brought inequality and poverty into national conversation. In an age of economic uncertainty and a declining social safety net,

When people think of the Virgin Mary in terms of American religious history, there is a tendency to focus on opposition. For instance, Catholic devotion to Mary on the one side, and Protestant critique of that devotion on the other side. However,

John William McCormack served as Speaker of the House of Representatives throughout most of the 1960s, during which time he shepherded the legislation of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program through the chamber.

If all you knew about methamphetamines came from popular culture (“Breaking Bad”) or government anti-drug campaigns (“Faces of Meth”), then you’d probably think that the typical meth user was a unemployed, rail thin degenerate with bad acne,

How can we challenge the way film and television represents the world around us? In Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2017) Nancy Wan Yuen, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Biola University,

Beginning with a network of reformed figures that orbited around Billy Graham, from J. Howard Pew’s money to Carl Henry’s passion for cultural esteem, Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford Univer...

In Washington and Hamilton: The Alliance that Forged America (Sourcebooks, 2015), authors Stephen F. Knott and Tony Williams explore the relationship between George Washington and Alexander Hamilton over the course of three distinct periods where their...

This episode of New Books in African American Studies covers Patrick Phillips’ powerful new book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016) At the turn of the twentieth century, Forsyth County in Georgia,