Best remembered as the nineteenth commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, Clifton B. Cates began his long and distinguished military career as a second lieutenant in World War I. In I Will Hold: The Story of USMC Legend Clifton B. Cates,

In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2015), Holly Allen offers a fascinating analysis of how notions of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship were challenged and defined during the...

What do our myths say about us? Why do we choose to believe stories that have been disproven by science? In Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), David M.

Mireya Loza’s Defiant Braceros How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) sheds new light on the private lives of migrant men who participated in the Bracero Program (1942-1964),

Darian M. Parker joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling (Lexington Books, 2015). Through an ethnographic lens,

Donald Kettl is the author of Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Competence (Brookings Press, 2016). Kettl is professor of public policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a nonresident fellow at t...

Ibram X. Kendi is an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books, 2016) offers a fast moving narrative of racist ideas beginni...

“Anyone can make a difference. Find a problem, get some friends together, and go fix it. Remember you don’t have to change the world, just change your world.” –Joan Trumpauer Mulholland In the early 1960s, in the segregated South, a white teenager,

In the early 2000s, the press–at least in Boston, where I was living at the time–was full of shrill stories about drug-crazed addicts breaking into area pharmacies in search of something called “Oxycontin.” I had no idea what Oxycontin was,

It can be tempting to generalize certain attributes of schools as either being good or bad. Magnet and charter schools are often characterized as being inherently good. They usually offer special programs that ground all of their instruction.

Ellen Fitzpatrick is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her book The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016) provides the story of three women,

When Abraham Lincoln wrote that the better part of one’s life consists of his friendships, it is likely that he had in mind his friendship with Joshua Speed. Starting as roommates in Springfield, the two formed an extraordinarily close attachment,

Carol McCabe Booker is a Washington, D.C. attorney and former journalist. In the 1960s and 70s, she covered civil rights for the Voice of America, freelanced articles for The Washington Post, Readers Digest, Ebony, Jet, and Black Stars,

Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globaliza...

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, antebellum African Americans elites turned to the newspaper as a means of translating their belief in black “chosenness” into programs for black liberation. Benjamin Fagan’s The Black Newspaper and the Chosen...

Before the war, before the novels, before the four marriages and the safaris, the plane crashes and the bullfighting fascination, Ernest Hemingway was simply a young boy growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Author Robert K.

Whatever your role — teacher, principal, or superintendent — when you work in a school system, you experience tensions between your reasons for going into education and how you actually spend your time in schools.

Daniel Kreiss is back on the podcast with his new book Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Kreiss is associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University...

Battles over school politics from curriculum to funding to voucher systems are key and contentious features of the political landscape today. Many of these familiar fights started in the 1970s. However, these battles have roots even earlier in mid-twen...

In her new book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford Law Books, 2016), Samantha Barbas provides a history of Americans’ use of law to manage their public image. She approaches this endeavor from the perspective of a legal and cultu...

Stephen Lee Naish first became aware of Dennis Hopper watching David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, jumpstarting what would become a long examination of Hopper’s ambitions and creative output as an actor, filmmaker, photographer, sculptor, and painter.

As evidenced by many of the conversations featured on this podcast, scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands composes a significant and influential genre within the field of U.S. Western History and Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies.

Joel K. Goldstein has written The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden (University Press of Kansas, 2016). Goldstein is the Vincent C. Immel Professor of Law, Saint Louis University School of Law.

Though not a household name today, Philip Pendleton Barbour was a leading political and judicial figure in antebellum America. In Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (U. of Alabama Press, 2016),

Islamophobia, both as a term and concept, has a storied and complicated history, and understanding its many layers in our current historical moment remains important for any number of audiences and purposes.