In this podcast I talk with Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University about his book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015). Per the book jacket,

Anthony Maniscalco is the author of Public Spaces, Marketplaces, and the Constitution: Shopping Malls and the First Amendment (SUNY Press, 2015). Maniscalco is the director of the Edward T. Rogowsky Internship Program in Government and Public Affairs a...

In Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest (New York University Press, 2015), Sujey Vega Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, traces the way Latina/o Hoosiers established community and belonging...

Heath W. Carter‘s new book Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a bold interpretation of the origins of the American Social Gospel by highlighting the role of labor in both art...

An interview with Daniel Tortora

Michael Kimmel is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University. He is also executive director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities. His book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an...

Julie M. Weise‘s new book Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South Since 1910 (UNC Press, 2015) is the first book to comprehensively document Mexicans’ and Mexican Americans’ long history of migration to the U.S. South.

In Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli.

In Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature (New York University Press, 2013), Jodi Eichler-Levine, associate professor of Religion Studies and Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization at Lehigh U...

In her new book, Identity, Youth, and Gender in the Korean American Church (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dr. Christine Hong explores the lives of female Korean American Mainline Christian adolescents. Hong’s work,

What is hip? Can a piece of music be hip? Or is hipness primarily a way of engaging with music which recognizes the hip potential of the music? Or primarily a manner of being, which allows the hip individual to authentically engage with the hip artwork...

Have you seen those Facebook memes floating around, arguing that we shouldn’t support a 15-dollar -per-hour minimum wage for service sector workers because the military doesn’t earn a living wage? Jennifer Mittelstadt tells us how these stark lines wer...

Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His book, In the Beginning was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 (Oxford University Press, 2015),

In Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, a writer and former journalist, introduces us to the larger-than-life personality Ha...

Mark A. Smith is the author of Secular Faith: Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Smith is professor of political science at the University of Washington. The provocative central thesis of this book is...

Finalist, 2015 National Jewish Book Award In her new book Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2015), Leah Garrett, the Loti Smorgon (Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at Mona...

Colson Whitehead’s fiction has drawn varied criticism. On the one hand, there’s the scholarship of the African diaspora, a tradition that takes the long view of Whitehead–extrapolating him from their existing canon (of Du Bois, Hurston, Ellison, etc.

For much of the last 50 years, there has been a consensus that restrictions on political money would improve politics and government. Federal and state campaign finance reforms aimed to do just that. In their recent book Campaign Finance and Political ...

Let’s say you had a curiosity about, maybe even a hankering for, Indiana’s signature dessert, sugar cream pie. You might search for it and, on a typical foodie website, find this description, written in typical foodie prose: “As Indiana’s state pie,

Robert Stoker is the co-author (with Clarence Stone, John Betancur, Susan Clarke, Marilyn Dantico, Martin Horak, Karen Mossberger, Juliet Musso, Jeffrey Sellers, Ellen Shiau, Harold Wolman, and Donn Worgs) of Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitaliz...

In Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Marjorie Feld, associate professor of history at Babson College, explores the tension between the particularist and universalist commitments many American Jew...

Who made life risky? In his dynamic new book, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historian Dan Bouk argues that starting in the late nineteenth century,

Gambling and sports have been in the news lately in the US. Authorities in Nevada and New York have shut down the fantasy sports operatorsDraftKings and FanDuel in their states, judging that their daily fantasy games constitute illegal gambling.

Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph have written the alliteratively titled Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is professor of political science at Vanderbilt Uni...