Our taken for granted assumptions are questioned in a new book by Karl Spracklen, a professor of leisure studies at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. Whiteness and Leisure (Palgrave, 2013) combines two bodies of theoretical literature to interr...

“We are not half a dozen provinces. We are one great Dominion,” Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald proudly declared. More than a century later, Canada has 10 provinces and three northern territories making it one of the biggest and riches...

Modernity and religion have often been seen as fundamentally at odds. However, the articles in Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America (University of Hawaii Press, 2014 ), edited by Albert L. Park and David K. Yoo,

It is a rare event when a dissertation focused on a single work yields a rich and fruitful account of an entire period. James Nisbet‘s new book, which began as a study of Walter De Maria’s 1977 Land Art work TheLightning Field,

If group biography is one of the exciting new trends in life-writing (and some say it is), Karen Abbott– the historian, not to be confused with the novelist-proves one of its deftest practitioners- first, in her debut Sin in the Second City,

An unflinching examination of the trauma, violence, opportunism, and vision that combined to create the empire for slavery that was the Old South, Ed Baptist‘s new book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic ...

Chicago would be one of the first places that people think of when the topic of organized crime is raised. Al Capone made the city famous during prohibition. I have done the Gangster bus tour in Chicago which focuses entirely on that period in history....

Julia Azari has written Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (Cornell University Press, 2014). Azari is assistant professor of political science at Marquette University.

On November 29, 1957, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday, Zoot Sims, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and a multi-talented young R&B player who played jazz that night, Ray Charles, and others played a benefit concert for the Morningside Recreation Center at Ca...

With a new focus on vocational and work ready education, the notion of a liberal education is becoming less valued in American society. Though, there are still defenders of this well-rounded and classic form of education. One staunch defender is Dr.

Once upon a time, before baseball drew crowds to America’s ballparks and English workers spent their Saturdays at the football grounds, one of the most popular spectator events in both countries was watching people walk.

Staci Zavattaro is the author of the new book Cities for Sale: Municipalities as Public Relations and Marketing Firms (SUNY Press, 2013). Zavattaro is assistant professor of public administration at Mississippi State University.

Matt Grossmann is back on the podcast with his newest book, Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Grossmann is associate professor of political science at Michigan State Unive...

In Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance  (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Mark Rifkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and incoming president of the Native American and In...

Elizabeth Lunbeck has made a major contribution to the historical study of psychoanalysis with the publication of The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard University Press, 2014). Exploring the concept of narcissism and how it is deployed at the leve...

“Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.”  This was the headline of a recent New Republic article that reverberated across the internet recently, going viral as it was shared over 160 thousands times on Facebook. The author of this piece, Dr.

Glenn Feldman is the editor of Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government (University Press of Florida, 2014). Feldman is professor of history at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

There are many movies about evil CIA agents assassinating supposed enemies of the US. Those who saw the latest Captain America movie will have witnessed the plan by Hydra (a fascist faction within a secret agency presumably within the CIA) build floati...

Expressions of religious belief through popular media are a regular occurrence in our contemporary age. But the circulation and negotiation of religious identities in public contexts has a fairly long history in American culture. Matthew Hedstrom,

In the post 9/11 era in which Muslims in America have increasingly felt under the surveillance of the state, media, and the larger society, how have female Muslim students on US college campuses imagined, performed,

Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His book, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013) fills out the constitutional history of America’s “Second Reconstruction” period...

In 1969, the United States created and implemented a new method of drafting young men for military service–the “draft lottery.” The old system, whereby local draft boards selected those to enter service, was corrupt and unfair. The new system,

Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands,

During his lifetime, Michael Jackson became a global icon. Michael Jackson was beloved by millions; his journey began as he became a boy star with The Jackson Five and it culminated with his being crowned the King of Pop,

Martin Joseph Ponce‘s recently published book, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (NYU Press, 2012), traces the roots of Filipino literature to examine how it was shaped by forces of colonialism, imperialism,