In the annals of cold war history Italy is rarely seen as a crucial locale.  In his stimulating new book, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare (Cambridge University Press, 2014),

Donna J. Drucker is a guest professor at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. Her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014) is an in-depth and detailed study of Kinsey’s ...

Political debate in western democracies such as in Canada, the U.S. and Britain has become empty theatre, full of rhetorical flourishes with little meaning for citizens, according to a new book by a former minister of finance in the Canadian province o...

Contested and complicated histories create the best books. This is true for many volumes and is certainly so for Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches (University Press of Florida, 2014), a recent work edited by Wendy Oliver and Lindsay Guari...

The period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries witnessed a mass migration which carried millions of Jews from central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to new lands. Hasia Diner’s new book,

Biography is, both etymologically and in its conventional forms, the writing of a life. But what is the role of place within that? And how do the stories of lives- some of them well known, others less so- realign when we see them through the lens of a ...

American policymakers and scholars alike have looked to the rapid transformation of Germany, specifically West Germany, from a defeated Nazi state into a thriving democracy as one of the most successful postwar reconstructions of the twentieth century....

Akwugo Emejulu has written Community Development as Micropolitics: Comparing Theories, Policies, and Politics in America and Britain (Policy Press, 2015). Emejulu is a lecturer at the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh,

In 2012, a young Cherokee girl named Veronica became famous. The widespread and often coercive adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by non-Native families has long been known, discussed, and challenged in Indian Country. Now,

Tim Lacy is an assistant professor and academic advisor at Loyola University Chicago. His specialties are intellectual history, cultural history, and the history of education. He is co-founder of both the U.S.

Contemporary American political culture is arguably more divisive than ever before. Blue states are bluer, red states are redder, and purple states are becoming harder and harder to find. Because of this divisiveness,

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014),

David Bullock is the author of Coal Wars: Unions, Strikes, and Violence in Depression-Era Central Washington (Washington State University Press, 2014). Bullock is professor and is the chair of the Communications and Languages Department at Walla Walla ...

Across a series of twelve essays, When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in American History (Palgrave McMillan, 2014)examines the important and understudied role gossip has played in American history.Whether fashioned as “rumor, hearsay,

This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, a legal revolution with far-reaching cultural, political, and economic import. But as J. Douglas Smith argues in On Democracy’s Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Cour...

Bruce Springsteen is an American icon, known to his fans as “Bruce” and the “Boss.” Springsteen burst onto the American music scene in 1975 with the release of his classic album, Born To Run. His concerts are legendary,

Commercial interests are often understood as impinging upon the ethical norms of medicine. In his new book, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2013),

Steven Spielberg’s long career as a filmmaker began with television. In addition to episodes of popular TV series, he also directed one of the most popular made for television movies of all time, Duel. In Steven Spielberg and Duel: The Making of a Film...

Deana A. Rohlinger has just written Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Rohlinger is associate professor of sociology at Florida State University. In the last several weeks,

Many Americans know about the military side of the Civil War, and the private, official diplomacy of the Civil War is also well documented. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (Basic Books, 2015), though,

In 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge University Press, 2014), David Krugler chronicles the origins and development of ten major race riots that took place in the United States during that year.

Lisa Tetrault received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. Tetrault’s book The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement,

Jane Bayard Wilson and John Leighton Wilson were unlikely African missionaries, coming as they did from privileged slaveholding families in Georgia and South Carolina, respectively. Yet in 1834 they embarked on a nearly twenty-year adventure as Christi...

Two Canadian socialist thinkers have published a new book on the successes and failures, the crises, contradictions and conflicts in present-day capitalism. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013),

Daniel DiSalvo is the author ofGovernment against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2015). DiSalvo is associate professor of political science at the City College of New York, CUNY,