In the United States, World War II is now called “The Good War,” as opposed to bad ones, I suppose, like Vietnam. Moreover, the Americans who fought in World War II are now called “The Greatest Generation,” as opposed to lesser generations, I suppose.

Occasionally you hear shrill news reports about American Nazis. Judging by the pictures of them, they are almost always skin-headed morons who can’t put two words together (other than “Sieg Heil” or some such).

While it has become typical to see Filipina/o migrants working in nursing or domestic work in the United States, many are surprised to see Filipina/os doing the same work in Hong Kong, Israel, and Dubai. Indeed,

There are many books about the war against Al Qaeda. Most of these focus on counter-terrorism or counter insurgency military tactics or espionage operations. These books have become more frequent with the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Read most any account of early Filipino America, and you’re likely to hear a story of roaming migrant bachelors who rarely settled. Yet if this was always the case, then how did third and forth generation Filipino/a Americans appear in the United State...

It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-ending cycles of revision.

Life insurance! The very word sends shivers of excitement down the spine. OK, maybe not . . . but Sharon Murphy‘s book on the development of the life insurance industry in the United States from its infancy in the early republic through its breakthroug...

Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emotional development. In Marga Vicedo,

It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly pronounced in the case of iconic figures of the 20th century (think: Marilyn Monroe,

Stella M. Rouse is the author of Latinos in the Legislative Process: Interests and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Rouse is assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland and a research fellow at the Center for Ame...

Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolina. In his far-reaching but concise and elegantly written new book A New World of Labor: The Development ...

When I was growing up the only cooking show on TV I remember was Julia Child. I sometimes watched “The French Chef,” not so much to learn anything about cooking, but rather just to watch Julia. She was a hoot.

What do Barry Goldwater, Edward Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau have in common? On the surface, they would seem to be at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. As Brian Allen Drake shows, however, environmental concerns often brought together public...

We all know the song. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” And now, thankfully, we all know the controversy; celebrating a perpetrator of genocide might say a few unpleasant things about the country doing the celebrating.

The story of the rise of Jim Crow in Jacksonville, Florida is in many ways illustrative of the challenges facing newly emancipated African Americans throughout the South with local officials erecting barriers to black participation; blacks building ins...

During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W.

New Jersey. Home to Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Yo La Tango. . .and the Misfits, a hardcore metal horror rock band from Lodi. In This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of the Misfits (Scarecrow Press, 2013), James Greene Jr.

How could members of a movement committed to cosmopolitanism accommodate nationalism? How could men and women committed to non-resistance reconcile themselves to politics when the authority of even democratic polities depended ultimately upon the threa...

One phenomenon of movies made of classic novels is that the movie often says a lot more about the time of its making than about the time of the novel. And so Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is more a depiction of a 2012 idea of the 1920s than a...

Pretty much every day you can read an article–usually somewhat intemperate–about how women can or can’t “have it all.” Rarely, however, do you read anything about the way in which men try to balance work and family.

Presidents, you know, are people too. They read the newspaper (including the sports page and the funnies), settle in with books (yes, beach reading too), watch movies and TV (after all, they have a private theatre in the White House),

Robert Horwitz is the author of America’s Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party (Polity, 2013). Horwitz is professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego.

Philip Kretsedemas is the author of The Immigration Crucible: Transforming Race, Nation, and the Limits of the Law (Columbia UP 2012). He is associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the past quarter century.

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk,