The American penitentiary model began as not merely a physical construct, but as a philosophical and religious one. Prisoners were to use their time in silence and isolation to contemplate their crimes/sins and to pursue God’s grace.

What’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin? What about the difference between a hornpipe and a reel, a hoedown and a breakdown? The answer to the former, of course, is that you don’t spill beer on a violin. For answers to the latter,

Shannon Gleeson is the author of Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston (Cornell University Press, 2012). Dr. Gleeson is assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the Univers...

You sometimes see bumper stickers that say “What would Jesus do?” It’s a good question, at least for Christians. You don’t see bumper stickers that say “What would Washington do?” But that, Logan Beirne says, is a question Americans should be asking.

What can be gained from another biography of Abraham Lincoln? A lot, it turns out. Michael Burlingame has been researching the life and times of Abraham Lincoln during his entire career as a historian. As he explains in this interview,

Cari Lee Skogberg Eastman is the author of Shaping the Immigration Debate: Contending Civil Societies on the US-Mexico Border (Lynne Rienner Publishers 2013). Eastman earned her doctoral degree at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Nature or nurture? Inborn or learned? Genetic or extra-genetic? Humans are so complicated that in many cases we can’t really know what is “in us” from the beginning and what is “acquired” as we learn. And even when we find something that is “in us,

When I was a teenager growing up in the early 80s, I took it as an article of faith that punk rock and heavy metal were definably different genres. To be sure, punk and metal bands both played heavy, loud, and fast music,

John Buschman is the author of Libraries, Classrooms, and the Interests of Democracy: Marking the Limits of Neoliberalism (Scarecrow Press 2012). Buschman is Dean of University Libraries at Seton Hall University.

The relationship between music and religion is a site of increasing interest to scholars within Religious Studies. Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explores the social processes and human activit...

Historian David Silbey returns to New Books in Military History with his second book, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China (Hill and Wang, 2012). The popular uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion has long only been vaguely understood,

When I think of the name “Billy Wilson” certain things come to mind immediately. I think of his sparkling career as director and choreographer of “Bubbling Brown Sugar” on Broadway. I am still stunned by his ability to shift from Broadway and back agai...

It’s rare that a person’s name comes to represent an object, but such is the case with Lilly Pulitzer. Just say ‘Lilly’ and it conjures images of simple sheath dresses in vivid colors. But what of Lilly Pulitzer herself?

How were black women manumitted in the Old South, and how did they live their lives in freedom before the Civil War? Historian, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University in Bloomington) answers thi...

Americans are simultaneously one of the most religious people on earth and prone to conflict and war. Ray Haberski is interested in how this paradox has shaped the nation’s civil religion. His book, God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945 (Rutg...

Inderjeet Parmar‘s Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (Columbia University Press, 2012) navigates the history of US foreign policymaking in the twentieth century.

Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary Louise Roberts‘ latest book reveals a side of the Liber...

If the moniker of the slave ship Amistad brings to mind images of Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou, and Morgan Freeman you are likely not alone. The monumental success of Steven Spielberg’s cinematic depiction of this antebellum event swept the nation w...

Born in Kentucky, raised in Ohio, apprenticed in Los Angeles, Dwight Yoakam is not your typical mainstream country music star. Indeed, his honky-tonk style of country has always been a throwback to an earlier era, one in which Merle Haggard,

The perception of the United States as a Christian nation is one that is prevalent and persistent. It is difficult to conceive of a time when the term Christian America was not bandied about in the media, but as David Niose argues in his book Nonbeliev...

Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period...

WorldCat is the largest online catalog in the world, accessing the collections of more than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories. Using the catalog, a subject search of particular sports turns up the following tally of book titles in the w...

Scholars commonly trace the rise of the punk rock movement of the mid-1970s to two cities and two bands, New York’s Ramones and London’s The Sex Pistols. In Spray Paint the Walls: The Black Flag Story(Omnibus, 2010), however,

We’ve all heard the saying that when arguing we should ‘disagree without being disagreeable’ but, when it comes to guns, we often find ourselves disagreeing without actually disagreeing. Most Americans believe in some kinds of gun control.