Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family still stands as a memorable epic journey into the history of African Americans during the enslavement period and after. The 1977 televised miniseries was a must-watch event of the day,

If you have spent a bit of time in Germany or with German friends, you may have noticed the deep interest and affinity many Germans have for American Indians. What are the origins of this striking and enduring fascination? In many ways,

Do black mayors face a different governing challenge than other mayors? Ravi K. Perry explores this question in his Black Mayors, White Majorities: The Balancing Act of Racial Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).

Everybody knows the author of The Jungle was Upton Sinclair (or, if they’re a little confused, they might say Sinclair Lewis). As Lauren Coodley shows in her new biography Upton Sinclair: California Socialist,

Thuy Linh Tu‘s The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion (Duke University Press, 2010) considers the recent rise of Asian Americans working in New York’s fashion industry,

Cindy Hooper is a veteran of various local, state, and national political campaigns. She is the founder of a national organization for African American women that is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Hooper is also a member of the American Political Sc...

Patrick Weil is the author of The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is a visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a senior research fellow at the French Nat...

Kristin A. Goss is author of The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice (University of Michigan Press 2013). She is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University.

Host Jonathan Judaken talks with author and professor Amy Wood about her book, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Wood discusses her book,

Boston University School of Law Professor Jay Wexler offers readers an entertaining and enlightening tour through a “constitutional zoo” of ten strange-yet-important provisions of the Constitution of the United States in The Odd Clauses: Understanding ...

“…when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on the one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other hand – because Miles was that history.” -Herbie Hancock,

If you’re younger than 45 or so, you probably don’t remember the “Battle of the Sexes.” This tennis match, between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, is one of the iconic moments in American history of the 1970s.

Rick Baldoz is the author of The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (NYU Press, 2011), which investigates the complex relationship between the U.S. and Filipinos. Unlike other Asian American groups,

Conventional wisdom holds that the birth of the rock star came in 1956 with the ascendance of Elvis Presley. Not so, says author Michael Walker, who argues in his page-turning What You Want is in the Limo (Spiegel and Grau,

Christina Greer is the author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press, 2013). Greer is assistant professor of political science at Fordham University. In previous podcasts,

Erin Khue Ninh is the author of Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (New York University Press, 2011), which in 2013, won the Literary Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

On the podcast over the last few months, we’ve heard from Phil Krestedemas, Ron Schmidt, Shannon Gleeson about various aspects of immigration and immigrants in the US. Adding to this impressive list is Natalie Masuoka and Jane Junn are authors of The P...

The story begins with Davy Crockett and his hunting dogs chasing a bear in 1826. The bear gets caught in an earthquake crack, an effect of the great Mississippi Valley earthquakes of 1811-1812 that are now collectively known as the New Madrid earthquak...

This is a very timely book, coming as it does in the midst of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 — the war that gave birth to the maroon community of Prospect Bluff, Florida. In his book The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom i...

Julia H. Lee is the author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011). Dr. Lee is an Assistant Professor in the department of Asian American Studies at th...

2013 has been an annus horribilis for thrash metal legends Slayer. In February, Slayer parted ways with longtime drummer Dave Lombardo for the third and likely final time. In May, guitarist Jeff Hanneman died of alcohol-related cirrhosis,

Molly Worthen, author most recently of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the ideas that moved a variety of evangelicals in America over the last seventy...

Kevin Kerrane‘s Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting (CreateSpace, 2013) represents the first major study of the history and practice of professional baseball scouting.  Based on Kerrane’s ethnographic research with the Philadelphi...

How to research the history of sexual harassment in the office, when the term sexual harassment was only invented in 1975 and it was long tabou to even use the word sex in conversation? Using an array of rich sources — from Treasury Department archives...