By the fall of 1986, the Los Angeles heavy metal band Slayer had two solid but unspectacular records, 1984’s Haunting the Chapel and 1985’s Hell Awaits, to their name. Meanwhile, producer Rick Rubin had started a record company, Def Jam,

Christine Trost is program director of the Center for Right-Wing Studies and associate director of the UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. Her co-editor is Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director and lead researchers of Center for ...

When Americans go overseas, they know just who they are–Americans. But what was it like for a citizen of the United States to go abroad before there was a clear idea of what an “American” was? This is one (among many) of the fascinating questions Danie...

Drew Maciag, author of Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2013) spoke with Ray Haberski about the intellectual challenges Burke raised in a time of democratic revolutions and th...

The title says it all: Diana Vreeland was, in fact, that Empress of Fashion, reigning over Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute for half a century. As a result, her life story stretches the conventions of biogr...

Americans seem to be more concerned about economic inequality today than they have been in living memory. The Occupy Movement (“We are the 99%”) is only the most visible sign of this growing unease. But what are the dimensions of inequality in the Unit...

At the dawn of the twenty first century, the music business looked forward to its sixth decade of monopolistic dominance of the sale and manufacture of recorded music. An industry that once had dozens of labels competing for consumer dollars had become...

What do you do if you accompany a friend on her research trip to Boston University’s Gotlieb Archival Research Center and end up finding a treasure trove of letters, news articles, hand written notes, and original drafts of nonfiction by one of your fa...

Before the Second World War, very few Americans visited psychologists or psychiatrists. Today, millions and millions of Americans do. How did seeing a “shrink” become, quite suddenly, a typical part of the “American Experience?

Anyone who studies police corruption will be aware of the Knapp Commission that examined allegations of police corruption in New York City in the 1970s. Not only was this famous because of the movie Serpico,

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...