Mitt Romney must feel like Charlie Brown. Always facing an uphill climb against a popular incumbent, Romney truly believed he would kick the veritable football and take the White House. Unfortunately for the GOP,

The art salon is sadly less prevalent in our day than in days past, but it is far from obsolete. In its heyday, the salon provided people- particularly women Natalie Barney, orPerle Mesta)- with an extraordinary power to shape cultural tastes and conte...

According to the Marriam-Webster dictionary, an “enigma” can be defined as “something hard to understand or explain.” What is it that is so enigmatic about education? Aren’t schools there to teach information, and expand people’s minds?

Sanders Marble, senior historian of the United States Army’s Office of Medical History, presents a collection of essays related to the problems of substandard manpower as defined at different times in Western militaries over the modern era.

Stephen Caliendo and Charlton McIlwain are the authors of Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in US Political Campaigns (Temple University Press 2011). Caliendo is Professor of Political Science at North Central College and McIlwain is Associate Pr...

Colin Calloway is one of the leading historians of Native American history today and an award- winning author. Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hanover,

Digging up our roots seems to be the thing these days.  There are a host of genealogy resources available for anyone who cares to (re)discover their familial past.  Still, in the Americas people of African descent who want to take part in this digging ...

The 1970s and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict are quite possibly the two most depressing subjects an academic could study. With shag carpeting, disco, Watergate, malaise defining the former and an internecine and (seemingly) eternal clash characterizin...

An interview with Alec Foege

Where does rock ‘n’ roll begin? In The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll (W. W. Norton, 2011), Preston Lauterbach makes a strong case for its beginnings in the backwoods and small-town juke joints, fed by big-city racketeering,

It’s a great advantage of a dual biography that one can draw attention to a significant life that might otherwise be unexamined by linking it to the life of someone famous. Such is the case with Chip Bishop‘s biography,

Performance queen RuPaul once famously quipped that “we’re born naked; the rest is drag”–meaning everyone dons identity, performs one’s concept of self within our social networks, e.g., family, community, work.

What does it mean for a contemporary scholar to be trusted with the unfinished autobiography of a dance legend? How does one ensure that the integrity of their research matches the depth of life experience embodied in their subject’s narrative?

Just east of the Norwich-New London Turnpike in Uncasville, Connecticut, stands the Mohegan Congregational Church. By most accounts, it’s little different than the thousands of white-steepled structures dotting the New England landscape: the same high-...

This past October, David Stern announced that he would step down as commissioner of the National Basketball Association in February 2014. In Stern’s three decades at the helm, the NBA has seen its domestic fortunes rise and ebb.

In December 1958, US Senator Hubert H. Humphery recalled that at some point during an eight hour meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier “tore off on a whole long lecture” that the Senator wished he could remember because it was “the best sp...

Many Americans tend to think of 1776 as the year when the United States began making history on its own terms. That is simply untrue. Building on recent scholarship that challenges this assumption is Eliga Gould‘s Among the Powers of the Earth: The Ame...

From the ball fields and barrooms of Hoboken to your turntable, uh, CD player, uhm, MP3 player comes Yo La Tango, uh, Tengo, and with them alternative, uhm, indie rock. In Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock (Gotham,

As a journalist and author I usually work in factual financial news and analysis. Recently however, I have noticed an apparent increase in books that wrap the real financial tumult of our times into a fictional novel,

Ines Mergel, assistant professor of public administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the School of Information Studies (iSchool) at Syracuse University, is the author of Social Media in the Public Sector: A Guide to Par...

Despite what you may have learned in undergraduate surveys or high school textbooks, the nineteenth century was not one long and inexorable march toward Indian dispossession — the real story is far more tragic.

Sikivu Hutchinson‘s book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books, 2011) is a brave examination of African American religious perspectives vis a vis progressive racial politics, gender relations,

Scott Melzer is the author of Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War (New York University Press, 2012). Scott earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside and now is an associate professor of Sociology at Albion College.