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.

The Louisiana Purchase was a perfect illustration of the challenges, yet seemingly boundless opportunities that slavery presented statesmen like Thomas Jefferson. Napoleon Bonaparte had been dealt a significant military defeat at the hands of a slave r...

There are pigeons, cats, and Martians here. There are CT scanners, dentures, computers large enough to fill rooms, war games, and neural networks. In Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012),

Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich are authors of the provocative new book, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies (Rowman and Littlefield 2013). Dr. Tienken is an assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Services at Set...

The suspension of the so-called “Indian Wars” did not signal colonialism’s end, only a different battlefield. “The calvary man was supplanted–or, rather, supplemented–by the field matron, the Hotchkiss by the transit, and the prison by the school,

What can the United States learn from Europe? One good answer, says Steven Hill, is social capitalism, a form of economic management that is responsive to markets and productive of broadly-shared prosperity.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” We are still fighting that war today. According to many people, we’ve lost but don’t know it. Rates of drug use in the US remain, by historical standards,

Andrei Williams‘ provocative new book on African American class divisions in Post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow America is sure to spark spirited debate among those interested in how the interplay of economic status and racial identity influence what has...

After his incendiary performance at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix almost immediately went from obscure musician to pop superstar in America. But as Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber reveal in Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southe...

Most people today think of war–or really violence of any sort–as for the most part useless. It’s better, we say, just to talk things out or perhaps buy our enemies off. And that usually works. But what if you lived in a culture where fighting was an im...

History is in many respects the story of humanity’s quest for transcendence: to control life and death, time and space, loss and memory. When inventors or companies effectively tap into these needs products emerge that help define their times.

A friend of mine who had just graduated from law school said “Law school is great. The trouble is that when you are done you’re a lawyer.” Steven J. Harper would, after a fashion, agree (though he would probably add that law schools are not that great)...