The mass industrial democracy that is the modern United States bears little resemblance to the simple agrarian republic that gave it birth. The market revolution is the reason for this dramatic and ironic metamorphosis.

Of all American sports, baseball has contributed the greater number of folk heroes to the larger culture. Fictional characters of awe-inspiring ability, like the mighty Casey and Roy Hobbs, or quirky sages such as Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra are broad...

The “Personal is Political” was the mantra for the women’s movement and a generation of social historians interested in the lives of women and assorted minorities. This lens, looking at the interior lives of individuals to decipher their exterior choic...

In the 2012 presidential race two major issues are ever present but never mentioned: Mormonism and homosexuality. According to opinion polls, a significant number of Americans either won’t vote or are wary of voting for a Mormon. Likewise,

Lisa Garcia Bedolla and Melissa Michelson are the co-authors of Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate through Get-Out-The-Vote Campaigns (Yale University Press 2012). Lisa is associate professor of social and cultural studies at the Univers...

In Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Julietta Hua analyzes how discourse on human trafficking creates the boundaries of victimhood and thereby restricts concepts of punishment, remedy, and citizenship.

The 2012 presidential election might be closely contested but the battleground states are almost all exclusively outside of the Old Confederacy. Florida, Virginia, and, to a lesser extent, North Carolina might be contested but only because these states...

Recent political debates around language have often been controversial, sometimes poorly informed, and usually unedifying. It’s striking to consider that such debates have, at least in the USA, been current for more than 100 years; and perhaps surprisi...

There is exactly one strong woman in the movie “The Godfather,” and she’s not Italian. (It’s “Kay Adams,” played by the least Italian-looking actress alive, Diane Keaton.) Such is the stereotype about Italian women, at least in the U.S.

During a Presidential campaign when the ethnic background of many major national figures and immigration in general has weighed heavily on the debate, Wendy Roth‘s new book, Race Migration: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race (Stanford Univ...

“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-lop-bam-boom!”And so rock and roll was born. And so American culture changed forever. So says David Kirby in Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Continuum, 2009). “Tutti Frutti,” Little Richard’s first hit,

$800 billion is a lot of money. That is the amount of cash the Obama administration pumped into the American economy through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Ever wonder what happened to all that dough?

What is religion? Who gets to define it? Why is defining something a religion such an important endeavor? What exactly is at stake in determining the status of religion? Like many people think, you may say “Religion is self evident – you just know it w...

Laura Stark‘s lucid and engaging new book explores the making and enacting of the rules that govern human subjects research in the US. Using a thoughtfully conceived combination of ethnographic and archival work,

In Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (Oxford, 2010), Peter C. Hoffer offers a succinct and refreshing new look at the Stono slave rebellion of 1739, an event that has been the subject of much historical scholarship.

In August of 2009, the South African runner Caster Semenya won the 800 meter final in the world Championship leading by one minute. “Muscles bulging and triumphant hand aloft,” the news reported, “she crossed the line way ahead of the rest of the field...

Every person must confront death; the only question is how that person will do it. In our culture (I speak as an American here), we don’t really do a very good job of it. We face death by fighting it by any and every means at our disposal. Why we...

In the history of American sports, few athletes were as famous and hated in their day as Jack Johnson. The first African American boxing champion, Johnson was an astonishingly brash figure who flouted the prejudices held by white Americans.

In the Pacific Northwest, immigrants from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia coexist, making a life for themselves and their family in a new country. In the book Seeking Salaam : Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis in the Pacific Northwest (University of Wash...

Ben Cawthra‘s Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (University of Chicago, 2011) discusses the way images of jazz and the musicians who played it both reflected and influenced our racial perceptions during the period between the 1930s an...

Daniel Kreiss is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford Univ...

Cultural movements don’t exist in vacuums. Consciously or not, all movements borrow from, and sometimes reject, those that came before. In Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (Lexington Books, 2011),

Brendan C. Lindsay‘s impressive if deeply troubling new book centers on two concepts long considered anathema: democracy and genocide. One is an ideal of self-government, the other history’s most unspeakable crime. Yet as Lindsay deftly describes,

An interview with Andrew P. Haley

If you’ve spent any time in New Orleans, you can appreciate the challenge of putting the city’s joie de vivre into words.However, as a New Orleans native, John Kennedy Toole was steeped in the traditions and flavor of his hometown and, therefore,