Battles over school politics from curriculum to funding to voucher systems are key and contentious features of the political landscape today. Many of these familiar fights started in the 1970s. However, these battles have roots even earlier in mid-twen...

Emile Chabal’s A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an in-depth analysis of the languages and preoccupations of French civil society and political culture from the 1970s to the p...

Joel K. Goldstein has written The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden (University Press of Kansas, 2016). Goldstein is the Vincent C. Immel Professor of Law, Saint Louis University School of Law.

I have to admit that I was quite intimidated by a book on taxation in imperial Russia. But States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republics (U. of Toronto Press, 2014) is an award winning book so I decided to...

Though not a household name today, Philip Pendleton Barbour was a leading political and judicial figure in antebellum America. In Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (U. of Alabama Press, 2016),

Islamophobia, both as a term and concept, has a storied and complicated history, and understanding its many layers in our current historical moment remains important for any number of audiences and purposes.

What links a water privatization scheme and a prominent software company in India’s silicon city, Bangalore? Simanti Dasgupta’s new book, BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press,

Jason Stahl is the author of Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Stahl is an historian and lecturer in the Department of Organizational Leadership and Policy Deve...

Since the birth of the modern Olympics movement in the late nineteenth century, its leaders have attempted to maintain a strict separation of athletics and politics. Former International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage once stated,

This week we feature two new books on the podcast, both about corporate power. First, Zachary Roth has written The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (Crown, 2016).

Russell Rickford is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University. We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power and the Radical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an intellectual history of the Pan African nati...

In Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Diana L. Linden, an art historian of American art based in Claremont, California, explores the colorful–and political–murals of the leftist arti...

Dr. Jon Hale, Assistant Professor of Educational History, Department of Teacher Education, College of Charleston, joins the New Books Network to discuss his new book, entitled The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movem...

In the introduction to Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (University of Hawaii Press, 2015), historian Simon Creak writes that Laos, a country that has never won an Olympic medal,

Seth Masket has written The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How they Weaken Democracy (Oxford UP, 2016). Masket is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Denver.

Known as the Iron Man of politics, Alben Barkley enjoyed a career that took him from rural Kentucky to the vice-presidency of the United States of America. In his book Alben Barkley: A Life in Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), James K.

Since World War II, the United States has repeatedly posited itself as a defender of democracy, using its military might to promote freedom abroad even as it ascended to the status of the world’s only superpower.

Robert Boatright, associate professor of political science at Clark University, is the editor of The Deregulatory Moment? A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws (University of Michigan Press, 2015).

Noriko Manabe’s new book is a compelling analysis of the content, performance style, and role of music in social movements in contemporary Japan. Paying special attention to the constraints that limit and censor people–both ordinary citizens and musici...

Though in many ways the forgotten man of Irish politics, John Redmond came closer to achieving the long-sought goal of Home Rule for Ireland than had his more illustrious predecessors Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell.

William Resh is the author of Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).

Who plans the hundreds of political rallies and events each year? Josh King’s new book, Off Script: An Advance Mans Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide (St. Martins Press, 2016) offers an answer.

As a trailblazing attorney, Bessie Margolin lived a life of exceptional achievement. At a time when the legal profession consisted almost entirely of men, she earned the esteem of her colleagues and rose to become one of the most successful Supreme Cou...

As the most populous country in Eastern Europe as well as the birthplace of the largest anticommunist dissident movement, Poland is crucial in understanding the end of the Cold War. During the 1980s, both the United States and the Soviet Union vied for...

Scott Meinke has just published Leadership Organizations in the House of Representatives: Party Participation and Partisan Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2016). He is associate professor of political science at Bucknell University.