New Books in American Studies
Episodes
Zalman Newfield, "Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey Out of Hasidism" (Temple UP, 2026)
23 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Orthodox Jewish community, Zalman Newfield was raised in an atmosphe...
American Masterpiece: The Civil War Diaries of George Templeton Strong with Brenda Wineapple and Geoff Wisner
23 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Wednesday, February 18—Called “the greatest American diary of the nineteenth century,” the journal of the patrician New York City lawyer George ...
Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)
22 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A Histor...
Jamila Michener and Mallory E. Sorelle, "Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power" (Princeton UP, 2026)
22 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Each year, as many as 250 million Americans face civil legal problems like eviction, debt collection, and substandard housing. These problems are disp...
Mark D. Steinberg, "Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa, and Bombay: Sex, Crime, Violence, and Nightlife in the Modern City" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
21 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Using public storytelling as a driving force, Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa, and Bombay: Sex, Crime, Violence, and Nightlife in the Mo...
Mark Thomas Edwards, "Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor" (Oxford UP, 2023)
21 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His "Today and Tomorrow" columns attract...
Erick Guerra, "Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction" (Island Press, 2025)
20 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The world’s largest public works investment visible from space, the Interstate Highway System and the hundreds of thousands of miles of supporting r...
Kenneth Lowande, "False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age The University of Chicago Press, 2024 Kenneth Lowande Political Scientist ...
David M. Henkin, "Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball" (Oxford UP, 2026)
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
All over the world, masses of people watch, follow, document, and obsess over baseball. Everything remarkable about the impact of baseball derives fro...
Emily Dufton, "Addiction, Inc: Medication-assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
18 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How the war on drugs created the gold standard treatment for addiction--until America's opioid crisis got privatized for profit, to the detriment of p...
John Drabinski, "So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
18 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What happens if we turn to James Baldwin, not just for the amazing quotations and excellent photos, but as a critical theorist? What if we read his no...
Brian Hallstoos, "Sol Butler: An Olympian's Odyssey through Jim Crow America" (U Illinois Press, 2026)
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A superstar in both football and track and field Sol Butler pioneered the parlaying of sports fame into business prosperity. In Sol Butler: An Oly...
Cassandra Shepard, "Settler Colonialism is the Disaster: A Critique of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina and During the COVID-19 Pandemic" (U Illinois Press, 2026)
15 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Settler Colonialism is the Disaster: A Critique of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina and During the COVID-19 Pandemic (U Illinois Press, 2026) ...
Marc James Carpenter, "The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest" (Yale UP, 2025)
14 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest (Yale UP, 2025) by Marc James Carpenter is a history book about hist...
Laura K. Field, "Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right" (Princeton UP, 2025)
13 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Political Theorist Laura Field has written an insightful and detailed exploration of the people and the ideas that have shaped the second Trump Admini...
Digestive Belonging, Trans-Species Sensing & Care in America’s Dairyland
13 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we speak with Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Katy Overstreet. Katy is coordinator f...
Heather Ann Thompson, "Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage" (Pantheon, 2026)
12 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this masterful, groundbreaking work Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2...
Zaid Adhami, "Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith" (UNC Press, 2025)
12 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In one of the most important books published in 2025—Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith, published by UNC Press—Zaid Ad...
Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)
11 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (Princeton UP, 2025) shatters one of the...
Ron Hayduk, "Untangling the Political Roots of Immigration and Inequality in the United States" (Routledge, 2026)
11 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Untangling the Political Roots of Immigration and Inequality in the United States (Routledge, 2026) examines the causes, consequences, and politi...
Jameson R. Sweet, "Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Historical accounts tend to neglect mixed-ancestry Native Americans: racially and legally differentiated from nonmixed Indigenous people by U.S. gover...
Nicholas Boggs, "Baldwin: A Love Story" (FSG, 2025)
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Baldwin: A Love Story (FSG, 2025) the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relati...
Charles Alistair McCrary, "Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
09 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
"Sincerely held religious belief" is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Cou...
Gloria Browne-Marshall, "A Protest History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2026) Revisited
09 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In December 2025, writer, civil rights attorney, playwright, speaker, and Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Glo...
Ashlyn Hand, "Prioritizing Faith: International Religious Freedom and U.S. Foreign Policy" (NYU Press, 2025)
08 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 formally established the promotion of religious freedom as a U.S. foreign policy and national security...
Isaac Butler, "The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
08 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling towar...
Garrett Felber, "A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre" (AK Press, 2025)
06 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The first biography of the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism. A Co...
Nina Bandelj, "Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting" (Princeton UP, 2026)
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Parents are exhausted. When did raising children become such all-consuming, never-ending, incredibly expensive, and emotionally absorbing effort? In t...
Dianna N. Watkins-Dickerson, "A Black Woman for President: Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris" (UP of Mississippi)
04 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout US history, only three Black women—Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris—have given successfully recognized bids for...
Dafeng Xu, "Chinatown: San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake and the Paradox of American Immigration Policy" (JHU Press, 2026)
04 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
San Francisco's Chinatown is the oldest Chinatown in North America and one of the largest Chinese enclaves outside Asia. Spanning 30 city blocks and h...
Jens Ludwig, "Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually gro...
Luca Cottini, "The Rise of Americanism in Italy, 1888-1919" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a pivotal time for the United States as the nation emerged as a political and industrial powe...
Michael Casiano, "Let Us Alone: The Origins of Baltimore's Police State" (U Illinois Press, 2025)
01 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The racist roots of modern policing in Baltimore By the early twentieth century, postbellum assaults on civil rights and the advent of Jim Crow expan...
Rolando Pujol, "The Great American Retro Road Trip: A Celebration of Roadside Americana" (Artisan Publishers, 2025)
31 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Rolando Pujol's The Great American Retro Road Trip: A Celebration of Roadside Americana (Artisan, 2025) celebrates the nostalgic pleasures of Americ...
Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine
30 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Despite reform efforts that have grown in scope and intensity over the last two decades, the machine of American mass incarceration continues to flour...
Stephen Bezruchka, "Born Sick in the USA: Improving the Health of a Nation" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
30 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How healthy you are is dependent on where you live. Americans suffer more cancers, heart disease, mental illness, and other chronic diseases than thos...
Mark Anthony Neal, "New Black Man" (Routledge, 2015)
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In honor of the twentieth anniversary of Mark Anthony Neal’s pivotal text New Black Man (Routledge, 2015), Mickell Carter interviews Neal abou...
LiLi Johnson, "Technologies of Kinship: Asian American Racialization and the Making of Family" (NYU Press, 2025)
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Delving into the complex interplay of race, kinship, and technology, Technologies of Kinship: Asian American Racialization and the Making of Family ...
Terry Williams, "Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York" (Columbia UP, 2024)
28 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, dis...
Betty Boyd Caroli, "A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing" (Oxford UP, 2026)
28 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Betty Boyd Caroli's biography of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch is the first full-length work on a seminal figure in the settlement house movement, which ...
Karin Wulf, "Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
27 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In eighteenth-century America, genealogy was more than a simple record of family ties—it was a powerful force that shaped society. Lineage: Genealo...
George Fisher, "Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)
27 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
George Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial M...
Damon Scott, "The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco" (U Texas Press, 2024)
26 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively hist...
Kong Pheng Pha, "Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality" (U Washington Press, 2025)
26 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This episode features Dr. Kong Pheng Pha discussing his recently published book, Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyp...
Justin Owen Rawlins, "Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance" (U Texas Press, 2024)
26 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, ...
Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
25 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their milita...
Kimberley Johnson, "Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis" (Cornell UP, 2025)
25 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Kimberley Johnson is about how the Black Power movement res...
Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023)
24 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America,...
Andrew Burstein, "Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
23 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently revi...
Ryan Donovan, "Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity" (Oxford UP, 2023)
23 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Broadway has body issues. What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able,...
Oline Eaton, "Finding Jackie: The Second Act of America's First Lady" (Diversion Books, 2023)
22 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented (Diversion Books, 2023), scholar and writer Oline Eaton examines the story of an era's biggest...
Emilie Connolly, "Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States" (Princeton UP, 2025)
22 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
From the earliest days of its founding, the United States set its sights on Native territory. Amid better-known “Indian wars,” the federal governm...
Brian D. Behnken, "Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025" (UNC Press, 2025)
21 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How police abuse ignited the Chicano movement in the Southwest Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest,...
Kendra D. Boyd, "Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
21 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers a...
O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, "We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the spring of 1969, hundreds of workers, all Black and mostly female, went on strike at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital to ...
Kellen Hoxworth, "Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance (Northwestern UP, 2024) Dr. Kellen Hoxworth presents a sweeping history of racialized performan...
Christopher Lynch, "Formulating Foster: Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth" (Oxford UP, 2025)
19 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen C. Foster (1826–1864) was a prolific song composer. A few of his minstrel tunes have become so enmeshed in American musical culture that the...
John Samuel Harpham, "Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2025)
19 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The period from 1550 to 1700 was critical in the development of slavery across the English Atlantic world. During this time, English discourse about s...
Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
19 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Mark Christian Thompson's book, Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2022) examines the changin...
Zeke Hernandez, "The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)
18 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Immigration is one of the most controversial topics in the United States―and everywhere else. Pundits, politicians, and the public usually depict im...
Sonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)
18 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just fou...
Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)
17 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Ol...
Lottie Whalen, "Radicals & Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern" (Reaktion, 2023)
17 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Radicals & Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern (Reaktion, 2023) is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the to...
A. Mechele Dickerson, "The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream" (U California Press, 2026)
17 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century The US middle class was a product of state a...
Emily Walton, "Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England" (Stanford UP, 2025)
16 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A racial demographic transition has come to rural northern New England. White population losses sit alongside racial and ethnic minority population...
T. R. Johnson, "New Orleans: A Writer's City" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
16 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels,...
Jose Eos Trinidad, "Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education" (Oxford UP, 2025)
16 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have crea...
Mary E. Stuckey, "Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are" (UP of Kansas, 2025)
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Mary E. Stuckey, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, has a brilliant new book that dive...
Michael J. Illuzzi, "Mending the Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age" (UP of Kansas, 2025)
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Political Scientist Michael Illuzzi has a fascinating new book on peoplehood in the United States, focusing on different political actors at different...
Lukas Foss: A "New American Music Series" Gallatin Lecture, April 15, 1982
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s a...
Theodore J. Karamanski, "Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
14 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Theodore Karamanski joins fellow Lake Michigan enthusiast Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan. ...
Fernando Luiz Lara, "Spatial Theories for the Americas: Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024)
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, land...
Steven J. Brady, "Less Than Victory: American Catholics and the Vietnam War" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The first book of its kind, Less Than Victory: American Catholics and the Vietnam War (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Dr. Steven J. Brady explores both the ...
Robert D. Bland, "Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation" (UNC Press, 2026)
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their ...
Adam S. Ferziger. "Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism" (NYU Press, 2025)
12 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode Drora Arussy speaks with historian Adam S. Ferziger about his latest book, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation...
Chris Boucher, "Harry "Bucky" Lew: A Biography of the First Black Professional Basketball Player" (McFarland, 2026)
11 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Harry "Bucky" Lew leapt over pro basketball's color wall in 1902 and continued to integrate every single role in the game over the next 25 years. He w...
Brooke Kroeger, "Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism" (Knopf, 2023)
11 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (Knopf, 2023) is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put...
Book Talk 69: American Medium, with Eyal Peretz
10 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What is “America” not only as a political entity but in our imagination? How can we properly envision America, without repeating clichés that fra...
Jason Isralowitz, "Nothing to Fear: Alfred Hitchcock and the Wrong Men" (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2023)
09 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock focused his lens on an issue that cuts to the heart of our criminal justice system: the risk of wrongful conviction. The res...
Paul J. Gutacker, "The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past" (Oxford UP, 2023)
08 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bibl...
Mary M. Burke, "Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
07 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview, she discusses her book, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (Oxford UP, 2023), which inserts successive Irish-Am...
W. Ralph Eubanks, "When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land" (Beacon Press, 2026)
07 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted fo...
Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that B...
Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023)
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career...
Matthew Davis, "A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
04 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Mount Rushmore is something of an American Rorschach test. Some look at the monument and see American patriotic ideals carved into a mountainside. Oth...
Philip A. Wallach, "Why Congress" (Oxford UP, 2023)
03 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
To achieve legitimate self-government in America's extended Republic, the U.S. Constitution depends on Congress harmonizing the country's factions thr...
Scott A. Mitchell, "The Making of American Buddhism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
02 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in...
Jean Pfaelzer, "California, a Slave State" (Yale UP, 2023)
01 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russ...
Anna Zeide, "US History in 15 Foods" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
31 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that repre...
Kathryn Cornell Dolan, "Breakfast Cereal: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
30 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Breakfast Cereal: A Global History (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Kathryn Dolan presents the long, distinguished and surprising history of breakfast cereal....
Richard Bradford, "Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
29 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's life ...
Helle Strandgaard Jensen, "Sesame Street: A Transnational History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
29 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford UP, 2023), author Helle Strandgaard Jensen tells the story of how the American television show bec...
Andrew Porwancher, "American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews" (Princeton UP, 2025)
28 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A scion of the Protestant elite, Theodore Roosevelt was an unlikely ally of the waves of impoverished Jewish newcomers who crowded the docks at Ellis ...
Jack Z. Bratich, "On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death" (Common Notions, 2022)
28 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death (Common Notions, 2022) Dr. Jack Z. Bratich explores the cultural elements in American society that suppor...
Ruby Oram, "Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
27 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 (U Chicago Press, 2025) historian Ruby Oram tells the ...
Elizabeth Suhay, "Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025)
26 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Faith in the American Dream—the idea that anyone who works hard can achieve success—has waned in the 21st century. Decreases in economic mobility,...
Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025)
26 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After nearly four decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, threats, and backdoor channels, the United States has failed to stop North Korea's nucl...
Trymaine Lee, "A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America" (St. Martins, 2025)
26 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why,...
Sustainability, Identity, Artisans and Designers
25 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Long before the fashion industry formally addressed questions of sustainability and advocated for “slow fashion,” a husband-and-wife design duo we...
Colin Williamson, "Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
25 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opus Fantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent sc...