New Books in American Studies

Josh Shepperd, "Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

26 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Despite uncertain beginnings, public broadcasting emerged as a noncommercial media industry that transformed American culture. In Shadow of the New D...

Bradley C. S. Watson, "Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea" (U Notre Dame Press, 2020)

25 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

“Only recently have scholars outside the historical profession identified progressivism for what it was and continues to be: a fundamental rupture w...

Thomas W. Lippman, "Get the Damn Story: Homer Bigart and the Great Age of American Newspapers" (Georgetown UP, 2023)

24 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the decades between the Great Depression and the advent of cable television, when daily newspapers set the conversational agenda in the United Stat...

Craig Nelson, "V Is For Victory: Franklin Roosevelt's American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II" (Scribner, 2023)

24 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

As Nazi Germany began to conquer Europe, America’s military was unprepared, too small, and poorly supplied. The Nazis were supported by robust Germa...

Jean Pfaelzer, "California, a Slave State" (Yale UP, 2023)

23 Jun 2023

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...

Postscript: Politics, Identity, and the US Supreme Court

23 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Postscript invites authors to react to contemporary political events that engage their scholarship. Since the Supreme Court is wrapping up their term,...

Erik Kojola, "Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range" (NYU Press, 2023)

23 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in t...

Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

22 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies...

Michael Gray, "Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan-Vol. 1 Language & Tradition" (FM Press, 2023)

22 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Song & Dance Man is an established classic, available again for Dylan fans and scholars alike on the 50th Anniversary of the original edition. The wo...

Samuel G. Freedman, "Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights" (Oxford UP, 2023)

21 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

From one of the country's most distinguished journalists, a revisionist and riveting look at the American politician whom history has judged a loser, ...

Richard Duncan, "The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)

21 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century, economist and bestselling author Richard Duncan lays out a farsighted strategy to ...

Giulia Pecorella, "The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression" (Routledge, 2021)

21 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Giulia Pecorella's The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression (Routledge, 2021) traces the position of the United States of America o...

Rani-Henrik Andersson and Janne Lahti, "Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America: Rethinking Finnish Experiences in Transnational Spaces" (Helsinki UP, 2022)

20 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Finns tell a story about themselves as a people exempt from European colonialism. Not so, argue the contributors to Finnish Settler Colonialism in No...

M. Todd Bennett, "Neither Confirm Nor Deny: How the Glomar Mission Shielded the CIA from Transparency" (Columbia UP, 2022)

20 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

When the Soviet K-129 submarine sank in the Pacific Ocean in 1968, the CIA saw a possible treasure trove of intelligence information on Soviet militar...

The Ascendance of Social Conservatism in the Public Square

20 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Within political discussions on the Right, social conservatism is on the rise. Why did the Right have a libertarian phase, and why is it leaving it be...

Rachel E. Walker, "Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

19 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Between the 1770s and 1860s, people across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. Physiognomy refers to using facial ...

Frank Costigliola, "Kennan: A Life Between Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2023)

19 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy--and one of its most com...

The History of the American Shopping Mall and Its Cultures

19 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Writer and design critic Alexandra Lange talks about her book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Shopping Mall (Bloombury, 2023), w...

Vicky Johnson-Dahl, "Buffalo in 50 Maps" (Belt, 2023)

17 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The third entry in Belt's urban cartography series, Buffalo in 50 Maps (2023) offers a truly unique view of the City of Good Neighbors, from the Ea...

Lloyd Daniel Barba, "Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California" (Oxford UP, 2022)

16 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Lloyd Daniel Barba's book Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (Oxford UP, 2022) traces the development of Pentecostalis...

Anna Piela, "Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

16 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In recent years the niqab has emerged as one of the most ubiquitous symbols of everything that is perceived to be wrong with Islam: barbarity, backw...

Susan McCall Perlman, "Contesting France: Intelligence and US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

16 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

With the defeat of France in 1940 by the Germans during World War II, its status as a world power was deeply shaken. It wasn't until the liberation by...

Allan E. S. Lumba, "Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines" (Duke UP, 2022)

15 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Duke UP, 2022) investigates the ways in which racial and c...

Judith Hicks Stiehm, "Janet Reno: A Life" (UP of Florida, 2023)

14 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this first full biography of former United States attorney general Janet Reno (1938–2016), Judith Hicks Stiehm describes the independent and unco...

Moon-Ho Jung, "Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State" (U California Press, 2022)

14 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

As the American imperial project in the Pacific World grew at the end of the nineteenth century, so too did the American security and intelligence sta...

The Rhetoric of Decline

13 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of High Theory, Jed Esty talks about the Rhetoric of Decline. Declinism names the contradictory political narrative that America will ...

Nate G. Hilger, "The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis" (MIT Press, 2023)

13 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, a...

Samuel J. Redman, "The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience" (NYU Press, 2022)

13 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the...

Lee Lowenfish, "Baseball's Endangered Species: Inside the Craft of Scouting by Those Who Lived It" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

11 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Scouting has been called pro baseball’s personalized way of renewing itself from year to year and a pathway to the game’s past. It takes a very sp...

Jacqueline Beatty, "In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America" (NYU Press, 2023)

11 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Patriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women’s rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploi...

Paul Metsa and Rick Shefchik, "Blood in the Tracks: The Minnesota Musicians Behind Dylan's Masterpiece" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

11 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The story of the Minneapolis musicians who were unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album. When Bob Dyl...

Kathryn Olivarius, "Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom" (Harvard UP, 2022)

10 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the ...

Patrick J. Charles, "Vote Gun: How Gun Rights Became Politicized in the United States" (Columbia UP, 2023)

10 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today, gun control is one of the most polarizing topics in American politics. However, before the 1960s, positions on firearms rights did not necessar...

Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, "The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule Within America's Universities" (Duke UP, 2023)

10 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Critics of contemporary US higher education often point to the academy’s “corporatization” as one of its defining maladies. However, in The Aut...

Amanda L. Van Lanen, "The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)

09 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the nineteenth century, most American farms had a small orchard or at least a few fruit-bearing trees. People grew their own apple trees or purchas...

James Kyung-Jin Lee, "Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority" (Temple UP, 2021)

08 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The pressures Asian Americans feel to be socially and economically exceptional include an unspoken mandate to always be healthy. Nowhere is this more ...

Mark R. Warren, "Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline" (Oxford UP, 2021)

07 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline...

Michael T. Friedman, "Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption" (Cornell UP, 2023)

07 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption (Cornell UP, 2023), Michael T. Friedman observes that as cathedrals represented power...

Robin James, "The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence" (UNC Press, 2023)

07 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In 1983, an Ohio radio station called WOXY launched a sonic disruption to both corporate rock and to its conservative home region, programming an omni...

Erik J. Dahl, "The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough" (Georgetown UP, 2023)

06 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Epidemiologists and national security agencies warned for years about the potential for a deadly pandemic, but in the end global surveillance and warn...

The History of 19th-Century Quarantine Politics: A Conversation with David S. Barnes

05 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

David S. Barnes, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about his book, Lazaretto: How Phil...

J. T. Roane, "Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place" (NYU Press, 2023)

04 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023), author J. T. Roane shows how working-class Black communitie...

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, "The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States" (Columbia UP, 2023)

04 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media...

Chris Suh, "The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion" (Oxford UP, 2023)

03 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion (Oxford UP, 2023) traces how American ideas ...

Lorenzo Costaguta, "Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

03 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costagu...

Kidada E. Williams, "I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

02 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in...

You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape

02 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Writer and educator Marcus Gilroy-Ware (After the Fact?, Filling the Void) speaks with Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner about their new book ...

Yang Va Lor, "Unequal Choices: How Social Class Shapes Where High-Achieving Students Apply to College" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

30 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

High-achieving students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to end up at less selective institutions compared to their so...

Joel Lafayette Fletcher III, "With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)

28 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of Queer Voices I talk to Joel Lafayette Fletcher III about his book With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life (UP of Mis...

Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons

28 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Dungeons and Dragons expert Jon Peterson (The Elusive Shift, Game Wizards) speaks with Peter Bebergal (Season of the Witch, Too Much to Dream) about ...

Scott McGaugh, "Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin: The Glider Pilots of World War II" (Osprey, 2023)

28 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This book distills war down to individual young men climbing into defenseless gliders made of plywood, ready to trust the towing aircraft that would p...

Tazeen M. Ali, "The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam" (NYU Press, 2022)

28 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the...

Chris Campion and Bud Lee, "The War is Here: Newark 1967" (ZE Books, 2023)

28 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver John Smith by local police, the city of Newark--already a tinderbox, became a hot...

Strategy and Saratoga: A Conversation with Kevin Weddle

27 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

At the Battle of Saratoga, the tide of the Revolutionary War turned in favor of unlikely victors: the American patriots.  What were the major strateg...

Naoíse Mac Sweeney, "The West: A New History of an Old Idea" (Dutton, 2023)

27 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Naoíse Mac Sweeney presents a radical new account of how the idea of the West has shaped our history, told through the stories of fourteen fascin...

Evelyn Alsultany, "Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion" (NYU Press, 2022)

26 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion (NYU Press, 2022), Evelyn Alsultany, Professor at the University of Southern California, argues t...

Missing: Men at Work — A Conversation with Nick Eberstadt

26 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Over six million prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work; America's low unemployment rate hides the fact that many men have dropped out...

Kenneth Mondschein, "On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)

26 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Western culture has been obsessed with regulating society by the precise, accurate measurement of time since the Middle Ages. In On Time: A History o...

Saskia Coenen Snyder, "A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting" (Oxford UP, 2022)

25 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

During the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of ...

Party

24 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Sheila Liming talks about the party, social gatherings that occasion joy and dread and various emotions in between. The party is both a pause and an a...

America & Democracy Ep. 5: Brandon Terry on MLK

23 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the final episode of this series, Brandon Terry, political theorist and African American Studies scholar at Harvard discusses the life and work o...

Money or Meaning? A Discussion on Choice and Restlessness with Ben and Jenna Storey

23 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What kinds of tools do we need to make big decisions, and why aren't our universities training us to make them? Are universities doing students a diss...

James Zarsadiaz, "Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A." (U California Press, 2022)

23 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The myth of the frontier West found its home in America's late twentieth century suburbs, argues University of San Francisco associate professor James...

Rebecca Brückmann, "Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation" (U Georgia Press, 2021)

22 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation (U Georgia Press, 2021) offers a comparative sociocultural and spatia...

Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, "From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)

21 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969 (U Nebraska Press, 2020), Alicia Gutierrez-Romine examines the history ...

Christopher H. Evans, "Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard" (Oxford UP, 2022)

21 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most prominent American social reformers of the late nineteenth century. As the long-time president of the ...

Book Talk 60: Cleo McNellly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn"

20 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of Amer...

America & Democracy Ep. 3: Carol A. Stabile on the Red Scare

20 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this series of interviews from The MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping...

Carceral Capitalism

19 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Conor Rose reads from Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism. This extract, taken from the opening of the book, offers insight into the Black Lives Matte...

Kathryn J. McGarr, "City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

19 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Kathryn McGarr’s City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (U Chicago Press, 2022) explores foreign policy jour...

Landon Jones, "Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved into a Culture of Fans and Followers" (Beacon, 2023)

19 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Writer and editor Landon (Lanny) Jones, a former PEOPLE magazine editor, reveals how the cult of celebrity has shaped our politics, culture, and pers...

Mark Paul, "The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

18 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the provision of life's necessities, those basic condi...

Virginia Jackson, "Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric" (Princeton UP, 2023)

18 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth a...

Thom Shanker and Andrew Hoehn, "Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats" (Hachette Books, 2023)

17 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Again and again, American taxpayers are asked to open their wallets and pay for a national security machine that costs $1 trillion operate. Yet time...

The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Lee: A Conversation with Allen C. Guelzo

16 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Why should we study Robert E. Lee? Why did he make the fateful decision to betray his country? How should we judge Robert E. Lee? Allen C. Guelzo, Dir...

Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, "Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women" (Sandycove, 2023)

16 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Child abandonment, theft, kidnapping, prostitution, bigamy, and murder! Bad Bridget is a must-read examination of crime and Irish emigrant women in ...

Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer, "The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

16 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

America’s religious and political public forum is no longer confined to debates between liberals (be they Catholics or Protestants) and socially con...

Matthew Jagel, "Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia" (Northern Illinois UP, 2023)

15 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is a political history of Cambodia from ...

Pharmacological Histories Ep. 2: Mikkael A. Sekeres on the Drugs Fighting Leukemia

15 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This episode offers an insight into the work of leading cancer specialist and author of When Blood Breaks Down, Mikkael A. Sekeres. 1 in 2 people wi...

Michelle Smirnova, "The Prescription-To-Prison Pipeline: The Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain" (Duke UP, 2023)

15 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In The Prescription-To-Prison Pipeline: The Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain (Duke UP, 2023), Michelle Smirnova argues that the ongoing o...

Jonathan Eig, "King: A Life" (FSG, 2023)

13 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life (FSG, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights ico...

Alvin J. Henry, "Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

13 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel (U Minnesota Press, 2021) reinterprets key African American novels from the H...

Bill Steigerwald, "30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South" (Lyons Press, 2017)

13 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The dangerous, trailblazing work of a white journalist and black leader who struck a shocking early blow against legal segregation In 1948, most white...

Naomi McDougall Jones, "The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood" (Beacon, 2020)

12 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood (Beacon, 2020) by Naomi McDougall Jones is a brutally honest look a...

Maria L. Quintana, "Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

12 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) explores the origins of twentieth-century U.S. guestwo...

John Klaess, "Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City" (Duke UP, 2022)

12 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City (Duke UP, 2022), John Klaess tells the story of rap's emergence on New York City's air...

Philip Clayton Shackelford, "Rise of the Mavericks: The U.S. Air Force Security Service and the Cold War" (US Naval Institute Press, 2023)

12 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The U.S. Air Force had to struggle to establish itself as an independent branch of the American military, and originally was an extension of the Army....

Jack Parlett, "Fire Island" (Hanover Square Press, 2022)

11 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

A groundbreaking account of New York's Fire Island, chronicling its influence on art, literature, culture and queer liberation over the past century F...

Timothy Sandefur, "Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Freedom in an Age of Darkness" (Cato Institute, 2022)

11 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In 1943, three books appeared that changed American politics forever: Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of ...

Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value

10 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp read from Saturation, a book that offers an analysis of racial representation and controversy in the art world. Co...

Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication

10 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Co-Illusion, writer and critic David Levi Strauss, tracks the rise of Donald Trump and the media landscape that warped around him. In this intervi...

Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)

09 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking sp...

Christianity and the American Founding with Mark David Hall

09 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Questions about the nature of the American founding undergird our fraught political discourse: was the American Revolution justified? How religious we...

Karin Chenoweth, "Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement" (Harvard Education Press, 2021)

09 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement (Harvard Education Press, 2021), long-time education writ...

Gregory Harms, "No Politics, No Religion?: How America's Code of Conduct Conceals Our Unity" (Political Animal Press, 2022)

09 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Americans are told that they are divided and polarized, but is it true? No Politics, No Religion?: How America's Code of Conduct Conceals Our Unity ...

The Future of Guantanamo: A Discussion with James Connell

08 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Will Guantanamo ever be closed down? Some people are still there – all these years after 9/11. So why are they still held and when will it end? Jam...

Michael W. Hankins, "Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia" (Cornell UP, 2021)

08 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia (Cornell UP, 2021) brings us back to the post-Vietnam era, when...

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, "Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia" (Fordham UP, 2022)

08 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthod...

Kyla Sommers, "When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellion and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation's Capital" (New Press, 2023)

08 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible—or resulted in more p...

Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture

07 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Break On Through, Lucas Richert explores Anti-psychiatry, psychedelics, and radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of men...