New Books in American Studies
Episodes
Brittany Michelle Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)
24 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of ...
Liberation & the Literature of the Women’s Movement with Bess Wohl and Honor Moore
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Wednesday, December 17—“The best play I’ve seen this season,” says New York Magazine’s Sara Holdren about Liberation, Bess Wohl’s moving...
David Fleming, "A Big Mess in Texas: The Miraculous, Disastrous 1952 Dallas Texans and the Craziest Untold Story in NFL History" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
22 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today we are joined by David Fleming, Peabody-nominated correspondent for Meadowlark Media, longtime ESPN senior writer, and author of A Big Mess in ...
Christian Smith, "Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
22 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is traditional American religion doomed?Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of America...
Leo R. Chavez, "The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation" (Stanford UP, 2025)
21 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
News media and pundits too frequently perpetuate the notion that Latinos, both US-born and immigrants, are an invading force bent on destroying the Am...
Terry Kirby, "The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
20 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Newsmongers unfolds the seedy history of tabloid journalism, from the first printed ‘Strange Newes’ sheets of the sixteenth century to the se...
Amy Erdman Farrell, "Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA" (UNC Press, 2025)
19 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When eight-year-old Amy Erdman Farrell moved with her family to Akron, Ohio, in 1972, she found herself adrift in a sea of taunting boys and mean girl...
Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025)
18 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
American conservatism as we know it today is a West Texas export, argues College of Wooster professor Jeff Roche in The Conservative Frontier: Texas...
Peter Mancina, "On the Side of ICE: Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State" (NYU Press, 2025)
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the United States, local law enforcement agencies are legally and organizationally independent entities from federal law enforcement agencies like ...
David Nasaw, "The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II" (Penguin, 2025)
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In its duration, geographical reach, and ferocity, World War II was unprecedented, and the effects on those who fought it and their loved ones at home...
Mirya Holman, "The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy" (Temple UP, 2025)
14 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy (Temple UP, 2025) by Dr. Mirya Holman explicates the purpose, role, and ...
Joseph L Graves, "Why Black People Die Sooner: What Medicine Gets Wrong about Race and How to Fix It" (Columbia UP, 2025)
14 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates th...
Julian Schmid, "Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
12 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century (Edinburgh UP, 2025) by Dr. Julian Schmid considers ho...
Matt Sleat, "Post-Liberalism" (Polity, 2025)
12 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Liberalism may feel as though it has been around forever - as the "dominant ideology of the modern west" - but not even its advocates and detractors c...
Caitlin Wiesner, "Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime" (U Pennsylvania, 2025)
11 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the 1970s, a series of government agencies established to carry out the federal “war on crime” offered financial and ideological supp...
René Esparza, "From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS" (UNC Press, 2025)
11 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Shifting the focus of AIDS history away from the coasts to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, this impressive book uncovers how homonormativ...
Michael D. Dwyer, "Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt" (Oxford UP, 2025)
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of Hollywood's role in the shaping of the Rust Belt in t...
James Sears, "Queering Rehoboth Beach: Beyond the Boardwalk" (Temple UP, 2024)
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“Create A More Positive Rehoboth” was a decades-long goal for progress and inclusiveness in a charming beach town in southern Delaware. Rehoboth, ...
Benjamin Schneider, "The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution" (Island Press, 2025)
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution (Island Press, 2025), Benjamin Schneider argues that American city-building is ...
Gloria Browne-Marshall, "A Protest History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2026)
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Exploring 500 years of protest and resistance in US history—and how its force is foundational and can empower us to navigate our chaotic world In t...
Sylvia D. Hoffert, "Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town (University of Georgia Press, 2025), Dr. Sylvia Hoffert...
David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people fo...
José Blanco F. and Raúl J. Vázquez-López, "Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico: Taínos to Beauty Queens" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
07 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Analyzing dress, costume, and fashion in Puerto Rico, Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico: Taínos to Beauty Queens (Bloomsbury, 20...
Gwyneth Mellinger, "Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
06 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a deba...
Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The City and the Hospital (Chicago 2023) focuses on an urban paradox: American hospitals are imagined as sites of healing and care, and yet the peopl...
Jonathan S. Jones, "Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis" (UNC Press, 2025)
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, t...
Brooke Barbier, "King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father" (Harvard UP, 2023)
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father (Harvard UP, 2023) is a rollicking portrait of the paradoxical patriot, whose meas...
Julia Wagner, "Hester Street" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Joan Micklin Silver's groundbreaking debut feature film, Hester Street (1975), vividly portrays the immigrant experience through the eyes of Gitl (C...
Michael McCulloch, "Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers’ Houses in Early Twentieth-Century Detroit" (Temple UP, 2023)
30 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The dream of the modern worker’s house emerged in early twentieth-century America as wage earners gained access to new, larger, and better-equipped ...
Stefania Marghitu, "Teen TV" (Routledge, 2021)
30 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Stefania Marghitu's Teen TV (Routledge, 2021)explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ...
Benjamin Balthaser, "Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left" (Verso Books, 2025)
30 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since October 7, 2023, the world has witnessed a massive American Jewish uprising in support of Palestinian liberation. Through sit-ins in Congress or...
Chris Yogerst, "The Warner Brothers" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)
28 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formati...
Sabrina Mittermeier, "Fan Phenomena: Disney" (Intellect Books, 2023)
28 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sabrina Mittermeier's edited volume Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect Books, 2023) analyzes the fandom of Disney brands across a variety of media inc...
Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)
28 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the...
Deborah Carr, "Aging in America" (U California Press, 2023)
28 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The aging of America will reshape how we live and will transform nearly every aspect of contemporary society. Renowned life course sociologist Deborah...
Jonathan Eig, "King: A Life" (FSG, 2023)
27 Nov 2025
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...
Philip Rocco, "Counting Like a State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 US Census" (UP Kansas, 2025)
27 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Marquette University Political Scientist Phil Rocco has a new book focusing on the 2020 U.S. Census and how the states, localities, and federal govern...
Christina Cecelia Davidson, "Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation" (Duke UP, 2024)
26 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
H. C. C. Astwood: minister and missionary, diplomat and politician, enigma in the annals of US history. In Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and t...
Eric King, "A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon" (PM Press, 2025)
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A Clean Hell opens the doors of America’s most secretive prison and lets the reader step into the cell to experience all the horrors the Federal Bur...
Renata Keller, "The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War" (UNC Press, 2025)
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United St...
Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
24 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edg...
John Bodnar, "Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11" (UNC Press, 2021)
22 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
September 11th, 2001 marked the beginning of the so-called war on terror, but the attacks of that day also re-ignited battles over the nature of Ameri...
Julie Dobrow, "Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage" (NYU Press, 2025)
22 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Like any set of star-crossed lovers, Elaine and Charles came from different worlds. Elaine, an acclaimed childhood poet from a remote corner of the Ma...
Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, "Videotape" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
22 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind th...
Yanqiu Zheng, "In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
21 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean for a country to seek admiration — and what kinds of institutions try to make that admiration possible? Yanqiu Zheng’s In Sear...
Can America Still Lead? Foreign Policy in an Age of Division with Joel Rubin
21 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when America loses its foreign-policy playbook? RBI acting director Eli Karetny talks with veteran diplomat and policy strategist Joel Ru...
Simon Appleford, "Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
21 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America (U Virginia Press, 2023) is the first book-length critical examination of th...
160* Hannah Arendt's Refugee Politics (JP)
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
John's “Arendt's Refugee Politics” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hanna...
Karen Auman, "The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores some of Georgia’s earliest settlers, the Sal...
Ana Patricia Rodríguez, "Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area" (University of Arizona Press, 2025)
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the re...
Nicholas Buccola, "One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal" (Princeton UP, 2025)
19 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.'s decade-long clash over th...
Tim Seiter, "Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios" (U Texas Press, 2025)
19 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A richly detailed history of daily life for colonial Spanish soldiers surviving on the eighteenth-century Texas Gulf Coast. In 1775, Spanish King Car...
Heath Pearson, "Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town" (Duke UP, 2024)
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town (Duke UP, 2024), Heath Pearson showcases dynamic, interdependent comm...
Vanessa S. Williamson, "The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History" (Basic Books, 2025)
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Americans have always fought over the meaning of freedom and equality. What is not commonly recognized is that the battles most pivotal in defining ou...
Michelle McSweeney, "OK" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees)....
Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of S...
Ethan W. Ris, "Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, E...
Doug MacCash, "Mardi Gras Beads" (Louisiana UP, 2022)
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana’s iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads (2022) delves into the history of this celebr...
Christina Lane, "Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock" (Chicago Review Press, 2020)
16 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include t...
Joe Allen, "The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS" (Haymarket Books, 2020)
16 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If the 20th Century was the American Century, it was also UPS's Century. Joe Allen's The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS (Haymarket ...
Miranda S. Spivack, "Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back" (The New Press, 2025)
15 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize A groundbreaking look at how ordinary people are fighting back against their local and state governments to ...
David Garland, "Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment" (Princeton UP, 2025)
14 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The United States has long been an international outlier, with a powerful business class, a weak social state, and an exceptional gun culture. In Law...
David Kieran, "Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military's Mental Health Crisis" (NYU Press, 2019)
14 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The surprising story of the Army's efforts to combat PTSD and traumatic brain injury The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a tremendous toll on...
Carolyn T. Adams et. al, "Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century" (Penn Press, 2025)
14 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Informed by current scholarship and richly illustrated with full-color photographs and maps, Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First...
Ronald Angelo Johnson, "Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution" (Cornell UP, 2025)
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of he...
Caroline Jack, "Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism...
Joseph P. Viteritti, "Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education" (Oxford UP, 2025)
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education and demands to desegregate public schools, race and class remain the most reliable predictors of edu...
Lars Cornelissen, "Neoliberalism and Race" (Stanford UP, 2025)
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neolib...
Jason A. Higgins, "Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
10 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (University of Mass. Press, 2024), Dr. Jason Higgins examines the connections betw...
Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
09 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relations...
Shoshana Walter, "Rehab: An American Scandal" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
08 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the...
David T. Beito, "FDR: A New Political Life" (Open Universe, 2025)
07 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
David Beito's new book brings to bear the latest historical scholarship to shed light on the life and achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Profe...
House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to...
Diane T. Feldman, "Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi (UP Mississippi, 2025) chronicles...
Jack B. Greenberg and John A. Dearborn, "Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Political Scientists Jack Greenberg (Yale University) and John Dearborn (Vanderbilt University) have a new book that focuses on the idea of presidenti...
Carol Mason, "From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary" (U California Press, 2025)
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactic...
Mimi Abramovitz, "Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present" (Routledge, 2025)
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the fourth edition of Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present, drawing on important feminist concep...
Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciti...
Rebecca L. Davis, "Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America" (Norton, 2024)
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year From an esteemed sc...
Shaul Kelner, "A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized To Free Soviet Jews" (NYU Press, 2025)
02 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Winner of The 74th National Jewish Book Award: American Jewish Studies Celebrate 350 Award Reveals the mass mobilization tactics that help...
Linda Upham-Bornstein, "'Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender': Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law during the Great Depression" (Temple UP, 2023)
02 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
During the Great Depression, the proliferation of local taxpayers’ associations was dramatic and unprecedented. The justly concerned members of thes...
Rob Wells, "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)
31 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike o...
Democratic Dialogues: Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A podcast from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy Center on Global Democracy About the Podcast Each week, co-hosts Rachel Beatty ...
Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)
28 Oct 2025
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 mo...
Javier Wallace, "Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams" (Duke UP, 2025)
26 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every year, hundreds of international student athletes arrive in the U.S. chasing their basketball dreams — many on F-1 student visas. But for some ...
Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
26 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of ...
Hector Vera, "Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America" (Vanderbilt UP, 2025)
25 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its...
Sarah Smarsh, "Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class" (Scribner, 2024)
25 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on ...
Tami Parr, "Goats in America: A Cultural History" (Oregon State UP, 2025)
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The humble goat has played a surprising and important role throughout the history of the United States. Despite this, goats are often overlooked by ma...
Becky M. Nicolaides, "The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945" (Oxford UP, 2024)
22 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The adoption of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, triggered a wave of immigration to the U.S. not seen since before the First World War. But these newcomer...
Aileen Teague, "Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)
22 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings ...
Peter D. Blackmer, "Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers" (UVA Press, 2025)
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers (UVA Press, 2025) explores the local dynamics, natio...
Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
20 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it...
Ada Ferrer, "Cuba: An American History" (Scribner, 2021)
19 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“No country is ever just one thing.” In her new book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), NYU historian Ada Ferrer shows this again and a...
Nancy Newman, "Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York: Including Twenty-Two New Settings of Period Tunes" (SUNY Press, 2025)
18 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Upstate New York's Anti-Rent Movement is considered the last struggle over feudalism in the United States. Tenant farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk region ...
Andrea Freeman, "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The first and definitive history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black...
Michael T. Bertrand, "Southern History Remixed: On Rock 'n' Roll and the Dilemma of Race" (UP Florida, 2024)
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Southern History Remixed: On Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race (UP Florida, 2024) spotlights the key role of popular music in the shaping...
Francis L. Sampson, "Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre" (Catholic U of America Press, 2023)
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films...
Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz" (Duke UP, 2024)
15 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and producti...
Gustav Meibauer, "The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument" (Policy Press, 2025)
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Suggested additional channels: Political Science, National Security, American Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern European Studies, New Books wi...