New Books in American Studies

Lawrence Grossman, "Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945-2025" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)

13 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In American Judaism today, Orthodoxy is the fastest growing movement. However, Orthodoxy is anything but monolithic. Living in Both Worlds: Modern Or...

Naomi R. Williams, "A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

12 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Naomi R Williams is associate professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University. Their primary research interests include lab...

Jason Schneider, "That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of Hey Joe' and Popular Music's History of Violence" (Anvil Press, 2025)

12 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is the story of a song. Yet, it is a song that binds nearly every strand of 20th-century American popular music. “Hey Joe” was written someti...

Melissa M. Matthes, "When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter" (Harvard UP, 2021)

12 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises. In the afterma...

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

12 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fa...

David Singerman, "Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

11 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long a...

Anthony J. Knowles, "Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany" (Brill, 2025)

11 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany (Brill, 2025) reconstructs the industrial histo...

Kevin M. Schultz, "Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A bracing, accessible history of white American liberals—and why it’s time to change the conversation about them.If there’s one thing most Ameri...

Meghan Crnic, "The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores" (U Washington Press, 2025)

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For centuries, the ocean was seen as a place of danger and work, but by the late nineteenth century, northeastern shores of the United States became t...

Maria Fedorova, "Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) examines the US and Soviet exchange ...

John Minton, "Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the late 1930s, fieldworkers with the Works Progress Administration interviewed about 3,500 formerly enslaved people resulting in approximately 20,...

Clay Risen, "Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

08 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both “lays out the many mechanisms of re...

Zara Anishanslin, "The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2025)

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists...

Michael Glass, "Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How debt and speculation financed the suburban American dream and led to today’s inequalities In the popular imagination, the suburbs are synonymou...

Vartan Matiossian, "The Color of Choice: The Armenians and the Politics of Race in the United States and Germany (1890-1945)" (Brill, 2025)

06 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The extensive research literature on race has paid little attention to Armenians. Between the two world wars, they had to prove that they were free w...

Marion Orr, "House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr." (UNC Press, 2025)

06 Oct 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 1...

Jill Elaine Hasday, "We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality" (Oxford UP, 2025)

05 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for "We the People", too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society inclu...

Emma Ashford, "First Among Equals: U. S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World" (Yale UP, 2025)

05 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A fresh, concise roadmap for U.S. grand strategy in a multipolar world For the past thirty years, post-Cold War triumphalism and a desire to reshape t...

Raymond J. McKoski, "David Davis, Abraham Lincoln's Favorite Judge" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

03 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One of Abraham Lincoln's staunchest and most effective allies, Judge David Davis masterminded the floor fight that gave Lincoln the presidential nomin...

Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

02 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Kathleen Casey joins Jana Byars to talk about The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford UP, 2025). Purses and bags...

Robert F. Williams, "The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America's Cold War Army" (Cornell UP, 2025)

01 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America's Cold War Army (Cornell UP, 2025) explores how a small group of World War II airborne of...

Disco Sucks

30 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On July 12, 1979, Chicago’s Comiskey Park erupted into chaos during what was supposed to be a quirky baseball promotion. Shock radio jock Steve Dahl...

Scott Beekman, "The Last Gladiator: William Muldoon and the Making of American Sports" (U Texas Press, 2025)

27 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

William Muldoon was an infamous athlete whose prowess, savvy, and chicanery across his six-decade career led him to wealth, cultural importance, and p...

Aaron Cayer, "Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire" (U California Press, 2025)

26 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

By the end of the twentieth century, US architecture and engineering firms held more capital than entire countries, employed more people than were hou...

John L. Campbell, "Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

26 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since the Reagan era, conservatives in the United States have championed cutting taxes, especially for wealthy individuals and corporations, as the be...

Ecodefense: Dave Foreman and Earth First!’s Deep Ecology

25 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A cowboy hat-wearing Goldwater conservative named Dave Foreman got religion and then founded the most radical environmental group of recent memory, Ea...

Debra Michals, "She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

25 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the years after World War II, as women were being pushed from wartime jobs for returning soldiers, government and business leaders—and women them...

Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is a very special episode of the New Books Network, as the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon (UP of Mississippi, 2025), Dr. Constance B...

Mark Archuleta, "The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr: From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again" (U North Texas Press, 2025)

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1921 headlines across the country announced the death of Henry Starr, a burgeoning silent film star who was killed while attempting to rob a bank i...

Kate Haulman, "The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

23 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In May 1894, President Grover Cleveland gave a speech thanking those who gathered “to worship at this national shrine.” He was not referring to th...

Bob Wyss, "Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal" (University of California Press, 2025)

22 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For decades coal has been crucial to America's culture, society, and environment, an essential ingredient in driving out winter's cold, cooking meals,...

Tim Weiner, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century" (Mariner Books, 2025)

22 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 2007, Tim Weiner published the book Legacy of Ashes. It was a history of the CIA from its founding to the early 2000s. As a university student in ...

Calvin Schermerhorn, "The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made" (Yale UP, 2025)

21 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. J Calvin Schermerhorn is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Hi...

Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis, "Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism" (UP of Kansas, 2025)

21 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Nicholas Jacobs (Colby College) and Sidney Milkis (University of Virginia) have a new book, Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils o...

Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025)

20 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Conspiracy, mutiny and liberation on America’s waterfront by the award-winning author of The Slave Ship. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History o...

Jonathan White and Lucas Morel, "Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln" (Reedy Press, 2025)

20 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (Reedy Press, 2025), acclaimed scholars Lucas E. Morel and Jonathan W. W...

Rebecca Nagle, "By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land" (Harper, 2024)

17 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled, in a surprise decision, that treaties still on the books as US law meant that the Muscogee people of Oklahoma mai...

Michael Poznansky, "Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2025)

16 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the wake of World War II, the United States leveraged its hegemonic position in the international political system to gradually build a new global ...

Jessica B. Harris, "Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine" (Clarkson Potter, 2025)

16 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Discover the sweeping story of how Indigenous, European, and African traditions intertwined to form an entirely new cuisine, with over 90 recipes for ...

Lucy Sante, "Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (The Experiment, 2022)

14 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware,...

Keisha N. Blain, "Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights" (W.W. Norton, 2025)

14 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Even before they were recognized as citizens of the United States, Black women understood that the fights for civil and human rights were inseparable....

Laura Hobson Faure, "Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust" (Yale UP, 2025)

12 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The first account of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France—and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime At the eve...

Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, "Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

11 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) tells the story of an extrao...

Alfred L. Martin Jr. and Taylor Cole Miller eds., "The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

10 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai (Rutgers UP, 2025) is an accessible collection that explores the cultural, industrial, and historical impact ...

Andrea Louise Campbell, "Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes" (Princeton UP, 2025)

10 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why Americans favor progressive taxation in principle but not in practice Most Americans support progressive taxation in principle, and want the rich...

Thomas Graham, "Getting Russia Right" (Polity Press, 2023)

10 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That s...

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus

09 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus, by Betsy Golden Kellem, reveals the hidden history of early female circus perfo...

Is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? with Damon Linker

08 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We begin the new season of International Horizons by asking a crucial question: is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? RBI Deputy Director, Eli...

Breanne Pleggenkuhle and Joseph A. Schafer, "Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Adaptations in the US Criminal Justice System" (Southern Illinois UP, 2025)

08 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal...

Kevin J. Hayes, "Understanding Hunter S. Thompson" (U South Carolina Press, 2025)

07 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) pushed the boundaries of storytelling. While the writer is most recognized for the genre-bending work Fear and Loathin...

Katherine Fusco, "Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System" (Columbia UP, 2025)

06 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a nu...

Molly Worthen, "Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump" (Random House, 2025)

06 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of...

Daniel Horowitz, "Bear With Me: A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America" (Duke UP, 2025)

05 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From teddy bears and Winnie-the-Pooh to Smokey Bear, Yogi Bear, and Cocaine Bear, American popular culture has been fascinated with real and fictional...

Flannery Burke, "Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region" (U Washington Press, 2025)

03 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Just as easterners imagined the American West, westerners imagined the American East, reshaping American culture. Back East: How Westerners Invented ...

Brendan A. Shanahan, "Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1965" (Oxford UP, 2025)

03 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late n...

Wade Davies, "Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970" (UP of Kansas, 2020)

02 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The game of basketball is perceived by most today as an “urban” game with a locale such as Rucker Park in Harlem as the game’s epicenter (as wel...

Donald G. Nieman, "The Path to Paralysis: How American Politics Became Nasty, Dysfunctional, and a Threat to the Republic" (Anthem Press, 2024)

01 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Much has been written about political polarisation in the United States, but no one has examined it through the lens of recent U.S. history. There is ...

Glenn Ligon, "Distinguishing Piss from Rain" (Hauser & Wirth, 2024)

31 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

An expansive volume featuring over two decades of incisive reflections on race, art and pop culture by one of the greatest artists working today This ...

LaShawn Harris, "Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City" (Beacon, 2025)

30 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months beh...

Daniel Wortel-London, "The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

30 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances dep...

Andrew Fialka, "Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

30 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Fialka illustrates ...

Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

29 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For generations of Americans, the purse has been an essential and highly adaptable object, used to achieve a host of social, cultural, and political o...

Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta, "Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America" (Princeton UP, 2025)

29 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What does it mean to supervise a bank? And why does it matter who holds that power? In this episode, Sean H. Vanatta joins us to explore the hidden ma...

Steve Luxenberg, "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation" (Norton, 2019)

29 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices i...

Patrice D. Douglass, "Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence" (Stanford UP, 2025)

29 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford UP, 2025) Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between...

John Lisle, "Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

29 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The inside story of the CIA’s secret mind control project, MKULTRA, using never-before-seen testimony from the perpetrators themselves.Sidney Gottli...

Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football

28 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different...

Tracy Slater, "Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp" (Chicago Review Press, 2025)

28 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced Executive Order 9066, which authorized the confinement of tens of thousands of Japanese an...

Timothy Messer-Kruse, "Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution" (LSU Press, 2024)

27 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution (LSU Press, 2024) unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional...

Tom Arnold-Forster, "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography" (Princeton UP, 2025)

27 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers ...

Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., "Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune" (Ballantine, 2013)

26 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Bill Dedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and New York Times #1 bestselling author of Empty Mansions, shares the extraordinary s...

Elaine Weiss, "Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

26 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, follows that magisterial work with a work of equal scholarly ...

Gregory A. Daddis, "Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945" (Oxford UP, 2025)

25 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In a groundbreaking reassessment of the long Cold War era, historian Gregory A. Daddis argues that ever since the Second World War's fateful conclusio...

K. Ian Shin, "Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America's Pacific Century" (Stanford UP, 2025)

25 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode, which is co-hosted with Delaney Chieyen Holton, features Dr. K. Ian Shin discussing his recently published book, Imperial Stewards: Chi...

Susan C. Boyd, "Heroin: An Illustrated History" (Fernwood, 2022)

24 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Susan Boyd is a scholar/activist and Distinguished Professor emerita at the University of Victoria. Her research examines a variety of topics rela...

Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2025)

23 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the tr...

Marlee S. Bunch, "Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era"

22 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press, 2025), Dr. M...

Ben A. Vagle and Stephen G. Brooks, "Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China" (Oxford UP, 2025)

22 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China (Oxford UP, 2025) provides a systematic reevaluation of the balance of e...

Kathleen Wilson, "Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

21 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces...

Citizenship Stripping: You Are Not American

21 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Over the last two centuries, the US government has revoked citizenship to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all consid...

Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson, "Racial Resentment in the Political Mind" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

21 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disag...

Bench Ansfield, "Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" (Norton, 2025)

20 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series a...

Shennette Garrett-Scott, "Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal" (Columbia UP, 2019)

20 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard?  Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South.  Shennette Garrett-Scott's n...

Mary Bridges on US Bankers Abroad and the Making of a Global Superpower

20 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International...

Michael Hiltzik, "Golden State: The Making of California" (Mariner, 2025)

19 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

California has long reigned as the land of plenty, a place where the sun always shines and opportunity beckons. Even prior to its statehood in 1850, i...

Edward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia" (Yale UP, 2025)

18 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity. Two material artifacts defined the middle-class America...

Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

17 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s ...

Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

17 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Roll...

Matthew Goodman, "The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team" (Ballantine Books, 2019)

17 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The 1949-50 CCNY Beavers basketball team were one of the unlikeliest of champions in sports history. CCNY was a tuition-free in Harlem, New York, inte...

Ryan Griffiths, "The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work" (Oxford UP, 2025)

16 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Is the breakup of an increasingly polarized America into separate red and blue countries even possible? There is a growing interest in American seces...

Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)

16 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive, detailing her harrowing escape from ens...

W. Henry Sledge, "The Old Breed... The Complete Story Revealed" (Knox Press, 2025)

15 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Because events like D-Day and the Battle of Okinawa took place an entire lifetime ago, it is rare to find any new accounts and memories from veterans....

Prudence Peiffer, "The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever" (Harper, 2023)

15 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became th...

Bryon L. Garner, "Black Veteranality: Military Service and the Illusion of Inclusive Patriotism" (Routledge, 2025)

14 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Military service in the United States has long been associated with patriotism. But for Black veterans, this association with patriotism, love for cou...

Kenneth Jones, "African American Males and Video Games: How Gaming Technology Can Motivate and Enhance Learning" (Myers Education, 2025)

13 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

African American males are confronted with formidable barriers in their pursuit of quality education, resulting in stark disparities in academic perfo...

Garrett M. Graff, "When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

13 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

June 6, 1944—known to us all as D-Day—is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military triumphs. The surprise sunrise landing of more...

Meredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film" (U Georgia Press, 2018)

12 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example ...

Matthew R. Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, "Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)

12 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Matthew Sparks and Oliva Sizemore join Jana Byars for a fun, chilling, and thoughtful discussion about about Haint Country: Dark Tales from the Hill...

Melody Glenn, "Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis" (Beacon Press, 2025)

11 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her ER...

Alan M. Wald, "Bohemian Bolsheviks: Dispatches from the Culture and History of the Left" (Brill, 2025)

11 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For several decades now, Alan Wald has been thoroughly documenting the history of the literature and cultural output of the American left. While his n...