New Books in American Studies

Alexandra Freidus, "Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City" (NYU Press, 2025)

10 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City (NYU Press, 2025) argues that diversity and racial integration efforts ...

Terri Diane Halperin, “The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)

09 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Terri Diane Halperin has provided a political...

Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019)

09 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Harvard UP, 2019), the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning challenges the idea th...

Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America" (Oxford UP, 2021)

09 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment...

David D. Hall, "The Puritans: A Transatlantic History" (Princeton UP, 2019) 

09 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role...

Alan McPherson, "Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice" (UNC Press, 2019)

09 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On September 21, 1976, a car bomb exploded in Washington DC, killing a former Chilean diplomat named Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni...

Irvin Weathersby Jr., "In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space" (Viking, 2025)

08 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly do...

Robert Fitzgerald, "Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency" (UNC Press, 2025)

08 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Few politicians produced the musical reaction that Ronald Reagan did. His California-branded conservatism inspired countless young people to pick up g...

Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)

08 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous l...

Kit W. Myers, "The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States"(U California Press, 2025)

07 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode features Dr. Kit W. Myers, associate professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, d...

Teacher by Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives

07 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Teacher By Teacher traces the journey of the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education and is a deeply personal love letter to all the teachers in our lives....

Russell Shorto, “Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom” (Norton, 2017)

06 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Russell Shorto‘s Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (Norton, 2017) is a history of many revolutions, kaleidoscopic turns through six indiv...

Neil Roberts, “A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass” (UP of Kentucky, 2018)

06 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ birth. It can hardly be said that scholars have neglected Douglass; indeed, he is o...

Timothy W. Kneeland, "Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA" (Syracuse UP, 2021)

05 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Join me for an insightful and timely conversation with historian Timothy Kneeland about his book Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the...

Benjamin Francis-Fallon, "The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History" (Harvard UP, 2019)

04 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

While media pundits continually speculate over the future leanings of the so-called “Latino vote,” Benjamin Francis-Fallon historicizes how Latino...

Sarah E. K. Smith, "Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America" (UBC Press, 2025)

03 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

hat is the relationship between culture and trade? In Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America Sarah E. K. Smith, an Asso...

Anand Pandian, "Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down" (Stanford UP, 2025)

03 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump's harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States, the appeal of that politics of anger and fear. ...

Linda Gordon, "Seven Social Movements That Changed America" (LIveright, 2025)

02 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do social movements arise, wield power, and bring about meaningful change? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these and other salient ques...

Bradley Morgan, "Frank Zappa's America" (LSU Press, 2025)

02 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From his early albums with the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa established a reputation as a musical genius who pushed the limits of culture through...

Anthony Michael Petro, "Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars" (Oxford UP, 2025)

01 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the late twentieth century, artists were on the front lines of the culture wars. Leaders of the Christian Right in the U.S. made a national spectac...

Yuki Kato, "Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City" (NYU Press, 2025)

01 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been ...

Religion in the Lands That Became America

31 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Pr...

Arianne Edmonds, "We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

30 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Black press provided a blueprint to help Black Americans transition from slavery and find opportunities to a...

Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Random House, 2023)

29 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War...

Michael Stauch, "Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

28 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise o...

Mark R. Rank, "Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty" (Oxford UP, 2021)

26 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood ...

Joseph O. Jewell, "White Man’s Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era" (UNC Press, 2023)

25 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the sam...

Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022)

25 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and ...

Osita Nwanevu, "The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding" (Random House, 2025)

25 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Frustrated with our political dysfunction, wearied by the thinness of contemporary political discourse, and troubled by the rise of anti-democratic at...

Ashley Howard, "Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement" (UNC Press, 2025)

24 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode features Dr. Ashley Howard, assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa, discussing her book, ...

Luke A. Nichter, "The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election Of 1968" (Yale UP, 2024)

22 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A sitting Democratic president who chooses not to run for re-election, a vice president running out of the president’s shadow, and a Republican nomi...

Michael John Witgen, "Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America" (UNC Press, 2021)

21 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining much of their land in the Old Northwest—what’s now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnes...

Frank L. Jones, "Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age" (UP Kansas, 2020)

20 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In a 2012 opinion piece bemoaning the state of the US Senate, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank cited a “leading theory: There are no giants in...

Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov, "American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship" (UP of Kansas, 2021)

20 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

All nations make rules -- through their constitutions, legislatures, bureaucratic practices – about who counts as a citizen. American by Birth exa...

Jubilee (1978)

19 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the ninth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell traces the trans-Atlantic movement of artists associated with punk culture in New York and ...

Gary Kulik, "Conscientious Objectors at War: The Vietnam War's Forgotten Medics" (Texas Tech UP, 2025)

19 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

During the war in Vietnam, thousands of young men served as conscientious objector medics. They had been certified by their local draft boards as nonc...

Claudia Setzer, "The Progressives' Bible: How Scriptural Interpretation Built a More Just America" (Fortress Publishers, 2024)

18 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In her book, The Progressives' Bible: How Scriptural Interpretation Built a More Just America, (Fortress Press, 2024), Claudia Setzer argues that whi...

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, "Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

18 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orle...

Lily Hamourtziadou, "Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq" (Bristol UP, 2021)

16 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq (Bristol University Press, 2021), Lily Hamourtziadou’s investigation into civilian victi...

Sonia C. Gomez, "Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America" (NYU Press, 2024)

15 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Picture Bride, War Bride examines how the institution of marriage created pockets of legal and social inclusion for Japanese women during the period ...

Jeremy Black, "The Civil War" (Saint Augustine's Press, 2025)

14 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The American Civil War may have been more consequential to American history (and its global supremacy) than its Revolutionary War and participation in...

Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, "Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War" (Basic Books, 2021)

14 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A riveting account of the five most crucial days in twentieth-century diplomatic history: from Pearl Harbor to Hitler's declaration of war on the Unit...

Elizabeth Popp Berman, "Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy" (Princeton UP, 2022)

14 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious chan...

Alexander Lian, "Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

13 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A unique and thorough work of intellectual history and legal scholarship Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education (Cambridge Univ...

Andrew Herscher, "Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

12 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, Anishinaabe leaders granted land to a college where their children could be educated. At the time, the colonial sett...

Phil Tiemeyer, "Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants" (Cornell UP, 2025)

11 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants (Cornell University Press, 2025) is a global history of postwar aviation th...

Andrew S. Berish, "Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

10 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Andrew S. Berish. 2025. Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse. (U of Chicago Press, 2025) Some good words ...

Elana Levine, "Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History" (Duke UP, 2020)

07 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic,...

Dennard Dayle, "How to Dodge a Cannonball: A Novel" (Henry Holt, 2025)

06 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not j...

Ezra Glinter, "Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah" (Yale UP, 2024)

05 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, one of the world’s best-known Hasidic groups, is driven by the belief that we are on the verge of the messianic age. ...

John Bardes, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930" (UNC Press, 2024)

05 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024) reveals that Americans often assume that ...

Andrew Hartman, "Karl Marx in America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

05 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew Hartman To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. Peop...

Brent Z. Kaup and Kelly F. Austin, "The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease" (U of California Press, 2025)

04 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Brent Z. Kaup & Dr. Kelly F. Austi...

153: What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about Anticipatory Despair (JP)

03 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against antic...

Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson, "Why America Didn't Become Great Again" (Routledge, 2025)

02 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Examining the conditions that not only blocked attempts to make America great again, but actively made the country worse, Why America Didn't Become G...

Rebecca Jo Kinney, "Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt" (Temple UP, 2025)

02 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode we challenge the ideas about invisibility of Asian Americans in the urban Midwest by discussing Rebecca Jo Kinney’s Mapping AsiaTow...

Elisabeth Åsbrink, "1947: Where Now Begins" (Other Press, 2019)

01 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

An award-winning writer captures a year that defined the modern world, intertwining historical events around the globe with key moments from her perso...

Paul R. Beckett, "An Anatomy of Tax Havens: Europe, the Caribbean and the United States of America" (de Gruyter, 2023)

30 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tax havens in offshore lands like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas were once considered a rarity, the preserve of the super-rich. Today...

Matthew Wisnioski on the History of the Idea and Culture of “Innovation” in the United States

30 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Wisnioski, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, about his new book, Eve...

Sarah Gold McBride "Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

29 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the young nati...

Ross A. Kennedy, "The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)

28 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe (Taylor & Francis, 2025), spans 1914–1939 to provide a concise interpretation of the...

Char Miller, "Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning" (Oregon State UP, 2024)

28 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Fire is a means of control and has been deployed or constrained to levy power over individuals, societies, and ecologies. In Burn Scars: A Documenta...

Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)

27 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated div...

Stacy Horn, "Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York" (Algonquin Books, 2019)

27 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York's Blackwell's Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two pris...

Louis P. Masur, "A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship" (Oxford UP, 2025)

26 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Between May 21 and June 16, 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison went on a trip together through Upstate New York and parts of New England on hors...

How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America

26 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, (Harvard Education PR, 2024) Laura C. Chávez-Moreno uncovers the process throug...

Philip Kadish, "The Great White Hoax: Frauds, Forgeries, and 200 Years of Selling Racism in America"

24 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Fake news, outright political lies, a shamelessly partisan press, and the collapse of truth, civility, and shared facts, Dr. Philip Kadish argues, are...

Kevin J. Hayes, "Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin" (Oxford UP, 2025)

23 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

An exploration of the mind of one of America's most beloved Founding Fathers and most brilliant minds, through the books he read and his social circle...

Michael Broyles, "Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades That Changed a Country and Its Sounds" (Norton, 2024)

21 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Michael Broyles examines a wide variety of musical, technological, and social currents that helped to shape American music in Revolutions in American...

Kevin Nguyen, "My Documents" (One World, 2025)

20 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Kevin Nguyen, My Documents (One World, 2025) Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novel New Waves, published in 2020. He is the features editor at T...

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings" (Harper, 2025)

20 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfict...

Prema Kurien, "Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization Among New Americans" (Oxford UP, 2025)

19 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization Among New Americans (Oxford UP, 2025) looks at Indian Americans, currently the seco...

Howard A. Husock, "The Projects: A New History of Public Housing" (NYU Press, 2025)

18 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How housing policy failed the people it was designed to help -- and how to fix it As the US struggles to provide affordable housing, millions of Amer...

Leah Lax, "Not From Here: the Song of America" (Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie, 2024)

17 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When Leah Lax was asked to write an opera to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to accounts of upheaval, migration, an...

Ana Hebra Flaster, "Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town" (She Writes Press, 2025)

16 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ana Hebra Flaster was six years old when her working-class family was kicked out of their Havana barrio for opposing communism. Once devoted revolutio...

Maraam A. Dwidar, "Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy" (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

13 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A vital examination of how social and economic justice organizations overcome resource disadvantages and build political power. Why do some coalitions...

David Zweig, "An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions" (MIT Press, 2025)

12 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions (MIT Press, 2025) is a devastating account of the decision-making...

Alexandria Russell, "Black Women Legacies: Public History Sites Seen and Unseen" (University of Illinois Press, 2024)

11 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From Black clubwomen to members of preservation organizations, African American women have made commemoration a central part of Black life and culture...

Myra Mendible, "American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021)

10 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Even with the availability of new forms of storytelling, the memoir remains as one of the favored ways for combat veterans to tell their stories about...

Jeffrey P. Rogg, "The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

09 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Intelligence is all around us. We read about it in the news, wonder who is spying on us through our phones or computers, and want to know what is happ...

Jonathan Tarleton, "Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons" (Beacon Press, 2025)

09 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons (Beacon Press, 2025), urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleto...

Gwynne Kuhner Brown, "William L. Dawson" (University of Illinois Press, 2024)

08 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

William L. Dawson (University of Illinois Press, 2024) by Gwynne Kuhner Brown is a biography of the Black American composer, conductor and pedagogue....

Sladja Blažan, "Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America" (University of Virginia Press, 2025)

08 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America (University of Virginia Press, 2025), Dr. Sladja Blažan explain...

Brando Simeo Starkey, "Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System" (Doubleday, 2025)

06 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System (Doubleday, 2025) takes readers...

Questions: A Discussion with Leslie Butler and Holly Case

06 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

BOOKS UNDER DISCUSSION: Leslie Butler, Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford Univers...

Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)

05 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, Dr. Brittany Friedman delves into how the California Department of Correctio...

Dionne Koller, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport" (U California Press, 2025)

04 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tens of millions of children in the United States participate in youth sport, a pastime widely believed to be part of a good childhood. Yet most child...

Robert Chernomas, Gregory Chernomas, and Ian Hudson, "The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines" (Routledge, 2025)

03 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Biological justification for all forms of inequality has a long history, with the claim that particular groups suffer disproportionately from inherite...

Bonnie Yochelson, "Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen" (Fordham UP, 2025)

03 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen (Fordham University Press, 2025) by Dr. Bonnie Yochelson, explore Gilded A...

Andy Oler, "Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature" (LSU Press, 2019)

02 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In light of recent conversations about the crisis of masculinity, let's revisit Dr. Andy Oler's book Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity a...

Jon Shelton, "The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy" (Cornell UP, 2023)

02 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Cornell UP, 2023) questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the o...

Jessica Vasquez-Tokos, "Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation" (NYU Press, 2025)

02 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation By Jessica Vasquez-Tokos, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon W.E.B. Du Bois famously...

Victoria Bynum, "Deep Roots, Broken Branches: A History and Memoir" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

01 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Historian Victoria Bynum turns now to her own history in this multigenerational American saga spanning from 1840 to 1979. Through meticulous historica...

Michael A. Meyer, "Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler" (CCAR Press, 2025)

01 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Reform Judaism looks different today than it did a century ago. There are a lot of factors that lead to that change, but among these is Rabbi Alexande...

Michael D. Gambone, "The New Praetorians: American Veterans, Society, and Service from Vietnam to the Forever War" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

31 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Contemporary veterans belong to an exclusive American group. Celebrated by most of the country, they are nevertheless often poorly understood by the s...

Jennifer Lynn Gross, "Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South" (LSU Press, 2025)

31 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Historians have thoroughly documented the vast devastation of the Civil War. In the attention they have paid to aspects of that destruction, however, ...

Nneka D. Dennie, "Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth Century Black Radical Feminist" (Oxford UP, 2023)

30 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1849, the Mary Ann Shadd Cary had not yet become one of the first Black woman newspaper editors in North America. She was decades away from being a...

False Dawn: A Conversation with George Selgin on Recovering from the Great Depression

30 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Join us on Madison's Notes as we sit down with George Selgin, senior fellow and director emeritus of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and ...

Robert F. Darden and Stephen M. Newby, "Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch" (Oxford UP, 2025)

29 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gospel singer and seven-time Grammy winner Andraé Crouch (1942-2015) hardly needs introduction. His compositions--"The Blood Will Never Lose Its Powe...

William Haldeman, "Meeting the Moment: Inspiring Presidential Leadership That Transformed America" (SUNY Press, 2024)

28 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The histories presented in Meeting the Moment: Inspiring Presidential Leadership That Transformed America  (SUNY Press, 2024) are of a select grou...