The untold journey

The first biography to foreground one of the most vivid figures and uncompromising cultural critics of the mid-twentieth century.

Harvard square

Diving into Harvard Square’s past and present, Catherine J. Turco, an economic sociologist and longtime Harvard Square denizen, tells the crazy, complicated love story of one quirky little marketplace and in the process, reveals the hidden love story Americans everywhere have long had with their ...

Cross-cultural harlem

Drawing on fiction, sociology, political speech, autobiography, and performance, Sandhya Shukla develops a living theory of Harlem, in which peoples of different backgrounds collide, interact, and borrow from each other, even while Blackness remains crucial.

Chinatown, honolulu

This book offers a critical account of the history of Chinese in Hawai‘i from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in this context of U.S. empire, settler colonialism, and racialization.

Conservatorship

This book is an incisive and compelling portrait of the functioning—and failings—of California’s conservatorship system, drawing on hundreds of interviews with professionals, policy makers, families, and conservatees.

New york’s yiddish theater

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a vibrant theatrical culture took shape on New York City's Lower East Side. Original dramas, comedies, musicals, and vaudeville, along with sophisticated productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, were innovatively staged for crowds that rivaled...

Set the earth on fire

An eye-opening account of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, showing how the strike—and the violent backlash that ensued—reveal the genesis of modern policing. In the early years of the twentieth century, in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, nearly 150,000 miners took part in one of ...

American zion

American Zion is the story of the Bundys, a Mormon family famous for their armed conflicts on western public lands.

Morris kight: humanist, liberationist, fantabulist

Morris Kight fought for gay rights the only way he knew how—outrageously

Rough road to the north

The exploration of the Canadian and Alaskan frontier still calls to the wonder of our souls. Poet and novelist, Jim Christy explores the history of the building of the great Alcan highway through his personal experiences and the stories of residents and pioneers who came before him.

Newport

The first book to focus on the urban development of Newport, Rhode Island, this is an extensively illustrated, multi-layered view of the city as both an urban entity and a cultural site of national significance.

Alice

The city of vines

The eighth moon

“Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, and identity.”—Chris KrausA rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti...

Glad to the brink of fear

An engaging reassessment of the celebrated essayist and his relevance to contemporary readersMore than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much mo...

The little exile

A Japanese-American girl's life changes forever when she and her family are relocated from San Francisco to Arkansas during WW2.

Dixie be damned

"The South will rise again" has a whole new meaning.

In search of another country

In the 1960s, Mississippi was the heart of white southern resistance to the civil-rights movement. To many, it was a backward-looking society of racist authoritarianism and violence that was sorely out of step with modern liberal America. White Mississippians, however, had a different vision of t...

Areas of fog

Areas of Fog: a year-long journal of inner and outer weather, journeying through New England seasons accompanied by literary ghosts.

The shifting grounds of race

Los Angeles has attracted intense attention as a "world city" characterized by multiculturalism and globalization. Yet, little is known about the historical transformation of a place whose leaders proudly proclaimed themselves white supremacists less than a century ago. In The Shifting Grounds of...

Paths out of dixie

The transformation of the American South--from authoritarian to democratic rule--is the most important political development since World War II. It has re-sorted voters into parties, remapped presidential elections, and helped polarize Congress. Most important, it is the final step in America's d...

Dreamworlds of race

How transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United StatesBetween the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the Unit...

White reconstruction

Winner, The Frantz Fanon Award for an Outstanding Book in Caribbean ThoughtWe are in the fray of another signature moment in the long history of the United States as a project of anti Black and racial–colonial violence. Long before November 2016, white nationalism, white terrorism, and white fasc...

Preaching with their lives

This volume tells the little-known story of the Dominican Family—priests, sisters, brothers, contemplative nuns, and lay people—and integrates it into the history of the United States. Starting after the Civil War, the book takes a thematic approach through twelve essays examining Dominican contr...

Modern constitutions

More than two millennia ago, Aristotle is said to have compiled a collection of ancient constitutions that informed his studies of politics. For Aristotle, constitutions largely distilled and described the varied and distinctive patterns of political life established over time. What constitutiona...

White freedom

The racist legacy behind the Western idea of freedomThe era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African sla...

A revolution in eating

Sugar, pork, beer, corn, cider, scrapple, and hoppin' John all became staples in the diet of colonial America. The ways Americans cultivated and prepared food and the values they attributed to it played an important role in shaping the identity of the newborn nation. In A Revolution in Eating, Ja...

Desegregating the past

Robyn Autry recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the s...

Hollywood's censor

From 1934 to 1954 Joseph I. Breen, a media-savvy Victorian Irishman, reigned over the Production Code Administration, the Hollywood office tasked with censoring the American screen. Though little known outside the ranks of the studio system, this former journalist and public relations agent was o...

Alexander hamilton on finance, credit, and debt

This book traces the development of Alexander Hamilton’s financial thinking, policies, and actions through a selection of his writings. The financial historians and Hamilton experts Richard Sylla and David J. Cowen provide commentary that demonstrates the impact Hamilton had on the modern economi...

Exiles in new york city

Exiles in New York City shares untold stories from Ward’s Island, offering a new lens on the city’s past and present from the perspective of the marginalized.

Movie journal

A new edition of the classic work that defined the aesthetics, techniques, and identity of American avant-garde film.

Upsetting the apple cart

An exciting new history of the activists, protestors, politicians, and even recipes that changed New York City.

Changing the subject

This remarkable story begins in the years following the Civil War, when reformers—emboldened by the egalitarian rhetoric of the post–Civil War era—pressed New York City's oldest institution of higher learning to admit women in the 1870s. Their effort failed, but within twenty years Barnard Colleg...

To be mayor of new york

From Tammany Hall to the election of David Dinkins, To Be Mayor of New York offers insights into the effect of ethnic competition on the demise of urban political machines.Beginning with a colorful assessment of New York City's Tammany Hall as it existed in the late nineteenth century, McNickle t...

“keep ’em in the east”

Richard Koszarski chronicles the compelling and often surprising origins of New York’s postwar film renaissance. He examines the social, cultural, and economic forces that shaped New York filmmaking, from city politics to union regulations

Hispanic new york

Over the past few decades, a wave of immigration has turned New York into a microcosm of the Americas and enhanced its role as the crossroads of the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. Yet far from being an alien group within a "mainstream" and supposedly pure "Anglo" America, people referred t...

Wall streeters

Many of Wall Street's contemporary trends can be traced back to the work of fourteen critical figures who wrote, and occasionally broke, the rules of American finance. Edward Morris details Wall Street's transformation from a clubby enclave of financiers to a symbol of vast economic power.