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.

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...

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...

The untold journey

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

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.

The forgotten borough

What sets Staten Island apart from the rest of New York City? Kenneth M. Gold argues that the lack of a subway connection has deeply shaped Staten Island’s history and identity. He chronicles decades of recurrent efforts to build a rail link, using this history to explore the borough’s fraught re...

Language city

From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planetHalf of all 7...

A perfect frenzy

From the nationally bestselling author of The Secret Token, the largely untold story of rebellion in Virginia that will forever change our understanding of the American RevolutionAs the American Revolution broke out in New England in the spring of 1775, dramatic events unfolded in Virginia that p...

Queer enlightenments

A BOOK RIOT BEST BOOK OF THE YEARA ground-breaking history delivered in a refreshing new voice, Queer Enlightenments details eleven overlooked stories of eighteenth-century queer people who lived extraordinary lives of resistance and joyQueer people have always existed. In an era when this basic ...

The diplomacy of independence

Presenting more than seventy documents from Spanish archives that provide a rare glimpse into Benjamin Franklin’s connection to Spain.Although Benjamin Franklin never set foot in Spain, from 1774 until his death in 1790 he maintained contact and correspondence with a wide range of Spanish officia...

Tom paine's iron bridge

In a letter to his wife, Abigail, John Adams judged the author of Common Sense as having “a better hand at pulling down than building.” Adams’s dismissive remark has helped shape the prevailing view of Tom Paine ever since. But, as Edward G. Gray shows in this fresh, illuminating work, Paine was ...

It happened at the palace

Discover the Palace Theatre's transformation from a Vaudeville house to a Broadway sensation, its near-demise, and the dramatic restoration that catapulted it back to stardom. With an insider's flair, Lane shares tales of legendary performances and the Herculean efforts to preserve this cultural ...

Potomac fever

An impassioned meditation on American identity and its ebb and flow through the Capital’s great waterwayAs she walks the length of the Potomac River, clambering up its banks and sounding its depths, Charlotte Taylor Fryar examines the geography and ecology of Washington, D.C. with all manner of f...

Philadelphia

A comprehensive history of Philadelphia from the region’s original Lenape inhabitants to the myriad of residents in the twenty-first centuryPhiladelphia is famous for its colonial and revolutionary buildings and artifacts, which draw tourists from far and wide to gain a better understanding of th...

That further shore

This book is the autobiography of a lawyer, born in the Bronx of immigrant parents, who practiced law, served as dean of Fordham Law, participated in framing the Constitution’s Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and served as President of the New York City Bar Association and chair of State Commissions on g...

Lady liberty

Magnificent art complements an unvarnished history of the Statue of Liberty and its relationship to immigration policy in the United States throughout the years.What began in 1865 in Glatigny, France, at a dinner party hosted by esteemed university professor Édouard René de Laboulaye and attended...

Humbug!

Mines the more than 300 newspapers published in New York City before the Civil War for art criticism, in order to trace the changing political positions of artists, artworks, and authors.

The forgotten radical peter maurin

The definitive edition of Catholic Worker cofounder Peter Maurin's Easy Essays, including 74 previously unpublished worksAlthough Peter Maurin is well known among people connected to the Catholic Worker movement, his Catholic Worker co-founder and mentee Dorothy Day largely overshadowed him. Maur...

Only in new york

No one denies that New York City is unique—but what makes it sui generis? Sam Roberts, a longtime city reporter, has puzzled over this in print and in his popular New York Times podcasts for years. In Only in New York, updated with new tales and fascinating glimpses into uniquely NYC life, he wri...

The american museum of natural history and how it got that way

Tells the story of the building of the American Museum of Natural History and Hayden Planetarium, a story of history, politics, science, and exploration, including the roles of American presidents, New York power brokers, museum presidents, planetarium directors, polar and African explorers, ...