April 24, 2024

Virginia Hanusik on Into the Quiet and the Light

Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana offers a glimpse into the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry....

April 17, 2024

Jean Yen-chun Lin on A Spark in the Smokestacks

When author Jean Lin initially approached first-time homeowners of newly built gated communities in Beijing regarding their protests against overflowing landfills and waste incinerator construction plans, she believed that her research should focus on mobilization strategies in an authoritarian context....

April 3, 2024

Pete Hill on River Profiles

Centuries of mismanagement and destructive development have gravely harmed American waterways, with significant consequences for the ecosystems and communities built around them. In River Profiles: The People Restoring Our Waterways, Pete Hill  delves into the deep-rooted challenges facing American waterways,...

March 27, 2024

Laura E. Helton on Scattered and Fugitive Things

In Scattered and Fugitive Things, Laura E. Helton tells the stories of six Black collectors who played a pivotal role in shaping the early twentieth-century Black archive. From the parlors of the urban North to HBCU reading rooms and branch...

March 1, 2024

Wendy Steiner on The Beauty of Choice

In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women’s taste as...

February 28, 2024

Lucy Diggs Slowe on Black Women, the Role of the University, and Democracy

Amy Yeboah Quarkume

Lucy Diggs Slowe (1885–1937) was one of the most remarkable and accomplished figures in Black women’s higher education. Her story is one of resilience, activism, and relentless determination to overcome barriers. She defied societal limitations to become a pioneering educator...

February 26, 2024

Sandhya Shukla on Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place

Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place, proposes an understanding of Harlem as a place where peoples of different backgrounds collide, interact, and borrow from each other—and cross the borders of ethnic and racial identities and community enclaves in the process....

February 21, 2024

Q&A: Najha Zigbi-Johnson on Mapping Malcolm

Mapping Malcolm is a collection of essays, conversations, and works of art that reinscribes Malcolm X’s memory and legacy across the built environment, forms of contemporary community building, and Black freedom movements as they continue to manifest across New York...

January 23, 2024

Kimberly D. Acquaviva on The Handbook of LGBTQIA-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care

A year and a half after she published her first book about LGBTQIA-inclusive hospice and palliative care in 2017, Kimberly D. Acquaviva learned that her wife Kathy had ovarian cancer. When they were unable to find a local hospice with...

December 20, 2023

Why Democrats Need to Show Up in Rural America

Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea

The widening gulf between rural and urban America is becoming the most serious political divide of our day. Support for Democrats, up and down the ballot, has plummeted throughout the countryside. Rural Americans are supposedly bigots, culturally backward, lazy, scared...

December 18, 2023

The Evolving Politics of the Rust Belt “Union Man”

Lainey Newman

In the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace and conveyed fundamental worldviews, making blue-collar unionists into loyal Democrats who saw the party as on the side of the working man. Today, Republican-leaning groups...

December 11, 2023

James W. Cortada in Conversation with Robyn Massey About Inside IBM

James W. Cortada―a business historian who worked at IBM for many years―pinpoints the crucial role of corporate culture in IBM’s success. He provides an inside look at how this culture emerged and evolved over the course of nearly a century,...