New Books in American Studies

President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill remain two of the most iconic figures of the twentieth century and Joel Nelson’s new book, Kennedy’s Only Hero: How JFK’s Obsession with Winston Churchill Defined His Presidency   (Public Affairs, 2026), reveals the unexpected influence that Churchill had on Kennedy’s political career. Winston Churchill remains one of the moder...

David N. Gellman interviews Nicholas P. Wood on Let the Oppressed Go Free: Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America In Let the Oppressed Go Free, Nicholas P. Wood presents the opponents of slavery who sustained and expanded the antislavery movement during the American Revolution in the face of widespread hostility. These early abolitionists were inspired by antislavery theology: the view...

Many Americans have a constant dread of impending doom. Glued to the screens of our computers and smartphones, we sense that some total catastrophe is just around the corner. But what if our anxiety stems from an event that’s already completely destroyed an old world? What if the real cataclysm was the introduction of those computers and smartphones, and our current political, cultural, and social...

In the early twentieth century, most US states established eugenics programs to improve the human race through selective breeding. North Carolina ran one of the nation's most aggressive programs; between 1927 and 1977, at least 5,700 people were sterilized and thousands more were committed to institutions. While sterilizations in the 1950s and 1960s disproportionately targeted Black women receivin...

Historians have always known that the success of the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day in June 1944 depended on deceiving the Germans about where the invasion would take place. Jason Bell’s book, Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War   (Hanover Square Press, 2026), tells the story of how three secret agents got themselves captured in H...

There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day’s headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movem...

“Does Thomas Jefferson still matter?” ask two leading historians on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.   Thomas Jefferson has been reinvented more than perhaps any American president in history. In the nineteenth century, slavery’s defenders invoked Jefferson’s defense of states’ rights while abolitionists drew on his antislavery writings in support of their cause. Afte...

Shows how apocalypticism helped drive anti-slavery abolitionism and inspire progressive social reform in nineteenth-century America In March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly left her local Methodist church because it supported slavery and other “sins” that permeated America. Botsford was among one hundred thousand other abolitionists who abandoned their evangelical churche...

In Democracy on the Edge , leading political scientists John Kenneth White and Matthew R. Kerbel unravel the elections of 2020, 2022, and 2024 to show how each represented a flashpoint in the reordering of political priorities and electoral coalitions. The consequences have the potential to redefine our politics and shape our democracy for years to come. In 2020, American voters temporarily remove...

Pamela S. Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and is Director of the Jewish Studies Program. A specialist in American Jewish history and women’s history, she teaches a variety of courses in Jewish civilization. Pamela Nadell’s books include America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W.W. Norton, 2019), named Jewish Book of the Year by the Jew...

Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab.  For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from one place to many.  Mehran Gul tries to map out this...

In Sugar Coated: Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America's Favorite Breakfast Food (U California Press, 2026), world-renowned food politics expert Marion Nestle joins forces with former cereal executive Lisa Sutherland to examine what cereal boxes reveal about American culture and food politics. If you want to understand how the food business works, just have a look at a box of breakfast cerea...

A gripping exposé of deception, cult power, and the long shadow of Carlos Castaneda, the man behind the biggest literary hoax of the twentieth century.  Twenty years in the making, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda (OR Books, 2026) unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history. Both an invest...

How is it, Samuel Johnson famously asked on the eve of the Revolution, that Americans could so vociferously demand freedom for themselves while so conspicuously continuing to deny it to those they held in slavery? With Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World   (U Virginia Press, 2025), Matthew Mason helps answer that piercing question. As h...

We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of the California Missions (U Nebraska Press, 2026) by Dr. Lee M. Panich & Gustavo Flores explores how Native people in the southern San Francisco Bay Area—the ancestors of today’s Ohlone community—navigated the collapse of the California mission system. The volume spans from Mexican independence in 1821 through the region’s annexation...

In A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt   (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered “mixed race.” He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnu...

Celebrated poet, essayist, playwright, and American artist Langston Hughes is one of the few American writers who consistently wrote about democracy from a joyous perspective, and  My America  explores how his work speaks to the political anxieties and crises we face today. Randal M. Jelks deftly examines the themes in Hughes’s work, including creative expression, communal dignity, class...

Kentucky, 1798: A harrowing series of murders begins. The first body, discovered by cattle drovers, lies bloody at the bottom of a ridge. Then another—a dead boy staring up from a sinkhole. Bodies turn up along roadsides, stuffed into brush. They float to the surface of muddy brooks. For nine terrifying months, over hundreds of miles of Kentucky and Tennessee countryside, the terror unfolds. The k...

As affordability crises once limited to coastal cities have spread across the broader United States, the history of home and land ownership has never been more relevant. In Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner (Princeton University Press, September 2026), Dr. Joshua Specht traces how ownership has challenged the nation’s politics and promise from the founding to the present...

Since the beginning of European colonization, the sun-drenched land of California has always attracted dreamers and schemers. Whether it was Spanish missionaries, Russian fur traders, or American argonauts, the myth - or perhaps brand - of California has long been a place here one's wildest dreams can come true. Starting in the late nineteenth century and accelerating in the twentieth, that myth a...

Even as Donald J. Trump keeps his tight grip on the Republican Party, conservative ranks are rife with sharpening tensions on both domestic and foreign-policy matters. I discuss this subject with Matthew Continetti, columnist for The Wall Street Journal  and author of The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism  (Basic Books, 2022). Conservative thinkers and political figur...

At first glance, New Hampshire and Vermont seem like mirror images. Separated only by the Connecticut River, the oft-termed "Twin States" share a common history, relatively small populations, and heavily mountainous and forested landscapes dotted with small towns. Yet despite their similarities, they have evolved strikingly different political cultures, with Vermont prizing cooperation and communi...

The twenty-first century has seen major transformations in the US electricity sector—but while the use of coal power wanes and the need for renewable energy becomes more urgent, financial actors maintain a complicating influence on the trajectory of energy transition.  Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) identifies changing...

Today, pierogi are the most recognizable Polish food in the United States and a symbol of Polish American identity. How did this humble dish attain such lofty status? In Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food (Columbia UP, 2026), Professor Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann explores the surprising history of pierogi, tracing how Polish cuisine evolved in the multiethnic landscape of the United State...

With his riveting chronicle of the New York Mets baseball team, AM Gittlitz is emerging as a rising star in the field of popular social history. Writing with what the Wall Street Journal calls “the lunatic panache of a utopian manifesto,” Gittlitz weaves together the genealogies of American’s Pastime and the complex histories of race, class, ethnicity, and politics in the nation’s largest city. In...