Departments

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books

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    6/30/2021

    Looking for Nat Turner

    Christopher Tomlins' new book takes seriously the apocalyptic Christianity of Nat Turner, viewing it not as a metaphor for liberation but a key part of how Turner understood freedom. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/12/2021

    Elizabeth Hinton: Unearthing the Roots of Black Rebellion

    Elizabeth Hinton's new book argues that anti-police uprisings, commonly called "riots," were frequent and widespread in American Black communities in the 1960s, and should be understood as a political movement against inequality and the inherently abusive nature of the "war on crime." 

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    4/8/2021

    Black Soldiers and the Civil War

    by Aston Gonzalez

    Deborah Willis's book "The Black Civil War Soldier" utilizes visual imagery other historians have often passed over to describe how Black soldiers understood military service in relation to their hopes for future economic, political, and familial security. 

  • SOURCE: New Statesman
    4/6/2021

    Can Joe Biden Replicate FDR’s Success in Rebuilding the Democrats’ Coalition?

    Eric Rauchway's latest book on the FDR era shows that the New Deal was a complex undertaking, administered often through local channels, which meant it sometimes enabled democracy and sometimes suppressed it. The Biden administration can win allegiance from voters by expanding the safety net and strategic spending, but it won't be simple. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    3/24/2021

    Paleo Con

    by Daniel Immerwahr

    Why do the lifestyles of paleolithic hunter-gatherers repeatedly pop up as foils for western capitalist modernity? 

  • SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
    3/26/2021

    Lindsay Chervinsky's Five Best Books on Presidential Cabinets

    The author of an acclaimed book about George Washington's creation of the cabinet recommends five books about presidential cabinets, including those of Lincoln, Eisenhower and JFK, the unofficial team of African American advisors to FDR, and the consequential relationship between George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    3/25/2021

    The Spy Who Came in from the Carrel

    Two new books by Kathy Peiss and Richard Ovenden deal with the question of acquiring or destroying knowledege as an act of war, including the work of archivists in the OSS's "Chairborne Division" and the forced labor of Jewish scholars to identify major works of Judaica for Nazi Germany to purge. 

  • 3/21/2021

    The Same Mistakes Twice? Teaching Dr. Seuss

    by Walter Kamphoefner

    Step back from the current media controversy and consider how Theodor Geisel's cartooning illustrate the contradictory nature of America's posture toward foreign and domestic racism in the World War II era, a pivotal moment for the nation that must be understood in all its complication. 

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
    3/9/2021

    Dr. Philip Nel on the Legacy of Dr. Seuss

    "A lot of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that an artist and a writer can be both a genius and a racist, can do brilliant work and be profoundly damaging. Those are not mutually exclusive categories."