For this month’s Free Book Friday, we’re giving away a copy of Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II, which features very rare color photographs of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. Continue Reading Free Book Friday: Colors of Confinement
Louis A. Pérez Jr. is one of the most influential historians of Cuba. Available for the first time as an Omnibus Ebook edition, this three-volume set brings together three of Pérez’s most acclaimed works on Cuba and its relations to the United States, all bundled into one convenient ebook. Continue Reading New Omnibus E-Book: The Louis A. Pérez Jr. Cuba Trilogy
Well-Read Lives evolved from my interest in women’s history and biography that my father did not live to witness. He would surely have had his doubts about the gender angle. But I like to think that my admiration for his literary interests informed my choice of subject, if not my approach to it. Continue Reading Barbara Sicherman: It Happened in the Archives
One reason for the U.S. failure in the Middle East seems obvious. The Bush administration embraced empire long after empire’s expiration date had passed. The American project faced potent opposition in Iraq and Afghanistan that could be contained only by making deals with shrewd collaborators with their own interests to serve. The international hostility to the Iraq invasion was intense, and even in the United States the Iraq adventure fell into disfavor. Continue Reading Michael H. Hunt: Ryan Crocker and the Imperial Reckoning
Between about 1660 and 1760, French colonists and their Native allies enslaved thousands of Indians, keeping them in the towns and villages of New France or shipping them to the French Caribbean. Over time, a vast network of slave raiders, traders, and owners emerged, ensnaring both colonists and Indians in the violence that generated slaves and kept them under French control. Continue Reading Excerpt: Bonds of Alliance, by Brett Rushforth
We start our series with icon number 1: the Blue Ridge Parkway. Our State Magazine says, “Travel any one of the Parkway’s 252 North Carolina miles and you’re guaranteed a beautiful drive.” We have three different books that will help you explore the Blue Ridge Parkway in three different ways. Continue Reading North Carolina Icons: Blue Ridge Parkway
During the post-WWII period in the United States, a new generation of pollutants proved especially mobile and persistent. Overriding a widespread segregation of neighborhoods by class as well as race, these pollutants proved capable of pervading entire suburban metropolises. Americans, especially around our largest cities, were forced to confront just how shared the burden of pollution had become. Continue Reading Interview: Christopher C. Sellers on the origins of American environmentalism
In The Color of Christ, Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey discuss America’s perceptions of the race of Jesus Christ. To observe some popular opinions, an interviewer and a camera went to Comic-Con, where they asked attendees about their views of Jesus. From questions about who would win in a fight, Jesus or the Joker? to popular perceptions of Jesus’ race, see the colorful answers from the even more colorful Comic-Con goers. Continue Reading Video: Jesus Christ at Comic-Con
The current scholarly consensus holds that no single individual created baseball; rather, it evolved incrementally from various forms of bat-and-ball folk games, including British rounders. This cultural form of transatlantic hybrid pedigree grew into a modern team sport in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York in the early nineteenth century, with each of these burgeoning northeastern American cities developing its distinctive formats of the game. Continue Reading Excerpt: Transpacific Field of Dreams, by Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu
African Americans now had both more freedom to move about and more reason to believe they could begin to live the lives they had previously only imagined. For many, this meant reuniting with family, so they urgently attempted to get to the places where they thought their loved ones might be. Sometimes they found them there; other times the people were gone. Continue Reading Excerpt: Help Me to Find My People, by Heather Andrea Williams
When we think of the Abolition movement, a common history textbook answer is that the Abolition movement began when William Lloyd Garrison started publishing his Liberator in 1831, but the roots of American abolitionism are fairly long. Continue Reading Video: Manisha Sinha on the Origins of Abolitionism
Today, 70 years after those first African Americans joined the Marines, Montford Point veterans are being formally honored with the Congressional Gold Medal. Continue Reading First African American Marines Honored with Congressional Gold Medal
“Because the Civil War, by chance, began right at the beginning of an administration, that part of the Constitution that gave the president a four-year term and made the president the commander-in-chief was extremely important. That meant that, barring impeachment or assassination, there would be a determined Republican in the White House fighting the South until March of 1865.”—Mark E. Neely Jr. Continue Reading Video: Mark E. Neely Jr. on the advantage of the U.S. Constitution during the Civil War
In the United States, even from Bunner’s time, what nourished the nature love of the more and less scientifically qualified alike was a shared suburban experience. It was one not so much of home buying as home owning. Nor was it reducible to suburban dwellers’ relationship with “the land,” however fraught. What finally secured the breadth of environmentalism’s appeal was how nature love itself had become ever more suffused with anxieties about human health. Continue Reading Excerpt: Crabgrass Crucible, by Christopher C. Sellers
For all his genius as a political theorist (we remember him as “the Father of the Constitution”) and despite remarkable success as a politician (he lost only one election in a public career spanning forty years) James Madison has never been ranked among the greatest of presidents. The War of 1812 permanently stained his reputation. Yet Madison’s wartime leadership deserves a second look. Continue Reading Jeff Broadwater: James Madison, the Constitution, and the War of 1812
Panetta’s formal comments and casual remarks reveal little interest in this rich past, no insights that would be instructive, and some generalizations that are distinctly misleading if not wrongheaded. Continue Reading Michael H. Hunt: Panetta on tour in an Asia without history
What matters more than the goal of language learning is its motivation. Instead of regarding “foreign” language instruction as a means for preserving academic privilege or meeting the demands of a global marketplace, we need to embrace the acquisition of languages as a preparation for one of the most fundamental experiences we share as human beings—the encounter with difference. Continue Reading Patrick M. Erben: Learning Foreign Languages Increases Inter-Human Understanding
The extent of these Nahuas’ and Oaxacans’ participation in the invasions of 1524-28 undermines the very notion of a Spanish conquest. Their lives as Indian conquistadors in Guatemala suggest that we still have a long way to go to understand the lived experience of colonialism by the American continents’ indigenous peoples. Continue Reading Excerpt: Memories of Conquest, by Laura E. Matthew
What is missing here is any social and economic context. True, the Civil War is the film’s encompassing social explanation, but it leaves me wondering why the set of social and economic circumstances that confronted folks in post war Appalachia is completely ignored. In the Tug Valley, as in all Appalachia and even the entire South, economic decline was a serious threat to almost everyone. Continue Reading Altina L. Waller: The Hatfield-McCoy Feud
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