If sexology―the science of sex―came into being sometime in the nineteenth century, then how did statesmen, scientists, and everyday people make meaning out of sex before that point? In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Greta LaFleur demonstrates that eighteenth-century natural...
etween 2009 and 2013, as the nation contemplated the historic election of Barack Obama and endured the effects of the Great Recession, Matthew Frye Jacobson set out with a camera to explore and document what was discernible to the “historian’s eye” during this tumultuous period. Having...
The success of the English colony of Barbados in the seventeenth century, with its lucrative sugar plantations and enslaved African labor, spawned the slave societies of Jamaica in the western Caribbean and South Carolina on the American mainland. These became the most prosperous slave economies in...
Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through...
In 1911, the publication of Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man challenged widely held claims about race and intelligence that justified violence and inequality. Now, a group of leading scholars examines how this groundbreaking work hinged on relationships with a global circle of Indigenous...
In this remarkable biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two...
A re-examination of the Cuban diaspora through the lens of popular culture.
In an era of warming relations between the US and Cuba, this book updates the conversation about Cuban America by showing how this community has changed over the past 25 years. No longer a conservative Republican voting...
Claire Schwartz, Ph.D. candidate, a winner of the 2016 Button Poetry Prize, investigates queerness, Jewish identity, and kinships through a consuming series of narrative and lyric. As the book unfolds, each poem is like a ballad engulfing readers in vulnerability, politics, love, and the body....
In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960’s and the intersectional activism of the present day...
2012
A People’s Guide to Los Angeles offers an assortment of eye-opening alternatives to L.A.’s usual tourist destinations. It documents 115 little-known sites in the City of Angels where struggles related to race, class, gender, and sexuality have occurred. They introduce us to people and events...
