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...
The United States has been an empire since the time of its founding, and this empire is inextricably intertwined with American religion. Religion and US Empire examines the relationship between these dynamic forces throughout the country’s history and into the present. The volume will serve as the...
This book presents an ethnographic study on gestational surrogacy in India. It frames the ethnography of the surrogacy clinic in conversation with concerns raised in the arenas of law, policy, medical ethics, and global structural inequality about the ethics of transnational assisted reproductive...
The story of the dramatic postwar struggle over the proper role of citizens and government in American society.
In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists,...
In Parenting Empires, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas focuses on the parenting practices of Latin American urban elites to analyze how everyday experiences of whiteness, privilege, and inequality reinforce national and hemispheric idioms of anti-corruption and austerity. Ramos-Zayas shows that for upper-class...
When 20-year-old Odetta Holmes-classically trained as a vocalist and poised to become “the next Marian Anderson”-veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and folk tunes before mixed-race audiences in 1950s...
Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist...
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...
A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism.
In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of...
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...
