A history of the humble footnote and its impact on the highest court in the landIn May 2022, a seismic legal event occurred as the draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was leaked. The majority aimed to eliminate constitutional...

How children helped abolish slaveryDuring the antebellum period, several abolitionist figures, including William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator; Susan Paul, an African American primary school teacher; Henry Clarke Wright, a white reformer;...

Asks how we can better understand a politics of refusalWriting a new story of Black politics, Jump emerges from the practice of enslaved Africans jumping overboard off their slavers’ ships. Reading against the narrative that depoliticizes and denigrates...

In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw explores African American art and representation from the height of the British colonial period to the present. She engages in the process of "rememory"—the recovery of facts and...

A rigorous analysis of systemic misogyny in the law and a thoughtful exploration of the tools needed to transcend it through constitutional change beyond litigation in the courts.   Just as racism is embedded in the legal system, so is misogyny—even...

A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry.Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth...

“Considering the emphasis in Said’s critical work on space and place and the political importance of geography, it is less surprising to see the luxuriant evocation of a specific topography of dusty roads, grottos, plump figtrees, desert flowers, muddy...

A revelatory and wide-ranging series of interviews with award-winning writer Arundhati Roy, touching on US empire, Indian nationalism, a writer’s work, and more.As a novelist, Arundhati Roy is known for her lush language and intricate structure. As a...

The story of Maecenas and his role in the evolution and continuing legacy of ancient Roman poetry and cultureAn unelected statesman with exceptional powers, a patron of the arts and a luxury-loving friend of the emperor Augustus: Maecenas was one of the...

Fang Fang's Soft Burial begins with a mysterious, nameless protagonist. Decades earlier she was pulled out of a river in a state of near-death; upon regaining consciousness, she discovered that her entire memory had been erased. The narrative follows her...

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Harlem has been the capital of both Black America and a global African diaspora, an early home for Italian and Jewish immigrant communities, an important Puerto Rican neighborhood, and a...

Why is being a victim such a potent identity today? Who claims to be a victim, and why? How have such claims changed in the past century? Who benefits and who loses from the struggles over victimhood in public culture?In this timely and incisive book,...

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner AwardWinner of James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, SHEARWinner of the Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana HistoryWinner of the Humanities Book of the Year Award, Louisiana Endowment for the...

“Eminently readable, and anybody who cares about the future of American democracy in these perilous times can only hope that it will be widely read and carefully considered.”―James Pope, Washington Post“Fishkin and Forbath’s accessible work serves as...

“This is the book to throw at your human resources director—not literally, of course—when any attempt is being made to bamboozle you about how decisions on pay have been made...It is a closely argued, thoroughly researched treatise on how we got here and...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceA Public Books Best Book of the Year“A profound and optimistic call to action and reflection. For Piketty, the arc of history is long, but it does bend toward equality. There is nothing automatic about it,...

“[A] learned and thoughtful portrayal of the history of race relations in America...authoritative and highly readable...[An] impressive work.”—Randall Kennedy, The Nation“This comprehensive history...reminds us that the fight for justice requires our...

A vivid account of the past, present, and future of economic growth, showing how and why we must continue to pursue it while responding to the challenges it creates.Over the past two centuries, economic growth has freed billions from the struggle for...

As culture wars pit us against each other, A Great Disorder looks to the myths that have shaped American identity and reveals how they have brought us to the brink of an existential crisis.Red America and Blue America are so divided they could be two...

The story of how nineteenth-century European rulers conspired with Mexican conservatives in an outlandish plan to contain the rising US colossus by establishing Old World empire on its doorstep.The outbreak of the US Civil War provided an unexpected...