When I first read Foucault's Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, "What does this look like, though? How might the disciplining of the body play out in different places?" Greg Eghigian, author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigi...

"Anyone can make a difference. Find a problem, get some friends together, and go fix it. Remember you don't have to change the world, just change your world." --Joan Trumpauer Mulholland In the early 1960s, in the segregated South, a white teenager, ...

Ibram X. Kendi is an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books, 2016) offers a fast moving narrative of racist ideas beginni...

In the early 2000s, the press--at least in Boston, where I was living at the time--was full of shrill stories about drug-crazed addicts breaking into area pharmacies in search of something called "Oxycontin." I had no idea what Oxycontin was, but I was...

The story of the martyrdom of Husayn, the prophet Muhammad's grandson, is recounted annually around the world. More broadly, the communal retelling of the lives of Shia imams has played an important part in shaping Shia identity and practice. Matthew P...

In his book, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel (New York University Press, 2014), Adam Rovner, Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver, explores the possibilities for Jewish homelands before th...

Ellen Fitzpatrick is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her book The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women's Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016) provides the story of three women, out of over two hundred wome...

When Abraham Lincoln wrote that the better part of one's life consists of his friendships, it is likely that he had in mind his friendship with Joshua Speed. Starting as roommates in Springfield, the two formed an extraordinarily close attachment, one ...

In 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote to...

Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The "Conspiracy" of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globaliza...