January 22, 2025

Robert E. Kirsch and Emily Ray on Be Prepared

How does someone escape the solitary fate of life in the bunker to instead meet collective problems together with their community? In Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States, coauthors Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray trace political and cultural...

November 27, 2024

A Historical Roadmap to Understanding the United States’ Relationship with China

Thomas M. Larkin

How does one make sense of the relationship between the United States and China? Where should one even begin? China and the United States are the world’s two largest economies by a significant margin, and entangled ones at that. A...

September 18, 2024

Will Race and Gender Influence Opposition to Kamala Harris?

Matthew Tokeshi

Kamala Harris is the first Black woman to be a major party’s nominee for president. Her candidacy raises the question of whether race and/or gender will be grounds for opposition. In my book, Campaigning While Black, I answer this question...

July 24, 2024

Why History Lessons Are So Threatening to Those with Power

Chana Teeger

Erasure and denial of the past are not the only ways to suppress historical claims and reproduce privilege. Chana Teeger’s research in two racially diverse South African schools shows how the past can be recalled while its legacies are ignored.

July 17, 2024

Michiko Suzuki on Decentering the Western Humanitarian Movement:

Japanese Indigenous Humanitarianism (Jindō)

In this Q&A, Michiko Suzuki’s discusses Humanitarian Internationalism Under Empire. The book is the first English written research monograph about the history of the Japanese Red Cross movement.

July 10, 2024

An Impossible Friendship and the Possibilities of Friendship in Israel/Palestine

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi

An Impossible Friendship invites us to glimpse alternative possibilities within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine.

June 19, 2024

Technology and Vannevar Bush, Fifty Years Later

G. Pascal Zachary

On his death fifty years ago, Vannevar Bush was celebrated with a page one obituary in the New York Times. He died quietly in his home in the late hours of June 29, and his passing was met with the...

May 23, 2024

Rumi Yasutake on The Feminist Pacific

Rumi Yasutake’s book, The Feminist Pacific: International Women’s Networks in Hawai’i, 1820–1940, conceptualizes the emergence of pan-Pacific feminism in the process of interacting historical forces and women’s activism in Hawai‘i from 1820 through the 1930s. When a mounting tide of...

April 2, 2024

André Colomer, the Action of the Arts, and the Importance of Poetry

Oskar De Wolf

– An individualist anarchist? To the uninitiated, it may appear somewhat peculiar that an individualist anarchist is a part of poetry month at the Columbia University Press blog. Anarchism has a well-earned reputation for being a little cold, a little...

March 27, 2024

Laura E. Helton on Scattered and Fugitive Things

In Scattered and Fugitive Things, Laura E. Helton tells the stories of six Black collectors who played a pivotal role in shaping the early twentieth-century Black archive. From the parlors of the urban North to HBCU reading rooms and branch...

February 28, 2024

Lucy Diggs Slowe on Black Women, the Role of the University, and Democracy

Amy Yeboah Quarkume

Lucy Diggs Slowe (1885–1937) was one of the most remarkable and accomplished figures in Black women’s higher education. Her story is one of resilience, activism, and relentless determination to overcome barriers. She defied societal limitations to become a pioneering educator...

February 26, 2024

Sandhya Shukla on Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place

Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place, proposes an understanding of Harlem as a place where peoples of different backgrounds collide, interact, and borrow from each other—and cross the borders of ethnic and racial identities and community enclaves in the process....