American History - Columbia University Press Blog

April 14, 2021

Browse Our OAH 2021 Virtual Exhibit Booth with Stephen Wesley

I am delighted to present the 2021 Columbia University Press new books in American history. The titles featured here demonstrate the vibrancy of Columbia University Press’s program as we continue a long tradition of publishing top scholarship in the field. The...

January 9, 2021

Hubert Harrison and Contemporary Struggles for Racial Equality

By Jeffrey B. Perry

“This long-awaited final volume guides us through the last decade of Harrison’s life, when he played a major role in the political upheavals and cultural transformations that shaped Harlem in the wake of the First World War. Thanks to Perry’s...

January 7, 2021

Browse Our AHA Virtual Book Exhibit with Caelyn Cobb

Hello and welcome to the Columbia University Press American Historical Association virtual exhibit, coming live—once again—from our socially distanced homes to yours. I’m Caelyn Cobb, the editor for global history, and I’m so disappointed not to see any of your...

December 3, 2020

The Op-Ed in an Evangelical Age

By L. Benjamin Rolsky

“Rise and Fall should garner a wide and varied audience, and it appears intentionally so. It is self-consciously and transparently situated, adeptly self-described in relation to a number of subfields, scholars, and paradigmatic shifts.” ~CARA BURNIDGE, Society for U.S. Intellectual History...

December 2, 2020

Video: Introducing Ms. Donna Haskins and Take Back What the Devil Stole

“Like Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, this study of an impossibly ordinary life grabs you and refuses to let go, even as it offers new insights into a hidden spiritual world.” Stephen Prothero, author of Why Liberals...

September 30, 2020

Evan Friss on Bicycling Through the Pandemic

“In On Bicycles, Evan Friss fills in the missing chapters that bicycles hold in New York City’s near-miraculous transportation history and shows how the city’s streets are finally catching up with them.” ~!Janette Sadik-Khan, Bloomberg Associates, former NYC transportation commissioner Today...

September 28, 2020

Martin V. Melosi on Garbage and Climate Change

“Fresh Kills frames Staten Island’s iconic landfill as not just a repository for solid waste but also a monument to consumer culture. This is an immensely readable and valuable book by a distinguished scholar of environmental history.” ~Michael Rawson, author...

September 10, 2020

Heath Brown on Homeschooling the Right

“In this exciting book, Heath Brown enlarges our understanding of conservative public policies and their relation to American political development, helps situate the homeschooling movement within the larger “New Right” enterprise, and offers a novel theory of conservative freedom policies...

September 2, 2020

Q&A: Claire Seiler on Midcentury Suspension

“It is impossible not to be impressed by the highly accomplished results on offer in Claire Seiler’s reconfiguration of early postwar transatlantic literature in terms of the concept of the “midcentury” and the forms of temporal and theoretical suspension she...

August 21, 2020

Book Excerpt! Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, edited by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell

“An outstanding collection of cutting-edge essays, Educating Harlem rewrites the narrative of twentieth-century urban education. Eschewing a single thesis or grand narrative, this groundbreaking volume shows the creativity, debate, fierce love, and impassioned determination of a community to make...

August 20, 2020

Video: Bruce D. Haynes on “What Makes Harlem Special?”

“Bruce D. Haynes’s story is a classic American tale—which combines the big themes of history with the gritty reality of a single family’s extraordinary story.” ~Jeffrey Toobin, staff writer at The New Yorker and senior legal analyst at CNN...