Orlando Patterson’s award-winning book The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament, out now in paperback, grapples with the paradox of this country: its remarkable achievements amid continuing struggles since independence. In this excerpt, Patterson offers a fresh answer to why Jamaica is so dominant in the sport of sprinting. …

Called “a brilliant tour d’horizon of the West” by the New York Review of Books, Michael Kulikowski’s The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy is a sweeping political history of the turbulent two centuries that led to the demise of the Roman Empire. This excerpt…

In The Next Shift, Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America’s cities have weathered new economic realities. The following excerpt describes the intergenerational pull of class by focusing on the personal stories of steelworkers at Homestead Steel Works in Pittsburgh. Out now in paperback, The…

In his book God In Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan, now out in paperback, Jon Butler reveals how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism. The chosen excerpt offers a short tour of Manhattan in the early 20th century, as city spaces everywhere…

In Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States, Julia Rose Kraut reveals how the United States has a long history of barring or expelling foreign noncitizens based on their political expressions and associations to suppress dissent throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from…

Jean Rhodes’ award-winning book Older and Wiser: New Ideas for Youth Mentoring in the 21st Century, now out in paperback, surveys the state of youth mentoring and offers effective paths forward for the field today. In the following excerpt, Rhodes recounts the touching story behind the foundation of the first…

Tim Harper’s Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire tells the dramatic story of the shadowy networks of revolutionaries across Asia who laid the foundations in the early twentieth century for the end of European imperialism on their continent. Underground Asia was a Financial Times and Economist best…

Exhibiting at The Shed through April 16 is The Yanomami Struggle, a collection dedicated to the Yanomami people’s fight against the invasion of their land. The exhibition features paintings and drawings by contemporary Yanomami artists and is narrated through the voice of shaman Davi Kopenawa. Below is an excerpt from…

Jarvis R. Givens chronicles the subversive tradition of Black education in America in his award-winning book Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. This excerpt unpacks the complicated narrative of the fugitive slave and its place in both Black collective memory and curricula. The theory of…