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What is new about Sovereign Skies that sets it apart from other books in the field?While this is not the first book to address the early development of civil aviation policy in the United States, it is the first to demonstrate the central role that...

Havoc and Reform: Workplace Disasters in Modern America arose organically from my previous book, Vegas at Odds: Labor Conflict in a Leisure Economy, 1960-1985 (both published by Johns Hopkins). I was working on the latter project, reading old newspapers on a...

I learned of the recent revelation that Mr. Johns Hopkins (1795-1873), long reputed to have been a staunch abolitionist, was in fact a slaveholder, along with the rest of the world. News of this nature has surfaced before at other premier institutions, but as...

One essential thing I learned while writing Neighborhood of Fear was so much of what I studied related directly to contemporary American culture including the roots of so many practices and beliefs prevalent today – from consumer-centered environmentalism and...

The memorial landscape in the United States has changed before our eyes. Death and Rebirth in a Southern City speaks to those changes through the lens of the historic cemeteries in Richmond, Virginia – the onetime capital of the Confederacy and heart of the...

America’s relationship to science is fraught with turmoil. Images of science have long held an ambiguous place in our collective psyche: from Frankenstein’s monster to the moon landing, people have characterized it in both nefarious and glowing terms. Our...

It is often said that Americans know little about world geography, but it seems safe to say that, if asked to draw an outline map of the United States (at least the lower forty-eight), most Americans would do a decent job. After all, the shape of the United...

I began The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870 while finishing my previous book, Tribe, Race, History, on Native Americans in southern New England from the Revolution through Reconstruction. At that time, 2005, the widening gulf between...

The September 2019 issue of Reviews in American History introduced readers to a new and unique feature. Although RAH is a book review journal, “Process Stories” presents essays that do not review a specific title, but instead look more personally and...

Among the most powerful artifacts I know of early American women’s work isn’t an artifact at all. It is the darkened wood around some eighteenth-century flooring, shown to me many years ago now by an architectural conservator at work in the Porter-Phelps...