Newsroom

When we think about disparities in health status, it is common to view these inequities in terms of race. For example, we often look at infant mortality as an issue of race. In 2016, for every 1,000 babies born to black mothers in the United States, 11.4 died...

I have always been fascinated by politics in democratic societies both ancient and modern. The focus of my research and teaching during the past 36 years, though, has been the Roman Republic (509-31B.C.), specifically the last century of the republic. This was...

By the time of publication of the first edition of Governing Health: The Politics of Health Policy in 1996, the possibility of national health care reform – which had not long before seemed so bright – had severely dimmed. The Clinton Administration’s proposed...

“Fake news” has become an all-too-familiar phrase since Donald Trump introduced it into the vernacular during his bid for the presidency in 2015-16. Yet the term has a long history, mostly under the name “propaganda.” Today the term is generally defined as...

In William Faulkner’s well-known aphorism “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner’s understanding of history forcefully applies to the story of Maryland during the Civil War. If we had forgotten his point, the recent controversy over the future...

I started writing this book, Northern Italy in the Roman World, with a question: what effects did the Roman Empire have on territories under its control? That question has been a mainstay of Roman studies for decades, and I was hoping to apply it to northern...

The late Michael Rogin, a political theorist who taught at the University of California, Berkley, spent his career finding creative approaches to critiquing the intersections of culture and power. His work "foregrounds the patterns of racialized nationalism...

As a political historian, my initial objective when writing Hydrocarbon Nation was simply to investigate the role that fossil fuels have played in influencing America’s political and economic advance. My sense was that although most environmentalists view...

As the Trump administration seeks to upend much of what our government does, our book, What American Government Does is an indispensable resource for understanding what is at stake. The new president is seeking radical changes in the direction of public policy...

In the introduction to a recent special issue of the journal Library Trends, the guest editors simply state that “libraries are part of the fabric of society.” That kicks off the discussion of “Libraries in the Political Process,” the topic of the Fall 2016...