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Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was the head of the Bureau of Chemistry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the precursor of today’s Food and Drug Administration. He is best remembered today as an important force behind the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act...

Why did you write Essential Documents in the History of American Higher Education? JHUP Editorial Director Greg Britton and I discussed this and agreed that our aim was to transform the history of American higher education from a spectator sport into an active...

Between 1945 and 1991, dozens of American and Soviet journalists moved to the capital cities of Communism and Capitalism to report on the rival superpower. They wanted to understand a country that appeared to stand against everything that they held dear and...

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...

We wrote Swansea Copper out of a sense of frustration. Histories of global trade and industry seemed to have no place for copper. Cotton, sugar, tobacco: yes. But copper? What could copper tell us that we didn’t already know about global industrial history...

I wrote Broken Cities because I saw that ruins were being used to shape our view of the past and even to create the “pastness” of the past. As you can see by looking at the cover illustrations of any number of Classics monographs (including Broken Cities)...