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By Steven Diner There is extensive public discussion today about how colleges decide whom to admit and about the need for affirmative action to ensure minority access to higher education. Colleges today are ranked not only by academic selectivity but by their...

By Paul A. Lombardo I began my book Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell, with an account of my introduction to the Buck case in 1980, when I saw a newspaper story about a lawsuit brought by someone who had been...

By Timothy Wientzen My scholarship focuses on literature of the early twentieth century, a period that scholars generally refer to as the “modernist” period. This era is so named because it was defined by the rapid and novel transformations of everyday life...

By Ian Afflerbach Literary scholars pride ourselves on wrangling with words. We stop and isolate them, pick them apart, flip through historical records to uncover their prior meanings. I always find it interesting, then, when certain words slip out from this...

In April 2018, Social Research held its 37th Conference at The New School. a collaboration with the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, the conference examined "Cons and Scams: Their Place in American Culture."...

On the occasion of the paperback release of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, I want to reflect on two images—one that appears on the book’s cover and one that does not feature in the book at all but is equally illustrative of its...

One of the things that continually fascinates me about the Amish is the diversity within this group that can, at first glance, seem entirely uniform. Today there are more than 300,000 Amish living in more than 500 communities across 31 U.S. states and three...

This post is part of our July “Unexpected America” blog series, focused on intriguing or surprising American history research from 1776 to today. Check back with us all month to see what new scholarship our authors have to share! (Photo Credit Nicholas Raymond...

This post is part of our July “Unexpected America” blog series, focused on intriguing or surprising American history research from 1776 to today. Check back with us all month to see what new scholarship our authors have to share! (Photo Credit Nicholas Raymond...

I have a confession to make: I wrote a book about the history of refrigeration in the United States, but I didn’t realize that Seven Eleven started life as an ice delivery company until a radio producer told me. To be fair, there were many, many ice companies...