John Wigger is Professor of History at the University of Missouri. This interview is based on his new book, The Hijacking of American Flight 119: How D.B. Cooper Inspired a Skyjacking Craze and the FBI’s Battle to Stop It (Oxford...
Alison Bell is Professor of Anthropology at Washington and Lee University. This interview is based on her new book, The Vital Dead: Making Meaning, Identity, and Community through Cemeteries (University of Tennessee Press, 2023). JF: What led you to write The Vital Dead?...
Here is Ben Sixsmith, editor of The Critic: A couple of years ago, I had almost my entire collection of books shipped from England to Poland. They had been lurking in my dad’s attic but he understandably decided that he...
Brooks R. Blevins is Professor of History at Missouri State University. This interview is based on his new book, Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins (University of Arkansas Press, 2023). JF: What led you to write Up...
Jennifer Helgren is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at University of the Pacific. This interview is based on her new book, The Camp Fire Girls: Gender, Race, and American Girlhood, 1910–1980 (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). JF:...
John C. Winters is Assistant Professor History at the University of Southern Mississippi. This interview is based on his new book, “The Amazing Iroquois” and the Invention of the Empire State (Oxford University Press, 2023). JF: What led you to...
Gregory A. Andrews is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Texas State University. This interview is based on his new book, Shantyboats and Roustabouts: The River Poor of St. Louis, 1875–1930 (LSU Press, 2022.) JF: What led you to write Shantyboats...
Paul Hardin Kapp is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This interview is based on his new book, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South (University Press of Mississippi, 2022). JF: What...
Catherine V. Bateson is Associate Lecturer of American History and American Studies Chief Examiner at the University of Kent. This interview is based on her new book, Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood (LSU Press, 2022). JF:...
Kyle Mays is Assistant Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. This interview is based on his new book, City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of...
Sam Lebovic is Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. This interview is based on his new book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization (University of Chicago Press, 2022). JF: What led you to...
Kocku von Stuckrad is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen. This interview is based on his new book, A Cultural History of the Soul: Europe and North America from 1870 to the Present (Columbia University Press, 2022)....
Robert A. Gross is Emeritus Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. This interview is based on his new book, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). JF: What led you to ​write The Transcendentalists...
Richard Kagan is Academy Professor and Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor Emeritus of History at Johns Hopkins University. This interview is based on his new book, The Spanish Craze: America’s Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779-1939 (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). JF: What led...
Matthew Bowman is associate professor of history at Henderson State University. This interview is based on his new book, Christian: The Politics of a Word in America (Harvard University Press, 2018). JF: What led you to write Christian: The Politics of a Word...
When I was writing The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America I spent a lot of time reading scholarship on the book trade in early America. I was trying to trace the print...
Over at the Politics/Talk podcast, Rutgers University historian James Livingston interviews his colleague: historian and public intellectual T. Jackson Lears. If you are interested in Lears’s work, the history of consumerism, American intellectual history, and academic biography this 2-part podcast...
Oxford University Press blog is running an excerpt from Jenna Weissman Joselit‘s new book Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments. Here is a taste: Although we are told that Moses received the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, their...
Jacey Fortin of The New York Times reports on a history course at the University of Tennessee focused on the life and times of country singer Dolly Parton. The course is taught by historian Lynn Sacco, author of Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest...
Joanna Cohen is a lecturer in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London. This interview is based on her new book, Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America (Penn Press, 2017). JF: What led you...
