American History

For the Politician’s Culture-Savvy Daughter

Remember this? Right around publication date for one of our titles, Andy Warhol, Meghan McCain posted a Twitpic of herself on a night-in, happily ready to curl up with our new book. Okay, okay, we were so surprised at the coincidence (not her reading choice) that we even had a

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Notes from a Native New Yorker: Trading Ideas with the Past

Michelle Stein Yale Press’s books manage to take the reader all across the world, and look in depth at a great many topics.  They also have a great many books that delve into the city of New York, where I was born and have thoroughly explored.  I hope to also

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Henry Roe Cloud Series and More on Native American History

As reported by the Yale Daily News earlier this month, the new Henry Roe Cloud series on American Indians and Modernity was announced by Ned Blackhawk, a Yale professor of History and American Studies, and Christopher Rogers, Editorial Director of Yale University Press. Cloud was the first known Native American

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Tuesday Studio: Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand

Between 1917 and 1937, Alfred Stieglitz took 331 photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Along with the thousands of letters the two exchanged throughout their 30-year romance, these photographs occupy a sort of middle ground between documentation and expression, between correspondence and art. They are an eloquent testament to a profound and

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New Story of the Alcotts

In The Flowering of New England, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of 19th century Boston, historian Van Wyck Brooks creates an American mythology of individuals. Falling somewhere between collective biography and literary narrative, the book tracks a flourishing of intellectual output concentrated in the Boston area between the War of 1812

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Comanche Lands

On a surface level, Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire exposes and defends an overlooked narrative in American history. His book tells the story of the Comanche people, from their first mention in the ledgers of a Spanish colonial official in 1706 to their decimation by famine and an expanding United States

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Tuesday Studio: Designing Tomorrow

While the Great Depression has been a heavily referenced subject, almost exclusively in its negative sense, it’s worth considering the aesthetic aspects of the period that appeared and endured alongside, or in spite of, worldwide economic restraints. At a time when the United States had emerged as a world power

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Presidents and Their Mid-Term Elections

Dorothy Rabinowitz’s op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, titled “Why Obama is No Roosevelt” comes from the comparisons made to FDR that have followed President Obama since the run-up to the 2008 election. In September 2010, The National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the recession was over in June

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Tocqueville in America

A few weeks ago, we celebrated Columbus Day and the discovery of America. Or at least he made the physical discovery, and even that is contested. What other Americas were there to discover? One might say: the political discovery of the American Republic’s early successes. Alexis de Tocqueville and his

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Blurring Party Lines

Tuesday was a major event for midterm primary elections; eleven were held that day, and the results revealed a great deal about the current state of partisan and electoral politics.  There were high-profile candidates stepping into political races for the first time, as well as high-profile incumbents facing primary challenges.

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