Recent publications

August 2020
Alan Mikhail

Long neglected in world history, the Ottoman Empire was a hub of intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the height of their authority in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans, with extraordinary military dominance and unparalleled monopolies over trade routes,...
February 2023
Matthew Jacobson

  A deep dive into racial politics, Hollywood, and Black cultural struggles for liberation as reflected in the extraordinary life and times of Sammy Davis Jr.   Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.’s six-decade career in show business—from vaudeville to Vegas to Broadway, Hollywood, and network TV—...
October 2020
John Witt

  From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease...
November 2022
Beverly Gage

  A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today’s conservative political landscape. We remember him as a bulldog–squat frame...
September 2020
Jon Butler

  In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity’s rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly...
September 2022
Ivano Dal Prete

  It is commonly assumed that the creation story of Genesis and its chronology were the only narratives openly available in medieval and early modern Europe and that the discovery of geological time in the eighteenth century came as a momentous breakthrough that shook the faith in the historical...
November 2020
Stuart Schwartz

  In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three...
January 2023
Alan Mikhail

  An unmatched contemporary history of authoritarian politics and an unflinching examination of the politics of historical authority, My Egypt Archive is at once a chronicle of Egypt in the 2000s and a historian’s bildungsroman. As Alan Mikhail dutifully collected the paper scraps of the past, he...
May 2021
Elizabeth Hinton

  What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader,...
March 2023
Marcela Echeverri Muñoz

  Bringing together experts across Latin America, North America, and Spain, The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence innovatively revisits Latin American independence within a larger regional, temporal, and thematic framework to highlight its significance for the Age of Atlantic...