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The Beach Cure

A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores

By Meghan Crnic. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

How sun and sea air were prescribed as medicine on America's Eastern coast

For centuries, the ocean was seen as a place of danger and work, but by the late nineteenth century, northeastern shores of the...

Red Harbor

Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pacific Northwest

By Aaron Goings

Brings to life Grays Harbor's fiery legacy of class conflict

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Grays Harbor was the Lumber Capital of the World. While thousands of lumber and maritime workers fought for...

Back East

How Westerners Invented a Region

By Flannery Burke

Western imaginations of "Back East" rewrote America's cultural identity, shaping myths and realities alike

Just as easterners imagined the American West, westerners imagined the American East, reshaping American culture. Back East flips the script of American...

Contaminated Country

Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia

By Jessica Urwin. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

The destruction and defiance that swirled around Australia's embrace of the world's nuclear order

Though a nonnuclear state, Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear energy programs of numerous global powers across the twentieth...

Contested Taiwan

Sovereignty, Social Movements, and Party Formation

By Lev Nachman

Where statehood is contested, questions of identity and territory define the political landscape

Despite maintaining de facto sovereignty, states like Taiwan find themselves unrecognized in today’s international system because another power claims the state as part...

Indigenizing California Mission Art and Architecture

By Yve Chavez

Examines how native artists kept their culture alive by creatively adapting under colonial rule

Between 1769 and 1823, the Franciscans established twenty-one missions in California, colonizing the ancestral territories of many Native communities between present-day Sonoma...

Waves of Belonging

Indigeneity, Race, and Gender in the Surfing Lineup

By Lydia Heberling, David Kamper, Jess Ponting

Showcases surfing as a site of social belonging and power formation

The surf zone—the place between ocean and shore—offers a powerful space to reflect on the dynamic contemporary politics of our worlds. Surfing always occurs on...

Nature Unfurled

Asian American Environmental Histories

By Connie Y. Chiang

Explores Asian Americans' diverse connections and interactions with the natural world

As immigrants and laborers, gardeners and artists, activists and vacationers, Asian Americans have played, worked, and worshipped in nature for almost two centuries, forging enduring...

Three Impeachments

Guo Xiu and the Kangxi Court

By R. Kent Guy

A probe into corruption in late Imperial China

At the beginning of China's long eighteenth century or "High Qing" era, a time of peace and prosperity when the foundations of Manchu rule under the Qing dynasty...

Native Alienation

Spiritual Conquest and the Violence of California Missions

By Charles A. Sepulveda

Challenges the romantic portrayal of Spanish missions

Sites of slavery and spiritual conquest, the California missions played a central role in the brutal subjugation of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Mainstream California history, however, still largely presents...

Animating Central Park

A Multispecies History

By Dawn Day Biehler. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

The entangled human and more-than-human histories of one of the world’s iconic urban green spaces

From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central...

Refusing Settler Domesticity

Native Women's Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program

By Caitlin Keliiaa

Traces young Native women’s lives and experiences as Bay Area domestic workers

In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor...

Silk Roads

By Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-Ping, Elisabeth R. O'Connell, Tim Williams

Explores how the movement of people, objects, and ideas from 500 to 1000 CE shaped cultures and histories

In the ninth century CE, an Arabian ship sank off the coast of Indonesia. The objects found in...

Transpacific, Undisciplined

By Lily Wong, Christopher B. Patterson, Chien-ting Lin

Remaps the scope and methods of the transpacific approach

Antinuclear coalitions centering Native survivance from Okinawa to the Dakotas to Micronesia, refugee figures and automated empathy in virtual reality, cross-strait erotic intimacy in Taiwanese teahouses, art...

Good Wife, Wise Mother

Educating Han Taiwanese Girls under Japanese Rule

By Fang Yu Hu

Traces Japan's efforts to modernize Taiwan through gendered educational practices

In Good Wife, Wise Mother, female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and...

Alaska Native Resilience

Voices from World War II

By Holly Miowak Guise

Alaska Native elders remember wartime invasion, relocation, and land reclamation

The US government justified its World War II occupation of Alaska as a defense against Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian Islands, but it equally served to...

Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory

Grassroots Activism and Nuclear Waste in the Midwest

By Casey A. Huegel. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Housewives, hard hats, and an Ohio town’s restoration of the radioactive wasteland in its backyard

In 1984, a uranium leak at Ohio’s outdated Fernald Feed Materials Production Center highlighted the decades of harm inflicted on Cold...

Botany of Empire

Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism

By Banu Subramaniam

An accessible foray into botany’s origins and how we can transform its future

Colonial ambitions spawned imperial attitudes, theories, and practices that remain entrenched within botany and across the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields...

Late Industrialization, Tradition, and Social Change in South Korea

By Yong-Chool Ha

Examines how primary social ties fueled economic growth

South Korea's rapid industrialization occurred with the rise of powerful chaebǒl (family-owned business conglomerates) that controlled vast swaths of the nation's economy. Leader Park Chung Hee's sense of...

Cold War Deceptions

The Asia Foundation and the CIA

By David H. Price

Investigates how the CIA tried to influence scholars and governments

During the early Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency created dozens of funding fronts to support work that aligned with CIA goals, from clandestine operations and...