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In 1984, a uranium leak at Ohio’s outdated Fernald Feed Materials Production Center highlighted the decades of harm inflicted on Cold...

Exiled to Motown

A Community History of Japanese Americans in Detroit

By Detroit JACL History Project Committee

During World War II, Detroit emerged as a relative space of freedom for Nisei permitted by the War Relocation Authority to leave sites of incarceration but banned from returning to their homes in the exclusion...

Treaty Justice

The Northwest Tribes, the Boldt Decision, and the Recognition of Fishing Rights

By Charles Wilkinson

In 1974, Judge George Boldt issued a ruling that affirmed the fishing rights and tribal sovereignty of Native nations in Washington State. The Boldt Decision transformed Indigenous law and resource management across the United States...

The Unknown Great

Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History

By Greg Robinson. With Jonathan van Harmelen

An astounding new set of biographical portraits in Japanese American history

Through stories of remarkable people in Japanese American history, The Unknown Great illuminates the diversity of the Nikkei experience from the turn of the twentieth...

Settler Cannabis

From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California

By Kaitlin Reed

Connects California cannabis production to the violence and dispossession of Indigenous land and people

Young countercultural back-to-the-land settlers flocked to northwestern California beginning in the 1960s, and by the 1970s, unregulated cannabis production proliferated on Indigenous...

Bellwether Histories

Animals, Humans, and US Environments in Crisis

By Susan Nance, Jennifer Marks

Explores ecological crises and extinctions that have shaped US history

A multispecies history of the globalized United States, Bellwether Histories reveals how animals have been ensnared in colonialism, capitalism, and environmental destruction as human decisions created...

Wide-Open Desert

A Queer History of New Mexico

By Jordan Biro Walters

Reveals the untold stories about New Mexico’s queer past

Throughout the twentieth century, New Mexico’s LGBTQ+ residents inhabited a wide spectrum of spaces, from Santa Fe’s nascent bohemian art scene to the secretive military developments at...

Skid Road

On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle

By Josephine Ensign

A finalist for the Washington State Book Award

Affluent Seattle has one of the highest numbers of unhoused people in the United States. In 2021 an estimated 40,800 people experienced homelessness in Seattle and King County...

Black Lives in Alaska

A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest

By Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer. Foreword by Calvin E. Williams

Documents the rich history of Black life in Alaska since the 1850s

The history of Black Alaskans runs deep and spans generations. Decades before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s,...

New Women of Empire

Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America

By Chrissy Yee Lau

Strong, bold, and vivacious—Japanese American young women were leaders and heroines of the Roaring Twenties. Controversial to the male immigrant elite for their rebellion against gender norms, these women made indelible changes in the community,...

The Great Quake Debate

The Crusader, the Skeptic, and the Rise of Modern Seismology

By Susan Hough

In the first half of the twentieth century, when seismology was still in in its infancy, renowned geologist Bailey Willis faced off with fellow high-profile scientist Robert T. Hill in a debate with life-or-death consequences...

Love Your Asian Body

AIDS Activism in Los Angeles

By Eric C. Wat

Winner of the Outstanding Achievement in History Award for 2023, presented by the Association for Asian American Studies

Defying the AIDS epidemic, Asian American activists sparked a sex-affirming movement

The AIDS crisis reshaped life in Los Angeles...

Love for Liberation

African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

By Robin J. Hayes

CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title

Illuminates how global solidarity defined African American politics and invigorated the African diaspora

During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the US and Africa came together to...

The Unsung Great

Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans

By Greg Robinson

Fascinating portraits illuminate the diversity of Japanese American experiences

From a title-winning boxer in Louisiana to a Broadway baritone in New York, Japanese Americans have long belied their popular representation as “quiet Americans.” Showcasing the lives...

Alaska

An American Colony

By Stephen W. Haycox

Alaska often looms large as a remote, wild place with endless resources and endlessly independent, resourceful people. Yet it has always been part of larger stories: the movement of Indigenous peoples from Asia into the...

Smell Detectives

An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America

By Melanie A. Kiechle. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

What did nineteenth-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the nineteenth-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary...

Japanese Prostitutes in the North American West, 1887-1920

By Kazuhiro Oharazeki

This compelling study of a previously overlooked vice industry explores the larger structural forces that led to the growth of prostitution in Japan, the Pacific region, and the North American West at the turn of...

Stars for Freedom

Hollywood, Black Celebrities, and the Civil Rights Movement

By Emilie Raymond

From Oprah Winfrey to Angelina Jolie, George Clooney to Leonardo DiCaprio, Americans have come to expect that Hollywood celebrities will be outspoken advocates for social and political causes. However, that wasn’t always the case. As...

Dutch New York Histories

Connecting African, Native American and Slavery Heritage

By Dienke Hondius, Nancy Jouwe, Dineke Stam, and Jennifer Tosch

Did you know that the famous African American abolitionist Sojourner Truth was enslaved and spoke Dutch until the age of ten? Or that the Dutch brought enslaved Africans to North America in the merchant ships...