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The Unknown Great

Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History

By Greg Robinson. With Jonathan van Harmelen

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 century to the present day. Acclaimed historian and journalist Greg...

Bellwether Histories

Animals, Humans, and US Environments in Crisis

By Susan Nance, Jennifer Marks

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 and perpetuated untenable and unequal interspecies relationships. The collection's...

Settler Cannabis

From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California

By Kaitlin Reed

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 lands. As of 2021, the California cannabis economy was valued at $3.5 billion....

Wide-Open Desert

A Queer History of New Mexico

By Jordan Biro Walters

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 Los Alamos. Shifting focus away from the urban...

Skid Road

On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle

By Josephine Ensign

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 during the year, not counting the significant...

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

The history of Black Alaskans runs deep and spans generations. Decades before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, Black men and women participated in Alaska’s politics and culture. They...

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

The AIDS crisis reshaped life in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s and radicalized a new generation of queer Asian Americans with a broad vision of health equity and sexual freedom. Even amid the...

Love for Liberation

African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

By Robin J. Hayes

During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the US and Africa came together to fight for Black self-determination and the antiracist remaking of society. Beginning with the 1957 Ghanaian independence celebration, the...

The Unsung Great

Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans

By Greg Robinson

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 and achievements of relatively unknown but remarkable people...

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...

North

Finding Place in Alaska

By Julie Decker

Alaska is part of an international circumpolar North, which makes the United States an Arctic nation. Alaska is a place of Indigenous ingenuity and adaptation, a place where environmental extremes challenge the ways of living....

The Goldmark Case

An American Libel Trial

By William L. Dwyer

In 1962 John Goldmark, cattle rancher, Harvard Law School graduate, and distinguished three-term state legislator for a lightly populated area in north central Washington, was overwhelmingly defeated in his bid for reelection. He and his...

Bike Battles

A History of Sharing the American Road

By James Longhurst

Americans have been riding bikes for more than a century now. So why are most American cities still so ill-prepared to handle cyclists? James Longhurst, a historian and avid cyclist, tackles that question by tracing...

Dismembered

Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights

By David E. Wilkins. Shelly Hulse Wilkins

While the number of federally recognized Native nations in the United States are increasing, the population figures for existing tribal nations are declining. This depopulation is not being perpetrated by the federal government, but by...