Category: American History

Guest Post by Dane A. Morrison ISIS, Ebola, globalization, the Ukraine. State-sponsored terrorism, globally transmitted disease, worldwide economic disruption, fraught relations with overseas powers. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and FOX News shout this constellation of dangers to even the casual, cowering observer. In response, we imagine better times and think of these troubles…

Guest post by Robert C. Post On the dust jacket of my book, Who Owns America’s Past, there is a blurb from Dr. Deborah Douglas, Director of Collections at the MIT Museum and a marvelous historian. Debbie calls it “part history, part memoir, and part polemic,” and I’ve had to admit that she “got” my…

Guest post by Stephen H. Grant A century ago, in 1914, Henry Folger received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Amherst College. The citation read: “Henry Clay Folger, a graduate of this college in 1879, called to the bar in due course, called by ability, by character, by efficiency, integrity and the confidence of men…

Guest post by Carl Benn We normally think of native people in the War of 1812 participating in traditional war parties, which is accurate for the vast majority of the Iroquoian, Algonquian, Siouan, and Muskogean peoples of eastern North America who took up arms between 1812 and 1815. A small number, however, served within Euro-American…

Guest post by Marc Ferris In 1996, while sitting in a graduate history seminar at Stony Brook University, I searched for a topic to write about. My professors indulged my inquiry into the culture clash between United States authorities and headhunting tribes in the Philippines after the Spanish–American War, but I wanted to combine my…

September is shaping up to be a banner month for JHU Press authors and staff—and decidedly star-spangled here in Baltimore. This month, the city hosts the Star-Spangled Spectacular to celebrate the bicentennial of the Battle of Baltimore and the moment when Francis Scott Key put pen to paper, and we’ll be waving the JHU Press flag…

By Brendan Coyne As people across the world grapple with such issues as the Islamic State and continued hostilities between Palestinians and the Israeli state to institutionalized discrimination and militarized police to climate change and unstable governments, the world's largest collection of political scientists meets this week in Washington, D.C. We're happy to be here supporting…

By Brendan Coyne As people across the world grapple with such issues as the Islamic State and continued hostilities between Palestinians and the Israeli state to institutionalized discrimination and militarized police to climate change and unstable governments, the world's largest collection of political scientists meets this week in Washington, D.C. We're happy to be here supporting…

Guest post by Joseph F. Spillane Historians have, finally, seized upon the phenomenon of mass incarceration as a subject worthy of serious consideration. The astonishing and unprecedented rise of imprisonment rates between the early 1970s and the 2000s is undoubtedly one of the most significant developments in modern social policy. Indeed, mass incarceration is now…

Guest post by D. Rose Elder The media typically portray Amish characters as either disapproving, humorless, and colorless adults rigidly humming a solemn hymn to keep worldly thoughts at bay or conflicted, cocky, out-of-control rumspringa adolescents listening to ear-splitting rock and testing all the limits of decency. Of course, TV and the movies are by…