Creating a culture of consumption in 20th century Chicago meant making space for shoppers, which meant integrating women into public life, in a downtown dominated by men. Historian Emily Remus revels in the ramifications of that cultural shift in A Shoppers' Paradise.
In Out of Our Minds, Fernández-Armesto encourages readers to distrust visionaries who promise perfection.
Wasn't That a Time digs into the Weaver's empathy for the working class struggle, which was weaponized and politicized against them by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Solitary confinement; monastic discipline; gender discrimination: In Silence, Jane Brox explores how our circumstances shape our ideals, showing how authority muffles her not so quiet subject.
In Pat Buchanan's 1992 presidential address he evoked fear of "crossdressers in our midst" as a metaphor for the infiltration of liberal political culture. Grant Morrison's The Invisibles comics proved he had reason to fear.
Director William McGregor reflects on how his fantastical period film, Gwen, began as a reaction to mainstream television, and how the capitalist antagonist will allow the film to continue to resonate with audiences in the future.
Historian Richard Noakes interviews with PopMatters on his work, Physics and Psychics, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, which offers fascinating insights into the 'heretical' activities of some of the most eminent scientists in Victorian Britain.
Naoko Abe's The Sakura Obsession chronicles the struggle to preserve diversity in a world of compulsive uniformity.
Focusing on vinyl records and the labels that released them, An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels traces the parallel rise of social movements in the second half of the twentieth century and the vinyl record as the dominant form of music distribution.
Julián Herbert's The House of the Pain of Others is a masterly study that sheds light on the role played by educated elites in fomenting genocide.
Stylistically risqué, The Favourite relates to a certain type of subversive British cinema from filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway, although it is not an imitation.
The juxtaposition of the comics and their prose-only afterwards in Amplify are intriguing, but the result is a surprising undercurrent of mistrust in comics to represent history independently of traditional scholarly apparatus.
Socialists need to do better in fighting against identity-based discrimination, as editor of Jacobin Bhaskar Sunkara notes in The Socialist Manifesto, but that struggle will only be effective if waged as part of a larger struggle against neoliberal capitalism.
Roy Christopher's dense book-length essay, Dead Precedents, takes much of what is now axiomatic about hip-hop and reminds us how revolutionary its innovations and practices really were.
Ironically, James Sullivan's liberalism is fundamental to what's wrong with Which Side Are You On?: 20th Century American History in 100 Protest Songs.
Part diary, part travelogue, and part social science study, Abdallah Saaf's A Significant Year examines Morocco's 2007 elections with a perspective on all modern democracies.
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