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History & Society

Explore books and original articles that examine how history, culture, institutions, education, and social change shape communities and human experience.

36 published books 1 published article

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The Devil in the White City

Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

Erik Larson reconstructs two histories unfolding in and around Chicago during the early 1890s. The larger strand follows architect Daniel H. Burnham and the formidable effort to design, finance, construct, and open the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Burnham must coordinate prominent architects, landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, engineers, laborers, civic leaders, and exhibitors while confronting deadlines, weather, economic instability, construction accidents, and the death of his partner John Root. The second strand follows Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as H. H. Holmes, a physician, swindler, bigamist, and murderer operating not far from the fairgrounds. Larson alternates between these narratives rather than treating the fair as background decoration for a conventional crime account. The result is a study in contrasting forms of ambition: Burnham’s public, collaborative effort to create a temporary ideal city and Holmes’s private manipulation of people, property…

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The Ministry for the Future

A Novel

Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future novel examines climate change as a crisis of institutions, economics, technology, justice, and collective action rather than as a single disaster with a single solution. It opens with a lethal heat wave in India, experienced by aid worker Frank May, and follows the psychological and political consequences of that catastrophe. A second central thread concerns Mary Murphy, the head of an international body informally called the Ministry for the Future, whose mandate is to represent future generations and living beings that lack political power in the present. The book gradually expands beyond Frank and Mary into a global systems narrative. It moves among central bankers, climate scientists, activists, refugees, lawyers, agricultural communities, engineers, political officials, and covert organizations. Conventional scenes are interspersed with testimony, reports, meeting notes, explanatory passages, dialogues, and nonhuman or conceptual voices. This co…

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The New Jim Crow

Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander argues that the extraordinary expansion of the United States criminal legal system—especially through the War on Drugs—created a durable structure of racial control after the formal dismantling of Jim Crow segregation. Her argument is not simply that individual officials may be prejudiced or that racial disparities are unfortunate side effects. She maintains that ostensibly race-neutral laws, discretionary policing, prosecutorial power, plea bargaining, sentencing policy, and the continuing penalties attached to a criminal record operate together as a system. The book begins by placing mass incarceration within a longer history of racial hierarchy, moving from slavery through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the late-twentieth-century politics of crime. It then explains how drug enforcement and criminal procedure give police and prosecutors broad discretion while courts make proof of systemic racial discrimination exceptionally difficult. Alexander follows people beyon…

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The Color of Law

A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

The book presents a historical and constitutional argument about residential segregation in the United States. Richard Rothstein disputes the familiar description of metropolitan segregation as merely de facto—that is, arising through private prejudice, household preference, economic inequality, or market behavior without decisive government involvement. He argues that federal, state, and local authorities repeatedly imposed, reinforced, or protected racial separation, making much of the resulting geography de jure segregation. ([guides.loc.gov](https://guides.loc.gov/real-estate-industry-sources/residential/fair-housing?utm_source=openai)) Rothstein builds this case through connected examples rather than a single-city history. He examines racially explicit zoning, segregated public housing, discriminatory federal mortgage policy, suburban development restricted to white purchasers, tax and land-use decisions, official tolerance of violence against integrating families, and public act…

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Invisible Women

Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Invisible Women examines what happens when institutions treat male bodies, routines, and experiences as the human norm. Caroline Criado Perez calls attention to a “gender data gap”: missing, unreported, or insufficiently separated information about women. Her central argument is not merely that women are absent from datasets. It is that decisions made from incomplete evidence can turn that absence into material disadvantages—including unsuitable products, ineffective public services, distorted economic measurements, and avoidable health and safety risks. The book moves from ordinary environments to increasingly consequential systems. Its six parts address daily life, employment, design, medicine, public life, and disasters. Examples involving transportation, toilets, unpaid care, workplace practices, protective equipment, phones, medical research, government spending, refugee assistance, and disaster recovery allow the same underlying pattern to be observed across otherwise unrelated…

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The Jakarta Method

Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World

Vincent Bevins presents a transnational history of Cold War anticommunist violence, placing the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 at the center of a much larger story. Rather than treating Indonesia as a peripheral episode in a contest dominated by Washington and Moscow, he argues that the destruction of Indonesia’s organized left was a major geopolitical turning point. The book traces connections among decolonization, the Non-Aligned Movement, the 1964 Brazilian military coup, the Indonesian Army’s rise under Suharto, and later campaigns of repression in Latin America and elsewhere. The phrase “Jakarta Method” describes more than one operation or fixed doctrine. In the book, it becomes a framework for recognizing a recurring political pattern: communist, socialist, labor, peasant, or reform movements are portrayed as existential threats; military and conservative forces receive encouragement or assistance; targeted people are detained, disappeared, or killed; and the resulting po…

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Say Nothing

A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Say Nothing is a work of investigative narrative nonfiction about the Troubles and their long aftermath in Northern Ireland. Its central case is the December 1972 abduction and killing of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten taken from her Belfast home. McConville’s disappearance gives the book a human-scale route into a much larger history of republican militancy, British security policy, sectarian division, clandestine intelligence, imprisonment, political negotiation, and unresolved grief. Rather than attempting a complete chronological history of the conflict, Keefe follows intersecting lives. These include members of the McConville family; republican activists Dolours and Marian Price; senior IRA figure Brendan Hughes; and Gerry Adams, whose alleged relationship to the IRA is treated as a major question in the narrative. The book also examines the Boston College oral-history undertaking commonly known as the Belfast Project. Interviews recorded for that archive promised parti…

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Evicted

Poverty and Profit in the American City

Evicted examines how the loss of a home operates within the broader machinery of American poverty. Its principal setting is Milwaukee during and after the 2008 financial crisis, where Desmond follows eight low-income families—Black tenants on the city’s North Side and white tenants in a South Side mobile-home park—along with the landlords whose decisions shape their housing prospects. Rather than presenting poverty only through statistics or policy analysis, the book reconstructs daily life under severe rent burdens: searching for apartments, negotiating with landlords, appearing in housing court, losing possessions, moving between temporary homes, and trying to preserve work and family routines amid displacement. The narrative is based on embedded fieldwork supplemented by interviews, surveys, and analysis of eviction-court records. Desmond reports that he interviewed 250 tenants in eviction court, surveyed more than 1,000 Milwaukee renters, and analyzed hundreds of thousands of cour…

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