In Insatiable City, Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploit ..read more

The University of Chicago Press is pleased to announce that Objects in Air: Objects and Their Outside around 1900 by Margareta Ingrid Christian is the recipient of the 2024 Gordon J. Laing Award. The award was presented by the University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos at a gala reception on April 24, 2024, in the City View Room of the David Rubenstein Forum at the University of Chicago. The Gordon J. Laing Award is conferred annually by vote of the Board of University Publications on the faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the list of ..read more

Few—if any—of us are looking forward to the upcoming 2024 Election season. During such a historically tumultuous year, most Americans are chiefly concerned with safeguarding their emotional and mental wellbeing while being engaged political citizens. Nothing about this election will be simple or inconsequential—and that is precisely why it matters now more than ever to engage with the massive questions lying before our nation.    As we enter the heat of the election season, we’d like to draw your attention to a handful of thought-provoking, salient books that beg us to consider our p ..read more

In 1973, economist E. F. Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful, which introduced a mainstream audience to his theory of “appropriate technology”: the belief that international development projects in the Global South were most sustainable when they were small-scale, decentralized, and balanced between the traditional and the modern. The first critical book on “appropriate technology,” Developing to Scale shows how global health came to be understood as a problem to be solved with the right technical interventions. Read on for an interview with the author, Heidi Morefield, abou ..read more

In her revealing new book, American Imperialist, historian Arwen P. Mohun offers a nuanced portrait of how her great-grandfather’s pursuit of career success and financial security for his family came at a tragic cost to countless Africans. In anticipation of its upcoming release in November, we’re sharing the beginning of the book’s prologue here. Prologue He’d never intended to work for the Belgian king. But intentions aren’t actions. Still, a few years earlier, he had turned down Leopold II’s first job offer. The accusatory voices of journalists, friends, and reformers reinforced his reluct ..read more

To celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we’ve assembled a reading list highlighting the lives of Indigenous individuals and the history of their communities that have lived in the Americas for thousands of years. With these books, you can honor the story of a Canadian Indian residential school survivor, face our nation’s troubled archaeological history, explore hundreds of pieces crafted by Indigenous artists featured at the Denver Art Museum, and much more. This month, enjoy 40% off these print and e-books using the code ___________ on our website. Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictograp ..read more

In Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen, Karen Sullivan invites readers on a literary journey through the stories about the famous medieval queen, in order to discover what even the most fantastical tales reveal about Eleanor and life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. In this guest post below, Sullivan follows the queen through four such stories. In the 1968 film The Lion in Winter, Henry II, King of England, speculates as to what future historians will record about his reign. He imagines them saying that he was the ablest soldier at an able time and t ..read more

At the Gordon J. Laing Prize reception for 2023 winner Elisabeth S. Clemens for her book “Civic Gifts, Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State” at the University of Chicago’s Rubenstein Forum on May 8, 2023. University President Paul Alivisatos (left), author Elisabeth S. Clemens (center), and Press Director Garrett Kiely (right) (Photo by Jason Smith) The University of Chicago Press is pleased to announce that Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State by Elisabeth S. Clemens is the recipient of the 2023 Gordon J. Laing Award. The award was presented ..read more

In Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency, Dror Goldberg tells the lesser-known history of how modern money was invented in a seventeenth-century Massachusetts colony while tracing its roots in today’s financial systems. Read on below for an interview with the author about his research and what lessons we can apply from the early days of currency to today’s crypto world. While you were working on this project, what did you learn that surprised you the most? I was surprised to learn how interesting early American history was. As a foreign economist, without a Britis ..read more

The Last Consolation Vanished is a unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz. His extraordinary account, accompanied by a foreword and afterword by Philippe Mesnard and Arnold I. Davidson, is a voice speaking to us from the past on behalf of millions who were silenced. Here, we share a moving excerpt from the book, entitled “The Song from the Grave.” The Song from the Grave In the large bunker stand thousands of victims, waiting for death. All at once, spontaneously, a song rings out. Once again the clique of superior ..read more