Using rarely studied financial records from the Inquisition’s archives, Ana María Silva Campo reveals how the Spanish Inquisition seized property from prosperous Black women and descendants of Portuguese Jews—a process of selective persecution and wealth redistribution that helped create racialized economic hierarchies in a Spanish colonial city.

Keeping Our Enemies Closer reveals what happens when college students, police, and community members talk across political lines. Based on in-depth research, it explores the promises and limits of dialogue in polarized times—offering a nuanced, powerful look at how real conversations can both challenge and change individuals and institutions.

An exploration of the history of auditory attention between roughly 1800 and 1930, The Attentive Ear probes the origins, key theories, and experimental trajectories of attentional discourses around the globe, demonstrating the central role of audition in shaping our conceptions of focus and distraction.

The Fly Room tells the story of Nobel Prize-winning biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan’s laboratory at Columbia University where he and his students, by experimenting with and breeding fruit flies, invented genetics, which would eventually lead to the refutation of the theory of eugenics and prove Darwin’s theory of evolution right.

Troop Movements explains how mass mobilization for World War II—involving multiracial soldiers and defense workers—provided an opportunity for entangled alliances across race, class, and global concerns. This mobilization and conflicts within it catalyzed the national and international political movements and conflicts of the postwar period.

Lavishly illustrated, Travels on the Edge not only carries readers to some of the most remote and inaccessible parts of the world but also celebrates the challenges and joys of scientific research. Its author brings a rich human perspective to regions few people have had a chance to explore.

The Temptations of Trade reveals the opportunities and tensions of doing business in regions far from strict imperial control, where the actions of individuals could both connect empires and drive them to war.

Hunch explores ten issues in geology and astronomy—among them what causes the heating of the sun’s surface and whether Palaeolithic people sailed across oceans—where the accepted scientific answers to these questions were challenged, and how following one’s intuition can often lead to great intellectual rewards.

In Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850, Mark J. Miller argues that transatlantic Protestant discourses of abjection engaged with, and furthered the development of, concepts of race and sexuality in the creation of public subjects and public spheres.

Pepperpot City, a lavishly illustrated collection of seventeen thematic essays ranging from memoir to investigative history written by veteran food writer and Philadelphian William Woys Weaver, provides an engaging and accessible tour of Old Philadelphia cuisine as well as modernized re-creations of historical dishes, including pepperpot soup.