Examining how the work of writers including More, Shakespeare, and Milton dealt with humanism’s entanglements with these new prisons, Houses of Correction constructs the first book-length literary history of some of early modern Europe’s most influential carceral institutions.

People as Protection explores civilian self-protection in Nigeria’s struggle to overcome Boko Haram, focusing on the Civilian Joint Task Force, a grassroots response to the insurgency. Merging emotional insight and cultural analysis, it uncovers how hope, patriotism, and community drove ordinary citizens to confront violence and reclaim dignity.

The years 1945 to 2020, from the testing of the first atomic bomb to the rise of artificial intelligence, constitute the “American century,” which coincides with the rise and fall of the United States as a global power. Arnold Thackray’s pioneering expertise in the history of science provides a unique perspective from which to tell this story.

The Rising Generation chronicles the history of emancipation in the United States through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a remarkable generation of black northerners. It focuses on the efforts of the “children of gradual abolition,” who, as grown-ups, shaped national and state campaigns for legal equality and the end of slavery.

Making All the World America offers a new account of the Doctrine of Discovery. While scholars have maintained that the doctrine operated through the suppression of Indigenous peoples, Timothy Bowers Vasko contends that the doctrine’s ideological work actually depended on the recognition of Indigenous rights and sovereignty.

In Illusions of Progress, Brent Cebul traces the rise of what he terms “supply-side liberalism” back to the 1930s and contends that, by binding national visions of progress to the local interests of capital, liberals often entrenched the very inequalities of power and opportunity they imagined their programs solving.

Undoing Slavery excavates medical and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Facing many challenges to their goal of restoring embodied self-sovereignty to the enslaved, abolitionists learned that legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.

Focusing on the British occupation of Philadelphia from 1777 to 1778, The Disaffected highlights the perspectives of those wearied by and withdrawn from the War for Independence and reveals the consequences of a Revolutionary ideology that assumed the nation's people to be a united and homogenous front.

A New Working Class traces efforts by Black public-sector workers and their unions to fight for racial and economic justice in Baltimore. Federal policy shifts imperiled their efforts. Officials justified weakening the welfare state and strengthening the carceral state by criminalizing Black residents—including government workers.

In Extinction and the Human Timothy Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them, focusing especially on the force of human impact on megafauna—mammoths, whales, and the North American bison.