Category: American History & Studies

This Month’s Podcast: Victoria W. Wolcott on Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters

“It’s not simply kids having fun at a roller skating rink. It’s that when you associate certain kinds of spaces with cleanliness, safety, and fun that exclude people of color, then that association has powerful cultural and political effects long after desegregation actually happens,” says Wolcott.

Bodies and Books–Now Available

Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America Gillian Silverman 256 pages | 6 x 9 | 3 illus. Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4415-1 | $55.00… READ MORE

Q&A with Geoffrey Plank, author of John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom

Woolman’s ideals were informed by a literal reading of the Bible and the experience of growing up on a farm in New Jersey. He associated well-ordered, peaceful, pastoral landscapes with Eden and the Peaceable Kingdom that Isaiah foresaw as part of humanity’s future. The tensions and violence of slavery had no place in the world that Woolman hoped to see established.