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A sweeping history of urban incarceration in Chicago and Cook County, This Is My Jail shows that jails are critical sites of urban inequality that sustain the racist actions of the police and judges and exacerbate the harms wrought by housing discrimination, segregated schools, and inaccessible health care.

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.

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.

In The Sonic South, Rebeccah Bechtold traces how white listeners both heard and imagined the plantation South and its Black communities and examines the legacy of these ways of hearing in the popular plantation literature of the 1830s to 1860s, written by both pro- and antislavery authors.

Through an exploration of ostensibly race- and gender-neutral policy approaches to alleviate patriarchal anxieties, H. Howell Williams reveals that political advocates’ efforts to regulate fatherhood were really attempts to bolster White American patriarchy and protect its dominance.

Speculation Nation chronicles the “mania” for land speculation that swept the new United States, as the nation’s elite founders rushed to profit off Native American dispossession. It reveals how the American Revolution produced a republican “empire of liberty” with financial speculation at its core.

Jane Colden (1724–1760) was America’s first woman botanist. This richly illustrated account of her life and work examines Colden’s original writing, the correspondence of her father, Dr. Cadwallader Colden, and eighteenth-century botanic sources, and restores her legacy as one of the country’s great botanists.

In Ancien Régime France, the discourse of society was usually referred to as bruit, or noise. Public Acoustics explores how writers manipulated this acoustic metaphor to theorize the political and social force of common talk, offering an alternative history of the public sphere that resonates with the noisy digital media environments of today.

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.