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The first relational study of twentieth-century U.S. guestworker programs from Mexico and the Caribbean, Contracting Freedom explores how 1940s debates over labor programs elided race and empire while further legitimating and extending U.S. domination abroad in the post-World War II era.

When royal commissioners came to enforce the demands of the newly restored King Charles II, many New Englanders chafed against what they saw as arbitrary rule. Adrian Chastain Weimer shows how, despite being under immense metropolitan pressure, they mobilized to defy the crown, forming a robust and longstanding constitutional culture.

Through the voices of tenants, organizers, artists, sex workers, mutual aid practitioners, and young people, You Can’t Evict a Movement explores how housing justice in New York’s Chinatown links to broader struggles for community safety, collective wellness, and the possibility of living otherwise.

In The Business of Education, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer shows that US colleges and universities have always had to hustle to limit expenses while aggressively competing for donations, business contracts, federal grants, state allocations, and students willing and able to pay tuition.

No Wood, No Kingdom explores the conflicting attempts to understand the problem of wood scarcity in early modern England and demonstrates how these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of England's earliest colonies.

The Engine of Free Expression shows that, over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, copyright became a powerful tool and product of the growth of local, state, and national governments, establishing precedents that are with us in the present.

Capitalism and the American Century argues that post–World War II US political economy cannot be understood as primarily a domestic story. The contributors to this volume show that treating postwar US capitalism as a global story transforms our narratives of the period’s political, social, and cultural life.

Focusing on the relations between Uruguay and the United States in the context of World War II, Forgotten Neighbors emphasizes Uruguay’s important role in the era’s inter-American affairs and in the evolving US security matrix, highlighting both the vast reach and limits of US power.

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.