Frank Guridy’s newest book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play is now available through Basic Books. Read reviews by the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and listen to Professor Guridy’s interview with NPR on Fresh Air discussing the role of the stadium in American political and cultural life.

James Tejani (PhD 2009) has published A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America (W. W. Norton, July 2024), which explores how America’s global gateway – the busiest container port in the Western hemisphere – came to be from mud and salt marsh. The tale spans to Washington, DC, New York City, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia as it follows Mexican ranchers, US frontier explorers, imperialist politicians like Jefferson Davis and Theodore Roosevelt, land speculators (among them Civil War general Edward Ord), and railroad titans like Collis Huntington and Edward H. Harriman. 

Kim Phillips-Fein published a review of Luke Nichter’s The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 for The London Review of Books, exploring the unusual circumstances surrounding the 1968 election, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision to drop out of the race and Richard Nixon’s behind-the-scenes political manuevering.

Angelo Caglioti published an article in Past and Present on the origins of Italian settler colonialism in the perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism.  It argues that the Italian project to turn the highlands of the Horn of Africa into a settler colony was an “imperial mirage”: the perception that the momentarily depopulated landscape of Ethiopia, produced by “natural” disasters that were in fact the social products of colonial warfare, would be available to Italian settlers in the future. This mirage was based on a domino effect of environmental catastrophes connecting climate history, animal disease, and the politics of European imperialism. Thus, the article explains the battle of Adwa (1896) as the result of willful ignorance and wishful self-deception that fueled Italian colonization projects.