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The definitive history of an iconic American food, with new chapters, sidebars, and updated historical accounts.

Expert Robert F. Moss researched hundreds of sources—newspapers, letters, journals, diaries, and travel narratives—to document the origins and evolution of barbecue from its origins among Native Americans to its present status as an icon of American culture. In this definitive guide, he maps out the development of the rich array of regional barbecue styles, chronicles the rise of barbecue restaurants, and profiles the famed pitmasters who made the tradition what it is today.

Barbecue is the story not just of a dish but also of a social institution that helped shape many regional cultures of the United States. The history begins with British colonists’ adoption of barbecuing techniques from Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries, moves to barbecue’s establishment as the preeminent form of public celebration in the 19th century, and is carried through to barbecue’s ubiquitous standing today.

From the very beginning, barbecues were powerful social magnets, drawing together people from a wide range of classes and geographic backgrounds. Barbecue played a key role in three centuries of American history, both reflecting and influencing the direction of an evolving society. By tracing the story of barbecue from its origins to today, Barbecue: The History of an American Institution traces the very thread of American social history.

Moss has made significant updates in this new edition, offering a wealth of new historical research, sources, illustrations, and anecdotes.

WINNER OF THE ANNE B. & JAMES B. MCMILLAN PRIZE IN SOUTHERN HISTORY
WINNER OF THE ERMINIE WHEELER-VOEGELIN BOOK AWARD
WINNER OF THE BERSHIRE CONFERENCE OF WOMEN HISTORIANS BOOK AWARD
WINNER OF THE GEORGE C. ROGERS, JR. AWARD FROM THE SOUTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The story of Catawba women who experienced sweeping changes to their world but held onto traditional customs to create and preserve a Catawba identity and build a nation.

Brooke M. Bauer’s Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 is the first book-length study of the role Catawba women played in creating and preserving a cohesive tribal identity over three centuries of colonization and cultural turmoil. Bauer, a citizen of the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, weaves ethnohistorical methodologies, family history, cultural context, and the Catawba language together to generate an internal perspective on the Catawbas’ history and heritage in the area now known as the Carolina Piedmont.

This unique and important study examines the lives and legacies of women who executed complex decision-making and diplomacy to navigate shifting frameworks of kinship, land ownership, and cultural production in dealings with colonial encroachments, white settlers, and Euro-American legal systems and governments from the mid-sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Personified in the figure of Sally New River, a Catawba cultural leader to whom 500 remaining acres of occupied tribal lands were deeded on behalf of the community in 1796 and which she managed until her death in 1821, Bauer reveals how women worked to ensure the survival of the Catawba people and their Catawba identity, an effort that resulted in a unified nation.

Bauer’s approach is primarily ethnohistorical, although it draws on a number of interdisciplinary strategies. In particular, Bauer uses “upstreaming,” a critical strategy that moves toward the period under study by using present-day community members’ connections to historical knowledge—for example, family histories and oral traditions—to interpret primary-source data. Additionally, Bauer employs archaeological data and material culture as a means of performing feminist recuperation, filling the gaps and silences left by the records, newspapers, and historical accounts as primarily written by and for white men. Ultimately, Becoming Catawba effects a welcome intervention at the intersections of Native, women’s, and Southern history, expanding the diversity and modes of experience in the fraught, multifaceted cultural environment of the early American South.
 

The year 2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act, the cornerstone of historic preservation policy and practice in the United States. The act established the National Register of Historic Places, a national system of state preservation offices and local commissions, set up federal partnerships between states and tribes, and led to the formation of the standards for preservation and rehabilitation of historic structures. This book marks its fiftieth anniversary by collecting fifty new and provocative essays that chart the future of preservation.

The commentators include leading preservation professionals, historians, writers, activists, journalists, architects, and urbanists. The essays offer a distinct vision for the future and address related questions, including, Who is a preservationist? What should be preserved? Why? How? What stories do we tell in preservation? How does preservation contribute to the financial, environmental, social, and cultural well-being of communities? And if the “arc of the moral universe . . . bends towards justice,” how can preservation be a tool for achieving a more just society and world?

Explores the roots of evangelical Christian support for Israel through an examination of the Southern Baptist Convention

One week after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) repeatedly and overwhelmingly voted down resolutions congratulating fellow Southern Baptist Harry Truman on his role in Israel’s creation. From today’s perspective, this seems like a shocking result. After all, Christians—particularly the white evangelical Protestants who populate the SBC—are now the largest pro-Israel constituency in the United States. How could conservative evangelicals have been so hesitant in celebrating Israel’s birth in 1948? How did they then come to be so supportive?

Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel addresses these issues by exploring how Southern Baptists engaged what was called the “Palestine question”: whether Jews or Arabs would, or should, control the Holy Land after World War I. Walker Robins argues that, in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, most Southern Baptists did not directly engage the Palestine question politically. Rather, they engaged it indirectly through a variety of encounters with the land, the peoples, and the politics of Palestine. Among the instrumental figures featured by Robins are tourists, foreign missionaries, Arab pastors, converts from Judaism, biblical interpreters, fundamentalist rebels, editorialists, and, of course, even a president. While all revered Palestine as the Holy Land, each approached and encountered the region according to their own priorities.

Nevertheless, Robins shows that Baptists consistently looked at the region through an Orientalist framework, broadly associating the Zionist movement with Western civilization, modernity, and progress over and against the Arabs, whom they viewed as uncivilized, premodern, and backward. He argues that such impressions were not idle—they suggested that the Zionists were bringing to fruition Baptists’ long-expressed hopes that Israel would regain the prosperity it had held in the biblical era, the Holy Land would one day be revived, and biblical prophecies preceding the return of Christ would be fulfilled.
 

“Utterly illuminating. . . . Just a really revelatory book.”—Jill Lepore, The New York Times, The “Book Review” Podcast • “As historian Stein traces in Bicentennial, a national birthday can launch a much broader, more inclusive, and ambitious national project.”—Rebecca Brenner Graham, The New Republic • “A comprehensive and critical look at the Spirit of 1976.”—Library Journal

As the United States marks its semiquincentennial in 2026, renowned historian Marc Stein looks back at the politics of another landmark celebration during a time of striking similarities and surprising differences: the US bicentennial in 1976. 
 
In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, the bicentennial sparked an extraordinary national conversation about the country’s past, present, and future. As patriots, planners, profiteers, and protesters argued about how to commemorate the national birthday, they collectively reimagined the promises and perils of democracy during a transformational decade.

From award-winning historian Marc Stein, Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s is an original, illuminating, and insightful study of that era. While focusing on festivities and fights in Philadelphia, the nation’s birthplace, the book also explores the many proposed and abandoned celebrations that percolated up around the country. It tells a broadly democratic story of both the “official” bicentennial and counter-bicentennial activism, offering revolutionary perspectives on national politics, social movements, and popular culture. From the queer courtship of President Richard Nixon and Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo to parades and protests with millions of participants, and from a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at Philadelphia’s most prestigious hotel to the establishment of groundbreaking African American, ethnic, and Jewish museums, the bicentennial reveals a kaleidoscope of American peculiarities, problems, and possibilities.

The lasting influence of 1976 on one of the nation’s great urban centers and the United States as a whole is undeniable. As the nation—once again enmeshed in political and social upheaval—marks its two-hundred-fiftieth birthday in 2026, there is no better time to look back at its two-hundredth and marvel at what has changed, and what has not.

Drawing on a vast wealth of evidence—folktales, oral histories, religious rituals, and music—this book explores the pervasive if often unacknowledged influence of African traditions on American life. The result is a bold reinterpretation of American history that disrupts conventional assumptions and turns racial stereotypes inside out.

William D. Piersen begins by examining a series of African and African-American oral narratives that interpret the experience of slavery from a distinctly black perspective. Centered on issues of moral truth, these tales bear witness to the meaning and human cost of the slave trade as perceived by those who were its victims. Piersen then analyzes the ways in which enslaved Africans adapted their rich cultural heritage to the new circumstances they were forced to endure. He shows, for example, how they imaginatively—and often aggressively—devised forms of public satire to resist white authority. He traces the transfer of traditional African medical knowledge to the Americas and demonstrates that in antebellum America many black healers were more skilled than their white counterparts. He further shows how African customs helped shape the evolving contours of American culture—particularly in the South—from holiday celebrations, musical traditions, and architectural styles to modes of speech, habits of work, and ways of cooking. The black legacy to America even extended, ironically, to the Ku Klux Klan, whose founders imitated masking traditions handed down from West African secret societies. By reestablishing the forgotten cultural links between Africa and America, this study enriches our understanding of American history and is a powerful testament to the legacy of African culture in American life.

All too often, the disciplines of film studies, literary criticism, and art history ignore the opportunity to collaborate in a dialogue. Branche and his contributors present a unified approach, however, suggesting that cultural production should not be viewed narrowly, especially when studying the achievements of the Afro-Latin world.

As a minority group for most of their history, Jews were often marginalized and persecuted. Traces of their lives can be found in the archives of the dominant societies, but only as they intersected with the concerns of those in power. Just as Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, and others recovered the voices of the peasants, so, too, scholars of Jewish history and culture have productively mined these reservoirs of evidence to retrieve glimpses of the ordinary lives of Jews. Blood Libels, Hostile Archives explores what can be reclaimed about everyday lives from what can be called “hostile archives”—from archival evidence produced and collected explicitly to manufacture malicious tales and pass them as “facts.” For Jewish history, in some places, these archival sources may be the only remaining records documenting the lives of Jews there.

The book explores two places: Trent, in northern Italy, and Sandomierz, in eastern Poland. Though hundreds of miles away, the towns have many things in common: both had been sites of anti-Jewish libels falsely accusing Jews of killing Christian children, Trent in 1475 and Sandomierz twice—in 1698 and 1710; in both, the instigators of the Jews’ persecution left unique and extensive archives, both towns have physical remnants of these deadly affairs, and, finally, neither town has an existing Jewish population. Yet, centuries later, these anti-Jewish libels have not been relegated to the past; in both towns, their legacies still reverberate today.

In the late twentieth century the American and global economy shifted from manufacturing toward a knowledge industry. Following an economic low point several decades earlier, the city of Boston took advantage of the new era of globalization, fueled by dramatic advances in telecommunications, computer power, and air and sea travel, as well as its own impressive intellectual capital.

Boston and the Making of a Global City pulls together scholarship, media stories, personal interviews, and city planning documents to tell the story of Boston’s historical trajectory, as it quickly became a competitive global hub. Starting with its role as a colonial port and nineteenth-century maritime power, but moving quickly forward, the book describes how Boston capitalized on its strengths in higher education and such innovation sectors as life sciences, healthcare, information technology, and finance. Author James O’Connell traces the historical sweep of global flows—trade and supply chains, innovation and the dissemination of knowledge, investment, transportation, tourism, telecommunications, and immigration—that have shaped the city and region’s development. This volume also addresses the economic, social, and environmental challenges that Boston currently faces and how it is strategically positioned to confront them going forward.

A study of Timorese communities that offers a human perspective on post-conflict reconciliation.

Violent conflict may end in a kind of peace. But reconciliation processes do not always work, let alone bring healing. How are families and communities to rebuild their lives when old divisions, pain, and memories still linger? Centering on social repair, this beautifully crafted study explores how families and communities in Timor-Leste and exile communities in Indonesia live with the enduring consequences of political violence, forced separation, and displacement after twenty-four years of Indonesian occupation.

Following relationships across borders and between generations, Boundaries of Repair shows how ruptures in kinship and community life reverberate across time and space, and even between the living and the dead. Rather than treating repair as a state-driven undertaking, the book reveals social repair as an uneven, fragile, and ongoing process, sustained through everyday care practices, memory work, emotional labor, and creative acts of negotiation in contexts marked by impunity and unresolved loss.

By foregrounding what it means to live with damage that cannot be fully repaired, the book challenges dominant assumptions about justice, healing, and closure. It offers a powerful account of how people renegotiate relationships, boundaries, and belonging amid traces of violence, contributing new insights to debates on post-conflict recovery, memory, displacement, and the limits of reconciliation.