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With new research on building programs in political, religious, and domestic settings in the United States and Europe, this collection of essays offers a fresh look at postwar modernism and the role that architecture played in constructing modern identities.

In the decades following World War II, modern architecture spread around the globe alongside increased modernization, urbanization, and postwar reconstruction—and it eventually won widespread acceptance. But as the limitations of conventional conceptions of modernism became apparent, modern architecture has come under increasing criticism. In this collection of essays, experienced and emerging scholars take a fresh look at postwar modern architecture by asking what it meant to be “modern,” what role modern architecture played in constructing modern identities, and who sanctioned (or was sanctioned by) modernism in architecture.

This volume presents focused case studies of modern architecture in three realms—political, religious, and domestic—that address our very essence as human beings. Several essays explore developments in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia and document a modernist design culture that crossed political barriers, such as the Iron Curtain, more readily than previously imagined. Other essays investigate various efforts to reconcile the concerns of modernist architects with the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian institutions. And a final group of essays looks at postwar homebuilding in the United States and demonstrates how malleable and contested the image of the American home was in the mid-twentieth century. These inquiries show the limits of canonical views of modern architecture and reveal instead how civic institutions, ecclesiastical traditions, individual consumers, and others sought to sanction the forms and ideas of modern architecture in the service of their respective claims or desires to be modern.

A cultural history of race, resistance, and representation in a city divided by politics and play

When outfielder Bernie Carbo joined the Red Sox in 1974, he brought with him a toy gorilla named Mighty Joe Young that became the team’s unofficial mascot for several players and many in the local press. This seemingly innocent stuffed animal was introduced within a baseball team notorious for its stubborn discrimination, and during a particularly fraught era of racial discord in Boston. That June, after years of activism from the city’s Black community, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that Boston must address the segregation of its schools through redistricting and busing. The ensuing racial animus to these policies led some of the city’s white residents to throw bananas and chant monkey sounds at African American students as they integrated the predominantly white South Boston High School. In this agitated atmosphere, cultural symbols like the Red Sox’s Mighty Joe Young mirrored and amplified the heightened racial tensions of Boston’s busing crisis.

Situated at the intersection of US cultural and social history, Segregation Games examines the surprising ties in 1970s Boston between the racial segregation of the city’s schools and the racial controversies expressed on and off the field of “Red Sox Nation.” “I found out in the black community why they don’t come out [to Fenway Park],” explained Black player Reggie Smith of his experiences with the Red Sox and the city during this period. “The team was the last to get Black players, and some of the things I hear out in the stands make me sick.” To understand these connections, Faflik erases the lines between politics and sport, which routinely blurred in a city suffused with an anti-Black racism that was both deceptively subtle and fiercely overt.

Drawing upon deep archival research from sources that have largely been ignored, such as the Black press of the time, Faflik offers a carefully nuanced portrait of Boston’s cultural life at a pivotal moment in the city’s history. 

How science fiction films in the 1950s were marketed and helped create the broader genre itself.

For Hollywood, the golden age of science fiction was also an age of anxiety. Amid rising competition, fluid audience habits, and increasing government regulation, studios of the 1950s struggled to make and sell the kinds of films that once were surefire winners. These conditions, the leading media scholar J. P. Telotte argues, catalyzed the incredible rise of science fiction.

Though science fiction films had existed since the earliest days of cinema, the SF genre as a whole continued to resist easy definition through the 1950s. In grappling with this developing genre, the industry began to consider new marketing approaches that viewed films as fluid texts and audiences as ever-changing. Drawing on trade reports, film reviews, pressbooks, trailers, and other archival materials, Selling Science Fiction Cinema reconstructs studio efforts to market a promising new genre and, in the process, shows how salesmanship influenced what that genre would become. Telotte uses such films as The Thing from Another World, Forbidden Planet, and The Blob, as well as the influx of Japanese monster movies, to explore the shifting ways in which the industry reframed the SF genre to market to no-longer static audience expectations. Science fiction transformed the way Hollywood does business, just as Hollywood transformed the meaning of science fiction.

Historians of journalism and mass media have tended to focus on journalism and news – its people and content – while neglecting the field’s broader and interconnected roles in United States history. Shadow Press: The Myth and Making of Independent Journalism explores how the extreme edges of reporting challenged and reshaped American journalism for over a century, from 1890 to 1980. 

What a reporter is and does, and does not do, and the integrity of that idea, has always been an unsettled question, interrogated on the borders between journalism and the state. There, from battlefields in Cuba, revolution in Mexico, presidential politics in Washington, D.C., and world wars in Europe, reporters – formally and informally, officially and unofficially, openly and secretly – served the state. This book explains how and why reporters, amidst the allure of patriotism, prestige, and power, came to work for the state, and then stopped, culminating with the historically aberrant ascent of modern independent journalism. 

To reclaim that history, Shadow Press spotlights famous, infamous, or previously unknown reporters whose careers reflected the usually submerged question of press-state collaboration and revealed wider changes within journalism. Part I documents how reporters traveled multiple routes into the state, including U.S. empire (the War of 1898), the Mexican Revolution, the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the domestic reform efforts of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and World War II. Part II documents how, during the Cold War, reporters, embedded within the state, separated to redefine journalism, and lobbied to establish in 1980 the uneasy policies of today that narrowly permit the CIA and FBI to impersonate reporters.

Shadow Press provides accessible plots and character-driven narrative arcs for general readers interested in American history. Moreover, journalism critics will take an interest in how the history provided in Shadow Press informs the debate over how best to do journalism today. During the last two decades, a historical caricature of news objectivity has emerged, a rigid model of amoral methodology and unacknowledged personal subjectivity that still lingers. That caricature has concealed the political activism of the self-declared objective press. Today’s “objectivity war” in journalism is a memory war. As a result, the debate about how best to cover the Republication Party, Donald Trump, and far right movements is based on a broad misunderstanding of how journalism functioned in US democracy. Combining expansive and rigorous archival investigation with the dramatic requirements of a good story, Shadow Press provides a new line of scholarly inquiry to expand the scope of journalism within US political history.

Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection is a landmark work of early American social and economic history that offers a comprehensive examination of one of the most consequential, and often misunderstood, uprisings in the history of the early American republic. Between 1786 and 1787, debt-ridden farmers across western Massachusetts, many of them veterans of the Revolutionary War, rose in armed protest against the state government's crushing tax and debt collection policies. Under the informal leadership of Daniel Shays, the rebels sought to prevent court foreclosures on their farms, demand tax relief, and reform a judicial system they saw as serving the interests of wealthy creditors at the expense of ordinary citizens. The uprising—ultimately suppressed by a privately funded state militia—sent shockwaves through the young nation, alarming leading figures including George Washington and James Madison, and powerfully accelerating the movement toward a stronger central government and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.

Szatmary frames the rebellion not as an isolated outbreak of lawlessness, but as a deeply rooted agrarian insurrection produced by the collision of two fundamentally different economic worlds in post-Revolutionary New England. His analysis begins by establishing the divergent economic realities of the region: on one side, the commercial and mercantile economy of New England's coastal towns, driven by creditors, merchants, and professional elites integrated into transatlantic trade networks; on the other, the subsistence farming communities of the interior, whose inhabitants operated largely outside the cash economy and bore a disproportionate burden of wartime debt and postwar taxation. Drawing on this structural conflict, Szatmary traces the chain of debt that left rural farmers increasingly unable to meet their obligations, the escalating cycle of court actions and property seizures that pushed them toward organized resistance, and the government's responses, ultimately military, to the protests.

The book is also attentive to the rebellion's broader political consequences, examining how Shays' Rebellion transformed the national debate about governance, federal authority, and the relationship between popular democracy and social order in the new republic. Described by one reviewer as a "well-balanced" study that "classifies Shays' Rebellion as the historical watershed it truly is," the book remains a standard reference in the historiography of the Early American Republic, the Articles of Confederation period, and the origins of the Constitutional Convention.

At an ecopark in Mexico, tourists pretend to be illegal migrants, braving inhospitable terrain and the U.S. Border Patrol as they attempt to cross the border. At a living history museum in Indiana, daytime visitors return after dark to play fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. In the Mojave Desert, the U.S. Army simulates entire provinces of Iraq and Afghanistan, complete with bustling villages, insurgents, and Arabic-speaking townspeople, to train soldiers for deployment to the Middle East. At a nursing home, trainees put on fogged glasses and earplugs, thick bands around their finger joints, and sandbag harnesses to simulate the effects of aging and to gain empathy for their patients.

These immersive environments in which spectator-participants engage in simulations of various kinds—or “simming”—are the subject of Scott Magelssen’s book. His book lays out the ways in which simming can provide efficacy and promote social change through affective, embodied testimony. Using methodology from theater history and performance studies (particularly as these fields intersect with cultural studies, communication, history, popular culture, and American studies), Magelssen explores the ways these representational practices produce, reify, or contest cultural and societal perceptions of identity.

The 1909 opening of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway marked a foundational moment in the history of automotive racing. Events at the famed track and others like it also helped launch America’s love affair with cars and an embrace of road systems that transformed cities and shrank perceptions of space.

Brian Ingrassia tells the story of the legendary oval’s early decades. This story revolves around Speedway cofounder and visionary businessman Carl Graham Fisher, whose leadership in the building of the transcontinental Lincoln Highway and the iconic Dixie Highway had an enormous impact on American mobility. Ingrassia looks at the Speedway’s history as a testing ground for cars and airplanes, its multiple close brushes with demolition, and the process by which racing became an essential part of the Golden Age of Sports. At the same time, he explores how the track’s past reveals the potent links between sports capitalism and the selling of nostalgia, tradition, and racing legends.

The story of how the American South became the most incarcerated region in the world’s most incarcerated nation.

Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State examines the evolution of southern criminal punishment from Jim Crow to the dawn of mass incarceration, charting this definitive era of carceral transformation and expansion in the southern United States. The demise of the county chain gang, the professionalization of police, and the construction of large-scale prisons were among the sweeping changes that forever altered the southern landscape and bolstered the region’s capacity to punish. What prompted this southern revolution in criminal punishment?

Kirstine Taylor argues that the crisis in the cotton fields and the arrival of Sunbelt capitalism in the south’s rising metropolises prompted lawmakers to build expansive, modern criminal punishment systems in response to Brown v. Board of Education and the Black freedom movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Taking us inside industry-hunting expeditions, school desegregation battles, the sit-in movement, prisoners’ labor unions, and policy commissions, Taylor tells the story of how a modernizing south became the most incarcerated region in the globe’s most incarcerated nation.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

The story of how the American South became the most incarcerated region in the world’s most incarcerated nation.

Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State examines the evolution of southern criminal punishment from Jim Crow to the dawn of mass incarceration, charting this definitive era of carceral transformation and expansion in the southern United States. The demise of the county chain gang, the professionalization of police, and the construction of large-scale prisons were among the sweeping changes that forever altered the southern landscape and bolstered the region’s capacity to punish. What prompted this southern revolution in criminal punishment?

Kirstine Taylor argues that the crisis in the cotton fields and the arrival of Sunbelt capitalism in the south’s rising metropolises prompted lawmakers to build expansive, modern criminal punishment systems in response to Brown v. Board of Education and the Black freedom movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Taking us inside industry-hunting expeditions, school desegregation battles, the sit-in movement, prisoners’ labor unions, and policy commissions, Taylor tells the story of how a modernizing south became the most incarcerated region in the globe’s most incarcerated nation.