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In his Foreword to this edition, Jean Charlot says: "An unusual feature of Orozco's letters is the great deal that he has to say about art. That one artist writing to another would emphasize art as his subject seems normal enough to the American reader. Yet, within the context of the Mexico of those days, the fact remains exceptional. The patria Orozco was leaving behind had, even from the point of view of its artists, many cares more pressing than art."

The letters and unpublished writings of Orozco from this period (1925-1929) describe an important period of transition in the artist's life, from his departure from Mexico, almost as a defeated man, to the period just before he received the great mural commissions—Pomona, The New School for Social Research in New York, Dartmouth—that were to bring him lasting international fame.

Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with 103 million vehicles crossing it in 2016. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about this majestic structure.

Intimate and engaging, this revised and expanded edition of Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentalities. This new edition brings new insight since its initial publication in 2008, including a new chapter on the infamous “Bridgegate” Chris Christie-era scandal of 2013, when members of the governor's administration shut down access to the bridge, causing a major traffic jam and scandal and subsequently helping undermine Christie’s candidacy for the US presidency.

Stunning photos, from when the bridge was built in the late 1920s through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.

Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it someday.

Illuminates how borough residents, urban planners, and politicians used environmental policy to cement a racially restrictive landscape.

Though it was once home to the world’s largest landfill, today Staten Island boasts thousands of acres of parklands, dozens of public-private conservation arrangements, and four ecological zoning districts. In this book, Patrick D. Nugent details the political forces that gave rise to this wealth of greenery in a famously dense city. He demonstrates how postwar economic and political trajectories intersected in the 1960s with the rising consciousness of environmentalism to create a distinctive laboratory in Staten Island, where white communities and politicians heeded the rising call for the preservation of green space—but often as a tool to maintain racial segregation. Ecological zoning, public-private park management, conservation easement, environmental litigation, and other strategies created a lush, discriminatory landscape. Nugent refers to these policies as greenlining.

The Greenlining of Staten Island shows that the political and environmental history of Staten Island is key to understanding how environmentalism has been used to reinforce racial discrimination, not just in New York City, but nationwide. By the mid-1970s, conservationists had embraced urban planning that preserved low-density housing districts and bolstered the sprawling and segregated landscape that took shape in metropolitan America over the coming decades. In exploring the gap between the modern environmental movement’s ambitious goals and its tangible outcomes, Nugent excavates important lessons for contemporary city dwellers debating zoning reform and planning for climate change’s impending effects.

Explores the relationship between immigrant and national culture

Yiddish melodramas about the tribulations of immigration. German plays about alpine tourism. Italian vaudeville performances. Rubbernecking tours of Chinatown. In the New York City of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these seemingly disparate leisure activities played similar roles: mediating the vast cultural, demographic, and social changes that were sweeping the nation’s largest city.

2026 Honorable Mention in Monographs, North American Society for Sport History (NASSH)

The incredible career of the forgotten but foundational pro wrestler who shaped American sports culture. 

William Muldoon was an infamous athlete whose prowess, savvy, and chicanery across his six-decade career led him to wealth, cultural importance, and political power. Muldoon, the child of poor Irish immigrants, began wrestling in the 1870s and quickly became one of the most famous athletes of the post–Civil War era. He started acting and modeling as his popularity grew, making him one of the first sports stars to achieve crossover success. After a triumphant stint rehabilitating fallen boxing heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan in 1889, he retired from the ring and began a new career as a fitness impresario, founding an elite gymnasium and remaking himself as a health authority in the press. He became trainer to the rich, famous, and politically powerful, which led to his appointment as chair of the New York State Athletic Commission in the 1920s. From this position, Muldoon exerted his influence over the rules of boxing and wrestling and weaponized his power to maintain segregation in sport.

The Last Gladiator is a deep, insightful dive into Muldoon’s life and impact, demonstrating the significance of this often-controversial figure in the development of American sports, professional wrestling, and physical and popular culture.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Non-fiction
The unexpurgated edition of the award-winning autobiography

Born in New York City’s black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city’s new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade’s opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters.

A Scholar's Quest for Home and Identity

Experience the remarkable story of a Romanian-born, Hungarian-speaking Jewish professor. From Vienna to Columbia and Harvard, he navigates a life marked by rootlessness, seeking comfort and purpose. His journey unfolds against the backdrop of five decades, two continents, and significant political and cultural changes.

As we follow his pursuit of a home, we gain insight into the critical developments of post-1945 Europe and America. Markovits's emigration experiences, first from Romania to Vienna and later from Vienna to New York, shed light on the challenges he faced.

His journey offers a panoramic view of the forces shaping the latter half of the 20th century. Despite America's flaws, he finds it a beacon of academic excellence, intellectual openness, cultural diversity, and religious tolerance—qualities that Europe lacked.

Explore the complexities of identity, culture, and the universal search for belonging in this captivating narrative.

In 1849—months before the term “confidence man” was coined to identify a New York crook—Thomas Powell (1809–1887), a spherical, monocled, English poetaster, dramatist, journalist, embezzler, and forger, landed in Manhattan. Powell in London had capped a career of grand theft and literary peccadilloes by feigning a suicide attempt and having himself committed to a madhouse, after which he fled England. He had been an intimate of William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and a crowd of lesser literary folk. 

Thoughtfully bearing what he presented as a volume of Tennyson with a few trifling revisions in the hand of the poet, Powell was embraced by the slavishly Anglophile New York literary establishment, including a young Herman Melville. In two pot-boilers—The Living Authors of England (1849) and The Living Authors of America (1850)—Powell denounced the most revered American author, Washington Irving, for plagiarism; provoked Charles Dickens to vengeful trans-Atlantic outrage and then panic; and capped his insolence by identifying Irving and Melville as the two worst “enemies of the American mind.” For almost four more decades he sniped at Dickens, put words in Melville’s mouth, and survived even the most conscientious efforts to expose him. Long fascinated by this incorrigible rogue, Hershel Parker in The Powell Papers uses a few familiar documents and a mass of freshly discovered material (including a devastating portrait of Powell in a serialized novel) to unfold a captivating tale of skullduggery through the words of great artists and then-admired journalists alike.

School choice promises to free families from the limits of where they live. The Scarcity Loop asks what happens when that promise is made in school systems where more children seek desirable schools than those schools can serve. Focused on New York City’s high school admissions system, sociologist Jennifer L. Jennings argues that choice becomes another way to ration scarce educational opportunity, shifting where rationing happens, who must manage it, and how families understand the outcomes that follow.

Jennings begins with the admissions process itself. New York City asks every eighth grader to choose from hundreds of options. On paper, the system offers extraordinary possibility. But that possibility still has to be converted into a seat. Someone has to learn the rules, compare schools, manage deadlines, make trips, and decide how much risk a thirteen-year-old can bear. Jennings calls this the work of getting in and shows that the capacity to do that work is not evenly distributed. Some families enter choice systems with the fluency and flexibility to turn options into opportunity. Others confront it with fewer supports and far less room for error. Some teenagers shoulder decisions with little adult help. Counselors translate complicated rules under impossible constraints. Principals are not passive actors. Jennings shows how they recruit and adapt as they try to build schools families will choose while managing demand and reputation.

Jennings contends that reforms meant to expand access can reorganize the very competition they aim to resolve. As one barrier recedes, another becomes more consequential. Residence matters less, but advantage does not disappear; it travels through information, timing, and familiarity with the rules. Inequality persists not because nothing changes, but because advantage finds new points of entry as reforms change rules. As the work of securing opportunity shifts, so do understandings of inequality. Unequal outcomes can come to look less like consequences of how educational opportunities are organized and more like reflections of how families navigate the system.

Drawing on more than 450 interviews, participant observation, administrative data, and archival research, The Scarcity Loop follows students, parents, counselors, and principals as they navigate school choice at scale. Jennings traces who must do the work of making choice real, clarifying what is at stake when public education becomes something families must know how to secure.

The Scarcity Loop skillfully shows the consequences of scarcity in public education on schools and families, and reveals how scarcity reproduces itself, even when reforms are sincere.

JENNIFER L. JENNINGS is the Class of 1988 Professor in Domestic Policy and Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University