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The Jackson County Rebellion explores a dramatic if little-known populist insurgency in the American West. Author Jeff LaLande takes a deep dive into a tumultuous uprising that captured national attention as it played out in rural Oregon. First tracing its roots back to the area’s tradition of protest, including the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, he focuses on Jackson County’s politics of upheaval during the worst days of the Great Depression. The broad strokes of the episode may be familiar to contemporary readers: Demagogues fanning rage — relentlessly accusing an elite of corruption and conspiracy. The strife-torn episode featured nativist and anti-Semitic elements.  

The local press played a key role in the events. Two inflammatory newspapers, one owned by wealthy orchardist Llewellyn Banks and the other by politician Earl Fehl, became the vehicles by which these men won the loyalty of rural and working-class residents. Partners in demagoguery, Banks and Fehl created a movement — dubbed the “Good Government Congress”  that very nearly took over county government through direct action, ballot theft, and threats of violence.  Among those opposing the two men was Harvard-educated Robert Ruhl, owner/editor of the Medford Mail-Tribune, who faced off against Banks and Fehl. Despite boycotts and threats of sabotage. Ruhl ran a resolute editorial campaign against the populist threat in his Mail-Tribune, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the uprising.  

The rebellion blazed hotly but not for long. Its end was marked by the arrest of its leaders after the fiercely contested 1932 election and by Banks’s murder of the police officer sent to arrest him. Placing the Jackson County Rebellion squarely within America’s long tradition of populist uprisings against the perceived sins of an allegedly corrupt, affluent local elite, LaLande argues that this little-remembered episode is part of a long history of violent conflict in the West that continues today.

This comprehensive treatment of post–World War II Allied war crimes trials in the Far East is a significant contribution to a neglected subject. While the Nuremberg and, to a lesser degree, Tokyo tribunals have received considerable attention, this is the first full-length assessment of the entire Far East operation, which involved some 5,700 accused and 2,200 trials.

After discussing the Tokyo trial, Piccigallo systematically examines the operations of each Allied nation, documenting procedure and machinery as well as the details of actual trials (including hitherto unpublished photographs) and ending with a statistical summary of cases.

This study allows a completely new assessment of the Far East proceedings: with a few exceptions, the trials were carefully and fairly conducted, the efforts of defense counsel and the elaborate review procedures being especially noteworthy. Piccigallo’s approach to this emotion-filled subject is straightforward and evenhanded throughout. He concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of such war crimes trials, a matter of interest to the general reader as well as to specialists in history, law, and international affairs.

An intimate and revelatory memoir on personal challenges, political turmoil, and the state of American democracy―now in paperback with a new preface

During the past few years, as our country has faced unprecedented challenges, Senator Amy Klobuchar has been in the room where it happens―on the Senate floor for critical votes during the pandemic, at the debate podium during one of the most crucial presidential primaries in U.S. history, and in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists stormed the building, interrupting the certification of the Electoral College. It was well past midnight when Klobuchar stood beside then–Vice President Pence to officially certify President Biden's victory.

In her candid, honest, and at times bitingly funny memoir, the pragmatic senator shares insider stories from these historic moments, while also inviting readers into her personal life. An underdog in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, she built surprising early momentum, only to suspend her candidacy in order to support Joe Biden. Within weeks of returning to work in the Senate, the sudden onslaught of Covid-19 hit her family directly: her husband was hospitalized for a week and spent a month in isolation. Klobuchar shares her experience facing a cancer diagnosis while her beloved father succumbs to Alzheimer's. She recounts the dramatic narrative of January 6 and how close we came to losing our democracy. And, with her signature humor, she reveals what it's like to work with some of her more . . . well, interesting . . . colleagues.

At the crux of these stories is a narrative of resilience—of personal resilience and the resilience of a nation—and, improbably, joy.

Congress and the president are not the only branches that deal with fiscal issues in times of war. In this innovative book, Nancy Staudt focuses on the role of federal courts in fiscal matters during warfare and high-cost national defense emergencies. There is, she argues, a judicial power of the purse that becomes evident upon examining the budgetary effects of judicial decision making. The book provides substantial evidence that judges are willing—maybe even eager—to redirect private monies into government hands when the country is in peril, but when the judges receive convincing cues that ongoing wartime activities undermine the nation’s interests, they are more likely to withhold funds from the government by deciding cases in favor of private individuals and entities who show up in court.

In stark contrast with conventional legal, political, and institutional thought that privileges factors associated with individual preferences, The Judicial Power of the Purse sheds light on environmental factors in judicial decision making and will be an excellent read for students of judicial behavior in political science and law.

Women of colors and a literature written in corporeal and spiritual scars

The corporeal and spiritual healing in literature by women of colors can be seen to redefine modern thought and printed text. Sarah Soanirina Ohmer traces the impact of colonization and enslavement on Black women and Black women’s contributions to colonial, nineteenth, and twentieth century literature in the US, Brazil, and the Caribbean.

Drawing on intersectional analysis, Ohmer focuses on portrayals of trauma and spirituality in works by Toni Morrison, Conceição Evaristo, Maryse Condé, Gloria Anzaldúa, the Quilombhoje poets, and María de los Reyes Castillo. Ohmer compares literature from different countries along four thematic pathways: ghosts, mirrors, naming, and motherhood. Her analysis unlocks the literature’s power to heal through gut-wrenching descriptions of wounds and thrilling passages of hope and liberation. Throughout, Ohmer weaves in her life story as a Black woman as she reflects on how colonialism, racism, sexism, and capitalism have impacted her work, traumas, and faith journey.

FINALIST FOR THE 2026 GEORGE WASHINGTON PRIZE

Winner of the 2026 Book of the Year Award, George Washington American Revolution Round Table, Washington, DC

The killing of Jane McCrea on July 26, 1777, on the outskirts of a village in the northern Hudson Valley, would unexpectedly rupture the British advance from Canada that was meant to crush the American Revolution in one knockout blow. On that day, twenty-five-year-old McCrea, an unremarkable person preparing for an impending marriage, was assaulted, scalped, and killed by a group of Native Americans in the employ of British general John Burgoyne. Though the murder was but one of many civilian deaths in a fierce war zone, McCrea’s killing had far-reaching consequences for each of the three major parties involved in the Northern Campaign of 1777. In America, she became the great cause célèbre of the Revolution, the sympathetic female victim of the war symbolizing the righteousness of The Cause. In Britain, she was a human-rights tragedy that tarnished the polished surface of British honor and galvanized Whig politicians who shouted out her name in Parliament as an example of how low the nation had fallen. For Native peoples, recruited by both the British and the Americans, and caught in the middle of a war staged on ancestral grounds, McCrea’s killing was the opening salvo in a vicious chain of bloody retribution that led to the disintegration of the venerable Iroquois Confederacy and the obliteration of Native homelands. After the war, the nightmarish image of a young Jane McCrea slaughtered on the New York frontier would obsess white Americans who came to fear Native peoples as irredeemable savages. Her murder would help justify the expulsion of Indigenous tribes and open the doors for an expansionary United States that was fully intent on transforming the American continent into its own image.
            The Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier by distinguished historian Paul Staiti undertakes for the first time a comprehensive investigation into McCrea’s life, death, and especially her long and strange afterlife. Using both visual arts and written records, the author reassembles the scattered fragments to illuminate a historical terrain long since shrouded in misinformation, mired in controversy, and relegated to mythology. Coming into view is a major portrait of the persons, cultures, actions, and motives that fatally converged on that hot July morning in 1777.

Irony and satire in the contemporary American moment.

The second Trump administration has committed itself to upending the knowledge systems and deliberative institutions that have been essential to modern democracy, with the American university—site of scientific research and liberal education—a primary target.  In The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, literary and film critic James Chandler spotlights an American tradition of such hostility to intellectual life, especially the nativist movement of the 1850s that persecuted Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Ironically, Steve Bannon, the self-proclaimed “Know-Nothing vulgarian” who long ago recruited candidate Trump to his anti-intellectual crusade, is himself the great-grandson of an Irish immigrant who would have faced Know-Nothing backlash in that era.

Such dark ironies define our moment, Chandler argues, and they call out not only for intellectual critique but also for satire. Yet in the midst of the MAGA campaign’s calamitous effects on American public discourse, even satire must confront the “kayfabe” practices imported by Trump from professional wrestling, which mix illusion and reality to turn political life into a “spectacle without thought.” Drawing widely on cultural critics from Jonathan Swift and Alexis de Tocqueville to Roland Barthes, Chandler’s pamphlet offers an elegant and bracing account of the MAGA campaign against higher learning and its transformative effects on criticism and democracy itself.