Results by title

Winner, 2026 New England Historical Association James P. Hanlan Book Prize

Finalist, 2026 New England Society Book Award in Nonfiction

Reuben Ruby and Nathaniel Gordon II were born eleven months apart in 1798 and 1799 and spent much of their boyhoods roaming the noisy, bustling waterfront of Portland, Maine. They lived just blocks from one another, attended school together, and went to the same church with their families. But they were worlds apart, separated by family, culture, and race. Reuben Ruby was Black and Nathaniel Gordon was White. 

The Rubys became prominent antislavery activists, equal rights advocates, and operatives on the Underground Railroad. Their neighbors, the Gordons, became well-to-do ship masters, owners, and merchants: among them, the most notorious American slave ship captain of the century, Nathaniel Gordon III. As activists, sea captains, businessmen, prospectors, and politicians, members of these two families traveled to New York, California, Texas, Louisiana, Africa, Haiti, and Brazil, where their experiences were shaped by their racial identities. At home in the “Free North,” they faced social and political divisions nearly as sharp as those they encountered elsewhere. 

To understand the issues that divided nineteenth-century America—and, in many ways, still divide the nation—few have looked to the far North. In this compelling narrative history and intimate dual-family biography, Carol Gardner traces the Rubys and Gordons as they navigate the turbulent 1800s. As families and individuals, they demonstrate that the North was a critical proving ground for American notions of freedom and equality, as telling as any town, plantation, or battlefield in the South. Their experiences help reveal what it meant to live in a free state during the age of slavery, with all the promise, disappointment, irony, and hope that the notion entailed. 

Should the negotiation of the post–World War II peace treaties in Europe have been pursued separately or should they have been approached within the framework of a general European settlement? The debate on this fundamental foreign policy issue, which has left only faint tracks in the documentary record, is fully explored here for the first time.

W. W. Rostow, in his second book in the Ideas and Action Series, describes a meeting that took place on the eve of the departure of Secretary of State James Byrnes for Paris to participate in treaty negotiations. The meeting was probably the only occasion during 1946 when the peace treaty issue as a whole was explicitly addressed at a high level with lucid alternatives on the table. The plan laid before Secretary of State Byrnes by his senior subordinates, Under Secretary Dean Acheson and Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs Will Clayton, aimed to halt the movement toward the split of Europe and the emergence of hostile blocs. It outlined an all-European settlement, including economic and security institutions linked to the United Nations. Only one part of the proposal gained Byrnes's support and came to life: the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva. But the Acheson-Clayton proposal foreshadowed the Marshall Plan.

The book's larger theme is the process by which the Cold War came about. Rostow's interpretation differs from either conventional or revisionist views, emphasizing as it does the process of incremental deterioration that occurred in 1946 and the role of uncertainty and weakness in American policy.

This second volume in the Ideas and Action Series will interest general readers as well as those with a particular interest in World War II. It should be of special value to political scientists, economists, military historians, and policy makers, and may serve as a case study in a variety of courses.

In the seventeenth century most English households had gardens. These gardens were not merely ornamental; even the most elaborate and fashionable gardens had areas set aside for growing herbs, fruit, vegetables, and flowers for domestic use. Meanwhile, more modest households considered a functional garden to be a vital tool for the survival of the house and family. The seventeenth century was also a period of exciting introductions of plants from overseas, which could be used in all manner of recipes.

Using manuscript household manuals, recipe books, and printed herbals, The Domestic Herbal takes the reader on a tour of the productive garden and of the various parts of the house—kitchens and service rooms, living rooms and bedrooms—to show how these plants were used for cooking and brewing, medicines and cosmetics, in the making and care of clothes, and to keep rooms fresh, fragrant, and decorated. Recipes used by seventeenth-century households for preparations such as flower syrups, snail water, and wormwood ale are also included. A brief herbal gives descriptions of plants both familiar and less known to today’s readers, including the herbs used for common tasks like dyeing and brewing, and those that held a particular cultural importance in the seventeenth century. Featuring exquisite colored illustrations from John Gerard’s herbal book of 1597 as well as prints, archival material, and manuscripts, this book provides an intriguing and original focus on the domestic history of Stuart England.

Exposing the ableism underlying medical innovation

 

As medical advancements continue to shape the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of disability and illness, technology is often presented as a pathway to autonomy. Challenging this assumption, Rebecca Monteleone shows how medical technologies contribute to a cruel double bind, forcing disabled people to be accountable for adapting to a world built by and for nondisabled people while dismissing their lived experiences in favor of medical expertise. Far more complex than simple progress, these technologies are more oppressive than liberating when they place the burden of care on individuals and perpetuate societal ableism that demands that bodies look, move, and function in certain ways.

The Double Bind of Disability examines the complex relationship between medical technologies and their users, highlighting tensions between personal responsibility and medical authority. Sharing the perspectives and experiences of users of three medical technologies (prenatal genetic screening, deep brain stimulation, and do-it-yourself artificial pancreas systems), Monteleone analyzes how users navigate the constraints of these systems and also imagine a new, more liberatory approach to healthcare.

Asserting a bold vision, Monteleone describes a future where medical interventions take seriously the lived expertise of disabled people to address ableist infrastructures rather than require the modification of nonnormative bodyminds. She calls for a radical reimagining of medical technology that moves beyond individualistic frameworks to embrace collective experience and embodied knowing.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

When President Harry Truman introduced the atomic bomb to the world in 1945, he described it as a God-given harnessing of “the basic power of the universe.” Six days later a New York Times editorial framed the dilemma of the new Atomic Age for its readers: “Here the long pilgrimage of man on Earth turns towards darkness or towards light.” American nuclear scientists, aware of the dangers their work involved, referred to one of their most critical experiments as “tickling the dragon's tail.”

Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most Americans may not have been sure what an atomic bomb was or how it worked. But they did sense that it had fundamentally changed the future of the human race. In this book, Robert Jacobs analyzes the early impact of nuclear weapons on American culture and society. He does so by examining a broad range of stories, or “nuclear narratives,” that sought to come to grips with the implications of the bomb's unprecedented and almost unimaginable power. 

Beginning with what he calls the “primary nuclear narrative,” which depicted atomic power as a critical agent of social change that would either destroy the world or transform it for the better, Jacobs explores a variety of common themes and images related to the destructive power of the bomb, the effects of radiation, and ways of surviving nuclear war. He looks at civil defense pamphlets, magazines, novels, and films to recover the stories the U.S. government told its citizens and soldiers as well as those presented in popular culture. 

According to Jacobs, this early period of Cold War nuclear culture—from 1945 to the banning of above-ground testing in 1963—was distinctive for two reasons: not only did atmospheric testing make Americans keenly aware of the presence of nuclear weapons in their lives, but radioactive fallout from the tests also made these weapons a serious threat to public health, separate from yet directly linked to the danger of nuclear war.

The drama's laws,
the drama's patrons give,
For we that live to please,
must please to live.
—Samuel Johnson, 1747

Democratic ferment, responsible for political explosions in the seventeenth century and expanded power in the eighteenth, affected all phases of English life. The theatre reflected these forces in the content of the plays of the period and in an increased awareness among playgoers that the theatre "must please to live."

Drawing from a wealth of amusing and informative contemporary accounts, Leo Hughes presents abundant evidence that the theatre-going public proved zealous, and sometimes even unruly, in asserting its role and rights. He describes numerous species of individual pest—the box-lobby saunterers, the vizard masks (ladies of uncertain virtue), the catcallers, and the weeping sentimentalists. Protest demonstrations of various interest groups, such as footmen asserting their rights to sit in the upper gallery, reflect the behavior of the audience as a whole—an audience that Alexander Pope described as "the manyheaded monster of the pit."

Hughes analyzes the changes in the audience's taste through the long span from Dryden's day to Sheridan's. He illustrates the decline in taste from the sophisticated, if bawdy, comedy of the Restoration Period to the sentimentalism and empty show of later decades. He attributes the increased emphasis on sentiment and spectacle to audience influence and describes the effects of audience demands on managers, playwrights, and players. He describes in detail the mixed assembly that frequented the theatre during this period and the greatly enlarged theatres that were built to accommodate it.

Hughes concludes that it was the English people's basic love of liberty that allowed them to accept audience disruptions considered intolerable by foreign visitors and that the drama's patrons greatly influenced the quality of theatrical production during this long period.

The first-century Roman tragedies of Seneca, like all ancient drama, do not contain the sort of external stage directions that we are accustomed to today; nevertheless, a careful reading of the plays reveals such stage business as entrances, exits, setting, sound effects, emotions of the characters, etc. The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedy teases out these dramaturgical elements in Seneca's work and uses them both to aid in the interpretation of the plays and to show the playwright's artistry.

Thomas D. Kohn provides a detailed overview of the corpus, laying the groundwork for appreciating Seneca's techniques in the individual dramas. Each of the chapters explores an individual tragedy in detail, discussing the dramatis personae and examining how the roles would be distributed among a limited number of actors, as well as the identity of the Chorus. The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedymakes a compelling argument for Seneca as an artist and a dramaturg in the true sense of the word: "a maker of drama." Regardless of whether Seneca composed his plays for full-blown theatrical staging, a fictive theater of the mind, or something in between, Kohn demonstrates that he displays a consistency and a careful attentiveness to details of performance. While other scholars have applied this type of performance criticism to individual tragedies or scenes, this is the first comprehensive study of all the plays in twenty-five years, and the first ever to consider not just stagecraft, but also metatheatrical issues such as the significant distribution of roles among a limited number of actors, in addition to the emotional states of the characters. Scholars of classics and theater, along with those looking to stage the plays, will find much of interest in this study.

Analyzes the link between “civilized warfare” and the American self-image

Linda R. Robertson argues that the development of the United States as a global military power arose from the influence of an image of air combat carefully constructed during World War I to mask the sordid realities of modern ground warfare. The Dream of Civilized Warfare carries this trajectory to its logical end, tracing the long history of the American desire to exert the nation’s will throughout the world without having to risk the lives of ground soldiers—a theme that continues to reverberate in public discussions, media portrayals, and policy decisions today.

A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imaginations of filmmakers and audiences for over a century. In The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film, the only book-length study of the space, author Desirée J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed. Garcia analyzes the backstage film, which spans film history, modes, and genre, to show how dressing rooms have been a useful space for filmmakers to examine the performativity of American life. From the Black maid to the wife and mother to the leading man, dressing rooms navigate, shape, and challenge society’s norms. The stakes are high in dressing rooms, Garcia argues, because they rehearse larger questions about identity and its performance, negotiating who can succeed and who cannot and on what terms.