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A People's History of the Second World War unearths the fascinating history of the war as fought 'from below'. Until now, the vast majority of historical accounts have focussed on the conflict between the Allied and Axis powers for imperialist mastery. Donny Gluckstein shows that in fact between 1939 and 1945 two distinct wars were fought – one ‘from above’ and one ‘from below’.

Using examples from countries under the Nazi heel, in the colonies and within the Axis and Allied camps, Gluckstein brings to life the very different struggle of the people's and resistance movements which proliferated during the war. He shows how they fought not just fascism, but colonialism and empire, and were betrayed by the Allies at the war’s end.

This book will fundamentally challenge our understanding of the Second World War – both about the people who fought it and the reasons for which it was fought.

Less celebrated than the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the 1933–1934 Century of Progress Exposition brought visitors face-to-face with gleaming American consumerism in the midst of the Great Depression. Lindsay Fullerton draws on a wealth of personal photographs, scrapbooks, oral histories, and writings to illuminate the wildly different experiences of fairgoers against the backdrop of a city steeped in poverty and segregation.

The Exposition took place amidst massive changes sparked by expansion of mass media, Franklin Roosevelt’s election, the repeal of Prohibition, and the Great Migration. A diverse cross-section of Chicagoans informs Fullerton’s history of the event in the context of the fast-changing America of the interwar era. These personal accounts tell stories of how attendees interpreted their own experiences while being surrounded by whiz-bang products and full-throated evangelism on the benefits of progress.

A colorful people’s history, Ephemeral City takes readers inside the other Chicago World’s Fair and how visitors interacted with a pivotal moment in American history.

How healthy control subjects in clinical research transformed the practice and labor of science, as told by the Normals themselves.

In the 1950s, the National Institutes of Health were in search of a large, replenishing stream of healthy people to participate in clinical studies. To establish legal sources of test subjects, the NIH signed unprecedented contracts with American colleges, church organizations, and other government agencies, and in the process gave rise to a new type of test subject: the “normal patient.” Thousands of them eventually moved into the NIH Clinical Center to live in hospital rooms, eat food prepared in a metabolic kitchen, and follow—or flout—the rules.

The Normals is a groundbreaking account of the NIH Normal Volunteer Patient Program, which has lasted into the twenty-first century. This program harnessed outside organizations in all areas of postwar American life—colleges and universities, labor unions, civic groups, federal prisons, and churches—to recruit research subjects for human experiments. Drawing on thousands of pages of unearthed government documents, oral histories, and personal materials shared by the patients themselves (collected in a new archive), Laura Stark follows five experiments and the people involved, delving into their biographies, their time at the Clinical Center, and the thorny problem of determining who counts as “normal.” The “Normals” were not passive objects of study, Stark shows, but active research participants who collaborated with scientists, maintained the laboratories where they served, informed official ethics policies, and bargained to meet their needs.

By taking seriously the pillow fights and the first kisses, the bible clubs and the movie nights that animated the Clinical Center as much as the medical experiments, The Normals brings to life a surprising true story of the origins of our present-day system of human experiment, one that at once explores what it means to work, to serve, to volunteer.

The Iraqi city of Fallujah has become an epicenter of geopolitical conflict, where foreign powers and non-state actors have repeatedly waged war in residential neighborhoods with staggering humanitarian consequences. The Sacking of Fallujah is the first comprehensive study of the three recent sieges of this city, including those by the United States in 2004 and the Iraqi-led operation to defeat ISIS in 2016.

Unlike dominant military accounts that focus on American soldiers and U.S. leaders and perpetuate the myth that the United States “liberated” the city, this book argues that Fallujah was destroyed by coalition forces, leaving public health crises, political destabilization, and mass civilian casualties in their wake. This meticulously researched account cuts through the propaganda to uncover the lived experiences of Fallujans under siege and occupation, and contextualizes these events within a broader history of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Relying on testimony from Iraqi civilians, the work of independent journalists, and documentation from human rights organizations, Ross Caputi, Richard Hil, and Donna Mulhearn place the experiences of Fallujah's residents at the center of this city's recent history.

The story of a once vibrant, now vanished off-reservation Ojibwe village—and a vital chapter of the history of the North Shore

At the turn of the nineteenth century, one mile east of Grand Marais, Minnesota, you would have found Chippewa City, a village that as many as 200 Anishinaabe families called home. Today you will find only Highway 61, private lakeshore property, and the one remaining village building: St. Francis Xavier Church. In Walking the Old Road, Staci Lola Drouillard guides readers through the story of that lost community, reclaiming for history the Ojibwe voices that have for so long, and so unceremoniously, been silenced.

Blending memoir, oral history, and narrative, Walking the Old Road reaches back to a time when Chippewa City, then called Nishkwakwansing (at the edge of the forest), was home to generations of Ojibwe ancestors. Drouillard, whose own family once lived in Chippewa City, draws on memories, family history, historical analysis, and testimony passed from one generation to the next to conduct us through the ages of early European contact, government land allotment, family relocation, and assimilation. 

Documenting a story too often told by non-Natives, whether historians or travelers, archaeologists or settlers, Walking the Old Road gives an authentic voice to the Native American history of the North Shore. This history, infused with a powerful sense of place, connects the Ojibwe of today with the traditions of their ancestors and their descendants, recreating the narrative of Chippewa City as it was—and is and forever will be—lived.