Natalie K. Zelensky (Music) Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination Indiana University Press (2019) At the end of the Russian Civil War, in 1922, the vanquished foes of the Bolsheviks fled to Turkey and other safe havens, leaving behind the trappings of privilege but carrying with them the memories—and […]
Heather Hansman ’05 Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West University of Chicago Press (2019) Parched farms, water-intensive oil and gas fields, thirsty cities, river ecology managers and preservationists, and a growing outdoor recreation economy compete for water from the Colorado and its tributaries under an arcane and unrealistically generous system of water […]
Jane Brox ’78 Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2019) The idea first came to Brox after a visit to the Cistercian abbey of Sénanque in the south of France in 2001: “I was so taken by its architecture and the complex understanding of […]
Kentucky native Joseph Holt was born into a slaveholding family, and Sandy Holt was one of his several slaves. They stayed together until Joseph Holt transferred Sandy Holt to his brother’s possession and moved to Washington to join the Buchanan Administration in 1857. Seven years later, Sandy Holt ran away to enlist in the United […]
Eminent author and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin ’64 circles back to cast an eye on four presidents she has studied extensively, this time to consider what made them great leaders and what lessons we can draw from their lives and times. Goodwin asks, “Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? … Do […]
“Having to write for a younger audience, I had to distill language in such a way that it stripped me down. I couldn’t use extended metaphors in the ways I most enjoyed, and relied on, as a writer. So everything was distilled and pared down, and there was this vulnerability I had to confront. The […]
Dan Shea (Government) Why Vote? Essential Questions About the Future of Elections in America Routledge (2019) Why vote? Dan Shea will tell you why. As one of our country’s leading scholars in parties and elections, Shea is more than qualified to tell us that yes, every vote matters. His book is a compelling and digestible guide […]
Tilar Mazzeo (English) Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton Gallery (2018) The hit musical Hamilton introduced theater audiences to Eliza Hamilton, wife—and eventually widow—of Alexander Hamilton. Mazzeo’s biography brings Eliza Hamilton fully to life in a meticulously researched and engagingly told account. In this telling, Hamilton is revealed […]
L. Sandy Maisel (Government) and Hannah Dineen ’17 Trumping Ethical Norms: Teachers, Preachers, Pollsters, and the Media Respond to Donald Trump Routledge (2018) This book was literally born on Mayflower Hill. Maisel, in his first class for Introduction to American Government in the fall of 2016, divulged his Democratic pedigree. That nod to transparency, however, […]
Elizabeth Finch (Museum of Art), Donna M. Cassidy, and Randall R. Griffey Marsden Hartley’s Maine The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017) This handsome and informative edition represents the first in-depth discussion of artist Marsden Hartley’s complex relationship with Maine, his home state. It was published to coincide with Marsden Hartley’s Maine, the exhibition organized by […]
