Jorell Meléndez-Badillo on Puerto Rico: A National History April 12, 2024 Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago’s people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today. Read More
Listen in: Puerto Rico April 09, 2024 Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Read More
Martin Thomas on The End of Empires and a World Remade March 25, 2024 Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. Read More
Learning from imperial violence February 22, 2024 Historians are supposed to feel lucky when our new books align closely with topics prominently in the news. I would welcome a little less relevance for “They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence.” Read More
Exploring Black Experiences February 01, 2024 First proposed by Black educators and the Black United Students at Kent State University in 1969, Black History Month, celebrated annually in February in the US, is an opportunity to celebrate Black voices, achievements, and to reflect on the central role of African Americans throughout US history. Princeton University Press is proud to publish books that engage with serious issues and ideas relating to Black experiences. Read More
The Dialectic Is in the Sea November 30, 2023 Beatriz Nascimento (1942–1995) was a poet, historian, artist, and political leader in Brazil’s Black movement, an innovative and creative thinker whose work offers a radical reimagining of gender, space, politics, and spirituality around the Atlantic and across the Black diaspora. Read More
Approaching 2024: A perspective on opposition and democracy from Indian history November 08, 2023 Next year, the world’s largest democracy will head to the polls. Narendra Modi’s dominant ethnomajoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies will seek to win a third straight victory in India’s General Election. At this crucial crossroads, it is worth reflecting upon the history of one opposition party during the original era of one-party dominance. Read More
American Classicist November 03, 2023 Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) didn’t publish her first book until she was sixty-two. But over the next three decades, this former headmistress would become the twentieth century’s most famous interpreter of the classical world. Read More
Bidenomics and the Hillbilly Highway October 12, 2023 No region in the country has witnessed a greater decline in its manufacturing employment rate during the twenty-first century than the southeast. Regional deindustrialization, as much if not more so than the politics of racial resentment, explains the current era of one-party Republican rule in the South. Read More
Dog diplomacy October 03, 2023 The habit of judging a political figure by their dog may seem to be a distinctively medieval preoccupation. Yet it is by no means alien to modern political discourse. Read More
Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man September 28, 2023 In some portraits of Henry VIII there appears another, striking figure—a gaunt and morose-looking man with a shaved head and, in one case, a monkey on his shoulder. Read More
The joke’s on whom? September 19, 2023 Amidst the uproar that ensued after the incident at the Oscars ceremony last year, there were writers and reporters who pointed out that Chris Rock was exercising the age-old tradition of the “fool’s license.” If we actually go to the historical record on court and household fools, then we find an even more interesting, but also more complex, backdrop to the discussion on whether it is right or not to get angry at a comedian for making a joke. Read More
Bill Clinton’s failure September 13, 2023 By 1995 Bill Clinton was fighting to remain “relevant” to the politics of his day. Many would soon label Clinton a “Democratic Eisenhower,” leading a party whose electoral success was predicated upon a wholesale accommodation to the ideologies of its opponents. Read More
From empire to federation? The view from the Middle East August 22, 2023 The European Union, India, the United States of America, and the United Arab Emirates all have something in common: they are all types of federations. Read More
Rabbis in the Roman public bathhouse: Ancient perspectives on modern sensibilities May 03, 2023 The figure of the rabbi, whether modern or ancient, seems far removed from the corporeal reality of a Roman public bathhouse—or at least that’s what we would assume. Yet, the vast body of writings, known collectively as Rabbinic Literature, paints an entirely different picture. Read More
