How nineteenth-century media makers helped shape national opinion

Finalist, James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship A stunning work of popular history—the story of how a crop transformed the history of slavery Americans consume over 1.5 billion pounds of peanut products every year. But few of us know the peanut’s tumultuous history, or its intimate connection to slavery and freedom. Lyrical and powerful, Slaves for Peanuts deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions. Author Jori Lewis reveals how demand for peanut oil in Europe ensured that slavery in Africa would persist well into the twentieth century, long after the European powers had officially banned it in the territories they controlled. Delving deep into West African and European archives, Lewis recreates a world on the coast of Africa that is breathtakingly real and unlike anything modern readers have experienced. Slaves for Peanuts is told through the eyes of a set of richly detailed characters—from an African-born French missionary harboring runaway slaves, to the leader of a Wolof state navigating the politics of French imperialism—who challenge our most basic assumptions of the motives and people who supported human bondage. At a time when Americans are grappling with the enduring consequences of slavery, here is a new and revealing chapter in its global history.

Looks at advertising during the 1960s, focusing on the relationship between the counterculture movement and commerce.

This fascinating probe into U.S. mission history spotlights four cases: Junipero Serra, the Franciscan whose mission to California natives has made him a candidate for sainthood; John Eliot, the renowned Puritan missionary to Massachusetts Indians; Pierre-Jean De Smet, the Jesuit missioner to the Indians of the Midwest; and Henry Benjamin Whipple, who engineered the U.S. government's theft of the Black Hills from the Sioux.

A noted historian analyzes Yasser Arafat’s role in destabilizing the Middle East in a book praised as “eye-opening and exhaustively researched” (New York Post). Offering the first comprehensive account of the collapse of the most promising peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, historian Efraim Karsh details Arafat’s efforts since the historic Oslo Accords in building an extensive terrorist infrastructure, his failure to disarm the extremist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Authority’s systematic efforts to indoctrinate hate and contempt for the Israeli people through rumor and religious zealotry. Arafat has irrevocably altered the Middle East’s political landscape, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict will always be Arafat’s war.

Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.