summer reading wrap-up

In true mid-career fashion, I took an inadvertent break from the newsletter to focus on teaching and administrative duties. But! There are so many great books coming out and I am excited to bring those to your inboxes soon. In the meantime, here are some top picks from my summer reading:

I was chair-comment for great panel on carceral history in the Early Republic at SHEAR including Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan, author of Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (NYU Press, 2019) and Adam Malka, The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (UNC Press, 2021). The panel was organized by Nicole Breault, author of the important recent JER article, "The Quotidian State: Nightly Watches and Police Practice in the Early Republic."

I taught an online graduate class on US history for high school history teachers. Far and away their favorite week had us reading Max Felker-Kantor's DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools (UNC Press, 2024) and Kathleen Belew's Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2019). I read Bring the War Home when it came out but was knocked out this time around by how much of the story passes through policing and prison.

Beyond US carceral history, I read a lot in urban history because I am teaching it this fall. I was excited to incorporate chapters from these books into the syllabus:Theresa McCulla's Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Jeff Ogbar's edited volume Black Movement: African American Urban History since the Great Migration (UNC Press, 2025), and Mike Amezcua's Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification (University of Chicago Press, 2022). And of course, the new volume of America's Urban History (Routledge, 2024) is excellent.

I also spent a fair amount of time noodling around in the history of the Middle Ages after reading Anya Seton's Katherine (good for fans of Matrix and Philippa Gregory novels). The best of the bunch was Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (Basic Books, 2020). I just finished binge-reading Benjamin Nathans' To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton, 2024). I am so obsessed with this book and how it breaks apart the assumption that the law matters to government. Timely! I am ready for a book club on The Gulag Archipelago when you are.