**NATIONAL BESTSELLER"This book, I suspect, will detonate over certain corners in America.... Darkology is a major and thrilling work of American history." —Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review, cover storyAs Heard on NPR's Fresh Air: "Quite enlightening." —Terry Gross"Tremendous.... Barnes has corralled the chaos, contradiction, and surprise of American social reality; evaded mythology; and made... the ‘unwritten’ legible.... [A] pai...

A groundbreaking history, decades in the making, that chronicles how blackface dominated American society culturally, financially, and racially for nearly two centuries.Never before has the disturbing story of blackface and its piercing reflection of American society been so comprehensively told. Darkology, from Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes, meticulously unravels this complex, subterranean, and all-too-often expunged history. By 1830, blackface, wh...

Just over fifty years ago on January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade assured millions of women that abortion was a protected constitutional right due to a woman’s right to privacy. In the context of the burgeoning women’s rights movement, it seemed like an inalienable victory: women might become equal to men in their right to determine what would happen to their bodies. This was a hard-won fight that reached back to colonial America and slavery, b...

After Life is a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020 election. Inspired by the writers who documented American life during the Great Depression and World War II for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the editors asked twenty-first-century historians and legal experts to focus on ...

How studying material texts can help us better understand the diversity of the Americas, past and presentA Hawai’ian quilt stitched with anti-imperial messages; a Jesuit report that captures the last words of a Wendat leader; an invitation to a ball, repurposed by enslaved people in colonial Antigua; a book of poetry printed in a Peruvian penitentiary. Countless material texts—legible artifacts—resulted from the diverse intercultural encounters that characterize th...

How studying material texts can help us better understand the diversity of the Americas, past and presentA Hawai’ian quilt stitched with anti-imperial messages; a Jesuit report that captures the last words of a Wendat leader; an invitation to a ball, repurposed by enslaved people in colonial Antigua; a book of poetry printed in a Peruvian penitentiary. Countless material texts—legible artifacts—resulted from the diverse intercultural encounters that characterize th...

After Life is a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020 election.Inspired by the writers who documented American life during the Great Depression and World War II for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the editors asked twenty-first-century historians and le...