In Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers (Headpress, 2024), Jared Stearns tells the untold story of the world's most famous X-rated star, who rose to fame as the face of Ivory Snow and the star of Behind the Green Door but struggled to find her true self in a world of sex, scandal, and shattered dreams. Marilyn Chambers was the embodiment of the free-spirited Seventies, the world's most famous X-rated star, and an unappreciated talent whose work in adult films hindered her dreams of becoming a serious actress. Raised in an affluent Connecticut suburb, Marilyn catapulted to fame when it was learned that not only had she starred in the groundbreaking X-rated film, Behind the Green Door but was also the model on the box of Ivory Snow laundry detergent (product tagline: "99 44/100% Pure.") Marilyn was the first woman known primarily for her work in adult films to cross over to mainstream entertainment. She sustained a versatile three-decade career in entertainment, including roles in dramatic plays, a Broadway musical revue, her own television show, and the lead role in David Cronenberg's film Rabid. 

But her success in adult films also proved to be her undoing. Marred by a violent relationship with her abusive husband-manager, Chuck Traynor, she developed the persona of a twenty-four-hour-a-day sex star. In the process, she lost her sense of self and spent much of her life searching for her true identity. With recollections from family and friends, many of whom have never spoken publicly, along with Marilyn's own words, and never-before-published photos, Jared Stearns vividly captures the revolutionary career of one of the twentieth century's most misunderstood icons.

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It’s the UConn Popcast, and “Hit Man” is writer and director Richard Linklater’s latest film, available on Netflix after a brief theatrical run. We analyze the movie through Linklater’s classic themes: identity and its malleability, American sub-cultures, and American mythologies. “Hit Man” is a less challenging watch than much of Linklater’s canon, but it works best, we argue, when seen as part of his wider project of examining the permeable boundary between fantasy and reality.

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Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism.

In Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024), Dr. Gale L. Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s missionary movement to create a Christian world order. She shows that this Christian imperial feminism marked a break from an earlier Protestant worldview that focused on moral and racial purity and in which interactions among races were inconceivable. This new approach actually prioritised issues like civil rights and racial integration, as well as the uplift of women, though the racially diverse world Christianity it aspired to was still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered, with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians.

In exposing these dynamics, this book departs from recent scholarship on white evangelical nationalism to focus on the racial politics of white religious liberalism. Christian Imperial Feminism adds a necessary layer to our understanding of religion, gender, and empire.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In the eighteenth century, women’s contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recorded in material ways, through the ink they applied to paper or the artefacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism.

In Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read—and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artefacts made by women, including makers of colour, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arm’s reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women’s material contributions to the home’s place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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If you don't recall the 1976 Denver Olympic Games, it's because they never happened. The Mile-High City won the right to host the winter games and then was forced by Colorado citizens to back away from its successful Olympic bid through a statewide ballot initiative. In The Olympics that Never Happened: Denver '76 and the Politics of Growth (University of Texas Press, 2022) Dr. Adam Berg details the powerful Colorado regime that gained the games for Denver and the grassroots activism that brought down its Olympic dreams, and he explores the legacy of this milestone moment for the games and politics in the United States.

The ink was hardly dry on Denver's host agreement when Mexican American and African American urbanites, white middle-class environmentalists, and fiscally concerned local politicians realised opposition to the Olympics provided them new political openings. The Olympics quickly became a platform for taking stands on a range of issues, from conservation to urban livability to the very idea of growth, which for decades had been unquestioned in Colorado. The Olympics That Never Happened argues that hostility to the Olympics galvanised and empowered diverse citizens in a major US city, with long-term ramifications for Colorado and political activism elsewhere. The Olympics themselves were changed forever, compelling organisers to take seriously competing interests from subgroups within their communities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (University of California Press, 2024), Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve. Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza, has a very specific and familiar history--one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways.

Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Infinite Dreams: The Life of Alan Vega (Backbeat, 2024) by Laura Davis-Chanin and Liz Lamere is the first biography on the life of Alan Vega, best known as the co-founder of the punk duo Suicide. In their exhaustive biography Davis-Chanin and Vega's wife of 30 years, Liz Lamere, start with Vega's early life and attempts at astrophysics in college, to his encounter with Iggy Pop that changed his path and encouraged him to become an artist and performer. Infinite Dreams describes Vega’s many experiments across a variety of media, including the partnership with Marty Rev that became Suicide, which challenged audiences to look deep inside themselves and to not settle for distractions. Delving into his artistic life as well as his personal trials, Infinite Dreams combines candid photos, drawing, images of art pieces, and reminiscence of a wide array of musicians and artists, creating an intimate glimpse into the life of Vega and those he influenced. 

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Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead.

In Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921 (U Nebraska Press, 2020) Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions emerging within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials negotiating the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death as well as how they used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.

Alex Beckstrand is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Connecticut and an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves.

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Latinos have long influenced everything from electoral politics to popular culture, yet many people instinctively regard them as recent immigrants rather than a longstanding racial group. In Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism (The New Press, 2020), Laura Gómez, a leading expert on race, law, and society, illuminates the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making of Latino identity that has spanned centuries, leaving a permanent imprint on how race operates in the United States today.

Pulling back the lens as the country approaches an unprecedented demographic shift (Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in a matter of decades), Gómez also reveals the nefarious roles the United States has played in Latin America—from military interventions and economic exploitation to political interference—that, taken together, have destabilized national economies to send migrants northward over the course of more than a century. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of Latinos migrate from the places most impacted by this nation’s dirty deeds, leading Gómez to a bold call for reparations. In this audacious effort to reframe the often-confused and misrepresented discourse over the Latinx generation, Gómez provides essential context for today’s most pressing political and public debates—representation, voice, interpretation, and power—giving all of us a brilliant framework to engage cultural controversies, elections, current events, and more.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.

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Over the past several decades, predominantly White, postindustrial cities in America’s agriculture and manufacturing centre have flipped from blue to red. Cities that were once part of the traditional Democratic New Deal coalition began to vote Republican, providing crucial support for the electoral victories of Republican presidents from Reagan to Trump. 

In How the Heartland Went Red Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Stephanie Ternullo argues for the importance of place in understanding this rightward shift, showing how voters in these small Midwestern cities view national politics—whether Republican appeals to racial and religious identities or Democrat’s appeals to class—through the lens of local conditions.

Offering a comparative study of three White blue-collar Midwestern cities in the run-up to the 2020 election, Ternullo shows the ways that local contexts have sped up or slowed down White voters’ shift to the right. One of these cities has voted overwhelmingly Republican for decades; one swung to the right in 2016 but remains closely divided between Republicans and Democrats; and one, defying current trends, remains reliably Democratic. Through extensive interviews, Ternullo traces the structural and organisational dimensions of place that frame residents’ perceptions of political and economic developments. These place-based conditions—including the ways that local leaders define their cities’ challenges—help prioritise residents’ social identities, connecting them to one party over another. Despite elite polarisation, fragmented media, and the nationalisation of American politics, Ternullo argues, the importance of place persists—as one of many factors informing partisanship, but as a particularly important one among cross-pressured voters whose loyalties are contested.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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