American Studies

Draws on diary entries and correspondence from students to tell the story of the early years of Haskell Institute, a government boarding school designed to “civilize” and acculturate Indians to Anglo-American ideals. Reveals how both resistance against and compliance with the dominant culture unified the students and erased traditional barriers between tribes.

Chronicles the creation and transformation of Reno’s reputation from backward railroad town to a nationally known “Sin Central.” The author shows how Reno civic leaders, in their never-ending quest for tourist dollars, dramatically altered the economy and physical appearance of the city.

The first book to examine the depictions of Catholics in American popular culture during the critical period between the Great Depression and the height of the Cold War. Looks at the popular films, TV shows, radio programs, and magazine coverage that re-imagined the Catholic role in American culture.

An examination of the figure who continues to expose key fault lines in the nation's self-definition. Draws on references ranging from All in the Family to All the President’s Men to show how Nixon has remained one of America’s most durable and multifaceted icons in the fierce debates over the import and meaning of the last sixty years of national life.

West of Harlem relocates the “New Negro” to the new landscape of the borderlands West, examining the work of writers like Arna Bontemps, Anita Scott Coleman, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Jean Toomer and shows that debates over cultural nationalism and uplift long considered central to New Negro politics and culture were even more complicated, and that fantasies of the West as both a deracinated frontier and a hybrid borderlands are undermined by black western experience.