Historian Julie Willett chronicles the rise of the 1970s caricature of masculinity and sexism in "The Male Chauvinist Pig". This academic work dives into second wave feminism... Read More

Alison M. Parker’s salient academic biography of undersung civil rights and women’s rights activist Mary Eliza Church Terrell analyzes excerpts from Terrell’s diary,... Read More

The judicial system’s bias against minorities has deep roots, acknowledges Garrett Felber in Those Who Know Don’t Say, which argues that the penal, or carceral, state... Read More

Ricky Moore’s "Saltbox Seafood Joint Cookbook" is a tasty compilation of recipes and information about traditional North Carolina foodways with helpful guidance for selecting,... Read More

The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 is a case study in the way that private industries twist government programs to their advantage. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s "Race... Read More

Kathleen Sprows Cummings’s thorough and spirited "A Saint of Our Own" looks at the Catholic community in the United States and its desire for an American saint.... Read More

The popularity of fusion cooking too often overshadows the fact that mastering, truly mastering, the cuisine of even one region can take years, even decades. On the one hand, we... Read More

With a resident’s in-the-bones understanding of the place, Jason Berry’s "City of a Million Dreams" is a hypnotic biography of a unique American city. Beyond its Mardis... Read More

Perre Coleman Magness explains why decadent American Southern food is so darn delicious in "Southern Snacks", which acknowledges that sharing bountiful amounts of food is a... Read More

Edna Lewis earned a reputation as a groundbreaking chef, both for excelling as an African American woman in the New York restaurant scene and for her work popularizing Southern... Read More

This riveting true-crime exploration highlights the relationship between race and the law in the post-Civil War South. Karen L. Cox’s Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder,... Read More

The world came to Gertrude Weil’s door, and Leonard Rogoff shows in Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South that she, in turn, bridged worlds. Born in 1879, a North... Read More