I started my career teaching high school. I attended amazing professional development institutes, where scholars showed me how the stories I’d learned and then taught to my own students were so oversimplified that they had become factually incorrect. I was hooked. I kept wondering what else I’d gotten wrong. I earned a Ph.D. in modern US History with specialties in women’s and gender history and war and society, and now I’m an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of ISU’s Social Studies Education Program. I focus on historical complexity and human motivations because they are the key to understanding change.
I wrote
Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance
We live in a time when personal convenience seems to trump everything else. So how is it that virtually the entire Black community of Montgomery, Alabama, stayed off the city buses for over a year in the mid-1950s?
The first three chapters of this book answer that question in a completely new way that made the realities of the Jim Crow South and the dangers of the struggle for racial justice snap into focus for me. The boycott was tangentially about segregation on buses, but really, argues McGuire, it was a fight for bodily integrity, safety, and self-respect.
Because it deals with rape and sexual assault, this can be a hard book to read, but it literally gave me a different understanding of what “equality” means.
Here is the courageous, groundbreaking story of Rosa Parks and Recy Taylor—a story that reinterprets the history of America's civil rights movement in terms of the sexual violence committed against Black women by white men.
"An important step to finally facing the terrible legacies of race and gender in this country.” —The Washington Post
Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of…
I’ve read thousands of books on US history (for real). Many have made me rethink the narratives I learned in high school and college, but this is the only one that made me rethink what we mean when we say “US History.”
I can’t count the number of times this book made me say, “Wow!” out loud. As just a taste, Immerwahr writes that by 1940, 1 in 8 Americans lived outside of the states themselves, Asians constituted the largest American minority, the center of population was in New Mexico, and Manila was one of the country’s largest cities.
All of what I thought I knew changed once I included the reality of the American empire.
Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick
A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire
We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories―the islands, atolls, and archipelagos―this country has governed and inhabited?
In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story…
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the…
Generally speaking, I hate anything that hints at theory. But this slim volume, which investigates the relationship between states of war and how we understand time, is grounded solidly in reality and does not require mental gymnastics to understand.
Using the examples of World War II, the Cold War, and the Global War on Terror, Dudziak made me rethink how we define when it’s “wartime” vs. when it’s “peacetime” and why that matters. Her argument is about how war has not been a time out of time or aberration, so treating war as a period when different rules apply has real consequences.
The book pushed me to rethink how and when I silo ideas, time, and events and how dangerous silo’ing can be.
When is wartime? On the surface, it is a period of time in which a society is at war. But we now live in what President Obama has called "an age without surrender ceremonies," when it is no longer easy to distinguish between wartime and peacetime. In this inventive meditation on war, time, and the law, Mary Dudziak argues that wartime is not as discrete a time period as we like to think. Instead, America has been engaged in some form of ongoing overseas armed conflict for over a century. Meanwhile policy makers and the American public continue to view…
This book is probably the first scholarly book that blew my mind and pushed me to want to know what else I had always gotten wrong.
Where, like most people I know, I had always thought that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was just a thing that happened because of “war,” this book made it clear why it happened.
The US and Japan, both diplomats and everyday people, did not choose to understand each other. Different world views, different assumptions, and plain old racism led the US and Japan into a horrific, bloody conflict with long-lasting consequences.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.”
In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.”
Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret…
Desperate to honor his father’s dying wish, Layken Martin vows to do whatever it takes to save the family farm. Once the Army discharges him following World War II, Layken returns to Missouri to find his legacy in shambles and…
If you’ve ever wondered about where the terms “coming out,” “tea room,” or “fairy” came from, this book has the answers. But more importantly, this book showed me the extent to which my preconceived notions about the relationship between gender and sexuality were simply wrong.
Chauncey’s careful and readable reconstruction of gay communities in early twentieth-century New York illustrates very clearly that ideas of masculinity and deviance and the meanings attached to sex between men are socially constructed and change over time.
His story also showed me how much history can hide in plain sight and how there are still so many stories left to tell.
The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century
Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (The Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (The New York Times), Gay New Yorkforever changed how…
Everyone who lived through the Vietnam War era knows that the draft wasn’t fair. Every man has a story about how they either avoided the draft or ended up serving in the US military. It’s received wisdom that it was much easier for middle-class and wealthy men to get out of the draft than working-class white men and all men of color. But why was this the case?
This book provides the answer, and it is not because of the circumstances of the era or the war’s unpopularity. Nor is it because men of the Vietnam generation were less patriotic or less responsible than, say, the “Greatest Generation” of World War II.
Lena thinks she knows her future: in her small village, nothing much has changed for two hundred years. Women farm and fish, plant and harvest: a cooperative, productive, peaceful life. Until the day a soldier rides in, to ask the unthinkable of the women: learn to fight. Invasion is imminent,…
The day the second atomic bomb was dropped, Clabe and Leora Wilson’s postman brought a telegram to their acreage near Perry, Iowa. One son was already in the U.S. Navy before Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Four more sons worked with their father, tenant farmers near Minburn until, one by…
