U.S. History Topics | OAH

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Click on an OAH Lecture title to go to the author's OAH Distinguished Lecturer profile page

A

"Awful Calamity": Sentiment, Gender, and Nation in the Richmond Theater Fire of 1811

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

A Cultural History of America's Thanksgiving

A Cultural History of Wall Street

A Nation without Class: A Social History of Inequality since the 1970s

A Passion for Liberty: Emotional Rhetoric and the American Revolution

A War for the Soul of America

African American Marriage in the Nineteenth Century

African Americans and American Popular Culture, 1890-1930

Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul

American Cosmopolitanism: Rabindranath Tagore and His Impact on American Readers in the Early Twentieth Century

Are We A Nation? New Perspectives on the Emergence of Modern America, 1896-1929

B

"Back in the U.S.A." The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll and 1950s America

"Born on the Fourth of July": Musical Celebrations of America's Independence

Baseball as History/History as Baseball

Blue-Collar Cosmopolitans: Toward a History of Working-Class Sophistication

Born to Shop? Consumerism and the American Woman

C

Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude: The 1970s' Shift in American Culture and Politics

Come Back Tom Joad: The Legacy of the 1930s

Community Building and Dismantling in Contemporary Asian American History

D

Did Tecumseh Stamp his Foot? Earthquakes and Legend in the South

E

El Sabor de la Patria: Mexican Restaurants, Cultural Tourists, and "Authenticity" in Early Mexican Chicago

Hamilton: A New American Civic Myth?

Emotion and Encounter: Early Atlantic Accounts

Evangelicalism and the Rise of the Sunbelt

Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb in Post–World War II America

F

"Fling Open the Gates So Wide": How Travel and Public Places Transformed Community and National Identity in the United States, 1789-1876

Fashion Forward? The Environmental History of Style

Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930

From Grits to the Allman Brothers: Why America Looks to the South for Authentic Culture

H

High Schools, New Girls, and New Women: 1880–1900

High Thoughts and Mass Markets: Philosophy and Popular Culture in American History

Historicizing the Carceral State: Race, Sex, and Power in Early America

History by Hollywood: The Movies’ Influence on Public Opinion

Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday

I

"Into the Fire": September 11, Popular Music, and Public Memory

Irish Americanization on Stage: How Irish Musicians, Playwrights, and Writers Created a New Urban American Culture

Is Birth Control Moral? Margaret Sanger and Changing Views of Contraception

K

Keeping It from the Kids: Censorship as Child Protection in Modern America

L

Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Creating Plantation Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790–1860

Landscapes of Segregation: Race, Recreation and Resistance in Modern America

Learning about America from Starbucks

Living in the Material World: American Housework in Historical Perspective

Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and the New American City

LOSER! How Trump's Favorite Insult Became Our Hugest Fear

M

Memorial Mania: Commemoration and Affect in Contemporary America

Missouri Miners Breaking Bad: How the "Show-Me State" Got Its Name

Multiculturalism

Music as a Mode of Communication in Cross-cultural Encounters

N

Narcissism in the Age of Trump

Nationalism, Nativism, and Fear in American History

New Directions in Worker and Community

New Right Beauty: Race, Gender, and American Conservatism’s Aesthetic Politics since 1945

Not Your Grandmother's Grandmother: Changes in Popular Culture Images of the American Grandmother in the Twentieth Century

O

"Our Newcomers to the City": The Great Migration and the Making of Modern Mass Culture

P

Pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism

Pictures of Feeling: Norman Rockwell's Affection for America

Popular Culture Goes To War: John Wayne, Joe Louis, Superman, and American Culture during World War II

Public Feeling, Public Healing: Contemporary Memorials and the Mediation of Grief

S

Scandal at Bizarre: Sex, Rhetoric, and Reality in Jefferson's America

Sex and the City: Jane Addams Confronts Prostitution

Smoking Hot!: The Synergistic Rise of Jazz and Cigarettes from the United States to China

Snake Oil Revisited: Household Medicine and Herbal Commerce in a Developing Consumer Society

So Far from Home: Negotiating Cultural, Environmental, and Community Survival in Early Mexican Chicago

Society Ladies and Political Parties: A Study in American Women's History

Soviet Prisoners, Berlin Exiles, and the Rise of Anti-Communism in the United States

Spanish Manila and the First American Chinatown

Stayin' Alive: Class and Popular Culture in the 1970s

T

The American Invention of Spirituality

The Changing Landscape of Love, Sex, Singlehood, and Marriage

The Cowboy Suit Tragedy: Owning Hazard in the Modern American Consumer Economy

The Culture Wars in Higher Education

The Declaration of Dependence: Voluntary Annexation, Salvadoran Statehood, and the Monroe Doctrine

The Domestic Impact of World War II

The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Buffalo, New York, and the Pan American Exposition, 1901

The Huntington Challenge: Latino History, American Culture, and the Future of Diversity in the United States

The Julia Child Project: Food in Mid-century American Life

The Long Rise and Short Decline of American Democracy

The Long Shadow of William James: Pragmatism in American Culture since 1870

The Military History of American Beauty Pageants

The Moon and Moonshine: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of the Invisible World

The Most Influential Satire in History: Harvey Kurtzman and MAD Magazine

The New American Citizenship and the Challenge of Intersectionality

The Nightmare Year 1968 and Rock Music

The Oddities of American History and the Possibility of Systemic Change in the Twenty-first Century

The Panic-less Panic: The Strange Career of the Panic of 1837

The Politics of Dress: Gender, Imperialism, and Modernity

The Politics of Toughness: Conservatism, Masculinity, and American Culture in the Late Twentieth Century

The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II

The Problem of Culture in U.S. Foreign Relations

The Rise and Fall of the Urban Volunteer Fire Company: Why Nineteenth-Century Citizens Chose to Pay for an Urban Service They Had Previously Received for Free

The Secret History of Property Law

The Silent Majority

The Sixties at 50: 1968 and the New American Cultural Politics

The Social History of the Climate Crisis

The South in American Popular Culture: From Tin Pan Alley to Reality Television

The Stroke of Midnight: New Year's Observances during the Civil War Era

The War for Tennessee, 1792–1794: Indian "Nations," White "Christians," and the Education of Andrew Jackson

The World Turned Inside Out, or Cartoon Politics: American Thought and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century

To Look for America: From Hiroshima to Woodstock (an impressionistic multi-media presentation on American society after 1945, with a focus on the upheaval of the sixties)

To Swear like a Sailor

Travel and Terror: Exploding Steamboats and the Popular Culture of Antebellum America

Twittering in the Past Tense: Social Technologies of the 1850s

U

Undoing Slavery: Abolition and the Argument over Humanity

Unfamiliar Territory: The Worldwide Transformation of Marriage and Family Life

Unruly Adults and Dissent in the 1950s

W

What's Laundry Got to Do with It?

Whatever Happened to Healthy Narcissism?

When Benjamin Franklin Worried about the Swarthy Germans: How Anxiety about Immigrants Shaped the United States

White Nationalism in Historical Perspective

Why Joe Louis Matters: Race, Masculinity, and Culture

Why Women's History Matters

Y

Yiddish Heritage and the Jewish Role in American Popular Culture