Shows how apocalypticism helped drive anti-slavery abolitionism and inspire progressive social reform in nineteenth-century America In March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly left her local Methodist church because it supported slavery and other “sins” that permeated America. Botsford was among one hundred thousand other abolitionists who abandoned their evangelical churches throughout the decade. These protesters came out with a stern apocalyptic warning: God would soon judge America—and its churches—for the sins of slavery and race prejudice. It has long been assumed that apocalypticism is antithetical to social reform. Yet in Apocalyptic Abolitionism: How Millennialists Helped Abolish Slavery and Reform America (NYU Press, 2026), Kevin M. Burton uncovers the untold story of how apocalypticism shaped the abolitionist cause and helped destroy slavery in the United States. Contrary to popular opinion, the revival fires of the Second Great Awakening did not drive most evangelicals to progressive social reforms like abolitionism. Neither were the denominational schisms during that period a fight between northern abolitionists and southern slaveholders. Rather, before the Methodist and Baptist denominations split along sectional lines, most abolitionists, particularly members of the Adventist movement, had already left their churches in what was likely the largest mass exodus from mainstream evangelicalism in American history, precisely because most evangelicals opposed radical social reform movements. This volume makes the case that evangelicals receive undeserved credit for antislavery, and that it was apocalyptic abolitionists who led the way. Drawing from rare and overlooked sources to create a database of biographies of nearly 2000 people to track their religious affiliations and activism over time, Burton offers invaluable data to develop a robust framework for understanding apocalypticism, evangelicalism, and social reform politics of the nineteenth century. Kevin M. Burton is Assistant Professor of Church History, Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, Andrews University, where he also directs the Center for Adventist Research. to American religious history." ~John Corrigan, author of The Feeling of Forgetting: Christianity, Race, and Violence in America

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Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab.

For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from one place to many.

Mehran Gul tries to map out this new network in his book The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies (Simon and Schuster, 2026). From China's startlingly messy AI ecosystem to Singapore's government-led innovation, from South Korea's decades-old conglomerates still at the frontier to India's world-class talent that too often works abroad; from Europe's struggle to hold on to its best companies, to the deeper role of the state everywhere—including in Silicon Valley—and why the United States, far from declining, is extending its lead into a genuinely bipolar technological order.

Mehran is a winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize. He attended Yale where he was a Fulbright Scholar, Fox International Fellow, and Teaching Fellow. He has been a Lead for the Digital Transformation of Industries at the World Economic Forum and an expert on Higher Education, Entrepreneurship, and Industrial Policy at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Before Yale, he studied at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He has been a visiting scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Fellow with the Acumen Fund.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The New Geography of Innovation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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How is it, Samuel Johnson famously asked on the eve of the Revolution, that Americans could so vociferously demand freedom for themselves while so conspicuously continuing to deny it to those they held in slavery? With Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World (U Virginia Press, 2025), Matthew Mason helps answer that piercing question. As he shows, the language of slavery and freedom had long suffused Anglo-American political debates in the eighteenth century, with the Revolution emerging as one particularly hyperdramatic act during which combatants on both sides of the war of words connected the idea of slavery to the headline issues of the day. Mason details how Patriots and Loyalists alike deployed the rhetoric of slavery in their debates about all the crucial questions of the day, including republicanism, taxation and representation, and—by claiming the moral high ground—the nature of the Revolutionary War itself. These debates left complex rhetorical and political legacies for those seeking to abolish and defend slavery in both the new US and the remaining British Empire.

“No one understands the politics of slavery and the rise of antislavery better than Matthew Mason. This is because he knows the original sources and deeply understands what historians have done and where they've taken detours. He keeps his eye on the big picture and his feet on the ground even while explaining the achievements and the limits of those who reached for the higher ground.”

- David Waldstreicher, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence

“Matthew Mason's important new book cuts through some of the sharpest historiographical debates on the role of slavery and abolition in the Revolutionary Era to reveal a textured and dynamic portrait of the transatlantic political world.”

- Rachel Shelden, Pennsylvania State University, author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War

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In Democracy on the Edge, leading political scientists John Kenneth White and Matthew R. Kerbel unravel the elections of 2020, 2022, and 2024 to show how each represented a flashpoint in the reordering of political priorities and electoral coalitions. The consequences have the potential to redefine our politics and shape our democracy for years to come. In 2020, American voters temporarily removed an authoritarian leader, only for this leader to instigate an insurrection attempt on January 6, 2021. The midterm election of 2022 broke with precedent on the basis of the public’s response to the historic overturning of Roe v. Wade and the fallout from J6, as voters rejected election deniers and MAGA candidates across the board. In 2024, however, voters could not reject this threat to democracy a third time, and Trump’s return to the White House has instead left the country at a crossroads and a moment of peril.

In unpacking recent electoral cycles and placing them in broader historical context, White and Kerbel show that both major parties face unique difficulties. After Barack Obama’s election, Democrats believed they were on the cusp of securing a majority that heralded a new era of political realignment around their multiracial dominance. That majority has not yet materialized. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party has transformed the GOP into a party completely beholden to him, embracing election denialism, conspiracy theories, and policies that are far out of step with the country beyond his base. The efforts of Republicans and Democrats are buffeted by dramatic and unpredictable cultural and economic shifts. The generational divide between Baby Boomers and Gen X on one side and Millennials and Gen Z on the other has become a fault line of lived experiences, cultural values, financial realities, and political beliefs. This is all further complicated by chaotic realignments on lines of race and gender.

And underneath it all is a political system under unprecedented pressure. Our democracy faces its most severe test since the Civil War. The aspirations contained in the Declaration of Independence and the systems built by the Constitution are no longer universally accepted. The Republican Party, led by Trump, seeks to accelerate the accumulation of presidential power and limit the Constitution’s phraseology of “We, the People” to “We, the Wealthy” or “We, the Cultural Warriors.” The final denouement of this political saga has yet to be written, but Trump’s election leaves us with the possibility of two unfamiliar outcomes—a brand of American authoritarianism or the establishment of a multicultural republic.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a bystander what kind of government the framers had wrought. Franklin’s famous answer was, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Keeping the republic will depend on the fallout from the last three unprecedented election cycles. Ultimately, our future is up to us.

John Kenneth White is professor of politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He is the author of What Happened to the Republican Party? and Barack Obama's America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era. Read his Substack.

Matthew R. Kerbel is professor of political science at Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania. He is the author of nine books, including Netroots and Next Generation Netroots, both about the emergence of internet politics and political engagement. Read his Substack.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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There is no humbler food than bread, none easier to take for granted. So ancient that it shows up in prehistoric sites, bread is still full of surprises. Heirloom grains and artisan loaves fetch top dollar, while home bakers pour their passion into naan and challah, anadama and pistolet.

In American Bread: A History (U California Press, 2026), award-winning author Andrew Coe provides the definitive history of American bread, from European settlers' introduction to corn through the COVID-era sourdough craze. Each chapter follows an emblematic loaf that connects flour, water, salt, and yeast to the evolving story of American agriculture, industry, immigration, and ideas about health.

Why did supermarket white become America's dominant bread, and how did rustic old-world bagels, ryes, and rolls find their way into our kitchens? Who was the early nineteenth-century dietary reformer who started the whole-grain revolution? Why not knead? An enriching and enlightening cultural chronicle, American Bread answers these questions and more and offers carefully sourced historical recipes to inspire the home baker.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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“Does Thomas Jefferson still matter?” ask two leading historians on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson has been reinvented more than perhaps any American president in history. In the nineteenth century, slavery’s defenders invoked Jefferson’s defense of states’ rights while abolitionists drew on his antislavery writings in support of their cause. After the Civil War, Jefferson’s reputation declined because of his association with secession and disunion, but in the twentieth century, his image soared as he came to embody the democratic values America fought for during World War II.

Unsurprisingly, Jefferson’s legacy has shifted yet again in the twenty-first century, effectively becoming a partisan talisman—jettisoned by the left as a plantation patriarch and repurposed by the right as an avatar of white nationalism. Dissatisfied with these political caricatures and manic swings, leading Jefferson scholars Peter S. Onuf and Francis D. Cogliano instead situate the founding father in his complicated historical context and reveal how his wisdom can be applied today.

In a series of three interrelated essays, the authors paint a nuanced portrait. “Generations” elucidates how Jefferson’s understanding of history shaped his responses to the major problems of his time. “My Country” delves into how he conceived of the American homeland, and “The People” unravels how Jefferson articulated a new national identity in the Declaration of Independence.

Taken together, Thomas Jefferson Survives: American Independence in His Time and Ours (Liveright, 2026) demonstrates how even amid crisis, Jefferson managed to articulate a capacious and optimistic vision for the future of the American people. As Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed writes in her foreword, “As much as Jefferson reflected the often-benighted times in which he lived, he rose above them in ways that have a great deal to tell us about the political straits in which we find ourselves.” After all, Jefferson knew better than anyone that 1776 was an important moment, but not the only moment, for Americans to write a better future.

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