The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West
by Martha A. Sandweiss
April 2025
A haunting image of an unnamed Native child and a recovered story of the American West
In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government’s treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. As The Girl in the Middle goes in search of her, it draws readers into the entangled lives of the photographer and his subjects. Read more about The Girl in the Middle.
Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein
by Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael D. Gordin
May 2025
A nuanced portrait of Albert Einstein, a world citizen pivotally engaged in politics, humanitarianism, and science.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was the most influential scientist of the twentieth century, and his influence shows little sign of abating. His work comprises of much of today's understanding of the structure of the microphysical and cosmic universes. Einstein was a man of the modern world, faced with intellectual and existential challenges of extraordinary magnitude, a working scientist immersed in epochal theories of special relativity, the quantum theory, but also in organizational activities and teaching at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. More than any other past scientist, Einstein still pervades popular iconography and has come to symbolize genius, creativity, and innovation infused with humanism, wisdom, and humor. His life is interconnected with so many of the important political and intellectual movements of his era — Zionism, pacifism, Nazism, nuclear weapons, philosophy, civil rights, McCarthyism, the League of Nations, and more — that his views shaped the world he lived in while his persona acquired a formidable patina deposited by generations of apocryphal mythmaking, both during and after his lifetime. Read more about Free Creations of the Human Mind.
Freedom's Horizon: Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
by Isadora Moura Mota
May 2025
A social and transnational history of black abolitionism in Brazil
Freedom’s Horizon is a transnational history of black abolitionism in Brazil. In the last country to abolish slavery in the Western Hemisphere, enslaved and free Africans and their descendants crafted their visions of liberation by thinking comparatively about the uneven spread of abolition across the Atlantic world. Between the 1840s and 1860s, they acted on the idea that the end of slavery anywhere placed freedom on the horizon in Brazil. Thus, they pursued alliances with British diplomats; rose in arms at the sight of both Union and Confederate warships off Brazil’s Atlantic coast; sought free soil at foreign consulates, on ships, and in maroon settlements (called quilombos); and organized uprisings for immediate abolition after learning of international emancipation struggles in the newspapers. Read more about Freedom's Horizon.