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Lost on the Freedom Trail details how urban planners and business interests “reimagined” Boston’s Revolutionary War landscape—including the Boston National Historic Park. In this significant contribution to the literature on historic preservation, Seth Bruggeman illustrates the connections among federal, state, and local shareholders and demonstrates that public history must engage challenging questions about race, power, and control in the city and the nation.

A Union Like Ours, a Bright Leaf title, was shortlisted for the 2023 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction presented by the Publishing Triangle. Scott Bane tells the remarkable story of the romantic relationship between Harvard University scholar and activist F. O. Matthiessen and Maine artist Russell Cheney, from their chance meeting on an ocean liner in 1924 to Cheney’s death after years of alcohol abuse in 1945, in the context of their own very accomplished lives and the shifting social dynamics in the United States.  

Designed for use in courses and engaging for general readers, this new compilation is the most diverse, most inclusive, and most comprehensive resource available for teaching and learning about the civil rights movement. With chronological and geographical depth, The New Civil Rights Movement Reader addresses a range of key topics, including youth activism, regional and local freedom struggles, voting rights, economic inequality, gender, sexuality, and culture, and the movement’s global reach.

Matthew Dennis considers a range of fraught public objects across the expanse of American history, from the gold epaulettes that George Washington wore into battle to the atrocious artifacts of lynching, Civil War souvenirs, and the bullet-riddled door of the Pulse nightclub. Drawing upon an impressive range of source material, Dennis explores the many ways that Americans have invested memory and meaning in relics, cherished and abhorred them, and used them to promote consensus and violence.