In 1911, the operators of Coney Island's Luna Park premiered a miniature, radically banked racetrack for staged automobile races that seemed to defy gravity. For a fee, patrons would watch from the perimeter of the 85-foot wooden saucer as daredevil drivers raced on the steep angle of the tiny track. The attraction created a sensation and was quickly copied with a show that featured motorcycle riders performing breathtaking stunts. When portable versions were made available, every traveling carnival owner in the United States rushed to have one. Motordromes with perfectly vertical walls soon followed, which permitted riders on their Indian motorcycles to climb, sometimes to a height of 20 feet, with nothing but centrifugal force between them and a trip to the trauma ward. And when full-grown lions were added to pursue riders in the arena, no one could resist buying a ticket! The Wall of Death, a name these shows received in 1917, remained a staple attraction on American carnival midways until the 1970s.

"Seething Nation! Vast & Flowing! Day & Night & Dawn!" Bold, sweeping, investigative, rhapsodic, hilarious, heart-rendering, thought-provoking, Edward Sanders' three-volume, America: A History in Verse uniquely and brilliantly tells "the story of America...a million stranded fabric / woven by billions of hands & minds". It is by turns angry, wistful, defiant and extremely funny re-inventions of historical and biographical worlds, a highly original mix of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic. Volume 1, 1900-1939 chronicles the birth of the American century through one world war and to the brink of a second. Not since Leaves of Grass has there been such an un-ironic attempt to give voice to "the rhapsody of a great nation / where so many sing without cease / work without halt / shoulder without shudder / to bring the Feather of Justice to every / bell tower, biome & blade of grass / in Graceful America." Long may Sanders sing our common song, and long may his America "dwell in peace, freedom & equality / out on its spiraling arm / in the Milky Way."

A world list of books in the English language.

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity. Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

While public debates over America's current foreign policy often treat American empire as a new phenomenon, this lively collection of essays offers a pointed reminder that visions of national and imperial greatness were a cornerstone of the new country when it was founded. In fact, notions of empire have long framed debates over western expansion, Indian removal, African slavery, Asian immigration, and global economic dominance, and they persist today despite the proliferation of anti-imperialist rhetoric. In fifteen essays, distinguished historians examine the central role of empire in American race relations, nationalism, and foreign policy from the founding of the United States to the twenty-first century. The essays trace the global expansion of American merchant capital, the rise of an evangelical Christian mission movement, the dispossession and historical erasure of indigenous peoples, the birth of new identities, and the continuous struggles over the place of darker-skinned peoples in a settler society that still fundamentally imagines itself as white. Full of transnational connections and cross-pollinations, of people appearing in unexpected places, the essays are also stories of people being put, quite literally, in their place by the bitter struggles over the boundaries of race and nation. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that the seemingly contradictory processes of boundary crossing and boundary making are and always have been intertwined. Contributors: James T. Campbell, Brown University Ruth Feldstein, Rutgers University-Newark Kevin K. Gaines, University of Michigan Matt Garcia, Brown University Matthew Pratt Guterl, Indiana University George Hutchinson, Indiana University Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University Prema Kurien, Syracuse University Robert G. Lee, Brown University Eric Love, University of Colorado, Boulder Melani McAlister, George Washington University Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky Louise M. Newman, University of Florida Vernon J. Williams Jr., Indiana University Natasha Zaretsky, Southern Illinois University Carbondale