Wes in the News

Kirk Swinehart, assistant professor of history, reviews the new book by New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend titled, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor. Writing for The Chicago Tribune, Swinehart says Friend” has written the memoir of the season–and one for all time. ‘Cheerful Money’ doubles as a bittersweet family portrait and deceptively subtle ethnography.”

Kirk Swinehart, assistant professor of history, has a reivew for The Chicago Tribune of Edmund Morgan’s latest book, American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America. Swinehart says: “as so many times before, Morgan proves himself one of our deftest thinkers about race — what he once called ‘the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom.’”

Assistant Professor of History Kirk Swinehart reviews Chloe Hooper’s gripping new book Tall Man which recounts a true crime incident that brought Palm Island back into the public consciousness of Australians and made news throughout the world.

In The Chicago Tribune, Kirk Davis Swinehart, assistant professor of history, reviews John Merriman’s new book The Dynamite Club, which examines an 1894 anarchist bombing in Paris. Swinehart calls the book “that rare thing: virtuosic storytelling that doubles as superb history.”

Kirk Swinehart, assistant professor of history, reviews the historic novel Blindspot in The Chicago Tribune. Set in 18th Century Boston, Swinehart says Blindspot “succeeds as raw entertainment; better, it soars as cunning academic revisionism.”

Assistant Professor of Government Elvin Lim talks about the intellectual complexity and near college-level language that  FDR used in his popular fireside chats.