The American Dream and Dreams Deferred

by Carlton D. Floyd, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer

2022 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

The American Dream and Dreams Deferred: A Dialectical Fairy Tale shows how rival interpretations of the Dream reveal the dialectical tensions therein. Exploring often neglected voices, literatures, and histories, Carlton D. Floyd and Thomas Ehrlich Reifer highlight moments when the American Dream appears both simultaneously possible and out of reach. In so doing, the authors invite readers to make a new collective dream of a better future, on socially just, multicultural, and ecologically sustainable foundations.

Religion in the Lands That Became America

by Thomas A. Tweed

2025 · Yale University Press

A sweeping retelling of American religious history, showing how religion has enhanced and hindered human flourishing from the Ice Age to the Information Age Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant and Atlantic. Driven by his strong sense of the historical and moral shortcomings of the usual story, Thomas A. Tweed offers a very different narrative in this ambitious new history. He begins the story much earlier—11,000 years ago—at a rock shelter in present-day Texas and follows Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, transnational migrants, and people of many faiths as they transform the landscape and confront the big lifeway transitions, from foraging to farming and from factories to fiber optics. Setting aside the familiar narrative themes, he highlights sustainability, showing how religion both promoted and inhibited individual, communal, and environmental flourishing during three sustainability crises: the medieval Cornfield Crisis, which destabilized Indigenous ceremonial centers; the Colonial Crisis, which began with the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans; and the Industrial Crisis, which brought social inequity and environmental degradation. The unresolved Colonial and Industrial Crises continue to haunt the nation, Tweed suggests, but he recovers historical sources of hope as he retells the rich story of America’s religious past.

The Slow Rush of Colonization

by Thomas Peace

2023 · UBC Press

In 1760, after Montcalm’s defeat at the Plains of Abraham, the French Empire was definitively expelled from the Saint Lawrence Valley. This history is well known. Less well known is that this decisive victory had its roots almost a hundred years earlier, when settler colonial systems of power first took root on the peripheries of the Maritime Peninsula (the places known today as Quebec, Maritime Canada, and New England). Drawing on the concept of spaces of power, historian Thomas Peace demonstrates that despite imperial changes of power and settler colonial incursions on their Lands, local Mi’kmaw, Wabanaki, Peskotomuhkati, Wolastoqiyik, and Wendat nations continued to experience the contested Peninsula as a cohesive whole, rather than one defined by subsequent colonial borders. This engaging history shows how overlapping concepts of space and power – shaped deeply by Indigenous agency and diplomacy – defined relationships in the eighteenth-century Maritime Peninsula and how, following the Seven Years’ War, this history was brushed aside as settlers flooded into the Peninsula, laying the groundwork from which Canada and the United States would develop.