American Incest: How White Supremacy Became White Lawlessness

FORTHCOMING Fall 2026

American Incest takes its readers on a whirlwind, barn-burning, eye-opening yet largely uncharted tour of America. Consider these examples: The first American novel was an incest novel, published in 1789 and intended as a rival document to the US Constitution. The most famous American painting is a painting about incest. The most influential American movie[…]

Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950–2000), Vol. 2: The Long 1960s

FORTHCOMING Fall 2026

Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950–2000) is the first collection of historical analyses and reminiscences by members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Communist youth movement in the US from the 1950s through the 1990s. The nearly fifty first-person testimonies bring to life a missing chapter in the history of[…]

Why the Center Can’t Hold: A Diagnosis of Puritanized America

Published: 05/30/2016

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” These words from Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” provide Why the Center Can’t Hold with its organizing theme. And although Yeats was describing the grim atmosphere of post-World War I Europe, O’Neill regards the poem’s pronouncements as eerily predictive of the state of the world as we are[…]