This author website is primarily focused on my new book project with Nicola Hale, which you can learn more about on other pages of this site:
On this page, you can see some other books I have already published:
Nutrition, Immunity, and the Warning from Early America (London and New York, 2018)
Co-Authored with scientist Nicola Hale, Nutrition, Immunity, and the Warning from Early America introduced some of the ideas that we explore in Arctic Signal, including the extraordinary genetic mutation that occurred among Indigenous people of Arctic North America around 6,000 years ago, and which offers a message for all of us about the fundamental (but often misunderstood) role of low-carb, keto, and omega-3s in evolutionary health.
Selected Reviews & Media
“Mailer and Hale provide a powerful critique of Virgin Soil theory…drawing on cutting-edge nutrition science, immunology, and archeology…” –David S. Jones, Harvard University, A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine
“A historian and a scientist, respectively, Mailer and Hale manage to weave together a cohesive narrative of how the forces of nutrition, immunity, environmental change, disease, settler colonialism…have influenced the general health of Native American people, from the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras to the present.” —Yes Magazine, Chelsey Luger, Turtle Mountain Chippewa / Standing Rock Sioux
“Nutrition, Immunity and the Warning from Early America is written for those who get excited by complex biological processes…drawing from archeological and historical case studies from Indigenous populations within the borders of the contemporary United States.” — Keitlyn Alcantara, “Not Lost but Found: Rebuilding Relations and Reclaiming Indigenous Food Systems,” Nature and Culture (Winter 2021).
Remembering Histories of Trauma (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Remembering Histories of Trauma explores the history and memory of Indigenous health, wellbeing, and population loss following the encounter with Europeans, and how that speaks to the way Holocaust memory has evolved. It includes work on Arctic North American communities whose history reappears in different ways in Arctic Signal.
Selected Reviews & Media
“This is an ambitious, generous, and much needed book.” — Jonathan Boyarin, Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor, Cornell University
“[Showing] great reflection and compassion…”– Kitty Millet, Professor and Department Chair, San Francisco University, USA
“Mailer’s book approaches his topic with great sensitivity and compassion.” — Central European History, Dec 2023.
“…Mailer’s analysis of public memory is nuanced…The analysis is sensitive to the complexities of the politics associated with public memory and avoids oversimplification or reductionist explanations.” — Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Winter 2023
“Weaving together examples from public sites of memory and scholarship, Mailer provides a remarkable balance.” – H-Diplo, Winter 2022
Some of these ideas are also explored in Join or Die: Unity and Conflict in North America, 1492-1865 (2019)
I have also published two books in my parallel research track on the social, intellectual, constitutional, and religious history of North America and the wider Atlantic World from 1600-1865. It highlights the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on the American Revolution and the formation of American federalism. You can find out more about this separate research on my university website.
Gideon Mailer 