Shows / New Books in American Studies
New Books in American Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in American Studies
John Bodnar, "Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11" (UNC Press, 2021)
September 11th, 2001 marked the beginning of the so-called war on terror, but the attacks of that day also re-ignited battles over the nature of American…
- New Books in American Studies
Julie Dobrow, "Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage" (NYU Press, 2025)
Like any set of star-crossed lovers, Elaine and Charles came from different worlds. Elaine, an acclaimed childhood poet from a remote corner of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, "Videotape" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron…
- New Books in American Studies
Can America Still Lead? Foreign Policy in an Age of Division with Joel Rubin
What happens when America loses its foreign-policy playbook? RBI acting director Eli Karetny talks with veteran diplomat and policy strategist Joel Rubin about…
- New Books in American Studies
Simon Appleford, "Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America (U Virginia Press, 2023) is the first book-length critical examination of the political…
- New Books in American Studies
Yanqiu Zheng, "In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
What does it mean for a country to seek admiration — and what kinds of institutions try to make that admiration possible? Yanqiu Zheng’s In Search of…
- New Books in American Studies
160* Hannah Arendt's Refugee Politics (JP)
John's “Arendt's Refugee Politics” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt is an…
- New Books in American Studies
Ana Patricia Rodríguez, "Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area" (University of Arizona Press, 2025)
For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region…
- New Books in American Studies
Karen Auman, "The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores some of Georgia’s earliest settlers, the Salzburgers…
- New Books in American Studies
Nicholas Buccola, "One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal" (Princeton UP, 2025)
From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.'s decade-long clash over the meaning…
- New Books in American Studies
Tim Seiter, "Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios" (U Texas Press, 2025)
A richly detailed history of daily life for colonial Spanish soldiers surviving on the eighteenth-century Texas Gulf Coast. In 1775, Spanish King Carlos III…
- New Books in American Studies
Heath Pearson, "Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town" (Duke UP, 2024)
In Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town (Duke UP, 2024), Heath Pearson showcases dynamic, interdependent community as the…
- New Books in American Studies
Vanessa S. Williamson, "The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History" (Basic Books, 2025)
Americans have always fought over the meaning of freedom and equality. What is not commonly recognized is that the battles most pivotal in defining our…
- New Books in American Studies
Doug MacCash, "Mardi Gras Beads" (Louisiana UP, 2022)
The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana’s iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads (2022) delves into the history of this celebrated New…
- New Books in American Studies
Ethan W. Ris, "Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris…
- New Books in American Studies
Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)
Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg…
- New Books in American Studies
Michelle McSweeney, "OK" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an…
- New Books in American Studies
Christina Lane, "Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock" (Chicago Review Press, 2020)
A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the…
- New Books in American Studies
Joe Allen, "The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS" (Haymarket Books, 2020)
If the 20th Century was the American Century, it was also UPS's Century. Joe Allen's The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS (Haymarket Books, 2020)…
- New Books in American Studies
Miranda S. Spivack, "Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back" (The New Press, 2025)
Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize A groundbreaking look at how ordinary people are fighting back against their local and state governments to keep their…
- New Books in American Studies
Carolyn T. Adams et. al, "Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century" (Penn Press, 2025)
Informed by current scholarship and richly illustrated with full-color photographs and maps, Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century…
- New Books in American Studies
David Garland, "Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment" (Princeton UP, 2025)
The United States has long been an international outlier, with a powerful business class, a weak social state, and an exceptional gun culture. In Law and Order…
- New Books in American Studies
David Kieran, "Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military's Mental Health Crisis" (NYU Press, 2019)
The surprising story of the Army's efforts to combat PTSD and traumatic brain injury The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a tremendous toll on the…
- New Books in American Studies
Caroline Jack, "Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism has been…
- New Books in American Studies
Ronald Angelo Johnson, "Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric…
- New Books in American Studies
Joseph P. Viteritti, "Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education and demands to desegregate public schools, race and class remain the most reliable predictors of educational…
- New Books in American Studies
Lars Cornelissen, "Neoliberalism and Race" (Stanford UP, 2025)
In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology…
- New Books in American Studies
Jason A. Higgins, "Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
In Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (University of Mass. Press, 2024), Dr. Jason Higgins examines the connections between the…
- New Books in American Studies
Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to…
- New Books in American Studies
Shoshana Walter, "Rehab: An American Scandal" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis, and…
- New Books in American Studies
David T. Beito, "FDR: A New Political Life" (Open Universe, 2025)
David Beito's new book brings to bear the latest historical scholarship to shed light on the life and achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Professor…
- New Books in American Studies
Diane T. Feldman, "Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi (UP Mississippi, 2025) chronicles the…
- New Books in American Studies
House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.
At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980…
- New Books in American Studies
Carol Mason, "From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary" (U California Press, 2025)
Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactics…
- New Books in American Studies
Jack B. Greenberg and John A. Dearborn, "Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Political Scientists Jack Greenberg (Yale University) and John Dearborn (Vanderbilt University) have a new book that focuses on the idea of presidential…
- New Books in American Studies
Mimi Abramovitz, "Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present" (Routledge, 2025)
In the fourth edition of Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present, drawing on important feminist concepts --…
- New Books in American Studies
Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting…
- New Books in American Studies
Rebecca L. Davis, "Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America" (Norton, 2024)
One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year From an esteemed scholar, a…
- New Books in American Studies
Linda Upham-Bornstein, "'Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender': Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law during the Great Depression" (Temple UP, 2023)
During the Great Depression, the proliferation of local taxpayers’ associations was dramatic and unprecedented. The justly concerned members of these…
- New Books in American Studies
Shaul Kelner, "A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized To Free Soviet Jews" (NYU Press, 2025)
Winner of The 74th National Jewish Book Award: American Jewish Studies Celebrate 350 Award Reveals the mass mobilization tactics that helped free Soviet…
- New Books in American Studies
Rob Wells, "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)
When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike out on his…
New Books in American StudiesDemocratic Dialogues: Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries
A podcast from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy Center on Global Democracy About the Podcast Each week, co-hosts Rachel Beatty Riedl and…
- New Books in American Studies
Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (Princeton UP, 2025) shatters one of the most…
- New Books in American Studies
Javier Wallace, "Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams" (Duke UP, 2025)
Every year, hundreds of international student athletes arrive in the U.S. chasing their basketball dreams — many on F-1 student visas. But for some their…
- New Books in American Studies
Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Hector Vera, "Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America" (Vanderbilt UP, 2025)
Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its…
- New Books in American Studies
Sarah Smarsh, "Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class" (Scribner, 2024)
National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the…
- New Books in American Studies
Tami Parr, "Goats in America: A Cultural History" (Oregon State UP, 2025)
The humble goat has played a surprising and important role throughout the history of the United States. Despite this, goats are often overlooked by many…
- New Books in American Studies
Aileen Teague, "Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings influence…
- New Books in American Studies
Becky M. Nicolaides, "The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945" (Oxford UP, 2024)
The adoption of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, triggered a wave of immigration to the U.S. not seen since before the First World War. But these newcomers were…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter D. Blackmer, "Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers" (UVA Press, 2025)
Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers (UVA Press, 2025) explores the local dynamics, national…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it. In the…
- New Books in American Studies
Ada Ferrer, "Cuba: An American History" (Scribner, 2021)
“No country is ever just one thing.” In her new book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), NYU historian Ada Ferrer shows this again and again. In clear…
- New Books in American Studies
Nancy Newman, "Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York: Including Twenty-Two New Settings of Period Tunes" (SUNY Press, 2025)
Upstate New York's Anti-Rent Movement is considered the last struggle over feudalism in the United States. Tenant farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk region engaged…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrea Freeman, "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)
The first and definitive history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael T. Bertrand, "Southern History Remixed: On Rock 'n' Roll and the Dilemma of Race" (UP Florida, 2024)
Southern History Remixed: On Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race (UP Florida, 2024) spotlights the key role of popular music in the shaping of the United…
- New Books in American Studies
Francis L. Sampson, "Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre" (Catholic U of America Press, 2023)
A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all…
- New Books in American Studies
Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz" (Duke UP, 2024)
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz…
- New Books in American Studies
Gustav Meibauer, "The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument" (Policy Press, 2025)
Suggested additional channels: Political Science, National Security, American Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern European Studies, New Books with…
- New Books in American Studies
Lawrence Grossman, "Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945-2025" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)
In American Judaism today, Orthodoxy is the fastest growing movement. However, Orthodoxy is anything but monolithic. Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox…