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
Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating…
- New Books in American Studies
Jason Schneider, "That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of Hey Joe' and Popular Music's History of Violence" (Anvil Press, 2025)
This is the story of a song. Yet, it is a song that binds nearly every strand of 20th-century American popular music. “Hey Joe” was written sometime in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Melissa M. Matthes, "When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises. In the aftermath of…
- New Books in American Studies
Naomi R. Williams, "A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin" (U Illinois Press, 2025)
Naomi R Williams is associate professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University. Their primary research interests include labor and…
- New Books in American Studies
Anthony J. Knowles, "Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany" (Brill, 2025)
Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany (Brill, 2025) reconstructs the industrial histories of the…
- New Books in American Studies
David Singerman, "Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and…
- New Books in American Studies
Kevin M. Schultz, "Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
A bracing, accessible history of white American liberals—and why it’s time to change the conversation about them. If there’s one thing most Americans can agree…
- New Books in American Studies
Meghan Crnic, "The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores" (U Washington Press, 2025)
For centuries, the ocean was seen as a place of danger and work, but by the late nineteenth century, northeastern shores of the United States became…
- New Books in American Studies
John Minton, "Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
In the late 1930s, fieldworkers with the Works Progress Administration interviewed about 3,500 formerly enslaved people resulting in approximately 20,000 pages…
- New Books in American Studies
Maria Fedorova, "Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)
Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) examines the US and Soviet exchange of…
- New Books in American Studies
Clay Risen, "Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both “lays out the many mechanisms of repression that…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Glass, "Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
How debt and speculation financed the suburban American dream and led to today’s inequalities In the popular imagination, the suburbs are synonymous with the…
- New Books in American Studies
Zara Anishanslin, "The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2025)
The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed…
- New Books in American Studies
Marion Orr, "House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr." (UNC Press, 2025)
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
Vartan Matiossian, "The Color of Choice: The Armenians and the Politics of Race in the United States and Germany (1890-1945)" (Brill, 2025)
The extensive research literature on race has paid little attention to Armenians. Between the two world wars, they had to prove that they were free white…
- New Books in American Studies
Emma Ashford, "First Among Equals: U. S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World" (Yale UP, 2025)
A fresh, concise roadmap for U.S. grand strategy in a multipolar world For the past thirty years, post-Cold War triumphalism and a desire to reshape the world…
- New Books in American Studies
Jill Elaine Hasday, "We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for "We the People", too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only…
- New Books in American Studies
Raymond J. McKoski, "David Davis, Abraham Lincoln's Favorite Judge" (U Illinois Press, 2025)
One of Abraham Lincoln's staunchest and most effective allies, Judge David Davis masterminded the floor fight that gave Lincoln the presidential nomination at…
- New Books in American Studies
Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Kathleen Casey joins Jana Byars to talk about The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford UP, 2025). Purses and bags have always…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert F. Williams, "The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America's Cold War Army" (Cornell UP, 2025)
The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America's Cold War Army (Cornell UP, 2025) explores how a small group of World War II airborne officers took…
New Books in American StudiesDisco Sucks
On July 12, 1979, Chicago’s Comiskey Park erupted into chaos during what was supposed to be a quirky baseball promotion. Shock radio jock Steve Dahl’s “Disco…
- New Books in American Studies
Scott Beekman, "The Last Gladiator: William Muldoon and the Making of American Sports" (U Texas Press, 2025)
William Muldoon was an infamous athlete whose prowess, savvy, and chicanery across his six-decade career led him to wealth, cultural importance, and political…
- New Books in American Studies
Aaron Cayer, "Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire" (U California Press, 2025)
By the end of the twentieth century, US architecture and engineering firms held more capital than entire countries, employed more people than were housed in…
- New Books in American Studies
John L. Campbell, "Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Since the Reagan era, conservatives in the United States have championed cutting taxes, especially for wealthy individuals and corporations, as the best way to…
- New Books in American Studies
Debra Michals, "She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
In the years after World War II, as women were being pushed from wartime jobs for returning soldiers, government and business leaders—and women themselves—saw…
- New Books in American Studies
Ecodefense: Dave Foreman and Earth First!’s Deep Ecology
A cowboy hat-wearing Goldwater conservative named Dave Foreman got religion and then founded the most radical environmental group of recent memory, Earth…
- New Books in American Studies
Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
This is a very special episode of the New Books Network, as the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon (UP of Mississippi, 2025), Dr. Constance Bailey…
- New Books in American Studies
Mark Archuleta, "The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr: From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again" (U North Texas Press, 2025)
In 1921 headlines across the country announced the death of Henry Starr, a burgeoning silent film star who was killed while attempting to rob a bank in…
- New Books in American Studies
Kate Haulman, "The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In May 1894, President Grover Cleveland gave a speech thanking those who gathered “to worship at this national shrine.” He was not referring to the…
- New Books in American Studies
Bob Wyss, "Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal" (University of California Press, 2025)
For decades coal has been crucial to America's culture, society, and environment, an essential ingredient in driving out winter's cold, cooking meals, and…
- New Books in American Studies
Tim Weiner, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century" (Mariner Books, 2025)
In 2007, Tim Weiner published the book Legacy of Ashes. It was a history of the CIA from its founding to the early 2000s. As a university student in Italy, I…
- New Books in American Studies
Calvin Schermerhorn, "The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made" (Yale UP, 2025)
Dr. J Calvin Schermerhorn is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His books…
- New Books in American Studies
Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis, "Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism" (UP of Kansas, 2025)
Nicholas Jacobs (Colby College) and Sidney Milkis (University of Virginia) have a new book, Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathan White and Lucas Morel, "Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln" (Reedy Press, 2025)
In Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (Reedy Press, 2025), acclaimed scholars Lucas E. Morel and Jonathan W. White…
- New Books in American Studies
Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025)
Conspiracy, mutiny and liberation on America’s waterfront by the award-winning author of The Slave Ship. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping…
- New Books in American Studies
Rebecca Nagle, "By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land" (Harper, 2024)
In 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled, in a surprise decision, that treaties still on the books as US law meant that the Muscogee people of Oklahoma maintained…
- New Books in American Studies
Jessica B. Harris, "Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine" (Clarkson Potter, 2025)
Discover the sweeping story of how Indigenous, European, and African traditions intertwined to form an entirely new cuisine, with over 90 recipes for the…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Poznansky, "Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In the wake of World War II, the United States leveraged its hegemonic position in the international political system to gradually build a new global order…
- New Books in American Studies
Keisha N. Blain, "Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights" (W.W. Norton, 2025)
Even before they were recognized as citizens of the United States, Black women understood that the fights for civil and human rights were inseparable. Over the…
- New Books in American Studies
Lucy Sante, "Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (The Experiment, 2022)
From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware…
- New Books in American Studies
Laura Hobson Faure, "Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust" (Yale UP, 2025)
The first account of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France—and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime At the eve of the Second…
- New Books in American Studies
Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, "Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) tells the story of an extraordinarily…
- New Books in American Studies
Alfred L. Martin Jr. and Taylor Cole Miller eds., "The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai (Rutgers UP, 2025) is an accessible collection that explores the cultural, industrial, and historical impact of that…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrea Louise Campbell, "Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Why Americans favor progressive taxation in principle but not in practice Most Americans support progressive taxation in principle, and want the rich to pay…
- New Books in American Studies
Thomas Graham, "Getting Russia Right" (Polity Press, 2023)
“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That saying sounds as…
- New Books in American Studies
Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus
Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus, by Betsy Golden Kellem, reveals the hidden history of early female circus performers…
- New Books in American Studies
Breanne Pleggenkuhle and Joseph A. Schafer, "Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Adaptations in the US Criminal Justice System" (Southern Illinois UP, 2025)
While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal justice…
- New Books in American Studies
Is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? with Damon Linker
We begin the new season of International Horizons by asking a crucial question: is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? RBI Deputy Director, Eli Karetny…
- New Books in American Studies
Kevin J. Hayes, "Understanding Hunter S. Thompson" (U South Carolina Press, 2025)
Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) pushed the boundaries of storytelling. While the writer is most recognized for the genre-bending work Fear and Loathing in Las…
- New Books in American Studies
Katherine Fusco, "Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System" (Columbia UP, 2025)
We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of…
- New Books in American Studies
Molly Worthen, "Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump" (Random House, 2025)
Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of…
- New Books in American Studies
Daniel Horowitz, "Bear With Me: A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America" (Duke UP, 2025)
From teddy bears and Winnie-the-Pooh to Smokey Bear, Yogi Bear, and Cocaine Bear, American popular culture has been fascinated with real and fictional bears…
- New Books in American Studies
Brendan A. Shanahan, "Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1965" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late nineteenth…
- New Books in American Studies
Flannery Burke, "Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region" (U Washington Press, 2025)
Just as easterners imagined the American West, westerners imagined the American East, reshaping American culture. Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region…
- New Books in American Studies
Wade Davies, "Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970" (UP of Kansas, 2020)
The game of basketball is perceived by most today as an “urban” game with a locale such as Rucker Park in Harlem as the game’s epicenter (as well as a pipeline…
- New Books in American Studies
Donald G. Nieman, "The Path to Paralysis: How American Politics Became Nasty, Dysfunctional, and a Threat to the Republic" (Anthem Press, 2024)
Much has been written about political polarisation in the United States, but no one has examined it through the lens of recent U.S. history. There is nothing…
- New Books in American Studies
Glenn Ligon, "Distinguishing Piss from Rain" (Hauser & Wirth, 2024)
An expansive volume featuring over two decades of incisive reflections on race, art and pop culture by one of the greatest artists working today This…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew Fialka, "Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Fialka illustrates two…
- New Books in American Studies
Daniel Wortel-London, "The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on…
- New Books in American Studies
LaShawn Harris, "Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City" (Beacon, 2025)
On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on…