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
Religion in the Lands That Became America
Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant…
- New Books in American Studies
Arianne Edmonds, "We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Black press provided a blueprint to help Black Americans transition from slavery and find opportunities to advance…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Random House, 2023)
More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War ended…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Stauch, "Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise of Black…
- New Books in American Studies
Mark R. Rank, "Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the…
- New Books in American Studies
Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export…
- New Books in American Studies
Joseph O. Jewell, "White Man’s Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era" (UNC Press, 2023)
In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time…
- New Books in American Studies
Osita Nwanevu, "The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding" (Random House, 2025)
Frustrated with our political dysfunction, wearied by the thinness of contemporary political discourse, and troubled by the rise of anti-democratic attitudes…
- New Books in American Studies
Ashley Howard, "Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement" (UNC Press, 2025)
This episode features Dr. Ashley Howard, assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa, discussing her book, Midwest…
- New Books in American Studies
Luke A. Nichter, "The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election Of 1968" (Yale UP, 2024)
A sitting Democratic president who chooses not to run for re-election, a vice president running out of the president’s shadow, and a Republican nominee trying…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael John Witgen, "Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America" (UNC Press, 2021)
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining much of their land in the Old Northwest—what’s now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their…
- New Books in American Studies
Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov, "American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship" (UP of Kansas, 2021)
All nations make rules -- through their constitutions, legislatures, bureaucratic practices – about who counts as a citizen. American by Birth examines the…
- New Books in American Studies
Frank L. Jones, "Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age" (UP Kansas, 2020)
In a 2012 opinion piece bemoaning the state of the US Senate, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank cited a “leading theory: There are no giants in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Gary Kulik, "Conscientious Objectors at War: The Vietnam War's Forgotten Medics" (Texas Tech UP, 2025)
During the war in Vietnam, thousands of young men served as conscientious objector medics. They had been certified by their local draft boards as…
New Books in American StudiesJubilee (1978)
In the ninth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell traces the trans-Atlantic movement of artists associated with punk culture in New York and London…
- New Books in American Studies
Ahmad Greene-Hayes, "Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans. When…
- New Books in American Studies
Claudia Setzer, "The Progressives' Bible: How Scriptural Interpretation Built a More Just America" (Fortress Publishers, 2024)
In her book, The Progressives' Bible: How Scriptural Interpretation Built a More Just America, (Fortress Press, 2024), Claudia Setzer argues that while…
- New Books in American Studies
Lily Hamourtziadou, "Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq" (Bristol UP, 2021)
Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq (Bristol University Press, 2021), Lily Hamourtziadou’s investigation into civilian victims during the…
- New Books in American Studies
Sonia C. Gomez, "Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America" (NYU Press, 2024)
Picture Bride, War Bride examines how the institution of marriage created pockets of legal and social inclusion for Japanese women during the period of…
- New Books in American Studies
Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, "Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War" (Basic Books, 2021)
A riveting account of the five most crucial days in twentieth-century diplomatic history: from Pearl Harbor to Hitler's declaration of war on the United…
- New Books in American Studies
Elizabeth Popp Berman, "Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy" (Princeton UP, 2022)
For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeremy Black, "The Civil War" (Saint Augustine's Press, 2025)
The American Civil War may have been more consequential to American history (and its global supremacy) than its Revolutionary War and participation in all…
- New Books in American Studies
Alexander Lian, "Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
A unique and thorough work of intellectual history and legal scholarship Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education (Cambridge University…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew Herscher, "Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
In the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, Anishinaabe leaders granted land to a college where their children could be educated. At the time, the colonial settlement of…
- New Books in American Studies
Phil Tiemeyer, "Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants (Cornell University Press, 2025) is a global history of postwar aviation that…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew S. Berish, "Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
Andrew S. Berish. 2025. Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse. (U of Chicago Press, 2025) Some good words from the…
- New Books in American Studies
Elana Levine, "Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History" (Duke UP, 2020)
Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic…
- New Books in American Studies
Dennard Dayle, "How to Dodge a Cannonball: A Novel" (Henry Holt, 2025)
How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew Hartman, "Karl Marx in America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew Hartman To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long…
- New Books in American Studies
Ezra Glinter, "Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah" (Yale UP, 2024)
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, one of the world’s best-known Hasidic groups, is driven by the belief that we are on the verge of the messianic age. The man…
- New Books in American Studies
John Bardes, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930" (UNC Press, 2024)
The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024) reveals that Americans often assume that slave…
- New Books in American Studies
Brent Z. Kaup and Kelly F. Austin, "The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease" (U of California Press, 2025)
The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Brent Z. Kaup & Dr. Kelly F. Austin is an…
- New Books in American Studies
153: What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about Anticipatory Despair (JP)
John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair…
- New Books in American Studies
Rebecca Jo Kinney, "Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt" (Temple UP, 2025)
In this episode we challenge the ideas about invisibility of Asian Americans in the urban Midwest by discussing Rebecca Jo Kinney’s Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson, "Why America Didn't Become Great Again" (Routledge, 2025)
Examining the conditions that not only blocked attempts to make America great again, but actively made the country worse, Why America Didn't Become Great Again…
- New Books in American Studies
Elisabeth Åsbrink, "1947: Where Now Begins" (Other Press, 2019)
An award-winning writer captures a year that defined the modern world, intertwining historical events around the globe with key moments from her personal…
- New Books in American Studies
Matthew Wisnioski on the History of the Idea and Culture of “Innovation” in the United States
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Wisnioski, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, about his new book, Every…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul R. Beckett, "An Anatomy of Tax Havens: Europe, the Caribbean and the United States of America" (de Gruyter, 2023)
Tax havens in offshore lands like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas were once considered a rarity, the preserve of the super-rich. Today, they…
- New Books in American Studies
Sarah Gold McBride "Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the young nation…
- New Books in American Studies
Char Miller, "Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning" (Oregon State UP, 2024)
Fire is a means of control and has been deployed or constrained to levy power over individuals, societies, and ecologies. In Burn Scars: A Documentary History…
- New Books in American Studies
Ross A. Kennedy, "The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)
The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe (Taylor & Francis, 2025), spans 1914–1939 to provide a concise interpretation of the role the…
- New Books in American Studies
Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated division in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Stacy Horn, "Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York" (Algonquin Books, 2019)
Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York's Blackwell's Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an…
- New Books in American Studies
How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America
In How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, (Harvard Education PR, 2024) Laura C. Chávez-Moreno uncovers the process through which…
- New Books in American Studies
Louis P. Masur, "A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Between May 21 and June 16, 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison went on a trip together through Upstate New York and parts of New England on horseback…
- New Books in American Studies
Philip Kadish, "The Great White Hoax: Frauds, Forgeries, and 200 Years of Selling Racism in America"
Fake news, outright political lies, a shamelessly partisan press, and the collapse of truth, civility, and shared facts, Dr. Philip Kadish argues, are nothing…
- New Books in American Studies
Kevin J. Hayes, "Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin" (Oxford UP, 2025)
An exploration of the mind of one of America's most beloved Founding Fathers and most brilliant minds, through the books he read and his social circles in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Broyles, "Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades That Changed a Country and Its Sounds" (Norton, 2024)
Michael Broyles examines a wide variety of musical, technological, and social currents that helped to shape American music in Revolutions in American Music…
- New Books in American Studies
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings" (Harper, 2025)
The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with…
- New Books in American Studies
Kevin Nguyen, "My Documents" (One World, 2025)
Kevin Nguyen, My Documents (One World, 2025) Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novel New Waves, published in 2020. He is the features editor at The Verge…
- New Books in American Studies
Prema Kurien, "Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization Among New Americans" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization Among New Americans (Oxford UP, 2025) looks at Indian Americans, currently the second-largest…
- New Books in American Studies
Howard A. Husock, "The Projects: A New History of Public Housing" (NYU Press, 2025)
How housing policy failed the people it was designed to help -- and how to fix it As the US struggles to provide affordable housing, millions of Americans live…
- New Books in American Studies
Leah Lax, "Not From Here: the Song of America" (Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie, 2024)
When Leah Lax was asked to write an opera to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to accounts of upheaval, migration, and arrival…
- New Books in American Studies
Ana Hebra Flaster, "Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town" (She Writes Press, 2025)
Ana Hebra Flaster was six years old when her working-class family was kicked out of their Havana barrio for opposing communism. Once devoted revolutionaries…
- New Books in American Studies
Maraam A. Dwidar, "Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy" (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
A vital examination of how social and economic justice organizations overcome resource disadvantages and build political power. Why do some coalitions triumph…
- New Books in American Studies
David Zweig, "An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions" (MIT Press, 2025)
An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions (MIT Press, 2025) is a devastating account of the decision-making process…
- New Books in American Studies
Alexandria Russell, "Black Women Legacies: Public History Sites Seen and Unseen" (University of Illinois Press, 2024)
From Black clubwomen to members of preservation organizations, African American women have made commemoration a central part of Black life and culture…
- New Books in American Studies
Myra Mendible, "American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021)
Even with the availability of new forms of storytelling, the memoir remains as one of the favored ways for combat veterans to tell their stories about war for…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeffrey P. Rogg, "The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Intelligence is all around us. We read about it in the news, wonder who is spying on us through our phones or computers, and want to know what is happening in…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathan Tarleton, "Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons" (Beacon Press, 2025)
In Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons (Beacon Press, 2025), urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton…