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
James Davison Hunter, "Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis" (Yale UP, 2024)
Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that…
- New Books in American Studies
Lesley J. Gordon, "Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Those who fought in the Civil War were expected to overcome their fear of injury or death as they charged into a hail of bullets. Soldiers could expect…
- New Books in American Studies
Rebecca Zorach, "Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America's Racial Enterprise" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Martha S. Jones, "The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir" (Basic Books, 2025)
Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right…
- New Books in American Studies
Julie Malnig, "Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock 'n' Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock 'n' Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a new look at the…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathan Rauch, "Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy" (Yale UP, 2025)
Today I’m speaking with Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. We are…
- New Books in American Studies
Megan Hunt, "Southern by the Grace of God: Religion, Race, and Civil Rights in Hollywood's American South" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Megan Hunt joins us to talk about her recent book, Southern By the Grace of God, which was published in 2024 by…
- New Books in American Studies
Tiffany D. Joseph, "Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)
Despite progressive policy strides in health care reform, immigrant communities continue to experience stark disparities across the United States. In Not All…
- New Books in American Studies
Bridget Kies, "Murder, She Wrote" (Wayne State UP, 2025)
As part of the TV Milestones Series, Bridget Kies explores Murder, She Wrote (Wayne State University Press, 2025). Embark on a journey through the mysteries of…
- New Books in American Studies
Kathleen Thelen, "Attention, Shoppers!: American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy" (Princeton UP, 2025)
The United States is widely recognized as the quintessential consumer society, one where huge companies like Walmart and Amazon are famous for enticing…
- New Books in American Studies
Walls, Warnings, and the War on Fentanyl: Peter Andreas on Trump’s Border Politics
In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The…
- New Books in American Studies
Jason Cannon, "A Time for Reflection: The Parallel Legacies of Baseball Icons Willie McCovery and Billy Williams" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025)
Professional baseball has featured a bevy of superstars over the past century and a half, but only a few of them have impacted their sport and cities as deeply…
- New Books in American Studies
Peder Anker, "For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering" (Anthem Press, 2025)
The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U.S…
- New Books in American Studies
Lincoln A. Mitchell, "Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco" (U Nevada Press, 2025)
Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more…
- New Books in American Studies
James M. O’Toole, "For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America" (Harvard UP, 2025)
For generations, American Catholics went faithfully to confession, admitting their sins to a priest and accepting through him God’s forgiveness. The sacrament…
- New Books in American Studies
Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy, "Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism" (Princeton UP, 2025)
In the decades preceding World War II, professional architecture schools enrolled increasing numbers of women, but career success did not come easily. Women…
- New Books in American Studies
James Tejani, "A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America" (Norton, 2024)
The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. The…
- New Books in American Studies
Making Radio History
Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. She is the author of The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public…
- New Books in American Studies
Jason L. Newton, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest" (West Virginia UP, 2024)
What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these…
- New Books in American Studies
Tom Lynch, "Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and Out West…
- New Books in American Studies
Jehanne Dubrow, "Civilians" (LSU Press, 2025)
The final volume in Dr. Jehanne Dubrow’s groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse, Civilians (LSU Press, 2025) examines a…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Knopf, 2025)
One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle…
- New Books in American Studies
Heather Akou, "Afterthought: A Family Story" (Indiana U Libraries, 2025)
Afterthought: A Family Story (Indiana University Bloomington Libraries Publishing, 2025) by Dr. Heather Akou focuses on the life of her grandmother, Lila…
- New Books in American Studies
David D. Grafton, "Muhammad in the Seminary: Protestant Teaching about Islam in the Nineteenth Century" (NYU Press, 2024)
Uncovers what Christian seminaries taught about Islam in their formative years Throughout the nineteenth century, Islam appeared regularly in the curricula of…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul R. Laird and Elizabeth A. Wells, "The Cambridge Companion to West Side Story" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Over sixty years after its opening night, West Side Story is perhaps the most famous and beloved of twentieth-century musicals and stands as a colossus of…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: Not a Matter of Left or Right: Historians Fighting Censorship
The presidents of the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians join the podcast to talk about the effects of historical…
- New Books in American Studies
Amanda M. Greenwell, "The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature" (UP of Mississippi, 2024)
The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2024) theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in…
- New Books in American Studies
Tracie Canada, "Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football" (U California Press, 2025)
Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality…
- New Books in American Studies
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, "The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It" (Basic Books, 2024)
A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress…
- New Books in American Studies
Matt Lodder, "Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art" (Yale UP, 2024)
There is a pervasive stereotype of tattoo culture as relating to an underworld of scoundrels, sailors, and ne’er-do-wells, yet it has existed in the West as a…
- New Books in American Studies
In Covid’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us--A Conversation with Stephen Macedo (Part 2)
This week on Madison’s Notes, we continue our discussion with Stephen Macedo, co-author of In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton UP, 2025)…
- New Books in American Studies
Douglas Field, "Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father and I" (Manchester UP, 2024)
A moving exploration of the life and work of the celebrated American writer, blending biography and memoir with literary criticism. Since James Baldwin's death…
- New Books in American Studies
Richard Buttny, "Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Buttny, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse…
- New Books in American Studies
Laurel Leff, "Well Worth Saving: American Universities' Life-And-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe" (Yale UP, 2019)
In Well Worth Saving (Yale University Press, 2019), Professor Laurel Leff explores how American universities responded to the sudden and urgent appeals for…
- New Books in American Studies
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, "Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2023)
Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capital: Mass…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: Donald Trump is Erasing History – What YOU Can Do about it
On January 20th, Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: How Trump’s Executive Order Contradicts Birthright Citizenship
Birthright citizenship is established in the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution – yet Donald Trump’s recent Executive…
- New Books in American Studies
Nima Bassiri, "Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a…
- New Books in American Studies
In Covid’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us: A Conversation with Frances Lee
In the first part of our two-part conversation on Madison’s Notes, we speak with Frances Lee, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University…
- New Books in American Studies
Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall, "Ain't I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston's literary…
- New Books in American Studies
"Steadfast Democrats" Five Years Later: A Conversation with Chryl N. Laird
Today I’m speaking with Chryl Laird, Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. We are discussing her…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850" (UNC Press, 2025)
Most US history textbooks contain a familiar map: shaded colors stretch across North America, clearly and neatly demarcating the extent of US expansion from…
- New Books in American Studies
Kristin A. Olbertson, "The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Kristin Olbertson is the first…
- New Books in American Studies
Lina-Maria Murillo, "Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands" (UNC Press, 2025)
The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez…
- New Books in American Studies
Gary Griggs, "California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State" (U California Press, 2024)
California has more natural hazards per square mile than any other state, but this hasn’t deterred people from moving here. Entire California towns and regions…
- New Books in American Studies
Rachelle Bergstein, "The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us" (Atria, 2024)
Everyone knows Judy Blume. Her books have garnered her fans of all ages for decades and sold tens of millions of copies. But why were people so drawn to them?…
- New Books in American Studies
Richard Heppner, "Woodstock: From World War to Culture Wars" (SUNY Press, 2024)
Few towns in America are as famous as Woodstock, New York—although Woodstock may be most famous for an event that happened many miles away! Long before the…
- New Books in American Studies
Georgia Finnegan, "Grace & Grit: A History of Ballet in Minnesota" (Afton Historical Society, 2024)
The names are iconic and familiar to anyone in Minnesota with an interest in dance: the Andaházy School of Classical Ballet, Minnesota Dance Theatre, James…
- New Books in American Studies
Arwen P. Mohun, "American Imperialist: Cruelty and Consequence in the Scramble for Africa" (Chicago UP, 2023)
This biography of “African explorer” Richard Dorsey Mohun, written by one of his descendants, reveals how American greed and state power helped shape the new…
- New Books in American Studies
Elizabeth T. Craft, "Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage" (Oxford UP, 2024)
George M. Cohan was one of those rare Broadway figures who was a composer, lyricist, playwright, performer, director, theater owner, and star actor. He could…
- New Books in American Studies
Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law--A Conversation with Janie Nitze
In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, I spoke with Janie Nitze, co-author of Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law (Harper, 2004), a book written…
- New Books in American Studies
Jack Dempsey, "Warriors for Liberty: William Dollarson & Michigan's Civil War African Americans" (Michigan Civil War Association, 2024)
Michigan's African Americans played critical roles in winning the Civil War and setting millions of fellow Americans forever free. The 1st Michigan Colored…
- New Books in American Studies
Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola, "Hollywood Unions" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
Hollywood Unions (Rutgers UP, 2024) is a unique collection that tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized motion picture and television…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Visontay, "Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible" (Scribe, 2024)
One hundred years ago, Gabriel Wells, a New York bookseller, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world’s greatest book, the Gutenberg Bible, and…
- New Books in American Studies
Erik Baker, "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" (Harvard UP, 2025)
How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful…
- New Books in American Studies
Hallie Franks, "Ancient Sculpture and Twentieth-Century American Womanhood: Venus Envy" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Ancient Sculpture and Twentieth-Century American Womanhood: Venus Envy (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Hallie Franks examines the reception of Graeco-Roman…
- New Books in American Studies
Dawn Day Biehler, "Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History" (U Washington Press, 2024)
From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central Park has long been home to an abundance of…
- New Books in American Studies
Timothy P. R. Weaver, "Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City" (Temple UP, 2025)
Looking closely at New York City's political development since the 1970s, three "political orders"--conservativism, neoliberalism, and egalitarianism--emerged…
- New Books in American Studies
Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America's Biggest Retail Stores
Our book is: Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (UP of Colorado, 2024) which presents a new look at how the big box…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeffrey Thomas Perry, "Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)
Most Americans today would not think of their local church as a site for arbitration and would probably be hesitant to bring their property disputes, moral…