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
Laureen D. Hom, "The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles" (U California Press, 2024)
Chinatown neighborhoods in the United States are about more than restaurants, shops, and architecture, argues San Jose State urban studies associate professor…
- New Books in American Studies
Linh Thuy Nguyen, "Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production" (Temple UP, 2024)
Nearly fifty years after the end of the war in Vietnam, American children of Vietnamese refugees continue to process the meanings of the war and its…
- New Books in American Studies
Mike Sielski, "Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
The evolution of basketball, and much of the social and cultural change in America, can be traced through one powerful act on the court: the slam dunk. The…
- New Books in American Studies
Religious Freedom: A Conversation on the Conservative Tradition with John D. Wilsey
In this conversation, we sit down with John D. Wilsey, Professor of Church History and Philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Senior…
- New Books in American Studies
Aure Schrock on Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Aure Schrock, an interdisciplinary technology scholar and writing coach and editor at Indelible Voice, about…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: How to Fight Back: Charting Opposition to the Actions of the Trump Administration
Shortly after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 47th American president, he issued 37 executive orders and, subsequently, the Trump administration has –…
- New Books in American Studies
Benjamin Heber Johnson, "Texas: An American History" (Yale UP, 2025)
There's more to Texas than hats, oil, and BBQ, writes Benjamin Johnson in his sweeping new synthesis, Texas: An American History (Yale UP: 2025) - though…
- New Books in American Studies
Ilan Stavans, "Latino USA: A Cartoon History" (Basic Books, 2024)
This interview includes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M); Annette Martínez-Iñesta, Instructor of…
- New Books in American Studies
The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker
Our book is: The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024) by Dr. Amy Reading, which is a lively and intimate biography of…
- New Books in American Studies
Adam R. Nelson, "Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America (U Chicago Press, 2023) launches a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of…
- New Books in American Studies
Lori A. Flores, "Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19" (UNC Press, 2025)
Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx…
- New Books in American Studies
Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)
We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. But, in America, this wasn’t…
- New Books in American Studies
Mary Frances Phillips, "Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins" (NYU Press, 2025)
In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered Black Panther Party member, as…
- New Books in American Studies
The Soundworld of Harriet Tubman
Just in time for Black History Month, we share an episode we’ve been excitedly working on for a number of months now. Ethnomusicologist Maya Cunningham brings…
- New Books in American Studies
Hunter Price, "Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty" (U Virginia Press, 2024)
In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic’s fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary association…
- New Books in American Studies
Jessica A. Brockmole, "Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way Into the Driver's Seat" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)
Since the commercial introduction of the automobile, US automakers have always sought women as customers and advertised accordingly. How, then, did car culture…
- New Books in American Studies
Allison Rank et al., "Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Political Scientists Lauren C. Bell, Allison Rank, and Carah Ong Whaley have a new edited volume, Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of…
- New Books in American Studies
Randall Fuller, "Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society "to answer the great questions" of special importance to women: "What are we…
- New Books in American Studies
Mountain Memories: A Conversation with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Robert P. George
In this episode, Henry Louis Gates and Robert P. George share a powerful conversation about their unlikely beginnings in West Virginia. Recorded in December…
- New Books in American Studies
Adam Laats, "Mr. Lancaster's System: The Failed Reform That Created America's Public Schools" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)
Two centuries ago, London school reformer Joseph Lancaster swept into New York City to revolutionize its public schools. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts passed…
- New Books in American Studies
American Higher Education Under the Second Trump Administration
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey speaks with Steven Brint, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeff Copeland, "Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn" (Feral House, 2025)
In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about…
- New Books in American Studies
Rebecca Davis Gibbons, "The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime" (Cornell UP, 2022)
At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has…
- New Books in American Studies
Katie Beisel Hollenbach, "The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom" (Oxford UP, 2024)
The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsiders the…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter J. Bowler, "Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the…
- New Books in American Studies
Hiroshi Motomura, "Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair, Realistic, and Sustainable Immigration Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeff Gomez, "There Was No Alternative: Generation X, AIDS, and the Making of a Classic Nineties Record" (McFarland, 2023)
Grunge. Flannel. Generation X. In 1993, Seattle was the capital of the world, Nirvana was king, and slackers were everywhere. When the Red Hot organization, a…
- New Books in American Studies
Martín Alberto Gonzalez, "Why You Always So Political?: The Experiences and Resiliencies of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx Students in Higher Education" (Viva Oxnard, 2023)
As of 2018, only about one in ten Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) students graduate with a college degree. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant…
- New Books in American Studies
Stan Bunger, "Mornings with Madden: My Radio Life With An American Legend" (Triumph, 2024)
John Madden is synonymous with football. He was the television face and voice of the nation's most popular sport, the namesake of its best-selling sports video…
- New Books in American Studies
Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, "Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
In this episode, I talked to Corinne Sugino, whose book Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines how mainstream…
- New Books in American Studies
Samantha Ege, "South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene by Samantha Ege (University of Illinois Press, 2014) is a collective…
- New Books in American Studies
Zai Liang. "From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States" (U California Press, 2023)
From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr…
- New Books in American Studies
Anthony E. Kaye, "Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History" (FSG, 2024)
In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. They attacked the plantations on which their…
- New Books in American Studies
Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024)
When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Sophia Rosenfeld, "The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe…
- New Books in American Studies
Patricia A. Roos, "Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
In 2015, Patricia Roos’s twenty-five-year-old son Alex died of a heroin overdose. Turning her grief into action, Roos, a professor of sociology at Rutgers…
- New Books in American Studies
Derek W. Black, "Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy" (Yale UP, 2025)
Few have ever valued literacy as much as the enslaved Black people of the American South. For them, it was more than a means to a better life; it was a gateway…
- New Books in American Studies
Edward Westermann, "Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest" (U Oklahoma Press, 2016)
As he prepared to wage his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum, or living…
- New Books in American Studies
Benjamin Carter Hett, "The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War" (Henry Holt, 2020)
Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Harmsen, "Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II" (Casemate, 2024)
Today I talked to Peter Harmsen about his book Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II (Casemate, 2024). The wartime interest in…
- New Books in American Studies
Taylor N. Carlson, "Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Accurate information is at the heart of democratic functioning. For decades, researchers interested in how information is disseminated have focused on mass…
- New Books in American Studies
Adam Jortner, "A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Today I’m speaking with Adam Jortner, Goodwin-Philpott Professor of History at Auburn University. We are discussing his latest book, A Promised Land: Jewish…
- New Books in American Studies
The Cambridge Centennial Edition of The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is often called the great American novel. Emblematic of an entire era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic tale of illicit desire, grand illusions…
- New Books in American Studies
Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, "America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)…
- New Books in American Studies
Leonne M. Hudson, "Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" (Southern Illinois UP, 2024)
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth carried out the first presidential assassination in United States history. The euphoria resulting from General Lee's…
- New Books in American Studies
Ryan Tan Wander, "Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West" (Texas Tech UP, 2024)
In today’s cultural and political climate of relative LGBTQ+ inclusion, Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West (Texas Tech University…
- New Books in American Studies
Truth Matters: A Conversation with Robert P. George and Cornel West
In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, we are privileged to join a profound conversation between Robert P. George and Cornel West, two towering figures in…
- New Books in American Studies
Brigid Schulte, "Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life" (Henry Holt, 2024)
Following Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte's groundbreaking examination of time management and stress, the prizewinning journalist now turns her attention to the…
- New Books in American Studies
Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin. "Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum" (NYU Press, 2024)
How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence. Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful…
- New Books in American Studies
Monica A. Hershberger, "Women in American Operas of The 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes" (U Rochester Press, 2023)
The 1950s looks placid from the outside, but underneath that calm post-war exterior roiled the intellectual and activist beginnings of the political movements…
- New Books in American Studies
James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)
California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the American West…
- New Books in American Studies
Elizabeth L. Block, "Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing" (MIT Press, 2024)
In the nineteenth century, the complex cultural meaning of hair was not only significant—it could affect one’s place in society. After the Civil War…
- New Books in American Studies
Anthony Walton, "The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation" (David R. Godine, 2024)
Born into the Civil Rights Movement, author Anthony Walton observed firsthand the opening of opportunity for racial reconciliation. He also saw systemic racism…
- New Books in American Studies
Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, "Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
In Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture (Rutgers UP, 2024), Beretta E. Smith-Shomade contends that Black…
- New Books in American Studies
Congressional Deliberation: A Conversation with Kevin J. Burns and Jordan T. Cash
In this episode, we sit down with Professors Jordan T. Cash and Kevin J. Burns to discuss their recently published book, Congressional Deliberation: Major…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephen Watt, "From the 'Troubles' to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960-2023" (Anthem Press, 2024)
Stephen Watt is the Provost Professor of English at Indiana University. His research interests include drama and theatre of the 19th and 20th centuries, Irish…
- New Books in American Studies
Brett Bannor, "American Sheep: A Cultural History" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
Why did Thomas Jefferson write that he would be happy if all dogs went extinct? What economic opportunity did attorney John Lord Hayes envision for the newly…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew Gomez, "Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945" (U Texas Press, 2024)
How Black and white Cubans navigated issues of race, politics, and identity during the post-Civil War and early Jim Crow eras in South Florida. On July 4…
- New Books in American Studies
Bernard J. Dobski, "Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)
Political Theorist B.J. (Bernard J.) Dobski has a new book focusing on Mark Twain’s final published novel, Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc. As Dobski notes…
- New Books in American Studies
Patrick Dixon, "Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item that…