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
Nora Gross, "Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
A heartbreaking account of grief, Black boyhood, and how we can support young people as they navigate loss. JahSun, a dependable, much-loved senior at Boys'…
- New Books in American Studies
Jorge Duany, "Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford UP, 2024)
In the second edition of Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, 2024), Jorge Duany unravels the fascinating and turbulent past and present of an…
- New Books in American Studies
Susan A. Brewer, "The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory" (Three Hills, 2024)
In Dr. Susan A. Brewer's fascinating The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory (Cornell University Press, 2024), she recounts…
- New Books in American Studies
Jennifer Greenburg, "At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War" (Cornell UP, 2023)
At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Jennifer Greenburg reveals how…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathon Wilson-Hartgrove, "White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy" (Liveright, 2024)
My guest today is Jonathon Wilson-Hartgrove. Wilson-Hartgrove is a writer, preacher, and moral activist. He is an assistant director at the Center for Public…
- New Books in American Studies
Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany
Our book is: Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts To Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Citadel Press, 2025) by Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham…
- New Books in American Studies
Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti, "Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views" (Oxford UP, 2024)
How should broadly liberal democratic societies stop illiberal and antidemocratic views from gaining influence while honouring liberal democratic values? This…
- New Books in American Studies
Rebecca Charbonneau, "Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain" (Polity, 2024)
In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or…
- New Books in American Studies
Stacey Diane Arañez Litam, "Patterns that Remain: A Guide to Healing for Asian Children of Immigrants" (Oxford UP, 2025)
This empowering book blends history, storytelling, and culturally grounded techniques to equip readers with the tools needed to promote self-reflection…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandome, "Marxism and America: New Appraisals" (Manchester UP, 2021)
If the United States has been so hostile to Marxism, what accounts for Marxism's recurrent attractiveness to certain Americans? Marxism and America: New…
- New Books in American Studies
Jennie Lightweis-Goff, "Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring…
- New Books in American Studies
Sarah B. Rodriguez, "The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a…
- New Books in American Studies
Simon Hall, "Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s" (Faber and Faber, 2020)
In his new book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s (Faber, 2020), Simon Hall, a Professor of Modern History at the University of…
- New Books in American Studies
Dean Itsuji Saranillio, "Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood" (Duke UP, 2018)
In Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood (Duke University Press, 2018), Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to…
- New Books in American Studies
Joshua Brinkman on American Farming Culture and the History of Technology
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Joshua Brinkman, Assistant Teaching Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at North Carolina State…
- New Books in American Studies
Judith Giesberg, “Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality” (UNC Press, 2017)
Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War, is professor and director of graduate studies in the history department at…
- New Books in American Studies
Theresa Keeley, "Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America" (Cornell UP, 2020)
In Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America (Cornell UP, 2020), Theresa Keeley analyzes the role of…
- New Books in American Studies
Amy Aronson, "Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Amy Aronson is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Fordham University and former editor at Working Woman and Ms. magazines. Her biography…
- New Books in American Studies
Devin Fergus, “Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class” (Oxford UP, 2018)
Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working class jobs…
- New Books in American Studies
Matthew C. Godfrey, ed., "The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 7" (Church Historians Press, 2018)
Joseph Smith, the nineteenth-century American prophet who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, can, at times, be considered an elusive…
- New Books in American Studies
Joshua D. Rothman, "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" (Basic Book, 2021)
Joshua Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America was published by Basic Books in 2021, and tells a sprawling history of…
- New Books in American Studies
Marc Gallicchio, "Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender formally ended…
- New Books in American Studies
Simon Miles, "Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2020)
In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2020) dramatically…
- New Books in American Studies
Benjamin T. Smith, "The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade" (W. W. Norton, 2021)
For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican…
- New Books in American Studies
Patrick T. Reardon, "The Loop: The 'L' Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago" (Southern Illinois UP, 2020)
Every day Chicagoans rely on the loop of elevated train tracks to get to their jobs, classrooms, or homes in the city’s downtown. But how much do they know…
- New Books in American Studies
Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934" (UVA Press, 2020)
As a novelist, short story author, screenwriter, and Nobel laureate, William Faulkner looms large in modern American literature. Yet the very range of his work…
- New Books in American Studies
Deborah Willis, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship" (NYU Press, 2021)
Photography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the…
- New Books in American Studies
I. Augustus Durham, "Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius" (Duke UP, 2023)
In Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke UP, 2023), I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, and media from…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Newton, "It's a Wonderful Life" (British Film Institute, 2023)
Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war…
- New Books in American Studies
Rachel Louise Moran, "Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular…
- New Books in American Studies
Shannan Clark, "The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Donna Tesiero, "A Revolutionary Woman: Elizabeth Freeman and the Abolition of Slavery in the North" (McFarland, 2024)
At the end of the American Revolution, Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved widow and mother living in Massachusetts. Hearing the words of the new Massachusetts…
- New Books in American Studies
Kent Michael Shaw, "Missiology Reimagined: The Missions Theology of the Nineteenth-Century African American Missionary" (Pickwick, 2024)
In Missiology Reimagined: The Missions Theology of the Nineteenth-Century African American Missionary (Pickwick, 2024), Kent Michael Shaw I examines the lives…
- New Books in American Studies
Hugh Wilford, "The CIA: An Imperial History" (Basic Books, 2024)
As World War II ended, the United States stood as the dominant power on the world stage. In 1947, to support its new global status, it created the CIA to…
- New Books in American Studies
James Baldwin’s Use of Mechanisms of Defense in this Story “Going to Meet the Man”
James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” is a powerful short story that describes the life of Jesse, a 42-year-old white police officer whose experiences…
- New Books in American Studies
Nick Yablon, "Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
In Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Nick Yablon traces the birth of the time capsule in…
- New Books in American Studies
Crystal R. Sanders, "A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs" (UNC Press, 2024)
A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024) tells the little-known story of…
- New Books in American Studies
Mike Madrid, "The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy" (Simon and Schuster, 2024)
In 2020, Latinos became the second largest ethnic voting group in the country. They make up the largest plurality of residents in the most populous states in…
- New Books in American Studies
Susanna Ashton, "A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin" (New Press, 2024)
In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for…
- New Books in American Studies
Farina King, "Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century" (UP of Kansas, 2023)
In this deeply personal account, University of Oklahoma associate professor of Native American Studies Dr. Farina King describes the history and present of…
- New Books in American Studies
Lisa Sheryl Jacobson. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition" (U California Press, 2024)
In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Dr. Lisa Jacobson reveals in…
- New Books in American Studies
Jess A. Goldberg, "Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
How can Black Atlantic literature challenge conventions and redefine literary scholarship? Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice (U Minnesota…
- New Books in American Studies
Vincent Haddad, "The Detroit Genre: Race, Dispossession, and Resilience in American Literature and Film, 1967-2023" (Lever Press, 2024)
Detroit has an essential relationship to genre in American literature and popular culture. The contemporary formations of the suburban sitcom, the…
- New Books in American Studies
Emily Mitchell-Eaton, "New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeremy Dauber, "American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond" (Algonquin Books, 2024)
From the acclaimed author of American Comics comes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror in American…
- New Books in American Studies
Linda M. Clemmons, "Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876" (SDHS Press, 2023)
For much of her life, Angelique Renville had decisions made for her. Where to live, who to live with, where to attend school, what to do with her land. That…
- New Books in American Studies
Scott Huver, "Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210" (Post Hill Press, 2024)
Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210 (Post Hill Press, 2024) explores the city’s true crime history, delving deep inside cases that made…
- New Books in American Studies
Joseph McBride, "George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director" (Columbia UP, 2024)
The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely…
- New Books in American Studies
Lindsay Weinberg, "Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)
In Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech…
- New Books in American Studies
Free Inquiry in the Academy and Beyond
In this episode of Madison’s Notes, we’re joined by Professors Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder for a thought-provoking discussion on the state of free speech in…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephen Jackson, "The Patchwork of World History in Texas High Schools" (Routledge, 2022)
The Patchwork of World History in Texas High Schools (Routledge, 2022) traces the historical development of the World History course as it has been taught in…
- New Books in American Studies
Bob Kuska, "Balls of Confusion: Pro Baskelball Goes to War (1965-1970)" (From Way Downtown, 2024)
Balls of Confusion: Pro Basketball Goes to War(1965-70) is the first of a two-part story about one of the most transformative events inpro basketball history…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, "Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
American democracy is in trouble. At the heart of the contemporary crisis is a mismatch between America's Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan…
- New Books in American Studies
Tom Clavin, "Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)
From multiple New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin comes the thrilling true story of the most infamous hangout for bandits, thieves and murderers of…
- New Books in American Studies
Tom Jenks, "James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues" (Oxford UP, 2024)
In James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues (Oxford University Press, 2024), Tom Jenks follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: Violence, Consent, and Coercion in American Football
Last week, the press focused on what the press repeatedly characterized as an “ugly” fight between American college football players that broke out after the…
- New Books in American Studies
Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, "The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai" (NYU Press, 2024)
Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a culture that…
- New Books in American Studies
Carrie M. Lane, "More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
This study of organizing and decluttering professionals helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our time and…
- New Books in American Studies
Oliver Rosales, "Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley" (U Texas Press, 2024)
In Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley (University of Texas Press, 2024), Oliver Rosales uncovers the role…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert Danisch, "Rhetorical Democracy: How Communication Shapes Political Culture" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024)
Rhetorical Democracy: How Communication Shapes Political Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024) offers an explanation and diagnosis of the current state of…