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
Matt Garcia, "Eli and the Octopus: The CEO Who Tried to Reform One of the World’s Most Notorious Corporations" (Harvard UP, 2023)
The poignant rise and fall of an idealistic immigrant who, as CEO of a major conglomerate, tried to change the way America did business before he himself was…
- New Books in American Studies
Meredith Oda, "The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
In The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Meredith Oda shows how city leaders…
- New Books in American Studies
Walter Greason and Tim Fielder, "The Graphic History of Hip Hop" (NYC Department of Education, 2023)
Hip Hop turned 50 this year. It has been five decades since DJ Cool Herc played a party in the Bronx that gave birth to a global cultural revolution. To honor…
- New Books in American Studies
James M. Lawson Jr. et al., "Revolutionary Nonviolence: Organizing for Freedom" (U California Press, 2022)
A persuasive account of the philosophy and power of nonviolence organizing, and a resource for building and sustaining effective social movements. Despite the…
- New Books in American Studies
Laurence Jurdem, "The Rough Rider and the Professor: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Friendship that Changed American History" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)
Evoking the political intrigue of the Gilded Age, Laurence Jurdem's book The Rough Rider and the Professor: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the…
- New Books in American Studies
On Native American Warfare: A Discussion with Author and Historian Wayne E. Lee
How did Native Americans make war, not with European settlers, but amongst themselves? Historian Wayne E. Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina…
- New Books in American Studies
Michelle J. Manno, "Denied: Women, Sports, and the Contradictions of Identity" (NYU Press, 2023)
Women’s college basketball is big business—top teams bring in millions of dollars in revenue for their schools. Women’s NCAA games are broadcast regularly on…
- New Books in American Studies
Yael A. Sternhell, "War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War" (Yale UP, 2023)
Yael A. Sternhell's War on Record: The Archive and the Aftermath of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023) is a history of the United States' greatest…
- New Books in American Studies
Daniel Campo, "Postindustrial DIY: Recovering American Rust Belt Icons" (Fordham UP, 2023)
A pioneering Detroit automobile factory. A legendary iron mill at the edge of Pittsburgh. A campus of concrete grain elevators in Buffalo. Two monumental train…
- New Books in American Studies
David Craig, "Apocalypse Television: How The Day After Helped Save the World" (Applause Books, 2023)
On November 20, 1983, a three-hour made-for-TV movie The Day After premiered on ABC. Set in the heartland of Lawrence, Kansas, the film depicted the events…
- New Books in American Studies
Emily Horowitz, "From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts, Not Fear" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
In her book From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts, Not Fear (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), Emily Horowitz shows how current sex-offense…
- New Books in American Studies
Katlyn Marie Carter, "Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions" (Yale UP, 2023)
Katlyn Marie Carter, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale UP, 2023) examines how debates over secrecy and…
- New Books in American Studies
Speech Unbound: A Conversation with Nadine Strossen
What (and why) can and can't we say? What do empirical examples both at home and abroad tell us about how we should protect freedom of speech? How do we create…
- New Books in American Studies
Jack D. Noe, "Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South" (LSU Press, 2021)
Examining identity and nationalism in the Reconstruction-era South, Jack Noe’s Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the…
- New Books in American Studies
Michelle R. Scott, "T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners' Booking Association in Jazz-Age America" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
Black vaudevillians and entertainers joked that T.O.B.A. stood for "tough on black artists." But the Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) played a…
- New Books in American Studies
Sara Chatfield, "In Her Own Name: The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage" (Columbia UP, 2023)
We often narrate the history of women’s rights in the United States by focusing on the fight for suffrage. Yet starting as early as 1835, states expanded…
- New Books in American Studies
Jackson Lears, "Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street" (FSG, 2023)
In this interview the distinguished historian Jackson Lears talks about his latest book, Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to…
New Books in American StudiesSisterhood
In this episode of High Theory, Katherine Turk tells us about Sisterhood, a familial metaphor used to evoke gendered solidarity in women’s movement of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Gary J. Bass, "Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia" (Knopf, 2023)
Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf, 2023), a book ten years in the making, is the definitive account of the postwar…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Richardson, "Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo" (U California Press, 2022)
Hunter S. Thompson was never a hippie, but his writing nonetheless helped define the counterculture and the San Francisco scene of the 1960s and early 1970s…
- New Books in American Studies
Ronald C. White, "On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain" (Random House, 2023)
Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin…
- New Books in American Studies
Caroline J. Smith, "Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women's Food Memoirs" (U Mississippi Press, 2023)
Between 2000 and 2010, many contemporary US-American women writers were returning to the private space of the kitchen, writing about their experiences in that…
- New Books in American Studies
Hugo Wong, "America's Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Like countless other migrants from China, Hugo Wong’s great-grandfathers–Wong Foon Chuck and Leung Hing–travel across the Pacific to make a life for themselves…
- New Books in American Studies
David Steele, "It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism" (Temple UP, 2022)
Today we are joined by the sports journalist David Steele, who has written for the Sporting News, AOL, the Baltimore Sun and the San Francisco Chronicle, and…
- New Books in American Studies
Julian Go, "Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US" (Oxford UP, 2023)
The police response to protests erupting on America's streets in recent years has made the militarization of policing painfully transparent. Yet, properly…
- New Books in American Studies
Melinda N. Ritchie, "Backdoor Lawmaking: Evading Obstacles in the US Congress" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Civics textbooks focus on how Congress makes policy through the legislative process, but the reality is that members of Congress have limited opportunities to…
- New Books in American Studies
Rob Harvilla, "60 Songs That Explain The 90s" (Twelve, 2023)
A companion to the #1 music podcast on Spotify, this book takes listeners through the greatest hits that define a weirdly undefinable decade. The 1990s were a…
- New Books in American Studies
Lindsey Claire Smith, "Urban Homelands: Writing the Native City from Oklahoma" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
What do Tulsa, Santa Fe, and New Orleans have in common? When viewed from the perspective of Indigenous arts and culture, the answer is quite a bit. In Urban…
- New Books in American Studies
Matthew Dennis, "American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
The gold epaulettes that George Washington wore into battle. A Union soldier's bloody shirt in the wake of the Civil War. A crushed wristwatch after the 9/11…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul Crosthwaite et al., "Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise…
- New Books in American Studies
Sean Howe, "Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s" (Hachette Books, 2023)
It wasn’t easy writing a biography the mysterious, shape-shifting Thomas King Forçade, but after nine years of research and extensive interviews, Sean Howe did…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeffrey S. Gurock, "Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend" (NYU Press, 2023)
For close to half a century after World War II, Marty Glickman was the voice of New York sports. His distinctive style of broadcasting, on television and…
- New Books in American Studies
Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, "Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine" (Callaway, 2023)
Several years ago, a treasure trove containing some 6,000 original Bob Dylan manuscripts was revealed to exist. Their destination? Tulsa, Oklahoma. The…
- New Books in American Studies
Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez, "An American Icon in Puerto Rico: Barbie, Girlhood, and Colonialism at Play" (Berghahn Books, 2022)
Since her debut in 1959, Barbie has transcended boundaries and transformed into a global symbol of femininity, capturing the imaginations of girls all around…
New Books in American StudiesGenealogies of Modernity Episode 4: Jamestown and the Myth of the Sovereign Family
What is the “traditional American family?” Popular images from the colonial and pioneer past suggest an isolated and self-sufficient nuclear family as the…
- New Books in American Studies
Grace Lin, "Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods" (Little, Brown Books, 2023)
Newbery and Caldecott honoree and New York Times bestselling author Grace Lin joins New Books Network to talk about her new, groundbreaking, lushly…
- New Books in American Studies
Katharine M. Millar, "Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community" (Oxford UP, 2022)
In the past, it was assumed that men, as good citizens, would serve in the armed forces in wartime. In the present, however, liberal democratic states…
New Books in American StudiesGenealogies of Modernity Episode 3: What Is Genealogy
Genealogy, in Charles Darwin’s terms, is the study of “descent with modification.” Taken as an analogy for the study of history, genealogy can guard against…
- New Books in American Studies
Self Help
In this episode of High Theory, Angela Hume tells us about Self Help, not the neoliberal strategy of self-actualization through consumer choices, but the…
- New Books in American Studies
Wendy S. Hesford, "Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics" (Ohio State UP, 2021)
Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in…
- New Books in American Studies
Emma K. Sutton, "William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Emma K. Sutton's William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician (U Chicago Press, 2023) is the first book to map William James's preoccupation with…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, "How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
In How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), Jonathan D. Fitzgerald examines a mode of…
- New Books in American Studies
Monica Huerta, "The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2023)
The end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernity—industrialization…
- New Books in American Studies
Ramsey Lewis and Aaron Cohen, "Gentleman of Jazz: A Life in Music" (Blackstone, 2023)
This immersive new autobiography provides insight into the early life and illustrious career of the late great Ramsey Lewis, one of the most popular jazz…
- New Books in American Studies
The Future of the State: A Discussion with Graeme Garrard
The Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal era started the retreat of the state. Privatisation and deregulation meant power was handed over to corporations and markets…
- New Books in American Studies
Barbara D. Savage, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar" (Yale UP, 2023)
Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living…
- New Books in American Studies
Sara Byala, "Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Travel to virtually any African country and you are likely to find a Coca-Cola, often a cold one at that. Bottled asks how this carbonated drink became…
- New Books in American Studies
Tracy E. Perkins, "Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism" (U California Press, 2022)
Despite living and working in California, one of the county's most environmentally progressive states, environmental justice activists have spent decades…
- New Books in American Studies
Chhaya Kolavalli, "Well-Intentioned Whiteness: Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
Chhaya Kolavalli's book Well-Intentioned Whiteness: Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City (U Georgia Press, 2023) documents how whiteness…
- New Books in American Studies
Daniel Herbert, "Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film" (U California Press, 2023)
Daniel Herbert's book Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film (U California Press, 2023) tells the improbable story of New…
- New Books in American Studies
Rachel Stephens, "Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture" (U Arkansas Press, 2023)
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the violence…
- New Books in American Studies
On “Henry Kissinger and His World” with author Barry Gewen
In my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disparate…
- New Books in American Studies
Russ Castronovo, "American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability" (Princeton UP, 2023)
An incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacy. For more than three…
- New Books in American Studies
Kevin F. Adler and Donald W. Burnes, "When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America" (North Atlantic Books, 2023)
Think about the last time that you saw or interacted with an unhoused person. What did you do? What did you say? Did you offer money or a smile, or did you…
- New Books in American Studies
Salim Yaqub, "Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Salim Yaqub's Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945 (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores how Americans from all walks of life – political…
- New Books in American Studies
Brian D. Blankenship, "The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics" (Cornell UP, 2023)
The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics (Cornell UP, 2023) examines the conditions under which the United States is willing and…
- New Books in American Studies
J. Daniel, "Suds Series: Baseball, Beer Wars, and the Summer of '82" (U Missouri Press, 2023)
On this episode, J. Daniel takes readers back more than forty years, telling a story that is part baseball history, part urban history, and part U.S. cultural…
- New Books in American Studies
Diane Carol Fujino, "Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake" (U Washington Press, 2020)
This episode, which is co-hosted with Michael Nishimura, features a conversation with Dr. Diane C. Fujino, the author of Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics…
- New Books in American Studies
Edward L. Ayers, "American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860" (Norton, 2023)
American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 (Norton, 2023) is a revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation defied power…
- New Books in American Studies
Daniel Shea and Nicholas F. Jacobs, "The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America" (Columbia UP, 2023)
The widening gulf between rural and urban America is becoming the most serious political divide of our day. Support for Democrats, up and down the ballot, has…