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
Dara Z. Strolovitch, "When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States. From the climate crisis…
- New Books in American Studies
Scott Eyman, "Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
The remarkable, must-read story of Charlie Chaplin’s years of exile from the United States during the postwar Red Scare, and how it ruined his film career…
- New Books in American Studies
Claire Jean Kim, "Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Where do Asian Americans fit into the U.S. racial order? How do we understand anti-Asian racism in relation to structural anti-Blackness? Are Asian Americans…
- New Books in American Studies
Frederick V. Engram, "Black Liberation Through Action and Resistance: MOVE" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
Black Liberation through Action and Resistance: MOVE (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) serves as a call to action for Black millennials and co-conspirators who are…
- New Books in American Studies
Chris Bishop, "Medievalist Comics and the American Century" (UP of Mississippi, 2016)
In Medievalist Comics and the American Century (UP of Mississippi, 2016), Chris Bishop surveys the medievalist comic, its stories, characters, settings, and…
- New Books in American Studies
Sarah Mayorga, "Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism" (UNC Press, 2023)
Racial capitalism, invisible but threaded throughout the world, shapes our lives. Focusing on the experiences of white, Black, and Latinx residents of…
- New Books in American Studies
James V. Fenelon, "Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790" (Routledge, 2023)
In this interview James Fenelon discusses his new book entitled Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790…
- New Books in American Studies
Nikki M. Taylor, "Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and…
- New Books in American Studies
Norman Solomon, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine" (New Press, 2023)
More than twenty years ago, 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan set into motion a hugely consequential shift in America’s foreign policy: a perpetual state of war…
- New Books in American Studies
Nicole Nguyen, "Terrorism on Trial: Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Rather than functioning as a final arbiter of justice, U.S. domestic courts are increasingly seen as counterterrorism tools that can incapacitate terrorists…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephen B. Armstrong, "I Want You Around: The Ramones and the Making of Rock 'n' Roll High School" (Backbeat Books, 2023)
Stephen Armstrong's new book I Want You Around: The Ramones and the Making of Rock-n-Roll High School (Backbeat Books, 2023), provides a detailed production…
- New Books in American Studies
Denise D. Meringolo, "Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism" (Amherst College Press, 2021)
Uncovering a radical tradition at the heart of public history within the United States, Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher P. Barton, "The Archaeology of Race and Class at Timbuctoo: A Black Community in New Jersey" (UP of Florida, 2023)
The Archaeology of Race and Class at Timbuctoo: A Black Community in New Jersey (UP of Florida, 2023) is the first book to examine the historic Black community…
- New Books in American Studies
Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer, "Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
A fascinating look at Walt Disney's last, unfinished project and the controversy that surrounded it. It was going to be Disneyland at the top of a mountain. A…
- New Books in American Studies
Scott Kamen, "From Union Halls to the Suburbs: Americans for Democratic Action and the Transformation of Postwar Liberalism" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
For decades, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) was perhaps the most influential multi-issue organization in American liberalism. The first book-length…
- New Books in American Studies
Eric G. Wilson, "Point Blank" (British Film Institute, 2023)
John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) has long been recognized as one of the seminal films of the sixties, with its revisionary mix of genres including neo-noir…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeff Kosseff, "Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
Thanks to the First Amendment, Americans enjoy a rare privilege: the constitutional right to lie. And although controversial, they should continue to enjoy…
- New Books in American Studies
Margaret K. Nelson, "Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s" (NYU Press, 2022)
All families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays A lesbian partnership, a “bastard” son, an aunt who is a prostitute, or a…
- New Books in American Studies
Aaron Tang, "Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence Is Destroying the Court--And How We Can Fix It" (Yale UP, 2023)
The American public’s confidence in the United States Supreme Court is a historic low – in part based on a belief that the Supreme Court is increasingly…
New Books in American StudiesDecolonizing Praxis
In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil…
- New Books in American Studies
Campbell F. Scribner, "A Is for Arson: A History of Vandalism in American Education" (Cornell UP, 2023)
In A Is for Arson: A History of Vandalism in American Education (Cornell UP, 2023), Campbell F. Scribner sifts through two centuries of debris to uncover the…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Welsh, "Big Bend National Park: Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem" (U Nevada Press, 2021)
National Parks are sites where politics, cultures, and ecology converge. University of Northern Colorado historian Michael Welsh argues that, at Big Bend…
- New Books in American Studies
Danielle N. Boaz, "Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or…
- New Books in American Studies
Jason C. Bivins, "Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America's Obsession with Religion" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Histories of political religion since the 1960s often center on the rise of the powerful conservative evangelical voting bloc since the 1970s. One of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Vintage, 2006)
The inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s major motion picture, Oppenheimer, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography explores the life and times of J. Robert…
- New Books in American Studies
Matthew Guariglia, "Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York" (Duke UP, 2023)
During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse metropolis. In Police and the Empire…
- New Books in American Studies
Katherine Mason, "The Reproduction of Inequality: How Class Shapes the Pregnant Body and Infant Health" (NYU Press, 2023)
Can you run a marathon, drink coffee, eat fish, or fly on a plane while pregnant? Such questions are just the tip of the iceberg for how most pregnant women's…
- New Books in American Studies
Allison M. Prasch, "The World Is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Allison M. Prasch, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a new book that focuses on the way that…
- New Books in American Studies
Philip Dray, "A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age" (FSG, 2022)
On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The…
- New Books in American Studies
The Unquiet Legacy of Jewish Radical Meir Kahane
In the wake of the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas in October, 2023 I spoke with Shaul Magid, author of Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeremy Land, "Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700-1776)" (Brill, 2023)
Jeremy Land's book Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700-1776) (Brill, 2023) takes a long-run view of the global…
- New Books in American Studies
The Future of Incarceration: A Discussion with Colleen P. Eren
The United States has long been associated with a very harsh criminal justice system with, in some cases, people serving long sentence for minor crimes. But…
- New Books in American Studies
Colin Dickey, "Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy" (Viking, 2023)
The United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael A. Robinson, "Dangerous Instrument: Political Polarization and US Civil-Military Relations" (Oxford UP, 2022)
As increasingly contentious politics in the United States raise concerns over the "politicization" of traditionally non-partisan institutions, many have turned…
- New Books in American Studies
Orisanmi Burton, "Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt" (U California Press, 2023)
Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (University of California Press, 2023) boldly and compellingly argues that…
- New Books in American Studies
Nick Tabor, "Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)
An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created (St. Martin's Press, 2023) charts the fraught…
- New Books in American Studies
Victoria Houseman, "American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) didn't publish her first book until she was sixty-two. But over the next three decades, this former headmistress would become the…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher John Bosso, "Why SNAP Works: A Political History--And Defense--of the Food Stamp Program" (U California Press, 2023)
How did the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program evolve from a Depression-era effort to use up surplus goods into America's foundational food assistance…
- New Books in American Studies
Kristen Green, "The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail" (Seal Press, 2022)
The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs. In The Devil's Half…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Stark, "Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation" (Random House, 2023)
The conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Alejandra Dubcovsky, "Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South" (Yale UP, 2023)
Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial South…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl, "If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)
Across today’s America, countless people will embark on an adventure. They will prowl among overgrown headstones in forgotten graveyards, stalk through…
- New Books in American Studies
Kristen M. Budd and David C. Lane, "Beyond Bars: A Path Forward from 50 Years of Mass Incarceration in the United States" (Policy Press, 2023)
The year 2023 marks 50 years of mass incarceration in the United States. This timely volume highlights and addresses pressing social problems associated with…
- New Books in American Studies
Lisandro Pérez, "The House on G Street: A Cuban Family Saga" (NYU Press, 2023)
In The House on G Street: A Cuban Family Saga (NYU Press, 2023), award-winning author Lisandro Pérez tells Cuba’s story through the lens of a single family…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert Greene and Tyler D. Parry, "Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina" (U South Carolina Press, 2021)
Since its founding in 1801, African Americans have played an integral, if too often overlooked, role in the history of the University of South Carolina. Robert…
- New Books in American Studies
Dennis C. Rasmussen, "The Constitution's Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter" (UP of Kansas, 2023)
Dennis Rasmussen’s new book, The Constitution's Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter (UP of Kansas, 2023), is a propulsive…
- New Books in American Studies
Indigenous DC: A Conversation with Elizabeth Rule
Today’s book is Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s First Capital (Georgetown UP, 2023), by Dr. Elizabeth Rule, which is the first and fullest…
- New Books in American Studies
Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol, "Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party" (Columbia UP, 2023)
In the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace. Unions fostered tight-knit communities, touching nearly every…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul Crenshaw, "Melt with Me: Coming of Age and Other '80s Perils" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
In his new collection of essays, Melt With Me (Mad Creek Press, 2023), Paul Crenshaw examines the intersection of 1980s pop culture, the Cold War, and the…
- New Books in American Studies
Sheila McManus, "Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West" (Texas A&M UP, 2022)
How do borderlands work? How do they maintain their distinctive features in the face of concerted efforts on the part of nation-states to make each of their…
- New Books in American Studies
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, "The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn" (UNC Press, 2023)
In The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (UNC Press, 2023), award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the…
- New Books in American Studies
Evan C. Rothera, "Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880" (LSU Press, 2022)
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, three violent national conflicts rocked the Americas: the Wars of Unification in Argentina, the War of the Reform…
- New Books in American Studies
Marlena Williams, "Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of the Exorcist" (Mad Creek Books, 2023)
Never watch The Exorcist, Marlena Williams's mother told her, just as she'd been told by her own mother as a Catholic teen in rural Oregon when the horror…
- New Books in American Studies
Rhoda Kanaaneh, "The Right Kind of Suffering: Gender, Sexuality, and Arab Asylum Seekers in America" (U Texas Press, 2023)
From the overloaded courts with their constantly changing dates and appointments to the need to prove oneself the “right" kind of asylum seeker, the asylum…
- New Books in American Studies
John Arena, "Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Exploring the role of identitarian politics in the privatization of Newark’s public school system In Expelling Public Schools, John Arena explores the more…
- New Books in American Studies
Oil Beach - How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life: A Conversation with Christina Dunbar-Hester
Christina Dunbar-Hester, professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, talks about her recent book…
- New Books in American Studies
Tariq D. Khan, "The Republic Shall be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
The Republic Will Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression (University of Illinois Press, 2023) by Dr. Tariq D. Khan examines…
- New Books in American Studies
The Future of Superstates: A Discussion with Alasdair Roberts
Empires are supposed to be a thing of the past but very big countries with global reach are becoming more entrenched. By 2050, almost 40 per cent of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew Monteith, "Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs" (NYU Press, 2023)
Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration. But as Dr. Andrew Monteith shows in Christian Nationalism…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephanie Southworth and Sara Brallier, "Homelessness in the 21st Century: Living the Impossible American Dream" (Routledge, 2023)
An accessible and engaging introductory text on homelessness and housing policy, this timely book uses a sociopolitical framework for understanding issues of…