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
Charlotte Gray, "Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
Born into upper-class America in the same year, 1854, Sara Delano (later to become the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Jennie Jerome (later to become…
- New Books in American Studies
Scott Creney and Brigette Adair Herron, "The Story of the B-52s: Neon Side of Town" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
The Story of the B-52s: Neon Side of Town (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is the first critical history of one of the most legendary and influential bands in…
- New Books in American Studies
Sharon Patricia Holland, "an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life" (Duke UP, 2023)
In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by…
- New Books in American Studies
Melissa Estes Blair, "Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women Who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
In Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women Who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century (U Georgia Press, 2023), Melissa Estes Blair…
- New Books in American Studies
Nick Baumgardner and Mark Snyder, "Mountaintop: The Inside Story of Michigan's 1997 National Title Climb" (Printopya, 2023)
When the 1997 college football season began, the once-mighty Michigan Wolverines were dismissed nationally as a relic of a bygone era. Michigan had posted four…
- New Books in American Studies
James N. Druckman and Elizabeth A. Sharrow, "Equality Unfulfilled: How Title IX's Policy Design Undermines Change to College Sports" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
The year 1972 is often hailed as an inflection point in the evolution of women's rights. Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert P. Watson, "When Washington Burned: The British Invasion of the Capital and a Nation's Rise from the Ashes" (Georgetown UP, 2023)
Perhaps no other single day in US history was as threatening to the survival of the nation as August 24, 1814, when British forces captured Washington, DC…
- New Books in American Studies
Adrian Chastain Weimer, "A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
In A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Adrian Chastain Weimer…
- New Books in American Studies
Janet Somerville, "Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War 1930-1949" (Firefly Books, 2022)
Before email, when long distance telephone calls were difficult and expensive, people wrote letters, often several each day. Today, those letters provide an…
- New Books in American Studies
Viet Thanh Nguyen, "A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023)
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023), Viet Thanh Nguyen…
- New Books in American Studies
Twenty Years After “The New Economy”: A Conversation with Doug Henwood
Economic journalist and broadcaster Doug Henwood revisits his 2003 book, After the New Economy (New Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. “The New…
- New Books in American Studies
Eric Bennett, "Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War" (U Iowa Press, 2015)
During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free…
- 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
Rebecca J. Fraser, "Black Female Intellectuals in 19th Century America: Born to Bloom Unseen?" (Routledge, 2022)
Drawing on letters, personal testimony, works of art, novels, and historic Black newspapers, this book is an interdisciplinary exploration of Black women’s…
- New Books in American Studies
Aaron Tang, "Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence Is Destroying the Court--And How We Can Fix It" (Yale UP, 2023)
Today I talked to Aaron Tang about his new book Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence Is Destroying the Court--And How We Can Fix It (Yale UP, 2023). The Supreme…
- New Books in American Studies
Christina Ward, "Holy Food: How Cults, Communes and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat" (Process, 2023)
Independent food historian and author Christina Ward joins New Books Network to discuss her highly anticipated book Holy Food: How Cults, Communes and…
- New Books in American Studies
Kiana Fitzgerald, "Ode to Hip-Hop: 50 Albums That Define 50 Years of Trailblazing Music" (Running Press Adult, 2023)
From underground roots to mainstream popularity, hip-hop's influence on music and entertainment around the world has been nothing short of extraordinary. Ode…
- New Books in American Studies
Sara Marcus, "Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis" (Harvard UP, 2023)
Moving from the aftermath of Reconstruction through the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States shows how artists, intellectuals, and…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Reed, "Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America…
- New Books in American Studies
Sirpa Salenius, "An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe" (U Massachusetts Press, 2016)
Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894) left the free black community of Salem, Massachusetts, where she was born, to become one of the first women to travel on…
- New Books in American Studies
Dylan C. Penningroth, "Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights" (Liveright, 2023)
A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights…
- New Books in American Studies
Jamie L. Jones, "Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling" (UNC Press, 2023)
Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathan Mael, "Harlem World: How Hip Hop's Super Showdown Changed Music Forever" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
July 3, 1981, was a pivotal night for the future of America's newest art form: hip hop. In New York's Harlem World Club, the Fantastic Romantic Five and the…
- New Books in American Studies
Michelle K. Berry, "Cow Talk: Work, Ecology, and Range Cattle Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West" (U Oklahoma Press, 2023)
How did ranching become an identity? University of Arizona historian Michelle Berry explains in Cow Talk: Work, Ecology, and Western Ranchers in the Postwar…
- New Books in American Studies
Alda Balthrop-Lewis, "Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Balthrop-Lewis's Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge UP, 2021) presents a ground-breaking…
- New Books in American Studies
Laura F. Edwards, "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South" (UNC Press, 2009)
Do individuals have the right to “keep and bear” arms? Do “the people” have any collective rights to public safety? Now that the United States Supreme Court…
- New Books in American Studies
Mark Thomas Edwards, "Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His "Today and Tomorrow" columns attracted a…
- New Books in American Studies
Nigel Biggar, "Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning" (William Collins, 2023)
In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the 'End of History' - that the global dominance of liberal…
- New Books in American Studies
Nigel Biggar, "Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning" (William Collins, 2023)
In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the 'End of History' - that the global dominance of liberal…
- New Books in American Studies
Megan MacKenzie, "Good Soldiers Don't Rape: The Stories We Tell About Military Sexual Violence" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Sexual violence is a significant problem within many Western militaries. Despite international attention to the issue and global #MeToo and #TimesUp movements…
- New Books in American Studies
Diana Rickard, "The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence" (NYU Press, 2023)
The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Rickard examines how serialized crime…
- New Books in American Studies
Steven P. Gietschier, "Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) explores the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth…
- New Books in American Studies
Jack Schneider and Ethan L. Hutt, "Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don't Have To)" (Harvard UP, 2023)
Amid widespread concern that our approach to testing and grading undermines education, two experts explain how schools can use assessment to support, rather…
- New Books in American Studies
Todd E. Vachon, "Clean Air and Good Jobs: U.S. Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice" (Temple UP, 2023)
The labor–climate movement in the U.S. laid the groundwork for the Green New Deal by building a base within labor for supporting climate protection as a…
- New Books in American Studies
Zebulon Vance Miletsky, "Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2022)
In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing…
- New Books in American Studies
C. J. Pascoe, "Nice Is Not Enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High" (U California Press, 2023)
Nice is not enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High (University of California Press, 2023) by Dr. C. J. Pascoe is a provocative story of…
- New Books in American Studies
David Cunningham, January 6th and Asymmetrical Policing (JP, EF)
Recall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the…
- New Books in American Studies
Diane Flynt, "Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived: The Surprising Story of Apples in the South" (UNC Press, 2023)
For anyone who's ever picked an apple fresh from the tree or enjoyed a glass of cider, writer and orchardist Diane Flynt offers a new history of the apple and…
- New Books in American Studies
Lipika Pelham, "Passing: An Alternative History of Identity" (Oxford UP, 2021)
A slave woman in 1840s America dresses as a white, disabled man to escape to freedom, while a twenty-first-century black rights activist is 'cancelled' for…
- New Books in American Studies
Molly Ladd-Taylor, "Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare…
- New Books in American Studies
Christian Kiefer, "The Heart of It All" (Melville House, 2023)
In The Heart of It All (Melville House, 2023), Christian Kiefer imagines a group of factory workers and their families living in a once vibrant Ohio town…
- New Books in American Studies
Kimberly Mack, "Living Colour's Time's Up" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
The iconic Black rock band Living Colour's Time's Up, released in 1990, was recorded in the aftermath of the spectacular critical and commercial success of…
- New Books in American Studies
Maria Smilios, "The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)
New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage. In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears…
- New Books in American Studies
Takeo Rivera, "Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity" (Oxford UP, 2022)
There are few grand narratives that loom over Asian Americans more than the “model minority.” While many Asian Americanist scholars and activists aim to…
- New Books in American Studies
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, "Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap" (U California Press, 2023)
This book shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in…
- New Books in American Studies
Lincoln A. Mitchell, "The One Hundred Most Important Players in Baseball History" (Artemesia Publishing, 2023)
Baseball lore and history is filled with many valuable players, and not all of them are the Hall of Famers you know. In The One Hundred Most Important Players…
- New Books in American Studies
Avery Dame-Griff, "The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet" (NYU Press, 2023)
Avery Dame-Griff's The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023) explores how the rise of the internet shaped transgender…
- New Books in American Studies
Luke Messac, "Your Money Or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine" (Oxford UP, 2023)
A riveting exposé of medical debt collection in America -- and the profound financial and physical costs eroding patient trust in medicine For the crime of…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher F. Zurn, "Splitsville USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking Up the United States" (Routledge, 2023)
At the end of the day, I have faith in the wisdom of democracy: the idea that good political solutions only arise from widely dispersed discussion, debate and…
- New Books in American Studies
Katie J. Wells et al., "Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City" (Princeton UP, 2023)
The first city to fight back against Uber, Washington, D.C., was also the first city where such resistance was defeated. It was here that the company created a…
- New Books in American Studies
Chris Molanphy, "Old Town Road" (Duke UP, 2023)
In Old Town Road (Duke University Press, 2023), Chris Molanphy considers Lil Nas X’s debut single as pop artifact, chart phenomenon, and cultural watershed…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher Paul Harris, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care" (Princeton UP, 2023)
When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, the…
- New Books in American Studies
Zachary Parolin, "Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from COVID-19" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2023)
Zachary Parolin's book Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from COVID-19 (Russell Sage Foundation, 2023) is interested in poverty during the COVID-19…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathan Daniel Wells, "The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War" (Bold Type Press, 2020)
In a rapidly changing New York, two forces battled for the city's soul: the pro-slavery New Yorkers who kept the illegal slave trade alive and well, and the…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathan Leal, "Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop" (Duke UP, 2023)
In Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke UP, 2023), Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for…
- New Books in American Studies
Anthony B. Sanders, "Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
Listing every right that a constitution should protect is hard. American constitution drafters often list a few famous rights such as freedom of speech…
- New Books in American Studies
Matthew McManus, "The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity" (Routledge, 2023)
McManus presents an intellectual history of the conservative and reactionary tradition, stretching from Aristotle and Filmer to Alexander Dugin and Patrick…
- New Books in American Studies
Michèle Lamont, "Seeing Others: How Recognition Works-And How It Can Heal a Divided World" (Atria, 2023)
How can we challenge and change inequalities? In Seeing Others: How Recognition Works— and How It Can Heal a Divided World (Atria, 2023), Michele Lamont…
- New Books in American Studies
The Shadow War between America and Russia
Western analysts and media often assess the prospect that Moscow might use nuclear weapons as the war in Ukraine grinds on, possibly to a flailing Russia’s…
- New Books in American Studies
A Better Way to Buy Books
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised…