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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
Gilberto Rosas, "Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
On August 3, 2019, a far-right extremist committed a deadly mass shooting at a major shopping center in El Paso, Texas, a city on the border of the United…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert F. Moss, "The Lost Southern Chefs: A History of Commercial Dining in the Nineteenth-Century South" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
In recent years, food writers and historians have begun to retell the story of southern food. Heirloom ingredients and traditional recipes have been…
- New Books in American Studies
William Darity et al., "The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice" (U California Press, 2023)
A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook…
- New Books in American Studies
Josephine Lee, "Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater" (UNC Press, 2022)
The history of race in American theater is more complicated than you might think, writes Dr. Josephine Lee in Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: How Firearms Fuel Domestic Violence in the US
In 2019, nearly two-thirds of domestic violence homicides in the United States were committed with a gun. On average, three women are killed by a current or…
- New Books in American Studies
Race and Electrical Infrastructure in the Jim Crow South
Conor Harrison, Associate Professor of Geography and the School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina, talks about his research…
- New Books in American Studies
Robyn Muir, "The Disney Princess Phenomenon: A Feminist Analysis" (Bristol UP, 2023)
The Disney Princesses are a billion-dollar industry, known and loved by children across the globe. In The Disney Princess Phenomenon: A Feminist Analysis…
- New Books in American Studies
Isabel Machado, "Carnival in Alabama: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in Mobile" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)
Mobile is simultaneously a typical and unique city in the postwar United States. It was a quintessential boomtown during World War II. That prosperity was…
- New Books in American Studies
Nicole Fabricant, "Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore" (U California Press, 2022)
Industrial toxic emissions on the South Baltimore Peninsula are among the highest in the nation. Because of the concentration of factories and other chemical…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeanne K. Firth, "Feeding New Orleans: Celebrity Chefs and Reimagining Food Justice" (UNC Press, 2023)
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many high-profile chefs in New Orleans pledged to help their city rebound from the flooding. Several formed their own…
- New Books in American Studies
Chris Yogerst, "The Warner Brothers" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)
One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formation in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Christian O. Paiz, "The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-And-File History of the UFW Movement" (UNC Press, 2023)
The past decades have borne witness to the United Farm Workers' (UFW) tenacious hold on the country's imagination. Since 2008, the UFW has lent its rallying…
- New Books in American Studies
Erik Sherman, "Daybreak at Chavez Ravine: Fernandomania and the Remaking of the Los Angeles Dodgers" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
Fernando Valenzuela was only twenty years old when Tom Lasorda chose him as the Dodgers' opening-day starting pitcher in 1981. Born in the remote Mexican town…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew Chan, "Why Mariah Carey Matters" (U Texas Press, 2023)
Why Mariah Carey Matters (University of Texas Press, 2023) examines the creative and complicated evolution of the musical artist. In the 1990s, Carey perfected…
- New Books in American Studies
Kristal Brent Zook, "The Girl in the Yellow Poncho: A Memoir" (Duke UP, 2023)
At five years old, Kristal Brent Zook sat on the steps of a Venice Beach, California, motel trying to make sense of her white father’s abandonment, which left…
- New Books in American Studies
Al Davidoff, "Unionizing the Ivory Tower: Cornell Workers' Fifteen-Year Fight for Justice and a Living Wage" (ILR Press, 2023)
Unionizing the Ivory Tower: Cornell Workers' Fifteen-Year Fight for Justice and a Living Wage (ILR Press, 2023) chronicles how a thousand low-paid custodians…
- New Books in American Studies
Alexander Stille, "The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune" (FSG, 2023)
In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for…
- New Books in American Studies
John Szwed, "Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith" (FSG, 2023)
Who was Harry Smith? Was he an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter? Was he a charlatan? A genius? Was he a moocher, a schmuck, a bum? As John Szwed's Cosmic…
- New Books in American Studies
Kidada E. Williams, "I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in…
- New Books in American Studies
Zachary Jacobson, "On Nixon's Madness: An Emotional History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
When Richard Nixon battled for the presidency in 1968, he did so with the knowledge that, should he win, he would face the looming question of how to extract…
- New Books in American Studies
Diana W. Anselmo, "A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood" (U California Press, 2023)
In A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (University of California Press, 2023), Diana W. Anselmo queers the earliest…
- New Books in American Studies
Kathryn J. Edin et al., "The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America" (Mariner Books, 2023)
A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America…
- New Books in American Studies
Hava Rachel Gordon, "This Is Our School!: Race and Community Resistance to School Reform" (NYU Press, 2021)
Parents, educators, and activists are passionately fighting to improve public schools around the country. In This Is Our School!: Race and Community Resistance…
- New Books in American Studies
Sarah R. Coleman, "The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Sarah Coleman, an historian at Texas State University, is the author of an important and topical book about immigration policy in the United States. The Walls…
- New Books in American Studies
Brooke L. Blower, "Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper" (Oxford UP, 2023)
On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways’ celebrated seaplane—the Yankee Clipper—took off from New York and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean…
- New Books in American Studies
John Brackett, "Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness" (Duke UP, 2023)
The Grateful Dead were one of the most successful live acts of the rock era. Performing over 2300 shows between 1965 and 1995, the Grateful Dead’s reputation…
- New Books in American Studies
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, "Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality" (Knopf Doubleday, 2023)
With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the…
- New Books in American Studies
Ana Lucia Araujo, "Museums and Atlantic Slavery" (Routledge, 2021)
Ana Lucia Araujo's book Museums and Atlantic Slavery (Routledge, 2021) explores how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are represented…
- New Books in American Studies
Denise Gigante, "Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America" (Yale UP, 2022)
In February 1848, a book auction took place in Astor House, No. 7, on the corner of Broadway and Vesey in lower Manhattan, New York. By all accounts, the books…
- New Books in American Studies
David Waldstreicher, "The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence" (FSG, 2023)
Thy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak, And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak. At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in English…
- New Books in American Studies
Asad L. Asad, "Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Because immigration is such a recurring-and divisive-topic in the United States, it is easy to assume that we understand what it means for an immigrant to live…
- New Books in American Studies
Beverly C. Tomek, "Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania" (Temple UP, 2021)
In her concise history Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania (Temple UP, 2021), Beverly Tomek corrects the long-held notion that slavery in the North was “not…
- New Books in American Studies
Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette, "Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls" (Lexington Books, 2022)
Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette's book Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls (Lexington Books, 2022) examines depictions of…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Heather and John Rapley, "Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West" (Yale UP, 2023)
Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, around the start of the new millennium, history took a dramatic turn. Faced with…
- New Books in American Studies
Vanessa I. Corredera, "Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
Vanessa I. Corredera’s book Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America (Edinburgh Univeristy Press, 2022) looks at how that seventeenth-century…
- New Books in American Studies
Elly Fishman, "Refugee High: Coming of Age in America" (The New Press, 2021)
Lit Hub's Most Anticipated of 2021. Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Award. A year in the life of a Chicago high school that has one of the highest…
- New Books in American Studies
Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin, "Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. In Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader (U…
- New Books in American Studies
Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin, "Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. In Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader (U…
- New Books in American Studies
Hollis Robbins, "Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition" (U Georgia Press, 2020)
As I learned from Hollis Robbins’s monograph Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (U Georgia Press, 2020), there has been a…
- New Books in American Studies
Marisa Holmes, "Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street…
- New Books in American Studies
Juliana Hu Pegues, "Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements" (UNC Press, 2021)
As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift…
- New Books in American Studies
Chesya Burke, "Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Erica O. Turner, "Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
For the past five years, American public schools have enrolled more students identified as Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian than white. At the same…
- New Books in American Studies
Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst, "I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America" (UNC Press, 2023)
Carl Ernst’s and Mbaye Lo’s new book I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America (UNC Press, 2023) is a fascinating and…
- New Books in American Studies
The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI
In this 2014 episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear from Betty Medsger. Medsger was a Washington Post reporter in March 1971, and received a cache of…
- New Books in American Studies
Cara Fitzpatrick, "The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America" (Basic Books, 2023)
America has relied on public schools for 150 years, but the system is increasingly under attack. With declining enrollment and diminished trust in public…
- New Books in American Studies
Erin Raffety, "From Inclusion to Justice: Disability, Ministry, and Congregational Leadership" (Baylor UP, 2022)
American Christianity tends to view disabled persons as problems to be solved rather than people with experiences and gifts that enrich the church. Churches…
- New Books in American Studies
Janiece Johnson, "Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture" (UNC Press, 2023)
On September 11, 1857, a small band of Mormons led by John D. Lee massacred an emigrant train of men, women, and children heading west at Mountain Meadows…
- New Books in American Studies
Lyndsie Bourgon, "Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods" (Little, Brown Spark, 2023)
In Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: Guns, Violence, and the Law: How Federal Courts are Trying to Figure Out the Second Amendment
Two blockbuster cases came down in June of 2022. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen substantially…
- New Books in American Studies
Brooke Kroeger, "Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism" (Knopf, 2023)
Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (Knopf, 2023) is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher C. Sellers, "Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis (U Georgia Press, 2023) turns an environmental…
- New Books in American Studies
Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein, "We've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care" (Penguin, 2023)
Few of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively…
- New Books in American Studies
Morgan L. W. Hazelton et al., "The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Does it matter if judges are nice to each other? The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary (Oxford UP, 2023)argues that how…
- New Books in American Studies
Becoming Justice Thomas
On today’s podcast, we are changing things up a bit. Instead of interviewing the author of a recent book, I am interviewing another podcaster about their…
- New Books in American Studies
Jean M. Twenge, "Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future" (Atria, 2023)
The United States is currently home to six generations of people: -the Silents, born 1925-1945 -Baby Boomers, born 1946-1964 -Gen X, born 1965-1979…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Moore, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream (1740–1776)" ( FSG, 2023)
The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas…
- New Books in American Studies
Kevin Landis, "One Public: New York’s Public Theater in the Era of Oskar Eustis" (Methuen Drama, 2022)
Kevin Landis's One Public: New York’s Public Theater in the Era of Oskar Eustis (Methuen Drama, 2022) tells the story of the remarkable first 17 years…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael R. Jin, "Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: A Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific" (Stanford UP, 2021)
This episode features a conversation with Dr. Michael R. Jin regarding his recently published book Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: The Japanese…
- New Books in American Studies
Samuel Moyn, "Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times" (Yale UP, 2023)
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising…