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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
Katherine C. Mooney, "Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey" (Yale UP, 2023)
Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most…
- New Books in American Studies
John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle, "Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living (Princeton UP, 2023) invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael O'Hanlon, "Military History for the Modern Strategist: America's Major Wars Since 1861" (Brookings, 2023)
The recent conclusion to the war in Afghanistan — America’s longest and one of its most frustrating — serves as a vivid reminder of the unpredictability and…
- New Books in American Studies
Samuel Helfont, "Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order" (Oxford UP, 2023)
The move away from post-Cold War unipolarity and the rise of revisionist states like Russia and China pose a rapidly escalating and confounding threat for the…
- New Books in American Studies
Danielle Allen, "Justice by Means of Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, has a new…
- New Books in American Studies
Mary Beltrán, "Latino TV: A History" (NYU Press, 2022)
In this episode, our host Lucila Rozas discusses the book Latino TV: A History (2022) by Mary Beltrán. You’ll hear about: A brief trajectory of the book and…
- New Books in American Studies
David E. Kelly, "First Fights in Fallujah: Marines During Operation Vigilant Resolve, in Iraq, April 2004" (Casemate, 2023)
In March 2004, the unprovoked ambush killing and desecration of the bodies of American civilian security contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, caused the National…
- New Books in American Studies
Eileen V. Wallis, "California and the Politics of Disability, 1850–1970" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Eileen V. Wallis' book California and the Politics of Disability, 1850–1970 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the political, legal, medical, and social…
- New Books in American Studies
Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, "A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School" (The New Press, 2023)
Across the U.S., state legislatures-often under the cover of darkness, and usually in spite of public opposition-are passing bills that channel public dollars…
- New Books in American Studies
James Zarsadiaz, "Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A." (U California Press, 2022)
In this episode, we discuss how myths of suburbia, the American West, and the American Dream informed regional planning, suburban design, and ideas about race…
- New Books in American Studies
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, "The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout…
- New Books in American Studies
Philip A. Wallach, "Why Congress" (Oxford UP, 2023)
To achieve legitimate self-government in America's extended Republic, the U.S. Constitution depends on Congress harmonizing the country's factions through a…
- New Books in American Studies
Sara Salman, "The Shaming State: How the U.S. Treats Citizens in Need" (NYU Press, 2023)
The Shaming State: How the U.S. Treats Citizens in Need (NYU Press, 2023) argues that Americans have been abandoned by a government that has relinquished its…
- New Books in American Studies
Josh Shepperd, "Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
Despite uncertain beginnings, public broadcasting emerged as a noncommercial media industry that transformed American culture. In Shadow of the New Deal: The…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephen Vladeck, "The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic" (Basic Books, 2023)
Many people are familiar with the United States Supreme Court’s merit docket. Each case follows detailed and professional proceedings that include formal…
- New Books in American Studies
Bradley C. S. Watson, "Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea" (U Notre Dame Press, 2020)
“Only recently have scholars outside the historical profession identified progressivism for what it was and continues to be: a fundamental rupture with the…
- New Books in American Studies
Craig Nelson, "V Is For Victory: Franklin Roosevelt's American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II" (Scribner, 2023)
As Nazi Germany began to conquer Europe, America’s military was unprepared, too small, and poorly supplied. The Nazis were supported by robust German factories…
- New Books in American Studies
Thomas W. Lippman, "Get the Damn Story: Homer Bigart and the Great Age of American Newspapers" (Georgetown UP, 2023)
In the decades between the Great Depression and the advent of cable television, when daily newspapers set the conversational agenda in the United States, the…
- New Books in American Studies
Erik Kojola, "Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range" (NYU Press, 2023)
On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in the rural…
- New Books in American Studies
Jean Pfaelzer, "California, a Slave State" (Yale UP, 2023)
California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: Politics, Identity, and the US Supreme Court
Postscript invites authors to react to contemporary political events that engage their scholarship. Since the Supreme Court is wrapping up their term, three…
- New Books in American Studies
Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Gray, "Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan-Vol. 1 Language & Tradition" (FM Press, 2023)
Song & Dance Man is an established classic, available again for Dylan fans and scholars alike on the 50th Anniversary of the original edition. The work in…
- New Books in American Studies
Giulia Pecorella, "The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression" (Routledge, 2021)
Giulia Pecorella's The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression (Routledge, 2021) traces the position of the United States of America on…
- New Books in American Studies
Richard Duncan, "The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)
In The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century, economist and bestselling author Richard Duncan lays out a farsighted strategy to maximize…
- New Books in American Studies
Samuel G. Freedman, "Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights" (Oxford UP, 2023)
From one of the country's most distinguished journalists, a revisionist and riveting look at the American politician whom history has judged a loser, yet who…
- New Books in American Studies
M. Todd Bennett, "Neither Confirm Nor Deny: How the Glomar Mission Shielded the CIA from Transparency" (Columbia UP, 2022)
When the Soviet K-129 submarine sank in the Pacific Ocean in 1968, the CIA saw a possible treasure trove of intelligence information on Soviet military codes…
- New Books in American Studies
Rani-Henrik Andersson and Janne Lahti, "Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America: Rethinking Finnish Experiences in Transnational Spaces" (Helsinki UP, 2022)
Finns tell a story about themselves as a people exempt from European colonialism. Not so, argue the contributors to Finnish Settler Colonialism in North…
- New Books in American Studies
The Ascendance of Social Conservatism in the Public Square
Within political discussions on the Right, social conservatism is on the rise. Why did the Right have a libertarian phase, and why is it leaving it behind?…
- New Books in American Studies
Frank Costigliola, "Kennan: A Life Between Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2023)
The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy--and one of its most complex…
- New Books in American Studies
Rachel E. Walker, "Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Between the 1770s and 1860s, people across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. Physiognomy refers to using facial features…
- New Books in American Studies
The History of the American Shopping Mall and Its Cultures
Writer and design critic Alexandra Lange talks about her book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Shopping Mall (Bloombury, 2023), with Peoples…
- New Books in American Studies
Vicky Johnson-Dahl, "Buffalo in 50 Maps" (Belt, 2023)
The third entry in Belt's urban cartography series, Buffalo in 50 Maps (2023) offers a truly unique view of the City of Good Neighbors, from the East Side to…
- New Books in American Studies
Anna Piela, "Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
In recent years the niqab has emerged as one of the most ubiquitous symbols of everything that is perceived to be wrong with Islam: barbarity, backwardness…
- New Books in American Studies
Lloyd Daniel Barba, "Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Lloyd Daniel Barba's book Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (Oxford UP, 2022) traces the development of Pentecostalism among…
- New Books in American Studies
Susan McCall Perlman, "Contesting France: Intelligence and US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
With the defeat of France in 1940 by the Germans during World War II, its status as a world power was deeply shaken. It wasn't until the liberation by the…
- New Books in American Studies
Allan E. S. Lumba, "Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines" (Duke UP, 2022)
Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Duke UP, 2022) investigates the ways in which racial and class…
- New Books in American Studies
Judith Hicks Stiehm, "Janet Reno: A Life" (UP of Florida, 2023)
In this first full biography of former United States attorney general Janet Reno (1938–2016), Judith Hicks Stiehm describes the independent and unconventional…
- New Books in American Studies
Moon-Ho Jung, "Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State" (U California Press, 2022)
As the American imperial project in the Pacific World grew at the end of the nineteenth century, so too did the American security and intelligence state…
- New Books in American Studies
Nate G. Hilger, "The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis" (MIT Press, 2023)
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its…
- New Books in American Studies
Samuel J. Redman, "The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience" (NYU Press, 2022)
On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames…
- New Books in American Studies
The Rhetoric of Decline
In this episode of High Theory, Jed Esty talks about the Rhetoric of Decline. Declinism names the contradictory political narrative that America will always be…
- New Books in American Studies
Jacqueline Beatty, "In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America" (NYU Press, 2023)
Patriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women’s rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploited these…
- New Books in American Studies
Lee Lowenfish, "Baseball's Endangered Species: Inside the Craft of Scouting by Those Who Lived It" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
Scouting has been called pro baseball’s personalized way of renewing itself from year to year and a pathway to the game’s past. It takes a very special person…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul Metsa and Rick Shefchik, "Blood in the Tracks: The Minnesota Musicians Behind Dylan's Masterpiece" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
The story of the Minneapolis musicians who were unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album. When Bob Dylan…
- New Books in American Studies
Kathryn Olivarius, "Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom" (Harvard UP, 2022)
Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal…
- New Books in American Studies
Patrick J. Charles, "Vote Gun: How Gun Rights Became Politicized in the United States" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Today, gun control is one of the most polarizing topics in American politics. However, before the 1960s, positions on firearms rights did not necessarily map…
- New Books in American Studies
Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, "The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule Within America's Universities" (Duke UP, 2023)
Critics of contemporary US higher education often point to the academy’s “corporatization” as one of its defining maladies. However, in The Autocratic Academy…
- New Books in American Studies
Amanda L. Van Lanen, "The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)
In the nineteenth century, most American farms had a small orchard or at least a few fruit-bearing trees. People grew their own apple trees or purchased apples…
- New Books in American Studies
James Kyung-Jin Lee, "Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority" (Temple UP, 2021)
The pressures Asian Americans feel to be socially and economically exceptional include an unspoken mandate to always be healthy. Nowhere is this more evident…
- New Books in American Studies
Mark R. Warren, "Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline" (Oxford UP, 2021)
The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael T. Friedman, "Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption" (Cornell UP, 2023)
In Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption (Cornell UP, 2023), Michael T. Friedman observes that as cathedrals represented power relations…
- New Books in American Studies
Robin James, "The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence" (UNC Press, 2023)
In 1983, an Ohio radio station called WOXY launched a sonic disruption to both corporate rock and to its conservative home region, programming an omnivorous…
- New Books in American Studies
Erik J. Dahl, "The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough" (Georgetown UP, 2023)
Epidemiologists and national security agencies warned for years about the potential for a deadly pandemic, but in the end global surveillance and warning…
- New Books in American Studies
The History of 19th-Century Quarantine Politics: A Conversation with David S. Barnes
David S. Barnes, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about his book, Lazaretto: How Philadelphia…
- New Books in American Studies
Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, "The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media renders…
- New Books in American Studies
J. T. Roane, "Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place" (NYU Press, 2023)
In Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023), author J. T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities…
- New Books in American Studies
Chris Suh, "The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion" (Oxford UP, 2023)
The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion (Oxford UP, 2023) traces how American ideas about race…
- New Books in American Studies
Lorenzo Costaguta, "Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costaguta…
- 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…