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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
Michael Joseph Roberto, "The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940" (Monthly Review Press, 2018)
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 shocked and appalled a number of people, forcing a critical reevaluation of what was possible, and what we ought to be…
- New Books in American Studies
Eric A. Stanley, "Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable" (Duke UP, 2021)
Content note: This episode contains discussions of suicide, as well as allusions to graphic anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Black violence Advances in LGBTQ rights in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Lisa Biggs, "The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
Over the last five decades, Black women have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the global prison population, thanks to changes in policies that…
New Books in American StudiesThe History of the Black Urban Working-Class in the United States
Joe William Trotter, Jr., Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Founder and Director of the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy…
New Books in American StudiesApocalyptic Politics: What Do Evangelical Voters Want?
Evangelical voters made up a significant portion of Donald Trump’s base in the 2016 presidential election. Their political agenda may not be peace or…
New Books in American StudiesInfrastructure and Inequality
Daniel Armanios, associate professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, talks about his work on infrastructure and inequality with…
- New Books in American Studies
Donna Stein, "Archaeology of Metaphor: The Art of Gilah Yelin Hirsch" (Skira, 2022)
Characterized by a search for meaning, Hirsch’s oeuvre connects psychological, scientific, and philosophical implications of form, bringing together ideas in…
- New Books in American Studies
Eternity Now: Talking about Mysticism with the Apostle to the Gangs of LA
Jesuit Father Greg Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries in East LA, the world’s largest and most successful gang intervention and rehabilitation program…
- New Books in American Studies
Tanya Katerí Hernández, "Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality" (Beacon Press, 2022)
Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press, 2022) will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and…
- New Books in American Studies
Aaron Berman, "America's Arab Nationalists: From the Ottoman Revolution to the Rise of Hitler" (Routledge, 2022)
Aaron Berman's book America's Arab Nationalists: From the Ottoman Revolution to the Rise of Hitler (Routledge, 2022) focuses in on the relationship between…
- New Books in American Studies
Sabrina Mittermeier, "Fan Phenomena: Disney" (Intellect Books, 2023)
Sabrina Mittermeier's edited volume Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect Books, 2023) analyzes the fandom of Disney brands across a variety of media including…
New Books in American StudiesChallenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America
Andrew Jewett is the author of Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (2020) and Science, Democracy, and the American…
- New Books in American Studies
Seeing Truth in the Speculative: A Conversation with Dexter Gabriel
Historian and author Dexter Gabriel talks about his relationship to truth and memory in his fiction and non-fiction writing. Come for his thoughts on what…
- New Books in American Studies
Simon Brodbeck, "Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata" (Cardiff UP, 2022)
Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata reflects on the theology of time in this early Hindu text and poses the key question: why does the…
- New Books in American Studies
The Climate Change Scientist: A Conversation with Dr. Shuang-Yu Wu
What is the difference between global warming and climate change? This episode explores: What led Dr. Wu into STEM, and to the study of climate change. Why the…
- New Books in American Studies
Sarah Imhoff, "The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist" (Duke UP, 2022)
In The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke UP, 2022), Sarah Imhoff tells the story of an individual full of contradictions. Jessie Sampter…
- New Books in American Studies
Vincent Phillip Muñoz, "Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
What is religious liberty, anyway? What are its origins? What are religious exemptions? What would a jurisprudence of religious liberty based on the idea of…
New Books in American StudiesDemeritocracy: Should We Still Believe in Meritocracy?
Total faith in meritocracy leads to the dangerous belief that all social winners and losers are wholly deserving. Instead, we need an economy of grace. Guests…
- New Books in American Studies
Matthew Smith, "The First Resort: The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Social psychiatry was a mid-twentieth-century approach to mental health that stressed the prevention of mental illness rather than its treatment. Its…
New Books in American StudiesPoverty, Race, and Rural Sanitation
Catherine Coleman Flowers, activist, author, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and MacArthur “genius prize” winner, talks…
New Books in American StudiesThe History of Household Technology from Open Hearth to the Microwave
Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan talks about her book, More Work for Mother, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. The book examines the history of how Americans…
New Books in American Studies21st Century Citizenship: What Does It Mean to be a Citizen in America?
What does it mean to be a citizen in America in 2017? Guests Danielle Allen, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and University Professor at…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathan W. White, "To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln" (UNC Press, 2021)
Many African Americans of the Civil War era felt a personal connection to Abraham Lincoln. For the first time in their lives, an occupant of the White House…
- New Books in American Studies
Lior Lehrs, "Unofficial Peace Diplomacy: Private Peace Entrepreneurs in Conflict Resolution Processes" (Manchester UP, 2022)
Unofficial Peace Diplomacy: Private Peace Entrepreneurs in Conflict Resolution Processes (Manchester University Press, 2022) by Dr. Lior Lehrs analyses the…
- New Books in American Studies
Neoliberalism and Higher Education
This episode is a roundtable discussion on the influence of the neoliberal project on higher education. Our guests are Professor Emeritus Frank Fear from…
- New Books in American Studies
Albert Glinsky, "Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2022)
The Moog synthesizer ‘bent the course of music forever’ Rolling Stone declared. Bob Moog, the man who did that bending, was a lovable geek with Einstein hair…
- New Books in American Studies
Jason Isralowitz, "Nothing to Fear: Alfred Hitchcock and the Wrong Men" (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2023)
In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock focused his lens on an issue that cuts to the heart of our criminal justice system: the risk of wrongful conviction. The result was…
- New Books in American Studies
Do We Live in a Christian Country?
I asked medieval historian Rachel Fulton Brown if we ought to still think of our nation (or any Western nation) as “a Christian country” in the twenty-first…
- New Books in American Studies
Ellen Cassedy, "Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie" (Chicago Review Press, 2022)
Today I talked to Ellen Cassedy about her new book Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie (Chicago Review Press, 2022). Many…
- New Books in American Studies
Roger A Sneed, "The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought" (Ohio State UP, 2021)
In The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought (Ohio State UP, 2021), Professor Roger Sneed illuminates the interplay of Black…
New Books in American StudiesWhite Balance: How Do Race and Class Intersect?
Understanding race in America requires understanding its relationship to class. Guests Joshua Bennett, writer and poet Julian Bourg, Professor of History at…
- New Books in American Studies
On W. H. Auden
In 1983, ten years after W. H. Auden’s death, the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a series of readings and discussions of his work. In this…
- New Books in American Studies
Why Did 48,000 UC Workers Go on Strike? A Conversation with Dr. Trevor Griffey
Why did thousands of workers at prestigious universities in the United States go on strike in 2022? How did we get to this historic moment, and is it really…
New Books in American StudiesGeneration Why?: Do We Need "Generations?"
Who gets to define generational cohorts and do they obscure more than illuminate? Guests Neil Howe, author of Generations Tony Tulathimutte, author of Why…
- New Books in American Studies
Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, "Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has always been globally situated, argues Montana State history professor Amanda Hendrix-Komoto in Imperial…
New Books in American StudiesAssessing Affirmative Action: A Conversation with Jason Riley
With the Supreme Court poised to potentially outlaw race-conscious admissions, Affirmative Action may soon be on the chopping block. What will be the legacy of…
- New Books in American Studies
Dannelle Gutarra Cordero, "She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul J. Gutacker, "The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone."…
New Books in American StudiesSeriously Funny: Politics and Comedy
What happens when politics becomes comedy and the jester becomes the king? Guests Emily Nussbaum, television critic for The New Yorker Avi Steinberg, writer…
New Books in American StudiesBonus Episode: "Nomadland"
A special bonus episode in honor of the 93rd Academy Awards on April 25, 2021! One of the most-nominated films at this year's Oscars is "Nomadland," adapted…
- New Books in American Studies
Felicity M. Turner, "Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America" (UNC Press, 2022)
Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Felicity M. Turner's Proving Pregnancy: Gender…
- New Books in American Studies
Mairead Sullivan, "Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger Between Feminist and Queer" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
The loss of lesbian spaces, as well as ideas of the lesbian as anachronistic, has called into question the place of lesbian identity within our current…
- New Books in American Studies
Adam M. Silver, "Partisanship and Polarization: American Party Platforms, 1840-1896" (Lexington Books, 2022)
This volume explores the development of political parties in nineteenth-century United States of America through an extensive analysis of the official…
- New Books in American Studies
Tommie Shelby, "The Idea of Prison Abolition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral…
- New Books in American Studies
Abdul Alkalimat, "The Future of Black Studies" (Pluto Press, 2022)
The marginalisation of Black voices from the academy is a problem in the Western world. But Black Studies, where it exists, is a powerful, boundary-pushing…
- New Books in American Studies
"Gone with the Wind" Revisited
In this week’s episode from the Institute’s Vault, Molly Haskell talks about her 2009 book, Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited, published by Yale…
- New Books in American Studies
Jed Rasula, "What the Thunder Said: How 'The Waste Land' Made Poetry Modern" (Princeton UP, 2022)
When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. "But," as Jed Rasula…
- New Books in American Studies
Jefferson Cowie, "Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power" (Basic Books, 2022)
"History recalls Wallace’s inaugural address as a set piece in the larger drama of defending Southern segregation, which it was. But the speech was about…
- New Books in American Studies
Mary M. Burke, "Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
In this interview, she discusses her book, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (Oxford UP, 2023), which inserts successive Irish-American…
- New Books in American Studies
Anatoly Liberman, "Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Three centuries of English idioms—their unusual origins and unexpected interpretations. To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or by crook…
- New Books in American Studies
Eve Golden, "Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn't Help It" (UP of Kentucky, 2021)
Jayne Mansfield (1933-1967) was driven not just to be an actress but to be a star. One of the most influential sex symbols of her time, she was known for her…
- New Books in American Studies
Kevin R. C. Gutzman, "The Jeffersonians: The Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)
Kevin R. C. Gutzman's The Jeffersonians: The Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe (St. Martin's Press, 2022) marks the first chronicle of…
- New Books in American Studies
Lucy Fraser, "The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of "The Little Mermaid"" (Wayne State UP, 2017)
“The Little Mermaid” has become popular around the world since the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen published it almost two centuries ago. Lucy Fraser’s…
- New Books in American Studies
Naa Oyo A. Kwate, "White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community. Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black…
- New Books in American Studies
Stuart Klawans, "Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges" (Columbia UP, 2023)
In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948--The Great…
- New Books in American Studies
The Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States: Part 3 of 3
Part 3 of 3. In the spring of 1942, James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, gave a series of lectures in New York on the first decade of the…
- New Books in American Studies
The Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States: Part 2 of 3
Part 2 of 3. In the spring of 1942, James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, gave a series of lectures in New York on the first decade of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Edward E. Curtis IV, "Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest" (NYU Press, 2022)
The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying…
- New Books in American Studies
Lauren N. Haumesser, "The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856-1861" (UNC Press, 2022)
Lauren N. Haumesser's The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856-1861 (UNC Press, 2022) offers a fresh examination of…
New Books in American StudiesNeurasthenia
In this episode of High Theory, Kim talks with Saronik about neurasthenia. A disease that no longer exists, neurasthenia was a nineteenth century American…