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
The Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States: Part 1 of 3
Part 1 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
Finis Dunaway. "Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2021)
In far northeastern Alaska lies one of the most remarkable, and contested, places in North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This coastal arctic…
- New Books in American Studies
The Future of Global Trade: A Discussion with Shannon K. O'Neil
Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less…
- New Books in American Studies
Brenden W. Rensink, "The North American West in the Twenty-First Century" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what…
- New Books in American Studies
Craig Seymour, "Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross" (2017)
On April 16, 2003, Luther Vandross suffered a near-fatal stroke, and the world held its breath. Inside sources said he might never sing again. He was too weak…
- New Books in American Studies
Jacob Kramer, "The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance" (Temple UP, 2015)
In The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance (Temple University Press, 2015)…
- New Books in American Studies
Lyzette Wanzer, "Trauma, Tresses, and Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives" (Chicago Review Press, 2022)
Black women continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From grammar and high schools to corporate boardrooms and military…
- New Books in American Studies
Matthew F. Delmont, "Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad" (Viking, 2022)
Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units…
- New Books in American Studies
Quentin Bruneau, "States and the Masters of Capital: Sovereign Lending, Old and New" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Today, states' ability to borrow private capital depends on stringent evaluations of their creditworthiness. While many presume that this has long been the…
- New Books in American Studies
Sonya Y. Ramsey, "Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership" (UP of Florida, 2022)
Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership (UP of Florida, 2022) examines a life of remarkable achievements and…
- New Books in American Studies
J. V. Fesko, "The Spirit of the Age: The 19th-Century Debate Over the Holy Spirit and the Westminster Confession" (Reformation Heritage, 2017)
In 1903, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America revised the Westminster Confession of Faith because they thought it was deficient regarding…
- New Books in American Studies
Kathleen Sprows Cummings, "A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American" (UNC Press, 2019
In A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Kathleen Sprows Cummings asks…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Weeks, "Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
In 1870 several hundred settlers arrived at a patch of land at the confluence of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre Rivers in Colorado Territory. Their…
- New Books in American Studies
Neil Baldwin, "Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern" (Knopf, 2022)
Time magazine called her "the Dancer of the Century." Her technique, used by dance companies throughout the world, became the first long-lasting alternative to…
- New Books in American Studies
Shelley Fraser Mickle, "Borrowing Life: How Scientists, Surgeons, and a War Hero Made the First Successful Organ Transplant a Reality" (Imagine, 2020)
Performed at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1954, the first successful kidney transplant was the culmination of years of grit, compassion, and the…
- New Books in American Studies
Gregory Smithsimon, "Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism" (NYU Press, 2022)
Half of Black Americans who live in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas are now living in suburbs, not cities. In Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class…
- New Books in American Studies
Sean Metzger, "The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization" (Indiana UP, 2020)
In The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020), Sean Metzger proposes a new analytical frame…
- New Books in American Studies
Alison L. Gash and Daniel J. Tichenor, "Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Political Scientists Alison Gash and Dan Tichenor have a new book, Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency (Oxford…
- New Books in American Studies
Karen Levy, "Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have long…
- New Books in American Studies
Samuel J. Redman, "Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums" (Harvard UP, 2022)
In Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Harvard University Press, 2022 for paperback edition), Samuel J. Redman, Associate…
- New Books in American Studies
Catherine Bateson, "Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood" (Louisiana UP, 2022)
Dr Catherine Bateson is Associate Lecturer of American History at the University of Kent. She researches and writes about the role of song in the American…
- New Books in American Studies
Elizabeth N. Ellis. "The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) tackles questions of Native power past and present and…
- New Books in American Studies
Harold Holzer, "The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media" (Dutton, 2020)
In The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media--from the Founding Fathers to Fake News (Dutton, 2020), Harold Holzer…
- New Books in American Studies
Yasmine Ali, "Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America" (Citadel Press, 2023)
The first book to examine the rarely-acknowledged Waverly Train Disaster of 1978 - the catastrophic accident that changed America forever and led to the…
- New Books in American Studies
William Inboden, "The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink" (Dutton, 2022)
With decades of hindsight, the peaceful end of the Cold War seems a foregone conclusion. But in the early 1980s, most experts believed the Soviet Union was…
- New Books in American Studies
What Went Wrong in the 1970s in the USA?: A Discussion with Bill McKibben
In this episode of How To Be Wrong we talk with author, educator, and environmentalist Bill McKibben, founder of Third Act, an organization focused on bringing…
- New Books in American Studies
Barbara Katz Rothman, "The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID Pandemic" (Stanford UP, 2021)
We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman…
- New Books in American Studies
Brian Daldorph, "Words Is a Powerful Thing: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail" (UP of Kansas, 2021)
Brian Daldorph first entered the Douglas County Jail classroom in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach a writing class on Christmas Eve 2001. His last class at the jail…
- New Books in American Studies
Natasha Lasky, "Britney Spears's Blackout" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Britney Spears barely survived 2007. She divorced her husband, lost custody of her kids, went to rehab, shaved her head and assaulted a paparazzo. In the midst…
- New Books in American Studies
Thomas Beller, "Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball" (Duke UP, 2022)
For players, coaches, writers, and fans, basketball is a science and an art, a religious sacrament, a source of entertainment, and a way of interacting with…
- New Books in American Studies
Daniel Immerwahr, "The Galactic Vietnam: Technology, Modernization, and Empire in George Lucas’s Star Wars" (2022)
In this episode I got to chat about two of my favorite things: the history of imperialism and Star Wars with Daniel Immerwahr, Professor of History at…
- New Books in American Studies
Jake S. Friedman, "The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation's Golden Age" (Chicago Review Press, 2022)
Soon after the birth of Mickey Mouse, one animator raised the Disney Studio far beyond Walt’s expectations. That animator also led a union war that almost…
- New Books in American Studies
Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic…
- New Books in American Studies
Dan Bouk, "Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them" (MCD, 2022)
Dan Bouk is a writer, professor, and cultural historian of quantification, or as Bouk puts it, the history all fascinating things “shrouded in the cloak of…
- New Books in American Studies
Norm Cohen et al., "An American Singing Heritage: Songs from the British-Irish-American Oral Tradition as Recorded in the Early Twentieth Century" (A-R Editions, 2021)
The Music of the United States of America Series of musical editions is a monumental undertaking funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities with…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert L. Hetzel, "The Federal Reserve: A New History" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
In The Federal Reserve: A New History (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Robert Hetzel draws on a 43-year career as an economist in the central bank to trace…
- New Books in American Studies
Timothy Shenk, "Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy" (FSG, 2022)
These days it seems that nobody is satisfied with American democracy. Critics across the ideological spectrum warn that the country is heading toward…
- New Books in American Studies
Barbara E. Mattick, "Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South" (Catholic U of America Press
Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South (Catholic University of America Press, 2022) discusses the work of the Sisters of…
- New Books in American Studies
Ted Conover, "Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge" (Knopf, 2022)
Today I talked to Ted Conover, author of Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge (Knopf, 2022) In May 2017, Conover went to Colorado to explore…
- New Books in American Studies
Virginia L. Summey, "The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism within the Courts" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
Virginia L. Summey's book The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism within the Courts (U Georgia Press, 2022) explores the life and contributions of…
- New Books in American Studies
Barbara Harris Combs, "Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society (U Georgia Press, 2022) asserts that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to be; it is…
- New Books in American Studies
Eyal Press, "Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America" (Picador, 2022)
In the episode of Conversations from the Institute, we hear from Eyal Press, who is the author of Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict…
- New Books in American Studies
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, "Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)
While the story of women’s liberation has often been framed by the growing acceptance of pants over the twentieth century, the most important and influential…
New Books in American StudiesOn James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time"
The writer and activist James Baldwin grew up in a majority white America that saw white American lives as standard and universal, and Black American lives as…
- New Books in American Studies
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, "Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt" (Harvard UP, 2021)
It didn't always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelor's degree. In Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations…
- New Books in American Studies
John Delury, "Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Dr. John Delury reconstructs the…
- New Books in American Studies
Madeline Lane-McKinley, "Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times" (Common Notions, 2022)
Comedy is so frequently the topic of cultural dialogue, but it is rarely taken seriously as an object of study. Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in…
- New Books in American Studies
Char Miller, "West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement" (Maverick Books, 2022)
On September 9, 1921, a tropical storm raged above San Antonio, Texas. The rain that night flooded the city's many waterways, distributing unequal destruction…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022)
The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and developing…
New Books in American StudiesOn John Rawl's "A Theory of Justice"
How do you create a fair society? Who deserves to rule? What rights do citizens have? How are those rights protected? What does it mean to act morally within…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephanie Azzarone, "Heaven on the Hudson: Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park" (Fordham UP, 2022)
On the west side of Manhattan, Riverside Park winds between the banks of the Hudson River and the elegant housing of Riverside Drive. In her new book Heaven on…
- New Books in American Studies
Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export…
- New Books in American Studies
Sarah Abel, "Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome" (UNC Press, 2021)
Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the public to…
- New Books in American Studies
William Marling, "Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left" (NYU Press, 2022)
Ammon Hennacy was arrested over thirty times for opposing US entry in World War 1. Later, when he refused to pay taxes that support war, he lost his wife and…
- New Books in American Studies
Shana Kushner Gadarian et al., "Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID" (Princeton UP, 2022)
None of us really want to relive our first encounters with COVID-19 and the disruptions to our lives, to say nothing of the anxiety and concern about the…
- New Books in American Studies
Gregory Nobles, "The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
The life of Betsey Stockton (ca. 1798–1865) is a remarkable story of a Black woman’s journey from slavery to emancipation, from antebellum New Jersey to the…
- New Books in American Studies
Jasmine Nichole Cobb, "New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair" (Duke UP, 2022)
From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair…
- New Books in American Studies
Jennifer Mittelstadt and Mark R. Wilson, "The Military and the Market" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
Throughout its history, the U.S. military has worked in close connection to market-based institutions and structures. It has run systems of free and unfree…
- New Books in American Studies
Kate Christine Moore Koppy, "Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them" (Lexington, 2021)
In the twenty-first century, American culture is experiencing a profound shift toward pluralism and secularization. In Fairy Tales in Contemporary American…
- New Books in American Studies
Tara T. Green, "Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer…