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
Christopher Willoughby, "Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools" (UNC Press, 2022)
Medical science in antebellum America was organized around a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be viable…
- New Books in American Studies
Joseph McBride, "Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge" (Columbia UP, 2021)
The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films―including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment―Billy Wilder…
- New Books in American Studies
Ray Scott, "The NBA in Black and White: The Memoir of a Trailblazing NBA Player and Coach" (Seven Stories Press, 2022)
“There’s a basic insecurity with Black guys my size,” Scott writes. “We can’t hide and everybody turns to stare when we walk down the street. … Whites believe…
- New Books in American Studies
Anna Arabindan-Kesson, "Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World" (Duke UP, 2021)
In Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke UP, 2021), Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the…
- New Books in American Studies
Burt Kearns, "Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood's Real-Life Tough Guy" (UP of Kentucky, 2022)
In his latest book, Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood's Real-Life Tough Guy (The University of Kentucky Press, 2022) Burt Kearns explores the life of actor Lawrence…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeanne Theoharis, "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks" (Beacon Press, 2015)
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Beacon Press, 2015) is the definitive political biography of Rosa Parks and the basis for a 2022 documentary…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael A. Verney, "A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Dr. Michael A. Verney…
- New Books in American Studies
Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back" (Beacon Press, 2022)
Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where…
- New Books in American Studies
Rhonda F. Levine, "When Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City" (Routledge, 2019)
In When Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City (Routledge, 2019), Rhonda Levine provides a 15-year ethnography that follows the…
- New Books in American Studies
Amy Gajda, "Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy" (Viking, 2022)
Should everyone have privacy in their personal lives? Can privacy exist in a public place? Is there a right to be left alone, even in the United States? The…
- New Books in American Studies
Bridget Kies and Megan Connor, "Fandom, the Next Generation" (U Iowa Press, 2022)
In Fandom, the Next Generation (University of Iowa Press, 2022), Bridget Kies and Megan Connor have edited the first collection to offer a close study of fan…
- New Books in American Studies
Caroline Grego, "Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South" (UNC Press, 2022)
On an August night in 1893, the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history struck the Lowcountry, killing thousands—almost all African American. But the…
- New Books in American Studies
Lyndsie Bourgon, "Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)
There's a strong chance that chair you are sitting on was made from stolen lumber. In Tree Thieves: Crime And Survival In North America's Woods (Little, Brown…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Genovese, "The Modern Presidency: Six Debates That Define the Institution" (Columbia UP, 2022)
The Modern Presidency: Sex Debates That Define the Institution (Columbia University Press, 2022) is a concisely written book that helps makes sense of the most…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul Barba, "Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Most of what people think they know about Texas history is wrong, argues Bucknell University history professor Paul Barba in Country of the Cursed and the…
- New Books in American Studies
Antonio T. Bly, "Escaping Slavery: A Documentary History of Native American Runaways in British North America" (Lexington Books, 2022)
Antonio T. Bly had collected and edited hundreds of advertisements offering a reward for enslaved Native Americans who run away from their masters. Escaping…
- New Books in American Studies
Elliott H. Powell, "Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
From Beyoncé's South Asian music-inspired Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane's use of Indian song structures and…
- New Books in American Studies
Jon Lewis, "The Godfather, Part II" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather, Part II" (1974) is a magisterial cinematic work, a gorgeous, stylized, auteur epic, and one of the few sequels judged by…
- New Books in American Studies
Psyche A. Williams-Forson, "Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America" (UNC Press, 2022)
In Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (UNC Press, 2022), Psyche A. Williams-Forson offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert P. Crease with Peter D. Bond, "The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory" (MIT Press, 2022)
In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a…
- New Books in American Studies
Bradley Morgan, "U2's the Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America" (Backbeat Books, 2021)
In U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat, 2021) Bradley Morgan examines U2's iconic album and their critique of America as a symbol…
- New Books in American Studies
Ethnonationalism since 1973: A Discussion with Quinn Slobodian
What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth turn for answers to Quinn…
- New Books in American Studies
Riché Richardson, "Emancipation's Daughters: Re-Imagining Black Femininity and the National Body" (Duke UP, 2020)
In Emancipation's Daughters: Re-Imagining Black Femininity and the National Body (Duke UP, 2020), Riché Richardson examines iconic black women leaders who have…
- New Books in American Studies
Riché Richardson, "Emancipation's Daughters: Re-Imagining Black Femininity and the National Body" (Duke UP, 2020)
In Emancipation's Daughters: Re-Imagining Black Femininity and the National Body (Duke UP, 2020), Riché Richardson examines iconic black women leaders who have…
- New Books in American Studies
Steve Kemper, "Our Man In Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor" (Mariner Books, 2022)
A gripping, behind-the-scenes account of the personalities and contending forces in Tokyo during the volatile decade that led to World War II, as seen through…
- New Books in American Studies
Adam Laats, "Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Who are America's creationists? What do they want? Why do they think Jesus rode around on a dinosaur? In Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching…
- New Books in American Studies
Heart of All: Oral Histories of Oglala Lakota People on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
Working with a group of over fifty students at the Little Wound School in Kyle, South Dakota, Mark Hetzel collected countless hours of oral history interviews…
- New Books in American Studies
Science Against the People: Anti-Capitalist Science
It’s difficult to criticise science from the left. Right-wingers attack science and liberals defend it. Science for the People is a radical movement of…
- New Books in American Studies
Alan Shuback, "Hollywood at the Races: Film's Love Affair with the Turf" (UP of Kentucky, 2019)
Today I talked to Alan Shuback about his book Hollywood at the Races: Film's Love Affair with the Turf (UP of Kentucky, 2019) A love of the slapstick film duo…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeffrey Bellin, "Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective…
- New Books in American Studies
Megan Asaka, "Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City" (U Washington Press, 2022)
Seattle has a reputation as a city of Progressive values, but as Megan Asaka argues in Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a…
- New Books in American Studies
Naomi A. Moland, "Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism?: Children's Television and Globalized Multicultural Education" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Sesame Street has taught generations of Americans their letters and numbers, and also how to better understand and get along with people of different races…
- New Books in American Studies
Ryan Poll, "Aquaman and the War Against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
In Aquaman and the War against Oceans (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), Ryan Poll explores ways the New 52 reimagining of Aquaman--a massive overhaul and…
- New Books in American Studies
Therí Alyce Pickens, "Black Madness :: Mad Blackness" (Duke UP, 2019)
In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke UP, 2019), Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common…
- New Books in American Studies
Transforming the Urban University: Northeastern University, 1996-2006
It is rare to see colleges and universities achieve major and rapid changes in their national rankings. Richard Freeland, the president emeritus of…
- New Books in American Studies
Bruce W. Dearstyne, "The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era" (SUNY Press, 2022)
During the early twentieth century New York State, with its settlement houses, muckraking journalists, labor unions and national political leaders like…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeremy Bangs, "New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration" (Brill, 2019)
Jeremy Duperteis Bangs, a leading expert in the history of the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony, overturns stereotypes with exciting new analyses of colonial…
- New Books in American Studies
Kathryn Gin Lum, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History" (Harvard UP, 2022)
In Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022), Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the “heathen” has been maintained…
- New Books in American Studies
Rachael Hanel, "Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman's Life from Small-Town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
How could an artist and former social worker from small-town Minnesota become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Camilla Hall was…
- New Books in American Studies
Sofi Thanhauser, "Worn: A People's History of Clothing" (Vintage, 2022)
Worn: A People's History of Clothing (Vintage, 2022) by Sofi Thanhauser explores linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, wool: through the stories of these five…
- New Books in American Studies
Bradley Onishi, "Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--And What Comes Next" (Broadleaf Books, 2023)
The insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not a blip or an aberration. It was the logical outcome of years of a White evangelical subculture's…
- New Books in American Studies
David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)
They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their…
- New Books in American Studies
Hua Hsu, "Stay True: A Memoir" (Doubleday, 2022)
Stay True (Doubleday: 2022), the new memoir from Hua Hsu, is a coming-of-age story about the writer’s time in the University of California in Berkeley, where…
- New Books in American Studies
Muggsy Bogues and Jake Uitti, "Muggsy: My Life from a Kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball" (Triumph, 2022)
Growing up, Muggsy Bogues was always told he should do something else, anything besides basketball. He never acknowledged his many doubters except to prove…
- New Books in American Studies
Sarah E. Wagner, "What Remains: Bringing America's Missing Home from the Vietnam War" (Harvard UP, 2019)
For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans— and more than 300,000 Vietnamese—involved in the conflict are still unaccounted…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephen G. Rabe, "The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy: A Story of Resistance, Courage, and Solidarity in a French Village" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
The fateful days and weeks surrounding 6 June 1944 have been extensively documented in histories of the Second World War, but less attention has been paid to…
- New Books in American Studies
Where Does Research Really Begin?
Today’s book is: Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (U Chicago Press, 2022) by Thomas S. Mullaney and…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew Fiss, "Performing Math: A History of Communication and Anxiety in the American Mathematics Classroom" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
Performing Math: A History of Communication and Anxiety in the American Mathematics Classroom (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by Dr. Andrew Fiss tells the…
- New Books in American Studies
Katie Hickman, "Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West" (Spiegel & Grau, 2022)
Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom towns; wives and mothers traveling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies…
- New Books in American Studies
Nancy Woloch, "The Insider: A Life of Virginia C. Gildersleeve" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Virginia C. Gildersleeve was the most influential dean of Barnard College, which she led from 1911 to 1947. An organizer of the Seven College Conference, or…
- New Books in American Studies
Natasha Lance Rogoff, "Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the timing appeared perfect to bring Sesame Street to millions of children living in the former…
New Books in American StudiesOn Toni Morrison's "Beloved"
In 1987, Toni Morrison published her fourth novel, Beloved, based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery with her child. Garner and her…
- New Books in American Studies
Richard Petts, "Father Involvement and Gender Equality in the United States: Contemporary Norms and Barriers" (Routledge, 2022)
Richard Petts' Father Involvement and Gender Equality in the United States: Contemporary Norms and Barriers (Routledge, 2022) focuses on issues of family…
- New Books in American Studies
Todd Meyers, "All That Was Not Her" (Duke UP, 2022)
While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a…
- New Books in American Studies
Veronica Kirin, "Stories of Elders: What the Greatest Generation Knows about Technology that You Don't" (2018)
America’s Greatest Generation (born before 1945) witnessed incredible changes in technology and social progress. From simple improvements in entertainment to…
- New Books in American Studies
Bruce Davis, "The Academy and the Award: The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" (Brandeis UP, 2022)
Written by the former executive director of the Academy, this is the first behind-the-scenes history of the organization behind the Academy Awards. For all the…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher Howard, "Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Societies are often judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members: the poor and near poor. In the United States, this responsibility belongs not only…
- 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)
The census isn't just a data-collection process; it's a ritual, and a tool, of American democracy. Behind every neat grid of numbers is a collage of messy…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew S. Rosenberg, "Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration" (Princeton UP, 2022)
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restriction on…
- New Books in American Studies
Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach, "Dream Books and Gamblers: Black Women's Work in Chicago's Policy Game" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
Ubiquitous illegal lotteries known as policy flourished in Chicago's Black community during the overlapping waves of the Great Migration. Policy "queens" owned…