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
Homes of the Past
In 1940s New York, immigrant Jewish scholars sought to build a museum to commemorate their lost worlds and people. Among the Jews who arrived in the United…
- New Books in American Studies
Annette Gordon-Reed ed., "Jefferson on Race: A Reader" (Princeton UP, 2026)
From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson’s…
- New Books in American Studies
Chloe Chapin, "Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men" (Oxford UP, 2026)
How did black suits become so ubiquitous? Why has men's business clothing been so plain for the last 250 years? How did a style adopted by the Founding Fathers…
- New Books in American Studies
Craig Fehrman, "This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark" (Simon & Schuster, 2026)
In 1806, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark return from their journey—having led the Corps of Discovery across eight thousand miles of rapids, mountains…
- New Books in American Studies
Joanna Dee Das, "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America (University of Chicago Press, 2025) examines the history of Branson, Missouri’s…
- New Books in American Studies
Julie J. Park, "Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era" (Harvard Education Press, 2026)
In Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era (Harvard Education Press, 2026), Julie J. Park offers deft analysis of the changes to…
- New Books in American Studies
Ashley Rose Young, "Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans" (Oxford UP, 2025)
For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echoing out…
- New Books in American Studies
Charlie Qiuli Xue and Arwen Yingting Chen, "American-Designed Shopping Malls in China" (Hong Kong UP, 2026)
China’s remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world’s second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumption capacity…
- New Books in American Studies
Robin R. Means Coleman and Novotny Lawrence eds., "The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Since the release of Jordan Peele's Academy Award-winning horror hit Get Out (2017), interest in Black horror films has erupted. This renewed intrigue in…
- New Books in American Studies
Chunmei Du, "Everyday Occupation: American Soldiers and Chinese Civilians in the Aftermath of World War II" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Chunmei Du is an Associate Professor of History at Lingnan University. Her work focuses on the social and cultural history of modern China, specifically…
- New Books in American Studies
Timothy Mason Roberts, "After Barbary: Algeria's Roles in the French and American Empires" (Cornell UP, 2025)
After Barbary: Algeria's Roles in the French and American Empires (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Timothy Mason Roberts explores the connection between…
- New Books in American Studies
Paige Towers, "What They Stole: A Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption" (U Iowa Press, 2026)
In 1955, following the devastation of the Korean War, Bertha and Harry Holt made headlines for adopting eight Korean children. Driven by evangelical…
- New Books in American Studies
The Instigators
Black women have always been the most relentless instigators for change—building a democracy for all. In The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrea Zarafshon Moore, "Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory" (Fordham UP, 2025)
It is a compulsion of the human race to find a way to memorialize those we have lost and why we have lost them, from a gravestone of a loved one to war…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher S. Celenza, "The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
A rich and immersive reinterpretation of the history of Western thought, The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late Antiquity…
- New Books in American Studies
Jason S. Spicer, "Co-Operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American?" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Co-operative enterprises, which are democratically owned and governed by their workers, customers, or suppliers, have long captured the imagination of…
- New Books in American Studies
Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America
In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders debated how to preserve and produce Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and…
- New Books in American Studies
James O'Neil Spady, "Take Freedom: Recovering the Fugitive History of the Denmark Vesey Affair" (UNC Press, 2026)
In 1822, Black Charlestonians attempted to overthrow slavery. They were exposed before they could strike, and many were tried and executed in what has come to…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeffrey Whyte, "The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Jeffrey Whyte's book The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War (Oxford UP, 2023) explores the…
- New Books in American Studies
Thomas Xavier Sarmiento, "The Heartland of US Empire: Race, Region, and the Queer Filipinx Midwest" (Temple UP, 2026)
Published by Temple University Press in 2026, The Heartland of US Empire: Race, Region, and the Queer Filipinx Midwest examines Filipinx cultural…
- New Books in American Studies
Timothy K. August, "The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America" (Temple UP, 2020)
In The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America (Temple University Press, 2021), Timothy K. August centers Southeast Asian American writers and…
- New Books in American Studies
Shane Breaux, "Reverberations of Culture: Racialized Performance in Early Twentieth-Century Musical Variety by Just a Buncha Clowns" (Routledge, 2026)
Reverberations of Culture: Racialized Performance in Early Twentieth-Century Musical Variety by Just a Buncha Clowns (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Shane Breaux…
- New Books in American Studies
Stuart Schrader, "Blue Power: How Police Organized to Serve and Protect Themselves" (Basic Books, 2026)
In America today, police enjoy unmatched power. On the streets, officers employ violence at their own discretion. Behind closed doors, they are even more…
- New Books in American Studies
Ellen Levitt, "Former Synagogues of the United States: Looking at Buildings That Once Housed Synagogues, Schools, and Other Jewish Institutions" (Resource Publications, 2026)
Throughout the United States there are buildings that had been home to Jewish houses of worship, schools, and other institutions. What has happened to these…
- New Books in American Studies
Mary T. Freeman, "Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
Mary Freeman, associate professor of history at the University of Maine, joins Michael Stauch to discuss her new book Abolitionists and the Politics of…
- New Books in American Studies
Anna O. Law, "Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Since the late nineteenth century, the US federal government has enjoyed exclusive authority to decide whether someone has the ability to enter and stay in US…
- New Books in American Studies
Kori Schake, "The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States" (Wiley, 2025)
One of the biggest worries of the US Constitution's Framers was the danger of a standing army to a democracy, so they designed a system to ensure civilian…
- New Books in American Studies
Evelyn Iritani, "Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II" (FSG, 2026)
In October 1943, the Gripsholm—a Swedish ocean liner—and the Teia Maru—a Japanese troop ship—sat in Mormugao, a port in Portuguese India. There, the two ships…
- New Books in American Studies
Nathan K. Finney, "Orchestrating Power: The American Associational State in the First World War" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Orchestrating Power: The American Associational State in the First World War (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores how the expansion of the American state…
- New Books in American Studies
Debating the Constitution: On Originalism's Most Pressing Quarrels with Sherif Girgis
Here in Episode 8 of Season 5, I interview Professor Sherif Girgis. A graduate of Princeton University, the University of Oxford, and Yale Law School, Girgis…
- New Books in American Studies
George Baylon Radics, "Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the 'Lazy Native' and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines" (U Georgia Press, 2026)
In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist notions…
- New Books in American Studies
Rachel Deblinger, "Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust" (Indiana UP, 2025)
How did American Jews come to learn about the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the war? What kinds of images and representations of Holocaust survivors…
- New Books in American Studies
Thomas Doherty, "How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America" (Columbia UP, 2026)
By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from nearly forty years of motion pictures, allowing them to create a new kind of film stitched…
- New Books in American Studies
Steven W. Thrasher, "The Overseer Class: A Manifesto" (Amistad, 2026)
“The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason to, and God knows we didn't. ‘If you must call a cop,’ we said in those days…
- New Books in American Studies
Tom Meschery, "The Mad Manchurian: From the Internment Camps of Tokyo to the Hardwood Courts of the NBA" (Coffeetown Press, 2025)
I was born in Harbin, Manchuria, (later China), in 1938. At the outbreak of the Second World War my mother, sister and I, along with other non-combatants of…
- New Books in American Studies
David Eisler, "Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present" (U Iowa Press, 2022)
In Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present (U Iowa Press, 2022) David Eisler looks at how American literary fiction about war has…
- New Books in American Studies
Heather Ann Thompson, "Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage" (Pantheon, 2026)
Historian Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026) recounts the…
- New Books in American Studies
Justin Randolph, "Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside (UNC Press, 2026)
Justin Randolph, assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, joins Michael Stauch to discuss Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim…
- New Books in American Studies
Under the Tenement Rooftops: Immigrant and Migrant Families in New York
The Tenement Museum preserves and interprets the personal stories of residents of two buildings on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Ninety-seven Orchard…
- New Books in American Studies
Ayşehan Jülide Etem, "Film Diplomacy: A Media History of Turkey-US Relations" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Film Diplomacy: A Media History of Turkey-US Relations (Columbia UP, 2026) offers a powerful new account of how film shaped international relations and…
- New Books in American Studies
Gordon Simmons, "Mutiny in the Mountains: West Virginia Public Workers, 1969-2019" (PM Press, 2026)
Former chief steward and union organizer Gordon Simmons joins Michael Stauch to discuss his new book on the history of labor struggles by public sector workers…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul Stob, "Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind" (Counterpoint Publishing, 2026)
In Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind (Counterpoint Publishing, 2026), Dr. Paul Stob…
- New Books in American Studies
Amy D. McDowell, "Whispers in the Pews: Evangelical Uniformity in a Divided America" (NYU Press, 2026)
Whispers in the Pews: Evangelical Uniformity in a Divided America (NYU Press, 2026) reveals how mundane social interactions in an evangelical church silence…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephen F. Knott, "Conspirator in Chief: The Long Tradition of Conspiracy Theories in the American Presidency" (UP Kansas, 2025)
Political Scientist Steve Knott has a new book that focuses on conspiracy theories within the American presidency and often promulgated by the president…
- New Books in American Studies
Charles L. Glaser, "Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America's Future Against a Rising China" (Cornell UP, 2025)
In Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America's Future Against a Rising China (Cornell UP, 2025), Charles L. Glaser advances a thought-provoking strategy for…
- New Books in American Studies
Kira Ganga Kieffer, "Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Kira Ganga Kieffer (Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Wesleyan University; PhD, Boston University, 2023) studies contemporary American…
- New Books in American Studies
Wil Haygood, "The War within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home" (Knopf, 2026)
Award-winning author Wil Haygood joins Michael Stauch to discuss The War within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home (Knopf, 2026) his new book on…
- New Books in American Studies
Brenda Boyle, "American War Stories" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
In American War Stories (Rutgers UP, 2021) Brenda Boyle examines how the story of war is told in the Unites States and how these stories of war work to teach…
- New Books in American Studies
Shannon McKenna Schmidt, "You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson’s Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With Her" (Sourcebooks, 2026)
From the author of The First Lady of WWII comes You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson’s Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With Her…
- New Books in American Studies
Mark Peterson, "The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History" (Princeton UP, 2026)
A provocative new history of America's constitution and an urgent call to action for a nation confronted by challenges its founders could never have imagined…
- New Books in American Studies
Terror, Hope, & Exodus: The Testimony of Henry Adams, Freedman
May 5, 2026—In March 1880, an extraordinary American traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before a Senate committee investigating the exodus of formerly…
- New Books in American Studies
Julia Bowes, "Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism" (Princeton UP, 2026)
“Parental rights” is a rallying cry for today’s American conservatives, signaling opposition to mandatory vaccination and “woke” public school curricula. In…
- New Books in American Studies
Sharon Zukin, "Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change" (Rutgers UP, 2014)
Since its initial publication, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Rutgers UP, 2014) has become the classic analysis of the emergence of artists…
- New Books in American Studies
Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia
Prince George’s County, Maryland, is a suburban jurisdiction in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and is home to the highest concentration of Black…
- New Books in American Studies
Frontier Films for America250: On the Western Genre and Beyond with Matthew J. Franck
Here in Episode 7 of Season 5, I interview Dr. Matthew J. Franck. A senior contributing fellow at Public Discourse, a visiting lecturer in the Department of…
- New Books in American Studies
Lerone Martin, "Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr." (Amistad, 2026)
We know who Martin Luther King Jr. became, but who was he at the beginning of his life? How did his youth inform his outlook and activism? Before Martin Luther…
- New Books in American Studies
What Does the American Presidency Mean?
Coming in the thick of the second Trump term, What Does the American Presidency Mean? The Need for Interpretation in Presidency Studies is a timely and…
- New Books in American Studies
Alice Echols, "Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic" (Oxford UP, 2026)
A rich history of cross-racial coalitions and alliances of the Sixties' freedom movement, acclaimed historian Alice Echols's Black Power, White Heat reshapes…
- New Books in American Studies
Nicholas Tochka, "The Musical Lives of Charles Manson: The Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Invention of the Sixties" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Nicholas Tochka analyzes the role of rock music in the life of Charles Manson, the Family, and the August 1969 Tate-LaBianca killings, which also gives larger…
- New Books in American Studies
Katie Batza, "AIDS in the Heartland: How Unlikely Coalitions Created a Blueprint for LGBTQ Politics" (UNC Press, 2025)
This episode features a conversation with Dr. Katie Batza on their recently published book, AIDS in the Heartland: How Unlikely Coalitions Created a Blueprint…