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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
Evan Haefeli, "Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Origin stories of the United States often highlight religious freedom as a foundational pillar of the earliest English settlers. But Evan Haefeli tells a more…
- New Books in American Studies
Jakob Feinig, "Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society" (Stanford UP, 2022)
In this podcast Jakob Feinig introduces his ideas about how and when people's practices and institutions shape money and money creation. He provided deep…
- New Books in American Studies
Radicalism, Humility, and Racism in America
Today’s episode focuses on the new book by Lydia Moland, who is a Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. Her book, Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American…
- New Books in American Studies
Alexander Sergeant, "Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema" (SUNY Press, 2021)
Hollywood fantasy cinema is responsible for some of the most lucrative franchises produced over the past two decades, yet it remains difficult to find popular…
- New Books in American Studies
Charles Sawyer, "B. B. King: From Indianola to Icon: A Personal Odyssey with the 'King of the Blues'" (Schiffer Publishing, 2022)
Want to take a trip with the king of the Blues? As B.B. King’s photographer and original biographer, Charlie Sawyer was along for the ride. In B.B. King from…
- New Books in American Studies
Doron Taussig, "What We Mean by the American Dream: Stories We Tell about Meritocracy" (Cornell UP, 2021)
The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; in other…
- New Books in American Studies
Maria Adele Carrai and Jennifer Rudolph, "The China Questions 2: Critical Insights Into US-China Relations" (Harvard UP, 2022)
For decades Americans have described China as a rising power. That description no longer fits: China has already risen. What does this mean for the U.S.–China…
- New Books in American Studies
Sherry Boschert, "37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination" (New Press, 2022)
A sweeping history of the federal legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in education, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX. “No person in…
- New Books in American Studies
Bhaskar Sunkara, "The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality" (Basic Books, 2020)
In The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (Basic Books, 2020), Bhaskar Sunkara explores socialism's history…
- New Books in American Studies
Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan W. Concannon, "Does Scripture Speak for Itself?: The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Is the Bible the unembellished Word of God or the product of human agency? There are different answers to that question. And they lie at the heart of this…
- New Books in American Studies
Ramzi Fawaz, "Queer Forms" (NYU Press, 2022)
Ramzi Fawaz, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a new book that weaves together the more contemporary history of feminism and…
- New Books in American Studies
The Fight to Save the Town
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Why we need to write about difficult topics. Four American towns trying to save themselves…
- New Books in American Studies
Alena Pirok, "The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg: Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)
On any given night, hundreds of guests walk the darkened streets of Colonial Williamsburg looking for ghosts. Since the early 2000s, both the museum and…
- New Books in American Studies
Gabriel Debenedetti, "The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama" (Henry Holt, 2022)
In The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama (Henry Holt, 2022) New York Magazine national correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti reveals…
- New Books in American Studies
John D'Emilio, "Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties" (Duke UP, 2022)
In this episode of the Queer Voices podcast, John Marszalek interviews author John D’Emilio, one of the leading historians of his generation and a pioneering…
- New Books in American Studies
P. E. Caquet, "Opium's Orphans: The 200-Year History of the War on Drugs" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
The global war on drugs began some 150 years before US President Richard Nixon launched the current chapter of America’s drug war in 1971. In Opium’s Orphans…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Coviello, "Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
rom the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged––socially, sexually, even…
- New Books in American Studies
Sami Schalk, "Black Disability Politics" (Duke UP, 2022)
In Black Disability Politics (Duke UP, 2022) Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the…
- New Books in American Studies
Suzana Sawyer, "The Small Matter of Suing Chevron" (Duke UP, 2022)
In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years, a US…
- New Books in American Studies
Anima Adjepong, "Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra" (UNC Press, 2021)
Beyond simplistic binaries of the dark continent or Africa Rising, Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices…
- New Books in American Studies
Mitch Troutman, "Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925-1942" (PM Press, 2022)
Told with great intimacy and compassion, Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925-1942 (PM Press, 2022) uncovers a…
- New Books in American Studies
Nadine Weidman, "Killer Instinct: The Popular Science of Human Nature in Twentieth-Century America" (Harvard UP, 2021)
A historian of science examines key public debates about the fundamental nature of humans to ask why a polarized discourse about nature versus nurture became…
New Books in American StudiesTruth, Fiction, and Student Loan Forgiveness: A Conversation with Beth Akers
With the Biden Administration's student loan relief coming down the pike, Annika sits down with Dr. Beth Akers, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew Porwancher et al., "The Prophet of Harvard Law: James Bradley Thayer and His Legal Legacy" (UP of Kansas, 2022)
Though relatively short, the 2022 book The Prophet of Harvard Law: James Bradley Thayer and His Legal Legacy (UP of Kansas, 2022) by Andrew Porwancher, Austin…
- New Books in American Studies
M. Margaret McKeown, "Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas" (Potomac Books, 2022)
U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a giant in the legal world, even if he is often remembered for his four wives, as a potential…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Montoya, "The Second Civil War: A Citizen's Guide to Healing Our Fractured Nation" (RH Press, 2021)
America is on the brink of disaster. You've seen it -- on television, social media, at work, and even in your personal life. We're in the midst of a cold civil…
- New Books in American Studies
Technocracy Now! Part 2: Exploring Technocracy through Cybernetics
On part #2 of Technocracy Now, we tell stories of cybernetic technocracies. First, we hear the story of Charles A. McClelland, a liberal political scientists…
- New Books in American Studies
Emerald Garner, "Finding My Voice" (Haymarket, 2022)
In this unforgetable memoir, Emerald Garner recounts her father's cruel and unjust murder, the immense pain that followed, the pressures of an exploitative…
- New Books in American Studies
Joseph Blankholm, "The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious" (NYU Press, 2022)
For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in…
- New Books in American Studies
Kathryn Gin Lum, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History" (Harvard UP, 2022)
If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between "civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far," the words would hardly come as a…
New Books in American StudiesOn John Hersey's "Hiroshima"
In August of 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Less than a year later, American journalist John…
- New Books in American Studies
A Region of the Mind: U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies
Greg Marchildon interviews Molly P. Rozum, the author of Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies (U of Nebraska P &…
- New Books in American Studies
Edward Chancellor, "The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022)
Edward Chancellor's just published history of interest rates could not be better timed. As the world adjusts to rising rates after decades of falling ones…
- New Books in American Studies
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, "Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise" (Routledge, 2022)
Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise (Routledge, 2022) examines the multiplicity of books, films, TV shows, and merchandise that make up the…
- New Books in American Studies
Tenzan Eaghll and Rebekka King, "Representing Religion in Film" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Tenzan Eaghll and Rebekka King's Representing Religion in Film (Bloomsbury, 2021) is the first full-length exploration of the relationship between religion…
- New Books in American Studies
Ian Macpherson McCulloch, "John Bradstreet's Raid 1758: A Riverine Operation in the French and Indian War" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)
A year after John Bradstreet’s raid of 1758—the first and largest British-American riverine raid mounted during the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as…
- New Books in American Studies
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, "Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress" (NYU Press, 2022)
The first biography of trailblazing legislator Patsy Takemoto Mink, best known as the legislative champion of Title IX. "Every girl in Little League, every…
- New Books in American Studies
The Two Russias
In the late 1980s, Hollywood reflected the real world thaw in the Cold War by depicting the idea of two Russias: the cold bureaucratic state run by grey men…
- New Books in American Studies
Cinema’s First Nasty Women
What makes a nasty woman? Is it her unwillingness to break to the stringent standards of patriarchy, her gameness to get rough, even abject? Or is it the way…
- New Books in American Studies
The Future of the Legitimate Opposition: A Discussion with Alexander S. Kirshner
Alexander Kirshner’s book Legitimate Opposition (Yale UP, 2022) can be seen as a reaction to the politics of Donald Trump and the questions he has raised about…
- New Books in American Studies
Angela Tedesco, "Finding Turtle Farm: My Twenty-Acre Adventure in Community-Supported Agriculture" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
This is the tale of one woman's journey of growing a community-supported farm from earth to plate. In 1995 Angela Tedesco bought a twenty-acre farm with the…
- New Books in American Studies
Erin A. Snider, "Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East" (Cambridge UP. 2022)
For nearly two decades, the United States devoted more than $2 billion towards democracy promotion in the Middle East with seemingly little impact. To…
- New Books in American Studies
On Thomas Paine's "Common Sense"
In the 1770s, the American colonies were working up to a revolution. But while the colonists were increasingly dissatisfied with British rule, there was no…
- New Books in American Studies
Technocracy Now! Part 1: Noam Chomsky on Intellectuals and Expertise
Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. In fact, it's an idea as old as politics itself, and it emerges just about…
- New Books in American Studies
R. E. Evans and B. E. Kinnear, "'Richard Eager'": A Pilot's Story from Tennessee Eagle Scout to General Montgomery's 'Flying Fortress'" (Kieran Publishing, 2021)
Captain Richard E. Evans was an American B-17 "Flying Fortress" pilot. He flew 55 combat missions and during that time was also chosen to fly British Field…
- New Books in American Studies
NBN Classic: David Farber, "Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. A shattering account of the crack…
- New Books in American Studies
NBN Classic: Alexandra Minna Stern, "White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination" (Beacon Press, 2019)
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. In this episode, Dr. Alexandra Minna…
- New Books in American Studies
Noah Shusterman, "Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment" (U Virginia Press, 2020)
Although much has changed in the United States since the eighteenth century, our framework for gun laws still largely relies on the Second Amendment and the…
- New Books in American Studies
The Canada-US Border: A History of a Fluid and Unstable Boundary
Greg Marchildon interviews Benjamin Hoy, author of A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford UP…
- New Books in American Studies
Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert, "Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)" (Verso, 2022)
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it? We cannot change…
- New Books in American Studies
James Bessen, "The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation" (Yale UP, 2022)
In The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation (Yale UP, 2022), James Bessen explores the…
- New Books in American Studies
Kermit Roosevelt III, "The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
There's a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert P. Watson, "George Washington's Final Battle: The Epic Struggle to Build a Capital City and a Nation" (Georgetown UP, 2021)
George Washington is remembered for leading the Continental Army to victory, presiding over the Constitution, and forging a new nation, but few know the story…
- New Books in American Studies
Abigail Perkiss, "Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten Shore" (Cornell UP, 2022)
After the tumultuous night of October 29, 2012, the residents of Monmouth, Ocean, and Atlantic Counties faced an enormous and pressing question: What to do?…
- New Books in American Studies
Beverly Weintraub, "Wings of Gold: The Story of the First Women Naval Aviators" (Lyons Press, 2021)
On Feb. 2, 2019, the skies over Maynardville, Tennessee, filled with the roar of four F/A-18F Super Hornets streaking overhead in close formation. In each…
- New Books in American Studies
Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, "Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing" (Verso, 2022)
Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher Nichols and David Milne, "Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Ideology drives American foreign policy in ways seen and unseen. Racialized notions of subjecthood and civilization underlay the political revolution of…
- New Books in American Studies
Cold War Homefront
We could do a whole season on Vietnam war films, but in this episode we chose three films that highlight the Cold War’s omnipresence in daily life. You…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Coviello, "Vineland Reread" (Columbia UP, 2021)
Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s…
- New Books in American Studies
Tripp Mickle, "After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul" (William Morrow, 2022))
Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his "spiritual partner at Apple." The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who…