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
Richard Middleton, "Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World" (Yale UP, 2022)
Charles, First Marquis of Cornwallis (1738-1805), was a leading figure in late eighteenth-century Britain. His career spanned the American War of Independence…
- New Books in American Studies
Anthony Abraham Jack, "The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students" (Harvard UP, 2019)
The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse…
- New Books in American Studies
Elisabeth R. Anker, "Ugly Freedom" (Duke UP, 2022)
Freedom is often considered the cornerstone of the American political project. The 1776 revolutionaries declared it an inalienable right that could neither be…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael John Witgen, "Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America" (UNC Press, 2021)
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining much of their land in the Old Northwest—what’s now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their…
- New Books in American Studies
The Battle of Buxton: Saving a Lighthouse in the Era of Climate Change
If you tuned in to our “ideas in strange places” themed programming last week, you would have heard an episode of Darts and Letters’ predecessor: Cited. (If…
- New Books in American Studies
Christof Dejung et al., "The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire" (Princeton UP, 2019)
While the nineteenth century has been described as the golden age of the European bourgeoisie, the emergence of the middle class and bourgeois culture was by…
- New Books in American Studies
Koch Block My Campus: How Big Money Corrupts Academia
Why is so much right-wing money being funnelled at such a furious pace into universities across the US? Libertarian-minded billionaires like the Kochs and…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael K. Beauchamp, "Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815" (LSU Press, 2021)
M. K. Beauchamp's Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 (LSU Press, 2021) examines the challenges…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael S. Roth, "Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist's Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses" (Yale UP, 2021)
From the president of Wesleyan University, a compassionate and provocative manifesto, Safe Enough Spaces (Yale UP, 2021) on the crises confronting higher…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert W. Tomlinson, "The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy: The Case of the Yom Kippur War" (Lexington, 2022)
How do military organizations learn? Robert W. Tomlinson's book The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy (Lexington, 2022) covers an…
- New Books in American Studies
Thomas S. Kidd, "Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father" (Yale UP, 2017)
Renowned as a printer, scientist, and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin also published more works on religious topics than any other eighteenth-century American…
- New Books in American Studies
F. Brett Cox, "Roger Zelazny" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) combined poetic prose with fearless literary ambition to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 1960s. Yet…
- New Books in American Studies
Kecia Ali, ed., "Tying the Knot: A Feminist/Womanist Guide to Muslim Marriage in America" (Open BU, 2021)
Are you a born, revert, or convert Muslim who is trying to navigate the puzzle that is Muslim marriage in America? Do you want an egalitarian and fair Muslim…
- New Books in American Studies
The Grift of Meritocracy: All About Grifting (Inside and Outside of the Academy)
Our society is dominated by grifters. Cheats, cons, frauds: people who don’t really believe what they tell you. They’re just what they need to do to get ahead…
- New Books in American Studies
Duy Lap Nguyen, "The Unimagined Community: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam" (Manchester UP, 2019)
Duy Lap Nguyen's book The Unimagined Community: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam (Manchester UP, 2019) proposes a reexamination of the Vietnam War from…
- New Books in American Studies
James P. Byrd and James Hudnut-Beumler, "The Story of Religion in America: An Introduction" (Westminster John Knox Press, 2021)
The Story of Religion in America: An Introduction (Westminster John Knox Press, 2021) presents the broad scope of the story of religion in the American…
- New Books in American Studies
Mark Solovey, "Social Science for What?: Battles over Public Funding for the 'Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation" (MIT Press, 2020)
This is part one of a two part interview. "The social sciences have prospered best in the federal government where they have been included under broad umbrella…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, "It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)
The protests of summer 2020 led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more…
- New Books in American Studies
The Bland Corporation: On the RAND Corporation and the Defence-Intellectual Industrial Complex
Welcome to week two of our Darts and Letters summer showcase! Darts and Letters is a show about the politics of ideas. We’re celebrating joining the New Books…
- New Books in American Studies
Ann Marie Borys, "American Unitarian Churches: Architecture of a Democratic Religion" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)
The Unitarian religious tradition was a product of the same eighteenth-century democratic ideals that fueled the American Revolution and informed the founding…
- New Books in American Studies
Exiled in America: About the Lives of Registered Sex Offenders
Before Darts and Letters there was a documentary series called Cited. This is one of those documentaries. This episode is about the lives of sex offenders in…
- New Books in American Studies
Jay Baruch, "Tornado of Life: A Doctor's Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER" (MIT Press, 2022)
To be an emergency room doctor is to be a professional listener to stories. Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doctor’s most…
- New Books in American Studies
John Joe Schlichtman, "Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world High Point, North Carolina, is known as the “Furniture Capital of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Traci Parker, "Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s" (UNC Press, 2019)
In Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (UNC Press, 2019), Traci Parker examines…
- New Books in American Studies
Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner, "The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be" (MIT Press, 2022)
For The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be (MIT Press, 2022), Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner analyzed in-depth interviews…
- New Books in American Studies
David D. Dworak, "War of Supply: World War II Allied Logistics in the Mediterranean" (UP of Kentucky Press, 2022)
The era of modern warfare introduced in World War II presented the Allied Powers with one of the more complicated logistical challenges of the century: how to…
- New Books in American Studies
Jason Resnikoff, "Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work (U Illinois Press, 2021) traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its…
- New Books in American Studies
Prison Notebooks: Thinking (and Writing) about Incarceration
I can point you to mountains of research about prisons. I can also recommend at least a dozen Netflix documentaries, and highlight a handful of radical…
- New Books in American Studies
Ryan Uytdewilligen, "Killing John Wayne: The Making of the Conqueror" (Lyons Press, 2021)
Behold the history of a film so scandalous, so outrageous, so explosive it disappeared from print for over a quarter century! A film so dangerous, half its…
- New Books in American Studies
Gabrielle David, "Trailblazers: Black Women Who Helped Make America Great, American Firsts/American Icons" (2leaf Press, 2021)
Since slavery, Black women have struggled to liberate themselves from racism and sexism. Yet despite these hurdles and under the most difficult circumstances…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Boag, "Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-Of-the-Century Oregon" (U Washington Press, 2022)
On November 19, 1895, eighteen year old Lloyd Montgomery murdered his parents and their neighbor at his home in rural Linn County, Oregon. In Pioneering Death…
- New Books in American Studies
Caryn Rose, "Why Patti Smith Matters" (U of Texas Press, 2022)
Patti Smith arrived in New York City at the end of the Age of Aquarius in search of work and purpose. What she found—what she fostered—was a cultural…
- New Books in American Studies
Donald Trump Loves Wrestlemania
Darts and Letters is a show about the politics of ideas, and this week we’re searching for progressive politics in strange places… such as pro-wrestling. There…
- New Books in American Studies
Katharine A. Burnett and Monica Carol Miller, "The Tacky South" (LSU Press, 2022)
As a way to comment on a person’s style or taste, the word “tacky” has distinctly southern origins, with its roots tracing back to the so-called “tackies” who…
- New Books in American Studies
Tara Watson and Kalee Thompson, "The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
For decades, immigration has been one of the most divisive, contentious topics in American politics. And for decades, urgent calls for its policy reform have…
- New Books in American Studies
Thulani Davis, "The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom" (Duke UP, 2022)
In The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke UP, 2022) Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by…
- New Books in American Studies
Xine Yao, "Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America" (Duke UP, 2021)
What is unfeeling? According to today’s guest, Xine Yao, unfeeling includes “a broad range of affective modes, including withholding, disregard, growing a…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonna Perrillo, "Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands (U Chicago Press, 2022) begins with the 144 children of Nazi scientists who moved…
- New Books in American Studies
Kelsi Matwick and Keri Matwick, "Food Discourse of Celebrity Chefs of Food Network" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)
Kelsi Matwick and Keri Matwick's book Food Discourse of Celebrity Chefs of Food Network (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) explores a fascinating, yet virtually…
- New Books in American Studies
Pigeon Shit Bookstore: On Street Bookselling, Populism, and Public Intellectuals
Hi! This is Darts and Letters. We’ve just become a part of New Books Network, so we want to introduce ourselves. Fundamentally, This is a show about the…
- New Books in American Studies
Scott Meslow, "From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy" (Day Street, 2022)
An in-depth celebration of the romantic comedy's modern golden era and its role in our culture, tracking the genre from its heyday in the '80s and the '90s…
- New Books in American Studies
Sergei Zhuk, "KGB Operations Against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine 1953-1991" (Routledge, 2022)
Oriented for a general reading audience, Sergei Zhuk's book KGB Operations Against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine 1953-1991 (Routledge, 2022) gives a…
- New Books in American Studies
Victoria W. Wolcott, "Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeannie N. Shinozuka, "Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nursery stock…
- New Books in American Studies
Anthony W. Wood, "Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans…
- New Books in American Studies
Daniel Wirls, "The Senate: From White Supremacy to Governmental Gridlock" (U Virginia Press, 2021)
Daniel Wirls, Professor of Politics at the University of California-Santa Cruz, has a new book that continues his research stream on the United States’ Senate…
- New Books in American Studies
Hugh Ryan, "The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison" (Bold Type Books, 2022)
The Women’s House of Detention stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village from 1929 to 1974. Throughout its history, it was a nexus for tens of thousands of…
- New Books in American Studies
Jennifer Lin, "Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Historic Journey to China" (Temple UP, 2022)
In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra boarded a Pan Am 707 plane in Philadelphia for a once-in-a-lifetime journey: a multi-city tour of Maoist China, months…
- New Books in American Studies
Tanya M. Peres and Aaron Deter-Wolf, "Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink" (U Alabama Press, 2018)
Understanding and explaining societal rules surrounding food and foodways have been the foci of anthropological studies since the early days of the discipline…
- New Books in American Studies
Jed Esty, "The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits" (Stanford Briefs, 2022)
As the US becomes a second-place nation, can it shed the superpower nostalgia that still haunts the UK? The debate over the US's fading hegemony has raged and…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Mandelbaum, "The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower" (Oxford UP, 2022)
The United States is now nearly 250 years old. It arose from humble beginnings, as a strip of mostly agrarian and sparsely populated English colonies on the…
- 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
Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones, "Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the 1954 Indochina Crisis" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
In the spring of 1954, after eight years of bitter fighting, the war in Vietnam between the French and the communist-led Vietminh came to a head. With French…
- New Books in American Studies
Jennifer J. Hill, "Birthing the West: Mothers and Midwives in the Rockies and Plains" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
Childbirth defines families, communities, and nations. In Birthing the West, Jennifer J. Hill fills the silences around historical reproduction with copious…
- New Books in American Studies
Trevor Boffone, "TikTok Cultures in the United States" (Routledge, 2022)
Trevor Boffone's book TikTok Cultures in the United States (Routledge, 2022) examines the role of TikTok in US popular culture, paying close attention to the…
- New Books in American Studies
Shannen Dee Williams, "Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle" (Duke UP, 2022)
In Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke UP, 2022), Shannen Dee Williams, provides the first full history…
- New Books in American Studies
Alison Macor, "Making The Best Years of Our Lives: The Hollywood Classic That Inspired a Nation" (U Texas Press, 2022)
Released in 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives became an immediate success. Life magazine called it “the first big, good movie of the post-war era” to tackle…
- New Books in American Studies
Rain Prud'homme-Cranford and Darryl Barthé, "Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community" (U Washington Press, 2022)
Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew R. Polk, "Faith in Freedom: Propaganda, Presidential Politics, and the Making of an American Religion" (Cornell UP, 2021)
In Faith in Freedom: Propaganda, Presidential Politics, and the Making of an American Religion (Cornell UP, 2021), Andrew R. Polk argues that the American…
- New Books in American Studies
Ashley Remer and Tiffany Isselhardt, "Exploring American Girlhood through 50 Historic Treasures" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)
Who are the girls that helped build America? Conventional history books shed little light on the influence and impact of girls’ contributions to society and…