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
Brandon T. Jett, "Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South" (Louisiana State UP, 2021)
In this groundbreaking work, Professor Brandon T. Jett unearths how police departments evolved with the urbanization of the Jim Crow South, to target African…
- New Books in American Studies
Jafari S. Allen, "There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life" (Duke UP, 2022)
In There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Duke UP, 2022), Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher J. Gilbert, "Caricature and National Character: The United States at War" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021)
Dr. Christopher Gilbert, Assistant Professor of English at Assumption College, has a new book that examines the understanding of American national character…
- New Books in American Studies
Mark Edmundson, "Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Walt Whitman knew a great deal about democracy that we don’t. Most of that knowledge is concentrated in one stunning poem, Song of Myself. In Song of…
- New Books in American Studies
Alejandro Nava, "Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Today I speak with Alejandro Nava about his new book, Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop (U Chicago Press, 2022). This book explores an important…
- New Books in American Studies
Howard Mortman, "When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill" (Cherry Orchard, 2020)
Howard Mortman's book When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill (Cherry Orchard, 2020) is about the rabbis. It’s…
- New Books in American Studies
Kate Luce Mulry, "An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic" (NYU Press, 2021)
When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos…
New Books in American StudiesOn the Internment of Japanese Buddhists in World War Two
Duncan Ryuken Williams was born in Tokyo, Japan to a Japanese mother and British father. After growing up in Japan and England until age 17, he moved to the…
- New Books in American Studies
Sean J. Drake, "Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb" (U California Press, 2022)
In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephen Vider, "The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Stephen Vider uncovers how LGBTQ people reshaped domestic life in the postwar United States. From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of…
- New Books in American Studies
The Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training: A Discussion with Susan Rockwell Johnson and Margery B. Thompson
ADST has the world’s largest collection of U.S. diplomatic oral history. They have over 2,500 oral histories at ADST.org Susan Rockwell Johnson is the…
- New Books in American Studies
Carolina Bank Muñoz and Penny Lewis, "A People's Guide to New York City" (U California Press, 2022)
New York City is a preeminent global city, serving as the headquarters for hundreds of multinational firms and a world-renowned cultural hub for fashion, art…
- New Books in American Studies
John Markoff, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand" (Penguin, 2022)
Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is…
- New Books in American Studies
The Future of Neoliberalism: A Conversation with Gary Gerstle
The word neoliberalism is often used more as an insult than a description of a set of beliefs. And people can be rather hazy about the beliefs it refers to –…
- New Books in American Studies
Catherine McCormack, "Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies" (Norton, 2021)
Art historian Catherine McCormack challenges how culture teaches us to see and value women, their bodies, and their lives. Venus, maiden, wife, mother…
- New Books in American Studies
Ellen Schrecker, "The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American…
- New Books in American Studies
Emily Mendenhall, "Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji" (Vanderbilt UP, 2022)
Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) is the story of what happened in Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a…
- New Books in American Studies
Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London's 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the…
- New Books in American Studies
Liz Carlisle, "Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming" (Island Press, 2022)
A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that’s meant learning her…
- New Books in American Studies
Scott Reynolds Nelson, "Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World" (Basic Books, 2022)
Grain traders wandering across the steppe; the Russian conquest of Ukraine (in the 18th century, that is); boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the…
- New Books in American Studies
John Lardas Modern, "Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
In Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (U Chicago Press, 2021), religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter McFarlane with Doreen Manuel, "Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement" (Between the Lines, 2020)
Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement (Between the Lines Books, 2020) details the life of George Manuel, a…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher W. Wells, "Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader" (U Washington Press, 2018)
In the decades after World War II, the American economy entered a period of prolonged growth that created unprecedented affluence—but these developments came…
- New Books in American Studies
John DeFerrari and Douglas Peter Sefton, "Sixteenth Street NW: Washington, DC's Avenue of Ambitions" (Georgetown UP, 2022)
Sixteenth Street NW in Washington, DC, has been called the Avenue of the Presidents, Executive Avenue, and the Avenue of Churches. From the front door of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Konden Smith Hansen, "Frontier Religion: The Mormon-American Contest for the Meaning of America, 1857-1907" (U Utah Press, 2019)
In Frontier Religion: The Mormon-American Contest for the Meaning of America, 1857-1907 (U Utah Press, 2019) Konden Smith Hansen examines the dramatic…
- New Books in American Studies
Living in the United States as an Immigrant: A Collection of Stories
Today, millions of immigrants have found a home in the United States. But often, such people end up losing their individual cultures, languages, and…
- New Books in American Studies
Shannon L. Walsh, "Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
Today we are joined by Dr. Shannon Walsh, Associate Professor of Theatre History, and author of Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive…
- New Books in American Studies
Alicia Puglionesi, "In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire" (Scribner, 2022)
The important new book by Alicia Puglionesi, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022), is a fat sampler of…
- New Books in American Studies
Heba Gowayed, "Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential" (Princeton UP, 2022)
As the world confronts the largest refugee crisis since World War II, wealthy countries are being called upon to open their doors to the displaced, with the…
- New Books in American Studies
Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success" (Public Affairs, 2022)
Immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse—yet, in most cases, the things we believe about…
- New Books in American Studies
Donald A. Barclay, "Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)
Does the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth…
- New Books in American Studies
Elizabeth Rodrigues, "Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century Us Literatures" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
On a near-daily basis, data is being used to narrate our lives. Categorizing algorithms drawn from amassed personal data to assign narrative destinies to…
- New Books in American Studies
Alvin Eng, "Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond" (Fordham UP, 2022)
Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond (Fordham UP, 2022) is a memoir that decodes and processes the…
- New Books in American Studies
Book Talk 52: Linda Patterson Miller on Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"
When first published in 1926, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises changed American literature forever. Hemingway follows a disillusioned group of expats in…
- New Books in American Studies
Kai Bosworth, "Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial…
- New Books in American Studies
Dana W. Logan, "Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were…
- New Books in American Studies
Glenda E. Gilmore, "Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South" (UNC Press, 2022)
In Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South (UNC Press, 2022), Glenda Gilmore meticulously documents and…
- New Books in American Studies
Maha Hilal, "Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11" (Broadleaf Books, 2022)
In Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11 published in 2022 with Broadleaf Books, Maha Hilal…
- New Books in American Studies
Nigel Rothfels, "Elephant Trails: A History of Animals and Cultures" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)
When looking at historic records of all kinds—from prehistoric cave drawings and ancient rock art in Africa and India, from poetic narrations of travelers to…
- New Books in American Studies
Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Before the nineteenth century, travelers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India and elsewhere encountered a medical conundrum: why did they fall…
- New Books in American Studies
Zachary F. Price, "Black Dragon: Afro-Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination" (Ohio State UP, 2021)
In Black Dragon: Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination (Ohio State UP, 2022), Zachary F. Price illuminates martial arts as a site of…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: Post-Roe Politics
Today’s Postscript uniquely engages abortion politics by addressing structural political issues (voter suppression, gerrymandering, dilutions of minority…
- New Books in American Studies
Ryan Hall, "Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877" (UNC Press, 2020)
No matter what people call them today the northwestern Great Plains have been and continue to be Blackfoot country, argues Colgate University assistant…
- New Books in American Studies
Eve Ng, "Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Eve Ng’s new book Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture" from a critical media studies…
- New Books in American Studies
Mark V. Tushnet, "The Hughes Court: From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Mark V. Tushnet's book The Hughes Court: From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941 (Cambridge UP, 2022) describes the closing of one era in constitutional…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul M. Heideman, "Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question 1900-1930" (Haymarket Books, 2022)
In Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question, 1900-1930 (Haymarket Books, 2018), Paul Heideman collects, for the first time…
- New Books in American Studies
Samuel J. Redman, "Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology (Harvard UP, 2021) is a searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to…
- New Books in American Studies
Katherine Dugan, "Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics Is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Millennials in the U.S. have been characterized as uninterested in religion, as defectors from religious institutions, and as agnostic about the role of…
- New Books in American Studies
Kenny Xu, "An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy" (Diversion Book, 2021)
Even in the midst of a nationwide surge of bias and incidents against them, Asians from coast to coast have quietly assumed mastery of the nation's technical…
- New Books in American Studies
Paul Conrad, "The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
In The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Paul Conrad brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches…
- New Books in American Studies
The Future of Opinion Polls: A Conversation with Mark Pack
As the culture wars intensify, it seems that all sources of neutral authority get challenged and that includes opinion polls. Accusations about bias and…
- New Books in American Studies
The Problem with Museums: A Conversation with Georgina Adam and Nizan Shaked
In the past few years, museums of contemporary art have come under a fair deal of scrutiny. Pressures from groups such as Decoloinise This Space or the…
- New Books in American Studies
Emily West, "Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly" (MIT Press, 2022)
How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy…
- New Books in American Studies
Mónica Guzmán, "I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times" (BenBella Books, 2022)
Journalist Mónica Guzmán is the loving liberal daughter of Mexican immigrants who voted—twice—for Donald Trump. When the country could no longer see straight…
- New Books in American Studies
Kelly Lytle Hernández, "Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands" (Norton, 2022)
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022)tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910…
- New Books in American Studies
Dhanveer Singh Brar, "Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century" (Goldsmiths Press, 2021)
Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century (Goldsmiths Press, 2021) uses three Black electronic musics –…
- New Books in American Studies
Jaclyn Granick, "International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Today I talked to Jaclyn Granick about her book International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War (Cambridge UP, 2021). In 1914, seven million…
- New Books in American Studies
LaGina Gause, "The Advantage of Disadvantage: Costly Protest and Political Representation for Marginalized Groups" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Does protest influence political representation? If so, which groups are most likely to benefit from collective action? The Advantage of Disadvantage: Costly…
- New Books in American Studies
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, "Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)" (Haymarket, 2022)
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off…
- New Books in American Studies
Aaron Cohen, "Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the…