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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
Diana Kelly, "The Red Taylorist: The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov" (Emerald, 2020)
In this podcast Diana Kelly, author of The Red Taylorist: The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov (Emerald, 2020), tells us of the advantages of using a…
- New Books in American Studies
Fiona Hill, "There Is Nothing for You Here: Opportunity in an Age of Decline" (Mariner Books, 2021)
Today I talked to the remarkable Fiona Hill about her new memoir There Is Nothing for You Here: Opportunity in an Age of Decline (Mariner Books, 2021). We…
- New Books in American Studies
Kate Fortmueller, "Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID" (U Texas Press, 2021)
By March 2020, the spread of COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions, forcing widespread shutdowns across industries, including Hollywood. Studios, networks…
- New Books in American Studies
Mia Bay, "Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Mobility has been central to the American identity—think of the automobile, the perceived freedom that comes with it, the open road—but Black Americans have…
- New Books in American Studies
Alisa Freedman, "Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost" (Association for Asian Studies, 2021)
Alisa Freedman's book Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost (Association for Asian Studies, 2021) explores…
- New Books in American Studies
Dave Zirin, "The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World" (New Press, 2021)
In 2016, amid an epidemic of police shootings of African Americans, the celebrated NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a series of quiet protests on the…
- New Books in American Studies
Edward J. Ayers, "Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020" (LSU Press, 2020)
Taking a wide focus, Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020 (LSU Press, 2020) narrates the evolution of southern history from the…
- New Books in American Studies
Leigh Eric Schmidt, "The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism" (Princeton UP, 2021)
In his new book, The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2021), Dr. Leigh Eric Schmidt tells…
- New Books in American Studies
Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The…
- New Books in American Studies
Mark Lawrence Schrad, "Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition (Oxford UP, 2021) is a unique retelling of the history of temperance and prohibition. Rather than…
- New Books in American Studies
Aldona Jonaitis, "Art of the Northwest Coast," Second Edition (U Washington Press, 2021)
Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at…
- New Books in American Studies
David Herzberg, "White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
The contemporary opioid crisis is widely seen as new and unprecedented. Not so. It is merely the latest in a long series of drug crises stretching back over a…
- New Books in American Studies
Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian, "The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back" (New Press, 2021)
As people reach for social justice and better lives, they create public goods--free education, public health, open parks, clean water, and many others--that…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, "Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton UP, 2021) examines the “contemporary population politics of…
- New Books in American Studies
Samuel Moyn, "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War" (FSG, 2021)
Is it possible that efforts to make war more humane can actually make it more common and thus more destructive? This tension at the heart of this query lies at…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael S. Neiberg, "When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance" (Harvard UP, 2021)
According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the "most shocking single event" of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the…
- New Books in American Studies
Nicole Nguyen, "Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)
Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) is a powerful reassessment of the U.S…
- New Books in American Studies
69 Recall this Buck 4: Daniel Souleles on Private Equity (JP, EF)
In this installment of our Recall this Buck series (check out our earlier conversations with Thomas Piketty, Peter Brown and Christine Desan), John and…
- New Books in American Studies
Amy Fried and Douglas B. Harris, "At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump" (Columbia UP, 2021)
Political Scientists Amy Fried (University of Maine) and Douglas B. Harris (Loyola University Maryland) have a new book, At War with Government: How…
- New Books in American Studies
Jan Nisbet and Nancy Weiss, "Pain and Shock in America: Politics, Advocacy, and the Controversial Treatment of People with Disabilities" (Brandeis UP, 2021)
Amid a string of fall 2021 news reports about past-due exonerations and (white) self-defense that document the limits of racial justice within the U.S. legal…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrew Roberts, "The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III" (Viking, 2021)
Following upon the success of his magisterial account of Winston Churchill, Andrew Roberts returns with an outstanding biography of George III: The Last King…
- New Books in American Studies
Joseph C. Ewoodzie, "Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Getting Something to Eat in Jackson (Princeton Press, 2021) uses food—what people eat and how—to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of…
- New Books in American Studies
Noah Isenberg ed., Shelley Frisch, trans., "Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Before Billy Wilder became the screenwriter and director of iconic films like Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a freelance reporter, first…
- New Books in American Studies
Sean Brennan, "The Priest Who Put Europe Back Together: The Life of Rev. Fabian Flynn, CP" (Catholic U of America Press, 2018)
Philp Fabian Flynn led a remarkable life, bearing witness to some of the most pivotal events of the twentieth century. Flynn took part in the invasions of…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephen Skowronek et al, "Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (Oxford University Press, 2021) powerfully dissects one of the fundamental…
- New Books in American Studies
Crystal Webster, "Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North" (UNC Press, 2021)
For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American…
- New Books in American Studies
Pascale Joassart-Marcelli, "The Sixteen-Dollar Taco: Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification" (U Washington Press, 2021)
White middle-class eaters are increasingly venturing into historically segregated urban neighborhoods in search of "authentic" eating in restaurants run by-and…
- New Books in American Studies
Peter Cole, "Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly" (PM Press, 2021)
In the early twentieth century, when many US unions disgracefully excluded black and Asian workers, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) warmly welcomed…
- New Books in American Studies
Eric Berkowitz, "Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West from the Ancients to Fake News" (Beacon Press, 2021)
Eric Berkowitz has written a short history of a censorship, a large topic that has been a phenomenon since the advent of recorded history. In Dangerous Ideas…
- New Books in American Studies
Hadassah Lieberman, "Hadassah: An American Story" (Brandeis UP, 2021)
Born in Prague to Holocaust survivors, Hadassah Lieberman and her family immigrated in 1949 to the United States. She went on to earn a BA from Boston…
- New Books in American Studies
Kevin Bruyneel, "Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States" (UNC Press, 2021)
Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing…
- New Books in American Studies
Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to…
- New Books in American Studies
Robin J. Hayes, "Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground" (U Washington Press, 2021)
During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the US and Africa came together to fight for Black self-determination and the antiracist…
- New Books in American Studies
Yael Levy, "Chick TV: Antiheroines and Time Unbound" (Syracuse UP, 2021)
Yael Levy examines the underexplored antiheroine of early twenty-first century television in Chick-TV: Antiheroines and Time Unbound (Syracuse UP, 2022). Levy…
- New Books in American Studies
Gretchen E. Minton, "Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country's Love Affair with the World's Most Famous Writer" (U New Mexico Press, 2020)
Tracing more than two centuries of history, Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Writer (University of New Mexico…
- New Books in American Studies
Marc Gallicchio, "Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender formally ended…
- New Books in American Studies
Shelby Criswell, "Queer As All Get Out: 10 People Who've Inspired Me" (Street Noise Books, 2021)
On this episode of Queer Voices of the South, I talk with Shelby Criswell, whose book Queer As All Get Out: 10 People Who've Inspired Me (Street Noise Books…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher Coker, "The Rise of the Civilizational State" (Polity Press, 2019)
In recent years the resurgence of great power competition has gripped the headlines, with new emerging powers (such as Russia and China) seeking to challenge…
- New Books in American Studies
James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely, "Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)
A vast and desolate region, the Texas-New Mexico borderlands have long been an ideal setting for intrigue and illegal dealings--never more so than in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Steven P. Brown, "Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces That Changed a Nation" (U Alabama Press, 2020)
Steven P. Brown, professor of political science at Auburn University, has written a history of notable U.S. Supreme Cases and justices that hailed from…
- New Books in American Studies
Jasmine Mitchell, "Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U. S. and Brazilian Media" (U Illinois Press, 2020)
Brazil markets itself as a racially mixed utopia. The United States prefers the term melting pot. Both nations have long used the image of the mulatta to push…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: The Supreme Court, Concealed Carry, and How Your Laws Might Change
An earlier Postscript explained what was at stake for concealed carry laws in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court – and guessed at what the oral arguments…
- New Books in American Studies
Tanya L. Roth, "Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945–1980" (UNC Press, 2021)
Tanya L. Roth's Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945–1980 (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) explains that while Rosie the Riveter had fewer…
- New Books in American Studies
David Barak-Gorodetsky, "Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
In this episode, I interview David Barak-Gorodetzky about his new book, Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist (U Nebraska Press…
- New Books in American Studies
Dennis C. Rasmussen, "Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders" (Princeton UP, 2021)
When Americans conjure the image of the signing of the Constitution of the United States, they often think about the various paintings that depict the Founders…
- New Books in American Studies
Kate Fortmueller, "Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production" (U Texas Press, 2021)
Despite their considerable presence in Hollywood, extras and working actors have received scant attention within film and media studies as significant…
- New Books in American Studies
Adam Bonica and Maya Sen, "The Judicial Tug of War: How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Why have conservatives decried 'activist judges'? And why have liberals - and America's powerful legal establishment - emphasized qualifications and experience…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephen Cushman, "The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today" (UNC Press, 2021)
In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their…
- New Books in American Studies
Marilyn Lake, "Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform" (Harvard UP, 2019)
The paradox of Progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and…
- New Books in American Studies
Naoko Wake, "American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
The little-known history of U.S. survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings reveals captivating trans-Pacific memories of war, illness, gender…
- New Books in American Studies
Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, "The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South" (UNC Press, 2021)
Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces…
- New Books in American Studies
Matthew Stewart, “The Epicurean Republic” (Open Agenda, 2021)
The Epicurean Republic is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and award-winning author and independent scholar Matthew Stewart. In…
- New Books in American Studies
Celine-Marie Pascale, "Living on the Edge: When Hard Times Become a Way of Life" (Polity Press, 2021)
For the majority of Americans, hard times have long been a way of life. Some work multiple low-wage jobs, others face the squeeze of stagnant wages and rising…
- New Books in American Studies
Jen Corrinne Brown, "Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West" (U Washington Press, 2017)
From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen…
- New Books in American Studies
Efrén O. Pérez, "Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Political Scientist Efrén Pérez’s new book, Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity (U Chicago Press, 2021), explores the term and…
- New Books in American Studies
Ken Robison, "Cold War Montana" (History Press, 2021)
Home to some of the most powerful nuclear missile systems in the world, Montana played an indispensable role in the war against Communism. Utilizing the…
- New Books in American Studies
Chris McLaughlin, "Mississippi Barking: Hurricane Katrina and a Life That Went to the Dogs" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
On August 29, 2005, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and…
- New Books in American Studies
David Lester, "Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, A Graphic Novel" (Beacon Press, 2021)
Who is the most fascinating historical figure that you have never heard of? David Lester and Marcus Rediker make a good case that it was Benjamin Lay. Based on…
- New Books in American Studies
Samuel Moyn, "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War" (FSG, 2021)
Geographic and temporal limits have typically contained modern wars—rulers can ask their populace to risk lives and treasure for so long before losing…
- New Books in American Studies
Alaina E. Roberts, "I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of 40 acres and a mule--the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery…