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
Theresa Keeley, "Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America" (Cornell UP, 2020)
In Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America (Cornell UP, 2020), Theresa Keeley analyzes the role of…
- New Books in American Studies
Jennifer Carlson, "Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race" (Princeton UP, 2020)
When Americans talk about guns, they often use terms like “gun rights” or “gun control.” They also tend to separate gun politics and the politics of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrea Warner, "Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography" (Graystone Books, 2018)
Andrea Warner's Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography (Graystone Books, 2018) tells the story, often in Buffy's own words, of the life of the remarkable…
- New Books in American Studies
Murray Hogben, "Minarets on the Horizon: Muslim Pioneers in Canada" (Mawenzi House, 2021)
Minarets on the Horizon: Muslim Pioneers in Canada (Mawenzi House 2021) by Murray Hogben is an incredible archive of some of the early Muslim settlers in…
- New Books in American Studies
Samantha Durbin, "Raver Girl: Coming of Age in the 90s" (She Writes Press, 2021)
A ’90s time capsule buried inside a coming-of-age memoir set against the neon backdrop of the San Francisco Bay Area's rave scene, Raver Girl (She Writes…
- New Books in American Studies
67 Everything and Less: Mark McGurl on Books in the Age of Amazon
What do you make of Amazon: The new Sears Roebuck? A terrifying monopoly threat? Satisfaction (a paperback in your mailbox, a Kindle edition on your tablet)…
- New Books in American Studies
Doing an Ethnography of Policing: In Conversation with Sarah Brayne
How has the use of big data and algorithms changed policing and police surveillance? On this episode, we speak with Dr. Sarah Brayne, Assistant Professor of…
- New Books in American Studies
Jussi M. Hanhimäki, "Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post-Cold War Era" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Is the West finished as a political idea? In recent years, observers have begun pointing to signs that the transatlantic community is eroding. When the…
- New Books in American Studies
Renee Ann Cramer, "Birthing a Movement: Midwives, Law, and the Politics of Reproductive Care" (Stanford UP, 2021)
Political Scientist Renee Ann Cramer’s newest book Birthing a Movement tells the stories of American midwives and their battle for reproductive rights, legal…
- New Books in American Studies
Habiba Ibrahim, "Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life" (NYU Press, 2021)
Although more than fifty years apart, the murders of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin share a commonality: Black children are not seen as children. Time and time…
- New Books in American Studies
Matthew J. Lacombe, "Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners Into a Political Force" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force (Princeton, 2021) explores the scope and power of one of America’s most influential interest…
- New Books in American Studies
Ruby Hamad, "White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color" (Catapult, 2020)
Called “powerful and provocative" by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist, Ruby Hamad's White Tears/Brown…
- New Books in American Studies
Gregg Mitman, "Empire of Rubber: Firestone's Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia" (New Press, 2021)
In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s…
- New Books in American Studies
Hsuan L. Hsu, "The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics" (NYU Press, 2020)
Our sense of smell is a uniquely visceral—and personal—form of experience. As Hsuan L. Hsu points out, smell has long been spurned by Western aesthetics as a…
- New Books in American Studies
Matthew J. Holian, "Data and the American Dream: Contemporary Social Controversies and the American Community Survey" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
How much do new building codes reduce energy usage? How much and it what ways does it matter for an immigrant to be able to work legally? How has the…
- New Books in American Studies
David Madland, "Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States" (Cornell UP, 2021)
In Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States (Cornell UP, 2021), David Madland explores how labor unions are…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert J. Spitzer, "The Politics of Gun Control" (Routledge, 2020)
Dr. Robert J. Spitzer’s classic text, The Politics of Gun Control: 8th Edition (Routledge, 2020), has been revised based on new data on gun ownership and use…
- New Books in American Studies
Joan Marie Johnson, "Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870-1967" (UNC Press, 2020)
Joan Marie Johnson examines an understudied dimension of women's history in the United States: how a group of affluent white women from the late nineteenth…
- New Books in American Studies
Joseph Tachovsky, "40 Thieves on Saipan: The Elite Marine Scout-Snipers in One of WWII's Bloodiest Battles" (Regnery History, 2020)
An elite platoon of Marine Scout-Snipers, Lieutenant Frank Tachovsky's "40 Thieves" were chosen for their willingness to defy rules and beat all-comers. When…
- New Books in American Studies
Andrea Laurent-Simpson, "Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household" (NYU Press, 2021)
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Andrea Laurent-Simpson’s path in and out of and back into graduate school The story of her…
- New Books in American Studies
John A. Dearborn, "Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Political Scientist John Dearborn’s new book, Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation (U Chicago Press, 2021), weaves together three connected…
- New Books in American Studies
Kristy Nabhan-Warren, "Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland" (UNC Press, 2021)
Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among workers in…
- New Books in American Studies
Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, "This Land is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma, 1870-2010" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)
Cori Simon (Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Sarah Eppler Janda (Professor, Cameron University) and Patricia Loughlin (Professor…
- New Books in American Studies
Dina Gilio-Whitaker, "As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock" (Beacon Press, 2019)
Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty…
- New Books in American Studies
Marilyn J. Westerkamp, "The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: An Extraordinary Woman, the Puritan Patriarchs, and the World They Made and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2021)
When English colonizers landed in New England in 1630, they constructed a godly commonwealth according to precepts gleaned from Scripture. For these 'Puritan'…
- New Books in American Studies
Scott Sumner, "The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It's happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna…
- New Books in American Studies
David Pearson, "Rebel Music in the Triumphant Empire: Punk Rock in the 1990s United States" (Oxford UP, 2020)
In Rebel Music in the Triumphant Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020), musicologist David Pearson explores the changing landscape of punk in the United…
- New Books in American Studies
Imani Perry on a Life in African American Studies
On today’s podcast, I am chopping it up with my dear friend and play cousin Dr. Imani Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at…
- New Books in American Studies
Julian Agyeman and Sydney Giacalone, "The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America" (MIT Press, 2020)
The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America (MIT Press, 2020) considers the intersection of food and immigration at both the…
- New Books in American Studies
Postscript: The Supreme Court, Concealed Carry, and How Your Laws Might Change
The American media has been focused on the Supreme Court’s upcoming abortion cases but a decision in a critical Second Amendment case could overturn public…
- New Books in American Studies
Roy Schwartz, "Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero" (McFarland, 2021)
Introduced in June 1938, the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the sons of immigrants from Eastern Europe. They…
- New Books in American Studies
Don Stradley, "The War: Hagler-Hearns and Three Rounds for the Ages" (Hamilcar Publications, 2021)
The battle between Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns is remembered as one of the greatest fights of all time. But in the months before the two finally…
- New Books in American Studies
Rebecca DeWolf, "Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict Over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920-1963" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
In Political Science, we are very familiar with the work of scholars who try to unpack why the ERA failed to get the required states. But Gendered Citizenship…
- New Books in American Studies
Stephanie N. Brehm, "America's Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself): Stephen Colbert and American Religion in the 21st Century" (Fordham UP, 2019)
For nine years, Stephen Colbert’s persona “Colbert”?—a Republican superhero and parody of conservative political pundits--informed audiences on current events…
- New Books in American Studies
John Roy Price, "The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider's Perspective on Nixon's Surprising Social Policy" (UP of Kansas, 2021)
History is told, it is said, by the victors. And so it is in regard to Richard Nixon. We all know how his presidency ended. What too few of us recall or bother…
- New Books in American Studies
Justin Beal, "Sandfuture" (MIT Press, 2021)
Sandfuture (MIT Press, 2021) is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous…
- New Books in American Studies
Kelefa Sanneh, "Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres" (Penguin, 2021)
Kelefa Sanneh was born in England, and lived in Ghana and Scotland before moving with his parents to the United States in the early 1980s. He was a pop music…
- New Books in American Studies
Alice L Baumgartner, "South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War" (Basic Books, 2020)
For some enslaved Americans, the path to freedom led not north, but south, argues Dr. Alice Baumgardner, an assistant professor of history at the University of…
- New Books in American Studies
Esther De Dauw, "Hot Pants and Spandex Suits: Gender Representation in American Superhero Comic" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
Superman, Batman, Captain America, and Iron Man are names that are often connected to the expansive superhero genre, including the multi-billion-dollar film…
- New Books in American Studies
Chenxing Han, "Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists" (North Atlantic Books, 2021)
Despite the fact that two thirds of U.S. Buddhists identify as Asian American, mainstream perceptions about what it means to be Buddhist in America often…
- New Books in American Studies
Kant Patel and Mark E. Rushefsky, "The Opioid Epidemics in the United States: Missed Opportunities and Policy Failures" (Routledge, 2021)
The current opioid epidemic in the United States began in the mid-1990s with the introduction of a new drug, OxyContin, viewed as a safer and more effective…
- New Books in American Studies
Lindsey Stewart, "The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism" (Northwestern UP, 2021)
What can southern Black joy teach us about agency? What role does refusal have in liberation? What more might there be to root work than resistance? In The…
- New Books in American Studies
Ronald J. Pestritto, "America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism" (Encounter Books, 2021)
What’s a “progressive?” We hear constantly about the rift in the Democratic Party between its “progressive” wing and its “moderate” one. But what exactly was…
- New Books in American Studies
Katherine Chandler, "Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers UP, 2020) studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms…
- New Books in American Studies
Montana Historical Society, "History of Montana in 101 Objects: Artifacts & Essays from the Montana Historical Society" (MHS Press, 2021)
A History of Montana in 101 Objects: Artifacts & Essays from the Montana Historical Society (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2021) showcases the…
- New Books in American Studies
Elizabeth McCain, "A Lesbian Belle Tells: OUTrageous Southern Stories of Family, Loss, and Love" (Crystal Heart Imprints, 2020)
Settle back for a wild ride through a Southern lesbian's life of soul-searching, rule-breaking, and truth-telling. This belle's kind of coming out was not what…
- New Books in American Studies
Heather P. Venable, "How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique 1874-1918" (US Naval Institute Press, 2019)
For more than half of its existence, members of the Marine Corps largely self-identified as soldiers. It did not yet mean something distinct to be a Marine…
- New Books in American Studies
P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey, "The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century" (UNC Press, 2021)
P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey's edited volume The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2021) is the first…
- New Books in American Studies
Seth M. Siegel, "Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink" (Thomas Dunne, 2020)
There’s nothing more vital to survival than water. “Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!”, said the Ancient Mariner, in the poem by Samuel Taylor…
- New Books in American Studies
Claudia Goldin, "Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity" (Princeton UP, 2021)
A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college…
- New Books in American Studies
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper, "A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg" (Yale UP, 2021)
The Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups of…
- New Books in American Studies
Robert Hellyer, "Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups" (Columbia UP, 2021)
Robert Hellyer’s Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups (Columbia UP, 2021) is a tale of American and Japanese teaways, skillfully…
- New Books in American Studies
Will Mari, "The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960" (U Missouri Press, 2021)
The story of the American newsroom is that of modern American journalism. In The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960 (University of Missouri Press, 2021)…
- New Books in American Studies
Edward Schatz, "Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia" (Stanford UP, 2021)
I could not think of a better way to start my tenure as host of New Books in Central Asian Studies than discussing Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements &…
- New Books in American Studies
Erica R. Edwards, "The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire" (NYU Press, 2021)
Dr. Erica R. Edwards's The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire (New York University, 2021) reveals the troubling intimacy between…
- New Books in American Studies
Jessica M. Kim, "Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941" (UNC Press, 2019)
Between 1865 and 1900, the population of Los Angeles grew from around 5,000 people to over 100,000. With population growth that explosive came the opportunity…
- New Books in American Studies
Rachel M. Blum, "How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
The discussion of factions in American politics is as old as the republic itself. But there is more to consider, particularly in terms of the way that…
- New Books in American Studies
Luci Marzola, "Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building the Studio System" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Luci Marzola's book Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building Studio System (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandome, "Marxism and America: New Appraisals" (Manchester UP, 2021)
If the United States has been so hostile to Marxism, what accounts for Marxism's recurrent attractiveness to certain Americans? Marxism and America: New…
- New Books in American Studies
M. E. J. Huff and Carole Ann King, "Alabama Quilts: Wilderness Through World War II, 1682-1950" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)
Stephanie Khattak speaks with Carole Ann King, who, along with Mary Elizabeth “Sunshine” Johnson Huff, wrote Alabama Quilts: Wilderness Through World War II…