New Books in American Studies

In Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America's Future Against a Rising China (Cornell UP, 2025), Charles L. Glaser advances a thought-provoking strategy for securing vital US interests in the face of China's rise. Many believe China's ascent will drive it to war with the United States. Yet this is far from inevitable; geography and nuclear weapons should ensure US security. The real danger, Glas...

Award-winning author Wil Haygood joins Michael Stauch to discuss The War within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home (Knopf, 2026) his new book on the experiences of Black soldiers during the first war fought with an integrated military, the Vietnam War. Through the lives of seven soldiers, a pianist, and a wartime journalist, Haygood details how Black soldiers’ attempts to rise throu...

In American War Stories (Rutgers UP, 2021) Brenda Boyle examines how the story of war is told in the Unites States and how these stories of war work to teach American values. Looking at texts ranging from war memoirs and memorials to diplomatic cables and military presence at sporting events, Boyle shows how these "benignly encouraging" stories of war create compliance for going to war. Through th...

From the author of The First Lady of WWII comes You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson’s Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With Her (Sourcebooks, 2026), the story of Lady Bird Johnson's groundbreaking trip during the 1964 election, and the women who rode with her. "It takes women to have guts." Deemed “the most important campaign effort ever undertaken by the wife of an Americ...

A provocative new history of America's constitution and an urgent call to action for a nation confronted by challenges its founders could never have imagined The American Revolution occurred at a time when Britain's constitutional order failed to adapt to the extraordinary growth of its colonies. The framers designed an American constitution to succeed where Britain's had faltered, planning for co...

May 5, 2026—In March 1880, an extraordinary American traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before a Senate committee investigating the exodus of formerly enslaved people from the Southern states. Vividly describing the nightmarish violence and exploitation inflicted by “the very men who held us slaves,” the Louisiana freedman Henry Adams spoke of Black resistance to terrorism and disenfranchiseme...

“Parental rights” is a rallying cry for today’s American conservatives, signaling opposition to mandatory vaccination and “woke” public school curricula. In Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism (Princeton UP, 2026), Dr. Julia Bowes traces the origins of the modern parental rights movement to the nineteenth century, when the introduction of compulsory sc...

Since its initial publication, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Rutgers UP, 2014) has become the classic analysis of the emergence of artists as a force of gentrification and the related rise of "creative city" policies around the world. This 25th anniversary edition, with a new introduction, illustrates how loft living has spread around the world and that artists' districts--trai...

Prince George’s County, Maryland, is a suburban jurisdiction in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and is home to the highest concentration of Black middle-class residents in the United States. As such, it is well positioned to overcome white domination and anti-Black racism and their social and economic consequences. Yet Prince George’s does not raise tax revenue sufficient to provide consis...

Here in Episode 7 of Season 5, I interview Dr. Matthew J. Franck. A senior contributing fellow at Public Discourse, a visiting lecturer in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, as well as a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University, he has written, edited, and contributed to many books, including Against the Imperial...

Coming in the thick of the second Trump term, What Does the American Presidency Mean? The Need for Interpretation in Presidency Studies is a timely and provocative new title for the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. In it, Richard Holtzman sets an agenda for interpretivist presidency research. Using Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency as a bridge between presidency studies and interpretive p...

We know who Martin Luther King Jr. became, but who was he at the beginning of his life? How did his youth inform his outlook and activism? Before Martin Luther King, Jr. was a civil rights leader, a Nobel Laureate, and a global hero, he was an emotional boy, a middling high school student devoted to fashion, dancing, and dating. Lerone A. Martin, Faculty Director of the Martin Luther King Institut...

Nicholas Tochka analyzes the role of rock music in the life of Charles Manson, the Family, and the August 1969 Tate-LaBianca killings, which also gives larger insight into Sixties counterculture. Failed singer-songwriter. Devious cult leader. A rock Pied Piper. The product of a sick society. Just another dime-a-dozen singing hippy mystic. Did the guitar-playing guru personify the violence that the...

A rich history of cross-racial coalitions and alliances of the Sixties' freedom movement, acclaimed historian Alice Echols's Black Power, White Heat reshapes our understanding of the entire era. One of the most divisive issues in recent progressive politics has been what role, if any, allies might legitimately play in other people's movements. Despite the significance of this debate, it has taken...

This probing account shines a new light on the problem of anti-Asian violence and inspires us to build lasting solidarity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, racist demagoguery fomented a campaign of terror against Asian Americans. But these attacks were part of a much longer pattern that made anti-Asian racism integral to the outbreak of white supremacist, misogynist, and colonial violence across 175...

This episode features a conversation with Dr. Katie Batza on their recently published book, AIDS in the Heartland: How Unlikely Coalitions Created a Blueprint for LGBTQ Politics. Published by the University of North Carolina Press, AIDS in the Heartland demonstrates the unique collaborations of crop duster pilots, church van drivers, nuns, tribal leaders, and synagogue ladies in places such as dec...

In Treaty Ground: Diplomacy and the Politics of Sovereignty, from Roanoke to the Republic (U Nebraska Press, 2026), Professor Charles W. A. Prior offers a new account of the sovereign claims of Native Americans, the Crown, and colonies in early America, arguing that Native American diplomacy shaped how sovereignty was negotiated and contested among all three, from Virginia’s founding to the ratifi...

In the early twentieth century, a group of white writers, artists, and performers from the cultural hub of Charleston, South Carolina, created and curated a highly sanitized view of slavery. They imagined a once and future plantation society that would reestablish them as the proper heirs of the slave past. In the process, they crafted a set of dangerously durable and virulent stereotypes about sl...

Most people today understand contraception as central to women’s liberation, and when the birth control pill arrived in 1960, the media thought it would usher in a sexual revolution. But a surprising number of religious Americans in the mid-twentieth century also saw contraception as part of God’s plan—a tool to create happy, prosperous American families in the post–World War II era. In God Bless...

Miranda Yaver’s new book, Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States (Cambridge UP, 2026), has lots of examples and incidents that will seem quite familiar to anyone who has dealt with health insurance coverage in the United States. In a sense, this book speaks to everyone because we have all been in situations like the ones that Yaver hears about from her intervi...

In this special student edition of High Theory, Andrew Bennett, Jo Hoffman, Kai North, and Ally Sullivan tell us about Rugged Individualism, a concept they link to Marxist theory. They made this episode for an assignment in Professor John Linstrom’s course on Theory and Criticism at Centenary College of Louisiana. The students provided the show notes below. The baby theorist pictured in the fetchi...

Based on a decade of research and writing, enriched by eyewitness interviews and revealing documents obtained through dozens of freedom of information requests, Kennedy’s Coup vividly recreates the Kennedy Administration’s secret encouragement of the fatal 1963 military coup against South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem. The brutal assassination of Diem by his own generals—which capped weeks of...

This episode features S. Karthikeyan and S. Subbulakshmi, the Convenor and Secretary of the Ambedkar King Study Circle, an anti-caste organization based in Silicon Valley. Our conversation began with a discussion of the choice of B. R. Ambedkar and Martin Luther King Jr. as the titular heads of the organization, then moved on to a conversation about its membership-based structure, the anti-caste s...

Frank Wisner was one of the most powerful men in 1950s Washington, though few knew it. Reporting directly to senior U.S. officials--his work largely hidden from Congress and the public-- Wisner masterminded some of the CIA’s most daring and controversial operations in the early years of the Cold War, commanding thousands of clandestine agents around the world. Following an early career marked by e...

A landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the American Civil War and ReconstructionCharles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner’s status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time....