New Books in American Studies

In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2024), Jerry Rafiki Jenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction--the monsters of White rage, respectability, not-ness, and serial killing. Arguing that such monsters represent specific ideologies of American anti-Blackness, Jenkins shows that despite th...

The first presidential debate will be held on June 27th, 2024 and the Republicans are heading to Milwaukee (a city Donald Trump recently called “horrible” and crime-ridden). Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell had a wide ranging discussion including analysis of the upcoming debate, summer conventions, party platforms, and polling with three experts. Dr. Julia Azari is Professor of Political Science at M...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Trish Kahle, Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University-Qatar, about Kahle's new project, "Power Up: A Social History of American Electricity," which focuses especially on the labor history of both constructing and maintaining the electricity grid. They also talk about Kahle's forthcoming book, Energy Citizenship: Coal and Democracy in the A...

The first podcast in this series was inspired by a documentary film made in 2014 called “Black Analysts Speak” as well as some of the findings in the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis published in 2023. It also considered the reasons why racism has persisted so long in America including perspectives from a psychoanalytic vantage point. Mechanism of defense, particular...

For decades, Joni Mitchell's life and music have enraptured listeners. One of the most celebrated artists of her generation, Mitchell has inspired countless musicians--from peers like James Taylor, to inheritors like Prince and Brandi Carlile--and authors, who have dissected her music and her life in their writing. At the same time, Mitchell has always been a force beckoning us still closer, as--w...

From his overwhelming embrace by evangelicals and other people of faith to his championing of policies and conservative judicial candidates long sought by right-wing Christians, Donald Trump’s candidacy, campaign, and presidency were empowered by believers of many stripes who employed different methods of rationalizing or Christianizing Trump and his administration. In Performing for the Don: Thea...

The Los Angeles shoreline is one of the most iconic natural landscapes in the United States, if not the world. The vast shores of Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu are familiar sights to film and television audiences, conveying images of pristine sand, carefree fun, and glamorous physiques. Yet, in the early twentieth century Angelenos routinely lamented the city's crowded, polluted, and eroded san...

Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores the significant contributions of African American women radical activists from 1955 to 1995. It examines the 1961 case of African American working-class self-defense advocate Mae Mallory, who traveled from New York to Monroe, North Carolina, to provide support...

From the 1960s through the 1990s, the most common job for women in the United States was clerical work. Even as college-educated women obtained greater opportunities for career advancement, occupational segregation by gender remained entrenched. How did feminism in corporate America come to represent the individual success of the executive woman and not the collective success of the secretary? All...

How have women resisted sexism in TV? In Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation (U California Press, 2024), Jennifer S. Clark, an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, explores the people, organisations, TV shows and audiences who all shaped women in and on television during the 1970s. Drawing on a production studies perspective...

In Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II (Cornell UP, 2023), M. Girard Dorsey uncovers just how close Britain, the United States, and Canada came to crossing the red line that restrained poison gas during World War II. Unlike in World War I, belligerents did not release poison gas regularly during the Second World War. Yet, the looming threa...

In this episode of our occasional series, Postscript, we focus on the Supreme Court’s recently published decisions in two cases, about guns and abortion, but more about how the Executive and Judicial branches of government function in the United States. Constitutional Law scholar (and New Books in Political Science co-host) Susan Liebell takes us through Garland v. Cargill, which focused on the Tr...

In this sweeping new history, esteemed University of North Carolina historian Kathleen DuVal makes the case for the ongoing, ancient, and dynamic history of Native nationhood as a critical component of global history. In Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024), DuVal covers a thousand years of continental history, building on a new generation of scholars who have argued...

In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it...

Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate (McFarland, 2022), readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra P...

The 2020 Presidential Election in the United States marked, for many, a return to "compassionate politics." Joe Biden had run on a platform of empathy, emphasising his personal history as a means of connecting with everyone from American workers who had lost jobs to military families who had lost loved ones. Although perceptions of candidate compassion are broadly understood to influence vote choi...

Is involuntary psychiatric treatment the solution to the intertwined crises of untreated mental illness, homelessness, and addiction? In recent years, politicians and advocates have sought to expand the use of conservatorships, a legal tool used to force someone deemed “gravely disabled,” or unable to meet their needs for food, clothing, or shelter as a result of mental illness, to take medication...

Scholars working in archaeology, education, history, geography, and politics tell a nuanced story about the people and dynamics that reshaped this region and determined who would control it. The Ohio Valley possesses some of the most resource-rich terrain in the world. Its settlement by humans was thus consequential not only for shaping the geographic and cultural landscape of the region but also...

States are holding primaries. The Democrats and Republicans will convene in July and August but it has already been decided that the presidential race will be a rematch. Former President Donald Trump will challenge President Joe Biden. To take stock of where the race stands five months out, we have two experts on the presidency. Dr. Meena Bose is the Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Ser...

Did Woodrow Wilson's daddy issues cause World War II? And what might this teach us about our contemporary political plight? Jordan Osserman talks with psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster and historian Patrick Weil about The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard UP, 2023). While conducting research at Yale, Patrick Weil chan...

Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this second...

Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008 (Cambridge UP, 2023) explores the rise of the professional middle class across the Anglophone world from c. 1870 to 2008. With a focus on British settler colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States - Hannah Forsyth argues that the British middle class structured old forms of virtu...

The unintended consequences of youth empowerment programs for Latino boys Educational research has long documented the politics of punishment for boys and young men of color in schools—but what about the politics of empowerment and inclusion? In Good Boys, Bad Hombres: The Racial Politics of Mentoring Latino Boys in Schools (U Minnesota Press, 2024), Michael V. Singh focuses on this aspect of yout...

Serving Hispanic, Latine, and Latinx Students in Academic Libraries (Library Juice Press, 2024) is a collection of essays written by library workers that highlights academic library practices, programs, and services that support Hispanic, Latine, and Latinx students. As of 2020, there were over 500 federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in the United States and Puerto Rico with...

How do unequal societies function? In Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net (Portfolio, 2024), Jesscia Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examines how America’s DIY society depends on the labour of mothers and excludes the sorts of social supports present in other countries. This dependence has hugely negative social and indivi...