New Books in American Studies

Co-edited by Dave Mac Marquis and Moira Marquis, two activists with deep experience in organizing prison books programs (PBPs), Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement (University of Georgia Press, 2024) introduces readers to PBPs and their decentralized organization. PBPs are a grassroots-level and nationwide activist movement challenging the largest prison industry in the worl...

In Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America (UNC Press, 2023), Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throug...

In Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant human space program of the last 50 years, NASA's space shuttle. He begins with the origins of the space shuttle: a century-long effort to develop a low-cost, reusable, rocket-powered airplane to militarize and commercialize space travel, which Hersch expl...

The issue of the future of Social Security, on which millions of Americans depend, produced great political theater at the State of the Union address. That highlighted a bigger problem of financing retirement as baby boomers seek to retire, often with limited resources. Many argue that the solution to the problem is for people to work longer.  In Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement...

"The Movement Made Us takes literature to a momentous Southern Black space to which I honestly never thought a book could take us. This is literally the Movement that made us and both Davids love us whole here with a creation that is as ingenious as it is soulfully sincere. Stunning."--Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy. A dynamic family exchange that pivots between the voices of a father and son, The ...

The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles. At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024) is an essential book for understanding our present moment and...

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and diss...

Born in Yorba Linda and raised in Whittier, California, Nixon succeeded early in life, excelling in academics while enjoying athletics through high school. At Whittier College he graduated at the top of his class and was voted Best Man on Campus. During his career at Whittier's oldest law firm, he was respected professionally and became a chief trial attorney. As a military man in the South Pacifi...

How can so many people pledge allegiance to punk, something with no fixed identity? Depending on who and where you are, punk can be an outlet, excuse, lifestyle, escapism, conversation, community, ideology, sales category, social movement, punishable offense, badge of authenticity, reason to drink beer forever, or an aesthetic of belligerent incompetence. And if someone has a strong belief about w...

In 1717, the Council of Trade and Plantations received "agreeable news" from New England. "Bellamy with his ship and Company" had perished on the shoals of Cape Cod. Who was this Bellamy and why did his demise please the government? Born Samuel Bellamy circa 1689, he was a pirate who operated off the coast of New England and throughout the Caribbean. Later known as "Black Sam," or the "Prince of P...

It was 1953, the Korean War in full throttle, when two men—already experts in their fields—crossed the fabled 38th Parallel into Communist airspace aboard matching Panther jets. John Glenn was an ambitious operations officer with fifty-nine World War II combat missions under his belt. His wingman was Ted Williams, the two-time American League Triple Crown winner who, at the pinnacle of his career,...

Dr. SunAh M. Laybourn’s Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants (NYU Press, 2024) explores the experiences of Korean adoptees, the largest population of adult transnational adoptees in the United States. Over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted into primarily white US families since the 1950s, and despite being raised as US citizens, still experience both legal and social barrie...

Sociologist Neil M. Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between. In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los A...

How and why the election of Donald Trump inspired more women to enter politics. Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election shocked and dismayed many women, and motivated many to run for office at all levels of government. In The Pink Wave: Women Running for Office After Trump (NYU Press, 2023), Regina M. Matheson and William W. Parsons explore this inspiring phen...

Rachel S. Gross's Shopping All the Ways to the Woods (Yale University Press, 2024) tells the fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild...

University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox *01 delves into some of the popular wisdom surrounding marriage and tells us what the data has to say: is it better to marry young or wait? To move in with your partner before or after marriage? Does marriage hurt your career prospects or your ability to set aside time for your own happiness? What groups in America are doing well with regards to marri...

Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Maggie Hennef...

A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War.  So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Co...

Tim Lanzendörfer's Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel (Edinburgh UP, 2023) highlights the emergence of a literary mode, speculative historism, over the past two decades in U.S. literature. Discussing in depth novels by writers such as Ken Kalfus, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colson Whitehead, among others, it integrates questions of critical method, genre, form, and literary th...

Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries se...

The birchbark canoe is among the most remarkable Indigenous technologies in North America, facilitating mobility throughout the watery world of the Great Lakes region and its borderlands. In Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023), Texas Tech University historian John William Nelson argues that canoes, and a deep understanding of por...

The birchbark canoe is among the most remarkable Indigenous technologies in North America, facilitating mobility throughout the watery world of the Great Lakes region and its borderlands. In Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023), Texas Tech University historian John William Nelson argues that canoes, and a deep understanding of por...

Roberto Alomar was not just a five-tool Hall of Famer; he was a magician on the diamond, a generational talent whose defensive wizardry left teammates and opponents breathless. Yet, despite his twelve All-Star selections and ten Gold Glove awards, he has remained one of the most contentious and enigmatic characters in baseball’s history. Roberto Alomar: The Complicated Life and Legacy of a Basebal...

Famine brought ruin to the Irish countryside in the nineteenth century. In response, people around the world and from myriad social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds became involved in Irish famine relief. They included enslaved Black people in Virginia, poor tenant farmers in rural New York, and members of the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, as well as plantation owners in the US south, abolitioni...

The first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death. In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (U California Press, 2023), Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them...