New Books in American Studies

How did the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program evolve from a Depression-era effort to use up surplus goods into America's foundational food assistance program? And how does SNAP survive?  Incisive and original, Why SNAP Works: A Political History--And Defense--of the Food Stamp Program (U California Press, 2023) is the first book to provide a comprehensive history and evaluation of the nati...

The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs. In The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail (Seal Press, 2022), New York Times bestselling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young...

Across today’s America, countless people will embark on an adventure. They will prowl among overgrown headstones in forgotten graveyards, stalk through darkened woods and wildlands, and creep down the crumbling corridors of abandoned buildings. They have set forth in search of a profound paranormal experience and may seem to achieve just that. They are part of the growing cultural phenomenon, whic...

In The House on G Street: A Cuban Family Saga (NYU Press, 2023), award-winning author Lisandro Pérez tells Cuba’s story through the lens of a single family: his own. His book relays the tales of two officers who fought against the Spanish for Cuban independence; a plantation owner who smuggles himself onto a ship; families divided by political loyalties; an orphaned boy from central Cuba who would...

Since its founding in 1801, African Americans have played an integral, if too often overlooked, role in the history of the University of South Carolina. Robert Greene and Tyler D. Parry's edited volume Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina (U South Carolina Press, 2021) seeks to recover that historical legacy and reveal the many ways that African Am...

Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial South. In exploring their lives she rewrites early American history, challenging the established male-centered narrative. In Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale UP, 2023), Dubcovsky reconstructs the lives of Native wom...

The year 2023 marks 50 years of mass incarceration in the United States. This timely volume highlights and addresses pressing social problems associated with the US’s heavy reliance on mass imprisonment. In an atmosphere of charged political debate, including "tough on crime" rhetoric, the editors bring together scholars and experts in the criminal justice field to provide the most up-to-date scie...

In his new collection of essays, Melt With Me (Mad Creek Press, 2023), Paul Crenshaw examines the intersection of 1980s pop culture, the Cold War, and the trials of coming of age. Crenshaw takes up a range of topics from Star Wars to video games, Choose Your Own Adventure books to the Satanic Panic. Blending the personal with the historical, levity with gravity, Crenshaw shows how pop culture shap...

In the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace. Unions fostered tight-knit communities, touching nearly every aspect of the lives of members--mostly men--and their families and neighbors. They conveyed fundamental worldviews, making blue-collar unionists into loyal Democrats who saw the party as on the side of the working man. Today, unions play a...

Today’s book is Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s First Capital (Georgetown UP, 2023), by Dr. Elizabeth Rule, which is the first and fullest account of the suppressed history and continuing presence of Native Americans in Washington, DC. Washington, DC, is Indian land, but Indigenous peoples are often left out of the national narrative of the United States and erased in the capital ci...

Dennis Rasmussen’s new book, The Constitution's Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter (UP of Kansas, 2023), is a propulsive analysis of one of the key members of the Founding generation, Gouverneur Morris of New York and Pennsylvania. Morris is quite a character—from his reputation as a lady’s man to his brilliant speeches at the Constitutional Convention in Philade...

How do borderlands work? How do they maintain their distinctive features in the face of concerted efforts on the part of nation-states to make each of their borderlines into a harsh demarcation? According to most contemporary political discourse and popular perceptions, the two borders of the United States West have little in common but understanding their borderlands’ similarities can help us und...

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, three violent national conflicts rocked the Americas: the Wars of Unification in Argentina, the War of the Reform and French Intervention in Mexico, and the Civil War in the United States. The recovery efforts that followed reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas, Evan C. Rothera uses both transnational and co...

In The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (UNC Press, 2023), award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Ch...

Never watch The Exorcist, Marlena Williams's mother told her, just as she'd been told by her own mother as a Catholic teen in rural Oregon when the horror classic premiered. And like her mother, Mary, Williams watched it anyway. An inheritance passed from mother to daughter, The Exorcist looms large--in popular culture and in Williams's own life, years after Mary's illness and death. In Night Moth...

From the overloaded courts with their constantly changing dates and appointments to the need to prove oneself the “right" kind of asylum seeker, the asylum system in the United States is an exacting and drawn-out immigration process that itself results in suffering. When anthropologist Rhoda Kanaaneh became a volunteer interpreter for Arab asylum seekers, she discovered how applicants learned to c...

Christina Dunbar-Hester, professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, talks about her recent book, Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Port of Los Angeles and Beyond (U Chicago Press, 2023) with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The pair discuss the trajectory of Dunbar-Hester’s career from her dissertation on low po...

Empires​ are supposed to be a thing of the past but very big countries with global reach are becoming more entrenched. By 2050, almost 40 per cent of the world’s population will live in just four polities: India, China, the US and the EU. So, in what respects are these entities imperial and is there a future for small states? Listen to Owen Bennett-Jones in conversation with Alasdair Roberts, auth...

Exploring the role of identitarian politics in the privatization of Newark’s public school system In Expelling Public Schools, John Arena explores the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country—from the vantage point of elites advancing the pro-privatization agenda and their grassroots challengers. Analyzin...

The Republic Will Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression (University of Illinois Press, 2023) by Dr. Tariq D. Khan examines the long relationship between America’s colonising wars and virulent anticommunism. The colonising wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Dr. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and...

Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration. But as Dr. Andrew Monteith shows in Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs (NYU Press, 2023), the conflict actually began more than a century before, when American Protestants began the temperance movement and linked drug use with immorality. Dr. Monteith argues that this early dru...

An accessible and engaging introductory text on homelessness and housing policy, this timely book uses a sociopolitical framework for understanding issues of homelessness in the United States. The authors, leading sociologists in their field, use data from over 250 interviews and field notes to demonstrate that homelessness is rooted in the structure of our society. They identify and describe the...

Born into upper-class America in the same year, 1854, Sara Delano (later to become the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Jennie Jerome (later to become the mother of Winston Churchill) refused to settle into predictable, sheltered lives as little-known wives to prominent men. Instead, both women concentrated much of their energies on enabling their sons to reach the epicentre of political p...

In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawi...

The Story of the B-52s: Neon Side of Town (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is the first critical history of one of the most legendary and influential bands in American popular music. Locating The B-52s in the intellectual climate of their hometown of Athens, GA and following the band from New York's downtown scene in the early 1980s to their upcoming farewell tour, the book argues that The B-52s are muc...