New Books in American Studies

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...

In Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women Who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century (U Georgia Press, 2023), Melissa Estes Blair introduces us to five fascinating yet largely unheralded women who were at the heart of campaigns to elect and reelect some of our most beloved presidents. By examining the roles of these political strategists in affecting the outcome of pres...

When the 1997 college football season began, the once-mighty Michigan Wolverines were dismissed nationally as a relic of a bygone era. Michigan had posted four straight four-loss seasons and started out No. 14 in the polls for the third straight year, its worst preseason rankings since 1985. Michigan was led by an accidental third-year coach, Lloyd Carr, who had suffered through back-to-back four-...

Perhaps no other single day in US history was as threatening to the survival of the nation as August 24, 1814, when British forces captured Washington, DC. This unique moment might have significantly altered the nation’s path forward, but the event and the reasons why it happened are little remembered by most Americans.  Robert P. Watson's book When Washington Burned: The British Invasion of the C...

The year 1972 is often hailed as an inflection point in the evolution of women's rights. Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law that outlawed sex-based discrimination in education. Many Americans celebrate Title IX for having ushered in an era of expanded opportunity for women's athletics; yet fifty years after its passage, sex-based inequalities in college athletics r...

With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023), Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as wel...

In A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how, more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule. With the return of Charles II to the E...

Before email, when long distance telephone calls were difficult and expensive, people wrote letters, often several each day. Today, those letters provide an intimate and revealing look at the lives and loves of the people who wrote them. When the author is a brilliant writer who lived an exciting, eventful life, the letters are especially interesting. Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed, self-made...

Economic journalist and broadcaster Doug Henwood revisits his 2003 book, After the New Economy (New Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. “The New Economy” was a catchphrase that became extremely popular with economists, politicians, pundits, and many others during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The phrase was thought to describe a new economic reality rooted in information and computing tec...

Drawing on letters, personal testimony, works of art, novels, and historic Black newspapers, this book is an interdisciplinary exploration of Black women’s contributions to the intellectual life of nineteenth-century America. Rebecca J Fraser's book Black Female Intellectuals in 19th Century America: Born to Bloom Unseen? (Routledge, 2022) reconceptualizes the idea of what the term "intellectual"...

During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War...

Think about the last time that you saw or interacted with an unhoused person. What did you do? What did you say? Did you offer money or a smile, or did you avert your gaze?  When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America (North Atlantic Books, 2023) takes an urgent look at homelessness in America, showing us what we lose—in ours...

Moving from the aftermath of Reconstruction through the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States shows how artists, intellectuals, and activists turned political disappointment--the unfulfilled desire for change--into a basis for solidarity. Sara Marcus argues that the defining texts in twentieth-century American cultural history are records of political disappointment. Through ins...

From underground roots to mainstream popularity, hip-hop's influence on music and entertainment around the world has been nothing short of extraordinary. Ode to Hip-Hop chronicles the journey with profiles of fifty albums that have defined, expanded, and ultimately transformed the genre into what it is today. From 2 Live Crew's groundbreaking As Nasty As They Wanna Be in 1989 to Cardi B's similarl...

Today I talked to Aaron Tang about his new book Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence Is Destroying the Court--And How We Can Fix It (Yale UP, 2023). The Supreme Court, once the most respected institution in American government, is now routinely criticized for rendering decisions based on the individual justices' partisan leanings rather than on a faithful reading of the law. For legal scholar Aaron...

Independent food historian and author Christina Ward joins New Books Network to discuss her highly anticipated book Holy Food: How Cults, Communes and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat (Process, 2023) – exploring the influence of mainstream to fringe religious beliefs on modern American food culture. In the book and over the course of the interview, Ward unravels the numerous ways religio...

American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance (Cambridge UP, 2022), Peter P. Reed reveals how Americans embodied and re-enacted their connections to Haiti through a wide array of performance forms. In the wake of Haiti's slave revolts in the 1790s,...

Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894) left the free black community of Salem, Massachusetts, where she was born, to become one of the first women to travel on extensive lecture tours across the United Kingdom. Remond eventually moved to Florence, Italy, where she earned a degree at one of Europe's most prestigious medical schools. Her language skills enabled her to join elite salons in Florence and Rome...

How did ranching become an identity? University of Arizona historian Michelle Berry explains in Cow Talk: Work, Ecology, and Western Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West (U Oklahoma Press, 2023). During the middle decades of the twentieth century, small-scale ranchers weathered a series of crisis, rolled with increasing changes to their labor and lives, and communicated with one another through p...

A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement. The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges o...

July 3, 1981, was a pivotal night for the future of America's newest art form: hip hop. In New York's Harlem World Club, the Fantastic Romantic Five and the Cold Crush Brothers competed, with an unprecedented $1,000--and their reputations--on the line in a highly anticipated rap battle. The show drew hundreds of fans to settle a question that still dominates hip hop circles: Who's the best? In Har...

Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate the country. The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s brought cheap and plentiful petroleum into the market, decimating whale oil's popularity. Here, from our modern age of fossil fuels, Jamie L. Jones uses literary and cultural history to...

Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His "Today and Tomorrow" columns attracted a global readership of well over ten million. Lippmann was the author of numerous books, including the best-selling A Preface to Morals (1929) and U.S. Foreign Policy (1943). His Public Opinion (1922) remains a classic text within American politic...

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the 'End of History' - that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats. These threats are not only external. Espec...