New Books in American Studies

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...

Balthrop-Lewis's Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge UP, 2021) presents a ground-breaking interpretation of Henry David Thoreau's most famous book, Walden. Rather than treating Walden Woods as a lonely wilderness, Balthrop-Lewis demonstrates that Thoreau's ascetic life was a form of religious practice dedicated to cultivating a just, multispe...

Do individuals have the right to “keep and bear” arms? Do “the people” have any collective rights to public safety? Now that the United States Supreme Court requires each side to argue based on the “history” and “tradition” of 1791 and 1868, what do scholars tell us about legal practices and public understanding in those times? Dr. Laura F. Edwards argues that Americans in the South transformed th...

Sexual violence is a significant problem within many Western militaries. Despite international attention to the issue and global #MeToo and #TimesUp movements highlighting the impact of sexual violence, rates of sexual violence are going up in many militaries. Good Soldiers Don't Rape: The Stories We Tell About Military Sexual Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Megan MacKenzie uses...

Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) explores the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business within the broader contours of American history. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years...

The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Rickard examines how serialized crime shows became an American obsession. TV shows and podcasts like Making a Murderer, Serial, and Atlanta Monster have taken the cultural zeitgeist by storm, and contributed to the release of wrongly imprisoned people—such as Adnan Syed. The popular...

Amid widespread concern that our approach to testing and grading undermines education, two experts explain how schools can use assessment to support, rather than compromise, learning. Anyone who has ever crammed for a test, capitulated to a grade-grubbing student, or fretted over a child’s report card knows that the way we assess student learning in American schools is freighted with unintended co...

In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing erupted, many observers professed shock at the overt racism on display in the "cradle of liberty." Yet the city has long been divided over matters of race, and it was also home to a far older Black organizing tradition than many realize. A com...

The labor–climate movement in the U.S. laid the groundwork for the Green New Deal by building a base within labor for supporting climate protection as a vehicle for good jobs. But as we confront the climate crisis and seek environmental justice, a “jobs vs. environment” discourse often pits workers against climate activists. How can we make a “just transition” moving away from fossil fuels, while...

Nice is not enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High (University of California Press, 2023) by Dr. C. J. Pascoe is a provocative story of contemporary high school that argues that a shallow culture of kindness can do more lasting harm than good. Based on two years of research, Nice Is Not Enough shares striking dispatches from one high school's "regime of kindness" to underli...

Recall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, 2021, he came back for this conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Something Happening Here, 2004) studied the contrast betw...

A slave woman in 1840s America dresses as a white, disabled man to escape to freedom, while a twenty-first-century black rights activist is 'cancelled' for denying her whiteness. A Victorian explorer disguises himself as a Muslim in Arabia's forbidden holy city. A trans man claiming to have been assigned male at birth is exposed and murdered by bigots in 1993. Today, Japanese untouchables leave ho...

Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and adm...

For anyone who's ever picked an apple fresh from the tree or enjoyed a glass of cider, writer and orchardist Diane Flynt offers a new history of the apple and how it changed the South and the nation. Showing how southerners cultivated over 2,000 apple varieties from Virginia to Mississippi, Flynt shares surprising stories of a fruit that was central to the region for over 200 years. Colorful chara...

This book shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. In Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap (U California Press, 2023), Tanya Maria Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city, revealing how policies and pol...

New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage. In the pre-antibiotic days when tuber­culosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay,...

The iconic Black rock band Living Colour's Time's Up, released in 1990, was recorded in the aftermath of the spectacular critical and commercial success of their debut record Vivid. Time's Up is a musical and lyrical triumph, incorporating distinct forms and styles of music and featuring inspired collaborations with artists as varied as Little Richard, Queen Latifah, Maceo Parker, and Mick Jagger....

There are few grand narratives that loom over Asian Americans more than the “model minority.” While many Asian Americanist scholars and activists aim to disprove the model minority as “myth,” author Takeo Rivera instead rethinks the model minority as cultural politics. Rather than disproving the model minority, Rivera instead argues that Asian Americans have formulated their racial and gendered su...

In The Heart of It All (Melville House, 2023), Christian Kiefer imagines a group of factory workers and their families living in a once vibrant Ohio town during the Trump era. The factory is the only place to work outside of Walmart, the grocery store, or a fast-food chain, and it’s owned by Mr. Marwat, a Pakistani man whose wife helps in the office, while their teenagers embrace American life. Th...

Baseball lore and history is filled with many valuable players, and not all of them are the Hall of Famers you know. In The One Hundred Most Important Players in Baseball History (Artemesia Publishing, 2023) Lincoln A. Mitchell highlights the one hundred players who have had the biggest impact on baseball, popular culture, and history through their careers inside or outside of baseball. You'll fin...

Avery Dame-Griff's The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023) explores how the rise of the internet shaped transgender identity and activism from the 1980s to the present. Through extensive archival research and media archeology, Avery Dame-Griff reconstructs the manifold digital networks of transgender activists, cross-dressing computer hobbyists, and others inte...

A riveting exposé of medical debt collection in America -- and the profound financial and physical costs eroding patient trust in medicine For the crime of falling sick without wealth, Americans today face lawsuits, wage garnishment, home foreclosure, and even jail time. Yet who really profits from aggressive medical debt collection? And how does this predatory system affect patients and doctors r...

At the end of the day, I have faith in the wisdom of democracy: the idea that good political solutions only arise from widely dispersed discussion, debate and decision among the broadest group of those affected. This book is intended, then, not as a finalized blueprint or technical report delivered from on high but as a conversation opener for democratic debate among my fellow citizens. – Christop...

The first city to fight back against Uber, Washington, D.C., was also the first city where such resistance was defeated. It was here that the company created a playbook for how to deal with intransigent regulators and to win in the realm of local politics. The city already serves as the nation’s capital. Now, D.C. is also the blueprint for how Uber conquered cities around the world—and explains wh...

In Old Town Road (Duke University Press, 2023), Chris Molanphy considers Lil Nas X’s debut single as pop artifact, chart phenomenon, and cultural watershed. “Old Town Road” was more than a massive hit, with the most weeks at No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 history. It is also a prism through which to track the evolution of popular music consumption and the ways race influences how the music industry ca...