New Books in American Studies

When Phil Klay left the Marines a decade ago after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself a part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences--for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war--from the revolutionary war of our founding, to the civil war that ended slavery, to the two world...

From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends to be colorblind. In When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age (U California Press, 2023), Rob Eschmann blends rigorous research and engaging personal nar...

Today I talked to Benjamin Studebaker about his new book The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly subjecting Americans of nearly all income levels and backgrounds to enormous amounts of stress. The United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress, and politicians incre...

Joseph F. Smith was born in 1838 to Hyrum Smith and Mary Fielding Smith. Six years later both his father and his uncle, Joseph Smith Jr., the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were murdered in Carthage, Illinois. The trauma of that event remained with Joseph F. for the rest of his life, affecting his personal behavior and public tenure in the highest tiers of the...

When her mother passed along a cookbook made and assembled by her grandmother, Erica Abrams Locklear thought she knew what to expect. But rather than finding a homemade cookbook full of apple stack cake, leather britches, pickled watermelon, or other “traditional” mountain recipes, Locklear discovered recipes for devil’s food cake with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. Some recipes eve...

The poor have always been with us, even in a rich country and a prosperous time. I ask Ben Metcalf, former Secretary of Housing and Community Development in California, about the challenges and successes of the government in providing shelter for its people. Our conversation recalls the question from Matthew 25:37-38, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? W...

The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there. Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the...

The twentieth century was the managerial century in the United States. An organizational transformation, from entrepreneurial to managerial capitalism, brought forth what became a dominant narrative: that administrative coordination by trained professional managers is essential to the efficient running of organizations both public and private. And yet if managerialism was the apotheosis of adminis...

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors. We discuss their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. We recently caught up with Héctor Tobar to discuss his new book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino" (MCD, 2023). Our conversation included mention...

Today’s book is: Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, published by Algonquin Books, and written by Michelle Dowd. Forager is a memoir which showcases Michelle’s life growing up on an isolated mountain in California as part of an apocalyptic cult, and how she found her way out of poverty and illness by drawing on the gifts of the wilderness. Our guest is: Michelle Dowd, who is a journa...

In Imperiled Whiteness: How Hollywood and Media Make Race in "Postracial" America (University Press of Mississippi, 2023), Penelope Ingram examines the role played by media in the resurgence of white nationalism and neo-Nazi movements in the Obama-to-Trump era. As politicians on the right stoked anxieties about whites “losing ground” and “being left behind,” media platforms turned whiteness into a...

For decades, parents across America have asked their kids, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” The answer is, “Duh, yes.” Peers, as parents well know, have a tremendous impact on who their kids are and what they will become. And even while they insist otherwise, parents know that they’re largely powerless to change this. But the effect of peers is not just a story about kids; peers c...

While a luscious layer cake may exemplify the towering glory of southern baking, like everything about the American South, baking is far more complicated than it seems. In Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (UNC Press, 2022), Rebecca Sharpless here weaves a brilliant chronicle, vast in perspective and entertaining in detail, revealing how three global food traditions—Indigen...

After being forgotten for nearly 130 years, the “Mother of Suffrage in Missouri” and her husband are finally taking their rightful place in history. St. Louisans Virginia and Francis Minor forever changed the direction of women’s rights by taking the issue to the Supreme Court for the first and only time in 1875, a feat never eclipsed even by their better-known peers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth...

The Supreme Court recently wrapped up their term – and announced that they will hear a very controversial case about domestic abuse, the power of Congress, and the right to keep and bear arms called United States v. Rahimi. The Court will decide whether a Texas man who assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone has been deprived of his Second Amendment...

Told through the eyes of witnesses to the fall of Kabul, Walkley award-winning journalist Andrew Quilty's debut publication offers a remarkable record of this historic moment. August in Kabul: America's Last Days in Afghanistan (Bloomsbury, 2023) is the story of how America's longest mission came to an abrupt and humiliating end, told through the eyes of Afghans whose lives have been turned upside...

At the end of the 1930s, the West was in peril. A cultural and economic backwater, the Great Depression had all-but wiped out the extractive industries which had fueled the region's economy for decades. What catapulted the West into the global twentieth century was mobilization for World War II.  In The Mobilized American West: 1940-2000 (U Nebraska Press, 2023), University of Washington emeritus...

Anna Zeide, Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech, talks about her book, US History in 15 Foods (Bloomsbury, 2023), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. US History in 15 Foods is an approachable book that covers key moments and major themes in the history of the United States from before European colonization to the present, using food as the lens of examination. Zeide and Vinsel also...

Howard Fishman's To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse (Dutton, 2023) is a fascinating hybrid biography that weaves together Fishman's own odyssey of research with the surprising life story he uncovers. Connie Converse was a gifted songwriter whose music came to public notice more than fifty years after it was recorded. Her album How Sad, How Lovely has taken its...

Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. He teaches and writes about Buddhism in the West, Pure Land Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism. As of 2010, there were approximately 3-4 million Buddhists in the United States, and that figure is expected to grow significantly. Beyond the nu...

In Becoming Colorado: The Centennial State in 100 Objects (UP of Colorado, 2021), historian William Wei paints a vivid portrait of Colorado history using 100 of the most compelling artifacts from Colorado’s history. These objects reveal how Colorado has evolved over time, allowing readers to draw multiple connections among periods, places, and people. Collectively, the essays offer a treasure trov...

Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches (University of Wales Press, 2022) by Miranda Corcoran is a study in teenage witches in twentieth-century American popular culture. The teenage witch emerged in American fiction in the late twentieth century, quickly becoming a cultural touchstone. Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture reveals how novels, films, t...

Beloved culinary and cultural institutions, Jewish delis are wonderlands of amazing flavors and great food—bright, buttery, briny, sweet, fatty, salty, smoky. . . . In The Jewish Deli: An Illustrated Guide to the Chosen Food (Chronicle Books, 2023), comics artist and deli aficionado Ben Nadler takes a deliciously entertaining deep dive into the history and culture of this food and the places that...

Nobody who sits in traffic on Sedona, Arizona's main stretch or stands shoulder-to-shoulder in its many souvenir shops would call it a ghost town. Neither would anyone renting a room for $2,000 a month or buying a house for a half-million dollars. And yet, the people who built the small town and made it a community are being pushed further and further out. Their home is being sold out from under t...

What is natural law, and what does it have to do with originalism? Why does the Right defend religion yet so often struggle to define it? Next up in our "Summer of Law" series, Hadley Arkes, the Edward Ney Professor Emeritus of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Amherst College and the Founder and Director of the James Wilson Institute sits down to chat about his recent book, Mere Natural Law: Originalism...