New Books in American Politics

Matt Hern began to examine urban displacement when he first encountered an empty lot in the northeast sector of Portland, OR. This corner was the site of a community resisting against gentrification. In this episode, Chris Gondak speaks with Matt Hern about the inspiration for his book, and the battles that many urban communities are fighting across North America. Portland, Oregon, is one of the m...

The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander’s study reveals the untold story of how free and enslaved Black people in the United States defended the young Caribbean nation from forces intent on maintaining slavery and white supremacy. Concentrating on Haiti’s place in the history of Black internationa...

With fake news on Facebook, trolls on Twitter, and viral outrage everywhere, it's easy to believe that the internet changed politics entirely. In Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), historian Claire Bond Potter shows otherwise, revealing the roots of today's dysfunction by situating online politics...

Until he passed away in 2021, Colin Powell was revered as one of America's most trusted and admired leaders. Jeffrey J. Matthews' Colin Powell: Imperfect Patriot (U Notre Dame Press, 2019) demonstrates that Powell's decades-long development as an exemplary subordinate is crucial to understanding his astonishing rise from a working-class immigrant neighborhood to the highest echelons of military an...

Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women’s rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath. In Against the World: Anti-Globalism and M...

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the violent public assassination of President John F. Kennedy, over half of all Americans surveyed continue to believe that he was killed by a conspiracy involving multiple assassins. Through its reasoned and detailed analysis of the content and evolution of JFK conspiracy narratives, Thinking Critically about the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths an...

Zachary M. Schrag's The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation (Pegasus, 2021) is a gripping and masterful account of the moment one of America's founding cities turned on itself, giving the nation a preview of the Civil War to come. In 1844, Philadelphia was set aflame by a group of Protestant ideologues—avowed nativists—who were seeking s...

The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Lisa Hajjar examines how hundreds of lawyers mobilized to challenge the illegal treatment of prisoners captured in the war on terror and helped force an end to the US government's most odious policies. Told as a suspenseful, high-stakes story, The War in Court clearly outlines why challenges to th...

Zack Furness, an associate professor of communications at Penn State Greater Allegheny, talks about his 2010 book, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility (Temple University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. One Less Car examines the history of how bicycles became a tool and object of advocacy and activism. With roots going back 1960s countercultures and growing thro...

Has the liberal order been taken for granted? The post war consensus and the impact of the cold war may have helped establish a way of doing politics that in fact was on less secure foundations that it seemed. That’s the view of Professor James E Cronin of Boston College who has written Fragile Victory: The Making and Unmaking of the Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2023)  – listen to him in...

Political Scientist and presidential scholar Stephen Knott has a new book specifically focusing on the 35th president, John F. Kennedy. This book is not exactly a biography, since it is an interesting analysis not just of Kennedy himself as president, but also the context in which Kennedy is considered, understood, and positioned. Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy (UP of Kansas, 2022) is also a...

The story of water in the United States is one of ecosystemic disruption and social injustice. From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and Flint, Michigan, to the Appalachian coal and gas fields and the Gulf Coast, low-income communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color face the disproportionate effects of floods, droughts, sea level rise, and water contamination.  In Hydronarra...

One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London...

What would happen if microchips suddenly disappeared from our world? From phones to cars, medical equipment to heating units, they are crucial for the safe and smooth functioning of much of society. While they may not actually disappear anytime soon, we have learned from the COVID pandemic about the real and potential consequences of an essential microchips shortage. Listen to Hermann Aubié, senio...

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white...

Beginning with the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 and extending through the 2020 election cycle, political scientists M.V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee trace the process by which rural white southerners transformed from fiercely loyal Democrats to stalwart Republicans. While these rural white southerners were the slowest to affiliate with the Grand Old Party, they are now its staunchest supporters. This t...

From the time Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, Americans have been obsessed with and brooded over the meaning of fascism and how it might migrate to the United States. Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture (U Chicago Press, 2022) examines how we have viewed fascism overseas and its implications for our own country. Bruce Kuklick explores the rhetoric of pol...

This week on International Horizons, David Abraham from the University of Miami discusses the origins of social democratic parties in Europe and the parallels with similar movements in the US. Following his teacher Adam Przeworski, Abraham argues that Keynesianism boosted social democracy by convincing people that the state could manage economic growth. For a time, the iron curtain heightened soli...

What happens to policies when a president dies in office? Do they get replaced by the new president, or do advisers carry on with the status quo? In November 1963, these were important questions for a Kennedy-turned-Johnson administration. Among these officials was a driven National Security Council staffer named Robert Komer, who had made it his personal mission to have the United States form bet...

The overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a flurry of commentary and wondering, "Where next?" But, it also begs deeper questions: what is the history of abortion and sex-positivity within the feminist movement, and how did Roe affect our views on sex? Feminist legal scholar Dr. Erika Bachiochi is the founder and director of the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute and a fellow at...

What areas of our lives are governed by constitutional law? When asked about what constitutional law is, Americans tend to think of notable Supreme Court cases such as the abortion law case Roe v. Wade or the Civil Rights landmark of Brown v. Board of Education. But vast swaths of our lives are governed by, of all things, the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, which gives Congress the power “...

Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony discusses the Enlightenment, the American Founding, his latest book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery Publishing, 2022), and Conservatism's past and future. Dr. Hazony is the President of the Herzl Institute, based in Jerusalem, and the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute based in Washington D.C., which recently hosted...

With the Biden Administration's student loan relief coming down the pike, Annika sits down with Dr. Beth Akers, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in higher education finance. Beth discusses the issue of student debt, and what the Biden relief plan will and will not achieve. You can find more information about Dr. Akers and her recent writing and appearances here....

In the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the US population. An intuitive approach to social justice calls us to look to the sites of the greatest disadvantage, and take measures aimed at relieving them. This approach favors “race specific” policies for pursuing justice. However, that kind of r...

The work of Ibram X. Kendi distinguishes between two forms of racism: segregationism and assimilationism. Segregationists argue that some groups are inferior by nature; assimilationists, on the other hand, argue that some groups are inferior by 'nurture,' but can overcome this inferiority if they conform to another group's cultural standards -- in America, always a White cultural standard. Black l...