New Books in American Studies

Understanding race in America requires understanding its relationship to class. Guests Joshua Bennett, writer and poet Julian Bourg, Professor of History at Boston College Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

I asked medieval historian Rachel Fulton Brown if we ought to still think of our nation (or any Western nation) as “a Christian country” in the twenty-first century. My reasoning was that I thought our Judeo-Christian inheritance is the foundation—if partially forgotten—of the democratic principles of our republic. The resulting discussion was lively, fruitful, and surprising. Professor Fulton Bro...

Today I talked to Ellen Cassedy about her new book  Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie (Chicago Review Press, 2022). Many people may identify 9 to 5 with the comic film starring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin or perhaps only know Parton’s hit song that served as its theme. But 9 to 5 wasn't just a comic film—it was a movement built by Ellen Cassedy an...

In 1983, ten years after W. H. Auden’s death, the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a series of readings and discussions of his work. In this episode from the Vault, Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor, moderates a discussion between Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium...

Why did thousands of workers at prestigious universities in the United States go on strike in 2022? How did we get to this historic moment, and is it really over? This episode explores: The myriad ways universities can wield power over workers and even their families. Why university workers are divided into different unions—and why some have no union representation at all. How inflation, student d...

Who gets to define generational cohorts and do they obscure more than illuminate? Guests Neil Howe, author of Generations Tony Tulathimutte, author of Why There’s No ‘Millennial’ Novel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone." The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past (Oxford UP, 2023) challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward traditio...

What happens when politics becomes comedy and the jester becomes the king? Guests Emily Nussbaum, television critic for The New Yorker Avi Steinberg, writer Kwesi Mensah, comedian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

With the Supreme Court poised to potentially outlaw race-conscious admissions, Affirmative Action may soon be on the chopping block. What will be the legacy of this half-century-old policy? Jason Riley, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and columnist at the Wall Street Journal, discusses affirmative action's impact both on the black community and the broader American education system. Riley...

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has always been globally situated, argues Montana State history professor Amanda Hendrix-Komoto in Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific (U Nebraska, 2022). Through mission work, polygamous marriage, and extensive kinship networks, LDS members sought to create Zions - holy Mormon spaces - throughout the world...

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses on emotion serve to create and maintain White supremacy and racism. Throughout history, scientific theories have played a vital role in the accumulation of power over colonized and racialized people. Scientific intellectual discourses on ra...

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Felicity M. Turner's Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press, 2022) documents how women—Black and white, enslaved and free—gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the ninetee...

The loss of lesbian spaces, as well as ideas of the lesbian as anachronistic, has called into question the place of lesbian identity within our current culture. In Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger Between Feminist and Queer (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Mairead Sullivan probes the perception that lesbian status is in retreat, exploring the political promises—and especially the failures—of lesbian fem...

A special bonus episode in honor of the 93rd Academy Awards on April 25, 2021! One of the most-nominated films at this year's Oscars is "Nomadland," adapted from a book of the same name by journalist Jessica Bruder. "Nomadland" is about a 21st-century American phenomenon - the post-2008 increase in (mostly elderly) people who practice "vandwelling," living in vans, trucks, or other mobile housing...

By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral response to this? Can prisons and the practices surrounding incarceration feasibly be reformed, or should the entire enterprise be abolished? If the latter, then what? If the former, what are the necessary reforms? In The Idea of Prison Abolition (...

This volume explores the development of political parties in nineteenth-century United States of America through an extensive analysis of the official statements by a party in an election, the party platforms, and their connection with political elites and voters. Platforms indicate how party leaders reconciled local, state, and national conflicts and articulated their electoral appeals to various...

The marginalisation of Black voices from the academy is a problem in the Western world. But Black Studies, where it exists, is a powerful, boundary-pushing discipline, grown out of struggle and community action. In The Future of Black Studies (Pluto Press, 2022), Abdul Alkalimat, one of the founders of Black Studies in the US, presents a reimagining of the future trends in the study of the Black e...

"History recalls Wallace’s inaugural address as a set piece in the larger drama of defending Southern segregation, which it was. But the speech was about something even more profound, more enduring, even more virulent than segregation. Aside from his infamous “Segregation Forever” slogan, Wallace mentioned “segregation” only one other time that afternoon. In contrast, he invoked “freedom” twenty-f...

When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. "But," as Jed Rasula writes, "The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become...

In this week’s episode from the Institute’s Vault, Molly Haskell talks about her 2009 book, Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited, published by Yale University Press. Haskell grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and studied at the Sorbonne. She came to New York in the sixties to work for the French Film office, where she wrote a newsletter about French films. She wrote about movies for the Vi...

In this interview, she discusses her book, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (Oxford UP, 2023), which inserts successive Irish-American identities--forcibly transported Irish, Scots-Irish, and post-Famine Irish--into American histories and representations of race. Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature,...

Part 3 of 3. In the spring of 1942, James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, gave a series of lectures in New York on the first decade of the movement. The challenges, the setbacks, the accomplishments and the lessons learned were recounted with Cannon’s trademark style that managed to be accessible while also maintaining the revolutionary militancy he was trying to carry on. The lectu...

In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948--The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek among them--all from screenplays he alone had written.  Stuart Klawans' Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges (Columbia UP, 2023)...

The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community. Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces.  In Wh...

Three centuries of English idioms—their unusual origins and unexpected interpretations. To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or by crook. Curry favor. Drink like a fish. Eat crow. We hear such phrases every day, but this book is the first truly all-encompassing etymological guide to both their meanings and origins. Spanning more than three centuries, Take My Word for It: A Dicti...