New Books in American Studies

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...

“The Little Mermaid” has become popular around the world since the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen published it almost two centuries ago. Lucy Fraser’s The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of “The Little Mermaid” (Wayne State University Press, 2017) uses Japanese and American transformations of “The Little Mermaid” to think through the pleasures tha...

Jayne Mansfield (1933-1967) was driven not just to be an actress but to be a star. One of the most influential sex symbols of her time, she was known for her platinum blonde hair, hourglass figure, outrageously low necklines, and flamboyant lifestyle. Hardworking and ambitious, Mansfield proved early in her career that she was adept in both comic and dramatic roles, but her tenacious search for th...

Kevin R. C. Gutzman's The Jeffersonians: The Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe (St. Martin's Press, 2022) marks the first chronicle of the only consecutive trio of two-term presidencies of the same political party in American history: Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.  Before the consecutive two-term administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama,...

Part 2 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...

The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to consider a significant community at its very heart. Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest (NYU Press, 2022) uncovers the long history of Muslims in a part of the country where many...

Part 1 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 this episode of High Theory, Kim talks with Saronik about neurasthenia. A disease that no longer exists, neurasthenia was a nineteenth century American epidemic of energy depletion. Thinking about this diagnosis can help us understand the social functions of medical knowledge, and how that knowledge changes over time. In the episode Kim discusses two nineteenth-century medical texts: American N...

Lauren N. Haumesser's The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856-1861 (UNC Press, 2022) offers a fresh examination of antebellum politics comprehensively examines the ways that gender issues and gendered discourse exacerbated fissures within the Democratic Party in the critical years between 1856 and 1861. Whereas the cultural politics of gender had bolstered Dem...

Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) w...

In far northeastern Alaska lies one of the most remarkable, and contested, places in North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This coastal arctic region is a place of great natural beauty, ecological importance, as well as being home and birthplace of the Gwich'in people. It's also thought to contain massive fossil fuel wealth, making it a site of fifty years and more political contesta...

On April 16, 2003, Luther Vandross suffered a near-fatal stroke, and the world held its breath. Inside sources said he might never sing again. He was too weak to receive visitors, but cards and good wishes came from Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, Anita Baker, Halle Berry, Patti LaBelle, Jesse Jackson, Burt Bacharach, Bette Midler, Star Jones, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick, among others. With a...

In The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance (Temple University Press, 2015), Jacob Kramer examines how progressivism emerged at a time of critical transformation in American life. Kramer presents a study of Wilsonian-era politics to convey an understanding of the progressives’ views on radical America. Jacob Kramer i...

In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner’s frontier is no more, th...