New Books in American Studies

Together, bestselling author Julia Scheeres and award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert have written Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America's Most-Read Woman (Seal Press, 2022), the first biography of Elsie Robinson, the most influential newspaper columnist you've never heard of. At thirty-five, Elsie Robinson feared she'd lost it all. Reeling from a scandalous divorce in...

“America” means something different to everyone. American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, his account of the roaring twenties, the decade of economic growth and social change that followed the devastation of World War I. It’s a text that powerfully describes a country in flux, but it also captures something deeper and more enduring about American culture. David Alworth is...

Latinx Studies has long been overdue for a revamp – a different orientation to the questions with which we concern ourselves. Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader (New York University Press, 2021) is a leap toward this direction by offering the field nine distinct díalogos around which various established and junior scholars from different disciplines present their own writings to these...

Children and horror are often thought to be an incompatible meeting of audience and genre, beset by concerns that children will be corrupted or harmed through exposure to horror media. Nowhere is this tension more clear than in horror films for adults, where the demonic child villain is one of the genre's most enduring tropes. However, horror for children is a unique category of contemporary Holly...

Throughout his career, the internationally renowned Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot unsettled key concepts in anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and beyond. From his early critique of the West to the ongoing challenges he leveled at disciplinary and intellectual boundaries and formations, Trouillot centered the Caribbean as a site both foun...

The Democratic Socialists of America have exploded in the last few years, going from just a couple thousand members to close to a hundred thousand. This was from a combination of factors; two insurgent presidential campaigns by Bernie Sanders, a proto-fascistic movement coalescing around Donald Trump, the specter of climate change, a worldwide pandemic, general increasing economic inequality and a...

When did "parenting" become a verb? Why is it so hard to parent, and so rife with the possibility of failure? Sitcom families of the past--the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Conners--didn't seem to lose any sleep about their parenting methods. Today, parents are likely to be up late, doomscrolling on parenting websites. In Long Days, Short Years: A Cultural History of Modern Parenting (MIT Press, 2022)...

Corrections in Ink (St. Martin's Press, 2022) is an electric and unforgettable memoir about a young woman's journey-from the ice rink, to addiction and a prison sentence, to the newsroom-emerging with a fierce determination to expose the broken system she experienced. An elite, competitive figure skater growing up, Keri Blakinger poured herself into the sport, even competing at nationals. But when...

On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived...

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst, 2022), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and p...

The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics, 1860-1933 (Cambridge UP, 2022) elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860-2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 191...

In Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump (FSG, 2022), Wall Street Journal national security correspondent Michael R. Gordon reveals the strategy debates, diplomatic gambits, and military operations that shaped the struggle against the Islamic State. With extraordinary access to top U.S. officials and military commanders and to...

In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this authoritative and groundbreaking biography, leading Tocqueville...

In his acclaimed #1 bestseller Dark Towers, David Enrich presented the never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality. Now Enrich turns his eye towards the world of "Big Law" and the nearly unchecked influence these firms wield to shield the wealthy and powerful--and bury their secrets. To tell this story, Enrich focuses on Jones Day, o...

A Hollywood screenwriting and movie-making icon, Ernest Lehman penned some of the most memorable scenes to ever grace the silver screen. Hailed by Vanity Fair as “perhaps the greatest screenwriter in history,” Lehman's work on films such as North by Northwest, The King and I, Sabrina, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music helped define a generation of movie making. But while his talent took cent...

Last episode we discussed films about how a nuclear war would start, particularly the insane logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). In this episode we explore how American, British, and Australian filmmakers imagined the unimaginable - Armageddon and the literal and figurative fallout. We look at On the Beach (1959), The Day After (1983), and Threads (1984). We challenge the conventional wis...

As the 1974 school year began, Wayne Woodward was a beloved high school teacher in a rural Texas town. By the following spring, he was embroiled in a local political firestorm that would ultimately cost him his job. Woodward's sin was, in his own words, naively trying to found a chapter of the ACLU in his Hereford, Texas community. In You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, A Texas Town, and the R...

In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustai...

In the Fall of 1949, a series of international events shattered the notion that the United States would return to its traditional small peacetime military posture following World War II. John M. Curatola's book Autumn of Our Discontent: Fall 1949 and the Crises in American National Security (US Naval Institute Press, 2022) chronicles the events that triggered the wholesale review of United States...

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl...

Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate (U California Press, 2021) examines the failure of recent efforts to improve Americans' diets by increasing access to healthy food. Based on exhaustive research, this book by Kenneth H. Kolb documents the struggles of two Black neighborhoods in Greenville, South Carolina. For decades, outsiders ignored residents' complaints about the unsavory ret...

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It (Verso, 2022), leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite...

What story begins in a bedroom in suburban New Jersey in the early '60s, unfolds on some of the country's largest stages, and then ranges across the globe, demonstrating over and over again how Rock and Roll has the power to change the world for the better? This story. The first true heartbeat of Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir (Hachette Books, 2022) is the moment when Stevie Van Zandt trades in...

Having a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended—laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (Stanfor...

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear from Tod Gitlin. Gitlin was president of the Students for a Democratic Society, and went on to become a sociologist, political activist, and journalist, teaching at Berkeley, NYU and Columbia. He wrote sixteen books, and spoke at the Institute in 2007 about his book, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recov...