New Books in American Studies

Mark Christian Thompson's book, Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2022) examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century African American writers and thinkers, showing how their investments in sociology and anthropology gave way to a growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory by the 1960s. Thompson analyzes...

The period from 1550 to 1700 was critical in the development of slavery across the English Atlantic world. During this time, English discourse about slavery revolved around one central question: How could free persons be made into slaves? John Samuel Harpham shows that English authors found answers to this question in a tradition of ideas that stretched back to the ancient world, where they were m...

Stephen C. Foster (1826–1864) was a prolific song composer. A few of his minstrel tunes have become so enmeshed in American musical culture that they are often thought to be folk songs. Although he died in poverty and most of his music was quickly forgotten, by the early twentieth century he was hailed as the “Father of American Music” and had become a symbol of US democracy. In Formulating Foster...

Immigration is one of the most controversial topics in the United States―and everywhere else. Pundits, politicians, and the public usually depict immigrants either as villains who pose a threat to our economy, culture, and safety, or as victims―needy outsiders whom we must help, at our own cost if necessary. But the data clearly debunk both narratives. From jobs, investment, and innovation to cult...

Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, with more than twenty thousand white people in attendance. The crowd turns the violent spectacle of Bethea's hanging—the last documente...

An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century The US middle class was a product of state and federal policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. But since the 1980s, lawmakers have undermined what they once built, shredding the social safety net and instituting laws that virtually guarantee downward mobility for all but the most...

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America’s resemblance to medieval E...

Radicals & Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern (Reaktion, 2023) is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth-century capital of modern culture. Across the 1910s and ’20s, through provocative creative acts, shocking fashion, political activism, and dynamic social networks, these women reimagined modern life and foug...

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. T. R. Johnson's book New Orleans: A Writer's City (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired...

In Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have created an invisible infrastructure not only to affect local school districts but also to shape US education. He illustrates this by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how local organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have transformed d...

A racial demographic transition has come to rural northern New England. White population losses sit alongside racial and ethnic minority population gains in nearly all of the small towns of the Upper Valley region spanning New Hampshire and Vermont. Homesick considers these trends in a part of the country widely considered to be progressive, offering new insights on the ways white residents maint...

Mary E. Stuckey, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, has a brilliant new book that dives into the question of who we are as Americans, a theme that Stuckey has long researched and considered in much of her work (Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity, University Press of Kansas, 2004; For the Enjoyment of the People:...

Political Scientist Michael Illuzzi has a fascinating new book on peoplehood in the United States, focusing on different political actors at different crucial points in American history, and how the “story” of American peoplehood has been told. This idea of “peoplehood” is not necessarily new, since it brings with it a connection to the country where one is a citizen. But for the United States, th...

In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. In this lecture, a part of the “New American Music Series” of Gallatin Lectures at NYU, Foss discusses the state of American contemporary music, musical minimalism, and his own approach of combining serial elements with spontaneous composition....

Theodore Karamanski joins fellow Lake Michigan enthusiast Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan. Looking down from outer space a vast expanse of blue appears in the heart of North America. Of the magnificent chain of inland seas, only one of those bodies of water--Lake Michigan--is entirely within the boundaries of the United States. Lake Michigan...

To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent. With Spatial Theories...

The first book of its kind, Less Than Victory: American Catholics and the Vietnam War (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Dr. Steven J. Brady explores both the impact the Vietnam War had on American Catholics, and the impact of the nation's largest religious group upon its most controversial war. Through the 1960s, Roman Catholics made up one-quarter of the population, and were deeply involved in all aspects...

The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their place in a nation still grappling with the legacy of slavery. Often remembered as a period of failed progressive change that gave way to Jim Crow and second-class citizenship, Reconstruction’s tragic narrative has long overshadowed the resilience and...

Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada’s role in the bloody conflict that claimed more than 600,000 lives. Until From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War (ECW Press, 2022) by Brian Martin. A surprising 20,000 Canadians went south to take up arms on both sides of the conflict, w...

In this episode Drora Arussy speaks with historian Adam S. Ferziger about his latest book, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism (New York University Press, 2025). Ferziger, a professor at Bar-Ilan University and one of the leading voices in the study of modern religious movements, offers a compelling exploration of the transnational interactions that have resha...

Harry "Bucky" Lew leapt over pro basketball's color wall in 1902 and continued to integrate every single role in the game over the next 25 years. He was the first Black player, coach, manager, referee, and franchise owner in otherwise white leagues. His accomplishments were well documented in the newspapers of his day, but he has largely been forgotten, despite his assist to the Dodgers in finding...

Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (Knopf, 2023) is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their way to do journalism's most valued work. From Margaret Fuller's improbable success to the highly paid reporters of the mid-nineteenth century to the breakthrough investigative triumphs of Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, and Ida B. Wells, Brooke Kroe...

What is “America” not only as a political entity but in our imagination? How can we properly envision America, without repeating clichés that frame America as either reactionary or revolutionary, repressive or liberatory? I spoke with Eyal Peretz about his book American Medium, which looks at Hollywood to re-imagine the concept of "America" through the medium of film. By considering six fundamenta...

In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock focused his lens on an issue that cuts to the heart of our criminal justice system: the risk of wrongful conviction. The result was The Wrong Man, a bracing drama based on the real-life false arrest of Queens musician Christopher “Manny” Balestrero. Manny's ordeal is part of a larger story of other miscarriages of justice in the first half of the twentieth century.  In No...

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...