New Books in American Studies

For mixed-citizenship couples, getting married is the easy part. The US Supreme Court has confirmed the universal civil right to marry, guaranteeing every couple's ability to wed. But the Supreme Court has denied that this right to marriage includes married couples' right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on US soil, creating a challenge for mixed-citizenship couples whose individual-...

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Barbara Trish, professor of political science at Grinnell College, about her new book (co-authored with William Menner) Inside the Bubble: Campaigns, Caucuses, and the Future of the Presidential Nomination Process (Routledge, 2021).  The book is a behind-the-scenes look at the 2020 Democratic nomination process focusing on the Iowa caucuses and the campaign w...

How do gender and race interact to affect the election, behavior, and impact of all individuals – raced women and gendered minorities alike? According to our authors, “what we know depends mightily on how we go about obtaining that knowledge.” Political scientists have often assumed that there are no gender differences among minority representatives, and no racial differences among female represen...

In Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War (Columbia University Press, 2020), Sunny Xiang reads the archives of US intelligence agencies alongside Asian American literature to develop a method of reading for tone rather than content, and shows us how doing so allows us to rethink both the nature of war itself and the construction of race during the long...

Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring...

In this episode of the Queer Voices of the South podcast, John Marszalek interviews author Baker A. Rogers about their research on drag kings in the South and about their own experience performing as a drag king. While drag subcultures have gained mainstream media attention in recent years, the main focus has been on female impersonators. Equally lively, however, is the community of drag kings: ci...

Midori Yamamura’s Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular (MIT Press, 2015) is an in-depth examination of the famed artist’s early years in Japan and the United States. Based on extensive research in Kusama’s archives as well as interviews with Kusama herself, Inventing the Singular both tracks the evolution of Kusama’s artistic practice and maps the artistic, social, and political contexts in which...

Elaborately conceived, grandly constructed insane asylums—ranging in appearance from classical temples to Gothic castles—were once a common sight looming on the outskirts of American towns and cities. Many of these buildings were razed long ago, and those that remain stand as grim reminders of an often cruel system. For much of the nineteenth century, however, these asylums epitomized the widely h...

In Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (UNC Press, 2020), Tyler D. Parry untangles the convoluted history of the "broomstick wedding." Popularly associated with African American culture, Parry traces the ritual's origins to marginalized groups in the British Isles and explores how it influenced the marriage traditions of different communities on both s...

Hear Dr. Rosina Lippi-Green talk about some of her shocking findings on language discrimination and bias on campus. Lippi-Green and Avi discuss her book English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the US (Routledge, 2011) and what the academic community can do to be more inclusive of scholars with different levels of English. We also discuss Rosina's transition from researcher...

Kirsten Williams Lawson used to work with rocket scientists at NASA. Now she writes books for curious kids. Kirsten is the author of the picture book released several months back, A TRUE WONDER: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything, illustrated by Katy Wu (Clarion, 2021). She is also author of WOOD, WIRE, WINGS: EMMA LILIAN TODD INVENTS AN AIRPLANE, illustrated by Tracy Subisak (Calkins Cree...

The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (U Nebraska Press, 2021) is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not onl...

In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (Princeton UP, 2021), Andrew Porwancher debunks a string of myths about the origins of this founding father to arrive at a startling conclusion: Hamilton, in all likelihood, was born and raised Jewish. For more than two centuries, his youth in the Caribbean has remained shrouded in mystery. Hamilton himself wanted it that way, and most biographers have sim...

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living i...

At the end of the Supreme Court's 2019-20 term, the center was holding. The predictions that the court would move irrevocably to the far right hadn't come to pass, as the justices released surprisingly moderate opinions in cases involving abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and how local governments could respond to the pandemic, all shepherded by Chief Justice John Roberts. By the end of the 2020-21 t...

In the 1960s and 1970s, New York City was beset by a host of fiscal and social crises wrought by white flight, federal and state disinvestment, and a declining tax base. The city faced rising crime, dilapidated parks and transit, skyrocketing budget deficits, deteriorating public services, and a dysfunctional and eviscerated municipal bureaucracy. By the mid-1970s, the situation was so dire that f...

Jack Robinson made his name as a much-sought-after fashion and celebrity photographer during the 1960s and early 1970s, and his work is well documented in hundreds of pages of Vogue, the New York Times, and Life, as well as other publications. However, his personal life remains virtually unknown. In this study of Robinson and his photography, Howard Philips Smith takes an in-depth look at Robinson...

How do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history? A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (Oxford UP, 2021) argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish history from one g...

In Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life (Duke UP, 2021), Dr. Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl...

Kristin Waters' book Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought (U Mississippi Press, 2021) tells a crucial, almost-forgotten story of African Americans of early nineteenth-century America. In 1833, Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879) told a gathering at the African Masonic Hall on Boston’s Beacon Hill: “African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free ma...

Caught on film, the iconic jump of escaped POW Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) over an imposing barbed wire fence on a stolen motorcycle has become an unforgettable symbol of a disaffected 1960s America. Dana Polan's Dreams of Flight: 'The Great Escape' in American Film and Culture (U California Press, 2021) offers the first full-length study of The Great Escape, the classic film based on a true stor...

Scholars Esther De Dauw and Daniel J. Connell have assembled an array of chapters that explore the idea of masculinity in the realm of contemporary heroes and superheroes. Toxic Masculinity: Mapping the Monstrous in Our Heroes (UP of Mississippi, 2020) examines not only the presentation of masculinity in which we are constantly immersed in the superhero narrative in films, television, and comics,...

The Salton Sea is a kaleidoscope. To some people, it's a waste land, a place of death only suitable for a dumping ground. For others, it's a clarion call, a warning for what humanity faces in our anthropogenically climate changed future. For still others, it's simply home. In The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Dr. Traci Brynne Voyl...

Structural racism has impacted the lives of African Americans in the United States since before the country’s founding. Although the country has made some progress towards a more equal society, political developments in the 21st century have shown that deep divides remain. The persistence of inequality is an indicator of the stubborn resilience of the institutions that maintain white supremacy. To...

Political scientists have argued that Donald Trump exacerbated long-simmering changes in polarization, populism, and other aspects of politics. In their book News After Trump: Journalism's Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture (Oxford University Press, 2021), Matt Carlson, Seth C. Lewis, and Sue Robinson, argue that Trump's candidacy and presidency did the same in journalism. The question...