New Books in American Studies

In her prize-winning study Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Colonial Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2019), award-winning historian Sophie White (Professor of American Studies, Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies, and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the Unive...

National concern about income inequalities. Race relations at a boiling point. Riots in the streets. Cries on the left for massive allocations of federal money for housing and poverty reduction programs. Social scientists and professional activists touting theories and pet proposals for projects that will supposedly eradicate poverty if only enough money is thrown at them. Tensions between local a...

From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its European counterparts, it deserved independence. In Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Mov...

In Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Samoa (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020), JoAnna Poblete demonstrates how western-style economics, policy-making, and knowledge building imposed by the U.S. federal government have been infused into the daily lives of American Samoans. American colonial efforts to protect natural resources based on western approaches intersect with indigenous i...

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marg...

Among the tens of thousands of Americans who volunteered their services during the Civil War was Mary Walker, a daring young woman who was one of the handful of female doctors in the nation at that time. Yet despite the often desperate need for medical professionals she spent much of the war struggling to earn the respect she felt she deserved. In Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey t...

Before Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in 1981, nine highly qualified women were on the shortlist. What do the stories of these women tell us about the judiciary? Gender? Feminism? Race? In Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court (NYU Press, 2020), Renee Knake Jefferson (professor at the University of Houston Law Center) and Hannah Brenner Johnson (V...

Today we are joined by Kathleen Bachynski, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Muhlenberg College, and author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the intersection of public health and American football, the difficulty in assessing and quantifying sports...

Verónica Martínez-Matsuda about her book Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program (University of Pennsylvania Press). Migrant Citizenship exams the Farm Security Administration’s Migratory Labor Camp Program, and its role in the daily lives of a diverse number of farmworker families. Martínez-Matsuda thoroughly investigates the way public policy was used to...

In Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Katherine Zien examines the ways politicians, activists, artists, and residents performed and interpreted sovereignty in the Canal Zone from U.S. control over the zone in 1903 to its withdrawal in 1999. Moving beyond the big ditch and construction of the interoceanic canal, Zien...

In Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Thomas Bishop details the remarkable cultural history and personal stories behind an iconic figure of Cold War masculinity—the fallout shelter father, who, with spade in hand and the canned goods he has amassed, sought to save his family from atomic warfare. Putting policy docume...

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Emily Wallace, author and illustrator of the new book Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South (University of Texas Press, 2019). Road Sides pays homage to popular travel guides with its short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet containing a brief contextualizing essay followed by a feature of a spec...

Justin Gomer is the author of White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. White Balance explores the connection between politics and film from the 1970s to the 1990s. Gomer illustrates the myriad of ways that Hollywood relied on and helped solidify an emerging ideology of colorblindness in the wak...

In Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Manuel Betancourt explores what makes Judy Garland’s landmark album great, and why it holds such a central place in queer culture. A hit when released in 1961 (it was the first album by a woman ever to win the Grammy award for Best Album), Judy at Carnegie Hall quickly came to occupy a central place in the gay imaginary. And yet...

In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of Chicago police officers routinely tortured criminal suspects in their custody, while fellow cops, state attorneys and elected officials looked the other way. In his book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements For Police Accountability in Chicago (University of Chicago Press), Andrew Baer explains how the eponymous det...

In the United States, each election cycle reminds us that younger voters vote at much lower rates than their older counterparts. This discrepancy is often chalked up to apathy or lack of interest in politics among younger voters. In their new book, John B. Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus analyze this conventional explanation along with the political science literature about voting behavior among...

Today’s interview is with Dr. Raymond Winbush a research professor and the Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University. Dr. Winbush and Dr. Denise Wright coedited the book The Osiris Papers: Reflections on the Life and Writing of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing (Black Classic Press, 2019) As a scholar and activist, Dr. Winbush is known for his systems-thinking approaches to u...

Undocumented youth activists are at the forefront of the present-day immigrant rights movement. This is especially true surrounding the activism of the recent SCOTUS decision on DACA issued on June 18, 2020. Professor Kevin Escudero’s book, Organizing While Undocumented: Immigrant Youth’s Political Activism Under the Law (New York University Press, 2020), depicts just how undocumented immigrant yo...

How did the American Founders understand religious liberty? Why should students study the Founding? What is the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Dr. Vincent Phillip Muñoz, the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Political Science and Concurrent Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, joins Madison's Notes to discuss these questions and m...

In Hacking Diversity: The Politics of inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2020), Christina-Dunbar Hester, an associate professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, explores the world of open technology – communities centered on knowledge sharing. In particular, she investigates how these communities are considering the question of diversity...

St. Louis, Missouri is the city with the highest rate of police shootings in the United States. It’s the city with an 18 year difference in life expectancy between Black and white neighborhoods which stand just 10 miles apart. It’s the city where, after Mike Brown was shot in 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement was born. It is also, now, the city whose history offers essential lessons about the...

Sex scandals are ubiquitous in American politics. In Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2019), Leslie Dorrough Smith examines the dynamics of political sex scandals and the rhetorical strategies employed by politicians that enable them to successfully withstand a public sex scandal. Through an examination of some of the most sensatio...

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Xueli Wang from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on her new book, “On My Own: The Challenge and Promise of Building Equitable STEM Transfer Pathways (Harvard Education Press, 2020). For decades, the shortage of STEM talents has been a national concern in the United States. Many discussions about this issue focus on K-12, undergraduate, and graduate education, w...

Mark Anderson’s From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology (Stanford University Press) is at once a story about US anthropology and US liberalism from the 1930s to the 1960s. By interrogating the Boasian intervention into the idea of biological race, Anderson shows how, despite their progressive and anti-racist intentions, Boas and ‘the Boasians’ naturalised the idea of...

For the second time, Nick Estes has been gracious enough to participate in a New Books Network podcast to discuss his book Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019). (Listen to Ryan Tate’s interview for New Books in the American West here). This second interview focuses more on a genocide studies readin...