New Books in American Studies

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee M Pierce (s/t) interviews Luke Winslow of Baylor University on the book Luke Winslow, American Catastrophe: Fundamentalism, Climate Change, Gun Rights, and the Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump (Ohio State University Press, 2020), which offers a fresh, provocative, and insightful contribution to our most pressing social challenges by taking an orientation to...

Many Americans are familiar with the real, but repeatedly stereotyped problem of alcohol abuse in Indian country. Most know about the Prohibition Era and reformers who promoted passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, among them the members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). But few people are aware of how American Indian women joined forces with the WCTU to press for positive change in...

In today’s ultra-polarized and highly partisan political environment, Welfare for the Rich: How Your Tax Dollars End Up in Millionaires' Pockets―And What You Can Do About It (Post Hill Press, 2020) is one of the rare books written to appeal to engaged and open-minded citizens from across the political spectrum. Welfare for the Rich is the first book to describe and analyze the many ways that feder...

Taylor Petrey is an Associate Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College and the Editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. His latest book is Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). In it, Petrey documents and theorizes about Latter-day Saint teachings on gender, sexual difference, and marriage in the period since World War I...

Lauren Turek is an Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She earned her doctorate from the University of Virginia in 2015 and holds a degree in Museum Studies from New York University. A specialist in U.S. diplomatic history and American religious history, Dr. Turek’s first book, titled To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Righ...

Political Scientist Daniel Q. Gillion’s new book, The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an incredibly topical and important analysis of the connection between protests and the influence this public activism has on the voting electorate. Tracing the idea of the “silent majority” from Richard Nixon’s characterization of his supporters in t...

No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Social Movements (City Lights Publishing, 2020) by Hilary Moore and James Tracy recounts the stories of fearless organizers and activists who created an anti-racist social movement that fought against the normalization of white supremacy during the 1970s and 1980s. As white allies to contemporaneous Black-led movements aga...

During the opening decades of the Cold War, US policymakers and academics used modernization theory to provide an alternative model to communism for improving living standards. As Begüm Adalet demonstrates, Turkey was both a model case of elite-led modernization and a laboratory for development projects that could then be exported to other societies. Through her analysis of the flow of aid money a...

Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a widescreen view of how American “truth” has been discovered, defined, projected, televised, and streamed during more than one hundred years of dramatic change, through World Wars I and II, the dawn of mass media, the social and political turmoil of the sixties and seventies, and the communications revolution t...

The modern popularity of acupuncture and herbal medicine belies the long history of Chinese medicine in the U.S. In Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace (Yale University Press, 2019), Tamara Venit-Shelton (Claremont McKenna College) examines the historical contexts that shaped perceptions of traditional Chinese medicine from the colonial period to the p...

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Jay Timothy Dolmage of the University of Waterloo on the new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2018), a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American...

From the New York Times, best selling author Erica Bauermeister comes House Lessons: Renovating a Life (Sasquatch Books, 2020). This memoir is about the power of home, and the transformative act of restoring one house in particular. In this mesmerizing memoir-in-essays, Erica Bauermeister renovates a trash-filled house in eccentric Port Townsend, Washington, and in the process takes readers on a j...

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Scott Seider from Boston College and Dr. Daren Graves from Simmons University on their new book, Schooling for Critical Consciousness: Engaging Black and Latinx Youth in Analyzing, Navigating, and Challenging Racial Injustice (Harvard Education Press, 2020). Over the past thirty years, we have seen a steady increase in students of color in American public schools....

Are we asleep at the (common)wheel? Civil rights attorney and law professor Gilda R. Daniels insists that contemporary voter ID laws, voter deception, voter purges, and disenfranchisement of felons constitute a crisis of democracy – one that should remind us of past poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and physical intimidation – that should spur us to action. Uncounted combines law, h...

Michele Wakin’s new book Hobo Jungle: A Homeless Community in Paradise (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020) is an up-close exploration of the evolution that has taken place with unsheltered homelessness. She provided an evocative portrait of a jungle encampment that has endured since the Great Depression in one of the wealthiest cities located on California’s south coast. The realities of homelessness...

Burn It Down: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution (Verso, 2020), Breanne Fahs has curated a comprehensive collection of feminist manifestos from the nineteenth century to today. Fahs collected over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, calling on feminists to act, be defiant and show their rage. This thought-provoking and timely collection includes not only popular manifestos often tau...

What is the connection between the movement for death penalty abolition and the anti-slavery movement? In Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition (Routledge, 2018), Bharat Malkani, Senior Lecturer in Law at Cardiff University, explores this question. Beginning with an acknowledgment that the death penalty in the United States of America has long been shaped by the country’s history of...

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-s...

Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (NYU Press, 2017) reveals the multifaceted world of one of the city’s most important ethnic and religious groups. Jewish immigrants changed New York. They built its clothing industry and constructed huge swaths of apartment buildings. New York Jews helped to make the city the center of the nation’s publishing industry and shaped popular...

Most books about American music ask how it sounded, who wrote it, or who performed it. In his new book, Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (Norton, 2019), Dale Cockrell asks a different question: where is American music? His answer is in the brothels, dance halls, concert saloons, and cabarets of nineteenth-century New York City. Cockrell tells a story of popular mu...

“What is Africa to me?”, African-American writer Countee Cullen asked in Color, his 1925 collection of poems. African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019) lays out the long history of African American engagement with the continent. Nemata Blyden’s sweeping narrative weaves together iterations of Cullen’s question that have kept re-emerging from the 1600s through the 20...

You mean big business is good, contributes to our general welfare, and is not generally guilty--with notable exceptions--of all of the charges made against it? That's the argument libertarian economist Tyler Cowen makes in his book Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero (St. Martins, 2019) Most NBN listeners will raise an eyebrow to that claim, but most of those same NBN listeners ar...

Political Scientist Mary-Kate Lizotte’s new book, Gender Differences in Public Opinion: Values and Political Consequences (Temple University Press, 2020) helps us to understand the concept of the gender gap in American politics and how this gap looks across a host of different policy areas. Lizotte examines four different policy umbrellas: the use of force, environmental policy, social welfare pol...

Ronnie Grinberg speaks with Pamela S. Nadell, the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. Her books include America's Jewish Women, winner of the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award from the Jewish Book Council, and Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Prof. Nadell lives in North Bethesda...

A stark disparity exists between black and white youth experiences in the justice system today. Black youths are perceived to be older and less innocent than their white peers. When it comes to incarceration, race trumps class, and even as black youths articulate their own experiences with carceral authorities, many Americans remain surprised by the inequalities they continue to endure. In Presume...