New Books in American Studies

According to Viet Thanh Nguyen, all wars are fought twice: first on the field of battle, and then in the struggles over memory. In Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016) he explores the various ways in which the American War in Vietnam has been remembered and forgotten. But this wide-ranging, erudite, and joyously inter-disciplinary book is more than just...

I spoke with Dr Simon Bowmaker, Professor of Economics at New York University, Stern School of Business. He has recently published When the President Calls: Conversations with Economic Policymakers (MIT Press, 2019). His book is a very original and timely contribution on the relationship between US presidents and their economic advisers. The book, 674 pages, is divided into nine sections (one for...

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (they/she) interviews Thomas A. Discenna of Oakland University about the myriad ways that the labor of those employed by universities is situated as somehow distinct from ordinary labor. Focusing on a variety of sites where academic labor is discursively constructed in popular consciousness including among the professoriate itself, its critics a...

In this episode of the podcast, Vaneesa Cook discusses her new book Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). The book shows that there is a deep religious strain within the American Left despite contrary common perceptions. Leftists Cook calls spiritual socialists believed the basic expression of religious values—caring for the sick, tired, hun...

In recent decades, the number of Americans and Canadians who identify has nonreligious has risen considerably. With nearly one quarter of Canadian and American adults identifying as nonreligious, religious "nones" represent a sizable and growing group within the Canadian and American populations. In their recent book, None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the US and Canada (NYU Press, 2020),...

As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the history of disease and the story of continuing traf...

Polarization, a disaffected and frustrated electorate, and widespread distrust of government, media, and traditional politicians set the stage in 2016 for an unprecedented presidential contest. For many, Donald Trump’s campaign speeches and other rhetoric seemed on the surface to be simplistic, repetitive, and disorganized. In Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump (Texas A...

Richard Lachmann’s First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (Verso, 2020) is a two-for-one deal. The first half of the book is a historical analysis of why some empires transform their geopolitical power into global hegemony while others fail to do so, and why hegemons eventually lose their global predominance. Focusing on the great European empires...

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Elizabeth Engelhardt, co-editor of the new collection The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables (Ohio University Press, 2019), also edited by Lora Smith and published by Ohio University Press. We are also joined by Courtney Balestier who is a contributor to the collection. Though the collection is diverse in genre – inclu...

Today we are joined by Dr. Mitchell Nathanson, author of the book Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). Nathanson, a professor of law at the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports at Villanova University, examines the life of Jim Bouton, a journeyman pitcher whose 1970 book, “Ball Four,” was a lightning rod for controversy and became one of the bes...

Did Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency in 2016 because he was a master of character work – able to sum up opponents in pithy epithets that encourage the public to see them as weak or immoral? What is character work and how do characters with roots in ancient crease help us understand 21st-century politics? While many scholars of politics focus on plots, James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young and Elke...

Charles Lord Cornwallis’s campaign through the southern American colonies came to an ignominious close on October 19, 1781, on an open field outside Yorktown, Virginia. At approximately noon, Cornwallis’s beleaguered soldiers, exhausted and low on provisions, emerged from behind their fortifications, laid down their arms, and delivered the earl’s sword to Continental General Benjamin Lincoln, a ma...

How can we make sense of the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump? What forces moved American politics from the first African-American president and an all-Democratic Congress (2008) to ethno-nationalist rhetoric and GOP control of Congress (2016)? What do the reactions to these political events – the rise of the Tea Party and the Anti-Trump resistance – tell us about these, and future, pres...

Adam M. Sowards is professor of history at the University of Idaho and a leading environmental historian. His new book, An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), builds on his recent biography of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to describe what happened when a major copper corpo...

Today’s right wing media has a long history that is largely unknown to its current listeners. In The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement (Oxford University Press, 2020), Paul Matzko details its emergence in the 1950s and the response to its rise by some of the leading political and religious institutions of the era. As M...

In her latest book, Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California(Stanford University Press, 2019), Sarah M. A. Gualtieri uncovers the dynamic and complex stories of Arabic-speaking migrant communities who came to call Southern California home. Rather than a simple story of departure and arrival, Gualtieri traces the surprising twists and turns of Syrian migrants who travelled throughout the United S...

Americans are living through a social crisis, contends Yuval Levin in his 2020 book A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (Basic Books, 2020) In Levin’s view, acrimony reigns in the media, both social and traditional. Public discussion of crucial policy matters has degenerated into finger-pointing....

John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the...

In his book, Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba (UNC Press, 2019), Louis A. Pérez, Jr. explores how Cuba’s dependency on the sugar economy also made the island’s population dependent on food imports like rice. Despite efforts to diversify agricultural production and produce rice domestically, U.S. rice producers consistently resisted Cuban efforts to rid them of a pri...

In 2014, the cattle rancher Cliven Bundy entered the national spotlight after a showdown against federal officials over grazing rights on public lands. Two years later, his sons seized the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon and occupied it for forty days with militia and sovereign citizen groups. As journalists rushed to the scene, trying to make sense of the motivations behind their anti-governmen...

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Stacy Wolf of Princeton University about her book Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America (Oxford University Press, 2019), an exploration of the complexities of amateur and local theatre across the United States. From backstage moms to tiny divas to dinner theatres, Wolf demonstrates that this charming pastime of...

In One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924–1965 (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), Jia Lynn Yang recounts the personalities and debates that brought about the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which forms the foundation for modern U.S. immigration policy. Undoing the xenophobic national origins quotas enshrined in the 1924 Immigration Act required an ep...

In The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Ana Stevenson explores the ubiquity of what she terms the “woman-slave analogy” in nineteenth-century US feminist discourse. Using examples from the women’s suffrage, abolition, dress-reform, and labor movements, among others, Steveson reconstructs the creation of this theoretical framework that imagi...

How do young men use drill music and social media to gain power? In his new book, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy (Princeton University Press, 2020), Forrest Stuart uses ethnographic and interview methods to explore the lived experiences of young men on Chicago’s south side. Stuart peels back the layers on what is commonly referred to as the digital divide,...

Protégé of Elsie Clews Parsons and Franz Boas, founder and head of Barnard College's anthropology department, and a trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology, Gladys Reichard (1893–1955) is one of America’s least appreciated anthropologists. Her accomplishments were obscured in her lifetime by differences in intellectual approach and envy, as well as academic politics and the gen...