New Books in American Studies

As the leader of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles during the 1980s, Father Luis Olivares brazenly defied local Catholic authorities and the federal government by publicly offering sanctuary to Central American migrants fleeing political violence and civil war, and later extending it to undocumented Mexican immigrants unable to legalize their status after the passage of the Immigration Reform...

Today we are joined by Roger Gilles, Director of the Honors College and Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University, and author of Women on the Move: The Forgotten Era of Women’s Bicycle Racing (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the rise of women’s velodrome racing in the American Midwest in the 1890s, the business of six-day cycling, and the gender p...

What did the American Civil War look like from Diné Bikéyah and Apacheria? This is just one of the many questions that drives historian Megan Kate Nelson’s The Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which details the Civil War’s impact on a diversity of historical actors vying for control, opportunity, and survival in the cont...

In her new book Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promise (St. Martin's Press, 2019), Jodie Adams Kirshner tells the story of the people of Detroit before, during, and after its bankruptcy, offering lessons about urban governance, post-industrial economics, development, and the usefulness of bankruptcy itself as a tool to aid U.S. cities. Join us to hear the fascinating, infuriati...

In his book My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness (Oxford UP, 2017), Dr. Howard Jones describes how on March 16th, 1968, several units of American soldiers descended upon a collection of small villages in Central Vietnam, now collectively known as My Lai. In the space of a few short hours, they committed one of America’s most infamous war crimes. While failing to find the enemy troo...

Radio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006). The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition in 1845 turned the Arctic into an object of fascination. By the end of the century, it had become an ‘Arctic Fever.’ Fox is the h...

Saladin Ambar has written a masterful examination and analysis of American political thought in this new book which does, in fact, reconsider our thinking about this particular branch of political theory. Ambar has integrated into Reconsidering American Political Thought: A New Identity (Routledge, 2019) the variegated threads of many of the traditional texts within the American political thought...

Professor Blain Roberts of California State University, Fresno, talks about intersections of race, identity, and memory in the South in a wide-ranging discussion that starts in the segregated beauty parlors of the Jim Crow era and ends with remembrances of slavery in modern-day Charleston, South Carolina. From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American commu...

Today we are joined by Brad Balukjian, author of the book The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife (University of Nebraska, 2020). A combination of Charles Kuralt and Lawrence Ritter, Balukjian’s work examines 14 baseball players pulled from a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards. Balukjian takes the reader on a cross-country tour to meet these now-retired players, who have de...

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Kate Lockwood Harris (she/they)--Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota -on the courageous new book Beyond the Rapist: Title IX and Sexual Violence on US Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2019). Be...

Labels on a map: Surrey. Lower Norfolk. The Isle of Wight. Northumberland. Middlesex. Not a map England, but of the British colonies of Virginia and Maryland published in 1673. This is a map that proclaims empire: from the prominent royal arms, to the ships riding at anchor out in what is labelled the ‘North Sea’. It is both a map of land and of water: rivers open into the interior like great high...

Michael Bobelian has written a history of the nomination of Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968. In Battle for the Marble Palace: Abe Fortas, Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and the Forging of the Modern Supreme Court (Schaffner, 2019), he reminds us of the intense political battle over Lyndon Johnson’s legacy nomination of then-associate justice Abe Fortas...

The 1949-50 CCNY Beavers basketball team were one of the unlikeliest of champions in sports history. CCNY was a tuition-free in Harlem, New York, intended to give working class students the best education possible. The school was comprised of minorities, many of whom were the immigrants or children of immigrants. In 1949-50, the CCNY squad, led by legendary coach Nat Holman, shocked the basketball...

It seems unthinkable that citizens of one of the most powerful nations in the world must risk their lives and livelihoods in the search for access to necessary health care. And yet it is no surprise that in many places throughout the United States, getting an abortion can be a monumental challenge. Anti-choice politicians and activists have worked tirelessly to impose needless restrictions on this...

R. Scott Huffard Jr. is the author of Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019. Engines of Redemption is a fascinating history of capitalism in the South, which tells the story of how railroads revitalized the region following the Civil War. Huffard examines the myriad of was that railroads w...

Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 The Prophet is book that’s changed people’s lives. It is a deceptively simple book, but it contains a radical insight. “Of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving in your souls?” What can a book teach us that we cannot know ourselves? To detect this thing inside of us we must break through convention: our escape into social habits, religious and political doctri...

In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. At an immigrant educational society in Greenwich Village, these early Afro-Latino New Yorkers taught themselves to be poets, journalists, and revolutionaries. At the same time, these individuals―including Rafael Serra, a cigar maker, writer, and politic...

Catherine Newell talks about the religious roots of the final frontier, focusing on the collaboration of artist Chesley Bonestell, science writer Willy Ley, and the NASA rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Newell is an assistant professor of religion and science at the University of Miami. She’s the author of Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier (University of Pit...

Professor Jacob Remes of SUNY Empire State College discusses his book, Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (University of Illinois Press, 2015), and challenges prevailing assumptions about how ordinary people, governments, and institutions act in the wake of natural disasters. A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era–beliefs began to assume gre...

America has the largest incarcerated population in the world. This staggering and troubling fact has driven a great deal of scholarship. Much of this research has shown that mass incarceration in America is facilitated by systemic racial discrimination, which disproportionately affects African-American and Latinx communities. Only recently have scholars focused on the role of religion in American...

“Black lives matter before death.” (p.132) In her powerful new book, You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America (University of California Press, 2019), Andrea S. Boyles provides vivid ethnographic work and in-depth interviews from the Ferguson protests. She shares discussions and experiences that illustrate that protestor’s actions are both spontaneo...

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections t...

Catherine A. Stewart is the author of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. Long Past Slavery examines the history behind the collection of more than 2,300 narratives from formerly enslaved people, as part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project. Stewart pays close attention to how the ex-slave narrativ...

Much of the confusion about a central event in United States history begins with the name the "Civil War." In reality, the Civil War was not merely civil--meaning national--and not merely a war, but instead an international conflict of ideas as well as armies. Its implications transformed the U.S. Constitution and reshaped a world order, as political and economic systems grounded in slavery and em...

The so-called Sabermetrics revolution in baseball that began in the 1970s, popularized by the book—and later Hollywood film—Moneyball, was supposed to represent a triumph of observation over intuition. Cash-strapped clubs need not compete for hyped-up prospects when undervalued players provide better price per run scored. Q.E.D., right? In Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseb...