New Books in American Studies

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are written. So when you are reading, say, a popular...

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Before WWII, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women's l...

In July 1958, U.S. Marines stormed the beach in Beirut, Lebanon, ready for combat. Farcically. they were greeted by vendors and sunbathers. Fortunately, the rest of their mission—helping to end Lebanon’s first civil war—went nearly as smoothly and successfully, thanks in large part to the skillful work of American diplomats on site, who helped arrange a compromise solution. Future American interve...

Professor Jay Driskell of Hood College, author of Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (University of Virginia Press, 2014), traces the roots of black protest politics to early 20th century Atlanta and the fight for equal education. In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta...

Perla Guerrero is the author of Nuevo South: Asians, Latinas/os, and the Remaking of Place (University of Texas Press, 2017). Nuevo South explores the history of an ever diversifying U.S. South by examining the mixed reactions refugees, immigrants, and migrants, from different countries, received in Arkansas in the latter half of the 20th century. Comparing the experiences of Vietnamese, Cuban, an...

In 1866, a sixteen year old cowboy—the name was literal in his case—named J.M. Daugherty bought 1,000 cattle, hired five cowboys, and headed north for Missouri. In Indian Territory, he took the long way around Cherokee land, to avoid paying them for crossing their lands. As Daugherty told it, some Yankee “Jayhawkers” ambushed him, shot some of his companions, and took him prisoner, accusing him of...

A fortune teller, cotton prophet, and a weather forecaster walk into a bar—probably a more common occurrence than you might think in the Gilded Age United States! Jamie Pietruska’s Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017) assesses how different varieties of forecasting created an often-contradictory “culture of prediction” during the rise of...

Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a...

Nicholas Buccola’s new book, The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton University Press, 2019), uses the iconic debate between Baldwin and Buckley which took place at the Cambridge Union in February 1965 as an entry point into their own lives and their place within the post black freedom struggle and the rise of the modern conservati...

In his new book Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Zoltan Hajnal examines the political impact of the two most significant demographic trends of last fifty years. Examining federal and local elections over many decades, as well as policy, Hajnal finds that race more than class or any other demographic factor sha...

Do immersion trips really transform those who participate and how so? In his new book Empathy Beyond US Borders: The Challenges of Transnational Civic Engagement (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Gary J. Adler, Jr. explores this question and more. Using mixed methods, including surveys, interviews, and ethnography, Adler investigates how an immersion travel organization located on the U.S./Mexic...

Wakanda Dream Lab’s anthology, Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Re-Imaging Gender in Wakanda, features the work of writers, artists, and activists, as they imagine gender justice through the framework of Wakanda. The various stories and pieces are creative and thought-provoking as they center the voices, experiences, and visions of Black and Native women, femmes, girls, and trans and gender non-confo...

What really happened at “the first Thanksgiving”? In This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (Bloomsbury, 2019), historian David J. Silverman reveals the complex history surrounding the 1621 feast that every November many Americans associate with silver-buckled Pilgrim costumes, Squanto and Massasoit, and miraculous feats of friends...

We say on this show all the time that democracy is hard work. But what does that really mean? What it is about our dispositions that makes it so hard to see eye to eye and come together for the greater good? And why, despite all that, do we feel compelled to do it anyway? Jonathan Haidt is the perfect person to help us unpack those questions. We also explore what we can do now to educate the next...

Samuel Goldman, who teaches political science at George Washington University, Washington DC, has written a powerfully impressive new book on the long history of the political theology that he describes as “Christian Zionism.” God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America takes some very unexpected routes through a subject that, in some respects, is well-known. Beginning his account with English pur...

Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, has written an account of his view of the decline of the American university from a bastion of free inquiry and an arena for the pursuit of excellence to become a vocational training school and mere reflection of the wider society. In The Assault on American Excellence (Free Press, 2019), Professor Kronman contends that this is a failure by faculty...

Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area’s indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4 percent of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region’s economy and had shaped its cultural traditions. This story of slavery in New Engla...

Professor Greta de Jong of the University of Nevada, Reno, discusses her book, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), rural organizing, social justice movements, and the connected histories of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty in the US South. Two revolutions roiled the rural South after the m...

In Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Brandeis University Press, 2018), Professor Marc Dollinger who holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University, challenges widely held beliefs about the black-Jewish alliance in American politics. Dollinger shows how black nationalists enabled Jewish activ...

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to id...

In Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford UP, 2019), Julia G. Young reframes the Cristero war as a transnational conflict, using previously unexamined archival materials from both Mexico and the United States to investigate the intersections between Mexico's Cristero War and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. She traces the formation,...

Brenna Wynn Greer’s new study Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined American Citizenship (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), provides a fascinating look at a trio of black imagemakers – publisher John H. Johnson, PR executive Moss Kendrix, and photographer Gordon Parks – who played a critical role in selling the nation civil rights and African American respectability during the m...

The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account of constitutional change in the Founding era. Gerald Leonard, Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, and Saul Cornell, Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University...

Think economics is the "dismal science" with abstract formulas that have no impact on life as it is actually lived? Think again.  In The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (Little Brown, 2019), Binyamin Appelbaum--former correspondent and now an editorial board member of the New York Times--brings to life how academic economists rose "from the basement" of...

Lorena Oropeza, Professor of History at the University of California at Davis, sheds new light on one of Chicano history’s most notorious figures in her new book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement(University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Oropeza intervenes in the conventional historical scholarship on protest politics through her biography of Reies Lóp...