New Books in American Studies

One small town, two "thousand-year floods" in the span of two years: how does a community become resilient in the face of the ever-increasing risks of climate change? Small towns across America and around the world face mounting challenges with flood risk, a result of not only climate change but also poorly adapted landscapes, sprawl, overdevelopment and poor planning. After the Floods: The Search...

How are David Lynch's films as much in dialogue with literary and musical traditions as they are cinematic ones? By interrogating this question, David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2025) broadens the interpretive horizons of Lynch's filmography, calling for a new approach to Lynch's films that goes beyond cinema and visual art to explore how Lynch's work engag...

In this episode of Madison’s Notes, Michael McConnell examines the gap between the Founders’ vision of a limited presidency and today’s expansive executive power. Drawing on his book The President Who Would Not Be King (Princeton University Press, 2022), we discuss how the Constitution’s safeguards against monarchical authority have eroded over the past century—and what steps might restore balance...

What would a rodeo open to anyone and everyone look like? In their new book, Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo (U Washington, 2023), history professors Elyssa Ford (Northwest Missouri State) and Rebecca Scofield (University of Idaho) argue that the International Gay Rodeo Associaton (IGRA) provides a template. Founded in the 1970s as an alternative space that typically excluded LGBT...

Join me for a fascinating conversation with one of today’s leading voices in environmental studies, Daniel Macfarlane, as we explore his new book The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Please see the description of the book below, then tune in to hear Dr. Macfarlane share the insights, research, and stories that shaped this important work. Lake...

In My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America (Princeton University Press, 2025), Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resis...

In their fourth edition of Watching TV: American Television Season by Season (Syracuse University Press, 2025), Harry Castleman and Walter Podrazik present a season-by-season narrative that encompasses the eras of American television from the beginning in broadcast, through cable, and now streaming. They deftly navigate the dizzying array of contemporary choices so that no matter where you start o...

They were crop dusters and debutantes, college girls and performers in flying circuses-all of them trained as pilots. Because they were women, they were denied the opportunity to fly for their country when the United States entered the Second World War. But Great Britain, desperately fighting for survival, would let anyone-even Americans, even women-transport warplanes. Thus, twenty-five daring yo...

Today, and for the past several years, many people both here and abroad have been trying to make sense of the radical right and its financial and ideological grip on the Republican party. Why is it that so many Americans have turned against democracy? What explains the authoritarian reaction of so many American citizens, even when that reaction works so directly against their basic interests? How...

Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care (Abrams Press, 2025) is compelling exploration of the broken American foster care system, told through the stories of six former foster youth. This powerful narrative nonfiction book delves into the systemic failures that lead many foster children into the criminal justice system, highlighting the urgent need for reform. Award-winning jou...

Fifty-five years after the terrible shooting at Kent State University, I spoke with Brian VanDeMark, a Professor of History at the US Naval Academy, about his new book, Kent State: An American Tragedy (Norton, 2024). Cutting through the reductive narratives of the shooting, VanDeMark offers a definitive history of the fatal clash between Vietnam War protestors and the National Guard, illuminating...

How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes...

Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America (St. Martin's Press, 2024) tells the extraordinary story of how Irish and Jewish immigrants worked together to secure legitimacy in America. Popular belief holds that the various ethnic groups that emigrated to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century regarded one another with open hostility, fiercely comp...

This is the shocking true-life story of how PFAS—a set of toxic chemicals most people have never heard of—poisoned the entire country. Based on original, shoe-leather reporting in four highly contaminated towns and damning documents from the polluters’ own files, Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America (Island Press, 2025) traces an ugly history of corporate greed and devast...

While veterans are often talked about, in Fight to Live, Live to Fight Veteran Activism after War: Veteran Activism after War (SUNY Press, 2019), Dr. Benjamin Schrader flips this this perspective by focusing on veterans telling their own stories. These veterans are not "broken" or "damaged and dangerous" from their experiences in war, rather they are active agents in their own healing and demilita...

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore (U Chicago Press, 2024), anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Wr...

In American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West (U Oklahoma Press, 2022), historian Lynn Downey offers a cultural history of the dude ranch as a distinctly American invention—one that sits at the crossroads of fantasy and labor, leisure and land, myth and modernity. Instead of treating dude ranches as a kitschy "cowboy for a week" retreat, Downey situates them within the l...

In an age of growing wealth disparities, politicians on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm about the fading American Dream. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many still view the United States as the land of opportunity. The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy (Princeton University Press, 2025) addresses this puzzle by exposing the stark reality of to...

Since American president Donald Trump was elected to a second term, it is common to hear citizens, journalists, and public officials distinguish between the laws and leaders of their states and the national government. Those who oppose Trump’s policies with regard to reproductive rights, gun violence, LGBTQ+, education, police, and voting often present state constitutions, courts, laws, culture, a...

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century—but they've never been as intense as they are today. In No Common Ground: Confederate Mon...

In Cormac McCarthy's 1985 Western, Blood Meridian, the story follows infamous scalp hunter John Joel Glanton through the Mexican borderlands in the mid-19th century. How much of this story is myth, and how much history, asks Texas A&M-San Antonio history professor William Kiser. In his new book, The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America (Yale UP, 2025...

If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That’s not us,' think again. In Illiberal America: A History (Norton, 2024), a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberalism as deep-seated in the American past as the founding ideals. A storm of illiberalism, building in the United States for years, unleashed its destructive force in the Capito...

What does a general education from an Ivy League mean? What structures produce the course catalogues that students can choose to customize their education from? Is a world-class degree a world-class education? In this episode, we sit down with the three authors of Slacking: A Guide A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation (Encounter Books, 2025). Adam Kissel, Madison Marino Doan, and Rachel Alexander Ca...

People of various political stripes in many countries (particularly those countries where various political stripes are allowed) have been arguing about the Vietnam War for a long time. The participants in these debates were (and are) always quick to assign blame in what seems to be an endless attempt to justify “their side” and vilify “the other side.” In this context, Max Hastings’ new book Viet...

In 2020, Black Americans continued a centuries-long pursuit of racial equality and justice in the streets and at the polls. Arguing that this year was not a deviation from the historic Civil Rights Movement, the contributors to this collection examine the important work of Black men and women during the previous decades to shape, expand, and preserve a multiracial American democracy. The authors o...