New Books in American Studies

In Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society (ILR Press, 2021), Jack Metzgar attempts to determine the differences between working-class and middle-class cultures in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of multidisciplinary sources, Metzgar writes as a now middle-class professional with a working-class upbringing, explaining the various ways the two cultures confli...

Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes—and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greates...

For nearly two decades the renowned legal historian G. Edward White has been writing a multi-volume history of law in America. In his third and concluding volume, Law in American History, Volume III: 1930-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2019), he surveys the many developments in American law from the middle of the 20th century to the case of Bush v. Gore. One of the most important of these developm...

The recent conclusion to the war in Afghanistan — America’s longest and one of its most frustrating — serves as a vivid reminder of the unpredictability and tragedy of war. In Military History for the Modern Strategist: America's Major Wars Since 1861 (Brookings, 2023), esteemed military expert Michael O’Hanlon examines America’s major conflicts since the mid-1800s: the Civil War, the two World Wa...

Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living (Princeton UP, 2023) invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked: Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse who was scornful of work and other mundanities. In fact, Thoreau worked hard--surveying l...

The move away from post-Cold War unipolarity and the rise of revisionist states like Russia and China pose a rapidly escalating and confounding threat for the liberal international order. In Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Samuel Helfont offers a new narrative of Iraqi foreign policy after the 1991 Gulf War to argue that Sad...

Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, has a new book, Justice by Means of Democracy, that explores the foundational understanding of how humans best flourish, in particular in regard to the governmental system under which they live. Allen, author of many books that focus on questions of de...

In this episode, our host Lucila Rozas discusses the book Latino TV: A History (2022) by Mary Beltrán. You’ll hear about: A brief trajectory of the book and the conversations on global studies of media and communication with which this book engages; The concept of cultural citizenship and its relevance to study Latino TV; How the author puts together the traces of the history of Latino TV, especia...

Across the U.S., state legislatures-often under the cover of darkness, and usually in spite of public opposition-are passing bills that channel public dollars to private schools. These voucher schemes promise to transfer billions from state treasuries to upper-income families. But that's just the start. Opponents of public schools want to dismantle the public education system entirely. Outrageous...

In March 2004, the unprovoked ambush killing and desecration of the bodies of American civilian security contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, caused the National Command Authorities in Washington, DC. to demand that the newly arrived Marine Expeditionary Force there take action against the perpetrators and other insurgent forces. Planned Stability and Support Operations were cast aside as insurgent figh...

Eileen V. Wallis' book California and the Politics of Disability, 1850–1970 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the political, legal, medical, and social battles that led to the widespread institutionalization of Californians with disabilities from the gold rush to the 1970s. By the early twentieth century, most American states had specialized facilities dedicated to both the care and the control...

Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight (U Chicago Press, 2023), our transit networks are so bad...

The Shaming State: How the U.S. Treats Citizens in Need (NYU Press, 2023) argues that Americans have been abandoned by a government that has relinquished its duties of care toward its citizens. Sara Salman describes a government that withholds care in times of need and instead shames the very citizens it claims to serve, both poor and middle class. She argues that the state does so by emphasizing...

To achieve legitimate self-government in America's extended Republic, the U.S. Constitution depends on Congress harmonizing the country's factions through a process of conflict and accommodation. Why Congress (Oxford University Press, 2023) demonstrates the value of this activity by showing the legislature's distinctive contributions in two crucial moments in the mid-twentieth century: during Worl...

In this episode, we discuss how myths of suburbia, the American West, and the American Dream informed regional planning, suburban design, and ideas about race and belonging in California’s East San Gabriel Valley as found in James Zarsadiaz’s debut monograph Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A. Published by the University of California Press in October 2022...

Despite uncertain beginnings, public broadcasting emerged as a noncommercial media industry that transformed American culture. In Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (U Illinois Press, 2023), Josh Shepperd looks at the people, institutions, and influences behind the media reform movement and clearinghouse the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) in the dri...

Many people are familiar with the United States Supreme Court’s merit docket. Each case follows detailed and professional proceedings that include formal written and oral arguments. The justices’ decisions provide lengthy arguments and citations. They are freely available to the public, press, policy-makers, law makers, judges, and scholars. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, t...

“Only recently have scholars outside the historical profession identified progressivism for what it was and continues to be: a fundamental rupture with the roots of American order.” So writes the political scientist and theorist Bradley C. S. Watson in his 2020 book Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea (U Notre Dame Press).  Watson provides an intellectual history of how historians...

As Nazi Germany began to conquer Europe, America’s military was unprepared, too small, and poorly supplied. The Nazis were supported by robust German factories that created a seemingly endless flow of arms, trucks, tanks, airplanes, and submarines. The United States, emerging from the Great Depression, was skeptical of American involvement in Europe and not ready to wage war. Hardened isolationist...

In the decades between the Great Depression and the advent of cable television, when daily newspapers set the conversational agenda in the United States, the best reporter in the business was a rumpled, unassuming figure named Homer Bigart. Despite two Pulitzers and a host of other prizes, he quickly faded from public view after retirement. Few today know the extent to which he was esteemed by his...

Postscript invites authors to react to contemporary political events that engage their scholarship. Since the Supreme Court is wrapping up their term, three political scientists and one law professor joined Susan to talk about the power of the Federalist Society in shaping the courts (and how lawyers might strategically use political science research to get more progressive outcomes), how race, et...

California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives--the first slaves transported into California--and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California's carc...

On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in the rural northern part of their state. The crowd eagerly listened to speeches on how the project would bring long-term risks and potentially pollute the drinking water for current and future generations. A year later, another proposed mining project...

California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in Ca...

Song & Dance Man is an established classic, available again for Dylan fans and scholars alike on the 50th Anniversary of the original edition. The work in these three volumes has been called “Monumental, endlessly illuminating.” (Rolling Stone) “Probably the greatest book about the work of a single popular musician ever to have been published.” (London Review Bookshop) and "The definitive critical...