New Books in Politics and Polemics

James D. Boys is the author of Hillary Rising: The Politics, Persona, and Policies of a New American Dynasty (Biteback Publishing, 2016). Boys is an associate professor of international political studies at Richmond University. Just in time for the election, Hillary Rising explores the full biography of Hillary Clinton. Boys... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

Suja A. Thomas, a professor of law at the University of Illinois College of Law, has written The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries (Cambridge University Press, 2016)–a book comprising history, political science, and constitutional jurisprudence. Her topic is the history... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone....

Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2016) is a book about Indonesian youth activism both before 1998 and after. But it is no ordinary chronological study, a story told in halves with Soeharto’s end days in its interval. Rather, following a cue from... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

As Labour Party leader, member of Winston Churchill’s governing coalition during the Second World War, and prime minister of the epochal postwar government that established the welfare state, Clement Attlee played a decisive role in the history of modern Britain. In Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain (Oxford... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our...

In his new book The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Ethan Michaeli charts the riveting history of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s longest running and most significant black periodicals. Founded in 1905 by publisher Robert S. Abbott, the Defender came to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

What is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, assembles a new collection of essays to explore this question. The book develops the concept of a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...

Was Hegel a medieval thinker? In The Birth of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Andrew Cole puts forward a reexamination of Hegelian dialectics that embeds Hegel in a long tradition of medieval dialectical thinking and suggests that it is precisely Hegel’s engagement with medieval modes of thought that make... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sho...

Jessamyn R. Abel’s new book carefully traces the rise and transformations of an internationalist worldview in modern Japan, from its withdrawal from the League of Nations and admission into the UN, to successive attempts (both failed and successful) to host the Olympics in Tokyo, to important wartime and postwar conferences... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

Matthew Dallek is the author of Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security (Oxford University Press, 2016). Dallek is associate professor of political management at The George Washington University. In Defenseless Under the Night, Dallek tells the fascinating history behind America’s first federal office... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...

NB: Because Amherst College Press is open-access, this book is available free for download here. Just when I thought I had a pretty good handle on the ways and means of American politics, Donald Trump “happened.” I watched with amazement as he insulted just about every establishment figure in the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premi...

In Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire (Karnac Books, 2016), Psychoanalyst Jill Gentile explores the intersection between Freuds fundamental rule of free association and freedom of speech in a democracy, two subjects with obvious connections; however, as Gentile points out, surprisingly few writers have attempted to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch...

In a fragmented media world where anyone can speak, professional journalists are no longer the “gatekeepers” who decide what the public will see and hear. Instead, citizens are barraged with claims, assertions and innuendo that have not been subjected to the journalistic discipline of verification. Fact-checking, pioneered by bloggers and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adc...

Frances Lee is the author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Lee is professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. For much of the 20th century, Democrats were in the majority. Republicans had little chance to win... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by...

Kristin Stapleton’s new book opens onto a political crisis in China, and into a spirit of reform touched off by student demonstrations on May 4, 1919. Ba Jin was a teenager from a well-off family in Chengdu during this period. He wrote three popular novels Family, Spring, and Autumn, collectively... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premi...

How is the notion of the avant-garde in art relevant today? What can contemporary social movements learn from the Situationists? What is the meaning of artistic value to forms of resistance? These, and many other, questions associated with the role of art in modern society are at the heart of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium m...

Punk has long been viewed as a subculture of anger, disruption, and alternative political and lifestyle choices. In The Politics of Punk: Protest and Revolt from the Streets (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) David Ensminger examines the various ways in which punk has created connections to various activist communities. Using interviews... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...

Richard Bourke, Professor in the History of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, began developing his history of Edmund Burke’s political thought in 1991. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton University Press, 2015) uses Burke as a window into... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...

With the 2016 presidential election in full swing and rhetoric surrounding each candidate becoming more polarized, how does gender impact the way that people behave politically? Monika McDermott in her new book Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2016) seeks to answer this question. In her analysis,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone...

In Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Megan Thomas offers a thoroughly researched and closely attentive account of how anthropological sciences contributed to the making of the Philippines. While attending to the political concerns that drive Edward Said’s critique... Learn more about your ad ch...

In The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Terri Diane Halperin has provided a political history of the 1790s and explained the origins of one of the most contentious free speech events in American history. The Alien and Seditions Acts, which were... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by beco...

James E. Campbell has written Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (PrincetonUniversity Press, 2016). Campbell is UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York. Are we a polarized nation or polarizing? Are voters moving to the extremes or is this just... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our s...

Why did Michel Foucault radically recast the project of The History of Sexuality? How did he work collaboratively? What was the influence of Antiquity on his thought? In Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity Press, 2016) Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick explores these, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our s...

Megan Tompkins-Stange is the author of Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence (Harvard Education Press, 2016). She is assistant professor at the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Who hasn’t applied for a foundation grant? But what do they want out... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sh...

With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to find precursors to an unregulated market, corrupt bankers, and severe economic inequality. The comparisons are often too simple, however. In their new... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone....

How can we explain the “occlusion of embodied power” and “lack of attention to race, gender, and sexuality” in the discipline of political science, a field “that claims power as a central analytical concept” (17)? In her new book, Embodied Power: Demystifying Disembodied Politics (Routledge, 2016), Mary Hawkesworth (Political Science... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice...