New Books in Politics and Polemics

Donald Kettl is the author of Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Competence (Brookings Press, 2016). Kettl is professor of public policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. With trust in government at all-time lows,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our s...

In The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, reads a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to Israeli, Palestinian and postcolonial writers. She examines how representations of Jewishness in contemporary... Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Ellen Fitzpatrick is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her book The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016) provides the story of three women, out of over two hundred women, who pursued the presidency. In the nineteenth century, when women... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our s...

When Abraham Lincoln wrote that the better part of one’s life consists of his friendships, it is likely that he had in mind his friendship with Joshua Speed. Starting as roommates in Springfield, the two formed an extraordinarily close attachment, one that provided both men with considerable support at an... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becomin...

Carol McCabe Booker is a Washington, D.C. attorney and former journalist. In the 1960s and 70s, she covered civil rights for the Voice of America, freelanced articles for The Washington Post, Readers Digest, Ebony, Jet, and Black Stars, and reported from Africa, including the Nigerian warfront, for Westinghouse Broadcasting stations.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice...

In 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote today as it was when colonized... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https:...

John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco’s new book, Cuba, the United States, and the Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930-1975 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), reaches across the Atlantic ocean and connects journalists, musicians, activists and poets as they moved between Cuba and the United States in the turbulent eras of revolution. Covering 1933... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/a...

Daniel Kreiss is back on the podcast with his new book Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Kreiss is associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an affiliated fellow of the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...

Battles over school politics from curriculum to funding to voucher systems are key and contentious features of the political landscape today. Many of these familiar fights started in the 1970s. However, these battles have roots even earlier in mid-twentieth century school reform debates according to Campbell F. Scribner of the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppo...

Emile Chabal’s A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an in-depth analysis of the languages and preoccupations of French civil society and political culture from the 1970s to the present. Picking up where many historical studies leave off, the book pursues the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices S...

Joel K. Goldstein has written The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden (University Press of Kansas, 2016). Goldstein is the Vincent C. Immel Professor of Law, Saint Louis University School of Law. Since the vice presidential choices have been made, it is time for a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pr...

I have to admit that I was quite intimidated by a book on taxation in imperial Russia. But States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republics (U. of Toronto Press, 2014) is an award winning book so I decided to give it a try.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnet...

Though not a household name today, Philip Pendleton Barbour was a leading political and judicial figure in antebellum America. In Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (U. of Alabama Press, 2016), William S. Belko uses his career as an example of the political... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by be...

Islamophobia, both as a term and concept, has a storied and complicated history, and understanding its many layers in our current historical moment remains important for any number of audiences and purposes. By focusing on contemporary incarnations but also giving historical context, Todd Green accomplishes an admirable task in The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...

What links a water privatization scheme and a prominent software company in India’s silicon city, Bangalore? Simanti Dasgupta’s new book, BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press, 2015), explores the was in which the corporate governance of IT is seen as a model... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Su...

Jason Stahl is the author of Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Stahl is an historian and lecturer in the Department of Organizational Leadership and Policy Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. What is missing from... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

Since the birth of the modern Olympics movement in the late nineteenth century, its leaders have attempted to maintain a strict separation of athletics and politics. Former International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage once stated, “We actively combat the introduction of politics into the Olympic movement.” But this attempt to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch...

This week we feature two new books on the podcast, both about corporate power. First, Zachary Roth has written The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (Crown, 2016). Roth is a national reporter for MSNBC. Next, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is the author of Corporate Citizen?... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

Russell Rickford is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University. We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power and the Radical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an intellectual history of the Pan African nationalist schools that emerged in the late 1960s from dissatisfaction with urban school desegregation... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...

In Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Diana L. Linden, an art historian of American art based in Claremont, California, explores the colorful–and political–murals of the leftist artist Ben Shahn during the New Deal. Born in Lithuania and raised in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...

Dr. Jon Hale, Assistant Professor of Educational History, Department of Teacher Education, College of Charleston, joins the New Books Network to discuss his new book, entitled The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Columbia University Press, 2016). Through primary interviews and in-depth historical analysis, the author... Learn more about your ad choices....

In the introduction to Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (University of Hawaii Press, 2015), historian Simon Creak writes that Laos, a country that has never won an Olympic medal, may seem an unlikely place to study the history of sport. Yet from the uplands of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium...

Seth Masket has written The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How they Weaken Democracy (Oxford UP, 2016). Masket is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Denver. In a political season filled with candidate promises to challenge established party... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support ou...

Known as the Iron Man of politics, Alben Barkley enjoyed a career that took him from rural Kentucky to the vice-presidency of the United States of America. In his book Alben Barkley: A Life in Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), James K. Libbey draws upon his many years studying... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium memb...

Since World War II, the United States has repeatedly posited itself as a defender of democracy, using its military might to promote freedom abroad even as it ascended to the status of the world’s only superpower. The answer to almost every international problem, it seems, has been American military intervention... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by b...