New Books in American Studies

Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Jim Downs’ most recent book is Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Professor Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College.

The book offers a new history of epidemiology by shifting focus to the people behind the data points—people who were enslaved, imprisoned, or in some circles overlooked by conventional histories of epidemiology. The book shifts across locations and empires from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century because it wants to show how the confluence of war, imperialism, and slavery really made modern epidemiology.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Read Laura's article, "Can New Media Save the Book?"

email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.

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Adam Henig, "Baseball's Outcast: The Story of Ron LeFlore" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

When twenty-three-year-old Ron LeFlore played his first organized baseball game, it was in a yard at the State Prison of Southern Michigan where he was serving five to fifteen years for armed robbery. An extraordinary athlete, the Detroit native had luck on his side: his coach, a convicted felon, had connections to the Detroit Tigers. Within three-and-a-half years, Ron went from a prison inmate to a Tiger centerfielder.

In Baseball's Outcast: The Story of Ron LeFlore (Bloomsbury, 2026), Adam Henig tells for the first time in full the unbelievable life and career of Ron LeFlore. Blessed with blinding speed and a powerful swing, Ron shed his jailbird past to become one of the game's premiere hitters and its most dangerous base stealer during the latter half of the 1970s. His rags-to-riches life story became a bestselling book and a made-for-television movie starring actor LeVar Burton, fresh from his performance in Roots. But the good times did not last. Less than a decade after making his Major League debut, Ron was finished with baseball.

Baseball's Outcast is not just another book about the rise and fall of a troubled athlete. Henig goes deeper, tracing the star player's family roots, exploring the segregated world that Ron was raised in, examining the criminal justice system he was subjected to, and revealing how childhood trauma shaped his success and downfall. Filled with insight from Ron himself, as well as from former teammates, coaches, front-office personnel, inmates, childhood friends, and relatives, Baseball's Outcast provides unprecedented access into Ron's life story and the obstacles he faced every step of the way.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Nathaniel Greenberg, "The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-language communications—often while hiding the traces of American origins. To what extent did this vast propaganda apparatus sway Arab public opinion? Which ideas and actors shaped American public diplomacy in this period? What are the lessons for information strategy today?

The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11 (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nathaniel Greenberg tells the story of American propaganda campaigns in the Middle East after 9/11, drawing on in-depth interviews with key players and previously classified documents. Dr. Greenberg shows how the United States tried to control perceptions of its response to 9/11 through news and entertainment, and reveals that Arab governments and unofficial actors were involved—knowingly or not—in distributing US propaganda. He explores the institutions, strategy, and rhetoric deployed in the war on terror, placing them in the context of American and Soviet influence campaigns during the Cold War. Greenberg argues that US government-backed broadcasting laid the groundwork for global information warfare, such as the rise of competing Russian and Chinese state media operations. Shedding light on the ideological underpinnings of American propaganda in Arabic after 9/11, The Long War of Ideas offers new insight into soft power in the twenty-first century.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Kasey Jernigan, "Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity" (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The term "commod bod" is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal commodity food programs.

In Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press, 2026), Kasey Jernigan shares her ongoing collaborative research with Choctaw women and describes the ways that shifting patterns of participation in food and nutrition assistance programs (commodity foods) have shaped foodways; how these foodways are linked to bodies and health, particularly "obesity" and related conditions; and how foodways and bodies are intertwined with settler colonialism and experiences of structural violence, identity making, and heritage in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Organized thematically, the book moves from a critical history of obesity and health in Indian Country to narratives of Choctaw women navigating food, memory, and belonging. Chapters such as "Food and Fellowship" and "Heritage, Embodied" center personal stories that show how food is not only sustenance but also a site of connection, resistance, and meaning making.

Food is critical to cultural survival and affirmation. For Choctaw people, the intentional demise of traditional foodways and dependence on federal food programs are specific experiences that inform part of what it means to be Choctaw today.

Kasey Jernigan is an assistant professor of American studies and anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she also co-directs the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute. She is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller, "Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers" (U California Press, 2026)

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Boom to Bust is a timely investigation into the rise of Peak TV and the perfect storm that caused a rapid decline in Hollywood work.

When Hollywood writers and actors went on strike in 2023, they drew attention to the rapidly changing nature of film and television production. In Boom to Bust, media industry experts Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller combine economic and cultural analysis and interviews with industry workers to capture the lived experience of Hollywood in crisis. Tracking major disruptions of the preceding decade—including the transformation of streaming services into studios, the overproduction of series during Peak TV, as well as #MeToo and COVID—the authors explain how the conflicting interests of studio executives, creative workers, and workers' unions compelled a renegotiation of the terms of work. Grounding readers in the history of Hollywood labor negotiations, the authors provide a road map to make sense of Hollywood’s present—and what comes next.

Miranda Banks is Professor of Film, Television, and Media Studies at Loyola Marymount University, author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild, and coeditor of Production Studies.

Kate Fortmueller is Associate Professor of Film and Media History at Georgia State University and author of Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production and Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Emely Rumble, "Bibliotherapy in The Bronx" (Row House, 2025)

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Bibliotherapy in The Bronx (Row House, 2025) by Emely Rumble, LCSW, is a groundbreaking exploration of the healing power of literature in the lives of marginalized communities. Drawing from her personal and professional experiences, Rumble masterfully intertwines storytelling with therapeutic insights to reveal how reading can be a potent tool for self-discovery, emotional transformation, and social change.
In this transformative work, Rumble offers readers an intimate glimpse into her journey as a psychotherapist in the Bronx, where she has spent over 14 years using books to help clients navigate complex emotions, heal from trauma, and find their voices. Through vivid anecdotes and real-world case studies, she demonstrates how literature can serve as a bridge between personal pain and collective healing.
Rich with practical tips, reflective exercises, and book recommendations, Bibliotherapy in The Bronx is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the power of words to change lives. Whether you're a therapist, educator, bibliophile, or simply someone seeking deeper understanding and growth, this book offers a compassionate, culturally affirming guide to the transformative potential of storytelling.
Rumble's work is a testament to the enduring power of books to heal, empower, and liberate. In a time when the world feels increasingly divided, Bibliotherapy in The Bronx reminds us that the stories we tell—and the stories we read—can unite us in our shared humanity.

-Raymond Williams, PhD is a political scientist, blogger, and book club administrator with an interest in American History and Politics. You can find Raymond on Instagram, Threads, and Twitter at @rtwilliams16.

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169* Hannah Arendt on Oases (JP)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Our Recall This Buck series began by speaking with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School about how key ideas—and the actual currency, physical coins and bills— underlying the modern monetary system get “invisibilized” with that system’s success, so that seeing money clearly is both harder and more vital. Today, illustrious Princeton historian Peter Brown narrates the … Continue reading "42 Recall This Buck 2: Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early Christianity (JP)"

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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Mark A. Johnson, "American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon" (U Georgia Press, 2026)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon (U Georgia Press, 2026), Dr. Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple question: How has bacon overcome centuries of religious prohibition, cultural contempt, and dietary advice to become a twenty-first-century culinary and cultural powerhouse? Starting in early modern Britain and tracing the story of bacon through the colonial era, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, modern fad diets, and the emerging craft bacon industry, Johnson provides a new perspective on some familiar American narratives. More than a story of production, marketing, and consumption, Johnson argues, this cultural history connects bacon to race, class, and gender while also illuminating major historical forces, such as migration, warfare, urbanization and suburbanization, reform movements, cultural trends, and globalization. For Dr. Johnson, bacon’s story from “most dangerous food in the supermarket” to pop culture and gastronomic phenomenon reflects the cultural values of a nation.

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Alisa Kessel, "Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Political theorist Alisa Kessel (University of Puget Sound) has an important and impressive new book, Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Kessel’s research grew out of her work on questions of consent and how consent is embedded within the social contract structure. Initially the plan for the research was to critique this concept of “rape culture” which had found its way into popular discourse as well as academic work and was somewhat unclear in terms of application and understanding. Kessel notes in the book and in our conversations that her thinking about the idea of rape culture owes a great deal to black feminists who had been writing about and discussing the underlying issue at the heart of rape culture, which is not just about violence against women, but more broadly about the political, societal, and cultural dimensions of domination, victimhood, and human value. Rape Fantasies develops this understanding and provides fascinating examples of this intersectional concept. One of the key claims of the book is that sexual violence is not accidental, it is not necessarily based on physical urges that just cannot be controlled; it is, instead, based in the dynamic of political domination thus making rape itself a political act. Part of the unexamined problem with rape is that it is built around an entitlement to dominate, which also makes the threat of sexual violence a political act. Rape Fantasies traces this idea through a number of different case studies that unpack the dimensions of this threat of sexual violence in a variety of circumstances and situations, tied, inevitably, to the duality of domination and subordination or victimization, which is also wrapped up with questions of who is deserving of protection and who is not as deserving.

Kessel explains that in examining sexual violence, what she found was multifaceted reflections and refractions, since the issue and the individual’s experience with sexual violence are neither simple nor linear. And the examples and case studies that make up the thrust of the book present this multidimensional nature of sexual violence. This multifaceted thinking about sexual violence also integrates an intersectional analysis, drawing on work from indigenous studies, feminist and women’s studies, feminist theory, black feminism, political theory and other connected schools of thought. The interrogation of rape and rape culture, particular in context of the political valence, “occurs across multiple axes of oppression, including white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, cisgender, settler colonial, and capitalist axes.”[1] The case study examples in Rape Fantasies include bathroom bills across the states, the idea of the frontier and modes of extraction, consent contracts and consent apps, and OnlyFans and intimacy on demand. Each example is deeply researched and unpacked, providing the reader with historical, legal, political, economic, cultural, and societal analyses of these complex areas of domination and entitlement.

Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence is an expansive undertaking, bringing together theoretical frameworks from different schools of thought and analysis, threaded with important case studies that help the reader think deeply about this concept and how it is operationalized in our daily lives. Even if we are not aware of these narratives, they surround us and shape so much of our thinking about how the world works. And why sexual violence remains so persistent.

Susan Liebell is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

Lilly J. Goren is a Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

[1] Alisa Kessel. Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Oxford University Press, 2025. p. 6.

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Victor Li, "Supreme Pressure: The Rejection of John J. Parker and the Birth of the Modern Supreme Court Confirmation Process" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Supreme Pressure: The Rejection of John J. Parker and the Birth of the Modern Supreme Court Confirmation Process (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) examines the 1930 Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker, a turning point in American judicial politics. Alarmed by some of his past statements and opinions, labor and civil rights groups mounted a fierce campaign to block his confirmation. Not only was control of the Supreme Court hanging in the balance, but Parker's nomination symbolized a profound clash of ideologies, political agendas, economic doctrines, and interpretations of the Constitution. Their efforts sparked a dramatic Senate revolt, marking the first successful grassroots campaign to block a Supreme Court nominee.

By exploring the circumstances of Parker's rejection, this book traces how that battle laid the foundation for today's highly partisan and contentious confirmation process. The book also reintroduces Parker as a consequential but largely forgotten figure in American jurisprudence--one whose rulings helped shape the South's legal response to Brown v. Board of Education. Beyond the nomination fight, it delves into Parker's political campaigns, judicial opinions, and relationships with key public figures, charting his dramatic rise, humiliating defeat, and enduring influence.

Packed with intrigue, strategy, and the clash of competing ideologies, this is the story of how one nomination forever changed the rules of the game.

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Larry M. Bartels and Katherine J. Cramer, "The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Few time periods have been as defined by waves of monumental social change as the United States during the 1960s. Even today, almost sixty years later, the era is often depicted as a triumph of social progress. Yet, as Dr. Larry M. Bartels and Dr. Katherine J. Cramer show in The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation (U Chicago Press, 2026), it was Americans’ diverse reactions to the milestone events of the time—from the welcoming, to the fiercely resistant, to the largely oblivious—that planted the seeds of our current political turmoil.

Their masterful analysis draws on a unique historical resource: the longest-running systematic tracking of individual Americans’ political attitudes and behavior ever attempted. The study began in 1965 when researchers interviewed hundreds of high school students across the country and then periodically reinterviewed them over the next three decades. Bartels and Cramer supplement this historical record with in-depth interviews with dozens of the original students, painting a detailed picture of the generation’s individual and collective political development. By tracing the responses of the Class of ’65 to major events of their political lifetimes—including the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, the Vietnam War, the shifting role of religion, escalating economic inequality, immigration, and the rise of Donald Trump—Dr. Bartels and Dr. Cramer shed new light on the evolution of public opinion and the unsteady progress of American democracy.

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David-James Gonzales, "Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

On March 2, 1945, five Mexican American families and their Jewish American lawyer filed a class-action lawsuit against four school districts in Orange County, California, to end the segregation of ethnic Mexican children. In a shocking decision, the court ruled in favor of plaintiffs, setting a legal and historical precedent in Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County that shook the foundations of Jim Crow America and led to the end of de jure school segregation across the nation.

Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of how ethnic Mexicans in a relatively unknown agricultural backwater built the unprecedented movement that led to this decision. Beginning in the 1880s, David-James Gonzales details the social and economic history of Orange County, explaining how citrus capitalists, seeking increased market share and profitability, established the walls of segregation to manage ethnic Mexican family labor. By the early 1930s, ethnic Mexicans were segregated into over fifty underserved colonias and barrios. Without training or support from national civil rights organizations, they mobilized against segregation and inequality beginning in the late 1920s. Ethnic Mexican grassroots organizations proliferated throughout the county, intent on engaging in civic affairs and ending anti-Mexican discrimination and segregation. This movement, comprised of immigrants, citizens, parents, children, emerging activists, and their non-Mexican allies, paved the way for the growth of LULAC and nationwide organizing. As an essential part of the "long civil rights movement," the ethnic Mexican struggle against segregation in Orange County illustrates how minoritized groups have historically pushed US social, economic, and political institutions to live up to the nation's founding ideals.

David-James Gonzales is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.

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Donald Sassoon, "Revolutions: A New History" (Verso Books, 2025)

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Revolutions: A New History (Verso Books, 2025) is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the fall of the Bastille or the storming of the Winter Palace. In reality, they take decades to burn out, if they ever do.
Historian Donald Sassoon takes the long view of some of the most famous upheavals: the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, the national uprisings that unified Italy and Germany, and the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. This is a history rich in irony and surprises. As Sassoon shows in this tour de force account, revolutions usually catch revolutionaries themselves by surprise, and the consequences are difficult to fathom at any remove. Revolutions will change how you think about the transformative moments in history, both big and small.

Revolutions is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the fall of the Bastille or the storming of the Winter Palace. In reality, they take decades to burn out, if they ever do.
Historian Donald Sassoon takes the long view of some of the most famous upheavals: the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, the national uprisings that unified Italy and Germany, and the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. This is a history rich in irony and surprises. As Sassoon shows in this tour de force account, revolutions usually catch revolutionaries themselves by surprise, and the consequences are difficult to fathom at any remove. Revolutions will change how you think about the transformative moments in history, both big and small.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Voices from a Century of Struggle: Writings of the Jim Crow Era

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Tuesday, April 7, 2026—Confronting disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and terrorist violence in the aftermath of the Civil War, Black Americans challenged white supremacy in word and deed in a prolonged struggle to create a better, more just nation.

Join Tyina L. Steptoe, editor of the new two-volume LOA edition of writings from the Jim Crow era, and historians Keisha N. Blain and Manisha Sinha for a conversation about courageous voices and revelatory firsthand documents that bring this crucial period to life and speak powerfully to the present.

Hosted by Max Rudin

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John Bechtold, "U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory: Negotiating Dead Space" (Taylor & Francis, 2024)

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory: Negotiating Dead Space (Taylor & Francis, 2024), John Bechtold examines how the US military understands information and the media as a contested terrain. Focusing on the assaults on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, Bechtold shows the efforts the US military went through to make sure it was able maintain control over the battles’ narrative. This effort is more than public affairs and trying to shape how others understand the operations. Just like the military will fight over physical terrain, Bechtold argues that the military understands the information space and the news media as places of contestation that it must work to control. Using examples ranging from official memorialization efforts by the military to Luis Sinco’s photograph of James Blake Miller (the “Marlboro Marine”) to Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, this book shows how the assaults on Fallujah are remembered in US military history. Moreover, Bechtold shows how the military set the conditions for the Battle for Fallujah to remembered.

You can find a transcript of our interview here.

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Cedric de Leon, "Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity" (U California Press, 2025)

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Our guest today is Cedric de Leon, author of Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity (U California Press, 2025). In this book, de Leon explores the complex and often overlooked history of Black political organizing within the U.S. labor movement. Rather than presenting a simple story of unity, he highlights the tensions, debates, and internal conflicts within Black civil society that ultimately strengthened movements for interracial labor solidarity. The book traces key organizations, leaders, and events from early socialist influences in Harlem to the rise of labor coalitions and the Memphis sanitation strike; demonstrating how Black workers and leaders actively shaped strategies for liberation. By focusing on both cooperation and disagreement, de Leon argues that Black political agency is best understood through this dynamic interplay. Freedom Train ultimately reframes labor history by centering Black voices and showing how their activism was crucial in pushing forward both civil rights and workers’ rights in America.

Our guest, Cedric de Leon, is a Professor of Sociology and Labor studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2018 to 2022, Cedric directed the UMass Amherst Labor Center, the country's premier worker-side graduate program in Labor Studies. He was the first person of color to do so. Before de Leon became an academic, he worked as a staff organizer and elected leader in the U.S. labor movement. His research focuses on race, labor, social movements, and political sociology, and he has published several books examining labor history and organizing. He has written extensively about how social movements organize and how political identities are formed, particularly within Black communities and labor struggles. His research combines historical analysis with sociological theory to better understand power, resistance, and collective action.

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The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they’ve sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd’s and Sandra Bland’s, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence (Beacon Press, 2025) reveals a disturbing truth about these cases: coroners and other death investigators are often complicit in obscuring the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths. Through rigorous research—including critical records analysis, public health studies, and interviews with victims’ families—this book unmasks the systemic failures within forensic medicine. Dr. Terence Keel shows how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical documents, and strategically lost evidence effectively shield law enforcement from accountability.
The Coroner’s Silence uncovers how the current system of death investigation operates as a mechanism of institutional safeguarding. By highlighting the structural powerlessness of coroners and their disconnection from the communities most affected by police violence, Dr. Keel demonstrates how bureaucratic processes can render human suffering invisible. True accountability requires more than procedural reform. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how we investigate, document, and understand deaths at the hands of state institutions. The Coroner’s Silence is a crucial intervention that challenges us to confront the deeply ingrained mechanisms that perpetuate systemic violence.

Our guest is: Dr. Terence Keel, who is an award-winning scholar, the founding director of the BioCritical Studies Lab, and a professor of human biology, society, and African-American studies at UCLA. He received fellowships from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, and is the author of Divine Variations, and The Coroner’s Silence.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Michael W. Tuck, "The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World" (Brill, 2026)

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book, The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Brill, 2026) historian Dr. Michael W. Tuck examines life on James Island, now Kunta Kinteh Island, where enslaved Africans worked for European trading companies in the eighteenth century.

These individuals were not plantation workers. They served as carpenters, sailors, soldiers, canoe workers, healers, cooks, mothers, and interpreters. They built forts, repaired boats, buried the dead, and maintained trading posts.

Dr Tuck’s research demonstrates that, despite harsh conditions, Castle Slaves formed families, preserved African names, practised healing, held funerals, and resisted captivity through escape and daily acts of survival.

Women played key roles as caregivers, cultural anchors, and healers, despite facing significant vulnerability and exploitation. The book also highlights the high number of escape attempts from James Island, challenging the idea that resistance in West Africa was uncommon.

Drawing on company ledgers, punishment logs, and death records, Dr. Tuck reconstructs a world often overlooked in Atlantic history. His work emphasises that each archival entry represents a person with relationships, memories, fears, and hopes.

The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River provides both a history of slavery and a testament to resilience, community, and humanity.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands and Europe.

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Melissa Butcher, "The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future" (Manchester UP, 2026)

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

As Melissa Butcher puts it in her book The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future (Manchester UP, 2026) when asked to rank the importance of freedom to them most Americans would put it as an 11 out of 10. So, what happens when the idea of freedom becomes not something that unites Americans but rather, through its different interpretations, ideals and priorities becomes something that polarises Americans? Based upon extensive fieldwork and interviews with Americans across the states, Butcher is able to explore not just the different conceptions of freedom of America across realms such as justice, COVID, the rural/urban divide and religion, but also gives us an insight into how Americans think about America and how, especially at the local level, there are areas of hope which confound the claims we hear at the national level.

In our conversation we discuss issues such as how she identified her places to visit and people to speak to, the daily experiences of crossing the US/Mexico border at El Paso, Texas, the important conversations that can come from speaking to people as people rather than labels and why, precisely, so many Americans bring up postmodernism at the same time that Universities no longer teach it.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts.

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Scott M. Kenworthy, "The People's Patriarch: Tikhon Bellavin and the Orthodox Church in North America and Revolutionary Russia" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

On October 28, 1917, just days after the Bolsheviks seized power, the great Council of the Russian Orthodox Church voted to restore the patriarchate, which had been abolished by Peter the Great two centuries earlier. The Council chose Tikhon (Bellavin), the son of a humble village parish priest, to be head of Russia's largest religious confession. At the time, the majority of Orthodox Christians were devoutly religious. Tikhon's vision of the Church, which he began putting into practice during his years as the Orthodox bishop of North America (1898-1907), was that of an organic body which welcomed the participation of all believers. The Bolsheviks had other ideas. They aimed to create a revolution that would be carried out by the state on behalf of the people. And they sought to eradicate religion as "superstition" and not only to disestablish the Church, but to destroy it altogether. Although the alternate Russia which Tikhon represented would be crushed by the superior force of the Bolsheviks, he helped navigate the Church through immense challenges so that, in the end, the Orthodox Church outlived the Soviet experiment. The People's Patriarch tells the story of the clash of visions for the new Russia in 1917 through the lens of the humble man chosen to lead the Church, whose life exemplifies the transformations within the Orthodox Church in late Imperial Russia and its fate during the Revolution. The People's Patriarch is the first critical biography of one of the twentieth century's most important Orthodox Christian leaders, based on an exhaustive use of previously untapped primary sources, including Tikhon's letters and encyclicals, previously classified documents from the top Bolshevik leadership and Soviet secret police, and materials from a dozen archives in five countries.

Scott M. Kenworthy is Professor in the History Department at Miami University (Ohio), where he also teaches for the Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and Religious Studies programs.

Roland Clark is a Professor of Modern European History at the University of Liverpool.

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Priyanka Kumar, "Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit" (Island Press, 2025)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit--especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree--and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild? In The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit (Island Press, 2026), Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, unearthing a rich and complex history while illuminating how we can reimagine our relationship with nature.

Apples are popular, but in our everyday lives we rarely encounter more than a handful of varieties: of the sixteen thousand apple varieties once celebrated in America, scarcely a fifth remain accessible. Kumar reveals the richness of a hidden world, bringing readers to the vibrant forests and orchards where historic trees still survive. These mature and wild orchards offer more than just fruit: they are havens for creatures from hummingbirds to bears and a living connection to generations past. She brilliantly weaves together science and childhood memories with the apple's storied history, from its roots in Kazakhstan to Spanish orchards in the Southwest and Thomas Jefferson's beloved Monticello fruitery.

The Light Between Apple Trees is a lyric odyssey that will forever change how you look at an "apple a day." Kumar shows how--if we follow untamed paths--the tang and texture of an apple can lead us back to the wild.

Priyanka Kumar is a nationally-acclaimed naturalist and the author. Kumar has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California, and serves on the Advisory Council of the Leopold Writing Program.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, "The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Between May 1 and May 22, 1863, Union soldiers marched nearly 200 miles through the hot, humid countryside to assault and capture the fortified city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Upon its arrival, the army laid siege to the city for a grueling forty-seven days. Disease and combat casualties threatened to undermine the army’s fighting strength, leaving medical officers to grapple with the battlefield conditions necessary to sustain soldiers' bodies. Medical innovations were vital to the Union victory. When Vicksburg fell on July 4, triumph would have been fleeting if not for the US Army Medical Department and its personnel.
By centering soldiers' health and medical care in the Union army’s fight to take Vicksburg, in The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War (UNC Press, 2025), Dr. Lindsay Rae Smith Privette offers a fresh perspective on the environmental threats, logistical challenges, and interpersonal conflicts that shaped the campaign and siege. In doing so, Privette shines new light on the development of the army’s medical systems as officers learned to adapt to their circumstances and prove themselves responsible stewards of soldiers' bodies.

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Daniel Rachel, "This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich" (Akashic Books, 2026)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Over the last seven decades, some of rock 'n' roll's most celebrated figureheads have flirted with the imagery and theater of the Third Reich. From Keith Moon and Vivian Stanshall kitting themselves out in Nazi uniforms to Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious brandishing swastikas in the pomp of punk, generations of performers have associated themselves in troubling ways with the aesthetics, mass hysteria, and even ideology of Nazism. Whether shock factor, stupidity, or crass attempts at subversion, rock 'n' roll has indulged these associations in a way not accepted in any other art form. But how accountable should fans, the media, and the music industry be for what has often seemed a sleazy fascination with the eroticized perversions of a fascist regime?

In This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich (Akashic Books, 2026), award-winning music historian Daniel Rachel navigates these turbulent waters with extraordinary delicacy and care, asking us to look anew at the artists who have defined us, inspired us, and given us joy--and consider why so many have been drawn to the imagery of a movement responsible for some of the twentieth century's worst atrocities. Rachel asks essential questions of actions often overlooked or underplayed, while neither casting sweeping judgment nor offering easy answers. In doing so, he asks us to reassess the history of rock 'n' roll, and he sheds new light on the grim echoes of the Third Reich in popular culture and the legacy of twentieth (and twenty-first) century history as it defines us today and sheds new light on the grim echoes of the Third Reich in popular culture--and the legacy of twentieth (and twenty-first)-century history as it defines us today.

Daniel Rachel is a former musician turned award-winning and best-selling author. His previous books include Too Much Too Young, the 2 Tone Records Story; Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters; and The Lost Album of the Beatles: What If the Beatles Hadn't Split Up? He has also written sleeve notes for many artists including the Kinks, Madness, Ocean Colour Scene, Ray Davies, and Bryan Ferry. He lives in London.

Daniel Rachel’s website and Instagram.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.

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Danielle Bainbridge, "Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive" (NYU Press, 2026)

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive (NYU Press, 2026) is a bold and incisive reconsideration of the relationship between enslavement, disability, and performance in 19th- and early 20th-century America; a time when transition from slavery to legal freedom became entangled with the spectacle of the freak show stage, where disabled and racialized performers became lucrative attractions.

At the heart of this powerful study are conjoined twins Millie Christine McKoy, born into slavery and later emancipated, and the so-called “original Siamese Twins,” Chang and Eng Bunker, who navigated the freak show circuit not only as performers but also as enslavers. Their stories reveal how archival practices surrounding enslavement and performance labor worked in tandem, creating a system where unfree and newly freed bodies were simultaneously valued and devalued—exploited for their spectacle yet rendered abject within traditional labor economies.

Blending historical analysis with innovative archival theory, Currencies of Cruelty challenges conventional narratives of labor, freedom, and human worth. A gripping exploration of race, commerce, and bodily spectacle, this book sheds crucial light on how histories of subjugation continue to shape our understanding of value and visibility today.

Author Danielle Bainbridge is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, where she also holds courtesy appointments in Performance Studies and Black Studies. You can find her at the Northwestern University website, on Instagram, and on Bluesky.

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The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Belle Époque Paris, the Eiffel Tower was newly built, France was experiencing remarkable political stability, and American women were painting the town and gathering at a female-only Residence known as The American Girls' Club in Paris. Opened in 1893, The Club was the center of expatriate living and of dedication to a calling in the fine arts, and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women.
Now in The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025), curator, art historian, and podcast host Jennifer Dasal presents the untold story of the Club, the philanthropists who created it, and the artists it housed. These women forged connections in the arts and letters with luminaries like Auguste Rodin and Gertrude Stein or became activists through their relationships with the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst. But just as importantly, these women's lives revealed the power of the Club itself, and the way that having a safe home for single women of ambition allowed them to grow as teachers, artists, suffragists, and people.

A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life

Our guest is: Jennifer Dasal, who is the creator and host of the ArtCurious podcast, the author of ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History. She holds an MA in art history, and is the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She lectures frequently on art both locally and nationally

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

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Amelia Frank-Vitale, "Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds" (U California Press, 2026)

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The consequences of U.S. border policies through the experiences of Honduran migrants. Hondurans have been at the heart of some of the most visible migration phenomena in the last few years, as well as the direct target of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy. In Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds (U California Press, 2026) Amelia Frank-Vitale offers a detailed portrait of the Honduran exodus and what it reveals about the broader consequences of changing US border enforcement policies. She highlights the stories of those who are often presented as unsympathetic: deported young men implicitly associated with the very violence they are trying to flee. In the process, she challenges underlying assumptions frequently held by policy makers and humanitarian agencies. Connecting overlapping regimes of mobility control, from the invisible gangland borders within San Pedro Sula to the growing expansiveness of the U.S. border's reach, this book shows how deportation does not deter migration but, in fact, keeps people moving, and how U.S. policies fuel the migration "crisis" they claim to address. Drawing from her own experiences accompanying migrant caravans over many years, Frank-Vitale also explores how caravans emerge as both protest movement and migration tactic in response to this expanding border regime.

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Lee Ann S. Wang, "The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women" (Duke UP, 2026)

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women (Duke UP, 2026) examines U.S. laws designed to rescue immigrant survivors from gender and sexual violence only if they agree to cooperate with policing. Drawing upon ethnographic stories with legal and social service advocates who work with Asian immigrant women, the book engages abolition feminisms and antiblackness to critique "victim" as a genre of the human in law and produced through racial configurations of the model minority myth and the good/bad immigrant paradigm.

Author Lee Ann S. Wang is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies. She is also a Co-PI on the research initiative, Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories, housed at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender.

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Tyesha Maddox, "A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) examines the significance of Caribbean American mutual aid societies and benevolent associations to the immigrant experience, particularly their implications for the formation of a Pan-Caribbean American identity and Black diasporic politics.
At the turn of the twentieth century, New York City exploded with the establishment of mutual aid societies and benevolent associations. Caribbean immigrants, especially women, eager to find their place in a bustling new world, created these organizations, including the West Indian Benevolent Association of New York City, founded in 1884. They served as forums for discussions on Caribbean American affairs, hosted cultural activities, and provided newly arrived immigrants with various forms of support, including job and housing assistance, rotating lines of credit, help in the naturalization process, and its most popular function—sickness and burial assistance. In examining the number of these organizations, their membership, and the functions they served, Tyesha Maddox argues that mutual aid societies not only fostered a collective West Indian ethnic identity among immigrants from specific islands, but also strengthened kinship networks with those back home in the Caribbean. Especially important to these processes were Caribbean women such as Elizabeth Hendrickson, co-founder of the American West Indian Ladies’ Aid Society in 1915 and the Harlem Tenants’ League in 1928.
Immigrant involvement in mutual aid societies also strengthened the belief that their own fate was closely intertwined with the social, economic, and political welfare of the Black international community. A Home Away from Home demonstrates how Caribbean American mutual aid societies and benevolent associations in many ways became proto-Pan-Africanist organizations.

Kiana M. Knight is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Kiana’s Webpage

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Nick Juravich, "Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Today, we're speaking with Nicholas Juravich, author of Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education (U Illinois Press, 2024). In this book, Juravich explores the emergence of paraprofessional educators in U.S. schools during the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s. He shows how these workers—often underpaid and undervalued—played a crucial role in addressing what he calls a "crisis of care" in public education.

The book situates paraprofessionals within broader Black and Latino struggles for economic opportunity and social justice, particularly in New York City. Juravich traces how these workers reshaped classrooms, strengthened ties between schools and communities, and helped create pathways for Black and Latino teachers in the 1970s and early 1980s. He also highlights how their organizing contributed to the growth and diversification of public-sector unions. Para Power ultimately offers a compelling look at an often overlooked workforce and its impact on education, labor, and community life.

Nicholas Juravich is an assistant professor of history and labor studies at UMass Boston, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Labor Resource Center. Previously, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's History at the New-York Historical Society, where he curated the exhibition Ladies' Garments, Women's Work, Women's Activism and helped develop educational workshops on school segregation and movements for educational equality in New York City. His research focuses on public education, community organizing, and public-sector unions in 20th-century U.S. cities, and has been supported by numerous foundations and institutions.

My co-host today is Jillian Felton, a graduate student in the MA program in Communication at Oakland University.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese Food

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

For many Ashkenazi Jews in the United States, Christmastime sparks memories of egg rolls and General Tso's chicken. How did the affinity for Chinese food amongst many Jews begin? Trace this delicious history from the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side to today’s take-out lo mein with Andrew Coe, author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States.

This lecture originally took place on December 22, 2020.

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Matthew Guariglia and Brian Hochman, "The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State" (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026)

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Fifty years ago, a government investigation led by US senator Frank Church uncovered some of the darkest state secrets of the twentieth century. The Church Committee confirmed the nation's worst fears about the unchecked power of its intelligence agencies: at the FBI, surveillance campaigns against civil rights leaders and clandestine attempts to disrupt antiwar protests; at the CIA, assassination plots against foreign heads of state, experiments with toxic substances and illegal drugs, and covert partnerships with the Mafia. The Church Committee's findings were so explosive that key members found themselves on the watch lists of the very government agencies they were investigating. Three witnesses who cooperated with the inquiry were murdered.

Amid the creep of digital surveillance and the upheavals of social protest, this accessible volume The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026), containing the most harrowing revelations of the Church Committee investigation, sheds valuable light on some of today's most urgent concerns.

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Erica Morawski, "Development Design: Hotels and Politics in the Hispanic Caribbean" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2025)

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Underneath picturesque views of palm trees, fruity cocktails in hotel lounges, and day trips to preserved colonial zones lies a history of tourism design that intersects with larger projects of development and national and cultural identity formation. Locating modernity and coloniality as the key framework within which tourism development takes place, Development Design: Hotels and Politics in the Hispanic Caribbean (U Pittsburgh Press, 2025) by Dr. Erica Morawski focuses on hotel design and its relation to larger urban and rural landscapes to uncover the way these seemingly carefree spaces are bound to local politics and international relations. Focusing on three sites in the Hispanic Caribbean—San Juan, Ciudad Trujillo, and Havana—Dr. Morawski traces different attitudes and approaches to tourism and its material design through five hotels that serve as case studies. Through examination of wicker chairs and lobby interiors, architecture and landscaping, public works and urban planning, Development Design illustrates the integral role hotel design played in negotiated and contested histories of development in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

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Mark Hlavacik, "Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

How the rise of the culture wars afflicts the politics of education.

On August 9, 2022, the Denton Independent School District held a meeting to address complaints about its libraries. Like so many districts in Texas and across the country, Denton had been responding to accusations that children had access to inappropriate books at school. During the public comment session, a local man stood up to the podium and read a sexually explicit passage from a book that he wanted removed from Denton’s school libraries. But beguiled by the prospect of securing a political win, he had confused the title of the lurid psychological thriller he read aloud with a young adult fiction series about mermaids. While his attempt to ban a book that was never in Denton’s school libraries in the first place received a few laughs, it also reflects a deeply serious and troubling culture of conflict that has taken over the politics of education and now divides people so completely as to make public education as a shared endeavor seem impossible.

In Willing Warriors, Mark Hlavacik shows how the culture wars have redefined the politics of US schooling from the 1970s to the present through vivid accounts of public controversies featuring Allan Bloom, Oprah Winfrey, Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Betsy DeVos, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and others. Beginning in the 1970s, Hlavacik shows, efforts at innovation in schooling have increasingly been met by attempts to discredit them through exposé. As the culture wars have accelerated and exploded, this cycle of innovation and exposé has embroiled public schools in increasingly heated debates. He explains the dynamics that make curriculum controversies so intractable and confronts the delicate question of whether raucous public arguments are bad for education. With clarity and insight, Hlavacik reveals why bitter contests between educational ideologies not only add another burden for the schools, but also for the people—the willing warriors—who devote their lives to fighting for their betterment.

Mark Hlavacik is assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform.

Laura Beth Kelly is an associate professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

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Nicholas W. Gentile, "Enemies to Their Country: The Marblehead Addressers and Consensus in the American Revolution" (U Mass Press, 2025)

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Nicholas W. Gentile complicates our understanding of the American Revolution through a microhistory of one Massachusetts town in his new book, Enemies to Their Country: The Marblehead Addressers and Consensus in the American Revolution (U Mass Press, 2025).

In 1774, a group of elite men in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, just outside Salem, wrote an address to the royal governor thanking him for his service to the colony, even as town residents began demanding independence from Great Britain. Town meeting records reveal how the town’s patriot majority pressured the signers to withdraw their support for the governor and demanded public recantations and issued damning reports, even forcing some of the signers into exile.

Enemies to Their Country tells the story of the year following the Address, chronicling the town’s struggle to achieve consensus even as the war for American independence started. This microhistory of one vitally important town, the second largest in Massachusetts at the time, with a thriving local economy based on fishing and a robust community of religious and civically engaged citizens, complicates simplistic ideas of the American Revolution. Through compelling stories of neighboring individuals and families, many of which have not been told, it also provides an example of a politically polarized constituency struggling to find consensus at a time of great conflict.

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On Our Continuing Age of Oil with Journalist Stanley Reed

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Stanley Reed has been covering energy and the Middle East from London for more than three decades, most recently for The New York Times. With the war in Iran and its threat to global energy supplies as backdrop, we have a wide-ranging conversation about the Age of Oil. Despite longstanding predictions of Peak Oil, this era is by no means over, Reed tells me. Big Oil is used to political risk, as in the Persian Gulf region. Even now, the oil majors are busy exploring for deposits in Namibia. Venezuela could become a major producer again. The fundamental determinant, Reed says, is not the supply of fossil fuels but the demand for their use. The global Age of Oil, which began in the 19th century with commercial extractions in the United States and Caspian Sea region, huffs and puffs its way along in the 21st century.

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Cathryn J. Prince, "For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman" (U Illinois Press, 2026)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

My guest today is Cathryn J. Prince the author of For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman (U Illinois Press, 2026). From her start as one of the youngest activists in US history, Pauline Newman helped shape the International Ladies' Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) into a dominant force in industrial America. Cathryn J. Prince follows Newman’s life from a youth split between Lithuania and New York City sweatshops to her work as an advisor to New Deal–era labor secretary Frances Perkins. Newman’s long hours at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory informed her entrée into labor activism. In the following years, she tirelessly advocated for workers, ran for New York Secretary of State as a socialist, and became the first woman to serve as the ILGWU general organizer. Her interest in the health of workers led to service on the Joint Board of Sanitary Control and a decades-long term as education director of the ILGWU health center. Membership in Eleanor Roosevelt’s circle opened doors to government positions and advisory roles that continued into the postwar era. Prince also weaves in the details of Newman’s fifty-year relationship with a woman, her struggles with her sexual identity, and her final years.

Cathryn J. Prince is an adjunct professor of journalism at Fordham University. Her books include Queen of the Mountaineers: The Trailblazing Life of Fanny Bullock Workman and American Daredevil: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Halliburton, the World’s First Celebrity Travel Writer

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Tom Wells, "The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

A richly detailed collection of transcripts of Henry Kissinger's secretly recorded phone conversations from his time in the Nixon administration that touch on every important issue of Kissinger's day and provide a sweeping view of his era.
Henry Kissinger is unquestionably one of the most consequential foreign policy makers in American history. A remarkably influential academic during his long tenure at Harvard, Kissinger became Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor in 1969 and Secretary of State in 1973.
Like Nixon, Kissinger left a trail of secretly recorded evidence in his wake. Kissinger began taping in 1969, two years before Nixon did in 1971, and he continued taping for over three years after Nixon's recording system was dismantled in 1973. In The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations" (Oxford UP, 2026), Tom Wells draws on his expertise in the Nixon era to provide carefully selected, edited, and annotated transcripts of Kissinger's phone conversations, which chronologically highlight the most momentous crises and controversies of the era. They not only provide context and many revelations on Kissinger's role in numerous events but also throw his personality, character, and checkered record into sharp relief.
The conversations cover a wide range of issues, including the Vietnam War, the India-Pakistan conflict, the opening to China, the Middle East, the Greek coup in Cyprus, the Nixon administration's illegal wiretapping, and the Watergate scandal. The transcripts reveal Kissinger's opinions and attitudes on important policy matters and his complex relationship with President Nixon, as well as the many battles he fought with other administration officials and his subtle manipulations of well-known journalists.
A richly detailed collection of Kissinger's transcripts and commentary, this book provides a novel window into the Nixon administration and offers a genuinely unique perspective on one of the most important figures in modern American history.

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Joanna Siekiera ed., "NATO Stability Policing: Beneficial Tool in Filling the Security Gap and Establishing the Rule of Law, and a Safe and Secure Environment" (NATO Stability Policing Centre Of Excellence, 2024)

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Since the end of the Cold War and the resurgence of great power competition on the world stage, NATO has been in a period of transition to adapting to the new international security environment that is mark by great instability and violations of international law. These types of situation have in recent years have been labelled "grey-zone" style threats that can be dangerous but may avoid the official legal definition of warlike activity.
To combat this concerning situation has arisen the concept of "Stability Policing" that helps ensure that the rule of law is established and preserved in the long run. This includes the effective cooperation between military and civil law enforcement together to achieving long-term stability in troubled areas.
The NATO Stability Policing Centre Of Excellence commissioned its own extensive three volume study NATO Stability Policing: Beneficial Tool in Filling the Security Gap and Establishing the Rule of Law, and a Safe and Secure Environment (2024)edited by Dr. Joanna Siekiera to investigate the nature and challenges of such stability operations.
The three volumes are available online:The Stability Policing Trilogy Volume I – Past
The Stability Policing Trilogy Volume II – Present The Stabilit y Policing Trilogy Volume III – Future

Dr. Joanna Siekiera is an expert in international law, NATO consultant, trainer, and educator. She has previously been featured on the New Books Network for 21st Century as the Pacific Century. Culture and Security of Oceania States in Great Power Competition (Warsaw University Press, 2023), Evolution on Demand: The Changing Roles of the U.S. Marine Corps in Twenty-first Century Conflicts and Beyond (Marine Corps University Press, 2025), and International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region (Routledge, 2025).

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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Maya L. Kornberg, "Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress" (JHU Press, 2026)

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Why fifty years of changemaking and reform haven't fixed Congress—and what that reveals about American democracy. Congress, the central democratic institution in the United States, is hanging on by a thread. On January 6, 2021, a violent attack on the Capitol Building left five people dead, and threats and attacks against politicians are on the rise. In Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress (JHU Press, 2026), Maya Kornberg chronicles the efforts of congressional reformers over the last fifty years and documents the mounting forces that have kept their reforms from creating meaningful change. The "Watergate babies" of 1974, the Contract with America conservatives of 1994, and the historic 2018 class fueled by backlash to Donald Trump all represent younger, more diverse, and less entrenched members who arrived in Washington energized and idealistic. Kornberg reveals the ways Congress has become increasingly inhospitable to change. Political violence, astronomical campaign costs, relentless fundraising demands, shrinking staff, and centralized party leadership all constrain the ability of new members to legislate and represent their constituents. Social media, while offering new platforms for political expression, has also heightened harassment and fed a performative culture that rewards spectacle over substance. Bolstered by dozens of interviews, congressional records, and the voices of lawmakers past and present—including Henry Waxman, Toby Moffett, Phil English, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Lauren Underwood—Stuck offers a sobering portrait of a legislative body paralyzed by its own internal dynamics. Kornberg outlines tangible reforms that could restore Congress's capacity to function and amplify the power of its newest members. At a time when Americans are losing faith in democracy's most representative institution, Stuck makes the case for how it could be saved.

Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in the study of public policymaking and litigation in the US. A former British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, she is the author of the award-winning book,America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Maya Kornberg is Senior Fellow and Manager in the Elections and Government program at the NYU Brennan Center for Justice. Her first book Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process (Columbia University Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the 2025 WJM Mackenzie Book Prize.

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Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

On Feb. 6, 1945, just three days after the U.S. army started to fight the Japanese in the city of Manila, General Douglas MacArthur declared that “Manila had fallen.” In truth, the battle would take another month, as U.S. forces fought their way through block after block. By the end of the battle, which featured some of the most intense urban fighting faced by the U.S. army, Manila was in ruins, the old walled city of Intramuros was flattened, and 100,000 Filipino civilians were dead.

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes writes a comprehensive history of the fighting in The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War (Oxford UP, 2025)

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is an associate professor in the strategy and policy department at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of four books, including Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press: 2010)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Battle of Manila. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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On Trump as a “World Historical Individual” with author John B. Judis

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel “viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval,” the author John B. Judis wrote in a recent essay for NOTUS, and “assigned to what he called ‘world-historical individuals’ a special role in spurring the transition from one era to another.” Trump, Judis posited, “is exactly such an individual,” comparable in this respect to Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon. In our conversation, we discuss this proposition—including the forces that brought Trump to this role and the bleak destiny that typically greets “world-historical individuals.” Judis is the author of a number of books, including The Populist Explosion (Columbia Global Reports, 2016).

John B. Judis is an author and American journalist, a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo, a former senior writer at the National Journal, and a former senior editor at The New Republic

Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. His companion Substack newsletter, America and Beyond,” offers commentary and insights on the podcast. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His most recent book is Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024).

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Sarah Jaffe, "Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone" (Bold Type Books, 2021)

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone (Bold Type Books, 2021), Sarah Jaffe argues that modern culture encourages workers to see their jobs as a “labor of love.” This idea tells people that passion and dedication should motivate them more than pay or working conditions. Jaffe shows that this belief often allows employers to justify low wages, long hours, and poor treatment. Through stories of workers across many fields, such as teachers, domestic workers, nonprofit employees, artists, athletes, and tech workers, the book demonstrates how devotion to work is used to normalize exploitation. Jaffe calls for a reevaluation of the relationship between work, identity, and personal fulfillment, suggesting that workers should organize collectively and demand fair compensation and conditions instead of relying on passion alone.

Sarah Jaffe is a journalist and labor reporter who writes about work, inequality, and social movements. Her work has appeared in major publications such as The Nation, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Jaffe has long reported on labor struggles and worker organizing, including movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for $15 campaign. She is also the author of Necessary Trouble and most recently From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in A World on Fire. She is co-host of the labor podcast Belabored. Her writing focuses on how economic systems shape everyday life and workers’ experiences.

My co-producer on this episode is Kelly Knight, a graduate student in the MA program in Communication at Oakland University.

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Steven Pinker, "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life" (Scribner, 2025)

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.

But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room. In When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life (Scribner, 2026) Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life’s tragedies and comedies. Along the way he answers questions like:

-Why do people hoard toilet paper at the first sign of an emergency?

-Why are Super Bowl ads dominated by crypto?

-Why, in American presidential primary voting, do citizens typically select the candidate they believe is preferred by others rather than their favorite?

-Why did Russian authorities arrest a protester who carried a blank sign? -Why is it so hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye at the end of a phone call?

-Why does everyone agree that if we were completely honest all the time, life would be unbearable?

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator, and host of the New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here and also contributes here.

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Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, "Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell Elder examines the long-lasting political legacies of mining-company dominance in the Midwest and Appalachia. While the economic consequences of deindustrialization are well-known, Dr. Elder shifts the focus to a more insidious problem: the political dysfunction that took root long before the mines shut down.

Drawing on historical and administrative data, Dr. Elder shows that the coal industry hindered the growth of local government capacity in the places where it was dominant. Mining companies also engaged in outright corruption to shape local governments, practices which local elites then carried forward. When mining companies withdrew, they left behind not just economic decline, but local governments ill-equipped to govern.

These patterns have had enduring consequences for public life. Dr. Elder shows how these historical experiences have fueled a broader cynicism toward government, in which citizens expect little from public institutions and doubt the usefulness of elections. Company Towns underscores the consequences of corporate dominance for state capacity, public opinion, and democratic accountability today.

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Gabrielle Oliveira, "Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Who gets to live a life with dignity? Each day, families around the world make the difficult decision to leave their homes in search of safety, stability, and opportunity. For many migrant families, this search centers on access to strong, caring, and equitable educational systems that enable children to flourish. Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life (Stanford UP, 2025) follows the lives of 16 migrant families from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as they navigate the promises and challenges of the American education system. Drawing on immersive ethnographic research in homes and schools from 2018 to 2021, Gabrielle Oliveira offers an intimate portrait of these families' experiences. She weaves together stories of parental sacrifice, children's educational and migration journeys, and educators' responses to trauma—all shaped by the additional disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Oliveira highlights the perseverance of families confronting the overlapping crises of border detention, family separation, and a public health emergency. These experiences forced them to reimagine education and what it means to build a future in the U.S. By examining how migrant children engage in classrooms, how teachers understand their needs, and how hope evolves, this book offers vital insights into the intersections of schooling and immigration. It calls for more responsive educational practices and policies that affirm the dignity and potential of all migrant children.

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Doug Crandell, "Twenty-Two Cents an Hour: Disability Rights and the Fight to End Subminimum Wages" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Twenty-Two Cents an Hour: Disability Rights and the Fight to End Subminimum Wages (Cornell UP, 2022), Doug Crandell uncovers the harsh reality of people with disabilities in the United States who are forced to work in unethical conditions for subminimum wages with little or no opportunity to advocate for themselves, while wealthy CEOs grow even wealthier as a direct result. As recently as 2016, the United States Congress enacted bipartisan legislation which continued to allow workers with disabilities to legally be paid far lower than the federal minimum wage. Drawing on ongoing federal Department of Justice lawsuits, the horrifying story of Henry's Turkey Farm in Iowa, and more, Crandell shows the history of the policies that have led to these unjust outcomes, examines who benefits from this legislation, and asks important questions about the rise of a disability industrial complex. Exposing this complex—which is rooted in profit, lobbying, and playing on the emotions of workers' parents and families, as well as the public—Crandell challenges readers to reexamine how we treat some of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. Twenty-Two Cents an Hour forces the reader to face the reality of this exploitation, and builds the framework needed for reform.

Doug Crandell is Public Service Faculty at the Institute on Human Development and Disability at the University of Georgia. For more than thirty years he has worked in disability advocacy, specifically the intersection of employment, economic justice, and much-needed systems change. Doug Crandell is the author of several book and novels, inlcuding most recently "They're Calling You Home."

My co-producer for this episode is Shea Tripp, a graduate student in the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University.

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Imagining Independence; or, Why Does Rip Van Winkle Sleep Through the Revolution?

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Thursday, March 12—Inaugurating a series of programs to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, authors and scholars Michael Gorra, Wendy S. Walters, and Brenda Wineapple discuss three classic short stories, each written within fifty years of the American Revolution, that imaginatively explore the meaning of that founding moment: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” William Austin’s “Peter Rugg, The Missing Man,” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.”

Drawing on the recently published two-volume anthology The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century and Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches join us for an evening that will illuminate the surprising connections between the birth of our country and the dawning of our literature in ways that continue to resonate.

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Sunmin Kim, "The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

What happens when theories of racial hierarchies interact with reality? How are they contested, refuted and changed in light of that encounter? What role do experts, most notably social scientists, play here? And, what can these historical encounters tell us about how we should think of race and migration today? These are the questions which animate Sunmin Kim’s The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate (U Chicago Press, 2026). Taking as his focus the Dillingham Commission, a US government investigation into migrant groups established in 1907, Kim shows how theories of racial essentialism, which increasing were moving across the, at the time blurry, boundary between biology and society were used and contested in a moment when prominent political figures were eager to separate out the valued, long-established migrants from Western and Central Europe from those coming from Eastern and Southern Europe who all, on the face of it, were ‘white’. In doing so ideas such as ethnicity and the possibility of assimilation come to be mobilised. In turn Japanese migrants on the Pacific coast were placed beyond the pale of this possibility of assimilation and continued to be excluded. As Kim shows, not only did the commission report introduce some new vocabulary for thinking of race, but also played a key role in the development of US immigration quotas and a form of racial liberalism. This perspective, while accepting the possibility of a diverse body politic, rested on an assumption of a ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ element, including the possibility that some of the latter simply could never be ‘American’.

In our discussion we discuss the formation and activity of the Dillingham Commission. This includes discussing a number of key figures, such as Franz Boas who measures skulls for the commission and in so doing uses the same tools of the eugenicists and positivists to undercut their racist claims and Yamato Ichihashi who, while vociferously making the case that Japanese migrants such as himself are the ideal ‘Americans’ ends up being an example of the ‘insurmountable difference’ placed in front of such groups. We end by discussing how Zora Neale Hurston, once Boas’s student, provides a different way of conceiving of race and its place in immigration debates.

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Lisa Nakamura, "The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet (U Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Lisa Nakamura challenges the widespread myth that the internet was born from the labor of a handful of white male entrepreneurs, recovering the uncredited and unpaid contributions of women of color. Focusing on three key inflection points in computing—the microchip era of the 1960s and ’70s, the rise of social media in the 2000s, and A.I.-fueled virtual reality in the 2020s—Dr. Nakamura illuminates these women’s instrumental roles in building new technologies and making them coherent to users.

From the Navajo women who manufactured the first semiconductor circuits in New Mexico to Tila Tequila, the queer Vietnamese American refugee who became the first true internet influencer in the MySpace age, to Black virtual reality creators, Dr. Nakamura highlights how women’s gendered and racialized identities have uniquely positioned them to mediate the development and proliferation of new technologies. She exposes how these women have been structurally excluded from racial capitalism’s benefits while their labor is considered as exploitable and inexhaustible as that of machines. Confronting this injustice, she focuses our attention on their work, which undergirds and makes possible the platforms ingrained in our daily lives.

Arguing for both recognition and material compensation for these women’s labor, The Inattention Economy is a powerful counterhistory of Silicon Valley and a persuasive call to imagine a different kind of internet.

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A.J. Bauer, "Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against The Press" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against The Press (Columbia UP, 2026), A.J. Bauer examines the history of the idea of a “liberal media bias.” Rather than trying to show whether or not “liberal media bias” is an accurate description, Bauer shows how this idea has been an animating force for conservative political activists and media figures. Bauer shows the lineage of “liberal media bias” criticism going back to early leaders in the modern conservative movement and press, as well as the conservative and right-wing grassroots. In addition to promoting this idea of media bias, these early conservative media pioneers taught their audiences how to be media critics themselves, a tradition that is still practiced today.

A.J. Bauer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama.

You can find a transcript of the interview here.

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Entrepreneurial Work Ethic

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks with Erik Baker about the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic. The dominant work ethic of our current moment, it asks us to constantly create new work for ourselves. Eric contrasts the entrepreneurial work ethic with the industrious work ethic, which valued hard work and drudgery in one’s allotted task. Over the course of the 20th century industriousness was replaced by entrepreneurship in the American economic imaginary. The ultimate villain of the entrepreneurial mode is the bureaucrat, the ultimate failing is complacency. This toxic, exhausting ethos in which the standard of all labor is changing the world, paradoxically stabilizes our economic system, by trapping us in unachievable dreams.

We should note that High Theory as an academic side hustle is exemplary of the entrepreneurial work ethic, even if we have no ethics. That’s why we made a Patreon.

The transcript of this episode lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF.

Erik’s new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard UP 2025) explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as “self-realization.” Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious––and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to “make your own job” keeps hope alive.

Erik Baker is a lecturer in the History of Science Department and the director of the senior thesis program for the History & Science concentration. He received his PhD from Harvard and his BA from Northwestern University. He has published on the history of social science and American capitalism in Modern Intellectual History, History of the Human Sciences, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. He also writes widely for magazines such as n+1, The Baffler, and The Drift, where he is an associate editor.

Image for this episode is an unidentified book illustration from the British Library Commons. It shows a group of people kneeling in front of a dollar sign. It was found for High Theory by Lili Epstein on the Public Domain Image Archive.

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Abe Walker, "Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South" (Temple UP, 2026)

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

When Volkswagen’s Chattanooga Assembly Plant opened in 2012, the United Auto Workers were excited by the golden opportunity to organize in the anti-union South, where their efforts had been routinely thwarted. However, it took ten years and several attempts before the UAW was successful in unionizing the plant. Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South (Temple UP, 2026) explains why.

Dr. Abe Walker chronicles the organizing campaign from its origin in 2014 to the union’s breakthrough victory in 2024, illustrating what went wrong—and what went right—along the way. Walker provides a systematic analysis of the strategic challenges and tactical shifts, showing the patterns that persisted across three election cycles while highlighting their differences, from global-level alliances to local labor issues.

Reassembling the UAW also demonstrates how rebel rank-and-file workers ousted the old-guard leadership and transformed the UAW into a militant union to achieve results. Ultimately, Walker offers valuable lessons for organizational strategy, the power of collective action, and the future of the labor movement.

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Eurie Dahn, "Snack" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In the hierarchy of foods, snacks are deemed trivial – perhaps even childish – especially in contrast to meals, which are seen as substantial and necessary. The multiple aisles devoted to sweet and savory treats in supermarkets, and the availability of snacks even at places like home improvement and department stores, speak to the popularity of snacking. But the ubiquity of snacks is relatively new and not common to all countries.
In Snack (Bloomsbury, 2026), part of the Object Lessons series, Dr. Eurie Dahn traces the story of snacking culture through specific snacks, including Flamin' Hot Cheetos, cheese crackers, and Choco Pies, and in the contexts of ethnicity, popular culture, diet culture, and even parenting. Snack is an idiosyncratic cultural history that offers surprisingly filling food for thought.

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Courtney Humphries, "Climate Change and the Future of Boston" (Anthem Press, 2026)

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Like many of the world’s iconic coastal cities, Boston faces potentially severe impacts from climate change. Depending on global emissions, Boston could face several feet of sea level rise this century, which would leave many parts of the city subject to tidal and storm flooding. Precipitation events could become more frequent and extreme, and its already-humid summers could become dangerously hot, with most days over 90 degrees. Today, Boston is a booming city with a growing population, a glittering new waterfront neighborhood, world-class universities and a strong economy. Its future risks and opportunities related to climate change are shaped by the 400-year environmental, social and economic history of the city’s development.

As part of Anthem’s series, Climate Change and the Future of Boston (Anthem Press, 2026) by Dr. Courtney Humphries describes how Boston’s history and current context shape future climate impacts and examines the mitigation and adaptation strategies the city has taken. Boston is a leader in acknowledging the problem of climate change; it has set a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050, among other climate-related goals. It has also developed science-based climate models and undertaken a robust planning process to identify strategies to protect its waterfront from flooding and increase its resilience to other climate-related impacts. Its mayor has embraced a progressive Green New Deal for Boston emphasizing the need for an inclusive and equitable approach to climate mitigation and adaptation. But the city also faces structural challenges, such as aging infrastructure, historic racial inequities, rising gentrification and income inequality and ongoing political and regulatory obstacles that hinder efforts to adapt in an efficient and just manner. The book concludes with a set of forward-looking scenarios about what the future may have in store for the city and the lessons it holds for other coastal cities struggling with these challenges.

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Ethelene Whitmire, "The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram" (Viking, 2026)

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

On the eve of World War II, a handsome young scholar arrived in Paris. The queer, Black son of a housecleaner, who had nevertheless been decorated in the halls of Harvard and Columbia, Reed Peggram flirted with Leonard Bernstein, sat for portraits by famous artists, charmed minor royalty and became like a little brother to famed researcher and writer Jan Gay. Finally in Europe and on the same prestigious scholarship as literary luminaries Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes before him, he ignored the increasingly alarmed calls to return home to a repressive, segregated America and a constrained life as a second class citizen. And as tensions grew and gas masks were distributed in the City of Lights, Reed turned instead to the new life he’d made: with Arne, a tall and dashing Danish scholar with whom he had formed a deep bond.
Award-winning historian Ethelene Whitmire unearthed a trove of Reed’s letters when she met one of his descendants at a lecture, awed that she’d heard so little of this charismatic man and his fascinating true story of love and war. In The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram (Viking, 2026), she introduces us to an unforgettable character who fled from country to country as fighting advanced, was captured by Nazis and outwitted them in a daring escape, and risked it all in a personal fight for a life of love, freedom, beauty and dignity in a world set against him.

Ethelene Whitmire is a respected historian and professor for the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research has won awards and funding from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the American Library Association, and she has been invited to writers residencies including Yaddo, UCross, Hedgebrook, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). She is currently working on the book Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism.

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Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown, "Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

How the urban-rural divide drives partisan polarization Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battle between “us” and “them”? In Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy (Princeton UP, 2025) Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that political polarization is not just about red states and blue states, or coastal elites who alienate those in fly-over country. Instead, polarization permeates every region and every state—and has become organized through a pernicious rural-urban division. Mettler and Brown explain the evolution of this gulf across five decades, charting political trends in both places. Drawing on data on individuals, communities, and members of Congress, as well as interviews with local party leaders and former elected officials, they show how the divide emerged and why it poses a threat to democracy. Until about thirty years ago, both political parties attracted support from rural and urban voters. But after place-based inequality grew due to deregulation and trade liberalization, white rural dwellers began to view urban people and Democrats as affluent elites out of touch with their needs. Politically active evangelical churches, antiabortion organizations, and gun groups helped deepen the divide, encouraging many of these rural residents to become staunch supporters of the GOP. Now, regional one-party rule in rural America gives Republicans a systematic edge for gaining control of crucial political institutions, including the Senate, House of Representatives, the Presidency, and even the Supreme Court. This is helping enable an extremist political party and pushing democracy to the brink. Mettler and Brown argue that the divide can be repaired—but only if the Democrats build their own robust local organizations and offer citizens a meaningful choice.

Trevor Brown is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. In Fall 2026, he will join the University of Oregon's Department of Political Science as Assistant Professor of Inequality.

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Tristan J. Rogers, "Conservatism, Past and Present: A Philosophical Introduction" (Routledge, 2025)

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Conservatism, Past and Present: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2025), Tristan J. Rogers argues that philosophical conservatism is a coherent and compelling set of historically rooted ideas about conserving and promoting the human good. Part I, “Conservatism Past,” presents a history of conservative ideas, exploring themes, such as the search for wisdom, the limits of philosophy, reform in preference to revolution, the relationship between authority and freedom, and liberty as a living tradition. Major figures include Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, G.W.F. Hegel, and Roger Scruton. Part II, “Conservatism Present,” applies philosophical conservatism to contemporary conservative politics, focusing on issues such as nationalism, populism, the family, education, and responsibility.

Rogers shows that conservatism has been defined differently at different times: as a loose set of connected ideas reacting against the French Revolution; as a kind of disposition or instinct in favor of the status quo; and more recently as any ideas opposed to the political left. But he also allows a set of questions to guide his argument for conservatism’s merits: What is conservatism? Is it a coherent and attractive philosophy? What are conservatives for? And how is today’s conservatism related to its past? In his answers, Rogers paints a compelling and coherent picture of an aligned and attractive set of ideas.

Dr. Tristan J. Rogers teaches Logic and Latin at Donum Dei Classical Academy in San Francisco, CA. He has also taught philosophy at Santa Clara University, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Authority of Virtue: Institutions and Character in the Good Society (2020).

YouTube Channel: here

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An Evening with Philip Roth: A Conversation with Bernard Avishai, Igor Webb, and Steven Zipperstein

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The YIVO Institute was pleased to present a special evening with acclaimed novelist Philip Roth. Roth read excerpts from his new novel, Nemesis (2010), which tells the story of a terrifying polio epidemic raging in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944 and its devastating effect on the closely knit, family-oriented community and its children. Through this story, Roth addresses profound questions of human existence: What types of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand circumstance?

Preceding the reading was a panel discussion with YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent, Bernard Avishai (Hebrew University), Igor Webb (Adelphi University) and Steven Zipperstein (Stanford University).

This reading and discussion originally took place on May 18, 2011.

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Katelyn E. Stauffer, "The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S." (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Katelyn Stauffer, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia, has an excellent new book focusing on how voters and citizens perceive the legitimacy and functionality of political institutions, especially when they think there are women elected to those institutions. The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the United States (Oxford UP, 2025) weaves together a number of different threads to reach some interesting conclusions about women in elected office and the trust that voters have in those elected offices and institutions. Stauffer starts the research trajectory with a framing around representation, and how the different kinds of representation within elected bodies connects to how voters think about those bodies themselves and whether they trust them and think they are effective. This opens the path to bring in the question of gender, and how voters’ or citizens’ perceptions of how many women are in legislative bodies also connects with how much trust those same citizens have in those representative bodies.

The Politics of Perception explores both accurate perceptions as well as misperceptions about governmental institutions, and this is also where the research is truly fascinating. Part of what the research indicates is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the American public does not actually know a lot about politics or about how political institutions operate. At the same time, many citizens hold strong opinions or thoughts about politics, which generally are at odds with the lack of knowledge. This is also bound up with stereotypes that voters consider in terms of male and female elected officials and how they work within institutions. The Politics of Perception interrogates all of these misperceptions, unpacking the truth or reality versus the ideas that individuals hold about office holders and the political institutions in which those office holders work. Stauffer also discussed how she was able to build on a comparative politics approach, since parliamentary systems are, by their nature, collective institutions, and this approach helped to provide another theoretical framework for the analysis.

The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S. is an important and useful book for many different scholars: those who study American government and politics; scholars of gender and politics, especially in the United States; comparative political scientists; and political theorists exploring issues of representation and democracy.

We discussed the Ghost Bookstore in Athens, Georgia as a bookseller that can order The Politics of Perception for readers in Georgia or elsewhere.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Austin McCoy, "Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made" (Atria/One Signal, 2026)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

For fans of Dilla Time and The Chronicles of DOOM, a culturally connected celebration of the groundbreaking hip-hop group De La Soul, and how they changed the look, sound, and feel of Black America.

Music artists and trends come and go, but every once in a while, a moment arrives that genuinely changes everything. In 1988, De La Soul, three young men from Amityville, Long Island, did exactly that. Their always innovative work pulled inspiration from artists of the past and popularized cutting-edge music sampling techniques to blend jazz, R&B, and rap as they created a sound unlike any the world had heard before.

But the De La Soul experience didn’t end there. These weren’t just musicians—they were game-changers in so many ways. From the way they dressed, to the words they spoke, to the day-glo colors of their breakout 3 Feet and Rising, De La Soul rejected convention, refused to be talked back into the box, and left the door open for everyone behind them.

Now, in Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made (Atria/One Signal, 2026), West Virginia University history professor Austin McCoy explores how De La Soul not only defined a new era of hip-hop, but also American and Black culture at the same time. Through his eyes, ears, and well-studied recall of ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s America, McCoy takes us on a journey through the world this innovative musical act made.

One of the few hip-hop groups of their era to stay together long term, De La Soul lived astonishing highs and lows, from forming the Native Tongues collective to influential fights with their publishers to assert the artist’s right to control their creations. And after a lifetime left out of music’s digital revolution, in 2023 they finally hit streaming services just as it lost founding member David Jolicoeur too soon to see his work reach a brand-new generation of fans.

Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age will connect with DLS fans, ‘80s babies, and students of the rap game alike, in a beautifully rendered and deeply researched tome that places this group atop the pedestal it deserves.

Guest: Austin McCoy is an assistant professor of history at West Virginia University, specializing in African American History, labor history, social movements, and hip-hop culture. His work has appeared in numerous outlets including CNN, The Baffler, The Washington Post, Black Perspectives, and Truthout. He lives in West Virginia.

Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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Michelle Adams, "The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North" (FSG Press, 2025)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why?

In The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North (FSG Press, 2025), the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight—and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate—and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today.

Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise.

Guest: Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former codirector of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and other publications. She was born and grew up in Detroit.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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George Frazier, "Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. George Frazier is currently an assistant professor of Computer Information Sciences at Washburn University, where his research focuses on such topics as artificial intelligence and environmental informatics.

But George is so much more then a computer scientists. As a well known environmental author, Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America (University of Chicago Press, 2025) provides a compendium of engaging stories at the deep intersections of nature, history, and place.

His previous book, The Last Wild Places of Kansas: Journeys into Hidden Landscapes, was widely praised, winning the Ferguson Book Award, Midwest Book Award, Hamlin Garland Prize and designated a Kansas Notable Book.

George now lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife and daughter.

Professor Michael Simpson has been the Director of the Resource Management and Administration graduate program at Antioch University New England, in Keene, NH.

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Dana A. Williams, "Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship" (Amistad, 2025)

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon's profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature. A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as an editor at one of the nation's most prestigious publishing houses. While Toni Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her editorial work is little known. Drawing on extensive research and firsthand accounts, this comprehensive study discusses Morrison's remarkable journey from her early days at Random House to her emergence as one of its most important editors. During her tenure in editorial, Morrison refashioned the literary landscape, working with important authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and Lucille Clifton, and empowering cultural icons such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali to tell their stories on their own terms. Toni Morrison herself requested that Dana Williams be the one to tell this story, even giving her the book's title. From the manuscripts she molded, the authors she nurtured, and the readers she inspired, Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship (Amistad, 2025) demonstrates how Toni Morrison has influenced American culture beyond the individual titles or authors she published. Morrison's contribution as an editor transformed the broader literary landscape and deepened the cultural conversation. With unparalleled insight and sensitivity, Toni at Random charts this editorial odyssey.

Dr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University.

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Danielle Wiggins, "Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

A provocative new history of modern black liberalism

Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.

In the 1970s and ’80s, cities across the country elected black mayors for the first time. Just as these officials gained political power, however, their cities felt the full brunt of white flight and deindustrialization. Tasked with governing cities in crisis, black political leaders responded in seemingly conservative ways to the social problems that austerity worsened. Nowhere was this response more evident than in Atlanta. In the nation’s preeminent black urban regime, black leaders such as mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young employed the power of policing and the private sector to discipline black Atlantans, hoping they would equip vulnerable communities with the tools to manage the volatility of the era.

Danielle Wiggins shows that these punitive responses to the problems of crime, family instability, and unemployment were informed by black liberalism’s disciplinary impulse: an enduring tendency to reform behaviors believed to threaten black survival in a white supremacist nation. Forged in response to the violence of Jim Crow, the disciplinary impulse relied upon notions of pathology and its inverse, black excellence. Wiggins identifies several black liberal efforts to cultivate excellent black communities, families, and workers in the post–civil rights era, including community policing, corporate-sponsored family initiatives, and black entrepreneurship.

In embracing disciplinary strategies, however, black liberals often focused on behavior at the expense of addressing structural inequality. Consequently, their approaches dovetailed with those of the “New” Democrats, whose post–Great Society social policies were informed by urban black liberals. Black Excellence reveals thus how urban black liberals not only reshaped black politics but, as Democrats, also helped build the neoliberal Democratic Party.

Guest: Danielle Wiggins is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on U.S. and African American history since the 1960s. She is currently researching race and the politics of energy since the 1960s. Focusing on the 1970s energy crisis, her project will explore how black Americans thought about energy, consumption, growth, and sustainability in ways that alternately challenged, intersected with, and radically rethought mainstream energy discourses.

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The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City with Henry Sapoznik

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) offers a new look at over a century of Yiddish culture in New York City. Author Henry H. Sapoznik focuses on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black-Jewish cultural interactions, restaurants, real estate, and journalism to tell the history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the influence of Yiddish culture on New York City and showcases the culture’s persistent

Join YIVO for a discussion with Sapoznik about this new book, led by Eddy Portnoy.

This discussion originally took place on October 23, 2025.

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Patrick Chung, "Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026) by Dr. Patrick Chung traces the origins of today’s United States-led capitalist world economy. The nation’s foreign policy during the Cold War saw two unprecedented developments: the continuous global deployment of US soldiers and the creation of a permanent worldwide military base network. In the process, the US military came to control the flow of billions of dollars, large-scale construction projects at home and abroad, the purchase of countless goods and services, and the employment of millions of soldiers and workers. In other words, the Cold War US military became the world’s leading economic actor.
To illuminate the political and economic consequences of the US military’s globalization, Dr. Chung focuses on its activities in South Korea between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Chung shows how the Korean War and the subsequent militarization of South Korea became an important site for the spread of a new economic system, which he calls military-industrial capitalism. Sustained by providing the infrastructure and materials for the US military’s globalization, military-industrial capitalism influenced the development of governments, corporations, and workers throughout the US-led “free world.” As military-industrial capitalism expanded, more of the world depended on the physical and administrative standards used by the US military. Ironically, the creation of a globalized economy facilitated both South Korea’s “economic miracle” and the decline of US industrial might.
To clarify how these broader developments transformed everyday life in South Korea and around the world, Standardizing Empire explores three of South Korea’s leading multinational corporations today: shipping company Hanjin, steelmaker POSCO, and car manufacturer Hyundai. These case studies not only trace the companies’ early ties to the US military but also explain how they came to produce, sell, and employ workers worldwide, including in the United States.

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Catherine Boland Erkkila, "Spaces of Immigration: American Ports, Railways, and Settlements" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2025)

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Spaces of Immigration: American Ports, Railways, and Settlements (U Pittsburgh Press, 2025) follows the travel routes of immigrants during a foundational period of American infrastructure—from ports of arrival to train cars and depots to settlements—showing how the built environment of the railways fostered segregation through physical isolation and reinforced hierarchies according to race, ethnicity, and class. Catherine Boland Erkkila highlights the magnitude of this forced separation: how spatial design and the experiences within it reflected prejudices of contemporary middle-class Americans who viewed immigrants as poor, diseased, and dangerous. Spaces of Immigration draws attention to the control wielded by railroad companies and government officials, who dispatched European immigrants to ethnic enclaves across the Midwest, some of which still exist. This book ultimately offers a greater understanding of the immigrant experience in America through the lens of spatial history, revealing deeply embedded conflicts still pervasive in our society today.

This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023).

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Jennifer Randles, "Living Diaper to Diaper: The Hidden Crisis of Poverty and Motherhood" (U California Press, 2026)

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Many of us take diapers for granted. Yet diaper insecurity is a common, often hidden consequence of poverty in the US, where nearly half of American families with young children struggle to get enough diapers.

Drawing on interviews with mothers dealing with this overlooked issue, in Living Diaper to Diaper: The Hidden Crisis of Poverty and Motherhood (U California Press, 2026) Dr. Jennifer Randles shows how diapers have unique practical and symbolic significance for the well-being of families. Tracing the social history of diapering, Randles unravels a complex story of caregiving inequalities, the environmental impacts of child-rearing, and responsibility for meeting children’s basic needs. Yet it is also a hopeful story: the book chronicles the work of people who manage diaper banks as well as the growing diaper distribution movement.

A hard-nosed yet nuanced tale of parenting, Living Diaper to Diaper is an eye-opening examination of inequality and poverty in America.

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Michael James Roberts et al., "Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing" (San Diego State UP, 2024)

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing (San Diego State UP, 2024), Michael James Roberts, Kristin Lawler, and David P. Cline take the widespread participation of skateboarders and surfers in the Black Lives Matter movement as a catalyst to reconsider the significance of the cultural politics of surfing and skateboarding. It is the first academic volume to bring together leading scholars in the areas of both surfing and skateboarding studies. This episode also invites Jarret Rose to discuss his contribution to this anthology.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His current research projects include the study of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, temporal urban environments in rural historical towns, student experiences of hanging out and being at home while at college and university, and a more recent study on the making of rodeo. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email.

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Elizabeth Suhay, "Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025)

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Our guest today is Elizabeth Suhay, the author of Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics. Faith in the American Dream—the idea that anyone who works hard can achieve success—has waned in the 21st century. Decreases in economic mobility, increases in the wealth gap, and other economic shifts have undoubtedly influenced this decline. Dr. Suhay investigates how politics and political identity are intertwined with beliefs about the American Dream and the causes of inequality. Drawing on public opinion surveys spanning more than four decades, Suhay finds that Americans’ belief in the American Dream is strongly related to their political party affiliation. While it is true that Americans have become more skeptical of the American Dream overall, Suhay finds this skepticism is concentrated among Democratic members of the public. Despite the increasingly working-class make-up of the Republican coalition, most Republican members of the public continue to believe the American Dream is reality.

Elizabeth (Liz) Suhay is an associate professor of government in the School of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, D.C. She specializes in the study of U.S. public opinion and political psychology and is a Sine Civic Life Faculty Fellow and Vice Director of the Science & Policy certificate program. She has also co-edited three volumes including The Politics of Truth in Polarized America, with David Barker, The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion, with Bernard Grofman and Alex Trechsel, and "The Politics of Science" with James Druckman. She currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Political Psychology and Editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Political Psychology series.

This is episode is co-produced by Nora Kalaj, a student in the Master of Arts in Communication at Oakland University.

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Seth S. Tannenbaum, "Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark" (U Illinois Press, 2026)

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Celebrated as a democratic space for all Americans, the major league ballpark in fact privileged the middle- and upper-class white male fan while tacitly marginalizing poor urban residents and people of color. Seth S. Tannenbaum examines how the game’s economically and socially stratified system reflected changing understandings of urban space, inclusion, and the body politic.

Major League Baseball owners and executives masked exclusion and division by touting the game’s accessibility and instituting few overtly discriminatory policies. Affluent white males enjoyed a comfortable, safe space that reinforced their status as the prototypical American citizen. At the same time, ballparks relocated in response to how these favored fans felt about cities. Tannenbaum traces this journey from the urban locales of the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium through the suburban-oriented Dodger Stadium and Houston Astrodome to the cloistered fantasy of city life offered by Camden Yards. As he shows, owners’ pursuit of greater profits incorporated existing barriers that helped shape the structure of modern parks.

A revealing social history, Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark (U Illinois Press, 2026) revises the persistent myth of the ballpark as an egalitarian melting pot.

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Helen Redmond, "Liquid Handcuffs: Policing and Punishment in Methadone Clinics and the Future of Opioid Addiction Treatment" (North Atlantic Books, 2026)

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A hard-hitting exposé of how methadone clinics fail people in recovery—and an urgent, unapologetic case for their abolition.

Methadone is a life-saving medication. But the current system for obtaining it—the opioid treatment program, commonly known as the methadone clinic—is punitive, unjust, and often humiliating. In this eye-opening book Liquid Handcuffs: Policing and Punishment in Methadone Clinics and the Future of Opioid Addiction Treatment (North Atlantic Books, 2026), social worker and journalist Helen Redmond takes readers inside the hidden world of methadone clinics, exposing the “culture of cruelty” that polices, punishes, and profits from those they’re meant to serve. Through patient stories and extensive interviews with methadone users and clinic workers, Redmond weaves a compelling argument against the current clinic system. She provides a detailed history of how methadone was first developed and why the current system for dispensing methadone arose in the U.S., tracing its entanglement with the carceral system and the “War on Drugs” as well as private equity firms and tech companies. She details the numerous barriers to enter and remain and treatment, as well as standard practices that shame and discriminate against patients, such as restrictions on take-home doses; daily attendance requirements; regular urine testing; and threats of cutting off medication for any infraction of clinic rules. She also explores the nuances of resistance to methadone clinics within communities of color, unpacking the political, racial, and cultural circumstances behind the opposition to methadone. Redmond persuasively makes the case for removing police agencies like the DEA from clinic administration, and shows how a transition to provider-prescribed pharmacy pickup, along with other tools of harm reduction such as safe-supply and peer-support services, would restore dignity to patients struggling with addiction—and save thousands of lives.

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Coming Out as Dalit with Yashica Dutt

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

This episode features Yashica Dutt, journalist and author of Coming Out as Dalit. We began with a discussion of her choice to write a memoir, the significance of the memoir as a genre of Dalit writing, the politics around passing as upper caste, and what her mother’s role in the life taught her about Dalit feminism as a counter to Brahminical patriarchy. We then moved on to what her work as a journalist in India and the U.S. has revealed about the differences in the operations of caste in the two contexts. Finally, we ended with her coverage of the Zohran Mamdani campaign, both its promises and its failure to address the caste question head-on.

Guest:

Yashica Dutt is a journalist and author whose writings can be found on her Substack, Featuring Dalits and in New Lines magazine.

Mentioned in the episode:

Yashica Dutt, Coming Out as Dalit

Rohith Vemula: an Indian PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad whose suicide drew attention to widespread institutional casteism.

Kumari Mayawati: first Dalit woman chief minister in India who served in the state of Uttar Pradesh as the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party.

BSP: Bahujan Samaj Party founded in 1984 and focused on representing the interests of Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and religious minorities.

Origin: 2023 film written and directed by Ava DuVernay based on the life and work of Isabel Wilkerson.

ST/SC Act: Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is a landmark Indian law designed to protect marginalized communities from atrocities, hate crimes, and discrimination.

Cargenie Institute study: 2024 Indian American Attitudes Survey conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

DRUM Beats: organization that mobilizes working-class South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities.

Yashica Dutt, “I reported on the Zohran Mamdani Campaign for six months and documented South Asians' rise to power in New York City”

Yashica Dutt, “What Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign Says About the Quiet Erasure of Caste in US Politics”

Yashica Dutt, “If South Asians are prominent in the New York Mayoral Election, then where is caste?”

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James Giesler, "Francisco de Saavedra's American Revolutionary War, The Spanish Contribution to the Battle of Yorktown" (James Giesler, 2025)

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Francisco de Saavedra’s American Revolutionary War: The Spanish Contribution to the Battle of Yorktown (James Giesler, 2025) by James Giesler is the story of how the decisive victory in the American Revolutionary War, at the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781, was the result of French and Spanish cooperation in the Caribbean.

This cooperation started with Francisco de Saavedra’s arrival in Havana in early 1781. Although Spain had joined the war against Britain in 1779 little had been done by the Havana War Council, or Junta de Generales, to achieve Spain’s war aims. Saavedra united the Junta and established a close liaison with a French naval squadron which was present in Havana. This resulted in the fall of British held Pensacola in West Florida, in May 1781, to forces led by Bernardo de Gálvez. Saavedra would go on to meet Lt. General de Grasse in St. Domingue (Haiti) who was arriving from France with a large fleet. Together they agreed a plan of action for French and Spanish forces for the next nine months known as the de Grasse-Saavedra convention. As a result, de Grasse was able to sail promptly to Chesapeake Bay with a large fleet, troops, artillery and desperately needed Spanish silver dollars to fund the Yorktown campaign. De Grasse’s forces united with those of generals Washington and Rochambeau and trapped the British army at Yorktown in September 1781. Together they would deliver the coup de grace that led the British to abandon the war in North America. Saavedra would go on to play a significant role in the war as an adviser to the French and Spanish courts.

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Clarissa E. Francis, "Black Women's Bodily Autonomy, Sexual Freedom, and Pleasure: Explorations of the Hot Girl Movement" (Routledge, 2025)

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Black Women's Bodily Autonomy, Sexual Freedom, and Pleasure: Explorations of the Hot Girl Movement (Routledge, 2025) explores scholarship, practice, and advocacy for Black women’s pursuit of bodily autonomy, sexual freedom, and pleasure. Inspired by Megan Thee Stallion’s song "Hot Girl Summer" and pleasure activism, Dr. Clarissa E. Francis ("The Real Hot Girl Doc") examines the cultural and social impacts of "hot girl" music and its transformative effects on Black women’s sexual liberation journeys. Francis introduces readers to the Hot Girl Movement, addressing intergenerational trauma, denial of bodily autonomy, and pleasure politics.

This book offers a historical review and current documentation of Black women’s role in the evolving movement for sexual liberation in the United States, with a particular focus on Atlanta, Georgia. Chapters delve into the history of systemic oppression, presenting research on Black women’s experiences with gendered racism while demonstrating the socio-cultural influences shaping Black women’s sexual liberation. The book centers Black women’s narratives, featuring the work of sexologists, clinicians, somatic practitioners, and community organizers in guiding Black women to achieve sexual liberation.

The final chapter outlines conclusions of the research on the Hot Girl Movement and provides recommendations for participating in and supporting this movement. This interdisciplinary text is essential reading for scholars, clinicians, healing practitioners, birthworkers, and activists, including those in fields of sexuality, sex therapy, sociology, gender studies, Black/Africana studies, public health, and social justice.

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Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell, "Lincoln and the Jews: A History" (NYU Press, 2025)

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In this expanded edition to a groundbreaking work, now in paperback, Lincoln and the Jews: A History (NYU Press, 2025), Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell reveal how Abraham Lincoln's unprecedentedly inclusive relationship with American Jews broadened him as president, and, as a result, broadened America. A conversation with Professor Jonathan D. Sarna.

Co-authored with collector and scholar Benjamin Shapell, the book began as a lush coffee-table volume built around Shapell’s remarkable Civil War–era collection: letters, photographs, and documents that reveal Lincoln’s Jewish connections in real time. It has since been reissued in paperback by NYU Press, making it far easier to teach, carry, and assign. The shift mirrors the project’s purpose: from a beautiful artifact to a working tool for rethinking Lincoln’s world.

Sarna stresses that Lincoln didn’t “know Jews” in the abstract; he knew particular Jews who mattered. Abraham Jonas, an early ally, saw Lincoln as presidential material and encouraged the Republican Party to build a coalition of “outsiders,” explicitly including Jews. Lincoln also developed ties with German-speaking Jewish “48ers,” refugees of the failed 1848 revolutions who brought democratic ideals and anti-slavery commitments. Even in Illinois, Lincoln’s visits to Jewish clothing stores signaled a new kind of everyday encounter between Americans and Jewish merchants. The book opens with a table of concentric circles of relationships between Lincoln and the Jews.

Equally important is Lincoln’s religious formation. Raised in a Protestant culture steeped in the Hebrew Bible and divine providence, he drew heavily on biblical language. His letters and speeches are studded with scriptural echoes, reflecting a worldview in which Jews remain central to God’s historical drama rather than a superseded people. This helps explain his “live and let live” stance toward religious difference at a time when some ministers were moving toward more exclusionary theologies.

Our conversation touched on Lincoln’s reference to Haman from the Book of Esther in a letter to Joshua Speed. In an age of deep biblical literacy, Haman was a recognizable symbol of evil, later applied by some Jews to Grant after General Orders No. 11. Sarna also recounted the visit of a self-proclaimed prophet named Monk, who asked Lincoln to endorse a plan to “free the Jews” worldwide. Lincoln’s witty, biblically informed response (from the book of Joel) both acknowledged Jewish suffering abroad and rejected the idea of a special “Jewish problem” in the United States.

We also explored how 19th-century debates over the Mortara affair in Italy—where a secretly baptized Jewish child was taken from his parents by papal authorities—intersected with American slavery. President Buchanan’s refusal to condemn Rome, Sarna noted, reflected fears that criticizing Church-sanctioned child removal could invite scrutiny of the United States’ own separation of enslaved families.

Lincoln and the Jews ultimately invites us to place Jews back into the center of the American story. Lincoln’s friendships, his Hebrew Bible–shaped imagination, and his commitment to equality created a landscape in which Jews were not an abstract “question,” but neighbors and citizens. To understand Lincoln fully, Sarna suggests, we must see the Jews who walked beside him—and to understand American Jewish history, we must see how deeply it is entwined with Lincoln’s moral and political world.

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Cynthia Miller-Idriss, "Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The revelatory and urgent story of how an explosion of misogyny is driving a surge of mass and far-right violence throughout the West--from an internationally recognized extremism expert and media commentator

What two things do most mass shooters, terrorists, or violent extremists have in common? Most of us know the first: they are almost always men or boys. But the second? They are almost always virulent misogynists, homophobes, or transphobes--even if they are also motivated by racism, antisemitism, or xenophobia. The antigovernment militiamen charged with plotting to kidnap and execute Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer used language saturated with misogyny, with one telling an FBI informant, "Just grab the bitch." The men who killed scores at Virginia Tech, the Pulse nightclub, and a Maryland newsroom all had prior reports of stalking, domestic violence, or harassment of women. And in dozens of other incidents--from North America to Norway to New Zealand--an increasing number of misogynist incel (involuntary celibate) and male supremacist attackers have explicitly targeted and killed women, blaming feminism or sexual frustration with women as motivation for their attacks.

Yet, despite all evidence, the bright red thread of misogyny running through these attacks is barely acknowledged by the media or even experts--and this failing leaves us powerless to stop the violence. In Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism (Princeton UP, 2025), Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a leading expert on extremism, addresses this crucial oversight head-on, revealing how an epidemic of misogyny--both online and off--and a patriarchal backlash are driving an exponential rise in mass and far-right violence. She also offers essential strategies that all of us--including parents, teachers, and counselors--can use to fight the rising tide of violence, beginning with recognizing the misogyny that pervades our everyday lives.

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Sarah Jones Weicksel, "A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2026)

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, mended, lost, and stole, Americans expressed their allegiances, showed their love, confronted their social and economic challenges, subverted expectations, and, ultimately, preserved their history. As the collections they left behind make clear, Civil War Americans believed clothing was not merely a reflection of one’s class, gender, race, military rank, political ideology, or taste. Instead, Northerners and Southerners alike understood that clothing—from the weave of a fabric to the style and make of a coat—had the power to affect people’s way of living through the war’s tumult.
In A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era (UNC Press, 2026), Dr. Sarah Jones Weicksel reveals the meanings clothing had for Civil War Americans. Contributing to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of the Civil War, Dr. Weicksel invites readers to understand how the war penetrated daily life by focusing on the intimate, visceral, material experiences that shaped how people moved through the world.

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Dorothy Denetclaw and Matt Fitzsimons, "The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story" (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In 1919, the brother of one of the West’s most famous Indian traders was shot to death in a remote corner of the Navajo Nation.
Part history, part true crime, The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story (U Arizona Press, 2026) reexamines the killing and subsequent murder trial, while simultaneously embedding the story in a much larger saga of colonization and resistance. The result is a book that’s sweeping in its scope and surgical in its approach. Rewinding the clock to 1868, the authors follow the intertwining paths of two families to offer a riveting, deeply personal account that has been hailed as “a new way of doing historiography.”
One of the authors is a descendant of participants in the case; the other is an investigative journalist. By merging Diné oral traditions with archival evidence, they succeed in upending one false narrative after another.

This interview was conducted by Mary Reynolds, publicity manager for the University of Arizona Press. Her book, The Quake That Drained the Desert (forthcoming in 2026) investigates the 1887 borderlands earthquake that changed surface water and groundwater in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.

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Fred Turner on Countercultures, Cybercultures, and Californian and Texan Ideologies

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor of Digital Sociology at University of St. Gallen, talk to Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, about his classic 2006 book, _From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism_. They briefly explore the arc of Fred’s career and revisit the book in the spirit of asking what has changed in digital ideology since the book’s publication, including with the role of Silicon Valley elites in the second Trump Administration, Elon Musk’s role in DOGE, and the (perhaps only brief) turn of digital technology elites moving from California to Texas. Since this conversation was recorded in April 2025, Fred’s essay, “The Texan Ideology,” has been published in The Baffler: Link here.

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Jamila Michener and Mallory E. Sorelle, "Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Each year, as many as 250 million Americans face civil legal problems like eviction, debt collection, and substandard housing. These problems are disproportionately shouldered by racially and economically marginalized people, particularly women of color. Civil courts and legal aid organizations are supposed to protect their rights, yet more than 90 percent of low-income people receive inadequate or no legal assistance. Instead, access to justice is reserved for those who can afford its high price. For those who can’t, the repercussions can be devastating, from homelessness and loss of public benefits to broken families and diminished health. Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power (Princeton UP, 2026) looks at the US civil justice system through the eyes of the people whose very citizenship is indelibly shaped by it. Jamila Michener and Mallory SoRelle show how civil legal problems, and the institutions meant to address them, greatly erode trust in the legal system among marginalized communities, undermining their broader sense of democratic citizenship and political standing. While legal representation offers vital protections, increased access to justice through an ever-growing supply of lawyers does not address the structural problems that generate demand for lawyers in the first place. Looking at cases involving unfair evictions and substandard housing, Michener and SoRelle demonstrate how community groups such as tenants’ unions can fill this justice gap and provide the means to build political power that transforms the conditions that create precarity. Drawing on eye-opening qualitative evidence and a wealth of historical and survey data, Uncivil Democracy explains why collective organizing holds the greatest promise for altering the systems that create civil legal problems and exercising the political power necessary for meaningful change.

Jamila Michener is Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University and inaugural director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures. She is the author of the award-winning book, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Mallory SoRelle is the Tony and Teddie Brown Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She is the author of Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection (University of Chicago Press, 2020), based on her award-winning doctoral dissertation.

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Josh Seim, "The Welfare Assembly Line: Public Servants in the Suffering City" (U California Press, 2026)

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Despite claims that we live in a "post-welfare society," welfare offices remain vital not only for those who depend on them for benefits but also for those who depend on them for a paycheck. The Welfare Assembly Line: Public Servants in the Suffering City (U California Press, 2026), a theory-driven case study of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services, examines how welfare work has transformed to allow a department of just 14,000 to serve over a third of the county. Josh Seim argues that frontline workers at this agency--who are mostly Black and Brown women--have become increasingly proletarianized. Their work is defined less by their discretion and more by a lack of control over the productive process. This is enabled by a "welfare assembly line," where high divisions of labor and heavy uses of machinery resemble production regimes in factories and fast-food restaurants. With implications beyond the welfare office, The Welfare Assembly Line is a crucial addition to the broader national conversation about work, social policy, and poverty governance.

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Stephen Stacks, "The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song After 1968" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

What happened to freedom singing after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination? Stephen Stacks considers this question in The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song After 1968 (U Illinois Press, 2025). He argues that the cultural myths around the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968, which are partially supported by the appeal of Freedom Songs, have hindered and inspired later activists as they grappled with the shadow of a simplistic and sanitized memory of what it takes to create political change. Stacks’s analysis shifts the focus of attention from genre—freedom song—to process and practice—freedom singing. In a wide-ranging book, he contemplates the role of nostalgia in political advocacy, investigates the work of one of the movement’s great singers, Bernice Johnson Reagon after 1968, and explains how the media and crucial musical figures shaped and sometimes complicated the collective memory of the Civil Rights movement and its music. The Resounding Revolution examines sixty years of Black music to challenge and reshape the entrenched story of the Civil Rights Movement.

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American Masterpiece: The Civil War Diaries of George Templeton Strong with Brenda Wineapple and Geoff Wisner

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Wednesday, February 18—Called “the greatest American diary of the nineteenth century,” the journal of the patrician New York City lawyer George Templeton Strong stands as a remarkable documentary record of the Civil War and a captivating literary accomplishment in its own right. Unfolding like an epic historical novel, Strong’s precise and colorful account plunges readers into the midst of an unprecedented national crisis like nothing else in American letters.

Join historian Brenda Wineapple and Geoff Wisner, editor of the just-published Library of America edition of Strong’s Civil War Diaries, for a discussion of this extraordinary work, long out of print and now updated with never-before-published entries transcribed from the original manuscript at The New York Historical.

Max Rudin is President & Publisher of Library of America.

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Allison Powers, "Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law (Oxford UP, 2024) by Dr. Allison Powers offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power-one shaped as much by attempts to insulate the US government from international legal scrutiny as it was by efforts to project influence across the globe. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Mexico, Panama, and the United Kingdom, the book traces how thousands of dispossessed residents of US-annexed territories petitioned international Claims Commissions between the 1870s and the 1930s to charge the United States with violating international legal protections for life and property.
Through attention to the consequences of their unexpected claims, Dr. Powers demonstrates how colonized subjects, refugees from slavery, and migrant workers transformed a series of tribunals designed to establish the legality of US imperial interventions into sites through which to challenge the legitimacy of US colonial governance. One of the first social histories of international law, the book argues that contests over meanings of sovereignty and state responsibility that would reshape the mid-twentieth-century international order were waged not only at diplomatic conferences, but also in Arizona copper mines, Texas cotton fields, Samoan port cities, Cuban sugar plantations, and the locks and stops of the Panama Canal.
Arbitrating Empire uncovers how ordinary people used international law to hold the United States accountable for state-sanctioned violence during the decades when the nation was first becoming a global empire-and demonstrates why State Department attempts to erase their claims transformed international law in ways that continue to shield the US government from liability to this day.

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Zalman Newfield, "Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey Out of Hasidism" (Temple UP, 2026)

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Orthodox Jewish community, Zalman Newfield was raised in an atmosphere of strict gender segregation, rigorous religious education, and nearly all-consuming ritual practices. Trained to be a Lubavitch emissary, he traveled around the world doing Jewish outreach to help usher in the messianic redemption. However, after exposure to the wider world, he abandoned the faith of his youth.

Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey Out of Hasidism (Temple University Press, 2026) is Newfield's poignant and hopeful memoir about exiting Orthodoxy. He recounts asserting his individuality and taking the radical step of shaving his beard. Reflective about his upbringing, Newfield is open to and curious about a world beyond Brooklyn while also maintaining his profound bond with his family and Jewish tradition. He writes candidly about his emotional, intellectual, and social experiences in and out of the Lubavitch community.

From pivotal moments of devastation, including the illness and death of his younger brother and of his revered spiritual leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, to moments of joyful resolve, including the decision to pursue a doctorate and marry a non-Orthodox Jew, Newfield takes readers on his moving and impactful journey.

Zalman Newfield is Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple). Visit him online at zalmannewfield.com.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category.

Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter.

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Mark D. Steinberg, "Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa, and Bombay: Sex, Crime, Violence, and Nightlife in the Modern City" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Using public storytelling as a driving force, Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa, and Bombay: Sex, Crime, Violence, and Nightlife in the Modern City (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Dr. Mark D. Steinberg explores everyday social moralities relating to stories of sex, crime, violence, and nightlife in the 1920s city space. Focusing on capitalist New York, communist Odessa, and colonial Bombay, Dr. Steinberg taps into the global dimension of complex everyday moral anxiety that was prevalent in a vital and troubled decade.
Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa, and Bombay compares and connects stories of the street in three compelling cosmopolitan port cities. It offers novel insights into significant and varied areas of study, including city life, sex, prostitution, jazz, dancing, gangsters, criminal undergrounds, cinema, ethnic and racial experiences and conflicts, prohibition and drinking, street violence, 'hooliganism' and other forms of 'deviance' in the contexts of capitalism, colonialism, communism, and nationalism.
The book tells the stories of moralizers: empowered and insistent critics of deviance driven to investigate, interpret, and interfere with how people lived and played. Beside them, not always comfortably, were the policemen and journalists who enforced and documented these efforts. It also reveals the histories of women and men, mostly working class and young, who were observed and categorized: those judged to be wayward, disreputable, disorderly, debauched, and wild. Dr. Steinberg explores this global culture war and the everyday moral improvisations-shaped by experiences of class, generation, gender, ethnicity, and race-that came with it.

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Mark Thomas Edwards, "Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His "Today and Tomorrow" columns attracted a global readership of well over ten million. Lippmann was the author of numerous books, including the best-selling A Preface to Morals (1929) and U.S. Foreign Policy (1943). His Public Opinion (1922) remains a classic text within American political philosophy and media studies. Lippmann coined or popularized several keywords of the twentieth century, including "stereotype," the "Cold War," and the "Great Society." Sought out by U.S. Presidents and by America's allies and rivals around the world, Lippmann remained one of liberalism's most faithful proponents and harshest critics.

Yet few people then or since encountered the "real" Walter Lippmann. That was because he kept crucial parts of himself hiding in plain sight. His extensive commentary on politics and diplomacy was bounded by his sense that America had to adjust to the loss of a common faith and morality in a "post-Christian" era. Over the course of his life, Lippmann traded in his fame as a happy secularist for the stardom of a grumpy Western Christian intellectual. Yet he never committed himself to any religious system, especially his own Jewish heritage.

Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor (Oxford University Press, 2023) considers the role of religions in Lippmann's life and thought, prioritizing his affirmation and rejection of Christian nationalisms of the left and right. It also yields fresh insights into the philosophical origins of modern American liberalism, including liberalism's blind spots in the areas of sex, race, and class. But most importantly, this biography highlights the constructive power of doubt. For Lippmann, the good life in the good society was lived in irreconcilable tension: the struggle to be free from yet loyal to a way of life; to recognize the dangers yet also the necessity of civil religion; and to strive for a just and enduring world order that can never be. In the end, Lippmann manufactured himself as the prophet of limitation for an extravagant American Century.

Mark Thomas Edwards is professor of US history and politics at Spring Arbor University in Michigan.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Erick Guerra, "Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction" (Island Press, 2025)

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The world’s largest public works investment visible from space, the Interstate Highway System and the hundreds of thousands of miles of supporting roadways, are frequently hailed as a marvel and triumph of engineering. President Eisenhower’s 1956 Interstate Highway Act is often praised as a model of successful bipartisanship.

Today, the extensive damage wreaked by the creation of the highway system and the ills of car dependency are more widely acknowledged. Congestion and traffic deaths remain endemic despite nearly three-quarters a century of public policies and trillions of dollars spent with a primary stated goal of reducing congestion and improving traffic safety. The financing, governance, and construction models established by the 1956 act continue to influence what gets built today.

In Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction (Island Press, 2025), transportation planning expert Dr. Erick Guerra describes how the US roadway system became overbuilt, how public policy continues to encourage overbuilding, what the scale and consequences of overbuilding are, and how we can rethink our approach to highway building in the US.

Guerra explains that the national propensity to build roadways is no longer official or intentional policy. Instead, overbuilding stems from the institutions, finance mechanisms, and evaluation metrics developed in the first half of the twentieth century. While more funds are set aside for transit, walking, biking, and beautification, the investment paradigm has not changed. Planners and engineers have not adjusted the tools they use to determine which roads should be built, rebuilt, or widened and why. The country has added more lanes of urban Interstate since declaring the Interstate system complete than prior to it.

Despite having too much roadway, the country is still operating in construction mode, using the same basic approach used to finance and build the interstate system quickly, Dr. Guerra states. The interstate was completed more than three decades ago. Overbuilt argues convincingly that it is time to move on.

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David M. Henkin, "Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

All over the world, masses of people watch, follow, document, and obsess over baseball. Everything remarkable about the impact of baseball derives from the game's history and cultural status as events that draw people together in these ways. Understanding baseball as a cultural phenomenon is therefore less a matter of mastering the vocabulary of the game or merely recollecting its iconic stadiums, players, and stats. While all those details compel insiders and inspire fans, baseball's peculiar and persistent appeal can only be understood by adopting a wider lens. It requires reckoning with the history of structured competition. The classic backyard game of catch between a father and son draws meaning from its associations with the organized sport and its history. The challenge lies less in finding one perfect spot to look, but rather in identifying the many different places where baseball has accumulated significance.

Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2026) reconsiders the character, meaning, and delights of the game by exploring both baseball's unusual features and the sport's many resonances with other aspects of modern life. To this end, it abandons several assumptions and mythologies that underlie most approaches to histories of baseball: that it is unique among sports and fundamentally different from other kinds of entertainment; that it is specific to the United States; that it has changed fundamentally in recent years; and that the keys to understanding it lie primarily in examining what happens on the field of play.

Instead, David M. Henkin moves across time and space to examine baseball's history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders. He takes readers inside the structures of clubs and leagues, interprets the sacred scripture of rulebooks, and illuminates some of baseball's rites and rituals that are often associated with honor and manhood. He charts baseball's significance along the routes of American and Japanese imperial expansion and the shifting maps of race and ethnicity in the US. Baseball is found at negotiating tables that pit capital against labor and in pivotal moments in the history of mass media. Here, we are shown how baseball might offer a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.

David M. Henkin is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught courses on society and culture in nineteenth-century America for close to three decades.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Kenneth Lowande, "False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age

The University of Chicago Press, 2024

Kenneth Lowande

Political Scientist Kenneth Lowande (University of Michigan) has a new book, False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age, examining the ways in which presidents seem to be using their extraordinary powers (of the office itself) but are often holding back so as to avoid the full implementation of policies and ideas. This is an interesting thesis, since it takes apart the ways in which presidents operate, getting at not only the presentation of presidential power and the rhetoric used by presidents to illuminate their powers, but also where the full capacity of the Executive branch may not be put into action around issues, policies, or ideas. Lowande is assessing what is essentially symbolic, especially for the president, but is not substantive, even if it may seem that way.

This concept, this “false front”, comes out of the polarization within the American political system, and the difficulty that presidents also have in trying to accomplish policy shifts and changes. This is also in context of a Congress that has ceded significant power to the Executive and is generally less productive in terms of passing and implementing policy than it was in the past. This is then combined with the adjustments that presidents and presidential candidates have made in the way they approach the campaign and then their work while in office, since they are compelled to construct their own “brand” as a means to getting elected. Once in office, presidents then need to perform in some way that convinces the public that they are trying to execute what they promised while on the campaign trail. But the political climate makes those outcomes extraordinarily difficult. So, presidents have constructed this path where they publicly lean into policy areas, making public statements, having ceremonies and press releases, taking executive actions, or signing Executive Orders to illustrate their commitment and their activity, but when these policy areas are examined in some depth, it turns out that not much happened after all of this attention and apparent action.

Lowande notes, in our conversation, how once he had zeroed in on this presidential mode of operating it is very difficult not to see it. This becomes a kind of model of presidential behavior and strategic approaches. False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age essentially interrogates the founding basis for the American presidency, where Alexander Hamilton argued that the president is to be held accountable and responsible for the actions taken in the office itself. The media plays a role in this as well, since they report on the actions taken by the president—at least in terms of rhetoric, press releases, signing ceremonies, and executive actions—but there is no follow on analysis, for the most part, of the actual implementation of the policies and the plans. If there is no measurable outcome to distinguish how the policy solved the problem, or satisfied the demand for the policy, then the presidential action or rhetoric is disconnected from any particular policy or public good. This is also at odds with the reason for a democratic republic—where the demands of the voters are to be translated into real outcomes, not imaginary ones.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

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John Drabinski, "So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic" (Northwestern UP, 2025)

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

What happens if we turn to James Baldwin, not just for the amazing quotations and excellent photos, but as a critical theorist? What if we read his nonfiction philosophically? What can Baldwin help us understand and do now? In So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2025), John Drabinski takes up this project to give a sustained philosophical reading of Baldwin’s nonfiction. Drabinski does so to understand the event of Baldwin’s contributions in the context of the Black Atlantic. Baldwin was a thinker who looked to the United States, even when in exile. But he was also in the broader context of the mid-twentieth century Black Atlantic, of which he was surely aware but wrote little—what if we read for what was absent from Baldwin’s texts?

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Emily Dufton, "Addiction, Inc: Medication-assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

How the war on drugs created the gold standard treatment for addiction--until America's opioid crisis got privatized for profit, to the detriment of patients.

Despite epidemic levels of overdoses in the United States, by 2020, only twenty percent of Americans suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication-assisted treatment (MAT), the gold standard of addiction treatment, which uses methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone to reduce illicit drug use and curb the symptoms of withdrawal. While MAT is the most effective treatment available for OUD, it's also the most controversial, the most expensive, and the most difficult to access. And yet, the medications at the center of this treatment--and the private industries that distribute them--generate roughly sixteen billion dollars each year, on par with national sales of coffee and pet food.

In Addiction, Inc: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, historian Emily Dufton explains how this promising avenue of treatment emerged during President Richard Nixon's war on drugs in 1971 as a radical experiment in public health, when hundreds of federally-funded treatment clinics opened nationwide. Dufton then explores how these nationalized clinics gave way to an immensely profitable private industry that offers poor care at high costs to an insufficient number of people. Drawing on original research and over a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and patients and their families, she tells a gripping story of squandered potential and missed opportunities, as MAT transformed from a revolutionary political project launched from the White House itself into a commercial success--and a public health disaster.

Urgent, eye-opening, and deeply human, Addiction, Inc. reveals how, over the past fifty years, the United States built an addiction treatment system that made recovery harder instead of easier, and what it will take to change its course.

In Addiction, Inc., historian Emily Dufton explains how this promising avenue of treatment emerged during President Richard Nixon's war on drugs in 1971 as a radical experiment in public health, when hundreds of federally-funded treatment clinics opened nationwide. Dufton then explores how these nationalized clinics gave way to an immensely profitable private industry that offers poor care at high costs to an insufficient number of people. Drawing on original research and over a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and patients and their families, she tells a gripping story of squandered potential and missed opportunities, as MAT transformed from a revolutionary political project launched from the White House itself into a commercial success--and a public health disaster.

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Brian Hallstoos, "Sol Butler: An Olympian's Odyssey through Jim Crow America" (U Illinois Press, 2026)

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A superstar in both football and track and field Sol Butler pioneered the parlaying of sports fame into business prosperity. In Sol Butler: An Olympian's Odyssey through Jim Crow America (U Illinois Press, 2026) Brian Hallstoos tells the story of a Black athlete’s canny use of mainstream middle-class values and relationships with white society to transcend the athletic, economic, and social barriers imposed by white supremacy. Butler built on his feats as a high school athlete to become a four-year starter for the football team at Dubuque German College (later the University of Dubuque), a record-setting sprinter and long jumper, and an Olympian at the 1920 Summer Games. Hallstoos follows Butler’s sporting accomplishments while charting how family and interracial communities influenced the ways Butler tested the limits of social and physical mobility and gave him an exceptional ability to discern where he might be most free. From there, Hallstoos turns to Butler’s use of fame to boost his entrepreneurial efforts and his multifaceted success capitalizing on his celebrity in the Black communities of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. An engaging look at a forgotten trailblazer, Sol Butler illuminates the multifaceted life of a Black sports entrepreneur.

Craig Gill is a writer, researcher and historian based in Vancouver, BC. He is the author of Caddying on the Color Line, a history of African American golf caddies in the U.S. South.

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Cassandra Shepard, "Settler Colonialism is the Disaster: A Critique of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina and During the COVID-19 Pandemic" (U Illinois Press, 2026)

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Settler Colonialism is the Disaster: A Critique of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina and During the COVID-19 Pandemic (U Illinois Press, 2026) is the new book from Dr. Cassandra Shepard, Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana. Published with University of Illinois Press, this encompassing and engrossing book focuses on the crises that have engulfed New Orleans, including the disasters of colonialism, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and COVID-19, taking the reader through their causes and impacts on not only a broad level but through the everyday and often traumatic experiences of the residents of New Orleans. The analysis moves from the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, to state-level post-disaster reconstruction contracts, to international forms of colonialism, and even encompasses Beyonce. This book, which is also includes poetry and a recommended playlist, is also very relevant to the current global moment.

Shepard analyses the overlapping and intersecting disasters that have affected New Orleans through ideas of disaster capitalism and settler colonialism, demonstrating how Black and Indigenous peoples have been deprived of critical resources. The reconstruction processes following, and during, these crises have often sought to exploit the authentic New Orleans culture and vibrancy to further the consolidation of power, profit, and privilege of white elites, to the detriment of Black and Indigenous peoples. Shepard’s book, Settler Colonialism is the Disaster, takes a multi-scalar view of settler colonialism and investigates how it has not only operated historically in New Orleans, but clearly demonstrates that it is a continual process that still determines reconstruction, relief, and other projects today. Shepard connects the ongoing violence and dispossession inherent in settler colonialism within New Orleans, expressed through structural responses to Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, to other settler colonial projects around the world, such as in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia.

Cassandra Shepard’s new book is an exceptional, theoretically and empirically rich book that offers a new critique into ‘best practice’ reconstruction, which demands attention. Settler Colonialism is the Disaster offers an urgent, critical view of the political economy of reconstruction, aid, and government responses; a view which is crucial to take seriously in our world today, plagued as it is by crisis, war, and settler colonialism.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.

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Marc James Carpenter, "The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest (Yale UP, 2025) by Marc James Carpenter is a history book about history. More specifically, it's a book about how history gets subsumed in myth, and why the truth often matters less than the story that ends up being told. In the 1850s across the Pacific Northwest, settlers engaged in bloody wars with several Indgienous tribes to seize their homelands - Illahee - for incorporation into the United States. Yet, when those same settlers sat down to write about their experiences, the bloodshed, danger, and trauma was transmuted via memory and a multi-generational game of telephone into a triumphant story of peaceful pioneers fairly trading Native people for their land. The War on Illahee is thus not just a history of Native and settler warfare in what is today Oregon and Washingotn, but also an argument for the power of history, and the insidiousness of choosing to forget the past.

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Digestive Belonging, Trans-Species Sensing & Care in America’s Dairyland

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, we speak with Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Katy Overstreet. Katy is coordinator for the Landscapes, Senses, and Ecological Research Cluster as well as a core-member of the Centre for Sustainable Futures – both located at the University of Copenhagen. Katy’s core fields of research include multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, feminist STS, and agrarian political economy, and she has written on themes such as farm animal welfare, foodways, bioindustrialisation, technoscience, trans-species sensory worlds, and care.

Her main ethnographic fieldsites include the midwestern dairy worlds of the United States, and various sites in Denmark including pig farms, an insect farm, and a former brown coal mine. Across these sites, Katy has worked with a lot of different co-species social formations and technoscientifically modulated ways of living and dying in agriculture, and in today’s episode, she will speak to some of these, focusing on the relations between microbes, cows, and humans in raw milk consumption, production, and politics. The basis for our conversation is a talk that Katy gave on the day before we recorded the podcast as part of the BSAS seminar series. Her talk was titled ‘Digestive belonging: a microbial ethnography of raw milk in America’s Dairyland’.

In the podcast, Katy unravels the notion of ‘digestive belonging’ in this ethnographic context, connecting it to farmlife, microbes, social landscapes, pasteurization politics, and rural nostalgia among other things. We further discuss different modes of care in animal farming practices, the cultivation of trans-species sensing, and the idea of ‘positive animal welfare’.

The podcast was recorded in October 2025 when Katy was in Bergen to give a presentation as part of the Bergen Social Anthropology Seminar series.

Resources:

Katy Overstreet’s research profile

Articles mentioned, authored by Katy:

Digestive Belonging: A Microbial Ethnography of Raw Milk in America’s Dairyland (2026)
Be the boar: sex, sows, and courtship on a Danish pig farm (2022)
How to Taste Like a Cow: Cultivating Shared Sense in Wisconsin Dairy Worlds (2021)
EU funded Cost Action project LIFT aimed at ‘Lifting farm animal lives’ that Katy participates in: here

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Laura K. Field, "Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Political Theorist Laura Field has written an insightful and detailed exploration of the people and the ideas that have shaped the second Trump Administration (and some contributed, as well, to the first Trump Administration.) While Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton UP, 2025) is about quite a few scholars and academics, it is written like a propulsive page-turner of a book. And Field takes us through all the of the ins and outs of the individuals who have pursued a path to power and policy development, often from positions in the Ivory Tower. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is truly fascinating, since it is not simply about egg-headed academics writing up white papers or books, or simply about presidential advisors and the way they have worked to influence the president or put particular policies into place. Instead, Field interrogates the construction of the ideas that have come to dominate this New Right, seeking their genesis and how these ideas, which are divided into three distinct but overlapping intellectual camps, have made their way to the Trump Administration, through Trump himself, Vice President J.D. Vance, and so many of the advisors and cabinet members who surround Trump.

Field’s training in political theory, especially Straussian political theory, contributes to her understanding and analysis of the individuals at the heart of the story in Furious Minds—and how these particular academics think, but in particular how they think about politics and political projects. The substance of Furious Minds is focused on the past decade or so of engagement between these various schools of thought and the Trump Administration—both while in elected office as well as during the out of office interregnum. At the same time, Field traces the deep origins of some of these schools of thought through the longer conservative tradition in the United States. In our discussion, we explore the Claremonters, the Postliberals, and the National Conservatives. Each group is populated by well-educated (PhDs, published authors, etc.) individuals (mostly men) who are urging a concept of the common good, as they define it, on to the American people, through the Trump Administration’s rhetoric, policies, institutional dispositions, cultural approaches, and general demeanor. Field takes all of these thinkers and ideas seriously, making the case for understanding both the ideas themselves and their origins, while also critiquing much of this by exposing the more extremist bases behind these paths of thinking as well as the people who are purveying them.

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a tour de force of the intellectual and political landscape that has brought us to the midst of the second Trump Administration and provides the reader with deep insight into the radical origins of the myths and concepts that are the backbone of the current Trump Administration and the current Republican Party.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She studied political theory at Kenyon College and Boston College. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Heather Ann Thompson, "Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage" (Pantheon, 2026)

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In this masterful, groundbreaking work Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026), Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson shines surprising new light on an infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments and would lead, in unexpected ways, to a fractured future and a new era of rage and violence.

On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens, Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the “Death Wish Vigilante” would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz’s young victims would become villains.

Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the fury of a stunning number of Americans.

Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz Subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations, while deftly recovering the lives of the boys whom too many decided didn’t matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.

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Zaid Adhami, "Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith" (UNC Press, 2025)

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In one of the most important books published in 2025—Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith, published by UNC Press—Zaid Adhami explores questions of religious doubt, authenticity, and crisis of faith. The book examines what many American Muslims describe as a crisis of faith, but Adhami shows that this crisis is less about losing belief and more about the pressures of authenticity. In a cultural moment where people are expected to be true to themselves and to believe sincerely, faith becomes something that must feel emotionally real and personally chosen. Drawing on ethnographic research and intimate conversations with American Muslims, Adhami shows how this demand for authenticity can produce doubt and anxiety, while also becoming a powerful ground for recommitment to tradition. The book challenges familiar narratives of secularization and religious decline, and instead offers a nuanced account of how faith is lived, questioned, and sustained in an age that privileges “authenticity.”

The book would be of tremendous benefit to scholars and students of religion, anthropology, sociology, and American studies, as well as to those working on Islam in the United States. It will also resonate with scholars, students, and anyone who has tried to make sense of the complicated relationship between doubt, authenticity, and faith in contemporary American society.

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Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (Princeton UP, 2025) shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing outside department headquarters, and blocking city streets to protest officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of police surveillance, infiltration by undercover officers, and retaliatory prosecutions aimed at discrediting and derailing their movement.
The history of the civil rights era abounds with accounts of physical brutality by county sheriffs and tales of political intrigue and constitutional violations by FBI agents. Turning our attention to municipal officials in cities and towns across the US—North, South, East, and West—Davis reveals how local police bombarded civil rights organizers with an array of insidious weapons. More than just physical violence, these economic, legal, and reputational attacks were designed to project the illusion of color-blind law enforcement.
The civil rights struggle against police abuses is largely overlooked today, the victim of a willful campaign by local law enforcement to erase their record of repression. By placing activism against state violence at the center of the civil rights story, Police Against the Movement offers critical insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government attacks on protest.

Joshua Clark Davis is associate professor of history at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods and the coeditor of Baltimore Revisited, and he has written for The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Atlantic.

YouTube Channel: here

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Ron Hayduk, "Untangling the Political Roots of Immigration and Inequality in the United States" (Routledge, 2026)

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Untangling the Political Roots of Immigration and Inequality in the United States (Routledge, 2026) examines the causes, consequences, and politics of mass migration and growing inequality by investigating the case of the United States – the quintessential immigrant nation. While scholars, policy makers, and advocates have put forth a variety of explanations, many misdiagnose the causes and put forward remedies that treat symptoms. This book looks to the root causes of mass migration and intensifying inequality, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin resulting from rapacious forms of capitalist accumulation and imperialist interventionism. Developing a broadly left analytic framework grounded in elements of Marxist theory and political science, two periods are examined – 1870–1925 and 1970–2025 – when the proportion of immigrants in the US peaked at 15% of the total population, the US experienced steep inequality and political polarization, immigration and inequality became contentious political issues that generated sharp conflict, and immigrants and workers organized mass movements that advanced radical politics and transformative change. This book contains a wealth of information and elevates valuable lessons for scholars, policy makers, and organizers interested in understanding these trends and forging equitable and just solutions today.

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Jameson R. Sweet, "Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Historical accounts tend to neglect mixed-ancestry Native Americans: racially and legally differentiated from nonmixed Indigenous people by U.S. government policy, their lives have continually been treated as peripheral to Indigenous societies. Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (U Minnesota Press, 2025) intervenes in this erasure. Using legal, linguistic, and family-historical methods, Dr. Jameson R. Sweet writes mixed-ancestry Dakota individuals back into tribal histories, illuminating the importance of mixed ancestry in shaping and understanding Native and non-Native America from the nineteenth century through today.

When the U.S. government designated mixed-ancestry Indians as a group separate from both Indians and white Americans—a distinction born out of the perception that they were uniquely assimilable as well as manipulable intermediate figures—they were afforded rights under U.S. law unavailable to other Indigenous people, albeit inconsistently, which included citizenship and the rights to vote, serve in public office, testify in court, and buy and sell land. Focusing on key figures and pivotal “mixed-blood histories” for the Dakota nation, Dr. Sweet argues that in most cases, they importantly remained Indians and full participants in Indigenous culture and society. In some cases, they were influential actors in establishing reservations and negotiating sovereign treaties with the U.S. government.

Culminating in a pivotal reexamination of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, Mixed-Blood Histories brings greater diversity and complexity to existing understandings of Dakota kinship, culture, and language while offering insights into the solidification of racial categories and hierarchies in the United States.

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Nicholas Boggs, "Baldwin: A Love Story" (FSG, 2025)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Baldwin: A Love Story (FSG, 2025) the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.

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Gloria Browne-Marshall, "A Protest History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2026) Revisited

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In December 2025, writer, civil rights attorney, playwright, speaker, and Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Gloria J. Browne-Marshall spoke with New Books Network host, Sullivan Summer, about her book, A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2025). Little did Browne-Marshall and Summer know that, at the time of the book’s paperback release in early 2026, the nation would be in the midst of widespread and ongoing protests.

So Browne-Marshall is back, this time with conversation focused specifically on the chapter of the book titled, “Protesting Violent Policing.”

In this episode, we mention Terence Keel’s The Coroner’s Silence (Beacon Press, 2025). Keel’s New Books Network episode is available here.

A Protest History of the United States: In this timely new book in Beacon’s successful ReVisioning History series, professor Gloria Browne-Marshall delves into the history of protest movements and rebellion in the United States. Beginning with Indigenous peoples’ resistance to European colonization and continuing through to today’s climate change demonstrations, Browne-Marshall sheds light on known and forgotten movements and their unsung leaders, offering insights into past successes and setbacks.

Drawing upon legal documents, archival material, memoir, government documents and secondary sources, A Protest History of the United States expands the definition of protest beyond traditional marches and rallies. Acts of resistance also include journalism, legal battles, boycotts, everyday defiance, and more. Browne-Marshall highlights stories of individuals from all walks of life and time periods who helped bring strong attention to their causes.

As contemporary movements struggle with inertia and doubt, Browne-Marshall underscores the essential role of protest as an American tradition in shaping and preserving democratic principles. By illuminating the strategies and sacrifices of activists past and present, A Protest History of the United States empowers readers to find their own voice in today’s fights for justice.

Find author Gloria J. Browne-Marshall at her website and on Instagram.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Charles Alistair McCrary, "Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

"Sincerely held religious belief" is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court to local controversies. The "sincerity test" of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, framing what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (U Chicago Press, 2022), Charles McCrary provides an original account of how sincerely held religious belief became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion.

McCrary skillfully traces the interlocking histories of American sincerity, religion, and secularism starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants. Across this history, McCrary reveals how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and doesn't entitle a person to receive protections from the state.

This fresh analysis of secularism in the United States invites further reflection on the role of sincerity in public life and religious studies scholarship, asking why sincerity has come to matter so much in a supposedly "post-truth" era.

Dr. Charles McCrary is a scholar of American religion, focusing on secularism, religious freedom, race, and science. His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & American Culture, and Religion. He also has written for popular outlets such as Religion & Politics, The Revealer, and The New Republic, many of which are linked in the show notes of this episode. Before coming to ASU, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Isaac Butler, "The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.” This is how Isaac Butler articulates his project in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, February 2022). The Method tracks the origins of this transcontinental school of naturalistic acting and its many contradictions, including its emphasis on individualist achievement within communitarian organizations and the actorly tension between psychological interiority and external action when building a character. In following the life of this concept, Butler reveals the impossibly charming, ambitious, questionable cast of characters that have defined the terms of Western acting in the twentieth century. In the process, he clears up many of the public misunderstandings around Method as an approach and as a style.

In this discussion, Butler details his first career in the theater as a professional actor, explores how Constantin Stanislavski’s “system” of acting was the farthest thing from systematic, explains the difference between method and Method, and divulges the many rivalries and hostilities between American M/method practitioners and instructors at mid-century.

Isaac Butler is the coauthor (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, which NPR named one of the best books of 2018. Butler’s writing has appeared in New York magazine, Slate, the Guardian, American Theatre, and other publications. For Slate, he created and hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process. His work as a director has been seen on stages throughout the United States. He is the co-creator, with Darcy James Argue and Peter Nigrini, of Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of conspiracy theories in the American psyche, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times and has been adapted into a feature-length film. Butler holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and teaches theater history and performance at the New School and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Public Books, Literary Hub, The Forward, and Camera Obscura.

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Ashlyn Hand, "Prioritizing Faith: International Religious Freedom and U.S. Foreign Policy" (NYU Press, 2025)

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 formally established the promotion of religious freedom as a U.S. foreign policy and national security priority. Tracing its origins and passage, Prioritizing Faith: International Religious Freedom and U.S. Foreign Policy (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Ashlyn Hand shows how the legislation was made possible by the convergence of growing evangelical and Jewish advocacy, the expanding international human rights movement, and a broader search for post–Cold War purpose. Yet implementation across administrations has been uneven, shaped by shifting geopolitical dynamics and internal institutional constraints.
Relying on expert interviews and rich archival analysis, Dr. Hand traces how Clinton, Bush, and Obama each wove international religious freedom into their foreign policy visions while navigating competing priorities and evolving strategic interests. Through case studies in China, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia, Dr. Hand reveals the inner workings and persistent challenges of American religious freedom policy on the global stage.
Timely, insightful, and deeply researched, Prioritizing Faith offers an incisive assessment of the United States’ efforts to promote religious freedom abroad, highlighting the enduring tensions between normative aspirations and the complexities of foreign policy practice.

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Garrett Felber, "A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre" (AK Press, 2025)

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The first biography of the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism.

A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre (AK Press, 2025) is a political biography of one of the most important revolutionary figures of the twentieth century in the United States. Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty-one to forty-one years.

Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. During that time, he engaged in principled resistance to strip frisks for which he was beaten eleven times, raising awareness about the routinized sexual assault of imprisoned people. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey. Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.”

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Nina Bandelj, "Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Parents are exhausted. When did raising children become such all-consuming, never-ending, incredibly expensive, and emotionally absorbing effort? In this eye-opening book, Nina Bandelj explains how we got to this point--how we turned children into financial and emotional investments and child-rearing into laborious work. At the turn of the twentieth century, children went from being economically useful, often working to support families, to being seen by their parents as vulnerable and emotionally priceless. In the new millennium, however, parents have become overinvested in the emotional economy of parenting.

Analyzing in-depth interviews with parents, national financial datasets, and decades of child-rearing books, Bandelj reveals how parents today spend, save, and even go into debt for the sake of children. They take on parenting as the hardest but most important job, and commit their entire selves to being a good parent.

The economization and emotionalization of society work together to drive parental overinvestment, offering a dizzying array of products and platforms to turn children into human capital--from financial instruments to extracurricular programs to therapeutic parenting advice. And yet, Bandelj warns, the privatization of child-rearing and devotion of parents' monies, emotions, and souls ultimately hurt the well-being of children, parents, and society. Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting (Princeton UP, 2026) offers a compelling argument that we should reimagine children and what it means to raise them.

Nina Bandelj is Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and past president of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Dianna N. Watkins-Dickerson, "A Black Woman for President: Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris" (UP of Mississippi)

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Throughout US history, only three Black women—Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris—have given successfully recognized bids for the office of president of the United States. In A Black Woman for President: Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris(UP of Mississippi) author Dianna N. Watkins-Dickerson uses womanist rhetorical criticism to analyze the presidential announcement speeches of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun, and then-Senator Kamala Harris. In close readings of each candidate’s speeches, Watkins-Dickerson defines womanist rhetorical theory and its efficacy for researching Black female voices in the field of communication in general, and the presidential announcement speeches of Black women, specifically.

Beginning with Shirley Chisholm’s historic 1972 campaign as the first Black woman to run a viable campaign for the US presidency, the volume analyzes how Chisholm’s speech set a precedent for future generations of Black women in politics by boldly asserting her right to lead, despite the multiple barriers of race and gender. The study then moves to Carol Moseley Braun’s 2004 presidential announcement, exploring how Braun’s speech navigated the intersections of identity, representation, and political ambition during a time when Black women in the Senate were still a rarity. Finally, the analysis culminates with Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential bid, focusing on how her rhetoric blended elements of Black feminist resistance and national unity in an era of heightened political and racial division.

The volume highlights the ways in which Chisholm, Braun, and Harris drew upon their lived experiences and cultural legacies to construct powerful, transformative narratives and argues that their speeches not only expanded the boundaries of political discourse but also reimagined the possibilities for leadership in America. Ultimately, this study provides a rich, interdisciplinary framework for understanding how Black women have reshaped the political landscape through the power of their words.

You can find Dianna N. Watkins Dickerson at her website, and on social platforms @drdwd.

Find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Dafeng Xu, "Chinatown: San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake and the Paradox of American Immigration Policy" (JHU Press, 2026)

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

San Francisco's Chinatown is the oldest Chinatown in North America and one of the largest Chinese enclaves outside Asia. Spanning 30 city blocks and home to tens of thousands of monolingual Chinese residents, its endurance is remarkable—especially given how close it came to erasure.

In Chinatown: San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake and the Paradox of American Immigration Policy (JHU Press, 2026), Dr. Dafeng Xu uncovers the contested history of this vibrant community, focusing on the transformative period surrounding the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed 80 percent of the city, including Chinatown. White San Franciscans saw the disaster as an opportunity to permanently displace the neighborhood. Instead, Chinatown was rebuilt—but not without conflict or consequence. Using detailed census data and other historical documents, Dr. Xu examines how this rebuilt Chinatown differed socially and physically from its earlier form—and the many ways it stayed the same. He explores whether the earthquake shifted patterns of segregation, if and how Chinese immigrants navigated pressure to assimilate—including adopting English, changing their names, and leaving ethnic neighborhoods—and whether they gained economic ground in the city's new landscape.

Dr. Xu's study reveals a striking contradiction: while Chinese Americans were often criticized for not assimilating, systemic barriers made that very process nearly impossible. The post-disaster Chinatown became a symbol of cultural resilience, shaped by both community agency and persistent exclusion. Rich in insight and original research, Chinatown offers a powerful look at how disaster, racism, and resistance shaped one of America's most storied immigrant neighborhoods.

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Jens Ludwig, "Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don't, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe.
Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig’s immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including “countless hours spent in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald's,” Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is the Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab, codirector of the National Bureau of Economic Research's working group on the economics of crime, elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and a member of the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science.

Alfred Marcus is the Edson Spencer Professor at the Carlson School, University of Minnesota.

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Luca Cottini, "The Rise of Americanism in Italy, 1888-1919" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a pivotal time for the United States as the nation emerged as a political and industrial powerhouse and fashioned its new value system. Amid waves of emigration and evolving cultural exchanges, Italy’s relationship with America became a complex tapestry of admiration, critique, and adaptation.

This study of Italy’s Americanism explores social debates within Italy regarding emigration, the development of a Columbian narrative, European reactions to the Spanish-American War, the impact of American products on Italian society, and former US president Woodrow Wilson’s military intervention and political propaganda during the First World War. It highlights discussions among Italians about the implications of emigration, contrasting prevailing negative views with a counter-narrative from Italian journalists, scholars, and missionaries who visited the United States. The negotiation of US imports and their incorporation into the Italian national context document the formation of a distinct American subculture and the early phases of the nation’s Americanization.

The Rise of Americanism in Italy, 1888-1919 (University of Toronto Press, 2025) provides a unique perspective to assess the early stages of America’s “soft” expansion, as the flow of departing and returning emigrants made Italy a favourable terrain for commercial penetration in Europe, transforming an export ideology into a complex network of transatlantic relations.

Luca Cottini, PhD, is an associate professor of Italian in Villanova University. He is also the creator of the popular Youtube channel, Italian Innovators.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Michael Casiano, "Let Us Alone: The Origins of Baltimore's Police State" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The racist roots of modern policing in Baltimore

By the early twentieth century, postbellum assaults on civil rights and the advent of Jim Crow expanded Baltimore’s law enforcement into a vast network designed to oppress Black people. Michael Casiano’s history charts the institutional consolidation of the city’s post–Civil War police state.

Authorities in Baltimore organized and established municipal power in distinct but connected sites that included jails, areas of political and social activism, public schools, street corners, courtrooms, and homes. Casiano analyzes policing in light of two parallel and inextricable realities of the city’s governance. First, policing evolved from an inefficient and vigilante-driven system into a modern and paramilitary endeavor focused on suppressing citizens and maximizing the power, wealth, and reach of capitalists. Second, decades of racial antagonism shaped Baltimore policing into an apparatus primarily oriented around subduing Black freedom.

A compelling urban history, Let Us Alone: The Origins of Baltimore's Police State (U Illinois Press, 2025) uses voices from all levels of society to examine police power, incarceration, and the perils of being Black in post–Civil War Baltimore.

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Rolando Pujol, "The Great American Retro Road Trip: A Celebration of Roadside Americana" (Artisan Publishers, 2025)

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Rolando Pujol's The Great American Retro Road Trip: A Celebration of Roadside Americana (Artisan, 2025) celebrates the nostalgic pleasures of America's vintage signs, quirky roadside attractions, and offbeat fast food relics in this irresistible retro road trip across the country. The Great American Retro Road TripThe Great American Retro Road Trip is a coast-to-coast journey chronicling retro roadside America. Discover classic giant roadside attractions, from The Coffee Pot and The Big Duck to the World's Largest Paint Can and the Haines Shoe House. Or iconic signage, like the dazzling Yoken's neon sign, and the classic Moon Motel sign. Still-standing vintage locations of America's favorite chain restaurants, from Pizza Hut to McDonald's to Taco Bell. Through Pujol's anecdotes and clever narrative, readers will come away with a sweeping sense of roadside charm that still exists, as well as a desire to see it all for themselves. These lingering traces of America's past are an archive of disappearing roadside signage and architecture, and they tell a story of American ingenuity, creativity, and community. Whether you pick up this book for the nostalgia-inducing photos, the heartwarming stories, or as a reference for planning your own trip, you'll be encouraged to, as Pujol says, "Let your curiosity guide you."

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Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Despite reform efforts that have grown in scope and intensity over the last two decades, the machine of American mass incarceration continues to flourish. In Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future, formerly incarcerated activist and organizer Emile Suotonye DeWeaver argues that the root of the problem is white supremacy.

During twenty-one years in prison, DeWeaver covertly organized to pass legislation impacting juveniles in California’s criminal legal system; was a culture writer for Easy Street Magazine; and co-founded Prison Renaissance, an organization centering incarcerated voices and incarcerated leadership. DeWeaver draws on these experiences to interrogate the central premise of reform efforts, including prisoner rehabilitation programs, arguing that they demand self-abnegation, entrench white supremacy, and ignore the role of structural oppression.

DeWeaver intervenes in contemporary debates on criminal justice and racial justice efforts with his eye-opening discussion of the tools we need to end white supremacy—both within and outside the carceral setting. Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine adds a sharp and unique perspective to the growing discourse on racial justice, incarceration, and abolition.

This episode considers: parole boards; hidden factors that extend sentences; how power is structured; why most reforms repackage inequality; and ways to restructure power.

Our guest is: Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, who is a formerly-incarcerated activist and a 2022 Soros Justice Fellow. California’s Governor Brown commuted his life sentence after twenty-one years for his community work. He has written for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, Colorlines, The Appeal, The Rumpus, and Seventh Wave.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Stephen Bezruchka, "Born Sick in the USA: Improving the Health of a Nation" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

How healthy you are is dependent on where you live. Americans suffer more cancers, heart disease, mental illness, and other chronic diseases than those who live in other wealthy nations, despite having the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Why? Embark on a journey to unravel the profound impact of public policies on American health from before birth in Born Sick in the USA: Improving the Health of a Nation (Cambridge UP, 2026). Delve into the intricate web where economic inequality weaves a tapestry of sickness stemming from a highly stressed society. This compelling read illuminates the need for transformative change in social safety nets and public policies to uplift national health and well-being. Through vivid storytelling, the book unveils the symptoms, diagnosis, and 'medicine' required to steer the nation toward a healthier future. Join the movement for a healthier America by embracing the insightful revelations and empowering calls to action presented within the pages of this eye-opening book. Contact the author at: sabez@uw.edu

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LiLi Johnson, "Technologies of Kinship: Asian American Racialization and the Making of Family" (NYU Press, 2025)

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Delving into the complex interplay of race, kinship, and technology, Technologies of Kinship: Asian American Racialization and the Making of Family (NYU Press, 2025) challenges conventional notions of racial identity in an era of advanced genetic testing. As Author LiLi Johnson argues, kinship, far from being solely defined by biological ties, is a social construct shaped by "technologies of kinship"—systems like government bureaucracy, immigration policies, photography, online profiles, and ancestry tests. These technologies reveal the surprisingly fluid nature of racial categories in relation to kinship, a social formation that significantly affects how race is defined, understood, and experienced.

Johnson reexamines the technological systems that have shaped Asian American identity and kinship, exploring how the racialization of Asian Americans has evolved from exclusion to neoliberal multiculturalism over the last century, analyzing the political and interpersonal implications of these social and cultural changes for affected families.

LiLi Johnson is an Assistant Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Dalhousie University. Her research interests include Asian American family and kinship, racial formation and discourses of multiculturalism, cultural studies of science and technology, and digital and visual cultures.

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Mark Anthony Neal, "New Black Man" (Routledge, 2015)

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In honor of the twentieth anniversary of Mark Anthony Neal’s pivotal text New Black Man (Routledge, 2015), Mickell Carter interviews Neal about the book’s revolutionary model of Black masculinity for the twenty-first century—one that moves beyond patriarchy to embrace feminism and confront homophobia.

Now more vital than ever, New Black Man urges us to imagine a redefined Black masculinity grounded in family, community, and diversity. Part memoir and part manifesto, the book celebrates the Black man of our time in all his vibrancy and complexity.

The tenth-anniversary edition (2015) of this classic text includes a new foreword by Joan Morgan, as well as a new introduction and postscript by Neal, which bring the book’s central questions into the present.

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Terry Williams, "Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents’ world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020.

Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York (Columbia UP, 2024) explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experience among unhoused people. Bringing together anecdotal material, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and excerpts from personal journals, Williams provides a vivid ethnographic portrait of individual people, day-to-day activities, and the social world of the underground and their engagement with the world above, which they call “topside.” He shows how marginalized people strive to make a place for themselves amid neglect and isolation as they struggle for dignity. Featuring Williams’s distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy for those on the margins, Life Underground shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community.

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Betty Boyd Caroli, "A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Betty Boyd Caroli's biography of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch is the first full-length work on a seminal figure in the settlement house movement, which spearheaded efforts to improve the life of immigrants and to counter urban squalor in cities around America in the early 19th century. Greenwich House, the community center Simkhovitch founded in 1902 in Greenwich Village, then a destination point for new immigrants to New York, quickly gained a reputation equal to that of Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago, providing services in health, recreation, education, and the arts (which Greenwich House continues to do to this day). Simkhovitch became a tireless advocate of public housing and has been called by some "the mother of public housing." She played a central role in designing and administering the first public housing projects in America during the New Deal, in which she was an integral figure. The National Housing Conference, which she founded in 1931, continues to operate in our current "housing crisis" as among the most prominent advocates for safe, affordable housing. She co-wrote the National House Act of 1937, the first piece of legislation to establish the federal government's responsibility to help provide low-income families with housing.

A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Caroli, best-known for her work on presidential First Ladies, which has gone through multiple editions, will become the standard account of a truly remarkable life. Born in New England and educated in Boston and at the University of Berlin, Simkhovitch married a Russian intellectual seven years her junior who spoke no English and had no job prospects. Raising a family while working for her rapidly expanding set of causes, Simkhovitch was portrayed in a DC Comics series (also featuring Diana Prince) in the early 1940s as a "Wonder Woman of History" for her seeming ability to do it all: take on the full spectrum of urban ills while also raising and supporting her family. Her husband eventually joined the Columbia faculty and became a noted art collector, advising collectors such as J. P. Morgan, while she exposed the squalor of Downtown slums. The stress of trying to do it all took a heavy toll on Simkhovitch, but her lifelong, passionate advocacy of and contributions to housing reform continued unabated and remains both inspiring and relevant.

Betty Boyd Caroli is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MA in Mass Communication from Annenberg School of University of Pennsylvania, as well as a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University. She studied at the Università Per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy, and the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. A Fulbright in Italy led her to teach at the British College in Palermo, the English School in Rome, and two branches of City University of New York (Queens College and Kingsborough Community College).

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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George Fisher, "Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

George Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America’s Drug War, with Oxford University Press. George has been teaching and writing in the realms of evidence, prosecution practice, and criminal legal history since 1995. He began practice as a prosecutor in Massachusetts and later taught at the law schools of Boston College, Harvard, and Yale. Beware Euphoria is the most recent among a slew of other books, articles, and essays that he’s published over the years, and perhaps the most contrarian. In this interview, George discusses his research methods and how he came to the conclusion that the history of America’s drug war, while racially motivated, was not meant to target minorities, but protect the morals and health of America’s white youth.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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Karin Wulf, "Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In eighteenth-century America, genealogy was more than a simple record of family ties—it was a powerful force that shaped society. Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Karin Wulf delves into an era where individuals, families, and institutions meticulously documented their connections. Whether driven by personal passion or mandated by churches, local governments, and courts, these records appeared in diverse forms-from handwritten notes and account books to intricate silk threads and enduring stone carvings.
Family connections wielded significant influence across governmental, legal, religious, cultural, and social spheres. In the American context, these ties also defined the boundaries of slavery and freedom, with a child\'s status often determined by their mother, despite the prevailing patriarchy. This book reveals the profound importance of genealogy that was chronicled by family records, cultural artifacts, and court documents. These materials, created by both enslaved individuals seeking freedom and founding fathers seeking status, demonstrate the culturally and historically specific nature of genealogical interest.
Even as the American Revolution transformed society, the significance of genealogy endured. The legacy of lineage from the colonial period continued to shape the early United States, underscoring the enduring importance of family connections. Lineage offers a deep understanding of genealogy as a foundational element of American history, illuminating its vital role from the colonial era through the birth of the nation.

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Kong Pheng Pha, "Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality" (U Washington Press, 2025)

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

This episode features Dr. Kong Pheng Pha discussing his recently published book, Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (U Washington Press, 2025).
Queering the Hmong Diaspora dismantles narratives that frame Hmong communities as sexual deviant and reveals how legal cases, media representations, and legislative efforts have constructed Hmong Americans as hyperheterosexual and ungovernable subjects. This critical examination of how Hmong Americans are positioned within racial, gendered, and sexual discourses of liberalism, further explores the lived experiences of queer Hmong Americans, whose existence and activism challenge mainstream and ethnonationalist constructions of subjectivity. Addressing Hmong American gender and sexual politics through feminist, queer, and social justice lenses, Pha offers a critical framework for understanding how race and sexuality intersect in shaping the lives of minoritized refugee communities in the United States and beyond.

Kong Pang Pa is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator whose academic research, writing, and public scholarship explores the histories and politics of refugee migration, radical queer, feminist, and anti-racist social movements, activism, and community organizing, legacies of U.S. war and empire, minoritized student experiences in the modern university, and Asian American racial, gender, sexual, and queer formations, with particular attention on Hmong and Southeast Asian communities in the United States. Presently, he is an assistant professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Donna Doan Anderson is the Mellon research assistant professor in U.S. Law and Race at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Justin Owen Rawlins, "Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance (U Texas Press, 2024) investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.

Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on "anti-Method" stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Damon Scott, "The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement.

Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kimberley Johnson, "Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Kimberley Johnson is about how the Black Power movement reshaped urban politics in the United States—from expectations to practices. Although the national and international dimensions of the Black Power movement are often focused on, Dr. Johnson looks at the movement at the local level, highlighting Newark and East Orange, New Jersey, and Oakland and East Palo Alto, California, and three policy areas: housing, education, and policing.

Dr. Johnson examines how Black Power Urbanism had its own local meanings as it was defined by local activists, neighborhood residents, parents, tenants, and others who sought to repair cities and particularly black neighborhoods that were shattered due to urban renewal and highway construction, as well as ongoing political and economic disinvestment. Dark Concrete depicts how local conditions influenced the emergence of the Black Power movement and, in turn, the ways in which these local movements reshaped urban politics, institutions, and place.

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Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their military experiences were shaped by the racial environment of the home front. War is often viewed as a crucible that can transform society, but American race relations proved remarkably durable.

In Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam (U Massachusetts Press, 2023), Gerald F. Goodwin examines how Black servicemen experienced and interpreted racial issues during their time in Vietnam. Drawing on more than fifty new oral interviews and significant archival research, as well as newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and documentaries, Goodwin reveals that for many African Americans the front line and the home front were two sides of the same coin. Serving during the same period as the civil rights movement and the race riots in Chicago, Detroit, and dozens of other American cities, these men increasingly connected the racism that they encountered in the barracks and on the battlefields with the tensions and violence that were simmering back home.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914 (Oxford UP, 2023) traces the history of unregulated drug use and dependency before 1914, when the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act limited sales of opiates and cocaine under US law. Many Americans used opiates and other drugs medically and became addicted. Some tried ‘Hasheesh Candy’, injected morphine, or visited opium dens, but neither use nor addiction was linked to crime, due to the dearth of restrictive laws. After the Civil War, American presses published extensively about domestic addiction. Later in the nineteenth century, many people used cocaine and heroin as medicine.

As addiction became a major public health issue, commentators typically sympathized with white, middle-class drug users, while criticizing such use by poor or working-class people and people of color. When habituation was associated with middle-class morphine users, few advocated for restricted drug access. By the 1910s, as use was increasingly associated with poor young men, support for regulations increased. In outlawing users' access to habit-forming drugs at the national level, a public health problem became a larger legal and social problem, one with an enduring influence on American drug laws and their enforcement.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK.

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Ryan Donovan, "Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Broadway has body issues.

What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body.

In Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford UP, 2023), author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. To understand these intersectional relationships, he poses a series of questions: Why did A Chorus Line, a show that sought to individuate dancers, inevitably make dancers indistinguishable? How does the use of fat suits in musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two straight actors as the gay couple in La Cage aux Folles in 1983? How did deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West’s Broadway revivals? Whose bodies does Broadway cast and whose does it cast aside?

In answering these questions, Broadway Bodies tells a history of Broadway’s inclusion of various forms of embodied difference while revealing its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies.

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Andrew Burstein, "Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently reviled American icon.

Perhaps no founding father is as mysterious as Thomas Jefferson. The author of the Declaration of Independence was both a gifted wordsmith and a bundle of nerves. His superior knowledge of the human heart is captured in the impassioned appeal he brought to the Declaration. But as a champion of the common man who lived a life of privilege on a mountaintop plantation of his own design, he has eluded biographers who have sought to make sense of his inner life. In Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (Bloomsbury, 2026), acclaimed Jefferson scholar Andrew Burstein peels away layers of obfuscation, taking us past the veneer of the animated letter-writer to describe a confused lover and a misguided humanist, too timid to embrace antislavery.
Jefferson was a soft-spoken man who recoiled from direct conflict, yet a master puppeteer in politics. Whenever he left Monticello, where he could control his environment, he suffered debilitating headaches that plagued him for decades, until he finally retired from public life. So, what did it feel like to be Thomas Jefferson? Burstein explains the decision to take as his mistress Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of his late wife, who bore him six children, none of whom he acknowledged. Presenting a society that encouraged separation between public and private, appearance and essence, Burstein paints a dramatic picture of early American culture and brings us closer to Jefferson's life and thought than ever before.

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Emilie Connolly, "Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

From the earliest days of its founding, the United States set its sights on Native territory. Amid better-known “Indian wars,” the federal government quietly built an empire by treaty, offering payments to Native peoples for their land. Routinely inadequate, these payments were nonetheless pivotal because federal officials chose not to deliver them as a lump sum. Instead, the government kept the bulk of payments owed to Native nations under its own control as a trustee, and made access to future installments contingent on Native compliance. In Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States (Princeton UP, 2025), Dr. Emilie Connolly describes how a system of “fiduciary colonialism” seized a continent from its original inhabitants—and, ironically, furnished Native peoples with financial resources that sustained their nations.
Connolly documents two centuries of dispossession in the guise of fiduciary benevolence. Acting as both dispossessor and trustee, the federal government invested Native wealth in state bonds that financed banks, canals, and other infrastructural projects that enabled the country to expand further westward. Meanwhile, Native peoples protected the money they did receive for future generations, investing it in their own institutions and mounting legal challenges to hold their trustees accountable. Still, federal trusteeship placed tight constraints on Native economies with the aim of containing Native power, forcing nations to endure through sheer resilience and ingenuity. By chronicling the long history of Native land dispossession through financial paternalism, Vested Interests reveals the unequal dividends of colonialism in the United States.

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Oline Eaton, "Finding Jackie: The Second Act of America's First Lady" (Diversion Books, 2023)

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In her new book, Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented (Diversion Books, 2023), scholar and writer Oline Eaton examines the story of an era's biggest "star of life," Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, as she coped with trauma and built a new existence in an unstable world during the time between JFK's murder in 1963 and the death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, in 1975. Jackie Kennedy was universally loved and to this day is still remembered as dignified, classy, a superior wife, mother, decorator, and hostess. But what story lies beneath that of the former First Lady? What is the true tale of the woman who later wore leather miniskirts, grew her hair long, and married infamous Greek shipping tycoon Ari Onassis?

Eaton charts the taboo and often dismissed story of Jackie, the life of a woman reinventing herself time and time again. In Finding Jackie, she follows the "star of life" through her tragedies and triumphs with all the urgency and uncertainty she faced. Revealed is the Jackie the world has never seen, the Jackie who climbed pyramids, held fascinating jobs, lived abroad, married a scandalous man, saw a sex movie with him in a theater, and then judo-flipped a photographer on her way out. She frolicked braless and barefoot in Capri. She saved Grand Central. She stepped outside the rarefied world she'd been born into and exemplified the cultural changes of the 1960s and 70s. With newly released archival evidence, Finding Jackie illuminates the disconnect between the public story and what is now known of Jackie Kennedy Onassis' actual private life. Jackie has long been celebrated for her style rather than her substance but, when set in its full historical context, her story resonates today.

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Kendra D. Boyd, "Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers are well-known, countless African Americans also left the South to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and viewed business as key to Black liberation. Detroit's status as a mecca for Black entrepreneurship illuminates this overlooked aspect of the Great Migration story. In Freedom Enterprise, Kendra D. Boyd uses "migrant entrepreneurship" as a lens through which to understand the entwined histories of Black-owned business, racial capitalism, and urban space.

Freedom Enterprise follows Black Southerners' journeys to Detroit during the initial wave of migration in the 1910s and 1920s, through their efforts to build a prosperous Black business community in the 1930s and 1940s, to the destruction of that community through urban renewal projects and freeway construction in the 1950s and 1960s. Combining business and social history methods to analyze an eclectic archive, Boyd chronicles migrant entrepreneurs' experiences, highlighting tales of racial and economic violence, Black women's business organizing, illegal business, communist entrepreneurs, and cooperative economics.

Boyd uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine migrant entrepreneurs' experiences in twentieth-century America. In the Jim Crow South, African Americans worried about white mobs taking away their property, wealth, and lives. Though they sought refuge in Detroit, migrant entrepreneurs subsequently faced the loss of their livelihoods and the businesses they had spent decades building to the bulldozers of state-sponsored urban redevelopment initiatives. Southern migrants' "freedom enterprise"--their undertaking of attaining freedom through business--was curtailed by the reality of operating within the confines of US racial capitalism.

In tracing Black entrepreneurs across the Great Migration, Freedom Enterprise provides important insights into African Americans' activism for racial and economic justice and continued racialized wealth disparities.

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Brian D. Behnken, "Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025" (UNC Press, 2025)

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

How police abuse ignited the Chicano movement in the Southwest

Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025 (UNC Press, 2025) offers a sweeping history of Mexican American interactions with law enforcement and the criminal justice system in the US Southwest. Looking primarily at Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, Brown and Blue tells a complex story: Violent, often racist acts committed by police against Mexican American people sparked protests demanding reform, and criminal justice authorities sometimes responded positively to these protests with measures such as recruiting Mexican Americans into local police forces and altering training procedures at police academies.
Brian D. Behnken demonstrates the central role that the struggle for police reform played in the twentieth-century Chicano movement, and the ways its relevance continues to the present. By linking social activism and law enforcement, Behnken illuminates how the policing issues of today developed and what reform remains to be done.

Guest: Brian Behnken is a professor of history at Iowa State University. He specializes in African American and Mexican American history, with an emphasis on civil rights activism and comparative race relations. He has published widely within these fields and has also expanded his research focus to explore racial violence, law enforcement, popular culture, and nationalism as they relate to African American and Latino/a/x peoples.

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O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, "We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In the spring of 1969, hundreds of workers, all Black and mostly female, went on strike at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital to protest racial discrimination, low wages, and the marginalization of their dignity. The movement began with an incident of wrongful termination in 1967 involving five Black women at Medical College Hospital that uncovered the pervasiveness of racial and economic discrimination at both hospitals. The termination sparked outrage among other hospital workers who, with support from local community leaders, organized a movement that galvanized the city, state, and nation.

We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign (UP of Mississippi, 2025) explores this campaign in the context of a broader protest tradition, revealing it to be a full-scale movement that demonstrates the power and complexity of Black women's activism in the mid-twentieth century. O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight argues that the experiences of the women at the center of this conflict offer a window into the plight of Southern Black working-class women and the ways in which they fought for equality, access, and well-being.

Though much of what has been written about the hospital workers' campaign focuses on the strike through an institutional lens, Dixon-McKnight uses extensive interviews and oral history to expand the scope of existing scholarship. Local leaders such as Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, William Saunders, and Isaiah Bennett served as bridge builders for the Black community's involvement in protest, which helped shape and nurture the hospital workers' campaign. By discussing the grassroots organizing that sparked the strike and tracing the aftermath of the conflict, including what workers experienced in their return to work and their relationships with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Local 1199 Hospital and Nursing Home Employees Union, this volume situates the hospital workers' movement as a critical moment in the nation's long civil rights history.

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Kellen Hoxworth, "Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance (Northwestern UP, 2024) Dr. Kellen Hoxworth presents a sweeping history of racialized performance across the Anglophone imperial world from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

A material history of racialized performance throughout the Anglophone imperial world, Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance revises prevailing understandings of blackface and minstrelsy as distinctively US American cultural practices. Tracing intertwined histories of racialized performance from the mid-eighteenth through the early twentieth century across the United States and the British Empire, this study maps the circulations of blackface repertoires in theatrical spectacles, popular songs, visual materials, comic operas, closet dramas, dance forms, and Shakespearean burlesques.

Dr. Hoxworth focuses on overlooked performance histories, such as the early blackface minstrelsy of T. D. Rice’s “Jump Jim Crow” and the widely staged blackface burlesque versions of Othello, as traces of the racial and sexual anxieties of empire. From the nascent theatrical cultures of Australia, Britain, Canada, India, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United States, Transoceanic Blackface offers critical insight into the ways racialized performance animated the imperial “common sense” of white supremacy on a global scale.

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John Samuel Harpham, "Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The period from 1550 to 1700 was critical in the development of slavery across the English Atlantic world. During this time, English discourse about slavery revolved around one central question: How could free persons be made into slaves? John Samuel Harpham shows that English authors found answers to this question in a tradition of ideas that stretched back to the ancient world, where they were most powerfully expressed in Roman law. These ideas, in turn, became the basis for the earliest defenses of American slavery. The Roman tradition had located the main source of slavery in war: enslavement was the common fate of captives who otherwise faced execution. In early modern England, this account was incorporated into studies of the common law and influential natural rights theories by the likes of Hugo Grotius and John Locke. When Europeans started to publish firsthand accounts of Africa in the sixteenth century, these reports were thus received into a culture saturated with Roman ideas. Over time, English observers started to assert that the common customs of enslavement among the nations of Africa fit within the Roman model. Englishmen had initially expressed reluctance to take part in the Atlantic slave trade. But once assured that the slave trade could be traced back to customs they understood to be legitimate, they proved keen to profit from it.

An eloquent account of the moral logic that propelled the development of an immoral institution, John Samuel Harpham's The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2025) reveals the power of an overlooked tradition of ideas in the history of human bondage.

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Christopher Lynch, "Formulating Foster: Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Stephen C. Foster (1826–1864) was a prolific song composer. A few of his minstrel tunes have become so enmeshed in American musical culture that they are often thought to be folk songs. Although he died in poverty and most of his music was quickly forgotten, by the early twentieth century he was hailed as the “Father of American Music” and had become a symbol of US democracy. In Formulating Foster: Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth (Oxford University Press, 2025), Christopher Lynch examines the reception of Foster and his music between the composer’s death and the 1930s. It is an unusual book—part biography, part sourcebook, part scholarly reflection, part reception history, part myth buster. Lynch divides the book into three sections which each contain anywhere from ten to eighteen primary sources that provide evidence for how Foster’s American reception changed over time. He frames these primary documents with five essays that examine the ever-changing myths around Foster, why those myths developed, and how the collecting practices and biases of Foster devotees and his family members influenced the national memory about the composer and his most famous songs.

Christopher Lynch, PhD, is a musicologist and Head of the Theodore M. Finney Music Library in the University of Pittsburgh Library System, where he helps curate the Stephen Foster Memorial museum and archive. His research examines minstrelsy, popular song, and music theater as sites for contesting American ideals. He is co-editor of Listening Across Borders: Musicology in the Global Classroom and his work has been published in numerous journals.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Mark Christian Thompson's book, Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2022) examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century African American writers and thinkers, showing how their investments in sociology and anthropology gave way to a growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory by the 1960s. Thompson analyzes this shift in intellectual focus across the post-war decades, pinpointing its clearest expression in Amiri Baraka's writings on jazz and blues, in which he insisted on philosophy as the critical means by which to grasp African American expressive culture. More sociologically oriented thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, had understood blackness as a singular set of socio-historical characteristics. In contrast, writers such as Baraka, James Baldwin, Angela Y. Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X were variously drawn to notions of an African essence, an ontology of Black being. For them, the work of Adorno, Habermas, Marcuse, and German thinkers was a vital resource, allowing for continued cultural-materialist analysis while accommodating the hermeneutical aspects of African American religious thought. Mark Christian Thompson argues that these efforts to reimagine Black singularity led to a phenomenological understanding of blackness--a "Black aesthetic dimension" wherein aspirational models for Black liberation might emerge.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Zeke Hernandez, "The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Immigration is one of the most controversial topics in the United States―and everywhere else. Pundits, politicians, and the public usually depict immigrants either as villains who pose a threat to our economy, culture, and safety, or as victims―needy outsiders whom we must help, at our own cost if necessary. But the data clearly debunk both narratives. From jobs, investment, and innovation to cultural vitality and national security, more immigration has an overwhelmingly positive impact on everything that makes a society successful.
In The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers (St. Martin's Press, 2024), Wharton professor Zeke Hernandez draws from nearly twenty years of research to answer all the big questions about immigration. He combines moving personal stories with rigorous research to offer an accessible, apolitical, and evidence-based look at how newcomers affect our local communities and our nation. You’ll learn about the overlooked impact of immigrants on investment and job creation; realize how much we take for granted the novel technologies, products, and businesses newcomers create; get the facts straight about perennial concerns like jobs, crime, and undocumented immigrants; and gain new perspectives on misunderstood issues such as the border, taxes, and assimilation.
Hernandez turns fear into hope by proving that immigrants are essential for economically prosperous and socially vibrant nations.

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Sonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, with more than twenty thousand white people in attendance. The crowd turns the violent spectacle of Bethea's hanging—the last documented public execution in the United States—into a brutal carnival.

Bethea's story came to author Sonya Lea through her family, and it is through her family that she reckons with its truths. At her grandmother's funeral, Lea received an oral history recorded by a neighbor. In its pages, Lea, who is descended from white Kentuckians on both sides, discovered that two of the spectators at Bethea's execution were her grandparents, teenage newlyweds Sherrel and Frances Ralph. Lea's research would also divulge that she was related to the prosecuting attorney for the Commonwealth, the man considered most responsible for Bethea's hanging.

American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture (University Press of Kentucky, 2025) combines memoir with reportage and cultural criticism to interrogate and complicate the traditional narrative about how lynch culture is created in families, communities, and institutions. The essays in this collection grapple with our complicity in these atrocities—including the agreement in our silences—and demonstrate how we, as descendants, might take responsibility and bring new scrutiny to ancestral and communal crimes.

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Lottie Whalen, "Radicals & Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern" (Reaktion, 2023)

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Radicals & Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern (Reaktion, 2023) is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth-century capital of modern culture. Across the 1910s and ’20s, through provocative creative acts, shocking fashion, political activism, and dynamic social networks, these women reimagined modern life and fought for the chance to realize their visions. Taking the reader on a journey through the city’s salons and bohemian hangouts, Radicals and Rogues celebrates the tastemakers, collectors, curators, artists, and poets at the forefront of the early avant-garde scene. Focusing on these trailblazers at the center of artistic innovation—including Beatrice Wood, Mina Loy, the Stettheimer sisters, Clara Tice, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Marguerite Zorach, and Louise Arensberg—Lottie Whalen offers a lively new history of remarkable women in early twentieth-century New York City.

New Books in Women’s History Podcast

Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College website

@janescimeca.bsky.social

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A. Mechele Dickerson, "The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream" (U California Press, 2026)

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century The US middle class was a product of state and federal policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. But since the 1980s, lawmakers have undermined what they once built, shredding the social safety net and instituting laws that virtually guarantee downward mobility for all but the most privileged. How can we restore what has been lost? Rigorous and highly readable, The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream (U California Press, 2026) breaks down the policies that have decimated working families and proposes reforms to reverse this trend. As Mechele Dickerson shows, part of the problem is that politicians disingenuously conflate the middle class with the "White lower rich." Such propaganda hides how state and federal lawmakers consistently favor education, labor, housing, and consumer-credit laws that erode the bank accounts of lower- and middle-income people--especially those who are not White and don't have college degrees. Weaving together the latest research with the personal stories of Americans struggling to make ends meet, Dickerson provides a clarion call for political leaders to enact a bold agenda like the one that created the middle class almost a century ago.

A. Mechele Dickerson is the Arthur L. Moller Chair in Bankruptcy and Practice and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of Texas School of Law. Professor Dickerson is a nationally recognized scholar on financial vulnerability, consumer debt, housing affordability, and racial and economic disparities. She regularly teaches Remedies and Federal Civil Procedure at the School of Law, has taught a class on civil procedural disputes that arose between the two Trump presidencies, and has taught numerous cross-listed interdisciplinary graduate-level courses on the American middle-class and the COVID pandemic. She is also the author of Homeownership and America's Financial Underclass: Flawed Premises, Broken Promises, New Prescriptions.

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Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America’s resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience.
Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an “aristocracy of the skin,” Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst—and transformed the nation’s founding liberal tradition. He demonstrates how they drew on spiritual insight, Enlightenment thought, and a homegrown political philosophy that gave expression to their experiences at the bottom of the American social order. Roy sheds new light on how Black abolitionist writers and activists worked to eradicate the pernicious ideology of racial feudalism from American liberalism and renew the country’s commitment to values such as individual liberty, social progress, and egalitarianism.
American Dark Age reveals how the antebellum Black liberal tradition holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups continue to align themselves with fantasies of a medieval past and openly call for a return of all-powerful monarchs, aristocrats, and nobles who rule by virtue of their race.

Keidrick Roy is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He has received national attention through media outlets such as CBS News Sunday Morning and the Chicago Review of Books and appears in the HBO documentary Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches. He has curated two major exhibitions at the American Writers Museum in Chicago on Black American figures, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Ralph Ellison.

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Emily Walton, "Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A racial demographic transition has come to rural northern New England. White population losses sit alongside racial and ethnic minority population gains in nearly all of the small towns of the Upper Valley region spanning New Hampshire and Vermont. Homesick considers these trends in a part of the country widely considered to be progressive, offering new insights on the ways white residents maintain racial hierarchies even there.

In Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England Walton focuses on the experiences of mostly well-educated migrants of color moving to the area to take well-paid jobs - in this case in health care, higher education, software development, and engineering. Walton shows that white residents maintain their social position through misrecognition-a failure or unwillingness to see people of color as legitimate, welcome, and valuable members of the community. The ultimate impact of such misrecognition is a profound sense of homesickness, a deep longing for a place in which one can feel safe, wanted, and accepted.

Tightly and sensitively argued, this book helps us better understand how to recognize and unsettle such processes of exclusion in diversifying spaces in general.

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Jose Eos Trinidad, "Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have created an invisible infrastructure not only to affect local school districts but also to shape US education. He illustrates this by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how local organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have transformed data and worked with high schools to address the problem of students dropping out. The book argues that changes in a decentralized system happen less through top-down policy mandates or bottom-up social movements, and more through “outside-in” initiatives of networked organizations spread across various local systems. By detailing change across multiple levels and across multiple locations, Trinidad uncovers new ways to think about educational transformation, policy reform, and organizational change.

João Souto-Maior (website: here) is a postdoc at Stanford University.

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T. R. Johnson, "New Orleans: A Writer's City" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. T. R. Johnson's book New Orleans: A Writer's City (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives.

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Mary E. Stuckey, "Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are" (UP of Kansas, 2025)

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Mary E. Stuckey, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, has a brilliant new book that dives into the question of who we are as Americans, a theme that Stuckey has long researched and considered in much of her work (Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity, University Press of Kansas, 2004; For the Enjoyment of the People: The Creation of National Identity in American Public Lands, University Press of Kansas, 2023), but she traces this idea of American identity through Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President of the United States, key author of the Declaration of Independence, architect, and enslaver. Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are is an exploration not so much of Thomas Jefferson the person, but Thomas Jefferson as he has become iconic within the American imagination and what that position explains about not only Jefferson himself, but also what it says about the United States at any particular period in the course of American history.

Stuckey traces the symbolic and iconic Jefferson in a number of distinct areas, each of which communicate different presentations or representations of Jefferson himself but also how we, as citizens, consume the idea of Jefferson. All of these are avenues to understand American national identity. As a scholar of presidential rhetoric, Stuckey begins the research by exploring how other presidents have used Jefferson in their speeches and their rhetoric, finding that the vast majority of presidents have referenced Jefferson in some form or in some way to legitimize their own policies. Many presidents have integrated Jefferson’s own words (and he wrote many, many words over a long life, especially for the time) as a way to authorize what they were doing while in office. Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are then traces the many memorials and monuments that integrate Jefferson in some capacity. But this section is split into two pieces, one that specifically focuses on the Jefferson-centric presentations, and the other part that integrates Jefferson with other Founders or other presidents (like Mt. Rushmore). Stuckey makes clear the key dimension around the building of these kinds of memorials and monuments: they are as much about the people choosing to build them and how they are to look and exist as they are about the individual, in this case Jefferson, being honored within them. The next section of Remembering Jefferson examines Jefferson in popular culture, particularly in televisual and cinematic popular culture. And while Jefferson is, again, in many places, he comes across in fascinating ways in these renderings, since his relationship to slavery—that he had over 500 enslaved individuals over his lifetime, that a number of those who were enslaved were also his children—is often portrayed as incidental and as a kind of footnote. Jefferson is often hazy and romantic in these narratives. The final section of the book assesses Jefferson within children’s literature, since this is also a realm where Jefferson is taking on a civic teaching, and the presentation is about communicating a kind of citizenship to young people.

Mary Stuckey has produced an important reading of the United States by reading Thomas Jefferson in all the places and spaces where he turns up. Remembering Jefferson: Who He was, Who We Are is a delight to read, and discusses the complex ideas of national identity, enslavement, race, power, citizenship, and civic virtue.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

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Michael J. Illuzzi, "Mending the Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age" (UP of Kansas, 2025)

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientist Michael Illuzzi has a fascinating new book on peoplehood in the United States, focusing on different political actors at different crucial points in American history, and how the “story” of American peoplehood has been told. This idea of “peoplehood” is not necessarily new, since it brings with it a connection to the country where one is a citizen. But for the United States, this concept has been defined and redefined over more than 250 years and often connects back to the promise of the Declaration of Independence, where the commitment to equality was articulated, but has never been fully recognized or achieved. Part of what Illuzzi is doing in Mending the Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age is explaining, through a number of case studies, the difference between what are called “mending stories” and “bleaching stories”—those narratives that design a country that is more inclusive, that explain the past but also work towards mending earlier injustices, in contrast to those narratives that choose to erase historical injustices and inequalities and, in the process, also define the American fabric as exclusionary. This framework, drawing out these different approaches to narratives about American peoplehood, is vitally important as we find ourselves at this particular inflection point, with daily debates and armed conflicts over who is and isn’t allowed to be considered an American.

The case studies at the heart of Mending the Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age include the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, Mayor Samual Jones (of Toledo) and the integration of immigrants at the turn of the century, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Martin Luther King Jr’s coalition building beyond the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition in Chicago in the 1960s, and finally the Poor People’s Campaign led by Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Rev. Dr. William Barber II. In each case, Illuzzi examines different kinds of opposition to more authoritarian, more divisive, or more oppressive approaches, in the speeches and in the coalitions that are being built by those leading towards mending narratives. Part of the analysis is also about how political coalitions are expanded—especially in ways that may be unexpected, when common issues (like poverty, or police brutality, or healthcare access) transcend ethnic, racial, or even political boundaries and groupings.

This is a beautifully written discussion of the idea of the United States, and the ways in which politics, race, ethnicity, and class are all woven together within the broader fabric of a country “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Mending A Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age is particularly important in helping us to think about and possibly act on “from many, one” in the age of divisive populism and discrimination.

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Lukas Foss: A "New American Music Series" Gallatin Lecture, April 15, 1982

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. In this lecture, a part of the “New American Music Series” of Gallatin Lectures at NYU, Foss discusses the state of American contemporary music, musical minimalism, and his own approach of combining serial elements with spontaneous composition.

Foss was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, on August 15, 1922, the son of a lawyer and a painter. He began studying piano and music theory when he was 7, and sketched out an opera when he was 11. His family fled to Paris in 1933, and arrived in the U.S. in 1937. He attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and studied composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale.

In 1953, Foss succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as the head of the composition department at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1962, “Time Cycle,” a four-movement vocal setting of texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, premiered with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. From 1971 to 1988 Foss was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. After he left the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in 1990, Foss appeared as a guest conductor and pianist with orchestras around the world. He died in New York City on February 1, 2009.

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Theodore J. Karamanski, "Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2026)

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Theodore Karamanski joins fellow Lake Michigan enthusiast Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan. Looking down from outer space a vast expanse of blue appears in the heart of North America. Of the magnificent chain of inland seas, only one of those bodies of water--Lake Michigan--is entirely within the boundaries of the United States. Lake Michigan has been uniquely shaped by its relationship with humans, since its geological evolution took place at the same time as Paleo-Indian peoples interacted with the changing environment. Each generation of humans has altered the lake to suit society's changing needs, dredging harbors, building lighthouses, digging canals and channels, filling in shallows, and obliterating wetlands.

Great Lake is a comprehensive survey of the manifold ways Americans, from the first Native American communities to the present age, have abused, nurtured, loved, and neglected this massive freshwater resource. Extending 307 miles from north to south, the lake cuts across climatic, environmental, and physiographic zones, from the prairies of Illinois to the boreal forests of the north. Bordered by large cities like Chicago and Milwaukee as well as smaller Wisconsin resorts and northern Michigan mines and mill towns, the lake touches people in urban centers and countryside. Thus, the history of Lake Michigan combines the history of frontier resource extraction, agricultural abundance, industrialization, and dense urbanization in the American heartland. Great Lake is the story of the ever-escalating and divergent demands Americans have placed on Lake Michigan, how the lake's ecosystem responded to those changes, and how together they have shaped the modern American Midwest.

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Robert D. Bland, "Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation" (UNC Press, 2026)

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their place in a nation still grappling with the legacy of slavery. Often remembered as a period of failed progressive change that gave way to Jim Crow and second-class citizenship, Reconstruction’s tragic narrative has long overshadowed the resilience and agency of African Americans during this time.
Requiem for Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) chronicles Reconstruction’s legacy by focusing on key Black figures such as South Carolina congressman Robert Smalls, Judge William Whipper, writer Frances Rollin, and others who shaped postbellum Black America. Robert D. Bland traces the impact of the Reconstruction generation—Black Americans born between 1840 and 1870 who saw Reconstruction as a defining political movement and worked to preserve its legacy by establishing a new set of historical practices such as formulating new archives, shaping local community counternarratives, using the Black press to inform national audiences about Southern Republican politics, and developing a framework to interpret the recent past’s connection to their present world. Set in South Carolina’s Lowcountry—a hub of Black freedom, landownership, and activism—this book shows how late nineteenth-century Black leaders, educators, and journalists built a powerful countermemory of Reconstruction, defying the dominant white narrative that sought to erase their contributions.

Find Professor Bland at his website, and on Threads, BlueSky, and X.

Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack where she and Professor Bland continued their conversation.

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Fernando Luiz Lara, "Spatial Theories for the Americas: Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024)

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent.
With Spatial Theories for the Americas: Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024), Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space—drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and mostly architecture—and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of architecture, problematizing its theoretical foundation in relation to the inseparability of modernization and colonization. The second part makes explicit the insufficiencies of a hegemonic Western tradition at the core of spatial theories by discussing a long list of authors who have thought about the Americas.
To overcome centuries of Eurocentrism, Lara concludes, will require a tremendous effort, but, nonetheless, we have the responsibility of looking at the built environment of the Americas through our own lenses. Spatial Theories for the Americas proposes a fundamental step in that direction.

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Steven J. Brady, "Less Than Victory: American Catholics and the Vietnam War" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The first book of its kind, Less Than Victory: American Catholics and the Vietnam War (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Dr. Steven J. Brady explores both the impact the Vietnam War had on American Catholics, and the impact of the nation's largest religious group upon its most controversial war. Through the 1960s, Roman Catholics made up one-quarter of the population, and were deeply involved in all aspects of war. In this book, Dr. Brady argues that American Catholics introduced the moral, as opposed to the prudential, argument about the war earlier and more comprehensively than other groups. The Catholic debate on morality was three cornered: some saw the war as inherently immoral, others as morally obligatory, while others focused on the morality of the means – napalm, torture, and free-fire zones – that the US and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam were employing. These debates presaged greater Catholic involvement in war and peace issues, provoking a shift away from traditional ideas of a just war across American Catholic thinking and dialogue.

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Adam S. Ferziger. "Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism" (NYU Press, 2025)

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode Drora Arussy speaks with historian Adam S. Ferziger about his latest book, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism (New York University Press, 2025). Ferziger, a professor at Bar-Ilan University and one of the leading voices in the study of modern religious movements, offers a compelling exploration of the transnational interactions that have reshaped Israeli Judaism and redefined the contours of religious Zionism.

Agents of Change investigates how ideas, teachers, and institutions moved across the Atlantic between America and Israel, creating new hybrid forms of Jewish religious expression. Ferziger focuses on a group of North American Orthodox rabbis and educators, many of them students of Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik at Yeshiva University, who immigrated to Israel between 1965 and 1983. These figures—working at the nexus of American Modern Orthodoxy and Israeli religious Zionism—introduced new educational paradigms, reimagined communal norms, and ultimately diversified the ideological landscape of Israeli Orthodoxy.

The conversation delves into the shifting meaning of religious Zionism after the 1967 Six-Day War, when a movement once on the margins of Zionist politics emerged as a vital force within Israeli society. Ferziger traces how theological optimism about Israel’s redemptive role led to internal debates over nationalism, messianism, and engagement with secular Israeli culture. He also shows how American-trained educators brought new emphases on intellectual openness, structured learning, and ethical responsibility that subtly reconfigured Israeli Torah study and communal life.

Interwoven through the dialogue is a broader reflection on transnational educational exchange—how Jewish learning operates as both a local and global phenomenon. Ferziger emphasizes education’s transformative potential: students, he argues, do not merely replicate ideas but reinterpret them within new social and cultural frames. This dynamic has fueled the growth of innovative models in contemporary Israel, from advanced programs for women’s Torah study to initiatives blending religious learning with military and civic service.

Arussy and Ferziger also discuss adjacent developments, including the integration of American Haredim into Israeli society, the emergence of Orthodox feminism as a transnational phenomenon, and the rise of global study networks such as Hadran, founded by Michelle Farber. Through these case studies, Ferziger illustrates how the intellectual and spiritual currents flowing between America and Israel continue to reshape what it means to live a religious Jewish life in a modern state.

Throughout the interview, Ferziger reflects on the delicate balance between personal engagement and scholarly distance, underscoring the historian’s task of acknowledging one’s perspective while maintaining methodological transparency. His approach embodies the spirit of Agents of Change: to view Jewish history not as a story confined within national borders but as a transnational dialogue that continually evolves through exchange, adaptation, and reinterpretation.

Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism offers an incisive analysis of how transnational networks have redefined modern Jewish identities.

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Brian Martin, "From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War" (ECW Press, 2022)

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada’s role in the bloody conflict that claimed more than 600,000 lives. Until From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War (ECW Press, 2022) by Brian Martin.

A surprising 20,000 Canadians went south to take up arms on both sides of the conflict, while thousands of enslaved people, draft dodgers, deserters, recruiters, plotters, and spies fled northward to take shelter in the attic that is Canada. Though many escaped slavery and found safety through the Underground Railroad, they were later joined by KKK members wanted for murder. Confederate President Jefferson Davis along with several of his emissaries and generals found refuge on Canadian soil, and many plantation owners moved north of the border.

Award-winning journalist Brian Martin will open eyes in both Canada and the United States to how the two countries and their citizens interacted during the Civil War and the troubled times that surrounded it.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Brooke Kroeger, "Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism" (Knopf, 2023)

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (Knopf, 2023) is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their way to do journalism's most valued work. From Margaret Fuller's improbable success to the highly paid reporters of the mid-nineteenth century to the breakthrough investigative triumphs of Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, and Ida B. Wells, Brooke Kroeger examines the lives of the best-remembered and long-forgotten woman journalists. She explores the careers of standout woman reporters who covered the major news stories and every conflict at home and abroad since before the Civil War, and she celebrates those exceptional careers up to the present, including those of Martha Gellhorn, Rachel Carson, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Cokie Roberts, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

As Kroeger chronicles the lives of journalists and newsroom leaders in every medium, a larger story develops: the nearly two-centuries-old struggle for women's rights. Here as well is the collective fight for equity from the gentle stirrings of the late 1800s through the legal battles of the 1970s to the #MeToo movement and today's racial and gender disparities.

Undaunted unveils the huge and singular impact women have had on a vital profession still dominated by men.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

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Chris Boucher, "Harry "Bucky" Lew: A Biography of the First Black Professional Basketball Player" (McFarland, 2026)

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Harry "Bucky" Lew leapt over pro basketball's color wall in 1902 and continued to integrate every single role in the game over the next 25 years. He was the first Black player, coach, manager, referee, and franchise owner in otherwise white leagues. His accomplishments were well documented in the newspapers of his day, but he has largely been forgotten, despite his assist to the Dodgers in finding a home for their first Black players in the United States and the full integration of all major league sports that soon followed. Covering Lew's entire sporting career and major league legacy, this biography shows how he persevered and triumphed over adversity to provide a shining example for those seeking full participation across the sports spectrum.

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Book Talk 69: American Medium, with Eyal Peretz

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

What is “America” not only as a political entity but in our imagination? How can we properly envision America, without repeating clichés that frame America as either reactionary or revolutionary, repressive or liberatory? I spoke with Eyal Peretz about his book American Medium, which looks at Hollywood to re-imagine the concept of "America" through the medium of film. By considering six fundamental American movies: John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, Peretz explains how these films do more than represent America and envision a new way to ground human life in our secular age. Eyal Peretz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University and the author of seminal books on Melville, de Palma, Diderot, da Vinci, as well as film, art, and philosophy.

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Jason Isralowitz, "Nothing to Fear: Alfred Hitchcock and the Wrong Men" (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2023)

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock focused his lens on an issue that cuts to the heart of our criminal justice system: the risk of wrongful conviction. The result was The Wrong Man, a bracing drama based on the real-life false arrest of Queens musician Christopher “Manny” Balestrero. Manny's ordeal is part of a larger story of other miscarriages of justice in the first half of the twentieth century.

In Nothing to Fear: Alfred Hitchcock and the Wrong Men (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2023), attorney Jason Isralowitz tells this story in a revelatory book that situates both the Balestrero case and its cinematic counterpart in their historical context. Drawing from archival records, Isralowitz delivers a gripping account of Manny’ s trial and new insights into an errant prosecution. He then examines how Hitchcock’ s film bears witness to issues that animate the contemporary innocence movement. Given the hundreds of exonerations of the wrongfully convicted in recent years, this genre-bending work of true crime and film history is a must-read.

Jason Isralowitz is a partner in the New York office of Hogan Lovells. A Queens native, Jason graduated from Boston University’s College of Communication with a bachelor’s in journalism and holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has practiced law in Manhattan since 1993. Jason lives in Summit, New Jersey with his wife, Jennifer.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm.

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Paul J. Gutacker, "The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone." The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past (Oxford UP, 2023) challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants were deeply interested in the meaning of the Christian past. Paul J. Gutacker draws from hundreds of print sources-sermons, books, speeches, legal arguments, political petitions, and more-to show how ordinary educated Americans remembered and used Christian history.

Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis

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W. Ralph Eubanks, "When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land" (Beacon Press, 2026)

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted for the sins of the South, portrayed as a regional backwater that willfully cleaved itself from the modern world. But buried beneath the weight of good ol’ boy politics and white-washed histories lies the Delta’s true story.
Mississippi native and award-winning writer W. Ralph Eubanks unearths the region’s buried history, revealing a microcosm of economic oppression in the US. He traverses the Delta, examining its bellwether efforts to combat income inequality through vivid portraits of key figures like

Theodore G. Bilbo and William Whittington, segregationist congressmen who sabotaged federal reparations for former sharecroppers in the 1940s and ’50s

Gloria Carter Dickerson, founder of the Emmett Till Academy, whose parents were instrumental in desegregating schools in Drew, MS, where Till was murdered

Calvin Head, a community organizer who runs a farming co-op in Mileston, who revived the legacy of his hometown, the only Black resettlement community in Mississippi

Eubanks delivers a powerful and insightful examination of how racism and economic instability have shaped life in the Mississippi Delta. He traces the enduring consequences of political decisions that have entrenched inequality across generations. At the same time, he brings attention to the resilience of local communities and the grassroots movements working toward meaningful change. The book offers a thoughtful framework for policy reform and community investment, underscoring the need to support those who have long sustained the region through their labor and lived experience.

You can find Ralph at his website.

A soundtrack for the book is available here.

Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack.

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Mary M. Burke, "Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In this interview, she discusses her book, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (Oxford UP, 2023), which inserts successive Irish-American identities--forcibly transported Irish, Scots-Irish, and post-Famine Irish--into American histories and representations of race.

Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America's frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along its eastern seaboard. This cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas examines the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. Their racial transformations are indicated by the designations they acquired in the Americas: 'Redlegs,' 'Scots-Irish,' and 'black Irish.' In literature by Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Mitchell, Glasgow, and Yerby (an African-American author of Scots-Irish heritage), the Irish are both colluders and victims within America's racial structure. Depictions range from Irish encounters with Native and African Americans to competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between 'Saxon' Scots-Irish and 'Celtic' Irish Catholic. Irish-connected presidents feature, but attention to queer and multiracial authors, public women, beauty professionals, and performers complicates the 'Irish whitening' narrative. Thus, 'Irish Princess' Grace Kelly's globally-broadcast ascent to royalty paves the way for 'America's royals,' the Kennedys. The presidencies of the Scots-Irish Jackson and Catholic-Irish Kennedy signalled their respective cohorts' assimilation. Since Gothic literature particularly expresses the complicity that attaining power ('whiteness') entails, subgenres named 'Scots-Irish Gothic' and 'Kennedy Gothic' are identified: in Gothic by Brown, Poe, James, Faulkner, and Welty, the violence of the colonial Irish motherland is visited upon marginalized Americans, including, sometimes, other Irish groupings. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.

Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh

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Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post-WWII, early Cold War, and civil rights-era America.

Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford UP, 2023) uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears? To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences, and Brubeck himself. Throughout, author Kelsey Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene, using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries.

Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).

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Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open.

In this comprehensive biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927-2003). Based on extensive archival work and oral histories, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson (Oxford UP, 2023) sets Gibson's life and choices against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Jim Crow racism, the integration of American sports, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and second wave feminism. Throughout her life Gibson continuously negotiated the expectations of her supporters and adversaries, including her patrons in the black-led American Tennis Association, the white-led United States Lawn Tennis Association, and the media, particularly the Black press and community's expectations that she selflessly serve as a representative of her race.

An incredibly talented, ultra-competitive, and not always likeable athlete, Gibson wanted to be treated as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a specific race or gender. She was reluctant to speak openly about the indignities and prejudices she navigated as an African American woman, though she faced numerous institutional and societal barriers in achieving her goals. She frequently bucked conventional norms of femininity and put her career ahead of romantic relationships, making her personal life the subject of constant scrutiny and rumors. Despite her major wins and international recognition, including a ticker tape parade in New York City and the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time, Gibson endeavored to find commercial sponsorship and permanent economic stability. Committed to self-sufficiency, she pivoted from the elite amateur tennis circuit to State Department-sponsored goodwill tours, attempts to find success as a singer and Hollywood actress, the professional golf circuit, a tour with the Harlem Globetrotters and her own professional tennis tour, coaching, teaching children at tennis clinics, and a stint as New Jersey Athletics Commissioner. As she struggled to support herself in old age, she was left with disappointment, recounting her past achievements decades before female tennis players were able to garner substantial earnings.

A compelling life and times portrait, Serving Herself offers a revealing look at the rise and fall of a fiercely independent trailblazer who satisfied her own needs and simultaneously set a pathbreaking course for Black athletes.

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Matthew Davis, "A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Mount Rushmore is something of an American Rorschach test. Some look at the monument and see American patriotic ideals carved into a mountainside. Others see only the rank hypocrisy of American presidents blasted into an Indigenous sacred site. In A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore, writer and journalist Matthew Davis explores the complexities, moral grey areas, and fascinating history of this most iconic American memorial. In detailing the mountain's pre-carving past, the genesis of the memorial, the life and times of its tumultuous sculptor, and the mountain's continued relevance to the present day, Davis explores the complex history of the mountain behind the faces. In doing so, he shows how even when a message is sculpted sixty feet tall, there is nuance to be found in its history.

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Philip A. Wallach, "Why Congress" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

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 World War II, when congressional deliberation contributed to national cohesion by balancing interests and ensuring fairness, and during the push to end racial segregation, when a prolonged debate in Congress focused the nation's attention and delivered a decisive victory for the broad coalition united around civil rights.

The second part of the book traces the evolution of Congress, which first experimented with radical decentralization in the 1970s and then, beginning in the 1980s, embraced powerful leadership and ideological caucuses that prioritized partisan unity and electoral confrontation. This transformed institution has been unable to work through the country's deep divisions on contemporary issues like immigration or the COVID-19 pandemic. Contemporary policymaking often circumvents Congress entirely. In other instances, Congress is engaged, but it proceeds without any bipartisan cooperation or through leader-broken compromises generated by crises. Each of these patterns creates serious difficulties for legitimating American policy. The book concludes with three scenarios for Congress's future. Without significant change, the institution will sink into decrepitude. But it could still be transformed, either by progressive constitutional reform empowering the president at the legislature's expense, or by a revival of meaningful deliberation and debate facilitated by the renewal of the committee system.

Philip A. Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies America's separation of powers, with a focus on regulatory policy issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Scott A. Mitchell, "The Making of American Buddhism" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. He teaches and writes about Buddhism in the West, Pure Land Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism.

As of 2010, there were approximately 3-4 million Buddhists in the United States, and that figure is expected to grow significantly. Beyond the numbers, the influence of Buddhism can be felt throughout the culture, with many more people practicing meditation, for example, than claiming Buddhist identity. A century ago, this would have been unthinkable. So how did Buddhism come to claim such a significant place in the American cultural landscape?

The Making of American Buddhism (Oxford UP, 2023) offers an answer, showing how in the years on either side of World War II second-generation Japanese American Buddhists laid claim to an American identity inclusive of their religious identity. In the process they-and their allies-created a place for Buddhism in America. These sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants-known as “Nisei,” Japanese for “second-generation”-clustered around the Berkeley Bussei, a magazine published from 1939 to 1960. In the pages of the Bussei and elsewhere, these Nisei Buddhists argued that Buddhism was both what made them good Americans and what they had to contribute to America-a rational and scientific religion of peace.

The Making of American Buddhism also details the behind-the-scenes labor that made Buddhist modernism possible. The Bussei was one among many projects that were embedded within Japanese American Buddhist communities and connected to national and transnational networks that shaped and allowed for the spread of modernist Buddhist ideas. In creating communities, publishing magazines, and hosting scholarly conventions and translation projects, Nisei Buddhists built the religious infrastructure that allowed the later Buddhist modernists, Beat poets, and white converts who are often credited with popularizing Buddhism to flourish. Nisei activists didn't invent American Buddhism, but they made it possible.

Dr. Victoria Montrose is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Furman University.

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Jean Pfaelzer, "California, a Slave State" (Yale UP, 2023)

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

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 carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers.

By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers.

California, a Slave State (Yale UP, 2023) shreds California's utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America's uneasy paths to freedom.

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Anna Zeide, "US History in 15 Foods" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that represent key moments in the history of the United States, this book takes readers from before European colonization to the present, narrating major turning points along the way, with food as a guide.

US History in 15 Foods (Bloomsbury, 2023) takes everyday items like wheat bread, peanuts, and chicken nuggets, and shows the part they played in the making of America. What did the British colonists think about the corn they observed Indigenous people growing? How are oranges connected to Roosevelt's New Deal? And what can green bean casserole tell us about gender roles in the mid-20th century? Weaving food into colonialism, globalization, racism, economic depression, environmental change and more, Anna Zeide shows how America has evolved through the food it eats.

Anna Zeide is Associate Professor of History and the founding director of the Food Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, USA. She has previously written Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (2018), which won a 2019 James Beard Media Award, and co-edited Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (2021). Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Kathryn Cornell Dolan, "Breakfast Cereal: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Breakfast Cereal: A Global History (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Kathryn Dolan presents the long, distinguished and surprising history of breakfast cereal.

Simple, healthy and comforting, breakfast cereals are a perennially popular way to start the day around the world. They have a long, distinguished and surprising history – around 10,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture, people began breaking their fast with porridges made from wheat, rice, corn and other grains. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, in the United States, that a series of entrepreneurs and food reformers created the breakfast cereals we recognize today: Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Cheerios and Quaker Oats, among others.

In this global, entertaining and well-illustrated account, Dr. Dolan explores the history of breakfast cereals, including many historical and modern recipes that the reader can try at home.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Helle Strandgaard Jensen, "Sesame Street: A Transnational History" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford UP, 2023), author Helle Strandgaard Jensen tells the story of how the American television show became a global brand. Jensen argues that because the show's domestic production was not financially viable from the beginning, Sesame Street became a commodity that its producers assertively marketed all over the world. Sesame Street: A Transnational History combines archival research from seven countries, bolstering an insightful analysis of how local reception and rejection of the show related to the global sales strategies and American ideals it was built upon.

Contrary to the producers’ oft-publicized claims of Sesame Street’s universality, the show was heavily shaped by a fixed set of assumptions about childhood, education, and commercial entertainment. This made sales difficult as Sesame Street met both skepticism and direct hostility from foreign television producers who did not share these ideals. Drawing on insights from new histories about childhood, education, and transnational media, the book lays bare a cultural clash of international proportions rooted in divergent approaches to children's television. In doing so, it provides a reflective backdrop to the many ongoing debates about children's media.

In contrasting the positive receptions and renunciations of Sesame Street, Jensen demonstrates that it was only after a substantial rethinking of Sesame Street’s aims and business model that this program ended up on numerous broadcasting schedules by the mid-1970s. Along the way, this rethinking and the constant negotiations with potential international buyers created and shaped the business and corporate brand that paved the way for the Sesame Street we know today.

Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Richard Bradford, "Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's life comes as close as is possible to being the Great American Novel: beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive.The Naked and the Dead was acclaimed not so much for its intrinsic qualities but rather because it launched a brutally realistic sub-genre of military fiction - Catch 22 and MASH would not exist without it.

In Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer (Bloomsbury, 2023), Richard Bradford combs through Mailer's personal letters - to lovers and editors - which appear to be a rehearsal for his career as a shifty literary narcissist, and which shape the characters of one of the most widely celebrated World War II novels.

Bradford strikes again with a merciless biography in which diary entries, journal extracts and newspaper columns set the tone of this study of a controversial figure. From friendships with contemporaries such as James Baldwin, failed correspondences with Hemingway and the Kennedys, to terrible - but justified - criticism of his work by William Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt, this book gives a unique, snappy and convincing perspective of Mailer's ferocious personality and writings.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics (Twitter @15MinFilm).

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Jack Z. Bratich, "On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death" (Common Notions, 2022)

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death (Common Notions, 2022) Dr. Jack Z. Bratich explores the cultural elements in American society that support fascism. Microfascism appears in many aspects of culture engaging consumers to think of others and their own self in ways that extend fascism into everyday life while constantly adapting to cultural and political change. Beyond the cultural aspects of microfascism, Bratich also explores how it organizes seemingly unrelated groups who, at times, work together for specific actions aimed at furthering fascist political goals. By looking at the specifically gendered formations of microfascism, Bratich shows the misogyny at the core of the larger fascist project that is geared to “eliminate” those needed to fulfill the “restoration” of some past glory. On Microfascism combines insights from fascism studies and cultural studies scholarship with contemporary examples from current events and popular culture to show the microfascism embedded in American society, already primed for violence. But even though this microfascism can be found throughout American culture and politics, Brartich argues that it is fragile and can be countered with micro-antifascism. Due to the misogyny at the core of fascism and microfascism, political and cultural movements grounded in feminism are the places to most effectively perform micro-antifascism.

Jack Z. Bratich is a Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University.

You can find his work at Researchgate.

You can find a transcript of our conversation here.

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Andrew Porwancher, "American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A scion of the Protestant elite, Theodore Roosevelt was an unlikely ally of the waves of impoverished Jewish newcomers who crowded the docks at Ellis Island. Yet from his earliest years he forged ties with Jews never before witnessed in a president. American Maccabee traces Roosevelt’s deep connection with the Jewish people at every step of his dazzling ascent. But it also reveals a man of contradictions whose checkered approach to Jewish issues was no less conflicted than the nation he led.
As a rising political figure in New York, Roosevelt barnstormed the Lower East Side, giving speeches to packed halls of Jewish immigrants. He rallied for reform of the sweatshops where Jewish laborers toiled for pitiful wages in perilous conditions. And Roosevelt repeatedly venerated the heroism of the Maccabee warriors, upholding those storied rebels as a model for the American Jewish community. Yet little could have prepared him for the blood-soaked persecution of Eastern European Jews that brought a deluge of refugees to American shores during his presidency. Andrew Porwancher uncovers the vexing challenges for Roosevelt as he confronted Jewish suffering abroad and antisemitic xenophobia at home.
Drawing on new archival research to paint a richly nuanced portrait of an iconic figure, American Maccabee chronicles the complicated relationship between the leader of a youthful nation and the people of an ancient faith.

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Ruby Oram, "Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 (U Chicago Press, 2025) historian Ruby Oram tells the story of how middle-class, white women reformers lobbied the state to implement various public education reforms to shape the lives of girls and women in industrial cities between 1870 and 1930. Women such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley used education reform to target working-class communities and advocate for their middle-class ideals of girlhood and femininity, which could vary depending on the racial or socio-economic backgrounds of the girls. For example, reformers generally encouraged white girls to care for their future families, while pushing Black girls toward becoming domestic workers in others’ homes. Using Chicago as a case study, Oram also explores how many of the reforms sought by white women were in response to evolving anxieties about immigration, health, and sexual delinquency.
An illuminating addition to the history of urban education in America, Home Work enriches our understanding of educational inequality in twentieth-century schools.

Allie Morris (aemorris5@wisc.edu) is a joint Ph.D. student in Educational Policy Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She broadly studies gender, age, and education in the late 20th-century United States. Her current research focuses on the political history of girlhood from the 1960s to the 1990s, examining girls’ culture and activism in the American high school.

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Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025)

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

After nearly four decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, threats, and backdoor channels, the United States has failed to stop North Korea's nuclear program which now has the capability to strike American cities with weapons of mass destruction. In Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea (Yale UP, 2025), Joel S. Wit explains why US efforts to contain North Korea have not worked and gives readers a front-row seat to the policy debates, diplomatic deals, and secret talks between Washington and Pyongyang.

Wit, a former State Department official, takes readers to the front lines of nuclear negotiations and recounts how perilously close the United States and North Korea have come, on various occasions, to nuclear confrontation. Based on more than three hundred interviews with officials in Washington, Beijing, and Seoul, as well as with the author’s contacts in Pyongyang, this book chronicles how six American presidents have approached the problem of North Korea.
Wit points to Barack Obama and Donald Trump as the two presidents most responsible for the failure to halt North Korea’s march to build a nuclear arsenal, since it was under their successive tenures that Pyongyang acquired the ability to threaten every city in North America. Wit also offers an unparalleled portrait of Kim Jong Un that refutes his caricature as impulsive and illogical. Like his father and his grandfather, Kim is a ruthless despot but also a canny and informed negotiator determined to secure his dictatorship’s future by exploring diplomacy or, failing that, by building a nuclear arsenal.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book which examines the high price that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were willing to pay in order to achieve total victory in World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Trymaine Lee, "A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America" (St. Martins, 2025)

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him—the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.
In this powerful narrative, Lee weaves together three strands: the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and illegal gun industries; and his own life story. With unflinching honesty he takes readers on a journey, from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to tracing the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors’ footsteps, to confronting the challenges of representing his people in an overwhelmingly white and often hostile media world, and most importantly, to celebrating the enduring strength of his family and community.
In A Thousand Ways to Die (St. Martin’s Press, 2025) Lee answers Nola and all who seek a more just America. He shares the hard truths and complexities of the Black experience, but he also celebrates the beauty and resilience that is Nola’s legacy.

In this episode we discuss the work of Dana Tenille Weeks. You can hear her talk about the reimagination of future at Episode 22 of her podcast, The Rest of Us.

Find Trymaine Lee at his website and on Instagram.

Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack.

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Elizabeth Suhay, "Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025)

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Faith in the American Dream—the idea that anyone who works hard can achieve success—has waned in the 21st century. Decreases in economic mobility, increases in the wealth gap, and other economic shifts have undoubtedly influenced this decline. Politics, however, are an overlooked contributor to confidence, or lack of confidence, in the American Dream. In Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025), political scientist Elizabeth Suhay investigates how politics and political identity are intertwined with beliefs about the American Dream and the causes of inequality. Drawing on public opinion surveys spanning more than four decades, Suhay finds that Americans’ belief in the American Dream is strongly related to their political party affiliation. Democratic Party leaders have increasingly questioned the fairness of the American economy, and, in effect, have called into question whether the American Dream is “real.” Republican Party leaders, by contrast, have consistently defended the fairness of the economy and the American Dream. While it is true that Americans have become more skeptical of the American Dream overall, Suhay finds this skepticism is concentrated among Democratic members of the public. Despite the increasingly working-class make-up of the Republican coalition, most Republican members of the public continue to believe the American Dream is reality. Suhay finds that both Democrats and Republicans tend to adhere to their party’s economic narratives when identifying the causes of inequality between rich and poor, White and Black and Latino Americans, and men and women. Democrats and liberals often attribute inequality between these groups to societal causes, such as lack of access to education and jobs or discrimination. Republicans and conservatives, on the other hand, are more likely to blame individuals and lower income groups for their difficulties. However, Americans’ beliefs are less polarized when they consider socioeconomic inequalities rarely debated by politicians. For example, when asking Republicans and Democrats about the roots of rural-urban and White-Asian inequality, there is no clear unequal opportunity-individual responsibility partisan divide. Suhay argues that the availability of partisan “scripts” helps to explain differences in the public’s views on inequality between groups that have been politicized. These beliefs appear to bolster support for the two parties’ policy agendas among party supporters, driving a wedge between Democrats and Republicans in support for redistributive economic policy as well as the political candidates who support or oppose redistribution. Debating the American Dream provides fascinating insights into politics’ role in Americans’ beliefs and attitudes concerning inequality.

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Sustainability, Identity, Artisans and Designers

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Long before the fashion industry formally addressed questions of sustainability and advocated for “slow fashion,” a husband-and-wife design duo were working to create handcrafted leather-goods and functional women’s sportswear that could be worn for decades. Active from the 1940s to the late 1960s, the Phelps quickly won acclaim, attracting a broad clientele and becoming known for quality, utility, and craftsmanship.

Using vintage metal insignia and hardware, the Phelpses designed bags and belts that answered the need for American-made luxury goods during and after World War II. They worked to revive artisan workshops, fostered positive work environments for their employees, and employed injured veterans.

In Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps, Dr. Rebecca Jumper Matheson offers the first in-depth analysis of the Phelpses’ partnership, their contributions to the fashion industry, and their forward-thinking business practices. She connects their work to larger conversations about sustainable fashion, consumerism, industrialization practices, and the intersection of art with American identity during and after World War II. The result is a richly-illustrated account of a brand, and the classic pieces that stood the test of time.

Guest: Dr. Rebecca Jumper Matheson is a fashion historian and adjunct instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women’s dress, using interdisciplinary approaches to discover women’s narratives as designers, makers, sellers, and consumers. She is the author of three monographs, including Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a Ph.D. in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Colin Williamson, "Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opus Fantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent scientific models and ideas about nature were an important inspiration for Disney’s groundbreaking animated realism. In Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Dr. Colin Williamson presents a vivid portrait of how developments in biology, physics, and geology between 1900 and the long 1960s influenced not just Disney but the American cartoon industry as a whole.

Drawing on original research on the scientific appetites of animators and studios such as Winsor McCay, the Fleischer Brothers, Walt Disney, and United Productions of America, Dr. Williamson opens new avenues for understanding the history and aesthetics of cartoons. Interrogating the differences between art and science and reconsidering the realms of dream, magic, and fantasy as they pertain to pop culture, he yields novel proposals for bridging longstanding divides between animation, live-action cinema, and the history of science.

Drawn to Nature not only illuminates the extent to which animators have drawn on scientific insights, it also considers seriously how commercial animations themselves participate in scientific discourse. It revises and revitalizes our existing narratives about the history of American animation to uncover the many ways science informs our collective cultural imagination.

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Brittany Michelle Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Brittany Friedman terms "carceral apartheid." Prisons are a microcosm of how carceral apartheid operates as a larger governing strategy to decimate political targets and foster deceit, disinformation, and division in society. Among many shocking discoveries, Friedman shows that beginning in the 1950s, California prison officials declared war on imprisoned Black people and sought to identify Black militants as a key problem, creating a strategy for the management, segregation, and elimination of these individuals from the prison population that continues into the present day. Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons (UNC Press, 2025), delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques, including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists, to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

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Liberation & the Literature of the Women’s Movement with Bess Wohl and Honor Moore

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Wednesday, December 17—“The best play I’ve seen this season,” says New York Magazine’s Sara Holdren about Liberation, Bess Wohl’s moving exploration of the women’s movement through the story of an Ohio consciousness-raising group in the early 1970s and a daughter who yearns to understand her mother’s life and her own.
To discuss this timely play and the movement’s powerful literary roots, Wohl joins memoirist Honor Moore, co-editor of Library of America’s Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can, for a conversation about freedom, feminism, and visions for a better future, then and now.
LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations.

Max Rudin is President & Publisher of Library of America.

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David Fleming, "A Big Mess in Texas: The Miraculous, Disastrous 1952 Dallas Texans and the Craziest Untold Story in NFL History" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by David Fleming, Peabody-nominated correspondent for Meadowlark Media, longtime ESPN senior writer, and author of A Big Mess in Texas: The Miraculous, Disastrous 1952 Dallas Texans and The Craziest Untold Story in NFL History (St. Martin’s Press, 2025). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of the infamous (but also surprisingly un-famous) Dallas Texans, the club’s disastrous rise and fall, and why the NFL’s first franchise in Texas failed.

In A Big Mess in Texas, Fleming skilfully recovers the characters, hijinks and scandals, losses and one wonderful win that engulfed and eventually finished the Dallas Texans over ten months in 1952. It was the last NFL franchise to fail. His tale includes notable NFL personalities including Bert Bell, Jimmy Phelan, Gino Marchetti, Buddy Young, and Art Donovan.

He argues that the Texans, mostly remembered for being a famous flop, also deserve a place in NFL history for being pioneers. They were the first team NFL team in the south, the first football team to integrate and Texas, and their management and ownership included men and women. The rump of the team became the beginnings of the super successful Baltimore Colts team of the 1950s. Perhaps most importantly, while they were never America’s team, they set the stage for the emergence of the Dallas Cowboys in 1960, who borrowed liberally from the aesthetics and the antics of the Texans.

Fleming’s compelling account, deeply researched, and genuinely rollicking narrative will be of broad interest to people fascinated by American sports, football, and the NFL.

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Christian Smith, "Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Is traditional American religion doomed?
Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of Americans identifying as "not religious" has increased remarkably. Religious affiliation, service attendance, and belief in God have declined. More and more people claim to be "spiritual but not religious." Religious organizations have been reeling from revelations of sexual and financial scandals and cover-ups. Public trust in "organized religion" has declined significantly. Crucially, these religious losses are concentrated among younger generations. This means that, barring unlikely religious revivals among youth, the losses will continue and accelerate in time, as less-religious younger Americans replace older more-religious ones and increasingly fewer American children are raised by religious parents. All this is clear. But what is less clear is exactly why this is happening. We know a lot more about the fact that traditional American religion has declined than we do about why this is so.
Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (Oxford UP, 2025) aims to change that. Drawing on survey data and hundreds of interviews, Christian Smith offers a sweeping, multifaceted account of why many Americans have lost faith in traditional religion. An array of large-scale social forces-everything from the end of the Cold War to the rise of the internet to shifting ideas about gender and sexuality-came together to render traditional religion culturally obsolete. For growing numbers of Americans, traditional religion no longer seems useful or relevant. Using quantitative empirical measures of big-picture changes over time as well as exploring the larger cultural environment—the cultural "zeitgeist"—Smith explains why this is the case and what it means for the future. Crucially, he argues, it does not mean a strictly secular future. Rather, Americans' spiritual impulses are being channelled in new and interesting directions.

Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Smith is well known for his research focused on religion, adolescents and emerging adults, and social theory. He has written many books, including Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (with Michael O. Emerson), as well as Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (with Melinda Lundquist Denton).

YouTube Channel: here

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Leo R. Chavez, "The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

News media and pundits too frequently perpetuate the notion that Latinos, both US-born and immigrants, are an invading force bent on destroying the American way of life. Leo R. Chavez challenges the basic tenets of this assumption and other myths of the "Latino threat," providing a critical investigation into the fears and prejudices that are used to malign an entire population. In this updated and expanded third edition of his groundbreaking book, Chavez incorporates Donald Trump's emergence in American political life, with particular focus on the US-Mexico border as a site of political theater and the further sharpening of anti-Latino and anti-immigration rhetoric in public discourse. He also includes new discussions of "anchor babies," Dreamers and DACA, Latina reproduction and white replacement theory, and the emotional and psychological effects of negative political rhetoric on those whom it targets. Through trenchant analysis, this book reexamines urgent questions about what it means to be American.

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Terry Kirby, "The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Newsmongers unfolds the seedy history of tabloid journalism, from the first printed ‘Strange Newes’ sheets of the sixteenth century to the sensationalism of today’s digital age. The narrative weaves from Regency gossip writers through New York’s ‘yellow journalism’ battles to the ‘sex and sleaze’ Sun of the 1970s; and from the Brexit-backing populism of the Daily Mail to the celebrity-obsessed Mail Online of the 2000s. Colourful figures such as Daniel Defoe, Lord Northcliffe, Hugh Cudlipp, Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell are brought to vivid life. From scandalous confessions to the Leveson Inquiry, the book explores journalists’ unscrupulous methods, taking in phone hacking, privacy breaches and bribery. In the digital era, popular journalism succumbed to ‘churnalism’ while a certain royal is seeking revenge on the tabloids today.

Terry Kirby is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of The Trials of the Baroness (1991). He has been a journalist for more than four decades and was a founder member of staff at The Independent, where he worked for more than twenty years in a number of roles, including crime correspondent, night editor and chief reporter

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Amy Erdman Farrell, "Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA" (UNC Press, 2025)

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

When eight-year-old Amy Erdman Farrell moved with her family to Akron, Ohio, in 1972, she found herself adrift in a sea of taunting boys and mean girls. Shy by nature, she dreaded her long, unhappy days at school. But a few years later, Farrell found an escape from bullying, the promise of sisterhood, a rising sense of confidence, adventure, and—best of all—lifelong friendship when she joined a Girl Scout troop. Decades later, award-winning author Dr. Farrell returns to those formative experiences to explore the complicated and surprising history of the Girl Scouts of the USA.
Drawing from extensive archival research, visits to iconic Girl Scout sites around the world, and vivid personal reflections, in Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) Dr. Farrell uncovers the Girl Scouts intricate history, revealing how the organization has shaped the lives of more than 50 million girls and women since its founding in 1912. With Dr. Farrell as our own intrepid guide, we travel to American Indian boarding schools, Japanese American incarceration centers, segregated African American communities, middle-class white neighborhoods, and outposts throughout the globe. Intrepid Girls unpacks how the Girl Scouts navigated tensions over feminism, race, class, and political differences, carving out extraordinary opportunities for girls and women—even as it participated in the very discrimination it promised to transcend.
For anyone who has ever worn a uniform or wondered about the hidden history behind this iconic American institution, Intrepid Girls will surprise, inspire, and challenge what we think we know about the Girl Scouts.

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Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025)

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

American conservatism as we know it today is a West Texas export, argues College of Wooster professor Jeff Roche in The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right (U Texas Press, 2025). Tracing the roots of the state's conservative movement back to the giant cattle ranches and tycoons of the nineteenth century, Roche argues that you cannot separate the local and historical conditions in the West (and in West Texas specifically) from the "cowboy conservatism" of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Full of fascinating characters and the kind of tall tales you only find in the Lone Star State, The Conservative Frontier makes a compelling case for Texas politics eventually becoming national politics by the mid to late 20th century. No matter where you are in the United States today, the political weight of Texas creates a gravity that has proven impossible for American politics to emerge from.

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Peter Mancina, "On the Side of ICE: Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State" (NYU Press, 2025)

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the United States, local law enforcement agencies are legally and organizationally independent entities from federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ICE. While local police enforce local, state and federal laws, they are not required to enforce civil immigration laws. On the Side of ICE: Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State (NYU Press, 2025) examines the role of local police as voluntary, auxiliary reinforcements for ICE, focusing on the police force in New Jersey. It argues that even police in sanctuary jurisdictions, which explicitly label themselves as immigrant-friendly, are nonetheless still informally multiplying ICE’s forces through voluntary cooperation. While to date, the ethnography of policing has been produced from participant observation with the police in “ride-alongs” during patrol work and in jails and the examination of official documents like police reports, this book employs a novel method of transcribing police body worn camera (BWC) video footage to provide immersive, ethnographic thick description narratives of instances of local police officers assisting ICE. It makes the case that BWC ethnographic methods are better able to capture realistic interactions between the police and those they stop than when participant observers are on the scene. The volume thus not only reveals the ways in which local police function to assist ICE in enforcing federal civil immigration law, but also demonstrates the significance of using BWC-based ethnographies to examine how police exercise power. From police footage, internal records, and other materials, On the Side of ICE renders intimate, on-the-ground ethnographic narratives that illuminate what policing immigration looks like in contemporary America.

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David Nasaw, "The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II" (Penguin, 2025)

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In its duration, geographical reach, and ferocity, World War II was unprecedented, and the effects on those who fought it and their loved ones at home, immeasurable. The heroism of the men and women who won the war may be well documented, but we know too little about the pain and hardships the veterans endured upon their return home. As historian David Nasaw makes evident in his masterful recontextualization of these years, the veterans who came home to America were not the same people as those who had left for war, and the nation to which they returned was not the one they had left behind. Contrary to the prevailing narratives of triumph, here are the largely unacknowledged realities the veterans—and the nation—faced that radically reshaped our understanding of this era as a bridge to today.

The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II (Penguin, 2025) tells the indelible stories of the veterans and their loved ones as they confronted the aftershocks of World War II. Veterans suffering from recurring nightmares, uncontrollable rages, and social isolation were treated by doctors who had little understanding of PTSD. They were told that they were suffering from nothing more than battle fatigue and that time would cure it. When their symptoms persisted, they were given electro-shock treatments and lobotomies, while the true cause of their distress would remain undiagnosed for decades to come. Women who had begun working outside the home were pressured to revert to their prewar status as housewives dependent on their husbands. Returning veterans and their families were forced to double up with their parents or squeeze into overcrowded, substandard shelters as the country wrestled with a housing crisis. Divorce rates doubled. Alcoholism was rampant. Racial tensions heightened as White southerners resorted to violence to sustain the racial status quo. To ease the veterans’ readjustment to civilian life, Congress passed the GI Bill, but Black veterans were disproportionately denied their benefits, and the consequences of this discrimination would endure long after the war was won.

In this richly textured examination, Dr. Nasaw presents a complicated portrait of those who brought the war home with them, among whom were the period’s most influential political and cultural leaders, including John F. Kennedy, Robert Dole, and Henry Kissinger; J. D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut; Harry Belafonte and Jimmy Stewart. Drawing from veterans’ memoirs, oral histories, and government documents, Dr. Nasaw illuminates a hidden chapter of American history—one of trauma, resilience, and a country in transition.

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Mirya Holman, "The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy" (Temple UP, 2025)

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy (Temple UP, 2025) by Dr. Mirya Holman explicates the purpose, role, and consequences of appointed boards in U.S. cities. Dr. Holman finds cities create strong boards that generate policy, consolidate power, and defend the interests of businesses and wealthy and white residents. In contrast, weak boards pacify agitation from marginalized groups to give the appearance of inclusivity, democratic deliberation, and redistributional policymaking. Cities preserve this strong board/weak board dichotomy through policymaking power, institutional design, and by controlling who serves on the boards.

The Hidden Face of Local Power examines the role of boards in the development of urban political institutions, the allocation of power in local politics, and the persistence of inequality. Holman enhances our understanding of how political institutions have contributed to racism and their impact on how people use and live in urban spaces. In her shrewd analysis of the creation and use of boards as political institutions, Dr. Holman proves that neither weak or strong boards achieves the goal they are advertised to achieve. In doing so, she provides a new view of the failures of local democracy along with ideas for improvement.

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Joseph L Graves, "Why Black People Die Sooner: What Medicine Gets Wrong about Race and How to Fix It" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates that the medical profession still fails to grasp basic facts about race, tracing how deep-rooted falsehoods have perpetuated the disparity between Black and white lifespans. He equips readers with the tools to dispel the fallacies and errors of racialized medicine, including an understanding of evolutionary biology and human biological variation. Graves also debunks common misconceptions about race and health on topics such as high blood pressure, sickle cell disease, the microbiome, infectious diseases, and cancer. Why Black People Die Sooner closes by offering a sweeping vision for dismantling medical racism, from professional training to clinical practice through biomedical research. Timely and bracing, this book reveals why medicine keeps misunderstanding race—and how we can make it change.

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Julian Schmid, "Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century (Edinburgh UP, 2025) by Dr. Julian Schmid considers how the long-standing superhero genre has been reinvigorated in the twenty-first century as an interlocutor of security and surveillance discourses following the events of ‘9/11’. While superheroes have a long cultural history, Dr. Schmid argues that their contemporary representations in Hollywood films and TV shows create and deepen specific discourses on security, terrorism and violence. He shows how the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, in particular, are important artefacts that can help us to understand how these discourses are popularised and ultimately normalised.
The book offers a rich account of the emergence of superheroes against the backdrop of America’s history since its founding in 1776 and their rise to popularity through comic books since the 1930s. Analysing the connections between superheroes, foreign policy and security from ‘9/11’ to the present, it demonstrates the significance of superheroes for the construction of heroism and security in contemporary times.

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Matt Sleat, "Post-Liberalism" (Polity, 2025)

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Liberalism may feel as though it has been around forever - as the "dominant ideology of the modern west" - but not even its advocates and detractors can agree what it is. Political sophisticates ask whether it is classical-, social-, ordo- or neo-liberal while American main street associates it with socialism.

Yet a new generation of "post-liberal" thinkers know liberalism well enough to want to give it upi or, in most cases, go back to a time - real or imagined - before it took hold.
In the US, these political philosophers are mostly Catholic conservatives. In the UK, with one prominent exception, they are largely left-wing Anglicans. In both countries, they tend to be religious and yearn for pre-globalisation communitarian, familial and patriotic certainties.

"Where liberals believe political authority is derived from individuals consenting to be ruled, for post-liberals it comes from serving the common good," writes Matt Sleat in Post-Liberalism (Polity, 2025). His book explores the ideas of the likes of Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, Sohrab Ahmari and post-liberalism's two standout thinkers: Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen.
Matt Sleat is Reader in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield.
*The author's book recommendations were Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty First Century by Edward Hall (OUP Oxford, 2025) and Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order by Paul Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2022). Click here to see the full reading list.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who writes and podcasts at 242.news.

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René Esparza, "From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS" (UNC Press, 2025)

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Shifting the focus of AIDS history away from the coasts to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, this impressive book uncovers how homonormative political strategies weaponized the AIDS crisis to fuel gentrification. During the height of the epidemic, white gay activists and politicians pursued social acceptance by assimilating to Midwestern cultural values. This approach, Dr. René Esparza argues in From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS (UNC Press, 2025), diluted radical facets of LGBTQ activism, rejected a politics of sexual dissidence, severed ties with communities of color, and ushered in the destruction of vibrant queer spaces.
Drawing from archival research, oral histories, and urban studies from the 1970s through the 1990s, Dr. Esparza illustrates how the onset of the AIDS epidemic provided a pretext for further criminalization of perceived sexual deviance, targeting sex workers, “promiscuous” gay men, and transgender women. More than the criminalization of people and behaviors, this time period also saw increased targeting of urban venues such as bathhouses, adult bookstores, and public parks where casual, anonymous encounters occurred. Cleansing the city of land uses that undermined gentrification became a protective measure against AIDS, and the most marginalized bore the brunt of the ensuing surveillance and displacement. From Vice to Nice illuminates how, despite purporting seemingly progressive values, LGBTQ Midwestern politics of conformity leveraged the AIDS crisis to further instigate racial and sexual exclusion and fundamentally alter the urban landscape.

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Caitlin Wiesner, "Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime" (U Pennsylvania, 2025)

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Beginning in the 1970s, a series of government agencies established to carry out the federal “war on crime” offered financial and ideological support to the fledgling feminist movement against sexual violence. These entities promoted the carceral tactics of policing, prosecution, and punishment as the only viable means of controlling rape, and they expected anti-rape organizers to embrace them. Yet Black women anti-rape organizers viewed police as a source of violence within their communities, not a solution to it.

Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism amid the War on Crime (U Pennsylvania, 2025) examines how Black anti-rape organizers critically engaged both the feminist movement against sexual violence and the federal War on Crime between 1974 and 1994. In Philadelphia, Washington, DC, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and Atlanta, activists inflected Black women’s longstanding tradition of community-based caring labor with the Black feminist condemnation of patriarchal and state violence. Their multifaceted and adaptable brand of anti-rape advocacy was premised on sustaining the survival of Black women and girls individually and Black communities more broadly. In this way, Black anti-rape activists countered the growing emphasis within the feminist movement on controlling rape through carceral collaborations. They acted subversively, redirecting state funds and state-funded research premised on rape control to projects that offered care to Black victims. In public education, social welfare, and public health, they instituted preventative education and emotional healing as modes of justice. At times, they outspokenly resisted carceral legislation that displaced their caring labor with punitive programs of rape control.

Spotlighting Black anti-rape organizers’ enduring commitment to care work shows that the cooptation of the feminist movement against sexual violence by law enforcement entities was never total. Between the Street and the State deepens our historical understanding of Black women’s tradition of anti-rape activism by attending to how their tactics shifted in response to the political realignments of the post–civil rights era.

Guest: Caitlin Wiesner is an assistant professor of history at Mercy University who specializes in the history of gender, sexuality, race and crime control policy in the 20th century United States. She is also the author of “The War on Crime and the War on Rape: The LEAA and Philadelphia WOAR, 1974-1984," which appeared in the journal, Modern American History, in March 2024, as well as numerous book chapters and reviews. When she is not writing or in the classroom, Dr. Wiesner enjoys cooking (and eating) new foods and exploring the natural and historic wonders of her native New Jersey.

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Michael D. Dwyer, "Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of Hollywood's role in the shaping of the Rust Belt in the United States. During the 1970s and 1980s, filmic representations of shuttered auto plants, furloughed millworkers, and decaying downtowns in the industrial heartland contributed to pervasive narratives of American malaise and decline--informing the wider cultural view of these cities and their people. Author Michael D. Dwyer (Arcadia University) untangles the complicated relationship between Hollywood and the Rust Belt, exploring how the sociocultural image of the region has become a tool to tell stories about America's mythic past, degraded present, and potential futures.
Dwyer offers a reading in twofold: through the conventional lens of film and cultural studies, and through an interdisciplinary lens that pulls in elements of cultural geography and urban studies to understand the ways in which Americans learned to interpret the cities and towns of the industrial Midwest. Each chapter spotlights a different Rust Belt city--Johnstown, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit--and considers how films and filmmaking processes helped shape audiences' cultural understanding of those cities. Over the course of the book, Dwyer also examines several films which offer notable representations of the Rust Belt, including Slap Shot, The Blues Brothers, Major League, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and It Follows. Finally, the volume highlights how in more recent years, cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland have all attempted to remake their public image and revitalize their economies through film and media production.

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Benjamin Schneider, "The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution" (Island Press, 2025)

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution (Island Press, 2025), Benjamin Schneider argues that American city-building is a lost art. U.S. cities used to constantly evolve, experimenting with new urban designs and ambitious infrastructure projects, from railroads and subways to public housing and shopping malls. But in recent years, the country has continued pursuing the same mid-20th century urban development plans—freeways, downtown office towers, suburban housing developments. The Unfinished Metropolis covers how this pattern is why Americans are so dependent on their cars, why housing is so expensive and homelessness is at crisis levels, and why downtowns are struggling and communities are fraying.

Over the course of an engaging tour of the built environment, Schneider explores common urban designs that shape our lives and color our cultural imagination: office parks, apartments, single family homes, and transit systems. He explains how these forms came to be, why they no longer function as promised, and introduces readers to the advocates and professionals around the country who are working on transformative new solutions.

Benjamin Schneider is a freelance journalist covering all things urbanism. His work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, MIT Technology Review, Slate, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He also writes a Substack newsletter called, “The Urban Condition.”

This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo, an urbanist who has worked as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor to the City of Chicago.

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James Sears, "Queering Rehoboth Beach: Beyond the Boardwalk" (Temple UP, 2024)

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

“Create A More Positive Rehoboth” was a decades-long goal for progress and inclusiveness in a charming beach town in southern Delaware. Rehoboth, which was established in the 19th century as a Methodist Church meeting camp, has, over time, become a thriving mecca for the LGBTQ+ community. In Queering Rehoboth Beach: Beyond the Boardwalk (Temple UP, 2024), historian and educator Dr. James Sears charts this significant evolution.

Dr. Sears draws upon extensive oral history accounts, archival material, and personal narratives to chronicle the "Battle for Rehoboth,” which unfolded in the late 20th century, as conservative town leaders and homeowners opposed progressive entrepreneurs and gay activists. He recounts not just the emergence of the gay and lesbian bars, dance clubs, and organizations that drew the queer community to the region, but also the efforts of local politicians and homeowners, among other groups who fought to develop and protect the traditional identity of this beach town. Moreover, issues of race, class, and gender and sexuality informed opinions as residents and visitors struggled with the AIDS crisis and the legacy of Jim Crow.

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David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom.

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash.

Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.

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Sylvia D. Hoffert, "Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town (University of Georgia Press, 2025), Dr. Sylvia Hoffert calls on a particularly rich collection of primary sources, including diaries, letters, oral histories, census data, court documents, church records, and psychiatric hospital logs, all relating to Hillsborough, North Carolina, to argue that gossip and rumor were central to the formation of interpersonal relationships and an integral part of small-town life in the antebellum South. They exposed the insecurities and anxieties of the town’s inhabitants. Indeed, they served as important weapons in the power struggle between the white slaveholding elite—who tried to exert, maintain, and consolidate their control over community life—and the Black, white, and mixed-race men and women, free and enslaved, who did their best to challenge the socioeconomic status quo. And they exposed fissures in the social fabric that discretion, good manners, and historical amnesia could not obscure.

The result was that, on a day-to-day basis, the shady streets of Hillsborough may have seemed peaceful to the casual observer. But underneath all that tranquility, the town was ripe with competition and conflict as the inhabitants used gossip to negotiate relationships with their neighbors and make places for themselves in the social, economic, and political hierarchy of the community.

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Gloria Browne-Marshall, "A Protest History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2026)

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Exploring 500 years of protest and resistance in US history—and how its force is foundational and can empower us to navigate our chaotic world

In this timely new book in Beacon’s successful ReVisioning History series, professor Gloria Browne-Marshall delves into the history of protest movements and rebellion in the United States. Beginning with Indigenous peoples’ resistance to European colonization and continuing through to today’s climate change demonstrations, Browne-Marshall sheds light on known and forgotten movements and their unsung leaders, revealing how protest has shaped our nation and remains a vital force for change today.

Drawing upon legal documents, archival material, memoir, government documents and secondary sources, A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2026) gives voice to those who pushed back against the mistreatment of others, themselves, and in some instances planet Earth. Browne-Marshall highlights stories of individuals from all walks of life, backgrounds, and time periods who helped bring strong attention to their causes. Those stories include those of:

Wahunsenacock, more commonly known to history as Chief Powhatan, who took on English invaders in pre-colonial America in 1607;
legendary boxer Muhammad Ali who refused to be inducted into the US military during the Vietnam era and appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court;
and David Buckel, LGBTQ+ rights lawyer and environmental activist who protested against fossil fuels by committing self-immolation in 2018.

Regardless of whether these protests accomplished their end goals, Browne-Marshall reminds us that dissent is always meaningful and impactful. In fact, reading this book is an act of protest.

Find Professor Gloria J. Browne-Marshall at her website and on Instagram.

And find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack where she and Gloria continued their conversation.

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José Blanco F. and Raúl J. Vázquez-López, "Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico: Taínos to Beauty Queens" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Analyzing dress, costume, and fashion in Puerto Rico, Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico: Taínos to Beauty Queens (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. José Blanco F. & Raúl J. Vázquez-López utilizes case studies that explore national identity and nation formation as well as past and current practices in Puerto Rican visual culture.
As the last Spanish-speaking colony with an ever-growing diaspora, Puerto Rico presents a unique opportunity to study national identity and nation formation through dress and fashion. In Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico, José Blanco F. and Raúl J. Vázquez-López combine new material and previously published essays that review diverse aspects of visual culture in Puerto Rico.
The book is divided into three sections that define and redefine the terms "dress", "costume", and "fashion" through case studies that include the resurgence of native Taíno imagery, the Young Lords' resistance through dress, the iconic Jíbaro peasants, festival and dance costumes, and the fashion of Puerto Rican Miss Universe contestants.

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Gwyneth Mellinger, "Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

“When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a debate over journalism standards. Many white southern editors, for instance, designated Black Americans as “Negro” in news stories, claiming it was necessary for accuracy and “objectivity,” even as white subjects went unlabeled. These news professionals disparaged media outlets that did not adhere to these norms, such as the Black press. In this way, the southern white press weaponized journalism standards—and particularly the idea of objectivity—to counter and discredit reporting that challenged white supremacy.

Through deep engagement with letters and other materials in numerous archives from editors, journalists, and leaders of newswire services, Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)interrogates and exposes how the white southern press used journalism standards as a professional rationalization for white supremacy and a political strategy to resist desegregation. Gwyneth Mellinger argues that white skin privilege gave these news professionals a stake in the racial status quo and was thus a conflict of interest as they defended Jim Crow. Her study includes an examination of the Southern Education Reporting Service, an objectivity project whose impartiality, she contends, instead affirmed systemic racism. In a pointed counternarrative, Mellinger highlights Black editors and academics who long criticized the supposed objectivity of the press and were consequently marginalized and often dismissed as illegitimate, fanciful, and even paranoid.

Elegant and incisive, Racializing Objectivity unequivocally demonstrates that a full telling of twentieth-century press history must reckon with the white southern press’s cooptation of objectivity and other professional standards to skew racial narratives about Black Americans, the freedom struggle, and democracy itself.”

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Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The City and the Hospital (Chicago 2023) focuses on an urban paradox: American hospitals are imagined as sites of healing and care, and yet the people who live and work in nearby neighborhoods have some of the worst health outcomes in the nation. One part urban sociology and one part policy analysis, this book reports insights from a collaborative research team that investigated three sites (Hartford, Cleveland, Aurora, CO) and conducted more than two hundred interviews for this study. The book explores how collective memory operates, how “anchor institutions” connect with the people living in their midst, and the very meaning of “community” itself. Theoretically rich and empirically insightful, the book will be of interest to scholars, scientists, advocates, and administrators in medical setting and in any powerful organization (universities, museums) that may inadvertently cause harm to those nearest to them in their efforts to do good.

email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Jonathan S. Jones, "Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis" (UNC Press, 2025)

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, thousands of ailing soldiers became addicted, or “enslaved,” as nineteenth-century Americans phrased it. Veterans, their families, and communities struggled to cope with addiction’s health and social consequences. Medical and government authorities compounded veterans' suffering and imbued the epidemic with cultural meaning by branding addiction as a matter of moral weakness, unmanliness, or mental infirmity. Framing addiction as “opium slavery” limited the efficacy of care and left many veterans to suffer needlessly for decades after the war ended.

Drawing from veterans' firsthand accounts as well as mental asylum and hospital records, government and medical reports, newspaper coverage of addiction, and advertisements, in Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis (UNC Press, 2025) Dr. Jonathan S. Jones unearths the poorly understood stories of opiate-addicted Civil War veterans in unflinching detail, illuminating the war’s traumatic legacies. In doing so, Jones provides critical historical context for the modern opioid crisis, which bears tragic resemblance to that of the post–Civil War era.

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Julia Wagner, "Hester Street" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Joan Micklin Silver's groundbreaking debut feature film, Hester Street (1975), vividly portrays the immigrant experience through the eyes of Gitl (Carol Kane), a young, Orthodox Jewish woman who arrives in New York City from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Reunited with her already-assimilated husband, Gitl finds they now have little in common and she is forced to adjust to a new way of life. Hester Street achieved international critical and commercial success, and Kane received a Best Actress nomination at the 1976 Academy Awards.

Marking the film's 50th anniversary, Dr. Julia Wagner's landmark book Hester Street (Bloomsbury, 2025) is the first to focus exclusively on Micklin Silver's film. Wagner examines how, despite the sexism and prejudice that Micklin Silver faced, a low-budget, black-and-white, female-led, independent production with Yiddish dialogue became an unexpected box-office hit. Through close analysis, Dr. Wagner highlights the importance of Hester Street as a milestone in cinema and affirms Micklin Silver's status as a unique voice in the history of American film-making.

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Brooke Barbier, "King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father (Harvard UP, 2023) is a rollicking portrait of the paradoxical patriot, whose measured pragmatism helped make American independence a reality.

Americans are surprisingly more familiar with his famous signature than with the man himself. In this spirited account of John Hancock's life, Brooke Barbier depicts a patriot of fascinating contradictions--a child of enormous privilege who would nevertheless become a voice of the common folk; a pillar of society uncomfortable with radicalism who yet was crucial to independence. About two-fifths of the American population held neutral or ambivalent views about the Revolution, and Hancock spoke for them and to them, bringing them along.

Orphaned young, Hancock was raised by his merchant uncle, whose business and vast wealth he inherited--including household slaves, whom Hancock later freed. By his early thirties, he was one of New England's most prominent politicians, earning a place on Britain's most-wanted list and the derisive nickname King Hancock. While he eventually joined the revolution against England, his ever moderate--and moderating--disposition would prove an asset after 1776. Barbier shows Hancock appealing to southerners and northerners, Federalists and Anti-Federalists. He was a famously steadying force as president of the fractious Second Continental Congress. He parlayed with French military officials, strengthening a key alliance with his hospitable diplomacy. As governor of Massachusetts, Hancock convinced its delegates to vote for the federal Constitution and calmed the fallout from the shocking Shays's Rebellion.

An insightful study of leadership in the revolutionary era, King Hancock traces a moment when passion was on the side of compromise and accommodation proved the basis of profound social and political change.

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Michael McCulloch, "Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers’ Houses in Early Twentieth-Century Detroit" (Temple UP, 2023)

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The dream of the modern worker’s house emerged in early twentieth-century America as wage earners gained access to new, larger, and better-equipped dwellings. Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers’ Houses in Early Twentieth-Century Detroit (Temple UP, 2023) is a cogent history of the houses those workers dreamed of and labored for. Dr. Michael McCulloch chronicles the efforts of employers, government agencies, and the building industry who, along with workers themselves, produced an unprecedented boom in housing construction that peaked in the mid-1920s.

Through oral histories, letters, photographs, and period fiction, Dr. McCulloch traces wage earners’ agency in negotiating a new implicit social contract, one that rewarded hard work with upward mobility in modern houses. This promise reflected workers’ increased bargaining power but, at the same time, left them increasingly vulnerable to layoffs.

Building a Social Contract focuses on Detroit, the quintessential city of the era, where migrant workers came and were Americanized, and real estate agents and the speculative housebuilding industry thrived. The Motor City epitomized the struggle of Black workers in this period, who sought better lives through industrial labor but struggled to translate their wages into housing security amid racist segregation and violence. When Depression-era unemployment created an eviction crisis, the social contract unraveled, and workers rose up—at the polls and in the streets—to create a labor movement that reshaped American capitalism for decades.

Today, the lessons Dr. McCulloch provides from early twentieth-century Detroit are a necessary reminder that wages are not enough, and only working-class political power can secure affordable housing.

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Stefania Marghitu, "Teen TV" (Routledge, 2021)

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Stefania Marghitu's Teen TV (Routledge, 2021)explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ways in which television has embraced youth subcultures, tracing the shifts in American and global televisual and youth cultures. Organized chronologically, Teen TV starts with Baby Boomers and moves to Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z as a way to contextualize and discuss cultural and historical contexts of teen television and television audiences. The book examines a wide range of historical and contemporary programming: from the broadcast bottleneck, multi-channel era that included youth targeted spaces like MTV, the WB, and the CW, to the rise of streaming platforms and global crossovers. It covers the thematic concerns and narrative structure of the coming-of-age story, and the prevalent genres of teen TV, and milestones faced by teen characters. The book also includes interviews with creators and showrunners of hit network television teen series, including Degrassi's Linda Schulyer, and the costume designer that established a heightened turn in the significance of teen fashion on the small screen in Gossip Girl, Eric Daman.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Benjamin Balthaser, "Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left" (Verso Books, 2025)

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Since October 7, 2023, the world has witnessed a massive American Jewish uprising in support of Palestinian liberation. Through sit-ins in Congress or Grand Central Terminal, through petitions and marches, thousands of Jews have made it known the Israeli state is not acting in their name. This resistance did not come out of nowhere. Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left (Verso Books, 2025) returns us to its roots in the “red decade” of the 1930s and, from there, traces the history of American Jewish radicals and revolutionaries to the present day.
Benjamin Balthaser delves into radical Jewish novels and memoirs, as well as interviews with Jewish revolutionaries, to unearth a buried if nonetheless unbroken continuity between leftist Jewish Americans and the diasporic internationalism of today.
Covering more than just the politics of anti-Zionism, Citizens of the Whole World explores the Jewish revolutionary traditions of Marxist internationalism, Jewish solidarity with Third World struggles, and relations between Jewish and Black radicals during the Civil Rights era.
Balthaser’s book stages an intervention into current anti-Zionist politics, suggesting activists can learn from past struggles to help form a future politics in a world after Zionism.

Benjamin Balthaser's critical and creative work explores the connections among radical U.S. social movements, racial and class formation, internationalism, and culture. He is the author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Radical Transnational Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and Dedication (Partisan Press, 2011). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as American Quarterly, Historical Materialism, Boston Review, Jacobin, Shofar and elsewhere. He is currently associate professor of multi-ethnic U.S. literature at Indiana University, South Bend, and associate editor of American Quarterly.

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Deborah Carr, "Aging in America" (U California Press, 2023)

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The aging of America will reshape how we live and will transform nearly every aspect of contemporary society. Renowned life course sociologist Deborah Carr provides a lively, nuanced, and timely portrait of aging in the United States. The US population is older than ever before, raising new challenges for families, caregivers, health care systems, and social programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Organized in seven chapters, Aging in America (U California Press, 2023) covers these topics:

the history of aging and the development of theoretical approaches
how cultural changes shape our views on aging
the demographic characteristics of older adults today
older adults' family lives and social relationships
the health of older adults and social disparities in who gets sick
how public policies affect the well-being of older adults and their families
how baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials will experience old age

Drawing on state-of-the-art data, current events, and pop culture, this portrait of an aging population challenges outdated myths and vividly shows how future cohorts of older adults will differ from the generations before them.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England.

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Chris Yogerst, "The Warner Brothers" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formation in the early twentieth century, the studio has been a constant presence in cinema history, responsible for the creation of acclaimed films, blockbuster brands, and iconic superstars.

In The Warner Brothers (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Chris Yogerst follows the siblings from their family's humble origins in Poland, through their young adulthood in the American Midwest, to the height of fame and fortune in Hollywood. With unwavering resolve, the brothers soldiered on against the backdrop of an America reeling from the aftereffects of domestic and global conflict. The Great Depression would not sink the brothers, who churned out competitive films that engaged audiences and kept their operations afloat―and even expanding. During World War II, they used their platform to push beyond the limits of the Production Code and create important films about real-world issues, openly criticizing radicalism and the evils of the Nazi regime. At every major cultural turning point in their lifetime, the Warners held a front-row seat. These days, the studio is best known as a media conglomerate with a broad range of intellectual property, spanning movies, TV shows, and streaming content. Despite popular interest in the origins of this empire, the core of the Warner Bros. saga cannot be found in its commercial successes. It is the story of four brothers―Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack―whose vision for Hollywood helped shape the world of entertainment as we know it.

Paying close attention to the brothers' identities as cultural and economic outsiders, Yogerst chronicles how the Warners built a global filmmaking powerhouse. Equal parts family history and cinematic journey, The Warner Brothers is an empowering story of the American dream and the legacy four brothers left behind for generations of filmmakers and film lovers to come.

Chris Yogerst is the author of Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures and From the Headlines to Hollywood: The Birth and Boom of Warner Bros. He appeared on the New Books Network to discuss the book in 2020. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of American Culture, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and the Hollywood Reporter. He currently serves as an associate professor of communication in the Department of Arts and Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University and an Associate Faculty member at University of Arizona Global Campus. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Sabrina Mittermeier, "Fan Phenomena: Disney" (Intellect Books, 2023)

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Sabrina Mittermeier's edited volume Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect Books, 2023) analyzes the fandom of Disney brands across a variety of media including film, television, novels, stage productions, and theme parks. It showcases fan engagement such as cosplay, fan art, and on social media, as well as the company’s reaction to it. Further, the volume deals with crucial issues—race and racism, the role of queerness, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the advent of the streaming service Disney+—within the Disney fandom and in Disney texts.

The authors come from a variety of disciplines including cultural and media studies, marketing and communications, cultural history, theater and performance studies, and more. In addition to interviews with fan practitioners, the essays feature both leading experts in fan and Disney studies alongside emerging voices in these fields. A vital new addition to the growing subdiscipline of fan studies, it will be popular with scholars of cultural studies, cultural history, and media studies.

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Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the urgency of this topic. Today we welcome philosopher Jake Monaghan to discuss his book, Just Policing (Oxford UP, 2023), which applies interdisciplinary insights to examine the morality of policing.

Though the injustices of our world seemingly require some kind of policing, the police are often sources of injustice themselves. But this is not always the result of intentionally or negligently bad policing. Sometimes it is an unavoidable result of the injustices that emerge from interactions with other social systems. This raises an important question of just policing: how should police respond to the injustices built into the system? Just Policing attempts an answer, offering a theory of just policing in non-ideal contexts.

Monaghan argues that police discretion is not only unavoidable, but in light of non-ideal circumstances, valuable. This claim conflicts with a widespread but inchoate view of just policing, the legalist view that finds justice in faithful enforcement of the criminal code.

But the criminal code leaves policing seriously underdetermined; full enforcement is neither possible nor desirable. Police need an alternative normative framework for evaluating and guiding their exercise of power.

Just Policing critiques popular approaches to police abolitionism while defending normative limits on police power. The book offers a defense of police discretion against common objections and evaluates controversial issues in order maintenance, such as the policing of "vice" and homelessness, democratic control over policing, community policing initiatives, police collaborations and alternatives like mental health response teams, and possibilities for structural reform.

Jake Monaghan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. His research is primarily in moral and political philosophy.

He is interviewed by Tom McInerney, an international lawyer, scholar, and strategist, who has worked to advance rule of law and development internationally for 25 years. He has taught in the Rule of Law for Development Program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law since 2011. He writes the Rights, Regulation and Rule of Law newsletter on Substack.

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Jonathan Eig, "King: A Life" (FSG, 2023)

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life (FSG, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.--and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family's origins as well as MLK's complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father--as well as the nation's most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history's greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

Jonathan Eig is a former senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including two highly acclaimed bestsellers, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. Visit him at JonathanEig.com.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Philip Rocco, "Counting Like a State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 US Census" (UP Kansas, 2025)

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Marquette University Political Scientist Phil Rocco has a new book focusing on the 2020 U.S. Census and how the states, localities, and federal government all worked – at times well, at times not quite as well – to conduct the census. This is a fascinating exploration of federalism at work in the American system, with some states putting in place extensive mechanisms to help with the census, which is a national responsibility. Other states did far less; and the national government, which is constitutionally required to execute a census every ten years, approached the census with some controversial requirements, with the federal courts having to make decisions as to the constitutional validity of some of those requirements. Counting Like a State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 U.S. Census (UP Kansas, 2025) explores this particular census as a kind of case study. The 2020 census was tricky on a number of fronts, not the least because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and because of the Trump Administration’s approach to the census itself. Rocco goes through the various approaches to the census as a national undertaking, searching for understandings of how the process actually worked and where there were positive and negative engagements with the process.

As a scholar of federalism, data science, and public policy, Rocco was intrigued by what he found in terms of cooperation on the state level, especially in places like California. The research also highlights various levels of mistrust of government entities and institutions, which makes the census process more difficult and potentially inaccurate because individuals are skeptical about completing the census forms. Because the census is required by law and regulation, it has a number of statutory deadlines, and in 2020, the Covid pandemic shattered the expected and legally compelled timeline for the reporting of results. This is another important aspect of this particular census that Rocco examines in order to assess how states and the national government tried to manage a rather unique process in 2020.

Counting Like A State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 U.S. Census examines not only the 2020 census but also sketches out the history of the census process in the United States so as to provide context for the most recent census and the processes that were implemented across the board. This is a very interesting exploration of how the federal government works, especially in context of federalism and unanticipated constraints.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022) and The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Christina Cecelia Davidson, "Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation" (Duke UP, 2024)

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

H. C. C. Astwood: minister and missionary, diplomat and politician, enigma in the annals of US history. In Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation (Duke UP, 2024), Christina Cecelia Davidson explores Astwood’s extraordinary and complicated life and career. Born in 1844 in the British Caribbean, Astwood later moved to Reconstruction-era New Orleans, where he became a Republican activist and preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. In 1882 he became the first Black man named US consul to the Dominican Republic. Davidson tracks the challenges that Astwood faced as a Black politician in an era of rampant racism and ongoing cross-border debates over Black men’s capacity for citizenship. As a US representative and AME missionary, Astwood epitomized Black masculine respectability. But as Davidson shows, Astwood became a duplicitous, scheming figure who used deception and engaged in racist moral politics to command authority. His methods, Davidson demonstrates, show a bleaker side of Black international politics and illustrate the varied contours of transnational moral discourse as people of all colors vied for power during the ongoing debate over Black rights in Santo Domingo and beyond.

Kiana M. Knight is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Kiana’s Webpage

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Renata Keller, "The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for postwar domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground--a standard account that obscures the shock waves that reverberated throughout Latin America. The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War (UNC Press, 2025), as the first hemispheric examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis, shows how leaders and ordinary citizens throughout the region experienced it, revealing that, had the missiles been activated, millions of people across Latin America would have been at grave risk. Traversing the region from the Southern Cone to Central America, Renata Keller describes the deadly riots that shook Bolivia when news of the Cuban Missile Crisis broke, the naval quarantine that members of Argentina's armed forces formed around Cuba, the pro-Castro demonstrations organized by Nicaraguan students, and much more. Drawing on a vast array of archival sources from around the hemisphere and world, The Fate of the Americas demonstrates that even at the brink of destruction, Latin Americans played active roles in global politics and inter-American relations.

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Eric King, "A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon" (PM Press, 2025)

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A Clean Hell opens the doors of America’s most secretive prison and lets the reader step into the cell to experience all the horrors the Federal Bureau of Prisons tries to keep hidden underground.

The federal supermax ADX Florence is the most secure facility in the United States, a dungeon of isolation, sensory deprivation, and psychological disintegration. Here, cruelty isn’t accidental; it’s the design. Built in 1995, the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” was made to cage the so-called worst of the worst: bombers, gang leaders, political enemies, and anyone the government deems too rebellious, too inconvenient, or too visible.

Among them was antifascist prisoner Eric King, targeted for his politics, brutally tortured by the Bureau of Prisons, and ultimately entombed at ADX after beating a politically motivated federal prosecution. A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon (PM Press, 2025) is a searing firsthand account from inside the most repressive prison in the United States, a place built not for rehabilitation but for disappearance. It tells the story of Eric’s decade behind bars: the years of surveillance and retaliation, the years locked in solitary confinement, the reality of being known as a “race traitor,” and the daily acts of resistance that kept him—and others—alive.

More than just a firsthand survival story and exposé, this is a blistering indictment of the carceral state and the sanitized violence it tries to hide. A Clean Hell is a crucial document of solidarity and struggle inside the belly of the beast and required reading for anyone concerned with mass incarceration, political repression, or the inhumane architecture of the US prison system.

Guest: Eric King is an anarchist who was imprisoned in 2014 for acts of solidarity with the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising. During his time in prison, which included almost two years in Federal Supermax, or ADX, Eric coedited the political prisoner anthology, Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners, published by AK Press, and wrote many other essays about his experiences in prison. In addition to his writing, Eric is also an activist, antifascist, and loving father and husband.

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Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest stars, wrote scores of plays, and toured the United States and England, but he never became a household name. Inspired by this average performer’s life and labor, An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Amy Hughes offers an alternative history of nineteenth-century theater, focusing on the daily rhythms and routines of theatrical life rather than the celebrated people, plays, and exceptional events that tend to dominate histories of US theater and performance. In the process, Dr. Hughes asks uncomfortable questions about the existence, predominance, and erasure of White male mediocrity in US culture, both in the past and present.

When historians focus only on performers and plays with artistic “merit,” what communities, perspectives, and cultural trends remain invisible? How did men like Watkins advance themselves professionally, despite their mediocrity? Why did men like Watkins embrace and perpetuate myths like the American Dream, the “self-made man,” and meritocracy, and how have these ideals shaped casting, producing, and celebrity worship in today’s US entertainment industry?

Ultimately, Dr. Hughes reveals how this actor’s tale illuminates the widespread tendency to ignore, deny, and forgive White male mediocrity in US culture, and how a deeper understanding of people like Watkins can transform our understanding of the past—and our understanding of ourselves.

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Jim Cullen, "1980: America's Pivotal Year" (Rutgers UP, 2022)

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching.

1980: America's Pivotal Year (Rutgers UP, 2022) puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot JR, cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s.

Jim Cullen is the author of numerous books, including The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Those Were the Days: Why ‘All in the Family’ Still Matters, and From Memory to History: Television Versions of the Twentieth Century. He teaches history at the newly-founded upper division of Greenwich Country Day School.

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

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Julie Dobrow, "Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage" (NYU Press, 2025)

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Like any set of star-crossed lovers, Elaine and Charles came from different worlds. Elaine, an acclaimed childhood poet from a remote corner of the Massachusetts Berkshires, traveled to the Dakota Territories to teach Native American students, undaunted by society’s admonitions. Charles, a Dakota Sioux from Minnesota, educated at Dartmouth and Boston University Medical School, was considered by his Euro-American mentors the epitome of an assimilated Indian. But when they met just ahead of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, the magnetic pull of love brought them together despite the tremendous odds stacked against them.
Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Julie Dobrow offers a dual biography of Elaine Goodale and Ohíye’Sa, (Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman), exploring their individual lives as well as their highly publicized interracial marriage. Both well-known in their own time– Elaine as a poet, journalist, and advocate for Indian education and Charles as writer, public speaker, and ardent activist for Indian rights– their marriage started with a shared vision to work on behalf of Indians. In the face of extreme prejudice, financial burden, and personal tragedy however, the marriage began to unravel.
Dr. Dobrow paints an intimate, emotional portrait of the Eastmans’ lives drawn from Elaine and Charles’s letters, papers, and hundreds of accounts of the Eastmans’ lives from newspapers. Along the way, she skillfully illuminates the shifting late 19th and early 20th century definitions of Indigenous identity, and reveals how the Eastmans’ legacies reflect changing American attitudes toward gender, interracial relationships and biracial children. The result is a compelling new history that weds the private and the political, and Native America and the United States of America– entwined yet separated, inextricable yet never fully joined, just like Elaine and Charles themselves.

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Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, "Videotape" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War.
In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new forms of socialization and economic exchanges, while announcing the gradual crumbling of government control over the imagination of the people.
By the mid-1990s, the VHS format was displaced by the DVD. The DVD would eventually give way to streaming. As explored in Videotape (Bloomsbury, 2025), by Dr. Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy in the Object Lessons series, the cultural legacy of the videotape continues to inform our relationship to technology, privacy, and to entertainment.

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John Bodnar, "Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11" (UNC Press, 2021)

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

September 11th, 2001 marked the beginning of the so-called war on terror, but the attacks of that day also re-ignited battles over the nature of American patriotism. In Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11 (UNC Press, 2021), Professor John Bodnar argues that the nature of patriotism as being war-based or empathetic divided the nation as much as the responses to the 9/11 attacks. Using a variety of public media and private correspondence, Dr. Bodnar explores the different ways Americans tried to understand and remember 9/11, their disagreements over government responses to it, and how patriotism itself was also part of the debate. Dr. Bodnar shows how people on all the various sides to national security debates used patriotism as a motivating factor for their positions. Divided by Terrorshows how patriotism and how it is to be practiced was contested and fought over as much as the policies that it inspired.

Dr. Bodnar is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University. He is the author of 8 academic books in addition to numerous journal articles.

You can find a transcript here.

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Can America Still Lead? Foreign Policy in an Age of Division with Joel Rubin

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What happens when America loses its foreign-policy playbook? RBI acting director Eli Karetny talks with veteran diplomat and policy strategist Joel Rubin about the vacuum of strategic vision shaping U.S. decisions from Venezuela to Ukraine to Gaza. Rubin pulls back the curtain on factional battles inside both parties, the dangers of politicizing diplomacy, and why rebuilding a bipartisan foreign-policy consensus may be critical for American leadership in a volatile world.

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Yanqiu Zheng, "In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What does it mean for a country to seek admiration — and what kinds of institutions try to make that admiration possible?

Yanqiu Zheng’s In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974 (U Michigan Press, 2024) traces how China attempted to reshape its international image across a century marked by imperialism, political upheaval, civil war, and Cold War realignments. Beginning in the late Qing, when China’s reputation was battered by foreign domination, Yanqiu examines the painstaking emergence of cultural diplomacy as a long-term pedagogical project, one that sought to teach America about China through art, opera, exhibitions, lectures, and even reconstructed rickshaws. Drawing on archives in the United States, Taiwan, and mainland China, Zheng reconstructs how institutions such as the China Institution navigated competing agendas, the often-chaotic world of philanthropy, and geopolitical crises to present China on a global stage.

Throughout, In Search of Admiration and Respect asks questions that are still relevant today: How do countries cultivate cultural authority? What happens when narratives of refinement collide with Orientalist imaginaries? And how to institutions such as government ministries, nonprofits, and museums shape the ways nations hope to be seen?

This book will interest readers of modern Chinese history, U.S.–China relations, museum and exhibition history, and anyone curious about how culture intertwines with politics of the global stage.

Listeners of the episode might also want to check out an article that Yanqiu mentions over the course of our conversation: "Chinese Tofu in Cold War Taiwan: Gendered Cosmopolitanism and Contested Chineseness," available here.

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Simon Appleford, "Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America" (U Virginia Press, 2023)

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America (U Virginia Press, 2023) is the first book-length critical examination of the political and social impact of the political cartoonist Herbert Block--popularly known as Herblock. Working for the Washington Post, Herblock played a central role in shaping, propagandizing, and defending the ideals of postwar liberalism, a normative set of values and assumptions that dominated American politics and culture after World War II.

Best remembered for his unrelenting opposition to and skewering cartoons of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, Herblock introduced the term "McCarthyism" into the American political lexicon. With its unstinting and unapologetic support for the liberal agenda, across a career spanning over fifty years at the Post, Herblock's work affords a unique lens through which to interpret and understand the shifts and contours of twentieth-century American political culture, from the postwar period through the civil rights era into the Nixon presidency.

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Ana Patricia Rodríguez, "Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area" (University of Arizona Press, 2025)

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community. In this episode, we sit down with Ana Patricia Rodríguez, author of Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area (U Arizona Press, 2025). In In Avocado Dreams, Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area. Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñidades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region.
This timely and relevant work not only enriches our understanding of Salvadoran diasporic experiences but also contributes significantly to broader discussions on migration, identity, and cultural production in the United States.

This interview was conducted by Mary Reynolds, publicity manager for the University of Arizona Press. Her book, The Quake That Drained the Desert (forthcoming in 2026) investigates the 1887 borderlands earthquake that changed surface water and groundwater in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.

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160* Hannah Arendt's Refugee Politics (JP)

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

John's “Arendt's Refugee Politics ” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt is an opponent both of identity politics and also of a cosmpolitan universalism that is blind to all the differences (of race, gender, belief) that make us who though not what we are. Going back to one of the first pieces she published in English, a 1943 essay from Menorah called "We Refugees", he reflected on how amazingly Arendt was able to air her unease about militant Zionism at the same time she warned fellow arrivals in America from rushing to disguise their origins.

Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and a read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.

Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off!

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Karen Auman, "The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores some of Georgia’s earliest settlers, the Salzburgers.

Georgia, the last of Britain’s American mainland colonies, began with high aspirations to create a morally sound society based on small family farms with no enslaved workers. But those goals were not realized, and Georgia became a slave plantation society, following the Carolina model. This trajectory of failure is well known. But looking at the Salzburgers, who emigrated from Europe as part of the original plan, provides a very different story.

The Good Forest reveals the experiences of the Salzburger migrants who came to Georgia with the support of British and German philanthropy, where they achieved self-sufficiency in the Ebenezer settlement while following the Trustees’ plans. Because their settlement comprised a significant portion of Georgia’s early population, their experiences provide a corrective to our understanding of early Georgia and help reveal the possibilities in Atlantic colonization as they built a cohesive community.

The relative success of the Ebenezer settlement, furthermore, challenges the inherent environmental, cultural, and economic determinism that has dominated Georgia history. That well-worn narrative often implies (or even explicitly states) that only a slave-based plantation economy—as implemented after the Trustee era—could succeed. With this history, Auman illuminates the interwoven themes of Atlantic migrations, colonization, charity, and transatlantic religious networks.

Guest: Dr. Karen Auman is an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University and a certified genealogist. She studies Germans during the colonial period in the Atlantic World, religion on the frontiers of America, migrations, and families.

Host: Lucy Smith Biemiller is an intended M.A. History student at the University of Georgia. She studies 18th and 19th material culture in the American South primarily as it relates to classical culture.

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Nicholas Buccola, "One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.'s decade-long clash over the meaning of freedom--and how their conflicting visions still divide American politics

In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history--and still divide American politics. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of "freedom now," insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people--regardless of race--were empowered politically, economically, and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of "extremism in defense of liberty," advocating radical individualism. In One Man's Freedom, Nicholas Buccola tells the compelling story of Goldwater and King's dramatic decade-long debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal.

Part dual biography, part history, One Man's Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal (Princeton UP, 2025) traces the actions and words of Goldwater and King over a crucial and eventful decade, from their dizzying rise through 1964, which ended with Goldwater's landslide defeat in the presidential election and King's Nobel Peace Prize. The book chronicles why Goldwater and King, who never met in person, came to view each other as perhaps the greatest threat to freedom in America. It explains how their ideas of freedom could be so vastly different, yet both so deeply rooted in American history and their times. And it shows how their disagreement continues to shape and explain politics today, when the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats often come down to the question of what kind of freedom Americans want--the one defined by Goldwater or by King?

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Tim Seiter, "Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios" (U Texas Press, 2025)

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A richly detailed history of daily life for colonial Spanish soldiers surviving on the eighteenth-century Texas Gulf Coast.

In 1775, Spanish King Carlos III ordered the capture of American pelicans for his wildlife park in Madrid. The command went to the only Spanish fort on the Texas coast—Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía in present-day Goliad. But the overworked soldiers stationed at the fort had little interest indulging a king an ocean away. Their days were consumed with guarding their community against powerful Indigenous peoples and managing the demands of frontier life. The royal order went ignored.

Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios (U Texas Press, 2025) brings to life the world of Presidio La Bahía’s Hispano soldiers, whose duties ranged from heated warfare to high-stakes diplomacy, while their leisure pursuits included courtship, card playing, and cockfighting. It highlights the lives of presidio women and reveals the ways the Spanish legal system was used by and against the soldiers as they continually negotiated their roles within the empire and their community. Although they were agents of the Spanish crown, soldiers at times defied their king and even their captain as they found ways to assert their autonomy. Offering a fresh perspective on colonial Texas, Wrangling Pelicans recreates the complexities of life at the empire’s edge, where survival mattered more than royal decrees.

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Heath Pearson, "Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town" (Duke UP, 2024)

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town (Duke UP, 2024), Heath Pearson showcases dynamic, interdependent community as the best hope for undoing the systems of confinement that reproduce capital in Cumberland County, New Jersey—a place that is home to three state prisons, one federal prison, and the regional jail. Pearson places today’s prisons within the region’s longer history of Lenape genocide, chattel slavery, Japanese American labor camps, and other forms of racialized punishment and carceral control. From this vantage, prisons appear not as the structural fix for the region’s failed political economy but as a continuation of the carceral principle that has always sustained it. This ongoing use of confinement, though, is merely the backdrop. Through ethnographic vignettes written in story form, Pearson offers an alternative history of the unruly and unexpected ways that people resist, get by, make money, find joy, and build radical social life in the small, unseen spaces beside large-scale confinement. As such, Pearson enriches our understanding of daily life in and around prisons—in any American community—while providing a kaleidoscope of possibilities for theorizing and organizing alternative paths.

Heath Pearson is Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University.

Alize Arıcan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican

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Vanessa S. Williamson, "The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History" (Basic Books, 2025)

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Americans have always fought over the meaning of freedom and equality. What is not commonly recognized is that the battles most pivotal in defining our democracy, from the framing of the Constitution to the decades-long backlash to the civil rights movement, hinged on one issue—taxes.
In The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History (Basic Books, 2025), Vanessa S. Williamson challenges the myth that Americans are instinctively anti-tax, revealing that fights over taxes have always been proxies for deeper conflicts over who is included in “We the People.” Poorer people have repeatedly built movements that sought to tax all Americans to create a more equal and democratic nation. Wealthy people have responded by constraining the power to tax and stifling democracy through voting restrictions, gerrymandering, and violence. Yet as hard as anti-tax crusaders have fought to create an America that redistributes not from rich to poor, but from non-white people to rich white people, the battle rages on.
The Price of Democracy uncovers how fights for fiscal fairness have defined American history, delivering a powerful message to the present: that taxes are the public’s most powerful weapon in the fight for a real democracy.

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Michelle McSweeney, "OK" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK (Bloomsbury, 2023), by Dr. Michelle McSweeney and published by Bloomsbury in 2023, explores this story

OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for “all correct” when the steam-powered printing press pushed newspapers into the mainstream. Today it is spoken and written by nearly everyone in the world. Drawing on linguistics, history, and new media studies, Michelle McSweeney traces OK from its birth in the Penny Presses through telephone lines, grammar books, and television signals into the digital age.

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Doug MacCash, "Mardi Gras Beads" (Louisiana UP, 2022)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana’s iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads (2022) delves into the history of this celebrated New Orleans artifact, explaining how Mardi Gras beads came to be in the first place and how they grew to have such an outsize presence in New Orleans celebrations. It explores their origins before World War One through their ascent to the premier parade catchable by the Depression era. Doug MacCash explores the manufacture of Mardi Gras beads in places as far-flung as the Sudetenland, India, and Japan, and traces the shift away from glass beads to the modern, disposable plastic versions. Mardi Gras Beads concludes in the era of coronavirus, when parades (and therefore bead throwing) were temporarily suspended because of health concerns, and considers the future of biodegradable Mardi Gras beads in a city ever more threatened by the specter of climate change.

Doug MacCash covers New Orleans art and culture for NOLA.com, The Times- Picayune, and The New Orleans Advocate.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a PhD in Musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

Check out some of MacCash's other pertinent writings from NOLA.com here:

"Pretend Karens, marching traffic cones and French Quarter Fools: An amazing Monday before Mardi Gras"

"Biodegradable Mardi Gras beads might be rarest throw of 2022 - or ever"

"Mardi Gras flashback: Texas artist, 65, says she was first to bare breasts for beads at Carnival"

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research is about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival.

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Ethan W. Ris, "Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris argues in Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (U Chicago Press, 2022), the reform impulse is baked into American higher education, the result of generations of elite reformers who have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. When that reform is beneficial, offering major rewards for minor changes, colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile, attacking autonomy or values, they know how to resist it. The result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence.

In the early twentieth century, the “academic engineers,” a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but those efforts fell short, despite the wealth and power of their backers, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians is again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But, as Ris argues, top-down design is not destiny. Drawing on extensive and original archival research, Other People’s Colleges offers an account of higher education that sheds light on today’s reform agenda.

Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Student in Sociology of Education at the New York University.

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Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg as a Barnumesque purveyor of spectacle, Lester D. Friedman presents the filmmaker as a major artist who pairs an ongoing willingness to challenge himself with a widely recognized technical mastery.

This new edition of Citizen Spielberg (University of Illinois Press, 2022) expands Friedman’s original analysis to include films of the 2010s like Lincoln and Ready Player One. Breaking down the works by genre, Friedman looks at essential aspects of Spielberg’s art, from his storytelling concerns and worldview to the uncanny connection with audiences that has powered his longtime influence as a cultural force. Friedman's examination reveals a sustained artistic vision--a vision that shows no sign of exhausting itself or audiences after Spielberg's nearly fifty years as a high-profile filmmaker.

Incisive and discerning, Citizen Spielberg, Second Edition, offers a career-spanning appraisal of a moviemaking icon.

Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales [https://research.bangor.ac.uk/...(b8c6d91f-14c5-4862-8745-0f5d0e938a28).html]. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick [https://oxford.universitypress...]. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams

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Joe Allen, "The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS" (Haymarket Books, 2020)

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

If the 20th Century was the American Century, it was also UPS's Century. Joe Allen's The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS (‎Haymarket Books, 2020), tears down the Brown Wall surrounding one of America's most admired companies—the United Parcel Service (UPS). The company that we see everyday but know so little about. How did a company that began as a bicycle messenger service in Seattle, Washington become a global behemoth? How did it displace General Motors, the very symbol of American capitalism, to become the largest, private sector, unionized employer in the United States? And, at what cost to its workers and surrounding communities? Will it remain the Package King in the 21st Century or will be dethroned by Amazon?

Joe Allen worked for nearly a decade at UPS between its Watertown, Massachusetts and Chicago, Illinois Jefferson Street hubs. Allen's work life has largely involved different sections of freight and logistics including for such major employers as A.P.A Transport (Canton, Mass.), Yellow Freight (Maspeth, NY), and UPS. He has been a member of several Teamster local unions and a member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Christina Lane, "Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock" (Chicago Review Press, 2020)

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller, and a pioneer of female-centered suspense media at mid-century. Harrison remains best known as Alfred Hitchcock’s right-hand woman—that is, to the extent that she is known at all.

Christina Lane has written the first-ever book dedicated to the life and art of Joan Harrison, entitled Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago Review Press, February 2020). Born into a middle-class family in Surrey, Harrison took a secretarial job with Alfred Hitchcock as an aimless twenty-something, only to become a producer on films including Foreign Correspondent (1940), Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941). In the 1940s, Harrison branched out, building a solo career producing movies for RKO and Universal Studios, only to return to the Hitchcock fold to run TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962).

In this discussion, Lane shares how she uncovered this obscure history, placing this “phantom lady” at the center of her own story. She also discusses the trajectory of Harrison’s career and how she adapted her research for a broader readership.

Christina Lane is Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Miami and Edgar®-Award winning author of Phantom Lady: Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. She provides commentary for such outlets as the Daily Mail, CrimeReads and AirMail, and has been a featured guest speaker at the Film Forum, and on NPR and Turner Classic Movies.

Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms.

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Miranda S. Spivack, "Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back" (The New Press, 2025)

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize

A groundbreaking look at how ordinary people are fighting back against their local and state governments to keep their communities safe, by an award-winning journalist

Most Americans are likely to encounter the effects of government malfeasance or neglect close to home—from their governors, mayors, town councils, school boards, police, and prosecutors. In fact, deals shrouded in darkness are regularly made at the state and local levels, often the result of closed-door discussions between governments and industry without any scrutiny whatsoever from the public. Too often, as this groundbreaking new work of investigative reporting reveals, residents are intentionally kept on the outside, struggling to get information about significant issues affecting their communities—from car crashes and dirty drinking water, to failing safety gear—until the backroom deals are done and it’s too late to challenge them.

A work of riveting narrative nonfiction based on years of original reporting, Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back (The New Press, 2025) tells the story of five “accidental activists”—people from across the United States who started questioning why their local and state governments didn’t protect them from issues facing their communities and why there was a frightening lack of transparency surrounding the way these issues were resolved. The secret deals, lies, and corruption they uncover shake their faith in government but move them to action.

For readers of Chain of Title and Superman’s Not Coming, Spivack’s revealing take on a hidden dimension of American politics will outrage and educate anyone who cares about the forces shaping their own communities.

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Carolyn T. Adams et. al, "Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century" (Penn Press, 2025)

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Informed by current scholarship and richly illustrated with full-color photographs and maps, G reater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century (Penn Press, 2025) brings to the public an up-to-date, diverse history of Philadelphia across its many dimensions. Volume 1 adopts "Greater Philadelphia" to indicate a regional scope, but not one limited by a fixed geographical boundary. Instead, "Greater Philadelphia" refers to the interdependence between the city and its periphery across parts of three states: southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware. The Greater Philadelphia Region represents a collection of stories fundamental to the Philadelphia area's history and evolution based on the belief that regions work best when residents, divided in space but linked in multiple ways through social and economic connections, possess shared knowledge about the people and the places that surround them. Volume 2 begins with Philadelphia's role during the American Revolution, as the nation's first capital until 1800, and as home to one of the North's largest free African American communities in the antebellum period. From the Civil War to woman suffrage, from the Lenape people to the Gray Panthers, from Black Power to Occupy Philadelphia, the book chronicles the ongoing dynamics of citizenship and nationhood as they unfolded in the Philadelphia region from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Greater Philadelphia and the Nation demonstrates how Philadelphia, and its periphery across southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware, create, challenge, and sustain the nation. Volume 3 reveals the influence of empires and nations on Greater Philadelphia while also emphasizing the dynamic role the region and its people have played in shaping the modern world. Exploring the immigrants who peopled the Delaware Valley, the faiths they practiced, the environment they shaped, the wars they waged, and the global connections they forged, Greater Philadelphia and the World reveals a city and its surroundings that has been continually molded by its links to the Atlantic, the Americas, and the Pacific.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a PhD Candidate in History & African American Studies at UC-Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu

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David Kieran, "Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military's Mental Health Crisis" (NYU Press, 2019)

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The surprising story of the Army's efforts to combat PTSD and traumatic brain injury

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a tremendous toll on the mental health of our troops. In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama took to the Senate floor to tell his colleagues that "many of our injured soldiers are returning from Iraq with traumatic brain injury," which doctors were calling the "signature wound" of the Iraq War. Alarming stories of veterans taking their own lives raised a host of vital questions: Why hadn't the military been better prepared to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI)? Why were troops being denied care and sent back to Iraq? Why weren't the Army and the VA doing more to address these issues?

Drawing on previously unreleased documents and oral histories, David Kieran tells the broad and nuanced story of the Army's efforts to understand and address these issues, challenging the popular media view that the Iraq War was mismanaged by a callous military unwilling to address the human toll of the wars. The story of mental health during this war is the story of how different groups--soldiers, veterans and their families, anti-war politicians, researchers and clinicians, and military leaders--approached these issues from different perspectives and with different agendas. It is the story of how the advancement of medical knowledge moves at a different pace than the needs of an Army at war, and it is the story of how medical conditions intersect with larger political questions about militarism and foreign policy.

Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military's Mental Health Crisis (NYU Press, 2019) shows how PTSD, TBI, and suicide became the signature wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how they prompted change within the Army itself, and how mental health became a factor in the debates about the impact of these conflicts on US culture.

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David Garland, "Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The United States has long been an international outlier, with a powerful business class, a weak social state, and an exceptional gun culture. In Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (Princeton UP, 2025), David Garland shows how, after the 1960s, American-style capitalism disrupted poor communities and depleted social controls, giving rise to violence and social problems at levels altogether unknown in other affluent nations. Aggressive policing and punishment became the default response.
Garland shows that America lags behind comparable nations in protections for working people. He identifies the structural sources of America’s penal state and the community-level processes through which political economy impacts crime and policing. He argues that there is nothing paradoxical in America’s reliance on coercive state controls; the nation’s vaunted liberalism is largely an economic liberalism devoted to free markets and corporate power rather than to individual dignity and flourishing. Fear of violent crime and distrust of others ensure public support for this coercive Leviathan; racism enables indifference to its harms.
Interviewee: David Garland is the Arthur T Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University and an Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Caroline Jack, "Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what Caroline Jack calls “sponsored economic education media.” These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to “sell America to Americans,”
found their way into communities, classrooms, and workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of “free enterprise” under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant—a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Jack reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility—and, in the process, shut out other hierarchies of value and common care.

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Ronald Angelo Johnson, "Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation.

Ronald Angelo Johnson brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny.

The American Revolution occurred between two of the greatest achievements in diplomacy of the eighteenth century: the peace treaties at Paris in 1763 and 1783. In Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution (Cornell UP, 2025), Johnson draws on original multilingual sources to offer readers fresh, lively stories in a timely study. While modern understandings of freedom are often linked to the US Declaration of Independence, Johnson argues that the desire of Black Atlantic inhabitants for liberty and their will to resist slavery predated the fateful standoff between minutemen and redcoats at Lexington and Concord.

Entangled Alliances is a US history of the American Revolution, fusing the search for freedom by Black and white founders in the United States and Saint-Domingue into a coherent story of collective resistance during the most explosive twenty-year period of the eighteenth century.

You can find Dr. Ronald Angelo Johnson at the Baylor University website.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack where she and the author continued their conversation.

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Lars Cornelissen, "Neoliberalism and Race" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it.

Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History.

YouTube Channel: here

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Joseph P. Viteritti, "Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education and demands to desegregate public schools, race and class remain the most reliable predictors of educational achievement in America. In attempting to address this divide, many school reformers have championed school choice: solutions like charter schools, vouchers, and other innovations designed to build more options into the system. Today, at least thirty-five states have laws that enable parents to send their children to private and religious schools at public expense while forty-six states have legalized charter schools.

In Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Joseph P. Viteritti tells the definitive history of the school choice movement. In the 1990s, school choice emerged as an effort by a coalition of Black activists and conservative lawmakers seeking to offer economically disadvantaged students of color a way out of failing schools. As Viteritti shows, however, today's movement--championed by Republicans, conservatives, and faith-based organizations--has become less about placing disadvantaged children in better schools and more about providing public funding to students, irrespective of income, attending private--and frequently religious--schools.

Viteritti, an education insider and supporter of school choice for underserved students, profiles six influential figures, the "radical dreamers," who were integral to understanding the movement for greater education equality and the role that choice can play in fully realizing the movement's potential. Radical Dreamers urges us to have an honest conversation about education in America and where we have gone wrong. Viteritti's compelling narrative of how some of the most passionate educators conceived of school choice provides a valuable context to our nation's long struggle to offer every child in America a good education, and how that goal was undermined by advocates on both the left and right.

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Jason A. Higgins, "Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (University of Mass. Press, 2024), Dr. Jason Higgins examines the connections between the military and carceral system through the stories of those most knowledgeable about it: veterans who were incarcerated after their military service. Combining a thorough historical narrative with the oral histories of veterans who had been imprisoned after their return to civilian society, Dr. Higgins shows how the so-called war on drugs and war on crime intersect with the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Through this history he shows how government policies built on racism, ableism, and patriarchy contributed to many young Americans being pushed into the military, punished during their service, and then being kicked out with no access to any type of support which then leads them into the carceral system. Dr. Higgins also tells the story of how incarcerated veterans helped organize amongst themselves leading to Veterans Treatment Courts which have helped reduce the number of veterans going into prison and also show a model for non-punitive responses to crime.

Prisoners after War has been awarded the Oral History Association's book award for 2025. It is available open access: https://uplopen.com/books/m/35...

Jason Higgins is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing and Press and an Assistant Professor affiliated with the Virginia Tech University Library and the Department of History.

You can find a transcript of this interview here.

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Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to enslavement in his first nonfiction book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021). From Monticello plantation to Angola Prison to Galveston Island, Smith guides the reader on a journey as he visits domestic and abroad landmarks. In his exploration, he includes the reactions of the people he meets, like tourists, local public historians, and teachers, illuminating how these sites and all of us participate in remembering enslavement in contemporary America.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Shoshana Walter, "Rehab: An American Scandal" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis, and the malfeasance, corruption, and snake oil which blight the drug rehabilitation industry. Our country’s leaders all seem to agree: People who suffer from addiction need treatment. Today, more people have access to treatment than ever before. So why isn’t it working? The answer is that in America—where anyone can get addicted—only certain people get a real chance to recover. Despite record numbers of overdose deaths, our default response is still to punish, while rehabs across the United States fail to incorporate scientifically proven strategies and exploit patients. We’ve heard a great deal about the opioid crisis foisted on America by Big Pharma, but we’ve heard too little about the other half of this epidemic—the reason why so many remain mired in addiction. Until now. In this book, you’ll find the stories of four people who represent the failures of the rehab-industrial complex, and the ways our treatment system often prevents recovery. April is a black mom in Philadelphia, who witnessed firsthand how the government’s punitive response to the crack epidemic impeded her own mother’s recovery—and then her own. Chris, a young middle-class white man from Louisiana, received more opportunities in his addiction than April, including the chance to go to treatment instead of prison. Yet the only program the judge permitted was one that forced him to perform unpaid back-breaking labor at for-profit companies. Wendy is a mother from a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, whose son died in a sober living home. She began investigating for-profit treatment programs—yet law enforcement and regulators routinely ignored her warnings, allowing rehab patients to die, again and again. Larry is a surgeon who himself struggled with addiction, who would eventually become one of the first Suboxone prescribers in the nation, drawing the scrutiny of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Together, these four stories illustrate the pitfalls of a system that not only fails to meet the needs of people with addiction, but actively benefits from maintaining their lower status. They also offer insight into how we might fix that system and save lives.

More of Shoshana's work:

- Her reporting on hospital drug testing

- Her reporting on moms reported to child welfare authorities for taking medication-assisted treatment during pregnancy

- The American Rehab podcast

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released next year.

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David T. Beito, "FDR: A New Political Life" (Open Universe, 2025)

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

David Beito's new book brings to bear the latest historical scholarship to shed light on the life and achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Professor Beito traces the irresistible political rise of Roosevelt, a scion of inherited wealth who never posed as a man of the people but was always perceived as a genial aristocrat. As well as eyebrow-raising disclosures on FDR's private life, Beito's narrative brings out Roosevelt's ruthless opportunism, and his susceptibility to all the prejudicial views fashionable at the time, on race, sex, nationalism, and economics.

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Diane T. Feldman, "Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi (UP Mississippi, 2025) chronicles the profound history of a low-income county that became a pivotal site for Delta organizing during the civil rights movement. Landowning African American farmers, who enjoyed more economic independence than sharecroppers, emerged as the grassroots leaders of the movement.

The volume begins with the county’s Native American heritage, moving through the periods of removal, land sales to speculators, the rapid increase of enslaved labor in the nineteenth century, and early African American political engagement during Reconstruction. Author Diane T. Feldman explores how African Americans fostered cooperative landownership efforts in the 1880s and 1920s, alongside the development of schools and churches, particularly the Church of God in Christ, a denomination founded in Holmes County. The fight for voting rights started with African American farmers in the 1950s and gained momentum with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. Their struggle to desegregate schools culminated in the landmark Supreme Court case Alexander v. Holmes, which abolished dual school systems in the South.

The final chapters cover the past sixty years and current initiatives to restore food production in the Mississippi Delta. Enriched with recent and historic photographs, this volume serves as a microhistory of a single county, illuminating broader themes prevalent throughout Mississippi and the rural South.

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House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan’s first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also the chief architect of legislation that restored home rule to Washington, DC, and almost single-handedly ignited the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s.

Drawing on extensive archival research, including Diggs’s rarely seen personal papers, FBI documents, and original interviews with family members and political associates, political scientist Dr. Marion Orr reveals that Diggs practiced a politics of strategic moderation. Dr. Orr argues that this quiet approach was more effective than the militant race politics practiced by Adam Clayton Powell and more appealing than the conservative Chicago-style approach of William Dawson—two of Diggs’s better-known Black contemporaries. Vividly written and deeply researched, House of Diggs is the first biography of Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the most consequential Black federal legislators in US history. Congressman Diggs was a legislative lion whose unfortunate downfall punctuated his distinguished career and pushed him and his historic accomplishments out of sight. Now, for the first time, House of Diggs restores him to his much-deserved place in the history of American politics.

Our guest is: Dr. Marion Orr, who is the inaugural Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Brown University. He specializes in urban politics, race and ethnic politics, and African-American politics.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who produces the Academic Life podcast. She is a dissertation and grad student coach, and a developmental editor for humanities scholars at all stages of their careers. She writes the Academic Life Newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.Com.

Playlist for listeners:

The End of White Politics

The Vice-President's Black Wife

No Common Ground

The Social Constructions of Race

Smithsonian American Women

The First and Last King of Haiti

Of Bears and Ballots

Never Caught

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And get free bonus content HERE.

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Carol Mason, "From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary" (U California Press, 2025)

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactics, personnel, and funds have contributed to a global rise of the Right.
From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary (University of California Press, 2025) is a scholar’s story of why and how abortion foes join other militants in waging war against the federal government. Reflecting on her thirty years of analyzing the intersections of race, reproduction, and right-wing movements, Carol Mason examines primary antiabortion sources that influenced political currents of the last fifty years. From Cold War conspiracism and apocalyptic fundamentalism to anti-statist terrorism, Tea Party populism, and MAGA insurrection, opposing abortion has come to imperil democracy worldwide.

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Jack B. Greenberg and John A. Dearborn, "Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientists Jack Greenberg (Yale University) and John Dearborn (Vanderbilt University) have a new book that focuses on the idea of presidential self-restraint and the ways in which the U.S. Congress has tried to design Executive positions with an eye towards making real this dimension of presidential norms. The concept of presidential self-restraint is a component of how the president uses his/her executive powers: that the president has a certain expanse of power and chooses, based on a variety of reasons or outcomes, to husband some of that power, or restrain its use. Because presidential self-restraint is particularly hard to divine, especially in how presidents think about the execution of their powers, Greenberg and Dearborn turned to congressional considerations that essentially take into account this idea. Congress has spent quite a lot of time over the past fifty years (since Watergate) in designing appointed positions within the Executive branch in such a way as to flesh out a kind of restraint on the president’s part. In so doing, Congress has attempted different means to insulate individuals/positions from potential abuse by a president.

Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint integrates a number of case studies of congressional action on presidential appointments to examine this push and pull between the legislative and executive branches. As the issue of self-restraint has become more pressing, Greenberg and Dearborn sketch out three foundational shifts that provides the framework for the way that Congress has tried to insulate executive positions, and the ways in which Congress has acknowledged the tension around depending on presidential self-restraint. The issues of political polarization, especially as demonstrated by congressional co-partisans with the president, the Supreme Court’s growing commitment to constitutional formalism and unilateralism in the Executive, and Congress’s unwillingness to defend its own powers and assert those powers all contribute to this conundrum of a reliance on presidential self-restraint that is often caught up in an expansion of the use of executive powers. The case studies provided demonstrate this conundrum and help us to see just how Congress tried to structure self-restraint into a number of different appointments and how presidents have tried to work around those constraints, some more successfully than others.

This is a brief but complex analysis of the current dynamic between the president and Article II powers, the U.S. Congress’s evaporating powers, and the Supreme Court’s complicit role in fortifying an expansive understanding of presidential power.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022) and The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Mimi Abramovitz, "Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present" (Routledge, 2025)

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the fourth edition of Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present, drawing on important feminist concepts -- social reproduction, the gender division of labor, and patriarchy -- Mimi Abramovitz exposes the gendered and racialized myths and stereotypes built into welfare state programs. The book explains the contextual conditions that contributed to the precursors of the modern welfare state, its rise and expansion after World War II, and the recent neoliberal effort to dismantle the cash assistance programs most likely to lift women out of poverty. This edition marks the most extensive overhaul to date. It revises the conceptual and background chapters, discusses cash assistance programs, and considers emerging ideas such as the role of economic crises in the development of the US welfare state. It also considers the future of the welfare state under the second Trump Presidency. Regulating the Lives of Women is an essential resource for all students of social work, sociology, history, political science, public policy, and gender studies.

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Rebecca L. Davis, "Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America" (Norton, 2024)

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades. Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a “tradwife” is gaining adherents on the right while polyamory wins converts on the left. It may seem as though debates over sex are more intense than ever, but as acclaimed historian Rebecca L. Davis demonstrates in Fierce Desires, we should not be too surprised, because Americans have been arguing over which kinds of sex are “acceptable”—and which are not—since before the founding itself.

From the public floggings of fornicators in early New England to passionate same-sex love affairs in the 1800s and the crackdown on abortion providers in the 1870s, and from the movements for sexual liberation to the recent restrictions on access to gender affirming care, Davis presents a sweeping, engrossing, illuminating four-hundred-year account of this nation’s sexual past. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including legal records, erotica, and eighteenth-century romance novels, she recasts important episodes—Anthony Comstock’s crusade against smut among them—and, at the same time, unearths stories of little-remembered pioneers and iconoclasts, such as an indentured servant in colonial Virginia named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and postwar female pleasure activist Betty Dodson.

At the heart of the book is Davis’s argument that the concept of sexual identity is relatively novel, first appearing in the nineteenth century. Over the centuries, Americans have shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values, such as those rooted in faith or culture, to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. And at every step, legislators, police, activists, and bureaucrats attempted to regulate new sexual behaviors, transforming government in the process. The most comprehensive account of America’s sexual past since John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s 1988 classic, Intimate Matters, Davis’s magisterial work seeks to help us understand the turmoil of the present. It demonstrates how fiercely we have always valued our desires, and how far we are willing to go to defend them.

Rebecca L. Davis is professor of History and of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware where she held the Miller Family Endowed Early Career Professorship. She is the author of several books including Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics and More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss and is one of the co-founders and co-hosts of the podcast This is Probably a Weird Question about bodies, sexuality, health and history.

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Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expedited the entry of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial South Asia and sent them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the United States. Although this arrangement was conceived as temporary, over the decades it has become a permanent fixture of the medical system, with FMGs comprising at least a quarter of the physician labor force since the act became law.

This cohort of practitioners has not been extensively studied, rendering the impacts of immigration and foreign policy on the everyday mechanics of US health care obscure. In The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare, Dr. Alam foregrounds global dynamics embedded in the medical system to ask how and why Asian physicians—and especially practitioners from South Asia—have become integral to US medical practice and ubiquitous in the US public imaginary. Drawing on transcripts of congressional hearings; medical, scientific, and social scientific literature; ethnographies; oral histories; and popular media, Dr. Alam explores the enduring consequences of postcolonial physician migration. Combining theoretical and methodological insights from a range of disciplines, this book analyzes both the care provided by immigrant physicians as well as the care extended to them as foreigners.

Our guest is: Dr. Eram Alam, who specializes in the history of medicine, with a particular emphasis on globalization, race, migration, and health during the twentieth century. She is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She received her PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and holds a BA and BS from Northwestern University and a MA from the University of Chicago.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a developmental editor, and the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She writes the show’s newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.com

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes, or by donating here. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Shaul Kelner, "A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized To Free Soviet Jews" (NYU Press, 2025)

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Winner of The 74th National Jewish Book Award: American Jewish Studies Celebrate 350 Award

Reveals the mass mobilization tactics that helped free Soviet Jews and reshaped the Jewish American experience from the Johnson era through the Reagan–Bush years
What do these things have in common? Ingrid Bergman, Passover matzoh, Banana Republic®, the fitness craze, the Philadelphia Flyers, B-grade spy movies, and ten thousand Bar and Bat Mitzvah sermons? Nothing, except that social movement activists enlisted them all into the most effective human rights campaign of the Cold War.
The plight of Jews in the USSR was marked by systemic antisemitism, a problem largely ignored by Western policymakers trying to improve relations with the Soviets. In the face of governmental apathy, activists in the United States hatched a bold plan: unite Jewish Americans to demand that Washington exert pressure on Moscow for change.
A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized To Free Soviet Jews (NYU Press, 2025) delves into the gripping narrative of how these men and women, through ingenuity and determination, devised mass mobilization tactics during a three-decade-long campaign to liberate Soviet Jews—an endeavor that would ultimately lead to one of the most significant mass emigrations in Jewish history.
Drawing from a wealth of archival sources including the travelogues of thousands of American tourists who smuggled aid to Russian Jews, Shaul Kelner offers a compelling tale of activism and its profound impact, revealing how a seemingly disparate array of elements could be woven together to forge a movement and achieve the seemingly impossible. It is a testament to the power of unity, creativity, and the unwavering dedication of those who believe in the cause of human rights.

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Linda Upham-Bornstein, "'Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender': Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law during the Great Depression" (Temple UP, 2023)

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

During the Great Depression, the proliferation of local taxpayers’ associations was dramatic and unprecedented. The justly concerned members of these organizations examined the operations of state, city, and county governments, then pressed local officials for operational and fiscal reforms. These associations aimed to reduce the cost of state and local governments to make operations more efficient and less expensive.

"Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender": Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law during the Great Depression (Temple UP, 2023) by Dr. Linda Upham-Bornstein presents a comprehensive overview of these grassroots taxpayers’ leagues beginning in the 1860s and shows how they evolved during their heyday in the 1930s. Dr. Upham-Bornstein chronicles the ways these taxpayers associations organized as well as the tools they used—constructive economy, political efforts, tax strikes, and tax revolt through litigation—to achieve their objectives.

Taxpayer activity was a direct consequence of—and a response to—the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the expansion of the size and scope of government. “Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender” connects collective tax resistance in the 1930s to the populist tradition in American politics and to other broad impulses in American political and legal history.

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Rob Wells, "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike out on his own. With a specialized knowledge of finance and close connections to top Washington officials, Kiplinger was uniquely positioned to tell deeper truths about the intersections between government and business. With careful reporting and insider access, he delivered perceptive analysis and forecasts of business, economic, and political news to busy business executives, and the newsletter's readership grew exponentially over the coming decades. More than just a pioneering business journalist, Kiplinger emerged as a quiet but powerful link between the worlds of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, and used his Letter to play a little-known but influential role in the New Deal. Part journalism history, part biography, and part democratic chronicle, The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022) offers a well-written and deeply researched portrayal of how Kiplinger not only developed a widely read newsletter that launched a business publishing empire but also how he forged a new role for the journalist as political actor."

Rob Wells is is visiting associate professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Kavya Sarathy is a Linguistics student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Marketing Intern for the University of Massachusetts Press. She is currently a political Staff Writer at The Massachusetts Daily Collegian.

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Democratic Dialogues: Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A podcast from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy Center on Global Democracy

About the Podcast

Each week, co-hosts Rachel Beatty Riedl and Esam Boraey bring together leading scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore the challenges and possibilities facing democracy around the world. Produced by Cornell’s Center on Global Democracy, Democratic Dialogues bridges academic research with real-world debates — from democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence to civic resistance, renewal, and reform. We look at new books, groundbreaking articles, and the ideas reshaping how we understand and practice democracy today.

Listen on YouTube, NBN, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode 1

Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries

This week, we feature an episode with Kenneth Roberts, Jennifer McCoy, and Murat Somer, joining co-hosts Rachel Riedl and Esam Boraey to discuss their collaborative article, “Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries,” recently published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Together, they unpack how democracies don’t collapse overnight, but instead erode through different pathways — from executive aggrandizement to elite collusion — and how societies can resist or even partially recover. The conversation examines how these dynamics unfold in contexts as varied as Latin America, Turkey, Hungary, and the United States, and what practical lessons citizens and policymakers can draw today. This is an essential conversation for understanding how democracies falter, and how collective action, civic mobilization, and institutional renewal can push them back from the brink.

Books, Links, & Articles

“Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2025)
Jennifer McCoy & Murat Somer, Pernicious Polarization and Its Global Impact
Kenneth Roberts, Populism, Political Mobilization, and the Latin American Left
Rachel Beatty Riedl, Authoritarian Origins of Democratic Institutions in Africa

Upcoming Episodes

Our next episode features Susan C. Stokes (University of Chicago) discussing her book The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies. Stay tuned for an in-depth conversation on why democratic leaders sometimes turn against the institutions that empower them — and what can be done to safeguard democracy in an era of uncertainty.

Subscribe and follow us on YouTube and social media for new releases every month.

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Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The history of the civil rights era abounds with accounts of physical brutality by county sheriffs and tales of political intrigue and constitutional violations by FBI agents. Turning our attention to municipal officials in cities and towns across the US—North, South, East, and West—Davis reveals how local police bombarded civil rights organizers with an array of insidious weapons. More than just physical violence, these economic, legal, and reputational attacks were designed to project the illusion of color-blind law enforcement.

The civil rights struggle against police abuses is largely overlooked today, the victim of a willful campaign by local law enforcement to erase their record of repression. By placing activism against state violence at the center of the civil rights story, Police Against the Movement offers critical insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government attacks on protest.

Guest: Joshua Clark Davis Blackmer (he/him) is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Baltimore. Davis is also the author of an earlier book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods, which examines organic food stores, feminist enterprises, Black bookstores and other businesses that emerged from movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. His research has earned awards from the Fulbright Program, the Silvers Foundation, and the NEH Public Scholars Program, and he has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, and The Washington Post, and that work has been featured in The New York Times and CNN among other venues.

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Javier Wallace, "Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams" (Duke UP, 2025)

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Every year, hundreds of international student athletes arrive in the U.S. chasing their basketball dreams — many on F-1 student visas. But for some their journey turns into exploitation.

Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams (Duke University Press, 2025) uncovers how dreams are sold, manipulated, and in some cases stolen — especially for young Black athletes from the Global South. This book offers a powerful call to action for educators, institutions, and sport leaders to safeguard the next generation of hoopers.

Rooted in his own experience as a distinguished former Division 1 college athlete and an alumnus of a Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), Javier has a unique perspective on the significance of sports in cultural and social movements. He procured his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from Florida A&M University, followed by a PhD from The University of Texas at Austin, where he delved into the intersections of race, culture, and athletics.

Javier’s expertise has led him to prominent roles, including serving as a Fellow at Harvard’s AfroLatin American Research Initiative, a University of Pennsylvania & University of Birmingham (UK) Immigration Fellow, and a Postdoctoral Associate and Professor at Duke University. His scholarly work has been recognized with accolades, such as the Harvard ALARI Best Dissertation on an Afro-Latin American topic in 2020 and a Preservation Merit Award from Preservation Austin.

Javier has been featured in numerous media outlets such as TEDx, The Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, Vice Sports, ESPN, and CNN, marking him as a distinctive voice in his arena. His dedication to shining a light on the unsung heroes who have transformed sports into a stage for empowerment and social change remains unwavering. A committed traveler and cultural enthusiast, Javier continues to connect and promote these remarkable stories of resilience and triumph wherever his journey takes him.

You can find Javier online, on Instagram, and at LinkedIn.

Find Host Sullivan Summer online, on Instagram, or on Substack, where she and Javier continue their conversation.

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Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the prison years of civil rights icon Malcolm X. The book was a Kirkus Nonfiction Book of the Year for 2024, a Spectator best book of the year, and a finalist for the 2025 ASALH book prize.

In February 1946, when 20-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X’s post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth.

Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr’s Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X’s life (1925–1965). Parr traces Malcolm’s African lineage, explores his complicated childhood in the Midwest, and follows him as he moves east to live with his sister Ella in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where he is convicted of burglary and sentenced.

Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the reader into the unique cultures—at times brutal and at times instructional—of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony. It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture.

In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told.

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Sarah Smarsh, "Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class" (Scribner, 2024)

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the experience of the rural working class in the US. Her essay in The Common’s fall 2014 issue, “Death of the Farm Family,” became part of her 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which became an instant New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and named on President Barack Obama’s best books of the year list.

Smarsh discusses her most recent book, a collection of essays from 2012 to 2024 titled Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class (Scribner, 2024), out this fall in paperback. The conversation ranges from what the media gets wrong about working class Americans to how our understanding of and interest in talking about class and access has changed since the early 2000s. Stick around to hear how Smarsh manages the dual identities of rural Kansas farm kid and nationally recognized writer-commentator on class and culture, and hear what she’s working on next.

Born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, Harper’s, the Guardian, and many other publications. Her 2020 book She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. A former writing professor, Smarsh has served as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She lives in rural Kansas, where she is currently at work on a book about the endangered tallgrass prairie ecosystem.

Read Sarah Smarsh’s essay “Death of the Farm Family” in The Common here.

Learn more about her books and work at her website.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Hector Vera, "Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America" (Vanderbilt UP, 2025)

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its preference for practicality has not adopted the most practical, scientific, and innovative system of measurement? Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America (Vanderbilt UP, 2025) by Dr. Hector Vera answers these questions by analyzing the political, economic, and international factors that determined the trajectory of the United States as a nation self-excluded from one of the most successful global technical languages.

Using a historical-comparative approach and qualitative analysis of archival material, the book examines the trajectories of American scientists, engineers, politicians, and industrialists from 1787 to 1982, to detail what they wanted to attain and to explain what was actually possible to achieve given the political and economic conditions in which they lived. Yardstick Nation argues that in order to understand the unbreached distance between the United States and the metric system, we must consider the interaction between three structural elements: historical timing, state infrastructural power, and international economic integration.

Dr. Vera’s systematic look at when and why countries have adopted the metric system shows that its introduction is never casual. In the countries that voluntarily embraced the metric system, this was the result of either deep internal political transformations or momentous changes in the international economy. When the adoption of the metric system is politically driven, it comes as the result of a social revolution, independence war, national unification, or the draft of a new constitution. When it is propelled by economic factors, metrication is part of the efforts of economically stagnant countries to integrate into international markets.

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Tami Parr, "Goats in America: A Cultural History" (Oregon State UP, 2025)

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The humble goat has played a surprising and important role throughout the history of the United States. Despite this, goats are often overlooked by many Americans, even if they have strong opinions about these complex creatures. In Goats in America: A Cultural History (Oregon State UP, 2025) Dr. Tami Parr calls attention to these disregarded animals, uncovering the remarkable stories behind everything from goat meat and milk to goat yoga and more.

Since arriving in North America with cattle and other domesticated livestock in the sixteenth century, goats have provided people sustenance and valuable products, including milk, meat, and mohair. But humans did not appreciate the animals, and as a result, throughout much of American history goats were persecuted as public nuisances and symbols of degenerate behavior. Nevertheless, over the centuries the tenacious goat has overcome many of these stereotypes and secured a spot in the hearts and minds of modern Americans, who love goat cheese and embrace goats as social media stars.

Examining key moments and notable developments in goat history and culture, Goats in America outlines the history and evolving role of goats in communities across the country, from San Francisco and New York City to rural Wisconsin and the Navajo Nation. Parr shows that the evolving reputation of goats in American society ultimately reveals more about humans than it does about goats themselves. So, the next time you are enjoying your favorite goat cheese, take a moment to consider the history and role of goats within American culture.

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Becky M. Nicolaides, "The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The adoption of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, triggered a wave of immigration to the U.S. not seen since before the First World War. But these newcomers were now far less likely to have come from Europe than Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. And they were far more likely to settle in suburbia than the “inner city.” In The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford UP, 2024) Becky M. Nicolaides analyzes the consequences of mass migration by looking at how four LA suburbs reacted—wealthy San Marino and Pasadena, working class South Gate, and lower middle class Lakewood. She invites the reader to consider whether in becoming more diverse, a community becomes more tolerant.

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Aileen Teague, "Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings influence the world's perception of Mexico. Mexico's so-called drug war, as generally conceived by journalists and academics, was the product of recent cartel turf wars, the end of the PRI's single party rule in 2000, and enhanced US border security measures post-9/11. These explanations are compelling, but they overlook state actions beginning in the 1970s that set the foundation for drug violence over the longer term.

In Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2025), Aileen Teague chronicles a largely ignored but critical prehistory of intensified bilateral antidrug efforts by exploring their origins and inherent contradictions in Mexico. Beginning in the 1960s, US leaders externalized their aggressive domestic drug control practices by forcing junior partners such as Mexico into adopting their policies. Leaders on both sides of the border situated counternarcotics within a larger paradigm of militarized policing, which increased the power and influence of the military and aggressive counternarcotics in both countries. However, different security imperatives motivated US and Mexican agents, complicating enforcement in Mexico. Between 1969 and 2000, Mexico's embrace of America's punitive antidrug policies strengthened the coercive capacities of the Mexican state, exacerbated crime, and were so ineffective in an era of open trade blocs that they hastened the expansion of the drug trade.

Drawing on such sources as records from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the US State Department, interviews with key officials, accounts from Mexican journalists, and rarely seen Mexican intelligence reports, Teague relates the war on drugs as a transnational story with deep historical roots in US and Mexican conceptions of policing and security. The negative impacts of US-led counternarcotics policies in Mexico can be attributed to the complex relationship between the United States' and Mexico's shared approach to the drug war--with critical implications for present-day relations.

Aileen Teague is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is a former Marine Corps officer and a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Peter D. Blackmer, "Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers" (UVA Press, 2025)

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers (UVA Press, 2025) explores the local dynamics, national connections, and global context of the Black freedom movement in Harlem from 1954 to 1964, illuminating how activists, organizers, and ordinary people mounted their resistance to systemic racism in the Jim Crow North. The richness of Black radical thought and action in this period made Harlem a key battleground in the national civil rights movement, transformed local Black grassroots politics, and facilitated the rise of Black Power in New York City. At the same time, the city’s attempts to clamp down on activists revealed the repressive nature of Northern liberalism and heralded the expansion of the carceral state. Peter Blackmer argues that this decade of confrontations between Black communities and white state power caused Harlem residents and activists to seek “new means” for achieving freedom within a city, state, and nation determined to deny it. Tracing the dual evolution of Black radicalism and white resistance, Unleashing Black Power offers a new framework for analyzing the epochal urban uprisings in the 1960s.

Guest: Peter Blackmer (he/him) is an associate professor of Africology and African American Studies at Eastern Michigan University and his research and teaching explore the ways in which Black-led grassroots organizing campaigns for self-determination in the 20th and 21st Century United States have shaped local and national politics through struggles for civil rights, human rights, and political power in American cities.

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Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it. In the twenty-one conversations contained in this engaging and highly accessible book, we hear from the musicians themselves, in their own words, direct and unfiltered. Peter Zimmerman’s interviewing technique is straightforward. He turns on a recording device, poses questions, and allows his subjects to improvise, similar to the way the musicians do at concerts and in recording sessions. Topics range from their early days, their struggles and victories, to the impact the music has had on their own lives. The interviews have been carefully edited for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians’ actual words.

Peter Zimmerman tirelessly sought virtuosi whose lives span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The reader is rewarded with an intimate look into the past century’s extraordinary period of creative productivity. The oldest two interview subjects were born in 1920 and all are professional musicians who worked in jazz for at least five decades, with a few enjoying careers as long as seventy-five years. These voices reflect some seventeen hundred years of accumulated experience yielding a chronicle of incredible depth and scope.

The focus on musicians who are now emeritus figures is deliberate. Some of them are now in their nineties; six have passed since 2012, when Zimmerman began researching The Jazz Masters. Five of them have already received the NEA’s prestigious Jazz Masters award: Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, Yusef Lateef, Jimmy Owens, and most recently, Dick Hyman. More undoubtedly will one day, and the balance are likewise of compelling interest. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they are as people.

This book is a labor of love celebrating the vibrant style of music that Dizzy Gillespie once described as “our native art form.” Zimmerman’s deeply knowledgeable, unabashed passion for jazz brings out the best in the musicians. Filled with personal recollections and detailed accounts of their careers and everyday lives, this highly readable, lively work succeeds in capturing their stories for present and future generations. An important addition to the literature of music, The Jazz Masters goes a long way toward “setting the record straight.”

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Ada Ferrer, "Cuba: An American History" (Scribner, 2021)

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

“No country is ever just one thing.” In her new book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), NYU historian Ada Ferrer shows this again and again. In clear and engaging prose, Ferrer narrates five centuries of history from a decidedly different angle than previous one-volume studies; the main drivers of history in this book are not just familiar political figures and abstract historical forces, but a whole range of typically marginalized historical actors. Ferrer integrates the voices of the enslaved, ordinary Cubans, and her own family to reimagine what it means to tell the history of the island. Part of this reimagining also involves showing the many points of convergence between the history of the United States and Cuba. Ferrer uses many anecdotes—such as the story of the inauguration of a Vice President of the United States on a sugar plantation in Cuba—to suggest how the lines between Cuban and American history were often blurred together. The result is a finely crafted and deeply personal book that encourages readers to recognize Cuba’s contested past and its multiple identities.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

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Nancy Newman, "Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York: Including Twenty-Two New Settings of Period Tunes" (SUNY Press, 2025)

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Upstate New York's Anti-Rent Movement is considered the last struggle over feudalism in the United States. Tenant farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk region engaged in organized protest throughout the 1840s to contest monopoly ownership of the land they worked. Arguing their cause in newspapers, on broadsides, and at rallies, their aspirations also took shape in poetry and song. More than twenty sets of lyrics (and one instrumental composition) were written at various stages of the conflict. Some of their musical sources, such as "Old Dan Tucker" and "Bruce's Address," are still well known. Each fully contextualized song offers insight into the role vernacular music played in one of the nineteenth century's major social reform movements.

Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York: Including Twenty-Two New Settings of Period Tunes (SUNY Press, 2025) by Dr. Nancy Newman is the first book to gather the poetry and corresponding tunes into one publication (you can find recordings of some of the songs here). It provides detailed analysis of the repertory, followed by new musical scores of the songs, reconstructed from contemporary historical sources for study and performance. It also examines the movement's later dramatization in novels, film, and public commemorations as successive generations grapple with its meaning.

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Michael T. Bertrand, "Southern History Remixed: On Rock 'n' Roll and the Dilemma of Race" (UP Florida, 2024)

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Southern History Remixed: On Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race (UP Florida, 2024) spotlights the key role of popular music in the shaping of the United States South from the late nineteenth century to the era of rock ’n’ roll in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. While musical activities are often sidelined in historical narratives of the region, Michael Bertrand shows that they can reveal much about social history and culture change as he connects the rise of rock ’n’ roll to the civil rights movement for racial equality.

In this book, Bertrand traces a long-term culture war in which white southerners struggled over the region’s cultural complexion with music serving as an engine that both sustained and challenged white supremacy. He shows how rock ’n’ roll emerged as a working-class genre with biracial sources that stoked white racial anxieties and engaged the region’s color and culture lines. This book discusses the conflict over southern identity that played out in responses to jazz, barn dance radio, Pentecostal and gospel music, Black radio programming, and rhythm and blues, concluding with a close look at the popularity of Elvis Presley within a racially segregated society.

Southern History Remixed suggests that both Black and white southerners have used music as a tool to resist or negotiate a rigid regional hierarchy. Urging readers and scholars to take the study of popular music seriously, Bertrand argues that what occurs in the music world affects and reflects what happens in politics and history.

Guest: Michael T. Bertrand is a historian of the American South and the modern United States.

Host: Caroline Alt (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Georgia. She studies the hauntings of the American South from the 19th through the 21st centuries.

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Andrea Freeman, "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The first and definitive history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” Destroying harvests is just one way that the United States has used food as a political tool. Trying to prevent enslaved people from rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only enough to fuel labor. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dumping grounds for unwanted agricultural surpluses. From frybread to government cheese, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan Books, 2024) on the Ground draws on over fifteen years of research to argue that American food law and policy have created and maintained racial and social inequality. In an epic, sweeping account, Andrea Freeman, who pioneered the term “food oppression,” moves from colonization to slavery to the Americanization of immigrant food culture, to the commodities supplied to Native reservations, to milk as a symbol of white supremacy. She traces the long-standing alliance between the government and food industries that have produced gaping racial health disparities, and she shows how these practices continue to this day, through the marketing of unhealthy goods that target communities of color, causing diabetes, high blood pressure, and premature death. Ruin Their Crops on the Ground is a groundbreaking addition to the history and politics of food. It will permanently upend the notion that we freely and equally choose what we put on our plates.

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Francis L. Sampson, "Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre" (Catholic U of America Press, 2023)

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all time, Saving Private Ryan. From rural beginnings in northwestern Iowa, Sampson’s life would take him from the University of Notre Dame to the battlefields of Normandy on D-Day, the ambitious failure of Operation Market Garden, the harshness of a winter as a POW of the Germans during the closing stages of the Second World War, to the fall of North Korean capital Pyongyang in the early stages of the Korean War. Part of the very rare breed of Parachute Chaplains, in his case with the 101 st Airborne Division, Sampson spent much of his career as an army chaplain in the center of maelstroms of the 20th century. Throughout it all, Sampson offered a valuable Christian witness in the darkest of times and the most difficult of circumstances.

This second edition of his memoirs, Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre (Catholic U of America Press, 2023) contains material on his service during the Korean War and occupation duty in Germany and Japan as well as the Second World War, with a new historical introduction by University of Scranton Professor Sean Brennan.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz" (Duke UP, 2024)

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. Exploring how musicians, producers, and other industry professionals navigated these dynamics, Mueller contends that the practice of making LPs significantly changed how jazz was created, heard, and understood in the 1950s and beyond. By attending to the details of audio production, he reveals how Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus worked to redefine prevailing notions of race and cultural difference within the United States. Mueller demonstrates that the LP emerges as a medium of sound and culture that maps onto the more expansive sonic terrain of Black modernity in the 1950s.

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University

nathan.smith@yale.edu

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Gustav Meibauer, "The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument" (Policy Press, 2025)

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Suggested additional channels: Political Science, National Security, American Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern European Studies, New Books with Miranda Melcher NB: I don’t think this needs to go on General History

The no-fly zone is a frequently used instrument in the US foreign policy arsenal, despite detrimental, or even catastrophic, results. This book examines why the instrument has such a hold on leaders’ imaginations and rhetoric despite its patchy record in practice.

Examining detailed historical case studies from conflicts in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, South Sudan/Darfur, Libya and Syria, The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument (Bristol University Press, 2025) by Dr. Gustav Meibauer shows how debates about, and actual use of, no-fly zones in US foreign policy have not been primarily about managing conflict or protecting civilians. Instead, the focus is often on navigating contradictory international and domestic political incentives and constraints, leading to US intervention in an ill-considered and incremental manner.

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Lawrence Grossman, "Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945-2025" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In American Judaism today, Orthodoxy is the fastest growing movement. However, Orthodoxy is anything but monolithic.

Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945–2025 by Lawrence Grossman explores a piece of the Orthodox story, that of Modern Orthodoxy.

For those who may be unfamiliar, Modern Orthodoxy affirms the traditional tenets and practices of Orthodox Judaism while at the same time maintaining an openness to contemporary cultural and intellectual developments. Beginning in the post-World War II era, Living in Both Worlds shows how a fledgling Modern Orthodoxy carved out an identity separate and apart from unacculturated ultra-Orthodoxy to its right and Conservative Judaism to its left, and follows its development through the first quarter of the twenty-first century as new, divisive issues such as feminism, LGBTQ rights, and the spread of academic biblical scholarship challenged its coherence, and a rejuvenated ultra-Orthodoxy contested its religious legitimacy.

This is a book that not only records history but challenges us to think deeply about question about how modernity and tradition intersect and explores the delicate dance to have fidelity to both the past and the present moment.

Rabbi Lawrence Grossman worked at the American Jewish Committee for close to 40 years, serving as director of publications and editor of the American Jewish Year Book. He earned BA and MHL degrees and rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University, and a PhD in history from the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS)

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Melissa M. Matthes, "When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises.

In the aftermath of national tragedies, Americans often turn to churches for solace. Because even secular citizens attend these services, they are also significant opportunities for the Protestant religious majority to define and redefine national identity and, in the process, to invest the nation-state with divinity. The sermons delivered in the wake of crises become integral to historical and communal memory--it matters greatly who is mourned and who is overlooked.

Melissa M. Matthes conceives of these sermons as theo-political texts. In When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter (Harvard UP, 2021), she explores the continuities and discontinuities they reveal in the balance of state power and divine authority following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the Rodney King verdict, the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, the Newtown shootings, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She argues that Protestant preachers use these moments to address questions about Christianity and citizenship and about the responsibilities of the Church and the State to respond to a national crisis. She also shows how post-crisis sermons have codified whiteness in ritual narratives of American history, excluding others from the collective account. These civic liturgies therefore illustrate the evolution of modern American politics and society.

Despite perceptions of the decline of religious authority in the twentieth century, the pulpit retains power after national tragedies. Sermons preached in such intense times of mourning and reckoning serve as a form of civic education with consequences for how Americans understand who belongs to the nation and how to imagine its future.

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Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating work of comparative intellectual history, nineteenth-century Americans were especially conversant with narratives of the English Civil Wars of the 1600s. Northerners and Southerners alike drew from histories of the English past to make sense of their own conflict, interpreting the events of the past in drastically different ways. Confederates, for example, likened themselves to England’s Royalists (also known as Cavaliers), hoping to preserve a social order built on hierarchy and claiming the right to resist what they perceived as radicals' assaults on tradition. Meanwhile, conservative Northerners painted President Lincoln as a tyrant in the mold of English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, while radical abolitionists drew inspiration from Cromwell and sought to rebuild the South as Cromwell had attempted with Ireland.

Surveying two centuries of history-making and everyday engagement with historical thought, in Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), Dr. Sheehan-Dean convincingly argues that history itself was a battlefront of the American Civil War, with narratives of the past exercising surprising agency in interpretations of the nineteenth-century present. Dr. Sheehan-Dean’s discoveries provide an entirely fresh perspective on the role of historical memory in the Civil War era and offer a broader meditation on the construction and uses of history itself.

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Jason Schneider, "That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of Hey Joe' and Popular Music's History of Violence" (Anvil Press, 2025)

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This is the story of a song. Yet, it is a song that binds nearly every strand of 20th-century American popular music. “Hey Joe” was written sometime in the early 1960s by a man named Billy Roberts, an obscure singer and guitarist from South Carolina who moved to New York City, drawn by the burgeoning folk music scene in Greenwich Village. It was a time when new, original material was scarce, leading other singers to quickly adapt songs of quality in the spirit of folk music’s oral traditions. Thus began the long journey of “Hey Joe” from New York coffeehouses to the bars on L.A.’s Sunset Strip to the ears of a young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix who launched his career with his radical, electrified interpretation.

Extensively researched, That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of ‘Hey Joe’ and Popular Music’s History of Violence (Anvil Press, 2025) also presents previously unpublished information about the life of Billy Roberts, a shadowy figure whose 2017 death went unreported by all news outlets.

With a Foreword by Lenny Kaye.

Jason Schneider has written for Exclaim!, The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, Paste, American Songwriter, Relix, Shindig and many other media outlets. He is the co-author of Have Not Been The Same: the CanRock Renaissance 1985-1995, and his other books include Whispering Pines: the Northern Roots of American Music, and the novel 3,000 Miles. He currently lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

Jason Schneider on Bluesky.

Bradley Morgan on Facebook and Bluesky.

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Naomi R. Williams, "A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Naomi R Williams is associate professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University. Their primary research interests include labor and working-class history, urban history and politics, gender and women, race and politics, and more broadly, social and economic movements of working people. Naomi focuses on worker voice and late-capitalism at the end of the 20th century. Naomi’s research also examines the ways working people impact local and national political economies and the ways workers participate in collaborative social justice movements. Naomi engages working-class history in urban settings, looking at low-wage service work, industrial employment, and workers in higher education.

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Anthony J. Knowles, "Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany" (Brill, 2025)

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany (Brill, 2025) reconstructs the industrial histories of the American and German automotive industries in a new light. From the Fordist assembly line to Japanese lean production and Industry 4.0, Anthony J. Knowles critically examines major technical developments within the historical dynamics of capitalism. Both countries face the pressure to automate, transform labor, and increase efficiency, yet their responses differ due to divergent paradigms of integrating business, labor, and government. Driving Productivity makes the case that improving productivity is a never-ending process that becomes a compulsory social imperative that industries must respond to but are nevertheless responded to differently between countries.

Guest: Anthony Knowles (he/him) is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Sociology and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: here

Linktree: here

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David Singerman, "Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and unsavory history. Over the past five hundred years, sugar has shaped empires, made fortunes for a few, and brought misery for millions of workers both enslaved and free. How did sugar become a defining modern food and an essential global commodity?

In Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar (U Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. David Singerman recasts our thinking about this crucial substance in the history of capitalism. Before the nineteenth century, sugar’s value depended on natural qualities: its color, its taste, where it was grown, and who had made it. But beginning around 1850, a combination of plantation owners, industrialists, and scientists set out to redefine sugar itself. Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, they transformed not just how sugar was produced or traded but even how people thought about it. By changing sugar into a pure chemical object, these forces stripped power from workers and enabled—and obscured—new kinds of fraud, corruption, and monopoly.

Taking us to unexplored spaces in the world of sugar, from laboratories and docks to refineries and the halls of Congress, Dr. Singerman illuminates dark intersections of the histories of corruption, science, and capitalism.

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Kevin M. Schultz, "Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A bracing, accessible history of white American liberals—and why it’s time to change the conversation about them.
If there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism’s beard. Even liberals hate liberals—either because they can’t manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they’re so self-hating.
This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz’s lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more—in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.
Sharply assessing how decades of attacks on liberals and liberalism have steadily hollowed out the center of American political life, Schultz also explains precisely what needs to be done to avoid digging ourselves even further into the hole of polarization. The ultimate goal, he argues, is to achieve political fragmentation that will fuel the rise of a true multiparty system, where ideology will matter more, not less.
With a tight command of postwar American history and a spirited voice, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A Critical History (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand—and envision a way forward in—the complicated landscape of American politics.

Kevin M. Schultz is professor and chair of history at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). He is the author of Buckley and Mailer and Tri-Faith America.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Meghan Crnic, "The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores" (U Washington Press, 2025)

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For centuries, the ocean was seen as a place of danger and work, but by the late nineteenth century, northeastern shores of the United States became therapeutic destinations for the sick and weary. Doctors in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other cities began prescribing time at the beach as a remedy for ailments such as tuberculosis, rickets, and exhaustion. In the decades that followed, seaside towns became health havens complete with hospitals that served urban families and children.
Dr. Meghan Crnic’s The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores (U Washington Press, 2025) explores how physicians, tourists, and families transformed the coastline into a medical and cultural landscape. Dr. Crnic traces how beliefs in “marine medication”—the healing power of the sun, sea air, and saltwater—shaped the development of northeastern coastal tourist destinations and health institutions in Atlantic City, Coney Island, and beyond. Despite advances in germ theory and the rise of laboratory science, the conviction that nature can restore health and well-being persisted and continues to resonate with beachgoers today.
This book uncovers the profound ways in which Americans tied health to place, showing how the underlying belief in nature’s therapeutic powers brought people to the seashore as a precursor to the beach becoming a destination for leisure and recreation. The Beach Cure offers fresh insight into the history of environmental health, urging readers to reflect on how landscapes shape well-being.

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John Minton, "Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the late 1930s, fieldworkers with the Works Progress Administration interviewed about 3,500 formerly enslaved people resulting in approximately 20,000 pages of unedited typescripts. This collection of oral histories is arguably the single greatest body of African American folklore extant, and a significant portion is devoted to folk music and song. John Minton’s Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives (UP of Mississippi, 2024) examines the musical references in these narratives. A combination of reference information and analysis, Minton contextualizes and scrutinizes the vocal and instrumental music the narrators talked about, explains the various musical and cultural influences on Black folk music, and discusses the place of music and dance in the lives of enslaved people. He covers instrumental music and social dancing, spirituals and hymns, singing games and lullabies, ring plays and reels, worksongs, minstrel songs, ballads, war songs, slavery laments, and more. In the course of this exhaustive book, Minton helps his readers understand the lives of the narrators and the conditions in which they lived before and after emancipation.

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Maria Fedorova, "Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) examines the US and Soviet exchange of agricultural knowledge and technology during the interwar period.

Maria Fedorova challenges the perception of the Soviet Union as a passive recipient of American technology and expertise. She reveals the circular nature of this exchange through official government bureaus, amid anxious farmers in crowded auditoriums, in cramped cars across North Dakota and Montana, and by train over the once fertile steppes of the Volga.

Amid the post–World War I food insecurity, Soviet and American agricultural experts relied on transnational networks, bridging ideological differences. As Soviets traveled across the US agricultural regions and Americans plowed steppes in the southern Urals and the lower Volga, both groups believed that innovative solutions could be found beyond their own national borders. Soviets were avidly interested in American technology and American agricultural experts perceived the Soviet Union to be an ideal setting for experimenting with and refining modern farm systems and organizational practices. As Seeds of Exchange shows, agricultural modernization was not the exclusive domain of Western countries.

Guest: Maria Fedorova (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College. She received her PhD in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the history of agriculture, food insecurity, US-Russia/Soviet relations, and transnational history.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

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Clay Risen, "Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both “lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible…[and] describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end” (The New Yorker)—based in part on newly declassified sources.

Now, for the first time in a generation, Clay Risen delivers a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (Simon and Schuster, 2025). This period, known as the Red Scare, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, and the terrifying onset of the Cold War. Marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria, this was a defining moment in American history, completely unlike any that preceded it. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and with “scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses” (The New York Times Book Review), journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.
Beginning with the origins of the era after WWI through to its conclusion in 1957, Risen brings to life the politics, patriotism, courage, and delirium of those years. Red Scare takes us beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists and toward a fuller understanding of what the country went through at a time of moral questioning and perceived threat from the Left, and what we were capable of doing to each other as a result.

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Michael Glass, "Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How debt and speculation financed the suburban American dream and led to today’s inequalities

In the popular imagination, the suburbs are synonymous with the “American Dream” of upward mobility and economic security. After World War II, white families rushed into newly built suburbs, where they accumulated wealth through homeownership and enjoyed access to superior public schools. In this revelatory new account of postwar suburbanization, historian Michael R. Glass exposes the myth of uniform suburban prosperity. Focusing on the archetypal suburbs of Long Island, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) uncovers a hidden landscape of debt and speculation.

Glass shows how suburbanites were not guaranteed decent housing and high-quality education but instead had to obtain these necessities in the marketplace using home mortgages and municipal bonds. These debt instruments created financial strains for families, distributed resources unevenly across suburbs, and codified racial segregation. Most important, debt transformed housing and education into commodities, turning homes and schools into engines of capital accumulation. The resulting pressures made life increasingly precarious, even for those privileged suburbanites who resided in all-white communities. For people of color denied the same privileges, suburbs became places where predatory loans extracted wealth and credit rating agencies punished children in the poorest school districts. Long Islanders challenged these inequalities over several decades, demanding affordable housing, school desegregation, tax equity, and school-funding equalization. Yet the unequal circumstances created by the mortgages and bonds remain very much in place, even today.

Cracked Foundations not only transforms our understanding of housing, education, and inequality but also highlights how contemporary issues like the affordable housing crisis and school segregation have their origins in the postwar golden age of capitalism.

Guest: Michael Glass (he/him) is a political and urban historian of the twentieth-century United States, with research and teaching interests in racism, capitalism, and inequality. Michael is an Assistant Professor of History at Boston College.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: here

Linktree: here

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Zara Anishanslin, "The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed with paint, canvas, and wax played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals. In The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard UP, 2025), Dr. Zara Anishanslin charts the intertwined lives of three such figures who dared to defy the British monarchy: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright. From London to Boston, from Jamaica to Paris, from Bath to Philadelphia, these largely forgotten patriots boldly risked their reputations and their lives to declare independence.

Mostly excluded from formal political or military power, these artists and their circles fired salvos against the king on the walls of the Royal Academy as well as on the battlefields of North America. They used their talents to inspire rebellion, define American patriotism, and fashion a new political culture, often alongside more familiar revolutionary figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Phillis Wheatley. Pine, an award-winning British artist rumored to be of African descent, infused massive history paintings with politics and eventually emigrated to the young United States. Demah, the first identifiable enslaved portrait painter in America, was Pine’s pupil in London before self-emancipating and enlisting to fight for the Patriot cause. And Wright, a Long Island–born wax sculptor who became a sensation in London, loudly advocated for revolution while acting as an informal patriot spy.

Illuminating a transatlantic and cosmopolitan world of revolutionary fervor, The Painter’s Fire reveals an extraordinary cohort whose experiences testify to both the promise and the limits of liberty in the founding era.

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Vartan Matiossian, "The Color of Choice: The Armenians and the Politics of Race in the United States and Germany (1890-1945)" (Brill, 2025)

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The extensive research literature on race has paid little attention to Armenians.

Between the two world wars, they had to prove that they were free white persons to ensure their naturalization in the United States, while in Nazi Germany they needed to document that they were stakeholders of the Aryan race to safeguard their existence.

Vartan Matiossian's book is the first comprehensive account of a mostly untold story of dehumanization and racism in Europe and America that enhanced the racial and moral profiling of Armenians as undesirables. The Color of Choice: The Armenians and the Politics of Race in the United States and Germany (1890-1945) (Brill, 2025) frames this development within the context of the debates on whiteness and immigration in the United States culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924 and the xenophobic discourse in Germany before and during Nazism likening Armenians to Jews.

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Marion Orr, "House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr." (UNC Press, 2025)

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922-1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan's first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till's killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also the chief architect of legislation that restored home rule to Washington, DC, and almost single-handedly ignited the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including Diggs's rarely seen personal papers, FBI documents, and original interviews with family members and political associates, political scientist Marion Orr reveals that Diggs practiced a politics of strategic moderation. Orr argues that this quiet approach was more effective than the militant race politics practiced by Adam Clayton Powell and more appealing than the conservative Chicago-style approach of William Dawson--two of Diggs's better-known Black contemporaries.
Vividly written and deeply researched, House of Diggs is the first biography of Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the most consequential Black federal legislators in US history. Congressman Diggs was a legislative lion whose unfortunate downfall punctuated his distinguished career and pushed him and his historic accomplishments out of sight. Now, for the first time, House of Diggs restores him to his much-deserved place in the history of American politics.

Marion Orr is the Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and professor of political science and urban studies at Brown University.

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Jill Elaine Hasday, "We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for "We the People", too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women's struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decision making, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.
Professor Jill Elaine Hasday's We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2025) is the first book to explore how forgetting women's struggles for equality—and forgetting the work America still has to do—perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. Professor Hasday argues that remembering women's stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality. These stories highlight the persistence of women's inequality and make clear that real progress has always required women to disrupt the status quo, demand change, and duel with determined opponents.
America needs more conflict over women's status rather than less. Conflict has the power to generate forward momentum. Patiently awaiting men's spontaneous enlightenment does not. Transforming America's dominant stories about itself can reorient our understanding of how women's progress takes place, focus our attention on the battles that are still unwon, and fortify our determination to push for a more equal future.

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Emma Ashford, "First Among Equals: U. S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A fresh, concise roadmap for U.S. grand strategy in a multipolar world For the past thirty years, post-Cold War triumphalism and a desire to reshape the world have defined U.S. foreign policy. But the failures of the global war on terror, the return of conflict to Europe, and growing tensions with China all suggest that this approach to the world is flawed. For the United States--the country that has ruled the international system largely alone since 1991--this moment is particularly perilous. Can policymakers adapt American foreign policy to better fit the twenty-first century, and in doing so avoid the pitfalls and excesses of the past three decades? In this book, Emma Ashford proposes a return to a more pragmatic, realist set of strategic principles, ones better suited for the emerging multipolar world, that would pursue narrower U.S. interests, cultivate the capabilities of friendly states, and emphasize room for maneuver over rigid alliances. In this she provides a valuable counterpoint to today's liberal internationalist consensus, as well as a road map for policymakers who seek to change the course of U.S. foreign policy.

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Raymond J. McKoski, "David Davis, Abraham Lincoln's Favorite Judge" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

One of Abraham Lincoln's staunchest and most effective allies, Judge David Davis masterminded the floor fight that gave Lincoln the presidential nomination at the 1860 Republican National Convention. This history-changing event emerged from a long friendship between the two men. It also altered the course of Davis's career, as Lincoln named him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1862.

In David Davis, Abraham Lincoln's Favorite Judge (University of Illinois Press, 2025), Raymond J. McKoski offers a biography of Davis's public life, his impact on the presidency and judiciary, and his personal, professional, and political relationships with Lincoln. Davis lent his vast network of connections, organizational and leadership abilities, and personal persuasiveness to help Lincoln's political rise. When Davis became a judge, he honed an ability to hear each case with complete impartiality, a practice that endeared him to Lincoln but one day put him at odds with the president over important Civil War-era rulings. McKoski details these cases while providing an in-depth account of Davis's role in Lincoln's two unsuccessful campaigns for U.S. Senate and the fateful run for the presidency.

Raymond J. McKoski is a retired Illinois Circuit Judge and adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law.

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Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Kathleen Casey joins Jana Byars to talk about The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford UP, 2025). Purses and bags have always been much more than a fashion accessory. For generations of Americans, the purse has been an essential and highly adaptable object, used to achieve a host of social, cultural, and political objectives. In the early 1800s, when the slim fit of neoclassical dresses made interior pockets impractical, upper-class women began to carry small purses called reticules, which provided them with a private place in a world where they did not have equal access to public space. Although many items of apparel have long expressed their wearer's aspirations, only the purse has offered carriers privacy, pride, and pleasure. This privacy has been particularly important for those who have faced discrimination because of their gender, class, race, citizenship, or sexuality. The Things She Carried reveals how bags, sacks, and purses provided the methods and materials for Americans' activism, allowing carriers to transgress critical boundaries at key moments. It explores how enslaved people used purses and bags when attempting to escape and immigrant factory workers fought to protect their purses in the workplace. It also probes the purse's nuanced functions for Black women in the civil rights movement and explores how LGBTQ people used purses to defend their bodies and make declarations about their sexuality. Kathleen Casey closely examines a variety of sources--from vintage purses found in abandoned buildings and museum collections to advertisements, photograph albums, trade journals, newspaper columns, and trial transcripts. She finds purses in use at fraught historical moments, where they served strategic and symbolic functions for their users. The result is a thorough and surprising examination of an object that both ordinary and extraordinary Americans used to influence social, cultural, economic, and political change.

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Robert F. Williams, "The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America's Cold War Army" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America's Cold War Army (Cornell UP, 2025) explores how a small group of World War II airborne officers took control of the US Army after World War II. This powerful cadre cemented a unique airborne culture that had an unprecedented impact on the Cold War US Army and beyond.

Robert F. Williams reveals the trials and tribulations this group of officers faced in order to bring about their vision. He spotlights the relationship between organizational culture, operational behavior, and institutional change in the United States Army during the Cold War, showing that as airborne officers ascended to the highest ranks of the army they transmitted their culture throughout their service in four major ways—civil-military relations, preparation for potential atomic combat, helicopter airmobility, and strategic response forces.

Experiences of training and commanding airborne divisions in World War II led these men to hold sway in army doctrine by the mid-1950s. Dominating institutional thought and imparting their values, beliefs, and norms throughout the service they enjoyed a special privilege within the group culture. Williams demonstrates this impact, privilege, and power by focusing on the paratrooper triumvirate of Matthew Ridgway, Maxwell Taylor, and James Gavin and the lasting impression they made on how the US Army fought.

The Airborne Mafia illuminates the power subcultures can have in changing their parent cultures over time, particularly one as set in its ways and as large as the US Army. With a deft touch, deep research, and an unwavering eye for the human stories behind organizational change, Williams helps explain the existence and importance of the paratrooper mystique that remains within the military still today.

Former paratrooper Robert F. Williams analyzes masterfully the origins, development, and impact of a small but very influential group of airborne leaders in the decades following WWII. I witnessed this dynamic in both peace and war, and Williams captures the subject superbly. The Airborne Mafia is a must-read for soldiers, scholars, policymakers, and history buffs who want to learn how culture can so significantly influence an organization.

Cutting through the outsized myths of one of the US Army's most storied units, Williams delivers a groundbreaking study of the airborne and its soldiers. An incredibly well-told tale of operational innovation, institutional leadership, and cultural persuasion, The Airborne Mafia will no doubt be a go-to book for those interested in an organizational history of the US armed forces during the Cold War era.

The Airborne Mafia is a significant contribution to military history. Williams has worked carefully with culture as a driving force in this book. He reveals and fully appreciates how the actions and thoughts of World War II airborne generals shaped the institution into the 21st century.

Williams uses the analytical lens of airborne—as a warfighting concept and as individuals dedicated to it—to examine how military institutions change over time. The Airborne Mafia does a phenomenal job articulating how this particular subculture and its vital undercurrents first coalesced and then unified into a powerful force.

General David Petraeus, US Army (Ret.)Gregory A. Daddis, author of Pulp VietnamIngo Trauschweizer, author of Maxwell Taylor's Cold WarWilliam A. Taylor, author of Every Citizen a Soldier

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Disco Sucks

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:02:00 -0000

On July 12, 1979, Chicago’s Comiskey Park erupted into chaos during what was supposed to be a quirky baseball promotion. Shock radio jock Steve Dahl’s “Disco Demolition Night” incentivized listeners to bring disco records to a White Socks doubleheader, where, between games Dahl promised to blow them up in center field. Instead, the event descended into a riot, forcing the team to forfeit. On the surface, the incendiary event looked like a wild publicity stunt gone wrong — but in hindsight, it was tantamount to a book burning. In retrospect, the destruction of thousands of disco records was a symbolic rejection of the social meanings the sounds held, particularly for queer communities of color. The night marked not just the literal destruction of vinyl but a cultural turning point when disco’s dazzling reign collapsed under backlash. Or did it? In this episode, we explore how a stadium stunt revealed the deeper racial, sexual, and generational tensions shaping American music at the dawn of the 1980s.

In episode seven, host Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares talk with Gillian Frank is a historian of gender, sexuality, religion, and politics in the twentieth-century United States at Trinity College, Dublin. He is a managing editor of NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality and co-host of the podcast Sexing History, which explores how the past shapes contemporary debates about sex. Frank’s scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals and edited volumes, and he has held research fellowships at Princeton and other institutions. His current book project examines the history of child adoption and foster care in the U.S., tracing how religion, race, and politics shaped family formation in modern America.

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Scott Beekman, "The Last Gladiator: William Muldoon and the Making of American Sports" (U Texas Press, 2025)

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

William Muldoon was an infamous athlete whose prowess, savvy, and chicanery across his six-decade career led him to wealth, cultural importance, and political power. Muldoon, the child of poor Irish immigrants, began wrestling in the 1870s and quickly became one of the most famous athletes of the post–Civil War era. He started acting and modeling as his popularity grew, making him one of the first sports stars to achieve crossover success. After a triumphant stint rehabilitating fallen boxing heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan in 1889, he retired from the ring and began a new career as a fitness impresario, founding an elite gymnasium and remaking himself as a health authority in the press. He became trainer to the rich, famous, and politically powerful, which led to his appointment as chair of the New York State Athletic Commission in the 1920s. From this position, Muldoon exerted his influence over the rules of boxing and wrestling and weaponized his power to maintain segregation in sport.

The Last Gladiator: William Muldoon and the Making of American Sports (U Texas Press, 2025) is a deep, insightful dive into Muldoon’s life and impact, demonstrating the significance of this often-controversial figure in the development of American sports, professional wrestling, and physical and popular culture.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out on November 1. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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John L. Campbell, "Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Since the Reagan era, conservatives in the United States have championed cutting taxes, especially for wealthy individuals and corporations, as the best way to achieve economic prosperity. In his new book, Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich (Cambridge UP, 2025) John L. Campbell shows that while these claims are highly influential, they are also wrong. Using historical and cross-national evidence, the book challenges and refutes every justification conservatives have made for tax cuts - that American taxes are too high; they hurt the economy; they facilitate government waste; they constitute an unfair downward redistribution of income; and they threaten individual freedom - and conversely shows that countries can actually benefit from higher taxes, especially when tax increases fall most heavily on those most able to pay them. Through clear prose and a well-reasoned argument, Campbell's book provides an accessible, engaging, and much-needed perspective on the role of taxes in American society.

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Aaron Cayer, "Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire" (U California Press, 2025)

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

By the end of the twentieth century, US architecture and engineering firms held more capital than entire countries, employed more people than were housed in most cities, and rented offices in more nations than comprised the UN. Within them, architects were designing not single buildings but urban systems, including the multinational infrastructures, legal codes, and financial mechanisms on which those systems came to depend. However, despite the extraordinary power of these architects, their histories remain shrouded in myth and concealed—by design.

In Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire (U California Press, 2025) Dr. Aaron Cayer provides a forensic analysis that traces a history of architects at one such firm, AECOM, as they assembled their own multinational corporation and embedded themselves in the operations of American empire after World War II, shielding themselves from the instabilities of a postwar political economy. Incorporating Architects reveals how architects, through their businesses more than their drawings or buildings, modulated the political economy, gripped the reins of their profession, and produced the global injustices that define our neoliberal present.

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Ecodefense: Dave Foreman and Earth First!’s Deep Ecology

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A cowboy hat-wearing Goldwater conservative named Dave Foreman got religion and then founded the most radical environmental group of recent memory, Earth First! They dreamed of a ‘deep ecology’ that recognized the inherent value of nature, and they committed to protecting that nature at almost any cost. Yet, in putting the earth first, did Dave Foreman relegate humanity to a distant second place?

This is the third episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS).

Plus: Live in Toronto? Come out to our live event, October 2nd.

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Debra Michals, "She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the years after World War II, as women were being pushed from wartime jobs for returning soldiers, government and business leaders—and women themselves—saw small business ownership as a viable economic solution. In just five years, US women owned nearly a million of the nation’s businesses. In the decades since, women have moved increasingly into business ownership, often outpacing male start-ups so that today, they own more than fourteen million businesses, 40 percent of all US companies.

She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II (Rutgers UP, 2025) by Dr. Debra Michals chronicles the forces that made entrepreneurship attractive to women. In rich detail, Dr. Michals shares the stories of the countless women of all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities who contributed to this important history. The book also explores the intersection of women’s personal choices within changing social, political, and economic factors, such as the rising divorce rates of the 1960s and 1970s, ongoing workplace and credit discrimination, civil and women’s rights activism and activist entrepreneurs, the 1970s recession and 1980s “Reagan Revolution,” and more recently, the internet, crowd-funding, and social entrepreneurship.

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Mark Archuleta, "The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr: From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again" (U North Texas Press, 2025)

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 1921 headlines across the country announced the death of Henry Starr, a burgeoning silent film star who was killed while attempting to rob a bank in Harrison, Arkansas. Cynics who knew the real Starr were not surprised. Before becoming a matinee idol, Starr had been the greatest bank robber of the horseback bandit era.

Born in 1873, Cherokee outlaw Henry Starr had survived shootouts and death sentences and lived long enough to witness the invention of moving pictures. In 1919, after Starr was released from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, a hotshot movie producer convinced him he had the looks, charisma, and “wild and woolly” life story to become the next big movie star.

When filming began in 1920, powerful organizations aligned to censor Starr, attempting to prevent him from exposing Oklahoma’s corrupt legal system and the government’s mistreatment of the Cherokee. The Women's Christian Temperance Union pressured theater owners to ban his film, state and federal lawmakers drafted legislation to stymie theatrical distribution, and police and district attorneys threatened to send him back to prison.

Starr's only film, the biographical movie A Debtor to the Law, is lost to history, but through surviving memorabilia, newspaper accounts, and interviews with people who worked with him on set, author Mark Archuleta traces how the reformed gentleman bandit attempted to use the power of cinema to reframe his life story and redeem himself in the eyes of the public, his family, and the Cherokee Nation.

The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr: From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again (University of North Texas Press, 2025) by Mark Archuleta is about more than heists and Hollywood glamor. Starr’s journey is about the American myth of reinvention, recidivism, and the founding of the motion picture industry when racial tensions were simmering to a boil.

Contact the author here.

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Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This is a very special episode of the New Books Network, as the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon (UP of Mississippi, 2025), Dr. Constance Bailey, discusses the process of selecting, compiling, and publishing the volume with the subject himself, award-winning author, Kiese Laymon.

Conversations with Kiese Laymon provides an in-depth look at Laymon as an educator, creative writer, activist, family member, and Mississippian. Interviews capture surprising insights into Laymon’s life and craft. Within the book’s pages, Laymon talks about his engagement with other writers, including Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. These revelations situate his memoir, Heavy, among other great Mississippi autobiographies and memoirs, such as Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive. In other interviews, he discusses his obsession with revision and deftly fields questions about pop culture, politics, and Black masculinity, along with a host of other pressing contemporary issues.

As the first collection of its kind, Conversations with Kiese Laymon serves as the perfect introduction to studying Laymon. The cross section of interviews included reflects Laymon’s humility, while simultaneously celebrating his accomplishments. Most importantly, the interviews reflect his stature as a major American literary figure. With topics ranging from hip-hop and family to politics and everything in between, Conversations provides an unfiltered look at the prolific Southern writer in his own words.

And the same can be said of this episode.

You can find Dr. Constance Bailey at her website, and on Instagram.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Kate Haulman, "The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In May 1894, President Grover Cleveland gave a speech thanking those who gathered “to worship at this national shrine.” He was not referring to the battlefields at Gettysburg or Antietam, nor to Mount Vernon, but to the gravesite of Mary Ball Washington, mother of George. While dedicating the new monument that marked it in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Cleveland honored “the woman who gave our Nation its greatest and best citizen.” There could be no clearer valorization of eighteenth-century republican motherhood and its centrality to the nation's origin story.
The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Kate Haulman examines the role of motherhood in the commemoration of the American Revolution by tracing the creation and evolution of the Mother of Washington figure. Dr. Haulman explores the nineteenth-century memory of an eighteenth-century woman known for and through her famous son, the nation's first president. Underpinned by a canon of stories about Mary that often involved George, the monument and the figure it memorialized overlapped, sometimes in surprising and even paradoxical ways. In print, in images, and on the landscape, memorializing Mary foregrounded maternal ideals based in traditional gender roles and ancestry in the public memory of the nation's founding. As some women framed their engagement with the state in maternal terms, other men and women used the Mother of Washington to link the virtues she represented to the nation's origins. Women memorialists finally took up the cause to complete the monument, finishing what elite men had begun decades earlier.
Then as now, groups used the past to construct American motherhood, as well as using motherhood to engage with the founding past. The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America offers fresh arguments about gender, race, and the politics of Revolutionary history and memory still contested 250 years later.

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Tim Weiner, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century" (Mariner Books, 2025)

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2007, Tim Weiner published the book Legacy of Ashes. It was a history of the CIA from its founding to the early 2000s. As a university student in Italy, I bought the book as soon as it came out. The second non-fiction book I ever bought in English. The book was riveting. It kickstarted my interest in the CIA and covert operations.

Now, Tim Weiner has published a sequel to Legacy of Ashes. His new book is called The Mission: the CIA in the 21st Century (Mariner Books, 2025). It is a gripping and revelatory history of the from the late 1990s to the present. It ranges from 9/11 through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to today's battles with Russia and China--and with the President of the United States.

At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn't being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA's officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.

Then came September 11th, 2001. After the attacks, the CIA transformed itself into a lethal paramilitary force, running secret prisons and brutal interrogations, mounting deadly drone attacks, and all but abandoning its core missions of espionage and counterespionage. The consequences were grave: the deaths of scores of its recruited foreign agents, the theft of its personnel files by Chinese spies, the penetration of its computer networks by Russian intelligence and American hackers, and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq. A new generation of spies now must fight the hardest targets--Moscow, Beijing, Tehran--while confronting a president who has attacked the CIA as a subversive force.

The book reveals how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror--and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The key message of the book is that the CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. This is made even more difficult by the attacks on the intelligence community deployed by the second Trump presidency, from unqualified senior officials to loyalty tests. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance. The Mission includes exclusive on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, the top spymaster, thirteen station chiefs, and scores of top operations officers who served undercover for decades and have never spoken to a journalist before.

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Bob Wyss, "Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal" (University of California Press, 2025)

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For decades coal has been crucial to America's culture, society, and environment, an essential ingredient in driving out winter's cold, cooking meals, and lighting the dark. In the coalfields and beyond, in Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal (University of California Press, 2025) Bob Wyss describes how this magical elixir sparked the Industrial Revolution, powered railroads, and built urban skylines, while providing home comforts for families.

Coal's history and heritage are fundamental to understanding its legacy of threats to America's well-being. As industry developed so did clashes between powerful tycoons, coal miners, and innocent families. Exploitation and avarice led to victimization, deadly violence, and ultimately the American labor movement. More recently coal has endangered American lives and safety, brought on by two centuries of carbon combustion, and here the threat remains unresolved. This is coal's most enduring legacy, and Black Gold is pivotal in helping us understand how we got to this point.

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Calvin Schermerhorn, "The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. J Calvin Schermerhorn is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His books include The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860, and Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery. He lives in Tempe, AZ.

The long history of the racial wealth gap in America told through the stories of seven Black families who struggled to build wealth over multiple generations
Wealth is central to the American pursuit of happiness and is an overriding measure of well-being. Yet wealth is conspicuously absent from African American households. Why do some 3.5 million Black American families have zero or negative wealth?
In The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made (Yale UP, 2025) historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization—what Frederick Douglass called plunder—through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder.
From the story of Anthony and Mary Johnson, abducted from Angola and brought to Virginia in 1619, to the enslaved Black workers dispossessed by the Custis-Washington family, to Venture Smith (born Broteer Furro), who purchased his freedom, to three generations of a family enslaved in the South who moved north after Emancipation, to the Tulsa massacre and the subprime lending crisis, Schermerhorn shows that we cannot reckon with today’s racial wealth inequality without understanding its unrelenting role in American history.

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Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis, "Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism" (UP of Kansas, 2025)

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Nicholas Jacobs (Colby College) and Sidney Milkis (University of Virginia) have a new book, Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism (UP of Kansas, 2025), focusing on the idea of presidentialism, which is a way to think of political systems that include a dominant president or executive. In the United States, with the original constitutional system of separate co-equal branches of government, presidentialism disrupts the structure that was initially constructed under the U.S. Constitution. Over the course of more than two centuries, the United States has contended with the waxing and waning of presidential power within the multi-branch system. But Jacobs and Milkis maintain that since the 1990s we have seen an expansion of presidentialism, with a collective tendency to invest greater responsibilities and power in the presidential office itself as well as in the person who is serving in that capacity. Part of this thesis is also about how different, competing forces and ideologies have pushed for the use of presidential power to solve cultural struggles, which are not necessarily the institutional or structural role of the presidency. While the growth of American presidentialism may be more contemporary, it has origins in the struggles and ruptures of the 1960s and the 1970s—which were never fully resolved, especially in regard to who belongs within the American community. Subverting The Republic spends time examining this historical framework to help us think about the current structural, political, and cultural contexts, and especially the place of President Donald J. Trump within our understanding of presidentialism.

This book is a careful and deeply researched historical and political analysis of the shifts and changes in how the American presidency has operated over the past 75 years, and grounds many of the actions we have seen within both Trump Administrations, as well as much of the pushback against some of these actions and assertions of power. In weaving together the historical background with the structural form of the presidency and the various tools that a president has at his command, Jacobs and Milkis lay out both the precedents relied upon by presidents of the 21st century, especially Donald Trump, but also the anomalies of the Trump Administration and actions. While Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism went to press before President Trump was re-elected in 2024 (and there is a brief postscript that is included, noting the results and considering what the second Trump Administration might look like), the authors noted in our conversation that much of what they discuss about the first Trump Administration in the book has only grown and expanded in the second Trump Administration. This is an important analysis of the office of the American presidency and how that office, as conceived of by the Founders and situated within a constitutional system that includes other centers of power and responsibility, has evolved rather dramatically from that initial form and structure.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Jonathan White and Lucas Morel, "Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln" (Reedy Press, 2025)

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (Reedy Press, 2025), acclaimed scholars Lucas E. Morel and Jonathan W. White assemble Frederick Douglass’s most meaningful and poignant statements about Abraham Lincoln, including a dozen newly discovered documents that have not been seen for 160 years. Readers will encounter the distrust and vitriol Douglass directed at Lincoln throughout much of the Civil War, including his anger and frustration with the president as he moved slowly, but methodically, toward emancipation. Douglass’s writings also reveal how three personal interactions between these two great men led to powerful feelings of friendship and mutual admiration. After Lincoln’s assassination—as Jim Crow laws and political violence gutted the hard-won rights of Black Americans—Douglass expressed greater appreciation for Lincoln’s statesmanship during the Civil War and praised him as a model for postwar America. There is no one better than Frederick Douglass to offer a critical assessment of the Great Emancipator and savior of the Union. His reflections not only convey Lincoln’s contributions to the nation but also teach today’s generation timely lessons on how to fulfill the promise of the American republic. Measuring the Man sheds new light on the most critical period of American history and will transform the way we think about these two extraordinary leaders.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a PhD Candidate in History and African American Studies at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu.

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Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025)

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Conspiracy, mutiny and liberation on America’s waterfront by the award-winning author of The Slave Ship.

Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea (Penguin Group, 2025) is a gripping history of stowaway slaves and the vessels that carried them to liberty. Up to 100,000 fugitives successfully fled the horrors of bondage in the American South. Many were ushered clandestinely northwards from safe house to safe house: know as the Underground Railway. Thousands of others escaped not by land, but by sea. Their dramatic tales of whispered conspiracy and billowing sails make Freedom Ship essential and enthralling reading.
Through the intricate riverways of the Carolinas to the banks of the Chesapeake Bay, Freedom Ship traces the freedom seekers who turned their sights to the sea. Sailaways regularly arrived in Britain on cotton ships from New York or Southern ports. For example, Moses Roper, one of the most determined runaways in American history, traveled 350 miles through slave country before eventually taking a ship named the Napoleon to Liverpool. Both legendary abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman used the waterfront as a path to freedom.

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. His “histories from below,” including The Slave Ship: A Human History, have won numerous awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, and have been translated into seventeen languages worldwide. He has produced a film, Ghosts of Amistad, with director Tony Buba, and written a play, “The Return of Benjamin Lay,” with playwright Naomi Wallace. He is currently writing a book about escaping slavery by sea in antebellum America.

YouTube Channel here

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Rebecca Nagle, "By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land" (Harper, 2024)

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled, in a surprise decision, that treaties still on the books as US law meant that the Muscogee people of Oklahoma maintained legal jurisdiction over a large portion of the state; in short, that much of Oklahoma remained Indian Country. McGirt v. Oklahoma has been fought over in the court system since, but the implications are ongoing, in Oklahoma and elsewhere. In By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land (Harper, 2024), award winning journalist, writer, and podcaster Rebecca Nagle tracks this story back hundreds of years, through the history of the Muscogee and other Southeastern Indigenous nations, to the era of removal in the 1830s, and up through the present day. This includes the case of Patrick Murphy, and the murder that kickstarted McGirt's surprising and unlikely trek through the courts. A powerful of story of what can happen when people simply follow the laws as written, Nagle argues that Indigenous resistance, resilience, and power as just as much of the story of the West as disposession and land loss.

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Jessica B. Harris, "Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine" (Clarkson Potter, 2025)

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Discover the sweeping story of how Indigenous, European, and African traditions intertwined to form an entirely new cuisine, with over 90 recipes for the modern home cook—from the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Famer and star of the Netflix docuseries High on the Hog. One of our preeminent culinary historians, Dr. Jessica B. Harris has conducted decades of research throughout the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa. In this telling of the origins of American food, though, she gets more personal. As heritage is history, she intertwines the larger sweeping past with stories and recipes from friends she’s made over the years—people whose family dishes go back to the crucial era when Native peoples encountered Europeans and the enslaved Africans they brought with them. Through this mix, we learn that Clear Broth Clam Chowder has both Indigenous and European roots; the same, too, with Enchiladas Suizas, tomatillo-smothered tortillas made “Swiss” with cheese and dairy; and that the hallmarks of African American food through the centuries have been evolution based on region, migration, and innovation, resulting in classics like Red Beans and Rice and Peach Bread Pudding Cupcakes with Bourbon Glaze. With recipes ranging from everyday meals to festive spreads, Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine (Clarkson Potter, 2025) offers a new, in-depth, delicious look at American culinary history.

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Michael Poznansky, "Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of World War II, the United States leveraged its hegemonic position in the international political system to gradually build a new global order centered around democracy, the expansion of free market capitalism, and the containment of communism. Named in retrospect the "liberal international order" (LIO), the system took decades to build and is still largely with us today even as the US's relative power within it has diminished.

In Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2025), Michael Poznansky explores how the LIO has influenced US foreign policy from its founding to the present. Proponents argue that its impact has been profound, producing a system that has been more rule-bound and beneficial than any previous order. Critics charge that it has failed to prevent the US itself from consistently violating rules and norms. Poznansky contends that the answer lies in between. While rule-breaking has been a constant feature of the postwar order, the nature of violations varies in surprising and poorly understood ways. America's approach to compliance with the LIO, including whether leaders feel the need to conceal rule violations at all, is a function of two primary factors: the intensity of competition over international order, and the burden of complying with the liberal order's core tenets in a given case.

Drawing on nine case studies, including the Korean War and Iraq War, Great Power, Great Responsibility sheds important light on the future of US foreign policy in an era where American unipolarity has ended and great power rivalry has returned.

Our guest is Michael Poznansky, an Associate Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department and a core faculty member in the Cyber & Innovation Policy Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Keisha N. Blain, "Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights" (W.W. Norton, 2025)

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Even before they were recognized as citizens of the United States, Black women understood that the fights for civil and human rights were inseparable. Over the course of two hundred years, they were at the forefront of national and international movements for social change, weaving connections between their own and others’ freedom struggles around the world.

Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights (W.W. Norton, 2025) tells how, during American history, Black women made humans rights theirs: from worldwide travel and public advocacy in the global Black press to their work for the United Nations, they courageously and effectively moved human rights beyond an esoteric concept to an active, organizing principle. Acclaimed historian Keisha N. Blain tells the story of these women—from the well-known, like Ida B. Wells, Madam C. J. Walker, and Lena Horne, to those who are still less known, including Pearl Sherrod, Aretha McKinley, and Marguerite Cartwright. Blain captures human rights thinking and activism from the ground up with Black women at the center, working outside the traditional halls of power.

By shouldering intersecting forms of oppression—including racism, sexism, and classism—Black women have long been in a unique position to fight for freedom and dignity. Without Fear is an account of their aspirations, strategies, and struggles to pioneer a human rights approach to combating systems of injustice.

Dr. Keisha Blain is a professor of Africana studies and history at Brown University. She is a Guggenheim, Carnegie, and New America Fellow, and author—most recently of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Until I Am Free. You can find her on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and Facebook.

You can find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Lucy Sante, "Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (The Experiment, 2022)

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties. This feat of engineering served to meet New York City’s ever-increasing need for water, sustaining its inhabitants and cementing it as a center of industry. West of the Hudson, it meant that twenty-six villages, with their farms, forest lands, orchards, and quarries, were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished, and submerged, profoundly altering ecosystems in ways we will never fully appreciate.

This paradox of victory and loss is at the heart of Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (The Experiment, 2022) Lucy Sante’s meticulous account of how New York City secured its seemingly limitless fresh water supply, and why it cannot be taken for granted. In inimitable form, Sante plumbs the historical record to surface forgotten archives, bringing lost places back to life on the page. Her immaculately calibrated sensitivity honors both perspectives on New York City’s reservoir system and helps us understand the full import of its creation.

An essential history of the New York City region that will reverberate far beyond it, Nineteen Reservoirs examines universal divisions in our resources and priorities—between urban and rural, rich and poor, human needs and animal habitats. This is an unmissable account of triumph, tragedy, and unintended consequences.

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Laura Hobson Faure, "Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust" (Yale UP, 2025)

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The first account of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France—and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime

At the eve of the Second World War, an estimated 1.6 million Jewish children lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. While 10,000 of them escaped to Britain in the Kindertransport, only some 500 found a new home in France. Here they attempted to begin again—but their refuge would all too soon become a trap.
For the first time, Laura Hobson Faure brings to life the experiences of these children, and the Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who helped them. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies as well as children’s diaries, letters, drawings, songs, and poems, Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust (Yale UP, 2025) re-creates their complex journeys, including how some of them eventually found safety in America.
Hobson Faure paints a moving portrait of these children and their escape, uncovering their agency in the flight from Nazism—and knits together the network of the many who aided them along the way.

Laura Hobson Faure is professor of modern history and chair of Modern Jewish History at Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne. She’s an expert on French-American Jewish history and the author of The “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France.

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Find Geraldine here

Mentioned in the podcast:

Rebecca Clifford, Survivors, Children’s Lives after the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2020).
Rebecca Clifford, “Who is a Survivor? Child Holocaust Survivors and the Development of a Generational Identity,” Oral History Forum. Forum d’Histoire Orale 37 (2017).
Beth B. Cohen, Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience (Rutgers University Press, 2018).
Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (Yale University Press, 1991).
Katy Hazan, “Le sauvetage des enfants juifs de France vers les Amériques, 1933-1947,” in Hélène Harter and André Kaspi, Terres promises: mélanges offerts à André Kaspi, 2008, p. 481-93.
Katy Hazan, Rire le jour, pleurer la nuit: les enfants juifs cachés dans la Creuse pendant la guerre, 1939-1944 (Calman-Levy, 2014).
Laura Hobson Faure, Manon Pignot, and Antoine Rivière, eds., Enfants en guerre. “Sans famille” dans les conflits du XXe siècle (CNRS, 2023).
Sarah L. Holloway, Louise Holt, and Sarah Mills, “Questions of Agency: Capacity, Subjectivity, Spatiality and Temporality,” Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 3 (2019): 458–477.
Laurent Joly, L'État contre les Juifs: Vichy, les nazis et la persécution antisémite 1940–1944 (Grasset, 2018).
Célia Keren, “Autobiographies of Spanish Refugee Children at the Quaker Home in La Rouvière (France, 1940): Humanitarian Communication and Children’s Writings,” Les Cahiers de FRAMESPA 5 (2010).
Lisa Moses Leff, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Joanna B. Michlic, “Missed Lessons from the Holocaust: Avoiding Complexities and Darker Aspects of Jewish Child Survivors’ Life Experiences,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 17, no. 2 (Spring 2024): 272–286. See also her forthcoming book.

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Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, "Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) tells the story of an extraordinarily influential group of business executives at the helms of the largest US multinational corporations and their quest to drive globalization forward over the last eight decades. Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl argues that the spectacular expansion of international investment, trade, and production after 1945 cannot be understood without considering the role played by these corporate globalizers and the organization they created, the US Council (today’s United States Council for International Business). By shaping governmental policy through their congressional lobbying and close connections to successive presidential administrations, US Council members, including executives from General Electric, Coca Cola, and IBM, among others, consistently fought for ever more market deregulation, culminating in the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995.

Crusading for Globalization is also a book about those who opposed the growing might of multinationals. In the years immediately after World War II, resistance came from business protectionists, before labor and policymakers from the Global South joined the effort in the early 1970s. Schaufelbuehl breaks new ground by offering a panorama of this early anti-globalization movement, and by showing how the leaders of multinationals organized to limit its political influence. She also examines continuities between this early movement and the opposition to globalization that emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century from the left and the populist right and discusses how business responded by promoting corporate social responsibility and voluntary guidelines.
The first book to shed light on what caused corporate executives to pursue a pro-globalization agenda and to examine their methods for dealing with their opponents, Crusading for Globalization reveals the historical roots of today’s disparities in wealth and income distribution.

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Thomas Graham, "Getting Russia Right" (Polity Press, 2023)

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That saying sounds as true now as ever in the midst of Russia’s war in Ukraine. In Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023), however, Thomas Graham provides an expert perspective on Russian history and statecraft and offers timely keys to Russian national interests which can help the United States get Russia right.

As US-Russian relations scrape the depths of Cold-War antagonism, the promise of partnership that beguiled American administrations during the first post-Soviet decades increasingly appears to have been false from the start. Why did American leaders persist in pursuing it? Was there another path that would have produced more constructive relations or better prepared Washington to face the challenge Russia poses today?

With a practitioner's eye honed during decades of work on Russian affairs, Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, deftly traces the evolution of opposing ideas of national purpose that created an inherent tension in relations. Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023) identifies the blind spots that prevented Washington from seeing Russia as it really is and crafting a policy to advance American interests without provoking an aggressive Russian response. Distilling the Putin factor to reveal the contours of the Russia challenge facing the United States whenever he departs the scene, Graham lays out a compelling way to deal with it so that the United States can continue to advance its interests in a rapidly changing world.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached by email here or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Alfred L. Martin Jr. and Taylor Cole Miller eds., "The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai (Rutgers UP, 2025) is an accessible collection that explores the cultural, industrial, and historical impact of that beloved American sitcom. Edited by Taylor Cole Miller and Alfred L. Martin, Jr., this anthology brings together a diverse range of voices that model different media studies approaches to researching and critically analyzing television texts. The Golden Girls reclaims the production history and development of the show, opens new conversations about audiences–especially Black, queer, and female audiences–and provides new insight into the meteoric rise in popularity of The Golden Girls as a 2020s cultural phenomenon. With twelve original chapters and extensive original interviews offering readers rare insights behind the scenes, the book is a long day’s journey into the marinara of The Golden Girls–an immersive, engaging opportunity for readers to learn more about the show. It truly is the golden age of The Golden Girls.

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Andrea Louise Campbell, "Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why Americans favor progressive taxation in principle but not in practice

Most Americans support progressive taxation in principle, and want the rich to pay more. But the specific tax policies that most favor are more regressive than progressive. What is behind such a disconnect? In Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes (Princeton UP, 2025), Andrea Louise Campbell examines public opinion on taxation, exploring why what Americans favor in principle differs from what they accept in practice. Campbell shows that since the federal income tax began a century ago, the rich have fought for lower taxes through reduced rates and a complicated system of tax breaks. The resulting complexity leaves the public confused about who benefits from the convoluted tax code, and leads to tax preferences that are driven by factors other than principles or interests.

Campbell argues that tax attitudes vary little by income, or by party, as some Democrats, more Republicans, and even more independents want most taxes decreased. Instead, white opinion on nearly every tax is racialized. Many do not realize the rich benefit the most from tax breaks, attitudes toward which are racialized, too. And among Black and Hispanic Americans, long subject to government coercion, greater support for government spending is not matched by greater support for taxation. Everyone has a reason to dislike taxes, which helps antitax Republicans win votes--and helps the rich in their long campaign to get their own taxes reduced and undermine progressivity.

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Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus, by Betsy Golden Kellem, reveals the hidden history of early female circus performers: boundary-breaking women like Lavinia Warren, known as the Queen of Beauty; to Millie-Christine McKoy, the Two-Headed Nightingale; to Patty Astley, the mother of the modern circus. These astounding female and gender-nonconforming artists wrestled snakes, performed magic tricks with electricity, and walked across waterfalls on tightropes, shattering taboos by performing in public. Betsy deftly explores how major forces in the long nineteenth century combined to create the uniquely American spectacle of the traveling circus. During the transformation of the circus from scrappy “mud shows” to a major international business, these extraordinary women challenged contemporary ideas of femininity, creating new possibilities for women far beyond the big top.

Our guest is: Betsy Golden Kellem, who is a scholar of the unusual. She has served on the boards of the Barnum Museum and the Circus Historical Society, is the Emmy-winning host and writer of the Showman’s Shorts video series on P.T. Barnum, and writes for JSTOR Daily. An expert media and intellectual property attorney, she has taught at Yale and the University of Connecticut, and regularly speaks on the weirder corners of history and law.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a dissertation and writing coach, and a developmental editor for scholars in the humanities. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Women’s History playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? with Damon Linker

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

We begin the new season of International Horizons by asking a crucial question: is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? RBI Deputy Director, Eli Karetny talks with political writer and scholar Damon Linker about how Trump’s movement sees presidential power, why it challenges long-standing rules and institutions, and what it means for America’s role in the world. They explore whether U.S. influence has shifted from leading a global order after World War II to carving out its own “sphere of influence” alongside other major powers. The discussion looks at attacks on government expertise, the idea of “restraint” in foreign policy, and how fringe thinkers on the right are shaping real political choices. What happens when leaders value absolute freedom of action over laws, expertise, or alliances? Tune in for a clear look at the ideas driving today’s high-stakes political battles.

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Breanne Pleggenkuhle and Joseph A. Schafer, "Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Adaptations in the US Criminal Justice System" (Southern Illinois UP, 2025)

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal justice system. Scholars recognized the unique opportunity to study crime and the justice system’s response during this period, though they soon realized that determining the pandemic’s effects would be a complicated, nuanced process.
Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Adaptations in the US Criminal Justice System (Southern Illinois University Press 2025) features analyses and findings from more than thirty contributors in eleven essays. The collection examines the multifaceted social, economic, cultural, legislative, and policy responses to COVID-19 and their impacts on crime and justice. It also explores how professionals across the criminal justice system—police officers, campus police officers, attorneys, judges, correctional staff, and community supervision agents—adapted to unprecedented challenges.
Through diverse perspectives and empirical approaches ranging from advanced statistical analysis to qualitative interviews, Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic offers a comprehensive exploration of the complexities that affect research results. It showcases the resilience and innovation within the criminal justice field and details the challenges professionals in this area tackled during a universally trying time, presenting valuable lessons for future crises.

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Kevin J. Hayes, "Understanding Hunter S. Thompson" (U South Carolina Press, 2025)

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) pushed the boundaries of storytelling. While the writer is most recognized for the genre-bending work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), in Understanding Hunter S. Thompson (University of South Carolina Press, 2025), Kevin J. Hayes provides a broad and nuanced analysis of Thompson's multifaceted career and unique literary voice. Following a biographical introduction, Hayes examines the different roles Thompson played throughout his literary career, resulting in a view of his work unlike any previously published biographical or critical study. The ensuing chapters analyze Thompson's work in his capacities as a foreign correspondent, literary critic, New Journalist, gonzo journalist, campaign writer, anthologist, letter writer, and novelist. Hayes draws on previously unrecorded articles, correspondence, and interviews to inform his insightful analysis. Written in an engaging and propulsive style, Understanding Hunter S. Thompson is essential reading for scholars and fans.

Kevin J. Hayes is professor emeritus of English, University of Central Oklahoma.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Molly Worthen, "Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump" (Random House, 2025)

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. How did we get here?
In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump" (Random House, 2025)
Context (Random House, 2025), historian Molly Worthen argues that we will understand our present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma, Worthen argues, stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama where hopes are fulfilled and grievances are put right—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way.
The story of charisma in America reveals that when traditional religious institutions fail to deliver on their promise of a meaningful life, people will get their spiritual needs met in a warped cultural and political landscape dominated by those who appear to have the power to bring order and meaning out of chaos. Charismatic leaders address spiritual needs, offering an alternate reality where people have knowledge, power, and heroic status, whether as divinely chosen instruments of God or those who will restore national glory.
Through Worthen’s centuries-spanning historical research, Spellbound places a crucial religious lens on the cultural, economic, and political upheavals facing Americans today.

Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a freelance journalist.

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Katherine Fusco, "Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of unusual stars appeared on the silver screen, representing groups from which the American mainstream typically sought to avert its eyes. What did it mean for a white entertainment columnist to empathize with an ambiguously gendered Black child star? Or for boys to idolize Lon Chaney, famous for portraying characters with disabilities?

Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System (Columbia UP, 2025) explores the affective ties between white, non-disabled audiences and the fascinatingly different stars with whom they identified—but only up to a point. Katherine Fusco argues that stardom in this era at once offered ways for viewers to connect across group boundaries while also policing the limits of empathy. Examining fan magazines alongside film performances, she traces the intense audience attachment to atypical celebrities and the ways the film industry sought to manage it. Fusco considers Shirley Temple’s career in light of child labor laws and changing notions of childhood; shows how white viewers responded to Black music in depictions of the antebellum South; and analyzes the gender politics of conspiracy theories around celebrity suicides. Shedding light on marginalized stardoms and the anxieties they provoked, Hollywood’s Others challenges common notions about film’s capacity to build empathy.

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Daniel Horowitz, "Bear With Me: A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America" (Duke UP, 2025)

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

From teddy bears and Winnie-the-Pooh to Smokey Bear, Yogi Bear, and Cocaine Bear, American popular culture has been fascinated with real and fictional bears for more than two centuries. Bears are ubiquitous, appearing in advertisements, as logos for sports teams, and as central characters in children’s books, cartoons, movies, and video games.

In Bear With Me: A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America (Duke UP, 2025), Dr. Daniel Horowitz presents a vibrant history of the pedestrian and celebrity bears who have captured our imaginations and infiltrated our everyday lives. He shows that bears’ ability to represent and evoke both terror and comfort makes them well-suited for their omnipresence. Today, cultural depictions of bears largely encompass examples of human-bear relationships, reciprocity, and emotional engagement. Reminders that climate change threatens the lives of polar bears engender feelings of empathy, while news of bear attacks drives us to fascinated fear. Whether examining the subculture of gay bears or the deadly consequences of anthropomorphizing animals, Dr. Horowitz charts the complexities and depth of American culture’s unique and enduring relationship with bears.

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Brendan A. Shanahan, "Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1965" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It is far less understood that the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the country remained primarily contested in the realms of state politics and law until the mid-to-late twentieth century. Such state-level political debates often centered on whether noncitizen immigrants should vote, count as part of the polity for the purposes of state legislative representation, work in public and publicly funded employment, or obtain professional licensure.
Enacted state alienage laws were rarely self-executing, and immigrants and their allies regularly challenged nativist restrictions in court, on the job, by appealing to lawmakers and the public, and even via diplomacy. Battles over the passage, implementation, and constitutionality of such policies at times aligned with and sometimes clashed against contemporaneous efforts to expand rights to marginalized Americans, particularly US-born women.

Often considered separately or treated as topics of marginal importance, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965 (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Brendan A. Shanahan underscores the centrality of nativist state politics and alienage policies to the history of American immigration and citizenship from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that the proliferation of these debates and laws produced veritable disparate regimes of citizenship rights in the American political economy on a state-by-state basis. It further illustrates how nativist state politics and alienage policies helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in law, practice, and popular perception in the United States.

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Flannery Burke, "Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region" (U Washington Press, 2025)

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Just as easterners imagined the American West, westerners imagined the American East, reshaping American culture. Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region (University of Washington Press, 2025) by Dr. Flannery Burke flips the script of American regional narratives.
In novels, travel narratives, popular histories, and dude ranch brochures, twentieth-century western US writers saw the East through the lens of their experiences and ambitions. Farmers following the railroad saw capitalists exploiting their labor, while cowboys viewed urban easterners as soft and effete. Westerners of different racial backgrounds, including African Americans and Asian Americans, projected their hopes and critiques onto an East that embodied urbanity, power, and opportunity.
This interplay between “Out West” and “Back East” influenced income inequality, land use, cultural identities, and national government. It fueled myths that reshaped public lands, higher education, and the publishing industry. The cultural exchange was not one-sided; it contributed to modern social sciences and amplified marginalized voices from Chicane poets to Native artists.
By examining how westerners imagined the American East, Back East provides a fresh perspective on the American cultural landscape, offering a deeper understanding of the myths that continue to shape it.

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Wade Davies, "Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970" (UP of Kansas, 2020)

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The game of basketball is perceived by most today as an “urban” game with a locale such as Rucker Park in Harlem as the game’s epicenter (as well as a pipeline to the NBA). While that is certainly a true statement, basketball is not limited to places such as New York City.

In recent years scholars have written about the meaning of the game (and triumphs on the hardwood) to other groups, such as Asian Americans (Kathleen Yep and Joel Franks) and Mexican Americans (Ignacio Garcia). To this important literature one can now add an examination of the sport in the lives of Native Americans, through Wade Davies' Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970 (University Press of Kansas, 2020).

The game, as Davies notes, was not just something imposed upon Natives in locales such as the Indian Industrial Training School in Kansas (and elsewhere). The game provided linkages to the Native past, and was embraced as a way to “prove their worth” within a hostile environment designed to strip students of all vestiges of their cultural inheritance. The sport provided both young men and women with an opportunity to compete against members of other institutions (both Native and white) and to challenge notions of inferiority and inherent weaknesses.

Davies’ work does an excellent job of detailing the role of the sport in the lives of individuals, schools, and eventually, Native communities. Additionally, it examines how these players competed against sometimes seven opponents (the five players on the court and the two officials) to claim their rightful place on the court. They also often had to deal with the taunts and racism of crowds at opposing gyms. Still, most of these schools managed to field competitive teams that created their own “Indian” style of basketball that proved quite difficult to defeat.

Wade Davies is professor of Native American studies at the University of Montana, Missoula.

Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University.

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Donald G. Nieman, "The Path to Paralysis: How American Politics Became Nasty, Dysfunctional, and a Threat to the Republic" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Much has been written about political polarisation in the United States, but no one has examined it through the lens of recent U.S. history. There is nothing deterministic about how we became polarised, and it happened more recently than many think. To fully understand the problem, we must take the long view, the perspective provided by history, with its attention to change over time and the role of contingency. That’s what The Path to Paralysis does.

The book illuminates the broad forces that have shaped and reshaped American society and politics since the mid-1960s: the shift from an industrial to an information economy that produced economic inequality not seen since the 1920s; dramatic, unsettling changes in gender and sexuality; sharp conflict between those who embrace the culture of personal freedom that was a legacy of the 1960s and politically mobilised White evangelicals; persistent racial discord that transformed Southern politics and shattered the New Deal coalition; and dramatic changes in communication that transformed broadcasting into narrowcasting, creating alternate news and truths.

These developments had their origin in the late 1960s and have generated sharp political conflict for six decades. But they didn’t overwhelm the system until the 21st century. Ronald Reagan moved American politics to the right, but Republicans and Democrats forged compromise on issues as diverse as economic policy, civil rights, and immigration. After the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tacked to the centre and sought bipartisan solutions to issues like welfare, education and immigration. Sharp conflict and governance were compatible.

The tipping point was the election of the nation’s first Black president and the economic collapse he inherited. Fault lines of religion, region, gender, sexual orientation, class, education and, especially, race widened. People chose sides and identified enemies, the number of true swing voters shrunk, fewer states and congressional districts were competitive, the two major parties became more monolithic, and appeals to the base drove strategy and what passed for policy. It was an atmosphere that provided fertile ground for a demagogue whose norm-busting appeals to White grievance and Christian Nationalism, as well as to regional and class resentment strengthened his appeal to an angry base and threatened the peaceful transition of power, the bedrock of American democracy for more than two centuries.

Donald G. Nieman is an authority on modern U.S. law and politics, and professor of history and provost emeritus at Binghamton University – State University of New York.

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Glenn Ligon, "Distinguishing Piss from Rain" (Hauser & Wirth, 2024)

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

An expansive volume featuring over two decades of incisive reflections on race, art and pop culture by one of the greatest artists working today This long-awaited and essential volume collects writings and interviews by Glenn Ligon, whose canonical paintings, neons and installations have been delivering a cutting examination of race, history, sexuality and culture in America since his emergence in the late 1980s. No stranger to text, the artist has routinely utilized writings from James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Pryor, Gertrude Stein and others to construct work that centers Blackness within the historically white backdrop of the art world and culture writ large. Ligon began writing in the early 2000s, engaging deeply with the work of peers such as Julie Mehretu, Chris Ofili and Lorna Simpson, as well as with artists who came before him, among them Philip Guston, David Hammons and Andy Warhol. Interweaving a singular voice and a magical knack for storytelling with an astute view of art history and broader cultural shifts, this collection cements Ligon's status as one of the great chroniclers of our time. Glenn Ligon was born in the Bronx in 1960. He began as an abstract painter but shifted to text-based works which often incorporate quotes from Black authors. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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LaShawn Harris, "Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City" (Beacon, 2025)

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on rent, Ms. Bumpurs was facing eviction when white NYPD officer Stephen Sullivan shot her twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. LaShawn Harris, 10 years old at the time, felt the aftershocks of the tragedy in her community well beyond the four walls of her home across the street.
Now an award-winning historian, Harris uses eyewitness accounts, legal documents, civil rights pamphlets, and more to look through the lens of her childhood neighbor’s life and death. She renders in a new light the history of anti-Black police violence and of the watershed anti-policing movement Eleanor Bumpurs’s murder birthed.
So many Black women’s lives have been stolen since—Deborah Danner, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Sonya Massey—and still more are on the line. A deeply researched, intimate portrait of Eleanor Bumpurs’s life and legacy highlights, Tell Her Story (Beacon Press, 2025) shows how one Black grandmother’s brutal police murder galvanized an entire city, and how possible and critical it is to stand together against racist policing now.

Author LaShawn Harris is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and former Managing and Book Review Editor for the Journal of African American History (JAAH). She is a historian of U. S. history with a focus on African American, Black Women’s, and urban histories. You can find her on Instagram.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Andrew Fialka, "Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Fialka illustrates two exceptional incidents of occupational and guerrilla violence in Missouri during the American Civil War. The first is a Union spy's two-week-long murder spree targeting civilians, and the second is a pro-Confederate guerrillas' mutilation of almost 150 U.S. troops.
The men leading the atrocities (Jacob Terman, alias Harry Truman, and “Bloody" Bill Anderson) weren't so different. Both the Union spy and the infamous Confederate guerrilla claimed to be avenging the deaths of their families, operated under orders from military officials, and were hard drinkers. Their acts outline the terror inflicted on both sides of the struggle.
This book's use of sequential art, illustrated by Anderson Carman, displays these grisly realities to mute the war's glorification and to help prompt a modern, meaningful reconciliation with the war. The moral ambiguities contained within this story call into question our understanding of the laws of war and the ways in which wars end.

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Daniel Wortel-London, "The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects—its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasn’t always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of activists, citizens, and intellectuals in New York City connected local fiscal crises to the greed and waste of the rich. These figures saw other routes to development, possibilities rooted in alternate ideas about what was fiscally viable.

In The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981 (U of Chicago Press, 2025), Daniel Wortel-London argues that urban economics and politics are shaped by what he terms the “fiscal imagination” of policymakers, activists, advocates, and other figures. His survey of New York City during a period of explosive growth shows how residents went beyond the limits of redistributive liberalism to imagine how their communities could become economically viable without the largesse of the wealthy. Their strategies—which included cooperatives, public housing, land value taxation, public utilities, and more—centered the needs and capabilities of ordinary residents as the basis for local economies that were both prosperous and just.

Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) holds an MPhil in intellectual history from the University of Cambridge.

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Patrice D. Douglass, "Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford UP, 2025) Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human. By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Douglass reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence—one of the most prevalent under slavery—continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. Engendering Blackness urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual history.

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Steve Luxenberg, "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation" (Norton, 2019)

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices in his book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (Norton, 2019) It is unusual because it is chiefly an ensemble biography of Henry Brown, John Marshall Harlan, and Albion Tourgee, three men intimately connected with the Plessy case. The book covers the Antebellum period youth of the three men, each from a different part of the young nation and each encountering freedmen, slaves, and the institution of slavery in different social and political contexts. We follow these men through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the post-Reconstruction period leading up to the Plessy decision. The Plessy case helped solidify official, state-enforced segregationist practices throughout the United States. It made the now-infamous phrase “separate but equal” a constitutional doctrine that was the law of the land until the 1950s and 1960s.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta, "Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What does it mean to supervise a bank? And why does it matter who holds that power? In this episode, Sean H. Vanatta joins us to explore the hidden machinery behind American finance, as told in his new book Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America (Princeton UP, 2025), co-authored with Peter Conti-Brown.

Spanning nearly 150 years, the book traces the evolution of bank supervision from a patchwork of state-level oversight to a complex, layered system involving federal agencies, private actors, and political discretion. Sean takes us from the wildcat banks of the 1830s to the rise of the Federal Reserve, through crises, reforms, and the quiet work of bank examiners who shaped the rules behind the scenes.

We discuss why supervision differs from regulation, how discretion has become central to managing financial risk, and what the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 reveals about the enduring tension between private profit and public responsibility. Along the way, Sean shares stories of forgotten institutions, colourful characters, and the surprising role of gender and civil rights in shaping financial oversight.

Whether you're a policymaker, historian, or simply curious about how money and power interact, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on the institutions that quietly govern our financial lives. Tune in for a rich and engaging journey through the history and current state of banking politics.
The interview on "Plastic Capitalism" is available here

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Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For generations of Americans, the purse has been an essential and highly adaptable object, used to achieve a host of social, cultural, and political objectives. In the early 1800s, when the slim fit of neoclassical dresses made interior pockets impractical, upper-class women began to carry small purses called reticules, which provided them with a private place in a world where they did not have equal access to public space. Although many items of apparel have long expressed their wearer's aspirations, only the purse has offered carriers privacy, pride, and pleasure. This privacy has been particularly important for those who have faced discrimination because of their gender, class, race, citizenship, or sexuality.

The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford University Press, 2025) reveals how bags, sacks, and purses provided the methods and materials for Americans' activism, allowing carriers to transgress critical boundaries at key moments. It explores how enslaved people used purses and bags when attempting to escape and immigrant factory workers fought to protect their purses in the workplace. It also probes the purse's nuanced functions for Black women in the civil rights movement and explores how LGBTQ people used purses to defend their bodies and make declarations about their sexuality.

Kathleen Casey closely examines a variety of sources--from vintage purses found in abandoned buildings and museum collections to advertisements, photograph albums, trade journals, newspaper columns, and trial transcripts. She finds purses in use at fraught historical moments, where they served strategic and symbolic functions for their users. The result is a thorough and surprising examination of an object that both ordinary and extraordinary Americans used to influence social, cultural, economic, and political change.

Kathleen B. Casey is Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Professor of History at Furman University in South Carolina.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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John Lisle, "Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The inside story of the CIA’s secret mind control project, MKULTRA, using never-before-seen testimony from the perpetrators themselves.
Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s most cunning chemist. As head of the infamous MKULTRA project, he oversaw an assortment of dangerous—even deadly—experiments. Among them: dosing unwitting strangers with mind-bending drugs, torturing mental patients through sensory deprivation, and steering the movements of animals via electrodes implanted into their brains. His goal was to develop methods of mind control that could turn someone into a real-life “Manchurian candidate.”
In conjunction with MKULTRA, Gottlieb also plotted the assassination of foreign leaders and created spy gear for undercover agents. The details of his career, however, have long been shrouded in mystery. Upon retiring from the CIA in 1973, he tossed his files into an incinerator. As a result, much of what happened under MKULTRA was thought to be lost—until now.
In Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA (St. Martin's Press, 2025) historian John Lisle has uncovered dozens of depositions containing new information about MKULTRA, straight from the mouths of its perpetrators. For the first time, Gottlieb and his underlings divulge what they did, why they did it, how they got away with it, and much more. Additionally, Lisle highlights the dramatic story of MKULTRA’s victims, from their terrible treatment to their dogged pursuit of justice.
The consequences of MKULTRA still reverberate throughout American society. Project Mind Control is the definitive account of this most disturbing of chapters in CIA history.

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Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Dr. Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday lives.
Tackling the Everyday shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading "football family" narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Dr. Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America's favorite game.

Our guest is: Dr. Tracie Canada, who is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose ethnographic research uses sport to theorize race, kinship and care, gender, and the performing body. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the founder and director of the HEARTS Lab, and is affiliated with the Duke Sports and Race Project. Her work has been featured in public venues and outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Guardian, and Scientific American.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She works as a dissertation and grad student coach, and as a developmental editor for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. She also writes the Academic Life newsletter, found at christinagessler.substack.com.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Tracy Slater, "Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp" (Chicago Review Press, 2025)

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced Executive Order 9066, which authorized the confinement of tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the Western U.S., sending them to cramped, hastily-constructed camps like Manzanar and Amache.

One such Japanese-American was Karl Yoneda, a well-known labor activist–and the husband of Elaine Yoneda, a Jewish-American woman. Elaine soon followed her husband to the Manzanar camp, after authorities threatened to send her three-year-old mixed-race son, Thomas, to the camp alone.

The Yonedas time in the camp is the subject of Tracy Slater’s book, Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp (Chicago Review Press, 2025)

Tracy is a Jewish American writer from Boston, based in her husband’s country of Japan. Her previous book was the mixed-marriage memoir The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2015). She has also published work in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time’s Made by History, and more.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Together in Manzanar. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Tom Arnold-Forster, "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America.

His words and ideas had a powerful impact on American liberalism and his writings on the media are still taught today.

Lippmann is now the subject of Tom Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton UP, 2025). Arnold-Forster explores Lippmann in his evolving historical context, from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. He argues that Lippmann was a much more complicated thinker than is usually recognized who went from being a liberal socialist to a conservative liberal.

Arnold-Forster is a historian at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, where he works on the political and intellectual history of the modern United States and the history of political thought. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and general interest publications. His article on Lippmann and public opinion, published in American Journalism, won the 2024 Dorothy Ross Prize for best article from the Society for United States Intellectual History.

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Timothy Messer-Kruse, "Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution" (LSU Press, 2024)

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution (LSU Press, 2024) unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. While historians have generally acknowledged that patriot leaders assembled in response to postwar economic chaos, the threat of popular insurgencies, and the inability of the states to agree on how to fund the national government, Timothy Messer-Kruse suggests that scholars have discounted Americans' desire to compel Britain to return fugitives from slavery as a driving force behind the convention.

During the Revolutionary War, British governors offered freedom to enslaved Americans who joined the king's army. Thousands responded by fleeing to English camps. After the British defeat at Yorktown, American diplomats demanded the surrender of fugitive slaves. When British generals refused, several states confiscated Loyalist estates and blocked payment of English creditors, hoping to apply enough pressure on the Crown to hand over the runaways. State laws conflicting with the 1783 Treaty of Paris violated the Articles of Confederation--the young nation's first constitution--but Congress, lacking an executive branch or a federal judiciary, had no means to obligate states to comply.

The standoff over the escaped slaves quickly escalated following the Revolution as Britain failed to abandon the western forts it occupied and took steps to curtail American commerce. More than any other single matter, the impasse over the return of enslaved Americans threatened to hamper the nation's ability to expand westward, develop its commercial economy, and establish itself as a power among the courts of Europe. Messer-Kruse argues that the issue encouraged the founders to consider the prospect of scrapping the Articles of Confederation and drafting a superseding document that would dramatically increase federal authority--the Constitution.

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Elaine Weiss, "Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, follows that magisterial work with a work of equal scholarly significance and narrative excellence, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement (Simon and Schuster, 2025), "the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement."
"In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.
Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.”

Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. In addition to Spell Freedom, she is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army of the Great War; and The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more at her website.

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Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., "Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune" (Ballantine, 2013)

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Bill Dedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and New York Times #1 bestselling author of Empty Mansions, shares the extraordinary story of a reclusive copper heiress, the battle over her fortune, and the HBO series adaptation now in development.

As an investigative journalist, Bill Dedman has built his career writing stories that change the way we see the world. It was that reporter’s instinct—paired with relentless curiosity—that led him to one of the most extraordinary tales of American wealth: the mysterious life of Huguette Clark and the spending of a great American fortune.

Had Bill not stumbled onto her story—and brought it to light in Empty Mansions—her final wishes might well have been lost in the legal battle over her $300 million estate.

Huguette was the daughter of copper magnate and U.S. senator W.A. Clark, one of the richest men in America. She grew up in dazzling extravagance: the largest home in New York City, with 121 rooms, four art galleries displaying rare art, and a $100,000 pipe organ that filled the halls with music. There was also Bellosguardo, the family’s 23-acre estate in Santa Barbara with sweeping views of the Pacific. She traveled to Europe, attended champagne soirées and black-tie balls—it was, by any measure, a life lived in grandeur.

And yet, in stark contrast, Huguette later chose seclusion.

For decades, Huguette lived reclusively in her Fifth Avenue apartments, surrounded by paintings by Renoir, Degas, and Corot, and by her vast collection of antique dolls—thousands of them, some dressed in custom Dior. She painted portraits, read voraciously, and built elaborate miniature temples by hand, each costing up to $100,000 to make. In her eighties, though still in excellent health, she chose to move into a modest hospital room, where she remained for the next twenty years—her whereabouts unknown even to longtime friends. Meanwhile, her staff kept her mansions in New York, California, and Connecticut just as she left them—waiting, it seemed, for her return.

What makes Huguette’s story even more remarkable is her quiet generosity to friends, strangers, and staff: $30 million to her nurse, a Stradivarius violin for the nurse’s son, a Rolls- Royce for the chauffeur, a Renoir, fine jewels, Christmas cards with $30,000 checks enclosed—among many other gestures that changed the lives of those around her.

Her choices were so unusual that distant relatives, left out of her will, seized on Huguette’s eccentricities as grounds to question her capacity, sparking a legal battle over her fortune. Was she being manipulated? Was she unwell? Crazy? "Did you hear about the dolls?" Had they been Birkins, she'd be on the pages of Vogue...

Bill uncovers a more nuanced truth: a woman of elegance and discretion, a loyal friend and deeply caring person, a trained artist dedicated to her craft.

"It takes a while to get close enough to someone's choices so that they start to make sense," he said. That insight runs through Empty Mansions, the New York Times #1 bestseller that continues to captivate readers. A brilliant reporter and storyteller, no one but Bill Dedman could have written this story with such depth and intrigue.

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K. Ian Shin, "Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America's Pacific Century" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This episode, which is co-hosted with Delaney Chieyen Holton, features Dr. K. Ian Shin discussing his recently published book, Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America’s Pacific Century (Standford UP, 2025).

Imperial Stewards argues that, beyond aesthetic taste and economics, geopolitics were critical to the United States’ transformation into possessing some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated collections of Chinese art between the Gilded Age and World War II. Collecting and studying Chinese art and antiquities honed Americans' belief that they should dominate Asia and the Pacific Ocean through the ideology of imperial stewardship—a view that encompassed both genuine curiosity and care for Chinese art, and the enduring structures of domination and othering that underpinned the burgeoning transpacific art market.

Tracing networks across both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, K. Ian Shin uncovers a diverse cast of historical actors that both contributed to US imperial stewardship and also challenged it, including Protestant missionaries, German diplomats, Chinese-Hawaiian merchants, and Chinese overseas students, among others. By examining the development of Chinese art collecting and scholarship in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, Imperial Stewards reveals both the cultural impetus behind Americans' long-standing aspirations for a Pacific Century and a way to understand—and critique—the duality of US imperial power around the globe.

Ian Shin is Assistant Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, where he is also a core faculty member in the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program. In addition to Imperial Stewards, his articles and reviews on topics that range from the Boy Scout movement in New York's Chinatown to the role of colleges and universities in 19th-century U.S.-China relations to the history of museums of American art have appeared in Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, and Connecticut Historical Review.

Donna Doan Anderson is the Mellon research assistant professor in U.S. Law and Race at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Delaney Chieyen Holton is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Stanford University.

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Gregory A. Daddis, "Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a groundbreaking reassessment of the long Cold War era, historian Gregory A. Daddis argues that ever since the Second World War's fateful conclusion, faith in and fear of war became central to Americans' thinking about the world around them. With war pervading nearly all aspects of American society, an interplay between blind faith and existential fear framed US policymaking and grand strategy, often with tragic results. A sweeping history, Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2025) makes a forceful argument by examining the tensions between Americans' overreaching faith in war as a foreign policy tool and their overwhelming fear of war as a destructive force.

Gregory A. Daddis is Professor of History and holds the Melbern G. Glasscock Endowed Chair in American History at Texas A&M University. A retired US Army colonel, he deployed to both Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Susan C. Boyd, "Heroin: An Illustrated History" (Fernwood, 2022)

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Susan Boyd is a scholar/activist and Distinguished Professor emerita at the University of Victoria. Her research examines a variety of topics related to the history of drug prohibition and resistance to it, drug law and policy, including maternal drug use, maternal/state conflicts, film and culture, radio and print media, heroin assisted-treatment, community-based research and qualitative research methodology.

Her latest book, Heroin: An Illustrated History (Fernwood, 2022), is an illustrated history of two centuries of Canadian heroin regulation that reveals the deep roots of our current failure to address the overdose death epidemic caused by criminalizing and pathologizing drug users and resisting harm-reduction policies. From its discovery in 1898, heroin was prescribed for therapeutic use in Canada. With little evidence of the harm of heroin, its prohibition has been tied up with colonization and systemic racism as well as class and gender injustice. Using documentary evidence and the experiences of people who use/used heroin, drug user unions and harm-reduction advocates, Boyd argues that in order to create a more just future, prohibition and punitive policies that drive the illegal overdose crisis must end.

Today’s host is Jay Shifman. Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, stigma-destroying speaker, podcaster, and event host. The survivor of two suicide attempts and an overdose, Jay holds a BA in Psychology from Northern Kentucky University and has put in numerous hours of independent learning acquiring certifications in mental health, substance misuse and addiction, and drug policy.

Jay founded his company, Choose Your Struggle, in 2015 with two distinct goals: ending stigma and promoting honest and fact-based education around the topics of Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy.

For more information, visit: https://jay.campsite.bio/ or find him on social media.

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Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2025)

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (Basic Books, 2025), historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin opens a longer and wider aperture on World War II and recasts the war as a brutal conflict for survival and hegemony between declining and ascendant imperial powers.

Scorched Earth dismantles the myth of World War II as a “good war.” Instead, Chamberlin depicts the conflict as a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers’ dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. And World War II did not deliver lasting peace: instead, the Soviet Union and United States emerged as hypermilitarized superpowers that would create arsenals of nuclear weapons, resulting in a decades-long Cold War standoff and subsequent violence across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Dramatically rendered and persuasively argued, Scorched Earth offers a revisionist history of World War II, revealing it was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its execution, and imperial in its outcomes.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Ben A. Vagle and Stephen G. Brooks, "Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China (Oxford UP, 2025) provides a systematic reevaluation of the balance of economic power between the U.S. and China. The conventional wisdom is that China's economic power is very close to America's and that Washington cannot undertake a broad economic cutoff of China without hurting itself as much or more. This book demonstrates the conventional wisdom is wrong on both fronts. In peacetime, America's lead in economic power over China is more dramatic than commonly appreciated because the vast majority of the firms that drive global commerce, particularly in high-technology sectors, are based in the U.S. and its allies. China's economic capacity has also been overestimated because Beijing manipulates its economic data and because comparing China's uniquely structured economy with other leading economies is challenging. These facts are necessary to understand why Washington has been able to target and undermine individual Chinese companies and even entire sectors in recent years while facing so little retaliation from Beijing. America's advantage in economic power over China would be even more marked in wartime. Our analysis indicates Washington could impose massive, disproportionate harm on Beijing if it were to impose a broad economic cutoff of China in cooperation with its allies or via a distant naval blockade. Across six scenarios, China's short-term economic losses from a broad cutoff range from being 5 to 11 times higher than America's. And in the long run, America and almost all its allies would return to previous economic growth levels; in contrast, China's growth would be permanently degraded

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Marlee S. Bunch, "Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era"

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press, 2025), Dr. Marlee Bunch shared her research on Black female educators in Mississippi during the Civil Rights era and discussed how their experiences and wisdom continue to inform contemporary teaching practices and diversity initiatives. The conversation explored the importance of preserving and unearthing hidden histories through various forms of cultural expression, while examining the role of educators in creating inclusive learning environments. Marlee's work extends to her teaching philosophy and upcoming projects, including a National Academy of Education postdoc award project that will expand her oral history research to include Black male educators and explore the power of storytelling across generations.

Despite significant challenges and powerful opposition, Black female teachers stood at the forefront of advocating for and providing education to Black students. Their dedication not only improved opportunities for Black communities but also influenced changes in U.S. laws and societal expectations. Bunch draws on a rich fund of oral histories to reveal the interior lives of Black female educators who taught before and after desegregation in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In their own voices, these women detail the hurdles they faced guiding students through Jim Crow laws and Civil Rights-era desegregation. Bunch unearths the personal stories of teaching and activism during a historic time that included the Brown v. Board of Education decision and whites’ massive resistance to desegregation. The educators explain the importance of the Black community and Black homes while discussing their part in priming students for success and creating community cohesion. In addition, Bunch looks at the legacies of Black educators and the work still to be done. A section of images and poetry compliments the text. Inspiring and immersive, Unlearning the Hush combines memory with Civil Rights history to document Black women’s role in education during a tumultuous time.

Bunch is an interdisciplinary educator, scholar, author, and preserver of oral histories dedicated to illuminating untold stories and fostering human-centered, inclusive learning spaces. With over a decade of teaching experience across secondary and post-secondary classrooms, she has consistently championed equitable, rigorous, and reflective education that honors the lived experiences of students and educators alike.

A passionate advocate for justice-centered education, Bunch earned her doctoral degree in Education, Policy, Organization, and Leadership with an emphasis in Diversity and Equity from the University of Illinois. She also holds an M.Ed. in Secondary Education from DePaul University, an M.S. in Gifted Education, and an ESL certification — a testament to her commitment to meeting the diverse needs of learners. She is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.

At the heart of Bunch’s work is the belief that history and storytelling hold transformative power. Her research centers on the oral histories of Black female educators in Mississippi who taught during the Civil Rights era (1954–1970), preserving their narratives as both historical record and source of contemporary wisdom. Through this work, she invites reflection on resistance and the enduring importance of educators as community leaders and cultural stewards.
Her other publications include The Magnitude of Us (Teachers College Press, 2024), and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6-12, co-authored with Brittany R. Collins (Routledge, 2025).

Whether through scholarship, storytelling, or advocacy, Bunch continues to elevate voices too often left at the margins, reminding us that the most meaningful learning happens when we center humanity, history, and hope.

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Kathleen Wilson, "Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe.

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Citizenship Stripping: You Are Not American

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Over the last two centuries, the US government has revoked citizenship to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all considered “un-American”—whether due to their race, ethnicity, marriage partner, or beliefs. Drawing on the narratives of those who have struggled to be treated as full members of “We the People,” law professor Amanda Frost exposes a hidden history of discrimination and xenophobia that continues to this day.
The Supreme Court’s rejection of Black citizenship in Dred Scott was among the first and most notorious examples of citizenship stripping, but the phenomenon did not end there. Women who married noncitizens, persecuted racial groups, labor leaders, and political activists were all denied their citizenship, and sometimes deported, by a government that wanted to redefine the meaning of “American.” You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers (Beacon Press, 2021) grapples with what it means to be American and the issues surrounding membership, identity, belonging, and exclusion that still occupy and divide the nation in the twenty-first century.

Our guest is: Professor Amanda Frost, who writes and teaches in the fields of immigration and citizenship law, federal courts and jurisdiction, and judicial ethics. Her scholarship has been cited by dozens of state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has been invited to testify on the topics of her articles before both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. You Are Not American was named a “New & Noteworthy” book by The New York Times Book Review, and shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize. She is writing a book on birthright citizenship, publishing in 2026.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor, dissertation and writing coach for scholars in the humanities. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show’s newsletter with weekly bonus material on her Substack found here.

Playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson, "Racial Resentment in the Political Mind" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disagreements, and objections to policies that seek to help racial minorities stem from racial prejudice. They argue that racial resentment arises from just-world beliefs and appraisals of deservingness that help explain the persistence of racial inequality in America in ways more consequential than racism or racial prejudice alone.
The culprits, as many White people see it, are undeserving people of color, who are perceived to benefit unfairly from, and take advantage of, resources that come at Whites’ expense—a worldview in which any attempt at modest change is seen as a challenge to the status quo and privilege. Yet, as Davis and Wilson reveal, many Whites have become racially resentful due to their perceptions that African Americans skirt the “rules of the game” and violate traditional values by taking advantage of unearned resources. Resulting attempts at racial progress lead Whites to respond in ways that retain their social advantage—opposing ameliorative policies, minority candidates, and other advancement on racial progress. Because racial resentment is rooted in beliefs about justice, fairness, and deservingness, ordinary citizens, who may not harbor racist motivations, may wind up in the same political position as racists, but for different reasons.

Professor Davis’ research interests include most areas in public opinion and political behavior. A unifying theme running through much of his research is a concern for identifying the social psychological motivations underlying political attitudes and behavior. This approach has been applied to specific research areas, including political tolerance, implicit racial attitudes, the role of threat and anxiety in political behavior, public reactions to terrorism, social desirability, the measurement of political and social attitudes, racism and racial politics, and the political behavior of African Americans.
Professor Davis is co-author of a forthcoming Cambridge University Press book, Perseverance in the Parish? Religious Attitudes from a Black Catholic Perspective. Based on the first national survey of African American Catholics, this book explores the perceptions of racism and racial experiences in the Catholic Church. His other book, Negative Liberty: Public Opinion and the Terrorist Attacks on America, examines the role of threat perceptions on the tradeoffs between civil liberties and security, political tolerance, and ideas of citizenship.

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Bench Ansfield, "Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" (Norton, 2025)

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (Norton, 2025), the vast majority of the fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords.

Ansfield’s book, based on a decade of research, introduces the term “brownlining” for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress. Ansfield shows that as the FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate— eclipsed manufacturing in the 1970s, they began profoundly reshaping Black and Brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit. At every step, Ansfield charts the tenant-led resistance movements that sprung up in the Bronx and elsewhere, as well as the explosion of popular culture around the fires, from iconic movies like The Towering Inferno to hit songs such as “Disco Inferno.” Ultimately, they show how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era, especially in regions most at risk of climate shocks.

Bench Ansfield is Assistant Professor of History at Temple University. They hold a PhD in American Studies from Yale University and won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history from the Society of American Historians. They live in Philadelpha, Pennsylvania. Bluesky. Website.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Mary Bridges on US Bankers Abroad and the Making of a Global Superpower

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion.

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Shennette Garrett-Scott, "Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal" (Columbia UP, 2019)

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard? Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South. Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) tells the fascinating story of just such an endeavor, first the Independent Order of St. Luke, and then the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, founded in Richmond in 1903. Along the way, she tells the tale of force-of-nature strong women, particularly Maggie Lena Walker, who wouldn't take no for an answer as she built up a culture of business and entrepreneurship against incredibly long odds and never-ending efforts by regulators and competitors to thwart her efforts. It makes for gripping reading.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

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Michael Hiltzik, "Golden State: The Making of California" (Mariner, 2025)

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

California has long reigned as the land of plenty, a place where the sun always shines and opportunity beckons. Even prior to its statehood in 1850, it captured the world’s imagination. We think of bearded prospectors lured by the promise of gold; we imagine its early embrace of immigrant labor during the railroad boom as prologue to its diverse social fabric today. But what lies underneath the myth is far more complicated.

Thanks to extensive research by Michael Hiltzik, one of our longstanding voices on California, Golden State: The Making of California (Mariner Books, 2025) uncovers the unvarnished truth about the state we think we know well. From Spanish incursions into what became known as Alta California to the rise of Big Tech, the history of California is one of stark contradictions. In rich, previously overlooked detail, we see its earliest statesmen wreak havoc among native peoples while racing to draft their own constitution even ahead of statehood. Gold-hungry settlers venture into the Sierra foothills only to leave with little, while a handful of their suppliers turn themselves into millionaire railroad magnates. Wars erupt in the name of water as Los Angeles booms, and early efforts to tame the vast landscape create a haven for fossil fuel extraction and environmental conservation alike. Hollywood politicians stoke fear, contributing to a centuries-long tradition of anti-Asian violence, and, remarkably, legal redlining and free higher education take root together.

Golden State brings a fresh critical eye to the origins of the state against which the rest of the country measures itself. From its very start, Hiltzik shows, the story of the United States was written in California.

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Edward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia" (Yale UP, 2025)

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity.

Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American lifestyle in the mid-twentieth century: the automobile, which brought gas stations, highways, commercial strips, and sprawl; and the single-family suburban home, the repository of many families’ long-term wealth. While the man who did the most to make the automobile a mass commodity—Henry Ford—is well known, few know the story of the man who did the same for the suburban house.

Edward Berenson describes the remarkable career of William Levitt, who did more than anyone else to create the modern suburb. In response to an unprecedented housing shortage as veterans returned home from World War II, his Levittown developments provided inexpensive mass-produced housing that was wildly popular—prospective buyers would camp out in line for two days for the chance to put down a deposit on a Levitt house. He was a celebrity, a life-changing hero to tens of thousands, and the pitchman of a renewed American Dream. But Levitt also shared Ford’s dark side. He refused to allow Black people to buy or rent in his developments and doggedly defended this practice against legal challenges. Leading the way for other developers who emulated his actions, he helped ensure that suburbs nationwide remained white enclaves. These legacies are still with us. Levitt made a major contribution to the stubborn wealth disparity between white families and Black families, and his solution to the housing crisis of the 1940s—the detached house and surrounding yard—is a primary cause of the housing crisis today.

As a person, Levitt was a strangely guileless and tragic figure. He accumulated vast wealth but, after losing control of his building company, surrendered it all through foolish investments and a lavish lifestyle that included a Long Island mansion and a two-hundred-foot yacht. Just weeks before his death, as a charity patient in a hospital to which he had once given millions, he was still imagining his great comeback.

Edward Berenson is a professor of history at New York University and director of its Institute of French Studies. His books include Europe in the Modern World, The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story, and The Accusation. He lives in Tarrytown, NY.

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Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland’s razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump’s first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America’s “Cold War University”—and who ousted Washington’s gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.
Brzezinski’s impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow’s “Achilles heel”—the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow’s grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history’s orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed.

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Matthew Goodman, "The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team" (Ballantine Books, 2019)

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The 1949-50 CCNY Beavers basketball team were one of the unlikeliest of champions in sports history. CCNY was a tuition-free in Harlem, New York, intended to give working class students the best education possible. The school was comprised of minorities, many of whom were the immigrants or children of immigrants. In 1949-50, the CCNY squad, led by legendary coach Nat Holman, shocked the basketball world by becoming the first and only school to win the N.I.T. and N.C.A.A. tournaments in the same scene. At a time when college basketball was much more popular in New York than the fledgling NBA, the CCNY boys became the talk of the town and heroes to millions.

The following season, several members of the CCNY team, including the entire starting five, were arrested as part of a massive point shaving scandal that had engulfed the entire collegiate basketball scene in New York City. Overnight, the CCNY boys went from heroes to villains. Their dreams of playing in the NBA were dashed and gambling scandal became a stigma which attached to them for the rest of their lives. The scandal was so persuasive that many members of the New York Police Department were caught up in it, leading to the resignation of the chief of police and the mayor.

Matthew Goodman's The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team (Ballantine Books, 2019) is not just a book about basketball. It is a journey through life in New York City in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a window into how big cities ran in the mid-20th century, an inside look at the world of sports gambling, a story of corruption, and ultimately, a tale of working class people and the decisions they are faced with. Through the use of meticulous research, Goodman delves into the complex characters of the basketball players involved and how the scandal affected their lives moving forward. The reader is left to ponder one crucial question: Would I have taken the money had I been in their position?

Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to write about basketball for Bleacher Report and his first book about the New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s is due out this year. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon. Christopher M. Reali's in-depth look at the fabled musical hotbed examines the events and factors that gave the Muscle Shoals sound such a potent cultural power. Many artists trekked to FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound in search of the sound of authentic southern Black music—and at times expressed shock at the mostly white studio musicians waiting to play it for them. Others hoped to draw on the hitmaking production process that defined the scene. Reali also chronicles the overlooked history of Muscle Shoals's impact on country music and describes the region's recent transformation into a tourism destination. Multifaceted and informed, Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals (University of Illinois Press, 2022) reveals the people, places, and events behind one of the most legendary recording scenes in American history.

Dr. Christopher Reali is an assistant professor of music at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama's carnival.

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Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive, detailing her harrowing escape from enslavement, seven years hiding in an attic crawl space, and the racism she faced in freedom.

Forgotten for decades after its original, 19th century publication, Jacobs’ story was so harrowing and so brave it was thought to be fiction. Only through the research of historian Jean Fagan Yellin in the 1980s was it proven, once and for all, to be a brilliant and compelling work of nonfiction. Incidents is routinely cited by historians and fiction writers alike as one of the most influential texts of our time and our history.

In this latest edition published by W.W. Norton (2025), Jacobs’ characters come alive for a new generation of readers, and re-readers, this time contextualized with a new introduction and explanatory notes by Evie Shockley.

Dr. Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is a two-time winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Review Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. You can find her on Instagram.

You can find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Ryan Griffiths, "The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Is the breakup of an increasingly polarized America into separate red and blue countries even possible?

There is a growing interest in American secession. In February 2023, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that "We need a national divorce...We need to separate by red states and blue states." Recent movements like Yes California have called for a national divorce along political lines. A 2023 Axios poll shows that 20 percent of Americans favor a national divorce. These trends show a sincere interest in American secession, and they will likely increase in the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election.

Proponents of secession make three arguments: the two sides have irreconcilable differences; secession is a legal right; and smaller political units are better. Through interviews with secessionist advocates in America, Ryan Griffiths explores the case for why Red America and Blue America should split up.

But as The Disunited States shows, these arguments are fundamentally incorrect. Secession is the wrong solution to the problem of polarization. Red and Blue America are not neatly sorted and geographically concentrated. Splitting the two parts would require a dangerous unmixing of the population, one that could spiral into violence and state collapse. Drawing on his expertise on secessionism worldwide, he shows how the process has played out internationally-and usually disastrously. Ultimately, this book will disabuse readers of the belief that secession will fix America's problems. Rather than focus on national divorce as a solution, the better course of action is to seek common ground.

Ryan D. Griffiths is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. His research focuses on the dynamics of secession and the study of sovereignty, state systems, and international orders. He teaches on topics related to nationalism, international relations, and international relations theory.

Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running p

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Prudence Peiffer, "The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever" (Harper, 2023)

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art.

Now, for the first time, in The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever (Harper, 2023) Dr. Prudence Peiffer pays homage to these artists and the unsung impact their work had on the direction of late twentieth-century art and film. This remarkable biography, as transformative as the artists it illuminates, questions the very concept of a “group” or “movement,” as it spotlights the Slip’s eclectic mix of gender and sexual orientation, abstraction and Pop, experimental film, painting, and sculpture, assemblage and textile works. Brought together not by the tenets of composition or technique, nor by philosophy or politics, the artists cultivated a scene at the Slip defined by a singular spirit of community and place. They drew lasting inspiration from one another, but perhaps even more from where they called home, and the need to preserve the solitude its geography fostered. Despite Coenties Slip’s obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones—one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street; named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and site of the boom and bust of the city’s maritime industry; and, in the artists’s own time, a development battleground for Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The Slip’s history is entwined with that of the artists and their art—eclectic and varied work that was made from the wreckage of the city’s many former lives.

An ambitious and singular account of a time, a place, and a group of extraordinary people, The Slip investigates the importance of community, and makes an argument for how we are shaped by it, and how it in turns shapes our work.

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W. Henry Sledge, "The Old Breed... The Complete Story Revealed" (Knox Press, 2025)

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Because events like D-Day and the Battle of Okinawa took place an entire lifetime ago, it is rare to find any new accounts and memories from veterans. Thankfully, forty years after the publication of Eugene Sledge’s famous memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa comes The Old Breed… The Complete Story Revealed (Knox Press, 2025) by Eugene’s son, Henry. Complementing and expanding on his father’s experiences, Henry Sledge’s book adds new material and immeasurable depth to his father’s story and shows how World War II continues to shape our lives.

The Old Breed… The Complete Story Revealed brings to life an abundance of new material from the original manuscript of Eugene Sledge’s classic memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. By interspersing his own personal anecdotes throughout, Henry Sledge takes his father’s work and gives it newfound context, sharing memories of conversations between father and son. The result is a flowing narrative that portrays an intimate look at a World War II veteran and his struggles to adapt to civilian life following the war.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Bryon L. Garner, "Black Veteranality: Military Service and the Illusion of Inclusive Patriotism" (Routledge, 2025)

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Military service in the United States has long been associated with patriotism. But for Black veterans, this association with patriotism, love for country, is complicated by their experiences with racism and discrimination in the US and both civilians and as members of the military. In Black Veteranality: Military Service and the Illusion of Inclusive Patriotism(Routledge, 2025). Dr. Bryon Garner explores the intersections between race and American patriotism and veteran identity. Drawing from his own service in the US Navy and experiences as a veteran, historical examples, and interviews with other Black veterans, Dr. Garner shows how the Black veteran experience helps illuminate the often undiscussed tensions around race, identity, and inclusion in American patriotism. Black Veteranality is an important opening in conversations about race, military service, and patriotism in the United States.

Please check out Dr. Garner’s podcast “American Paradox: Black Veterans and America 250.”

And you can find a transcript of the interview here.

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Garrett M. Graff, "When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

June 6, 1944—known to us all as D-Day—is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military triumphs. The surprise sunrise landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of occupied northern France is one of the most consequential days of the 20th century. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff, historian and author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Watergate, brings them all together in a one-of-a-kind, bestselling oral history that explores this seminal event in vivid, heart-pounding detail.
The story begins in the opening months of the 1940s, as the Germany army tightens its grip across Europe, seizing control of entire nations. The United States, who has resolved to remain neutral, is forced to enter the conflict after an unexpected attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. For the second time in fifty years, the world is at war, with the stakes higher than they’ve ever been before. Then in 1943, Allied leaders Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meet in Casablanca to discuss a new plan for victory: a coordinated invasion of occupied France, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Failure is not an option. Over the next eighteen months, the large-scale action is organized, mobilizing soldiers across Europe by land, sea, and sky. And when the day comes, it is unlike anything the world has ever seen.
These moments and more are seen in real time. A visceral, page-turning drama told through the eyes of those who experienced them—from soldiers, nurses, pilots, children, neighbors, sailors, politicians, volunteers, photographers, reporters and so many more, When the Sea Came Alive “is the sort of book that is smart, inspiring, and powerful—and adds so much to our knowledge of what that day was like and its historic importance forever” (Chris Bohjalian)—an unforgettable, fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.

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Kenneth Jones, "African American Males and Video Games: How Gaming Technology Can Motivate and Enhance Learning" (Myers Education, 2025)

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

African American males are confronted with formidable barriers in their pursuit of quality education, resulting in stark disparities in academic performance, economic opportunities, and social outcomes. Despite numerous educational initiatives striving for parity, African American males persistently bear the brunt of the highest rates of suspensions, expulsions, and dropout rates, surpassing all other demographic groups. Educational environments often fail to acknowledge and integrate the cultural and social needs of Black males, viewing them as "problems" rather than recognizing their immense potential for academic and leadership success. The prevalence of negative stereotypes in media, particularly in video games, exacerbates societal biases, portraying African American males as inherently violent and criminal. These representations contribute to implicit biases that affect perceptions and treatment in real-life scenarios. The systemic issues within the education system, coupled with socioeconomic factors, result in African American males being underrepresented in advanced placement and gifted education programs. This underrepresentation limits their opportunities for higher education and professional advancement.

Confronting these challenges necessitates a comprehensive approach that encompasses the creation of inclusive educational environments, the eradication of systemic racism, and the promotion of positive representations of African American males in media. By acknowledging and fostering the potential of Black males, society can strive to reduce disparities and cultivate a more equitable and just education system that recognizes and celebrates their academic and professional achievements. African American Males and Video Gamesexplores the perspectives of four African American male college students aged 18 to 21 on the impact of video games on their academic growth and development. The participants, all maintaining a GPA of 3.0 or higher, shared their experiences with teachers, video games, and coping mechanisms. This qualitative approach allowed for a rich understanding of the participant's experiences and the role of video games in their academic and mental well-being. Video games emerged as a significant coping tool for the participants, providing a mental escape from academic and social pressures. The games allowed them to engage in competitive and creative activities, fostering a sense of accomplishment and reducing stress. For example, games like NBA 2K21 and Forza Horizon 4 enabled them to explore alter egos and interests in a virtual space, offering entertainment and a sense of community. African American Males and Video Gamesis a critical text for exploring alternatives in providing a quality education experience for young African American males.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.

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Matthew R. Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, "Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Matthew Sparks and Oliva Sizemore join Jana Byars for a fun, chilling, and thoughtful discussion about about Haint Country: Dark Tales from the Hills and Hollers (University Press of Kentucky, 2024). The hills of the Appalachia region hold secrets—dark, deep, varied, and mysterious. These secrets are often told in the form of eerie, thrilling, and creepy folk tales that reveal strange sightings, curious oddities, and commonly serve as cautionary tales for eager and curious ears. These spine-tingling stories have been told and retold by family members, neighbors, and "hillfolk" for generations. Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers is a collection of weird, otherworldly, and supernatural phenomenon in Eastern Kentucky—tales that have been recorded and documented for the first time. Collected and adapted by Matthew Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, the anthology explores stories of ghosts or "haints," strange creatures or "boogers," haunted locations or "stained earth," uncanny happenings or "high strangeness," and humorous Appalachian ghost stories. Contemporary yarns of black panthers, demons, and sightings of ghostly coal miners are narrated in the first person, reflecting the style and dialect of the collected oral history. Though comprised of a mixture of claimed accounts and fabricated lore, the locations and people woven throughout are very real. Complemented with evocative watercolor illustrations by Olivia Sizemore (who was inspired by the work of Stephen Gammell) and a compendium that provides additional context, Haint Country is a thrilling and bone-chilling excursion to the spooky corner of Appalachia.

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Meredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film" (U Georgia Press, 2018)

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example of how the region is stereotyped and misunderstood, particularly in films. In her book, Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film(University of Georgia Press, 2018), Meredith McCarroll, Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Bowdoin College, describes Appalachian people as being shown as different from both white and nonwhite groups, often considered as belonging to the worst of each group. Her book discusses specific film examples that help to illustrate the negative connotation heaped upon Appalachia, and also presents where filmmakers treat them more fairly.

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Alan M. Wald, "Bohemian Bolsheviks: Dispatches from the Culture and History of the Left" (Brill, 2025)

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For several decades now, Alan Wald has been thoroughly documenting the history of the literature and cultural output of the American left. While his numerous books and essays cover a lot of territory, much of his work is united by an interest in commitment, particularly when it comes to radical politics. What does it mean to commit ones life to a radical political cause, one which may not see anything beyond minor and marginal fractions of success in your lifetime? This question has animated his voluminous writing. On this episode, he joined us to discuss his newest book, Bohemian Bolsheviks: Dispatches from the Culture and History of the Left from the Historical Materialism book series. Clocking in at over 600 pages, this volume collects essays, reviews and reflections published over almost two decades, and offers readers a glimpse into Wald’s attempts to map the lefts literary intelligentsia, all the while raising questions about the tensions and ambiguities of its many members and fellow travelers.

Published in hardback by Brill, with a Haymarket paperback scheduled later.

Alan M. Wald is the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professer Emeritus at University of Michigan. His numerous books include The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade and American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War.

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Melody Glenn, "Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis" (Beacon Press, 2025)

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her ER. While working at a methadone clinic, she realized how effective harm reduction treatments could be and set out to discover why they weren’t used more broadly. That’s when she found Dr. Marie Nyswander.
In the 1960s, Nyswander defied the DEA and medical establishment to co-develop methadone maintenance as a treatment for heroin addiction. According to some addiction specialists, its discovery could be considered as monumental as the discovery of penicillin. Yet, it still carries a stigma today.
Deftly weaving together interviews, media coverage, and historical documents, Glenn recovers Nyswander’s important legacy and reveals how the forces of racism, fearmongering politicians, and misinformation colluded to set us back decades in our understandings of opioids.
With Nyswander as her guide, Glenn also shares her journey through addiction medicine as she confronts her own personal and philosophical quandaries around bias, ambition, and saviorism in the medical field.
As the US continues to struggle with opioid and fentanyl use in communities, Mother of Methadone is a powerful reminder of the ways biases have prevented doctors from saving countless lives.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her second book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released in 2026.

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Alexandra Freidus, "Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City" (NYU Press, 2025)

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City (NYU Press, 2025) argues that diversity and racial integration efforts are not sufficient to address educational inequality.

New York City schools are among the most segregated in the nation. Yet over seven decades after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, New Yorkers continue to argue about whether school segregation matters. Amid these debates, Alexandra Freidus dives deep into the roots of racial inequality in diversifying schools, asking how we can better understand both the opportunities and the limits of school diversity and integration. Unequal Lessons is based on six years of observations and interviews with children, parents, educators, and district policymakers about the stakes of racial diversity in New York City schools.

The book examines what children learn from diversity, exploring both the costs and benefits of school integration. By drawing on students’ first-hand experiences, Freidus makes the case that although a focus on diversity offers many benefits to students, it often reinscribes, rather than diminishes, existing inequalities in school policy and practice. The idea of diversity for its own sake is frequently seen as the solution, with students of color presumed to benefit from their experiences with white students, while schools fail to address structural inequality. Though educators and advocates often focus on diversity out of a real desire to make a positive difference in students’ lives, this book makes clear the gaps between good intentions and educational injustice.

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Terri Diane Halperin, “The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 20:00:00 -0000

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 actually four laws enacted in 1798, dramatically tested the principles of free speech in the young republic. Halperin explains the political origins of the controversy, which began in the earliest days the George Washington’s administration. Although the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and John Adams, and the Democratic-Republicans (or Jeffersonians), led by Jefferson and James Madison, had already established their differences on the national stage regarding the Constitution, foreign affairs would create further cleavages between these groups. Halperin investigates and analyzes how the French Revolution was celebrated and feared in America. When France descended into civil war and instigated European wars, the United States feared being drawn into the conflicts. The Federalists developed an affinity for Britain’s rejection of the Terror and resistance to France, while the Democratic-Republicans celebrated the promise of the French Revolution, even though most deplored the violence of the Terror. French and Irish immigrants were welcomed by the Jeffersonians and feared by the Federalists.

Halperin demonstrates how dissent against American foreign policy, usually through the many newspapers published in America, was viewed as subversive and threatening to America’s reputation and national security. The Federalists, who dominated the national government during the 1790s, conceived of federal criminal laws to quash dissent. Halperin explains how both sides had their dearly held beliefs: the Federalists thought Jeffersonian newspaper editors would encourage rebellions against federal power or foreign powers efforts to acquire land in the New World; the Jeffersonians claimed that dissent was legitimate and pointed to the First Amendment’s free speech clause as a right that allowed criticism of government. My conversation with Halperin covers all of these events and reveals the importance of the debate over free speech in the early Republic.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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David D. Hall, "The Puritans: A Transatlantic History" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role in the story of America. Shedding critical new light on the diverse forms of Puritan belief and practice in England, Scotland, and New England, David D. Hall provides a multifaceted account of a cultural movement that judged the Protestant reforms of Elizabeth’s reign to be unfinished. Hall’s vivid and wide-ranging narrative describes the movement’s deeply ambiguous triumph under Oliver Cromwell, its political demise with the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, and its perilous migration across the Atlantic to establish a “perfect reformation” in the New World.

A breathtaking work of scholarship by an eminent historian, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton University Press, 2019) examines the tribulations and doctrinal dilemmas that led to the fragmentation and eventual decline of Puritanism. It presents a compelling portrait of a religious and political movement that was divided virtually from the start. In England, some wanted to dismantle the Church of England entirely and others were more cautious, while Puritans in Scotland were divided between those willing to work with a troublesome king and others insisting on the independence of the state church. This monumental book traces how Puritanism was a catalyst for profound cultural changes in the early modern Atlantic world, opening the door for other dissenter groups such as the Baptists and the Quakers, and leaving its enduring mark on what counted as true religion in America.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defining features of the social history of medicine in the United States.

In Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America (Oxford UP, 2021), Lewis A. Grossman presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American health policy, law, and regulation from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Grossman grounds his analysis in historical examples ranging from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. He vividly describes how activists and lawyers have resisted a wide variety of legal constraints on therapeutic choice, including medical licensing statutes, FDA limitations on unapproved drugs and alternative remedies, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions against medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide. Grossman also considers the relationship between these campaigns for desired treatments and widespread opposition to state-compelled health measures such as vaccines and face masks. From the streets of San Francisco to the US Supreme Court, Choose Your Medicine examines an underexplored theme of American history, politics, and law that is more relevant today than ever.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Alan McPherson, "Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice" (UNC Press, 2019)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On September 21, 1976, a car bomb exploded in Washington DC, killing a former Chilean diplomat named Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt. The assassination was a cruel and brazen attempt by the Chilean government to silence a critic of the Pinochet regime. And it proved to be a major strategic error––Pinochet himself used the language of “banana peel”––as the legal action that followed helped unravel US-Chile relations and provided a template for other human-rights victims to pursue justice in post-Pinochet Chile.

Alan McPherson, a professor of history at Temple University, investigates this event in his new book Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). With the perspicuous eye of a detective, McPherson puts all the pieces together to explain how Pinochet and his secret service organized the murder, before following Orlando Letelier’s wife Isabel’s decades-long struggle to hold the assassins and the Chilean government accountable. It’s a harrowing but hopeful tale. And McPherson tells it masterfully.

Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations.

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Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Harvard UP, 2019), the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning challenges the idea that women are outside of war, through a trio of dramatic stories revealing women's transformative role in the American Civil War. We think of war as a man's world, but women have always played active roles in times of violence and been left to pick up the pieces in societies decimated by war. In this groundbreaking reconsideration of the Civil War, the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning invites us to see America's bloodiest conflict not just as pitting brother against brother but as a woman's war. When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief.

Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason sparked heated controversy, defying the principle of civilian immunity and leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved women escaped across Union lines, upending emancipation policies that extended only to enslaved men. The Union's response was to classify fugitive black women as "soldiers' wives," regardless of whether they were married--offering them some protection but placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. In the war's aftermath, the Confederate grande dame Gertrude Thomas wrestled with her loss of status and of her former slaves. War, emancipation, and economic devastation affected her family intimately, and through her life McCurry helps us see how fundamental the changes of Reconstruction were. Women's War dismantles the long-standing fiction that women are outside of war and shows that they were indispensable actors in the Civil War, as they have been--and continue to be--in all wars.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a doctoral candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers.

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Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor, survival, and agency. This history takes center stage in historian Liza Black's new book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which looks at Indigenous peoples' experiences in the American film industry that so often relied upon and reproduced racialized stereotypes of "authentic Indians" to produce profit. Black shows how non-Native film producers, in producing monolithic and historically static Native caricatures for profit, reinforced settler colonial narratives on screen while simultaneously denying Indigenous actors, extras, and staff of their modernity.

Thorough in detail and innovative in analysis, Black incorporates film studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and history, shedding new light on the mid-century film industry and Native peoples' roles in it. Black chronicles the contours of American settler colonialism and its cultural and economic manifestations both on- and off-screen, giving the "authentic Indian" so familiar to non-Native audiences a much-needed dose of historical context. The result is an engaging story of Indigenous talent, labor, and livelihood that transcends critical moments in Native and U.S. histories alike.

Listeners can now purchase Picturing Indians using code 6AF20 for a 40% discount on the University of Nebraska Press' site.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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Irvin Weathersby Jr., "In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space" (Viking, 2025)

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.
Professor Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt (Viking, 2025) offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation’s true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely.

Find Professor Weathersby at his website, where you can order In Open Contempt, check out his other writings, and attend upcoming events.

Host Sullivan Summer can be found at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Professor Weathersby continue their conversation.

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Robert Fitzgerald, "Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency" (UNC Press, 2025)

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Few politicians produced the musical reaction that Ronald Reagan did. His California-branded conservatism inspired countless young people to pick up guitars and thrash out their political angst. Punk bands across the United States took aim at the man, his presidency, and the idea of America he was selling to voters nationwide. Small yet vibrant scenes across the country emerged to challenge the communal norms and social values projected on them by the popular media and consumer culture. Punk enthusiast Robert Fitzgerald argues that these songs' lyrics aren't just catchy and fun to scream along with; they also reveal the thoughts and feelings of artists reacting to their political environment in real, forthright, and uncensored time.
In Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan (UNC Press, 2025), Fitzgerald shows how these lyrics illustrated what young adults felt and how they reacted to one of the most influential and divisive leaders of the era. Punk lyrics are seemingly simple, the author argues, but they sketch out a complex, musically inspired countermovement that is as canonical in the American songbook as the folk and rock protest music that came before.

Robert Fitzgerald is a laboratory school administrator and a lifelong punk fan.

Robert Fitzgerald on UNC Press’s website.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming book is U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, October 2025).

Bradley Morgan on Facebook and Bluesky.

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Teacher by Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Teacher By Teacher traces the journey of the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education and is a deeply personal love letter to all the teachers in our lives. The story of John B. King Jr.’s inspiring path to President Obama’s Cabinet begins the day that his mother died. He insisted on going to school that day, knowing he would find comfort in his classroom. As he navigated living alone with a father dying from undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, it was public school teachers who saved his life, believed in him and saw his potential. They made school a safe, supportive, and engaging place where he could be a kid despite the challenges at home. While some might have dismissed a rebellious young Black and Puerto Rican teen whose life was in crisis, King’s teachers and counselors gave him a second chance. He went on to earn degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and Yale and committed his career to trying to do for other young people what educators did for him.

Teacher By Teacher shows how dedicated educators—both Dr. King’s own teachers and the phenomenal teachers who he has encountered throughout his career as a teacher, principal, and education policymaker—can profoundly shape the lives of their students.

Our guest is: Dr. John B. King Jr., who served in President Barack Obama’s cabinet as the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education. Over the course of his influential career in public education, he has been a high school teacher, a middle school principal, the first African American and Puerto Rican to serve as New York State Education Commissioner, a college professor, the president and CEO of the Education Trust, and the chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY). His parents were career New York City public school educators. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, an education researcher and former teacher, and his two daughters.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a writing coach and developmental editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and the author of the Academic Life newsletter found at christinagessler.substack.com.

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Kit W. Myers, "The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States"(U California Press, 2025)

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This episode features Dr. Kit W. Myers, associate professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, discussing his book The Violence of Love: Race, Family and Adoption in the United States, which was published by the University of California Press in January 2025.

The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.

Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in the department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Russell Shorto, “Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom” (Norton, 2017)

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 20:00:00 -0000

Russell Shorto‘s Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (Norton, 2017) is a history of many revolutions, kaleidoscopic turns through six individual lives. There is Cornplanter, a leader of the Seneca Indians; George Germain, who led the British war strategy during the Revolution; Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, the daughter of a British major; the always worried and wearied George Washington; Venture Smith, an African slave who eventually purchased his freedom in Connecticut; and Abraham Yates, the self-taught rabble rouser from Albany who helped shape the politics of New York, and the country. With each turn in their stories, these six lives continuously remerge and recolor the text, and together make one Revolution.

Shorto keeps the reader on the ground, so that we can see how the term “freedom,” among other concepts of the time, gained its meaning and importance. We feel each individual’s fight for self-determinacy, including its ugly and oppressive aspects, across their life spans.

In our conversation, Shorto and I talk about the insecurities and failures, the feelings of incompleteness, and the attempts at asserting or gussying up one’s self that drive the stories of all these historical subjects. The book slips and slides into ‘great’ events through wonderfully stark portraits of contingency, circumstance, and personality. What Shorto’s approach makes viscerally clear, and what we return to as we talk, is that no one person determined the Revolution more than any other, and no individual view contains all. This matters for the very reason that this Revolution song is no fiction. It is a history with many parts in contrapuntal relation that resolve only to hear a new dissonance and seek another resolution. It is a song we continue to sing.

Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com.

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Neil Roberts, “A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass” (UP of Kentucky, 2018)

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ birth. It can hardly be said that scholars have neglected Douglass; indeed, he is one of the most written-about figures in American history. But not all aspects of Douglass’ thought have received their due. One such blank spot in what might be called “Douglass Studies” concerns his political philosophy. Williams College scholar Dr. Neil Roberts’ new edited volume, A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), helps to fill this lacuna in Douglass scholarship.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Timothy W. Kneeland, "Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA" (Syracuse UP, 2021)

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Join me for an insightful and timely conversation with historian Timothy Kneeland about his book Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA (Syracuse University Press, 2021). This book masterfully bridges the gap between academic research and real-world policy implications.

Hear from the author himself as he reflects on the historical roots of disaster policy, the political forces that shape emergency response, and the enduring implications for governance today.

Timothy W. Kneeland is a Professor and Director of the Center for Public History at Nazareth University. He writes on American politics and disaster policy, American science, and psychiatry.

ABOUT THE BOOK: On Friday, January 28, 1977, it began to snow in Buffalo. The second largest city in New York State, located directly in line with the Great Lakes’ snowbelt, was no stranger to this kind of winter weather. With their city averaging ninety-four inches of snow per year, the citizens of Buffalo knew how to survive a snowstorm. But the blizzard that engulfed the city for the next four days was about to make history. Between the subzero wind chill and whiteout conditions, hundreds of people were trapped when the snow began to fall. Twenty- to thirty-foot-high snow drifts isolated residents in their offices and homes, and even in their cars on the highway. With a dependency on rubber-tire vehicles, which lost all traction in the heavily blanketed urban streets, they were cut off from food, fuel, and even electricity. This one unexpected snow disaster stranded tens of thousands of people, froze public utilities and transportation, and cost Buffalo hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses and property damages. The destruction wrought by this snowstorm, like the destruction brought on by other natural disasters, was from a combination of weather-related hazards and the public policies meant to mitigate them. Buffalo’s 1977 blizzard, the first snowstorm to be declared a disaster in US history, came after a century of automobility, suburbanization, and snow removal guidelines like the bare-pavement policy. Kneeland offers a compelling examination of whether the 1977 storm was an anomaly or the inevitable outcome of years of city planning. From the local to the state and federal levels, Kneeland discusses governmental response and disaster relief, showing how this regional event had national implications for environmental policy and how its effects have resounded through the complexities of disaster politics long after the snow fell.

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Benjamin Francis-Fallon, "The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

While media pundits continually speculate over the future leanings of the so-called “Latino vote,” Benjamin Francis-Fallon historicizes how Latinos were imagined into a national electoral constituency in his new book The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History (Harvard University Press, 2019). Francis-Fallon, Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University, examines the rhetorical construction of a national voting bloc by politicians, parties, and a national network of Latino political elites. This interview explores some of the major themes in the book, including the essential role of Latino congressmen, the ideological struggles between Latino elected officials and radical activists, and the ongoing appeals to a panethnic Latino voting bloc from presidential campaigns. Of course Democratic Party politics is only half of the story, with the efforts of the Republican Party featuring prominently in the text as well. By discussing the parallel Latino engagement strategies of both parties, Francis-Fallon underscores the fact that the “rise of the Latino vote was a multiparty phenomenon.” Building upon existing studies that detail how panethnic Latinidad was constructed in the twentieth-century United States, Francis-Fallon adds national and presidential politics to the list of forces that continue to define what it means to be Latino.

Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr.

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Sarah E. K. Smith, "Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America" (UBC Press, 2025)

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 08:05:00 -0000

hat is the relationship between culture and trade? In Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America Sarah E. K. Smith, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University and the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Art, Culture and Global Relations, examines the history of cultural relations between Canada, the USA and Mexico at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book considers how North America was conceptualised by cultural practices such as art and video, as well as how the arts engaged and responded to free trade agreements in that period. As the world confronts a very different trading and cultural context, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future, as well as the past, of cross-national cultural exchange. The book will also be available open access in 2026

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Anand Pandian, "Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump's harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States, the appeal of that politics of anger and fear. In the years that followed, he crisscrossed the country—from Fargo, North Dakota to Denton, Texas, from southern California to upstate New York—seeking out fellow Americans with markedly different social and political commitments, trying to understand the forces that have hardened our suspicions of others. The result is Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life (Stanford University Press, 2025), and How to Take Them Down, a groundbreaking and ultimately hopeful exploration of the ruptures in our social fabric, and courageous efforts to rebuild a collective life beyond them.

The stakes of disconnection have never been higher. From the plight of migrants and refugees to the climate crisis and the recent pandemic, so much turns on the care and concern we can muster for lives and circumstances beyond our own. But as Pandian discovers, such empathy is often thwarted by the infrastructure of everyday American life: fortified homes and neighborhoods, bulked-up cars and trucks, visions of the body as an armored fortress, and media that shut out contrary views. Home and road, body and mind: these interlocking walls sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it difficult to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.

Through vivid encounters with Americans of many kinds—including salesmen, truck drivers, police officers, urban planners, and activists for women's rights and environmental justice—Pandian shares tools to think beyond the twists and turns of our bracing present. While our impasses draw from deep American histories of isolation and segregation, he reveals how strategies of mutual aid and communal caretaking can help to surface more radical visions for a life in common with others, ways of meeting strangers in this land as potential kin.

Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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Linda Gordon, "Seven Social Movements That Changed America" (LIveright, 2025)

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How do social movements arise, wield power, and bring about meaningful change? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these and other salient questions in this “visionary, cautionary, timely, and utterly necessary book” (Nicole Eustace), narrating how some of America’s most influential twentieth-century social movements transformed the nation.
Beginning with the turn-of-the century settlement house movement, the book compares Chicago’s celebrated Hull-House, begun by privileged women, to a much less well known African American project, Cleveland’s Phillis Wheatley House, begun by a former sharecropper. Expanding her highly praised book The Second Coming of the KKK, the second chapter shows how a northern Klan became a mass movement in the 1920s. Contrary to what many Klan opponents thought, this KKK was a middle-class organization, its members primarily urban and well educated. In the 1930s, the KKK gave birth to dozens of American fascist groups—small but extremely violent. Profiles of two other 1930s movements follow: the Townsend campaign for old-age insurance, named for its charismatic leader, Dr. Francis Townsend. It created the public pressure that brought us Social Security, which was considered radical at the time, as was the movement to bring about federal unemployment aid for millions.
Proceeding to the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott—which jump-started the career of Martin Luther King, Jr.—the narrative shows how the city’s entire Black population refused to ride segregated buses; initiated by Black women, their years-long, hard-fought victory inspired the civil rights movement. Gordon then examines the 1970s farmworkers struggle, led by Cesar Chavez and made possible by the work of tens of thousands of the primarily Mexican American farmworkers. Together they built the United Farm Workers Union, winning better wages and working conditions for some of the country’s poorest workers. The book concludes with the dramatic stories of two Boston socialist feminist groups, Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective, which influenced the whole women’s liberation movement.

Linda Gordon is professor emerita of history and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. She is the winner of two Bancroft prizes for best book in American History. Her previous work includes The Second Coming of the KKK and a biography of the photographer Dorothea Lange.

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Bradley Morgan, "Frank Zappa's America" (LSU Press, 2025)

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

From his early albums with the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa established a reputation as a musical genius who pushed the limits of culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s, experimenting with a blend of genres in innovative and unheard-of ways. Not only did his exploratory styles challenge the expectations of what popular music could sound like, but his prolific creative endeavors also shaped how audiences thought about the freedom of artistic expression.

In Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), Bradley Morgan casts the artist as an often-misunderstood figure who critiqued the actions of religious and political groups promoting a predominantly white, Christian vision of the United States. A controversial and provocative satirist, often criticized for the shocking subject matter of his songs, Zappa provided social commentary throughout his career that spoke truth to power about the nefarious institutions operating in the lives of everyday Americans. Beginning in the late 1970s, his music frequently addressed the rise of extremist religious influence in American politics, specifically white Christian nationalism.

Despite commercial and critical pressure, Zappa refused to waver in his support for free speech during the era of Reagan and MTV, including his pointed testimony before the U.S. Senate at the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) hearings. Throughout the 1980s, and until his death in 1993, Zappa crafted his art form to advocate for political engagement, the security of individual liberties, and the advancement of education. Music became his platform to convey progressive views promoting the rights of marginalized communities most at risk in a society governed by the principles of what he perceived as Christian radicalism.

Frank Zappa's Americexamines the musician's messaging through song, tracing the means by which Zappa created passionate, at times troubling, art that combats conservativism in its many manifestations. For readers in the twenty-first century, his music and public advocacy demonstrate the need to preserve democracy and the voices that uphold it.

Bradley Morgan, a media arts professional based in Chicago, is the author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships for CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and directs the station's music film festival. Morgan also interviews authors of music and pop culture books for the New Books Network podcast.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Anthony Michael Petro, "Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the late twentieth century, artists were on the front lines of the culture wars. Leaders of the Christian Right in the U.S. made a national spectacle out of feminist and queer art, blasting it as sacrilegious or pornographic--and sometimes both. On the bully pulpits of television and talk radio, as well as in the halls of Congress, conservatives denounced artists ranging from Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Chicago to Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz. Conservatives, alarmed by shifting sex and gender norms, collided with progressive artists who were confronting sexism, homophobia, and racism. In Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars (Oxford University Press, 2025), Anthony Petro offers a compelling new history of the culture wars that places competing moralities of gender and sexuality alongside competing visions of the sacred. The modern culture wars, he shows, are best understood not as contests pitting religious conservatives against secular activists, but as a series of ongoing historical struggles to define the relationship between the sacred and the political. Through captivating case studies of "subversive" artists, Provoking Religion illuminates the underside of the culture wars, revealing how progressive artists and activists rendered from those most apparently profane aspects of human life-the stuff of conservatives' worst nightmares--their own haunting visions of the sacred.

Anthony M. Petro is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at University of Notre Dame (effective fall 2025). His first book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion, was a finalist for the Religion Newswriters Association's book award for nonfiction. An early chapter from this book also won the 2012 LGBTQ Religious History Award from the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. In 2019-2020, Petro was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

Clayton Jarrard is a graduate student at NYU's XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program.

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Yuki Kato, "Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City" (NYU Press, 2025)

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been a historical trend of urban gardening gaining popularity during times of crisis. Gardens of Hope is the story of urban gardening in New Orleans in the decade after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Yuki Kato highlights the impact urban gardens have on communities after disasters and the efforts of well-intended individuals envisioning alternative futures in the form of urban farming.

Drawing on repeated interviews with residents who began cultivation projects in New Orleans between 2005 and 2015, Kato explains how good intentions and grit were not enough to implement or sustain urban gardeners’ visions for the post-disaster city’s future. Coining the term “prefigurative urbanism,” Kato illustrates how individuals tried to realize alternative ways of living and working in the city through pragmatism and innovation. Gardens of Hope asks key questions about what inspires and enables individuals to pursue prefigurative urbanism and about the potential and limitations of this form of civic engagement to bring about short- and long-term changes in cities undergoing transformation, from gentrification, post-pandemic recovery, to climate change.

Yuki Kato is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology at Georgetown University. She is an urban sociologist whose research interests intersect the subfields of social stratification, food and environment justice, culture and consumption, and symbolic interaction. She is the co-editor of A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City (NYU Press, 2020).

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, development studies, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Religion in the Lands That Became America

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant and Atlantic. Driven by his strong sense of the historical and moral shortcomings of the usual story, Thomas A. Tweed offers a very different narrative in this ambitious new history. He begins the story much earlier—11,000 years ago—at a rock shelter in present-day Texas and follows Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, transnational migrants, and people of many faiths as they transform the landscape and confront the big lifeway transitions, from foraging to farming and from factories to fiber optics.

Setting aside the familiar narrative themes, Dr. Tweed highlights sustainability, showing how religion both promoted and inhibited individual, communal, and environmental flourishing during three sustainability crises: the medieval Cornfield Crisis, which destabilized Indigenous ceremonial centers; the Colonial Crisis, which began with the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans; and the Industrial Crisis, which brought social inequity and environmental degradation. The unresolved Colonial and Industrial Crises continue to haunt the nation, Dr. Tweed suggests, but he recovers historical sources of hope as he retells the rich story of America’s religious past.

Our guest is: Dr. Thomas A. Tweed, who is professor emeritus of American Studies and history at the University of Notre Dame. A past president of the American Academy of Religion, he is the editor of Retelling U.S. Religious History and the author numerous books including Religion: A Very Short Introduction, and Religion in the Lands That Became America.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in American history. She works as a grad student and dissertation coach, and is a developmental editor for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast and the author of the Academic Life newsletter, found at christinagessler.substack.com

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Arianne Edmonds, "We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Black press provided a blueprint to help Black Americans transition from slavery and find opportunities to advance and define African American citizenship. Among the vanguard of the Black press was Jefferson Lewis Edmonds, founder and editor of The Liberator newspaper. His Los Angeles-based newspaper championed for women's rights, land and business ownership, education, and civic engagement, while condemning lynchings and other violent acts against African Americans. It encouraged readers to move westward and build new communities, and it printed stories about weddings and graduations as a testament to the lives and moments not chronicled in the White-owned press.

Edmonds took this fierce perspective in his career as a journalist, for he himself was born into slavery and dedicated his life to creating pathways of liberation for those who came after him. Across the pages of his newspaper, Edmonds painted a different perspective on Black life in America and championed for his community--from highlighting the important work of his contemporaries, including Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, to helping local readers find love in the personal ads section. The Liberator, along with a chorus of Black newspapers at the turn of the century, educated an entire generation on how to guard their rights and take claim of their new American citizenship.

Written by Jefferson Lewis Edmonds' great-great granddaughter, We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America (Oxford University Press, 2025) chronicles how Edmonds and other pioneering Black publishers documented the shifting tides in the advancement of Black liberation. Arianne Edmonds argues that the Black press was central in transforming Black Americans' communication patterns, constructing national resistance networks, and defining Black citizenship after Reconstruction--a vision, mission, and spirit that persists today through Black online social movements. Weaving together poetry, personal narrative, newspaper clips, and documents from the Edmonds family archive, We Now Belong to Ourselves illustrates how Edmonds used his platform to center Black joy, Black triumph, and radical Black acceptance.

Arianne Edmonds is a 5th generation Angeleno, archivist, civic leader, and founder of the J.L. Edmonds Project, an initiative dedicated to preserving the history and culture of the Black American West. She is currently a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism funded by the MacArthur Foundation and a Commissioner for the Los Angeles Public Library.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Random House, 2023)

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War ended. Was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”?

That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose previous work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title, Lincoln's Peace, in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death. To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States’s interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.

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Michael Stauch, "Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise of Black political control in the 1970s. Wildcat of the Streets documents how the “community policing” approach of Mayor Coleman Young (1974–1993)—including neighborhood police stations, affirmative action hiring policies, and public participation in law enforcement initiatives—transformed Detroit, long considered the nation’s symbol of racial inequality and urban crisis, into a crucial site of experimentation in policing while continuing to subject many Black Detroiters to police brutality and repression.

In response, young people in the 1970s and 1980s drew on the city’s storied history of labor radicalism as well as contemporary shopfloor struggles to wage a “wildcat of the streets,” consisting of street disturbances, decentralized gang activity, and complex organizations of the informal economy. In this revelatory new history of the social life of cities, Michael Stauch mines a series of evocative interviews conducted with the participants to trace how Black youth made claims for political equality over and against the new order of community policing.

Centering the perspective of criminalized and crime-committing young people, Wildcat of the Streets is an original interpretation of police reform, the long struggle for Black liberation, and the politics of cities in the age of community policing.

Guest: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an Associate Professor at the University of Toledo. He historian of the modern United States with a focus on policing, politics, and the intersection of race, labor, and youth in social movements.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

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Mark R. Rank, "Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the beginnings of the country, with the rhetoric only ratcheting up in recent times. Our current era of fake news, alternative facts, and media partisanship has led to a breeding ground for all types of myths and misinformation to gain traction and legitimacy.

Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty (Oxford UP, 2021) is the first book to systematically address and confront many of the most widespread myths pertaining to poverty. Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock powerfully demonstrate that the realities of poverty are much different than the myths; indeed in many ways they are more disturbing. The idealized image of American society is one of abundant opportunities, with hard work being rewarded by economic prosperity. But what if this picture is wrong? What if poverty is an experience that touches the majority of Americans? What if hard work does not necessarily lead to economic well-being? What if the reasons for poverty are largely beyond the control of individuals? And if all of the evidence necessary to disprove these myths has been readily available for years, why do they remain so stubbornly pervasive? These are much more disturbing realities to consider because they call into question the very core of America's identity.

Armed with the latest research, Poorly Understood not only challenges the myths of poverty and inequality, but it explains why these myths continue to exist, providing an innovative blueprint for how the nation can move forward to effectively alleviate American poverty.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Osita Nwanevu, "The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding" (Random House, 2025)

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Frustrated with our political dysfunction, wearied by the thinness of contemporary political discourse, and troubled by the rise of anti-democratic attitudes across the political spectrum, journalist Osita Nwanevu has spent the Trump era examining the very meaning of democracy in search of answers to questions many have asked in the wake of the 2024 election: Are our institutions fundamentally broken? How can a country so divided govern itself? Does democracy even work as well as we believe?
The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (Random House, 2025) offers us challenging answers: while democracy remains vital, American democracy is an illusion we must make real by transforming not only our political institutions but the American economy. In a text that spans democratic theory, the American Founding, our aging political system, and the dizzying inequalities of our new Gilded Age, Nwanevu makes a visionary case for a political and economic agenda to fulfill the promise of American democracy and revive faith in the American project.
“Nearly two hundred fifty years ago, the men who founded America made a fundamental break not just from their old country but from the past—casting off an order that had subjugated them with worn and weak ideas for the promise of true self-governance and greater prosperity in a new republic,” Nwanevu writes. “With exactly their sense of purpose and even higher, more righteous ambitions for America than they themselves had, we should do the same now⁠—work as hard as we can in the decades ahead to ‘institute new Government’ for the benefit of all and not just the few.”

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Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests.

Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other--or, increasingly, to Russia and China.

Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from commodities markets in Russia to Iran's COVID response and China's cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy--as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider's account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world.

Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424

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Joseph O. Jewell, "White Man’s Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era" (UNC Press, 2023)

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time, demographers have predicted the "browning" of the nation's middle class--once considered a de facto "white" category--over the next twenty years as the country becomes increasingly racially diverse. In this book, Joseph O. Jewell takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how evidence of middle-class mobility among Black, Mexican American, and Chinese men generated both new anxieties and varieties of backlash among white populations.
Blending cultural history and historical sociology, Jewell chronicles the continually evolving narratives that linked whiteness with middle-class mobility and middle-class manhood. In doing so, Jewell addresses a key issue in the historical sociology of race: how racialized groups demarcate, defend, and alter social positions in overlapping hierarchies of race, class, and gender. New racist narratives about non-white men occupying middle-class occupations emerged in cities across the nation at the turn of the century. These stories helped to shore up white supremacy in the face of far-reaching changes to the nation's racialized economic order.

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Ashley Howard, "Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement" (UNC Press, 2025)

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This episode features Dr. Ashley Howard, assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa, discussing her book, Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press in June 2025.

In six thoroughly researched chapters, Midwest Unrest argues that urban rebellions were a working-class response to the failure of traditional civil rights activism and growing fissures between the Black working and middle classes in the 1960s. Howard focuses on three Midwestern sites–Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Omaha–to explore the ways region, race, class, and gender all played critical and often overlapping roles in shaping Black people's resistance to racialized oppression. Using arrest records, Kerner Commission documents, and author-conducted oral history interviews, Howard registers the significant impact the rebellions had in transforming African Americans' consciousness and altering the relationship between Black urban communities and the state. Specifically, multiple parties, including municipal governments, city residents, and most importantly rebels, wielded urban revolt as a political tool to achieve their own objectives.

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Luke A. Nichter, "The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election Of 1968" (Yale UP, 2024)

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A sitting Democratic president who chooses not to run for re-election, a vice president running out of the president’s shadow, and a Republican nominee trying to make a political comeback amidst accusations of collusion – welcome to the 2024 1968 presidential election. What we think we know about the election has been challenged, however, by a new book by Luke A. Nichter, a professor of history and presidential studies at Chapman University. In The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 (Yale UP, 2024) Nichter reexamines the campaign and shows how the ‘68 election foreshadowed our current political landscape.

The 1968 presidential race was a contentious battle between vice president Hubert Humphrey, Republican Richard Nixon, and former Alabama governor George Wallace. The United States was reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy and was bitterly divided on the Vietnam War and domestic issues, including civil rights and rising crime. Drawing on previously unexamined archives and numerous interviews, Luke A. Nichter upends the conventional understanding of the campaign.

Nichter chronicles how the evangelist Billy Graham met with Johnson after the president’s attempt to reenter the race was stymied by his own party, and offered him a deal: Nixon, if elected, would continue Johnson’s Vietnam War policy and also not oppose his Great Society, if Johnson would soften his support for Humphrey. Johnson agreed.

Nichter also shows that Johnson was far more active in the campaign than has previously been described; that Humphrey’s resurgence in October had nothing to do with his changing his position on the war; that Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” has been misunderstood, since he hardly even campaigned there; and that Wallace’s appeal went far beyond the South and anticipated today’s Republican populism. This eye-opening account of the political calculations and maneuvering that decided this fiercely fought election reshapes our understanding of a key moment in twentieth-century American history.

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Michael John Witgen, "Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America" (UNC Press, 2021)

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining much of their land in the Old Northwest—what’s now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the region. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates in Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2021), the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves. Outnumbering white settlers well into the nineteenth century, they leveraged their political savvy to advance a dual citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal members to lay claim to a place in US civil society. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of US expansion.

John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020.

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Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov, "American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship" (UP of Kansas, 2021)

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

All nations make rules -- through their constitutions, legislatures, bureaucratic practices – about who counts as a citizen. American by Birth examines the role of the Supreme Court – particularly a ruling from 1898 that is still precedent today. Wong Kim Ark v. United States interpreted the language of the 14th Amendment to answer whether a man born in the United States was a citizen. The Court ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark and held that the 14th Amendment extends to children of immigrants who were born in the United States. Using the work of legal scholars, political scientists, and historians, Drs. Julie L. Novkov and Carol Nackenoff provide an extended biography of Wong Kim Ark and the historic 1898 landmark case – but also a biography of US Citizenship from the colonies to the present. American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship (UP of Kansas, 2021) concludes with an impressive chapter that contextualizes birthright citizenship globally and within the context of American politics and scholarly debates – with an emphasis on the vulnerability of birthright citizenship to indirect and direct change.

Dr. Julie L. Novkov is Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and interim dean of Rockefeller college at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954 (UMichigan, 2008).

Dr. Carol Nackenoff is Richter Professor emeritus of Political Science at Swarthmore College. She is the author of The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse (Oxford, 1994).

They are also co-editors of Stating the Family: New Directions in the Study of American Politics (University Press of Kansas, 2020) and Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

Two resources mentioned in the podcast: Tian Atlas Xu’s “Immigration Attorneys and Chinese Exclusion Law Enforcement: The Case of San Francisco, 1882–1930” and

the symposium on American by Birth.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Frank L. Jones, "Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age" (UP Kansas, 2020)

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a 2012 opinion piece bemoaning the state of the US Senate, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank cited a “leading theory: There are no giants in the chamber today.” Among the respected members who once walked the Senate floor, admired for their expertise and with a stature that went beyond party, Milbank counted Sam Nunn (D-GA).

Nunn served in the Senate for four terms beginning in 1972, at a moment when domestic politics and foreign policy were undergoing far-reaching changes. As a member and then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had a vital impact on most of the crucial national security and defense issues of the Cold War era and the “new world order” that followed—issues that included the revitalization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military capability, US-Soviet relations, national defense reorganization and reform, the Persian Gulf conflict, and nuclear arms control. In this first full account of Nunn’s senatorial career, Frank Leith Jones reveals how, as a congressional leader and “shadow secretary of defense,” Nunn helped win the Cold War, constructing the foundation for the defense and foreign policies of the 1970s and 1980s that secured the United States and its allies from the Soviet threat.

At a time of bitter political polarization and partisanship, Nunn’s reputation remains that of a statesman with a record of bipartisanship and a dedication to US national interests above all. His career, as recounted in Sam Nunn: Statesman of the Nuclear Age (University Press of Kansas, 2020), provides both a valuable lesson in the relationships among the US government, foreign powers, and societies and a welcome reminder of the capacity of Congress, even a lone senator, to promote and enact policies that can make the country, and the world, a better and safer place.

Frank Leith Jones is professor of security studies and the General C. Marshall Chair of Military Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His published work includes Blowtorch: Robert Komer, Vietnam, and American Cold War Strategy.

Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter.

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Jubilee (1978)

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the ninth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell traces the trans-Atlantic movement of artists associated with punk culture in New York and London. In conversation with British cultural historian Matt Worley, we follow New York-based artists like Jayne (née Wayne) County, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, and others to the U.K. where they embedded themselves in a growing music-based subculture. As the punk aesthetic expanded internationally it diversified in form incorporating elements of fashion, literature, and cinema like Derek Jarman’s apocalyptic masterpiece JUBILEE (1978).

Matt Worley is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading and author of numerous books that cover modern British history with a special focus on music and the British Labor movement. His book No Future: Punk, Politics and British Your Culture, 1976-1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores the evolution of punk as a fashion, a musical form, an attitude, and an overall aesthetic. Setting punk culture against a backdrop of social fragmentation, violence, high unemployment, and socio-economic change, Worley recaptures punk's anarchic force as a medium through which the frustrated and the disaffected could reject, revolt, and re-invent.

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Gary Kulik, "Conscientious Objectors at War: The Vietnam War's Forgotten Medics" (Texas Tech UP, 2025)

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

During the war in Vietnam, thousands of young men served as conscientious objector medics. They had been certified by their local draft boards as noncombatants, but many would know intense combat nonetheless. Without weapons training, they ran through the infantry lines, answering the desperate call, "Medic!" Many displayed exemplary heroism even at the cost of their lives. With the end of the draft, we will never see their like again.

Conscientious Objectors at War: The Vietnam War's Forgotten Medics (Texas Tech University Press, 2025) tells their stories within the background context of pacifist churches in America. It is the first book exclusively devoted to such men, who emerged initially from the historic peace churches--Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites--and from Seventh-day Adventists, who would comprise roughly half of all conscientious objector medics serving in the Vietnam War. From World War II on, growing numbers of men from mainstream churches made the same choices, and after a Supreme Court decision in 1965, so too would men who claimed humanist and secular justification. The pages contain the stories of pantheists and Catholics, among others from the peace traditions.

Gary Kulik, who also served as a conscientious-objector medic, interweaves his own story into those he recounts, stories of fierce combat, stumbling accidents, moments of fleeting honor and ever-present death.

Gary Kulik served as a deputy director of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, near Wilmington, Delaware. Previously, he was a department head and assistant director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and the editor of American Quarterly.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Claudia Setzer, "The Progressives' Bible: How Scriptural Interpretation Built a More Just America" (Fortress Publishers, 2024)

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In her book, The Progressives' Bible: How Scriptural Interpretation Built a More Just America, (Fortress Press, 2024), Claudia Setzer argues that while conservative groups have often appealed to the Bible to support their positions, so too have many progressive voices rooted in the Bible, seeing their struggles in its narratives and characters, and drawing on its verses to prove the truth of their positions. Abolitionism countered pro-slavery arguments with copious biblical material. Women's rights advocates strongly disagreed with one another about whether the Bible was good news for their cause, but some argued that it was. Temperance, a broadly inclusive reform movement in the nineteenth century, employed arguments that reflected a critical, non-literalist stance to the text. Civil rights speakers identified with biblical figures and struggles, infusing their rhetoric with familiar verses. The Progressives' Bible foregrounds women, especially women of color, like Maria Stewart, Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer, while also considering the works of crucial figures like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. A final chapter describes contemporary social justice movements that draw strength from biblical and religious traditions, from Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant perspectives.

Interviewee: Claudia Setzer is a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College in Riverdale, NY. Her books include The Bible in the American Experience (co-edited with David Shefferman), The Bible and American Culture: A Sourcebook (co-edited with David Shefferman), Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Doctrine, Community, and Self-Definition, and Jewish Responses to Early Christians: History and Polemics, 30-150 C.E.

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Ahmad Greene-Hayes, "Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans. When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space. Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an antiblack world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms--ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more--to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.

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Lily Hamourtziadou, "Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq" (Bristol UP, 2021)

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq (Bristol University Press, 2021), Lily Hamourtziadou’s investigation into civilian victims during the conflicts that followed the US-led coalition’s 2003 invasion of Iraq provides important new perspectives on the human cost of the War on Terror. From early fighting to the withdrawal and return of coalition troops, the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS, the book explores the scale and causes of deaths and places them in the contexts of power struggles, US foreign policy and radicalisation. Casting fresh light on not just the conflict but international geopolitics and the history of Iraq, it constructs a unique and insightful human security approach to war.

Lily Hamourtziadou is Senior Lecturer in Criminology with Security Studies and Deputy Course Director at Birmingham City University, and Principal Researcher of Iraq Body Count, which maintains the largest public database of violent civilian deaths.

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Sonia C. Gomez, "Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America" (NYU Press, 2024)

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Picture Bride, War Bride examines how the institution of marriage created pockets of legal and social inclusion for Japanese women during the period of Japanese exclusion. Gomez’s work joins together an analysis of picture brides, or Japanese women who migrated to the United States to join husbands whom they married [in absentia] in the early 20th century, with war brides, or Japanese women who married American military servicemen after World War II. By combining the analysis of these two categories, Gomez centralizes the overlapping and conflicting logics to either racially exclude Japanese or facilitate their inclusion via immigration legislation that privileged wives and mothers. In short, the book tells a story of how the interplay between societal norms and political interests can both harness and contradict the interconnected frameworks of race, gender, and sexuality.

Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in the department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Jeremy Black, "The Civil War" (Saint Augustine's Press, 2025)

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The American Civil War may have been more consequential to American history (and its global supremacy) than its Revolutionary War and participation in all other world wars. The influence of this war is not just reduced to the victory of the north and its economic infrastructure, but the fact of Union success ushered in the notion of 'what it means to be American' that even the revolution could not instill.

European military historian Jeremy Black reorients readers to see what was extraordinary in the civil war of 'the American colonies' and why this was warfare unlike anything that could be properly understood on the world stage at that time. He also examines with expertise the role of foreign powers (or lack thereof).

Black's treatment might be the doom of civil war counterfactuals. Was the south destined to fail? Was it weaker motive, faulty strategy, or lack of European support? Was the north just lucky, or possessed of foresight and providential endowment? Black dispels romanticism and sentimentalist hindsight--the American Civil War is unparalleled in many respects, but it is not without clear lessons in warcraft, diplomacy, and cultural-economic impasse.

Furthermore, Black's Civil War is a new resource that teaches, reaffirms, and reminds readers of the intensity of the American past--in both error and idealistic impulse--that might continue to guide us to the best future and avoid the lose-lose circumstances of a civil war. Black's acumen for historical review in this case renders a kind of warning: May the leaders of men in the future come to a better way of self-realization than give way to the internal conflict that pits father against son, and sister against brother. But if he must engage, at least understand the distinction between war and politics.

Black's objective and concise account is a treasure for students and experts alike who need clarity and insight without too much of an investment. The take-away is an appreciation for the American spirit that civil strife petrified and an understanding of the tactical progression of this conflict and the context of combat of that era.

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Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, "Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War" (Basic Books, 2021)

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A riveting account of the five most crucial days in twentieth-century diplomatic history: from Pearl Harbor to Hitler's declaration of war on the United States.

By early December 1941, war had changed much of the world beyond recognition. Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked--and the United States remained at peace.

Hitler's American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11. Tracing developments in real time and backed by deep archival research, historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman show how Hitler's intervention was not the inexplicable decision of a man so bloodthirsty that he forgot all strategy, but a calculated risk that can only be understood in a truly global context. This book reveals how December 11, not Pearl Harbor, was the real watershed that created a world war and transformed international history.

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Elizabeth Popp Berman, "Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What happened to bold political vision on the left, and what shrunk the very horizons of possibility? In Thinking like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman tells the story of how a distinctive way of thinking—an “economic style of reasoning”—became dominant in Washington between the 1960s and the 1980s and how it continues to dramatically narrow debates over public policy today.

Introduced by liberal technocrats who hoped to improve government, this way of thinking was grounded in economics but also transformed law and policy. At its core was an economic understanding of efficiency, and its advocates often found themselves allied with Republicans and in conflict with liberal Democrats who argued for rights, equality, and limits on corporate power. By the Carter administration, economic reasoning had spread throughout government policy and laws affecting poverty, healthcare, antitrust, transportation, and the environment. Fearing waste and overspending, liberals reined in their ambitions for decades to come, even as Reagan and his Republican successors argued for economic efficiency only when it helped their own goals.
A compelling account that illuminates what brought American politics to its current state, Thinking like an Economist also offers critical lessons for the future. With the political left resurgent today, Democrats seem poised to break with the past—but doing so will require abandoning the shibboleth of economic efficiency and successfully advocating new ways of thinking about policy.

Elizabeth Popp Berman is Director and Richard H. Price Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine (Princeton).

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Alexander Lian, "Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A unique and thorough work of intellectual history and legal scholarship Stereoscopic Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Education (Cambridge University Press, 2020) by Alexander Lian, a practicing commercial litigator, reconstructs Oliver Wendell Holmes’ as a pioneering legal pedagogue and sophisticated theoretician of law and the ‘reality of practice’. Lian advances the thesis that the most famous article in American jurisprudence, Oliver Wendell Holmes's “The Path of the Law,” presents Holmes' perspective on legal education. Through meticulous analysis, Lian cogently shows that Holmes’ ‘theory of legal study’ broke down artificial barriers between theory and practice. For contemporary legal educators—and anyone interested in the history of America’s legal tradition—Stereoscopic Law reformulates Holmes’ fundamental message: the law must be seen, taught, and practiced three-dimensionally.

Alexandar Lian practices commercial litigation in Miami, FL. Since 2008, he has been a solo practitioner. Alexander Lian is a graduate of both the Graduate and Law Schools of Vanderbilt University. He has represented clients in a variety of contested matters ranging from high dollar contract disputes and real property disputes to the prosecution and collection of large judgments totaling in the millions. He is also a Florida Supreme Court Qualified Arbitrator and, formerly, president of COLBAR (Colombian American Bar Association).

Ayushi Singh is a graduate student at IIT Gandhinagar, India.

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Andrew Herscher, "Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, Anishinaabe leaders granted land to a college where their children could be educated. At the time, the colonial settlement of Anishinaabe homelands hardly extended beyond Detroit in what settlers called the “Michigan Territory.” Four days after the Treaty of Fort Meigs was signed, the First College of Michigania was founded to claim the land that the Anishinaabeg had just granted. Four years later, the newly-chartered University of Michigan would claim this land. By the time that the university’s successor moved to Ann Arbor twenty years later, Anishinaabe people had been forced to cede almost all their land in what had become the state of Michigan, now inhabited by almost 200,000 settlers.

Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Herscher narrates the University of Michigan’s place in both Anishinaabe and settler history, tracing the university’s participation in the colonization of Anishinaabe homelands, Anishinaabe efforts to claim their right to an education, and the university’s history of disavowing, marginalizing, and minimizing its responsibilities and obligations to Anishinaabe people. Continuing the public conversations of the same name on U-M’s campus in 2023, Under the Campus, the Land provides a new perspective on the relationship between universities and settler colonialism in the US. Members of the U-M community, scholars of Midwest history, and those interested in Indigenous studies will find this book compelling.

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Phil Tiemeyer, "Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants (Cornell University Press, 2025) is a global history of postwar aviation that examines how states nurtured airlines for competing political and economic goals during the Cold War. While previous histories almost exclusively stress US and Western European aviation progress, Dr. Phil Tiemeyer examines how smaller, poorer states in socialist Eastern Europe and in the postcolonial Global South utilized airlines of their own to forge rival pathways to modernization.

Part of this modernization involved norms for working women. Stewardesses at airlines around the globe encountered novel threats to their dignity as the Jet Age approached. By the late 1960s, stewardesses endured harsh objectification: High hemlines, tight uniforms, and raunchy marketing were touted as modern and liberated. These women, whether from the West, East, or South, forged their own pathways to achieve greater dignity at work. In Women and the Jet Age, Dr. Tiemeyer's global account of the rise of air travel and of early feminist strivings among stewardesses is one of the first histories to place such developments—political, economic, and feminist—in dialogue with each other.

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Andrew S. Berish, "Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Andrew S. Berish. 2025. Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse. (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Some good words from the inside flap:

“

A deep dive into the meaning behind the hatred of jazz.
A rock guitarist plays four notes in front of one thousand people, while a jazz guitarist plays one thousand notes in front of four people. You might laugh or groan at this jazz joke, but what is it about jazz that makes people want to disparage it in the first place?
Andrew S. Berish’s Hating Jazz listens to the voices who have denounced, disparaged, and mocked the music. By focusing on the rejection of the music, Berish says, we see more holistically jazz’s complicated place in American cultural life. Jazz is a display of Black creativity and genius, an art form that is deeply embedded in African American life. Though the explicit racial tenor of jazz jokes has become muted over time, making fun of jazz, either in a lighthearted or aggressive way, is also an engagement with the place of Blackness in America. An individual’s taste in music may seem personal, but Berish’s analysis of jazz hatred demonstrates that musical preferences and trends are a social phenomenon. Criticism of jazz has become inextricable from the ways we understand race in America, past and present. In addition to this form of criticism, Berish also considers jazz hate as a form of taste discrimination and as a conflict over genre boundaries within different jazz cultures.
Both enlightening and original, Hating Jazz shows that our response to music can be a social act, unique to our historical moment and cultural context—we react to music in certain ways because of who we are, where we are, and when we are.

“

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University

nathan.smith@yale.edu

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Elana Levine, "Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History" (Duke UP, 2020)

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen.

In a wide-ranging and enjoyable interview with Dr. Elana Levine, we covered a broad array of subjects pertaining to the history, culture, and craft of soap operas. After an initial conversation, I asked her a series of questions about her work and how it resonates with other genres such as the Real Housewives franchise, especially how original housewives (domestic workers as well as suburban housewives of numerous ethnicities and races) represented the viewership of soap opera consumption and support. We talked about the early origins of soap operas, especially with Proctor & Gamble in the early inception of the soap opera genre to now, with the innovative partnership and collaboration between Proctor and Gamble/CBS and the NAACP in debuting the new soap opera, Beyond the Gates.

We discussed the ways in which the viewership of soaps, mostly working women and stay at home women shed light on significant aspects of American Women's and Gender history, women's civic participation (combing public and private space) as well as informs how women viewers, often housewives and domestics, found ways to weave their own life narratives together with those of cast actors, thus contributing to an interpretive lens on life matter,(blurring line between real and imagined), representing both an innovative and inclusive type of Citizenship seasoning process, whereby, via interaction with soap operas stars as both celebrities and everyday people, (as fellow Cinema scholar Anna McCarthy talks about in her work on ways in which 1950s television, functioned as a kind of citizen machine governing America, championed inclusive democratic practice that engaged citizens in repetitious call and response and back and forth conversation about everyday practices of everyday working people.

Lastly, we talked about the parallels with primetime soap operas like Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing, Yellowstone, as well as what Dr. Levine calls a hybrid form of soap opera storytelling found in series like Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and other primetime television series. We also spoke about the parallels between soap operas as meditations on aspects of good and evil, finding interesting synergy with genres such as wrestling as soap opera drama sport, the drama of superheroes and villains in the DC and Marvel Universe, as well as versions of science fiction.

Dr. Elana Levine is Professor of Media, Cinema and Digital Studies in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She got her PhD, Communication Arts from University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research areas of interest include Television history, theory, and criticism; gender, sexuality, and media; media industry and production studies; media audience studies.

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Dennard Dayle, "How to Dodge a Cannonball: A Novel" (Henry Holt, 2025)

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.
How to Dodge a Cannonball (Henry Holt, 2025) is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future―as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus.
Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler―until he’s captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate―until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform. While visibly white, he claims to be an octoroon, and they claim to believe him. Only then does his life get truly strange.
His new brothers are even stranger, including a science-fiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slave feuding with God. Despite his best efforts, Anders starts seeing the war through their eyes, sparking ill-timed questions about who gets to be American or exploit the theater of war. Dennard Dayle’s satire spares no one as doomed charges, draft riots, gleeful arms dealers, and native suppression campaigns test everyone’s definition of loyalty.
Uproariously funny and revelatory, How to Dodge a Cannonball asks if America is worth fighting for. And then answers loudly. Read it while it’s still legal.

You can find author Dennard Dayle at his newsletter. And I am your host, Sullivan Summer. You can find me online, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Dennard went to talk about Cannonball spoilers.

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John Bardes, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930" (UNC Press, 2024)

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024) reveals that Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholders were deeply reliant on coercive state action. Authorities built massive slave prisons and devised specialized slave penal systems to maintain control and maximize profit. Indeed, in New Orleans—for most of the past half-century, the city with the highest incarceration rate in the United States—enslaved people were jailed at higher rates during the antebellum era than are Black residents today. Moreover, some slave prisons remained in use well after Emancipation: in these forgotten institutions lie the hidden origins of state violence under Jim Crow.

With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but they are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance.

Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

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Andrew Hartman, "Karl Marx in America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew Hartman

To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.
In historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.
After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society.

Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Ezra Glinter, "Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah" (Yale UP, 2024)

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, one of the world’s best-known Hasidic groups, is driven by the belief that we are on the verge of the messianic age. The man most recognized for the movement’s success is the seventh and last Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), believed by many of his followers to be the Messiah.

While hope of redemption has sustained the Jewish people through exile and persecution, it has also upended Jewish society with its apocalyptic and anarchic tendencies. So it is not surprising that Schneerson’s messianic fervor made him one of the most controversial rabbinic leaders of the twentieth century. How did he go from being an ordinary rabbi’s son in the Russian Empire to achieving status as a mystical sage? How did he revitalize a centuries-old Hasidic movement, construct an outreach empire of unprecedented scope, and earn the admiration and condemnation of political, communal, and religious leaders in America and abroad?

In Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah (Yale University Press, 2024), Glinter presents a thoughtful biography of the spiritual leader that inspired the Lubavitch Hasidic community and its global outreach activities.

Interviewee: Ezra Glinter is a writer, editor, translator, and biographer. For five years he worked as the deputy culture editor of the Forward newspaper, where he edited Have I Got a Story for You, an anthology of Yiddish fiction in translation. He is currently the senior staff writer and editor at the Yiddish Book Center.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Brent Z. Kaup and Kelly F. Austin, "The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease" (U of California Press, 2025)

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Brent Z. Kaup & Dr. Kelly F. Austin is an exploration of how the rising power and profits of Wall Street underpin the contemporary increases in and inadequate responses to vector-borne disease. Over the past fifty years, insects have transmitted infectious diseases to humans with greater frequency and in more unexpected places. To examine this phenomenon, Dr. Kaup and Dr. Austin take readers to the exurban homes of northern Virginia; the burgeoning agricultural outposts of Mato Grosso, Brazil; and the smallholder coffee farms of the Bududa District of eastern Uganda. Through these case studies, the authors illuminate how the broader financialization of society is intimately intertwined with both the creation of landscapes more conducive to vector-borne disease and the failure to prevent and cure such diseases throughout the world.

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153: What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about Anticipatory Despair (JP)

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt.

Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent--not just in how America's campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance.

Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off.

Mentioned in the episode:

M. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy

Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit"

Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978)

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Rebecca Jo Kinney, "Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt" (Temple UP, 2025)

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode we challenge the ideas about invisibility of Asian Americans in the urban Midwest by discussing Rebecca Jo Kinney’s Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt (Temple University Press, 2025).

Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland links the contemporary development of Cleveland’s “AsiaTown” to the multiple and fragmented histories of Cleveland’s Asian American communities from the 1940s to present. Kinney’s sharp insights include Japanese Americans who resettled from internment camps, Chinese Americans food purveyors, and Asian American community leaders who have had to fight for visibility and representation in city planning—even as the Cleveland Asian Festival is branded as a marquee “diversity” event for the city. Importantly, this book contributes to a growing field of Asian American studies in the U.S. Midwest by foregrounding the importance of region in racial formation and redevelopment as it traces the history of racial segregation and neighborhood diversity in Cleveland during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Rebecca Jo Kinney is a Fulbright Scholar and an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA. Dr. Kinney’s award-winning first book, Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier argues that contemporary stories told about Detroit’s potential for rise enables the erasure of white supremacist systems. Her third book, Making Home in Korea: The Transnational Lives of Adult Korean Adoptees, is based on research undertaken while she was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea. Her research has appeared in American Quarterly, Food, Culture & Society, Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Radical History Review, Race&Class, among other journals.

Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in the department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson, "Why America Didn't Become Great Again" (Routledge, 2025)

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Examining the conditions that not only blocked attempts to make America great again, but actively made the country worse, Why America Didn't Become Great Again (Routledge, 2025) identifies those organizations, institutions, politicians and prominent characters in the forefront of the economic and social policies - ultimately asking who is responsible. While the period from the late 1970s to 2020s became the best of times for America's corporate class, as profits grew along with the wealth and income that they delivered for their stockholders and management, their goal was to set new rules for the rest of us to live by, not as special interests but with a clear class agenda - for which institutions have been organized, government policies reoriented, economists, journalists and politicians recruited, funded and promoted. And so it has not been the best of times for working families as inequality, stagnant wages, debt, and ever longer working hours became their fate. This book critically analyses those who very deliberately set out to implement policies enacted at the state and federal level in order to redistribute wealth and income upwards and change the balance of power in the United States in response to the class, gender and racial challenges that resulted in compressed income and wealth differentials. An essential book on contemporary inequality in America, Why America Didn't Become Great Again surveys the past near half century that have resulted in American economic instability and inequality, environmental crisis, a crumbling physical and harmful social infrastructure, among the very worst health outcomes, child poverty, food insecurity and social mobility of the industrialized countries culminating in a Trump regime and the road to further ruin.

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Elisabeth Åsbrink, "1947: Where Now Begins" (Other Press, 2019)

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

An award-winning writer captures a year that defined the modern world, intertwining historical events around the globe with key moments from her personal history.
The year 1947 marks a turning point in the twentieth century. Peace with Germany becomes a tool to fortify the West against the threats of the Cold War. The CIA is created, Israel is about to be born, Simone de Beauvoir experiences the love of her life, an ill George Orwell is writing his last book, and Christian Dior creates the hyper-feminine New Look as women are forced out of jobs and back into the home.
In the midst of it all, a ten-year-old Hungarian-Jewish boy resides in a refugee camp for children of parents murdered by the Nazis. This year he has to make the decision of a lifetime, one that will determine his own fate and that of his daughter yet to be born, Elisabeth.

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Matthew Wisnioski on the History of the Idea and Culture of “Innovation” in the United States

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Wisnioski, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, about his new book, Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life. The pair talk about how the new book connects to Matt’s earlier book, Engineers for Change; how what Matt calls “innovation expertise” first emerged; how government played a key role in promoting the idea of innovation; how the idea of innovation was democratized from focusing on elite white men to focusing on women, people of color, children, and, well, everyone; and much more. Vinsel and Wisnioski also talk about Matt’s current book project with Michael Meindl, Associate Professor of Communication at Radford University - a history of the television show and multimedia product, The Magic School Bus.

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Paul R. Beckett, "An Anatomy of Tax Havens: Europe, the Caribbean and the United States of America" (de Gruyter, 2023)

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Tax havens in offshore lands like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas were once considered a rarity, the preserve of the super-rich. Today, they are big business available to the masses. Their goal? To avoid any form of accountability. Own nothing. Possess everything. Be answerable to no one. Where are these tax havens? What forms can they take? What future lies in store for them, and why should we care?

An Anatomy of Tax Havens: Europe, the Caribbean and the United States of America (de Gruyter, 2023) answers these questions, and more, in the first comparative study in one volume of European, Caribbean and United States tax havens.

It examines their simple origin to the extreme forms some take today, delving into the murky subculture that has deliberately made them impenetrably obscure. Uniquely, it combines detailed technical expertise (regulatory regimes, financial crime, legal and equitable structuring) with an analysis of their impact on domestic and global political, economic, environmental and social concerns.

An Anatomy of Tax Havens is a fascinating, informative read for a broad readership; from legal, accountancy and tax practitioners to compliance regulators, law enforcement agencies, and students and researchers interested in business studies, taxation, and crime.

Paul R. Beckett is a Lawyer and Academic, specializing in company, commercial and trust law; banking and fund management; cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. He practices on the Isle of Man.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Sarah Gold McBride "Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the young nation wrestled with its identity. During the colonial period, hair was usually seen as bodily discharge, even “excrement.” But as Dr. Sarah Gold McBride shows in Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2025), hair gradually came to be understood as an integral part of the body, capable of exposing truths about the individuals from whom it grew—even truths they wanted to hide.

As the United States diversified—intensifying divisions over race, class, citizenship status, and region—Americans sought to understand and classify one another through the revelatory power of hair: its color, texture, length, even the shape of a single strand. While hair styling had long offered clues about one’s social status, the biological properties of hair itself gradually came to be seen as a scientific tell: a reliable indicator of whether a person was a man or a woman; Black, white, Indigenous, or Asian; Christian or heathen; healthy or diseased. Hair was even thought to illuminate aspects of personality—whether one was courageous, ambitious, or perhaps criminally inclined. Yet if hair was a teller of truths, it was also readily turned to purposes of deception in ways that alarmed some and empowered others. Indeed, hair helped many Americans to fashion statements about political belonging, to engage in racial or gender passing, and to reinvent themselves in new cities.

A history inscribed in bangs, curls, and chops, Whiskerology illuminates a period in American history when hair indexed belonging in some ways that may seem strange—but in other ways all too familiar—today.

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Char Miller, "Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning" (Oregon State UP, 2024)

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Fire is a means of control and has been deployed or constrained to levy power over individuals, societies, and ecologies. In Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning (Oregon State UP, 2024), Pomona College professor Char Miller has edited a collection of documents and essays tracing the history of fire and human interactions in the West and across North America. Indigenous people in California and elsewhere used fire for their own benefit, allowing naturally occurring wildfires to replenish landscapes, and controlling "light burns" to better suit their own hunting, gathering, and agricultural means. It was only with the arrival of first the Spanish and then other European and American settlers that fire took on a decidedly "uncivilized" connotation. As Americans instituted fire regimes across the continent, wildfires grew larger and forests unhealthier. It's only been in recent years that Native people, using traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and settler forest science have begun to combine as a means of restoring fires as a central component of forest health.

Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College.

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Ross A. Kennedy, "The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe (Taylor & Francis, 2025), spans 1914–1939 to provide a concise interpretation of the role the United States played in the origins of the Second World War. It synthesizes recent scholarship about interwar international politics while also presenting an original interpretation of the sources of American policy.

The book shows how the drive for international reform, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, reflected both America’s unusual power and its fears about maintaining its domestic freedoms in a world dominated by arms races and the threat of war. The American desire to reform or to escape from the existing international system reshaped Europe’s balance of power from 1914 to 1929, leaving it precarious and unlikely to produce lasting stability. America’s power continued to loom globally in the 1930s, as first its isolationism and, after 1938, its open hostility toward Germany and Japan influenced the policies of the West and of Hitler. The coda at the end of the volume analyzes how the United States affected the strategic choices made by Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and Japan from 1939 to 1941 that globalized the conflict.

This book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students in history and political science, especially courses focused on World War II and the history of U.S. foreign relations.

Guest: Ross A. Kennedy (he/him), is a Professor of History and Chair at Illinois State University. He is the author of The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (2009) as well as numerous other publications on the First World War.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

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Stacy Horn, "Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York" (Algonquin Books, 2019)

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York's Blackwell's Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals, quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, "a lounging, listless madhouse." Digging through city records, newspaper articles, and archival reports, Stacy Horn tells a gripping narrative through the voices of the island's inhabitants. We also hear from the era's officials, reformers, and journalists, including the celebrated undercover reporter Nellie Bly. And we follow the extraordinary Reverend William Glenney French as he ministers to Blackwell's residents, battles the bureaucratic mazes of the Department of Correction and a corrupt City Hall, testifies at salacious trials, and in his diary wonders about man's inhumanity to his fellow man. Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad and Criminal in 19th Century New York (Algonquin Books, 2019) shows how far we've come in caring for the least fortunate among us--and reminds us how much work still remains.

Stacy Horn shows that in setting up institutions for the humane treatment of social outcasts, New York City was so quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers confined to the Insane Asylum, Workhouse, Almshouse, Penitentiary and Hospital, that what emerged was a veritable gulag on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island. Based on a careful reading of both remarkably candid official documents detailing widespread suffering and accounts by the intrepid undercover reporter Nellie Bly and the socially prominent Josephine Shaw Lowell, we come to appreciate the long shadow of history cast over the city’s remaining island of the damned—Rikers.

James Wunsch is Emeritus Professor of Historical and Educational Studies at SUNY Empire State.

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Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarchical side in response to the Civil Rights movement.

Bryan Jones draws from his own family's centuries-old history in the region to explore the rise and fall of the "two minds" of the South. Through a comparison of the experiences of a slaveholding line in his family with three non-slaveholding lines, Jones provides a rich history of the politics of both class and race in the region from the Founding era to the present. The slaveholding side of his family settled in Black Belt Alabama, while ancestral members of the other side of his family were poorer uplanders. In the 1890s, the latter supported the burgeoning populist movement, which for a short window of time tried to unite poor Blacks and poor whites against the patrician planter class and industrialists. After a series of close elections, the planter class was able to stanch the populist tide. They did this in large part by sowing racial division among populism's supporters. Indeed, one of Jones' ancestors helped draft the 1901 Alabama constitution that made Jim Crow the law of the state.

Throughout, Jones shows how deep the political differences were between the two regions, with oligarchy characterizing the slaveholding region and a more democratic ethos shaping the non-slaveholding areas. Jones serves as the final observer, a white boy observing not only the demise of the Jim Crow South, but--in the wake of the Civil Rights movement--the demise of the mountain democratic South as well. Today, the vast majority of Southern whites regardless of class support an oligarchical Republican Party.

Bryan Jones is J.J."Jake" Pickle Regents' Chair in Congressional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Louis P. Masur, "A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Between May 21 and June 16, 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison went on a trip together through Upstate New York and parts of New England on horseback. This "northern journey" came at a moment of tension for the new nation, one in whose founding these Virginians and political allies had played key roles. The Constitution was ratified and President Washington was in his first term of office. Whether the country could overcome regional and political differences and remain unified, however, was still very much in question. Hence why some observers at the time wondered whether this excursion into Federalist New England by the two most prominent southern Democratic-Republicans, both future presidents, had an ulterior motive.

Madison, maintained that the journey was for "health, recreation, and curiosity." He and Jefferson needed a break from their public responsibilities, so off they set. Along the way, they took notes on the ravages of the Hessian Fly, an insect that had been devastating wheat crops. While in Vermont, they focused on the sugar maple tree, which many hoped might offer a domestic alternative to slave-grown sugar cane imports. An encounter with a free Black farmer at Fort George resulted in a journal entry that illuminates their attitudes toward slavery and race. A meeting with members of the Unkechaug tribe on Long Island led to a vocabulary project that preoccupied Jefferson for decades, and which remains relevant today.

The northern journey was also about friendship. Madison later recalled that the trip made Jefferson and him "immediate companions," solidifying a bond with almost no peer in the annals of American history, one that thrived for fifty years. Jefferson declared at the end of his life, that his friendship with Madison had been "a source of constant happiness" to him. A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship (Oxford University Press, 2025) reveals the moment when it took hold.

Louis P. Masur is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, (Harvard Education PR, 2024) Laura C. Chávez-Moreno uncovers the process through which schools implicitly and explicitly shape their students’ concept of race and the often unintentional consequences of this on educational equity. Dr. Chávez-Moreno sheds light on how the complex interactions among educational practices, policies, pedagogy, language, and societal ideas interplay to form, reinforce, and blur the boundaries of racialized groups, a dynamic which creates contradictions in classrooms and communities committed to antiracism. Dr. Chávez-Moreno urges readers to rethink race, to reconceptualize Latinx as a racialized group, and to pay attention to how schools construct Latinidad (a concept about Latinx experience and identity) in relation to Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Whiteness.

The work explores, as an example, how Spanish-English bilingual education programs engage in race-making work. It also illuminates how schools can offer ambitious teachings to raise their students’ critical consciousness about race and racialization. Ultimately, Dr. Chávez-Moreno’s groundbreaking work makes clear that understanding how our schools teach about racialized groups is crucial to understanding how our society thinks about race and offers solutions to racial inequities. The book invites educators and scholars to embrace ambitious teaching about the ambivalence of race so that teachers and students are prepared to interrogate racist ideas and act toward just outcomes.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom

Transforming Hispanic Serving Institutions for Equity and Justice

We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States

Presumed Incompetent

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

Our guest is: Dr. Laura C. Chávez-Moreno, who is assistant professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Her research has been recognized with multiple awards, including from the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. She is the author of How Schools Make Race, winner of a 2025 AAHHE Book of the Year Award, and a 2025 Nautilus Silver Book Award.

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Philip Kadish, "The Great White Hoax: Frauds, Forgeries, and 200 Years of Selling Racism in America"

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Fake news, outright political lies, a shamelessly partisan press, and the collapse of truth, civility, and shared facts, Dr. Philip Kadish argues, are nothing new. The Great White Hoax: Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America (The New Press, 2025), a masterpiece of historical and literary sleuthing, reveals that the era of Fox News and Donald Trump is simply a return to form. We have been here before.

In a book that brilliantly puts our current era into historical context, The Great White Hoax uncovers a centuries-long tradition of white supremacist hoaxes, perpetrated on the American public by a succession of political hucksters and opportunists, all of them willfully using racial frauds as tools for political and social advantage. In the antebellum era, slavery’s defenders used bogus science to “prove” the inferiority of African American people; during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s enemies circulated a sham pamphlet accusing him of promoting a dilution of the white race through “miscegenation” (a racist term invented by the pamphlet’s authors). From these murky beginnings, Dr. Philip Kadish draws a direct thread to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Henry Ford’s adaptation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Madison Grant’s embrace of eugenics (which directly influenced Adolf Hitler), Alabama Governor George Wallace’s race-baiting, and Roger Ailes’s creation of Fox News.

The Great White Hoax reveals white supremacy as today’s real “fake news”—and exposes the cast of villains, past and present, who have kept American racism alive.

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Kevin J. Hayes, "Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

An exploration of the mind of one of America's most beloved Founding Fathers and most brilliant minds, through the books he read and his social circles in the United States and Europe. Arguably the most intellectual, creative, cosmopolitan, and curious of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin is the only top-tier Founder not to have served as president. Despite not becoming the Chief Executive, Franklin played an active role in American politics and served the aspiring and young United States in the key European capitals. His prodigious reading and appetite for learning are epic. As he did in works about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, Kevin J. Hayes interprets the life and mind of Franklin through what he read.

Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin (Oxford University Press, 2025) tells the story of the development of Franklin's intellect, starting with the earliest books he read as a child before examining his formal schooling and his independent study after his father pulled him from school. As an apprentice in his brother's printing house, Franklin's intellectual life developed through his contact with the Couranteers, the group of his brother's friends who contributed to his newspaper, and through his attention to his brother's excellent office library. After Franklin ran away to Philadelphia, he developed a new group of friends, all of whom loved reading. In many ways, the story of Franklin's intellectual odyssey is the story of the friends he made along the way. His time in London in his late teens introduced him to several important intellectuals who encouraged him to develop his mind.

After returning to Philadelphia from London, he and some friends formed the Junto, a club for mutual improvement that made reading and writing important activities. With other members of the Junto, he formed the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first subscription library in colonial America. His role as a printer put him in contact with the best eighteenth-century American writing and kept a steady flow of imported books coming from Britain. He became a scientist, assembling a great scientific library, which helped his electrical research. An educational reformer, Franklin founded the Philadelphia Academy, which would become the University of Pennsylvania. As agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin lived in London for many years, where he befriended some of Britain's greatest minds. Different concentrations of books in his library reveal Franklin's interests in travel and exploration, warfare, and slavery. His time in Paris toward the end of his life gave Franklin another great intellectual experience, but he ultimately returned home to live the last five years of his life in Philadelphia, where he imparted his knowledge and experience to a new generation of Americans. In this gripping work, Benjamin Franklin is given a biography as rich and complex as his own intellectual life by master literary historian Kevin J. Hayes.

Kevin J. Hayes is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Michael Broyles, "Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades That Changed a Country and Its Sounds" (Norton, 2024)

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Michael Broyles examines a wide variety of musical, technological, and social currents that helped to shape American music in Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades that Changed a Country and Its Sounds (Norton, 2024), but he accomplishes this by focusing on just thirty years. Broyles discusses three pivotal decades in US musical history: the 1840s, the 1920s, and the 1950s. He argues that these decades fundamentally remade the American cultural landscape in enduring ways. Although Revolutions in American Music describes the ruptures caused by new musical and technological innovations such as the development of jazz or rock 'n roll, Broyles also revisits deep cultural and social fissures that affected America and American music in all three time periods. Throughout the book, Broyles introduces important figures who have been overlooked and tells stories that illuminate the messy, complex, sometimes dark, but always fascinating history of music in the United States.

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Kevin Nguyen, "My Documents" (One World, 2025)

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Kevin Nguyen, My Documents (One World, 2025)

Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novel New Waves, published in 2020. He is the features editor at The Verge, where he publishes award-winning stories about labor, business, and policing, and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn.

Recommended Books:

Annelise Chen, Clam Down

Tash Aw, The South

Ian Penman, Eric Satie Three Piece Suite

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings" (Harper, 2025)

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings (Harper, 2025), Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.

Find author Honorée Fannone Jeffers at her website, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack.

Host Sullivan Summer can be found at her website, Instagram, and Substack.

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Prema Kurien, "Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization Among New Americans" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization Among New Americans (Oxford UP, 2025) looks at Indian Americans, currently the second-largest group of immigrants in the United States, and a group that has seen significant representation in the three most recent presidential administrations. Prema Kurien asks how Indian Americans have become a rising political force given that they have not followed the traditional, recommended model of political influence. She examines the dialectical process through which immigrants conform to the structures and cultures of the society to which they have immigrated, but also work to transform their adopted homelands to accommodate their unique needs.

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Howard A. Husock, "The Projects: A New History of Public Housing" (NYU Press, 2025)

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How housing policy failed the people it was designed to help -- and how to fix it

As the US struggles to provide affordable housing, millions of Americans live in deteriorating public housing projects, enduring the mistakes of past housing policy. In The Projects: A New History of Public Housing (NYU Press, 2025), Howard A. Husock explains how we got here, detailing the tragic rise and fall of public housing and the pitfalls of other subsidy programs. He takes us inside a progressive movement led by a group of New York City philanthropists, politicians, and business magnates who first championed public housing as a solution to urban blight. From First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the controversial city planner Robert Moses, many well-known historical figures made a convincing case for affordable housing in America.

Despite the movement's lofty ideals, the creation of the Projects led to the destruction of low-income communities across the country. From the Hill District in Pittsburgh to Black Bottom in Detroit, predominantly Black neighborhoods were judged only by the quality of their housing. Husock looks beyond these neighborhoods' physical conditions to their uncounted riches, from local artists like August Wilson to vital community institutions. As he shares residents' stories, he honors what they crafted through their own plans, rather than those of city planners.

Husock traces the history of public housing to contemporary debates on the government's role in the housing market. Through interviews with residents, he reveals how public housing transformed the lives of Americans and the physical faces of cities and towns. He ultimately critiques "repair and reform" efforts, making policy recommendations that address the core failings of public housing for the people it was once designed to help. Mapping out a better path for policy-makers, he lays a new foundation for upward mobility in America.

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Leah Lax, "Not From Here: the Song of America" (Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie, 2024)

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When Leah Lax was asked to write an opera to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to accounts of upheaval, migration, and arrival told her in confidence by people from around the globe. She felt she had discovered America, found its great beating heart.

In interludes between the astounding and powerful stories in Not From Here: the Song of America (Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie, 2024), Leah uncovers the lost history of her Jewish family and finds a larger context for her own story. "In a way," she writes, "we Americans are all immigrants."

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Ana Hebra Flaster, "Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town" (She Writes Press, 2025)

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Ana Hebra Flaster was six years old when her working-class family was kicked out of their Havana barrio for opposing communism. Once devoted revolutionaries themselves but disillusioned by the Castro government’s repressive tactics, they fled to the US. The permanent losses they suffered—of home, country, and loved ones, all within forty-eight hours—haunted her multigenerational family as they reclaimed their lives and freedom in 1967 New Hampshire. There, they fed each other stories of their scrappy barrio—some of which Hebra Flaster has shared on All Things Considered—to resurrect their lost world and fortify themselves for a daunting task: building a new life in a foreign land.
Weaving pivotal events in Cuba–US history with her viejos’—elders’—stories of surviving political upheaval, impossible choices, and “refugeedom,” Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town (She Writes Press, 2025) celebrates the indomitable spirit and wisdom of the women warriors who led the family out of Cuba, shaped its rebirth as Cuban Americans, and helped Ana grow up hopeful, future-facing—American. But what happens when deeply buried childhood memories resurface, demanding an adult’s reckoning?
Here’s how the fiercest love, the most stubborn will, and the power of family put nine new Americans back on their feet.

Ana Hebra Flaster has written about Cuba and the Cuban American experience for national print and online media including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Boston Globe. Her commentaries and storytelling have aired on NPR and PBS’s Stories from the Stage. Ana writes about the ongoing struggle for freedom and human rights in Cuba in her popular Substack, CubaCurious.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Maraam A. Dwidar, "Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy" (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A vital examination of how social and economic justice organizations overcome resource disadvantages and build political power. Why do some coalitions triumph while others fall short? In Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy, Maraam A. Dwidar documents the vital role of social and economic justice organizations in American politics and explores the process by which they strategically build partnerships to advance more effective and equitable advocacy. Using original data tracking the collaboration patterns of more than twenty thousand nationally active advocacy organizations, Dwidar evaluates the micro- and macro-level conditions surrounding these groups' successful efforts to collectively shape public policy. Power to the Partners reveals that while organizational advocates for social and economic justice are at a disadvantage in the American lobbying landscape--financially, tactically, and politically--coalition tactics can help ameliorate these disparities. By building and sustaining coalitions with structures and memberships that facilitate clarity, learning, and diverse perspectives, these advocates can successfully--and uniquely--make their mark on American public policy. Dwidar's work offers critical insights for scholars and practitioners alike--from groundbreaking academic findings to evidence-based lessons for political organizers.

Maraam A. Dwidar an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University.

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David Zweig, "An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions" (MIT Press, 2025)

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions (MIT Press, 2025) is a devastating account of the decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy failures in a century—the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. In fascinating and meticulously reported detail, David Zweig shows how some of the most trusted members of society—from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to eminent health officials—repeatedly made fundamental errors in their assessment and presentation of evidence. As a result, for the first time in modern American history, millions of healthy children did not set foot in a classroom for more than a year.
Since the spring of 2020, many students in Europe had been learning in person. Even many peers at home—in private schools, and public schools in mostly “red” states and districts—were in class full time from fall 2020 onward. Whatever inequities that existed among American children before the pandemic, the selective school closures exacerbated them, disproportionately affecting the underprivileged. Deep mental, physical, and academic harms—among them, depression, anxiety, abuse, obesity, plummeting test scores, and rising drop-out rates—were endured for no discernible benefit. As Europe had shown very early, after they had sent kids back to class, there was never any evidence that long-term school closures, nor a host of interventions imposed on students when they were in classrooms, would reduce overall cases or deaths in any meaningful way.
The story of American schools during the pandemic serves as a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis and uncertainty. Ultimately, this book is not about COVID; it’s about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.

David Zweig is the author of the novel Swimming Inside the Sun and the nonfiction book Invisibles. He has testified twice before Congress as an expert witness on American schools during the pandemic, and his investigative reporting on the pandemic has been cited in numerous congressional letters and a brief to the Supreme Court. Zweig’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York, Wired, The Free Press, The Boston Globe, and, most often, his newsletter, Silent Lunch. He lives with his family in New York State.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Alexandria Russell, "Black Women Legacies: Public History Sites Seen and Unseen" (University of Illinois Press, 2024)

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

From Black clubwomen to members of preservation organizations, African American women have made commemoration a central part of Black life and culture. Alexandria Russell illuminates the process of memorialization while placing African American women at the center of memorials they brought into being and others constructed in their honor. Their often undocumented and unheralded work reveals the importance of the memorializers and public memory crafters in establishing a culture of recognition. Forced to strategize with limited resources, the women operated with a resourcefulness and savvy that had to meet challenges raised by racism, gender and class discrimination, and specific regional difficulties. Yet their efforts from the 1890s to the 2020s shaped and honed practices that became indispensable to the everyday life and culture of Black Americans.

Intersectional and original, Black Women Legacies: Public History Sites Seen and Unseen (Illinois University Press, 2024) explores the memorialization of African American women and its distinctive impact on physical and cultural landscapes throughout the United States.

Dr. Alexandria Russell is the Executive Director of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail and a WEB Du Bois Research Institute Non-Residential Fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Dr. Russell continue their conversation.

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Myra Mendible, "American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Even with the availability of new forms of storytelling, the memoir remains as one of the favored ways for combat veterans to tell their stories about war for a public eager to know. In American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), Dr. Myra Mendible examines how combat veterans use the memoir to tell their stories of war and to engage in political conversations about war itself. Using memoirs by US veterans of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Dr. Mendible shows how these "true fictions" can shape knowledge about war, how veteran-writers use the "politics of credibility," the aesthetics of war and silence, and the often-ignored political function of the war memoir.

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Jeffrey P. Rogg, "The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Intelligence is all around us. We read about it in the news, wonder who is spying on us through our phones or computers, and want to know what is happening in the shadows. The US Intelligence Community or IC, as insiders call it, is more powerful than ever, but also more vulnerable than it has been in decades. It is facing the threat of rival intelligence services from countries like Russia and China while fighting to keep up with new technology and the private sector. Still, the IC's greatest struggle is always with the American people, who expect it to keep them safe but not at the cost of their liberty and principles. This foundational problem is at the center of The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2025). Based on original research and a new interpretation of US history, this masterful book offers a complete history of American intelligence from the Revolutionary War to the present day. Jeffrey Rogg explores the origins and evolution of intelligence in America, including its overlooked role in some of the key events that shaped the nation and the historical underpinnings of intelligence controversies that have shaken the country to its constitutional core. With the American public in mind, he introduces the concept of US civil-intelligence relations to explain the interaction between intelligence and the society it serves.While answering questions from the past, The Spy and the State poses new questions for the future that the United States must confront as intelligence gains ever greater importance in the twenty-first century.

Jeffrey P. Rogg is Senior Research Fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida. He previously held academic positions at the Joint Special Operations University at US Special Operations Command, the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel, and the National Security Affairs Department at the US Naval War College.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Jonathan Tarleton, "Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons" (Beacon Press, 2025)

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons (Beacon Press, 2025), urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces readers to 2 social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept their homes affordable for decades or to cash out at great personal profit, thereby denying future generations the same opportunity to build thriving communities rooted in mutual care.

With a deft hand for mapping personal histories atop the greater housing crisis, Tarleton explores housing as a public good, movements for tenant rights and Indigenous sovereignty, and questions of race and class to lay bare competing visions of what ownership means, what homes are for, and what neighbors owe each other.

Jonathan Tarleton is an urban planner, designer, and writer based in Washington, DC.

This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo, a graduate student in urban studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked professionally as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor to the City of Chicago.

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Sladja Blažan, "Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America" (University of Virginia Press, 2025)

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America (University of Virginia Press, 2025), Dr. Sladja Blažan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a medium for framing political ideologies, philosophical thought, racial anxieties, and social concerns. Ghosts and Their Hosts analyzes American ghost stories, considering their role as a settler colonial tool that emerged to help justify land appropriation and human labor exploitation. Dr. Blažan breaks with the long tradition of reading ghosts as harbingers of justice, arguing that early American ghost stories worked instead to suppress the presence of non-Europeans through fantasies of European transcultural incorporation. Images of sentient forests and nature possessed by spirits helped develop fixed racial, gendered, and sexualized categories, while authors used ghosts to affirm existing hierarchies and establish new ones. Focusing on the cultural exchanges between Germany, England, France, and the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century, Dr. Blažan deploys a groundbreaking ecocritical and comparative approach to shed light on this haunting subject.

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Gwynne Kuhner Brown, "William L. Dawson" (University of Illinois Press, 2024)

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

William L. Dawson (University of Illinois Press, 2024) by Gwynne Kuhner Brown is a biography of the Black American composer, conductor and pedagogue. She gives equal weight to the different aspects of Dawson’s career from his early training at Tuskegee Institute (now University) to his twenty-five years as director of choirs and composer at the same school and ending with his thirty years as a free-lance conductor. Dawson was part of the same generation of Black classical musicians that produced Florence Price and William Grant Still. His most famous composition is probably the Negro Folk Symphony, but he wrote other music including choral arrangements of spirituals that are a staple of college choral programs. Recently, in part because of work by people like Gwynne Kuhner Brown, Dawson’s other compositions are beginning to be heard in concert halls once again.

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Questions: A Discussion with Leslie Butler and Holly Case

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

BOOKS UNDER DISCUSSION:

Leslie Butler, Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Holly Case, The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond by Holly Case (Princeton University Press, 2018)

Civilizations have faced challenges and debated how to manage them probably as long as civilization has existed. In our era we talk about these challenges as issues, or crises when perceived as more urgent. In the nineteenth century, what we now call issues or problems tended to be spoken of as questions. In this sprawling conversation, ranging from nineteenth-century “trolls” to the scalability of democracy in a various media ecosystems, Leslie Butler and Holly Case talk not only about the 19th-century questions that have captivated them as scholars, but also how, where, by whom, and to what ends these questions were discussed. When did posing questions serve to bring rationality and even-handedness to debates and when was it a rhetorical strategy intended to steer towards a particular end? Butler’s analysis of the “Woman Question” in America’s pursuit of “consistent democracy” distinguished between public opinion and published opinion while Case implicates the internationalization of the public sphere in the emergence of an “Age of Questions.” Have a listen as these erudite scholars contemplate the ways historians might navigate between the Scylla of cynicism and Charybdis of overly earnest naiveté in analyzing the past as well as in our current moment.

Leslie Butler is a Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. She is an American intellectual and cultural historian, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century.

Holly Case is a historian of modern Europe at Brown University in Providence, RI. Her work focuses on the relationship between foreign policy, social policy, science, and literature in the European state system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Brando Simeo Starkey, "Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System" (Doubleday, 2025)

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System (Doubleday, 2025) takes readers from the Civil War era to the present and describes how the Supreme Court, even more than the presidency or Congress, aligned with the enemies of Black progress to undermine the promise of the Constitution’s Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
The Reconstruction Amendments, which sought to abolish slavery, establish equal protection under the law, and protect voting rights, converted the Constitution into a potent anti-caste document. But in the years since, the Supreme Court has refused to allow the amendments to fulfill that promise. Time and again, when petitioned to make the nation’s founding conceit, that all men are created equal, real for Black Americans, the nine black robes have chosen white supremacy over racial fairness.

Their Accomplices Wore Robes brings to life dozens of cases and their rich casts of characters to explain how America arrived at this point and how society might arrive somewhere better, even as today’s federal courts lurch rightward.

Brando Simeo Starkey is a writer and scholar. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a member of the New York Bar, he taught law at Villanova Law School and wrote for several years for ESPN’s The Undefeated (now Andscape). Born and raised in Cincinnati, he lives in Southern California with his wife and two sons. You can find him online at The Braveverse, and on his YouTube channel of the same name.

You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Brando continue their conversation.

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Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, Dr. Brittany Friedman delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques—including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists—to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Dr. Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

This episode considers: what the official records omit, how the questions we ask guide the answers we find, pattern mapping, racial categorization systems, surveillance mechanisms, the importance of outsider archives, protecting your sources, and why we need to awaken.

Our guest is: Dr. Brittany Friedman, who is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

The Social Constructions of Race

Hands Up, Don't Shoot

The Names of All the Flowers

Freemans Challenge

Stitching Freedom

The Emerson Prison Initiative

The Journal of Higher Education in Prison

Education Behind The Wall

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help to support the show by posting about, downloading, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Dionne Koller, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport" (U California Press, 2025)

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Tens of millions of children in the United States participate in youth sport, a pastime widely believed to be part of a good childhood. Yet most children who enter youth sport are driven to quit by the time they enter adolescence, and many more are sidelined by its high financial burdens. Until now, there has been little legal scholarly attention paid to youth sport or its reform. In More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport (University of California Press, 2025) Dr. Dionne Koller sets the stage for a different approach by illuminating the law and policy assumptions supporting a model that puts children's bodies to work in an activity that generates significant surplus value. In doing so, she identifies the wide array of beneficiaries who have a stake in a system that is much more than just play—and the political choices that protect these parties' interests at children's expense.

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Bonnie Yochelson, "Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen" (Fordham UP, 2025)

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen (Fordham University Press, 2025) by Dr. Bonnie Yochelson, explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and much more.
Alice Austen (1866–1952) lived at Clear Comfort, her grandparent’s Victorian cottage on Staten Island, which is now a National Historic Landmark. As a teenager, she devoted herself to photography, recording what she called “the larky life” of tennis matches, yacht races, and lavish parties.
When she was 25 and expected to marry, Austen used her camera to satirize gender norms by posing with her friends in their undergarments and in men’s clothes, “smoking” cigarettes, and feigning drunkenness. As she later remarked, she was “too good to get married.” Austen embraced the rebellious spirit of the “New Woman,” a moniker given to those who defied expectations by pursuing athletics, higher education, or careers. She had romantic affairs with women, and at 31, she met Gertrude Tate, who became her life partner. Briefly, Austen considered becoming a professional photographer. She illustrated Bicycling for Ladies, a guide written by her friend Violet Ward, and she explored the working-class neighborhoods of Manhattan to produce a portfolio, “Street Types of New York.” Rejecting the taint of commerce, however, she remained within the confines of elite society with Tate by her side.
Although interest in Austen has accelerated since 2017, when the Alice Austen House was designated a national site of LGBTQ history, the only prior book on Austen was published in 1976. Copiously illustrated, Too Good to Get Married fills the need for a fresh and deeply researched look at this skillful and witty photographer. Through analysis of Austen’s photographs, Yochelson illuminates the history of American photography and the history of sexuality.

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Robert Chernomas, Gregory Chernomas, and Ian Hudson, "The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines" (Routledge, 2025)

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Biological justification for all forms of inequality has a long history, with the claim that particular groups suffer disproportionately from inherited flaws of ability and character used to explain a remarkably wide variety of inequalities. Providing an important critique of that biodeterminist history and how the Human Genome Project has inspired some contemporary scientists and economists to follow a similar path of ascribing socioeconomic outcomes to genetic inheritance, The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines (Routledge, 2025) details new research that suggests that the social and economic environment can affect how genes express themselves in specific human traits and social outcomes. Using the three cases of the American white working class, Black Americans and American women, the authors demonstrate that relying on nature as an explanation is seriously flawed - showing that the socioeconomic inheritance created by the conditions in which these populations worked and lived offer a far better explanation than nature for the stratified results. This book is the story of an American history rife with unnecessary misery and the waste of human potential, along with the liberating effect of understanding the degree to which its citizens are the product of social inheritance and the potential power of a nurturing economy and society that equality promises.

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Jessica Vasquez-Tokos, "Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation" (NYU Press, 2025)

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation

By Jessica Vasquez-Tokos, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon

W.E.B. Du Bois famously pondered a question he felt society was asking of him as a Black man in America: “How does it feel to be a problem?” Jessica Vasquez-Tokos uses this question to examine how communities of color are constructed as “problems,” and the numerous ramifications this has for their life trajectories. Uncovering how various members of racial groups understand and react to what their racial status means for inclusion in, or exclusion from, the nation, Burdens of Belonging examines the historical underpinnings of the racial-colonial hierarchy, the influence this hierarchy has on lived experience, and how racialized life experience influences the feelings, perspectives and goals of people of color.
Burdens of Belonging is based on interviews with people in Oregon from various racial groups, and brings multiple racial groups’ opinions together to weigh in on the ways in which race contours national belonging and affects sense of self, everyday life and wellness, and aspirations for the future. This book highlights the value of inquiring how people from various racial backgrounds perceive their fit in the nation and reveals how race matters to belonging in multifaceted ways.
Filling a gap in research on the everyday effects of accumulated racial disadvantage, Burdens of Belonging brings to the fore an analysis of how racial inequality, settler colonialism, and race relations penetrate multiple layers of social life and become etched into bodies and futures.

Michael L. Rosino, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Molloy University

Recent Books:

Democracy is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside Grassroots Political Organizing (UNC Press) 30% off with code: 01UNCP30

Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and the Media (Routledge)

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Jon Shelton, "The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Cornell UP, 2023) questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the only, way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As Jon Shelton shows, linking education to economic well-being was not politically inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, public education was championed as a way to help citizens learn how to participate in a democracy. By the 1930s, public education, along with union rights and social security, formed an important component of a broad-based fight for social democracy.

Shelton demonstrates that beginning in the 1960s, the political power of the education myth choked off powerful social democratic alternatives like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget. The nation's political center was bereft of any realistic ideas to guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. Embraced first by Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Republicans like George W. Bush also pushed the education myth. The result, over the past four decades, has been the emergence of a deeply inequitable economy and a drastically divided political system.

Jon Shelton is professor and chair of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. In addition to The Education Myth he is the author of Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order, which was the winner of the International Standing Conference of the History of Education’s First Book Award in 2018. Shelton has also published work in the Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other publications. He served as the Vice-Chair of the city of Green Bay’s first ever Equal Rights Commission and sits on the Board of Directors for the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Wisconsin Labor History Society. He also serves as President for Higher Education of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin.

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Andy Oler, "Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature" (LSU Press, 2019)

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In light of recent conversations about the crisis of masculinity, let's revisit Dr. Andy Oler's book Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature. I sat down with Dr. Oler to discuss the persistent anxiety about masculinity, the role of regional literature in American modernism, and the need for an expansive definition of the Midwest. We also talked about literary representation of futuristic equipment such as the cabbage transplanter. And for our scholar friends, Dr. Oler offers tips on how to secure texts that are not available in libraries or archives.

Andy Oler is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach.

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Michael A. Meyer, "Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler" (CCAR Press, 2025)

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Reform Judaism looks different today than it did a century ago. There are a lot of factors that lead to that change, but among these is Rabbi Alexander Schindler (1925-2000). Doing most of his work in the middle of the 20th century, Schindler was either part of or directly responsible for the changes in Reform (and even American) Judaism that we see today.

In his biography of Rabbi Schindler, Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler (CCAR Press), Dr. Michael Meyer paints a picture of an extraordinarily influential leader in the history of Reform Judaism. From 1973 to 1996, he served as president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (today's Union for Reform Judaism), where his charisma and vision raised the Reform Movement to unprecedented influence. Never afraid to be controversial, he argued for recognizing patrilineal descent, institutionalized outreach to interfaith families and non-Jews, and championed LGBTQ rights and racial equality. He was a tireless advocate for Israel while maintaining diaspora Jews' right to speak out independently on the Jewish state.

In this conversation, historian Michael A. Meyer brings Rabbi Schindler to life. His book, which he discusses with us, is based on extensive archival research and interviews and paints a definitive portrait of Schindler's life.

Michael Meyer is the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History Emeritus at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where he taught since 1967. A leading scholar of modern Jewish history, Meyer has authored several award-winning books, including The Origins of the Modern Jew, Response to Modernity, and recent biographies of Rabbis Leo Baeck and Alexander Schindler. He served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Leo Baeck Institute, and held visiting positions at Hebrew University, Ben Gurion University, and others. Honored internationally, he received the Moses Mendelssohn Award and the Order of Merit from the German Federal Republic.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is most recently the author of Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS)

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Victoria Bynum, "Deep Roots, Broken Branches: A History and Memoir" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Historian Victoria Bynum turns now to her own history in this multigenerational American saga spanning from 1840 to 1979. Through meticulous historical research, personal letters, diaries, and the unpublished memoir of Mary Daniel Huckenpoehler, the author’s maternal grandmother, Bynum examines five generations within the broader context of the nation’s history, navigating pivotal events such as First Wave immigration, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, two world wars, the Cold War, and beyond.

Child of a mother from Waconia, Minnesota, and father from Jones County, Mississippi, Bynum blends a historian’s voice with personal experiences, intertwining her grandmother’s unpublished memoir and letters with her own role as a diarist and historian. She explores class, race, ethnicity, and gender dynamics. From the rise of Welsh immigrant ancestors in the Upper Midwest and the Gilded Age privileges of her grandmother’s upbringing to Bynum’s own tumultuous childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s as she is shuttled between Georgia, Mississippi, Minnesota, Florida, and California, Bynum grapples with numerous dangers of being raised in a volatile environment marked by alcohol-fueled violence, sexual degradation, and neglect. Against the backdrop of racial segregation, civil rights movements, and the Cold War, Deep Roots, Broken Branches: A History and Memoir (UP of Mississippi, 2025) traces the author’s coming-of-age journey, and the profound influence of her grandmother.

Revealed through the lens and tensions of an Air Force family, Deep Roots, Broken Branches explores Bynum’s intellectual curiosity, voracious reading habits, and turbulent path through early motherhood, divorce, and higher education in California. Throughout, her grandmother remains a stabilizing force, offering inspiration and guidance. This book paints a vivid portrait of a southern identity’s growth amid personal challenges and broader societal shifts.

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Jennifer Lynn Gross, "Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South" (LSU Press, 2025)

Sat, 31 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Historians have thoroughly documented the vast devastation of the Civil War. In the attention they have paid to aspects of that destruction, however, one of the most obvious ramifications appears routinely overlooked—Confederate widowhood. Dr. Jennifer Lynn Gross’s Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South (LSU Press, 2025) helps rectify that historical omission by supplying a sweeping analysis of women whose husbands perished in the war.

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Michael D. Gambone, "The New Praetorians: American Veterans, Society, and Service from Vietnam to the Forever War" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Sat, 31 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Contemporary veterans belong to an exclusive American group. Celebrated by most of the country, they are nevertheless often poorly understood by the same people who applaud their service. Following the introduction of an all-volunteer force after the war in Vietnam, only a tiny fraction of Americans now join the armed services, making the contemporary soldier, and the veteran by extension, increasingly less representative of mainstream society. Veterans have come to comprise their own distinct tribe--modern praetorians, permanently set apart from society by what they have seen and experienced. In an engrossing narrative that considers the military, economic, political, and social developments affecting military service after Vietnam, Michael D. Gambone investigates how successive generations have intentionally shaped their identity as veterans. The New Praetorians: American Veterans, Society, and Service from Vietnam to the Forever War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) also highlights the impact of their homecoming, the range of educational opportunities open to veterans, the health care challenges they face, and the unique experiences of minority and women veterans. This groundbreaking study illustrates an important and often neglected group that is key to our understanding of American social history and civil-military affairs.

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False Dawn: A Conversation with George Selgin on Recovering from the Great Depression

Fri, 30 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Join us on Madison's Notes as we sit down with George Selgin, senior fellow and director emeritus of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia. In this insightful conversation, Selgin unpacks the myths and realities of FDR’s New Deal through the lens of his book, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 (University of Chicago Press, 2025). While the New Deal is often celebrated as a bold and successful response to the Great Depression, Selgin argues that many of its policies actually prolonged economic suffering—with unemployment remaining staggeringly high years later. Drawing on extensive historical and economic analysis, he separates the New Deal’s successes from its failures, examines the distinct roles of fiscal and monetary policy, and reveals the overlooked factor that truly ended the Great Depression (hint: it wasn’t just WWII).

This episode challenges conventional narratives and offers crucial lessons for navigating future economic crises. Tune in for a nuanced discussion on why we must assess policy decisions carefully—learning from the past to build a more resilient future.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Nneka D. Dennie, "Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth Century Black Radical Feminist" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Fri, 30 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 1849, the Mary Ann Shadd Cary had not yet become one of the first Black woman newspaper editors in North America. She was decades away from being admitted to Howard University’s Law School and becoming the first Black woman to so enroll in the United States. She had not yet begun to lobby for women’s right to vote, and she had not yet emigrated to Canada, where she would rise to prominence as a formidable abolitionist and emigrationist. Though many years would pass before she made a name for herself as a gifted writer, editor, lecturer, educator, lawyer, and suffragist, in 1849, Mary Ann Shadd Cary was already certain of one thing: “We should do more, and talk less.”

Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2023) includes letters, newspaper articles, organizational records, and never-before-published handwritten notes and essay drafts that illustrate how Shadd Cary participated in major Africana philosophical debates during the nineteenth century. Racial uplift, women’s rights, emigration, citizenship and economic self-determination for Black people in general and Black women in particular, were all subjects of Shadd Cary’s writings and activism throughout her lifetime, shaping Black radical theory and praxis. She is one of many nineteenth-century Black women theorists whose intellectual contributions are often overlooked. By interrogating Shadd Cary’s Black radical ethic of care, this book reveals the philosophies that have shaped Black women's centuries-long struggle for rights and freedom.

Nneka D. Dennie is Assistant Professor of History, core faculty in Africana Studies, and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington and Lee University. She is also co-founder and president of the Black Women’s Studies Association. Dr. Dennie’s research examines Black feminism and Black intellectual thought with an emphasis on nineteenth-century African American women thinkers. Her work has been published in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International; Feminist Studies; Atlantic Studies: Global Currents; The Routledge Companion to Black Women's Social and Cultural Histories; The Oxford Handbook of W.E.B. Du Bois, and more.

You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Dr. Dennie continue their conversation.

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Robert F. Darden and Stephen M. Newby, "Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thu, 29 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Gospel singer and seven-time Grammy winner Andraé Crouch (1942-2015) hardly needs introduction. His compositions--"The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power," "Through It All," "My Tribute (To God be the Glory)," "Jesus is the Answer," "Soon and Very Soon," and others--remain staples in modern hymnals, and he is often spoken of in the same "genius" pantheon as Mahalia Jackson, Thomas Dorsey and the Rev. James Cleveland. As the definitive biography of Crouch published to date, Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch (Oxford University Press, 2025) celebrates the many ways that his legacy indelibly changed the course of gospel and popular music.

10 Songs chosen by the authors:

The Blood (Will Never Lose Its Power)
I’ve Got Confidence
My Tribute (to God be the Glory)
Satisfied
Bless His Holy Name
Take Me Back
Soon and Very Soon
Bless His Holy Name
Jesus is the Answer
Just Like He Said He Would

Robert F. Darden is Emeritus Professor of Journalism at Baylor University and the founder of the Black Gospel Music Preservation Project. He is the author of more than two dozen books and former Gospel Music Editor for Billboard magazine.

Stephen M. Newby holds the Lev H. Prichard III Endowed Chair in the Study of Black Worship as Professor of Music and serves as Ambassador for Black Gospel Music Preservation at Baylor University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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William Haldeman, "Meeting the Moment: Inspiring Presidential Leadership That Transformed America" (SUNY Press, 2024)

Wed, 28 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The histories presented in Meeting the Moment: Inspiring Presidential Leadership That Transformed America (SUNY Press, 2024) are of a select group of US presidents, their inspired leadership characteristics, and how they may inspire us today. The traits these presidents possessed were cultivated over a lifetime of lived experience and immortalized through the power of the presidential word-speeches, letters, and addresses-which collectively represent the most transcendent documents in American history. Viewed through the lens of nuance, complication, human emotion, pathos, and drama, William Haldeman sets forth the lives of these presidents in ways to help inform our own lives, from leveraging our experience and instincts to making the right calls when they matter the most. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach, Haldeman appeals to both scholars and general audience readers alike, offering a refreshing view of presidential leadership that not only elevates leadership as a central part of the scholarly field, but also broadly engages American presidency enthusiasts and readers of history, biography, politics, and leadership development.

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Karida L. Brown, "The Battle for the Black Mind" (Legacy Lit, 2025)

Tue, 27 May 2025 13:37:00 -0000

A gripping chronicle of the relentless fight for Black educational freedom--and the bold strategies to protect, nourish, and empower Black minds. The Battle for the Black Mind (Legacy Lit, 2025) is an explosive historical account of the struggle for educational justice in America. Drawing on over a decade of archival research, personal reflection, and keen sociological insight, this book traces a century of segregated schooling, examining how early efforts to control Black minds through education systems has laid the foundation for the systemic inequities we still live with today. NAACP Image Award-winning author Dr. Karida L. Brown, takes readers from the rural South to the bustling cities of the North and connects the dots between the experiences of Black students and educators across the nation. From the founding of early Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), such as Hampton, Atlanta, and Tuskegee University, to the rise of the Black freedom struggle, The Battle for the Black Mind weaves together the stories of pioneering Black leaders and the institutions they built to educate future generations. Far from dwelling solely on oppression, this book offers powerful insight into how Black people have always fought to create environments where Black minds could thrive. Brown concludes with an urgent and empowering call to action, equipping everyday Americans with practical steps--both big and small--to ensure that Black minds can continue to flourish, even as our education system itself comes under attack. Grounded in both historical rigor and astute social commentary, The Battle for the Black Mind speaks directly to today's national fight over the American classroom, making it clear that the battle for Black minds is far from over. This book will resonate deeply if one understands the transformative power of education and is invested in understanding how education has always played a role in shaping the moral conscience of America.

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Ryan J. Vander Wielen et al., "The House that Fox News Built?: Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Partisan News" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 25 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The influence of partisan news is presumed to be powerful, but evidence for its effects on political elites is limited, often based more on anecdotes than science. Using a rigorous quasi-experimental research design, observational data, and open science practices, The House that Fox News Built?: Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Partisan News (Cambridge UP, 2024) carefully demonstrates how the re-emergence and rise of partisan cable news in the US affected the behavior of political elites during the rise and proliferation of Fox News across media markets between 1996 and 2010. Despite widespread concerns over the ills of partisan news, evidence provides a nuanced, albeit cautionary tale. On one hand, findings suggest that the rise of Fox indeed changed elite political behavior in recent decades. At the same time, the limited conditions under which Fox News' influence occurred suggests that concerns about the network's power may be overstated.

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Pollyanna Rhee, "Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 24 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 quickly became a landmark in the history of American environmentalism, helping to inspire the creation of both the Environmental Protection Agency and Earth Day. But what role did the history of Santa Barbara itself play in this? In Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970 (U Chicago Press, 2025), Pollyanna Rhee shows, the city’s past and demographics were essential to the portrayal of the oil spill as momentous. Moreover, well-off and influential Santa Barbarans were positioned to “domesticate” the larger environmental movement by embodying the argument that individual homes and families—not society as a whole—needed protection from environmental abuses. This soon would put environmental rhetoric and power to fundamentally conservative—not radical—ends.

Pollyanna Rhee is assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and affiliate faculty in history, sustainable design, and theory and interpretive criticism. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Constitutional Crisis or a Stalemate?

Fri, 23 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

At the 100 day mark of Donald Trump’s second term as president, the political scientists at Bright Line Watch released their 25th report on the state of American democracy entitled “Threats to democracy and academic freedom after Trump’s second first 100 days.” Based on polling both experts (760 political scientists) and the public (representative sample of 2000 Americans), the Bright Line Watch researchers find that the Trump administration has challenged constitutional and democratic norms on a wide range of issues, including the scope of executive power and the authority of courts to check it, individual freedom of expression, due process and habeas corpus, immigration, and academic freedom. In this episode of POSTSCRIPT: Conversations on Politics and Political Science, two of Bright Line Watch’s co-directors analyze the latest report – and what it means for American democracy. Topics include democratic performance, threats to democracy and academic freedom and self-censorship.

Dr. John Carey (he/him) is the Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. He is the author of 6 books and dozens of articles on democratic institutions, representation, and political beliefs.

Dr. Gretchen Helmke is the Thomas H. Jackson Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Political Science and faculty director of the Democracy Center at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on democracy and the rule of law in Latin America and the United States. Her new co-authored article definition and measuring democratic norms is forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science. She has been named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2025.

Mentioned:

Bright Line Watch’s April 2025 report, Threats to Democracy and Academic Freedom after Trump's Second First 100 Days (based on parallel surveys of 760 political scientists and a representative sample of 2,000 Americans fielded in April).

Bright Line Watch homepage with data and past reports
John Carey on NPR’s All Things Considered, 4/22 discussing the latest report.
Adam Przeworski’s Substack Diary (free to subscribe and read)
Democratic Erosion Project (with dataset that Gretchen mentioned)
Susan’s New Books Network conversation with Dr. Sue Stokes on the importance of integrating comparative politics and American politics.

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Ken Conca, "After the Floods: The Search for Resilience in Ellicott City" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 22 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 for Resilience in Ellicott City (Oxford UP, 2024) is about Ellicott City, a small town in central Maryland that experienced two devastating flash floods just 22 months apart. Despite the town's many advantages—wealth, access to expertise, a mobilized community, and a stout identity steeped in 250 years of history—Ellicott City found itself mired in a deeply divisive argument over what to do in the aftermath. As a resident, Ken Conca bore firsthand witness to the conflict that took root when the flood waters receded.
While this book is about one residential suburb, the dilemmas that it faces over how to adapt to climate change are coming soon to a small town near you. On one level a story about re-engineering a landscape, After the Floods ultimately grapples with uncertainty over local history, justice, democracy, and identity. What can we know about future risks to our communities? What is the meaning of place and history when preservation goals come into conflict with flood protection? What should we protect? Who gets to speak for the community? In Ellicott City's search for answers, we can find important lessons for other small communities that must begin preparing for future climate risks.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies.

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Executive Power and the President Who Would Not Be King: A Conversation with Michael McConnell

Wed, 21 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 to our system of government. From war powers to administrative overreach, the conversation tackles the urgent question: How did we get here, and what can be done?

Michael McConnell is a renowned constitutional scholar, Stanford Law professor, and former federal judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. A leading voice on originalism and separation of powers, his work bridges historical intent and modern legal debates, making him the perfect guide for this critical discussion.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Mike Miley, "David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Wed, 21 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 engages with literary and musical works that have shaped the American imagination. As much as Lynch stands as a singular artistic voice, his work arises from and taps into the cultural zeitgeist in a way that illuminates not only his approach to creativity but also the way works interact with each other in an age of mass media. From children's literature to teen tragedy ballads, Nathanael West and Cormac McCarthy to folk music and mixtapes, David Lynch's American Dreamscape investigates the cultural frequencies Lynch's films tune into and positions Lynch's work as a conduit for American popular culture, a medium or channel through which the subconscious of American life finds its way into full view.

The book expands upon this approach by discussing how artists such as David Foster Wallace and Lana Del Rey graft Lynch's affiliative, cinematic sensibility onto their own projects. Reading their work as intertextual engagements with Lynch's films further illustrates the versatile interactions among creators and audiences to generate more works, readers, and readings.

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Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield, "Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo" (U Washington Press, 2023)

Tue, 20 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 LGBTQ+ individuals, gay rodeo has evolved into its present day form: a campy, raucous, and accepting spectacle of gay masculinity and gender play in all its forms. It's not a perfect space - there are still boundaries, binaries, and traditional barriers which constrain some aspects of gay rodeo as an open form of competition - but as the oral histories and deep archival research in this book show, it is an institution that has proven capable of weathering the storms of pandemics, politics, and internal debates. Slapping Leather tracks the development, growth, and dynamic present of this uniquely Western, and uniquely queer, artform.

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Daniel MacFarlane, "The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

Mon, 19 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 Ontario has profoundly influenced the historical evolution of North America. For centuries it has enabled and enriched the societies that crowded its edges, from fertile agricultural landscapes to energy production systems to sprawling cities. In The Lives of Lake Ontario Daniel Macfarlane details the lake’s relationship with the Indigenous nations, settler cultures, and modern countries that have occupied its shores. He examines the myriad ways Canada and the United States have used and abused this resource: through dams and canals, drinking water and sewage, trash and pollution, fish and foreign species, industry and manufacturing, urbanization and infrastructure, population growth and biodiversity loss. Serving as both bridge and buffer between the two countries, Lake Ontario came to host Canada’s largest megalopolis. Yet its transborder exploitation exacted a tremendous ecological cost, leading people to abandon the lake. Innovative regulations in the later twentieth century, such as the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements, have partially improved Lake Ontario’s health. Despite signs that communities are reengaging with Lake Ontario, it remains the most degraded of the Great Lakes, with new and old problems alike exacerbated by climate change. The Lives of Lake Ontario demonstrates that this lake is both remarkably resilient and uniquely vulnerable.

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Ruth Braunstein, "My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Sun, 18 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 resist the use of their taxes to fund war, antiabortion activists against “taxpayer funded abortions,” and a diverse group of people who promote taxpaying as a moral good.

Though taxpaying is often portrayed as dull and technical, exposure to collective rituals, civic education, propaganda, and protest transforms the practice for many Americans into either a sacred rite of citizenship or a profane threat to what they hold dear. These sacred and profane meanings can apply to the act of taxpaying itself or to the specific uses of tax dollars. Despite intense disagreement about these meanings, politically diverse Americans engaged in both taxpaying and tax resistance valorize the individual taxpayer and “my tax dollars.”
Braunstein explores the profound implications of this meaning making for tax consent, the legitimacy of the tax system, and citizens’ broader understandings of their political relationships. Going beyond the usual focus on tax policy, Braunstein’s innovative view of taxation through the lens of cultural sociology shows how citizens in value-diverse societies coalesce around shared visions of the sacred and fears of the profane.

Interviewee: Ruth Braunstein is Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut.

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Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, "Watching TV: American Television Season by Season, Fourth Edition" (Syracuse UP, 2024)

Sat, 17 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 on the media timeline, Watching TV provides the context and background to this multi-billion-dollar enterprise.

Drawing on decades of research, the authors weave together personalities, popular shows, corporate strategies, historical events, and changing technologies, enhancing the main commentary with additional elements that include fall prime time schedule grids for every season, date box timelines, highlighted key text, and selected photos. Full of facts, firsts, insights, and exploits from now back to the earliest days, Watching TV is the standard chronology of American television, and reading it is akin to channel surfing through history. The fourth edition updates the story into the 2020s and looks ahead to the next waves of change. This new edition is the first to also be available in a digital format.

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Becky Aikman, "Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger during World War II" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Fri, 16 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 young aviators bolted for England in 1942, becoming the first American women to command military aircraft.

In a faraway land, these "spitfires" lived like women decades ahead of their time. Risking their lives in one of the deadliest jobs of the war, they ferried new, barely tested fighters and bombers to air bases and returned shot-up wrecks for repair, never knowing what might go wrong until they were high in the sky. Many ferry pilots died in crashes or made spectacular saves. It was exciting, often terrifying work. The pilots broke new ground off duty as well, shocking their hosts with thoroughly modern behavior.

With cinematic sweep, in Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger during World War II (Bloomsbury, 2025) Becky Aikman follows the stories of nine of the women who served, drawing on unpublished diaries, letters, and records, along with her own interviews, to bring these forgotten heroines fully to life. Spitfires is a vivid, richly detailed account of war, ambition, and a group of remarkable women whose lives were as unconventional as their dreams.

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Katherine Stewart, "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Thu, 15 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 is it that this anti-democratic trend has escaped the explanatory frameworks of pundits and scholars alike? Perhaps we need to re-frame the narrative about the MAGA movement and the various constituencies that have somehow conspired to undermine democratic values and replace them with radical libertarian principles joined by theocratic, White nationalist, and anti-intellectual ideals.

Addressing these concerns, Katherine Stewart has written Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (Bloomsbury Press, 2025).

Casting a light on the religious right’s “Funders, Thinkers, Sergeants, Infantry, and Power Players,” Stewart recounts her effort “to record what I have seen and heard from the leaders and supporters of the antidemocratic movement in the auditoriums and breakout rooms at national conferences, around the table at informal gatherings of activists, in the living rooms of the rank and file, and in the pews of hard-line churches. The story features a rowdy mix of personalities: ‘apostles’ of Jesus, atheist billionaires, reactionary Catholic theologians, pseudo-Platonic intellectuals, woman-hating opponents of ‘the gynocracy,’ high-powered evangelical networkers, Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand, pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (White) babies, COVID truthers, and battalions of ‘spirit warriors’ who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about undermining democracy at its foundations.” Over and against the idea that religion is a relatively insignificant factor in the rise of the radical political right, Stewart makes plain how Christian nationalism is “front and center” in the effort to solidify the power of the MAGA movement and Donald Trump’s presidency.

Richard B. Miller is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Emeritus Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Chicago. He previously taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University where he also served as Director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions. The author of numerous articles and books, the most of which is Why Study Religion? (NY: Oxford University Press, 2021). Bluesky.

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Claudia Rowe, "Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care" (Abrams Press, 2025)

Wed, 14 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 journalist Claudia Rowe brings her extensive experience and investigative prowess to this eye-opening work. With a career spanning over 25 years, Rowe has written for publications such as The New York Times and Mother Jones, and her reporting has influenced policy changes in Washington State. Her previous book, The Spider and the Fly, was a gripping true-crime memoir that showcased her ability to blend personal narrative with broader social issues.

In Wards of the State, Rowe's storytelling is both vivid and unflinching, offering readers a deep understanding of the foster care-to-prison pipeline. Through interviews with psychologists, advocates, judges, and the former foster children themselves, Rowe paints a heartbreaking picture of the lives shaped by this broken system.

By the time Maryanne was 16 years old, she had been arrested for murder. In and out of foster and adoptive homes since age 10, she'd run away, been trafficked and assaulted, and finally pointed a gun at the latest man to take her into his car. She pulled the trigger and fled. But with no family to turn to and few reliable friends, it didn't take long for the police to catch up with her.

In court, the defense blamed neither traffickers, nor Maryanne, but Washington state itself--or rather, its foster care system, which parents thousands of children every year. The courts didn't listen to that argument, but award-winning journalist Claudia Rowe did.

Washington state isn't alone. Each year, hundreds of thousands of children grow up in America's $30 billion foster care system, only to leave and enter its prisons, where a quarter of all inmates are former foster youth.

Weaving Maryanne's story with those of five other foster kids across the country--including an 18-year-old sleeping on the New York City subways; a gangbanger turned graduate student; and a foster child who is now a policy advisor to the White House--Rowe paints a visceral survival narrative showing exactly where, when, and how the system channels children into locked cells.

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Brian VanDeMark, "Kent State: An American Tragedy" (Norton, 2024)

Tue, 13 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 its causes, lasting consequences, and cautionary lessons for us all.

On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, political fires that had been burning across America during the 1960s exploded. Antiwar protesters wearing bell-bottom jeans and long hair hurled taunts and rocks at another group of young Americans―National Guardsmen sporting gas masks and rifles. At half past noon, violence unfolded with chaotic speed, as guardsmen―many of whom had joined the Guard to escape the draft―opened fire on the students. Two reductive narratives ensued: one, that lethal state violence targeted Americans who spoke their minds; the other, that law enforcement gave troublemakers the comeuppance they deserved. For over fifty years, little middle ground has been found due to incomplete and sometimes contradictory evidence.

Kent State meticulously re-creates the divided cultural landscape of America during the Vietnam War and heightened popular anxieties around the country. On college campuses, teach-ins, sit-down strikes, and demonstrations exposed the growing rift between the left and the right. Many students opposed the war as unnecessary and unjust and were uneasy over poor and working-class kids drafted and sent to Vietnam in their place. Some developed a hatred for the military, the police, and everything associated with authority, while others resolved to uphold law and order at any cost.

Focusing on the thirteen victims of the Kent State shooting and a painstaking reconstruction of the days surrounding it, historian Brian VanDeMark draws on crucial new research and interviews―including, for the first time, the perspective of guardsmen who were there. The result is a complete reckoning with the tragedy that marked the end of the sixties.

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Aaron Robertson, "The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America" (FSG, 2024)

Mon, 12 May 2025 09:00:00 -0000

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 his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. Central to this endeavor was the Shrine’s chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. The Shrine’s members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defense force, and raised their children communally, eventually working to establish the country’s largest Black-owned farm, where attempts to create an earthly paradise for Black people continues today.

Alongside the Shrine’s story, Robertson reflects on a diverse array of Black utopian visions, from the Reconstruction era through the countercultural fervor of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day. By doing so, Robertson showcases the enduring quest of collectives and individuals for a world beyond the constraints of systemic racism.

The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America (FSG, 2024) offers a nuanced portrait of the struggle for spaces—both ideological and physical—where Black dignity, protection, and nourishment are paramount. This book is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making—one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future.

The Black Utopians is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.

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Hasia R. Diner, "Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

Sun, 11 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 competing for limited resources and even coming to blows in the crowded neighborhoods of major cities. One of the most enduring stereotypes is that of rabidly anti-Semitic Irish Catholics, like Father Charles Coughlin of Boston and the sensationalized Gangs of New York trope of Irish street thugs attacking defenseless Jewish immigrants. In Opening Doors, Hasia R. Diner, one of the world's preeminent historians of immigration, tells a very different story; far from confrontational, the prevailing relationships between Jewish and Irish Americans were overwhelmingly cooperative, and the two groups were dependent upon one another to secure stable and upwardly mobile lives in their new home. The Irish had emigrated to American cities en masse a generation before the first major wave of Jewish immigrants arrived, and had already entrenched themselves in positions of influence in urban governments, public education, and the labor movement. Jewish newcomers recognized the value of aligning themselves with another group of religious outsiders who were able to stand up and demand rights and respect despite widespread discrimination from the Protestant establishment, and the Irish realized that they could protect their political influence by mentoring their new neighbors in the intricacies of American life.

Opening Doors draws from a deep well of historical sources to show how Irish and Jewish Americans became steadfast allies in classrooms, picket lines, and political machines, and ultimately helped one another become key power players in shaping America's future. In the wake of rising anti-Semitism and xenophobia today, this informative and accessible work offers an inspiring look at a time when two very different groups were able to find common ground and work together to overcome bigotry, gain representation, and move the country in a more inclusive direction.

Hasia R. Diner is a professor emeritus of American Jewish History and former chair of the Irish Studies program at New York University. She is the author of numerous books on Jewish and Irish histories in the U.S., including the National Jewish Book Award winning We Remember with Reverence and Love, which also earned the Saul Veiner Prize for most outstanding book in American Jewish history, and the James Beard finalist Hungering for America. Diner has also held Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and served as Director of the Goren Center for American Jewish History.

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, "Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America" (Island Press, 2025)

Sat, 10 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 devastation of human lives.

We learn that PFAS, the ‘forever chemicals’ found in everyday products, from cooking pans to mascara, are coursing through the veins of 97% of Americans. We witness the pain of families who lost sisters and daughters, cousins and neighbors, after PFAS leached into their drinking water. We discover evidence that the makers of forever chemicals may have known for decades about the deadly risks of their products—because their own scientists have been documenting these dangers since the 1960s. And we see the failure of our government, time after time, to provide basic protections to its citizens.

It is impossible to read this searing exposé without being infuriated by the recklessness of corporate America. But readers will also be awed by the spirit of ordinary people who, while fighting for their own lives, took it upon themselves to fix a broken regulatory system. Heart-wrenching and maddening, stirring and uplifting, Poisoning the Well offers a unique window into the worst and best of human nature. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about the unfettered power of industry and the invisible threat it poses to the health of the nation—and to each of us.

Sharon Udasin is a reporter for The Hill, covering U.S. West climate & policy from her home base in Boulder, Colorado. She was a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder and has also reported for The Jerusalem Post and The New York Jewish Week. A graduate of both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Journalism School, Sharon also received a 2022 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award and was honored by the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership in 2013.

Rachel Frazin covers energy and environment policy for The Hill: that’s everything from climate change to gasoline prices to toxic chemicals to renewable and fossil energy. It was through this work that she learned about, and became alarmed by, "forever chemicals." She is originally from South Florida, and she studied journalism and political science at (the very cold) Northwestern University. Previously, her work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Beast, the Tampa Bay Times, and The Palm Beach Post.

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Benjamin Schrader, "Fight to Live, Live to Fight Veteran Activism after War: Veteran Activism after War" (SUNY Press, 2019)

Fri, 09 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 demilitarization. Schrader weaves his own experiences in the US military and then as a member of activist communities with the stories of other activist veterans across the United States. He critically examines US foreign and domestic policy through the narratives of post-9/11 military veterans who have turned to social justice activism after leaving the military. These veterans are involved in a wide array of activism, including antiwar organizing, economic justice, sexual violence prevention, immigration issues, and veteran healing through art. In the process of attempting to demilitarize their communities and themselves, these veterans turned activists remake their understandings of bravery and patriotism. This is an accessible and engaging work that may be read and appreciated not just by scholars, but also students and anyone interested in understanding the lives of veterans and the effects of war.

Benjamin Schrader, Ph.D. is the Director of the Adult Learner and Veteran Services at Colorado State University.

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Chloe Ahmann, "Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 08 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors.

Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains — “that’s not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.

Futures after Progress is available in Open Access here.Mentioned in this episode:

Ahmann, Chloe and Anand Pandian. 2024. “The Fight Against Incineration is a Chance to Right Historic Wrongs.” Baltimore Beat, June 26.
Ahmann, Chloe. 2024. “Curtis Bay Residents Deserve a Coal-free Future.” Baltimore Sun, February 18.
Boym, Svetlana. 2007. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” Hedgehog Review 9(2).
Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Butler, Octavia. 1998. Parable of the Talents. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.
South Baltimore Community Land Trust. https://www.sbclt.org/
Weston, Kath. 2021. “Counterfactual Ethnography: Imagining What It Takes to Live Differently.” AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 16(3): 463–87.

Chloe Ahmann is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her work explores what efforts to think and enact environmental futures look like from the sedimented space of late industrialism.

Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at The Ohio State University. [please link my name.

Special thanks to Brittany Halley, Nikoo Karimi, Abigail Musch, Kate Roos, and Koray Sackan, who helped prepare this interview in the Comparative Studies Seminar in Technology and Culture.

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Lynn Downey, "American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)

Wed, 07 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 larger history of how the American West has been imagined and sold. Dude ranching reflected the romanticism of cowboy masculinity, even as it helped produce it, yet still carved out a space where women could shape their own adventures.

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Eunji Kim, "The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Tue, 06 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 today’s media landscape, revealing how popular entertainment media shapes politics and public opinion in an increasingly news-avoiding nation.
Drawing on an eclectic array of original data, Dr. Eunji Kim demonstrates how, amid a dazzling array of media choices, many Americans simply are not consuming the news. Instead, millions flock to entertainment programs that showcase real-life success stories, such as American Idol, Shark Tank, and MasterChef. Dr. Kim examines how shows like these leave viewers confoundingly optimistic about the prospects of upward mobility, promoting a false narrative of rugged individualism and meritocracy that contradicts what is being reported in the news.
By taking seriously what people casually watch every day, The American Mirage shows how rags-to-riches programs perpetuate the myth of the American Dream, glorifying the economic winners, fostering tolerance for income inequality, and dampening support for redistributive policies that could improve people’s lives.

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Stephen H. Legomsky, "Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Mon, 05 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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, and leaders as a bulwark against Trump’s autocratic rule.

But Professor Stephen H. Legomsky sees it differently. His new book, Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government (Cambridge University Press 2025) argues that – if we care about democracy – we should imagine an America without state government. No longer a union of arbitrarily constructed states, the country would become a union of one American people. Reimagining the American Union understands state government as the root cause of the gravest threats to American democracy. While some of those threats are baked into the Constitution, the book argues that others are the product of state legislatures abusing their powers through gerrymanders, voter suppression, and other less-publicized manipulations that often target African-Americans and other minority voters. Reimagining the American Union interrogates how having national, state and local legislative bodies, taxation, bureaucracy, and regulation wastes taxpayer money and burdens the citizenry. After assessing the supposed benefits of state government, Professor Legomsky argues for a new, unitary American republic with only national and local governments.

Stephen H. Legomsky is the John S. Lehmann University Professor Emeritus at the Washington University School of Law. Professor Legomsky has published scholarly books on immigration and refugee law, courts, and constitutional law. He served in the Obama Administration as Chief Counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and later as Senior Counselor to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. He was a member of President-Elect Biden’s transition team, has testified often before Congress, and has worked with state, local, UN, and foreign governments.

Mentioned:

Cambridge University press is offering a 20% discount here (until October)
Susan’s NBN interview with Richard Kreitner on Break It Up: Secession, Division, and The Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union
Jonathan A. Rodden’s Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (Basic Books 2019)
Hendrik Hertzberg’s review of Robert A. Dahl’s How Democratic Is the American Constitution (Yale)
Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court case that overturned the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s pre-clearance requirement for historically discriminating districts

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No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

Sun, 04 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (UNC Press, 2021), Dr. Karen L. Cox offers an eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments. Dr. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that anti-monument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

Our guest is: Dr. Karen L. Cox, who is professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her other books include Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture and Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by downloading, assigning and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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William Kiser, "The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sat, 03 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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), Kiser argues that scalp hunting, or scalp warfare as it may more accurately be called, was in many ways more brutal, and more nuanced and complex, than popular imaginings often describe. By following the practice from 17th century New France to colonial and early republic New England, through to the southwestern borderlands and finally the California gold rush in the mid-19th century, Kiser uncovers important differences, as well as throughlines, from time to time and place to place. In doing so, The Business of Killing Indians shows that there is no one story of Native-settler relations, and that while structural forces like markets and colonialism matter a great deal, when it comes to violence, the devil truly lies in the details.

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Steven Hahn, "Illiberal America: A History" (Norton, 2024)

Fri, 02 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. The attack on American democracy and images of mob violence led many to recoil, thinking “That’s not us.” But now we must think again, for Steven Hahn shows in his startling new history that illiberalism has deep roots in our past. To those who believe that the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence set us apart as a nation, Hahn shows that Americans have long been animated by competing values, equally deep-seated, in which the illiberal will of the community overrides individual rights, and often protects itself by excluding perceived threats, whether on grounds of race, religion, gender, economic status, or ideology.

Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fueled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and abolitionists. After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernized during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities as well as the poor. The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education, and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history, and how that history bears on the present crisis.

Steven Hahn is an acclaimed historian whose works include A Nation Under Our Feet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize, and A Nation Without Borders. He is professor of history at New York University.

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Adam Kissel et al., "Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation" (Encounter Books, 2025)

Thu, 01 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 Cambre guide us through their process of collaboration and their argument that Ivy League institutions are not providing students with a quality education. Through the saturation of DEI-coded or hyper-specialized courses, they argue, students lack access to classical education and Western civilization–based instruction that would better serve their intellectual development. The authors discuss their approach to building the argument, the origins of their idea, and what students should keep in mind when selecting their schools and course lists.

Adam Kissel is a visiting fellow for higher education reform in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. He is a board member of the University of West Florida, Southern Wesleyan University, and the National Association of Scholars. Rachel Alexander Cambre teaches for Belmont Abbey College’s new Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education program. A visiting fellow in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Politics and Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation from 2022 to 2024, she researches and writes on liberal arts education and American political thought. She held a research postdoctoral fellowship at the James Madison Program from 2019-2020. Madison Marina Doan is a senior research associate in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Her work focuses on affordability and accountability reform in higher education and K-12 education choice initiatives. Her work may be found in Fox News, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, The Daily Signal, and the Educational Freedom Institute.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Max Hastings, “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975” (Harper, 2018)

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (HarperCollins, 2018) comes as something of a relief, for he essentially says that all the “sides” in the war made a moral mess of things. According to Hastings, the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, the French, and the Americans were all guilty as sin of cynically starting, ruthlessly fighting, and stubbornly continuing a conflict that was, if not “unnecessary,” at least not worth it for any of them. In Hastings’ very readable account, everyone gets their hands very dirty indeed. Listen in.

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Reginald K. Ellis et al., "Black Citizens and American Democracy: Fighting for the Soul of a Nation" (UP of Florida, 2025)

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

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 of these chapters show that Black Americans have long pushed local and national leaders to ensure that all citizens reap the full benefits of the Constitution. They discuss Black women's roles in advancing national voting rights; how Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) developed "race leaders"; discriminatory news coverage and actions against it; antipoverty efforts; and the racial and gender dynamics of activist organizations.

These studies show how Black activism from the mid-twentieth century to the present has led to positive changes for all Americans, holding the nation to its democratic ideals and promises. Black Citizens and American Democracy (UP of Florida, 2025) compels recognition of many unsung people who have risked their lives and livelihoods for the good of the country.

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Frederick Knight, "Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Would there have been a Frederick Douglass if it were not for Betsy Bailey, the grandmother who raised him? Would Harriet Jacobs have written her renowned autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, if her grandmother, a free black woman named Molly Horniblow, had not enabled Jacobs’ escape from slavery?

In Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Frederick C. Knight explores the experiences of African Americans with aging and in old age during the eras of slavery and emancipation. Though slavery put a premium on young labor, elders worked as caregivers, domestics, cooks, or midwives and performed other tasks in the margins of Southern and Northern economies. Looking at black families, churches, mutual aid societies, and homes for the aged, Dr. Knight demonstrates the pivotal role of elders in the history of African American community formation through Reconstruction, offering a unique window into the individual and collective lives of African Americans, the day-to-day struggles they waged around their experiences of aging, and how they drew upon these resources to define the meaning of family, community, and freedom.

You can find Dr. Knight at the Howard University History Department page, or on LinkedIn.

And, once you’ve listened to the episode, head over to Additions to the Archive on Substack for a further conversation with Dr. Knight and host Sullivan Summer.

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Katie Rose Hejtmanek, "The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon" (NYU Press, 2025)

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

CrossFit in the United States has become increasingly popular, around which a fascinating culture has developed which shapes everyday life for the people devoted to it. CrossFit claims to be many things: a business, a brand, a tremendously difficult fitness regimen, a community, a way to gain salvation, and a method to survive the apocalypse. In The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon (NYU Press, 2025), Dr. Katie Rose Hejtmanek examines how this exercise program is shaped by American Christian values and practices, connecting American religious ideologies to secular institutions in contemporary American culture.

Drawing upon years of immersing herself in CrossFit gyms in the United States and across six continents, this book illustrates how US CrossFit operates using distinctly American codes, ranging from its intensity and patriarchal militarism to its emphasis on (white) salvation and the adoration of the hero and vigilante. Despite presenting itself as a secular space, Dr. Hejtmanek argues that CrossFit is both heavily influenced by and deeply intertwined with American Christian values. She makes the case that the Christianity that shapes CrossFit is the Christianity that shapes much of America, usually in ways we do not even notice. Offering a new cross-cultural perspective for understanding a popular workout, The Cult of CrossFit provides a window into a particularly American rendition of a Christian plotline, lived out one workout at a time.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Alfred L. Martin, Jr., "Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences" (NYU Press, 2025)

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences (NYU Press, 2025) breaks from our focus on white fandom to center Black fandoms. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., engages these fandoms through what he calls the “four C’s”: class, clout, canon, and comfort.

Class is a key component of how Black fandom is contingent on distinctions between white, nationally recognized cultural productions and multicultural and/or regional cultural productions, as demonstrated by Misty Copeland’s ascension in American Ballet Theatre. Clout refers to Black fans’ realization of their own consumer spending power as an agent for industrial change, reducing the precarity of Blackness within historically white cultural apparatuses and facilitating the production of Black blockbusters like 2018’s Black Panther. Canon entails a communal fannish practice of sharing media objects, like the 1978 film The Wiz, which lead them to take on meanings outside of their original context. Comfort describes the nostalgic and sentimental affects associated with beloved fan objects such as the television show, Golden Girls, connected to notions of Black joy and signaling moments wherein Black people can just be themselves.

Through 75 in-depth interviews with Black fans, Fandom for Us, by Us argues not only for the importance of studying Black fandoms, but also demonstrates their complexities by both coupling and decoupling Black reception practices from the politics of representation. Martin highlights the nuanced ways Black fans interact with media representations, suggesting class, clout, canon, and comfort are universal to the study of all fandoms. Yet, for all the ways these fandoms are similar and reciprocal, Black fandoms are also their own set of practices, demanding their own study.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Jonathan D. Cohen, "Losing Big: America's Dangerous Sports Gambling Boom" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025)

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined.

The rise of online sports gambling—the immediacy of betting with your phone, the ability of the companies to target users, the dynamic pricing and offers based on how good or bad of a gambler you are—has produced a public health crisis marked by addiction and far too many people, particularly young men, gambling more than they can afford to lose. Under intense lobbying from the gaming industry, states have created a system built around profit for sportsbooks, not the well-being of players.

In Losing Big: America's Dangerous Sports Gambling Boom (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), historian Jonathan D. Cohen lays out the astonishing emergence of online sports gambling, from sportsbook executives drafting legislation to an addicted gambler confessing their $300,000 losses. Sports gambling is here to stay, and the stakes could not be higher. Losing Big explains how this brewing crisis came to be, and how it can be addressed before new generations get hooked.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Neil Kraus, "The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement" (Temple UP, 2023)

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Wage stagnation, growing inequality, and even poverty itself have resulted from decades of neoliberal decision making, not the education system, writes Neil Kraus in his urgent call to action, The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (Temple UP, 2023).

Kraus claims the idea that both the education system and labor force are chronically deficient was aggressively and incorrectly promoted starting in the Reagan era, when corporate interests and education reformers emphasized education as the exclusive mechanism providing the citizenry with economic opportunity. However, as this critical book reveals, that is a misleading articulation of the economy and education system rooted in the economic self-interests of corporations and the wealthy.

The Fantasy Economy challenges the basic assumptions of the education reform movement of the last few decades. Kraus insists that education cannot control the labor market and unreliable corporate narratives fuel this misinformation. Moreover, misguided public policies, such as accountability and school choice, along with an emphasis on workforce development and STEM over broad-based liberal arts education, have only produced greater inequality.

Ultimately, The Fantasy Economy argues that education should be understood as a social necessity, not an engine of the neoliberal agenda. Kraus' book advocates for a change in conventional thinking about economic opportunity and the purpose of education in a democracy.

Neil Kraus is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. He is the author of Majoritarian Cities: Policy Making and Inequality in Urban Politics and Race, Neighborhoods, and Community Power: Buffalo Politics, 1934-1997.

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Henry Jenkins, "Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Postwar America" (NYU Press, 2025)

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The 60s produced a Baby Boom generation that catalyzed the dawn of a new era—the space age, the age of television, the global age, and the beginnings of civil rights. At the same time, a new paradigm for parenting was unfolding that put emphasis on permissiveness, defined by what it permitted – the free and unfettered impulses of children. Others worried that the wildness of children, personified by the characters in Maurice Sendak’s 1963 classic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, was destructive, disruptive and disrespectful.

Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Postwar America (NYU Press, 2025) centers on the exploding, contentious national conversation about the nature of childhood and parenting in the postwar US emblematized by Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. Renowned scholar Henry Jenkins demonstrates that the language that shaped a growing field of advice literature for parents also informed the period’s fictions—in film, television, comics, children’s books, and elsewhere—produced for and consumed by children. In particular, Jenkins demonstrates, the era’s emblematic child was the boy in the striped shirt: white, male, suburban, middle class, Christian, and above all, American.

Weaving together intellectual histories and popular texts, Jenkins shows how boy protagonists became embodiments of permissive child rearing, as well as the social ideals and contradictions that permissiveness entailed. From Peanuts comic strips and TV specials to The Cat in the Hat, Dennis the Menace, and Jonny Quest, the book reveals how childhood and the stories about it became central to Cold War concerns with democracy, citizenship, globalization, the space race, science, race relations, gender, and sexuality. Written by a former boy in a striped shirt, Where the Wild Things Were explores iconic works, from Mary Poppins to Lost in Space, contextualizing them through a critical but respectful engagement with the core animating ideas of the permissive imagination.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Colleen A. Dunlavy, "Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the U.S.into a Manufacturing Powerhouse" (Polity Press, 2024)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the U.S. into a Manufacturing Powerhouse, published by Polity Books in 2024, offers a bold reinterpretation of American industrial history. Challenging the myth of free-market supremacy, the book reveals how strategic state intervention—from wartime production to Cold War R&D—shaped the rise of U.S. manufacturing. It highlights the role of public investment, procurement, and policy in scaling firms and fostering innovation. Timely and incisive, this is essential reading for anyone interested in rethinking industrial strategy, reshoring production, or understanding how the state can drive economic transformation in an age of geopolitical and technological change.

This book made Martin Wolf's list of Best Summer Books of 2024 in the Financial Times and was noted briefly in a recent Foreign Affairs article on industrial policy.

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Ross Benes, "1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times" (UP of Kansas, 2025)

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted our Bizarre Times (2025, University of Kansas Press) journalist Ross Benes examines low culture in the late 1990s. From pro wrestling and Pokémon to Vince McMahon and Jerry Springer, Benes reveals its profound impact and how it continues to affect our culture and society today.

The year 1999 was a high-water mark for popular culture. According to one measure, it was the "best movie year ever." But as Benes shows, the end of the '90s was also a banner year for low culture. This was the heyday of Jerry Springer, Jenna Jameson, and Vince McMahon, among many others. Low culture had come into its own and was poised for world domination. The reverberations of this takeover continue to shape American society. During its New Year's Eve countdown, MTV entered 1999 with Limp Bizkit covering Prince's famous anthem to the new year. The highlights of the lowlights continued when WCW and WWE drew 35 million American viewers each week with sex appeal and stories about insurrections. Insane Clown Posse emerged from the underground with a Woodstock set and platinum records about magic and murder. Later that year, Dance Dance Revolution debuted in North America and Grand Theft Auto emerged as a major video game franchise. Beanie Babies and Pokemon so thoroughly seized the wallets and imagination of collectors that they created speculative investment bubbles that anticipated the faddish obsession over nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The trashy talk show Jerry Springer became daytime TV's most-watched program and grew so mainstream that Austin Powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The Wayans Bros., The Simpsons, and The X-Files incorporated Springer into their own plots during the late '90s. Donald Trump even explored a potential presidential nomination with the Reform Party in 1999 and wanted his running mate to be Oprah Winfrey, whose own talk show would make Dr. Oz a household name. Among Springer's many guests were porn stars who, at the end of the millennium, were pursuing sex records in a bid for stardom as the pornography industry exploded, aided by sex scandals, new technology, and the drug Viagra, which marked its first full year on the US market in 1999.

According to Benes, there are many lessons to learn from the year that low culture conquered the world. Talk shows and reality TV foreshadowed the way political movements grab power by capturing our attention. Pro wrestling mastered the art of "kayfabe"--the agreement to treat something as real and genuine when it is not--before it spread throughout American society, as political contests, corporate public relations campaigns, and nonprofit fundraising schemes have become their own wrestling matches that require a suspension of disbelief. Beanie Babies and Pokémon demonstrate capitalism's resiliency as well as its vulnerabilities. Legal and technological victories obtained by early internet pornographers show how the things people are ashamed of have the ability to influence the world. Insane Clown Posse's creation of loyal Juggalos illustrates the way religious and political leaders are able to generate faithful followers by selling themselves as persecuted outsiders. And the controversy over video game violence reveals how every generation finds new scapegoats. 1999 is not just a nostalgic look at the past. It is also a window into our contentious present.

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Maurice Jackson, "Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: How Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for Equality" (Georgetown UP, 2025)

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the Nation's Capital, music and sports have played a central role in the lives of African Americans, often serving as a barometer of social conflict and social progress―for sports clubs and ball games, jam sessions and concerts, offered entertainment, enlightenment, and encouragement. At times, they have also offered a means of escape from the harsh realities of everyday life.

Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience (Georgetown UP, 2025) tells the story of these musicians and athletes who have used their skills and their determination to achieve success in the face of discrimination. Jackson begins with pioneers such as James Reese Europe, who formed the first musicians' union and fought as a member of the Harlem Hellfighters in World War I, and ends with giants of the twentieth century, such as Duke Ellington and Georgetown University basketball coaching legend John Thompson Jr.

Readers interested in the history of Washington, DC, the civil rights movement, racial justice, music, and sports will draw important lessons from these stories of the Black men and women who found in sports and music spaces to combat racial prejudice and bring people in the District of Columbia together.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Davida Siwisa James, "Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries" (Fordham UP, 2024)

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For last 100 years, the neighborhood of Harlem in New York City has stood as the capital of Black America and the capital of the global African diaspora. Yet Harlem is so big and so varied that it contains smaller sections with distinct identities and histories of their own.

Davida Siwisa James explores two parts of Harlem in her book Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries, published by the Empire State Editions imprint of Fordham University Press. Exploring four centuries of life in a part of upper Manhattan that stretches from 135th Street to 165th Street and from Edgecombe Avenue to the Hudson River, James looks at the encounters between the Lenape and Dutch settlers, the rural village that was Harlem, and the Harlem Renaissance luminaries who lived in Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill.

James blends the personal and the historical to illuminate great events, fascinating people, and amazing architecture. In a time when Harlem is going through great demographic and cultural changes, she explores both the long history of Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill and their significance for the history Black America.

Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian, professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University, and the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell, 2025). Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu.

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Engage and Evade in 2025: Asad L. Asad on Latino Immigrants in America

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023). A highly relevant book, Engage and Evade documents the interactions between undocumented people and the agents and institutions of government. One might expect undocumented people to avoid the IRS, but as Asad demonstrates, many engage with government institutions in the hopes that positive interactions and compliance might help their immigration cases down the road. Published in 2023, immigration policy and treatment of undocumented people by the government has shifted dramatically in a short time. I’m grateful today to be able to speak with Asad about this thoughtful book.

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The Great Gatsby is an American Dystopia

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

It’s the UConn Popcast, and on the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, we explore what The Great Gatsby means in America today.

In this deep-dive we ask:

What did Gatsby mean in 1925, and how have those meanings changed in 2025?
What mythologies of America does Gatsby circulate, and challenge?
How does Gatsby read to a Brit who never read it in high school, and to an American who only encountered it as an adult?
Is Nick Carraway right that Gatsby is the only pure soul in the story?
Can we rescue utopian imaginings from this dystopic picture of America?
Is there a hidden story of race submerged beneath Gatsby’s overt story of class?

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James Davison Hunter, "Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis" (Yale UP, 2024)

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.”

James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis (Yale UP, 2024) that those historic sources of national solidarity have now largely dissolved. While a deepening political polarization is the most obvious sign of this, the true problem is not polarization per se but the absence of cultural resources to work through what divides us. The destructive logic that has filled the void only makes bridging our differences more challenging. In the end, all political regimes require some level of unity. If it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed by force.

Can America’s political crisis be fixed? Can an Enlightenment-era institution—liberal democracy—survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment world? If, for some, salvaging the older sources of national solidarity is neither possible sociologically, nor desirable politically or ethically, what cultural resources will support liberal democracy in the future?

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Lesley J. Gordon, "Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Those who fought in the Civil War were expected to overcome their fear of injury or death as they charged into a hail of bullets. Soldiers could expect erupting artillery shells or Minié balls to maim or tear their bodies apart. The 11th New York Fire Zouaves and the 2nd Texas Infantry were no different. They charged into battle with high, perhaps even inflated, expectations of glory on the field of battle. After all, they had already shown their bravery at home especially in the case of the Fire Zoaves. Yet when they marched into battle at the fields of Bull Run or Shiloh, falter as a unit they did. Afterwards, members of both units faced charges of cowardice casting a lingering shadow on their regiments and personal reputations. Over time charges of cowardice would fade to be replaced with the rhetoric of martial heroism leading some historians to insist that all Civil War soldiers were heroes. In her latest work

, Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the America Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2024), Dr. Lesley Gordon seeks to offer a fuller understanding of the experiences of Civil War soldiers and sufferings of war.

Dr. Gordon is the Charles Boal Ewing Chair in Military History at West Point and the Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at the University of Alabama. Dr. Gordon received her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and specializes in civil war history.

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Rebecca Zorach, "Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America's Racial Enterprise" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the United States, in Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Rebecca Zorach carefully examines the place of art in the occupation of land and the upholding of White power in the US, arguing that it has been central to the design of America’s racial enterprise. Confronting closely held assumptions of art history, Zorach looks to the intersections of art, nature, race, and place, working through a series of symbolic spaces—the museum, the wild, islands, gardens, home, and walls and borders—to open and extend conversations on the political implications of art and design.

Against the backdrop of central moments in American art, from the founding of early museums to the ascendancy of abstract expressionism, Dr. Zorach shows how contemporary artists—including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates, Maria Gaspar, Kerry James Marshall, Alan Michelson, Dylan Miner, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams—have mined the relationship between environment and social justice, creating works that investigate and interrupt White supremacist, carceral, and environmentally toxic worlds. The book also draws on poetry, creative nonfiction, hip-hop videos, and Disney films to illuminate crucial topics in art history, from the racial politics of abstraction to the origins of museums and the formation of canons.

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Martha S. Jones, "The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir" (Basic Books, 2025)

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?”

Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives. But the color line was shifting and jagged, not fixed and straight. Some backed away from it, others skipped along it, and others still were cut deep by its sharp teeth.

Journeying across centuries, from rural Kentucky and small-town North Carolina to New York City and its suburbs, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (Basic Books, 2025) is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family.

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. A prizewinning author and editor of four books, most recently Vanguard, she is past copresident of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and has contributed to the New York Times, Atlantic, and many other publications. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Julie Malnig, "Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock 'n' Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock 'n' Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a new look at the highly popular phenomenon of the televised teen dance program. These teen shows were incubators of new styles of social and popular dance and both reflected and shaped pressing social issues of the day. Often referred to as "dance parties," the televised teen dance shows helped cultivate a nascent youth culture in the post-World War II era. The youth culture depicted on the shows, however, was primarily white. Black teenagers certainly had a youth culture of their own, but the injustice was glaring: Black culture was not always in evident display on the airwaves, as television, like the nation at large, was deeply segregated and appealed to a primarily white, homogenous audience.

The crux of the book, then, is twofold: to explore how social and popular dance styles were created and disseminated within the new technology of television and to investigate how the shows both reflected and re-affirmed the racial politics and attitudes of the time. The story of televised teen dance told here is about Black and white teenagers wanting to dance to rock 'n' roll music despite the barriers placed on their ability to do so. It is also a story that fuses issues of race, morality, and sexuality. Dancing Black, Dancing White weaves together these elements to tell two stories: that of the different experiences of Black and white adolescents and their desires to have a space of their own where they could be seen, heard, appreciated, and understood.

Julie Malnig is Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

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Jonathan Rauch, "Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. We are discussing his latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale UP, 2025). The enmity between secular liberals and religious conservatives is a source of chaos in American democracy. Religious conservatives blame secular liberals for creating a decadent society without traditional norms. Secular liberals accuse religious conservatives of intolerance and hatred. Both sides want to do away with the other, when we actually need to try to understand each other. Jonathan’s book offers a powerful critique of our uncompromising ways.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Megan Hunt, "Southern by the Grace of God: Religion, Race, and Civil Rights in Hollywood's American South" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Megan Hunt joins us to talk about her recent book, Southern By the Grace of God, which was published in 2024 by the University of Georgia Press.

Lke the media coverage of the civil rights era itself, Hollywood dramas have reinforced regional stereotypes of race, class, and gender to cleanse and redeem the wider nation from the implications of systemic racism. As Southern by the Grace of God reveals, however, Hollywood manipulates southern religion (in particular) to further enhance this pattern of difference and regional exceptionalism, consistently displacing broader American racism through a representation of the poor white southerner who is as religious as he (and it is always a he) is racist. By foregrounding the role of religion in these characterizations, Megan Hunt illuminates the pernicious intersections between Hollywood and southern exceptionalism, a long-standing U.S. nationalist discourse that has assigned racial problems to the errant South alone, enabling white supremacy to not only endure but reproduce throughout the nation. Southern by the Grace of God examines the presentation and functions of Protestant Christianity in cinematic depictions of the American South. Hunt argues that religion is an understudied signifier of the South on film, used--with varying degrees of sophistication--to define the region's presumed exceptionalism for regional, national, and international audiences. Rooted in close textual analysis and primary research into the production and reception of more than twenty Hollywood films that engage with the civil rights movement and/or its legacy, this book provides detailed case studies of films that use southern religiosity to negotiate American anxieties around race, class, and gender. Religion, Hunt contends, is an integral trope of the South in popular culture and especially crucial to the divisions essential to Hollywood storytelling.

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Tiffany D. Joseph, "Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Despite progressive policy strides in health care reform, immigrant communities continue to experience stark disparities across the United States. In Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), Tiffany D. Joseph exposes the insidious contradiction of Massachusetts' advanced health care system and the exclusionary experiences of its immigrant communities.

Joseph illustrates how patients' race, ethnicity, and legal status determine their access to health coverage and care services, revealing a disturbing paradox where policy advances and individual experiences drastically diverge. Examining Boston's Brazilian, Dominican, and Salvadoran communities, this book provides an exhaustive analysis spanning nearly a decade to highlight the profound impacts of the Affordable Care Act and subsequent policy shifts on these marginalized groups.

Not All In is a critical examination of the systemic barriers that perpetuate health care disparities. Joseph challenges readers to confront the uncomfortable truths about racialized legal status and its profound implications on health care access. This essential book illuminates the complexities of policy implementation and advocates for more inclusive reforms that genuinely cater to all. Urging policymakers, health care providers, and activists to rethink strategies that bridge the gap between legislation and life, this book reminds us that in the realm of health care, being progressive is not synonymous with inclusivity.

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Bridget Kies, "Murder, She Wrote" (Wayne State UP, 2025)

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

As part of the TV Milestones Series, Bridget Kies explores Murder, She Wrote (Wayne State University Press, 2025). Embark on a journey through the mysteries of Cabot Cove to learn why Murder, She Wrote is a timeless classic. Discover the secrets behind the enduring appeal of Murder, She Wrote (CBS, 1984-96) in this captivating investigation of the long-running mystery series. Kies details the show's lasting impact owing to several interconnecting factors tied to the series' genre, cast, and reception. Murder, She Wrote was a trailblazing "cozy" murder mystery, blending suspense and charm to captivate a wide and varied audience. Bolstered by Angela Lansbury's established star power, the iconic amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher is beloved by fans across generations and around the world. Kies also points to the series' extratextual tie-in novels, made-for-TV movies, licensed products, and crossovers and attempted spinoffs that helped create a franchise universe that lives on today. With insights into the show's twelve remarkable seasons, its rise to global fame, and data from fandom interviews, this book is a must-read for fans and newcomers alike. Embark on a journey through the mysteries of Cabot Cove and beyond to learn why Murder, She Wrote remains a timeless classic.

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Kathleen Thelen, "Attention, Shoppers!: American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The United States is widely recognized as the quintessential consumer society, one where huge companies like Walmart and Amazon are famous for enticing customers with cheap goods and speedy delivery. Attention, Shoppers!: American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy (Princeton University Press, 2025) traces the origins and evolution of American retail capitalism from the late nineteenth century to today, uncovering the roots of a bitter equilibrium where large low-cost retailers dominate and vast numbers of low-income families now rely on them to make ends meet.

Offering a comparative perspective on the history of American political economy, Dr. Kathleen Thelen shows how large-scale retailers in the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden faced a far less hospitable regulatory environment than companies in the United States, which enjoyed judicial forbearance and often active government support. As American companies grew in scale and scope, they assembled an ever-expanding political coalition that could be weaponized to head off regulatory efforts, leveraging their market strength to squeeze suppliers and workers and even engaging in outright rule breaking when they encountered resistance.

Placing the rise of the Amazon economy in a broader comparative-historical context, Attention, Shoppers! reveals how large discount retailers have successfully exploited a uniquely permissive regulatory landscape to create a shopper’s paradise built on cheap labor and mass consumption.

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Walls, Warnings, and the War on Fentanyl: Peter Andreas on Trump’s Border Politics

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 3rd edition (Cornell UP, 2022) and The Illicit Global Economy (Oxford UP, 2025), joins RBI Director John Torpey to unpack the myths and realities of border control, illicit trade, and tariffs in the era of Trump. Why do Trump’s border policies resonate with so many despite lower deportation numbers than previous administrations? How are fentanyl, tariffs, and military threats shaping U.S. relations with Mexico and Canada? Andreas explains the performative politics of the border, the historical amnesia around immigration enforcement, and why the lines between legal and illegal economies are blurrier than we think.

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Jason Cannon, "A Time for Reflection: The Parallel Legacies of Baseball Icons Willie McCovery and Billy Williams" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025)

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Professional baseball has featured a bevy of superstars over the past century and a half, but only a few of them have impacted their sport and cities as deeply as Willie McCovey and Billy Williams. Born just a handful of miles apart in 1938, they grew up in and around one of the sport’s true cradles, Mobile, Alabama, on their way to producing two iconic careers in Major League Baseball.

In A Time for Reflection: The Parallel Legacies of Baseball Icons Willie McCovey and Billy Williams (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), Jason Cannon examines these two legends of the game. Overcoming the heinous racism of the Jim Crow South as part of the second generation of African American major leaguers who followed in the footsteps of Jackie Robinson, they became two of baseball’s all-time greatest players. Off the field, they took impactful stands for racial progress that continue to resonate today. Their personal resolve, leadership in the clubhouse, and dedication to their baseball communities endeared them to teammates and fans alike.

Featuring original interviews with family members, friends, teammates, and Williams himself, A Time for Reflection brings to life their monumental accomplishments on the diamond, while also detailing how McCovey and Williams grew into pillars of San Francisco and Chicago and inspired future generations of ballplayers.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Peder Anker, "For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering" (Anthem Press, 2025)

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U.S. scholars. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the nuke’s ‘father’, is repeatedly centre stage, as in the case of the recent film about him. These are elitist stories that more often than not ignore the suffering and violence of the bomb to laypeople in general, and to marginalised groups in particular.

Starting with the gruesome mining of uranium by First Nation people in northern Canada, and continuing with the racialist culture of uranium enrichment in the Atomic City of Oak Ridge, in For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering (Anthem Press, 2025) Dr. Peder Anker offers alternative perspectives. It’s a story of how the bikini swimwear came to fetishise the nuclear bombardment of the Bikini Atoll with its celebration of ‘sex bombs’ and (an)atomic ‘bombshells’. Our current global warming fears also harbour back to ordinary citizens wondering if atomic bombs would blow up the entire sky. If some of this was news to you, it might have to do with how the story of nuclear bombs has been told.

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Lincoln A. Mitchell, "Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco" (U Nevada Press, 2025)

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a candidate who campaigned aggressively for expanding civil rights for both African Americans and LGBT people. He won his campaign for mayor chiefly because of huge support from those two constituencies. Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone's life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined.

Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today's San Francisco came into being. Moscone--through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor's race, and brief tenure as mayor--was a key figure in the city's evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone's election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today.

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James M. O’Toole, "For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For generations, American Catholics went faithfully to confession, admitting their sins to a priest and accepting through him God’s forgiveness. The sacrament served as a distinctive marker of Catholic identity, shaping parishioners’ views of their relationship to God, their neighbors, and the wider world. But starting in the 1970s, many abandoned confession altogether. Focusing on the experiences of both laypeople and priests, in For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America (Harvard University Press, 2025) Dr. James M. O’Toole reconstructs the history of confession’s steady rise—and dramatic fall—among American Catholics.

In the early United States, the Catholic Church grew rapidly—and with it, confession’s centrality. Although the sacrament was practiced unevenly for much of the nineteenth century, frequent confession became common by the early twentieth. Both priests and parishioners understood confession as a ritual crucial for the soul, while on a social level, it established Catholic distinctiveness within a largely Protestant country. Today, however, even faithful Catholics seldom confess. The reasons for this change, Dr. O’Toole reveals, include the emergence of psychology and other forms of counseling; the Church’s stance against contraception, which alienated many parishioners; and a growing sense of confession’s inability to confront social problems like structural racism, poverty, and sexism. Meanwhile, increasing recognition of sexual abuse within the Church further undermined trust in clergy as confessors.

Sensitively attuned to the historical importance of confession, For I Have Sinned also suggests that, if the sacrament no longer serves the needs of US Catholics, the Church and its members might find new ways to express their ideals in the twenty-first century.

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Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy, "Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the decades preceding World War II, professional architecture schools enrolled increasing numbers of women, but career success did not come easily. Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Mary Anne Hunting and Dr. Kevin D. Murphy tells the stories of the resilient and resourceful women who surmounted barriers of sexism, racism, and classism to take on crucial roles in the establishment and growth of Modernism across the United States.

Dr. Hunting and Dr. Murphy describe how the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Massachusetts evolved for the professional education of women between 1916 and 1942. While alumnae such as Eleanor Agnes Raymond, Victorine du Pont Homsey, and Sarah Pillsbury Harkness achieved some notoriety, others like Elizabeth-Ann Campbell Knapp and Louisa Vaughan Conrad have been largely absent from histories of Modernism. Dr. Hunting and Dr. Murphy describe how these innovative practitioners capitalized on social, educational, and professional ties to achieve success and used architecture to address social concerns, including how modernist ideas could engage with community and the environment. Some joined women-led architectural firms while others partnered with men or contributed to Modernism as retailers of household furnishings, writers and educators, photographers and designers, or fine artists.

With stunning illustrations, Women Architects at Work offers new histories of recognized figures while recovering the stories of previously unsung women, all of whom contributed to the modernization of American architecture and design.

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James Tejani, "A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America" (Norton, 2024)

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. The busiest container port in the Western hemisphere, it claims one-sixth of all US ocean shipping. Yet despite its centrality to our world, the port and the story of its making have been neglected in histories of the United States. In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America (WW Norton, 2024), historian Dr. James Tejani corrects that significant omission, charting the port’s rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro estuary—and showing how the story of the port is the story of modern, globalized America itself.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had identified the West Coast as the republic’s destiny, a gateway to the riches of the Pacific. In a narrative spanning decades and stretching to Washington, DC, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia, Tejani demonstrates how San Pedro came to be seen as all-important to the nation’s future. It was not virgin land, but dominated by powerful Mexican estates that would not be dislodged easily. Yet American scientists, including the great surveyor George Davidson, imperialist politicians such as Jefferson Davis and William Gwin, and hopeful land speculators, among them the future Union Army general Edward Ord, would wrest control of the estuary, and set the scene for the violence, inequality, and engineering marvels to come.

San Pedro was no place for a harbor, Dr. Tejani reveals. The port was carved in defiance of nature, using new engineering techniques and massive mechanical dredgers. Business titans such as Collis Huntington and Edward H. Harriman brought their money and corporate influence to the task. But they were outmatched by government reformers, laying the foundations for the port, for the modern city of Los Angeles, and for our globalized world. Interweaving the natural history of San Pedro into this all-too-human history, Dr. Tejani vividly describes how a wild coast was made into the engine of American power. A story of imperial dreams and personal ambition, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is necessary reading for anyone who seeks to understand what the United States was, what it is now, and what it will be.

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Making Radio History

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. She is the author of The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture” issue of the Radical History Review (2013). She has published articles in American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Russian Review, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Radio Journal, Cultural Studies, Social Media Society, and more.

Elena’s someone I’m always excited to talk to when I see her at conferences and I thought it would be fun talk to her on this podcast. In this episode we discuss some of her research interests including U.S. radio history, audience research, music recommendation and recognition algorithms, and her current book project, which centers on freeform radio station WFMU and the rise of online music.

Toward the end of the episode we talk about Elena’s research strategies as a historian working in the digital age.

And for our Patrons we’ll have Elena’s What’s Good segment, featuring something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join at patreon.com/phantompower.

Today’s show was edited by Nisso Sacha and Mack Hagood.

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Tom Lynch, "Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and Out West: The Settler Colonial Environmental Imaginary (U Nebraska Press, 2022), emeritus professor of English at the University of Nebraska Thomas Lynch takes those stories from two places - Australia and the arid American West - to compare how colonial stories have impacted land use practices. By placing Australian and American texts side by side, Lynch tracks the similar ways that settler colonialism played out across two deserts, while also highlighting important differences given the important ecological and social divergences between the two continents. Outback and Out West is also a book about material use. Rather than remaining in the realm of theory, Lynch places himself in the places he writes about, seeing first hand how settler colonial narratives have changed the land, and imploring readers to take concrete, identifiable, actions to nudge arid ecologies back toward health. Settlers found the West and the Outback strange upon first arrival - Lynch shows how recognizing that everyplace is not just normative, but is a home to somebody is the first step toward saving an ailing planet.

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Jason L. Newton, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest" (West Virginia UP, 2024)

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest (West Virginia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jason L. Newton provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization in America through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape.

Back when resources started running scarce, the environment of the forest and bodies of workers became the natural resources from which mills and landowners extracted. Bodies and cutover landscapes were mobilized in new ways to increase the scale and efficiency of production—a brutal process for workers, human and animal alike. In the Northern Forest, an industrial working class formed in relation to the unique ways that workers' bodies were used to produce value and in relation to the seasonal cycles of the forest environment.

Cutover Capitalism is an innovative historical study that combines methodological approaches from labor history, environmental history, and the new history of capitalism. The book tells a character-driven yet theoretically sophisticated story about what it was like to live through this process of industrialization.

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Jehanne Dubrow, "Civilians" (LSU Press, 2025)

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The final volume in Dr. Jehanne Dubrow’s groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse, Civilians (LSU Press, 2025) examines a significant moment of transformation in a military marriage: the shift from active-duty service to civilian life. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, Dr. Dubrow’s husband came to the end of his tenure as an officer. Civilians addresses what it means when someone who has been trained for war returns from the confining, restrictive space of a naval vessel. Set amid America’s seemingly endless conflicts, Dr. Dubrow’s poems confront pressing questions about the process of transitioning to a new reality as a noncombatant: What happens to the sailor removed from a world of uniforms and uniformity? How is his language changed? His geography? And what happens to a wife once physical and emotional distances are erased and she is reunited with her husband, a man made strange and foreign by his contact with war?

Civilians is a book both shadowed by and in conversation with the classics, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’s The Trojan Women, and Sophocles’s Philoctetes. Blending formal and free verse, with materials ranging from the historical to the personal, Dr. Dubrow offers readers a candid look at the experience of watching a loved one adjust to homelife after a career of military service.

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Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Knopf, 2025)

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace.

We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.

Was it April 9, at Appomattox, as conventional wisdom holds, where Lee surrendered to Grant in Wilmer McLean’s parlor? Or was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”? That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death.

To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States's interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.

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Heather Akou, "Afterthought: A Family Story" (Indiana U Libraries, 2025)

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Afterthought: A Family Story (Indiana University Bloomington Libraries Publishing, 2025) by Dr. Heather Akou focuses on the life of her grandmother, Lila Slaback, who grew up in a dysfunctional, working-class family in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the 1930s. In her short adult life, she gave birth to seven children with at least four different men and died in 1958 at age thirty-six. She was a real person, but her family was not proud of her story. This book is my best attempt to recover it.

This work of historical fiction can be read like a memoir. With extensive notes and resources, it can also be read as inspiration for researching and writing historical fiction, especially in the United States. As an educational text, it would be appropriate for courses on fashion history, American history, gender roles, family, poverty, healthcare, and generational trauma.

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David D. Grafton, "Muhammad in the Seminary: Protestant Teaching about Islam in the Nineteenth Century" (NYU Press, 2024)

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Uncovers what Christian seminaries taught about Islam in their formative years Throughout the nineteenth century, Islam appeared regularly in the curricula of American Protestant seminaries. Islam was not only the focus of Christian missions, but was studied as part of the history of the Church as well as in the new field of comparative religions. Moreover, Arabic was taught as a cognate biblical language to help students better understand biblical Hebrew. Passages from the Qur'an were sometimes read as part of language instruction. Christian seminaries were themselves new institutions in the nineteenth century. Though Islam had already been present in the Americas since the beginning of the slave trade, it was only in the nineteenth century that the American public became more aware of Islam and had increasing contact with Muslims. It was during this period that extensive trade with the Ottoman empire emerged and more feasible travel opportunities to the Middle East became available due to the development of the steamship.

Providing an in-depth look at the information about Islam that was available in seminaries throughout the nineteenth century, Muhammad in the Seminary (NYU Press, 2024) examines what Protestant seminaries were teaching about this tradition in the formative years of pastoral education. In charting how American Christian leaders' ideas about Islam were shaped by their seminary experiences, this volume offers new insight into American religious history and the study of Christian-Muslim relations.

The Rev. Dr. David D. Grafton is the Professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations on the faculty of the Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford International University

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Paul R. Laird and Elizabeth A. Wells, "The Cambridge Companion to West Side Story" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Over sixty years after its opening night, West Side Story is perhaps the most famous and beloved of twentieth-century musicals and stands as a colossus of musical and dramatic achievement. It not only helped define a generation of musical theatre lovers but is among the handful of shows that have contributed to our understanding of American musical identity at mid-century.

Bringing together contemporary scholars in music, theatre, dance, literature, and performance, The Cambridge Companion to West Side Story (Cambridge UP, 2024) explores this explosive 1950s remake of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and its portrayal of the raw passion, rivalries, jealousy and rage that doom the young lovers to their tragic fate. Organized thematically, chapters range from Broadway's history and precursors to West Side Story; the early careers of its creators; the show's score with emphasis on writing, production, and orchestrations; issues of class, colorism, and racism; New York's gang culture, and how the show's legacy can be found in popular culture throughout the world.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Postscript: Not a Matter of Left or Right: Historians Fighting Censorship

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The presidents of the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians join the podcast to talk about the effects of historical censorship, data shredding, meaningful public education – and what everyone can do to fight back.

After being sworn in as the 47th president, Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders. The order entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” declares that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality...” This order has swiftly affected what people may read on websites or museum panels that describe historical events and artifacts.

As a new joint statement from the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians recounts, “Some alterations, such as those related to topics like the Tuskegee Airmen and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, have been hurriedly reversed in response to public outcry. Others remain. The scrubbing of words and acronyms from the Stonewall National Monument webpage, for instance, distorts the site’s history by denying the roles of transgender and queer people in movements for rights and liberation. This distortion of history renders the past unrecognizable to the people who lived it and useless to those who seek to learn from the past.”

Dr. Beth English is Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians. Her research and teaching focus on the historical and contemporary labor movement, working-class issues, globalization, deindustrialization, and women in the workplace. She is the author of A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry, and co-editor of Global Women’s Work: Perspectives on Gender and Work in the Global Economy. She has contributed to the Washington Post, NPR, Vox, Huffington Post, The New Republic, and other media outlets.

Dr. James R. Grossman is executive director of the American Historical Association. Previously, he was vice president for research and education at the Newberry Library, and has taught at University of Chicago and University of California, San Diego. Among his many publications are the award-winning books, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900–1929. His articles and short essays have focused on various aspects of American urban history, African American history, ethnicity, higher education, and the place of history in public culture. His public facing scholarship includes work published in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, The Hill, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Education.

Grossman has consulted on history-related projects generated by the BBC, Smithsonian, and various theater companies, film makers, museums, libraries, and foundations. He has served on the governing boards of the National Humanities Alliance, American Council of Learned Societies, Association of American Colleges and Universities, and Center for Research Libraries.

Mentioned:

OAH’s Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative for individuals to report removed or changed material
For federal workers who are interested in sharing their experiences, OAH’s Emergency Oral History Project
Arlington National Cemetery website removes histories highlighting Black, Hispanic, and women veterans
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
Removal of climate data from government websites
Contribute to AHA and OAH
5calls ap for connecting with federal senators and representatives
AHA Action Alert for Iowa residents (and AHA letter to Iowa Senate Education Committee)

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Amanda M. Greenwell, "The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature" (UP of Mississippi, 2024)

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2024) theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature for children and adults. Through a range of texts, including James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man, Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, and more, Amanda M. Greenwell focuses on children and their literal acts of looking. Detailing how these acts of looking direct the reader, she posits that the sightlines of children serve as signals to renegotiate hegemonic ideologies of race, ethnicity, creed, class, and gender. In her analysis, Greenwell shows how acts of looking constitute a flexible and effective narrative strategy, capable of operating across multiple points of view, focalizations, audiences, and forms.

Weaving together scholarship on the US child, visual culture studies, narrative theory, and other critical traditions, The Child Gaze explores the ways in which child acts of looking compel readers to look at and with a child character, whose gaze encourages critiques of privileged visions of national identity. Chapters investigate how child acts of looking allow texts to redraw circles of inclusion around the locus of the child gaze and mobilize childhood as a site of resistance. The powerful child gaze can thus disrupt dominant scripts of power, widening the lens through which belonging in the US can be understood.

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Tracie Canada, "Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football" (U California Press, 2025)

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football (University of California Press, 2025) shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading "football family" narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America's favorite game.

Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her work has been featured in public venues and outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Guardian, and Scientific American.

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Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, "The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It" (Basic Books, 2024)

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand.

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality.

In The Age of Revolutions (Basic Books, 2024), historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown-from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun-he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures moulded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 engrained forms of inequality and racial hierarchy in modern politics that remain with us today.

A breath taking history spanning three continents, The Age of Revolutions uncovers how the period's grand political transformations emerged across oceans and, slowly and unevenly, over generations.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history at the University of Southern California. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times.

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Matt Lodder, "Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art" (Yale UP, 2024)

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

There is a pervasive stereotype of tattoo culture as relating to an underworld of scoundrels, sailors, and ne’er-do-wells, yet it has existed in the West as a professionalized art practice for centuries. Drawing on extensive new research and unprecedented access to largely unpublished private archives of photographs, art, and ephemera, in Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Matt Lodder offers a new perspective on the history of commercial tattooing in Europe and the United States, beginning even before it emerged as a recognizable profession in the mid-nineteenth century. In the process, he shows that the art of tattoo has long been both practiced and commissioned by individuals across economic, gender, and class divides; he also examines the stylistic trends that have shaped tattoo’s development as an art form over its history.

Lodder introduces the many artists and professionals who shaped tattoo history, including early figures like Martin Hildebrandt, the first-known professional tattoo artist in the West; prominent woman artists like Grace Bell and Jessie Knight; mid-twentieth-century icons like Sailor Jerry and Les Skuse and the Bristol Tattoo Club; and contemporary industry stars including Ed Hardy, Davy Jones, and the Leu family. Richly illustrated with rarely published images, this important book is the first to examine the history of tattoo in the west as both a serious profession and an art form.

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In Covid’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us--A Conversation with Stephen Macedo (Part 2)

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This week on Madison’s Notes, we continue our discussion with Stephen Macedo, co-author of In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton UP, 2025). The book examines the institutional failures during the pandemic, including the politicization of science, inconsistent messaging, and the disproportionate impacts of policies.

We cover key questions: What did “following the science” mean before COVID-19? Macedo explains that science is inherently uncertain, but this nuance was often lost during the pandemic, leading to unrealistic expectations. He also highlights how poor communication about scientific uncertainty eroded public trust.

The conversation addresses contradictory messaging about the origins of COVID-19, with public statements often differing from internal expert discussions. Macedo notes how this disconnect fueled skepticism. He also raises concerns about potential conflicts of interest among health officials and the dangers of concentrating decision-making power in a few unchecked individuals.

Macedo discusses the politicization of masking, which overshadowed scientific evidence and deepened divisions. He advises individuals to seek reputable sources, embrace uncertainty, and remain critical of simplistic narratives. Finally, he stresses the importance of accountability, open debate, and a commitment to democratic values like tolerance and truth as essential for navigating future crises.

This episode offers a concise yet powerful reflection on the lessons of the pandemic and the need for stronger, more transparent governance. Tune in for the full conversation.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Richard Buttny, "Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Buttny, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. With a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, his research interests include environmental communication, discourse analysis, and intercultural communication. Richard's latest book, Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in October 2024. About the book:

Since fracking emerged as a way of extracting natural gas, through intense deep drilling and the use of millions of gallons of water and chemicals to fracture shale, it has been controversial. It is perceived in different ways by different people--by some as an opportunity for increased resources and possibly jobs and other income; by others as a public health and environmental threat; and for many, an unknown. Richard Buttny, a scholar who works on rhetoric and discursive practices, read a story in his local paper in New York about hydrofracking coming to his area and had to research what it was, and what it could mean for his community. Soon he joined neighbors in fighting to have the practice banned state-wide. At the same time, he turned his scholarly eye to the messaging from both sides of the fight, using first-person accounts, interviews, and media coverage.

The activists fighting fracking won. New York is now the only state in the US with sizable deposits of natural gas that has banned hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Unfracked explains the competing rhetoric and discourses on fracking among New York-based advocates, experts, the grassroots, and political officials. Buttny examines how these positions evolved over time and how eventually the state arrived at a decision to ban this extractive technology. His accessible approach provides both a historical recounting of the key events of this seven-year conflict, along with four in-depth case studies: a grassroots citizen group, a public hearing with medical physicians, a key intergovernmental hearing, and a formal debate among experts. The result is a look at a very recent, important historical moment and a useful examination of environmental activist and fossil fuel advocate rhetoric around an issue that continues to cause debate nationwide.

From my own experience reading it, I wholeheartedly agree that it is a must-read for any scholar in the field and also anyone interested in this issue. Please enjoy getting to learn more about Richard and his work in this interview.

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Douglas Field, "Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father and I" (Manchester UP, 2024)

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A moving exploration of the life and work of the celebrated American writer, blending biography and memoir with literary criticism.

Since James Baldwin's death in 1987, his writing - including The Fire Next Time, one of the manifestos of the Civil Rights Movement, and Giovanni's Room, a pioneering work of gay fiction - has only grown in relevance.

Douglas Field was introduced to Baldwin's essays and novels by his father, who witnessed the writer's debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965. In Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father and I (Manchester UP, 2024), he embarks on a journey to unravel his life-long fascination and to understand why Baldwin continues to enthral us decades after his death.

Tracing Baldwin's footsteps in France, the US and Switzerland, and digging into archives, Field paints an intimate portrait of the writer's life and influence. At the same time, he offers a poignant account of coming to terms with his father's Alzheimer's disease. Interweaving Baldwin's writings on family, illness, memory and place, Walking in the dark is an eloquent testament to the enduring power of great literature to illuminate our paths.

Douglas Field is a writer and academic who teaches American literature at the University of Manchester. He has published two books on James Baldwin, the most recent of which is All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin (2015). His work has been published in Beat Scene, the Big Issue, the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, where he has been a regular contributor for twenty years. He is a founding editor of James Baldwin Review.

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Laurel Leff, "Well Worth Saving: American Universities' Life-And-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe" (Yale UP, 2019)

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Well Worth Saving (Yale University Press, 2019), Professor Laurel Leff explores how American universities responded to the sudden and urgent appeals for help from scholars trapped in Nazi-dominated Europe. Although many scholars were welcomed into faculty or research positions in the US, thousands more tried to find a way over and failed. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving" and tells the riveting, full story of the hiring decisions universities made during the Nazi era.

Laurel Leff is Professor of Journalism and Associate Director of Jewish Studies at Northeastern University.

This interview was conducted by Renee Hale, who holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and works in R&D for the food and beverage industry. She is the author of The Nightstorm Files, a voracious reader, and enjoys sharing the joy of discovering new perspectives with listeners.

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Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, "Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020.

Through extensive research, Dr. Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy.

Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.

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Postscript: Donald Trump is Erasing History – What YOU Can Do about it

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On January 20th, Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The order announced that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality...”

The enforcement of this executive order has rippled through the United States – and has included removing words and images from websites and papering over interpretive panels in museums. For example, material related to the Enola Gay -- a WWII Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets – was removed because it contained the word “gay.” As a new joint statement from the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians recounts, “Some alterations, such as those related to topics like the Tuskegee Airmen and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, have been hurriedly reversed in response to public outcry. Others remain. The scrubbing of words and acronyms from the Stonewall National Monument webpage, for instance, distorts the site’s history by denying the roles of transgender and queer people in movements for rights and liberation. This distortion of history renders the past unrecognizable to the people who lived it and useless to those who seek to learn from the past.”

To discuss how – and why – the Trump administration is censoring and removing historical materials, my guest is Dr. Wendy L. Rouse, Professor of History at San Jose State University where she is the program coordinator for the History/Social Science Teacher Preparation Program. Her research focuses on the history of gender and sexuality in the Progressive Era – and her publication for the National Park Service was changed after the executive order. She is the author of books and articles, including Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement published by NYU Press in 2022. Susan’s NBN conversation with Wendy about the book is here.

Mentioned in the Podcast:

Organization of American Historians (OAH)’s Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative for individuals to report removed or changed material
Reports by AP about scrubbing military websites and NPR on removal of photographs and mentions of trans and queer on National Park Service websites
LBGTQ Historian statements and articles including letter signed by 360 historians
Wendy’s blogposts on OutHistory and the NYU Press blog
5calls ap for connecting with senators and representatives
GLBT Historical Association
Multiple LGBTQ organizations, represented by Lambda Legal, have filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration's executive orders attempting to erase transgender people and deny them access to services

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Postscript: How Trump’s Executive Order Contradicts Birthright Citizenship

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Birthright citizenship is established in the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution – yet Donald Trump’s recent Executive Order 14160 denies some types of birthright citizenship. The Order contradicts over a century of American law, legal practice, and constitutional interpretation. Three groups have opposed the order as unconstitutional and challenged it in the courts: and cities, civil rights organizations, and labor organizations. In the podcast, three scholars to help Susan and Lilly interrogate the meaning of natural born citizenship, the political ramifications of Trump’s order, and the complicated history of natural born citizenship in the United States.

Dr. Anna O. Law is the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights and Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

Julie Novkov is Dean of Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy and Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University at Albany, SUNY.

Carol Nackenoff is the Emerita Richter Professor of Political Science, Swarthmore College

Mentioned:

Calvin’s Case (1608)
Donald Trump’s Executive order 14160
Julie and Carol’s 2021 book American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship and their NBN interview with Susan.
Anna’s 2025 FREE open-access article “The Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments’ Effects on Citizenship and Migration”
Anna’s NBN conversation with Heath Brown on her 2017 book, The Immigration Battle in American Courts
Lilly’s conversation with Martha Jones about her book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America
Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from Revolution to Reconstruction (2021)
Lilly’s NBN conversation with Elizabeth Cohen and Cyril Ghosh about their 2019 book Citizenship

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Nima Bassiri, "Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity.

Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state.

Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered.

Nima Bassiri is assistant professor of literature at Duke University, where he is also the codirector of the Institute for Critical Theory.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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In Covid’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us: A Conversation with Frances Lee

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In the first part of our two-part conversation on Madison’s Notes, we speak with Frances Lee, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, about her co-authored book In COVID’s Wake (Princeton UP, 2025). The book offers a comprehensive and candid political assessment of how institutions performed during the pandemic. It explores how governments, influenced by Wuhan’s lockdown, deviated from existing pandemic plans, leading to policies that often favored the “laptop class” while leaving essential workers vulnerable. Extended school closures disproportionately affected less-privileged families, and the politicization of science marginalized dissent. Lee and her co-author, Stephen Macedo, argue that future crises must uphold the values of liberal democracy: tolerance, respect for evidence, and a commitment to truth.

This discussion dives into key questions raised in the book, including the importance of conducting a post-mortem of the pandemic response. Lee highlighted how polarization in the two-party system complicates evaluations of what worked and what didn’t. We also explored the role of states as “laboratories” for different responses and whether meaningful comparisons can be drawn between them. Lee reflected on why pre-existing pandemic plans were abandoned and how the pandemic strained the public’s trust in media, policy advisors, and academic institutions. The ambiguity of desired policy outcomes, she noted, often hindered rational cost-benefit analysis, further complicating the response.

Lee emphasized the value of embracing complexity and ambiguity in conversations about societal and political issues. By examining the pandemic’s lessons, “In COVID’s Wake” challenges readers to consider how we can better prepare for future crises while staying true to democratic principles.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall, "Ain't I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston's literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what socio-cultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to Hurston's two areas of achievement by examining the critical response to her work across both fields. Drawing on a wide range of readings, Freeman Marshall explores Hurston's popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions. Perceptive and original, Ain't I an Anthropologist (University of Illinois Press, 2023) is an overdue reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston's place in American cultural and intellectual life.

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"Steadfast Democrats" Five Years Later: A Conversation with Chryl N. Laird

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Chryl Laird, Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. We are discussing her co-authored book with Ismail White, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. Published in 2020, this book remains highly relevant for understanding American political behavior. While Trump did make significant gains among black voters in 2024, particularly male voters, African American voters still overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. Chryl has appeared on the NBN in the past, so while we will discuss the book, we will also discuss it in the context of today.

Chryl Laird is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850" (UNC Press, 2025)

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Most US history textbooks contain a familiar map: shaded colors stretch across North America, clearly and neatly demarcating the extent of US expansion from 1776 thru the late nineteenth century. In The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limites of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press, 2025), University of Kansas distinguished historian Andrew Isenberg asks us to rethink the clean lines and simple borders of the North American past. By examing the stories of escaped enslaved people, Christian missionaries, government vaccination campaigns, anti-slavery schemes, and even well worn historical events like Lewis and Clark and the Lousiana Purchase, Isenberg shows that American power at its borders fell far short of expectations in Washington, and often doesn't match up to historical interpretations in our present day. Rather, American hegemony in the borderlands was contingent, weak, and anything but assured, until well into the nineteenth century. Rather than Manifest Destiny, Isenberg argues that American expansion both west and south should be viewed as one of just many possible outcomes of the boistrous mess that was early North American politics.

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Kristin A. Olbertson, "The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Kristin Olbertson is the first comprehensive study of criminal speech in eighteenth-century New England, traces how the criminalization, prosecution, and punishment of speech offenses in Massachusetts helped to establish and legitimate a social and cultural regime of politeness.

Analyzing provincial statutes and hundreds of criminal prosecutions, Dr. Olbertson argues that colonists transformed their understanding of speech offenses, from fundamentally ungodly to primarily impolite. As white male gentility emerged as the pre-eminent model of authority, records of criminal prosecution and punishment show a distinct cadre of politely pious men defining themselves largely in contrast to the vulgar, the impious, and the unmanly. “Law,” as manifested in statutes as well as in local courts and communities, promoted and legitimized a particular, polite vision of the king's peace and helped effectuate the British Empire. In this unique and fascinating work, Dr. Olbertson reveals how ordinary people interacted with and shaped legal institutions.

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Lina-Maria Murillo, "Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands" (UNC Press, 2025)

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez have confronted various interest groups determined to control their reproductive lives, including a heavily funded international population control campaign led by Planned Parenthood Federation of America as well as the Catholic Church and Mexican American activists. Uncovering nearly one hundred years of struggle, Lina-Maria Murillo reveals how Mexican-origin women on both sides of the border fought to reclaim autonomy and care for themselves and their communities.

Faced with a family planning movement steeped in eugenic ideology, working-class Mexican-origin women strategically demanded additional health services and then formed their own clinics to provide care on their own terms. Along the way, they developed what Murillo calls reproductive care— quotidian acts of community solidarity—as activists organized for better housing, education, wages, as well as access to birth control, abortion, and more. In Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands (UNC Press, 2025), Murillo lays bare Mexican-origin women's long battle for human dignity and power in the borderlands as reproductive freedom in Texas once again hangs in the balance.

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Richard Heppner, "Woodstock: From World War to Culture Wars" (SUNY Press, 2024)

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Few towns in America are as famous as Woodstock, New York—although Woodstock may be most famous for an event that happened many miles away! Long before the 1969 Woodstock festival put the town on the map, it had been a center for artists and free thinkers who found refuge in its rural setting. Longtime citizens were often shocked by the arrival of these newcomers who brought new values and attitudes to their once-isolated village. From the transformative arrival of artists in the early twentieth century to the influx of musicians and young people in the 1960s, Woodstockers worked and struggled to balance everyday life in a small, rural community with the attention and notoriety the outside world brought to it.

Presented chronologically, Woodstock: From World War to Culture Wars (SUNY Press, 2024) examines the nature of change within Woodstock's uncommon story as it emerges from the Great Depression, confronts the realty of World War II, moves through the 1950s and into an unimagined and unintended future with the arrival of the Sixties through today. At its core, this is a story of how Woodstock's cultural and political institutions, its citizens, and its physical landscape met the ever-changing challenges of changing times. It is a story of community, resilience, conflict, and transition into a world its early settlers could not have imagined.

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Gary Griggs, "California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State" (U California Press, 2024)

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

California has more natural hazards per square mile than any other state, but this hasn’t deterred people from moving here. Entire California towns and regions frequently contend with destruction caused by earthquakes, floods, landslides and debris flows, and sea-level rise and coastal erosion. As Dr. Gary Griggs demonstrates in California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State (University of California Press, 2024), few years go by without a disaster of some kind, and residents often rebuild in the same locations that were just destroyed.

Considering the current climate crisis and increasing environmental inequalities, the stakes are growing ever higher. This book dives into the history of the state’s vulnerability to natural hazards, why and where these events occur, and how Californians can better prepare going forward. A mix of photographs and maps both historical and contemporary orients readers within the state’s sprawling landscapes and provides glimpses of some of the geologic risks in each region. With the final chapter, Dr. Griggs issues a call to action and challenges readers to envision a safer, more equitable, and sustainable future.

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Rachelle Bergstein, "The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us" (Atria, 2024)

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Everyone knows Judy Blume.

Her books have garnered her fans of all ages for decades and sold tens of millions of copies. But why were people so drawn to them? And why are we still talking about them now in the 21st century?

In The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (Atria, 2024), her remarkable story is revealed as never before, beginning with her as a mother of two searching for purpose outside of her home in 1960s suburban New Jersey. The books she wrote starred regular children with genuine thoughts and problems. But behind those deceptively simple tales, Blume explored the pillars of the growing women’s rights movement, in which girls and women were entitled to careers, bodily autonomy, fulfilling relationships, and even sexual pleasure. Blume wasn’t trying to be a revolutionary—she just wanted to tell honest stories—but in doing so, she created a cohesive, culture-altering vision of modern adolescence.

Blume’s bravery provoked backlash, making her the country’s most-banned author in the mid-1980s. Thankfully, her works withstood those culture wars and it’s no coincidence that Blume has resurfaced as a cultural touchstone now. Young girls are still cat-called, sex education curricula are getting dismissed as pornography, and entire shelves of libraries are being banned. As we face these challenges, it’s only natural we look to Blume, the grand dame of so-called dirty books. This is the story of how a housewife became a groundbreaking artist, and how generations of empowered fans are her legacy, today more than ever.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Georgia Finnegan, "Grace & Grit: A History of Ballet in Minnesota" (Afton Historical Society, 2024)

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The names are iconic and familiar to anyone in Minnesota with an interest in dance: the Andaházy School of Classical Ballet, Minnesota Dance Theatre, James Sewell Ballet, Saint Paul City Ballet, and many more. Minnesota dance insider Georgia Finnegan, with a decades-long career as a professional ballet dancer and administrator of several dance companies in the Twin Cities, has compiled for the first time a comprehensive and long overdue history of ballet in Minnesota. In a lively writing style that features entertaining and moving personal stories as well as factual accounts about ballet companies, dance schools, artistic visionaries, and the supporters who helped to make it possible, Finnegan has created a remarkable resource on this particular art form in a state renowned for its commitment to art and culture.

From the international love story of Lorand and Anna Andaházy, to the Houltons and their beloved Nutcracker tradition, to the innovative Ballet of the Dolls, which brought new audiences to the dance performances, Grace & Grit introduces the major figures during more than eighty years of ballet in Minnesota, including companies and schools in Duluth, Rochester, Grand Rapids, and throughout the state as well as significant academic dance programs at several Minnesota colleges. Through numerous interviews and enhanced by her own experience and extensive connections, Finnegan presents her substantial in-depth research in a dynamic text that finally captures the successes, challenges, accomplishments, transitions, memorable performances, and fascinating people involved with the establishment and flourishing of ballet in Minnesota.

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Arwen P. Mohun, "American Imperialist: Cruelty and Consequence in the Scramble for Africa" (Chicago UP, 2023)

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This biography of “African explorer” Richard Dorsey Mohun, written by one of his descendants, reveals how American greed and state power helped shape the new imperial order in Africa.

Richard Dorsey Mohun spent his career circulating among the eastern United States, the cities and courts of Europe, and the African continent, as he served the US State Department at some points and King Leopold of Belgium at others. A freelance imperialist, he implemented the schemes of American investors and the Congo Free State alike. Without men like him, Africa’s history might have unfolded very differently. How did an ordinary son of a Washington bookseller become the agent of American corporate greed and European imperial ambition? Why did he choose to act in ways that ranged from thoughtless and amoral to criminal and unforgivable?

With unblinking clarity and precision, historian Arwen P. Mohun interrogates the life and actions of her great-grandfather in American Imperialist: Cruelty and Consequence in the Scramble for Africa (Chicago UP, 2023). She seeks not to excuse the man known as Dorsey but to understand how individual ambition and imperial lust fueled each other, to catastrophic ends. Ultimately, she offers a nuanced portrait of how her great-grandfather’s pursuit of career success and financial security for his family came at a tragic cost to countless Africans.

Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores the intersections of caste, religiosities, performances, sacred geographies, and the state, as informing/informed by colonial and postcolonial mobilities and circulatory regimes across modern South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific research interests, his disciplinary interests revolve across anthropology, literature, and the digital humanities. When not reading or writing in the university library, Rounak can be found organizing ambitious culinary ventures for friends and family. On Twitter.

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Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law--A Conversation with Janie Nitze

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, I spoke with Janie Nitze, co-author of Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law (Harper, 2004), a book written alongside Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Janie, a Harvard-educated attorney and former clerk for Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, discussed the growing complexity of laws in America and their impact on everyday citizens. The book shares stories of ordinary Americans—fishermen in Florida, families in Montana, monks in Louisiana, and more—who find themselves caught in legal mazes created by an overwhelming and often opaque system of regulations.

Janie explained that while laws are necessary to maintain order and freedom, the sheer volume and complexity of modern regulations can undermine those principles. She highlighted how excessive laws, many of which are created by unelected agency officials, disproportionately affect those without wealth or power. Through these stories, Over Ruled shows how overregulation can erode trust in the legal system and create unintended consequences for individuals navigating their lives.

Janie’s perspective, shaped by her work at the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice, and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, provided a clear look at the challenges of balancing regulation and individual liberty. Over Ruled is a timely exploration of these issues, and this episode offers a deeper understanding of the human cost of too much law. Tune in to hear Janie’s insights and learn more about the stories behind the book.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Elizabeth T. Craft, "Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

George M. Cohan was one of those rare Broadway figures who was a composer, lyricist, playwright, performer, director, theater owner, and star actor. He could, quite literally, do it all. In his day, he was famous as the "Yankee Doodle Boy" from his hit song and as the "Man Who Owned Broadway" from his musical of the same name. Cohan's songs and shows captured the spirit of an era when staggering social change gave new urgency to efforts to define Americanism.

Elizabeth Craft’s Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage (Oxford University Press, 2024) is not a conventional biography. Each chapter explores a different aspect of his life and career including Cohan’s approach to American nationalism, Irish American identity, celebrity, and the entertainment business along with defining what made Cohan’s shows unique. Craft finds songs and shows that serve as exemplars for each theme she highlights. The book ends with an examination of the 1942 biopic on Cohan and his enduring legacy. Yankee Doodle Dandy offers not only a fuller understanding of Cohan’s shows and career, but also new perspectives on fundamental debates about American identity and the performing arts in the early twentieth-century United States.

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Jack Dempsey, "Warriors for Liberty: William Dollarson & Michigan's Civil War African Americans" (Michigan Civil War Association, 2024)

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Michigan's African Americans played critical roles in winning the Civil War and setting millions of fellow Americans forever free. The 1st Michigan Colored Infantry Regiment, more than 1,500 strong, helped overwhelm their enemies on the battlefield. Alongside the soldiers, civilian Black men and women contributed in previously unrecognized ways to defending and extending human liberty. One such unsung hero, William Dollarson, escaped from brutal slave conditions in Natchez, became a conductor on the Underground Railroad in Detroit, and joined the staff of Michigan's preeminent general in fighting the Confederacy in Maryland and Virginia. This first-ever complete recounting coincides with the 160th anniversary of the Michigan regiment mustering into the U.S. Army.

Warriors for Liberty: William Dollarson & Michigan's Civil War African Americans (Michigan Civil War Association, 2024) sheds unprecedented light on the heroism, patriotism, and fortitude of Michiganders of African descent during this tumultuous era in American history. Aided by extensive research and fresh scholarship, this volume is a breakthrough study of compelling depth and majesty. Included is a first-person account by victims of the 1863 Detroit riot that spurred greater sacrifice by Michigan's people of color in the cause of saving the Union and of emancipation.

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Michael Visontay, "Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible" (Scribe, 2024)

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

One hundred years ago, Gabriel Wells, a New York bookseller, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world’s greatest book, the Gutenberg Bible, and sold it off in individual pages. In 1921, Wells’ audacity scandalized the rare-book world. The Gutenberg was the first substantial book in Europe to have been printed on a printing press. It represented the democratization of knowledge and was the Holy Grail of rare books. In Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible (Scribe, 2024), Michael Visontay describes how Wells’s gamble set off a chain of events that changed his family’s destiny.

Interviewee: Michael Visontay is the Commissioning Editor of The Jewish Independent, and has worked as a journalist and senior editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian.

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Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola, "Hollywood Unions" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Hollywood Unions (Rutgers UP, 2024) is a unique collection that tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized motion picture and television labor: IATSE, the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, and the WGA. The Hollywood unions represent a wide swath of the workers making media: from directors and stars to grips and makeup artists. People today know some of these organizations from their glitzy annual awards celebrations, but the unions’ actual importance is in bargaining with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on behalf of 331,000 workers in the motion picture and television industry. The Hollywood unions are not neutral institutions but rather have long histories of jurisdictional battles, competitions with rival unions, and industry-altering strikes. They have supported the industry’s workers through the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy era, the collapse of the studio system, the rise of television, runaway production, fights for gender parity, the digital revolution, and a global pandemic. The history of these unions has contributed to making media work sustainable in the long term and helped shape the conditions and production cultures of Hollywood.

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Hallie Franks, "Ancient Sculpture and Twentieth-Century American Womanhood: Venus Envy" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Ancient Sculpture and Twentieth-Century American Womanhood: Venus Envy (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Hallie Franks examines the reception of Graeco-Roman sculptures of Venus and their role in the construction of the body aesthetics of the “fit” American woman in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. In this historical moment, 19th-century anthropometric methods, the anti-corset dress reform movement and early fitness culture were united in their goal of identifying and producing healthy, procreative female bodies. These discourses presented ancient statues of Venus – most frequently, the Venus de Milo – as the supreme visual model of a superior, fit, feminine physique. An America of such Venuses would herald the future prosperity of the “American race” by reviving the robust health and moral righteousness of the ancient Greeks.

Venuses had long been symbols of beauty, but the new situation of Venus statues as an aesthetic and moral destination for women set up a slippage between ideal sculpture and living bodies: what did it mean for a woman to embody – or to try to embody – the perfect health and beauty of an ancient statue? How were women expected to translate this model into flesh? What were the political stakes to which this vision of a nation of American Venuses was bound? Who was believed to conform to this ideal, and who was excluded from it? In taking on these questions, Dr. Franks engages with physical culture and dress-reform media, modern artwork that adapts Graeco-Roman traditions, anthropological texts, art histories of ancient Greece, film, advertising and medical reporting on women's health.

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Erik Baker, "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change—not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven't seen commensurate rewards.

Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard University Press, 2025) by Dr. Erik Baker explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as “self-realization.” Policy experts embraced the new ethic as a remedy for urban and Third World poverty. Every social group and political tendency, it seems, has had its own exemplary entrepreneurs.

Dr. Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious––and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. From the advent of corporate capitalism in the Gilded Age to the economic stagnation of recent decades, Americans have become accustomed to the reality that today’s job may be gone tomorrow. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to “make your own job” keeps hope alive.

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Timothy P. R. Weaver, "Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City" (Temple UP, 2025)

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Looking closely at New York City's political development since the 1970s, three "political orders"--conservativism, neoliberalism, and egalitarianism--emerged. In Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, Timothy Weaver argues that the intercurrent impact of these orders has created a constant battle for power.

Weaver brings these clashes to the fore by showing how New York City politics has been shaped by these conflicting orders. He examines the transformation of the city's political economy in the aftermath of the 1975 fiscal crisis through neoliberal real estate development and privatization, the conservative rise of law-and-order politics in the 1970s to 1990s, and the efforts of the city's egalitarians to respond to each of these shifts through social movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter.

Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City (Temple UP, 2025) belies glib assumptions about the city's liberal character. Weaver reveals the metropolis not as a homogenous political whole, but as a site in which the victories and defeats of rival political forces change the terms of local citizenship for the millions of residents who call the city home.

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Dawn Day Biehler, "Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History" (U Washington Press, 2024)

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central Park has long been home to an abundance of animals. In 1858, the city adopted the Greensward Plan and began the long process of reshaping the 843 acres of land into a park where everything—from the trees to the trails to the inhabitants—would be meticulously planned to benefit New Yorkers and to promote the city as a global metropolis among the likes of London and Paris. But this vision of Central Park embodied white elite European values, and disagreements about which creatures belonged in the park’s waters and green spaces have often perpetuated systems of oppression.

Illuminating the multispecies story of Central Park from the 1850s to the 1970s in Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History (University of Washington Press, 2024), Dr. Dawn Day Biehler examines the vibrant and intimately connected lives of humans and nonhuman animals in the park. She reveals stories of grazing sheep, teeming fish, nesting swans, migrating warblers, and escaped bison as well as human New Yorkers’ attempts to reconfigure their relationships to the land and claim spaces for recreation and leisure. Ultimately, Dr. Biehler shows how Central Park has always been a place where animals and humans alike have vied for power and belonging.

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Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America's Biggest Retail Stores

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Our book is: Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (UP of Colorado, 2024) which presents a new look at how the big box retail store has dramatically reshaped the US economy and its ecosystems in the last half century. From the rural South to the frigid North, from inside stores to ecologies far beyond, this book examines the relationships that make up one of the most visible features of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century American life. The rise of big box retail since the 1960s has transformed environments on both local and global scales. Almost everyone has explored the aisles of big box stores. The allure of “everyday low prices” and brightly colored products of every kind connect shoppers with a global marketplace. Contributors join a growing conversation between business and environmental history, addressing the ways American retail institutions have affected physical and cultural ecologies around the world. Essays on Walmart, Target, Cabela’s, REI, and Bass Pro Shops assess the “bigness” of these superstores from “smokestacks to coat racks” and contend that their ecological impacts are not limited to the footprints of parking lots and manufacturing but also play a didactic role in educating consumers about their relationships with the environment. A model for historians seeking to bring business and environmental histories together in their analyses of merchant capital’s role in the landscapes of everyday life and how it has remade human relationships with nature, Big Box USA is a must-read for students and scholars of the environment, business, sustainability, retail professionals, and a general audience.

Our guest is: Dr. Rachel Gross, who is assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver, where she teaches US environmental, business, and public history. She works with university and community partners to bring history into the public realm. She is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America, and the co-editor of Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She uses her PhD in history to explore what stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Laureen D. Hom, "The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles" (U California Press, 2024)

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Chinatown neighborhoods in the United States are about more than restaurants, shops, and architecture, argues San Jose State urban studies associate professor Laureen Hom in The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles (California UP, 2024). They're also communities where people live, organize, and argue over politics. Chinatowns are vital political actors, places where culture, history, and community come together to form bulwarks of power as places that have historically had considerable agency in shaping their own destiny. In this close study of Los Angeles' Chinatown neighborhood in the early twenty first century, Hom argues that the neighborhood is a complex places, where urban trends such as gentrification and displacement have been at once both pushed against and, at times, encouraged, both from within and without.

The Power of Chinatown puts people at the center of the story, arguing that for all its tourist appeal, it is those who live in this place who care about it the most, and thus are willing to fight the hardest to protect what makes this neighborhood truly a community.

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Jeffrey Thomas Perry, "Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Most Americans today would not think of their local church as a site for arbitration and would probably be hesitant to bring their property disputes, moral failings, or personal squabbles to their kin and neighbors for judgment. But from the Revolutionary Era through the mid-nineteenth century, many Protestants imbued local churches with immense authority. Through their ritual practice of discipline, churches insisted that brethren refrain from suing each other before "infidels" at local courts and claimed jurisdiction over a range of disputes: not only moral issues such as swearing, drunkenness, and adultery but also matters more typically considered to be under the purview of common law and courts of equity, including disputes over trespass, land, probate, slave warranty, and theft.

In Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Jeffrey Thomas Perry explores the ways that ordinary Americans--Black and white, enslaved and free--understood and created law in their local communities, uncovering a vibrant marketplace of authority in which church meetinghouses played a central role in maintaining their neighborhoods' social peace. Churches were once prominent sites for the creation of local law and in this period were a primary arena in which civil and religious authority collided and shaped one another. When church discipline failed, the wronged parties often pushed back, and their responses highlight the various forces that ultimately hindered that venue's ability to effectively arbitrate disputes between members. Relying primarily on a deep reading of church records and civil case files, Perry examines how legal transformations, an expanding market economy, and religious controversy led churchgoers to reimagine their congregations' authority. By the 1830s, unable to resolve doctrinal quibbles within the fellowship, church factions turned to state courts to secure control over their meetinghouses, often demanding that judges wade into messy ecclesiastical disputes.

Tracking changes in disciplinary rigor in Kentucky Baptist churches from that state's frontier period through 1845, and looking beyond statutes and court decrees, Law in American Meetinghouses is a fresh take on church-state relations. Ultimately, it highlights an oft-forgotten way that Americans subtly repositioned religious institutions alongside state authority.

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Linh Thuy Nguyen, "Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production" (Temple UP, 2024)

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Nearly fifty years after the end of the war in Vietnam, American children of Vietnamese refugees continue to process the meanings of the war and its consequences through creative work. Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production (Temple UP, 2024) examines how Vietnamese American cultural productions register lived experiences of racism in their depictions of family life and marginalization.

Second-generation texts illustrate how the children of refugees from Vietnam are haunted by trauma and a violent, ever-present, but mostly unarticulated past. Linh Thủy Nguyễn’s analysis reveals that present experiences of economic insecurity and racism also shape these narratives of familial loss.

Developing a theory of intergenerational trauma, Nguyễn rethinks how U.S. imperialism, the discourse of communism, and assimilation impacted families across generations. Through ethnic studies and feminist and queer-of-color critique, Displacing Kinship offers a critical approach for reading family tensions and interpersonal conflict as affective investments informed by the material, structural conditions of white supremacy and racial capitalism.

She was recently featured in an interview regarding her monograph with Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE) of Choice, apublishing unit of the Association of College and Research Libraries. The complete interview is available at www.choice360.org/tie-post/tie-talks-with-linh-thuy-nguyen/.

Linh Thủy Nguyễn, PhD, is associate professor of American ethnic studies; adjunct associate professor of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies; and faculty associate in the Center for Southeast Asia and its Diasporas and the Harry Bridges Labor Center at the University of Washington. Her research explores the interpersonal and structural relationships between history, memory, race, war, migration, nation, and family. You can find more at linhthuynguyen.com.

Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard. Her research explores modern Vietnamese literature, literary translation across French, Vietnamese, English, and Chinese, and the literary history of French Indochina. She can be reached at cpham@g.harvard.edu.

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Mike Sielski, "Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The evolution of basketball, and much of the social and cultural change in America, can be traced through one powerful act on the court: the slam dunk. The dunk's history is the story of a sport and a country changed by the most dominant act in basketball, and it makes Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk (St. Martin's Press, 2025) a rollicking and insightful piece of narrative history and a surefire classic of sports literature.

When basketball was the province of white men, the dunk acted as a revolutionary agent, a tool for players like Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell to transform the sport into a Black man’s game. The dunk has since been an expression of Black culture amid the righteous upheaval of the civil-rights movement, of the threat that Black people were considered to be to the establishment. It was banned from college basketball for nearly a decade―an attempt to squash the individual expression and athleticism that characterized the sport in America’s cities and on its playgrounds. The dunk nevertheless bubbled up to basketball’s highest levels. From Julius Erving to Michael Jordan to the high flyers of the 21st century, the dunk has been a key mechanism for growing the NBA into a global goliath.

Drawing on deep reporting and dozens of interviews with players, coaches, and other hoops experts, Magic in the Air brings to life the tale of the dunk while balancing sharp socio-racial history and commentary with a romp through American sports and culture. There's never been a basketball book quite like it.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be published in 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Religious Freedom: A Conversation on the Conservative Tradition with John D. Wilsey

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this conversation, we sit down with John D. Wilsey, Professor of Church History and Philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Senior Fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, to tackle the urgent and often contentious topic of religious freedom in America. Drawing from his forthcoming book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer (William B. Eerdmans, 2025), Wilsey examines how conservatives have historically understood religious freedom, how those views have evolved, and why the gap between past and present perspectives matters in today’s culture, and how it is the bedrock of American Government.

Wilsey addresses issues at the heart of this debate: How has the conservative understanding of religious freedom shifted, and what are the consequences of that shift?

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Aure Schrock on Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Aure Schrock, an interdisciplinary technology scholar and writing coach and editor at Indelible Voice, about their book, Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America (MIT Press, 2024)

Politics Recoded examines the history and culture of Code for America, an organization that, as one of its leaders put it, aimed “to promote ‘civic hacking,’ and to bring 21st century technology to government.” The book describes how the organization has changed over time from a “tech-forward” vision rooted in techno-libertarianism to an organization that provides something like digital consulting services to governments. The pair also talk about Aure’s writing and editing company, the Indelible Voice, and what it’s like helping scholars refine their vision and voice in academic writing.

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Postscript: How to Fight Back: Charting Opposition to the Actions of the Trump Administration

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Shortly after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 47th American president, he issued 37 executive orders and, subsequently, the Trump administration has – through formal processes and also through extra-governmental extraordinary practices – triggered what many are calling a governmental and/or constitutional crisis. Dr. Christina Pagel has published two important Substack articles in which she groups the activities of the Trump administration into authoritarian and proto-authoritarian actions – and maps the opposition. Her unbelievable Venn diagram reveals which actions are being met with organized resistance – and which are being left unchallenged. She is a data hound – and her data not only clarifies what is happening in the United States but provides tools for those who wish to effectively oppose it in the U.S. and abroad.

Dr. Christina Pagel is Professor of Operational Research in Health Care, University College London. Operational Research is a pragmatic branch of mathematics to help people solve real-life problems. She is a member of Independent SAGE providing accessible updates on the national and international Covid-19 situation since May 2020. She has published in public-facing venues such as The Conversation and her free Substack, Diving into Data & Decision making. You can follow her on social media.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Christina’s 2/13/25 Substack, "So this is how liberty dies… " Making sense of Trump's first three weeks (categorizing 76 Trump administration actions and demonstrating how they align with authoritarianism).

Christina’s 2/17/25 Substack, How to fight back: charting opposition to the actions of the Trump administration (showing how Blue states, labor organizations, and civil rights groups are doing the most – and what can be learned from them).

The Just Security’s Litigation Tracker based at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.

Vox’s 2/12/25 Unexplainable podcast, “Is Science in Danger?” (20 minutes) Noam Hassenfeld interviewing Derek Dowe (chemist/science writer) Transcript or podcast.

Susan’s interview with Corey Brettschneider on his new Norton book The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It

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Benjamin Heber Johnson, "Texas: An American History" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

There's more to Texas than hats, oil, and BBQ, writes Benjamin Johnson in his sweeping new synthesis, Texas: An American History (Yale UP: 2025) - though, those all matter too. The state's reach has traveled globally, Johnson argues, influencing everything from how people around the world eat, to how they pray, to the music they listen to. In his new book, Johnson describes the long history of the Lone Star State, from its thousands of years of Indigenous habitation up through the present day. Along the way, he makes some surprising detours, including explaining how Indigenous Texas was anything but a backwater to Mesoamerica, and demonstrating the long progressive legacy in a state known today for its ardent conservatism. Texas is a book as big as its topic, trekking through centuries of history via noteworthy anecdotes which provide a window into a place that defies stereotypes.

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Ilan Stavans, "Latino USA: A Cartoon History" (Basic Books, 2024)

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This interview includes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M); Annette Martínez-Iñesta, Instructor of Italian, UPR-M; and Baruch Vergara, Artist and Professor of Plastic Arts, UPR-M. This episode has been sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, the Department of Humanities at the UPR-M, and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes.

This is the second podcast with Ilan Stavans about Latino USA; the first, in Spanish, is available on the New Books Network en español. About the book:

In Latino USA, Latin American and Latino scholar Ilan Stavans captures the joys, nuances, and multiple dimensions of Latino culture within the context of the English language. Combining the solemnity of so-called serious literature and history with the inherently theatrical and humorous form of comics, this cartoon history of Latinos includes Columbus, the Alamo, Desi Arnaz, West Side Story, Castro, Guevara, the Bay of Pigs, Neruda, the Mariel boatlift, Selena, Sonia Sotomayor, and much more.

To embrace the sweep of Hispanic civilization and its riot of types, archetypes, and stereotypes, Stavans deploys a series of "cliché figurines" as narrators, including a toucan (displayed regularly in books by García Márquez, Allende, and others), the beloved Latino comedian Cantinflas, a masked wrestler, and Captain America. Their multiple, at times contradictory voices provide unique perspectives on Latino history, together creating a carnivalesque epic, democratic and impartial.

Updated to bring the book up to the present moment, this twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes thirty new pages of Latino history, from Hamilton to George Santos. Latino USA, like the history it so entertainingly relates, is a treasure trove of irreverence, wit, subversion, anarchy, politics, humanism, and celebration.

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The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Our book is: The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024) by Dr. Amy Reading, which is a lively and intimate biography of trailblazing and era-defining New Yorker editor Katharine S. White. White helped build the magazine’s prestigious legacy and transform the 20th century literary landscape for women. In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse.

This exquisite biography brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words. White’s biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker—Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more. She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now classic stories and essays. She propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer’s work but also their life. Based on years of scrupulous research, acclaimed author Amy Reading creates a rare and deeply intimate portrait of a prolific editor—through both her incredible tenure at The New Yorker, and her famous marriage to E.B. White—and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community.

Our guest is: Dr. Amy Reading. Her book, The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. She is also the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library, among others. She lives in upstate New York, where she serves on the board of her local independent bookstore, Buffalo Street Books.

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Lori A. Flores, "Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19" (UNC Press, 2025)

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx people, including the largely underpaid and migrant workers who harvest, process, cook, and sell this desirable food. In Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19 (UNC Press, 2025), Lori A. Flores traces how our dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor has evolved from the World War II era to the COVID-19 pandemic, using the US Northeast as an unexpected microcosm of this national history.

Spanning the experiences of food workers with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America, Flores's narrative travels from New Jersey to Maine and examines different links in the food chain, from farming to restaurants to seafood processing to the deliverista rights movement. What unites this eclectic material is Flores's contention that as our appetite for Latinx food has grown exponentially, the visibility of Latinx food workers has demonstrably decreased. This precariat is anything but passive, however, and has historically fought--and is still fighting--against low wages and exploitation, medical neglect, criminalization, and deeply ironic food insecurity.

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Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. But, in America, this wasn’t always the case. Though for most of world history your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and for 200 years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity. Then, as the twentieth century wound down, economic and geographic stasis set in, producing deep social polarization.

What happened? In Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity (Random House, 2025), Yoni Appelbaum introduces us to the reformers who destroyed American mobility with discriminatory zoning laws, federal policies, and community gatekeeping. From the first zoning laws enacted to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California, to the toxic blend of private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in mid-century Flint, Michigan, Appelbaum shows us how Americans lost the freedom to move. Even Jane Jacobs’s well-intentioned fight against development in Greenwich Village choked off opportunity for strivers—and started a trend that would put desirable neighborhoods out of reach for most of us. And yet he also offers glimmers of hope. Perhaps our problems as a nation aren’t as intractable as they seem. If we tear down the barriers to mobility and return to the social and economic dynamism Americans invented, we might be able to rediscover the tolerance and possibility that made us distinctive.

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Adam R. Nelson, "Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America (U Chicago Press, 2023) launches a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of American higher education. In this volume, Adam R. Nelson focuses on the early republic, explaining how knowledge itself became a commodity, as useful ideas became salable goods and American colleges were drawn into transatlantic commercial relations. American scholars might once have imagined that higher education could sit beyond the sphere of market activity—that intellectual exchange could transcend vulgar consumerism—but already by the end of the eighteenth century, they saw how ideas could be factored into the nation’s balance of trade. Moreover, they concluded that it was the function of colleges to oversee the complex process whereby knowledge could be priced and purchased. The history of capitalism and the history of higher education, Nelson reveals, are intimately intertwined—which raises a host of important and strikingly urgent questions. How do we understand knowledge and education as commercial goods? Who should pay for them? And, fundamentally, what is the optimal system of higher education in a capitalist democracy?

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The Soundworld of Harriet Tubman

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Just in time for Black History Month, we share an episode we’ve been excitedly working on for a number of months now. Ethnomusicologist Maya Cunningham brings us “The Sound World of Harriet Tubman.” Maya Cunningham is an activist and jazz singer currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Afro-American studies with a concentration in ethnomusicology.

We first came across Maya’s work last year as part of The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project, an online initiative from Ms. magazine honoring the 200th anniversary of Harriet Tubman’s birth in 1822. It’s a remarkable package that adds many dimensions of understanding of the underground railroad conductor and feminist icon: Her experience of disability due to a blow to the head by a white overseer; her creation of a home for the aged; her love of the natural world; and much more. And to us, the richest of these essays was Maya’s the “Sound World of Harriet Tubman,” which used field recordings, historical research, and ethnomusicological research to explore the roles of sound and music, and voice in Tubman’s life and leadership. The piece included a Spotify playlist so you could listen as you read.

Today, we’re thrilled to bring you what we hope will be an even more immersive experience: Maya Cunningham reading her essay, and thanks to the editing and mixing skills of Phantom Power producer Ravi Krishnaswami, her field recordings and playlist selections are mixed into the story.

And just a quick note, you’re going to hear about the American Christian revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which stirred both Black and white people from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s. You’ll also hear about the Invisible Church, where enslaved African Americans were able to worship secretly and autonomously and through the singing of folk spirituals, which differed greatly from white religious music at the time, but would go on to influence not only gospel music but pretty much every form of popular music we know today. If you want to learn more about this history, a great place to start is a book edited by two professors Mack studied with at Indiana University, Drs. Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby. It’s called African American Music: An Introduction.

And today, we share our Patrons-only segment, “What’s Good,” in our main feed. Maya will recommend something good to read, listen to, and do.

Today’s musical selections and soundscapes are by Maya Cunningham. The show was mixed and edited by Ravi Krishnaswami. The Harriet Tubman image was created by Maddie Haynes.

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Mary Frances Phillips, "Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins" (NYU Press, 2025)

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered Black Panther Party member, as well as a mother, widow, educator, poet, and former political prisoner. In 1969, the police arrested Ericka Huggins along with Bobby Seale and fellow Black Panther Party members, who were accused of murdering Alex Rackley. This marked the beginning of her ordeal, as she became the subject of political persecution and a well-planned FBI COINTELPRO plot.

Drawing on never-before-seen archival sources, including prison records, unpublished letters, photographs, FBI records, and oral histories, Phillips foregrounds the paramount role of self-care and community care in Huggins's political journey, shedding light on Ericka's use of spiritual wellness practices she developed during her incarceration. In prison, Huggins was able to survive the repression and terror she faced while navigating motherhood through her unwavering commitment to spiritual practices. In showcasing this history, Phillips reveals the significance of spiritual wellness in the Black Panther Party and Black Power movement.

Transcending the traditional male-centric study of the Black Panther Party, Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins (NYU Press, 2025) offers an innovative analysis of Black political life at the intersections of gender, motherhood, and mass incarceration. This book serves as an invaluable toolkit for contemporary activists, underscoring the power of radical acts of care as well as vital strategies to thrive in the world.

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Jessica A. Brockmole, "Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way Into the Driver's Seat" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Since the commercial introduction of the automobile, US automakers have always sought women as customers and advertised accordingly. How, then, did car culture become so masculine? In Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way into the Driver's Seat (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), Dr. Jessica Brockmole shares the untold history of women's relationship with automobiles: a journey marked by struggle, empowerment, and the relentless pursuit of independence.

This groundbreaking work explores the evolution of women's automotive participation and the cultural shifts that have redefined their roles as drivers, mechanics, and consumers. Dr. Brockmole traces the rise of gendered marketing of automobiles over the course of the twentieth century. Auto companies created ads that conformed to commonly held ideas about women's relationships with automobiles. As the century progressed, marketing to women became less informative and even more gendered: the automotive industry portrayed women as passengers, props, or reluctant drivers, interested primarily in aesthetics. And yet, by the 1970s, female drivers were communicating directly with each other, forming clubs, and teaching each other through women-focused repair manuals.

By examining market research studies, advertising archives, trade journals, women's magazines, newspapers, driving handbooks, and repair manuals, this book shows how women bought their way into the automobile and masculine car culture. Brockmole uncovers the stories of pioneering women who defied conventions, such as trailblazer Alice Ramsey, the first woman to drive across the United States in 1909, and Barb Wyatt, whose contributions to automotive manuals broke new ground. Women have always been users of technology, and this book illustrates how the auto industry evolved—as well as how it chose not to evolve—in response.

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Hunter Price, "Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty" (U Virginia Press, 2024)

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic’s fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary association. Following the contours of settler expansion, the Methodist Episcopal Church also quickly became the largest denomination in the early American West. With Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty (University of Virginia Press, 2024), Dr. Hunter Price resituates the Methodist Episcopal Church as a settler-colonial institution at the convergence of “the Methodist Age” and Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.”

Dr. Price offers a novel interpretation of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a network through which mostly white settlers exchanged news of land and jobs and facilitated financial transactions. Benefiting from Indigenous dispossession and removal policies, settlers made selective, strategic use of the sacred and the secular in their day-to-day interactions to advance themselves and their interests. By analyzing how Methodists acted as settlers while identifying as pilgrims, Dr. Price illuminates the ways that ordinary white Americans fulfilled Jefferson’s vision of an Empire of Liberty while reinforcing the inequalities at its core.

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Allison Rank et al., "Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientists Lauren C. Bell, Allison Rank, and Carah Ong Whaley have a new edited volume, Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). This book has four separate sections that guide the reader through different dimensions of teaching civic engagement and the many aspects of this important pedagogical capacity that often falls on the shoulders of political science faculty at universities and colleges in the United States. In our discussion we cover the idea of civic engagement itself as an approach that many of us integrate into our courses in a variety of ways. Civic Pedagogies focuses on this complex topic first through a number of chapters that dive into the theory behind civic engagement and how to think about this concept as a dimension of or the entirety of a college course. The next section of the book takes up a variety of different practical approaches to embedding civic learning into courses. The last two sections of the book explore the challenges and benefits of civically engaged pedagogies and, finally, assessment of civically engaged pedagogies.

This is a thorough and thoughtful book with an impressive array of contributing authors all thinking about not only the importance of civically engaged pedagogies, but also the unique dimensions of this kind of pedagogy. The three editors explain, in our conversation, different points of importances that were fleshed out by the many contributors and their thinking about how best to embed this vital component of education within a democracy. Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics has so many different perspectives that it provides a rich array of options for most educators who want or need to integrate civic pedagogies into their classrooms. In our discussion, we also explore the value of being able to engage on public topics and political questions in a civil manner—both in the classroom itself and then, as students move into their lives beyond college, as members of their communities.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Randall Fuller, "Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society "to answer the great questions" of special importance to women: "What are we born to do? How shall we do it?" The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement.

Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism--a submerged counternarrative--that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women.

Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism (Oxford UP, 2024) is intended to reorient our understanding of transcendentalism: to help us see the movement as a far more collaborative and interactive project between women and men than is commonly understood. It recounts the lives of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller as they developed crucial ideas about the self, nature, and feeling even as they pushed their male counterparts to consider the rights of enslaved people of color and women.

Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them. Together, the five women of Bright Circle helped form the foundations of American feminism.

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Mountain Memories: A Conversation with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Robert P. George

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Henry Louis Gates and Robert P. George share a powerful conversation about their unlikely beginnings in West Virginia. Recorded in December 2024, they reflect on their childhoods, the challenges they faced, and the experiences that shaped their paths to becoming the influential figures they are today. Their discussion offers a unique perspective on overcoming adversity, the power of place, and the importance of intellectual curiosity. Tune in for an inspiring and personal dialogue that highlights how humble beginnings can lead to extraordinary futures.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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American Higher Education Under the Second Trump Administration

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey speaks with Steven Brint, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Riverside, about the early days of the second Trump administration and its impact on higher education. Brint discusses the administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape federal governance, including its attacks on DEI programs, proposals to tax university endowments, and moves to condition federal funding on ideological compliance. The conversation explores how these policies could undermine academic freedom, international student enrollment, and the global reputation of U.S. universities. Brint also examines the broader crisis of public confidence in higher education, tracing concerns over cost, curriculum relevance, and perceptions of political bias. The episode concludes with a discussion of the risks facing the American university system in an era of rising authoritarianism and political polarization.

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Adam Laats, "Mr. Lancaster's System: The Failed Reform That Created America's Public Schools" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Two centuries ago, London school reformer Joseph Lancaster swept into New York City to revolutionize its public schools. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts passed laws mandating Lancaster's methods, and cities such as Albany, Savannah, Detroit, and Baltimore soon followed. In Mr. Lancaster's System: The Failed Reform That Created America's Public Schools (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Adam Laats tells the story of how this abusive, scheming reformer fooled the world into believing his system could provide free high-quality education for poor children. The system never worked as promised, but thanks to real work done by students, teachers, and families, Lancaster's failed reforms eventually led to the creation of the modern public school system.

Lancaster's idea was simple: instead of hiring expensive adult teachers, Lancasterian schools made children teach one another to read, write, and behave properly. America's city leaders poured the equivalent of millions of dollars into the scheme, built specialized school buildings featuring Lancaster's teaching machines, and offered him a huge salary. In London, where Lancaster opened his first school, the enthusiasm of city leaders was quickly and similarly followed by scandal and dismay. Lancaster borrowed money—even from the king of England—and spent it on fancy carriage rides and cases of champagne. Even worse, Lancaster proved to be a sexual predator. Kicked out of London, Lancaster brought his simplistic plan to the United States. His school model didn't work any better in US cities than it had in London, and Lancaster himself never changed his abusive ways.

Mr. Lancaster's System details how American cities created their first public schools out of the wreckage of Lancasterian failure. In the end, the most important people in this story are not self-proclaimed geniuses like Lancaster or elites like New York's mayor De Witt Clinton, but rather the thousands of parents and children who forced urban public schools to assume their modern shape.

Adam Laats is a professor of education and history at Binghamton University. He taught high school for many years in Milwaukee and is the author of The Other School Reformers and Fundamentalist U.

Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University.

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Jeff Copeland, "Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn" (Feral House, 2025)

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about one of the most infamous of Warhol's Superstars. A young, aspiring writer desperate for a break...and the legendary Andy Warhol superstar who gave him the story of a lifetime. By the mid-1980s, Holly Woodlawn, once lauded by George Cukor for her performance in the 1970 Warhol production and Paul Morrissey directed Trash, was washed up. Over. Kaput. She was living in a squalid Hollywood apartment with her dog and bottles of Chardonnay.

A chance meeting with starry-eyed corn-fed Missouri-born Jeff Copeland, who moved to Hollywood with dreams of 'making it' as a television writer, changed the course of BOTH of their lives forever. Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a story of how an unlikely friendship with a young gay writer and an, ahem, mature trans actress and performer created the bestselling autobiography of 1991, A Low Life in High Heels. This book about writing a book is a celebration of chutzpa and love as Holly, the embodiment of Auntie Mame, introduces Jeff to the glamorous (and sometimes larcenous) world of a Warhol Superstar. In turn, Jeff uses his writing (and typing) talent to give Holly the second chance at fame she craved. In turns hilarious and heartwarming, Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a portrait of the real Holly who loved deeply, laughed loudly, and left mayhem in her wake.

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Rebecca Davis Gibbons, "The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system that has, for more than fifty years, controlled the spread of these catastrophic weapons. The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime (Cornell UP, 2022) details how that regime works and how, disastrously, it might falter.

Experts anticipated that all technologically capable states would build these powerful devices in the early nuclear age. That did not happen. Widespread development of nuclear arms did not occur, in large part, because a global nuclear nonproliferation regime was created. By the late 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had drafted the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Across decades, the regime has expanded, with more agreements and more nations participating. As a result, in 2022, only nine states possess nuclear weapons.

Why do most international states adhere to the nuclear nonproliferation regime? The answer lies, Gibbons asserts, in decades of painstaking efforts undertaken by the US government. As the most powerful state during the nuclear age, the United States had many tools with which to persuade other states to join or otherwise support nonproliferation agreements.

The waning of US global influence, Gibbons shows in The Hegemon's Tool Kit, is a key threat to the nonproliferation regime. So, too, is the deepening global divide over progress on nuclear disarmament. To date, the Chinese government is not taking significant steps to support the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and as a result, the regime may face a harmful leadership gap.

Our guest is Rebecca Gibbons, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern Maine.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the 2025 ISA-ISSS best book award.

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Peter J. Bowler, "Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.

Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature.

The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day
Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science
Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though

Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science.

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Katie Beisel Hollenbach, "The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsiders the story of American popular music, celebrity following, and fan behavior during World War II through close examination of “bobbysoxers.” Preserved in popular memory as primarily white, hysterical, teen girl devotees of Frank Sinatra clad in bobby socks and saddle shoes, these girls were accused of displaying inappropriate behavior and priorities in their obsessive pursuit of a crooning celebrity at a time of international crisis. Dr. Beisel Hollenbach peels back the stereotypes of girlhood idol adoration by documenting the intimate practices of wartime Sinatra fan clubs, revealing a new side of this familiar story in American history through the perspective of the bobbysoxer.

In World War II America, fan clubs and organizations like Teen Canteens offered a haven for teenage girls to celebrate their enjoyment of popular culture while cultivating relationships with each other through media icons and the entertainment industry. Many of these organizations attempted to encourage diverse memberships, influenced in part by Frank Sinatra's public work on racial and religious tolerance, and by Sinatra's own identity as an Italian American. Away from the critical public eye, these communities offered girls a place to safely explore and discuss issues including civil rights, politics, the war, patriotism, internationalism, and professional development in the context of their shared Sinatra fandom. With these broader social and political complexities in mind, The Business of Bobbysoxers shines a light on musical fan communities that provided teenage girls with peer groups at a critical moment of personal and historical change, allowing them to creatively express their desires and imagine their futures as American women together.

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Hiroshi Motomura, "Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair, Realistic, and Sustainable Immigration Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex responses to the phenomenon. Too many observers assume imaginary consensus, avoid basic questions, or disregard the larger context for human migration.

In Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2025), Hiroshi Motomura offers a complex and fair-minded account of immigration, its root causes, and the varying responses to it. Taking stock of the issue's complexity, while giving credence to the opinions of immigration critics, he tackles a series of important questions that, when answered, will move us closer to a more realistic and sustainable immigration policy. Motomura begins by affirming a basic concept—national borders—and asks when they might be ethical borders, fostering fairness but also responding realistically to migration patterns and to the political forces that migration generates. In a nation with ethical borders, who should be let in or kept out? How should people forced to migrate be treated? Should newcomers be admitted temporarily or permanently? How should those with lawful immigration status be treated? What is the best role for enforcement in immigration policy? To what extent does the arrival of newcomers hurt long-time residents? What are the "root causes" of immigration and how can we address them?

Realistic about the desire of most citizens for national borders, this book is an indispensable guide for moving toward ethical borders and better immigration policy.

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Martín Alberto Gonzalez, "Why You Always So Political?: The Experiences and Resiliencies of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx Students in Higher Education" (Viva Oxnard, 2023)

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

As of 2018, only about one in ten Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) students graduate with a college degree. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observations, pláticas, document analyses, and literature on race, space, and racism in higher education, Why you always so political?: The Experiences and Resiliencies of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx Students in Higher Education (Viva Oxnard, 2024) by Dr. Martín Alberto Gonzalez documents the narratives of 20 MMAX undergraduate students at a private, historically and predominantly white university in the Northeast United States. Utilizing counterstorytelling as a research method, Martín Alberto Gonzalez argues that the racially hostile campus environment experienced by MMAX students at their respective university manifests itself as a form of educational-environmental racism. By providing culturally relevant counterstories about racism in higher education, this book offers an accessible tool for teaching and learning about the harsh realities of Students of Color who attend predominantly white universities.

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Stan Bunger, "Mornings with Madden: My Radio Life With An American Legend" (Triumph, 2024)

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

John Madden is synonymous with football. He was the television face and voice of the nation's most popular sport, the namesake of its best-selling sports video game, and the man with the highest career winning percentage of any NFL coach. Despite his international fame, there was a side of Madden known only to those who listened to morning radio broadcasts in the San Francisco Bay Area. That's where Madden grew up, lived, and died. It's where for decades he found joy in a daily chat with his hometown radio station: a chance to unwind, tell stories, and impart his own brand of wit and wisdom.

In Mornings with Madden: My Radio Life With An American Legend (Triumph, 2024), Stan Bunger— the man most often on the other side of the mic— illuminates this larger-than-life figure, drawing upon memories of more than fifteen years of daily broadcasts, backed up by thousands of recordings of those conversations. Readers who adored Madden's football acumen and quirky personality on NFL broadcasts will get to know the father, husband, bad golfer, dog owner, lover of roadside diners, and philosopher whose personality dominated our radio chats. Featuring moving reflections alongside Madden's own words, this is a treasure trove of wry observations, self-deprecating humor, clear-eyed thinking about sports and society, and the "Maddenisms" that endeared the legendary coach to millions.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won. His next book, a biography of Moses Malone will be published in 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Jeff Gomez, "There Was No Alternative: Generation X, AIDS, and the Making of a Classic Nineties Record" (McFarland, 2023)

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Grunge. Flannel. Generation X. In 1993, Seattle was the capital of the world, Nirvana was king, and slackers were everywhere. When the Red Hot organization, a group of activists dedicated to raising money and awareness of AIDS, released their third compilation CD featuring the biggest bands of the era--Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, The Breeders, Nirvana and more it quickly became the touchstone of a generation. Rolling Stone called No Alternative a "jaw-dropping compilation of musical gems."

This book takes a look back at what happened to the bands involved with No Alternative. It includes new interviews with the musicians and others behind the record, and chronicles the downfall of an industry, the taming of a devastating illness, and the arrival of another global pandemic. It's about growing up, saying goodbye, and proving once more that you can't go home again (even if that's where you left all of your CDs).

Jeff Gomez has been writing about the worlds of Generation X and alternative music for over 25 years and is the author of several books including Zeppelin Over Dayton: Guided By Voices Album By Album and Math Rock.

Jeff Gomez’s website.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).

Bradley on Twitter and Bluesky.

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Zai Liang. "From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States" (U California Press, 2023)

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Zai Liang explores the recent history of Chinese immigration within the United States and the fundamental changes in spatial settlement that have relocated many low-skilled Chinese immigrants from New York City's Chinatown to new immigrant destinations. Using a mixed-method approach over a decade in Chinatown and six destination states, sociologist Dr. Liang specifically examines how the expansion and growing popularity of Chinese restaurants has shifted settlement to more rural and faraway areas.

Dr. Liang's study demonstrates that key players such as employment agencies, Chinatown buses, and restaurant supply shops facilitate the spatial dispersion of immigrants while simultaneously maintaining vital links between Chinatown in Manhattan and new immigrant destinations.

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Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, "Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, I talked to Corinne Sugino, whose book Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines how mainstream stories about Asian American success have come to serve harmful ideas about progress. At the turn of the century, Asian Americans have come to embody meritocracy and heteronormative family values, and more recently, some Asian Americans have become the face of law and order. These ideas become solidified in a variety of narratives, from blockbuster movies such as Crazy Rich Asians, to (supposedly) myth-busting documentaries such as Seeking Asian Female, to legal arguments against Affirmative Action. But these stories—usually stories about American citizens of East Asian descent—erase the diverse lived experience of Asian America. In this conversation, Corine Sugino also explains how we can draw on Black Studies, including scholarship by Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, to develop a more capacious understanding of “the human” and antiracism. This provides a foundation for imagining solidarity across racial lines.

About Corinne Sugino: Corinne Sugino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies. Their research focus lies at the intersections of Asian American studies, cultural studies, rhetorical theory, and media studies. Corinne's first book project, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers University Press, November 2024) explores how cultural and media narratives about Asian American racial and gendered difference naturalizes a limited understanding of what it means to be human. Beyond this project, her research interests also include discourses of false inclusion, Asian American grassroots media during the Asian American movement, and transnational racialization in Japan.

About Weishun Lu: Weishun Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanitities & Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Her research focus is contemporary poetry, avant-garde writing, the history of multiculturalism, and critical ethnic studies.

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Samantha Ege, "South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene by Samantha Ege (University of Illinois Press, 2014) is a collective biography of a group of Black women living in Chicago who were at the center of the support, promotion, and circulation of classical music by Black composers—often specifically Black women composers—in the years between the World Wars. Women like Nora Holt, Maud Roberts George, Estella Conway Bonds, and her daughter Margaret Bonds founded and led institutions, raised money, wrote music criticism, composed music, played in and arranged concerts, opened their homes to salons and their wallets to support concerts and even individuals. This “behind the scenes” book, shows how these Race Women made Chicago’s South Side into a center of Black classical music making.

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Anthony E. Kaye, "Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History" (FSG, 2024)

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. They attacked the plantations on which their enslavers lived and attempted to march on the county seat of Jerusalem, from which they planned to launch an uprising across the South. After the rebellion was suppressed, well over a hundred people, Black and white, lay dead or were hanged. As news of the revolt spread, it became apparent that it was the idea of a single man: Nat Turner. An enslaved preacher, he was as enigmatic as he was brilliant. He was also something more—a prophet, one who claimed to have received visions from the Spirit urging him to act.

Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History (FSG, 2024) is the fullest recounting to date of Turner’s uprising, and the first that refuses to tame or overlook his divine visions. Instead, it takes those visions seriously, tracing their emergence from the world of nineteenth-century Methodism, with its revivals, camp meetings, interracial churches, and Black preachers. The rebellion and its aftermath would hasten the end of this world, as Southern states further restricted the personal freedoms of the enslaved, even as the ongoing threat of revolt shaped the country’s politics. With this work of narrative history, the late historian Anthony E. Kaye and his collaborator Gregory P. Downs have given us a new understanding of one of the nineteenth century's most decisive events.

Nat Turner, Black Prophet was named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year and one of Literary Hub's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year.

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Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939—refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union despite its demands.

Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War (2024), Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs. American enthusiasm for funding the refugee organizations taking care of DPs quickly waned after the war. It was only after DPs were redefined—from “victims of war and Nazism” to “victims of Communism”—in 1947 that a solution was found: the United States would pay for the mass resettlement of DPs in America, Australia, and other countries outside Europe. The Soviet Union protested this “theft” of its citizens. But it was a coup for the United States. The choice of DPs to live a free life in the West, and the West’s welcome of them, became an important theme in America’s Cold War propaganda battle with the Soviet Union. A compelling story of the early Cold War, Lost Souls is also a rare chronicle of a refugee crisis that was solved.

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Sophia Rosenfeld, "The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. At the same time, we have been warned by everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists about the negative consequences stemming from our current obsession with choice. It turns out that not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities and anxious about what best to select. There are social costs too. How did all this happen? The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton UP, 2025) tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom.

Taking readers from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one's convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, those often with the fewest choices, who have frequently been the drivers of this change. She concludes with an exploration of how reproductive rights have become a symbolic flashpoint in our contemporary struggles over the association of liberty with choice.

Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from novels and restaurant menus to the latest scientific findings about choice in psychology and economics, The Age of Choice urges us to rethink the meaning of choice and its promise and limitations in modern life.

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Patricia A. Roos, "Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In 2015, Patricia Roos’s twenty-five-year-old son Alex died of a heroin overdose. Turning her grief into action, Roos, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, began to research the social factors and institutional failures that contributed to his death. Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction (Rutgers UP, 2024) tells her moving story—and argues for a more compassionate and effective approach to addiction treatment.

Weaving together a personal narrative and a sociological perspective, Surviving Alex describes how people become addicted. She highlights the toll that addiction took on Alex and all members of a family. Drawing from interviews with Alex’s friends, family members, therapists, teachers, and police officers—as well as files from his stays in hospitals, rehab facilities, and jails—Roos paints a compelling portrait of a young man whose life veered between happiness, anxiety, success, and despair. The book is part memoir, part sociological case study, and part policy proposal because it provides a strong challenge to extant treatment and policy options. As she explores how a punitive system failed her son, Dr. Roos calls for a community of action that would improve care for substance users and reduce addiction, realigning public health policy to address the overdose crisis.

Dr. PATRICIA ROOS is a Professor emerita of sociology at Rutgers University. Among her many publications are the books Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women's Inroads into Male Occupations (coauthored with Barbara Reskin) from Temple University Press and Gender and Work: A Comparative Analysis of Industrial Societies from University of Albany Press. After her son's death, Dr. Roos realigned her research and advocacy interests to explore mental health and substance use disorders, turning her grief into activism.

Mentioned:

David Herzberg’s White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America from University of Chicago Press.
Pat Roos on Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden addiction: Joe, Jill continue to show compassion

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Derek W. Black, "Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy" (Yale UP, 2025)

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Few have ever valued literacy as much as the enslaved Black people of the American South. For them, it was more than a means to a better life; it was a gateway to freedom and, in some instances, a tool for inspiring revolt. And few governments tried harder to suppress literacy than did those in the South. Everyone understood that knowledge was power: power to keep a person enslaved in mind and body, power to resist oppression. In the decades before the Civil War, Southern governments drove Black literacy underground, but it was too precious to be entirely stamped out.

Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy (Yale UP, 2025) describes the violent lengths to which southern leaders went to repress Black literacy and the extraordinary courage it took Black people to resist. Derek W. Black shows how, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of Reconstruction, literacy evolved from a subversive gateway to freedom to a public program to extend citizenship and build democratic institutions—and how, once Reconstruction was abandoned, opposition to educating Black children depressed education throughout the South for Black and white students alike. He also reveals the deep imprint those events had on education and how this legacy is resurfacing today.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a PhD student in the History department at UC Davis.

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Edward Westermann, "Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest" (U Oklahoma Press, 2016)

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

As he prepared to wage his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe and the United States's westward expansion under the banner of Manifest Destiny. The peoples of Eastern Europe were, he said, his "redskins," and for his colonial fantasy of a "German East" he claimed a historical precedent in the United States's displacement and killing of the native population. Edward B. Westermann examines the validity, and value, of this claim in Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).

The book takes an empirical approach that highlights areas of similarity and continuity, but also explores key distinctions and differences between these two national projects. The westward march of American empire and the Nazi conquest of the East offer clear parallels, not least that both cases fused a sense of national purpose with racial stereotypes that aided in the exclusion, expropriation, and killing of peoples. Westermann evaluates the philosophies of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum that justified both conquests, the national and administrative policies that framed Nazi and U.S. governmental involvement in these efforts, the military strategies that supported each nation's political goals, and the role of massacre and atrocity in both processes. Important differences emerge: a goal of annihilation versus one of assimilation and acculturation; a planned military campaign versus a confused strategy of pacification and punishment; large-scale atrocity as routine versus massacre as exception.

Comparative history at its best, Westermann's assessment of these two national projects provides crucial insights into not only their rhetoric and pronouncements but also the application of policy and ideology "on the ground." His sophisticated and nuanced revelations of the similarities and dissimilarities between these two cases will inform further study of genocide, as well as our understanding of the Nazi conquest of the East and the American conquest of the West.

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Benjamin Carter Hett, "The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War" (Henry Holt, 2020)

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history.

Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind the scenes in Berlin, London, Moscow, and Washington, revealing the unsettled politics within each country in the wake of the German dictator’s growing provocations. He reveals the fitful path by which anti-Nazi forces inside and outside Germany came to understand Hitler’s true menace to European civilization and learned to oppose him, painting a sweeping portrait of governments under siege, as larger-than-life figures struggled to turn events to their advantage.

As in The Death of Democracy, his acclaimed history of the fall of the Weimar Republic, Hett draws on original sources and newly released documents to show how these long-ago conflicts have unexpected resonances in our own time. To read The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War (Henry Holt, 2020) is to see past and present in a new and unnerving light.

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Peter Harmsen, "Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II" (Casemate, 2024)

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Peter Harmsen about his book Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II (Casemate, 2024).

The wartime interest in Greenland was a direct result of its vital strategic position--if you wanted to predict the weather in Europe, you had to have men in place on the vast, frozen island. The most celebrated example of Greenland's crucial contribution to Allied meteorological services is the correct weather forecast in June 1944 leading to the decision to launch the invasion of Normandy. In addition, both before and after D-Day a stream of weather reports from Greenland was essential for the Allied ability to carry out the bombing offensive against Germany.

The Germans were aware of the value of Greenland from a meteorological point of view, and they repeatedly attempted to establish semi-permanent weather stations along the sparsely populated east coast of the island. This resulted in an epic cat-and-mouse game, in which US Coast Guard personnel assisted by a celebrated sledge patrol manned by Scandinavian adventurers struggled to locate and eliminate German bases before they could make any difference. It's a story seldom told, but the fact remains that Greenland was the only part of the North American continent in which German troops maintained a presence throughout almost the entirety of the war.

At the same time, the US entry into the war triggered an enormous American effort to hastily establish the necessary infrastructure in the form of harbors and air bases that enabled Greenland to form a vital link in the effort to send men and supplies across the North Atlantic in the face of stern opposition from the German Navy. While Allied ships were passing through Greenland waters in massive numbers, planes were plying the so-called Snowball Route from Greenland over Iceland to the British Isles.

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Taylor N. Carlson, "Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Accurate information is at the heart of democratic functioning. For decades, researchers interested in how information is disseminated have focused on mass media, but the reality is that many Americans today do not learn about politics from direct engagement with the news. Rather, about one-third of Americans learn chiefly from information shared by their peers in conversation or on social media. How does this socially transmitted information differ from that communicated by traditional media? What are the consequences for political attitudes and behavior?

Drawing on evidence from experiments, surveys, and social media, in Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2024) Dr. Taylor N. Carlson finds that, as information flows first from the media then person to person, it becomes sparse, more biased, less accurate, and more mobilizing. The result is what Carlson calls distorted democracy. Although socially transmitted information does not necessarily render democracy dysfunctional, Through the Grapevine shows how it contributes to a public that is at once underinformed, polarized, and engaged.

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Adam Jortner, "A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Adam Jortner, Goodwin-Philpott Professor of History at Auburn University. We are discussing his latest book, A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2024). There is a myth that the only religion practiced by the American revolutionaries was Christianity. As Adam demonstrates, there was, in fact, a thriving segment of Jewish participants in the American fight for independence. A thoughtful and surprising new history, I’m pleased to be able to speak with Professor Jortner today.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network

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The Cambridge Centennial Edition of The Great Gatsby

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Great Gatsby is often called the great American novel. Emblematic of an entire era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic tale of illicit desire, grand illusions, and lost dreams is rendered in a lyrical prose that revives a vanished world of glittering parties and vibrant jazz, where money and deceit walk hand in hand. Rich in humor, sharply observant of status and class, the book tells the story of Jay Gatsby's efforts to keep his faith - in money, in love, in all the promises of America - amid the chaos and conflict of life on Long Island's Gold Coast during the Roaring Twenties.

The Cambridge Centennial Edition of The Great Gatsby (Cambridge UP, 2025) presents the established version of the text in a collector's volume replete with social, cultural, and historical context, and numerous illustrations. The authoritative introduction examines persistent myths about Fitzgerald, his greatest work, and the age he embodies, while offering fresh ways of reading this iconic work.

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Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, "America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earliest days of colonial conquest, auctions put Native land and human beings up for bidding alongside material goods, normalizing new economic practices that turned social relations into economic calculations and eventually became recognizable as nineteenth-century American capitalism.

Starting in the eighteenth century, neighbors collectively turned speculative value into economic “facts” in the form of concrete prices for specific items, thereby establishing ideas about fair exchange in their communities. This consensus soon fractured: during the Revolutionary War, state governments auctioned loyalist property, weaponizing local group participation in pricing and distribution to punish political enemies. By the early nineteenth century, suspicion that auction outcomes were determined by manipulative auctioneers prompted politicians and satirists to police the boundaries of what counted as economic exchange and for whose benefit the economy operated. Women at auctions—as commodities, bidders, or beneficiaries—became a focal point for gendering economic value itself. By the 1830s, as abolitionists attacked the public sale of enslaved men, women, and children, auctions had enshrined a set of economic ideas—that any entity could be coded as property and priced through competition—that have become commonsense understandings all too seldom challenged.

In contrast to histories focused on banks, currencies, or plantations, America Under the Hammer highlights an institution that integrated market, community, and household in ways that put gender, race, and social bonds at the center of ideas about economic worth. Women and men, enslaved and free, are active participants in this story rather than bystanders, and their labor, judgments, and bodies define the resulting contours of the American economy.

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Leonne M. Hudson, "Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" (Southern Illinois UP, 2024)

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth carried out the first presidential assassination in United States history. The euphoria resulting from General Lee's surrender evaporated at the news of Abraham Lincoln's murder. The nation--excepting many white Southerners--found itself consumed with grief, and no group mourned Lincoln more deeply than people of color. African Americans did not speak with a monolithic voice on social or political issues, but even Lincoln's Black contemporaries who may not have approved of him while he was alive mourned his death, understanding its implications for their future.

Beginning with the assassination itself and chronicling Lincoln's three-week-long national funeral, historian Leonne M. Hudson captures the profound sadness of Black Americans as they mourned the crafter of the Emancipation Proclamation and the man they thought of as their earthly Moses, father, friend, and benefactor. Hudson continues the narrative by detailing the postwar efforts of African Americans to gain citizenship and voting rights.

Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Southern Illinois UP, 2024) includes the tributes of prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley, who raised their voices to honor Lincoln, as well as formal expressions of grief by institutions and organizations such as the United States Colored Troops. In a triumph of research, Hudson also features the voices of lesser-known Black people who mourned Lincoln across the country, showing that the outpouring of individual and collective grief helped set the stage for his enduring glorification.

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Ryan Tan Wander, "Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West" (Texas Tech UP, 2024)

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In today’s cultural and political climate of relative LGBTQ+ inclusion, Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West (Texas Tech University Press, 2024) by Dr. Ryan Tan Wander provides a literary history that rewrites our understanding of when and how queerness began to align with US nationalism and settler colonialism, tracing the discursive production of masculinities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literatures of the American West.

Current scholarly understandings often equate turn-of-the-century representations of the US frontier with hypermasculinity and heteronormativity. Simultaneously, scholars tend to view queer inclusion—that is, the civil and political inclusion of those who make up the “-Q+” of the initialism LGBTQ+—as a phenomenon of post–Civil Rights era activism. Settler Tenses provides a deeper history of queerness in US history by showing that literature created frontier masculinities that representationally yoked a range of queer bodies and subjectivities to national identity as the US consolidated its sovereignty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Reframing and explaining anew the provenance and significance of the links between queerness and US nationalism and settler colonialism, Settler Tenses will appeal to an audience of advanced undergraduates as well as researchers and scholars in American literary studies, gender, queer, and sexuality studies, settler colonial studies, and critical race and ethnic studies.

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Truth Matters: A Conversation with Robert P. George and Cornel West

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, we are privileged to join a profound conversation between Robert P. George and Cornel West, two towering figures in political philosophy and social thought. Their discussion, based on their collaborative work Truth Matters, models what robust intellectual engagement and civil discourse can look like, especially when addressing issues that divide Americans today.

In this thought-provoking episode, George and West explore the concept of truth and its centrality to our personal and collective lives. They tackle critical questions surrounding truth’s role in the public square, and how we, as a society, can navigate the growing challenges to free expression and intellectual inquiry.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin. "Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum" (NYU Press, 2024)

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence.

Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum (NYU Press, 2024) examines how immigration laws and policies shape the lives of Latin American women who seek safety in the United States. Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin describe the women's histories prior to crossing the border, and the legal strategies they use to convince Immigration Judges that rape and other forms of "private violence" should merit asylum - despite laws built on Cold War era assumptions that persecution occurs in the public sphere by state actors.

Private Violence provides much-needed recommendations for incorporating a gender-based lens in the asylum process. The authors demonstrate how policy changes across Presidential administrations have made it difficult for survivors of "private violence" to qualify for asylum. Private Violence paints a damning portrait of America's broken asylum system. This volume illustrates the difficulties experienced by Latin American women who rely on this broken system for protection in the United States. It also illuminates women's resilience and the determination of immigration attorneys to reshape asylum law.

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Brigid Schulte, "Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life" (Henry Holt, 2024)

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Following Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte's groundbreaking examination of time management and stress, the prizewinning journalist now turns her attention to the greatest culprit in America's quality-of-life crisis: the way our economy and culture conceive of work. Americans across all demographics, industries, and socioeconomic levels report exhaustion, burnout, and the wish for more meaningful lives. This full-system failure in our structure of work affects everything from gender inequality to domestic stability, and it even shortens our lifespans.

Drawing on years of research, Schulte traces the arc of our discontent from a time before the 1980s, when work was compatible with well-being and allowed a single earner to support a family, until today, with millions of people working multiple hourly jobs or in white-collar positions where no hours are ever off duty.

She casts a wide net in search of solutions, exploring the movement to institute a four-day workweek, introducing Japan's Housewives Brigade--which demands legal protection for family time--and embedding with CEOs who are making the business case for humane conditions. And she demonstrates the power of a collective and creative demand for change, showing that work can be organized in an infinite number of ways that are good for humans and for business.

Fiercely argued and vividly told, rich with stories and informed by deep investigation, Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life (Henry Holt, 2024) lays out a clear vision for ending our punishing grind and reclaiming leisure, joy, and meaning.

Brigid Schulte is the author of the bestselling Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time and an award-winning journalist formerly for the Washington Post, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize. She is also the director of the Better Life Lab, the work-family justice and gender equity program at New America.

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Monica A. Hershberger, "Women in American Operas of The 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes" (U Rochester Press, 2023)

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The 1950s looks placid from the outside, but underneath that calm post-war exterior roiled the intellectual and activist beginnings of the political movements that tore through the 1960s and 1970s. In Women in American Operas of the 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes (University of Rochester Press, 2023), Monica A. Hershberger considers the main female characters in four operas written in the 1950s: The Ballad of Baby Doe, Lizzie Borden, The Tender Land, and Susannah. For each work, Hershberger analyzes the historical context and musical treatment of these four characters, who are all stereotyped as the virgin or the whore, or sometimes even both. In an unusual and productive analytical choice, Hershberger also includes the interpretive decisions and perspectives of the sopranos who originated or popularized these four roles, rather than focusing exclusively on the scores and the views of the male creative teams that wrote the works. Several of the operas include instances of emotional abuse as well as gendered and sexual violence that have long been ignored or downplayed by opera scholars, but Hershberger does not shy away from these disturbing subjects in the book.

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James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (University of Texas Press, 2024) examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian Dr. James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city.” This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region’s rich natural environment.

Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Dr. Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.

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Elizabeth L. Block, "Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing" (MIT Press, 2024)

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the nineteenth century, the complex cultural meaning of hair was not only significant—it could affect one’s place in society. After the Civil War, hairdressing was a growing profession and the hair industry a mainstay of local, national, and international commerce.

In Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing (MIT Press, 2024), Elizabeth L. Block expands the nascent field of hair studies by restoring women’s hair as a cultural site of meaning in the early United States. With a special focus on the places and spaces in which the industry operated, Block argues that the importance of hair has been overlooked due to its ephemerality as well as its misguided association with frivolity and triviality. Using methods of visual and material culture studies informed by concepts of cultural geography, Block identifies multiple substantive categories of place and space within which hair had pronounced impact. These include the preparatory places of the bedroom, hair salon, and enslaved peoples’ quarters, as well as the presentation spaces of parties, fairs, stages, and workplaces.

Here are also the untold stories of business owners, many of whom were women of color, and the creators of trendsetting styles such as the pompadour and Gibson Girl bouffant. Block’s groundbreaking study examines how race and racism affected who participated in the presentation and business of hair, and according to which standards. The result of looking closely at the places and spaces of hair is a reconfiguration that allows a new understanding of its immense cultural power.

Block reveals many shocking and illuminating truths about hairdressing—including that men’s pomades in the early 19th Century were often made with bear’s grease, lard, or mutton fat; or that plant-based hair dyes in the same time period were often supplemented with lead or sulphuric acid.

Despite the shocking nature of some of these previous practices, Block displays throughout Beyond Vanity that hairdressing was anything but frivolous. Rather, it reveals “the salient ways the practices, labor, maintenance, and presentation of hairstyles claimed substantial amounts of place, space, and time.”

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Stephen Watt, "From the 'Troubles' to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960-2023" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Stephen Watt is the Provost Professor of English at Indiana University. His research interests include drama and theatre of the 19th and 20th centuries, Irish Studies, and the contemporary university and his recent works include Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel (2018), “Something Dreadful and Grand”: American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious (2015), and Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing (2009).

In this interview he discusses his new book, From the 'Troubles' to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960-2023 (Anthem Press, 2024), a personal history of Irish, American and Irish-American politics and culture since the 1960s.

The essays in this book combine historical investigation with cultural criticism to illuminate the present moment, particularly the present American moment. In this regard, the dates 1960 and 2023 in the book’s subtitle are by no means accidental. The first three chapters concern the history of America’s relationship with Ireland during the administrations of the presidents whose terms spanned the immediate pre-history and history of the Troubles. After a glance backward at American and Irish relations in the nineteenth century, the first chapter focuses on the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president in America’s history and the first to visit Ireland during his term of office. It also juxtaposes Kennedy’s jubilant 1963 trip to Ireland with Ronald Reagan’s more complicated homecoming in 1984. From there, the book traces Irish-American connections via the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as well as Michael D. Higgins.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

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Anthony Walton, "The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation" (David R. Godine, 2024)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Born into the Civil Rights Movement, author Anthony Walton observed firsthand the opening of opportunity for racial reconciliation. He also saw systemic racism and the vicious backlash against Black progress embodied in the Southern Strategy, Tea Party, and MAGA. Over time, Walton came to believe that moving forward requires a "Third Reconstruction" to accomplish what remains: better health outcomes, secure voting rights, and sustained economic and educational opportunity. Only this approach, he believes, will accomplish what remains unfinished for true African American equality.

Blending social history, bracing analysis, and autobiography, this dazzling collection includes essays published in The New York Times and The Atlantic--including "Willie Horton and Me" and the much-anthologized "Technology vs. African Americans"--as well as new work that probes Walton's earlier thinking. Throughout, the author delivers insights that wrestle with the hydra-headed, ever-changing realities of an American society in which the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation (David R. Godine, 2024) illuminates recent American history as experienced by a writer who has remained open to hope, unfazed by failures, and unflinchingly dedicated to the truth. This book will leave you changed. And just may incite you to be a part of the change we need.

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Congressional Deliberation: A Conversation with Kevin J. Burns and Jordan T. Cash

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, we sit down with Professors Jordan T. Cash and Kevin J. Burns to discuss their recently published book, Congressional Deliberation: Major Debates, Speeches, and Writings, 1774–2023 (Hackett, 2024). Drawing on a wide array of primary sources, the book offers a deep dive into key historical debates and turning points in U.S. congressional history. We explored how the dynamics of deliberation in the House and Senate have shaped fundamental issues like war powers, impeachment, civil rights, and legislative leadership. With their expertise in American political thought, constitutionalism, and the history of political institutions, Professors Cash and Burns provide a rich, scholarly perspective on the role of Congress in the development of the American political system. Whether you’re a student of history or simply curious about the workings of the U.S. government, this conversation offers valuable insights into the continuing evolution of congressional deliberation.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, "Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture (Rutgers UP, 2024), Beretta E. Smith-Shomade contends that Black spirituality and Black church religiosity are the critical crux of Black popular culture. She argues that cultural, community, and social support live within the Black church and that spirit, art, and progress are deeply entwined and seal this connection. Including the work of artists such as Mary J. Blige, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Prince, Spike Lee, and Oprah Winfrey, the book examines contemporary Black television, film, music and digital culture to demonstrate the role, impact, and dominance of spirituality and religion in Black popular culture. Smith-Shomade believes that acknowledging and comprehending the foundations of Black spirituality and Black church religiosity within Black popular culture provide a way for viewers, listeners, and users not only to endure but also to revitalize.

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition here.

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Brett Bannor, "American Sheep: A Cultural History" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Why did Thomas Jefferson write that he would be happy if all dogs went extinct? What economic opportunity did attorney John Lord Hayes envision for the newly emancipated during Reconstruction? What American workers were mocked by Theodore Roosevelt as “morose, melancholy men”? What problems with revenue collection did Congressman James Beauchamp Clark mention when proposing an income tax? Why did Harley O. Gable of Armour & Company recommend that his meat-packing business manufacture violin strings? Why was Senator Lyndon Johnson angry at the Army and Navy Munitions Board at the start of the Korean War?

The answers to all these questions involve sheep. From the colonial era through the mid-twentieth century, America’s flocks played a key role in the nation’s development. Furthermore, much consternation centered around the sheep the United States lacked, so that dependency on foreign wool—a headache in times of peace—became a full-blown crisis in wartime. But more than just providers of wool, sheep were valued for their meat, for their byproducts after slaughter, and even for their efficiency at lawn maintenance.

American Sheep: A Cultural History (University of Georgia Press, 2024) is the story of the complex and fascinating relationship between Americans and their sheep. Brett Bannor explains how sheep have significantly impacted the broader growth and development of the United States. The history of America’s sheep encompasses topics that touch on many cornerstones of the American experience, such as enslavement, warfare, western expansion, industrialization, taxation, feminism, conservation, and labor relations, among others.

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Andrew Gomez, "Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How Black and white Cubans navigated issues of race, politics, and identity during the post-Civil War and early Jim Crow eras in South Florida.

On July 4, 1876, during the centennial celebration of US independence, the city of Key West was different from other cities. In some of post–Civil War Florida, Black residents were hindered from participating in 4th of July festivities, but Key West's celebration, “led by a Cuban revolutionary mayor working in concert with a city council composed of Afro-Bahamians, Cubans, African Americans, and Anglos,” represented a profound exercise in interracial democracy amid the Radical Reconstruction era.

Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945 (U Texas Press, 2024) examines the first Cuban American communities in South Florida—Key West and Tampa—and how race played a central role in shaping the experiences of white and Black Cubans. Andrew Gomez argues that factors such as the Cuban independence movement and Radical Reconstruction produced interracial communities of Cubans that worked alongside African Americans and Afro-Bahamians in Florida, yielding several successes in interracial democratic representation, even as they continued to wrestle with elements of racial separatism within the Cuban community. But the conclusion of the Cuban War of Independence and early Jim Crow laws led to a fracture in the Cuban-American community. In the process, both Black and white Cubans posited distinct visions of Cuban-American identity.

Andrew Gomez is an associate professor of history at the University of Puget Sound.

Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.

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Bernard J. Dobski, "Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Political Theorist B.J. (Bernard J.) Dobski has a new book focusing on Mark Twain’s final published novel, Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc. As Dobski notes in his work and in our conversation, this is one of the more obscure texts by Twain, but Twain considered it his best work. Dobski’s book is a close reading of Twain’s Joan of Arc and an analysis of how this particular work, focusing on Joan of Arc’s life through the narration of Sieur Louis De Conte (Joan’s childhood friend and her secretary during her military undertakings), is part of Twain’s larger efforts to understand the turn towards modernity, and all that entails. Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity is part of series at Palgrave/MacMillan focusing on recovering political philosophy, and this book fits into that series particularly well.

Mark Twain had a lifelong fascination with Joan of Arc. Twain’s Joan serves, in the novel, as a kind of path out of the Middle Ages, and, in this way, is being positioned as a Machiavellian “princess”— embodying a political science more effectively than can the Church at the time. Dobski’s interpretation explores the ways in which Joan of Arc, according to Twain, refounded and reformed France, taking many of Machiavelli’s teachings into account. Another dimension of Twain’s Joan of Arc is seen in context of the “historical maid” Joan of Arc and how both renderings are positioning a woman serving in a man’s role. Dobski explains the controversy over Joan’s attire—wearing men’s clothing as a woman, which was one of the charges brought against her—and how these laws were designed to foreground the Church’s teaching on modesty and decency and a means to regulate sexual ethics. This also reflects the maleness of Christ, which is not incidental to preserving the moral teachings that are rooted in the distinction between the sexes. But Joan is very much a woman in a man’s world, and her success in the man’s world challenges the Church’s basis for these distinctions between female and male. Many of these entanglements are the focus of Twain’s novel, and thus of Dobski’s analysis of Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc.

Ultimately, Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity digs into overarching and universal concerns, including the theological-philosophical conundrum, the claim of divine right by monarchs, and how to live a good life. B.J. Dobski skillfully follows Twain’s curvy path through Joan of Arc’s life and reputation to unpack Twain’s own thinking about these perennial questions.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Patrick Dixon, "Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item that quickly evolved into a meal, spawned a legion of imitators, and gained a large share of the global poultry market. Yet, almost as soon as the McNugget made its North American debut, it quickly became the subject of opprobrium and ridicule, taking on a symbolic status among serious food connoisseurs as an indication of Americans’ culinary decline and a growing disconnection between diners and the origins of the food that they ate.

During a time of rising beef prices and growing health concerns regarding red meats, the Chicken McNugget was received as a lighter alternative to traditional burger meals, clean and easy to consume, popular with children, and adaptable to busy “on-the-go” lifestyles of working parents. Consumers understood that they were not purchasing a premium product made from the finest cuts but selected the McNugget as a rational economic purchase that represented a new way of dining.

In reassembling the rise of poultry in the United States, Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Patrick Dixon presents a multilayered approach, connecting the entwined stories of workers and industrialists with restauranteurs and consumers, the former geographically moored within the South, the latter diverse and nationwide. Dr. Dixon centers further processed chicken within an analysis of the U.S. food system that demonstrates that consumers did not unwittingly succumb to a “junk food” diet but made deliberate and aspirational decisions based on conceptions of leisure, lifestyle, and bodily needs.

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Nora Gross, "Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 05:00:00 -0000

A heartbreaking account of grief, Black boyhood, and how we can support young people as they navigate loss.

JahSun, a dependable, much-loved senior at Boys' Prep was just hitting his stride in the fall of 2017. He had finally earned a starting position on the varsity football team and was already weighing two college acceptances. Then, over Thanksgiving, tragedy struck. An altercation at his older sister's home escalated into violence, killing the unarmed teenager in a hail of bullets. JahSun's untimely death overwhelmed his entire community, sending his family, friends, and school into seemingly insurmountable grief. Worse yet, that spring two additional Boys' Prep students would be shot to death in their neighborhood. JahSun and his peers are not alone in suffering the toll of gun violence, as every year in the United States teenagers die by gunfire in epidemic numbers, with Black boys most deeply affected.

Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools (U Chicago Press, 2024) closely attends to the neglected victims of youth gun violence: the suffering friends and classmates who must cope, mostly out of public view, with lasting grief and hidden anguish. Set at an ambitious urban high school for boys during the heartbreaking year following the death of JahSun, the book chronicles the consequences of untimely death on Black teen boys and on a school community struggling to recover. Sociologist Nora Gross tells the story of students attempting to grapple with unthinkable loss, inviting readers in to observe how they move through their days at school and on social media in the aftermath of their friends' and classmates' deaths. Gross highlights the discrepancy between their school's educational mission and teachers' and administrators' fraught attempts to care for students' emotional wellbeing. In the end, the school did not provide adequate space for grief, making it more difficult for students to heal, reengage with school, and imagine hopeful futures. Even so, supportive relationships deepened among students and formed across generations, offering promising examples of productive efforts to channel student grief into positive community change.

A searing testimony of our collective failure to understand the inner lives of our children in crisis, Brothers in Grief invites us all to wrestle with the hidden costs of gun violence on racial and educational inequity.

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Susan A. Brewer, "The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory" (Three Hills, 2024)

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Dr. Susan A. Brewer's fascinating The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory (Cornell University Press, 2024), she recounts the story of the parcel of central New York land on which she grew up. Brewer and her family had worked and lived on this land for generations when the Oneida Indians claimed that it rightfully belonged to them. Why, she wondered, did she not know what had happened to this place her grandfather called the best land. Here, she tells its story, tracing over the past four hundred years the two families—her own European settler family and the Oneida/Mohawk family of Polly Denny—who called the best land home.

Situated on the passageway to the west, the ancestral land of the Oneidas was coveted by European colonizers and the founders of the Empire State. The Brewer and Denny families took part in imperial wars, the American Revolution, broken treaties, the building of the Erie Canal, Native removal, the rise and decline of family farms, bitter land claims controversies, and the revival of the Oneida Indian Nation. As Dr. Brewer makes clear in The Best Land, through centuries of violence, bravery, greed, generosity, racism, and love, the lives of the Brewer and Denny families were profoundly intertwined. The story of this homeland, she discovers, unsettles the history she thought she knew.

With clear determination to tell history as it was, without sugarcoating or ignoring the pain and suffering of both families, Dr. Brewer navigates the interconnected stories with grace, humility, and a deep love for the land. The Best Land is a beautiful homage to the people, the place, and the environment itself.

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Jorge Duany, "Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the second edition of Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, 2024), Jorge Duany unravels the fascinating and turbulent past and present of an island that is politically and economically tied to the United States, yet culturally distinct.

Acquired by the United States from Spain in 1898, Puerto Rico has a peculiar status among Latin American and Caribbean countries. As a US Commonwealth, the island enjoys limited autonomy over local matters, but the US has dominated it militarily, politically, and economically for much of its recent history. Though they are US citizens, Puerto Ricans do not have their own voting representatives in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections (although they are able to participate in the primaries). In recent years, Puerto Rico's colossal public debt sparked an economic crisis that catapulted it onto the national stage and intensified the exodus to the US, bringing to the fore many of the unresolved remnants of its colonial history.

In the second edition of Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Jorge Duany provides a succinct, authoritative introduction to the island's rich history, culture, politics, and economy, as well as its diaspora. Beginning with a historical overview of Puerto Rico, Duany covers the Spanish colonial period (1493-1898) and the first five decades of the US colonial regime. He then delves into the demographic, economic, political, and cultural features of contemporary Puerto Rico--the inner workings of the Commonwealth government and the island's relationship to the United States. Moreover, the book explores the massive population displacement that has characterized Puerto Rico since the mid-twentieth century. New material examines the multiple issues affecting Puerto Rico in the last decade, including a prolonged recession, the devastating impact of two hurricanes, and the largest migrant wave ever recorded from Puerto Rico.

While a popular tourist destination, few beyond Puerto Rico's shores are familiar with its complex history and diverse culture. Duany takes on the task of educating readers on the most important facets of the unique, troubled, but much beloved isla del encanto.

Jorge Duany is the recently retired Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies and Director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.

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Jennifer Greenburg, "At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Jennifer Greenburg reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for "hearts and minds." Despite women technically being banned from ground combat units, the all-female teams were drawn into combat nonetheless. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing military trainings, this book challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women's rights and celebrated women's integration into combat as a victory for gender equality.

Dr. Jennifer Greenburg critically interrogates a new imperial feminism and its central role in securing US hegemony. Women's incorporation into combat through emotional labor has reinforced gender stereotypes, with counterinsurgency framing female soldiers as global ambassadors for women's rights. This book provides an analysis of US imperialism that keeps the present in tension with the past, clarifying where colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality have resurfaced and how they are changing today.

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Jonathon Wilson-Hartgrove, "White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy" (Liveright, 2024)

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

My guest today is Jonathon Wilson-Hartgrove. Wilson-Hartgrove is a writer, preacher, and moral activist. He is an assistant director at the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. Wilson-Hartgrove lives with his family at the Rutba House, a house of hospitality in Durham, North Carolina that he founded with H his wife, Leah. Wilson-Hartgrove directs the School for Conversion, a popular education center in Durham committed to "making surprising friendships possible," and is an associate minister at St. John's Missionary Baptist Church. Jonathan is the author or coauthor of more than a dozen books, including Reconstructing the Gospel, The Third Reconstruction, and Strangers at My Door.

About White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (Liveright, 2024):

One of the most pernicious and persistent myths in the United States is the association of Black skin with poverty. Though there are forty million more poor white people than Black people, most Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, continue to think of poverty--along with issues like welfare, unemployment, and food stamps--as solely a Black problem. Why is this so? What are the historical causes? And what are the political consequences that result?

These are among the questions that the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, a leading advocate for the rights of the poor and the "closest person we have to Dr. King" (Cornel West), addresses in White Poverty, a groundbreaking work that exposes a legacy of historical myths that continue to define both white and Black people, creating in the process what might seem like an insuperable divide. Analyzing what has changed since the 1930s, when the face of American poverty was white, Barber, along with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, addresses white poverty as a hugely neglected subject that just might provide the key to mitigating racism and bringing together tens of millions of working class and impoverished Americans.

Thus challenging the very definition of who is poor in America, Barber writes about the lies that prevent us from seeing the pain of poor white families who have been offered little more than their "whiteness" and angry social media posts to sustain them in an economy where the costs of housing, healthcare, and education have skyrocketed while wages have stagnated for all but the very rich. Asserting in Biblically inspired language that there should never be shame in being poor, White Poverty lifts the hope for a new "moral fusion movement" that seeks to unite people "who have been pitted against one another by politicians (and billionaires) who depend on the poorest of us not being here."

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Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti, "Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How should broadly liberal democratic societies stop illiberal and antidemocratic views from gaining influence while honouring liberal democratic values? This question has become particularly pressing after the recent successes of right-wing populist leaders and parties across Europe, in the US, and beyond. Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Alasia Nuti and Gabriele Badano develops a normative account of liberal democratic self-defence that denounces the failures of real-world societies without excusing those supporting illiberal and antidemocratic political actors. This account is innovative in focusing not only on the role of the state but also on the duties of nonstate actors including citizens, partisans, and municipalities. Consequently, it also addresses cases where the central government has at least been partly captured by illiberal and antidemocratic agents. Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti's approach builds on John Rawls's treatment of political liberalism and his awareness of the need to 'contain' unreasonable views, that is, views denying that society should treat every person as free and equal through a mutually acceptable system of social cooperation where pluralism is to be expected. The authors offer original solutions to vexed problems within political liberalism by putting forward a new account of the relation between ideal and non-ideal theory, explaining why it is justifiable to exclude unreasonable persons from the constituency of public reason, and showing that the strictures of public reason do not apply to those suffering from severe injustice. In doing so, the book further politicizes political liberalism and turns it into a framework that can insightfully respond to the challenges of real politics.

Alasia Nuti is senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of York. Her work is situated at the intersection of analytical political theory, critical theory, gender studies and critical race theory

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Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Our book is: Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts To Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Citadel Press, 2025) by Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham, which is an inspiring new narrative of the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. In March 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Frances Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR. As Hitler rose to power, thousands of German-Jewish refugees and their loved ones reached out to the INS—then part of the Department of Labor—applying for immigration to the United States, writing letters that began “Dear Miss Perkins . . .” Perkins’s early experiences working in Chicago’s famed Hull House and as a firsthand witness to the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire shaped her determination to advocate for immigrants and refugees. As Secretary of Labor, she wrestled widespread antisemitism and isolationism, finding creative ways to work around quotas and restrictive immigration laws. Diligent, resilient, empathetic, yet steadfast, she persisted on behalf of the desperate when others refused to act.

Our guest is: Dr Rebecca Brenner Graham who is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University. Previously, she taught at the Madeira School and American University. She has a PhD in history and an MA in public history from American University, and a BA in history and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College. In 2023, she was awarded a Cokie Roberts Fellowship from the National Archives Foundation and a Rubenstein Center Research Fellowship from the White House Historical Association. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, Time, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Stacey Diane Arañez Litam, "Patterns that Remain: A Guide to Healing for Asian Children of Immigrants" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This empowering book blends history, storytelling, and culturally grounded techniques to equip readers with the tools needed to promote self-reflection, personal growth, and diasporic healing. Asian Americans represent the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, yet few books capture how historical events, immigration experiences, cultural values, and unhelpful generational patterns contribute to this group's thoughts, attitudes, and actions in ways that impact relationships, well-being, and psychological health. In Patterns That Remain: A Guide to Healing for Asian Children of Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. Stacey Diane Arañez Litam empowers readers to heal from diasporic wounds and become people, partners, and parents who embody abundance mentalities grounded in joy, balance, and gratitude. This unique book combines complex and nuanced facets of Asian American history, research, and therapeutic modalities in ways that validate Asian American worldviews and promote a deep sense of universality and community. Each chapter addresses culturally relevant topics among Asian Americans and children of Asian immigrants and is informed by academic research in addition to author-conducted interviews with diverse Asian American community members and thought leaders. The book effortlessly blends history, storytelling, and culturally grounded perspectives to provide an inspirational, validating, and practical framework toward healing. Informed by Litam's lived experiences as a Filipina and Chinese immigrant as well as by her professional identities as a professor, researcher, and mental health clinician, Patterns That Remain provides the foundation for timely conversations and centers the importance of healing, personal growth, and unlocking the power behind our stories.

Dr. Stacey Diane Leetam is an Associate Professor of Counselor Education, a licensed professional clinical counselor and supervisor, as well as a diplomate and clinical sexologist with the American Board of Sexology. Dr. Litam is a member of the Forbes Health Advisory Board, an Advisory Council Chair for the National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC) Minority Fellowship Program, and was named one of Crain’s Cleveland 40 Under 40 in 2023. Dr. Litam has published over 50 academic peer-reviewed papers and book chapters and facilitated hundreds of workshops and trainings. Her work has resulted in a total of 15 national and 12 regional/state awards. She is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on the impact of COVID-19 related discrimination on the mental health and wellbeing of disaggregated AAPI communities and communities of color with 17 publications archived in the World Health Organization’s Global Database on COVID-19 literature.

Dr. Litam is a keynote speaker, racial equity strategist, and content expert on topics related to mental health, sexual wellbeing, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), as well as Asian American and Pacific Islander concerns. She regularly serves as a content expert on platforms such as Forbes Health, National Public Radio (NPR), and media outlets. Additionally, she has been featured in the White House, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Forbes Health, National Public Radio (NPR), Discovery Magazine, Dutch BBC, Psychology Today, National Institutes of Health, Mental Health Academy, The Daily Mail, The Filipino Channel, as well as in podcasts, documentaries, and news outlets. Her past partners include Fortune 500 Companies, professional sports teams, and federal level politicians. Dr. Litam is an immigrant and identifies as a Chinese and Filipina American woman.

Visit Dr. Litam's website here and find information on her upcoming book tour here

Follow her on Instagram @drstaceyalitam

Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is Assistant Editor at the New Books Network

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Rebecca Charbonneau, "Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain" (Polity, 2024)

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration—but SETI’s use of signals intelligence technology also served military and governmental purposes.

In this captivating new history of the collaboration between American and Soviet radio astronomers as they sought to detect evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, historian Dr. Rebecca Charbonneau reveals the triumphs and challenges they faced amidst a hostile political atmosphere. Shedding light on the untold stories from the Soviet side for the first time, she expertly unravels the complex web of military and political interests entangling radio astronomy and the search for alien intelligence, offering a thought-provoking perspective on the evolving relationship between science and power.

Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain (Polity, 2024) is not just a story of radio waves and telescopes; it's a revelation of how scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain navigated the complexities of the Cold War, blurring the lines between espionage and the quest for cosmic community. Filled with tension, contradiction, and the enduring human desire for connection, this is a history that transcends national boundaries and reaches out to the cosmic unknown, ultimately asking: how can we communicate with extraterrestrials when we struggle to communicate amongst ourselves?

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Jennie Lightweis-Goff, "Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year—centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities —similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan—resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts.

Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the “hospitality” cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a literary reflection that argues for coastal cities as a distinct region that scrambles time, resisting the “post” in postindustrial and the “neo” in neoliberalism. Jennie Lightweis-Goff offers a cultural exploration bound by American literature, especially life-writing by the enslaved, as well as compelling reassessments of works by canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur.

Lightweis-Goff reveals how the preserved yet fragile landscapes of these cities are haunted—not simply by the ghost tours that are signature stops for travelers in their historic districts—but by the echoes of slavery in their economies and built environments.

Jennie Lightweis-Goff is a scholar, lyric essayist, and, most essentially, a New Orleans flâneur. She is the author of two scholarly books, Blood at the Root and Captive City. Her essays have appeared in the major journals of U.S. literature, including Signs, American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, minnesota review, and south. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Liberties, and at her Substack, The Butcher's Darling, where she writes on grief, precarious labor, sobriety, and intellectual work that was "born in the back of the house."

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Sarah B. Rodriguez, "The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process.

It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that’s not the whole story. The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation (Rutgers University Press, 2020) asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn’t he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action?

The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation.

Sarah B. Rodriguez is a medical historian at Northwestern University in the Global Health Studies Program, the Department of Medical Education, and the Graduate Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. Her teaching and research focuses on the history of reproduction, clinical practice, and research ethics. Her publications include the book Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Practice.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandome, "Marxism and America: New Appraisals" (Manchester UP, 2021)

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

If the United States has been so hostile to Marxism, what accounts for Marxism's recurrent attractiveness to certain Americans? Marxism and America: New Appraisals (Manchester University Press, 2021) sheds new light on that question in essays engaging sexuality, gender, race, nationalism, class, memory, and much more, from the Civil War era through to 21st century cultures of activism. This book is an invaluable resource for historians and theorists of US political struggle.

I was joined for this interview by editors Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandome (both University of Nottingham), and contributors Mara Keire (Oxford University) and Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University).

We discussed the impetus behind the book and its broader scholarly context, before turning to Mara's chapter ("Class, commodity, consumption: theorizing sexual violence during the feminist sex wars of the 1980s") and finally Andrew's chapter ("Rethinking Karl Marx: American liberalism from the New Deal to the Cold War"). We hope you enjoy our conversation as much as we enjoyed recording it!

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office; she has previously published on US Africa Command and the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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Simon Hall, "Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s" (Faber and Faber, 2020)

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In his new book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s (Faber, 2020), Simon Hall, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds, colorfully details an extraordinary visit by Fidel Castro to New York in the Autumn of 1960 for the opening of the UN General Assembly.

Holding court from the iconic Hotel Theresa in Harlem, Castro's riotous stay in New York saw him connect with leaders from within the local African American community, as well as political and cultural luminaries such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nikita Khrushchev, Kwame Nkrumah and Allen Ginsberg. Through exploring the local and global impact of these ten days, Hall recovers Castro's visit as a critical turning point in the trajectory of the Cold War and the development of the 'The Sixties.'

E. James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020).

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Judith Giesberg, “Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality” (UNC Press, 2017)

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War, is professor and director of graduate studies in the history department at Villanova University and Editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Two of her previous books include Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (2000), which is about the understudied roles of women in relief efforts during the war, and “Army at Home”: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (2009), which concerns the experiences of working class women in the north. She is also the principal editor of Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia (2014).

Her latest book, and the subject of our discussion, is Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of an American Morality (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Giesberg argues that the Civil War is the turning point for the influential rise of postwar anti-pornography laws and a genesis for the related network of anti-vice campaigns, which included laws against contraceptives and abortion, newly entrenched legal regulations of marriage, and ever broader social purity initiatives around sexuality.

We discuss how crucial, and yet understudied, questions of sex and desire are to the Civil War era and how silence around them has affected the ways we talk about and regulate social relations today. Much of our conversation focuses on how a small group of men created new regulations around pornography, the constitution of which was always up for debate, to hold onto the political and social power that they felt to be threatened by men of a lower class or of a different race. Prominent among this group of regulators, and a leading face of the postwar anti-vice campaigns, was Anthony Comstock. After serving in a largely inactive regiment during the war, and feeling left out of the camaraderie generated by the sharing of pornography among his fellow soldiers, Comstock fashioned for himself a largely illusory legal fraternity of moral crusaders. For pornography was hardly the main issue for those who associated themselves with his cause. Geisberg writes and talks about how other men in power negotiated the place of newly freed slaves by tightening the regulatory role that marriage played in their “free” lives. Doctors jumped at the opportunity to regulate abortion and contraception as a way to further professionalize themselves after postwar advances in medicine. Both of these groups became part of an omnibus of social reform that affects the country to this day. As you will hear over the course of our conversation, the importance of Giesberg’s account is in showing the connections between these issues and how they come together in the Civil War. Sexual abuse was at the center of social systems, including slavery. But the legal articulations of sexual crimes after the war created more easily regulated vices that distracted attention aw...

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Theresa Keeley, "Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America (Cornell UP, 2020), Theresa Keeley analyzes the role of intra-Catholic conflict within the framework of U.S. foreign policy formulation and execution during the Reagan administration. She challenges the preponderance of scholarship on the administration that stresses the influence of evangelical Protestants on foreign policy toward Latin America. Especially in the case of U.S. engagement in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Keeley argues, the bitter debate between the U.S. and Central American Catholics over the direction of the Catholic Church shaped President Reagan’s foreign policy.

The flashpoint for these intra-Catholic disputes was the December 1980 political murder of four American Catholic missionaries in El Salvador. Liberal Catholics described nuns and priests in Central America who worked to combat structural inequality as human rights advocates living out the Gospel’s spirit. Conservative Catholics saw them as agents of class conflict who furthered the so-called Gospel, according to Karl Marx. The debate was an old one among Catholics, but, as Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns contends, it intensified as conservative, anticommunist Catholics played instrumental roles in crafting U.S. policy to fund the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan Contras.

Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns describes the religious actors as human rights advocates and, against prevailing understandings of the fundamentally secular activism related to human rights, highlights religion-inspired activism during the Cold War. In charting the rightward development of American Catholicism, Keeley provides a new chapter in the history of U.S. diplomacy. She shows how domestic issues such as contraception and abortion joined with foreign policy matters to shift Catholic laity toward Republican principles at home and abroad.

Allison Isidore is a graduate of the Religion in Culture Masters program at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Joshua Brinkman on American Farming Culture and the History of Technology

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Joshua Brinkman, Assistant Teaching Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at North Carolina State University, about his book, American Farming Culture and the History of Technology (Routledge, 2024). The book provides a fascinating exploration about how American farmers–contrary to their image as backwards and even anti-technology–have prided and put forward images of themselves as existing on the technological cutting-edge of modernity. Brinkman examines how different ideologies of farming have developed over time in the United States and how these ideologies have shaped the adoption of and ideas around new agricultural technologies. In addition to his academic work, Brinkman is also an accomplished saxophonist and jazz musician, and you can find recordings from two of his current bands, the Fabulous Nite-Life Boogie and Les Trois Chats, online.

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Dean Itsuji Saranillio, "Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood" (Duke UP, 2018)

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood (Duke University Press, 2018), Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to conventional understandings of Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state. Hawai‘i statehood is popularly remembered as a civil rights victory against racist claims that Hawai‘i was undeserving of statehood because it was a largely non-white territory. Yet Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood has been all but forgotten. Saranillio tracks these disparate stories by marshaling a variety of unexpected genres and archives: exhibits at world's fairs, political cartoons, propaganda films, a multimillion-dollar hoax on Hawai‘i’s tourism industry, water struggles, and stories of hauntings, among others. Saranillio shows that statehood was neither the expansion of U.S. democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a U.S. nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism. With clarity and persuasive force about historically and ethically complex issues, Unsustainable Empire provides a more complicated understanding of Hawai‘i’s admission as the fiftieth state and why Native Hawaiian place-based alternatives to U.S. empire are urgently needed.

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Amy Aronson, "Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Amy Aronson is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Fordham University and former editor at Working Woman and Ms. magazines. Her biography Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) gives us the life of a women’s rights activist, labor lawyer, radical pacifist, writer and co-founder of what became the Civil Liberties Union. Her life was shaped by key relationships including with her mother Annis Ford Eastman and a close relationship with her brother Max Eastman, editor of the socialist magazine The Masses. Subsequently with her brother, she would launch The Liberator. Eastman spoke and wrote about a variety of social and political problems and was threatened by censorship and economic hardship. One of her chief concerns was how women could combine meaningful work with family life based on egalitarian ideals of independence and freedom. She attempted to live out her feminist ideals by redefining her marriage, motherhood and career. Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life offers a vivid portrait of a modern feminist navigating the hazards of private and public life as it unfolded in the progressive era.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the cultural history of feminist thought seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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Devin Fergus, “Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class” (Oxford UP, 2018)

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working class jobs, a rise in finance-driven speculative capitalism, and a surge of tax policy decisions that benefit the ultra-rich, among others. While these arguments focus on the macro problems that contribute to growing inequality, they overlook one innocuous but substantial contributor to the widening divide: the explosion of fees accompanying virtually every transaction that people make.

As Devin Fergus, Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History, Black Studies, and Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, shows in Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class (Oxford University Press, 2018), these perfectly legal fees are buried deep within the verbose agreements between vendors and consumers – agreements that few people fully read or comprehend. The end effect, Fergus argues, is a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few: large banking corporations, airlines, corporate hotel chains, and other entities of vast wealth. Fergus traces the fee system from its origins in the deregulatory wave of the late 1970s to the present, placing the development within the larger context of escalating income inequality. He organizes the book around four of the basics of existence: housing, work, transportation, and schooling. In each category, industry lobbyists successfully influenced legislatures into transforming the law until surreptitious fees became the norm.

The average consumer is now subject to a dizzying array of charges in areas like mortgage contracts, banking transactions, auto insurance rates, college payments, and payday loans. The fees that accompany these transactions are not subject to usury laws and have effectively redistributed wealth from the lower and middle classes to ultra-wealthy corporations and the individuals at their pinnacles. By exposing this predatory and nearly invisible system of fees, Land of the Fee will reshape our understanding of wealth inequality in America.

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Matthew C. Godfrey, ed., "The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 7" (Church Historians Press, 2018)

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Joseph Smith, the nineteenth-century American prophet who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, can, at times, be considered an elusive historical figure. There were many forces that drove this man, along with the thousands of individuals who followed him, to create a flourishing religious movement that not only influenced minds, but fostered communities, built cities, and engaged in politics. The Mormons drastically influenced American culture, and they continue to impact the United States and the world in impressive ways. Join me as I talk with the managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers project, Matthew C. Godfrey, about a recently released documents volume (The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 7: September 1839 - January 1841). The book explores the geographical, political, and theological significance of Nauvoo, Illinois (a Mormon hub along the Mississippi River), the extraordinary proselytizing missions by the Church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles in England, and the further development of Mormon doctrine, especially the introduction of baptism for the dead. This new volume of the Joseph Smith Papers engages these topics with breadth and depth like never before, giving us a detailed view of how the Mormons negotiated their existence and growth within Jacksonian America and Victorian England.

Daniel P. Stone holds a PhD in American religious history from Manchester Metropolitan University (United Kingdom) and is the author of William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet(Signature Books, 2018). He has taught history courses at the University of Detroit Mercy and Florida Atlantic University, and currently, he works as a research archivist for a private library/archive in Detroit, Michigan.

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Joshua D. Rothman, "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" (Basic Book, 2021)

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Joshua Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America was published by Basic Books in 2021, and tells a sprawling history of slave traders in America. Often presented as outcasts and social pariahs, slave traders were often instead wealthy and respected members of their communities. Rothman explores the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard to show just what the work of a domestic slave trader looked like and the devastating affects their actions had on enslaved people. By weaving together a history the lives of men who created one of the most powerful slave trading operations in America, Rothman is able to show how slavery’s expansion and growth occurred up to the Civil War.

Joshua Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Alabama.

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Marc Gallicchio, "Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender formally ended the war in the Pacific and brought to a close one of the most cataclysmic engagements in history, one that had cost the lives of millions. VJ―Victory over Japan―Day had taken place two weeks or so earlier, in the wake of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war. In the end, the surrender itself fulfilled the commitment that Franklin Roosevelt had made that it be "unconditional," as had been the case with Nazi Germany in May, 1945.

Though readily accepted as war policy at the time, after Roosevelt's death in April 1945, popular support for unconditional surrender wavered, particularly when the bloody campaigns on Iwo Jima and Okinawa made clear the cost of military victory against Japan. The ending of the war in Europe spurred calls in Congress, particularly among anti-New Deal Republicans, to shift the American economy to peacetime and bring home troops. Even after the atomic bombs had been dropped, Japan continued to seek a negotiated surrender, further complicating the debate. Though this was the last time Americans would impose surrender unconditionally, questions surrounding it continued at home through the 1950s and 1960s, when liberal and conservative views reversed, and particularly in Vietnam and the definition of "peace with honor." It remained controversial through the ceremonies surrounding the 50th anniversary and the Gulf War, when the subject revived.

In Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II (Oxford UP, 2020), which publishes in time for the 75th anniversary of the surrender, Bancroft Prize co-winner Marc Gallicchio offers a narrative of the surrender in its historical moment, revealing how and why the event unfolded as it did and the principle figures behind it, including George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur, who would effectively become the leader of Japan during the American occupation. It also reveals how the policy underlying it remained controversial at the time and in the decades following, shaping our understanding of World War II.

Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II.

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Simon Miles, "Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2020) dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities.

The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan in particular opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, as Miles vividly demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly.

As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. Engaging the Evil Empire covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. Written with style and verve, Miles's bold narrative shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Budapest, Prague, and East Berlin.

Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub.

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Patrick T. Reardon, "The Loop: The 'L' Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago" (Southern Illinois UP, 2020)

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Every day Chicagoans rely on the loop of elevated train tracks to get to their jobs, classrooms, or homes in the city’s downtown. But how much do they know about the single most important structure in the history of the Windy City? In engagingly brisk prose, Patrick T. Reardon unfolds the fascinating story about how Chicago’s elevated Loop was built, gave its name to the downtown, helped unify the city, saved the city’s economy, and was itself saved from destruction in the 1970s.

Patrick T. Reardon's book The Loop: The 'L' Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago (Southern Illinois UP, 2020) combines urban history, biography, engineering, architecture, transportation, culture, and politics to explore the elevated Loop’s impact on the city’s development and economy and on the way Chicagoans see themselves. The Loop rooted Chicago’s downtown in a way unknown in other cities, and it protected that area—and the city itself—from the full effects of suburbanization during the second half of the twentieth century. Masses of data underlie new insights into what has made Chicago’s downtown, and the city as a whole, tick.

The Loop features a cast of colorful Chicagoans, such as legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow, poet Edgar Lee Masters, mayor Richard J. Daley, and the notorious Gray Wolves of the Chicago City Council. Charles T. Yerkes, an often-demonized figure, is shown as a visionary urban planner, and engineer John Alexander Low Waddell, a world-renowned bridge creator, is introduced to Chicagoans as the designer of their urban railway.

This fascinating exploration of how one human-built structure reshaped the social and economic landscape of Chicago is the definitive book on Chicago’s elevated Loop.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email tobtoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Benjamin T. Smith, "The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade" (W. W. Norton, 2021)

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (W. W. Norton, 2021), Benjamin T. Smith offers a history of the trade and its effects upon the people of Mexico. As he reveals, at the start of the 20th century drugs such as marijuana and opium were largely on the margins of Mexican society, used mainly by soldiers, prisoners, and immigrants. The association of marijuana with a bohemian subculture in the early 1920s prompted the first punitive laws against it, while the use of opium by Chinese immigrants led Mexican officials to target the drug as a means to arrest the country’s Chinese population.

Yet the drug trade thrived thanks to the growing demand for marijuana and heroin in the United States. In response, American officials pressured their Mexican counterparts to end drug production and distribution in their country, even to the point of ending the effort to provide heroin in a regulated way for the country’s relatively small population of heroin addicts. Yet these efforts often foundered on the economic factors involved, with many government officials protecting the trade either for personal profit or for the financial benefits the trade provided to their states. This trade only grew in the postwar era, as the explosion of drug use in the 1960s and the crackdown on the European heroin trade made Mexico an increasingly important supplier of narcotics to the United States. The vast profits to be made from this changed the nature of the trade from small-scale family-managed operations to much more complex organizations that increasingly employed violence to ensure their share of it. As Smith details, the consequences of this have proven enormously detrimental both to the Mexican state and to the Mexican people.

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Shannan Clark, "The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the shape and feel of the consumer economy. While this centre of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers challenged the managers and executives who directed their labours.

Shannan Clark. author of The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism (Oxford UP, 2020), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the origins of the creative class, their labour union struggles and successes, the role of the Works Projects Administration, and institutions like the Design Laboratory and Consumer Union which foretell the experiences of today’s culture workers.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Rachel Louise Moran, "Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular and medical voices blamed women who had emotional and mental distress after childbirth for their own suffering. By the end of the century, though, women with postpartum mental illnesses sought to take charge of this narrative.

In Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Rachel Louise Moran explores the history of the naming and mainstreaming of postpartum depression. Coalitions of maverick psychiatrists, psychologists, and women who themselves had survived substantial postpartum distress fought to legitimize and normalize women’s experiences. They argued that postpartum depression is an objective and real illness and fought to avoid it being politicized alongside other fraught medical and political battles over women’s health.

Based on insightful oral histories and in-depth archival research, Blue reveals a secret history of American motherhood, women’s political activism, and the rise of postpartum depression advocacy amid an often-censorious conservative culture. By breaking new ground with the first book-length history of postpartum mental illness in the twentieth century, Moran brings mothers’ battles with postpartum depression out of the shadows and into the light.

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Michael Newton, "It's a Wonderful Life" (British Film Institute, 2023)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war that is one of the central movies of the 1940s, and a key text in America's understanding of itself. This is a film that remains relevant to our own anxieties and yearnings, to all the contradictions of ordinary life, while also enacting for us the quintessence of the classic Hollywood aesthetic. Nostalgia, humour, and a tough resilience weave themselves through this movie, intertwining it with the fraught cultural moment of the end of World War II that saw its birth. It offers a still compelling merging of fantasy and realism that was utterly unique when it was first released, and has rarely been matched since.

Michael Newton's study of the film, It's a Wonderful Life (British Film Institute, 2023), investigates the source of its extraordinary power and its long-lasting impact. He begins by introducing the key figures in the movie's production - notably director Frank Capra and star James Stewart - and traces the making of the film, and then provides a brief synopsis of the film, considering its aesthetic processes and procedures, touching on all those things that make it such an astonishing film. Newton's careful analysis explores all those aspects of the film that are fundamental to our understanding of it, particularly the way in which the film brings tragedy and comedy together. Finally, Newton tells the story of the film's reception and afterlife, accounting for its initial relative failure and its subsequent immense popularity.

Michael Newton is Lecturer in English at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 (2012), and of Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003) and Rosemary's Baby (2020) in the BFI Film Classics series.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X.

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I. Augustus Durham, "Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius" (Duke UP, 2023)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke UP, 2023), I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, and media from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment. Drawing on psychoanalysis, affect theory, and black studies, Durham explores the black mother as both a lost object and a found subject often obscured when constituting a cultural legacy of genius across history. He analyzes the works of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Marvin Gaye, Octavia E. Butler, and Kendrick Lamar to show how black cultural practices and aesthetics abstract and reveal the lost mother through performance. Whether attributing Douglass’s intellect to his matrilineage, reading Gaye’s falsetto singing voice as a move to interpolate black female vocality, or examining the women in Ellison’s life who encouraged his aesthetic interests, Durham demonstrates that melancholy becomes the catalyst for genius and genius in turn is a signifier of the maternal. Using psychoanalysis to develop a theory of racial melancholy while “playing” with affect theory to investigate racial aesthetics, Durham theorizes the role of the feminine, especially the black maternal, in the production of black masculinist genius.

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Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934" (UVA Press, 2020)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

As a novelist, short story author, screenwriter, and Nobel laureate, William Faulkner looms large in modern American literature. Yet the very range of his work and the sources for his rich literary worlds often defy easy assessment. In The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), Carl Rollyson uses both an extensive range of archival collections and Faulkner’s wide-ranging literary output to assess the author’s life and the development of his many famous works. Growing up in Mississippi, young William absorbed his family’s tales and the larger history of the region to which it was tied. Yet it took Faulkner’s journeys outside of his community – first to Canada to train as a pilot for the Royal Air Force, then his extended visits to New York and Europe – to gain the perspective necessary to best use them in his writing. After an early foray into poetry Faulkner focused on writing prose, emerging by the end of the 1920s as an acclaimed author of novels and short stories. As Rollyson shows, this fame brought Faulkner to Hollywood, where he demonstrated quickly his ability to write as well for the rapidly emerging medium of talking pictures.

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Deborah Willis, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship" (NYU Press, 2021)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Photography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the photography culture grew during the Civil War, and it became an important material that archived this unprecedented war. Deborah Willis's The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York University Press, 2021) contains rarely seen letters and diary notes from Black men and women and photographs of Black soldiers who fought and died in this war. These ninety-nine images reshape African American narratives. The Black Civil War Soldier offers an opportunity to experience the war through their perspectives.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Donna Tesiero, "A Revolutionary Woman: Elizabeth Freeman and the Abolition of Slavery in the North" (McFarland, 2024)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

At the end of the American Revolution, Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved widow and mother living in Massachusetts. Hearing the words of the new Massachusetts state constitution which declared liberty and equality for all, she sought the help of a young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick, later Speaker of the House and one of America's leading Federalist politicians. The lawsuit that she and Sedgwick pursued would bring freedom to her and her daughter, as well as thousands of other enslaved people.

After leaving her enslaver's family to work for the family of Theodore Sedgwick, she effectively became the foster mother to his seven children when his wife Pamela became a chronic invalid, enabling Sedgwick to pursue his political career. Two of his sons would credit her with saving their lives. His daughter Catharine Maria Sedgwick, one of the most famous female novelists of the early decades of the nineteenth century, would make her the model for one of her most celebrated heroines. A Revolutionary Woman: Elizabeth Freeman and the Abolition of Slavery in the North (McFarland, 2024) details Elizabeth Freeman's life and the far-reaching influence of her battle for freedom.

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Kent Michael Shaw, "Missiology Reimagined: The Missions Theology of the Nineteenth-Century African American Missionary" (Pickwick, 2024)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Missiology Reimagined: The Missions Theology of the Nineteenth-Century African American Missionary (Pickwick, 2024), Kent Michael Shaw I examines the lives and theology of early African American missionaries of the Antebellum and Reconstruction era. The enslaved and formerly enslaved constructed a hermeneutic and interpreted the sacred text through a lens that contradicted the enslaver's version of Christianity. They engaged Scripture on their own terms and embraced a theology of mission that compelled them to risk death and re-enslavement to pursue a global mandate from God. These pioneering missionaries were not only mission workers but missiologists. The reader will discover an applied missiology with relevance not only for the African American church of that day but for the church as a whole today.

Dave Broucek is a retired cross-cultural missionary/coordinator of continuing education/international ministries director, having served on the staff of two faith-based nonprofits, The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) and South America Mission (SAM). He holds a PhD in Intercultural Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

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James Baldwin’s Use of Mechanisms of Defense in this Story “Going to Meet the Man”

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” is a powerful short story that describes the life of Jesse, a 42-year-old white police officer whose experiences alternate between his present-day struggles with impotence and his memories of racial violence. As the narrative unfolds a pivotal childhood memory of a lynching, sets the tone and comes to represent the fundamental weakness of white supremacy. His need for racist violence to regain potency suggests that the system of white supremacy requires constant reinforcement to maintain itself. Projective identification, a powerful mechanism of defense, also plays a significant role in exploring the complex psychological dynamics of racism and its impact on both the oppressor and the oppressed.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited seven books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world.

Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA).

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Hugh Wilford, "The CIA: An Imperial History" (Basic Books, 2024)

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

As World War II ended, the United States stood as the dominant power on the world stage. In 1947, to support its new global status, it created the CIA to analyze foreign intelligence. But within a few years, the Agency was engaged in other operations: bolstering pro-American governments, overthrowing nationalist leaders, and surveilling anti-imperial dissenters at home.

The Cold War was an obvious reason for this transformation--but not the only one. In The CIA, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford draws on decades of research to show the Agency as part of a larger picture, the history of Western empire. While young CIA officers imagined themselves as British imperial agents like T. E. Lawrence, successive US presidents used the covert powers of the Agency to hide overseas interventions from postcolonial foreigners and anti-imperial Americans alike. Even the CIA's post-9/11 global hunt for terrorists was haunted by the ghosts of empires past.

Comprehensive, original, and gripping, The CIA: An Imperial History (Basic Books, 2024) is the story of the birth of a new imperial order in the shadows. It offers the most complete account yet of how America adopted unaccountable power and secrecy abroad and at home.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Nick Yablon, "Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Nick Yablon traces the birth of the time capsule in the United States. Starting with the Gilded Age, Yablon explores the way Americans from diverse backgrounds constructed memories of their present through the creation of time capsules. Examining the ephemera included in the time capsules, including writing texts, photographs, phonographic records, films, and other artifacts, Yablon details the way these capsules not only created records of their time periods, but also how they show the ways in which their creators and contributors imagined the future. Remembrance of Things Present not only allows readers a glimpse into the history of time capsules, but also the ways in which politics, social justice, and American values were all represented in these buried treasures.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Crystal R. Sanders, "A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs" (UNC Press, 2024)

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024) tells the little-known story of "segregation scholarships" awarded by states in the US South to Black students seeking graduate education in the pre-Brown v. Board of Education era. Under the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, decades earlier, southern states could provide graduate opportunities for African Americans by creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. Most did neither and instead paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education.

Crystal R. Sanders examines Black graduate students who relocated to the North, Midwest, and West to continue their education with segregation scholarships, revealing the many challenges they faced along the way. Students that entered out-of-state programs endured long and tedious travel, financial hardship, racial discrimination, isolation, and homesickness. With the passage of Brown in 1954, segregation scholarships began to wane, but the integration of graduate programs at southern public universities was slow. In telling this story, Sanders demonstrates how white efforts to preserve segregation led to the underfunding of public Black colleges, furthering racial inequality in American higher education.

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Mike Madrid, "The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy" (Simon and Schuster, 2024)

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 2020, Latinos became the second largest ethnic voting group in the country. They make up the largest plurality of residents in the most populous states in the union, as well as the fastest segment of the most important swing states in the US Electoral College. Fitting neither the stereotype of the aggrieved minority voter nor the traditional assimilating immigrant group, Latinos are challenging both political parties' notions of race, religious beliefs, economic success, and the American dream. Given their exploding numbers—and their growing ability to determine the fate of local, state, and national elections—you’d think the two major political parties would understand Latino voters. After all, their emergence on the national scene is not a new phenomenon. But they still don’t.

Republicans, not because of their best efforts but rather despite them, are just beginning to see a movement of Latinos toward the GOP. Democrats, for the moment, still win a commanding share of the Latino vote, but that share is dwindling fast. Now, in The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy (Simon and Schuster, 2024), veteran political consultant Mike Madrid uses thirty years of research and campaign experience at some of the highest levels on both sides of the aisle to address what might be the most critical questions of our time: Will the rise of Latino voters continue to foment the hyper-partisan and explosive tribalism of our age or will they usher in a new pluralism that advances the arc of social progress? How and why are both political parties so uniquely unprepared for the coming wave of Latino votes? And what must each party do to win those votes?

By answering these questions, The Latino Century explores the true meaning of America at a time of rapid cultural change, the founding principles of self-government and individual responsibility, and one man’s journey through a political party that has turned itself inside out.

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Susanna Ashton, "A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin" (New Press, 2024)

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression: drawing from this experience, Stowe began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most influential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United States.

A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New Press, 2024) unfolds as a historical detective story, as Susanna Ashton combs obscure records for evidence of Jackson’s remarkable flight from slavery to freedom, his quest to liberate his enslaved family, and his emergence as an international advocate for abolition. This fresh and original work takes us through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the restoration of white supremacy—where we last glimpse Jackson losing his freedom again on a Southern chain gang.

In the spirit of Tiya Miles’s prizewinning All That She Carried and Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught, Susanna Ashton breathes life into a striving and nuanced American character, one unmistakably rooted in the vast sweep of nineteenth-century America.

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Farina King, "Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century" (UP of Kansas, 2023)

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this deeply personal account, University of Oklahoma associate professor of Native American Studies Dr. Farina King describes the history and present of Diné dóó Gáamalii, Navajo people who, in her words, "walk a Latter-day Saints pathway." The book, Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century (UP of Kansas, 2023), uses her family's history of life in the LDS church to explore the complicated and very human relationships Diné people have with so-called Mormonism. Refusing to be defined by easy stereotypes, King's account shows people coming to the church and remaining in the church for deeply personal and deeply felt reasons, often in the face of prejudice both from within and without wider Indigenous communities. Diné dóó Gáamalii is the story of complex religious life in the American West, and a history of acceptance being found sometimes where it might be least expected.

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Lisa Sheryl Jacobson. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition" (U California Press, 2024)

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Dr. Lisa Jacobson reveals in Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition (University of California Press, 2024), alcohol’s respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world war and a battalion of public relations experts and tastemakers to transform wine, beer, and whiskey into emblems of the American good life. Alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—powered a publicity machine that linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the place of pleasure in modern American life.

In this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Dr. Jacobson shows how the yearnings of ordinary consumers and military personnel shaped alcohol’s cultural reinvention and put intoxicating pleasures at the center of broader debates about the rights and obligations of citizens.

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Jess A. Goldberg, "Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How can Black Atlantic literature challenge conventions and redefine literary scholarship?

Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice (U Minnesota Press, 2024) is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, Jess A. Goldberg reveals how literary studies can help undo carceral epistemologies embedded in language and poetics. Goldberg examines poetry, drama, and novels from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first--such as William Wells Brown's The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel, Toni Morrison's A Mercy, and Claudia Rankine's Citizen--to consider literature and literary scholarship's roles in shaping societal paradigms. Focusing on how Black Atlantic literature disrupts the grammar of law and order, they show how these texts propose nonlinear theories of time that imagine a queer relationality characterized by care rather than inheritance, property, or biology. Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking critically about what is meant by the term justice in the broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the abolitionist movement.

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Vincent Haddad, "The Detroit Genre: Race, Dispossession, and Resilience in American Literature and Film, 1967-2023" (Lever Press, 2024)

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Detroit has an essential relationship to genre in American literature and popular culture. The contemporary formations of the suburban sitcom, the post-apocalyptic genre, the sci-fi dystopia, crime fiction, the superhero genre, and contemporary horror would not exist in the way they do today without the aesthetic material and racial history of Detroit. When DC Comics wanted to compete with Marvel and market “socially relevant” comics, especially ones dealing with issues of race, they swapped Gotham and Metropolis for Detroit. What about vampires concerned with de-industrialization, heritage conservation, and impending water wars? Must be Detroit. A story about a half-man, half-robot wrestling with what it means to be human by fighting crime? Improbably, Detroit has two. Author Vincent Haddad’s The Detroit Genre: Race, Dispossession, and Resilience in American Literature and Film, 1967-2023 (Lever Press, 2024) provides the first comprehensive literary and cultural investigation of the representations of Detroit in popular and literary culture.

The book first establishes the concept of the “Detroit genre” that emerged in late 1960s and traces the tropes of this white-centric narrative genre in popular culture, touching on key texts including Blue Collar, Robocop, The Crow, It Follows, and Barbarian. The second part shows how Black writers, including Alice Randall, adrienne maree brown, Stephen Mack Jones, and Angela Flournoy, reclaimed and revised the Detroit genre by un-fixing Detroit narratives of dispossession, criminality, and industrial and social failure through formal experimentations on genre itself.

Where Detroit has typically been painted in the news as one of three things—the center of the automotive industry; crime-ridden and in ruins; or as a “blank canvas” with limitless potential of entrepreneurship—Vincent Haddad shows that the Detroit genre in literature and film can be far more powerful than news media in narrating Black dispossession as a pragmatic, even liberal consensus. The texts studied here condition forgetfulness about Detroit’s history or expose it to a full reckoning, direct attention toward or away from the city’s agents of injustice, fetishize resilience or model resistance, and foreclose or imagine a future of Black liberation. Appealing to scholars of popular literature, media, race, and American studies, The Detroit Genre is an accessible and engaging study of the city’s influence on a wide array of genres in pop culture.

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Jeremy Dauber, "American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond" (Algonquin Books, 2024)

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

From the acclaimed author of American Comics comes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror in American literature, and, ultimately, culture—from the taut, terrifying stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the grisly, lingering films of Jordan Peele

America is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie theater and are shared around the campfire. They blare out in tabloid true-crime headlines, and in the worried voices of local news anchors. They are consumed, virally, on the phones in our pockets. Like the victims in any slasher movie worth its salt, we can’t escape the thrall of scary stories.

In American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond (Algonquin Books, 2024), noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of horror in the United States. Dauber draws a captivating through line that ties historical influences ranging from the Salem witch trials and enslaved-person narratives directly to the body of work we more closely associate with horror today: the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft, the lingering fiction of Shirley Jackson, the disquieting films of Alfred Hitchcock, the up-all-night stories of Stephen King, and the gripping critiques of Jordan Peele.

With the dexterous weave of insight and style that have made him one of America’s leading historians of popular culture, Dauber makes the haunting case that horror reveals the true depths of the American mind.

Jeremy Dauber is a professor of Jewish Literature and American Studies at Columbia University. His books include Jewish Comedy and The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem, both finalists for the National Jewish Book Award, American Comics: A History, and Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew. He lives in New York City.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. You can also find his writing about books and films on Pages and Frames.

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Scott Huver, "Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210" (Post Hill Press, 2024)

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210 (Post Hill Press, 2024) explores the city’s true crime history, delving deep inside cases that made headlines, scandals that engulfed Hollywood legends, and more strange-but-true tales that could only happen in the 90210. Beverly Hills Noir chronicles an assortment of jaw-dropping true crime stories spanning the legendary city’s history, each with oh-so-90210 twists—including a high-profile murder mystery in the city’s most extravagant mansion, the daring exploits of a handsome cat burglar with movie star looks, a toxic Tinseltown love triangle that ended in gunplay, a brazen Rodeo Drive jewelry store holdup with tragically stunning finale, an Oscar nominated actress on shoplifting spree and more—complete with major roles and countless cameos by Hollywood idols and cultural icons. A gripping, century-long tour of the glamorous city’s shadowy underbelly through crimes and misdemeanors as over-the-top as the city itself, Beverly Hills Noir collects the kinds of stories you’d expect to be swapped if James Ellroy and Dominick Dunne had met Jackie Collins and Ryan Murphy for cocktails at the Polo Lounge. It’s Sunset Boulevard and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood turned sordid, face-down-in-the-pool reality.

Scott Huver has covered the inner workings of Beverly Hills, the entertainment industry, and the Los Angeles-area elite for three decades.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Linda M. Clemmons, "Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876" (SDHS Press, 2023)

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

For much of her life, Angelique Renville had decisions made for her. Where to live, who to live with, where to attend school, what to do with her land. That changed in 1863 when she made a plan and successfully hatched her plan to escape, living the end of her life on her own terms. This is the story Dr. Linda Clemmons tells in Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876 (South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2023).

Hers is a story, yes, of defeat and loss, but also so much more than that. Of a young woman carving her own path through a world in flux, and finding space to make choices even when those choices are limited. And it's a story with afterlives, as the web of connections created by Renville during her life continued even after her untimely death in 1876. As a work of biography, Unrepentant Dakota Woman does not pretend to speak for all Dakota women, or even all 19th century Dakota women born into fur trade families, but does show how one life can both embody the historical forces that shape our stories, and how our choices can overcome even the strongest headwinds.

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Emily Mitchell-Eaton, "New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching imperial power dynamics between the two countries. The U.S.-RMI Compact at once enshrined exclusive U.S. military access to the islands and established the right of “visa-free” migration to the United States for Marshallese citizens, leading to a Marshallese diaspora whose largest population resettled in the seemingly unlikely destination of Springdale, Arkansas.

An “all-white town” by design for much of the twentieth century, Springdale, having nearly quadrupled in population since 1980, has been remade by Marshallese as well as Latinx immigration. Through ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Emily Mitchell-Eaton tells the story of these place-based transformations, revealing how U.S. empire both causes and constrains mobility for its subjects, shaping migrants’ experiences of racialization, citizenship, and belonging in new destinations of empire.

In examining two spatial processes—imperialism and migration—together, Dr. Mitchell-Eaton reveals connections and flows between presumably distant, “remote” sites like Arkansas and the Marshall Islands, showing them to be central to the United States’ most urgent political issues: immigration, racial justice, militarization, and decolonization.

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Lindsay Weinberg, "Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech solutions and systems in our schools impacts students' abilities to access opportunities and exercise autonomy on their campuses. Using historical and textual analysis of administrative discourses, university policies, conference proceedings, grant solicitations, news reports, tech industry marketing materials, and product demonstrations, Weinberg argues that these more recent transformations are best understood as part of a longer history of universities supporting the development of technologies that reproduce racial and economic injustice on their campuses and in their communities.

Mentioned in this episode is this piece that Dr. Weinberg wrote in Inside Higher Ed:

Lindsay Weinberg is a clinical assistant professor and the Director of the Tech Justice Lab in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue University.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Joseph McBride, "George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely admired but often misunderstood. Reductively stereotyped in his time as a "woman's director"-a thinly veiled, disparaging code for "gay"-he brilliantly directed a wide range of iconic actors and actresses, including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Smith. As Katharine Hepburn, the star of ten Cukor films, told the director, "All the people in your pictures are as goddamned good as they can possibly be, and that's your stamp."

In this groundbreaking, lavishly illustrated critical study, Joseph McBride provides insightful and revealing essayistic portraits of Cukor's actors in their most memorable roles. The queer filmmaker gravitated to socially adventurous, subversively rule-breaking, audacious dreamers who are often sexually transgressive and gender fluid in ways that seem strikingly modern today. McBride shows that Cukor's seemingly self-effacing body of work is characterized by a discreet way of channeling his feelings through his actors. He expertly cajoled actors, usually gently but sometimes with bracing harshness, to delve deeply into emotional areas they tended to keep safely hidden. Cukor's wry wit, his keen sense of psychological and social observation, his charm and irony, and his toughness and resilience kept him active for more than five decades in Hollywood. George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director (Columbia UP, 2024) gives him the in-depth, multifaceted examination his rich achievement deserves.

Joseph McBride is a film historian and a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg; three books on Orson Welles; and critical studies of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and the Coen Brothers. He acted for Welles in The Other Side of the Wind and has won a Writers Guild of America award.

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Stephen Jackson, "The Patchwork of World History in Texas High Schools" (Routledge, 2022)

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The Patchwork of World History in Texas High Schools (Routledge, 2022) traces the historical development of the World History course as it has been taught in high school classrooms in Texas, a populous and nationally influential state, over the last hundred years.

Arguing that the course is a result of a patchwork of competing groups and ideas that have intersected over the past century, with each new framework patched over but never completely erased or replaced, the author crucially examines themes of imperialism, Eurocentrism, and nationalism in both textbooks and the curriculum more broadly. The first part of the book presents an overview of the World History course supported by numerical analysis of textbook content and public documents, while the second focuses on the depiction of non-Western peoples, and persistent narratives of Eurocentrism and nationalism. It ultimately offers that a more global, accurate, and balanced curriculum is possible, despite the tension between the ideas of professional world historians, who often de-center the nation-state in their quest for a truly global approach to the subject, and the historical core rationale of state-sponsored education in the United States: to produce loyal citizens.

Offering a new, conceptual understanding of how colonial themes in World History curriculum have been dealt with in the past and are now engaged with in contemporary times, it provides essential context for scholars and educators with interests in the history of education, curriculum studies, and the teaching of World History in the United States.

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Free Inquiry in the Academy and Beyond

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Madison’s Notes, we’re joined by Professors Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder for a thought-provoking discussion on the state of free speech in today’s polarized climate. We explore the role of the university as a space for critical inquiry, the challenges to academic freedom, and the growing tensions between open discourse and political pressures. Professors Khalid and Snyder share their perspectives on the biggest threats to free speech today, offering insight into how institutions of higher learning can navigate these complex issues while remaining true to their educational mission. Tune in for a deep dive into the intersection of free expression, education, and the broader societal forces shaping our public discourse.

Amna Khalid is an Associate Professor in the department of History at Carleton College. She specializes in modern South Asian history, the history of medicine and the global history of free expression. Khalid is the author of multiple book chapters on the history of public health in nineteenth-century India, with an emphasis on the connections between Hindu pilgrimages and the spread of epidemics. She completed a Bachelor’s Degree at Lahore University of Management Sciences and earned both an MPhil in Development Studies and a DPhil in History from Oxford University. Growing up under a series of military dictatorships in Pakistan, Khalid has a strong interest in issues relating to free expression. She hosts a podcast and accompanying blog called “Banished,” which explores censorship controversies in the past and present.

Jeff Snyder is an Associate Professor in the department of Educational Studies at Carleton College. He is a historian of education, whose work examines questions about race, national identity and the purpose of public education in a diverse, democratic society. Snyder is the author of the book, Making Black History: The Color Line, Culture and Race in the Age of Jim Crow. He holds a BA from Carleton, an EdM in Learning and Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a PhD in the History of Education from New York University. Before pursuing graduate studies, Snyder taught English to Speakers of Other Languages in the Czech Republic, France, China, India, Nepal and the United States.

Khalid and Snyder speak regularly together about academic freedom, free speech and campus politics at colleges and universities across the country. They write frequently on these issues for newspapers and magazines, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic and The Washington Post. During the 2022/23 academic year, Khalid and Snyder were fellows with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. Their research focused on threats to academic freedom in Florida, the state at the epicenter of the conservative “culture wars” movement to encourage state intervention in public school classrooms. Based on interviews they conducted with Florida faculty members, Khalid and Snyder submitted an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs who are challenging the Stop WOKE Act.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, "Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

American democracy is in trouble. At the heart of the contemporary crisis is a mismatch between America's Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan politics. Although American political institutions remain federated and fragmented, the ground beneath them has moved, with the national subsuming and transforming the local.

In Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (U Chicago Press, 2024), political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring today's challenges into new perspective. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape-state parties, interest groups, and media-varied locally and reinforced the nation's stark regional diversity. They created openings for new policy demands and factional divisions that disrupted party lines. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. Now thoroughly integrated into a single political order and tightly coupled with partisanship, they no longer militate against polarization. Instead, they accelerate it. Precisely because today's polarization is different, it is self-perpetuating and, indeed, intensifying. With the precision and acuity characteristic of both authors' earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy. They show that America's political system is distinctively, and acutely, vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America's unusual Constitutional design.

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Bob Kuska, "Balls of Confusion: Pro Baskelball Goes to War (1965-1970)" (From Way Downtown, 2024)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Balls of Confusion: Pro Basketball Goes to War(1965-70) is the first of a two-part story about one of the most transformative events inpro basketball history: the war between the National Basketball Association and its challenger the American Basketball Association (ABA).From this nine-year battle for the heart of the game, modern pro basketball emerged in the mid-1970s and grew into today's global, multibillion-dollar sports industry. Part One takes a definitive behind-the-scenes look at both leagues marching to war, their marketing schemes, their labor woes, their legal challenges, and their coming to terms with the 1960s and the nation's changing attitudes on race. If you love sports history and pro basketball's throwback days of Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, Connie Hawkins, and Julius Erving, this is a book for you, with part two soon to follow.

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Tom Jenks, "James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues (Oxford University Press, 2024), Tom Jenks follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by which Baldwin indelibly writes "Sonny's Blues" into the consciousness of readers. It provides ongoing observations of the aesthetics underlying the particulars of the story, with references to Edward P. Jones (whose magnificent story "All Aunt Hagar's Children" bears a knowing relationship to "Sonny's Blues,") to Charlie Parker's music, and to Billie Holiday's "Am I Blue?" and John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" as part of the musical progression Baldwin creates, and with attention to Baldwin's oratorical gifts and the biblical references in the story, to its time structure, characterizations, dramatic action, and, most of all, its totality of effect.

Drawing on Baldwin's book-length essay The Fire Next Time, which Baldwin published a six years after the publication of the short story, Tom Jenks offers insight on some of the sources in Baldwin's life for "Sonny's Blues" and on the logic and passion by which life may be meaningfully transformed into art.

Tom Jenks is the cofounder and editor of Narrative magazine. Check out his magazine online here. He is a former editor of Esquire, Gentlemen's Quarterly, The Paris Review, and a senior editor at Scribners, where he edited Hemingway's The Garden of Eden. With Raymond Carver, he edited American Short Story Masterpieces. His writing has appeared in Harper's, Ploughshares, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The American Scholar, Five Points, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He has given classes at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Creative Writing Programs at University of California, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network.

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Tom Clavin, "Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

From multiple New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin comes the thrilling true story of the most infamous hangout for bandits, thieves and murderers of all time―and the lawmen tasked with rooting them out.

Robbers Roost, Brown’s Hole, and Hole-in-the-Wall were three hideouts that collectively were known to outlaws as “Bandit Heaven.” During the 1880s and ‘90s these remote locations in Wyoming and Utah harbored hundreds of train and bank robbers, horse and cattle thieves, the occasional killer, and anyone else with a price on his head.

Clavin's Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West (St. Martin's Press, 2024) is the entertaining story of these tumultuous times and the colorful characters who rode the Outlaw Trail through the frigid mountain passes and throat-parching deserts that connected the three hideouts―well-guarded enclaves no sensible lawman would enter. There are the “star” residents like gregarious Butch Cassidy and his mostly silent sidekick the Sundance Kid, and an array of fascinating supporting players like the cold-blooded Kid Curry, and “Black Jack” Ketchum (who had the dubious distinction of being decapitated during a hanging), among others.

Most of the hard-riding action takes place in the mid- to late-1890s when Bandit Heaven came to be one of the few safe places left as the law closed in on the dwindling number of active outlaws. Most were dead by the beginning of the 20th century, gunned down by a galvanized law-enforcement system seeking rewards and glory. Ultimately, only Cassidy and Sundance escaped . . . to meet their fate 6000 miles away, becoming legends when they died in a fusillade of lead.

Bandit Heaven is a thrilling read, filled with action, indelible characters, and some poignance for the true end of the Wild West outlaw.

Tom Clavin is a bestselling author of 25 nonfiction books on American and military history, sports, and entertainment. His writing career began in journalism, as a roving reporter for The New York Times for 15 years as well as a contributor to national magazines including Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, Parade, Reader’s Digest, and Sports Illustrated. Along the way, he was awarded numerous prizes by the Society of Professional Journalists and National Newspaper Association.

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Postscript: Violence, Consent, and Coercion in American Football

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Last week, the press focused on what the press repeatedly characterized as an “ugly” fight between American college football players that broke out after the University of Michigan beat The Ohio State. But another story received less attention. Medrick Burnett Jr., a 20 year old from Southern California was playing his first season as a linebacker with Alabama A&M University when he sustained a head injury during the annual Magic City Classic against in-state rivals Alabama State University on Oct. 26. A month later, Burnett died. Today’s Postscript features two prominent scholars of sports raising questions about the hypocrisy of blaming players for a fight yet downplaying the death caused by playing by the rules. This remarkable conversation includes an unpacking of the “consent” to physical, psychological, and economic impacts, insight into the Foucauldian elements of discipline, punishment, and surveillance, and concrete reform suggestions for all people who watch football and/or work at universities. This nuanced conversation is for those who love or loathe football as a college sport.

Dr. Nathan Kalman-Lamb (he/him) is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick and Dr. Derek Silva (he/him) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-authors of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game published by UNC Press in 2024 – and their public-facing scholarship appears in outlets such as The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times. They are the co-hosts (with Johanna Mellis) of The End of Sport podcast.

Mentioned:

“The hypocrisy of shaming college football player brawls,” Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, LATimes
“A player’s foreseeable death raises existential questions for college football,”Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, The Guardian
“Alabama A&M football player dies a month after suffering a head injury in a game,” Pat Duggins, Alabama Public Radio
Paul Knepper’s New Books Network interview with Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva on their 2024 book, “The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game”
Dr. Jill A. Fisher’s Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials (Rutgers University Press 2008)
Dr. Erin Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment (University of California Press, 2020)

On the University of Missouri football team’s successful threat to strike if the university president didn't resign see

"The Power of a Football Boycott,” Jake New, Inside Higher Education,
The Forgotten History of Head Injuries in Sports:
Stephen Casper, a medical historian, argues that the danger of C.T.E. used to be widely acknowledged. How did we unlearn what we once knew? Ingfei Chen, The New Yorker

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Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, "The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai" (NYU Press, 2024)

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a culture that offered women few options other than marriage. She was American born when most American Jews were immigrants. She affirmed and maintained her dedication to Jewish religious practice and Jewish faith while many family members embraced Christianity. Yet she also lived well within the social parameters established for Southern white women, espoused Southern values, and owned enslaved African Americans.

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai is one of the few surviving Civil War diaries by a Jewish woman in the antebellum South. It charts her daily life and her evolving perspective on Confederate nationalism and Southern identity, Jewishness, women's roles in wartime, gendered domestic roles in slave-owning households, and the centrality of family relationships. While never losing sight of the racist social and political structures that shaped Emma Mordecai's world, the book chronicles her experiences with dislocation and the loss of her home.

Bringing to life the hospital visits, food shortages, local sociability, Jewish observances, sounds and sights of nearby battles, and the very personal ramifications of emancipation and its aftermath for her household and family, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai offers a valuable and distinct look at a unique historical figure from the waning years of the Civil War South.

Dianne Ashton was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and World Religions at Rowan University. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Hanukkah in America: A History and Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America.

Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Rowan University. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920; Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890-1940; Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925; and Ballet Class: An American History.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Oliver Rosales, "Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley (University of Texas Press, 2024), Oliver Rosales uncovers the role of the multiracial west in shaping the course of US civil rights history. Focusing on Bakersfield, one of the few sizable cities within California’s Central Valley for much of the twentieth century in a region most commonly known as a bastion of political conservatism, oil, and industrial agriculture, Rosales documents how multiracial coalitions emerged to challenge histories of racial segregation and discrimination. He recounts how the region was home to both the historic farm worker movement, led by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong, and also a robust multiracial civil rights movement beyond the fields. This multiracial push for civil rights reform included struggles for fair housing, school integration, public health, media representation, and greater political representation for Black and Brown communities. In expanding on this history of multiracial activism, Rosales further explores the challenges activists faced in community organizing and how the legacies of coalition building contribute to ongoing activist efforts in the Central Valley of today.

*At around 1:07:00, Oliver said Teresa Rodriguez instead of the correct name, Rebecca Flores.

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Carrie M. Lane, "More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

This study of organizing and decluttering professionals helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our time and energy.

For a widely dreaded, often mundane task, organizing one’s possessions has taken a surprising hold on our cultural imagination. Today, those with the means can hire professionals to help sort and declutter their homes. In More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Carrie M. Lane introduces us to this world of professional organizers and offers new insight into the domains of work and home, which are forever entangled—especially for women.

The female-dominated organizing profession didn’t have a name until the 1980s, but it is now the subject of countless reality shows, podcasts, and magazines. Lane draws on interviews with organizers, including many of the field’s founders, to trace the profession’s history and uncover its enduring appeal to those seeking meaningful, flexible, self-directed work. Taking readers behind the scenes of real-life organizing sessions, More Than Pretty Boxes details the strategies organizers use to help people part with their belongings, and it also explores the intimate, empathetic relationships that can form between clients and organizers.

But perhaps most importantly, More Than Pretty Boxes helps us think through an interconnected set of questions around neoliberal work arrangements, overconsumption, emotional connection, and the deeply gendered nature of paid and unpaid work. Ultimately, Lane situates organizing at the center of contemporary conversations around how work isn’t working anymore and makes a case for organizing’s radical potential to push back against the overwhelming demands of work and the home, too often placed on women’s shoulders. Organizers aren’t the sole answer to this crisis, but their work can help us better understand both the nature of the problem and the sorts of solace, support, and solutions that might help ease it.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about the negotiation that humans make between their identity and the spaces they inhabit. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky @professorjohnst.bsky.social,Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Robert Danisch, "Rhetorical Democracy: How Communication Shapes Political Culture" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024)

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Rhetorical Democracy: How Communication Shapes Political Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024) offers an explanation and diagnosis of the current state of American democracy rooted in the American pragmatist tradition. Robert Danisch analyzes the characteristics of communication systems and communication practices that inhibit or enhance democratic life. In doing so, this book provides a detailed explanation of the ways in which the communication systems and practices that constitute democratic life are currently fostering polarization and how they might be made to foster cooperation. Scholars of communication, rhetorical studies, political science, and media studies will find this book of particular interest.

Robert Danisch is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo whose research interests include rhetorical theory, persuasion, and public communication in democratic societies. He is the author of Pragmatism, Democracy and the Necessity of Rhetoric, Building a Rhetorical Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism as well as journal articles and several co-authored books. He is also the host of the podcast Now We’re Talking that focuses on communication skills.

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Barbara A. Biesecker, "Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State" (Penn State Press, 2024)

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture. But beginning in the mid-eighties it reemerged with a vengeance, and for nearly fifteen years World War II was ubiquitous across US popular and political culture. In Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Barbara A. Biesecker explores the prestige and rhetorical power of the “Good War,” revealing how it was retooled to restore a new kind of social equilibrium to the United States.

Biesecker analyzes prominent cases of World War II remembrance, including the canceled exhibit of the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995 and its replacement, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Situating these popular memory texts within the culture and history wars of the day and the broader framework of US political and economic life, Dr. Biesecker argues that, with the notable exception of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, these reinventions of the Good War worked rhetorically to restore a strong sense of national identity and belonging fitted to the neoliberal nationalist agenda.

By tracing the links between the popular retooling of World War II and the national state fantasy, and by putting the lessons of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and their successors to work for a rhetorical-political analysis of the present, Dr. Biesecker not only explains the emergence and strength of the MAGA movement but also calls attention to the power of public memory to shape and contest ethnonational identity today.

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Melissa B. Jacoby, "Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal" (New Press, 2024)

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In theory, bankruptcy in America exists to cancel or restructure debts for people and companies that have way too many--a safety valve designed to provide a mechanism for restarting lives and businesses when things go wrong financially. In this brilliant and paradigm-shifting book, legal scholar Melissa B. Jacoby shows how bankruptcy has also become an escape hatch for powerful individuals, corporations, and governments, contributing in unseen and poorly understood ways to race, gender, and class inequality in America. When cities go bankrupt, for example, police unions enjoy added leverage while police brutality victims are denied a seat at the negotiating table; the system is more forgiving of civil rights abuses than of the parking tickets disproportionately distributed in African American neighborhoods. Across a broad range of crucial issues, Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal (New Press, 2024) reveals the hidden mechanisms by which bankruptcy impacts everything from sexual harassment to health care, police violence to employment discrimination, and the opioid crisis to gun violence. In the tradition of Matthew Desmond's groundbreaking Evicted, Unjust Debts is a riveting and original work of accessible scholarship with huge implications for ordinary people and will set the terms of debate for this vital subject.

Melissa B. Jacoby is the Graham Kenan Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Leslie Beth Ribovich, "Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools" (NYU Press, 2024)

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The processes of secularization and desegregation were among the two most radical transformations of the American public school system in all its history. Many regard the 1962 and 1963 US Supreme Court rulings against school prayer and Bible-reading as the end of religion in public schools. Likewise, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case is seen as the dawn of school racial equality. Yet, these two major twentieth-century American educational movements are often perceived as having no bearing on one another.

Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools (New York University Press, 2024) by Dr. Leslie Beth Ribovich redefines secularization and desegregation as intrinsically linked. Using New York City as a window into a national story, the volume argues that these rulings failed to successfully remove religion from public schools, because it was worked into the foundation of the public education structure, especially how public schools treated race and moral formation. Moreover, even public schools that were not legally segregated nonetheless remained racially segregated in part because public schools rooted moral lessons in an invented tradition—Judeo-Christianity—and in whiteness.

The book illuminates how both secularization and desegregation took the form of inculcating students into white Christian norms as part of their project of shaping them into citizens. Schools and religious and civic constituents worked together to promote programs such as juvenile delinquency prevention, moral and spiritual values curricula, and racial integration advocacy. At the same time, religiously and racially diverse community members drew on, resisted, and reimagined public school morality.

Drawing on research from a number of archival repositories, newspaper and legal databases, and visual and material culture, Without a Prayer shows how religion and racial discrimination were woven into the very fabric of public schools, continuing to inform public education’s everyday practices even after the Supreme Court rulings.

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Ana Lucia Araujo, "Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (U Chicago Press, 2024) grapples with this history by foregrounding the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas.

Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, it is deeply informed by African history and shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources such as artworks and artifacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas, building families and cultivating affective ties, congregating and re-creating their cultures, and organizing rebellions.

Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities have had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism.

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Beth Kaplan, "Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin" (Syracuse UP, 2007)

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Born of an Anglican mother and a Jewish father who disdained religion, Kaplan knew little of her Judaic roots and less about her famed great-grandfather until beginning her research, more than twenty years ago.

In Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin (Syracuse UP, 2007), Kaplan describes the commune he founded and led in Russia, his meteoric rise among Jewish New York's literati, the birth of such masterworks as Mirele Efros and The Jewish King Lear, and his seething feud with Abraham Cahan, powerful editor of the Daily Forward. Writing in a graceful and engaging style, she recaptures the Golden Age and colorful actors of Yiddish Theater from 1891-1910. Most significantly she discovers the emotional truth about the man himself, a tireless reformer who left a vital legacy to the theater and Jewish life worldwide.

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Holly M. Karibo, "Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1929, the United States government approved two ground-breaking and controversial drug addiction treatment programs. At a time when fears about a supposed rise in drug use reached a fevered pitch, the emergence of the nation’s first “narcotic farms” in Fort Worth, Texas, and Lexington, Kentucky, marked a watershed moment in the treatment of addiction. Rehab on the Range is the first in-depth history of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm and its impacts on the American West. Throughout its operation from the 1930s to the 1970s, the institution was the only federally funded drug treatment center west of the Mississippi River. Designed to blend psychiatric treatment, physical rehabilitation, and vocational training, the Narcotic Farm, its proponents argued, would transform American treatment policies for the better. The reality was decidedly more complicated.

In Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West (University of Texas Press, 2024) Dr. Holly M. Karibo tells the story of how this institution—once framed as revolutionary for addiction care—ultimately contributed to the turn towards incarceration as the solution to the nation’s drug problem. Blending an intellectual history of addiction and imprisonment with a social history of addicts’ experiences, Rehab on the Range provides a nuanced picture of the Narcotic Farm and its cultural impacts. In doing so, it offers crucial historical context that can help us better understand our current debates over addiction, drug policy, and the rise of mass incarceration.

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S4E18 Who Cares? A Conversation with Emily Kenway

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Emily Kenway shares insights from her powerful new book Who Cares: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving, and How We Solve It (Seal Press, 2023), an eye-opening exploration of the invisible world of unpaid caregivers. Drawing from her own experience caring for her terminally ill mother, Emily sheds light on the challenges faced by millions who provide critical care while being marginalized, unsupported, and overburdened. In our conversation, she urges us to reimagine a society that places care at its core, rather than on the sidelines. This conversation is a call to action for all of us to recognize and support those who give so much and ask for so little in return. Tune in to hear why Who Cares? is a book for everyone, now and in the future.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Caroline Winterer, "How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, takes her reader on a journey through the historical strata of the United States’ relationship with deep time. From the early days of the republic to the first half of the twentieth century, Winterer retraces how the study of the continent’s geological past provided Americans with “a vocabulary with which to frame their nation’s place in the cosmic order.” If the bones of dinosaurs found in the West play an expected part in this history, the book highlights the forgotten roles of less conspicuous, yet just as fascinating, fossils, such as the remains of Silurian trilobites and Carboniferous ferns.

The book shows how fossil finds throughout history helped re-imagine, many times over, the past, present, and future of the United States. Far from simply ennobling the “New World” with an antiquity that could compete with the depth of Europe’s past, the study of American fossils influenced how Americans thought about the origins, landscapes, resources, and the many peoples of the continent. Indeed, if the author makes room for the intriguing developments of paleontological discoveries and the riveting story of how “Americans crafted a virtual deep time” made of paintings, magic lanterns, and other models, she also addresses the violence, both toward ecosystems and people, often justified by deep time imaginaries. Through its historical investigation, How the New World Became Old reminds the reader that today’s responses to intertwined ecological and social challenges will inevitably be informed by our conceptions of deep time.

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Aisha M Beliso-de Jesús, "Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease" (Duke UP, 2024)

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints.

In Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease (Duke University Press, 2024), Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. Exposing excited delirium syndrome’s flawed diagnostic criteria, she outlines its inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús demonstrates that it is yet a further example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. In so doing, she furthers understanding of the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University and author of Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion.

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Rebecca Brenner Graham, "Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany" (Citadel Press, 2025)

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

She was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated accomplishments there is another dimension to Frances Perkins’s story. Without fanfare, and despite powerful opposition, Perkins helped save the lives of countless Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.

“Immigration problems usually have to be decided in a few days. They involve human lives. There can be no delaying,” Perkins wrote in her memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew. In March 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR. As Hitler rose to power, thousands of German-Jewish refugees and their loved ones reached out to the INS—then part of the Department of Labor—applying for immigration to the United States, writing letters that began “Dear Miss Perkins . . .”

Perkins’s early experiences working in Chicago’s famed Hull House and as a firsthand witness to the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire shaped her determination to advocate for immigrants and refugees. As Secretary of Labor, she wrestled widespread antisemitism and isolationism, finding creative ways to work around quotas and restrictive immigration laws. Diligent, resilient, empathetic, yet steadfast, she persisted on behalf of the desperate when others refused to act.

Based on extensive research, including thousands of letters housed in the National Archives, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Citadel Press, 2025) adds new dimension to an already extraordinary life story, revealing at last how one woman tried to steer the nation to a better, more righteous course.

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Jeremy Brecher, "The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy (U Illinois Press, 2024) offers a visionary program for national renewal, the Green New Deal aims to protect the earth's climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty.

Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice. Jeremy Brecher goes beyond the national headlines and introduces readers to the community, municipal, county, state, tribal, and industry efforts advancing the Green New Deal across the United States. Brecher illustrates how such programs from below do the valuable work of building constituencies and providing proofs of concept for new ideas and initiatives. Block by block, these activities have come together to form a Green New Deal built on a strong foundation of small-scale movements and grassroots energy. A call for hope and a better tomorrow, The Green New Deal from Below offers a blueprint for reconstructing society on new principles to avoid catastrophic climate change.

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Susan Gaunt Stearns. "Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade" (U Virginia Press, 2024)

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, imperial control of the North American continent remained an open question. Spain controlled the Mississippi River, closing it to American trade in 1784, and western men on the make like Jackson had to navigate the overlapping economic and political forces at work with ruthless pragmatism.

In Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade (University of Virginia Press, 2024), Dr. Susan Gaunt Stearns takes readers back to a time when there was nothing inevitable about the United States’ untrammeled westward expansion. Her work demonstrates the centrality of trade on and along the Mississippi River to the complex development of the political and economic structures that shaped the nascent American republic. Dr. Stearns’s perspective-shifting book reconfigures our understanding of key postrevolutionary moments—the writing of the Constitution, the outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Louisiana Purchase—and demonstrates how the transatlantic cotton trade finally set the stage for transforming an imagined west into something real.

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Casey B. K. Dominguez, "Commander in Chief: Partisanship, Nationalism, and the Reconstruction of Congressional War Powers" (UP of Kansas, 2024)

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The balance of power between the United States Congress and the president is particularly contested when it comes to war powers. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war but Article II Section 2 declares that "[t]he President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States." Today, presidents broadly define their constitutional authority as commander in chief. But in the nineteenth century, Congress claimed and defended expansive war powers authority. How did Congress define the boundaries between presidential and congressional war powers in the early republic? Did the definition of “commander in chief” change, and if so, when, how, and why did it do so?

Based on an original, comprehensive dataset of every congressional reference to the commander-in-chief clause from the ratification of the Constitution through 1917, Dr. Casey B.K. Dominguez analyzes the authority that members of Congress ascribed to the president as commander in chief and the boundaries they put around that authority.

In Commander in Chief: Partisanship, Nationalism, and the Reconstruction of Congressional War Powers (University Press of Kansas, 2024) Dominguez shows that for more than a century members of Congress defined the commander in chief's authority narrowly, similar to that of any high-ranking military officer. But in a wave of nationalism during the Spanish-American War, members of Congress began to argue that Congress owed deference to the commander in chief – as a national representative of the military, nation, and flag rather than a military officer. These debates were partisan with members of Congress arguing for broader presidential war powers when the president was from their own party. Scholars often assume that it is the Supreme Court that interprets the Constitution but Dominguez’s work shows how all the branches interpret the constitution. She offers particularly keen insights on the use of constitutional stories or scripts about the commander in chief clause. While scholars have assumed that the expansion of presidential war powers happened in the middle of the 20th century, Dominguez’s research shows that the dynamical expansion began 50 years earlier. Her work helps readers understand when – and how – the United States shifted many military decisions to the president.

Dr. Casey B. K. Dominguez is professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego. Her research focuses on the relationships between political parties and interest groups, and on the evolution of Constitutional war powers in the United States. I’m delighted to welcome her to New Books in Political Science.

Mentioned:

Victoria A. Farrar-Myers’s book on constitutional scripts, Scripted for Change

The Institutionalization of the American Presidency (Texas A&M Press, 2007)

Emmerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758)

Mariah Zeisberg’s War Powers: The Politics of Constitutional Authority (Princeton 2013)

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F. K. Clementi, "South of My Dreams: Finding My American Home, A Memoir" (U South Carolina Press, 2024)

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

South of My Dreams: Finding My American Home, A Memoir (U South Carolina Press, 2024) by F. K. Clementi follows the adventures and misadventures of Fania, a quixotic heroine, who dreamed all her life of making it big in New York City. Growing up in 1970s Italy, she felt constrained by a stale environment, a corrupt society, and a national culture hostile to women's independence. In pursuit of her childhood fantasy, and heavily influenced by Hollywood films, she leaves everything behind to begin her new life in New York, where she thinks her American Dream awaits. Instead, her American nightmare begins.

South of My Dreams, published in 2024 by the University of South Carolina Press, is a story of irreparable trauma graced by intense love, faithful friendships, and inspiring mentors. Simultaneously merciless and humorous, Clementi's memoir is an inspiring account of a woman's disillusionment and personal rebirth in the polyglot neighborhoods of New York City, enriched by her portraits of life, love and work. South of My Dreams will resonate with all who fight hard for what they want and refuse to put aside their childhood dreams.

Hosted by Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu.

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Stacy Torres, "At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America" (U California Press, 2025)

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

To understand elders' experiences of aging in place, sociologist Stacy Torres spent five years with longtime New York City residents as they coped with health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges. The sensitive portrait Torres paints in At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America (University of California Press, 2025), moves us beyond stereotypes of older people as either rich and pampered or downtrodden and frail to capture the multilayered complexity of late life.

These pages chronicle how a nondescript bakery in Manhattan served as a public living room, providing company to ease loneliness and a sympathetic ear to witness the monumental and mundane struggles of late life. Through years of careful observation, Torres peels away the layers of this oft-neglected social world and explores the constellation of relationships and experiences that Western culture often renders invisible or frames as a problem. At Home in the City strikes a realistic balance as it highlights how people find support, flex their resilience, and assert their importance in their communities in old age.

Interviewee: Stacy Torres is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco.

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Victoria Sturtevant, "It's All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Victoria Sturtevant's It’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2024) is about how changing depictions of pregnancy in comedy from the start of the twentieth century to the present show an evolution in attitudes toward women’s reproductive roles and rights.

Some of the most groundbreaking moments in American film and TV comedy have centered on pregnancy, from Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy on I Love Lucy, to the abortion plot on Maude; Murphy Brown’s controversial single motherhood; Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pregnancy in Junior; or the third-trimester stand-up special Ali Wong: Baby Cobra.

In the first book-length study of pregnancy in popular comedy, Victoria Sturtevant examines the slow evolution of pregnancy tropes during the years of the Production Code; the sexual revolution and changing norms around nonmarital pregnancy in the 1960s and ‘70s; and the emphasis on biological clocks, infertility, adoption, and abortion from the 1980s to now.

Across this history, popular media have offered polite evasions and sentimentality instead of real candor about the physical and social complexities of pregnancy. But comedy has often led the way in puncturing these clichés, pointing an irreverent and satiric lens at the messy and sometimes absurd work of gestation. Ultimately, Sturtevant argues that comedy can reveal the distortions and lies that treat pregnancy as simple and natural “women’s work,” misrepresentations that rest at the heart of contemporary attacks on reproductive rights in the US.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, "Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America" (W. W. Norton, 2024)

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins about the new, edited volume, Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America (W.W. Norton, 2024). Danny is Assistant Professor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University and the steward of a fantastic interview series in The Nation magazine. Did it Happen Here? presents a snapshot of the fascism debate being waged on American campuses, in magazines, and on social media. The most recent iteration of the fascism debate began, as with many debates about the state of American politics, with the election of Donald Trump. Since his first term in 2016, speculation about the true nature of Trumpism has generated countless think-pieces and books. Did It Happen Here? is the definitive summary of the major scholarly views on whether fascism has come to America. As Danny puts it, “the fascism debate is Rorschach test for understanding what is truly ailing American society.”

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is Assistant Professor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Deondra Rose, "The Power of Black Excellence: HBCUs and the Fight for American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

From their founding, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) educated as many as 90 percent of Black college students in the United States. Although many are aware of the significance of HBCUs in expanding Black Americans' educational opportunities, much less attention has been paid to the vital role that they have played in enhancing American democracy.

In The Power of Black Excellence: HBCUs and the Fight for American Democracy (Oxford UP, 2024), Deondra Rose provides an authoritative history of HBCUs and the unique role they have played in shaping American democracy since 1837. Drawing on over six years of deep research, Rose brings into view the historic impact that government support for HBCUs has had on the American political landscape, arguing that they have been essential for not only empowering Black citizens but also reshaping the distribution of political power in the United States. Rose challenges the conventional wisdom that, prior to the late twentieth century, the federal government took a laissez-faire approach to education. Instead, governmental action contributed to the expansion of HBCUs in an era plagued by racist policies and laws. Today, HBCUs remain extremely important, as evidenced by the outsized number of black political leaders--including Kamala Harris--who attended them. Rose stresses that policymakers promote democracy itself when they support HBCUs and their unique approach to postsecondary education, which includes a commitment to helping students develop politically empowering skills, promoting political leadership, and fostering a commitment to service.

A fresh look into the relationship between education and democracy, The Power of Black Excellence is essential reading for anyone interested not just in HBCUs, but the broader trajectory of Black citizenship in American history.

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Jonathan Conlin, "The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions. Its holdings encompass a vast range—including paintings, sculptures, costumes, instruments, and arms and armor—and span millennia, from ancient Egypt and Greece to Islamic art to European Old Masters and modern artists. How did the Met amass this trove, and what do the experiences of the people who bought, restored, catalogued, visited, and watched over these works tell us about the museum?

The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Conlin is a groundbreaking bottom-up history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exploring both its triumphs and its failings. Dr. Conlin tells the stories of the people who have shaped the museum—from curators and artists to museumgoers and security guards—and the communities that have made it their own. Highlighting inequalities of wealth, race, and gender, he exposes the hidden costs of the museum’s reliance on “robber barons” and oligarchs, the exclusionary immigration policies that influenced the foundation of the American Wing, and the obstacles faced by women curators. Drawing on extensive interviews with past and current staff, Conlin brings the story up to the present, including the museum’s troubled 150th anniversary in 2020. As the Met faces continued controversy, this book offers a timely account of the people behind an iconic institution and a compelling case for the museum’s vision of shared human creativity.

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Carrie N. Baker, "Abortion Pills: US History and Politics" (Amherst College Press, 2024)

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 20:37:42 -0000

In this compelling and informative interview, Carrie N. Baker discusses her newest book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics (Amherst College Press, 2024). This book is the first comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States, and Baker examines the actions of scientists, policy-makers, pharmaceutical companies, pro-abortion rights activists and anti-abortion forces as the abortion pill was developed in France in 1980, and subsequently brought to market in the United States. She carefully investigates the fight for FDA approval of the abortion pill, and reproductive rights advocates’ work to expand access. She pays particular attention to the critical period of 2020-2024 when in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic telemedicine abortion became a possibility. Baker ends exploring attempts to restrict abortion pills and self-managed abortions in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision. In this thoroughly researched history, Baker draws on interviews with over 80 activists, abortion providers, researchers, and people who have used abortion pills to demonstrate the range of actors involved in efforts to expand access to abortion pills. In addition, she analyzes medical research, government records, legal cases, and the archives of several reproductive health organizations.

Abortion Pills: US History and Politics is available open-access starting December 3, 2024. Click the following hyperlink to view and download a PDF of the book

You can also purchase a physical copy of the book by clicking here.

Carrie N. Baker holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University, a J.D. from Emory University School of Law, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory’s Institute of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Chair of American Studies and Professor of the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Smith College where, as a legal and social movement scholar, she teaches courses on gender, law and public policy; feminist social movements; and feminist public writing. In addition to publishing peer-reviewed academic scholarship, Baker also serves as a regular writer and contributing editor for Ms. Magazine, has a monthly column in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and hosts Feminist Futures, a radio program on WHMP 101.5 FM in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network.

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That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today’s book is: That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Amanda Jones, which offers her story of life as a small-town librarian. One of the things she values most about books is how they can affirm a young person's sense of self. So in 2022, when she caught wind of a local public hearing that would discuss “book content,” she knew what was at stake. Schools and libraries nationwide have been bombarded by demands for books with LGTBQ+ references, discussions of racism, and more to be purged from the shelves. She spoke out that night at the meeting. Days later, she woke up to a nightmare that is still ongoing. Her decision to support a collection of books with diverse perspectives made her a target for extremists using book banning campaigns-funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians-in a crusade to make America more white, straight, and "Christian." But she wouldn't give up without a fight: she sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance. Mapping the book banning crisis occurring all across the nation, That Librarian draws the battle lines in the war against equity and inclusion, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.

Our guest is: Amanda Jones, who is the school librarian at the same school she attended as a child. She is the author of That Librarian: Fighting Book Banners in Today’s America. She was the 2021 School Library Journal Co-Librarian of the Year, a 2021 Library Journal Mover and Shaker, and the 2020 Louisiana Librarian of the Year. She presents nationally and internationally on the importance of certified school librarians, book joy, and why every child deserves to see themselves reflected in the books on library shelves. Amanda has received intellectual freedom awards from the American Library Association, American Association of School Librarians, and Louisiana Library Association. She is the Executive Director of the Livingston Parish Library Alliance, and a co-founding member of Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship. She lives in Louisiana with her husband, daughter, and their cat.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by racial hierarchy, and justified through white supremacist logics. Now, in the twenty-first century, the biotech industry is the new capitalist whose race-based exploitation engages not only labor but racialized consumption. This arrangement is upheld through US drug policy, which over the past century has created a split legal system—one punitive system that criminalizes drug use common among Black, Brown, and lower-income communities and another system characterized by compassion and care that medicalizes, and thus legalizes, drug use targeted to middle-class White people.

In the award-winning book Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (U California Press, 2023), a trio of authors—Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg—explain how this arrangement came to pass, what impacts it has, and what needs to be done. This remarkable book won the 2023 Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom.

email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Caroline Alexander, "Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World" (Viking, 2024)

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

During the Second World War, FDR promised thousands of tons of US material to Chiang Kai Shek in order to keep China in the war and keep Japan distracted. But how would the US get it there? The only land route had been cut off by the Japanese invasion, leaving only one other option: air.

For the next three years, US planes flew “The Hump”: an air route from Assam to Chongqing, over the dangerous Himalayan mountains and Burmese jungles. Countless planes were lost, whether on a Himalayan mountainside or deep in the jungle.

That tale is the subject of Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World (Viking: 2024), by Caroline Alexander, who joins us today.

Caroline Alexander is the author of the bestselling The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (Knopf: 1998), which has been translated into thirteen languages. She writes frequently for The New Yorker and National Geographic, and she is the author of four other books, including Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition (Harper Perennial: 1999), the journal of the Endurance ship’s cat.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Skies of Thunder. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Matthew Gardner Kelly, "Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity (Cornell UP, 2024), Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices, but an intentional decision adopted in place of well-known alternatives during the Progressive Era, against past precedent and principle in several states.

From efforts to convert expropriated Indigenous and Mexican land into common school funding in the 1850s, to reforms that directed state aid to expanding white suburbs during the years surrounding World War II, Dividing the Public traces, in intricate detail, how a host of policies connected to school funding have divided California by race and class over time. In bringing into view the neglected and poorly understood history of policymaking connected to school finance, Kelly offers a new story about the role public education played in shaping the racially segregated, economically divided, and politically fragmented world of the post-1945 metropolis.

Matthew Gardner Kelly is an assistant professor of educational foundations, leadership, and policy at the University of Washington.

Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University.

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Rachel Hope Cleves, "Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex" (Polity, 2024)

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

We take the edible trappings of flirtation for granted: chocolate covered strawberries and romance, oysters on the half shell and desire, the eggplant emoji and a suggestive wink. But why does it feel so natural for us to link food and sexual pleasure? In Lustful Appetites: an Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex (Polity, 2024), Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for naughty sex, from the development of the Parisian restaurant as a place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses, to the role of sexual outlaws like bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men in creating epicurean culture in Britain and the United States. Taking readers on a gastronomic journey from Paris and London to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Lustful Appetites reveals how this preoccupation changed the ways we eat and the ways we are intimate―while also creating stigmas that persist well into our own twenty-first century.

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Laura C. Chávez-Moreno, "How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America" (Harvard Education Press, 2024)

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America (Harvard Education Press, 2025), Dr. Laura C. Chávez-Moreno uncovers the process through which schools implicitly and explicitly shape their students’ concept of race and the often unintentional consequences of this on educational equity. Dr.Chávez-Moreno sheds light on how the complex interactions among educational practices, policies, pedagogy, language, and societal ideas interplay to form, reinforce, and blur the boundaries of racialized groups, a dynamic which creates contradictions in classrooms and communities committed to antiracism.

In this provocative book, Dr. Chávez-Moreno urges readers to rethink race, to reconceptualize Latinx as a racialized group, and to pay attention to how schools construct Latinidad (a concept about Latinx experience and identity) in relation to Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Whiteness. The work explores, as an example, how Spanish-English bilingual education programs engage in race-making work. It also illuminates how schools can offer ambitious teachings to raise their students’ critical consciousness about race and racialization.

Ultimately, Dr. Chávez-Moreno’s groundbreaking work makes clear that understanding how our schools teach about racialized groups is crucial to understanding how our society thinks about race and offers solutions to racial inequities. The book invites educators and scholars to embrace ambitious teaching about the ambivalence of race so that teachers and students are prepared to interrogate racist ideas and act toward just outcomes.

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Terry H. Anderson, "Why the Nineties Matter" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Nearly a quarter century after the decade of the 1990s ended, what really mattered in America during that era is finally coming into focus. Many of the most important developments in politics, culture, and society today have roots in that era: the rise of right-wing extremism, broad transformations in voting preferences among both the working and professional classes; the spread of neoliberal economic policy; and the rise of social media.

In Why the Nineties Matter (Oxford University Press, 2024), Dr. Terry Anderson provides a broad-ranging history of America in that decade. Not simply a chronological account, the book focuses on key trends that either began or gained steam then and which have had lasting effects until this day. Threading together politics, economic transformations, and socio-cultural trends, he focuses on what mattered most in retrospect. Violent and extremist white nationalism intensified greatly in that decade, evidenced by the Oklahoma City bombing and the rise of the militia movement. The defection of the white working class from the Democratic Party began then as the Democrats expanded free trade and tried to cultivate professional-class Americans. Racial and gender politics transformed, birthing new movements that would grow in influence in the next century. Social media first emerged in the 1990s too, and its impact on all aspects of life cannot be underestimated. In foreign policy, America's long wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan have roots in US policies in the 1990s. And the current standoff between the US and Russia traces back to disagreements over NATO expansion a quarter century ago.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Corey Brettschneider, "The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It" (W. W. Norton, 2024)

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 2024, people around the world focus on an American president who calls for the imprisonment of critics, spreads the culture of white supremacy, and upends the law to commit crimes with impunity. Is Trump the first authoritarian to threaten American constitution democracy? Corey Brettschneider’s new book, The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It (W.W. Norton, 2024) argues that the United States has had previous authoritarian presidents who similarly threatened core democratic and rule of law values – and each was challenged by non-elected leaders Brettschneider terms “democratic constitutional constituencies.” John Adams waged war on the national press of the early republic, overseeing numerous prosecutions of his critics. In the lead-up to the Civil War, James Buchanan colluded with the Supreme Court to deny constitutional personhood to African Americans. A decade later, Andrew Johnson urged violence against his political opponents as he sought to guarantee a white supremacist republic after the Civil War. In the 1910s, Woodrow Wilson modernized, popularized, and nationalized Jim Crow laws. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon committed criminal acts that flowed from his corrupt ideas about presidential power.

Using an impressive combination of primary documents, secondary sources, and new interviews, Brettschneider highlights how freedom to dissent, equal citizenship, and rule of law are central to democratic norms and the role that citizens play in pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realize the promise of "We the People." He documents how Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Sadie Alexander, Daniel Ellsberg, and others we cannot easily name fought back against presidential abuses of power.

Dr. Corey Brettschneider is professor of Political Science at Brown University. His researches and teaches at the intersection of constitutional law and politics. His scholarly works include The Oath of Office (W.W. Norton, 2018) and he writes for outlets like the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post. I’m delighted to welcome him to New Books in Political Science.

Mentioned:

Online access to the Nixon tapes from Nixon Library

Princeton Library archive on Woodrow Wilson lectures

Susan’s NBN interview with Judge Richard Gergel on Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge

Corey’s interview with Michael Kruse of Politico, “I’d Rather Have 10 Ken Starrs Than One Donald Trump”

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Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder, "The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The past six years have been marked by a contentious political atmosphere that has touched every arena of public life, including higher education. Though most college campuses are considered ideologically progressive, how can it be that the right has been so successful in mobilizing young people even in these environments?

As Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder show in this surprising analysis of the relationship between political activism on college campuses and the broader US political landscape, while liberal students often outnumber conservatives on college campuses, liberal campus organizing remains removed from national institutions that effectively engage students after graduation. And though they are usually in the minority, conservative student groups have strong ties to national right-leaning organizations, which provide funds and expertise, as well as job opportunities and avenues for involvement after graduation. Though the left is more prominent on campus, the right has built a much more effective system for mobilizing ongoing engagement. What’s more, the conservative college ecosystem has worked to increase the number of political provocations on campus and lower the public’s trust in higher education.

In analyzing collegiate activism from the left, right, and center, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today (U Chicago Press, 2022) shows exactly how politically engaged college students are channeled into two distinct forms of mobilization and why that has profound consequences for the future of American politics.

Amy J. Binder is professor of sociology at John Hopkins University. She is the author of Contentious Curricula and coauthor of Becoming Right.

Jeffrey L. Kidder is professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Parkour and the City and Urban Flow

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Voices Part 1: Hut-Hut-Hike

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this first episode of a three-part series called Voices, we’re listening to the sound of American football—specifically the role of voices in the NFL. We start with a rather quirky story from NFL history that speaks to how the voice intersects with our ideologies around both disability and gender. It’s about a player whose voice stopped working the way it once did, revealing that football isn’t just a competition between teams on the gridiron—it’s a competition of audibility and vocal toughness. And like the rest of our Voices series, it opens up fascinating questions about what a voice actually is, what it does, and what it means, to us and to those around us.

Our guest is Travis Vogan, a prolific sports media scholar at the University of Iowa. Vogan has written books on ABC Sports, ESPN, boxing movies, and those “voice of God” NFL Films. We also hear briefly from sound scholar Jonathan Sterne, who will feature prominently in an upcoming episode of this Voices series.

Some of this episode is based on the article “The 12th Man: Fan Noise in the Contemporary NFL,” published in Popular Communication by Mack Hagood and Travis Vogan in 2016. If you don’t have institutional access, you can also find the PDF here.

Other things heard or mentioned in this episode:

“The Wild Story of the 49ers, Steve DeBerg, and a Shoulder-Pad Speaker System,” by Eric Branch, San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2020.

“The UNBELIEVABLE Story of Steve DeBerg’s Loudspeaker Shoulder Pads,” by the Pick Six Podcast.

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Sidney A. Shapiro and Joseph P. Tomain, "How Government Built America" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How Government Built America (Cambridge UP, 2024) challenges growing, anti-government rhetoric by highlighting the role government has played in partnering with markets to build the United States. Sidney A. Shapiro and Joseph P. Tomain explore how markets can harm and fail the country, and how the government has addressed these extremes by restoring essential values to benefit all citizens. Without denying that individualism and small government are part of the national DNA, the authors demonstrate how democracy and a people pursuing communal interests are equally important. In highly engaging prose, the authors describe how the government, despite the complexity of markets, remains engaged in promoting economic prosperity, protecting people, and providing an economic safety net. Each chapter focuses on a historical figure, from Lincoln to FDR to Trump, to illustrate how the government-market mix has evolved over time. By understanding this history, readers can turn the national conversation back to what combination of government and markets will best serve the country.

Sidney A. Shapiro holds the Fletcher Chair in Administrative Law at the Wake Forest University School of Law. He is the author of Administrative Competence: Reimagining Administrative Law (2020) and Achieving Democracy: The Future of Progressive Regulation (2014).

Joseph P. Tomain is Dean Emeritus and the Wilbert and Helen Ziegler Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati. A highly respected professor and scholar, his teaching and research interests focus in the areas of energy law, land use, regulatory policy, and contracts.

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Karen Lystra, "Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Karen Lystra is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. These laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay connected to those they loved. This book displays the personal expression of factory hands, manual laborers, peddlers, coopers, carpenters, lumbermen, miners, tanners, haulers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, domestics, sharecroppers, independent farmers, and common soldiers and their wives. Entering the “anonymous corners” of these people's lives through letters, we can see their humor, grit, hope, heartache, and endurance, and grasp what they believed and felt about themselves, their kinfolk, and their friends.

As much as possible, these working-class Americans living in the nineteenth century speak to contemporary readers in their own words. Often armed with only a third or fourth grade education, they could read but had limited instruction in writing. Yet they sat down to compose a letter, often spurred by a range of experience including the Gold Rush, westward expansion, slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, and what was arguably the most important event in nineteenth-century America, the Civil War. During the war, poor, undereducated soldiers and their families wrote letters in a quantity never before seen in American history.

Using letters written to parents, siblings, husbands, wives, friends, and potential mates between 1830 and 1880, Dr. Lystra identifies the shared conceptions of love and practices of courtship and marriage within a racially diverse population of free working-class people born in America. Readers can listen to their voices as they flirt, act as intermediaries in hometown courtships, express non-romantic love to their mates, tease each other, and voice their hopes for the future. Through these personal letters, poor, minimally schooled Americans show us how they felt about love and how they created meaningful attachments in their uncertain lives.

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Olivia Chilcote, "Unrecognized in California: Federal Acknowledgment and the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians" (U Washington Press, 2024)

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

California has more unrecognized Native tribes than any other state - what led to this strange state of affairs, and what does this mean in practice?

In Unrecognized in California: Federal Acknowledgment and the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians (U Washington Press, 2024), San Diego State associate professor Olivia Chilcote answers these questions through the history and experience of her own tribe. Despite the inherent tribal sovereignty of the San Luis Rey Band, and indeed, of all Native tribes and nations, the long and difficult past of colonialism in California - from the Spanish, to the Mexican, to the American empires - has provided an array of obstacles to the acquisition of land and tribal recognition for the San Luis Rey Band and others. This unrecognized status has kept them from accessing several programs and protections, including NAGPRA. Yet, despite these headwinds, the San Luis Rey Band and other unrecognized California tribes nonetheless practice sovereignty in other ways, and in doing so continue to fight toward future recognition. In this very personal history, Chilcote explains how the government-to-government relationship between the United States and tribal nations creates both challenges and opportunities for Native people in the twenty first century.

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Mary Ellen Curtin, "She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

During her keynote speech at the 1976 Democratic Party convention, Barbara Jordan of Texas stood before a rapt audience and reflected on where Americans stood in that bicentennial year. "Are we to be one people bound together by a common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future." The civil rights movement had changed American politics by opening up elected office to a new generation of Black leaders, including Jordan, the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress. Though her life in elected politics lasted only twelve years, in that short time, Jordan changed the nation by showing that Black women could lead their party and legislate on behalf of what she called "the common good."

In She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024), biographer Mary Ellen Curtin offers a new portrait of Jordan and her journey from segregated Houston, Texas, to Washington, DC, where she made her mark during the Watergate crisis by eloquently calling for the impeachment of President Nixon. Recognized as one of the greatest orators of modern America, Jordan inspired millions, and Black women became her most ardent supporters. Many assumed Jordan would rise higher and become a US senator, Speaker of the House, or a Supreme Court justice. But illness and disability, along with the obstacles she faced as a Black woman, led to Jordan's untimely retirement from elected office--though not from public life. Until her death at the age of fifty-nine, Jordan remained engaged with the cause of justice and creating common ground, proving that Black women could lead the country through challenging times.

No change in the law alone could guarantee the election of Black leaders. It took courage and ambition for Barbara Jordan to break into politics. This important new biography explores the personal and the political dimensions of Jordan's life, showing how she navigated the extraordinary pressures of office while seeking to use persuasion, governance, and popular politics as instruments of social change and betterment.

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Yii-Jan Lin, "Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration" (Yale UP, 2024)

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The metaphor of New Jerusalem has long been used to justify dueling narratives of America as the land of freedom with open gates and the walled city closed to all except those whose names are written in the book of life.

In Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (Yale University Press, 2024), Yii Jan Lin explores the idea of America as the New Jerusalem from early European exploration and colonization; through the waves of Chinese immigration and exclusion; the open gates envisioned by Ronald Reagan in his Farewell Address; and the present day rhetoric about closing the wall at the southern border and the characterization of migrants as diseased and dangerous.

Yii-Jan Lin traces the use of this metaphor in newspapers, political speeches, sermons, cartoons, and novels throughout American history to portray a shining, God-blessed refuge and it's simultaneous opposite, where the unwanted are defined as unworthy for entry. Lin shows Revelation’s apocalyptic logic at work in these conflicting interpretations of the American dream, where judgement may be based on the deeds of the individual or judgement may be based on whether they are predestined for inclusion.

Author recommended reading:

- Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum

- Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement by Jacqueline M. Hidalgo

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

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Daniel J. Mallinson and A. Lee Hannah, "Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States" (NYU Press, 2024)

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientists Dan Mallinson and Lee Hannah, both experts on state-level politics and the policy making process, have a new book that focuses on the state-level process of legalization of medical cannabis across the United States. Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States (NYU Press, 2024) is a book that needed to be written, since it is an important exploration not only of the continuing policy conflicts and tensions around marijuana in the United States, but it specifically focuses on how states have taken up this issue and what they each did in moving towards medical marijuana’s accessibility. The marijuana question in in the United States remains a fascinating federalism dynamic, with national laws in conflict with state laws, and state laws operating in different ways, around both medical marijuana and legalized recreational use of cannabis.

Mallinson and Hannah provide the reader with an excellent overview of policymaking designs and theories since their analysis takes up so many different dimensions of the policy process in the United States. They then move into the history behind the criminalization of marijuana, and the way in which this policy has clearly racialized roots. Green Rush highlights the ways that some of the shifts and changes in state policies started to make their way through different states, via action by state legislatures and or through state-wide referenda. With particular attention to a number of states, like California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, Mallinson and Hannah chart the ways that different states have gone about legalizing the medical use of marijuana, which has also been part of the pathway for other states to move towards decriminalization and legalization of adult use recreational marijuana.

Green Rush is an accessible policy analysis and provides important insight into the path that medical marijuana took as it became legal in one state after another. Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States charts the policy changes themselves, but also pays attention to changing public opinion around cannabis and shifts in the war on drugs as well.

(I found this book so useful that I have adopted it to use in my Public Policy class.)

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan: Can He Really Do It?

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Kitty Calavita, Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, discuss the historical context and implications of Operation Wetback, a 1954 U.S. mass deportation of Mexican immigrants, and its relevance to President-elect Donald Trump's proposed mass deportation plans. Calavita explains that Operation Wetback aimed to address the economic utility of undocumented workers and political backlash against them, particularly during a recession and Cold War rhetoric. She highlights the logistical challenges of such operations, including the integration of immigrants into various industries and the legal protections against random stops. Calavita suggests that while high-profile roundups may occur, a massive deportation campaign is unlikely due to economic and logistical obstacles.

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Sabrina Strings, "The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance" (Beacon Press, 2024)

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

More men than ever are refusing loving partnerships and commitment, and instead seeking out “situationships.” When these men deign to articulate what they are looking for in a steady partner, they’ll often rely on superficial norms of attractiveness rooted in whiteness and anti-Blackness.

Connecting the past to the present, in The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance (Beacon Press, 2024) sociologist Dr. Sabrina Strings argues that following the Civil Rights movement and the integration of women during the Second Wave Feminist movement, men aimed to hold on to their power by withholding love and commitment, a basic tenet of white supremacy and male domination, that served to manipulate all women. From pornography to hip hop, women—especially Black and “insufficiently white” women—were presented as gold diggers, props for masturbation, and side-pieces.

Using historical research, personal stories, and critical analysis, Dr. Strings argues that the result is fuccboism, the latest incarnation of toxic masculinity. This work shows that men are not innately “toxic.” Nor do they hate love, commitment, or sex. Instead, men across race have been working a new code to effectively deny loving partnerships to women who are not pliant, slim, and white as a new mode of male domination.

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Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert (U California Press, 2024) by Dr. Sunaura Taylor, tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican-American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Dr. Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires.

Our guest is: Dr. Sunaura Taylor, who is Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the American Book Award–winning Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Osamah F. Khalil, "A World of Enemies: America's Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A sobering account of how the United States trapped itself in endless wars—abroad and at home—and what it might do to break free.

Over the past half-century, Americans have watched their country extend its military power to what seemed the very ends of the earth. America’s might is felt on nearly every continent—and even on its own streets. Decades ago, the Wars on Drugs and Terror broke down the walls separating law enforcement from military operations. A World of Enemies: America's Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden (Harvard UP, 2024) tells the story of how an America plagued by fears of waning power and influence embraced foreign and domestic forever wars.

Osamah Khalil argues that the militarization of US domestic and foreign affairs was the product of America’s failure in Vietnam. Unsettled by their inability to prevail in Southeast Asia, US leaders increasingly came to see a host of problems as immune to political solutions. Rather, crime, drugs, and terrorism were enemies spawned in “badlands”—whether the Middle East or stateside inner cities. Characterized as sites of endemic violence, badlands lay beyond the pale of civilization, their ostensibly racially and culturally alien inhabitants best handled by force.

Yet militarized policy has brought few victories. Its failures—in Iraq, Afghanistan, US cities, and increasingly rural and borderland America—have only served to reinforce fears of weakness. It is time, Khalil argues, for a new approach. Instead of managing never-ending conflicts, we need to reinvest in the tools of traditional politics and diplomacy.

Osamah F. Khalil is an Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is the author of America’s Dream Palace, which was named a Best Book of 2017 by Foreign Affairs. His research on foreign policy, national security, and military affairs has been featured widely, from PBS NewsHour to USA Today.

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W. Paul Reeve, et al., "This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

On July 22, 1847, a group of about forty refugees entered the Salt Lake Valley. Among them were three enslaved men, two of whom shared the religion, Mormonism, that had caused them to flee. The valley was also home to members of the Ute tribe, who would sometimes barter captive women and children to Spanish colonizers. Thus, the question of whether the Latter-day Saints would accept or reject slavery in their new Zion confronted them on the day they first arrived. Five years later, after Utah had become an American territory, its legislature was prodded to take up the question then roiling the nation: would they be slave or free?

George D. Watt, the official reporter for the 1852 legislative session, reported debates and speeches in Pitman shorthand. They remained in their original format, virtually untouched, for more than one hundred and fifty years, until LaJean Purcell Carruth transcribed them. In this eye-opening volume This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah (Oxford University Press, 2024), Carruth, Dr. Christopher Rich, and Dr. W. Paul Reeve draw extensively on these new sources to chronicle the session, during which the legislature passed two important statutes: one that legally transformed African American slaves into "servants" but did not pass the condition of servitude on to their children and another that authorized twenty-year indentures for enslaved Native Americans.

This Abominable Slavery places these debates within the context of the nation's growing sectional divide and contextualizes the meaning of these laws in the lives of Black enslaved people and Native American indentured servants. In doing so, it sheds new light on race, religion, slavery, and unfree labor in the antebellum period.

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Daniel S. Goldberg, "Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries: Law, Ethics, and Public Health" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Football is the national game in the United States – and many families and friends bond over their love of the sport. While few people play professional football, many participate in tackle football as children and adolescents. In the last decades, more attention has been paid to the dangers of playing tackle football, including traumatic brain injury and the degenerative brain disease, CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). As more former players donated their brains, the rate of CTE surprised even those already concerned with traumatic brain injury. If the risks are so great, why do more than two million American children under the age of 18 continue to play tackle football? Is it the opportunity to contribute to a team? Overcome adversity? Test personal limits?

In Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries: Law, Ethics, and Public Health (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Dr. Daniel S. Goldberg asks readers to think about American tackle football as an industry – like the American tobacco industry – that sells a product that is dangerous to those who use it. Despite the clearly documented costs to society and individuals who play, the tackle football industry has successfully manufactured doubt about the health hazards. Goldstein argues that a basic familiarity with the history of regulated industries and their intersection with public health is needed both to understand the contemporary debates and to move forward with fair and equitable policy solutions. If the risks to people who play were better known to the public, the profitability and perhaps even the viability of American football would be at risk.

Goldberg draws on public health ethics, public health law, and the histories of occupational and public health to assess the limits of parental choice to expose their children to risks of injury. Goldberg recommends using public health laws to counter the manufacture of doubt – offering specific policy proposals to address the population health and ethical problems presented by tackle football.

Daniel S. Goldstein, JD, PhD is an associate professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He is the director of Education at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities and director of the Public Health Ethics and Law Program.

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David Suisman, "Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America's Soldiers" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In his new book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of the America's Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024), David Suisman shows that the US military has deep and multilayered investment in music. It employs thousands of musicians, whose music creates communal norms and identities. Music also helps soldiers to grapple with the realities of combat, while serving as a weapon in its own right, at places like Guantánamo Bay. Suisman calls music "a lubricant in the gears of the American war machine," and he ably shows how its elemental qualities have been used and transformed, much as the military itself has, by technology and by changing understandings of the self.

Instrument of War is a first-of-its-kind study of music in the lives of American soldiers. Although musical activity has been part of war since time immemorial, the significance of the US military as a musical institution has generally gone unnoticed. Historian David Suisman traces how the US military used—and continues to use—music to train soldiers and regulate military life, and how soldiers themselves have turned to music to cope with war’s emotional and psychological realities. Opening our ears to these practices, Suisman reveals how music has enabled more than a century and a half of American war-making. Instrument of War unsettles assumptions about music as a force of uplift and beauty, demonstrating how it has also been entangled in large-scale state violence.

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Kevin B. Smith, "The Jailer's Reckoning: How Mass Incarceration Is Damaging America" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How does a Black man in Austin get sent to prison on a 70-year sentence for stealing a tuna sandwich, likely costing Texas taxpayers roughly a million dollars? In America, your liberty--or even your life--may be forfeit not simply because of what you do, but where you do it. If the same man had run off with a lobster roll from a lunch counter in Maine it's unlikely that he'd be spending the rest of his life behind bars.

The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other industrial democracy in the world. We have more ex-prisoners than the entire population of Ireland, and more people with a felony record than the populations of Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and Liberia combined. Why did the United States become the world's biggest jailer? And, just as importantly, what has it done to us? What are the costs--socially, economically, and politically--of having the world's largest population of ex-prisoners? And what can we do about it?

In The Jailer's Reckoning: How Mass Incarceration Is Damaging America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), Kevin B. Smith explains that the United States became the world's biggest jailer because politicians wanted to do something about a very real problem with violent crime. That effort was accelerated by a variety of partisan and socio-demographic trends that started to significantly reshape the political environment in the 1980s and 1990s. The force of those trends varied from state to state, but ultimately led to not just historically unprecedented levels of incarceration, but equally unprecedented numbers of ex-prisoners. Serving time behind bars is now a normalized social experience--it affects a majority of Americans directly or indirectly. There is a clear price, the jailer's reckoning, to be paid for this. As Smith shows, it is a society with declining levels of civic cohesion, reduced economic prospects, and less political engagement. Mass incarceration turns out to be something of a hidden bomb, a social explosion that inflicts enormous civic collateral damage on the entire country, and we must all do something about it.

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Beverly Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick, "New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization" (UP of Florida, 2017)

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization (UP of Florida, 2017) examines the movement to resettle black Americans in Africa, an effort led by the American Colonization Society during the nineteenth century and a heavily debated part of American history. Some believe it was inspired by antislavery principles, but others think it was a proslavery reaction against the presence of free Black people in society.

Moving beyond this simplistic debate, contributors link the movement to other historical developments of the time, revealing a complex web of different schemes, ideologies, and activities behind the relocation of African Americans to Liberia. They explain what colonization, emigration, immigration, abolition, and emancipation meant within nuanced nineteenth-century contexts, looking through many lenses to more accurately reflect the past.

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Elizabeth Garner Masarik, "The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

With The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State (University of Georgia Press, 2024), Dr. Elizabeth Garner Masarik shows how middle-class women, both white and Black, harnessed the nineteenth-century “culture of sentiment” to generate political action in the Progressive Era. While eighteenth-century rationalism had relied upon the development of the analytic mind as the basis for acquiring truth, nineteenth-century sentimentalism hinged upon human emotional responses and the public’s capacity to feel sympathy to establish morally based truth and build support for improving the welfare of women and children.

Sentimentalism marched right alongside women’s steps into the public sphere of political action. The concerns over infant mortality and the “fall” of young women intertwined with sentimentalism to elicit public action in the formation of the American welfare state. The work of voluntary and paid female reformers during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries shaped what would become lasting collaborations between grassroots voluntary organizations and the national government.

Women saw a social need, filled it, and cobbled together a network of voluntary organizations that tapped state funding and support when available. Their work provided safeguards for women and children and created a network of female-oriented programs that both aided and policed women of child-bearing age at the turn of the twentieth century. Through an examination of these reform programs, Dr. Masarik demonstrates the strong connection between nineteenth-century sentimental culture and female political action, advocating government support for infant and maternal welfare, in the twentieth century.

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Katherine C. Epstein, "Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships. These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets, conditions that impeded accurate gunfire. Seeing the need to account for a plethora of variables, Pollen and Isherwood built an integrated system for gathering data, calculating predictions, and transmitting the results to the gunners. At the heart of their invention was the most advanced analog computer of the day, a technological breakthrough that anticipated the famous Norden bombsight of World War II, the inertial guidance systems of nuclear missiles, and the networked “smart” systems that dominate combat today. Recognizing the value of Pollen and Isherwood’s invention, the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy pirated it, one after the other. When the inventors sued, both the British and US governments invoked secrecy, citing national security concerns.

Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Katherine C. Epstein analyzes these and related legal battles over naval technology, exploring how national defense tested the two countries’ commitment to individual rights and the free market. Dr. Epstein deftly sets out Pollen’s and Isherwood’s pioneering achievements, the patent questions raised, the geopolitical rivalry between Britain and the United States, and the legal precedents each country developed to control military tools built by private contractors.

Dr. Epstein’s account reveals that long before the US national security state sought to restrict information about atomic energy, it was already embroiled in another contest between innovation and secrecy. The America portrayed in this sweeping and accessible history isn’t yet a global hegemon but a rising superpower ready to acquire foreign technology by fair means or foul—much as it accuses China of doing today.

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Travis A. Weisse, "Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness" (UNC Press, 2024)

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) Dr. Travis A. Weisse tells a new history of modern diets in America that goes beyond the familiar narrative of the nation's collective failure to lose weight. By exploring how the popularity of diets grew alongside patients' frustrations with the limitations and failures of the American healthcare system in the face of chronic disease, Weisse argues that millions of Americans sought "fad" diets—such as the notorious Atkins program which ushered in the low-carbohydrate craze—to wrest control of their health from pessimistic doctors and lifelong pharmaceutical regimens.

Drawing on novel archival sources and a wide variety of popular media, Dr. Weisse shows the lengths to which twentieth-century American dieters went to heal themselves outside the borders of orthodox medicine and the subsequent political and scientific backlash they received. Through colorful profiles of the leaders of four major diet movements, Health Freaks demonstrates that these diet gurus weren't shady snake oil salesmen preying on the vulnerable; rather, they were vocal champions for millions of frustrated Americans seeking longer, healthier lives.

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Lauren D. Olsen, "Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical Schools Reproduce Inequalities" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Medical schools have increasingly incorporated the humanities and social sciences into their teaching, seeking to make future physicians more empathetic and more concerned with equity. In practice, however, these good intentions have not translated into critical consciousness. Humanities and social sciences education has often not only failed to deliver on its promise but even entrenched the inequalities that the medical profession set out to address.

In Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical Schools Reproduce Inequalities (Columbia UP, 2024), Lauren D. Olsen examines how U.S. medical school faculty conceived, designed, and implemented their vision of education, tracing the failures of curricular reform. She argues that the way medical students encounter humanities and social sciences material in practice has served to reinforce the status quo by teaching them to individualize systemic problems. Students learn to avoid advocacy, critique, and attention to structural inequalities—while also gathering that it will be up to them to find coping strategies for problems from burnout to systemic racism. Olsen pinpoints the limitations of how clinical faculty understand the humanities and social sciences, arguing that in structuring and teaching courses, they assumed, reinforced, and glorified a white, elite model of the medical profession. Showing how deeply intertwined professional and social identities are in medical education, Curricular Injustice has significant implications for how occupations, organizations, and institutions shape understandings of inequality.

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138c Herbert Hoover gave us Woody Guthrie (with David Cunningham)

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Welcome to the final episode of What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. David Cunningham, chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, is author of Klansville, USA (Oxford UP, 2014) and There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (U California Press, 2005). His ongoing research includes the recent wave of conflicts around Confederate monuments and other sites of contested memory.

David's vision of what has changed in 2024 relates to an extended analogy to the election of 1972, when the avowedly racist George ("Segregation....forever") Wallace almost rode right-wing fury to victory.

Notes of hope? Well, David has faith in extant political institutions and even bureaucracy (long live the deep state) to blunt the force of Trump's onslaught; movement politics of the left may also prove capable, as they were in the 1930's of rising up in response to a ferocious successful mobilization on the right.

You can also listen to earlier conversations with Vincent Brown and Mark Blyth.

Listen and Read here.

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Liliana M. Naydan, "Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America" (U Georgia Press, 2021)

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America (University of Georgia Press, 2021) Dr. Liliana Naydan analyses representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves not only implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens but also threatened by it, while simultaneously attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality.

Dr. Naydan walks us through these complex relationships, revealing how authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, these authors complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, creating accessible, literary road maps to our digital future.

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Timothy E. Nelson, "Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930" (Texas Tech UP, 2023)

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

By most accounts, Blackdom, New Mexico existed from 1900-1930. However, as historian and artist Dr. Timothy Nelson argues in his new book, the Black colony founded in the then-territory of New Mexico has a much longer history and many afterlives, even after the residents moved away. In Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930 (Texas Tech University Press, 2023), Nelson weaves together the history of a particular place with philosophy, personal vulnerability, and the historiography of the American West to provide a unique account of the rise, decline, and continuance of Blackdom as both myth and reality. A unique book, Blackdom, New Mexico places Nelson as the storyteller front and center in the narrative, tracing his own life and family history growing up in Compton, California and training as a historian in New Mexico, and connecting these threads with the history of Black colonization along what he terms the Afro-Frontier. Blackdom, New Mexico is an excellent example of how even when the past seems dead in the past, its legacies and ghosts live on.

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138b Ronald Reagan Gave Us Punk Rock (with Vincent Brown)

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. In this episode, Vincent Brown (History professor at Harvard) last spoke with us about his own work on Caribbean slave revolts; his many other well-known projects include the recent PBS series The Bigger Picture.

What exactly happened and will happen? Well, Vince has sympathy for Bernie Sanders Boston Globe op-ed about the Democrat's neglect of working-class and Gabriel Wynant's "Exit Right" abut the need to remake left-wing politics. He also takes seriously Thomas Piketty's theory of the rise of "Brahmin Left". That's a topic explored in the Recall This Book series on the Brahmin left ( Jan-Werner Muller, Matthew Karp and Thomas Piketty).

Any hopeful note to end on? Well, bad government breeds righteous opposition. From Ronald Reagan we got...Minor Threat and the Bad Brains.

Tune in tomorrow to hear John speak with David Cunningham; the previous conversation, already up on New Books Network, was with Mark Blyth.

Listen and Read here.

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Jordan S. Carroll, "Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Although fascists insist that tomorrow belongs to them, they have always been and will continue to be contested by antifascist fans willing to fight for the future.

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Debra Bruno, "A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family (Cornell University Press, 2024) tells the long-ignored story of slavery's history in upstate New York through Debra Bruno's absorbing chronicle that uncovers her Dutch ancestors' slave-holding past and leads to a deep connection with the descendants of the enslaved people her family owned.

Bruno, who grew up in New York's Hudson Valley knowing little about her Dutch heritage, was shaken when a historian told her that her Dutch ancestors were almost certainly slaveholders. Driven by this knowledge, Bruno began to unearth her family's past. In the last will and testament of her ancestor, she found the first evidence: human beings bequeathed to his family along with animals and furniture. The more she expanded her family tree, the more enslavers she found. She reached out to Black Americans tracing their own ancestry, and by serendipitous luck became friends with Eleanor C. Mire, a descendent of a woman enslaved by Bruno's Dutch ancestors.

A Hudson Valley Reckoning recounts Bruno's journey into the nearly forgotten history of Northern slavery and of the thousands of enslaved people brought in chains to Manhattan and the Hudson Valley. With the help of Mire, who provides a moving epilogue, Debra Bruno tells the story of white and Black lives impacted by the stain of slavery and its long legacy of racism, as she investigates the erasure of the uncomfortable truths about our family and national histories.

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Peter Singer, "Consider the Turkey" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A turkey is the centerpiece of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Yet most of us know almost nothing about today’s specially bred, commercially produced birds. In this brief book, bestselling author Peter Singer tells their story—and, unfortunately, it’s not a happy one. Along the way, he also offers a brief history of the turkey and its consumption, ridicules the annual U.S. presidential “pardon” of a Thanksgiving turkey, and introduces us to “a tremendously handsome, outgoing, and intelligent turkey” named Cornelius. Above all, Singer explains how we can improve our holiday tables—for turkeys, people, and the planet—by liberating ourselves from the traditional turkey feast. In its place, he encourages us to consider trying a vegetarian alternative—or just serving the side dishes that many people already enjoy far more than turkey. Complete with some delicious recipes for turkey-free holiday feasting, Consider the Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2024) will make you reconsider what you serve for your next holiday meal—or even tomorrow’s dinner.

Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics, with a background in philosophy. He works mostly in practical ethics and is best known for Animal Liberation and for his writings about global poverty.

Kyle Johannsen is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

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Joan L. Bryant, "Reluctant Race Men: Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-century America" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Activists in the earliest Black antebellum reform endeavors contested and deprecated the concept of race. Attacks on the logic and ethics of dividing, grouping, and ranking humans into races became commonplace facets of activism in anti-colonization and emigration campaigns, suffrage and civil rights initiatives, moral reform projects, abolitionist struggles, independent church development, and confrontations with scientific thought on human origins. Denunciations persisted even as later generations of reformers felt compelled by theories of progress and American custom to promote race as a basis of a Black collective consciousness.

Reluctant Race Men: Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-century America (Oxford UP, 2024) traces a history of the disparate challenges Black American reformers lodged against race across the long nineteenth century. It factors their opposition into the nation's history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism. Black-controlled newspapers, societies, churches, and conventions provided the principal loci and resources for questioning race. In these contexts, people of African descent generated a lexicon for refuting race, debated its logic, and, ultimately, reinterpreted it. Reluctant Race Men was recently shortlisted for the 2024 Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award.

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Christopher Bell, "Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

They call it Spanish Harlem or sometimes just El Barrio. But for over a century, East Harlem has been a melting pot of many ethnic groups, including Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and Mexican immigrants, as well as Italian, Jewish, and African American communities. Though gentrification is rapidly changing the face of this section of upper Manhattan, it is still full of sites that attest to its rich cultural heritage.

Now East Harlem native Christopher Bell takes you on a tour of his beloved neighborhood. He takes you on three separate walking tours, each visiting a different part of East Harlem and each full of stories about its theaters, museums, art spaces, schools, community centers, churches, mosques, and synagogues. You'll also learn about the famous people who lived in El Barrio, such as actress Cecily Tyson, opera singer Marian Anderson, portrait artist Alice Neel, incomparable poet Julia De Burgos, and King of Latin Music Tito Puente.

Lavishly illustrated with over fifty photos, Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience (Rutgers University Press, 2024) points out not only the many architectural and cultural landmarks in the neighborhood but also the historical buildings that have since been demolished. Whether you are a tourist or a resident, this guide will give you a new appreciation for El Barrio's exciting history, cultural diversity, and continued artistic vibrancy.

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Benjamin Barson, "Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons" (Wesleyan UP, 2024)

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan UP, 2024) recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes. Perhaps most importantly, Barson locates the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas—Haiti—as a nexus for cultural and political change in nineteenth-century Louisiana. In dialogue with the work of recent historians who have inverted traditional histories of Latin American and Caribbean independence by centering the influence of Haitian activists abroad, this work traces the impact of Haitian culture in New Orleans and its legacy in movements for liberation.

Brassroots Democracy demonstrates how Black musicians infused participatory music practice with innovative forms of grassroots democracy. Late nineteenth-century Black brass bands and activists rehearsed these participatory models through collective performance that embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction. Termed "Brassroots Democracy," this fusion of political and musical spheres revolutionized both. Brassroots Democracy illuminates the Black Atlantic struggles that informed music-as-world-making from the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction to the jazz revolution. The work theorizes the roots of the New Orleans brass band tradition in the social relations grown in maroon ecologies across the Americas. Their fruits contributed to the socio-sonic commons of the music we call jazz today

BENJAMIN BARSON is a historian, baritone saxophonist, and political activist. He is an assistant professor of music at Bucknell University. His work has been published in Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (2020), Routledge Handbook on Jazz and Gender (2021) and Routledge Guide to Ecosocialism (2021).

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Carrie J. Preston, "Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this incisive critique of the ways performances of allyship can further entrench white privilege, author Carrie J. Preston analyses her own complicit participation and that of other audience members and theater professionals, deftly examining the prevailing framework through which white liberals participate in antiracist theater and institutional “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.

Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice (Oxford UP, 2024) addresses immersive, documentary, site-specific, experimental, street, and popular theatre in chapters on Jean Genet’s The Blacks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field, and Claudia Rankine’s The White Card. Far from abandoning the work to dismantle institutionalized racism, Preston seeks to reveal the contradictions and complicities at the heart of allyship as a crucial step toward full and radical participation in antiracist efforts.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Carrie J. Preston about the intersections of theater, racial justice, and social activism, the concept of “complicit participation,” and allyship.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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Domingo Morel, "Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Over the past fifty years, debates concerning race and college admissions have focused primarily on the policy of affirmative action at elite institutions of higher education. But a less well-known approach to affirmative action also emerged in the 1960s in response to urban unrest and Black and Latino political mobilization. The programs that emerged in response to community demands offered a more radical view of college access: admitting and supporting students who do not meet regular admissions requirements and come from families who are unable to afford college tuition, fees, and other expenses. While conventional views of affirmative action policies focus on the "identification" of high-achieving students of color to attend elite institutions of higher education, these programs represent a community-centered approach to affirmative action. This approach is based on a logic of developing scholars who can be supported at their local public institutions of higher education.

In Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education (Oxford UP, 2023), Domingo Morel explores the history and political factors that led to the creation of college access programs for students of color in the 1960s. Through a case study of an existing community-centered affirmative action program, Talent Development, Morel shows how protest, including violent protest, has been instrumental in the maintenance of college access programs. He also reveals that in response to the college expansion efforts of the 1960s, hidden forms of restriction emerged that have significantly impacted students of color. Developing Scholars argues that the origin, history, and purpose of these programs reveal gaps in our understanding of college access expansion in the US that challenge conventional wisdom of American politics.

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Andrew Stone Higgins, "Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan" (UNC Press, 2023)

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education remains to this day the largest and most ambitious attempt to provide free, universal college education in the United States. Yet the Master Plan, the product of committed Cold War liberals, unfortunately served to reinforce the very class-based exclusions and de facto racism that plagued K–12 education in the nation's largest and most diverse state. In doing so, it inspired a wave of student and faculty organizing that not only forced administrators and politicians to live up to the original promise of the Master Plan—quality higher education for all—but changed the face of California itself.

Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan (UNC Press, 2023) is the first and only comprehensive account of the California Master Plan. Through deep archival work and sharp attention to a fascinating cast of historical characters, Andrew Stone Higgins has excavated the forgotten history of the Master Plan: from its origins in the 1957 Sputnik Crisis, through Governor Ronald Reagan's financial starvation and his failed quest to introduce tuition, to the student struggle to institute affirmative action in university admissions.

Abigail (Abby) Jean Kahn is a PhD candidate in the history of education at Stanford's Graduate School of Education. She also currently sits on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society.

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Connie DeNave, "The Image Maker: Shattering Rock and Roll's Glass" (2023)

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In The Image Maker: Shattering Rock and Roll's Glass Ceiling (2023), Connie DeNave shares her experiences in the public relations world during the British Invasion and the beginning of rock-n-roll marketing. Born in Brooklyn, New York, DeNave graduated from Hunter College and found herself with no job skills. Throughout the mid-1950s to the 1980s, DeNave was rock and roll's first female press agent powerhouse. She revolutionized the public relations business at a time when it was an old boys' club. And she did this all with her—previously unheard of—all female staff. She crashed through the glass ceiling of the music business and represented some of the most influential and popular artists of their time. Her portfolio includes The Rolling Stones, Faces, Herman's Hermits, Dick Clark, Chubby Checker, Nat King Cole, Bobby Darin, and Dusty Springfield. DeNave's memoir examines what it meant to be a women in business at a time when women couldn't even get a credit card. She shares her experiences in the entertainment business and the importance of press agents and public relations in creating a star.

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Laura F. Edwards, "Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes, and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status of the least powerful members of American society? In the hands of eminent historian Laura F. Edwards, these textiles tell a revealing story of ordinary people and how they made use of their material goods' economic and legal value in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War.

Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2022) by Dr. Laura F. Edwards uncovers practices, commonly known then, but now long forgotten, which made textiles—clothing, cloth, bedding, and accessories, such as shoes and hats—a unique form of property that people without rights could own and exchange. The value of textiles depended on law, and it was law that turned these goods into a secure form of property for marginalized people, who not only used these textiles as currency, credit, and capital, but also as entree into the new republic's economy and governing institutions. Dr. Edwards grounds the laws relating to textiles in engaging stories from the lives of everyday Americans. Wives wove linen and kept the proceeds, enslaved people traded coats and shoes, and poor people invested in fabrics, which they carefully preserved in trunks. Dr. Edwards shows that these stories are about far more than cloth and clothing; they reshape our understanding of law and the economy in America.

Based on painstaking archival research from fifteen states, Only the Clothes on Her Back reconstructs this hidden history of power, tracing it from the governing order of the early republic in which textiles' legal principles flourished to the textiles' legal downfall in the mid-nineteenth century when they were crowded out by the rising power of rights.

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D. Andrew Johnson, "Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to provide a detailed account of the colony's population. Among the groups included in this report was an often-overlooked segment—Native Americans, who comprised roughly a quarter of the colony’s enslaved population. However, not long after, references to enslaved Native people largely disappeared from the historical record.

In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), D. Andrew Johnson argues that Native Americans played a pivotal role in shaping South Carolina's economy and culture. Through extensive research, including a database of over 15,000 references to enslaved individuals, Dr. Johnson employs an interdisciplinary approach to expand the historical narrative and center the experiences of enslaved Native people. In addition to his archival work, he uses spatial analysis and archaeological evidence to explore Native slavery within the context of plantation life.

While much of their impact was erased from mainstream history, the contributions of enslaved Native people were evident in the agricultural technologies they introduced, their influence on Creole culture, and the wealth and power amassed by early colonists as a result of their labor.

D. Andrew Johnson is a historian of early-modern America and the Atlantic. He is the coeditor of Atlantic Environments and the American South.

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Karen M. Dunak, "Our Jackie: Public Claims on a Private Life" (NYU Press, 2024)

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis became First Lady of the United States over sixty years ago, she stepped into the public spotlight. Although Jackie is perhaps best known for her two highly-publicized marriages, her legacy has endured beyond twentieth-century pop culture and she remains an object of public fascination today.

Drawing on a range of sources– from articles penned for the women’s pages of local newspapers, to esteemed national periodicals, to fan magazines and film– Our Jackie: Public Claims on a Private Life (NYU Press, 2024) evaluates how media coverage of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis changed over the course of her very public life. Jackie’s interactions with and framing by the American media reflect the changing attitudes toward American womanhood. Over the course of four decades, Jackie was alternatively praised for her service to others, and pilloried for her perceived self-interest. In Our Jackie, Karen M. Dunak argues that whether she was portrayed as a campaign wife, a loyal widow, a selfish jetsetter, or a mature career woman, the history of Jackie’s highly publicized life demonstrates the ways in which news, entertainment, politics, and celebrity evolved and intertwined over the second half of the twentieth century.

Examining the intimate chronicles of this famous First Lady’s life, Our Jackie suggests that media coverage of this enigmatic public figure revealed as much about the prevailing views of women in America– how they should behave and whom they should serve– as it did about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as an individual.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

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Ian Miller, "Self-Esteem: An American History" (Polity Press, 2024)

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

By the end of the twentieth century, the idea of self-esteem had become enormously influential. A staggering amount of psychological research and self-help literature was being published and, before long, devoured by readers. Self-esteem initiatives permeated American schools. Self-esteem became the way of understanding ourselves, our personalities, our interactions with others. Nowadays, however, few people think much about the concept of self-esteem—but perhaps we should.

Self-Esteem: An American History (Polity, 2024) by Dr. Ian Miller is the first historical study to explore the emotional politics of self-esteem in modern America. Written with verve and insight, Dr. Miller’s expert analysis looks at the critiques of self-help that accuse it of propping up conservative agendas by encouraging us to look solely inside ourselves to resolve life’s problems. At the same time, he reveals how African American, LGBTQ+, and feminist activists have endeavoured to build positive collective identities based on self-esteem, pride, and self-respect.

This revelatory book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of mental health and well-being, and in how the politics of self-esteem is played out in today’s US society and culture.

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Erin Lee Mock, "Changed Men: Veterans in American Popular Culture after World War II" (U Virginia Press, 2024)

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Millions of GIs returned from overseas in 1945. A generation of men who had left their families and had learned to kill and to quickly dispatch sexual urges were rapidly reintegrated into civilian life, told to put the war behind them with cheer and confidence. Many veterans struggled, openly or privately, with this transition. Others in society wondered what the war had wrought in them. As Erin Lee Mock shows in this insightful book, the “explosive” potential of men became a central concern of postwar American culture.

This wariness of veterans settled into a generalised anxiety over men’s “inherent” violence and hypersexuality, which increasingly came to define masculinity. Changed Men: Veterans in American Popular Culture after World War II (University of Virginia Press, 2024) by Dr. Erin Lee Mock engages with studies of film, media, literature, and gender and sexuality to advance a new perspective on the artistic and cultural output of and about the “Greatest Generation,” arguing that depictions of men’s violent and erotic potential emerged differently in different forms and genres but nonetheless permeated American culture in these years. Viewing this homecoming through the lenses of war and trauma, classical Hollywood, pulp fiction, periodical culture, and early television, Dr. Mock shows this history in a provocative new light.

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Deborah Parker, "Becoming Belle Da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters" (Villa I Tatti, 2024)

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian through Her Letters (Harvard University Press, October 2024), Deborah Parker chronicles the making and empowerment of a female connoisseur, curator, and library director in a world where such positions were held by men. Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian (1908–1913) and the first Director of the Morgan Library (1924–1948). She was also the daughter of two mixed-race parents and passed for white. In the nearly six hundred letters that Greene sent to art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), Parker identifies Greene’s energetic pursuit of exceptional opportunities, illuminating the artistry and imaginative features of Greene’s writing—her self-invention, her vibrant responses to books and art, and her pathbreaking work as a librarian. As Greene transformed a private library into a magnificent public institution, she also transformed herself: hers was a life both lived and writ large.

Deborah Parker is Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia, and her books include Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance, Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet, and Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing. Her writings also appear in the exhibition catalog for the Morgan Library & Museum’s centenary exhibition, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Risk

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of High Theory, Faye Raquel Gleisser tells us about Risk. A calculable danger in economics, athletics, sociology, or healthcare, risk has become a socially constructed danger that changes who we are and how we move through the world. Faye asks us to think about how risk management and risk literacy shaped the conceptual and performance work of American artists in the late twentieth century. Who is at risk? Who is safe? And how do we know?

Faye’s book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987 (U Chicago Press, 2023) studies how artists in the US starting in the 1960s came to use guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art, maneuvering policing, racism, and surveillance.

As US news covered anticolonialist resistance abroad and urban rebellions at home, and as politicians mobilized the perceived threat of “guerrilla warfare” to justify increased police presence nationwide, artists across the country began adopting guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art. Risk Work tells the story of how artists’ experimentation with physical and psychological interference from the late 1960s through the late 1980s reveals the complex and enduring relationship between contemporary art, state power, and policing. Drawing on art history and sociology as well as performance, prison, and Black studies, Gleisser argues that artists’ anticipation of state-sanctioned violence invokes the concept of “punitive literacy,” a collectively formed understanding of how to protect oneself and others in a carceral society.

Faye Raquel Gleisser is an associate professor of art history at Indiana University and curator, whose work focuses on three main subject areas: art and tactical intervention; the racial logics of archives; and curatorial ethics and canon formation. By bridging curation, art history, and performance studies, she investigates histories of art that challenge intertwined anti-Black societal structures and patriarchal, white-centering notions of value that have long limited the canon of “American art.” She approaches art as a material manifestation of sociopolitical conditions and artists as theorists of power and social encounter.

In the episode Faye names several artists including Asco, Chris Burden, the Guerrilla Girls, Tehching Hsieh, and Adrian Piper. This image for this episode is a photograph by Harry Gambota Jr. titled First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1974 that documents a performance by the Chicano art group Asco in Los Angeles. See the Artsy page about the photograph for more about the art and the artist.

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D. M. Giangreco, "Truman and the Bomb: The Untold Story" (Potomac Books, 2023)

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Many myths have grown up around President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan. In destroying these myths, D. M. Giangreco’s Truman and the Bomb: The Untold Story (Potomac Books, 2023) will discomfort both Truman’s critics and his supporters, and force historians to reexamine what they think they know about the end of the Pacific War.

Myth: Truman didn’t know of the atomic bomb’s development before he became president.

Fact: Truman’s knowledge of the bomb is revealed in his own carefully worded letters to a Senate colleague and specifically discussed in the correspondence between the army officers assigned to his Senate investigating committee.

Myth: The huge casualty estimates cited by Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson were a postwar creation devised to hide their guilt for killing thousands of defenseless civilians.

Fact: The flagrantly misrepresented “low” numbers are based on narrow slices of highly qualified—and limited—U.S. Army projections printed in a variety of briefing documents and are not from the actual invasion planning against Japan.

Myth: Truman wanted to defeat Japan without any assistance from the Soviet Union and to freeze the USSR out of the postwar settlements.

Fact: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Truman desperately wanted Stalin’s involvement in the bloody endgame of World War II and worked diligently—and successfully—toward that end.

Using previously unpublished material, D. M. Giangreco busts these myths and more. An award-winning historian and expert on Truman, Giangreco is perfectly situated to debunk the many deep-rooted falsehoods about the roles played by American, Soviet, and Japanese leaders during the end of the World War II in the Pacific. Truman and the Bomb, a concise yet comprehensive study of Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb, will prove to be a classic for studying presidential politics and influence on atomic warfare and its military and diplomatic components.

Making this book particularly valuable for professors and students as well as for military, diplomatic, and presidential historians and history buffs are extensive primary source materials, including the planned U.S. naval and air operations in support of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. These documents support Giangreco’s arguments while enabling the reader to enter the mindsets of Truman and his administration as well as the war’s key Allied participants.

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Agustina Paglayan, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How the expansion of primary education in the West emerged not from democratic ideals but from the state's desire to control its citizens.

Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education (Princeton UP, 2024), Agustina Paglayan offers an unsettling answer. The introduction of broadly accessible primary education was not mainly a response to industrialization, or fueled by democratic ideals, or even aimed at eradicating illiteracy or improving skills. It was motivated instead by elites' fear of the masses--and the desire to turn the "savage," "unruly," and "morally flawed" children of the lower classes into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws.

Drawing on unparalleled evidence from two centuries of education provision in Europe and the Americas, and deploying rich data that capture the expansion of primary education and its characteristics, this sweeping book offers a political history of primary schools that is both broad and deep. Paglayan shows that governments invested in primary schools when internal threats heightened political elites' anxiety around mass violence and the breakdown of social order.

Two hundred years later, the original objective of disciplining children remains at the core of how most public schools around the world operate. The future of education systems--and their ability to reduce poverty and inequality--hinges on our ability to understand and come to terms with this troubling history.

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Postscript: Reflections on the 2024 American Presidential Election

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Many pundits are rushing to judgement – claiming to identify the “one” reason that Donald Trump won or Kamala Harris lost the 2024 Presidential Election. Today’s Postscript offers a nuanced conversation among four political scientists to gather some key take-aways and interpretive tools for looking forward to the second Trump presidency, midterms, 2028 presidential election, and 2030 redistricting.

Julia Azari is Professor of Political Science at Marquette University and a prolific media commentator on politics. Jonathan Bernstein is a political scientist who focuses on political parties, Congress, the presidency, elections, and democracy. Political Parties, Congress the Presid, Elections, and Democracy. Meena Bose is the Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs at the Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs and director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, both at Hofstra University. Daniel E. Ponder is the L.E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University..

Mentioned:

Julia Azari and Jennifer K. Smith on informal norms: “Unwritten Rules: Informal Institutions in Established Democracies”
Julia Azari’s book on mandates: Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate
John Burn-Murdoch’s graph on incumbents losing globally in Financial Times
Gallup data on nostalgia for past presidents in Jeffrey M. Jones, Retrospective Approval of JFK Rises to 90%; Trump at 46%
Julia and Jonathan’s Good Politics/Bad Politics podcast

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We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today’s book is: We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024) by Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson.

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse, historian Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. The dismissal of “Black violence” as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away. Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation.

Our guest is: Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson, who is the Michael and Denise Kellen ’68 Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. Her book Force and Freedom was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. She is the cohost of the Radiotopia podcast “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” She lives outside of Boston with her husband and three children.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

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The Disappearance and Return of Inequality Studies in Economics

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

This is episode three Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

For much of the 20th century, few economists studied inequality. “Watching the study of inequality was like watching the grass grow,” is the way inequality scholar James K. Galbraith put it to us. Yet, the inequality studies grass is growing today–really, it’s something of a lush jungle. Arguably, the return of inequality studies is biggest change that has happened in economics over the last decade or so. Why did it return? Just as importantly, how could it have possibly disappeared? On this episode, we survey the broad political and intellectual history of inequality studies in economics.

First, economist Branko Milanovic, author of Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War, introduces us to a few of the reasons why inequality was marginalized, including the mathematization of the economic mainstream. In short, we sidelined the political in political economy. Then, political theorist Michael Thompson, author of The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America, introduces us to the work of Frank Knight and other market-friendly economists who provided ideological justification for widening inequality. Finally, inequality scholar Poornima Paidipaty, speaks to us about the return of inequality studies, particularly through the landmark work of Thomas Piketty. Yet, Paidipaty and her co-author Pedro Ramos Pinto highlight some of the limits of Picketty’s vision in their article “Revisiting the “Great Levelling”: The limits of Piketty’s Capital and Ideology for understanding the rise of late 20th century inequality.”

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Sara Glass, "Kissing Girls on Shabbat: A Memoir" (Atria, 2024)

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Growing up in the Hasidic community of Brooklyn’s Borough Park, Sara Glass knew one painful truth: what was expected of her and what she desperately wanted were impossibly opposed. Tormented by her attraction to women and trapped in a loveless arranged marriage, she found herself unable to conform to her religious upbringing and soon, she made the difficult decision to walk away from the world she knew, which she details in Kissing Girls on Shabbat: A Memoir (Atria, 2024).

Sara’s journey to self-acceptance began with the challenging battle for a divorce and custody of her children, an act that left her on the verge of estrangement from her family and community. Controlled by the fear of losing custody of her two children, she forced herself to remain loyal to the compulsory heteronormativity baked into Hasidic Judaism and married again. But after suffering profound loss and a shocking sexual assault, Sara decided to finally be completely true to herself.

Kissing Girls on Shabbat is not only a love letter to Glass’s children, herself, and her family—it is an unflinching window into the world of ultra-conservative Orthodox Jewish communities and an inspiring celebration of learning to love yourself.

Interviewee: Sara Glass is a psychotherapist and the clinical director of Soul Wellness NYC, a private psychotherapy practice in Midtown Manhattan.

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Hunter Hargraves, "Uncomfortable Television" (Duke UP, 2024)

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

From The Wire to Intervention to Girls, postmillennial American television has dazzled audiences with novelistic seriality and cinematic aesthetics. Yet this television is also more perverse: it bombards audiences with misogynistic and racialized violence, graphic sex, substance abuse, unlikeable protagonists, and the extraordinary exploitation of ordinary people.

In Uncomfortable Television (Duke UP, 2024), Hunter Hargraves examines how television makes its audiences find pleasure through feeling disturbed. He shows that this turn to discomfort realigns collective definitions of family and pleasure with the values of neoliberal culture. In viscerally violent dramas, cringeworthy ironic comedies, and trashy reality programs alike, televisual unease trains audiences to survive under late capitalism, which demands that individuals accept a certain amount of discomfort, dread, and irritation into their everyday lives. By highlighting how discomfort has been central to the reorganization and legitimization of television as an art form, Hargraves demonstrates television’s role in assimilating viewers into worlds marked by precarity, perversity, and crisis.

Cory Barker is a faculty member in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University, where he teaches courses on film, television, and digital culture. Twitter. Newsletter.

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Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement and the Great Society or a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racialization of crime.

In Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (U Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Grasso interrogates the intertwined histories of street and corporate crime to find that the differences in punishment are more than modern hypocrisy. Examining the carceral and regulatory states' evolutions from 1870 through today, Grasso argues that divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference such as eugenics to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct.

Even after eugenics was discredited, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Using an impressive array of sources and methods, Dr. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America's legal system.

Dr. Anthony Grasso is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University Camden. His research focuses on American political development, law, and inequality.

Mentioned:

Susan’s interview with Dr. Joanna Wuest on Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement
David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (Beard Books, 1989)

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Paul M. Renfro, "The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America" (UNC Press, 2024)

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In the 1980s, as HIV/AIDS ravaged queer communities and communities of color in the United States and beyond, a straight white teenager named Ryan White emerged as the face of the epidemic. Diagnosed with hemophilia at birth, Ryan contracted HIV through contaminated blood products. In 1985, he became a household name after he was barred from attending his Indiana middle school. As Ryan appeared on nightly news broadcasts and graced the covers of popular magazines, he was embraced by music icons and well-known athletes, achieving a curious kind of stardom.

Analyzing his struggle and celebrity, Paul M. Renfro's powerful biography grapples with the contested meanings of Ryan's life, death, and afterlives. As Renfro argues in The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (UNC Press, 2024), Ryan's fight to attend school forced the American public to reckon with prevailing misconceptions about the AIDS epidemic. Yet his story also reinforced the hierarchies at the heart of the AIDS crisis. Because the "innocent" Ryan had contracted HIV "through no fault of his own," as many put it, his story was sometimes used to blame presumably "guilty" populations for spreading the virus. Reexamining Ryan's story through this lens, Renfro reveals how the consequences of this stigma continue to pervade policy and cultural understandings of HIV/AIDS today.

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Donna J. Nicol, "Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action" (U Rochester Press, 2024)

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024) examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system's first Black woman trustee, who later became the board's first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974-94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Nicol argues that Hampton enacted "sly civility" to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates.

Donna J. Nicol is Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts at California State University, Long Beach, CA.

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James M. Bradley, "Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Despite serving as the 8th president of the United States, Martin Van Buren gets little consideration for his impact on American history. In his new biography of Van Buren, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician (Oxford UP, 2024), James M. Bradley makes it clear the extent to which his legacy has gone underappreciated. Mastering the complex politics of New York during the early republic, Van Buren built a political operation — the Albany Regency — that made him a power on the national scene. Upon this he built the Democratic Party, the oldest political party in the United States and one which dominated the politics of his era. In an age of political giants, Van Buren was able to use his organizational skills to win the prize that eluded all of them, winning election as president in 1836, only to lose it four years later thanks in part to the success of his Whig opponents in adopting his playbook. Though Van Buren never succeeded in returning to the office to which he aspired, his impact in national politics continued to be felt throughout the 1840s, and left a legacy that endures to the present day.

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Why Can’t the US Compete with China in Infrastructure?

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Dr. Shahar Hameiri and Dr. Lee Jones discuss the political economy and financing behind global infrastructure development, with a focus on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The discussion explores the driving forces behind Chinese infrastructure investment, while addressing the crucial question of why American and European initiatives such as Global Gateway and the Program for Global Infrastructure and Investment struggle to compete with the BRI. We discuss dynamics of public and private finance, the role of public-private partnerships, and the challenges private investors face. Importantly, this episode reveals the U.S. Development Finance Corporation’s increasing reliance on private capital, and the decline of the construction sector in the U.S. economy. This comprehensive view shows how different financing and development models shape the global infrastructure landscape, how infrastructure development has evolved into its current state, and novel fields of competition, such as undersea Internet cables.

Hameiri and Jones are co-authors of Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China's Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Dr. Hameiri is Professor in the School of Political Science and International Relation at The University of Queensland. A political economist with diverse research interests, traversing the fields of security, development and aid, governance, political geography and international relations, he is interested in understanding the evolving nature of statehood and political agency under conditions of globalisation. His books include International Intervention and Local Politics (Cambridge University, 2017), Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Regulating Statehood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and he is a co-editor for the fourth edition of The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Poliltics and Uneven Development Under Hyperglobalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). X: @ShaharHameiri.

Dr. Jones is Professor in International Politics at the Queen Mary University of London. Lee specialises in political economy and international relations, focusing on the politics of intervention, security, and governance, with a particular interest in social conflict and the transformation of states. Much of his work focuses on Southeast Asia and China. Lee regularly advises the British and other governments and civil society organisations and has often appeared in the national and international media. A fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he also sits on the board of Palgrave’s series Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, and the ESRC’s peer review college. For further information see www.leejones.tk.

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Andrew Stravers et al., "Beyond the Wire: US Military Deployments and Host Country Public Opinion" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The United States stands at a crossroads in international security. The backbone of its international position for the last 70 years has been the massive network of overseas military deployments. However, the US now faces pressures to limit its overseas presence and spending.

In Beyond the Wire: US Military Deployments and Host Country Public Opinion (Oxford University Press, 2023), Michael Allen, Michael Flynn, Carla Martinez Machain, and Andrew Stravers argue that the US has entered into a "Domain of Competitive Consent" where the longevity of overseas deployments relies upon the buy-in from host-state populations and what other major powers offer in security guarantees.

Drawing from three years of surveys and interviews across fourteen countries, they demonstrate that a key component of building support for the US mission is the service members themselves as they interact with local community members.

Highlighting both the positive contact and economic benefits that flow from military deployments and the negative interactions like crime and anti-base protests, this book shows in the most rigorous and concrete way possible how US policy on the ground shapes its ability to advance its foreign policy goals.

Our guests today are Michael Allen, who is a Professor of International Relations in the School of Public Service at Boise State University; Michael Flynn, who is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at Kansas State University; and Carla Martinez Machain, who is a Professor of Political Science at the University at Buffalo.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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The Impeachment Power: A Conversation with Keith Whittington

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this week’s episode we step into conversation with Keith Whittington about his new book, The Impeachment Power: The Law, Politics, and Purpose of an Extraordinary Constitutional Tool (Princeton UP, 2024), we explored the historical and constitutional dimensions of impeachment in American politics. Whittington provided a detailed account of how the Founders intended impeachment to function as a safeguard against executive overreach. We discussed the evolution of impeachment cases, from Andrew Johnson to more recent examples, examining how political partisanship and public opinion have shaped its application over time. Whittington also reflected on the implications of impeachment for the health of democratic institutions and constitutional governance today. It was an enlightening discussion on one of the most important, yet often misunderstood, mechanisms in the U.S. Constitution.

Keith E. Whittington is the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Whittington’s teaching and scholarship span American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech and the law. He is the author of You Can't Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms (2024), Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (2019), and Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (2018), as well as Constitutional Interpretation (1999), Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy (2007), and other works on constitutional theory and law and politics.

Whittington has spent most of his career at Princeton University, where he served as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics from 2006 to 2024. He has also held visiting appointments at Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, and the University of Texas School of Law.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Elia Powers, "Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Elia Powers' book Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality (Rutgers UP, 2024) explores how journalists from historically marginalized groups have long felt pressure to conform when performing for audiences. Many speak with a flat, “neutral” accent, modify their delivery to hide distinctive vocal attributes, dress conventionally to appeal to the “average” viewer, and maintain a consistent appearance to avoid unwanted attention. Their aim is what author Elia Powers refers to as performance neutrality—presentation that is deemed unobjectionable, reveals little about journalists’ social identity, and supposedly does not detract from their message. Increasingly, journalists are challenging restrictive, purportedly neutral forms of self-presentation. This book argues that performance neutrality is a myth that reinforces the status quo, limits on-air diversity, and hinders efforts to make newsrooms more inclusive. Through in-depth interviews with journalists in broadcasting and podcasting, and those who shape their performance, the author suggests ways to make journalism more inclusive and representative of diverse audiences.

Cory Barker is a faculty member in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University, where he teaches courses on film, television, and digital culture. Twitter. Newsletter.

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Aran Robert Shetterly, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul" (Amistad, 2024)

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

On November 3, 1979, as activist Nelson Johnson assembled people for a march adjacent to Morningside Homes in Greensboro, North Carolina, gunshots rang out. A caravan of Klansmen and Neo-Nazis sped from the scene, leaving behind five dead. Known as the "Greensboro Massacre," the event and its aftermath encapsulate the racial conflict, economic anxiety, clash of ideologies, and toxic mix of corruption and conspiracy that roiled American democracy then--and threaten it today.

In 88 seconds, one Southern city shattered over irreconcilable visions of America's past and future. When the shooters are acquitted in the courts, Reverend Johnson, his wife Joyce, and their allies, at odds with the police and the Greensboro establishment, sought alternative forms of justice. As the Johnsons rebuilt their lives after 1979, they found inspiration in Nelson Mandela's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Martin Luther King Jr's concept of Beloved Community and insist that only by facing history's hardest truths can healing come to the city they refuse to give up on.

This intimate, deeply researched, and heart-stopping account draws upon survivor interviews, court documents, and the files from one of the largest investigations in FBI history. The persistent mysteries of the case touch deep cultural insecurities and contradictions about race and class. A quintessentially American story, Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul (Amistad, 2024) explores the courage required to make change and the evolving pursuit of a more inclusive and equal future.

Arran Shetterly is the author of the critically acclaimed The Americano: Fighting with Castro for Cuba’s Freedom, the founder of the Mexico City-based magazine, Inside Mexico, and a member of the board of the Americans Who Tell the Truth organization. He has received numerous fellowships, including the Virginia Humanities Fellowship and the 2019 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Aran holds a BA in literature from Harvard College, and an MA in American Studies. He currently he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his son and wife, the New York Times bestselling author Margot Lee Shetterly.

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New Books in American Studies

Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Adam Henig, "Baseball's Outcast: The Story of Ron LeFlore" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Nathaniel Greenberg, "The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Kasey Jernigan, "Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity" (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller, "Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers" (U California Press, 2026)

Emely Rumble, "Bibliotherapy in The Bronx" (Row House, 2025)

169* Hannah Arendt on Oases (JP)

Mark A. Johnson, "American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon" (U Georgia Press, 2026)

Alisa Kessel, "Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Victor Li, "Supreme Pressure: The Rejection of John J. Parker and the Birth of the Modern Supreme Court Confirmation Process" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Larry M. Bartels and Katherine J. Cramer, "The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

David-James Gonzales, "Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Donald Sassoon, "Revolutions: A New History" (Verso Books, 2025)

Voices from a Century of Struggle: Writings of the Jim Crow Era

John Bechtold, "U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory: Negotiating Dead Space" (Taylor & Francis, 2024)

Cedric de Leon, "Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity" (U California Press, 2025)

The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence

Michael W. Tuck, "The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World" (Brill, 2026)

Melissa Butcher, "The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future" (Manchester UP, 2026)

Scott M. Kenworthy, "The People's Patriarch: Tikhon Bellavin and the Orthodox Church in North America and Revolutionary Russia" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Priyanka Kumar, "Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit" (Island Press, 2025)

Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, "The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Daniel Rachel, "This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich" (Akashic Books, 2026)

Danielle Bainbridge, "Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive" (NYU Press, 2026)

The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris

Amelia Frank-Vitale, "Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds" (U California Press, 2026)

Lee Ann S. Wang, "The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women" (Duke UP, 2026)

Tyesha Maddox, "A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Nick Juravich, "Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education" (U ﻿Illinois Press, 2024)

Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese Food

Matthew Guariglia and Brian Hochman, "The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State" (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026)

Erica Morawski, "Development Design: Hotels and Politics in the Hispanic Caribbean" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2025)

Mark Hlavacik, "Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Nicholas W. Gentile, "Enemies to Their Country: The Marblehead Addressers and Consensus in the American Revolution" (U Mass Press, 2025)

On Our Continuing Age of Oil with Journalist Stanley Reed

Cathryn J. Prince, "For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman" (U Illinois Press, 2026)

Tom Wells, "The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Joanna Siekiera ed., "NATO Stability Policing: Beneficial Tool in Filling the Security Gap and Establishing the Rule of Law, and a Safe and Secure Environment" (NATO Stability Policing Centre Of Excellence, 2024)

Maya L. Kornberg, "Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress" (JHU Press, 2026)

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War" (Oxford UP, 2025)

On Trump as a “World Historical Individual” with author John B. Judis

Sarah Jaffe, "Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone" (Bold Type Books, 2021)

Steven Pinker, "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life" (Scribner, 2025)

Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, "Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Gabrielle Oliveira, "Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Doug Crandell, "Twenty-Two Cents an Hour: Disability Rights and the Fight to End Subminimum Wages" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Imagining Independence; or, Why Does Rip Van Winkle Sleep Through the Revolution?

Sunmin Kim, "The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Lisa Nakamura, "The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

A.J. Bauer, "Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against The Press" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Entrepreneurial Work Ethic

Abe Walker, "Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South" (Temple UP, 2026)

Eurie Dahn, "Snack" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Courtney Humphries, "Climate Change and the Future of Boston" (Anthem Press, 2026)

Ethelene Whitmire, "The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram" (Viking, 2026)

Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown, "Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Tristan J. Rogers﻿, "Conservatism, Past and Present: A Philosophical Introduction" (Routledge, 2025)

An Evening with Philip Roth: A Conversation with Bernard Avishai, Igor Webb, and Steven Zipperstein

Katelyn E. Stauffer, "The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women’s Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S." (Oxford UP, 2025)

Austin McCoy, "Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made" (Atria/One Signal, 2026)

Michelle Adams, "The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North" (FSG Press, 2025)

George Frazier, "Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Dana A. Williams, "Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship" (Amistad, 2025)

Danielle Wiggins, "Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City with Henry Sapoznik

Patrick Chung, "Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)

Catherine Boland Erkkila, "Spaces of Immigration: American Ports, Railways, and Settlements" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2025)

Jennifer Randles, "Living Diaper to Diaper: The Hidden Crisis of Poverty and Motherhood" (U California Press, 2026)

Michael James Roberts et al., "Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing" (San Diego State UP, 2024)

Elizabeth Suhay, "Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025)

Seth S. Tannenbaum, "Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark" (U Illinois Press, 2026)

Helen Redmond, "Liquid Handcuffs: Policing and Punishment in Methadone Clinics and the Future of Opioid Addiction Treatment" (North Atlantic Books, 2026)

Coming Out as Dalit with Yashica Dutt

James Giesler, "Francisco de Saavedra's American Revolutionary War, The Spanish Contribution to the Battle of Yorktown" (James Giesler, 2025)

Clarissa E. Francis, "Black Women's Bodily Autonomy, Sexual Freedom, and Pleasure: Explorations of the Hot Girl Movement" (Routledge, 2025)

Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell, "Lincoln and the Jews: A History" (NYU Press, 2025)

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, "Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Sarah Jones Weicksel, "A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2026)

Dorothy Denetclaw and Matt Fitzsimons, "The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story" (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Nick Juravich, "Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

Tristan J. Rogers, "Conservatism, Past and Present: A Philosophical Introduction" (Routledge, 2025)

Jamila Michener and Mallory E. Sorelle, "Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Mark Anthony Neal, "New Black Man" (Routledge, 2015)

Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Zeke Hernandez, "The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)