New Books in American Studies

Interviews with Scholars of America about their New Books

Society & Culture
History
3726
Anjali Vats, "The Color of Creatorship: Intelle...
Vats offers an intricate and meticulously researched text on intellectual property history, race, and citizenship from the 1790s to the present...
49 min
3727
Claire Herbert, "A Detroit Story: Urban Decline...
Herbert examines how the informal reclamation of abandoned property has been shaping Detroit for decades...
38 min
3728
College Presidents and the Struggle for Black F...
Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, Eddie Cole shows how college presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, strategically, yet often silently, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere...
52 min
3729
Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: T...
By 1935 William Faulkner was well established as an author of critically praised novels, yet the low volume of his sales forced him to seek work in Hollywood....
50 min
3730
Matthew H. Rafalow, "Digital Divisions: How Sch...
Rafalow provides an ethnographic study of students and teachers at three Los Angeles schools utilizing instructional technology...
48 min
3731
Clayborne Carson, "Malcolm X: The FBI File" (Sk...
The FBI has made possible a reassembling of the history of Malcolm X that goes beyond any previous research. From the opening of his file in March of 1953 to his assassination in 1965, the story of Malcolm X’s political life is a gripping one....
85 min
3732
David Adjmi, "Lot Six" (Harper, 2020)
Adjmi’s memoir also traces his evolving relationship with his family and his community, from whom he desires to escape even as he finds himself drawn continually back to them...
57 min
3733
Jonathan Boyarin, "Yeshiva Days: Learning on th...
Boyarin explores the yeshiva's relationship with the neighborhood, the city, and Jewish and American culture more broadly, and brings vividly to life its routines, rituals, and rhythms...
62 min
3734
Jill Watts, "The Black Cabinet: The Untold Stor...
When did Black Americans move from stalwart party of Lincoln Republicans to dedicated New Deal Democrats?
63 min
3735
Jim Downs, "Stand by Me: The Forgotten History ...
Downs rewrites the history of gay life in the 1970s, arguing that the decade was about much more than sex and marching in the streets...
30 min
3736
D. G. Young, "Irony and Outrage: The Polarized ...
Young looks at two distinct genres of communication—irony and outrage—and their respective appeals to liberals and conservatives...
60 min
3737
Tabassum Fahim Ruby, "Muslim Women's Rights: Co...
Ruby follows the legal debates and public discussions that surrounded the proposed shari‘ah tribunals in Canada from 2003 to 2006...
69 min
3738
Jennifer M. Randles, "Essential Dads: The Inequ...
Randles shares the stories of more than 60 marginalized men as they sought to become more engaged parents through a government-supported “responsible” fatherhood program...
57 min
3739
Harvey Araton, "Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fa...
Araton's book reads like a mix between Tuesdays with Morrie and a sequel to his book When the Garden was Eden (which chronicled the New York Knicks’ early-70s title teams). It’s a book about friendship, aging and of course, basketball....
47 min
3740
Travis Vogan, "ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of...
Vogan traces the cultural impact of ABC Sports rise in the 1950s until its demise in the 1990s....
54 min
3741
Justin Gage, "We Do Not Want the Gates Closed B...
Gage shows how sustained communication between reservations enabled a diversity of peoples to share knowledge of common experiences under U.S. settler colonialism, culminating with the rise and rapid spread of the Ghost Dance...
62 min
3742
Ellen Lamont, "The Mating Game: How Gender Stil...
Lamont offers an in-depth analysis of how gender shapes dating practices...
45 min
3743
Nicholas Guyatt, "Bind Us Apart: How Enlightene...
Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that “all men are created equal”?
66 min
3744
Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native American...
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...
36 min
3745
Jon D. Schaff, "Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship...
Rather than smashing societal structures willy-nilly and wielding presidential power like a bludgeon, Schaff’s Lincoln was far more deferential to Congress than many of us realized...
122 min
3746
Andre E. Johnson, "No Future in This Country: T...
In this rhetorical history, Johnson contextualizes and analyzes some of Turner’s key speeches and writings delivered between 1896 and 1915 amid the rise of Jim Crow segregation and the first Great Migration...
72 min
3747
Christina Meyer, "Producing Mass Entertainment:...
The Yellow Kid was a ubiquitous figure at the end of the nineteenth century...
78 min
3748
Benjamin F. Armstrong, "Small Boats and Daring ...
Benjamin Armstrong sets out to take irregular naval warfare out of the shadow of the blue-water battles that dominate naval history...
56 min
3749
Luke A. Nichter, "The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot...
Few have ever enjoyed the degree of foreign-policy influence and versatility that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the grand-son of Woodrow Wilson’s senatorial antagonist, did...,
57 min
3750
Vanessa Diaz, "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino ...
Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work of producing celebrity in Los Angeles...
47 min