New Books in American Studies

Interviews with Scholars of America about their New Books

Society & Culture
History
4151
Jennifer Mercieca, "Demagogue for President: Th...
Mercieca describes the Trump campaign’s expert use of the common demagogic rhetorical techniques...
51 min
4152
Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, "None...
In recent decades, the number of Americans and Canadians who identify has nonreligious has risen considerably..
59 min
4153
Vanessa Cook, "Spiritual Socialists: Religion a...
Cook shows that there is a deep religious strain within the American Left despite contrary common perceptions...
50 min
4154
Thomas A. Discenna, "Discourses of Denial: The ...
Discenna paints a compelling picture of “the denial of academic labor” happening across public and private institutions...
59 min
4155
Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Figh...
Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World...
43 min
4156
Richard Lachmann, "First Class Passengers on a ...
Lachmann argues that while imperial expansion can deliver more resources to their centers, they can also create dynamics of elite conflict...
68 min
4157
Mitchell Nathanson, "Bouton: The Life of a Base...
Nathanson examines the life of Jim Bouton, a journeyman pitcher whose 1970 book, “Ball Four,” was a lightning rod for controversy and became one of the best sports books of all time....
74 min
4158
E. Engelhardt and L. Smith, "The Food We Eat, t...
Though the collection is diverse in genre – including academic essays alongside poetry, memoir, and illustration – the contents are united around challenging and complicating a notion of a single Appalachia....
52 min
4159
James M. Jasper, "Public Characters: The Politi...
Did Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency in 2016 because he was a master of character work – able to sum up opponents in pithy epithets that encourage the public to see them as weak or immoral?
41 min
4160
Stanley D. M. Carpenter, "Southern Gambit: Corn...
Charles Lord Cornwallis’s campaign through the southern American colonies came to an ignominious close on October 19, 1781, on an open field outside Yorktown, Virginia...
56 min
4161
T. Skocpol and C. Tervo, "Upending American Pol...
How can we make sense of the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump?
65 min
4162
Adam M. Sowards, "An Open Pit Visible from the ...
With the Wilderness Act (1964) unable to protect this area of outstanding beauty, conservationists set out to apply moral rather than legal strategies of resistance...
30 min
4163
Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, "Arab Routes: Pathways t...
Gualtieri uncovers the dynamic and complex stories of Arabic-speaking migrant communities who came to call Southern California home...
57 min
4164
Paul Matzko, "The Radio Right" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Matzko details its emergence in the 1950s and the response to its rise by some of the leading political and religious institutions of the era...
51 min
4165
Yuval Levin, "A Time to Build" (Basic Books, 2020)
Americans are living through a social crisis, contends Yuval Levin...
61 min
4166
Brandon K. Winford, "John Hervey Wheeler, Black...
John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders...
76 min
4167
Louis A. Pérez, "Rice in the Time of Sugar: The...
Pérez explores how Cuba’s dependency on the sugar economy also made the island’s population dependent on food imports like rice.
54 min
4168
Betsy Gaines Quammen, "American Zion: Cliven Bu...
Quammen situates the Bundy standoff within the long and convoluted history of Mormon migration into the American West—and provides an exciting new take on religion in modern American politics...
47 min
4169
Stacy Wolf, "Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and ...
From backstage moms to tiny divas to dinner theatres, Wolf demonstrates that this charming pastime of American culture that is anything but past...
64 min
4170
Jia Lynn Yang, "One Mighty and Irresistible Tid...
Yang recounts the personalities and debates that brought about the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which forms the foundation for modern U.S. immigration policy...
64 min
4171
Forrest Stuart, "Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, D...
How do young men use drill music and social media to gain power?
61 min
4172
Nancy Mattina, "Uncommon Anthropologist: Gladys...
Mattina offers the first full biography of Reichard, and examines her pathbreaking work in the ethnography of ritual and mythology; Wiyot, Coeur d’Alene, and Navajo linguistics; folk art, gender, and language; and her exceptional career of teaching, editing, publishing, and mentoring...
62 min
4173
Ana Stevenson, "The Woman as Slave in Nineteent...
Stevenson explores the ubiquity of what she terms the “woman-slave analogy” in nineteenth-century US feminist discourse...
48 min
4174
Kenesha N. Grant, "The Great Migration and the ...
Grant analyses the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities, and how this changed the political dynamics in many of the places where African Americans settled and built new lives...
49 min
4175
Randy E. Barnett, "An Introduction to Constitut...
Want to know under what pretexts a local government can seize your house?
75 min