New Books in American Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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5151
Connie Chiang, “Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An E...
The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is a well-known topic in American history and has been the subject of countess books and articles. In Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarc...
53 min
5152
Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Accounting for Slavery: ...
The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ‘total institutions’—an effort to forestall labor turno...
37 min
5153
Zachary Lechner, “The South of the Mind: Americ...
When talking about the American South in the second half of the twentieth century, popular discourse tended to fall into one of three camps (on occasion, two might coexist simultaneously): the “Vicious South” which was violent and regressive,
75 min
5154
Anthony Slide, “Magnificent Obsession: The Outr...
One of the major aspects of the popular film industry are the fans who want to collect material related to their favorite films, actors, and actresses. While this has become generally easier in the age of the Internet,
45 min
5155
Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “The New Immigrant Whit...
From Dancing with the Stars to the high-profile airport abandonment of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev by his American adoptive parents in April 2010, popular representations of post-Soviet immigrants in America span the gamut of romantic anti-Communist...
51 min
5156
J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, “Enchanted A...
Magical thinking lies at the heart of J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood’s new book, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Oliver is professor of political science at the University of Chica...
23 min
5157
M. L. Rozenblit and J. Karp, “World War I and t...
How was Jewish life affected by the First World War? How did Jews around the world understand, engage with, and influence the Great War and surrounding events? And why has the impact of World War I so often overlooked Jewish historical narratives?
50 min
5158
N. M. Sambaluk, “The Other Space Race: Eisenhow...
Many people place the beginning of the American space program at 7:28pm, October 4, 1957 – the moment the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. This event prompted the United States to open up its own crash program to put f...
85 min
5159
Adam Reich and Peter Bearman, “Working for Resp...
When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot y...
43 min
5160
Stefan M. Bradley, “Upending the Ivory Tower: C...
The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by produc...
42 min
5161
Jonathan Shandell, “The American Negro Theatre ...
The role of the artist in the cause of Black freedom has been a hotly debated topic for generations now. Dr. Jonathan Shandell’s The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (University of Iowa Press,
52 min
5162
Robert Kagan, “The Jungle Grows Back: America a...
Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Dangerous Nation, Of Paradise and Power, and A Twilight Struggle.
46 min
5163
Greg Sargent, “An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our ...
With many Americas fearing that democracy itself is in trouble, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent explores remedies to reserve the democratic decline in An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Pol...
46 min
5164
James S. Bielo, “Ark Encounter: The Making of a...
In his new book, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU Press, 2018), James Bielo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, goes behind the scenes at Grant County, Kentucky’s creationist theme park,
79 min
5165
Chloe Thurston, “At the Boundaries of Homeowner...
Earlier this year, we heard from Suzanne Mettler and her book on the politics of policies hidden from view. Mettler explained that most Americans are benefiting from numerous public policies, but often fail to notice it because participation is hidden ...
20 min
5166
Stella M. Rouse and Ashley D. Ross, “The Politi...
The Millenial generation, those born between the early 1980s and late 1990s, are the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in US history. They also grew up during the birth of the digital revolution and two cataclysmic events: September 11th ...
16 min
5167
Kiara M. Vigil, “Indigenous Intellectuals: Sove...
In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the 1880s and into the 1930s,
51 min
5168
Victoria Lamont, “Westerns: A Women’s History” ...
Westerns are having a bit of a moment in the early twenty-first century. Westworld was recently nominated for eight Emmys, the hit show Deadwood is slated for a return to television in the next few years, and in 2015 Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eig...
50 min
5169
Michael G. Hanchard, “The Spectre of Race: How ...
Michael G. Hanchard’s new book The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a rich and complex examination of the question of discrimination in general,
40 min
5170
Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, “Jack Benny and the Gold...
Jack Benny was one of the first crossover stars in broadcast comedy, rising from the vaudeville circuit to star in radio, film, and television. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley chronicles Benny’s career in her book, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio...
65 min
5171
Sylvia Chan-Malik, “Being Muslim: A Cultural Hi...
The story of Muslims in America has primarily been told through the experiences of men and often revolves around narratives of immigration. Sylvia Chan-Malik, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University,
67 min
5172
David Pietrusza, “TR’s Last War: Theodore Roose...
Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War,
56 min
5173
Steve Kornacki, “The Red and The Blue: The 1990...
How did American politics become so polarized? MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki points to clash of two larger-than-life characters in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, as the origin of our viciously tribal politics.
43 min
5174
Nathaniel Philbrick, “In the Hurricane’s Eye: T...
Most Americans do not appreciate the extent to which victory in the American Revolution was due to the leadership of a French aristocrat. As Nathaniel Philbrick demonstrates in his new book In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and th...
45 min
5175
David C. Posthumus, “All My Relatives: Explorin...
In All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), David C. Posthumus, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the University of South Dakota,
80 min