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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5701
Michael Neagle, “America’s Forgotten Colony: Cu...
Cuba’s Isle of Pines has a curious history. In the early twentieth century, hundreds of Americans moved there, hoping to get rich as citrus growers and hoping that one day the island would become part of the United States. Michael E.
51 min
5702
Christopher Mele, “Race and the Politics of Dec...
Urban sociologists typically use a few grand narratives to explain the path of the American city through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These include industrialization, mass immigration, the “Great Migration,” deindustrialization,
54 min
5703
Ryan Alford, “Permanent State of Emergency: Unc...
Ryan Alford is a law professor at Lakehead University and a specialist in constitutional law. His book Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of Rule of Law (McGill Queens University Press, 2017),
57 min
5704
David M. Ewalt, “Of Dice and Men: The Story of ...
David M. Ewalt‘s book Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons and Dragons and The People Who Play It (Scribner, 2013) is at once a love letter, cultural history, and succinct analysis of the roleplaying game phenomenon that started it all.
43 min
5705
Lee Trepanier, ed. “Why the Humanities Matter T...
Lee Trepanier, Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, edited this important analysis of why the humanities matter, especially within higher education. Trepanier’s collection,
29 min
5706
Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra, eds. “The Bitte...
“Boxing has always attracted writers because it issues a standing challenge to their powers of description and imagination, and also a warning–really a promise–that no matter how many layers of meaning you peel away there will always be others beneath ...
48 min
5707
John Bohrer, “The Revolution of Robert Kennedy:...
From the moment he entered politics as the manager of John F. Kennedy’s 1952 Senate campaign, Robert Kennedy’s political career was subsumed into that of his older brother. With President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 his grief-stricken youn...
62 min
5708
Adair Rounthwaite, “Asking the Audience: Partic...
In Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) Adair Rounthwaite examines the roles of artist, audience and institutional context in the rise of new forms of live art during the Reagan years.
46 min
5709
Amy Elkins, “Black is the Day, Black is the Nig...
Black is the Day, Black is the Night by Amy Elkins is self-published (2016), with an essay by Gregory J. Harris and C.F., unpaged, 80 color and black-and-white illustrations. Black is the Day, Black is the Night started as an exploration into,
45 min
5710
Richard E. Ocejo, “Masters of Craft: Old Jobs i...
Readers will want to grab a cocktail and charcuterie board when they sit down to read Richard E. Ocejo‘s new book, Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017). Ocejo explores the performance of culture through...
49 min
5711
Melissa L. Cooper, “Making Gullah: A History of...
Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is a wide-ranging history that upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by outsiders.
53 min
5712
Ralph Young, “Dissent: The History of an Americ...
Ralph Young is a professor of history at Temple University. His book Dissent: The History of an American Idea (New York University Press, 2015) provides a fast-paced four hundred years people’s history of dissenters in America and the role they played ...
55 min
5713
James Poyner, “Trump Tweets: His Social Media P...
The title of James Poyner’s book, Trump Tweets: His Social Media Phenomenon (Wilkinson Publishing, 2017), tells you everything you need to know about the world you about to enter. In temperament, and style,
78 min
5714
Amy Ziettlow and Naomi Cahn, “Homeward Bound: M...
The U.S. population is aging and we often rely on our family to care for us during our twilight years. But, families today can be quite complex, with divorce, step-families, and cohabitation changing the roles that family members are used to playing.
55 min
5715
Stanley Corkin, “Connecting the Wire: Race, Spa...
Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002-2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering a raw and dramatically compelling vision of the teeming drug trade and the vitality of life ...
52 min
5716
Jennifer Le Zotte, “From Goodwill to Grunge: A ...
In From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), historian Jennifer Le Zotte examines the movement of selling secondhand goods for profit and charity.
58 min
5717
Kate Daloz, “We Are As Gods: Back to the Land i...
Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America (PublicAffairs, 2016) traces the path taken by many children of suburbia in...
52 min
5718
Helen Anne Curry, “Evolution Made to Order: Pla...
Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural innovators like David Burpee,
33 min
5719
Jeremy C. Young, “The Age of Charisma: Leaders,...
In the age of the railroad, social movements, revivals, and campaigns for political office spread like wildfire across the United States. Leaders and their surrogates could go travel faster than ever before,
49 min
5720
Sarah Bracey White, “Primary Lessons: A Memoir”...
As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the sta...
26 min
5721
Stafanie Deluca, et.al. “Coming of Age in the O...
Do you think that what poor people most need to escape poverty is grit? Join us as we speak with Stefanie Deluca, co-author, along with Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Kathryn Edin, of Coming of Age in the Other America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016),
48 min
5722
Samuele F.S. Pardini, “In the Name of the Mothe...
In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,
99 min
5723
Allison E. Fagan, “From the Edge: Chicana/Chica...
What is a book? The answer, at first glance, may seem apparent: printed material consisting of a certain amount of pages. However, when a printed item goes under the scrutiny of readers, writers, editors, scholars, etc.,
41 min
5724
Rosemary Corbett, “Making Moderate Islam: Sufis...
Among the most powerful and equally insidious aspects of the new global politics of religion is the discourse of religious moderation that seeks to produce moderate religious subjects at ease with the aims and fantasies of liberal secular politics.
48 min
5725
Kathleen Collins, “Dr. Joyce Brothers: The Foun...
In her book, Dr. Joyce Brothers: The Founding Mother of TV Psychology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Kathleen Collins presents an extensive history of the woman who is arguably the most famous television psychologist.
51 min