Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) is about the “other” Texas, not the state known for its cowboy conservatism, but a mid-twentieth-century hotbed of community...

Dance & Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries (Manchester University Press, 2017) by Dana Mills, considers dance as a political expression from a number of perspectives, situating the analysis within a framework of contemporary political theory.

NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17 At the end of World War II, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia lay in ruins.

William Davenport Mercer‘s Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) argues that if we want to understand how Americans in the early Republic viewed the sources of t...

This week on the podcast we have a true political science legend. David R. Mayhew is the author of such political science greats as Congress: The Electoral Connection, Divided We Govern, and Partisan Balance.

As president John F. Kennedy enjoyed a remarkable degree of popularity, and in the decades since his assassination his standing has only grown in the public imagination. In The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Biography (Cambridge University Pre...

Josh Chafetz‘s new book, Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers (Yale University Press, 2017), examines Congress as a branch and the powers of the legislature within the constitutional system.

What is Black Power? Does it still exist in the so-called post-racial 21st Century? How does Black Power relate to similar movements, like Black Lives Matter? There as so many questions, but there may now be a scholar and text to help answer many of th...

Whether you’re on the right or the left of the political spectrum, I’ll bet that lately the Office of the President isn’t far from your mind. Every day, it seems, I encounter one, two, three, four stories about President Trump,

Mary E. Adkins has written Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida, 2016), an account of the reformation of the Florida state constitution in the 1960s.

From humble beginnings James Bronterre O’Brien became one of the leading figures in British radical politics in the first half of the 19th century, thanks in no small measure to his skills as a journalist and writer.

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.

In A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Text Publishing Company, 2017), Nir Baram, award winning author and journalist, gives a fascinating account of his travels around the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

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),

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...

Dr. Edward Vickers, Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University, joins New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, entitled Education and Society in Post-Mao China (Routledge Studies in Education and Society in Asia, 2017).

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 ...

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,

Historically, foreign policy has been seen as a sphere shaped and determined by the concerns of men alone. In ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Julie Gottlieb demonstrates the fallacy of suc...

Psychoanalysis has a reputation for insularity, often limiting its interest and scope to events in the consulting room. But the origins of Freud’s notion of free speech bear meaningful similarities to the Founding Fathers’ conception of free speech,

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,

Brian F. Harrison and Melissa R. Michelson‘s, Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a broad interrogation of the way that public opinion is formed (or reformed) and activated,

In 1959, approximately 2,000 members of the the Latvian Communist Party were purged for “nationalist tendencies.” However, the causes of their rise and their fall reached all the way to the Soviet Politburo in Moscow.

In the preface to his new book, Timothy Cheek calls out a widespread tendency to focus on dissidents when engaging with Chinese intellectuals. (This is a problem insofar as we use these intellectuals as a mirror for our own concerns, hopes, and fears.

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.