New Books In American Studies

  • Autor: Vários
  • Narrador: Vários
  • Editor: Podcast
  • Duración: 4702:06:52
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Sinopsis

Interviews with Scholars of America about their New Books

Episodios

  • Francis L. Sampson, "Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre" (Catholic U of America Press, 2023)

    16/10/2025 Duración: 48min

    A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all time, Saving Private Ryan. From rural beginnings in northwestern Iowa, Sampson’s life would take him from the University of Notre Dame to the battlefields of Normandy on D-Day, the ambitious failure of Operation Market Garden, the harshness of a winter as a POW of the Germans during the closing stages of the Second World War, to the fall of North Korean capital Pyongyang in the early stages of the Korean War. Part of the very rare breed of Parachute Chaplains, in his case with the 101 st Airborne Division, Sampson spent much of his career as an army chaplain in the center of maelstroms of the 20th century. Throughout it all, Sampson offered a valuable Christian witness in the darkest of times and the most difficult of circumstances. This second edition of his memoirs, Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre (Catholic U of America

  • Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz" (Duke UP, 2024)

    15/10/2025 Duración: 01h14min

    In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. Exploring how musicians, producers, and other industry professionals navigated these dynamics, Mueller contends that the practice of making LPs significantly changed how jazz was created, heard, and understood in the 1950s and beyond. By attending to the details of audio production, he reveals how Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus worked to redefine prevailing notions of race and cultural difference within the United States. Mueller demonstrates that the LP emerges

  • Gustav Meibauer, "The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument" (Policy Press, 2025)

    14/10/2025 Duración: 48min

    Suggested additional channels: Political Science, National Security, American Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern European Studies, New Books with Miranda Melcher NB: I don’t think this needs to go on General History The no-fly zone is a frequently used instrument in the US foreign policy arsenal, despite detrimental, or even catastrophic, results. This book examines why the instrument has such a hold on leaders’ imaginations and rhetoric despite its patchy record in practice. Examining detailed historical case studies from conflicts in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, South Sudan/Darfur, Libya and Syria, The No-Fly Zone in US Foreign Policy: The Curious Persistence of a Flawed Instrument (Bristol University Press, 2025) by Dr. Gustav Meibauer shows how debates about, and actual use of, no-fly zones in US foreign policy have not been primarily about managing conflict or protecting civilians. Instead, the focus is often on navigating contradictory international and domestic political incentives and constraints, l

  • Lawrence Grossman, "Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945-2025" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)

    13/10/2025 Duración: 55min

    In American Judaism today, Orthodoxy is the fastest growing movement. However, Orthodoxy is anything but monolithic. Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945–2025 by Lawrence Grossman explores a piece of the Orthodox story, that of Modern Orthodoxy. For those who may be unfamiliar, Modern Orthodoxy affirms the traditional tenets and practices of Orthodox Judaism while at the same time maintaining an openness to contemporary cultural and intellectual developments. Beginning in the post-World War II era, Living in Both Worlds shows how a fledgling Modern Orthodoxy carved out an identity separate and apart from unacculturated ultra-Orthodoxy to its right and Conservative Judaism to its left, and follows its development through the first quarter of the twenty-first century as new, divisive issues such as feminism, LGBTQ rights, and the spread of academic biblical scholarship challenged its coherence, and a rejuvenated ultra-Orthodoxy contested its religious legitimacy. This is

  • Melissa M. Matthes, "When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter" (Harvard UP, 2021)

    12/10/2025 Duración: 01h07min

    Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises. In the aftermath of national tragedies, Americans often turn to churches for solace. Because even secular citizens attend these services, they are also significant opportunities for the Protestant religious majority to define and redefine national identity and, in the process, to invest the nation-state with divinity. The sermons delivered in the wake of crises become integral to historical and communal memory--it matters greatly who is mourned and who is overlooked. Melissa M. Matthes conceives of these sermons as theo-political texts. In When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter (Harvard UP, 2021), she explores the continuities and discontinuities they reveal in the balance of state power and divine authority following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the Rodney King verdict, the Oklahoma City bombing, th

  • Naomi R. Williams, "A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

    12/10/2025 Duración: 45min

    Naomi R Williams is associate professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University. Their primary research interests include labor and working-class history, urban history and politics, gender and women, race and politics, and more broadly, social and economic movements of working people. Naomi focuses on worker voice and late-capitalism at the end of the 20th century. Naomi’s research also examines the ways working people impact local and national political economies and the ways workers participate in collaborative social justice movements. Naomi engages working-class history in urban settings, looking at low-wage service work, industrial employment, and workers in higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

  • Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

    12/10/2025 Duración: 55min

    Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating work of comparative intellectual history, nineteenth-century Americans were especially conversant with narratives of the English Civil Wars of the 1600s. Northerners and Southerners alike drew from histories of the English past to make sense of their own conflict, interpreting the events of the past in drastically different ways. Confederates, for example, likened themselves to England’s Royalists (also known as Cavaliers), hoping to preserve a social order built on hierarchy and claiming the right to resist what they perceived as radicals' assaults on tradition. Meanwhile, conservative Northerners painted President Lincoln as a tyrant in the mold of English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, while radical abolitionists drew inspiration from Cromwell and sought to rebuild the South as Cromwell had attempted with Ireland. Surveying two centuries of histor

  • Jason Schneider, "That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of Hey Joe' and Popular Music's History of Violence" (Anvil Press, 2025)

    12/10/2025 Duración: 57min

    This is the story of a song. Yet, it is a song that binds nearly every strand of 20th-century American popular music. “Hey Joe” was written sometime in the early 1960s by a man named Billy Roberts, an obscure singer and guitarist from South Carolina who moved to New York City, drawn by the burgeoning folk music scene in Greenwich Village. It was a time when new, original material was scarce, leading other singers to quickly adapt songs of quality in the spirit of folk music’s oral traditions. Thus began the long journey of “Hey Joe” from New York coffeehouses to the bars on L.A.’s Sunset Strip to the ears of a young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix who launched his career with his radical, electrified interpretation. Extensively researched, That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of ‘Hey Joe’ and Popular Music’s History of Violence (Anvil Press, 2025) also presents previously unpublished information about the life of Billy Roberts, a shadowy figure whose 2017 death went unreported by all news outlets. With a Fo

  • Anthony J. Knowles, "Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany" (Brill, 2025)

    11/10/2025 Duración: 46min

    Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany (Brill, 2025) reconstructs the industrial histories of the American and German automotive industries in a new light. From the Fordist assembly line to Japanese lean production and Industry 4.0, Anthony J. Knowles critically examines major technical developments within the historical dynamics of capitalism. Both countries face the pressure to automate, transform labor, and increase efficiency, yet their responses differ due to divergent paradigms of integrating business, labor, and government. Driving Productivity makes the case that improving productivity is a never-ending process that becomes a compulsory social imperative that industries must respond to but are nevertheless responded to differently between countries. Guest: Anthony Knowles (he/him) is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Sociology and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee. Host: Jen

  • David Singerman, "Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    11/10/2025 Duración: 01h08min

    Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and unsavory history. Over the past five hundred years, sugar has shaped empires, made fortunes for a few, and brought misery for millions of workers both enslaved and free. How did sugar become a defining modern food and an essential global commodity? In Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar (U Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. David Singerman recasts our thinking about this crucial substance in the history of capitalism. Before the nineteenth century, sugar’s value depended on natural qualities: its color, its taste, where it was grown, and who had made it. But beginning around 1850, a combination of plantation owners, industrialists, and scientists set out to redefine sugar itself. Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, they transformed not just how sugar was produced or traded but even how people thought about it. By changing sugar into a pure chemical ob

  • Kevin M. Schultz, "Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    10/10/2025 Duración: 01h26min

    A bracing, accessible history of white American liberals—and why it’s time to change the conversation about them.If there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism’s beard. Even liberals hate liberals—either because they can’t manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they’re so self-hating.This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz’s lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more—in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your

  • Meghan Crnic, "The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores" (U Washington Press, 2025)

    10/10/2025 Duración: 45min

    For centuries, the ocean was seen as a place of danger and work, but by the late nineteenth century, northeastern shores of the United States became therapeutic destinations for the sick and weary. Doctors in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other cities began prescribing time at the beach as a remedy for ailments such as tuberculosis, rickets, and exhaustion. In the decades that followed, seaside towns became health havens complete with hospitals that served urban families and children.Dr. Meghan Crnic’s The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores (U Washington Press, 2025) explores how physicians, tourists, and families transformed the coastline into a medical and cultural landscape. Dr. Crnic traces how beliefs in “marine medication”—the healing power of the sun, sea air, and saltwater—shaped the development of northeastern coastal tourist destinations and health institutions in Atlantic City, Coney Island, and beyond. Despite advances in germ theory and the rise of laboratory science, t

  • John Minton, "Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

    09/10/2025 Duración: 01h03min

    In the late 1930s, fieldworkers with the Works Progress Administration interviewed about 3,500 formerly enslaved people resulting in approximately 20,000 pages of unedited typescripts. This collection of oral histories is arguably the single greatest body of African American folklore extant, and a significant portion is devoted to folk music and song. John Minton’s Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives (UP of Mississippi, 2024) examines the musical references in these narratives. A combination of reference information and analysis, Minton contextualizes and scrutinizes the vocal and instrumental music the narrators talked about, explains the various musical and cultural influences on Black folk music, and discusses the place of music and dance in the lives of enslaved people. He covers instrumental music and social dancing, spirituals and hymns, singing games and lullabies, ring plays and reels, worksongs, minstrel songs, ballads, war songs, slavery laments, and more. In the course of this exhaus

  • Maria Fedorova, "Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

    09/10/2025 Duración: 49min

    Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) examines the US and Soviet exchange of agricultural knowledge and technology during the interwar period. Maria Fedorova challenges the perception of the Soviet Union as a passive recipient of American technology and expertise. She reveals the circular nature of this exchange through official government bureaus, amid anxious farmers in crowded auditoriums, in cramped cars across North Dakota and Montana, and by train over the once fertile steppes of the Volga. Amid the post–World War I food insecurity, Soviet and American agricultural experts relied on transnational networks, bridging ideological differences. As Soviets traveled across the US agricultural regions and Americans plowed steppes in the southern Urals and the lower Volga, both groups believed that innovative solutions could be found beyond their own national borders. Soviets were avidly interested in American technology and American agric

  • Clay Risen, "Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

    08/10/2025 Duración: 01h09min

    From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both “lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible…[and] describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end” (The New Yorker)—based in part on newly declassified sources. Now, for the first time in a generation, Clay Risen delivers a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (Simon and Schuster, 2025). This period, known as the Red Scare, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, and the terrifying onset of the Cold War. Marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria, this was a defining moment in American history, completely unlike any that preceded it. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and with “scenes are so vivid that

  • Michael Glass, "Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

    07/10/2025 Duración: 01h02min

    How debt and speculation financed the suburban American dream and led to today’s inequalities In the popular imagination, the suburbs are synonymous with the “American Dream” of upward mobility and economic security. After World War II, white families rushed into newly built suburbs, where they accumulated wealth through homeownership and enjoyed access to superior public schools. In this revelatory new account of postwar suburbanization, historian Michael R. Glass exposes the myth of uniform suburban prosperity. Focusing on the archetypal suburbs of Long Island, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) uncovers a hidden landscape of debt and speculation. Glass shows how suburbanites were not guaranteed decent housing and high-quality education but instead had to obtain these necessities in the marketplace using home mortgages and municipal bonds. These debt instruments created financial strains for families, distributed resources unevenly across suburbs, and

  • Zara Anishanslin, "The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    07/10/2025 Duración: 49min

    The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed with paint, canvas, and wax played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals. In The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard UP, 2025), Dr. Zara Anishanslin charts the intertwined lives of three such figures who dared to defy the British monarchy: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright. From London to Boston, from Jamaica to Paris, from Bath to Philadelphia, these largely forgotten patriots boldly risked their reputations and their lives to declare independence. Mostly excluded from formal political or military power, these artists and their circles fired salvos against the king on the walls of the Royal Academy as well as on the battlefields of North America. They used their talents to inspire rebellion, define American patriotism, and fashion a new political culture, often a

  • Marion Orr, "House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr." (UNC Press, 2025)

    06/10/2025 Duración: 59min

    At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922-1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan's first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till's killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also the chief architect of legislation that restored home rule to Washington, DC, and almost single-handedly ignited the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including Diggs's rarely seen personal papers, FBI documents, and original interviews with family members and political associates, political scientist Marion Orr reveals that Diggs practiced a politics of strategic moderation. Orr argues that this quiet approach was more effective than the militant race politics practiced by Adam Clayton Powell and more appealing than the conservative Chicago-style approach of William Dawson

  • Vartan Matiossian, "The Color of Choice: The Armenians and the Politics of Race in the United States and Germany (1890-1945)" (Brill, 2025)

    06/10/2025 Duración: 01h19min

    The extensive research literature on race has paid little attention to Armenians. Between the two world wars, they had to prove that they were free white persons to ensure their naturalization in the United States, while in Nazi Germany they needed to document that they were stakeholders of the Aryan race to safeguard their existence. Vartan Matiossian's book is the first comprehensive account of a mostly untold story of dehumanization and racism in Europe and America that enhanced the racial and moral profiling of Armenians as undesirables. The Color of Choice: The Armenians and the Politics of Race in the United States and Germany (1890-1945) (Brill, 2025) frames this development within the context of the debates on whiteness and immigration in the United States culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924 and the xenophobic discourse in Germany before and during Nazism likening Armenians to Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! h

  • Jill Elaine Hasday, "We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    05/10/2025 Duración: 24min

    In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for "We the People", too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women's struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decision making, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.Professor Jill Elaine Hasday's We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2025) is the first book to explore how forgetting women's struggles for equality—and forgetting the work America still has to do—perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. Professor Hasday arg

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