New Books In American Studies

In her innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties (University of North Carolina Press, 2015),  Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II–era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms. Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and p

Microhistories are an important method of investigating an historical moment with a fine-grain focus that can puncture holes in the generalizations that historians sometimes make. In her new book, Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louis Rebecca McCord (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), Candace L. Bailey uses a close reading of the music owned and performed by three prominent women in antebellum Charleston to demonstrate the varied experiences and perspectives of figures who also had much in common. All three women were sophisticated, well-traveled, and moved in the highest social circles of the planter class in Charleston. Yet, each woman had unique educational backgrounds, upbringings, and musical choices. They all experienced the Civil War and its aftermath quite differently. Rather than confining herself simply to an analysis of the musical repertoire each woman owned, Bailey examines the scores with the attention often reserved for Medieval m

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford University Press, 2018) explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which people navigated the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the spread of capitalism and class formation to immigration and urbaniza

Wrigley Field is one of a handful of sports stadiums to have transcended its athletic purpose to become a true American landmark. Nestled in its neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, the park may be a throwback to a bygone era of baseball, but a recent renovation has positioned it for a long future. Gregory H. Wolf has edited Wrigley Field: The Friendly Confines at Clark and Addison, a new volume from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).  Wolf is a professor of German studies and holder of the Dennis and Jean Bauman Endowed Chair in the Humanities at North Central College in Naperville, Ill. He is a member of SABR, for which he has edited nine books. Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His website is www.nathanbierma.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

When Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos first launch Original Plumbing in 2009, they created a magazine the world desperately needed: a creative and celebratory biannual publication about trans men, by trans men. For ten years, OP was an inspired response to the lack of meaningful representation of trans lives and culture. Each issue was filled with gorgeous, moving, hilarious, and sexy narratives that pushed back against marginalizing stereotypes. Taken together, these stories met mainstream media’s violence with self-love, dismissal with determination, and repression with resistance. Collecting the best of the magazine’s entire twenty-issue run, Original Plumbing: The Best Ten Years of Trans Male Culture (Amethyst Editions, 2019) is a remarkable full-color archive that includes interviews with trailblazers like Janet Mock and Silas Howard; cutting-edge artwork and photography; mediations on love, relationships, and family; political essays and personal reflections; and much, much more. Learn more about your ad cho

In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Duke University Press 2018), Dorinne Kondo brings together critical race studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis and her critically keen awareness of the politics and potential of theatre production and reception to ask how theatre ‘makes, unmakes and remakes’ race. Building on over 20 years of experience as an ethnographer, dramaturg and playwriter, Kondo exposes the racial structures that are mutually constitutive of the theatre specifically, and the arts more generally. So doing, she attends to the economic forces and representational practices that have not only enabled the affective violence through which the theatre so often operates; she also draws attention to how these forces and practices can produce the grounds for theatre’s restorative and transformative potential. Dorinne Kondo is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on cultural theory, performance,

The art and antics of rebellious figures in 1950s American nightlife―from the Beat Generation to eccentric jazz musicians and comedians―have long fascinated fans and scholars alike. In The Rebel Café: Sex, Race, and Politics in Cold War America’s Nightclub Underground(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Stephen R. Duncan flips the frame, focusing on the New York and San Francisco bars, nightclubs, and coffeehouses from which these cultural icons emerged. Duncan shows that the sexy, smoky sites of bohemian Greenwich Village and North Beach offered not just entertainment but doorways to a new sociopolitical consciousness. This book is a collective biography of the places that harbored beatniks, blabbermouths, hipsters, playboys, and partisans who altered the shape of postwar liberal politics and culture. Throughout this period, Duncan argues, nightspots were crucial―albeit informal―institutions of the American democratic public sphere. Amid the Red Scare’s repressive politics, the urban underground of New Yo

In 1956 Albert Gore, Sr. received national attention as one of only three senators from the states of the former Confederacy who refused to sign the infamous “Southern Manifesto” opposing the racial integration of public spaces. Lauded as Gore was by many for his decision, as Anthony J. Badger shows in his Albert Gore, Sr.: A Political Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) it was a product of a nuanced approach on the issue of civil rights in a changing time. The son of a farmer, Gore demonstrated his father’s strenuous work ethic in his efforts to earn a college education. After a rapid rise in state politics, Gore won election to the House of Representatives in 1938, where he served for fourteen years before defeating a longtime incumbent senator in a Democratic primary. As Badger demonstrates, while Gore’s “TVA liberalism” led him to play a key role in passing some of the major infrastructure legislation in the 1950s, the issues of civil rights and the Vietnam War ultimately led Gore to adopt posit

“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but also connected to the Cold War, commercial agriculture, and long-duration space flight. Today I speak with David Munns, professor of history at John Jay College, about his new book, Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), but we also talk about Matt Damon, shitting in space, and growing pot in your dorm room. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, a

The historian Nick Estes traces two centuries of Indigenous-led resistance and anti-colonial struggle. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019) moves from settler colonialism and Indian Wars to the front lines of indigenous climate activism today. He places the #NoDAPL movement, to block Dakota Access oil pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota in 2016, squarely within the tradition of indigenous resistance to settler erasure. The book weaves historical analysis into intergenerational stories and demonstrates that Standing Rock’s demands for native sovereignty and liberation are as much the outcome of history as they a harbinger of things to come. Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern United States history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the Ame

Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture (SUNY Press, 2018) examines the lives of two religious minority communities in Mexico, Mennonites and Mormons, as seen through Mexican culture. Mennonites emigrated from Canada to Mexico from the 1920s to the 1940s, and Mormons emigrated from the United States in the 1880s, left in 1912, and returned in the 1920s. Rebecca Janzen focuses on representations of these groups in film, television, online comics, photography, and legal documents. Janzen argues that perceptions of Mennonites and Mormons—groups on the margins and borders of Mexican society—illustrate broader trends in Mexican history. The government granted both communities significant exceptions to national laws to encourage them to immigrate; she argues that these foreshadow what is today called the Mexican state of exception. The groups’ inclusion into the Mexican nation shows that post-Revolutionary Mexico was flexible with its central tenets of land reform and building a mestizo race.

David Karol’s new book, Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines the history of environmental policy within American political parties. He ably integrates the early conservation movement into the discussion, providing foundational understandings of the distinction between the conservationists at the beginning of the 20th century and the growth and evolution of the environmental movement in the second half of the 20th century. Red, Green, and Blue also compares the U.S. engagement with “green” politics and how environmentalism and green social movements have operated in other developed, western democracies. The thrust of this book, which is part of the Element series at Cambridge University Press, is to focus on how, where, and why environmental policy became more acutely partisan. Karol also examines the functioning of party coalitions and interest groups as they wove together around environmental issues. Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Poli

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an almost revolutionary work of theory and critique: Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019). Ornamentalism offers arguably the first sustained theory of the yellow woman and, beyond that, a nuanced reflection on the way in which women of color are subjects-turned-into-things but that not every woman of color becomes-thing in the same way. Cheng insists on the term ornamentalism as both a lever of critique and of emancipation, resisting the easy distinction between person/thing and skin/substance to investigate how a theory of radical style offers ontological possibilities for thriving among injury. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingc

The Pacific Northwest was a hotbed of labor radicalism in the early twentieth century, where the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World (commonly known as the “Wobblies”) fought for better working conditions for all workers regardless of race, sex, or creed. The historian Heather Mayer takes a new look at the well-worn vision of the Wobblies as predominately radical young, itinerant men. Her new bookBeyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905-1924 (Oregon State University Press, 2018) finds women played a crucial role in the politics of the union. These women expanded the radical vision of the union beyond the workplace to include birth control, sexual emancipation, and freedom of choice in marriage. Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American Wes

Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard?  Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South.  Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) tells the fascinating story of just such an endeavor, first the Independent Order of St. Luke, and then the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, founded in Richmond in 1903.  Along the way, she tells the tale of force-of-nature strong women, particularly Maggie Lena Walker, who wouldn't take no for an answer as she built up a culture of business and entrepreneurship against incredibly long odds and never-ending efforts by regulators and competitors to thwart her efforts. It makes for gripping reading. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook

Though not as well known today as her husband George or her son William Randolph, Phoebe Apperson Hearst was a woman who rose beyond the gender norms of her age to exert considerable influence both within her community and nationally. In Phoebe Apperson Hearst: A Life of Power and Politics (Bison Books, 2018) (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), Alexandra M. Nickliss shows how Hearst came to exercise such power and the ways she uses it to advance the causes in which she believed. As Nickliss explains, Phoebe Apperson’s parents sought an education for their daughter in accordance with the reform principles of their faith. Marriage and her relocation to California did little to change Phoebe Hearst’s views, and with her husband often absent on business she took advantage of the couple’s wealth to travel and engage in voluntary associations. With George Hearst’s death Phoebe Hearst came into her own, soon moving beyond her involvement in the kindergarten movement to help develop the University of California and

Carolyn J. Dean’s The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the cultural history of the idea of the “witness to genocide” in Western Europe and the United States.  She portrays the witness in non-traditional genocide court trials as the moral compass.  In fact, many of these “moral witnesses” were not utilized for their testimony to identify perpetrators or mass murder, but rather a symbolic voice for survivor’s that would not normally be admissible in traditional legal proceedings. Dr. Dean is the Charles J. Still Professor of History and French at Yale University and is the author of several other books focused on morality and genocide.  The Moral Witness is part of the Cornell University Press’s series Corpus Juris: The Humanities in Politics and Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In her debut book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Stacy Fahrenthold sheds a timely light on Syrian and Lebanese immigrants who established vibrant diaspora communities in the Americas during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing on an impressive array of innovative and transnational sources, including a burgeoning migrant press, police records, passports, forged travel documents, memoirs, and diplomatic cables, Fahrenthold uncovers ethnic associations and transnational networks of migrants who sought to contribute to the betterment of their homeland. Between the Ottomans and the Entente shows how mahjar (diaspora) communities grappled with a series of enormous changes to their homeland from the Young Turk Revolution (1908), to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and the imposition of the French Mandate in 1920. The book vividly illustrates the precarious position Syrians an

Marisol LeBrón’s new book, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019), examines the rise of and resistance to punitive governance (tough on crime policing policies) in Puerto Rico from the 1990s to the present. As in the United States, LeBrón shows how increased investment in policing did not respond to a spike in crime. It actually emerged as a strategy to shore up the local political and economic establishment mired in the crisis of the archipelago’s postwar colonial development policy “Operation Bootstrap,” spiking unemployment, lack of U.S. investment, and a growing informal economy which included the drug trade. Puerto Rican elites hoped to reinvent themselves as models for tough on crime policing and gatekeepers for the United States to Latin America. Beginning with the mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) policy of commonwealth Governor Pedro Rosselló in 1993, police increasingly targeted lower income, predominantly Blac

There are countless ways to study the history of U.S. foreign policy. David Milne, however, makes the case that it is “often best understood” as “intellectual history.” In his innovative book, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), follows the lives and ideas of several foreign policy thinkers, from the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan at the turn of the twentieth century to Barack Obama in the twenty-first. By doing so, Milne helps us understand the changes and continuities in US foreign policy. One of the virtues of studying biography is that a life is idiosyncratic and one’s experiences shapes how one sees the world. An examination of the lives of foreign policy thinkers can therefore help explain why U.S. foreign policy took particular paths. It matters, for instance, that the pessimist Henry Kissinger was deployed as a U.S. soldier in post-Holocaust Germany. It also matters, as you’ll find out during the interview, that the cosmopolitan neoconservative