New Books in American Studies
Interviews with Scholars of America about their New Books
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- Update frequency
- every day
- Average duration
- 55 minutes
- Episodes
- 5118
- Years Active
- 2018 - 2025
Peter Hitchens, "The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion" (I.B. Tauris, 2018)
Was World War II really the 'Good War'? In the years since the declaration of peace in 1945 many myths have sprung up around the conflict in the victorious nations, especially the United Kingdom. In …
00:46:26 |
Wed 12 Dec 2018
Chad R. Diehl, "Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives" (Cornell UP, 2018)
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both play a central role in any narrative of the end of the East Asia-Pacific War in 1945, yet Hiroshima has consistently drawn more attention in the ens…
01:14:25 |
Tue 11 Dec 2018
Patricia O'Toole, "The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made" (Simon and Schuster, 2018)
Whether you love him or hate him, it is indisputable that few, if any, other 20th-century American presidents were as historically consequential as Woodrow Wilson. Historian Patricia O’Toole explores…
00:38:31 |
Mon 10 Dec 2018
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-F…
01:04:01 |
Thu 06 Dec 2018
Sara Komarnisky, "Mexicans in Alaska: An Ethnography of Mobility, Place, and Transnational Life" (U Nebraska Press, 2018)
“There are Mexicans in Alaska?” This was the response Sara Komarnisky heard repeatedly when describing her research on three generations of transnational migrants who divide their time between Anchor…
00:58:16 |
Thu 06 Dec 2018
Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman, "Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War" (Dartmouth College Press, 2018)
One of the major aspects of the end of the Cold War has been the discovery and release of records related to many government activities from the period. In Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Stud…
01:00:58 |
Wed 05 Dec 2018
Aram Goudsouzian and Charles McKinney, "An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee" (UP of Kentucky, 2018)
Most people will know that Memphis, Tennessee is where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. That's too bad, because Memphis played an important role in the struggle for civil rights both …
00:46:05 |
Tue 04 Dec 2018
Laszlo Borhi, "Dealing with Dictators: The United States, Hungary, and East Central Europe 1942-1989" (Indiana UP, 2016)
How does a political regime function? What contributes to a regime’s longevity and subversion? Laszlo Borhi’s Dealing with Dictators: The United States, Hungary, and East Central Europe 1942-1989(Ind…
00:37:33 |
Tue 04 Dec 2018
Adam Malka, "The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation" (UNC Press, 2018)
Criminal justice, policing, and mass incarceration have gained significant political attention recently, and the problems of these systems have drawn increasingly frequent calls for reform from the r…
01:02:36 |
Tue 04 Dec 2018
John Sides, Michael Tesler, Lynn Vavreck, "Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America" (Princeton UP, 2018)
In Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton University Press, 2018), co-authors John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck explore the un…
00:45:38 |
Mon 03 Dec 2018
John C. Hajduk, "Music Wars: Money, Politics, and Race in the Construction of Rock and Roll Culture, 1940–1960" (Lexington Books, 2018)
In his new book Music Wars: Money, Politics, and Race in the Construction of Rock and Roll Culture, 1940–1960(Lexington Books, 2018), John C. Hajduk examines the emergence of a “rock and roll culture…
01:03:26 |
Mon 03 Dec 2018
Alec Nevala-Lee, "Astounding" (Dey Street Books, 2018)
Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding is the first comprehensive biography of John W. Campbell, who, as a writer and magazine editor, wielded enormous influence over the field of science fiction in the mid-20…
00:44:18 |
Thu 29 Nov 2018
Sharon Block, “Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018)
Today we have a certain idea of “race”; it’s socially constructed, conventional, and not really biological-grounded in any sense. Yet we commonly use the idea of “race” in our everyday lives to iden…
01:00:16 |
Wed 28 Nov 2018
Sara Egge, “Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920” (U Iowa Press, 2018)
While the campaign to win for women the right to vote in America was waged on a national scale, this often obscures the fact that the most of battles took place at the state level, where local perspe…
00:54:42 |
Tue 27 Nov 2018
Kathleen Hull and John Douglass, “Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California” (U Arizona Press, 2018)
Between 1769 and 1834, an influx of Spanish, Russian, and then American colonists streamed into Alta California seeking new opportunities. Their arrival brought the imposition of foreign beliefs, pra…
01:16:53 |
Mon 26 Nov 2018
David Charles Sloane, “Is the Cemetery Dead?” (U Chicago Press, 2018)
It is certain that we all will experience death in our life. What is less certain is how and where our bodies will be disposed of. In Is the Cemetery Dead? (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dr. Da…
00:43:27 |
Mon 26 Nov 2018
Michael E. Staub, “The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve” (UNC Press, 2018)
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In The Mismeasure of Mi…
00:38:00 |
Wed 21 Nov 2018
Randy Shaw, “Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America?” (U California Press, 2018)
Why is housing so expensive in so many cities, and what can be done about it? Join us as we speak with long-time San Francisco housing activist Randy Shaw about his book Generation Priced Out: Who Ge…
00:33:00 |
Wed 21 Nov 2018
Bryan Caplan, “The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money” (Princeton UP, 2018)
Pretty much everyone knows that the American healthcare system is, well, very inefficient. We don’t, so critics say, get as much healthcare bang for our buck as we should. According to Bryan Caplan, …
00:29:14 |
Tue 20 Nov 2018
James M. Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg, “The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump” (Harvard UP, 2018)
It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing of …
00:58:43 |
Tue 20 Nov 2018
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