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
Marlee S. Bunch, "Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era"
In Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press, 2025), Dr. Marlee Bunch shared her research on Black female educ…
01:04:21 |
Fri 22 Aug 2025
Ben A. Vagle and Stephen G. Brooks, "Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China (Oxford UP, 2025) provides a systematic reevaluation of the balance of economic power between the U.S. and China. The conve…
00:49:10 |
Fri 22 Aug 2025
Kathleen Wilson, "Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wil…
00:55:38 |
Thu 21 Aug 2025
Citizenship Stripping: You Are Not American
Over the last two centuries, the US government has revoked citizenship to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all considered “un-American”—whether due to their race, eth…
00:54:36 |
Thu 21 Aug 2025
Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson, "Racial Resentment in the Political Mind" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disagreements, and objections to policies that seek to h…
00:55:57 |
Thu 21 Aug 2025
Bench Ansfield, "Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" (Norton, 2025)
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsu…
00:48:18 |
Wed 20 Aug 2025
Shennette Garrett-Scott, "Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal" (Columbia UP, 2019)
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. Fi…
00:41:58 |
Wed 20 Aug 2025
Mary Bridges on US Bankers Abroad and the Making of a Global Superpower
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School o…
01:08:10 |
Wed 20 Aug 2025
Michael Hiltzik, "Golden State: The Making of California" (Mariner, 2025)
California has long reigned as the land of plenty, a place where the sun always shines and opportunity beckons. Even prior to its statehood in 1850, it captured the world’s imagination. We think of b…
00:40:08 |
Tue 19 Aug 2025
Edward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia" (Yale UP, 2025)
The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity.
Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American lifestyle in the mid-twentieth century: the aut…
01:03:08 |
Mon 18 Aug 2025
Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at h…
00:43:25 |
Sun 17 Aug 2025
Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon. Christopher M. Reali's…
00:39:23 |
Sun 17 Aug 2025
Matthew Goodman, "The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team" (Ballantine Books, 2019)
The 1949-50 CCNY Beavers basketball team were one of the unlikeliest of champions in sports history. CCNY was a tuition-free in Harlem, New York, intended to give working class students the best educ…
00:50:28 |
Sun 17 Aug 2025
Ryan Griffiths, "The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Is the breakup of an increasingly polarized America into separate red and blue countries even possible?
There is a growing interest in American secession. In February 2023, Marjorie Taylor Greene tw…
01:03:52 |
Sat 16 Aug 2025
Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive, detailing her harrowing escape from enslavement, seven years hiding in an attic crawl spa…
01:12:40 |
Sat 16 Aug 2025
W. Henry Sledge, "The Old Breed... The Complete Story Revealed" (Knox Press, 2025)
Because events like D-Day and the Battle of Okinawa took place an entire lifetime ago, it is rare to find any new accounts and memories from veterans. Thankfully, forty years after the publication of…
01:02:20 |
Fri 15 Aug 2025
Prudence Peiffer, "The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever" (Harper, 2023)
For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip…
00:50:30 |
Fri 15 Aug 2025
Bryon L. Garner, "Black Veteranality: Military Service and the Illusion of Inclusive Patriotism" (Routledge, 2025)
Military service in the United States has long been associated with patriotism. But for Black veterans, this association with patriotism, love for country, is complicated by their experiences with ra…
00:56:32 |
Thu 14 Aug 2025
Garrett M. Graff, "When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
June 6, 1944—known to us all as D-Day—is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military triumphs. The surprise sunrise landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of occupied …
00:54:18 |
Wed 13 Aug 2025
Kenneth Jones, "African American Males and Video Games: How Gaming Technology Can Motivate and Enhance Learning" (Myers Education, 2025)
African American males are confronted with formidable barriers in their pursuit of quality education, resulting in stark disparities in academic performance, economic opportunities, and social outcom…
00:20:01 |
Wed 13 Aug 2025
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