New Books In American Studies

When George Washington led the United States to victory in the American Revolution, he did so in collaboration with seventy-three other men who served as major and brigadier generals in the Continental Army over the course of the war. In Washington’s Revolutionary War Generals (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Stephen R. Taaffe describes the roles these commanders played and their contributions to the war effort. As Taaffe explains, while there were plenty of men in the colonies at the start of the war with combat experience, there was no professional military tradition among the colonial leadership. With appointments determined by the Continental Congress, selection occurred from the ranks of the social elite with considerable attention given to political considerations. Though Washington possessed no formal power to name generals, the Continental Congress often deferred to his recommendations, and thanks to his ability to recognize talent a number of men were promoted who made notable contributions to t

All aficionados of baseball are familiar with the pathbreaking role of Jackie Robinson in reintegrating the game back in 1947. What many fans are less familiar with are the issues that Latinos of color endured both in the minor leagues and the Majors starting back in the 1950s. How difficult was it for a mulato, a person who had never endured (or even heard of) Jim Crow, to come to grips with the “peculiarities” of life in the United States, while simultaneously trying to learn a new language as well as trying play well enough in order to move up the various rungs of a particular franchise’s farm system? The story of Major League great (as a player and manager) Felipe Alou sheds light on this important topic. Alou started playing organized baseball late in life (early teens), endured poverty and hardship in his native Dominican Republic, and then helped to break down barriers of language and perception throughout his long career on the field and in the dugout. All the while, he played with skill, dignity, and

When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, a debate raged. Some celebrated, while many others questioned the choice. How could the world’s most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter who wouldn’t even deign to attend the medal ceremony? In Why Bob Dylan Matters (Dey Street, 2017), Harvard Professor Richard F. Thomas answers this question with magisterial erudition. A world expert on Classical poetry, Thomas was initially ridiculed by his colleagues for teaching a course on Bob Dylan alongside his traditional seminars on Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. Dylan’s Nobel Prize brought him vindication, and he immediately found himself thrust into the spotlight as a leading academic voice in all matters Dylanological. Today, through his wildly popular Dylan seminar—affectionately dubbed "Dylan 101"—Thomas is introducing a new generation of fans and scholars to the revered bard’s work. This witty, personal volume is a distillation of Thomas’s famous course, a

In Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), historian Brianna Theobald delivers a long-overdue, comprehensive history of Native women’s reproductive health, rights, and practices. Alternating her focus between the Crow Reservation in Montana and the experiences of Native women across the United States, Theobald shows how Native women navigated and resisted colonial attempts to restrict their bodily autonomy. By extension, argues Theobald, Native women constituted a particularly resilient vanguard of cultural resistance and persistence in the face of an increasingly aggressive, ever-expanding settler colonial system. Reproduction on the Reservation draws on a diverse range of ethnographic sources, health records and correspondence from the Office of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Indian Health Service, oral and tribal histories, and secondary literature. With nuanced analysis and clear prose,

The phenomenon of the Russian emigre writer is nothing new. Exile seems almost as necessary a commodity as ink to many of Russia's most celebrated writers, including Alexander Herzen, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Bunin, Josef Brodsky, and Sergei Dovlatov. For these titans of Russian literature, leaving was a binary choice, for some imposed upon them, for others a wrenching decision. For each, the idea of being "other" and "apart" was a rich lode of material, to be endlessly mined. A new generation of Russian emigres is blessed — or cursed — with the ease of long-haul flights and frequent flyer miles, Skype and FaceTime, Google translate, and regulations that seem anyway to be more forgiving about former citizens traveling to and fro between their old homes and new. For them, the border has become far more porous than it ever was, and the choices are now more nuanced. However, there are still plenty of cultural minefields to navigate. To this generation that includes writers as disparate as G

The names of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse are often readily recognized among many Americans. Yet the longer, dynamic history of the Lakota - a history from which these three famous figures were created - remains largely untold. In Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (Yale, 2019), historian Pekka Hämäläinen, author of The Comanche Empire, aims to provide a comprehensive history of Lakota migration, expansion, resistance, survival, and resilience. In turn, Hämäläinen tells the story of a people who “were - and are - shapeshifters with a palpable capacity to adapt to changing conditions around them and yet remain Lakotas.” With the Lakota as its primary historical agents, Lakota America recontextualizes the history of North America in terms of Lakota actions, interests, and power. Hämäläinen starts with the history of the Oceti Sakowin in the seventeenth-century western Great Lakes. From there, Hämäläinen follows the Lakota’s western trajectory, first to the Mnisose (Missouri River), an

Professor Michelle Haberland of Georgia Southern University, author of Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South (University of Georgia Press, 2015), discusses the dynamics of gender, class, race and globalization in the southern apparel industry from the 1930s to today. Apparel manufacturing in the American South, by virtue of its size, its reliance upon female labor, and its broad geographic scope, is an important but often overlooked industry that connects the disparate concerns of women’s history, southern cultural history, and labor history. In Striking Beauties, Haberland examines its essential features and the varied experiences of its workers during the industry’s great expansion from the late 1930s through the demise of its southern branch at the end of the twentieth century. The popular conception of the early twentieth-century South as largely agrarian informs many histories of industry and labor in the United States. But as Haberland demonstrates, the apparel industry became a key

The neoliberal 1980s of austerity and privatization may appear as a break with the past—perhaps a model of government drawn up by libertarian economists. Not so, says Amy Offner in her spectacular new book, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton University Press, 2019). Offner, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, shows how strategies such as self-help housing, for-profit privatized state-functions, and austere social programs were well-trodded decades earlier in the mid-century “mixed economy.” She also shows how these statebuilding strategies and their advocates moved back and forth between Latin America and the United States. Sorting Out the Mixed Economy brings together the history of U.S. foreign relations with that of domestic policy and of capitalism, and is therefore bound to shake up all three. Experts of each are well-advised to spend time with Offner’s provocative but wise analysis. Dexter Fergi

With a name associated with the famous university in Palo Alto, Leland Stanford is among the best-known of the famous “robber barons” of the 19th century. Yet as Roland De Wolk explains in American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford (University of California Press, 2019), much of his fascinating life has been obscured by efforts to hide some of his most nefarious activities. Growing up in New York, Stanford became a part of the general movement of many ambitious Americans westward soon after reaching adulthood. After a few years in Wisconsin as a lawyer and political candidate he followed his brothers to California, where Stanford operated a general store that provisioned the miners in the gold rush of the era. His burgeoning business and political career made him an ideal partner for the group that formed in Sacramento to build a railroad connecting California with the rest of the United States. De Wolk demonstrates how Stanford used his term as the state’s governor to benefit the Central Paci

What happened when Americans and Soviets fought alongside one another against Hitler? How did relations at Poltava airbase reveal cracks in the Grand Alliance? Serhii Plokhy tells the story of personal relationships and high geopolitics in his new book Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance (Oxford University Press, 2019). Using a wealth of memoirs and recently declassified secret police files, Plokhy captures the intimate detail of a culture clash that chilled relations before Nazism was even defeated. Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo S. Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His book exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Enemies of the People. He also cohosts the T

Inequality in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past decades -- on that there is agreement. There is less agreement on the causes of that inequality, the consequences of it, and, perhaps least of all, what to do about it. Join us to hear Jonathan Rothwell talk about his new book, A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), which pushes back against some of the conventional wisdom about the sources of inequality to offer his own provocative diagnosis of the problem and proposed remedies for it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. In Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019), Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides concep

In Creating the Law: State Supreme Court Opinions and The Effect of Audiences (Routledge, 2019), Michael Romano and Todd Curry examine whether judges tailor their language in order to avoid retribution during their retention elections. Using an extensive dataset that includes the text of all death penalty and education decisions issued by state supreme courts from 1995–2010, Romano and Curry examine the connection between retention incentives and legal language choices. In doing so, they find that judges write with their audience in mind, and emphasize dueling strategies of justification and persuasion in order to appeal to diverse audiences that may be paying attention. Michael Romano is an assistant professor of political science at Shenandoah University; Todd Curry is an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas, El Paso. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-

The word “ghetto” has taken on different meanings since its coinage in the 16th century. The uses of this term have varied considerably, from its original understanding as a compulsory Jewish quarter in Venice to its appropriation by black Americans to describe racial segregation in the United States. Daniel Schwartz traces this fascinating history in Ghetto: The History of a Word (Harvard University Press, 2019) and examines how “ghetto” has come to occupy different meanings to different people in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. Daniel Schwartz is Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at George Washington University. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than tobacco fields, a bluegrass bar, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive. Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne, the author of Holding Onto Nothing (Blair, 2019), grew up reading, writing, and shooting in East Tennessee. After graduating from Amherst College, she became a writer and a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly. Her nonfiction work has been published in the Atla

Do we need another book on the Vietnam War? Pierre Asselin, Dwight E. Stanford Chair in the History of US Foreign Relations at San Diego State University, thinks that we do. While he has already published A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (2002) and Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (2013), he argues that far too much of the English language scholarship on the war has failed to explain the Vietnamese Communists’ perspective. He holds that a number of myths about Hanoi’s war with America continue to circulate. However, with Vietnam’s American War: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Asselin addresses this shortcoming and offers a fresh and challenging narrative of the war. Based on extensive research in Vietnamese archives not previously accessed by foreigners, Vietnam’s American War is an iconoclastic revision of the history of the war. Amongst the various topics Asselin considers are the secret power struggle between the moderate Ho Chi Minh and the h

The First Amendment and a strong Fourth Estate are essential to a healthy democracy. David McCraw spends his days making sure that journalists can do their work in the United States and around the world. This includes responding to libel suits and legal threats, reviewing stories that are likely to be the subject of a lawsuit, helping reporters who run into trouble abroad, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and much more. Today we talk to McCraw, the Deputy General Counsel of the New York Times and author of Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (All Points Books, 2019). Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Dr. Wendy Gonaver discusses her book, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia, and the roles that race, the institution of slavery, and slave labor played in the development of psychiatric diagnosis and care through the nineteenth century and beyond. Though the origins of asylums can be traced to Europe, the systematic segregation of the mentally ill into specialized institutions occurred in the United States only after 1800, just as the struggle to end slavery took hold. In this book, Wendy Gonaver examines the relationship between these two historical developments, showing how slavery and ideas about race shaped early mental health treatment in the United States, especially in the South. She reveals these connections through the histories of two asylums in Virginia: the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, the first in the nation; and the Central Lunatic Asylum in Petersburg, the first creat

Dana Fisher has written a big new book on the movement to oppose Donald Trump, titled American Resistance: From the Women's March to the Blue Wave (Columbia University Press, 2019). American Resistance follows activists from the streets back to their congressional districts around the country. Fisher analyzes how Resistance groups turned anger into activism and electoral action. Beginning with the first Women’s March in 2017 and following the movement through the 2018 midterm Congressional elections, Fisher shows how the work the Resistance paid off in a wave of Democratic victories. She reveals the lessons for turning grassroots passion into electoral gains, and what comes next. Fisher is professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Dave Tell (he/him/his)--Professor of Communication at The University of Kansas--on the insightful Remembering Emmett Till (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book takes a rhetorical approach on the commemoration of Emmett Till by looking at acts of remembering Emmett following his brutal murder in the 1960s until the present day. Tell persuasively demonstrates the way in which the act of commemorating has saturated the physical landscape of the Mississippi Delta. In addition to a fascinating discussion of Till’s legacy and the current commemoration of racial tragedy in the American South, Dave also introduces listeners to the Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), which, among other things, offers a free app through which all of us can calibrate our relationship to Emmett to civil rights as an ongoing collective project. Learn more about