New Books In American Studies

Samuel Goldman, who teaches political science at George Washington University, Washington DC, has written a powerfully impressive new book on the long history of the political theology that he describes as “Christian Zionism.” God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America takes some very unexpected routes through a subject that, in some respects, is well-known. Beginning his account with English puritans in the early seventeenth century, and tracing the impact of their expectation of the future restoration of Jewish people to the Promised Land, he shows how this discourse became increasingly and then distinctively American, and until some new religious movements, such as the Mormons, came to imagine the new world as itself the location within which end-times prophecies would be fulfilled. Only since the 1980s has the term “Christian Zionism” entered the political lexicon as a neologism that obscures as much as it reveals about the agendas of those it is used to describe. God’s Country is an expansive, often sur

What really happened at “the first Thanksgiving”? In This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (Bloomsbury, 2019), historian David J. Silverman reveals the complex history surrounding the 1621 feast that every November many Americans associate with silver-buckled Pilgrim costumes, Squanto and Massasoit, and miraculous feats of friendship. Silverman bust these myths - and the many others - that skew American interpretations, understandings, and depictions of the Wampanoag peoples’ relationship with Plymouth colonists. This Land is Their Land painstakingly recounts the events leading up to and resulting from the Wampanoag-English alliance, and how the manipulation of this history continues to impact the present. Upon landing at Plymouth Rock four hundred years ago this November, English Separatists were swept up into the powerful currents of a dynamic indigenous world, populated with diverse peoples with diverse interests. Native figures such as Ou

We say on this show all the time that democracy is hard work. But what does that really mean? What it is about our dispositions that makes it so hard to see eye to eye and come together for the greater good? And why, despite all that, do we feel compelled to do it anyway? Jonathan Haidt is the perfect person to help us unpack those questions. We also explore what we can do now to educate the next generation of democratic citizens, based on the research Jonathan and co-author Greg Lukianoff did for their latest book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (Penguin, 2018). Jonathan is social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn St

Wakanda Dream Lab’s anthology, Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Re-Imaging Gender in Wakanda, features the work of writers, artists, and activists, as they imagine gender justice through the framework of Wakanda. The various stories and pieces are creative and thought-provoking as they center the voices, experiences, and visions of Black and Native women, femmes, girls, and trans and gender non-conforming people. In this interview, we chat with Aisha Shillingford and Terry Marshall about their own work and the work of Wakanda Dream Lab. We go on to discuss the process of putting together the anthology, what makes Wakanda so special, and what they want readers to learn from the book. Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Re-Imaging Gender in Wakanda shows the importance of speculative writing in envisioning liberation and justice. A huge shoutout to the many people involved in this project! Follow Wakanda Dream Lab’s work on their website and on their Instagram. Download the anthology for free here! Adrian King (they/the

Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, has written an account of his view of the decline of the American university from a bastion of free inquiry and an arena for the pursuit of excellence to become a vocational training school and mere reflection of the wider society. In The Assault on American Excellence (Free Press, 2019), Professor Kronman contends that this is a failure by faculty and administrators to provide students with the intellectual and moral challenges they need in order become a fully-formed human being. He reviews recent controversies happening at his school, Yale University, such as the debate over the name of Calhoun College and student and faculty objections to the use of the term “master” to describe the faculty head of a residential college. Kronman’s book is his response to what he sees as a crisis in higher education and an argument in favor of encouraging students, faculty, administrators and members of the general public to viewing college as a unique opportunity to pursue

Professor Greta de Jong of the University of Nevada, Reno, discusses her book, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), rural organizing, social justice movements, and the connected histories of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty in the US South. Two revolutions roiled the rural South after the mid-1960s: the political revolution wrought by the passage of civil rights legislation, and the ongoing economic revolution brought about by increasing agricultural mechanization. Political empowerment for black southerners coincided with the transformation of southern agriculture and the displacement of thousands of former sharecroppers from the land. Focusing on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Greta de Jong analyzes how social justice activists responded to mass unemployment by lobbying political leaders, initiating antipoverty projects, and forming cooperative enterprises that fostere

Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area’s indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4 percent of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region’s economy and had shaped its cultural traditions. This story of slavery in New England has been little told. In this concise yet comprehensive history, Jared Hardesty, Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University, focuses on the individual stories of enslaved people, bringing their experiences to life. He also explores larger issues such as the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England’s deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of S

In Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Brandeis University Press, 2018), Professor Marc Dollinger who holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University, challenges widely held beliefs about the black-Jewish alliance in American politics. Dollinger shows how black nationalists enabled Jewish activists to devise a new Judeo-centered political agenda - including the emancipation of Soviet Jews, the rise of Jewish day schools, the revitalization of worship services with gender-inclusive liturgy, and the birth of a new form of American Zionism. This book breaks new ground and charts new directions for understanding the relationship between black and Jewish politics in the twentieth century and beyond. Dr Max Kaiser teaches at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiserm@unimelb.edu.au  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https:

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017

The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account of constitutional change in the Founding era. Gerald Leonard, Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, and Saul Cornell, Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University, focus on the decline of the Founding generation's elitist vision of the Constitution and the rise of a more 'democratic' vision premised on the exclusion of women and non-whites. It incorporates recent scholarship on topics ranging from judicial review to popular constitutionalism to place judicial initiatives like Marbury vs Madison in a broader, socio-legal context. The book recognizes the role of constitutional outsiders as agents in shaping the law, making figures such as the Whiskey Rebels, Judith Sargent Murray, and James Forten part of a cast of characters that has traditionally been limited to white, male e

In Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford UP, 2019), Julia G. Young reframes the Cristero war as a transnational conflict, using previously unexamined archival materials from both Mexico and the United States to investigate the intersections between Mexico's Cristero War and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. She traces the formation, actions, and ideologies of the Cristero diaspora--a network of Mexicans across the United States who supported the Catholic uprising from beyond the border. Ethan Fredrick is a graduate student in history at the University of Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Brenna Wynn Greer’s new study Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined American Citizenship (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), provides a fascinating look at a trio of black imagemakers – publisher John H. Johnson, PR executive Moss Kendrix, and photographer Gordon Parks – who played a critical role in selling the nation civil rights and African American respectability during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Greer offers a dense and highly nuanced analysis of the relationship between race, capitalism, and the modern American state. By demonstrating how black entrepreneurs used magazines, photographs and advertising to position African Americans as enthusiastic consumers and upstanding citizens, Represented provides a field-altering account of the ways in which black people attempting to make the market work for racial progress. James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University. He is a historian of the modern United States. For more infor

Think economics is the "dismal science" with abstract formulas that have no impact on life as it is actually lived? Think again.  In The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (Little Brown, 2019), Binyamin Appelbaum--former correspondent and now an editorial board member of the New York Times--brings to life how academic economists rose "from the basement" of banks and universities in the post-war period to have a direct impact on almost every aspect of our lives. The end of the draft, unemployment levels, inflation, deregulation, air transport, phone service, patent law, monopolies and anti-trust activity, even the value of human lives--all of these have been directly affected by the activity of economists who emerged on the scene after World War II. Appelbaum traces the transition from the first school of these economists--the Keynesians who advocated a bigger role for government in addressing economic and social problems--to the second school, the Chicago "market" crow

In his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country (Stanford University Press 2018), Professor Francesco Duina asks why impoverished Americans espouse such great and abiding love for their country even as they suffer and struggle to get by. By many standards, America’s poor are objectively less well off than the poorest members of most other developed countries—they work longer hours, have lower chances of upward mobility, and experience some of the largest wealth and income gaps relative to the rich. Yet they espouse greater levels of patriotism than poor people nearly anywhere else. To understand this puzzle, Duina talked to poor Americans themselves, in laundromats, homeless shelters, bus stations, public libraries, senior centers, and fast food restaurants. Ultimately he identified three overarching narratives among those he spoke with centered around hope, prosperity, and freedom. He presents compelling statistics alongside extended interview excerpts to explain not only what poo

Lorena Oropeza, Professor of History at the University of California at Davis, sheds new light on one of Chicano history’s most notorious figures in her new book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement(University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Oropeza intervenes in the conventional historical scholarship on protest politics through her biography of Reies López Tijerina, a land grant activist and founder of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants). Tijerina was a living testament to the fact that individuals of Mexican descent were part and parcel of the monumental political changes in the United States during the 1960s and the challenge to the established racial order. But Tijerina was more than just another radical advocate of armed protest, he was also uniquely shaped by his extreme religious beliefs and his particular understanding of justice rooted in the restoration of land rights. As the author argues, Tijerina was the harbinger of an a

Larry Diamond joins us this week to talk about the threat China’s model of authoritarian capitalism poses to liberal democracy in the United States and around the world. Economics drives politics, and it’s easy to admire China’s growth while looking past things like increasing surveillance and lack of respect for norms and the rule of law. We’ve wanted to do an episode on China for a long time, and we are very excited to have Larry Diamond with us to discuss it. China plays an integral role in his new book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (Penguin, 2019) and he’s studied the region and its politics for decades. Larry is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. For more than six years, he directed the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford, where he now leads its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy and its Global Digital Policy Incubator. He is the founding co-ed

Valerie Olson talks about why the idea of outer space as a “frontier” is giving way to one that frames it as a cosmic ecosystem. Olson is an associate professor of anthropology at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme, revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of today’s natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studios, Olson examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He

World War II played an important role in the trajectory of race and American political development, but the War's effects were much more complex than many assume. In order to unpack these complexities and mine underutilized sources of public opinion data, Steven White had written World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). White is an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University. White offers an extensive analysis of rarely used survey data and archival evidence to assess white racial attitudes and the White house response to civil rights. Intriguingly, he shows that the white public's racial policy opinions largely DID NOT liberalize during the war against Nazi Germany and Congress remained unwilling to act on a civil rights policy agenda. Painfully aware of this, civil rights advocates shifted venues to lobby for unilateral action by the president. This book offers a reinterpretation of this criti

Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the nature of sports narrative, the way that fictional and non-fictional accounts can illuminate the lived experiences of fans, and the role sports blogs have played in reshaping sports narratives beyond the capitalist and competitive frameworks promoted by major leagues such as the NBA and the MLB. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Cohan investigates “the behavior of American sports fans to understand (its) cultural relevance beyond mere consumerism.” He argues that sports contain all the elements of traditional stories: beginnings, middles, ends, plots, characters, rising action, declension, and a causal trajectory. These narrative pieces allow fans to enact “consumptive, receptive, and appropriative” activities that are “funda

Karen Cox, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, discusses her new book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and what one murder case in 1930s Mississippi reveals about race relations, criminal justice, and life in the Jim Crow South. In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery—known in the press as the "Wild Man" and the "Goat Woman"—enlisted an African American man named George Pearls to rob their reclusive neighbor, Jennie Merrill, at her estate. During the attempted robbery, Merrill was shot and killed. The crime drew national coverage when it came to light that Dana and Dockery, the alleged murderers, shared their huge, decaying antebellum mansion with their goats and other livestock, which prompted journalists to