New Books In American Studies

The history of metropolitan expansion and suburbanization is often written from the perspective of the city. In Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South (University of Georgia Press, 2018), by contrast, Andrew C. Baker focuses his gaze on the rural counties that underwent significant social, cultural, political, and environmental change as southern cities expanded after World War II. Baker sees the expansion of Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C. into the “metropolitan fringe” as emblematic of processes at work throughout the South—and, in many ways, throughout the nation. Metropolitan growth transformed prevailing land uses in these counties: open-range forests gave way to fenced fields and subdivisions; market-oriented agriculture gave way to hobby farms; and rural residents considered proposals to develop waterways to accommodate the growing cities. Finally, Baker examines the degree to which the environmental deterioration caused by rapid, unplanned suburbanization helped fuel pos

What makes a good missionary makes a good spy. Or so thought "Wild" Bill Donovan when he secretly recruited a team of religious activists for the Office of Strategic Services. They entered into a world of lies, deception, and murder, confident that their nefarious deeds would eventually help them expand the kingdom of God. In Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War (Basic Books, 2019), historian Matthew Avery Sutton tells the extraordinary story of the entwined roles of spy-craft and faith in a world at war. Missionaries, priests, and rabbis, acutely aware of how their actions seemingly conflicted with their spiritual calling, carried out covert operations, bombings, and assassinations within the centers of global religious power, including Mecca, the Vatican, and Palestine. Working for eternal rewards rather than temporal spoils, these loyal secret soldiers proved willing to sacrifice and even to die for Franklin Roosevelt's crusade for global freedom of r

The guest this week on Historically Thinking is Jon Lauck. He’s the author of The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (University of Iowa Press, 2013), which is several things at once: a brief illustration of the importance of the Midwest to both American and World History; the history of the concept of midwestern history; and a manifesto for the renewal of historical focus upon the Midwest. Zambone and Lauck chat about all these topics, as well as how the new Midwestern History Association was formed, why Midwesterners are diffident about their history, and why they both hope that Warren Buffet is listening to this podcast. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) challenges the commonsensical notion that the Japanese empire granted its subjects no religious freedom—that, despite the legal provision in the Meiji Constitution of 1890 affirming freedom of worship, “State Shinto” was the law of the land—and that it was the American-led occupation which finally granted freedom of conscience and worship to the benighted Japanese. Thomas shows first that this vision of history obscures internal debates about religious freedom in both Japanese and American circles, but also that while the narrative in which religious freedom was bestowed upon Japan by the US was in fact strategic and deeply embedded in a particular historical moment and geopolitical context, it has had a long tail of consequences for our understandings of religion after 1945. Faking Liberties is divided into two deliberately paralleled parts, the first treating what Thomas calls the Meiji

The institutional history of mathematics in the United States comprises several entangled traditions—military, civil, academic, industrial—each of which merits its own treatment. David Lindsay Roberts, adjunct professor of mathematics at Prince George's Community College, takes a very different approach. His unique book, Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), anchors 20 biographical chapters to a decadal series of events, whose mathematical significance could not often have been anticipated. These short biographies range from the inauguration of military and civil engineering (Sylvanus Thayer) and the textbook industry (Catharine Beecher and Joseph Ray) to the influence of geopolitics during and after the Cold War (Joaquin Basilio Diaz, John F. Nash Jr.), and over the course of the book the subjects witness the professionalization of the research community (Charles H. Davis), radical expansions of educational access (Kelly Mille

Richard Bell is the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. Stolen tells the true story of how five young Black boys were kidnapped from Philadelphia in 1825. Dr. Bell recounts the boys’ journey as they were forced to travel south into slavery. Those familiar with Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years A Slave or Erica Dunbar’s Never Caught will find Dr. Bell’s Stolen to be a must read, as he explores how one kidnapping was shaped by the larger history of slavery, the interstate slave trade, the law, and a host of other factors. Dr. Bell is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland – College Park, where he studies United States history and culture in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supp

Histories and criticism of comics note that comic strips published in the Progressive Era were dynamic spaces in which anxieties about race, ethnicity, class, and gender were expressed, perpetuated, and alleviated. The proliferation of comic strip children—white and nonwhite, middle-class and lower class, male and female—suggests that childhood was a subject that fascinated and preoccupied Americans at the turn of the century. Many of these strips, including R.F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley and Buster Brown, Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids, and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland were headlined by child characters. Yet no major study has explored the significance of these verbal-visual representations of childhood. Nominated for the Eisner Award and winner of the Charles Hatfield Book Prize as well as the Ray & Pat Browne Award, Lara Saguisag's new book, Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics(Rutgers University Press, 2018), addresses this gap in

Over fifty years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) scolded the agricultural industry for its profligate spread of “poison” and pesticides “indiscriminately from the skies.” Now, in Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 (University of Alabama Press, 2018), David D. Vail re-examines aerial spraying in the North American Grasslands and the political and environmental controversies it provoked. He reveals how aircraft sprayers and practices emerged within the context of local environments and scientific experiments by regional universities and chemical companies. His pragmatic assessment of application technologies provides a nuanced perspective of pesticide use and environmental change. 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 West. @rydriskel

Neoliberalism is one of those fuzzy words that can mean something different to everyone. Wendy Brown is one of the world’s leading scholars on neoliberalism and argue that a generation of neoliberal worldview among political, business, and intellectual leaders led to the populism we’re seeing throughout the world today. But is it mutually exclusive to democracy? Not necessarily. Wendy joins us this week to help make sense of what neoliberalism is, and where things stand today. We were lucky enough to get an advance copy of her book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia UP, 2019), which will be released in July. It’s a follow up to her 2015 book, Undoing the Demos, and you’ll hear her talk about how her thinking has changed since then. Wendy is the Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches political theory. You might also recognize her from Astra Taylor’s documentary, What Is Democracy? Democracy Works is created b

Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have written an accessible and important book about the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and broader considerations of, essentially, how we got to where we are, in the United States, in regard to race and racism. They also go on to suggest and encourage readers and citizens to move towards a more equal and better future. Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter (NYU Press, 2019) compiles social science research and data to explain the current situation for white citizens, African-American citizens, Latinx citizens, and citizens of other races in the United States. By laying out, in facts and figures, the very different experiences and daily lives of citizens, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith demonstrate not only the way many individuals live profoundly separate and different lives in the United States, but also to show the many ways in which we, as Americans, speak past each other when we are talking about the fraught issue of race, racism, and rac

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It’s part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place series. The book contains 7 chapters, covering the earliest formally-published African-American-authored hospitality books from the 1820s to Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking from the 1970s, as well as the unpublished and incomplete cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, with many other examples in between. Each chapter examines a set of related texts in conversation with one another and the historical moment of their publication, treating cookbooks not just as archives for historical information about how people eat but also as literary, artistic, and culture-making documents. Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans provide “recipes for respect” alongside instructions for cooking. The avenues for respect vary between authors and era

Strange Trips isn’t only the title of Dr. Lucas Richert’s new book; it’s also a good description of the journey substances take from the black market to the doctor’s black bag—and, sometimes, back to the black market again. In Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs (McGill-Queens UP, 2019), Richert investigates the myths, meanings, and boundaries of recreational drugs, palliative care drugs, and pharmaceuticals, as well as struggles over product innovation, consumer protection, and freedom of choice in the medical marketplace. Focusing primarily on the United States and Canada, Richert shows how perceptions of products can swiftly change, and incorporates analyses of popular culture, science, politics and history to trace the strange trips drugs consistently go on as their uses evolve. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History S

The United States Supreme Court operates to resolve disputes among lower courts and the other branches of government, allowing elected officials, citizens, and businesses to act without legal uncertainty. Yet a Court that prioritizes resolving many disputes sometimes will produce contradictory opinions or fail to provide a rationale for its decision at all. In either case, it produces an unreasoned judgment. When does the Court do this and is this on the rise? Matthew Hitt has written Inconsistency and Indecision in the United States Supreme Court (University of Michigan Press, 2019) to answer this question. Hitt is assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University. In Inconsistency and Indecision in the United States Supreme Court, Hitt demonstrates that over time, institutional changes have substantially reduced unreasoned judgments in the Court’s output, coinciding with a reduction in the Court’s caseload. As such, though the Supreme Court historically emphasized dispute resolution, it

"On Christmas Eve, 1911, John Wanamaker stood in the middle of his elaborately decorated department store building in Philadelphia as shoppers milled around him picking up last minute Christmas presents. On that night, as for years to come, the store was filled with the sound of Christmas carols sung by thousands of shoppers, accompanied by the store’s Great Organ. Wanamaker recalled that moment in his diary, 'I said to myself that I was in a temple,' a sentiment quite possibly shared by the thousands who thronged the store that night." This is a conversation about a Philadelphian and his store, told by guest Nicole C. Kirk in Wanamaker’s Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store (New York University Press, 2018). Which might sound rather boring. But it’s really a conversation about nineteenth century stores, shopping, consumerism, Christianity, the social gospel, the prosperity gospel, social responsibility, art, beauty, Temple University, Dwight Moody, John Ruskin, Horace Bushnell, Chri

On April 8, 1865, after four years of civil war, General Robert E. Lee wrote to General Ulysses S. Grant asking for peace. Peace was beyond his authority to negotiate, Grant replied, but surrender terms he would discuss. As Gregory P. Downs, Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, reveals in this gripping history of post–Civil War America, Grant’s distinction proved prophetic, for peace would elude the South for years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Harvard University Press, 2015; Paperback Edition, 2019) argues that the war did not end with Confederate capitulation in 1865. Instead, a second phase commenced which lasted until 1871—not the project euphemistically called Reconstruction but a state of genuine belligerency whose mission was to shape the terms of peace. Using its war powers, the U.S. Army oversaw an ambitious occupation, stationing tens of thousands of troops in hundreds of outposts across the defeated South. Thi

Why Don′t Women Rule the World?: Understanding Women′s Civic and Political Choices (Sage, 2019) is a comprehensive and useful addition to the established literature on women and politics. This book, authored by four political scientists with a diversity of training and expertise, delves into a broad and extensive overview of the issues that have long surrounded women in civic life and in pursuing positions of power and leadership. J. Cherie Strachan and Lori M. Poloni-Staudinger, Shannon L. Jenkins, Candice D. Ortbals start with an anthropological understanding of how and where sex-specific societal roles were established, leading to the establishment of patriarchal structures and societal norms, and how these structures, norms, expectations, and roles have long kept women out of the public sphere. The thrust of Why Don’t Women Rule the World? is to help students and scholars understand women and politics, analyzing the limits that women have faced, and exploring how and where these limits have been dismantle

Early American colonialism is often distinguished by an urban and rural divide. Urban development was a sign of imperial progress. British writers frequently boasted about the size of early Boston and Philadelphia while mocking the scattered settlements of the French. Colonial founders characterized their social experiment as a ‘City on a Hill’, and texts that promoted colonization listed the size and location of a growing number of principal towns and cities. Outside the confines of cities lay different places: the backcountry of settlement and Indian war; an unmapped landscape of forests and rivers. If the town stood out as a site of ordered settlement, the ‘wilderness’ remained a place of mystery and danger. Paul Musselwhite is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake (University of Chicago Press, 2019), he challenges the conventional view of the Chesapeake as a rural society of tobac

Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives,Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute, 2019), offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cécile Vidal, Professor of History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city’s development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans’s rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city’s streets, market, taverns, church, h

In today’s podcast, host Robert Elliott speaks with Dr. Perin Gürel about her new book The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey(Columbia University Press, 2017), which examines how Turkish perceptions of the United States intersected with debates around "westernization" in the twentieth century. In a 2001 poll, Turks ranked the United States highest when asked: "Which country is Turkey's best friend in international relations?" When the pollsters reversed the question―"Which country is Turkey's number one enemy in international relations?"―the United States came in second. How did Turkey's citizens come to hold such opposing views simultaneously? In The Limits of Westernization, Gürel explains this unique split and its echoes in contemporary U.S.-Turkey relations. Using Turkish and English sources, Gürel maps the reaction of Turks to the rise of the United States as a world-ordering power in the twentieth century. As Turkey transitioned from an empire to a nation-state, the countr

For a book to exist, there must be a lot more than a writer. Of course, the writer is the essential component. But what about all the other hard-working professionals who shepherd the text from manuscript to beautiful finished product? There are a bunch of them, and today we talk to one:  Dawn Durante, Senior Acquisitions Editor at the University of Illinois Press for books in African American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Religion, and Anthropology. She tell us how it all works, from soup to nuts. Naturally, we at the New Books Network are very grateful for Dawn's work, and that of all her colleagues at UPs and trade presses, for without their efforts, there would be no New Books Network and you wouldn't get to listen to all these great authors talk about their great books. On with the show... Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick focusing on Black runaway women during the broad eighteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi