New Books In American Studies

Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develop a cancer vaccine drew more money than the Human Genome Project. In his first book, MIT historian of science Robin Wolfe Scheffler takes readers through the twists and turns of the American effort to identify human cancer viruses— a search which made fundamental contributions to molecular biology. In this podcast, we discuss how this was an effort which raises fundamental questions regarding how we think about disease in the laboratory and the legislature. Dr. Robin Scheffler’s book is called A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine(University of Chicago Press, 2019). Dr. Dorian Deshauer is a psychiatrist, historian, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He is associate editor for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada’s leading peer-reviewed general medical journal and is one of the h

Today we are joined by Stephen Hardy, retired professor of kinesiology and affiliate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, and Andrew Holman, professor of history at and the director of Canadian studies at Bridgewater State University.  Hardy and Holman are the co-authors of Hockey: A Global History (University of Illinois Press, 2018).  In our conversation, we discussed the popularization of the Montreal game in the 19th; the rise of divergent styles of hockey in Canada, the USA, and Europe; and the increasing commercialization of hockey. In Hockey, Hardy and Holman offer a comprehensive and engaging history of the fastest game from it’s origins in a series of stick based contests, including early hockey, bandy, and polo through to the development of our contemporary commercial hockey best exhibited by the NHL and KHL. Their work offers an innovative periodization that gives order to the tensions and contradictions inherent in the disorderly expansion and contraction of the global game.  T

Paul J. Croce, professor of history at Stetson University. Young William James Thinking (John Hopkins University Press, 2018) offers a developmental biography of the famous pragmatist. James’s mature thinking as a radical empiricist was formed through his experiences and intellectual curiosity as a young man. Looking for a suitable vocation that matched his intellectual interest, he explored life through art, science, travel, wide philosophical reading and his inner world. Thematically arranged the book looks into young James’s exploration of the tension between religion and science, his speculation over the benefits and drawback of modern medicine and sectarian medicine and the wisdom of the ancient Greeks approach to life. Through this exploration of the material and immaterial nature of reality, he navigated ill health, bouts of depression, familial tensions, unsatisfying romantic life and uncertainty. His ambivalent disposition caused him to put off making early commitments as he kept seeking for the mean

Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (Basic Books, 2019) places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics -- boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's political and environmental debates. Ranging from the Civil War to the present, from West Texas to Saudi Arabia to the Alberta Tar Sands, and from oil-patch boomtowns to the White House, this is a sweeping, magisterial book that transforms how we understand our

With the US in the midst of on-going negotiations with Iran, North Korea, and China, how is Congress playing a part? How is the new generation of Congress advocating for and against US action? Jeffrey Lantis’ new book answers these questions. He is the author of Foreign Policy Advocacy and Entrepreneurship: How a New Generation in Congress Is Shaping U.S. Engagement with the World(University of Michigan Press, 2019). Lantis is professor of political science at the College of Wooster. Through several case studies, Lantis shows how some of the freshest faces on Capitol Hill are advocating for change. From Elizabeth Warren to Tom Cotton, Michelle Bachman to Carlos Curbelo, members of Congress are staking out bold foreign policy stances on everything from trade to climate change. Lantis’ book weaves these cases together into a meaningful account of the contemporary Congress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.suppor

Almost 30 years ago, following the lead of scholars and thinkers of color and from the global South, anthropologist Faye Harrison and some of her colleagues published Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation. Harrison asked her readers: "How can anthropological knowledge advance the interests of the world’s majority during this period of ongoing crisis and uncertainty?" The lives of many have become even more precarious in the ensuing decades, among them people who have emigrated to the United States in search of greater economic stability. Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Duke University Press, 2019) responds directly to Harrison's call. The book explores ways in which ethnography, as practiced by people who have historically been objects of ethnographic study, can yield transformative and liberatory results. During former President Obama's second term, immigrant activists Lucía López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos Ga

In Charros: How Mexican Cowboys Are Remapping Race and American Identity (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Laura R. Barraclough tells a surprising story about the urban American West. Barraclough, the Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor in American Studies at Yale University, writes the history of elite Mexican and Mexican-American cowboys – charros – and how charro culture served as a site of contested national identity in the mid twentieth century United States. In Western cities such as Los Angeles, Denver, and San Antonio, Chicano men and women used charro organizations and events as places where one could assert both Mexican and American, as well as middle- and upper-class, identities. Rather than the archetypical image of a white, dusty, cowboy riding alone across a desolate mesa, Charros portrays a Western ranching culture that is more urban, more flamboyant, more crowded, and less white than many Americans may assume. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting

Throughout the 20th century, especially during and immediately after WWII, New York Jews changed their names at rates considerably higher than any other ethnic group. Representative of the insidious nature of American anti-Semitism, recognizably Jewish names were often barriers for entry into college, employment, and professional advancement. College and job application forms were intentionally used as a means to “control” the Jewish population in a given college or institution. As such, many Jewish families legally changed their names in an effort to thwart pervasive anti-Semitism and discrimination. In A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (New York University Press, 2018), Kirsten Fermaglich nuances the misconceptions and common assumptions made about name-changers and engages in a rich and meticulously researched study examining this trend. Kirsten Fermaglich is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Michigan State University. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD st

Where in the world do working moms have it best? In her new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press, 2019), Caitlyn Collins explores how women balance motherhood and work across the globe. Using interviews with middle class working mothers in Sweden, East and Western Germany, Italy, and the United States, Collins digs deep into how policies and cultural values shape these women’s lives. This book will be of interest to any working parent and would be a great addition to any sociology of family or sociology of work course. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Historian of Science Philip W. Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition. His book, Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition, is now out with University of Pittsburgh Press (2018). Part I, originally posted in November 2017, focuses on the goals and events of the expedition. Part II offers new material from the interview in which Clements discusses the expedition party’s scientific findings and treatment of local Sherpas. It also discusses the expedition’s broader relevance to the study of environmental history and climate change. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and explora

The sixties happened in Oklahoma too, argued Sarah Eppler Janda in Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma, 1962–1972(University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). While not a hub of activism and student protest on the scale of UC-Berkeley or Columbia, schools such as the University of Oklahoma and (to a lesser extent) Oklahoma State nonetheless had active student organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society. Borrowing from the language of the activists themselves, Janda dubs midwestern student protest to be “Prairie Power,” which had its beginnings in administrative paternalism and the stifling of student dissent. While typically less radical than its coastal analogues, Prairie Power was nonetheless similarly rooted in youth rebellion against censorship, American foreign policy, social norms, and racial hierarchy. Janda, a Professor of history at Cameron University, makes a compelling case for telling a broader story of 1960s and 1970s counterculture that looks beyond the

In Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957 (NYU Press, 2017), Nancy Mirabal details New York Cuban diasporic history between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with keen attention to how political debates about the potential future, visibility, and belonging in Cuba played out along issues of race and gender. By shifting moments of importance in Cuban and U.S. history, it becomes clear exactly how contentious the differing opinions on how to move the island away from Spanish colonial rule and the role it would come to play – if any – on the political, racial, and economic landscape of the United States. Mirabal utilizes vast archival material spanning club records, literary texts, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to tell how exiled Cuban migrants formed, maintained, and disagreed within social clubs in New York. Her inclusion of labor history, intellectual history, political history, social history, and immigration history makes for an incredibly det

In his book, Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal(University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Dr. Gregory D. Smithers effectively articulates the complex history of Native Southerners. Smithers conveys the history of Native Southerners through numerous historical eras while properly reinterpreting popular misconceptions about the past in a way that is compelling and easy to understand. Smithers expresses the rich and complex history of Native Southerners as it was while exposing the reality of settler colonialism and U.S. removal policies. As shown throughout the book, Native Southerners were constantly adapting to a changing world. But ultimately Native Southerners flourished, leading Smither to state, “My, how the architects of removal and assimilation failed.” Gregory D. Smithers is an American historian with a particular interest in the rich history of the Cherokee people, Indigenous history in the Southeast, and environmental history. He received his Ph.D. in History from the Universit

In her innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties (University of North Carolina Press, 2015),  Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II–era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms. Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and p

American society is deeply divided at this moment—not just on values and opinions but on basic perceptions of reality. In their latest book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Morgan Marietta and David Barker attribute such division to the natural human tendency towards having different versions of reality. They introduce the concept of ‘dueling fact perceptions’ based on years of research, and for our interview, Morgan Marietta explains how they arrived at such conclusions and their implications for our country’s future. We have a sobering conversation about how fact-checking and greater education will not fix the problem of dueling fact perceptions, and we address the importance of trust—in our politicians, media, and other information sources—can ultimately shape how we use information to advance our beliefs. This interview is essential for those seeking to making sense of our current political climate and will provide realistic but thoughtful an

“Fashion is universal,” writes my guest Kimberly Alexander in her book Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), “enabling historians across time, place, and culture to form an understanding of the people who made clothes and who wore them. But shoes are different. As shoe scholar June Swann opines, ‘No other garment or accessory maintains the imprint of its wearer–even over long spans of time.’ A shoe molds to the foot and captures a facet of the physical characteristics of its wearer, as well as, by extension, an element of his or her personal history. We can study how much wear occurred and on what part of the shoe, how a shoe was altered or repaired, why a shoe or a pair of shoes were saved and handed down–and, from this, form a idea of the ordinary lives of the people who wore them.” Together Kimberly and I discuss her new book; why shoes are important; why fashion is important; and even how to talk about material culture in class. Al Zambone is a historian and the hos

Microhistories are an important method of investigating an historical moment with a fine-grain focus that can puncture holes in the generalizations that historians sometimes make. In her new book, Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louis Rebecca McCord (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), Candace L. Bailey uses a close reading of the music owned and performed by three prominent women in antebellum Charleston to demonstrate the varied experiences and perspectives of figures who also had much in common. All three women were sophisticated, well-traveled, and moved in the highest social circles of the planter class in Charleston. Yet, each woman had unique educational backgrounds, upbringings, and musical choices. They all experienced the Civil War and its aftermath quite differently. Rather than confining herself simply to an analysis of the musical repertoire each woman owned, Bailey examines the scores with the attention often reserved for Medieval m

When Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos first launch Original Plumbing in 2009, they created a magazine the world desperately needed: a creative and celebratory biannual publication about trans men, by trans men. For ten years, OP was an inspired response to the lack of meaningful representation of trans lives and culture. Each issue was filled with gorgeous, moving, hilarious, and sexy narratives that pushed back against marginalizing stereotypes. Taken together, these stories met mainstream media’s violence with self-love, dismissal with determination, and repression with resistance. Collecting the best of the magazine’s entire twenty-issue run, Original Plumbing: The Best Ten Years of Trans Male Culture (Amethyst Editions, 2019) is a remarkable full-color archive that includes interviews with trailblazers like Janet Mock and Silas Howard; cutting-edge artwork and photography; mediations on love, relationships, and family; political essays and personal reflections; and much, much more. Learn more about your ad cho

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford University Press, 2018) explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which people navigated the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the spread of capitalism and class formation to immigration and urbaniza

Wrigley Field is one of a handful of sports stadiums to have transcended its athletic purpose to become a true American landmark. Nestled in its neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, the park may be a throwback to a bygone era of baseball, but a recent renovation has positioned it for a long future. Gregory H. Wolf has edited Wrigley Field: The Friendly Confines at Clark and Addison, a new volume from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).  Wolf is a professor of German studies and holder of the Dennis and Jean Bauman Endowed Chair in the Humanities at North Central College in Naperville, Ill. He is a member of SABR, for which he has edited nine books. Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His website is www.nathanbierma.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies