New Books In American Studies

In this sixth episode of Season 5, I interview Mr. Chris Griswold. An alum of Wheaton College and Princeton Theological Seminary, he was formerly a senior advisor to then Senator Marco Rubio, and is currently the Policy Director for American Compass—a leading center-right public policy think-tank. Recently, he contributed to the book, The New Conservatives (2025), an anthology edited by his colleague, Oren Cass, that re-articulates a conservative economic vision for the country. Drawing on it, we discuss the crisis of America’s political economy, from questions surrounding current AI, automation, and the end of free trade; political instability and populism; how economic policy can best serve American workers and families; and what makes us hopeful for the country’s future during its 250th anniversary. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack p

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director Eli Karetny interviews Jacob Siegel, writer, Army veteran, and author of The Information State. Siegel traces how military information operations, post‑9/11 surveillance programs, and Silicon Valley’s rise converged to create a new public‑private regime of control over information, attention, and consent. He discusses the intellectual roots of technocratic governance from Francis Bacon and Leibniz through progressivism, World War I propaganda, and cybernetics, and explains how the “information state” differs from classical authoritarianism. Finally, Siegel reflects on Trumpism, the tech counter‑elite around figures like Elon Musk, and how AI may usher in a more “Pharaonic” and quasi‑spiritual form of politics beyond traditional expert‑driven technocracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Jim Downs’ most recent book is Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Professor Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. The book offers a new history of epidemiology by shifting focus to the people behind the data points—people who were enslaved, imprisoned, or in some circles overlooked by conventional histories of epidemiology. The book shifts across locations and empires from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century because it wants to show how the confluence of war, imperialism, and slavery really made modern epidemiology. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Read Laura's article, "Can New Media Save the Book?

When twenty-three-year-old Ron LeFlore played his first organized baseball game, it was in a yard at the State Prison of Southern Michigan where he was serving five to fifteen years for armed robbery. An extraordinary athlete, the Detroit native had luck on his side: his coach, a convicted felon, had connections to the Detroit Tigers. Within three-and-a-half years, Ron went from a prison inmate to a Tiger centerfielder. In Baseball's Outcast: The Story of Ron LeFlore (Bloomsbury, 2026), Adam Henig tells for the first time in full the unbelievable life and career of Ron LeFlore. Blessed with blinding speed and a powerful swing, Ron shed his jailbird past to become one of the game's premiere hitters and its most dangerous base stealer during the latter half of the 1970s. His rags-to-riches life story became a bestselling book and a made-for-television movie starring actor LeVar Burton, fresh from his performance in Roots. But the good times did not last. Less than a decade after making his Major League debut,

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-language communications—often while hiding the traces of American origins. To what extent did this vast propaganda apparatus sway Arab public opinion? Which ideas and actors shaped American public diplomacy in this period? What are the lessons for information strategy today? The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11 (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nathaniel Greenberg tells the story of American propaganda campaigns in the Middle East after 9/11, drawing on in-depth interviews with key players and previously classified documents. Dr. Greenberg shows how the United States tried to control perceptions of its response to 9/11 through news and entertainment, and reveals that Arab governments and unoffici

Boom to Bust is a timely investigation into the rise of Peak TV and the perfect storm that caused a rapid decline in Hollywood work. When Hollywood writers and actors went on strike in 2023, they drew attention to the rapidly changing nature of film and television production. In Boom to Bust, media industry experts Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller combine economic and cultural analysis and interviews with industry workers to capture the lived experience of Hollywood in crisis. Tracking major disruptions of the preceding decade—including the transformation of streaming services into studios, the overproduction of series during Peak TV, as well as #MeToo and COVID—the authors explain how the conflicting interests of studio executives, creative workers, and workers' unions compelled a renegotiation of the terms of work. Grounding readers in the history of Hollywood labor negotiations, the authors provide a road map to make sense of Hollywood’s present—and what comes next. Miranda Banks is Professor of Film,

The term "commod bod" is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal commodity food programs. In Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press, 2026), Kasey Jernigan shares her ongoing collaborative research with Choctaw women and describes the ways that shifting patterns of participation in food and nutrition assistance programs (commodity foods) have shaped foodways; how these foodways are linked to bodies and health, particularly "obesity" and related conditions; and how foodways and bodies are intertwined with settler colonialism and experiences of structural violence, identity making, and heritage in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Organized thematically, the book moves from a critical history of obesity and health in Indian Country to narratives of Choctaw women navigating food, memory, and belonging. Chapters such as "Food and Fellowship" and "Heritage, Embodied" center personal s

Bibliotherapy in The Bronx (Row House, 2025) by Emely Rumble, LCSW, is a groundbreaking exploration of the healing power of literature in the lives of marginalized communities. Drawing from her personal and professional experiences, Rumble masterfully intertwines storytelling with therapeutic insights to reveal how reading can be a potent tool for self-discovery, emotional transformation, and social change.In this transformative work, Rumble offers readers an intimate glimpse into her journey as a psychotherapist in the Bronx, where she has spent over 14 years using books to help clients navigate complex emotions, heal from trauma, and find their voices. Through vivid anecdotes and real-world case studies, she demonstrates how literature can serve as a bridge between personal pain and collective healing.Rich with practical tips, reflective exercises, and book recommendations, Bibliotherapy in The Bronx is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the power of words to change lives. Whether you're a therapi

Our Recall This Buck series began by speaking with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School about how key ideas—and the actual currency, physical coins and bills— underlying the modern monetary system get “invisibilized” with that system’s success, so that seeing money clearly is both harder and more vital. Today, illustrious Princeton historian Peter Brown narrates the … Continue reading "42 Recall This Buck 2: Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early Christianity (JP)" Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon (U Georgia Press, 2026), Dr. Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple question: How has bacon overcome centuries of religious prohibition, cultural contempt, and dietary advice to become a twenty-first-century culinary and cultural powerhouse? Starting in early modern Britain and tracing the story of bacon through the colonial era, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, modern fad diets, and the emerging craft bacon industry, Johnson provides a new perspective on some familiar American narratives. More than a story of production, marketing, and consumption, Johnson argues, this cultural history connects bacon to race, class, and gender while also illuminating major historical forces, such as migration, warfare, urbanization and suburbanization, reform movements, cultural trends, and globalization. For Dr. Johnson, bacon’s story from “most dangerous food in the supermarket” to pop culture and gastronomic phenomenon reflects the cultural values of a

Political theorist Alisa Kessel (University of Puget Sound) has an important and impressive new book, Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Kessel’s research grew out of her work on questions of consent and how consent is embedded within the social contract structure. Initially the plan for the research was to critique this concept of “rape culture” which had found its way into popular discourse as well as academic work and was somewhat unclear in terms of application and understanding. Kessel notes in the book and in our conversations that her thinking about the idea of rape culture owes a great deal to black feminists who had been writing about and discussing the underlying issue at the heart of rape culture, which is not just about violence against women, but more broadly about the political, societal, and cultural dimensions of domination, victimhood, and human value. Rape Fantasies develops this understanding and provides fascinating examples of this intersectional concept.

Supreme Pressure: The Rejection of John J. Parker and the Birth of the Modern Supreme Court Confirmation Process (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) examines the 1930 Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker, a turning point in American judicial politics. Alarmed by some of his past statements and opinions, labor and civil rights groups mounted a fierce campaign to block his confirmation. Not only was control of the Supreme Court hanging in the balance, but Parker's nomination symbolized a profound clash of ideologies, political agendas, economic doctrines, and interpretations of the Constitution. Their efforts sparked a dramatic Senate revolt, marking the first successful grassroots campaign to block a Supreme Court nominee. By exploring the circumstances of Parker's rejection, this book traces how that battle laid the foundation for today's highly partisan and contentious confirmation process. The book also reintroduces Parker as a consequential but largely forgotten figure in American jurisprudence--one whose r

On March 2, 1945, five Mexican American families and their Jewish American lawyer filed a class-action lawsuit against four school districts in Orange County, California, to end the segregation of ethnic Mexican children. In a shocking decision, the court ruled in favor of plaintiffs, setting a legal and historical precedent in Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County that shook the foundations of Jim Crow America and led to the end of de jure school segregation across the nation. Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of how ethnic Mexicans in a relatively unknown agricultural backwater built the unprecedented movement that led to this decision. Beginning in the 1880s, David-James Gonzales details the social and economic history of Orange County, explaining how citrus capitalists, seeking increased market share and profitability, established the walls of segregation to

Few time periods have been as defined by waves of monumental social change as the United States during the 1960s. Even today, almost sixty years later, the era is often depicted as a triumph of social progress. Yet, as Dr. Larry M. Bartels and Dr. Katherine J. Cramer show in The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation (U Chicago Press, 2026), it was Americans’ diverse reactions to the milestone events of the time—from the welcoming, to the fiercely resistant, to the largely oblivious—that planted the seeds of our current political turmoil. Their masterful analysis draws on a unique historical resource: the longest-running systematic tracking of individual Americans’ political attitudes and behavior ever attempted. The study began in 1965 when researchers interviewed hundreds of high school students across the country and then periodically reinterviewed them over the next three decades. Bartels and Cramer supplement this historical record with in-depth inter

Tuesday, April 7, 2026—Confronting disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and terrorist violence in the aftermath of the Civil War, Black Americans challenged white supremacy in word and deed in a prolonged struggle to create a better, more just nation. Join Tyina L. Steptoe, editor of the new two-volume LOA edition of writings from the Jim Crow era, and historians Keisha N. Blain and Manisha Sinha for a conversation about courageous voices and revelatory firsthand documents that bring this crucial period to life and speak powerfully to the present. Hosted by Max Rudin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Revolutions: A New History (Verso Books, 2025) is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the fall of the Bastille or the storming of the Winter Palace. In reality, they take decades to burn out, if they ever do.Historian Donald Sassoon takes the long view of some of the most famous upheavals: the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, the national uprisings that unified Italy and Germany, and the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. This is a history rich in irony and surprises. As Sassoon shows in this tour de force account, revolutions usually catch revolutionaries themselves by surprise, and the consequences are difficult to fathom at any remove. Revolutions will change how you think about the transformative moments in history, both big and small. Revolutions is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the fall o

In U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory: Negotiating Dead Space (Taylor & Francis, 2024), John Bechtold examines how the US military understands information and the media as a contested terrain. Focusing on the assaults on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, Bechtold shows the efforts the US military went through to make sure it was able maintain control over the battles’ narrative. This effort is more than public affairs and trying to shape how others understand the operations. Just like the military will fight over physical terrain, Bechtold argues that the military understands the information space and the news media as places of contestation that it must work to control. Using examples ranging from official memorialization efforts by the military to Luis Sinco’s photograph of James Blake Miller (the “Marlboro Marine”) to Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, this book shows how the assaults on Fallujah are remembered in US military history. Moreover, Bechtold shows how the military set the conditions for the Ba

Our guest today is Cedric de Leon, author of Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity (U California Press, 2025). In this book, de Leon explores the complex and often overlooked history of Black political organizing within the U.S. labor movement. Rather than presenting a simple story of unity, he highlights the tensions, debates, and internal conflicts within Black civil society that ultimately strengthened movements for interracial labor solidarity. The book traces key organizations, leaders, and events from early socialist influences in Harlem to the rise of labor coalitions and the Memphis sanitation strike; demonstrating how Black workers and leaders actively shaped strategies for liberation. By focusing on both cooperation and disagreement, de Leon argues that Black political agency is best understood through this dynamic interplay. Freedom Train ultimately reframes labor history by centering Black voices and showing how their activism was crucial in pushing forward

Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they’ve sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd’s and Sandra Bland’s, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence (Beacon Press, 2025) reveals a disturbing truth about these cases: coroners and other death investigators are often complicit in obscuring the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths. Through rigorous research—including critical records analysis, public health studies, and interviews with victims’ families—this book unmasks the systemic failures within forensic medicine. Dr. Terence Keel shows how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical documents, and strategically lost evidence effectively shield law enforcement from accountability.The Coroner’s Silence uncovers how the current system of death investigation operates as a mechanism of institutional safeguarding. By highlighting the structural powerle

In his new book, The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Brill, 2026) historian Dr. Michael W. Tuck examines life on James Island, now Kunta Kinteh Island, where enslaved Africans worked for European trading companies in the eighteenth century. These individuals were not plantation workers. They served as carpenters, sailors, soldiers, canoe workers, healers, cooks, mothers, and interpreters. They built forts, repaired boats, buried the dead, and maintained trading posts. Dr Tuck’s research demonstrates that, despite harsh conditions, Castle Slaves formed families, preserved African names, practised healing, held funerals, and resisted captivity through escape and daily acts of survival. Women played key roles as caregivers, cultural anchors, and healers, despite facing significant vulnerability and exploitation. The book also highlights the high number of escape attempts from James Island, challenging the idea that resistance in West Africa was