New Books in American Politics

In Revolutionary Ink: New York Printers and the Promise of Democracy, 1693-1804 (Cambridge UP, 2026), my guest Mark J. Noonan explores the careers of New York printers whose presses disseminated Enlightenment ideals that fueled the American Revolution and framed the political debates of the early republic. Long overshadowed by the celebrated authors whose works they produced, printers William Bradford, John Peter Zenger, James Parker, Thomas Greenleaf and others helmed presses that provoked civic engagement, cultivated an appreciation for the arts and sciences, and defended press liberty. The book also examines the equally revolutionary work of their wives, who assisted with and sometimes ran their husband's presses. Throughout the narrative, Noonan addresses the discrepancy between revolutionary rhetoric and practice, and argues that to grasp New York's early print history is to confront the paradox of the Anglo-American Enlightenment: its profound advancements alongside the denial of universal human rights.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Blusky and IG: @robbyref 

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Timothy Stewart-Winter joins Michael Stauch to discuss the arrest that transformed Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life. Drawing on Jenkins’s previously unexamined personal papers, including hundreds of letters he received in the aftermath of his arrest from ordinary Americans and government officials alike, in Outed: LBJ's Confidant and the Arrest That Transformed a Presidency (U Chicago Press, 2026) Stewart-Winter shows how antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today.

Highlights include: 

- A discussion of Jenkins’s career as LBJ’s closest aide at the intersection of the Lavender Scare, the urbanization of Washington DC, and the growth of the federal government after World War II;
- How letters Jenkins received after his arrest reveal Americans’ changing views on sexuality and family life;
- The effect that Jenkins’s public exile had on gay visibility just before the rise of gay liberation;
- A tantalizing speculative reading of the effect that Jenkins’s exile from Washington, DC, had on the LBJ presidency and its most significant failure, the war in Vietnam;
- How a bouquet of flowers from none other than J. Edgar Hoover helped rehabilitate Jenkins’s image after his arrest.

Guest: Timothy Stewart-Winter is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. He is also the author of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, which won the John Boswell Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives (U Chicago Press, 2026) is a study of political parties and party nominations for the House of Representatives in 55 winnable open-seat nominations in the 2013-14 electoral cycle. Based on a combination of field interviews, fundraising and spending data from the Federal Election Commission, content analysis of newspaper coverage, and exit polls of voters in four contests, it argues that the most important actors in most nominations are those who supply campaign resources to some candidates and deny them to others. These "policy demanders," as the study calls them, consist mainly of standard interest group actors - business, labor, agriculture, professionals - but include faith-based activists and Tea Partiers as leading actors in some nominations. Among the study's main arguments are that policy demanders care more about their particular interests and values than general ideology, put serious effort into vetting candidates before supporting them, and often either work through local parties or coordinate among themselves. The study analyzes the competition between establishment and insurgent candidates in the Republican Party in terms of its general arguments. Progressive reformers sought the adoption of primary elections to empower voters to control the direction of their parties, but this study finds that most primary electorates pay too little attention to make use of the opportunity.

Professor Kathleen Bawn is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published her work in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science.

Professor John Zaller is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His other books include The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion and The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.

Host Dr Ursula Hackett is Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the University of Oxford. She is the author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State and a forthcoming book on redistricting. 

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The first full biography of the controversial and complex First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler--an unjustly scandalized New Yorker, the second wife to President John Tyler, and a savvy and consequential political figure in the age of the Civil War.

Myths, rumors, and gossip have long circulated around First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler. Commonly believed to be politically insignificant, most of our fascination with Tyler surrounds her reputation as a highly desired superficial flirt. This salacious mythos was based on her status in a politically influential New York family and the popular rumor that she posed for a sexually suggestive advertisement for a dry goods store in Manhattan.

Now, in the first full biography of Julia Tyler, Christopher J. Leahy and Sharon Williams Leahy correct such longstanding misconceptions about President John Tyler's second wife and establish her reputation as an influential political force. Presidentess: The Life of First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler (UP of Kansas, 2026) shows a presidential spouse who was more consequential than people realize and made a lasting contribution to the evolving role of first lady.

Leahy and Leahy present a compelling portrait of a determined woman who came to embrace her new Southern identity after marrying John Tyler, serving as a faithful defender of his views and values--including his decision to renounce the Union and join the Confederate government. In the aftermath of the Civil War, she orchestrated a public relations campaign to restore and protect her legacy as well as that of her late husband, the "traitor president." In her later years, she successfully lobbied Congress for a pension and reclaimed her status as a former first lady.

Presidentess casts a new light on Julia Gardiner Tyler's life and legacy, including new revelations about the scandalous "Rose of Long Island" advertisement, an exploration of the dark side of New York City's print culture, and Tyler's essential role as an unwitting character in the presidential election of 1844. Presidentess gives a fully developed portrait of Julia Tyler, illuminating this controversial first lady and this pivotal turning point in American history.

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Discover the untold story of why homeschooling moved from the margins to the mainstream of American education. In this groundbreaking study Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2026), historian Dixie Dillon Lane traces the rise of homeschooling in the United States, from the modern movement's beginnings in the 1950s as a fringe activity to its current status as a widely accepted educational choice. Through compelling nationwide data and vivid case studies from Los Angeles County, Lane uncovers a powerful truth: homeschooling taps into long-held American beliefs in local control and parental rights that have shaped our nation's schools for generations. Writing in an engaging, accessible style, Lane demonstrates how homeschooling's rise reflects Americans' response to the increasing centralization of public education. As public schools have shifted toward consolidation and away from local oversight, parents have rediscovered their voice, choosing homeschooling as an innovative way to renew parental influence in education. Unlike most authors writing on this topic, Lane writes as both a credentialed historian and an experienced homeschooling parent. As such, she offers an honest, balanced view that acknowledges the homeschooling movement's challenges as well as its strengths. Skipping School will be of interest to parents, historians, educators, policymakers, and anyone seeking a fuller understanding of American education.

Dixie Dillon Lane holds a PhD in history from the University of Notre Dame and is a homeschooling mother of four (who writes at The Bad Homeschool Moms substack). She serves as an associate editor of Hearth & Field and a contributing editor of Front Porch Republic.

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David N. Gellman interviews Jesse Wegman on The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon Books, 2026).

Jesse Wegman tells the story of James Wilson, a Founding Father whose bold vision shaped American democracy but whose legacy was lost to scandal.

As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He went on to write the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation.

Wilson believed that in a democracy, the people were the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency and unsuccessfully for a president elected by popular vote and a Senate apportioned by population. He was recognized for his ideas and leadership. But only a decade after the Constitution was ratified, he died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.

Instead of going down as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and relevance of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.

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Chicana Spiritual Activism: Making Change, Making Soul (U Arizona Press, 2026) explores the profound impact of spiritual activism within the Chicana feminist movement in Texas. It illuminates how a cohort of Texas Chicanas embraced spiritual activism in pursuit of social change during the movement and into the present day.

The book draws on an array of qualitative methodologies—including interviews, autoethnography, testimonio, pláticas, and archival analysis—to develop what the author formulates as “methodologies of the spirit.” Focusing on the lived experiences, histories, and spiritual activism of sixteen Chicanas/Tejanas, Sendejo shows how these trailblazing women confronted the enduring impacts and repercussions of colonial legacies in Texas through their involvement in movement initiatives such as electoral politics through Mujeres Por La Raza, the cultural arts movement, developing Chicana feminist thought, and the establishment of bilingual education and Chicana/o studies programs.

The activists highlighted in the book include well-known figures such as Santa Barraza, Norma E. Cantú, Rosie Castro, Martha P. Cotera, Inés Hernández-Ávila, and others. Through their work, these activists emerged as architects of their own healing and transformation. Simultaneously, they opened avenues for others to embark on similar journeys reshaping religious practices and unearthing and disseminating spiritual, feminist, and ancestral knowledges.

This interview was conducted by Mary Reynolds, publicity manager for The University of Arizona Press. Her book, The Quake That Drained the Desert, investigates the 1887 borderlands earthquake that forever changed surface water and groundwater in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.

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Kevin Galvin's Troubled Times: The Boston Courthouse Bombing Of 1976 (Brandeis UP, 2026), interweaves the stories of a revolutionary and a bombing victim to explore the roots and unintended consequences of political violence. 1976. The Vietnam War had ended, but radical political groups still operated clandestinely throughout the United States. Nowhere was the threat of civil unrest greater than in Boston. Racial tensions had been building since a federal judge ordered the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools, and civic leaders were counting on the pageantry of the nation's Bicentennial to boost both tourism and investment. In April, the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, prison reformers schooled in Marxism and angered by US interventions abroad, bombed the Suffolk County Courthouse, injuring twenty-two people. The site of the blast marked the spot where the lives of two men intersected: a mill town kid who'd been radicalized in Vietnam and prison, and an immigrant waiting in line because he needed to renew a cab license. Fifty years after the bombing shook the city, Troubled Times tells the story of lives changed by political violence at a time when the American experiment is again in crisis.

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The United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate crime wave has gone unprosecuted and unpunished, with those in the C-suites largely escaping accountability. Meanwhile, the country has doubled down on pursuing people accused of street and drug crimes and immigration offenses. Corporate impunity, the financialization of the economy, militarized policing, the burgeoning carceral state, and the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere all have fostered corporate, economic, and state violence in America. In Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America (Princeton UP, 2026), Marie Gottschalk argues that these developments have undermined the legitimacy of American political and economic institutions.

Gottschalk analyzes how the concentration of economic, political, and military power has siphoned off vital resources, preying on the most vulnerable communities and normalizing violence and death. It has kept America from attacking the root causes of violent street crime and curtailing “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses, and chronic diseases. The United States continues to incarcerate more of its people than nearly every other country even as it decriminalizes or turns a blind eye to elite-level corporate crime. Public and scholarly attention, however, remains fixated on violent street crime—although corporate and white-collar crime and state and economic violence directly and indirectly hurt far more people in the United States. Gottschalk contends that the US failure to protect its people from these harms has increased the fragility of democracy in America.

Professor Marie Gottschalk is the Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gottschalk specializes in American politics, with a focus on criminal justice, health policy, race, the development of the welfare state, and business-labor relations.

Her latest book is Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014). She is also the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the 2007 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Cornell University Press, 2000).

Professor Gottschalk is a former editor and journalist and was a university lecturer for two years in the People’s Republic of China. She was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and was named a Distinguished Lecturer in Japan by the Fulbright Program. She served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences National Task Force on Mass Incarceration and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration. She is a contributor to the Academy's final report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (National Academies Press, 2014).

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When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning in Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic (U Virginia Press, 2025), George Oberle provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge was created, circulated, and consumed in the early American republic.

Many of the founders, including George Washington, initially favored the creation of a centralized national university to educate Americans from all backgrounds. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, politicians moved away from any notion of publicly educated laypeople generating useful knowledge. The federal government ultimately founded the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to be run by experts only. Oberle’s insightful analysis of the competing ideas over the nature of education offers food for thought as we continue to grapple with a rapidly evolving media landscape amid contested meanings of knowledge, expertise, and the obligations of citizenship.

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