New Books in American Politics

In his sparkling and politically urgent new book Fear in Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Teaches Us About America (NYU Press, 2021), Caleb Elfenbein shows with precision and panache the discursive, institutional, and political conditions and processes that have normalized anti-Muslim hate in the United States, especially over the last two decades. How does fear for a caricatured and dehumanized religious minority become an entrenched part of public discourse? Elfenbein engages and answers this question through a painstaking analysis of a range of actors and discourses across the political spectrum that have contributed to establishing Islamophobia as a formidably pernicious form of violence. In our conversation, we discuss the key themes and arguments of this book that is ideally suited to be taught in various undergraduate courses, especially the introductory Islam course and Islam in North America.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome.

The Appalachian Trail, a thin ribbon of wilderness running through the densely populated eastern United States, offers a refuge from modern society and a place apart from human ideas and institutions. But as environmental historian—and thru-hiker—Sarah Mittlefehldt argues, the trail is also a conduit for community engagement and a model for public-private cooperation and environmental stewardship.

In Tangled Roots: The Appalachian Trail and American Environmental Politics (U Washington Press, 2013), Mittlefehldt tells the story of the trail’s creation. The project was one of the first in which the National Park Service attempted to create public wilderness space within heavily populated, privately owned lands. Originally a regional grassroots endeavor, under federal leadership the trail project retained unprecedented levels of community involvement. As citizen volunteers came together and entered into conversation with the National Parks Service, boundaries between “local” and “nonlocal,” “public” and “private,” “amateur” and “expert” frequently broke down. Today, as Mittlefehldt tells us, the Appalachian Trail remains an unusual hybrid of public and private efforts and an inspiring success story of environmental protection.

Sarah Mittlefehldt is an environmental historian and Professor of Earth, Environmental & Geographical Sciences at Northern Michigan University. 

Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Email: [email protected]

Award-winning journalist and editor Garrett Graff has produced a fascinating, propulsive, and captivating narrative about the Watergate scandal that rocked the United States and ultimately brought down a president. The idea of Watergate has long roots in American culture and politics, but Graff dives into this historical era, knitting together the actual reality of Watergate, and correcting, or at least interrogating the mythology that surrounds the scandal itself, the Nixon Administration, and this period in American politics. Watergate: A New History (Simon and Schuster, 2022) positions the Watergate burglary and cover-up within the broader “way of life” within the Nixon Administration, which was marked by a variety of different kinds of scandals, some of which are only now fully coming to light, others had been obscured at the time by the attention focused on Watergate. Graff outlines the dark criminal and conspiratorial mindset that dominated the Nixon Administration—and not simply the paranoia that is often associated with Nixon himself. Watergate: A New History delineates twelve different scandals, with overlapping actors and characters, executing wild schemes and crimes—and Graff notes that it was rarely clear where one scandal ended, and another began. Watergate was only one of the many scandals that entangled the Nixon Administration. Even so, the fallout from the Watergate scandal included 69 individuals who were criminally charged in association with the machinations around the break in and subsequent cover-up.

Graff notes that Watergate was such a spectacle because it was such a Washington, D.C. story, integrating power, ambition, the media, and politics, and all wrapped around the way things happen or work in D.C. He also notes that the myth of Watergate and the role of journalists in uncovering the scandal and reporting it out is more real than apocryphal, but that there were more reporters than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein involved in following the story; Jack Nelson of the L.A. Times, and Seymour Hersh and Walter Rugaber at the New York Times all spent 1972 and 1973 covering the break-in and the evolving scandal. The way that elected officials approached the scandal and their role in uncovering its details is also a significant part of the story itself. Graff explained the distinction between how members of the Republican Party in the House and the Senate operated in the face of the Watergate scandal, how their behavior reflected a duty to carry out the work of a co-equal branch of government, the U.S. Congress, and how this is in contrast to the current Republican members of the House and Senate, who suppress their responsibilities as members of the legislature and elevate their role as members of the GOP. For those who already know much about Watergate and Nixon, this book will provide more insight, context, and understanding of the scandal that brought down the president. For those who might know little about the scandal, Watergate: A New History guides the reader through the history, politics, people, and events of a ceaselessly fascinating period in American political history.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is the first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge.

In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Mario Daniels and Dr. John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state.

They argue that every single day beginning in the 1940s, US export controls have intervened in the global sharing of scientific-technological knowledge. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only—and not even the most important—regulatory instrument that came into being in the postwar era.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

When The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looked over into the promised land and tried to discern how we would get there, he called the poor to lead the way. The Poor People’s Campaign was part of a political strategy for building a movement expansive enough to tackle the enmeshed evils of racism, poverty, and war. In Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign (Fortress Academic, 2021), Colleen Wessel-McCoy roots King’s political vision solidly in his theological ethics and traces the spirit of the campaign in the community and religious leaders who are responding to the devastating crises of inequality today.

Colleen Wessel-McCoy is an Assistant Professor of Peace & Justice Studies and the Director of the Master of Arts in Peace and Social Transformation program at the Earlham School of Religion.

Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Email: [email protected]

In conversations about polarised political issues, phrases like ‘it’s not about race, it’s about class’ have become the perfect way to induce a stalemate. It seems as though the traditional, materialist critique of inequality has been supplanted by a fast-evolving set of reflections on group identity. Mainstream politics makes fast and loose assumptions about the relationship between class and identity, and economic conditions and culture. These assumptions are fodder for the culture wars.

In The Identity Myth: Why We Need to Embrace Our Differences to Beat Inequality (Constable & Robinson, 2022), David Swift covers the four different kinds of identity most susceptible to rhetorical and cultural manipulation – class, race, sex, and age. He considers how the boundaries of identities are policed and how diverse versions of the same identity can be deployed to different ends. Ultimately, it is not that identities are simply more ‘complex’ than they appear. Rather, there are commonalities more important to the creation of solidarity.

David Swift speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the crisis of class and the deceptive allure of identity politics. We talk about the divisive nature of the contested claims of identity and about strategies for regaining control of the narrative. In a powerful call to arms, Swift argues that we must unite against these identity myths and embrace our differences to beat inequality.

David Swift is a historian and writer who specialises in the history and contemporary politics of the British Left. He has written on the state of the Left for The Times, Fabian Review, Progress Online, Jewish Chronicle, and The Critic. He is the author of A Left for Itself, 2019.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

What are the connections between the past and modern politics? In Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism through Big Data (UCL Press, 2022), Chiara Bonacchi, a Chancellor's Fellow in Heritage, Text and Data Mining and Senior Lecturer in Heritage at History, Classics & Archaeology and Edinburgh Futures Institute at University of Edinburgh, explores the uses of heritage by contemporary populist politics. Drawing on ‘big data’ sources, including Facebook and Twitter, along with a deep theoretical engagement with digital humanities and heritage, the book compares and contrasts key political events in Italy, USA, and the UK to show how the ancient world is deployed by both politicians and audiences. The book is essential reading for both humanities and political science scholars, along with anyone interested in understanding the current populist moment. The book is available open access here.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

Ronald Reagan’s hagiography has created an entire mythology around the 40th president of the US; anticommunism and the fight against the ‘Evil Empire’ are the central tropes of the Reagan story to this day. The culmination of this narrative arc is the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event which is still routinely attributed to Reagan and, particularly in conservative circles, and hailed as the ultimate validation of American political models and of American values.

But the historical reality of the 1980s was far from ideologically monolithic. Andrew Hunt’s We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022) paints a nuanced picture of the complex social and cultural landscape of the United States during Reagan’s two terms. The country was in turmoil, bitterly divided over the meaning of its recent past (from nostalgia for the 1950s to the trauma of the Vietnam War) and over the direction of its future. It was rocked by street protests fueled by a rebirth of activism comparable to that of the 1960s. It witnessed the rise of fringe conspiracy theories, of popular opposition to U.S. involvement in Central America, and of widespread anxieties over nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Hunt’s book captures, in fascinating detail, the enormous pushback to the anticommunist rhetoric of the Reagan regime from citizens, activists, and artists, and the role that American popular culture—from music, to television, to film— played in reflecting, and sometimes influencing, the dynamics of the age.

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy is Associate Teaching Professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her book, Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination, came out in 2022. Twitter: @OanaGodyKenw. Oana’s webpage.

Dr. Christopher Gilbert, Assistant Professor of English at Assumption College, has a new book that examines the understanding of American national character and culture through the works of caricature and comic representations. Gilbert specifically focuses on this kind of work that is produced during moments of crisis, particularly during wartime. Wartime often prompts self-understanding for a nation, since there is a demand that the reason for war is made clear, and the role of the nation is seen in this context. Gilbert notes that in the early days of the republic, Benjamin Franklin turned to caricature to help define or start to clarify an American national character, particularly in distinction from British colonial power. And this concept of national character is different than either patriotism or nationalism, since it reflects how citizens, individually and as a whole, understand themselves as a nation, and as separate from other nations. Unique histories, characteristics, and “belonging” all contribute to this broader sense of self for a nation.

Caricature and National Character: The United States at War (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) examines the various symbols and images that have become part of the American national identity, noting, often, how those images shift and change with time and context. Gilbert notes that these recursive themes and images are distinct in different historical moments, providing a kind of complexity to the images and how and what they communicate. Consider the image of the bald eagle, which has been integrated into American national character for some time, but has been drawn and redrawn to represent imperialism, laziness, or cultural power at different points in U.S. history. Gilbert explains that humor itself is situational and situated, a sign or signal of the time, and that caricature and comic artists and political and editorial cartoonists are commenting on and positioning their work within a particular historical point, and in so doing, also reflecting American cultural politics.

Caricature and National Character brings a variety of artists together in a way that intertwines their work without silo-ing them within chronological periods. Their work is made, in a certain way, to be in conversation, and to help to understand the United States as a warring nation, even if there is no shooting war transpiring at times. The artists and cartoonists are using their own membership within the national character to present ideas and commentary on what it means, in time of war, to protect national character and what it is that needs protecting. These images, which can be explored across history, carry significant weight because they are reflecting on the notion of national character, which is often more clearly on display during times of war.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

Howard Mortman's book When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill (Cherry Orchard, 2020) is about the rabbis. It’s an unprecedented examination of 160 years of Jewish prayers delivered in the literal and figurative center of American democracy. With exhaustive research written in approachable prose, it uniquely tells the story of over 400 rabbis giving over 600 prayers since the Civil War days―who they are and what they say.

Few written works examine the tradition of prayers in government. This new angle will appeal to students and lovers of American history, Congress, American Jewish history, and religion. It’s a welcome, important addition to our understanding of Congress and Jewish contribution to America.