Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurprisingly, little read. Her groundbreaking book, The Hite Report, was the first feminist exploration of the link between sex and male power. It sold millions of copies when first published in 1976 and revolutionised the way people thought about marriage and the female orgasm. How, then, did it, and Hite, disappear from public consciousness?

In The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and The Hite Report (Melville House and New South, 2026), Australian historian Dr. Rosa Campbell combines original research and sharp cultural analysis to explore the complicated life and literary legacy of Shere Hite. Expanding on her ideas about sex – namely, that sex is sexist – the book explores Hite’s fraught childhood, struggles working in the porn industry, and eventual cancellation by the far-right Evangelical movement. All the while, Dr. Campbell holds Hite and The Hite Report to account for their own failings and absence of intersectionality.

In a post-#MeToo world, with the far-right on the march globally, Dr. Rosa Campbell’s examination of shifting ideological movements is essential to understanding the current feminist movement, as well as how conservative and reactionary efforts can silence even the most successful of women.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Owning My Masters (Mastered) is a digital archive of original rap music and spoken word poetry containing two volumes of music, an annotated timeline, videos, and a digital book. In this project, A.D. Carson exposes the artificial boundaries imposed on understood ideas about knowledge production in academia by employing hip-hop creative and compositional practices to interrogate ideas of citizenship, history, historical imagination, race, home, and humanness. Using sampled and live instrumentation and repurposed music, film, and news clips, an introductory video, and original rap lyrics, heoffers a new examination of how to create theory through hip-hop.

The unmastered album was originally submitted to Clemson University in South Carolina as the author’s dissertation, composed against the backdrop of the growing unrest across the U.S. and the world in response to the public attention to the deaths of Black people, many at the hands of police and vigilantes. As such, the songs highlight outlooks on Black life in America—on campuses and in communities across the country—and how they fit with geographic and temporal place and space. For this publication, the tracks have been mastered, and Carson has written a new introduction to contextualize and reflect on the moment in which the songs were written. It is a 2026 ACLS Open Access Multimodal Book Prize Finalist.

Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

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Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton University Press, 2026) is the first major new edition of Paine’s works, bringing together all his writings in six breathtaking volumes that dramatically revise our previous understanding of his activities as a writer and his importance as a democratic theorist in the age of revolutions. It includes about 180 new letters and some two hundred works newly attributed to Paine, with twenty-nine works previously regarded as Paine’s being deattributed. Drawing on pioneering computerized text analysis that makes possible for the first time attributions of anonymous and pseudonymous texts, this collection includes in volumes 5–6 newly identified pamphlets and newspaper and journal contributions, and suggests that Paine was extremely active as a Grub Street oppositional Whig writer in the decade prior to the American Revolution. Many writings from the period of his residence in France (1792–1802) and his subsequent return to the United States are also restored to his published output. Paine emerges as a much more consistent and serious democratic theorist than is often assumed, whose contributions to revolutionary debates in America, Britain, and France were unparalleled in their time. This volume spans the years 1772 to 1782, a decade that witnessed a diverse output of writings from Paine, from editorials and magazine pieces to pamphlets and newspaper articles. The book includes the Forester Letters, the Crisis papers, the Deane Affair articles, and Common Sense, with Gregory Claeys’s general introduction and commentary by the editors providing invaluable historical context.

Gregory Claeys is professor emeritus of the history of political thought at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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In preparation for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, it would be wise to look back at the ancient thinkers and writers who helped inspire its early leaders. Perhaps the preeminent role model was the Roman statesman and orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero. So here in Episode 11 of Season 5, I interview Michael C. Hawley to talk about the political philosophy of Cicero and his influence on the American Republic.

Michael Hawley is an assistant professor in the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow with the James Madison Program, he wrote the book, Natural Law Republicanism: Cicero's Liberal Legacy (2022). Now, he's working on a new one, Preaching to the Choir: The Rhetoric of Prophets, Reformers, and Demagogues.

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 the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”

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In March 1953 and May 1955, government officials—including the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), the US Department of Defense, and the Atomic Energy Commission—released nuclear bombs on two model towns at Nevada Test Site, the continental nuclear test facility during the Cold War. These so-called “Doom Towns” were designed to illustrate in the most vivid way possible what might happen to a “typical American home” caught in a Soviet atomic blast. Instead of training troops for war overseas, the Doom Towns literally brought the Cold War home.

Drawing on newspaper articles, FCDA reports, and corporate documents, in Doom Town, USA: The Nevada Test Site as Ground Zero of 1950s American Culture (University Press of Kansas, 2026), Dr. John Wills brings readers into Doom Town, USA—a place where life-size mannequins of the archetypal Mr. and Mrs. America walked the streets in JCPenney clothes, drove Chrysler cars, and lived in the latest trailer homes, tailor-made to escape in the event of nuclear war. The two Doom Towns of Operation Doorstep (1953) and Operation Cue (1955) were far more than just an exercise in developing a new civilian home front. They were a media spectacle and a cultural flashpoint, attracting corporate sponsors, drawing in atomic tourists, and generating new consumer products. The atom bomb may have been bad for world peace, but it was good for business. In the excitement about these experiments, real people even volunteered to be living test subjects—but most were turned away.

Doom Town became an unusual but effective banner for corporate and consumer life in the 1950s. Doom Town was an effective simulacrum of white middle-class America, right down to the racially segregated social spaces and the hierarchical gender roles of the dummies living in their classic suburban homes. But these homegrown Hiroshimas also contributed to a broader culture of catastrophe and fear in the late 1950s. Concerns over Communist invasion, Soviet spies, and ICBM missiles coalesced in the Nevada desert, framing a national culture of anxiety. The sudden explosion of the model towns revealed the shocking fragility of postwar living, calling into question the 1950s American Dream and the survivability of American ideals. The cultural crater left by these nuclear test sites exists even today in the many movies, television shows, and video games that dwell on the existential crisis of impending apocalypse.

Doom Town, USA is an eye-opening tour guide of one of the most bizarre and uniquely American places in history.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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On a crisp September afternoon in 1917, as the country waged war and the national pastime faced questions about its purpose, baseball paused to reconsider what it stood for. At Fenway Park, the game's greatest stars-many of them rivals, some near the end of their careers, others just emerging-took the field together in an exhibition played not for standings or championships, but for a colleague who had died, and for a cause larger than the game itself.

Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Connie Mack, and more. One newspaper called it "the greatest baseball show on earth."

What unfolded that day was more than a benefit or a curiosity. It was a moment of recognition among players, fans, and the sport's leaders that baseball could be something more than competition. It could be a shared stage. A public trust. A civic ritual capable of carrying the weight of a nation. Listen to our interview about One Day in September: Baseball, Brotherhood, and the Birth of the All-Star Game (Compass Rose, 2026)

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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A century after the Pan-American Highway was first conceived, its

This

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

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A powerful exposé of the American public education system's indifference toward marginalized children and the "slow violence" that fashions schools into hostile work and learning environments.
In 2017, sociologist Ranita Ray stepped inside a fourth-grade classroom in one of the nation’s largest majority-minority districts in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was there to conduct research on the lack of resources and budget cuts that regularly face public schools. However, a few months into her immersion, a disturbed Ray recognized that that greatest impediment to students was the “slow violence” that preys on their minds, bodies, and spirits at the hands of teachers and administrators who are charged with their care.
Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom (St. Martin's Press, 2025) lays bare the routine indifference, racism, and verbal and emotional abuse and harassment that teachers and administrators perpetrate routinely against the most vulnerable children in our schools. We meet Nazli, a bright, funny Black girl, and math wiz, who loses her baby brother, and is told that “grit” will enable her to rise above her grief. Reggie is a devoted student and curious scholar, but his path to success is derailed when teachers fashion him as a predator after they find him looking at two inappropriate photos on his iPad. There’s Nalin, a shy and determined Filipina who has just arrived in the US, but is ignored based on her educator’s assumption that “Asians” are “good at math.” Her entire journey through school is darkened by this stereotype. And there’s Miguel, a sharp, distracted Latino boy who can’t overcome his teachers’ urge to incorrectly diagnose him with autism.
Bolstered by an empathetic and passionate voice as well as the latest breaking research in the social sciences, Ray goes beyond timeworn discussions about the school-to-prison pipeline, funding, and achievement gaps to directly address what happens behind the closed doors of classrooms, introducing a compelling—and crucial—new perspective into the conversation about our education system.
In the warm, luminous spirit of character-driven books like Invisible Child, Slow Violence allows us to see that the way we’ve tried to make a start in education reform is wrong. To forge new approaches that foster young minds and flourishing generations we have to start with how children experience the classroom. Unflinchingly, Slow Violence tells us—and shows us where to begin.

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John Kapusta's Self-Realization Nation: How Artists of the Creative Counterculture Made a New America (U California Press, 2026) is the story of an unexpected group of performing artists who led one of the most influential artistic movements in contemporary American history. After World War II, personal fulfillment emerged as a defining American cultural ideal. Self-realization--the quest to become our authentic selves--remains a powerful part of American culture and arts today. In Self-Realization Nation, John Kapusta provides a lively cultural history of how an overlooked movement of musicians, dancers, and actors championed the ideal of self-realization. These performers, who spanned many backgrounds, identities, genres, and artistic styles, became what he calls the creative counterculture. Artists as varied as Sonny Rollins, John Cage, Anna Halprin, Alice and John Coltrane, and Pauline Oliveros shared an approach to creativity focused on letting go of limiting beliefs and subverting oppressive social norms. Through colorful vignettes, Kapusta reveals how these artists made their art and how their approach spread beyond the performing arts to influence such fields as psychology, education, and wellness. Ultimately, these creative counterculturists came to define a new vision of an America where everyone was free to be themselves, together.

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The American Dream at its best is an ethical ideal and a moral

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