New Books in American Studies

By New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently publ... more

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The podcast currently has 9,606 episodes available.

New Books in American Studies episodes:

August 13, 2026Bordering On Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality
Immigration agents have a frontline view of the racial, economic, and legal inequalities that undocumented migration reflects—and yet most agents do not think of the role their jobs play in those inequalities. Instead, they consider themselves law enforcers, trained to confine their work strictly to crime control and security. In Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality (Princeton UP, 2025), Dr. Irene Vega offers an original, detailed analysis of the rationales that shape how U.S. immigration agents understand and carry out their professional responsibilities. Drawing on interviews with ninety immigration agents—Border Patrol Agents and ICE Deportation Officers, most of whom are Mexican Americans from the region around the border—Dr. Vega examines why they took the job and how their training and socialization shape the ways that they grapple with the racial and moral issues raised by their work.
Dr. Vega shows that indifference is the bureaucratic resource that allows agents to look away from the most morally ambiguous aspects of their work and helps them cultivate legitimacy for their employer. She traces the development of the agents’ “moral economy”—the configuration of norms, values, and sensibilities that undergirds how they perform their work. She also shows how the immigration system benefits from minoritized bureaucrats’ labor. With Bordering on Indifference, Dr. Vega opens the closed doors of nondescript government buildings and goes into remote areas of the Southwestern borderlands to uncover the hidden normative world that immigration enforcement agents inhabit.
Guest: Dr. Irene I. Vega is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She studies how the United States regulates international migration, as well as migrants and their descendants.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders

Immigration Realities

We Are Not Dreamers

Secret Harvests

Who Gets Believed

In The Care of Foreigners

In The Garden Behind The Moon

We Take Our Cities With Us

The Translators Daughter

Reunited

Sin Padres Ni Papeles
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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52min
August 11, 2026 John E. McDonough, "America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)
How
can a nation with unmatched wealth and medical innovation also have the
highest health care costs and the poorest health outcomes among its
peers? In America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. John E. McDonough offers a
compelling explanation for this troubling puzzle of contemporary US life
and shows that this reality did not arise by accident.
Beginning
in the later twentieth century, a powerful political and economic
philosophy began to reshape the United States and continues to mold
the institutions that govern health care, insurance coverage, and
population health. Across four decades, the rise of neoliberal thinking
elevated privatization, deregulation, and profit maximization as guiding
principles for public policy. Dr. McDonough illustrates how these ideas
influenced medical care at every level, altering government roles,
accelerating consolidation, encouraging the financialization of
once-mission-driven sectors, and shifting the US health system's
priorities away from patients and communities. The consequences of these
changes include deepening inequality, eroded public health capacity,
and a growing burden of medical debt.
Synthesizing
history, policy analysis, and the lived realities of the American
health system, Dr. McDonough reveals how a national commitment to
economic freedom above all else
set the stage for today's dysfunctional health care system. Despite
today's crises, he also highlights emerging efforts that signal the
possibility of a new direction, one based on fairness, accountability,
and the restoration of health as a public value. America's Wrong Turn
offers a framework for understanding how the United States arrived at
this moment and what it will take to create a system worthy of the
people it serves.
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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1h 1min
August 10, 2026 David N. Gellman, "Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Edward Blum interviews David N. Gellman on his book Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York (Cornell UP, 2022).
In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic.
Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice.
John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles.
The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.

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50min
August 09, 2026 Margaret E. Farrar and Adam Kaul, "Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest" (U Nebraska Press, 2026)
Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest (U Nebraska Press, 2026) centers on the tiny community of Bishop Hill, Illinois, whose marketing materials call it “Utopia on the Prairie,” home to a radical communal religious sect that emigrated from Sweden in the 1840s. Through rich textual and ethnographic analyses, Dr. Margaret E. Farrar and Dr. Adam Kaul tell the story of what happens when a small, historically significant Midwestern community negotiates the contradictory impulses of twenty-first-century place-making. At first glance, Bishop Hill is simply a small heritage tourism destination in Midwestern flyover country, but further inspection reveals it to be a complex place that mixes a deep nostalgia for the past undercut by complex origin stories of displacement and colonialism, an active historic preservation movement amid futuristic green energy technologies built by multinational corporations, and a commitment to localism in the context of omnipresent globalization.
Based on fifteen years of fieldwork, Becoming Utopia is an interdisciplinary contribution to conversations about the importance and meaning of place-making, heritage-making, and sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) in the twenty-first century.
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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37min
August 09, 2026 Caryl Flinn and Dana B. Polan, "The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette" (Oxford UP, 2026)
In The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette (Oxford UP, 2026), the first ever published on The Patty Duke Show (1963-66), Caryl Flinn and Dana Polan examine the significance of this classic US sitcom within popular culture and within American society at the time. Child acting sensation Patty Duke plays the all-American Patty as well as her staid British counterpart Cathy, who comes to live with Patty's family in Brooklyn. Far from being a frivolous show, the show's use of twin girls--and their comic antics--offers glimpses into different identities and possibilities to try on, in keeping not only with girls' popular culture of the time but the optimism of John F. Kennedy's Camelot years.
At the same time, the series plugged into many of the contradictions of the mid-1960s. It flirted, as much of the US did, with foreign cultures, such as Julia Child's mediation of Frenchness, only to return to and reaffirm core US values. Like Kennedy, who encouraged the country's youth to engage with the world at large, the show gestures towards a cosmopolitanism that, ultimately, retreats into an American-based perspective, as evidenced in the series' preferential treatment of Patty over Cathy--despite the two characters being played by one actor.
Drawing on archival research, Flinn and Polan bring to light the show's production background, which has until now been largely lost to history, as well as considering the series's conception, reception, its many tie-in products, and its ongoing afterlife in the decades since its initial broadcast. In so doing, they reveal hidden and overt issues that shaped American culture and ideology of the 1960s.

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56min
August 07, 2026 Edlie Wong, "Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is an Element which centers the 'Black Pacific' as a generative site for comparative and intersectional methodologies and transnational frameworks for thinking about racial formations, post-national literary forms, and cultural histories. At the end of the nineteenth century, US overseas expansion into the Pacific brought white supremacy and colonial rule into alignment. It also threw into greater relief the contradictions of US
citizenship and national identity as legalized segregation and rising anti-Black violence foreclosed Reconstruction's possibilities. Race accrued dynamic new meanings in the age of new imperialism.
Focusing on the earliest of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1900–09) and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–7), in this Element, Dr. Edlie L. Wong examines the formative role of magazine and periodical writings in the development of early Black transpacific internationalism.
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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51min
August 07, 2026 Max Perry Mueller, "Wakara's America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West" (Basic Books, 2025)
In the mid-19th century, anyone who was anyone in the American West had heard of the Ute leader Wakara. Yet, by the early twenty first century, his story has been, if not forgotten, at the very least twisted and distorted into something that would have been unrecognizable to him and his contemporaries. In Wakara's America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books, 2025), University of Nebraska religious studies professor Max Perry Mueller not only sets the record straight on Wakara, his life, and his times, but also explains how and why his narrative grew to be so misused. It's a story of public history gone wrong, of grave robbing and NAGPRA, and above all about the complexities and contingencies of history. Mueller makes a convincing case that our understanding of Utah and the broader West has been incomplete without Wakara near the center of the story.

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1h 21min
August 05, 2026 Matthew Pinsker, "Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln" (Norton, 2026)
We know Abraham Lincoln as the eloquent, compassionate leader of a
nation torn by civil war. But he had another, less visible side, equally
central to his character and leadership: Lincoln was a master of party
politics. Schooled as a Whig in the rough-and-tumble of Illinois
electioneering in the 1830s, Lincoln skillfully navigated treacherous
partisan crosscurrents and helped build the Republican party into a
viable force. His decades of experience as a party leader proved
invaluable to him as president and commander in chief during the Civil
War.
Matthew Pinsker’s groundbreaking Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln
(W.W. Norton & Company, 2026) draws extensively on Lincoln’s
private correspondence to move beyond the marble icon and realize a
flesh-and-blood character in Boss Lincoln. Behind closed doors he was
shrewd and insistent, capable of deft manipulation, blunt intimidation,
or thoughtful argument as needed. As a decision-maker he was attentive
to detail but kept his own counsel and trusted his own acumen. His aides
noted that in cabinet meetings Lincoln had the final say, and “there is
no cavil.” Devoted to elections, he kept careful, handwritten tallies
of party turnout, even gifting one to Mary Todd, another partisan,
during their courtship. His hymn to democracy at Gettysburg in 1863
carried a partisan message to the political leaders gathered there: The
fight for the union would take place at the polls as well as on the
battlefield. Boss Lincoln often sacrificed candor for purpose. He used
his White House meeting with Frederick Douglass in 1864, ostensibly
about emancipation, to send a message to radicals about his need for
their support. With emancipation and the war’s outcome at stake, facing
withering criticism from all sides, Lincoln won reelection by building a
new political coalition through the Union party. Here was Boss Lincoln
at his height, captured in absorbing detail in this indelible portrait
of our greatest president.

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1h 13min
August 04, 2026 Blair L.M. Kelley, "Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days" (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026)
For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor
freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While
Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many
Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These
observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the
fight for full freedom was unfinished. Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) brings
together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and
beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created
and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations
who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their
contributions to the making of America be fully recognized.
Blair L.M. Kelley, Ph.D. is a renowned author, historian, and scholar
of the African American experience. She is the seventh president of the
National Humanities Center,
the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated
exclusively to the humanities. Blair previously held senior leadership
roles at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the Joel R.
Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and Director of
the Center for the Study of the American South and at North Carolina
State University where she served as Associate Dean for
Interdisciplinary Affairs and Partnerships and the Alumni Graduate
Professor of History. You can find her on all social platforms
@profblmkelley.
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48min
August 04, 2026 Samuel Marquis, "Empire and Frontier: Colonel Peter Schuyler and the Valiant Iroquois in King William's War: 1689-1701" (Pegasus Books, 2026)
Empire and Frontier: Colonel Peter Schuyler and the Valiant Iroquois in King William's War: 1689-1701
(Pegasus Books, 2026) by Samuel Marquis presents a
powerful episode of early American history, revealing the very human
story of friendship and alliance between Colonel Peter Schuyler and the
Iroquois during King William’s War (1689–1701). Like Philbrick’s Mayflower and Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, this new book reveals how fragile alliances and cross-cultural diplomacy changed the course of empires in North America.
At the heart of the book is Peter Schuyler, a Dutch-American
mayor of Albany, Indian Affairs commissioner, and militia colonel who
earned deep trust among the Iroquois. Decades ahead of his time in his
respect for Native diplomacy and sovereignty, Schuyler helped forge and
sustain a fragile alliance between English colonists and the
Haudenosaunee (Five Nations of the Iroquois) during a decade of brutal
warfare. That alliance, known as The Covenant Chain, not only blocked
French ambitions in the region, but also shaped the political and
military landscape of the American frontier for the next one hundred
years.
Told
through multiple perspectives, the book also follows two unforgettable
Indigenous figures during the conflict. Lawrence, a Mohawk war captain,
serves as Schuyler’s compatriot on the battlefield, working for and
navigating the survival of his people. Hilletie van Olinda, a biracial
Mohawk-Dutch woman, becomes a key translator and diplomatic go-between,
using her language skills and cultural fluency to mediate between the
Iroquois and English.
Across
a decade of war, espionage, and political intrigue—from the 1689
Leisler’s Rebellion and 1690 Schenectady Massacre to the climactic Grand
Settlement of 1701—these intertwined stories reveal the human cost and
political complexity behind one of early America’s most consequential
alliances.
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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
...more
46min

FAQs about New Books in American Studies:

How many episodes does New Books in American Studies have?

The podcast currently has 9,606 episodes available.

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