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 9,582 episodes available.

New Books in American Studies episodes:

July 23, 2026Cast Out: A Call For A Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration
In Cast Out: A Call For A Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration (Beacon Press, 2026), civil rights lawyer Joseph Margulies insists that those who commit even the most heinous crimes are one of us and should be judged in a spirit of forgiveness. He explains that American society is too often unforgiving, preferring to cast out those we consider irredeemable by fixating narrowly on the question What did they do? and imagining that those who have done great wrongs have no past worth learning and no future worth preserving.
Through intimate interviews, his rich chapters bring to life 6 men and women, sharing their (sometimes brutal) crimes, the grim but all-too-human paths that led them there, and their evolution and insights. Eye-opening and unflinching, Cast Out makes us truly see those society locks away—the so-called “worst of the worst.” It challenges the reader to see us in them and them in us, and in that way, to recognize the humanity we all share.
Guest: Joseph Margulies is a writer, litigator, Professor of the Practice of Law and Government at Cornell University. He was Counsel of Record in Rasul v. Bush (2004), and in Munaf v. Geren (2008). His books include Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power; and Cast Out.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and host of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
The Coroner's Silence

Ghost In The Criminal Justice Machine

Hands Up Don't Shoot

Freemans Challenge

The Journal Of Higher Education In Prison

Education Behind The Wall

Secrets Of The Killing State

Stitching Freedom

The Emerson Prison Initiative

The Names Of All The Flowers

Pink Crime

Carceral Apartheid

The Criminal Record Complex
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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1h 1min
July 23, 2026 Julia R. Azari, "Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Julia Azari, Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, has a new, award-winning[*] book centering on the connection between race and the American presidency, specifically in the reaction to presidents who made progress on the issue of race in the United States. Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History focuses on four different periods in American political history and a number of different presidential administrations including: Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump. Race and the American presidency are not usually topics that are looped together, and this is also part of the point that Azari is making in the book, since presidents often try to elide racial politics and policy issues. Race is also not usually connected to presidential impeachments, but this is yet another key point that Azari raises, connecting racial progress, the backlash responses, and the subsequent impeachments. In noting these connections, Azari threads examples over time where presidents directly confronted race in American politics, working towards more racial equality, and how these efforts also prompt a backlash response. The key case studies in Backlash Presidents are Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War in the 1860s, Lyndon Johnson’s efforts in the 1960s in regard to the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, as well as anti-poverty legislation, and finally Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States, which was both symbolic and structural. Backlash Presidents traces not only the progress made during these administrations, but also the responses that followed in the subsequent administrations. It is these next administrations, of Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump, where each of these presidents were either impeached or were about to be impeached, and how this dynamic pulls together a variety of different threads to help us to understand presidential politics, institutional development, and American political history all in context of the question of race.
Azari’s research is connected to the idea of political time, but with the important addition of pulling out the problem of race in the United States. Backlash Presidents contributes to our thinking about not only the time and context of presidents and their administrations, but also to thinking about what it is that presidents do to politics itself. Part of this analysis also interrogates populism, positioning these movements within the context of racial backlash, while also building out the understanding of the president’s position within his own party, especially during these fraught periods. In each of the key examples, Azari highlights the ways in which Johnson, Nixon, and Trump were outsiders to what was going on inside their parties—in each case the Republican Party at the time—and how these shifting partisan foundations opened up different kinds of vulnerabilities for these presidents.
In each of the case studies, there is also the discussion of the role that the U.S. Congress plays, since they are the actors who move towards impeaching and trying the president. Members of the House of Representatives need to move beyond constraints in order to impeach a president, and in these instances, they have concluded that the president is not correct in some basic and meaningful way, that the president is not upholding his oath of office, and is also undermining the forward movement on race and racial equality.
Backlash Presidents: From Transformation to Reactionary Leaders in American History is a deeply researched analysis, with important historical context and details to help flesh out the particular time period under consideration. The examination is further complicated and built out with important understandings of party politics in the United States, and how president fits into their political party, or may be seen as an outsider. Racial dynamics in the United States undergirds the entire theory, and helps us see the tensions within partisan politics, presidential politics, and American democracy.
Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
[*] The Presidents and Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association awarded Backlash Presidents the 2025 Richard E. Neustadt Best Book Award, given for the best book on executive politics published during the year.

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42min
July 22, 2026 David Denby, "Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer" (Henry Holt, 2025)
What made a generation of Jewish artists and intellectuals transform
American culture? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with
acclaimed cultural critic David Denby to discuss his book Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer (Henry Holt, 2025), a vibrant portrait of four extraordinary Americans whose Jewish identities helped shape the modern United States.
Though
they worked in vastly different fields, Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks,
Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer shared a remarkable historical moment.
Coming of age after World War II, they entered an America where Jewish
opportunity was expanding and antisemitism was beginning to recede.
Their Jewish heritage, energized by the freedoms of American life,
fueled bold, unconventional careers that reshaped music, comedy,
literature, feminism, and public debate.
Denby paints these figures in all their complexity: ambitious,
difficult, generous, provocative, and endlessly creative. Rather than
offering simple hero worship, he explores how their outsized
personalities and relentless drive allowed them to challenge old
assumptions about art, politics, gender, humor, and what it meant to be
both fully Jewish and fully American.
Together, Denby and Katz
explore why this particular generation produced so many cultural
revolutionaries, how Jewish identity informed their work without
defining it, and what their legacies reveal about the changing place of
Jews in postwar America.

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52min
July 22, 2026 Michael Patrick Cullinane, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Court Cabinet" (U Nebraska Press, 2026)
In his final days in office in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt invited dozens of friends to the White House for lunch. They had never met as a group, but they had one thing in common: Each played tennis with the president and advised on policy matters. Roosevelt half-joked that the public would never know how much these tennis partners did to make his administration a success. Journalists dismissively called them the “Tennis Cabinet,” making light of their contribution, but Roosevelt knew otherwise.
In Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Court Cabinet (Potomac Books, an Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2026), Michael Patrick Cullinane explains that the inner circle led the administration’s campaigns against corporate greed, investigated public health violations, and formulated consumer protections. They founded environmental conservation policies, prosecuted civil rights violations, and implemented bureaucratic efficiencies that saved the government billions. Roosevelt’s tennis mates shaped the nation’s diplomacy, ending wars and promoting American interests abroad.
Never had a more eclectic group advised a U.S. president. The Tennis Cabinet included legendary frontier lawman Seth Bullock and the starched-shirt corporate lawyer Henry Stimson, who served in five presidential administrations. Texas wolf wrangler Jack Abernathy played with stuffy bureaucrats like Labor Commissioner Charles Patrick Neill and social activist James Bronson Reynolds. The French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand spun yarns with football hero George Washington Woodruff and Roosevelt’s college friend and banker Robert Bacon. James Garfield, namesake son of a martyred president, sipped mint juleps with Supreme Court Justice William Henry Moody. And J. P. Morgan’s silver-spooned son-in-law Herbert Satterlee kept company with rugged soldier Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly.
For all their differences, these men shared a desire to help the president transform the nation from a parochial nineteenth-century republic into an imperial and industrial global power. They have escaped the attention of reporters and historians only because of Roosevelt’s towering celebrity. Turning away from Roosevelt as the singular force behind his administration, it is possible to see how the contributions of his Tennis Cabinet quietly sowed the seeds of the American Century.

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55min
July 21, 2026 R. Joseph Parrott, "Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism" (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. R. Joseph Parrott
explores how anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and
Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from
the 1960s through the 1970s and influenced American foreign policy as
the Vietnam War drew to a close. These Portuguese African liberation
movements, led by nationalists like Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral,
built global solidarity networks to support their military and social
challenges to empire while defending against Western intervention. US
activists disillusioned with the Cold War came to see African
self-determination as central to global campaigns for racial and
economic justice. A broad coalition ranging from Black Power radicals to
religious liberals mobilized against the North Atlantic alliance with
Portugal. In the process, this grassroots movement helped define a New
Left Internationalism that championed decentralized, multiracial
organizing and a collaborative vision of US foreign policy to redress
historic inequalities between Global North and South.
Drawing
on more than fifty oral histories and research in government and
activist archives on three continents in English, Portuguese, French,
and Afrikaans, Dr. Parrott reconstructs the transnational anti-imperial
network that injected Global South priorities into US political debates.
Popular protests and informational campaigns led to collaborations with
legislators eager to constrain the powerful executive branch. In 1976,
this grassroots-legislative alliance halted Gerald Ford’s anti-communist
intervention against the Soviet-backed government of newly independent
Angola. This victory of New Left Internationalist ideas anticipated
future anti-apartheid and Latin American peace movements while also
fueling
a conservative revival of Cold War containment. By exploring US
engagement with the contested process of African decolonization, Dream the Size of Freedom
highlights the origins of two contrasting visions of American foreign
policy that defined debates over the country’s proper role in the Global
South into the 1990s.
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 19min
July 20, 2026 Richard Bell, "The American Revolution and the Fate of the World" (Penguin, 2025)
Matthew Mason (Professor of History at Brigham Young University) chatted with Richard Bell (Professor of History at the University of Maryland) about his new book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Penguin, 2025). They had a wide-ranging conversation about this wide-ranging book, including how and why there hasn’t been a book quite like it written before, and how Bell illuminates both the “greatest hits” of American Revolutionary legend and some “deep cuts” that readers probably haven’t encountered before. For instance, they discussed how Bell recasts iconic events like the Boston Tea Party as having a much bigger context and impact than the provincial setting for most tellings. But also they mused over why certain events and participants, such as American privateers captured and turned into prisoners of war suffering for their country just as much as the soldiers at Valley Forge, have not been part of the central mythology of the Revolution. This and more make up this conversation about this important book.

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1h 3min
July 19, 2026 US 250: A Conversation with Peter John Loewen
This week on Democracy Dialogues, Rachel Beatty Riedl speaks with Peter John Loewen to reflect on the 250th anniversary of US independence. They discuss the ways in which America’s unique founding moment has shaped democratic institutions and practice, and the paradox of America’s profound democratic experiment.
In this episode, Loewen describes his research on the representative nature of elected politicians – how they are similar to and different from ordinary people in their decision making. He also tackles questions of polarization and what happens when people have increased contact with other points of view. And the conversation wraps up with a discussion of higher education and democracy, and what role universities can play in shaping the next generation of democratic citizens.

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54min
July 19, 2026 Martin Fitzgerald, "The Umbrella Man and Other Stories: What We Talk about When We Talk about the JFK Assassination" (Biteback Publishing, 2026)
What does the JKF assassination mean to us now? In ⁠The Umbrella Man and Other Stories: What We Talk About When We Talk About the JFK Assassination⁠, (Biteback Publishing, 2026) ⁠Martin Fitzgerald⁠
explores the lives and stories of the people present on that day in
Dallas at Dealey Plaza. In doing so, the book examines cultural memory,
artistic representations, history, conspiracy theory and the global
impact of the event. Drawing on personal reflections, rich archival
sources, and contemporary interviews, the book offers a brilliant and
compelling narrative that goes beyond the circumstances of 1963 to the
present day. The book will be of significant interest to a range of
humanities scholars as well as to anyone interested in the ongoing
legacy of one of the twentieth century’s defining events.

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40min
July 19, 2026 Gabriella Soto, "Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting (University of Arizona Press, 2026) begins
with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico
border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced. Moving
between the practical and the philosophical, forensic anthropologist
and author Gabriella Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and
what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of
haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as
objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice.
Centered primarily in Arizona and South Texas, Border Afterlives
offers a border-scale comparative account of forensic practices,
critiques the limits of “best practices” in under-resourced systems, and
calls for a re-imagining of forensic humanitarianism grounded in
reciprocity and dignity, beyond human rights. This is a book that
insists on remembering the dead.
In this conversation, we discuss
the difficult interplay between federal immigration policy and local
practices of death care on the border, the implications of policies that
cause increased death tolls, the politics of humanitarian immigration
reform, and, finally, how allowing ourselves to be haunted by the slow
mass casualties of the border can and should inspire us to act.
Gabriella
Soto is a contemporary archaeologist who examines the material world to
understand pressing social issues. Integrating ethnographic methods,
GIS technology, and archival research, she specializes in migration
materialities, focusing on Latinx migration and security at the
US-Mexico border. Her work analyzes the material footprints of transit,
forensic death investigations, and security and humanitarian
infrastructure. An ACLS fellow whose work has also been funded by the
Wenner-Gren Foundation, Soto is a research affiliate at the Binational
Migration Institute and holds faculty affiliations at Arizona State
University’s School of Transborder Studies, School of Interdisciplinary
Forensics, and the Latinx Oral History Lab. Her research has appeared in
American Anthropologist and Political Geography, and her article on
migrant material culture won the American Anthropological Association’s
Gordon R. Willey Paper Prize. Dr. Soto is the author of Border
Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of
Haunting (University of Arizona Press, 2026).

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1h 8min
July 19, 2026 Molly M. Brookfield, "Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States" (UNC Press, 2026)
Molly Brookfield’s book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) explores
the historical, legal, and cultural history of street harassment in the
United States. Historically, Brookfield identified the "masher panic"
(late 19th–early 20th century) when reformers and municipalities labeled
male accosting of women a public problem and enacted anti-masher
ordinances or applied disorderly-conduct laws. On law and policy, the
book highlights primarily local legal responses against harassment, with
municipal codes and reinterpretations of existing ordinances more
common than coherent federal action that criminalizes mashing.
In Watching the Girls Go By,
street harassment is situated on a continuum with other gendered and
sexualized violence, with the argument that street harassment normalizes
and underpins more extreme harms against women. The book portrays
historical scholarly perspectives to street harassment including those
of Cheryl Bernard and Edith Schlaffler. Also, the book builds on diverse
historical sources and employs varying terms for similar behaviors. The
author uses "intrusive behaviors" as a more precise analytic category
while preserving period-specific terms when discussing particular
historical contexts.
Mariam Olugbodi
is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the
monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches
Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag.
Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible
to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge
platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain
inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a
teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through
her social links: LinkedIn, ORCID, Meta.

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41min

FAQs about New Books in American Studies:

How many episodes does New Books in American Studies have?

The podcast currently has 9,582 episodes available.

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