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 9,657 episodes available.

New Books in American Studies episodes:

August 27, 2026 Jamie L. Brummitt, "Protestant Relics in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Edward Blum interviews Dr. Jamie L. Brummitt on how new book Protestant Relics in Early America.
In Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford UP, 2025), Jamie L. Brummitt upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. Brummitt chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered around collecting supernatural memory objects associated with dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends. These objects materialized the real physical presences of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth.
As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life--including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people--sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington's Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, post-mortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women's education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife.
In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, Brummitt demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather than diminished embodied presence. Moreover, Brummitt reveals how the secular historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down. This book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early American history, religion, politics, art, and popular culture.
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42min
August 27, 2026 John Davie, "Greek To Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Ancient Greek lives on in our culture in surprising ways. Sometimes funny - the word for an actor, hupokrites, gives us 'hypocrite'; sometimes beautiful - an astronaut is literally a sailor of the skies. And that's before we get to the myths which gave us our Achilles heel or our Midas Touch. And what about crocodile tears, which comes from the Greek's belief that crocodiles cried while eating their victims!
Greek To Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World (Bloomsbury, 2026) is a learned but always entertaining journey through the world of the Ancient Greeks, their extraordinary language and how it has shaped our own understanding of the world today. After all, what is language but the frame through which we understand the world? Davie aims to bring more than just humour, he seeks to trace the thread of ancient Greek thought that runs through our own civilization, always with the lightness of touch and fascinating etymology. We meet Eros and Aphrodite, Alexander the Great and Oscar Wilde, the stoics, Epicurus and Sparta.
While this is a book about language and the touching and illuminating presence of the ancient Greeks in our current words, it's also about how Ancient Greece shapes our culture today.
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1h 9min
August 26, 2026 Malcolm Murfett, "Eden's Alternative to Appeasement: The Anglo-American Strategy that Might Have Been, 1937–38" (Tithebarn Press, 2026)
As Foreign Secretary in Neville Chamberlain's Cabinet in 1937, Eden
didn't believe in appeasing the German and Italian dictatorships or the
militaristic Japanese regime. Instead, he wanted to confront their
aggression head on. Faced with growing Japanese assertiveness, including
the launching of an undeclared war on China in July 1937, Eden appealed
to the US for help. He believed sending an Anglo-American naval force
to the Western Pacific would demonstrate that the democracies were not
spineless, but were prepared to stand up for what they believed in. Was
this a viable alternative to Chamberlain's appeasement policy, now
notorious for its failure in the face of fascism?
In Eden's Alternative to Appeasement: The Anglo-American Strategy that Might Have Been, 1937–38 (Tithebarn Press, 2026), historian
Malcolm Murfett tells the story, using a wide range of primary sources
from the UK and US archives, of Eden's push to persuade Roosevelt's
administration to be more assertive in the Pacific. He reveals the
diplomatic dance both sides engaged in, each unsure of the other's
reliability, of their own ability to commit, and tied up in their own
internal struggles for policy dominance. We get a real insight into how
two once-and-future allies managed each other's expectations, as well as
the wider strategic parameters within which they were operating.
With
eerie echoes of our own times, Murfett explores the challenges involved
in both international diplomacy, and foreign and security policy. How
standing up for principles and values can become compromised by the
requirements of Realpolitik, and logistical constraints.
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35min
August 24, 2026 Eran Shalev, "The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation" (U Virginia Press, 2025)
Why does the American flag use stars to represent the states? In The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation (U Virginia Press, 2025), Eran Shalev answers this and many other questions, considering the cosmic imagery—so familiar today but so peculiar on reflection—that suffused the United States’ early political culture. In this comprehensive study, Shalev uncovers how “political astronomy”—the discussion and representation of politics through astronomical models, allusions, and metaphors—reflected and facilitated the emerging worldview that enabled Americans to justify and find meaning in the country’s new democratic modes of governance and its federal system. No other scholar has looked at American political rhetoric through this lens; in so doing, Shalev is able to explain in fascinating detail how Americans turned away from the sun of heliocentric monarchy toward the night sky full of federated constellations, and to discover republicanism imprinted in the firmament.
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33min
August 24, 2026 A.J.A. Woods, "The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West" (Verso, 2026)
The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (Verso Books, 2026) is the definitive history of a dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory.
“Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But
despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely
investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders,
right-wing intellectuals, and White House officials who believe a
coterie of left-wing scholars and students is plotting to undermine
Western civilization. Drawing on years of archival research and using
the tools of critical theory, A.J.A. Woods reveals how a group of German
thinkers known as the Frankfurt School was recast as the sinister
orchestrators of a global conspiracy. Instead of simply debunking this
conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the
political movements that have declared war on all that passes for
Cultural Marxism in the US, the UK, and Brazil.
Only when we understand the practices and weaknesses of those
reactionaries committed to fighting this illusory threat—a conflict
causing real-world damage—can we effectively resist. This is an
essential book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological currents
shaping politics in the twenty-first century.
A.J.A. Woods is an intellectual historian who lives in Brighton,
England. In 2022, Woods received a PhD from the Centre for the Study of
Theory and Criticism at Western University, Canada. Their writings on
conspiracy theories and reactionary politics have been translated into
four languages and appeared in Open Democracy, Patterns of Prejudice,
and Marx & Philosophy Review of Books.
Morteza Hajizadeh
is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
18th
and 19th Century British Literature.
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55min
August 22, 2026 Mark Leonard, "Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail" (Polity Press, 2026)
"Expansive visions. Universal institutions. Ideas of progress. It
was on the back of these that the West surged ahead and built a global
order. I was born into that world. But my children have entered a world
of Un-order."
We live in an explosive world. Trump is blowing up political order.
Xi Jinping is scrambling the economy. And Putin is redrawing the map of
Europe. At a time when every crisis bleeds into the next — from
pandemics and wars to climate shocks and AI revolutions — the old rules
of global order are collapsing. Mark Leonard reveals how geopolitics is
being rewritten in an age of "Un-Order," where no one agrees on the
rules, and even the concept of order itself is up for debate. Drawing on
years of conversations with leaders and thinkers from Beijing to
Washington, Leonard argues that we are witnessing a new divide in
international politics between the grand "architects" who try to build a
stable global system and the nimble "artisans" who adapt, improvise,
and survive amidst disruption. China, he shows, has embraced the
"artisan's" mindset while Europe and the West cling to the fading
certainties of the "architects". Part analysis, part manifesto, ⁠Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail⁠ (Polity Press, 2026) offers
a bold new framework for understanding power in the twenty-first
century — and a call for leaders to stop defending yesterday's world and
start learning how to thrive in tomorrow's.
Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think–tank.
Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
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1h 1min
August 22, 2026 Sandeep Vaheesan, "Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
In Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Sandeep Vaheesan recounts the rather overlooked story of how electricity spread across the U.S. economy during the 20th century. This book sheds careful light on the varied institutions and interests mediating the process, including investor-owned utilities and the rural electric cooperative. Vaheesan does not hesitate to critique the successes and failures cropping up along the way; rather, he lays them all bare in service of paving an actionable path toward the decarbonization and democratization of power.
Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He leads their legal research and advocacy, including the amicus program. He has written and spoken widely on antimonopoly law and policy and building a fair economy. Previously, he worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and American Antitrust Institute.
Anna Olteanu is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism.
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51min
August 21, 2026 A. J. Murphy, "Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business" (Harvard UP, 2026)
The strategic landscape of the Cold War generated political support for a permanent US military force of unprecedented scale. Faced with the problem of managing this behemoth, leaders of the defense bureaucracy looked to private industry for inspiration: since the military now resembled a huge industrial conglomerate, they reasoned, it should be run like a business. In Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. A. J. Murphy explores the profound consequences of translating military structures of command, logistics, and warfare into capitalist terms.
In the realm of budgeting and finance, defense reformers refashioned the supply process as a buy-and-sell transaction between units, requiring officers to express their need for equipment and labor in dollar terms. Bureaucrats embraced Taylorist work measurement to supervise everything from clerical filing to the production of massive weapons systems. The services even engaged management consultants to establish officer-training academies modeled on the Harvard Business School.
After the Vietnam War, many military leaders pushed back, questioning “managerialism” and calling for a return to traditional concepts of command. Civilian critics also chimed in, protesting the callousness of the business-minded secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who famously measured success and failure in body counts. By this time, however, the language and values of management had thoroughly infiltrated the military’s institutional structure and daily operations. As Pentagon Capitalism makes clear, the reorganization of the defense bureaucracy along the lines of a for-profit firm durably altered the experience of military work and facilitated the lasting privatization of US national security.
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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41min
August 21, 2026 Ashanté M. Reese, "Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness" (W. W. Norton, 2026)
Food justice is defined as the understanding that our food system is unequal and that something needs to be done about it. But how can we create a world where everyone has enough? What does it mean to truly nourish ourselves and our communities?
In Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness (Norton, 2026), anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese argues for a vibrant new vision of food justice that places Black communities at the center and offers us a visionary, delicious path forward. Reese reveals that to truly create equity in our food systems, we must embrace the abundance that already exists around us—and recognize that the social body is as important as our individual health
Gather presents rich, on-the-ground stories of gathering around food in four spaces—gardens, family reunions, repasts, and protests. Blending rich storytelling with analysis, these chapters argue for the political power of food and invite us to learn from the tactics Black communities have long used to create sustainable, systemic change.
There are no simple solutions to the problems of acute need. But by recognizing that food justice is already all around us, we can start working together to create a more nourishing, joyful world. Gather is an intimate and urgent invitation to embrace local power, build better food systems, and nourish ourselves, body and soul.
Ashanté M. Reese is a writer, anthropologist, and associate professor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Raised in Cooper Settlement, Texas, she lives in Austin and is involved in food justice movements nationwide.
Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Her book, Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
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37min
August 20, 2026 Seth Masket, "The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Political Scientist Seth Masket’s new book, The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders (Cambridge UP, 2026) is a companion book to his earlier work, Learning from Loss: The Democrats, 2016-2020 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In researching both these works, Masket spends time with party leaders throughout the United States, discussing the loss at the presidential level (for Democrats in 2016, for Republicans in 2020) and seeking to understand what the lessons might be for each party from their electoral loss. The Elephants in the Room focuses in on the idea and trajectory of nominating Donald Trump for the third time in as many election cycles, as the local party leaders of the Republican Party considered what to do in the lead up to the 2024 election cycle. Masket is able to regularly survey Republican Party chairs (state chairs, local chairs, county chairs) during the period leading to the 2024 nomination cycle. He also interviewed many of these same chairs, especially the ones in New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, and other early primary states. The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders analyzes the thinking among these party leaders—not necessarily at the national level, but certainly long-standing and engaged local-level leaders—and their concern that nominating Trump again would lead to another presidential election loss for the GOP.
One of the key points Masket makes both in the book and in our conversation is that these leaders had built, over time, a political party that they could no longer lead. These leaders are also distinct from the voters themselves, who may be adherents to the party, but are not part of the political party in the same way. Thus, the voters were much more interested in and attracted to the populism that has long lurked within American politics, and, of late, Republican politics, while the partisan leaders were not nearly as drawn to this strain of politics. We discuss the recent history of populist politics in the GOP, with Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run and convention speech as a key point within the historical trajectory. Trump, in 2015, entered partisan politics building on this already existing faction within the GOP. This is part of the post-2020 election framing, but Masket makes an important point in how the Republican Party differed from the Democrats in learning from a loss at the presidential level. For the Republicans, it was very difficult to learn much from the results of the 2020 election because so few Republicans were or are willing to acknowledge that Trump actually lost the 2020 election. It is quite difficult to learn a lesson from an event that didn’t happen.
Seth Masket, Learning from Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
The Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, CO has copies of The Elephants in the Room.
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
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46min

FAQs about New Books in American Studies:

How many episodes does New Books in American Studies have?

The podcast currently has 9,657 episodes available.

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