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

4.4

3232 ratings

Download on the App Store

Download on the App Store

Get it on Google Play

FAQs about New Books in American Studies:

How many episodes does New Books in American Studies have?

The podcast currently has 9,636 episodes available.

New Books in American Studies episodes:

July 14, 2026 Robert G Parkinson, "Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier" (Norton, 2024)
We are divided over the history of the United States, and one of the central dividing lines is the frontier. Was it a site of heroism? Or was it where the full force of an all-powerful empire was brought to bear on Native peoples? In this startingly original work Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier (Norton, 2024), historian Robert Parkinson presents a new account of ever-shifting encounters between white colonists and Native Americans. Drawing skillfully on Joseph Conrad's famous novella, Heart of Darkness, he demonstrates that imperialism in North America was neither heroic nor a perfectly planned conquest. It was, rather, as bewildering, violent, and haphazard as the European colonization of Africa, which Conrad knew firsthand and fictionalized in his masterwork.
At the center of Parkinson's story are two families whose entwined histories ended in tragedy. The family of Shickellamy, one of the most renowned Indigenous leaders of the eighteenth century, were Iroquois diplomats laboring to create a world where settlers and Native people could coexist. The Cresaps were frontiersmen who became famous throughout the colonies for their bravado, scheming, and land greed. Together, the families helped determine the fate of the British and French empires, which were battling for control of the Ohio River Valley. From the Seven Years' War to the protests over the Stamp Act to the start of the Revolutionary War, Parkinson recounts the major turning points of the era from a vantage that allows us to see them anew, and to perceive how bewildering they were to people at the time.
For the Shickellamy family, it all came to an end on April 30, 1774, when most of the clan were brutally murdered by white settlers associated with the Cresaps at a place called Yellow Creek. That horrific event became news all over the continent, and it led to war in the interior, at the very moment the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Michael Cresap, at first blamed for the massacre at Yellow Creek, would be transformed by the Revolution into a hero alongside George Washington. In death, he helped cement the pioneer myth at the heart of the new republic.
Parkinson argues that American history is, in fact, tied to the frontier, just not in the ways we are often told. Altering our understanding of the past, he also shows what this new understanding should mean for us today.
Robert G. Parkinson is professor of history at Binghamton University.
Edward J. Blum is a professor of nineteenth-century United States History in the History Department at San Diego State University.

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
33min
July 14, 2026 Soraya Murray, "Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination" (MIT Press, 2026)
Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination
(MIT Press, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies
classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about
advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech,
military weaponry, and surveillance culture. Technothriller is
about the changing imagination of technology within an American context
and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of
modern life.
Soraya Murray
is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the visual
culture of innovation, advanced computation, and its imaginaries as
imaged in popular American films, for which technology assumes a central
role. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), examines popular video games like Assassin’s Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Theft Auto as visual culture. She currently serves as Provost of Porter College, UCSC.

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
1h 7min
July 13, 2026 Jeffrey A. Marx, "Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I" (NYU Press, 2026)
Why were Jews once stereotyped as America's arsonists? In this
episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Jeffrey Marx to
discuss his fascinating book Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I (NYU Press, 2026), which uncovers a little-known chapter in the history of American antisemitism.
In the decades after the American Civil War, major insurance
companies instructed agents to deny fire insurance to Jewish customers,
claiming they were uniquely prone to arson. That accusation quickly
spread beyond the insurance industry, finding its way into newspapers,
cartoons, vaudeville, popular songs, and silent films, helping to cement
the image of the "Jewish firebug" in the American imagination.
Drawing on fire department records, insurance files, trial
transcripts, newspapers, and other archival sources, Marx untangles the
complicated relationship between stereotype and reality. He explores why
some Jewish immigrants became involved in organized arson schemes, how
insurance companies often enabled those crimes for their own financial
interests, and why Jews became the only ethnic group in America burdened
with this particular accusation. The result is a nuanced history that
reveals as much about immigrant life, poverty, and urban America as it
does about the enduring power of antisemitic myths.
Together, Marx and Katz examine how stereotypes are created, why they
persist long after the facts have faded, and what this forgotten
episode teaches us about the history—and continuing evolution—of
antisemitism in the United States.

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
39min
July 13, 2026 Nelson Lichtenstein on Clinton and Neoliberalism
We are joined by Nelson Lichtenstein, one of the deans of American labor history. The conversation ranges widely, from the tragedy of the Clinton administration and what might have been, to the importance of studying capitalism, to the politics of baby boomer self-loathing—all key parts of the history of the 1990s!

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
1h 16min
July 11, 2026 Diana Cucuz, "Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Diana Cucuz about her book, Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR (University of Toronto Press, 2023) and also asks her for advice to beginner scholars studying gender and the Cold War. A bit about Dr. Cucuz’s book: throughout the Cold War, Soviet citizens had limited access to US life and culture. Amerika, a glossy Russian-language magazine similar to Life, provided a rare exception. Produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA), America’s first peacetime propaganda organization, Amerika was used to influence the Soviet public and convince women in particular that an American-style consumer culture and conservative gender norms could better their lives. Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds relies on USIA archives, issues of Amerika, and American women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal to show how, during the postwar period, USIA officials deployed idealized images of American women as happy, fulfilled, and feminine wives, mothers, and homemakers.

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
36min
July 11, 2026 “American Elegy” with author Ed Simon
I discuss with the author his book American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America (Ig Publishing, 2026). Simon is the founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books.
The book is a lively and lyrical medley of short “flash” essays, as he
calls them, and our conversation ranges from his notes on “General Tso’s
Chicken” as a sticky American fusion classic to his thoughts on Jane
Jacob’s early 1960’s exploration of what makes for a vibrant urban
milieu. As Simon tells me, there is much in the American experience—in
the American song, it can be said—to celebrate notwithstanding all of
the discordant notes.
Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic.
He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall
Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January.

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
47min
July 11, 2026 Mary E. Mendoza, "Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border" (UNC Press, 2026)
As many as ten thousand people attempt to illegally cross the border
between the US and Mexico each month, braving deserts, rivers, and other
environmental hazards in the process. But the very illegality of that
crossing has an environmental history, writes Penn State University
assistant professor Mary Mendoza in Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border
(University of North Carolina Press, 2026). It was diseases, microbes,
insects, and animals which, in part, hardened the border from a porous
array of landscapes into the militarized zone seen on the news every
night. However, despite the ecological and political difficulties of
doing so, people continue to cross the border between the two countries,
defying environmental odds and risking death along the way. In Deadly Divide,
Mendoza explains why, underscores the risks involved, and shows how we
got to this point, keeping an eye on the border region's stark landscape
with every step of the way.

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
54min
July 09, 2026 Paul Helseth and David P. Smith eds., "New Perspectives on Old Princeton, 1812-1929" (Routledge, 2024)
New Perspectives on Old Princeton, 1812-1929 (Routledge, 2024) focuses on Princeton
Theological Seminary and the theologians who taught there from the time
of its founding in 1812 to the time of its reorganization in 1929. It
confronts the standard assessment of Old Princeton in the historiography
of North American evangelicalism and sets out why a new paradigm is
needed. The volume critically engages with the 'Ahlstrom thesis' and
other more recent scholarship concerning Old Princeton's relationship to
the Scottish intellectual tradition. The contributions seek to move
beyond Old Princeton's alleged indebtedness to Enlightenment thought and
advance a more constructive reading of the Old Princetonians, their
theology, and their place in the American evangelical experience. The
book offers a fresh and more accurate assessment of the theological and
philosophical assumptions that held sway at Old Princeton and through
the seminary to the American continent and beyond. It will appeal to
scholars interested in theology, religious history and intellectual
history.
Paul K. Helseth (PhD, Marquette University) is associate professor of
Christian thought at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and
the author of Right Reason and the Princeton Mind (2010).
David Smith (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is pastor in
the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church and adjunct faculty in
historical theology at Erksine Theological Seminary. He received his
M.Div. from Covenant Seminary (1995) and completed his dissertation,
published as B. B. Warfield’s Scientifically Constructive Theological Scholarship in 2010, under John Woodbridge.

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
45min
July 09, 2026 Doubled Up: Shared Households and the Precarious Lives of Families
More than eleven million children in the US live in doubled-up households, sharing space with extended family or friends. These households are even more common among low-income families, families of color, and single-parent families, functioning as a private safety net for many in a country with extremely limited public support for families. Despite their prevalence, we know little about how shared households form and how they shape family life. Doubled Up is an in-depth look at the experiences of families with children living in doubled-up households.
Drawing on extensive interviews with sixty parents living in doubled-up households, Dr. Hope Harvey examines what circumstances and motivations lead families to form doubled-up households, how living in shared households affects daily routines, and how families fare after these arrangements dissolve.
Dr. Harvey shows that although families rely on doubling up to get by in the face of rapidly rising housing costs, precarious labor markets, and unaffordable childcare, these private arrangements are rarely sufficient to overcome such structural barriers. And doubling up incurs its own costs for both host and guest families. For doubled-up families, negotiating household relationships and navigating shared space reshapes family life. Understanding the dynamics of doubled-up households extends scholarship on family life beyond the nuclear family and points the way toward better policies that will serve all families.
Guest: Dr. Hope Harvey is an assistant professor at the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Kentucky and a research affiliate at the Center for Poverty Research. She is the author of the award-winning book Doubled Up.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
What's On Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life
The Fight To Save The Town
You're Doing It Wrong
Raising Them
What Do You Want Out Of Life
How Girls Achieve
What Might Be
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!

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
57min
July 08, 2026 Gregg Andrews, "Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri: The Rise and Fall of Manufacturing in America’s Hometown, 1890–1970" (LSU Press, 2026)
In Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri: The Rise and Fall of Manufacturing in America’s Hometown, 1890–1970 (LSU Press, 2026), Dr. Gregg Andrews examines the history of factory laborers
in a celebrated Mississippi River town. In the late 1890s, shoe
manufacturing transformed Mark Twain’s boyhood home from a steamboat
village to a factory town. By the mid-1920s, the St. Louis–based
International Shoe Company, the world’s largest shoe manufacturer at the
time, controlled all shoe production in Hannibal and continued to do so
until it shut down production lines in the 1960s. The company kept a
tight grip on the town as it battled to keep out unions and maintain labor
at a low cost and in a malleable state. When Hannibal’s shoe workers
claimed their right to organize under the New Deal during the Great
Depression, the shoe corporation was defiant. The company’s stance
sparked mob violence against outside union organizers, nurtured a
company union, pitted unionists against company loyalists, and badly
divided Hannibal. At the same time, the town was engaged in yearlong
festivities to celebrate the centennial of Mark Twain’s birth and the
opening of a museum named in his honor.
Dr.
Andrews’s study of shoe manufacturing and its production workers is
thick in detail and rich with the human stories of those whose lives
were shaped by the rise and fall of the shoe industry in Hannibal.
Andrews captures the shoe workers—white and Black, men and women—in
their own words as they describe their jobs, family struggles, and
battles to unionize.
Dr. Andrews examines the prevailing conditions that led the company to
close its production facilities in Hannibal, leaving shoe workers and
the town to confront the early shock waves of deindustrialization. His
study of an industry that has virtually disappeared in the United States
leaves a record for the families of thousands of American shoe workers
and the citizens of Hannibal to better understand their history and the
role shoe manufacturing played in it.
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
1h 10min

FAQs about New Books in American Studies:

How many episodes does New Books in American Studies have?

The podcast currently has 9,636 episodes available.

More shows like New Books in American Studies