It was a year that at times left Lyndon Johnson feeling as though he was living in a continuous nightmare. Yet as Kyle Longley describes in his book LBJ’s 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America’s Year of Upheaval (Cambridge University Press, 2018), it was one in which he...

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti and Andrea Bernardi interview Franklin Obeng-Odoom who teaches urban economics and political economy in the School of Built Environment at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2016, Dr Obeng-Odoom won the Patrick Welch Prize awarded by the Association for Social Economics. He also won the...

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Music is frequently connected to leftist politics and seen as the soundtrack to social protest movements, most notably the civil rights movement. But the far right groups use music too. Benjamin Teitelbaum‘s Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Swedish...

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Prior to the wave of protests in 2017 supporting immigrants in the US, there were the protests of 2006. That spring, millions of Latinos and other immigrants across the country opposed Congressional action hostile to immigrants. These protesters participated in one of the largest movements to defend immigrant and civil...

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

As a United States senator in the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Vandenberg was one of the leading Republican voices shaping the nation’s foreign policy. Though initially a staunch isolationist, as Hendrik Meijer explains in Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century (University of Chicago Press, 2017),...

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Studies of Arab nationalism populate the field of Middle Eastern studies, perhaps even overpopulate it. However, what Adam Mestyan does in Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2017) is very different: he looks specifically at patriotic sentiment, not nationalism per se,...

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In the wake of the Alabama Senate election in December, 2017, attention has been drawn to the intersection of religion and politics. This is the subject of God at the Grassroots 2016: The Christian Right in American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), co-edited by Mark Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. Rozell...

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In a perceptive challenge to longstanding assumptions about Dominican anti-Haitianism, April J. Mayes finds fresh ways to think about the production of race in late 19th and 20th century Dominican Republic. Combining intellectual history with fine-grained social history, The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race and Dominican National Identity (University Press of...

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In their new book Recharging Judaism: How Civic Engagement is Good For Synagogues, Jews and America (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2017), Rabbi Judith Schindler and Judy Seldin-Cohen argue that social action and Jewish action go hand-in-hand. The book offers both inspiration and guidance, weaving together passages from Torah and...

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University. As a feminist and moral philosopher, Manne examines an idea that has been inadequately addressed in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2017). She argues that misogyny is on the wane as a working...

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics