New Books in American Studies

John's “Arendt's Refugee Politics” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt is an opponent both of identity politics and also of a cosmpolitan universalism that is blind to all the differences (of race, gender, belief) that make us who though not what we are. Going back to one of the first pieces she published in English, a 1943 essay from Menorah called "We Refugees", he reflected on how amazingly Arendt was able to air her unease about militant Zionism at the same time she warned fellow arrivals in America from rushing to disguise their origins. Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and a read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores some of Georgia’s earliest settlers, the Salzburgers.  Georgia, the last of Britain’s American mainland colonies, began with high aspirations to create a morally sound society based on small family farms with no enslaved workers. But those goals were not realized, and Georgia became a slave plantation society, following the Carolina model. This trajectory of failure is well known. But looking at the Salzburgers, who emigrated from Europe as part of the original plan, provides a very different story.  The Good Forest reveals the experiences of the Salzburger migrants who came to Georgia with the support of British and German philanthropy, where they achieved self-sufficiency in the Ebenezer settlement while following the Trustees’ plans. Because their settlement comprised a significant portion of Georgia’s early population, their experiences provide a corrective to our understanding of early Georgia and help reveal the possibilities in Atlantic colonization as they built a cohesive community.  The relative success of the Ebenezer settlement, furthermore, challenges the inherent environmental, cultural, and economic determinism that has dominated Georgia history. That well-worn narrative often implies (or even explicitly states) that only a slave-based plantation economy—as implemented after the Trustee era—could succeed. With this history, Auman illuminates the interwoven themes of Atlantic migrations, colonization, charity, and transatlantic religious networks. Guest: Dr. Karen Auman is an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University and a certified genealogist. She studies Germans during the colonial period in the Atlantic World, religion on the frontiers of America, migrations, and families. Host: Lucy Smith Biemiller is an intended M.A. History student at the University of Georgia. She studies 18th and 19th material culture in the American South primarily as it relates to classical culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community. In this episode, we sit down with Ana Patricia Rodríguez, author of Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area (U Arizona Press, 2025). In In Avocado Dreams, Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area. Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñidades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region.This timely and relevant work not only enriches our understanding of Salvadoran diasporic experiences but also contributes significantly to broader discussions on migration, identity, and cultural production in the United States. This interview was conducted by Mary Reynolds, publicity manager for the University of Arizona Press. Her book, The Quake That Drained the Desert (forthcoming in 2026) investigates the 1887 borderlands earthquake that changed surface water and groundwater in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.'s decade-long clash over the meaning of freedom--and how their conflicting visions still divide American politics In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history--and still divide American politics. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of "freedom now," insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people--regardless of race--were empowered politically, economically, and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of "extremism in defense of liberty," advocating radical individualism. In One Man's Freedom, Nicholas Buccola tells the compelling story of Goldwater and King's dramatic decade-long debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal. Part dual biography, part history, One Man's Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal (Princeton UP, 2025)  traces the actions and words of Goldwater and King over a crucial and eventful decade, from their dizzying rise through 1964, which ended with Goldwater's landslide defeat in the presidential election and King's Nobel Peace Prize. The book chronicles why Goldwater and King, who never met in person, came to view each other as perhaps the greatest threat to freedom in America. It explains how their ideas of freedom could be so vastly different, yet both so deeply rooted in American history and their times. And it shows how their disagreement continues to shape and explain politics today, when the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats often come down to the question of what kind of freedom Americans want--the one defined by Goldwater or by King? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

A richly detailed history of daily life for colonial Spanish soldiers surviving on the eighteenth-century Texas Gulf Coast. In 1775, Spanish King Carlos III ordered the capture of American pelicans for his wildlife park in Madrid. The command went to the only Spanish fort on the Texas coast—Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía in present-day Goliad. But the overworked soldiers stationed at the fort had little interest indulging a king an ocean away. Their days were consumed with guarding their community against powerful Indigenous peoples and managing the demands of frontier life. The royal order went ignored. Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios (U Texas Press, 2025) brings to life the world of Presidio La Bahía’s Hispano soldiers, whose duties ranged from heated warfare to high-stakes diplomacy, while their leisure pursuits included courtship, card playing, and cockfighting. It highlights the lives of presidio women and reveals the ways the Spanish legal system was used by and against the soldiers as they continually negotiated their roles within the empire and their community. Although they were agents of the Spanish crown, soldiers at times defied their king and even their captain as they found ways to assert their autonomy. Offering a fresh perspective on colonial Texas, Wrangling Pelicans recreates the complexities of life at the empire’s edge, where survival mattered more than royal decrees. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Americans have always fought over the meaning of freedom and equality. What is not commonly recognized is that the battles most pivotal in defining our democracy, from the framing of the Constitution to the decades-long backlash to the civil rights movement, hinged on one issue—taxes.In The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History (Basic Books, 2025), Vanessa S. Williamson challenges the myth that Americans are instinctively anti-tax, revealing that fights over taxes have always been proxies for deeper conflicts over who is included in “We the People.” Poorer people have repeatedly built movements that sought to tax all Americans to create a more equal and democratic nation. Wealthy people have responded by constraining the power to tax and stifling democracy through voting restrictions, gerrymandering, and violence. Yet as hard as anti-tax crusaders have fought to create an America that redistributes not from rich to poor, but from non-white people to rich white people, the battle rages on.The Price of Democracy uncovers how fights for fiscal fairness have defined American history, delivering a powerful message to the present: that taxes are the public’s most powerful weapon in the fight for a real democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town (Duke UP, 2024), Heath Pearson showcases dynamic, interdependent community as the best hope for undoing the systems of confinement that reproduce capital in Cumberland County, New Jersey—a place that is home to three state prisons, one federal prison, and the regional jail. Pearson places today’s prisons within the region’s longer history of Lenape genocide, chattel slavery, Japanese American labor camps, and other forms of racialized punishment and carceral control. From this vantage, prisons appear not as the structural fix for the region’s failed political economy but as a continuation of the carceral principle that has always sustained it. This ongoing use of confinement, though, is merely the backdrop. Through ethnographic vignettes written in story form, Pearson offers an alternative history of the unruly and unexpected ways that people resist, get by, make money, find joy, and build radical social life in the small, unseen spaces beside large-scale confinement. As such, Pearson enriches our understanding of daily life in and around prisons—in any American community—while providing a kaleidoscope of possibilities for theorizing and organizing alternative paths. Heath Pearson is Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University. Alize Arıcan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg as a Barnumesque purveyor of spectacle, Lester D. Friedman presents the filmmaker as a major artist who pairs an ongoing willingness to challenge himself with a widely recognized technical mastery.This new edition of Citizen Spielberg (University of Illinois Press, 2022) expands Friedman’s original analysis to include films of the 2010s like Lincoln and Ready Player One. Breaking down the works by genre, Friedman looks at essential aspects of Spielberg’s art, from his storytelling concerns and worldview to the uncanny connection with audiences that has powered his longtime influence as a cultural force. Friedman's examination reveals a sustained artistic vision--a vision that shows no sign of exhausting itself or audiences after Spielberg's nearly fifty years as a high-profile filmmaker.Incisive and discerning, Citizen Spielberg, Second Edition, offers a career-spanning appraisal of a moviemaking icon.Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales [https://research.bangor.ac.uk/...(b8c6d91f-14c5-4862-8745-0f5d0e938a28).html]. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick [https://oxford.universitypress...]. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris argues in Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (U Chicago Press, 2022), the reform impulse is baked into American higher education, the result of generations of elite reformers who have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. When that reform is beneficial, offering major rewards for minor changes, colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile, attacking autonomy or values, they know how to resist it. The result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence.In the early twentieth century, the “academic engineers,” a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but those efforts fell short, despite the wealth and power of their backers, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians is again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But, as Ris argues, top-down design is not destiny. Drawing on extensive and original archival research, Other People’s Colleges offers an account of higher education that sheds light on today’s reform agenda.Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Student in Sociology of Education at the New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana’s iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads (2022) delves into the history of this celebrated New Orleans artifact, explaining how Mardi Gras beads came to be in the first place and how they grew to have such an outsize presence in New Orleans celebrations. It explores their origins before World War One through their ascent to the premier parade catchable by the Depression era. Doug MacCash explores the manufacture of Mardi Gras beads in places as far-flung as the Sudetenland, India, and Japan, and traces the shift away from glass beads to the modern, disposable plastic versions. Mardi Gras Beads concludes in the era of coronavirus, when parades (and therefore bead throwing) were temporarily suspended because of health concerns, and considers the future of biodegradable Mardi Gras beads in a city ever more threatened by the specter of climate change.Doug MacCash covers New Orleans art and culture for NOLA.com, The Times- Picayune, and The New Orleans Advocate. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a PhD in Musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.Check out some of MacCash's other pertinent writings from NOLA.com here: "Pretend Karens, marching traffic cones and French Quarter Fools: An amazing Monday before Mardi Gras""Biodegradable Mardi Gras beads might be rarest throw of 2022 - or ever""Mardi Gras flashback: Texas artist, 65, says she was first to bare breasts for beads at Carnival"Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research is about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies