New Books in American Studies

Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century (Edinburgh UP, 2025) by Dr. Julian Schmid considers how the long-standing superhero genre has been reinvigorated in the twenty-first century as an interlocutor of security and surveillance discourses following the events of ‘9/11’. While superheroes have a long cultural history, Dr. Schmid argues that their contemporary representations in Hollywood films and TV shows create and deepen specific discourses on security, terrorism and violence. He shows how the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, in particular, are important artefacts that can help us to understand how these discourses are popularised and ultimately normalised.The book offers a rich account of the emergence of superheroes against the backdrop of America’s history since its founding in 1776 and their rise to popularity through comic books since the 1930s. Analysing the connections between superheroes, foreign policy and security from ‘9/11’ to the present, it demonstrates the significance of superheroes for the construction of heroism and security in contemporary times.  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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Liberalism may feel as though it has been around forever - as the "dominant ideology of the modern west" - but not even its advocates and detractors can agree what it is. Political sophisticates ask whether it is classical-, social-, ordo- or neo-liberal while American main street associates it with socialism. Yet a new generation of "post-liberal" thinkers know liberalism well enough to want to give it upi or, in most cases, go back to a time - real or imagined - before it took hold.In the US, these political philosophers are mostly Catholic conservatives. In the UK, with one prominent exception, they are largely left-wing Anglicans. In both countries, they tend to be religious and yearn for pre-globalisation communitarian, familial and patriotic certainties.  "Where liberals believe political authority is derived from individuals consenting to be ruled, for post-liberals it comes from serving the common good," writes Matt Sleat in Post-Liberalism (Polity, 2025). His book explores the ideas of the likes of Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, Sohrab Ahmari and post-liberalism's two standout thinkers: Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen.Matt Sleat is Reader in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield.*The author's book recommendations were Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty First Century by Edward Hall (OUP Oxford, 2025) and Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order by Paul Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2022). Click here to see the full reading list.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who writes and podcasts at 242.news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Shifting the focus of AIDS history away from the coasts to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, this impressive book uncovers how homonormative political strategies weaponized the AIDS crisis to fuel gentrification. During the height of the epidemic, white gay activists and politicians pursued social acceptance by assimilating to Midwestern cultural values. This approach, Dr. René Esparza argues in From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS (UNC Press, 2025), diluted radical facets of LGBTQ activism, rejected a politics of sexual dissidence, severed ties with communities of color, and ushered in the destruction of vibrant queer spaces.Drawing from archival research, oral histories, and urban studies from the 1970s through the 1990s, Dr. Esparza illustrates how the onset of the AIDS epidemic provided a pretext for further criminalization of perceived sexual deviance, targeting sex workers, “promiscuous” gay men, and transgender women. More than the criminalization of people and behaviors, this time period also saw increased targeting of urban venues such as bathhouses, adult bookstores, and public parks where casual, anonymous encounters occurred. Cleansing the city of land uses that undermined gentrification became a protective measure against AIDS, and the most marginalized bore the brunt of the ensuing surveillance and displacement. From Vice to Nice illuminates how, despite purporting seemingly progressive values, LGBTQ Midwestern politics of conformity leveraged the AIDS crisis to further instigate racial and sexual exclusion and fundamentally alter the urban landscape. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Beginning in the 1970s, a series of government agencies established to carry out the federal “war on crime” offered financial and ideological support to the fledgling feminist movement against sexual violence. These entities promoted the carceral tactics of policing, prosecution, and punishment as the only viable means of controlling rape, and they expected anti-rape organizers to embrace them. Yet Black women anti-rape organizers viewed police as a source of violence within their communities, not a solution to it. Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism amid the War on Crime (U Pennsylvania, 2025) examines how Black anti-rape organizers critically engaged both the feminist movement against sexual violence and the federal War on Crime between 1974 and 1994. In Philadelphia, Washington, DC, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and Atlanta, activists inflected Black women’s longstanding tradition of community-based caring labor with the Black feminist condemnation of patriarchal and state violence. Their multifaceted and adaptable brand of anti-rape advocacy was premised on sustaining the survival of Black women and girls individually and Black communities more broadly. In this way, Black anti-rape activists countered the growing emphasis within the feminist movement on controlling rape through carceral collaborations. They acted subversively, redirecting state funds and state-funded research premised on rape control to projects that offered care to Black victims. In public education, social welfare, and public health, they instituted preventative education and emotional healing as modes of justice. At times, they outspokenly resisted carceral legislation that displaced their caring labor with punitive programs of rape control. Spotlighting Black anti-rape organizers’ enduring commitment to care work shows that the cooptation of the feminist movement against sexual violence by law enforcement entities was never total. Between the Street and the State deepens our historical understanding of Black women’s tradition of anti-rape activism by attending to how their tactics shifted in response to the political realignments of the post–civil rights era. Guest: Caitlin Wiesner is an assistant professor of history at Mercy University who specializes in the history of gender, sexuality, race and crime control policy in the 20th century United States. She is also the author of “The War on Crime and the War on Rape: The LEAA and Philadelphia WOAR, 1974-1984," which appeared in the journal, Modern American History, in March 2024, as well as numerous book chapters and reviews. When she is not writing or in the classroom, Dr. Wiesner enjoys cooking (and eating) new foods and exploring the natural and historic wonders of her native New Jersey. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of Hollywood's role in the shaping of the Rust Belt in the United States. During the 1970s and 1980s, filmic representations of shuttered auto plants, furloughed millworkers, and decaying downtowns in the industrial heartland contributed to pervasive narratives of American malaise and decline--informing the wider cultural view of these cities and their people. Author Michael D. Dwyer (Arcadia University) untangles the complicated relationship between Hollywood and the Rust Belt, exploring how the sociocultural image of the region has become a tool to tell stories about America's mythic past, degraded present, and potential futures.Dwyer offers a reading in twofold: through the conventional lens of film and cultural studies, and through an interdisciplinary lens that pulls in elements of cultural geography and urban studies to understand the ways in which Americans learned to interpret the cities and towns of the industrial Midwest. Each chapter spotlights a different Rust Belt city--Johnstown, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit--and considers how films and filmmaking processes helped shape audiences' cultural understanding of those cities. Over the course of the book, Dwyer also examines several films which offer notable representations of the Rust Belt, including Slap Shot, The Blues Brothers, Major League, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and It Follows. Finally, the volume highlights how in more recent years, cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland have all attempted to remake their public image and revitalize their economies through film and media production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution (Island Press, 2025), Benjamin Schneider argues that American city-building is a lost art. U.S. cities used to constantly evolve, experimenting with new urban designs and ambitious infrastructure projects, from railroads and subways to public housing and shopping malls. But in recent years, the country has continued pursuing the same mid-20th century urban development plans—freeways, downtown office towers, suburban housing developments. The Unfinished Metropolis covers how this pattern is why Americans are so dependent on their cars, why housing is so expensive and homelessness is at crisis levels, and why downtowns are struggling and communities are fraying. Over the course of an engaging tour of the built environment, Schneider explores common urban designs that shape our lives and color our cultural imagination: office parks, apartments, single family homes, and transit systems. He explains how these forms came to be, why they no longer function as promised, and introduces readers to the advocates and professionals around the country who are working on transformative new solutions. Benjamin Schneider is a freelance journalist covering all things urbanism. His work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, MIT Technology Review, Slate, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He also writes a Substack newsletter called, “The Urban Condition.” This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo, an urbanist who has worked as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor to the City of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

“Create A More Positive Rehoboth” was a decades-long goal for progress and inclusiveness in a charming beach town in southern Delaware. Rehoboth, which was established in the 19th century as a Methodist Church meeting camp, has, over time, become a thriving mecca for the LGBTQ+ community. In Queering Rehoboth Beach: Beyond the Boardwalk (Temple UP, 2024), historian and educator Dr. James Sears charts this significant evolution. Dr. Sears draws upon extensive oral history accounts, archival material, and personal narratives to chronicle the "Battle for Rehoboth,” which unfolded in the late 20th century, as conservative town leaders and homeowners opposed progressive entrepreneurs and gay activists. He recounts not just the emergence of the gay and lesbian bars, dance clubs, and organizations that drew the queer community to the region, but also the efforts of local politicians and homeowners, among other groups who fought to develop and protect the traditional identity of this beach town. Moreover, issues of race, class, and gender and sexuality informed opinions as residents and visitors struggled with the AIDS crisis and the legacy of Jim Crow. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom.Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash.Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town (University of Georgia Press, 2025), Dr. Sylvia Hoffert calls on a particularly rich collection of primary sources, including diaries, letters, oral histories, census data, court documents, church records, and psychiatric hospital logs, all relating to Hillsborough, North Carolina, to argue that gossip and rumor were central to the formation of interpersonal relationships and an integral part of small-town life in the antebellum South. They exposed the insecurities and anxieties of the town’s inhabitants. Indeed, they served as important weapons in the power struggle between the white slaveholding elite—who tried to exert, maintain, and consolidate their control over community life—and the Black, white, and mixed-race men and women, free and enslaved, who did their best to challenge the socioeconomic status quo. And they exposed fissures in the social fabric that discretion, good manners, and historical amnesia could not obscure. The result was that, on a day-to-day basis, the shady streets of Hillsborough may have seemed peaceful to the casual observer. But underneath all that tranquility, the town was ripe with competition and conflict as the inhabitants used gossip to negotiate relationships with their neighbors and make places for themselves in the social, economic, and political hierarchy of the community. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Exploring 500 years of protest and resistance in US history—and how its force is foundational and can empower us to navigate our chaotic world In this timely new book in Beacon’s successful ReVisioning History series, professor Gloria Browne-Marshall delves into the history of protest movements and rebellion in the United States. Beginning with Indigenous peoples’ resistance to European colonization and continuing through to today’s climate change demonstrations, Browne-Marshall sheds light on known and forgotten movements and their unsung leaders, revealing how protest has shaped our nation and remains a vital force for change today. Drawing upon legal documents, archival material, memoir, government documents and secondary sources, A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2026) gives voice to those who pushed back against the mistreatment of others, themselves, and in some instances planet Earth. Browne-Marshall highlights stories of individuals from all walks of life, backgrounds, and time periods who helped bring strong attention to their causes. Those stories include those of: Wahunsenacock, more commonly known to history as Chief Powhatan, who took on English invaders in pre-colonial America in 1607; legendary boxer Muhammad Ali who refused to be inducted into the US military during the Vietnam era and appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court; and David Buckel, LGBTQ+ rights lawyer and environmental activist who protested against fossil fuels by committing self-immolation in 2018. Regardless of whether these protests accomplished their end goals, Browne-Marshall reminds us that dissent is always meaningful and impactful. In fact, reading this book is an act of protest. Find Professor Gloria J. Browne-Marshall at her website and on Instagram. And find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack where she and Gloria continued their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies