New Books in American Studies

Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City (NYU Press, 2025) argues that diversity and racial integration efforts are not sufficient to address educational inequality. New York City schools are among the most segregated in the nation. Yet over seven decades after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, New Yorkers continue to argue about whether school segregation matters. Amid these debates, Alexandra Freidus dives deep into the roots of racial inequality in diversifying schools, asking how we can better understand both the opportunities and the limits of school diversity and integration. Unequal Lessons is based on six years of observations and interviews with children, parents, educators, and district policymakers about the stakes of racial diversity in New York City schools.  The book examines what children learn from diversity, exploring both the costs and benefits of school integration. By drawing on students’ first-hand experiences, Freidus makes the case that although a focus on diversity offers many benefits to students, it often reinscribes, rather than diminishes, existing inequalities in school policy and practice. The idea of diversity for its own sake is frequently seen as the solution, with students of color presumed to benefit from their experiences with white students, while schools fail to address structural inequality. Though educators and advocates often focus on diversity out of a real desire to make a positive difference in students’ lives, this book makes clear the gaps between good intentions and educational injustice. 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 Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Terri Diane Halperin has provided a political history of the 1790s and explained the origins of one of the most contentious free speech events in American history. The Alien and Seditions Acts, which were actually four laws enacted in 1798, dramatically tested the principles of free speech in the young republic. Halperin explains the political origins of the controversy, which began in the earliest days the George Washington’s administration. Although the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and John Adams, and the Democratic-Republicans (or Jeffersonians), led by Jefferson and James Madison, had already established their differences on the national stage regarding the Constitution, foreign affairs would create further cleavages between these groups. Halperin investigates and analyzes how the French Revolution was celebrated and feared in America. When France descended into civil war and instigated European wars, the United States feared being drawn into the conflicts. The Federalists developed an affinity for Britain’s rejection of the Terror and resistance to France, while the Democratic-Republicans celebrated the promise of the French Revolution, even though most deplored the violence of the Terror. French and Irish immigrants were welcomed by the Jeffersonians and feared by the Federalists. Halperin demonstrates how dissent against American foreign policy, usually through the many newspapers published in America, was viewed as subversive and threatening to America’s reputation and national security. The Federalists, who dominated the national government during the 1790s, conceived of federal criminal laws to quash dissent. Halperin explains how both sides had their dearly held beliefs: the Federalists thought Jeffersonian newspaper editors would encourage rebellions against federal power or foreign powers efforts to acquire land in the New World; the Jeffersonians claimed that dissent was legitimate and pointed to the First Amendment’s free speech clause as a right that allowed criticism of government. My conversation with Halperin covers all of these events and reveals the importance of the debate over free speech in the early Republic. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defining features of the social history of medicine in the United States. In Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America (Oxford UP, 2021), Lewis A. Grossman presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American health policy, law, and regulation from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Grossman grounds his analysis in historical examples ranging from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. He vividly describes how activists and lawyers have resisted a wide variety of legal constraints on therapeutic choice, including medical licensing statutes, FDA limitations on unapproved drugs and alternative remedies, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions against medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide. Grossman also considers the relationship between these campaigns for desired treatments and widespread opposition to state-compelled health measures such as vaccines and face masks. From the streets of San Francisco to the US Supreme Court, Choose Your Medicine examines an underexplored theme of American history, politics, and law that is more relevant today than ever.Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

On September 21, 1976, a car bomb exploded in Washington DC, killing a former Chilean diplomat named Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt. The assassination was a cruel and brazen attempt by the Chilean government to silence a critic of the Pinochet regime. And it proved to be a major strategic error––Pinochet himself used the language of “banana peel”––as the legal action that followed helped unravel US-Chile relations and provided a template for other human-rights victims to pursue justice in post-Pinochet Chile.Alan McPherson, a professor of history at Temple University, investigates this event in his new book Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). With the perspicuous eye of a detective, McPherson puts all the pieces together to explain how Pinochet and his secret service organized the murder, before following Orlando Letelier’s wife Isabel’s decades-long struggle to hold the assassins and the Chilean government accountable. It’s a harrowing but hopeful tale. And McPherson tells it masterfully. Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Harvard UP, 2019), the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning challenges the idea that women are outside of war, through a trio of dramatic stories revealing women's transformative role in the American Civil War. We think of war as a man's world, but women have always played active roles in times of violence and been left to pick up the pieces in societies decimated by war. In this groundbreaking reconsideration of the Civil War, the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning invites us to see America's bloodiest conflict not just as pitting brother against brother but as a woman's war. When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief. Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason sparked heated controversy, defying the principle of civilian immunity and leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved women escaped across Union lines, upending emancipation policies that extended only to enslaved men. The Union's response was to classify fugitive black women as "soldiers' wives," regardless of whether they were married--offering them some protection but placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. In the war's aftermath, the Confederate grande dame Gertrude Thomas wrestled with her loss of status and of her former slaves. War, emancipation, and economic devastation affected her family intimately, and through her life McCurry helps us see how fundamental the changes of Reconstruction were. Women's War dismantles the long-standing fiction that women are outside of war and shows that they were indispensable actors in the Civil War, as they have been--and continue to be--in all wars.Jerrad P. Pacatte is a doctoral candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role in the story of America. Shedding critical new light on the diverse forms of Puritan belief and practice in England, Scotland, and New England, David D. Hall provides a multifaceted account of a cultural movement that judged the Protestant reforms of Elizabeth’s reign to be unfinished. Hall’s vivid and wide-ranging narrative describes the movement’s deeply ambiguous triumph under Oliver Cromwell, its political demise with the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, and its perilous migration across the Atlantic to establish a “perfect reformation” in the New World.A breathtaking work of scholarship by an eminent historian, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton University Press, 2019) examines the tribulations and doctrinal dilemmas that led to the fragmentation and eventual decline of Puritanism. It presents a compelling portrait of a religious and political movement that was divided virtually from the start. In England, some wanted to dismantle the Church of England entirely and others were more cautious, while Puritans in Scotland were divided between those willing to work with a troublesome king and others insisting on the independence of the state church. This monumental book traces how Puritanism was a catalyst for profound cultural changes in the early modern Atlantic world, opening the door for other dissenter groups such as the Baptists and the Quakers, and leaving its enduring mark on what counted as true religion in America.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Few politicians produced the musical reaction that Ronald Reagan did. His California-branded conservatism inspired countless young people to pick up guitars and thrash out their political angst. Punk bands across the United States took aim at the man, his presidency, and the idea of America he was selling to voters nationwide. Small yet vibrant scenes across the country emerged to challenge the communal norms and social values projected on them by the popular media and consumer culture. Punk enthusiast Robert Fitzgerald argues that these songs' lyrics aren't just catchy and fun to scream along with; they also reveal the thoughts and feelings of artists reacting to their political environment in real, forthright, and uncensored time.In Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan (UNC Press, 2025), Fitzgerald shows how these lyrics illustrated what young adults felt and how they reacted to one of the most influential and divisive leaders of the era. Punk lyrics are seemingly simple, the author argues, but they sketch out a complex, musically inspired countermovement that is as canonical in the American songbook as the folk and rock protest music that came before. Robert Fitzgerald is a laboratory school administrator and a lifelong punk fan. Robert Fitzgerald on UNC Press’s website. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming book is U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, October 2025). Bradley Morgan on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.Professor Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt (Viking, 2025) offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation’s true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely. Find Professor Weathersby at his website, where you can order In Open Contempt, check out his other writings, and attend upcoming events. Host Sullivan Summer can be found at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Professor Weathersby continue 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

Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor, survival, and agency. This history takes center stage in historian Liza Black's new book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which looks at Indigenous peoples' experiences in the American film industry that so often relied upon and reproduced racialized stereotypes of "authentic Indians" to produce profit. Black shows how non-Native film producers, in producing monolithic and historically static Native caricatures for profit, reinforced settler colonial narratives on screen while simultaneously denying Indigenous actors, extras, and staff of their modernity.Thorough in detail and innovative in analysis, Black incorporates film studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and history, shedding new light on the mid-century film industry and Native peoples' roles in it. Black chronicles the contours of American settler colonialism and its cultural and economic manifestations both on- and off-screen, giving the "authentic Indian" so familiar to non-Native audiences a much-needed dose of historical context. The result is an engaging story of Indigenous talent, labor, and livelihood that transcends critical moments in Native and U.S. histories alike.Listeners can now purchase Picturing Indians using code 6AF20 for a 40% discount on the University of Nebraska Press' site.Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Teacher By Teacher traces the journey of the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education and is a deeply personal love letter to all the teachers in our lives. The story of John B. King Jr.’s inspiring path to President Obama’s Cabinet begins the day that his mother died. He insisted on going to school that day, knowing he would find comfort in his classroom. As he navigated living alone with a father dying from undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, it was public school teachers who saved his life, believed in him and saw his potential. They made school a safe, supportive, and engaging place where he could be a kid despite the challenges at home. While some might have dismissed a rebellious young Black and Puerto Rican teen whose life was in crisis, King’s teachers and counselors gave him a second chance. He went on to earn degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and Yale and committed his career to trying to do for other young people what educators did for him. Teacher By Teacher shows how dedicated educators—both Dr. King’s own teachers and the phenomenal teachers who he has encountered throughout his career as a teacher, principal, and education policymaker—can profoundly shape the lives of their students. Our guest is: Dr. John B. King Jr., who served in President Barack Obama’s cabinet as the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education. Over the course of his influential career in public education, he has been a high school teacher, a middle school principal, the first African American and Puerto Rican to serve as New York State Education Commissioner, a college professor, the president and CEO of the Education Trust, and the chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY). His parents were career New York City public school educators. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, an education researcher and former teacher, and his two daughters. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a writing coach and developmental editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and the author of the Academic Life newsletter found at christinagessler.substack.com. Playlist for listeners: A Pedagogy of Kindness We Are Not Dreamers The Power of Play in Education Belonging : The Science of Creating Connection Show Them You're Good How Schools Make Race Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies