New Books in American Studies

Showing how the history of the apple goes far beyond the orchard and into the social, cultural and technological developments of Britain and the USA, Apples and Orchards since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Joanna Crosby takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the importance of the apple as a symbol of both tradition and innovation.From the 18th century in Britain, technological innovation in fruit production and orchard management resulted in new varieties of apples being cultivated and consumed, while the orchard became a representation of stability. In America orchards were contested spaces, as planting seedling apple trees allowed settlers to lay a claim to land. In this book, Dr. Crosby explores how apples and orchards have reflected the social, economic and cultural landscape of their times. From the association between English apples and 'English' virtues of plain speaking, hard work and resultant high-quality produce, to practices of wassailing highlighting the effects of urbanisation and the decline of country ways and customs, Apples and Orchards from the Eighteenth Century shows how this everyday fruit provides rich insights into a time of significant social change.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the turbulent end of China’s imperial system, violent revolutionary movements, and the fraught establishment of a republican government. During these decades of reform and revolution, millions of far-flung “overseas Chinese” remained connected to Chinese domestic movements.Transpacific Reform and Revolution: The Chinese in North America, 1898-1918 (Stanford UP, 2023) uses rich archival sources and a new network approach to examine how reform and revolution in North American Chinatowns influenced political change in ChinaPo and the transpacific Chinese diaspora from 1898 to 1918. Historian Zhongping Chen focuses on the transnational activities of Kang Youwei, Sun Yat-sen, and other politicians, especially their mobilization of the Chinese in North America to join reformist or revolutionary parties in patriotic fights for a Western-style constitutional monarchy or republic in China. These new reformist and revolutionary parties, including the first Chinese women’s political organization, led transpacific movements against American anti-Chinese racism in 1905 and supported constitutional reform and the Republican Revolution in China around 1911, achieving transpacific expansion through innovative use of cross-cultural political ideologies and intertwined institutional and interpersonal networks. Through network analysis of the origins, interrelations, and influences of Chinese reform and revolution in North America, this book makes a significant contribution to modern Chinese history, Asian American and Asian Canadian history, and Chinese diasporic scholarship.Zhongping Chen is Professor of History at the University of Victoria. He is also the author of Modern China’s Network Revolution: Chambers of Commerce and Sociopolitical Change in the Early Twentieth Century (Stanford University Press, 2011). He has been working on several digital projects such as “Victoria’s Chinatown: A Gateway to the Past and Present of Chinese Canadians” and “Chinese Canadian Artifacts Project."Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Cristina Brito's book Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) deals with peoples' practices, perceptions, emotions and feelings towards aquatic animals, their ecosystems and nature on the early modern Atlantic coasts by addressing exploitation, use, fear, empathy, otherness, and indifference in the relationships established with aquatic environments and resources by Indigenous Peoples and Europeans. It focuses on large aquatic fauna, especially manatees (but also sharks, sea turtles, seals, and others) as they were hunted, consumed, venerated, conceptualised, and recorded by different societies across the early colonial Americas and West Africa. Through a cross-cultural approach drawing on concepts and analytical methods from marine environmental history, the blue humanities and animal studies, this book addresses more-than-human systems where ecologies, geographies, cosmogonies, and cultures are an entangled web of interdependencies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance (U Texas Press, 2024) investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on "anti-Method" stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers.Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

This is an ambitious history of flags, stamps, and currency—and the role they played in US imperialism over the 20th century. In Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire (U Chicago Press, 2023), Alvita Akiboh, Assistant Professor of History at Yale University, reveals how US national identity has been created, challenged, and transformed through embodiments of empire found in US territories, from the US dollar bill to the fifty-star flag. Akiboh argues that these symbolic objects encode the relationships between territories—including the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam—and the American empire with which they have been entangled. Akiboh shows how such items became objects of power, and how their original intent was changed. For even if imperial territories were not always front and center for federal lawmakers and administrators, their inhabitants remained continuously aware of the United States, whose presence announced itself through localized fights over the predominant currency, stamps, and flags. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Mimi Khúc is a PhD, writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is currently the Co-Editor of The Asian American Literary Review and an adjunct lecturer in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. Her work includes Open in Emergency, a hybrid book-arts project decolonizing Asian American mental health; the Asian American Tarot, a reimagined deck of tarot cards; and the Open in Emergency Initiative, an ongoing national project developing mental health arts programming with universities and community spaces. Her new creative-critical, genre-bending book on mental health and a pedagogy of unwellness, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke University Press, 2024), is a journey into the depths of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care.Julia H. Lee is professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of three books: Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011), Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), and The Racial Railroad (New York University Press, 2022). With Professor Josephine Lee, she is co-editor of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022. You can find her on Instagram @julia.x.lee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Why do some devout Christians support authoritarian leaders who threaten the very democracies that protect religious freedoms?The resounding support from evangelical and conservative Christians for strident culture hawks like Donald Trump and other far right leaders may appear surprising, but exist within a long and broad history that spans continents and centuries.Surveying global politics and modern history, David P. Gushee calls on Christians to preserve democratic norms, including constitutional government, the rule of law, and equal rights for all. He analyzes how Christians have repeatedly put aside their commitment to the teachings of Jesus from the Gospels when they are tempted by authoritarian and reactionary leaders who promise a return to mythical greatness defined by family values, natural order, and cultural superiority.In Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies (William B. Eerdmans, 2023), He urges Christians to resist this urge by reviving the hard-won traditions of congregational democracy as fought for by American Baptist and Black Christian leaders.Rev. Prof. Dr. David P. Gushee (PhD, Union Theological Seminary, New York) is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, and Chair of Christian Social Ethics at Vrije Universiteit (“Free University”) Amsterdam, and Senior Research Fellow, International Baptist Theological Study Centre.Recommended reading:Hidden Roots of White Supremacy by Robert JonesComing soon from David Gushee:The Moral Teachings of Jesus (Cascade 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Kristine M. McCusker's book Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955 (U Illinois Press, 2023) takes, as its focus, the combined history of death and health in the American South between 1900 and 1955. The text is ambitious in scope, and weaves together multiple oral histories to create a nuanced and engaging narrative. McCusker charts the ways in which low life expectancy in the South was regarded as problematic by commercial life insurance firms, concerned that their customers were paying insufficient dues before mortality provoked funeral expenditures, and the various Churches seeking to save souls before an untimely demise robbed them of the opportunity. Both agencies were heavily invested in health care. McCusker expertly weaves further threads into this complex narrative: Southern funeral practices, the theological basis for strong belief in family re-union at death, and racial divides that created exclusions and opportunities for the Black Americans to express their own deathways, increasingly supported through commercial enterprise. Two World Wars test and refine common frameworks for organizing the dead, and McCusker underlines the importance, amongst other things, of etiquette guidance on the correct ways to grieve and to express condolence. This is a remarkably rich text that will intrigue a more general readership and prove essential to death scholars in the US and further afield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents’ world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020. Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York (Columbia UP, 2024) explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experience among unhoused people. Bringing together anecdotal material, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and excerpts from personal journals, Williams provides a vivid ethnographic portrait of individual people, day-to-day activities, and the social world of the underground and their engagement with the world above, which they call “topside.” He shows how marginalized people strive to make a place for themselves amid neglect and isolation as they struggle for dignity. Featuring Williams’s distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy for those on the margins, Life Underground shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that.Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction (UNC Press, 2023) tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration. Historian Carly Goodman takes readers from Washington, D.C., where proponents deployed a colorblind narrative about our "nation of immigrants" to secure visas for white immigrants, to the African countries where it flourished and fostered dreams of going to America. From the post office to the internet, aspiring emigrants, visa agents, and others embraced the lottery and tried their luck in a time of austerity and limits. Rising African immigration to the United States has enriched American life, created opportunities for mobility, and nourished imagined possibilities. But the promise of the American dream has been threatened by the United States' embrace of anti-immigrant policies and persistent anti-Black racism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies