New Books in American Studies

Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the young nation wrestled with its identity. During the colonial period, hair was usually seen as bodily discharge, even “excrement.” But as Dr. Sarah Gold McBride shows in Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2025), hair gradually came to be understood as an integral part of the body, capable of exposing truths about the individuals from whom it grew—even truths they wanted to hide. As the United States diversified—intensifying divisions over race, class, citizenship status, and region—Americans sought to understand and classify one another through the revelatory power of hair: its color, texture, length, even the shape of a single strand. While hair styling had long offered clues about one’s social status, the biological properties of hair itself gradually came to be seen as a scientific tell: a reliable indicator of whether a person was a man or a woman; Black, white, Indigenous, or Asian; Christian or heathen; healthy or diseased. Hair was even thought to illuminate aspects of personality—whether one was courageous, ambitious, or perhaps criminally inclined. Yet if hair was a teller of truths, it was also readily turned to purposes of deception in ways that alarmed some and empowered others. Indeed, hair helped many Americans to fashion statements about political belonging, to engage in racial or gender passing, and to reinvent themselves in new cities. A history inscribed in bangs, curls, and chops, Whiskerology illuminates a period in American history when hair indexed belonging in some ways that may seem strange—but in other ways all too familiar—today. 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

Fire is a means of control and has been deployed or constrained to levy power over individuals, societies, and ecologies. In Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning (Oregon State UP, 2024), Pomona College professor Char Miller has edited a collection of documents and essays tracing the history of fire and human interactions in the West and across North America. Indigenous people in California and elsewhere used fire for their own benefit, allowing naturally occurring wildfires to replenish landscapes, and controlling "light burns" to better suit their own hunting, gathering, and agricultural means. It was only with the arrival of first the Spanish and then other European and American settlers that fire took on a decidedly "uncivilized" connotation. As Americans instituted fire regimes across the continent, wildfires grew larger and forests unhealthier. It's only been in recent years that Native people, using traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and settler forest science have begun to combine as a means of restoring fires as a central component of forest health. Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe (Taylor & Francis, 2025), spans 1914–1939 to provide a concise interpretation of the role the United States played in the origins of the Second World War. It synthesizes recent scholarship about interwar international politics while also presenting an original interpretation of the sources of American policy. The book shows how the drive for international reform, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, reflected both America’s unusual power and its fears about maintaining its domestic freedoms in a world dominated by arms races and the threat of war. The American desire to reform or to escape from the existing international system reshaped Europe’s balance of power from 1914 to 1929, leaving it precarious and unlikely to produce lasting stability. America’s power continued to loom globally in the 1930s, as first its isolationism and, after 1938, its open hostility toward Germany and Japan influenced the policies of the West and of Hitler. The coda at the end of the volume analyzes how the United States affected the strategic choices made by Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and Japan from 1939 to 1941 that globalized the conflict. This book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students in history and political science, especially courses focused on World War II and the history of U.S. foreign relations. Guest: Ross A. Kennedy (he/him), is a Professor of History and Chair at Illinois State University. He is the author of The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (2009) as well as numerous other publications on the First World War. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York's Blackwell's Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals, quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, "a lounging, listless madhouse." Digging through city records, newspaper articles, and archival reports, Stacy Horn tells a gripping narrative through the voices of the island's inhabitants. We also hear from the era's officials, reformers, and journalists, including the celebrated undercover reporter Nellie Bly. And we follow the extraordinary Reverend William Glenney French as he ministers to Blackwell's residents, battles the bureaucratic mazes of the Department of Correction and a corrupt City Hall, testifies at salacious trials, and in his diary wonders about man's inhumanity to his fellow man. Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad and Criminal in 19th Century New York (Algonquin Books, 2019) shows how far we've come in caring for the least fortunate among us--and reminds us how much work still remains. Stacy Horn shows that in setting up institutions for the humane treatment of social outcasts, New York City was so quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers confined to the Insane Asylum, Workhouse, Almshouse, Penitentiary and Hospital, that what emerged was a veritable gulag on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island. Based on a careful reading of both remarkably candid official documents detailing widespread suffering and accounts by the intrepid undercover reporter Nellie Bly and the socially prominent Josephine Shaw Lowell, we come to appreciate the long shadow of history cast over the city’s remaining island of the damned—Rikers. James Wunsch is Emeritus Professor of Historical and Educational Studies at SUNY Empire State. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarchical side in response to the Civil Rights movement. Bryan Jones draws from his own family's centuries-old history in the region to explore the rise and fall of the "two minds" of the South. Through a comparison of the experiences of a slaveholding line in his family with three non-slaveholding lines, Jones provides a rich history of the politics of both class and race in the region from the Founding era to the present. The slaveholding side of his family settled in Black Belt Alabama, while ancestral members of the other side of his family were poorer uplanders. In the 1890s, the latter supported the burgeoning populist movement, which for a short window of time tried to unite poor Blacks and poor whites against the patrician planter class and industrialists. After a series of close elections, the planter class was able to stanch the populist tide. They did this in large part by sowing racial division among populism's supporters. Indeed, one of Jones' ancestors helped draft the 1901 Alabama constitution that made Jim Crow the law of the state. Throughout, Jones shows how deep the political differences were between the two regions, with oligarchy characterizing the slaveholding region and a more democratic ethos shaping the non-slaveholding areas. Jones serves as the final observer, a white boy observing not only the demise of the Jim Crow South, but--in the wake of the Civil Rights movement--the demise of the mountain democratic South as well. Today, the vast majority of Southern whites regardless of class support an oligarchical Republican Party. Bryan Jones is J.J."Jake" Pickle Regents' Chair in Congressional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, (Harvard Education PR, 2024) Laura C. Chávez-Moreno uncovers the process through which schools implicitly and explicitly shape their students’ concept of race and the often unintentional consequences of this on educational equity. Dr. Chávez-Moreno sheds light on how the complex interactions among educational practices, policies, pedagogy, language, and societal ideas interplay to form, reinforce, and blur the boundaries of racialized groups, a dynamic which creates contradictions in classrooms and communities committed to antiracism. Dr. Chávez-Moreno urges readers to rethink race, to reconceptualize Latinx as a racialized group, and to pay attention to how schools construct Latinidad (a concept about Latinx experience and identity) in relation to Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Whiteness. The work explores, as an example, how Spanish-English bilingual education programs engage in race-making work. It also illuminates how schools can offer ambitious teachings to raise their students’ critical consciousness about race and racialization. Ultimately, Dr. Chávez-Moreno’s groundbreaking work makes clear that understanding how our schools teach about racialized groups is crucial to understanding how our society thinks about race and offers solutions to racial inequities. The book invites educators and scholars to embrace ambitious teaching about the ambivalence of race so that teachers and students are prepared to interrogate racist ideas and act toward just outcomes. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom Transforming Hispanic Serving Institutions for Equity and Justice We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States Presumed Incompetent Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Our guest is: Dr. Laura C. Chávez-Moreno, who is assistant professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Her research has been recognized with multiple awards, including from the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. She is the author of How Schools Make Race, winner of a 2025 AAHHE Book of the Year Award​, and a 2025 Nautilus Silver Book Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Between May 21 and June 16, 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison went on a trip together through Upstate New York and parts of New England on horseback. This "northern journey" came at a moment of tension for the new nation, one in whose founding these Virginians and political allies had played key roles. The Constitution was ratified and President Washington was in his first term of office. Whether the country could overcome regional and political differences and remain unified, however, was still very much in question. Hence why some observers at the time wondered whether this excursion into Federalist New England by the two most prominent southern Democratic-Republicans, both future presidents, had an ulterior motive. Madison, maintained that the journey was for "health, recreation, and curiosity." He and Jefferson needed a break from their public responsibilities, so off they set. Along the way, they took notes on the ravages of the Hessian Fly, an insect that had been devastating wheat crops. While in Vermont, they focused on the sugar maple tree, which many hoped might offer a domestic alternative to slave-grown sugar cane imports. An encounter with a free Black farmer at Fort George resulted in a journal entry that illuminates their attitudes toward slavery and race. A meeting with members of the Unkechaug tribe on Long Island led to a vocabulary project that preoccupied Jefferson for decades, and which remains relevant today. The northern journey was also about friendship. Madison later recalled that the trip made Jefferson and him "immediate companions," solidifying a bond with almost no peer in the annals of American history, one that thrived for fifty years. Jefferson declared at the end of his life, that his friendship with Madison had been "a source of constant happiness" to him. A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship (Oxford University Press, 2025) reveals the moment when it took hold. Louis P. Masur is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Fake news, outright political lies, a shamelessly partisan press, and the collapse of truth, civility, and shared facts, Dr. Philip Kadish argues, are nothing new. The Great White Hoax: Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America (The New Press, 2025), a masterpiece of historical and literary sleuthing, reveals that the era of Fox News and Donald Trump is simply a return to form. We have been here before. In a book that brilliantly puts our current era into historical context, The Great White Hoax uncovers a centuries-long tradition of white supremacist hoaxes, perpetrated on the American public by a succession of political hucksters and opportunists, all of them willfully using racial frauds as tools for political and social advantage. In the antebellum era, slavery’s defenders used bogus science to “prove” the inferiority of African American people; during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s enemies circulated a sham pamphlet accusing him of promoting a dilution of the white race through “miscegenation” (a racist term invented by the pamphlet’s authors). From these murky beginnings, Dr. Philip Kadish draws a direct thread to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Henry Ford’s adaptation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Madison Grant’s embrace of eugenics (which directly influenced Adolf Hitler), Alabama Governor George Wallace’s race-baiting, and Roger Ailes’s creation of Fox News. The Great White Hoax reveals white supremacy as today’s real “fake news”—and exposes the cast of villains, past and present, who have kept American racism alive. 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

An exploration of the mind of one of America's most beloved Founding Fathers and most brilliant minds, through the books he read and his social circles in the United States and Europe. Arguably the most intellectual, creative, cosmopolitan, and curious of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin is the only top-tier Founder not to have served as president. Despite not becoming the Chief Executive, Franklin played an active role in American politics and served the aspiring and young United States in the key European capitals. His prodigious reading and appetite for learning are epic. As he did in works about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, Kevin J. Hayes interprets the life and mind of Franklin through what he read.  Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin (Oxford University Press, 2025) tells the story of the development of Franklin's intellect, starting with the earliest books he read as a child before examining his formal schooling and his independent study after his father pulled him from school. As an apprentice in his brother's printing house, Franklin's intellectual life developed through his contact with the Couranteers, the group of his brother's friends who contributed to his newspaper, and through his attention to his brother's excellent office library. After Franklin ran away to Philadelphia, he developed a new group of friends, all of whom loved reading. In many ways, the story of Franklin's intellectual odyssey is the story of the friends he made along the way. His time in London in his late teens introduced him to several important intellectuals who encouraged him to develop his mind.  After returning to Philadelphia from London, he and some friends formed the Junto, a club for mutual improvement that made reading and writing important activities. With other members of the Junto, he formed the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first subscription library in colonial America. His role as a printer put him in contact with the best eighteenth-century American writing and kept a steady flow of imported books coming from Britain. He became a scientist, assembling a great scientific library, which helped his electrical research. An educational reformer, Franklin founded the Philadelphia Academy, which would become the University of Pennsylvania. As agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin lived in London for many years, where he befriended some of Britain's greatest minds. Different concentrations of books in his library reveal Franklin's interests in travel and exploration, warfare, and slavery. His time in Paris toward the end of his life gave Franklin another great intellectual experience, but he ultimately returned home to live the last five years of his life in Philadelphia, where he imparted his knowledge and experience to a new generation of Americans. In this gripping work, Benjamin Franklin is given a biography as rich and complex as his own intellectual life by master literary historian Kevin J. Hayes. Kevin J. Hayes is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Central Oklahoma. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Michael Broyles examines a wide variety of musical, technological, and social currents that helped to shape American music in Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades that Changed a Country and Its Sounds (Norton, 2024), but he accomplishes this by focusing on just thirty years. Broyles discusses three pivotal decades in US musical history: the 1840s, the 1920s, and the 1950s. He argues that these decades fundamentally remade the American cultural landscape in enduring ways. Although Revolutions in American Music describes the ruptures caused by new musical and technological innovations such as the development of jazz or rock 'n roll, Broyles also revisits deep cultural and social fissures that affected America and American music in all three time periods. Throughout the book, Broyles introduces important figures who have been overlooked and tells stories that illuminate the messy, complex, sometimes dark, but always fascinating history of music in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies