New Books in American Studies

From multiple New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin comes the thrilling true story of the most infamous hangout for bandits, thieves and murderers of all time―and the lawmen tasked with rooting them out.Robbers Roost, Brown’s Hole, and Hole-in-the-Wall were three hideouts that collectively were known to outlaws as “Bandit Heaven.” During the 1880s and ‘90s these remote locations in Wyoming and Utah harbored hundreds of train and bank robbers, horse and cattle thieves, the occasional killer, and anyone else with a price on his head.Clavin's Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West  (St. Martin's Press, 2024) is the entertaining story of these tumultuous times and the colorful characters who rode the Outlaw Trail through the frigid mountain passes and throat-parching deserts that connected the three hideouts―well-guarded enclaves no sensible lawman would enter. There are the “star” residents like gregarious Butch Cassidy and his mostly silent sidekick the Sundance Kid, and an array of fascinating supporting players like the cold-blooded Kid Curry, and “Black Jack” Ketchum (who had the dubious distinction of being decapitated during a hanging), among others.Most of the hard-riding action takes place in the mid- to late-1890s when Bandit Heaven came to be one of the few safe places left as the law closed in on the dwindling number of active outlaws. Most were dead by the beginning of the 20th century, gunned down by a galvanized law-enforcement system seeking rewards and glory. Ultimately, only Cassidy and Sundance escaped . . . to meet their fate 6000 miles away, becoming legends when they died in a fusillade of lead.Bandit Heaven is a thrilling read, filled with action, indelible characters, and some poignance for the true end of the Wild West outlaw.Tom Clavin is a bestselling author of 25 nonfiction books on American and military history, sports, and entertainment. His writing career began in journalism, as a roving reporter for The New York Times for 15 years as well as a contributor to national magazines including Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, Parade, Reader’s Digest, and Sports Illustrated. Along the way, he was awarded numerous prizes by the Society of Professional Journalists and National Newspaper Association.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. You can also find his writing about books and films on Pages and Frames. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Balls of Confusion: Pro Basketball Goes to War(1965-70) is the first of a two-part story about one of the most transformative events inpro basketball history: the war between the National Basketball Association and its challenger the American Basketball Association (ABA).From this nine-year battle for the heart of the game, modern pro basketball emerged in the mid-1970s and grew into today's global, multibillion-dollar sports industry. Part One takes a definitive behind-the-scenes look at both leagues marching to war, their marketing schemes, their labor woes, their legal challenges, and their coming to terms with the 1960s and the nation's changing attitudes on race. If you love sports history and pro basketball's throwback days of Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, Connie Hawkins, and Julius Erving, this is a book for you, with part two soon to follow.Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won. His next book, a biography of Moses Malone will be published in 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues (Oxford University Press, 2024), Tom Jenks follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by which Baldwin indelibly writes "Sonny's Blues" into the consciousness of readers. It provides ongoing observations of the aesthetics underlying the particulars of the story, with references to Edward P. Jones (whose magnificent story "All Aunt Hagar's Children" bears a knowing relationship to "Sonny's Blues,") to Charlie Parker's music, and to Billie Holiday's "Am I Blue?" and John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" as part of the musical progression Baldwin creates, and with attention to Baldwin's oratorical gifts and the biblical references in the story, to its time structure, characterizations, dramatic action, and, most of all, its totality of effect.Drawing on Baldwin's book-length essay The Fire Next Time, which Baldwin published a six years after the publication of the short story, Tom Jenks offers insight on some of the sources in Baldwin's life for "Sonny's Blues" and on the logic and passion by which life may be meaningfully transformed into art.Tom Jenks is the cofounder and editor of Narrative magazine. Check out his magazine online here. He is a former editor of Esquire, Gentlemen's Quarterly, The Paris Review, and a senior editor at Scribners, where he edited Hemingway's The Garden of Eden. With Raymond Carver, he edited American Short Story Masterpieces. His writing has appeared in Harper's, Ploughshares, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The American Scholar, Five Points, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He has given classes at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Creative Writing Programs at University of California, and Washington University in St. Louis.Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at 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

American democracy is in trouble. At the heart of the contemporary crisis is a mismatch between America's Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan politics. Although American political institutions remain federated and fragmented, the ground beneath them has moved, with the national subsuming and transforming the local. In Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (U Chicago Press, 2024), political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring today's challenges into new perspective. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape-state parties, interest groups, and media-varied locally and reinforced the nation's stark regional diversity. They created openings for new policy demands and factional divisions that disrupted party lines. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. Now thoroughly integrated into a single political order and tightly coupled with partisanship, they no longer militate against polarization. Instead, they accelerate it. Precisely because today's polarization is different, it is self-perpetuating and, indeed, intensifying. With the precision and acuity characteristic of both authors' earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy. They show that America's political system is distinctively, and acutely, vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America's unusual Constitutional design. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada’s role in the bloody conflict that claimed more than 600,000 lives. Until From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War (ECW Press, 2022) by Brian Martin.A surprising 20,000 Canadians went south to take up arms on both sides of the conflict, while thousands of enslaved people, draft dodgers, deserters, recruiters, plotters, and spies fled northward to take shelter in the attic that is Canada. Though many escaped slavery and found safety through the Underground Railroad, they were later joined by KKK members wanted for murder. Confederate President Jefferson Davis along with several of his emissaries and generals found refuge on Canadian soil, and many plantation owners moved north of the border.Award-winning journalist Brian Martin will open eyes in both Canada and the United States to how the two countries and their citizens interacted during the Civil War and the troubled times that surrounded it.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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

Last week, the press focused on what the press repeatedly characterized as an “ugly” fight between American college football players that broke out after the University of Michigan beat The Ohio State. But another story received less attention. Medrick Burnett Jr., a 20 year old from Southern California was playing his first season as a linebacker with Alabama A&M University when he sustained a head injury during the annual Magic City Classic against in-state rivals Alabama State University on Oct. 26. A month later, Burnett died. Today’s Postscript features two prominent scholars of sports raising questions about the hypocrisy of blaming players for a fight yet downplaying the death caused by playing by the rules. This remarkable conversation includes an unpacking of the “consent” to physical, psychological, and economic impacts, insight into the Foucauldian elements of discipline, punishment, and surveillance, and concrete reform suggestions for all people who watch football and/or work at universities. This nuanced conversation is for those who love or loathe football as a college sport.Dr. Nathan Kalman-Lamb (he/him) is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick and Dr. Derek Silva (he/him) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-authors of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game published by UNC Press in 2024 – and their public-facing scholarship appears in outlets such as The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times. They are the co-hosts (with Johanna Mellis) of The End of Sport podcast.Mentioned: “The hypocrisy of shaming college football player brawls,” Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, LATimes “A player’s foreseeable death raises existential questions for college football,”Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, The Guardian “Alabama A&M football player dies a month after suffering a head injury in a game,” Pat Duggins, Alabama Public Radio Paul Knepper’s New Books Network interview with Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva on their 2024 book, “The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game” Dr. Jill A. Fisher’s Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials (Rutgers University Press 2008) Dr. Erin Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment (University of California Press, 2020) On the University of Missouri football team’s successful threat to strike if the university president didn't resign see  "The Power of a Football Boycott,” Jake New, Inside Higher Education, The Forgotten History of Head Injuries in Sports: Stephen Casper, a medical historian, argues that the danger of C.T.E. used to be widely acknowledged. How did we unlearn what we once knew? Ingfei Chen, The New Yorker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a culture that offered women few options other than marriage. She was American born when most American Jews were immigrants. She affirmed and maintained her dedication to Jewish religious practice and Jewish faith while many family members embraced Christianity. Yet she also lived well within the social parameters established for Southern white women, espoused Southern values, and owned enslaved African Americans.The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai is one of the few surviving Civil War diaries by a Jewish woman in the antebellum South. It charts her daily life and her evolving perspective on Confederate nationalism and Southern identity, Jewishness, women's roles in wartime, gendered domestic roles in slave-owning households, and the centrality of family relationships. While never losing sight of the racist social and political structures that shaped Emma Mordecai's world, the book chronicles her experiences with dislocation and the loss of her home.Bringing to life the hospital visits, food shortages, local sociability, Jewish observances, sounds and sights of nearby battles, and the very personal ramifications of emancipation and its aftermath for her household and family, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai offers a valuable and distinct look at a unique historical figure from the waning years of the Civil War South.Dianne Ashton was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and World Religions at Rowan University. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Hanukkah in America: A History and Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America.Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Rowan University. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920; Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890-1940; Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925; and Ballet Class: An American History.Caleb Zakarin is editor at 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 Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley (University of Texas Press, 2024), Oliver Rosales uncovers the role of the multiracial west in shaping the course of US civil rights history. Focusing on Bakersfield, one of the few sizable cities within California’s Central Valley for much of the twentieth century in a region most commonly known as a bastion of political conservatism, oil, and industrial agriculture, Rosales documents how multiracial coalitions emerged to challenge histories of racial segregation and discrimination. He recounts how the region was home to both the historic farm worker movement, led by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong, and also a robust multiracial civil rights movement beyond the fields. This multiracial push for civil rights reform included struggles for fair housing, school integration, public health, media representation, and greater political representation for Black and Brown communities. In expanding on this history of multiracial activism, Rosales further explores the challenges activists faced in community organizing and how the legacies of coalition building contribute to ongoing activist efforts in the Central Valley of today.*At around 1:07:00, Oliver said Teresa Rodriguez instead of the correct name, Rebecca Flores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Rhetorical Democracy: How Communication Shapes Political Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024) offers an explanation and diagnosis of the current state of American democracy rooted in the American pragmatist tradition. Robert Danisch analyzes the characteristics of communication systems and communication practices that inhibit or enhance democratic life. In doing so, this book provides a detailed explanation of the ways in which the communication systems and practices that constitute democratic life are currently fostering polarization and how they might be made to foster cooperation. Scholars of communication, rhetorical studies, political science, and media studies will find this book of particular interest.Robert Danisch is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo whose research interests include rhetorical theory, persuasion, and public communication in democratic societies. He is the author of Pragmatism, Democracy and the Necessity of Rhetoric, Building a Rhetorical Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism as well as journal articles and several co-authored books. He is also the host of the podcast Now We’re Talking that focuses on communication skills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

This study of organizing and decluttering professionals helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our time and energy.For a widely dreaded, often mundane task, organizing one’s possessions has taken a surprising hold on our cultural imagination. Today, those with the means can hire professionals to help sort and declutter their homes. In More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Carrie M. Lane introduces us to this world of professional organizers and offers new insight into the domains of work and home, which are forever entangled—especially for women.The female-dominated organizing profession didn’t have a name until the 1980s, but it is now the subject of countless reality shows, podcasts, and magazines. Lane draws on interviews with organizers, including many of the field’s founders, to trace the profession’s history and uncover its enduring appeal to those seeking meaningful, flexible, self-directed work. Taking readers behind the scenes of real-life organizing sessions, More Than Pretty Boxes details the strategies organizers use to help people part with their belongings, and it also explores the intimate, empathetic relationships that can form between clients and organizers.But perhaps most importantly, More Than Pretty Boxes helps us think through an interconnected set of questions around neoliberal work arrangements, overconsumption, emotional connection, and the deeply gendered nature of paid and unpaid work. Ultimately, Lane situates organizing at the center of contemporary conversations around how work isn’t working anymore and makes a case for organizing’s radical potential to push back against the overwhelming demands of work and the home, too often placed on women’s shoulders. Organizers aren’t the sole answer to this crisis, but their work can help us better understand both the nature of the problem and the sorts of solace, support, and solutions that might help ease it.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about the negotiation that humans make between their identity and the spaces they inhabit. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky @professorjohnst.bsky.social,Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies