New Books in American Studies

To understand elders' experiences of aging in place, sociologist Stacy Torres spent five years with longtime New York City residents as they coped with health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges. The sensitive portrait Torres paints in At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America (University of California Press, 2025), moves us beyond stereotypes of older people as either rich and pampered or downtrodden and frail to capture the multilayered complexity of late life.These pages chronicle how a nondescript bakery in Manhattan served as a public living room, providing company to ease loneliness and a sympathetic ear to witness the monumental and mundane struggles of late life. Through years of careful observation, Torres peels away the layers of this oft-neglected social world and explores the constellation of relationships and experiences that Western culture often renders invisible or frames as a problem. At Home in the City strikes a realistic balance as it highlights how people find support, flex their resilience, and assert their importance in their communities in old age.Interviewee: Stacy Torres is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco.Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

From their founding, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) educated as many as 90 percent of Black college students in the United States. Although many are aware of the significance of HBCUs in expanding Black Americans' educational opportunities, much less attention has been paid to the vital role that they have played in enhancing American democracy.In The Power of Black Excellence: HBCUs and the Fight for American Democracy (Oxford UP, 2024), Deondra Rose provides an authoritative history of HBCUs and the unique role they have played in shaping American democracy since 1837. Drawing on over six years of deep research, Rose brings into view the historic impact that government support for HBCUs has had on the American political landscape, arguing that they have been essential for not only empowering Black citizens but also reshaping the distribution of political power in the United States. Rose challenges the conventional wisdom that, prior to the late twentieth century, the federal government took a laissez-faire approach to education. Instead, governmental action contributed to the expansion of HBCUs in an era plagued by racist policies and laws. Today, HBCUs remain extremely important, as evidenced by the outsized number of black political leaders--including Kamala Harris--who attended them. Rose stresses that policymakers promote democracy itself when they support HBCUs and their unique approach to postsecondary education, which includes a commitment to helping students develop politically empowering skills, promoting political leadership, and fostering a commitment to service.A fresh look into the relationship between education and democracy, The Power of Black Excellence is essential reading for anyone interested not just in HBCUs, but the broader trajectory of Black citizenship in American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions. Its holdings encompass a vast range—including paintings, sculptures, costumes, instruments, and arms and armor—and span millennia, from ancient Egypt and Greece to Islamic art to European Old Masters and modern artists. How did the Met amass this trove, and what do the experiences of the people who bought, restored, catalogued, visited, and watched over these works tell us about the museum?The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Conlin is a groundbreaking bottom-up history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exploring both its triumphs and its failings. Dr. Conlin tells the stories of the people who have shaped the museum—from curators and artists to museumgoers and security guards—and the communities that have made it their own. Highlighting inequalities of wealth, race, and gender, he exposes the hidden costs of the museum’s reliance on “robber barons” and oligarchs, the exclusionary immigration policies that influenced the foundation of the American Wing, and the obstacles faced by women curators. Drawing on extensive interviews with past and current staff, Conlin brings the story up to the present, including the museum’s troubled 150th anniversary in 2020. As the Met faces continued controversy, this book offers a timely account of the people behind an iconic institution and a compelling case for the museum’s vision of shared human creativity.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

In this compelling and informative interview, Carrie N. Baker discusses her newest book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics (Amherst College Press, 2024). This book is the first comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States, and Baker examines the actions of scientists, policy-makers, pharmaceutical companies, pro-abortion rights activists and anti-abortion forces as the abortion pill was developed in France in 1980, and subsequently brought to market in the United States. She carefully investigates the fight for FDA approval of the abortion pill, and reproductive rights advocates’ work to expand access. She pays particular attention to the critical period of 2020-2024 when in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic telemedicine abortion became a possibility. Baker ends exploring attempts to restrict abortion pills and self-managed abortions in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision. In this thoroughly researched history, Baker draws on interviews with over 80 activists, abortion providers, researchers, and people who have used abortion pills to demonstrate the range of actors involved in efforts to expand access to abortion pills. In addition, she analyzes medical research, government records, legal cases, and the archives of several reproductive health organizations.Abortion Pills: US History and Politics is available open-access starting December 3, 2024. Click the following hyperlink to view and download a PDF of the bookYou can also purchase a physical copy of the book by clicking here.Carrie N. Baker holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University, a J.D. from Emory University School of Law, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory’s Institute of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Chair of American Studies and Professor of the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Smith College where, as a legal and social movement scholar, she teaches courses on gender, law and public policy; feminist social movements; and feminist public writing. In addition to publishing peer-reviewed academic scholarship, Baker also serves as a regular writer and contributing editor for Ms. Magazine, has a monthly column in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and hosts Feminist Futures, a radio program on WHMP 101.5 FM in Northampton, Massachusetts.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

Today’s book is: That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Amanda Jones, which offers her story of life as a small-town librarian. One of the things she values most about books is how they can affirm a young person's sense of self. So in 2022, when she caught wind of a local public hearing that would discuss “book content,” she knew what was at stake. Schools and libraries nationwide have been bombarded by demands for books with LGTBQ+ references, discussions of racism, and more to be purged from the shelves. She spoke out that night at the meeting. Days later, she woke up to a nightmare that is still ongoing. Her decision to support a collection of books with diverse perspectives made her a target for extremists using book banning campaigns-funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians-in a crusade to make America more white, straight, and "Christian." But she wouldn't give up without a fight: she sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance. Mapping the book banning crisis occurring all across the nation, That Librarian draws the battle lines in the war against equity and inclusion, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.Our guest is: Amanda Jones, who is the school librarian at the same school she attended as a child. She is the author of That Librarian: Fighting Book Banners in Today’s America. She was the 2021 School Library Journal Co-Librarian of the Year, a 2021 Library Journal Mover and Shaker, and the 2020 Louisiana Librarian of the Year. She presents nationally and internationally on the importance of certified school librarians, book joy, and why every child deserves to see themselves reflected in the books on library shelves. Amanda has received intellectual freedom awards from the American Library Association, American Association of School Librarians, and Louisiana Library Association. She is the Executive Director of the Livingston Parish Library Alliance, and a co-founding member of Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship. She lives in Louisiana with her husband, daughter, and their cat.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Books, Antisemitism, and a Viral Tweet Stitching Freedom What to Know About Book Banning : A Discussion with the National Coalition Against Censorship Before and After the Book Deal Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ 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

The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by racial hierarchy, and justified through white supremacist logics. Now, in the twenty-first century, the biotech industry is the new capitalist whose race-based exploitation engages not only labor but racialized consumption. This arrangement is upheld through US drug policy, which over the past century has created a split legal system—one punitive system that criminalizes drug use common among Black, Brown, and lower-income communities and another system characterized by compassion and care that medicalizes, and thus legalizes, drug use targeted to middle-class White people.In the award-winning book Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (U California Press, 2023), a trio of authors—Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg—explain how this arrangement came to pass, what impacts it has, and what needs to be done. This remarkable book won the 2023 Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science.This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom.email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

During the Second World War, FDR promised thousands of tons of US material to Chiang Kai Shek in order to keep China in the war and keep Japan distracted. But how would the US get it there? The only land route had been cut off by the Japanese invasion, leaving only one other option: air.For the next three years, US planes flew “The Hump”: an air route from Assam to Chongqing, over the dangerous Himalayan mountains and Burmese jungles. Countless planes were lost, whether on a Himalayan mountainside or deep in the jungle.That tale is the subject of Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World (Viking: 2024), by Caroline Alexander, who joins us today.Caroline Alexander is the author of the bestselling The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (Knopf: 1998), which has been translated into thirteen languages. She writes frequently for The New Yorker and National Geographic, and she is the author of four other books, including Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition (Harper Perennial: 1999), the journal of the Endurance ship’s cat.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Skies of Thunder. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity (Cornell UP, 2024), Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices, but an intentional decision adopted in place of well-known alternatives during the Progressive Era, against past precedent and principle in several states.From efforts to convert expropriated Indigenous and Mexican land into common school funding in the 1850s, to reforms that directed state aid to expanding white suburbs during the years surrounding World War II, Dividing the Public traces, in intricate detail, how a host of policies connected to school funding have divided California by race and class over time. In bringing into view the neglected and poorly understood history of policymaking connected to school finance, Kelly offers a new story about the role public education played in shaping the racially segregated, economically divided, and politically fragmented world of the post-1945 metropolis.Matthew Gardner Kelly is an assistant professor of educational foundations, leadership, and policy at the University of Washington.  Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

We take the edible trappings of flirtation for granted: chocolate covered strawberries and romance, oysters on the half shell and desire, the eggplant emoji and a suggestive wink. But why does it feel so natural for us to link food and sexual pleasure? In Lustful Appetites: an Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex (Polity, 2024), Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for naughty sex, from the development of the Parisian restaurant as a place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses, to the role of sexual outlaws like bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men in creating epicurean culture in Britain and the United States. Taking readers on a gastronomic journey from Paris and London to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Lustful Appetites reveals how this preoccupation changed the ways we eat and the ways we are intimate―while also creating stigmas that persist well into our own twenty-first century.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

In How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America (Harvard Education Press, 2025), Dr. 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.In this provocative book, 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.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