New Books in American Politics

In the United States, hundreds of thousands of elected and appointed officials serve more than 50,000 subnational governments, making important decisions about services ranging from education to infrastructure to policing. The provision of critical city services shapes citizens’ everyday lives. Supposedly, local politicians are the elected representatives closest to the people they serve, but are they actually accountable to their constituents? Justin de Benedictis-Kessner shows that they are not: local elections routinely fail to punish bad politicians or reward strong performers. The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable  argues that this is because urban politics is defined by minimally effective competition, complex institutions that confuse voters, and a lack of effective media coverage. These institutional features combine to stymie even well-intentioned voters and make accountability difficult. Fixing these problems is challenging, but, as de Benedictis-Kessner shows, change is possible if we can enable citizens to reclaim and assert their political power.Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances.Host Ursula Hackett is the Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Her award-winning book, America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State is published with Cambridge University Press. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Rehearsing the Future: The Thought and Practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs (AK Press, 2026), Michael Doan explores the work and legacy of James and Grace Lee Boggs, two of the most influential American radical thinkers of the twentieth century. Grace Lee Boggs earned a PhD in philosophy in the 1940s, though facing obstacles to an academic career as a young Chinese American woman, she left and became a political organizer in Detroit, where she met and married James Boggs, a Black autoworker and labor organizer from Alabama who had moved North during the Great Migration. Over the course of more than forty years of partnership and participation in labor, civil rights, Black Power, anticolonial, and feminist movements, the Boggses articulated a philosophy of long-term revolutionary strategy they called “dialectical humanism.” Rejecting state socialism and traditional Marxism, dialectical humanism instead attributes social change to the conscious, collective activity of people engaged in place-based organizing with a view to transforming everyday life, with hallmark projects such as community gardens, daycare networks, and mediation programs. Above all, revolution is not a fixed program but must evolve as ideas, movements, and institutions are changed through collective practice.Through their life work and publications, James and Grace Lee Boggs modeled how to do philosophy from within movements. In Rehearsing the Future, Doan lays out the intellectual history of dialectical humanism, the far-reaching theory and practice that continues to guide movement-building around the world, inspiring forms of activism such as visionary organizing and emergent strategy. Michael D. Doan is a Canadian-born father, educator, activist, and philosopher. He joined the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership in 2016 and is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oakland University.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought about self-loathing, reflecting her individual failure to exercise self-control, to keep it together. But during her fieldwork studying chemical exposure in Mexico City, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrate their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in shame. Roberts began to wonder if everything she thought she knew about addiction was wrong.In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World (Princeton UP, 2026) shares the unexpected journey that led Dr. Roberts to a new understanding of addiction. Taking lessons from her years in Mexico City as well as from addiction researchers, harm reduction activists, and scholars of religion, philosophy, and anthropology, Roberts pays close attention to the external forces that so often fuel the damage of addiction. As her neighbors in Mexico City suggest, the adverse health effects brought on by their dependencies on Coca-Cola, processed foods, drugs, and alcohol have more to do with the ongoing effects of the drug war and NAFTA than any personal failings. Taking up this ecological framework, Dr. Roberts draws a line between vice that isolates and addiction that connects, a distinction she movingly integrates into her own life and family, making a case for sharing in the pleasures—and suffering—of dependency.Provocative and deeply humane, In Praise of Addiction invites readers to cast aside the shame, self-hatred, and judgment associated with addiction and discover how dependency can serve as a binding force worthy of our most profound devotion.\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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How has Donald Trump’s return to the White House transformed the relationship between Canada and the United States? In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey speaks with Randall Hansen, Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at the University of Toronto, about Mark Carney’s response to U.S. tariffs and annexation rhetoric, rising Canadian nationalism, and the challenges facing the two countries. They explore whether this crisis could become an opportunity for Canada to reduce its economic dependence on the United States and redefine its place in the world. Link here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tejasvi Nagaraja joins Michael Stauch to talk about Troop Movements: Labor, Race, and Global Freedom Struggles in America’s World War II (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026). They discuss how the mobilization of soldiers and defense workers for World War II brought together disparate sectors of workers, all of whom were enmeshed in struggles over workers’ rights and civil rights in the wake of the Great Depression and New Deal. The entangled experiences of this anti-fascist mobilization of workers and soldiers forged alliances across race, class, and global concerns and catalyzed the national and international political movements and conflicts of the postwar period. Synthesizing diverse sources—from the US Army and UK Colonial Office archives to labor unions’ and civil rights organizations’ records—Nagaraja reconstructs this story of top-down and bottom-up movements from Pennsylvania to Panama, Georgia to Germany, Michigan to Manila in the World War II era.Highlights include: Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee’s participation in a “war worker front” during World War II that brought together “soldiers and solderers” in a multiracial movement from below; How an accidental explosion at Port Chicago (an ammunition depot in the Bay Area) and the sailor mutiny that followed, may have set in motion the modern Civil Rights movement;The often overlooked logistical role that the United States played in World War II by coordinating global supply chains;How World War II both heightened racial tensions, at home and abroad, and served as an instance of race-making in which the nation’s racial identity transformed;Discussion of an obscure anti-fascist article by a young Ronald Reagan.Guest: Tejasvi Nagaraja is an Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University in the ILR School. His first book is Troop Movements: Labor, Race, and Global Freedom Struggles in America’s World War II (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026). His writing has appeared in The Greater Second World War anthology, American Historical Review, and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Matthew Mason (Professor of History at Brigham Young University) interviews Christa Dierksheide (Brockman Foundation Jefferson Scholars Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia) and Nicholas Guyatt (Professor of North American History at the University of Cambridge) about their important new book, Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2026). Jefferson’s Wolf offers a decisive reassessment of Thomas Jefferson’s long-debated views on slavery, showing that his chief antislavery strategy was racial exclusion: the removal of emancipated Black people from the United States.Toward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson made his most famous statement about American slavery: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Presenting abolition as both necessary and perilous, the remark has long been relied upon to explain an apparent paradox: despite publicly opposing slavery for four decades, Jefferson had made no progress toward Black freedom in his political career by the time he died in 1826. Nor had he done so in his expansive household, where he enslaved more than 600 people, including Sally Hemings and the four children he fathered with her. Dierksheide and Guyatt argue that the key to understanding Jefferson’s antislavery position is his commitment to racial exclusion. Jefferson believed that the principal reason to abolish slavery was the threat of a massive slave revolt, but he viewed the presence of free Black people in the new nation as no less dangerous. To avert racial violence, Jefferson argued, the gradual abolition of slavery had to be paired with Black exile. Even when challenged by white and Black contemporaries with more expansive views of American belonging, Jefferson held fast to his vision for a white republic. Neither an egalitarian antiracist nor a proslavery apologist, Jefferson became the most influential advocate for racial separation in the early United States. Charting the evolution of his thought across the nation’s formative decades, Jefferson’s Wolf is a surprising and provocative account of the problem of slavery in the founding era.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Revolutionary Ink: New York Printers and the Promise of Democracy, 1693-1804 (Cambridge UP, 2026), my guest Mark J. Noonan explores the careers of New York printers whose presses disseminated Enlightenment ideals that fueled the American Revolution and framed the political debates of the early republic. Long overshadowed by the celebrated authors whose works they produced, printers William Bradford, John Peter Zenger, James Parker, Thomas Greenleaf and others helmed presses that provoked civic engagement, cultivated an appreciation for the arts and sciences, and defended press liberty. The book also examines the equally revolutionary work of their wives, who assisted with and sometimes ran their husband's presses. Throughout the narrative, Noonan addresses the discrepancy between revolutionary rhetoric and practice, and argues that to grasp New York's early print history is to confront the paradox of the Anglo-American Enlightenment: its profound advancements alongside the denial of universal human rights.Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Blusky and IG: @robbyref  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Timothy Stewart-Winter joins Michael Stauch to discuss the arrest that transformed Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life. Drawing on Jenkins’s previously unexamined personal papers, including hundreds of letters he received in the aftermath of his arrest from ordinary Americans and government officials alike, in Outed: LBJ's Confidant and the Arrest That Transformed a Presidency (U Chicago Press, 2026) Stewart-Winter shows how antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today.Highlights include: - A discussion of Jenkins’s career as LBJ’s closest aide at the intersection of the Lavender Scare, the urbanization of Washington DC, and the growth of the federal government after World War II;- How letters Jenkins received after his arrest reveal Americans’ changing views on sexuality and family life;- The effect that Jenkins’s public exile had on gay visibility just before the rise of gay liberation;- A tantalizing speculative reading of the effect that Jenkins’s exile from Washington, DC, had on the LBJ presidency and its most significant failure, the war in Vietnam;- How a bouquet of flowers from none other than J. Edgar Hoover helped rehabilitate Jenkins’s image after his arrest.Guest: Timothy Stewart-Winter is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. He is also the author of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, which won the John Boswell Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives (U Chicago Press, 2026) is a study of political parties and party nominations for the House of Representatives in 55 winnable open-seat nominations in the 2013-14 electoral cycle. Based on a combination of field interviews, fundraising and spending data from the Federal Election Commission, content analysis of newspaper coverage, and exit polls of voters in four contests, it argues that the most important actors in most nominations are those who supply campaign resources to some candidates and deny them to others. These "policy demanders," as the study calls them, consist mainly of standard interest group actors - business, labor, agriculture, professionals - but include faith-based activists and Tea Partiers as leading actors in some nominations. Among the study's main arguments are that policy demanders care more about their particular interests and values than general ideology, put serious effort into vetting candidates before supporting them, and often either work through local parties or coordinate among themselves. The study analyzes the competition between establishment and insurgent candidates in the Republican Party in terms of its general arguments. Progressive reformers sought the adoption of primary elections to empower voters to control the direction of their parties, but this study finds that most primary electorates pay too little attention to make use of the opportunity.Professor Kathleen Bawn is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published her work in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science.Professor John Zaller is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His other books include The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion and The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.Host Dr Ursula Hackett is Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the University of Oxford. She is the author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State and a forthcoming book on redistricting.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The first full biography of the controversial and complex First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler--an unjustly scandalized New Yorker, the second wife to President John Tyler, and a savvy and consequential political figure in the age of the Civil War.Myths, rumors, and gossip have long circulated around First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler. Commonly believed to be politically insignificant, most of our fascination with Tyler surrounds her reputation as a highly desired superficial flirt. This salacious mythos was based on her status in a politically influential New York family and the popular rumor that she posed for a sexually suggestive advertisement for a dry goods store in Manhattan.Now, in the first full biography of Julia Tyler, Christopher J. Leahy and Sharon Williams Leahy correct such longstanding misconceptions about President John Tyler's second wife and establish her reputation as an influential political force. Presidentess: The Life of First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler (UP of Kansas, 2026) shows a presidential spouse who was more consequential than people realize and made a lasting contribution to the evolving role of first lady.Leahy and Leahy present a compelling portrait of a determined woman who came to embrace her new Southern identity after marrying John Tyler, serving as a faithful defender of his views and values--including his decision to renounce the Union and join the Confederate government. In the aftermath of the Civil War, she orchestrated a public relations campaign to restore and protect her legacy as well as that of her late husband, the "traitor president." In her later years, she successfully lobbied Congress for a pension and reclaimed her status as a former first lady.Presidentess casts a new light on Julia Gardiner Tyler's life and legacy, including new revelations about the scandalous "Rose of Long Island" advertisement, an exploration of the dark side of New York City's print culture, and Tyler's essential role as an unwitting character in the presidential election of 1844. Presidentess gives a fully developed portrait of Julia Tyler, illuminating this controversial first lady and this pivotal turning point in American history. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.