New Books in American Politics

Born in Yorba Linda and raised in Whittier, California, Nixon succeeded early in life, excelling in academics while enjoying athletics through high school. At Whittier College he graduated at the top of his class and was voted Best Man on Campus. During his career at Whittier's oldest law firm, he was respected professionally and became a chief trial attorney. As a military man in the South Pacific during World War II, he was admired by his fellow servicemen. Returning to his Quaker roots after the war, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, and the vice presidency, all within six short years. After losing to John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon returned to Southern California to practice law. After losing his gubernatorial race he reinvented himself: he moved to New York and was elected president of the United States in 1968. He returned to Southern California after Watergate and his resignation to heal before once again taking a place on the world stage.Richard Nixon: California's Native Son (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) is the story of Nixon's Southern California journey from his birth in Yorba Linda to his final resting place just a few yards from the home in which he was born.Paul Carter is an attorney with more than twenty years of experience in investigation and trial work.Caleb Zakarin is an Editor at New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Contemporary politics is characterized by the rise (and fall) of many new parties. But what tools do political scientists have to map and measure electoral volatility? How can we best capture this change? And what insights can political scientists draw from other disciplines? Join host Tim Haughton for a discussion with Allan Sikk and Philipp Köker, the authors of a new book, Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2023). Their book draws on a database of 200 000 electoral candidates from over 60 elections across nine democracies. Allan Sikk is Associate Professor at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Philipp Köker is Lecturer and Research Fellow at Leibniz University in Hannover. Tim Haughton is Professor of Comparative and European Politics and a founding co-director of CEDAR at the University of Birmingham. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How and why the election of Donald Trump inspired more women to enter politics.Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election shocked and dismayed many women, and motivated many to run for office at all levels of government. In The Pink Wave: Women Running for Office After Trump (NYU Press, 2023), Regina M. Matheson and William W. Parsons explore this inspiring phenomenon and its impact on women's representation.Drawing on national surveys and in-depth interviews of over 900 women, across almost every state, Matheson and Parsons show us why more women decided to run for state legislature during the Trump administration, the obstacles they faced on the campaign trail, and whether they ultimately succeeded or failed in their bid for office. Candidates share valuable lessons they learned from their recent campaign experiences, providing future insight for women--on both sides of the aisle--who may be inspired to follow in their footsteps.Matheson and Parsons examine the impact Donald Trump had on women candidates--both positive and negative--and women's ambitions to pursue political office. The Pink Wave celebrates the hundreds of trailblazing women creating new political opportunities for representation, now and in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems?As Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.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/adchoices

In Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona (University of Arizona Press, 2023), Tom Zoellner, a fifth-generation Arizonan, takes the reader on a walk across the length of the state, his narrative interspersed with essays on Arizona’s history, culture and politics. Our conversation focuses on such topics as how Arizona anticipated the Trump Era in America—how “the scent of oncoming Trumpism,” as he writes in Rim to River, became such a pronounced feature of his native state’s political and cultural landscape. Yet the story of Arizona remains in flux, as migrants pour in not just from across the border with Mexico but from fellow U.S. states. Zoellner’s Arizona may yet end up foreshadowing America’s post-Trump future.Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His most recent book is Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of Native people and the National Park Service in the United States is fraught. Dispossession, cultural insensitivity, and outright erasure characterize the long relationship that the NPS has with Indigenous groups. But change is possible, as Drs. Christina Hill, Matthew Hill, and Brooke Neely adeptly demonstrate in National Parks, National Sovereignty: Experiments in Collaboration (U of Oklahoma Press, 2024). This edited collection contains several case studies that focus not just on critique, but practical tools and outcomes for use by public historians interested in forging partnerships between scholars and Native communities. The book also contains full-text interviews with people who have on-the-ground experience in forging these kinds of partnerships, including Gerard Baker, the first Native person to act as superintendent of Mount Rushmore and several other NPS sites. This book serves as a guide to forging new relationships between history institutions and Native communities, and shows that collaboration can be a bridge to telling truer, more democratic, stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hemispheric foreign policy has waxed and waned since the Mexican War, and the Cold War presented both extraordinary promises and dangerous threats to U.S.-Latin American cooperation. In Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America (UNC Press, 2022), Andrew J. Kirkendall examines the strengths and weaknesses of new models for U.S.-Latin American relations created by liberal Democrats who came to the fore during the Kennedy Administration and retained significant influence until the Reagan era. Rather than exerting ironfisted power in Latin America, liberal Democrats urged Washington to be a moral rather than a militaristic leader in hemispheric affairs. Decolonization, President Eisenhower's missteps in Latin America, and the Cuban Revolution all played key roles in the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress, which liberal Democrats hailed as a new cornerstone for U.S.-Latin American foreign policy. During the Vietnam War era, liberal Democrats began to incorporate human rights more centrally into their agendas, using Latin America as the primary arena for these policies. During the long period of military dictatorship in much of Latin America and the Caribbean, liberal Democrats would see their policies dissolved by the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations who favored militant containment of both communism and absolutism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1908, Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the momentous growth of the labor movement with alarm. "Socialism," he wrote, "has become a distinct substitute" for the church. He was not wrong.In the generation after the Civil War, few of the migrants who moved North and West to take jobs in factories and mines had any association with traditional Protestant denominations. In the place of church, workers built a labor movement around a shared commitment to a Christian commonwealth. They demanded an expanded local, state and federal infrastructure which supported collective bargaining for better pay, shorter work-days, and an array of municipal services. Protestant clergy worried that if the labor movement kept growing in momentum and cultural influence, socialist policies would displace the need for churches and their many ministries to the poor. Even worse, they feared that the labor movement would render the largest Protestant denominations a relic of the nineteenth century.In The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement (Oxford UP, 2023), Janine Giordano Drake carefully traces the relationships which Protestant ministers built with labor unions and working class communities. She finds that Protestant ministers worked hard to assert their cultural authority over Catholic, Jewish, and religiously-unaffiliated working-class communities. Moreover, they rarely supported the most important demands of labor, including freedom of speech and the right to collective bargaining. Despite their heroic narratives of Christian social reform, Protestant reformers' efforts to assert their authority over industrial affairs directly undermined workers' efforts to bring about social democracy in the United States.Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches courses in U.S. and public history. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. You can follow him on X @matthewfsimmons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s the UConn Popcast, and Taylor Swift is by some measures the most popular person on the planet. Her periodic reinventions set the mass cultural terms of debate, and her political interventions – through exhorting her fans on social media – lead to huge spikes in voter registration. It is hoped by Democrats, and feared by Republicans, that a Taylor endorsement of Joe Biden in 2024 might meaningfully tip the scales in favor of reelection.In this episode, we consider Taylor Swift as a popular and political text, over which she exercises substantial, but not total, authorial control. What role in the culture does she play? How should we interpret her recent association with the NFL? How do the parasocial relationships of her fans – “Swifties” – to the artist herself contribute to authorship of the Taylor text. And how should we read the counter-subversive conspiratorial responses to her halting forays into electoral politics? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The American Poet Laureate: A History of U.S. Poetry and the State (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Paeth shows how the state has been the silent centre of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo at the nation’s Capitol. It is also a history of how these state poets participated in national arts programming during the Cold War.Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials at the Library of Congress and materials at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Dr. Paeth describes the interactions of federal bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with literary organisations and with private patrons, including “Prozac heiress” Ruth Lilly. The consolidation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of state verse culture, recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, which followed Robert Frost’s “Mission to Moscow,” and which became dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s.The American Poet Laureate contributes to a growing body of institutional and sociological approaches to U.S. literary production in the postwar era and demonstrates how poetry has played a uniquely important, and largely underacknowledged, role in the cultural front of the Cold War.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/adchoices