New Books in American Politics

The US government is laboring under an enormous debt burden, one that will impact the living standards of future generations of Americans by limiting investment in people and infrastructure. In his new book, Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future (Oxford University Press, 2019), Brookings Institution senior scholar William Gale tackles the challenge head on, addressing what needs to happen to healthcare spending, Social Security, individual taxes, and corporate taxes, in order to make the numbers add up. It makes for sober reading, and the longer we wait, the worse the situation becomes. And the key challenge may not even be fiscal, but political, as the disagreements in Washington over the debt are as deep as the debt is large. Gale ends by making a few simple, inside-Washington suggestions as to how he thinks the political impasse can be broken.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this New Books Network/Gotham Center for NYC History podcast, guest host Beth Harpaz, editor of the City University of New York website SUM, interviews Jeanne Theoharis, distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College. Their topic is a new book just out from NYU Press, co-edited by Theoharis, called The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South (NYU Press, 2019).The book looks at the history of institutionalized racism around the U.S., showing that laws, policies, and entitlements in every region of the country not only created segregated communities, but also promoted affluence and opportunities for white Americans while keeping African Americans out of the middle class.“There did not need to be a ‘no coloreds’ sign for hotels, restaurants, pools, parks, housing complexes, schools, and jobs to be segregated across the North as well,” wrote Theoharis and her co-editor Professor Brian Purnell of Bowdoin College.In the podcast, Theoharis shows how African-Americans have faced discrimination in everything from pre-Civil War legal codes in New York, to 20th-century government programs like Social Security and the G.I. bill. She and Harpaz also discuss the ways in which the legacy of these racist policies persist today in public education, the criminal justice system, and other aspects of American society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United States is a hegemon, ignoring the country’s imperial traits to focus simply on its power. Dr. Daniel Immerwahr’s book How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) corrects this by explicitly focusing on the country’s territories and territories overseas possessions.Dr. Immerwahr begins at the country’s founding as apprehension over aggressive westward settlement gave way to enthusiastic land grabs by pioneers such as Daniel Boone. Propelled by an astonishingly high birth rate and immigration, Euroamericans displaced indigenous peoples. In addition to this more familiar narrative, other factors drove territorial expansion. A desperate need for fertilizers led to the annexation of nearly one hundred “guano islands” in the Pacific and Caribbean, followed by the annexation of even more territory following the Spanish-American War in 1898. These new territories, including Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and others enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the United States: they did not enjoy constitutional protections but nevertheless had a close relationship with what they called the mainland. While the United States backed away from traditional colonialism after 1945, what emerged instead was a “pointillist empire” that depended on bases and new uses of older territory to function.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (University of California Press, 2023), Calvin John Smiley explores the lives of people who were formerly incarcerated and the many daunting challenges they face. Those being released from prison must navigate the reentry process with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas, in a journey that is often confusing, complex, and precarious.Calvin John Smiley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York.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/adchoices

A gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England’s fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America.In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements and ethnic riots swept through New York and New Jersey. Dissidents in northern Carolina launched a revolution, proclaiming themselves independent of any authority but their own. English America teetered on the edge of anarchy.Though seemingly distinct, these conflicts were in fact connected through the Susquehannock Indians, a once-mighty nation reduced to a small remnant. Forced to scatter by colonial militia, Susquehannock bands called upon connections with Indigenous nations from the Great Lakes to the Deep South, mobilizing sources of power that colonists could barely perceive, much less understand. Although the Susquehannock nation seemed weak and divided, it exercised influence wildly disproportionate to its size, often tipping settler societies into chaos. Colonial anarchy was intertwined with Indigenous power.Piecing together Susquehannock strategies from a wide range of archival documents and material evidence, Matthew Kruer shows how one people’s struggle for survival and renewal changed the shape of eastern North America. Susquehannock actions rocked the foundations of the fledging English territories, forcing colonial societies and governments to respond. Time of Anarchy recasts our understanding of the late seventeenth century and places Indigenous power at the heart of the story.Matthew Kruer is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago where he teaches early American history.John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He is the author of Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (Univ. Press of Kansas, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"An air of finality pervades today’s world." That is the opening sentence of Jonathan White’s book In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea (Profile, 2024). What role, the book asks, has the idea of "the future" played in past politics? What role does it play in contemporary politics? Listen to White in discussion with Owen Bennett-Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Feminist Afterlives of the Witch: Popular Culture, Memory, Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) by Dr. Brydie Kosmina investigates the witch as a key rhetorical symbol in twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist memory, politics, activism, and popular culture.The witch demonstrates the inheritance of paradoxical pasts, traversing numerous ideological memoryscapes. This book is an examination of the ways that the witch has been deployed by feminist activists and writers in their political efforts in the twentieth century, and how this has indelibly affected cultural memories of the witch and the witch trials, and how this plays out in popular culture representations of the symbol through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Consequently, this book considers the relationship between popular culture and media, activist politics, and cultural memory.Using hauntological theories of memory and temporality, and literary, screen, and cultural studies methodologies, this book considers how popular culture remembers, misremembers, and forgets usable pasts, and the uses (and misuses) of these memories for feminist politics. Given the ubiquity of the witch in popular culture, politics and activism since 2016, this book is a timely examination of the range of meanings inherent to the figure, and is an important study of how cultural symbols like the witch inherit paradoxical memories, histories, and politics. The book will be valuable for scholars across disciplines, including witchcraft studies, feminist philosophy and history, memory studies, and popular culture studies.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

As I may be the target audience for Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies (Edinburgh UP, 2023), I really enjoyed interviewing Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, and Lee Mordechai. Their co-authored book explores the politics of American films about disease and zombies. We had a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and funny conversation about pandemics, capitalism, academic collaboration, apocalyptic fiction, and the importance of family.Robert Alpert is an Adjunct Instructor at Fordham University where he has taught courses on computers and robots in film, movies and the American experience, and media law. He has written extensively on movies, including on directors, such as Chaplin, Meyers, and Bigelow, as well as on other topics, such as gender, the Hollywood idiom, and the politics of science fiction. His publications can be found in Jump Cut, Senses of Cinema, and CineAction. Alpert received his M.F.A. in Film from Columbia University. He also received a J.D. from New York University and practiced intellectual property law for over 30 years.Merle Eisenberg is an Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University and a founding faculty member of the Oklahoma State Pandemic Center. He has published articles in journals including The American Historical Review and Past & Present. His work has also appeared in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which received press coverage in CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and the NY Post. He has also appeared on CNN to discuss historical pandemics and regularly teaches courses on plagues and pandemics in history. Along with Lee Mordechai, he is the co-founder and co-host of the Infectious Historians podcast.Lee Mordechai is a Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Associate Director of Princeton University’s Climate Change and History Research Initiative. He has published over twenty academic articles, including two in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and in The American Historical Review and Past & Present. He has taught several courses on epidemics, including a seminar that used a draft of Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A controversial character largely known (as depicted in the movie Glory) as a Union colonel who led Black soldiers in the Civil War, James Montgomery (1814-71) waged a far more personal and radical war against slavery than popular history suggests. It is the true story of this militant abolitionist that Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer tell in Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind: James Montgomery and His War on Slavery (U Oklahoma Press, 2023), summoning a life fiercely lived in struggle against the expansion of slavery into the West and during the Civil War.This book follows a harrowing path through the turbulent world of the 1850s and 1860s as Montgomery, with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet, inflicts destructive retribution on Southern slaveholders wherever he finds them, crossing paths with notable abolitionists John Brown and Harriet Tubman along the way. During the tumultuous years of "Bleeding Kansas," he became a guerilla chieftain of the antislavery vigilantes known as Jayhawkers. When the war broke out in 1861, Montgomery led a regiment of white troops who helped hundreds of enslaved people in Missouri reach freedom in Kansas. Drawing on regimental records in the National Archives, the authors provide new insights into the experiences of African American men who served in Montgomery's next regiment, the Thirty-Fourth United States Colored Troops (formerly Second South Carolina Infantry).Montgomery helped enslaved men and women escape via one of the least-explored underground railways in the nation, from Arkansas and Missouri through Kansas and Nebraska. With support of abolitionists in Massachusetts, he spearheaded resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in Kansas. And, when war came, he led Black soldiers in striking at the very heart of the Confederacy. His full story thus illuminates the actions of both militant abolitionists and the enslaved people fighting to destroy the peculiar institution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An authoritative biography of the controversial Confederate general, who later embraced Reconstruction and became an outcast in the South.It was the most remarkable political about-face in American history. During the Civil War, General James Longstreet fought tenaciously for the Confederacy. He was alongside Lee at Gettysburg (and counseled him not to order the ill-fated attacks on entrenched Union forces there). He won a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded during a later battle.After the war Longstreet moved to New Orleans, where he dramatically changed course. He supported Black voting and joined the newly elected, integrated postwar government in Louisiana. When white supremacists took up arms to oust that government, Longstreet, leading the interracial state militia, did battle against former Confederates. His defiance ignited a firestorm of controversy, as white Southerners branded him a race traitor and blamed him retroactively for the South's defeat in the Civil War.Although he was one of the highest-ranking Confederate generals, Longstreet has never been commemorated with statues or other memorials in the South because of his postwar actions in rejecting the Lost Cause mythology and urging racial reconciliation. He is being rediscovered in the new age of racial reckoning. Elizabeth Varon's Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023) is the first biography in decades and the first to give proper attention to Longstreet's long post-Civil War career. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices