New Books in American Studies
4,128 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 2 years ago - ★★★★ - 20 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of America about their New Books
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Episodes
Marga Vicedo, "Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother" (Beacon Press, 2021)
June 17, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesIn the early 1960s, Massachusetts writer and homemaker Clara Park and her husband took their 3-year-old daughter, Jessy, to a specialist after noticing that she avoided connection with others. Following the conventional wisdom of the time, the psychiatrist diagnosed Jessy with autism and blamed Clara for Jessy's isolation. Experts claimed Clara was the prototypical "refrigerator mother," a cold, intellectual parent who starved her children of the natural affection they needed to develop prope...
Judah Schept, "Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia" (NYU Press, 2022)
June 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAs the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, ...
James J. Connolly et al., "Vulnerable Communities: Research, Policy, and Practice in Small Cities" (Cornell UP, 2022)
June 17, 2022 08:00 - 35 minutesVulnerable Communities: Research, Policy, and Practice in Small Cities (Cornell UP, 2022) examines the struggles of smaller cities in the United States, those with populations between 20,000 and 200,000. Like many larger metropolitan centers, these places are confronting change within a globalized economic and cultural order. Many of them have lost their identities as industrial or commercial centers and face a complex and distinctive mix of economic, social, and civic challenges. Small citie...
Aziz Z. Huq, "The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies" (Oxford UP, 2021)
June 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourJust recently, the Supreme Court rejected an argument by plaintiffs that police officers should no longer be protected by the doctrine of qualified immunity when they shoot or brutalize an innocent civilian. Qualified immunity is but one of several judicial inventions that shields state violence and thwarts the vindication of our rights. But aren't courts supposed to be protectors of individual rights? As Aziz Huq shows in The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies (Oxford UP, 2021), history rev...
On Religion, Food, and Eating in America
June 17, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesDr. Nora Rubel is the Jane and Alan Batkin Professor of Jewish Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester in New York. Dr. Ben Zeller is associate professor of religion at Lake Forest College in Illinois. They are co-editors of the book Religion, Food, and Eating in North America from Columbia University Press (2014). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksn...
Matthew Specter, "The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States" (Stanford UP, 2022)
June 16, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesIn The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States (Stanford UP, 2022), intellectual historian Matthew Specter offers a boldly revisionist interpretation of "realism," a prevalent stance in post-WWII US foreign policy and public discourse and the dominant international relations theory during the Cold War. Challenging the common view of realism as a set of universally binding truths about international affairs, Specter argues that its ma...
Çigdem Çidam, "In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship" (Oxford UP, 2021)
June 16, 2022 04:00 - 59 minutesÇigdem Çidam, Associate Professor of Political Science at Union College, has a new book titled In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Oxford UP, 2021) that examines political action by citizens, and how we interpret and discuss that action in context of political structures. The title In the Street is a reference to the seminal French poster from May of 1968 that read “beauty is in the street,” and was adapted by the demonstrators in Turkey decades later, p...
Amy L. Stone, "Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South" (NYU Press, 2022)
June 15, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesQueer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South (NYU Press, 2022) reveals the importance of citywide celebrations like Mardi Gras and Fiesta for LGBTQIA+ communities in the US South. Drawing on five years of research, and over a hundred days at LGBTQ events in cities such as San Antonio, Santa Fe, Baton Rouge, and Mobile, Stone gives readers a front-row seat to festivals, carnivals, and Mardi Gras celebrations, vividly bringing these queer cultural spaces and the people that create and ...
Ellen Griffith Spears, "Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945" (Routledge, 2019)
June 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourRethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945 (Routledge, 2019) turns a fresh interpretive lens on the past, drawing on a wide range of new histories of environmental activism to analyze the actions of those who created the movement and those who tried to thwart them. Concentrating on the decades since World War II, environmental historian Ellen Griffith Spears explores environmentalism as a "field of movements" rooted in broader social justice activism. Noting major legislative ac...
Lydia Wilkes et al., "Rhetoric and Guns" (Utah State UP, 2022)
June 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourGuns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of public health, as is evident whenever a mass shooting occurs. But guns also play an important role in many Americans’ lives that is not reducible to violence and death—as tools, sporting equipment, and identity markers. They are also central to debates about constitutional rights, as seen in ongoing discussions about the Second Amendment, and the...
John Wills, "Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
June 15, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesIn 1975, design engineer Dave Nutting completed work on a new arcade machine. A version of Taito's Western Gun, a recent Japanese arcade machine, Nutting's Gun Fight depicted a classic showdown between gunfighters. Rich in Western folklore, the game seemed perfect for the American market; players easily adapted to the new technology, becoming pistol-wielding pixel cowboys. One of the first successful early arcade titles, Gun Fight helped introduce an entire nation to video-gaming and sold mor...
Charles Elton, "Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision" (Abrams Press, 2022)
June 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourCimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision (Abrams Press, 2022) is the first biography of critically acclaimed then critically derided filmmaker Michael Cimino--and a reevaluation of the infamous film that destroyed his career The director Michael Cimino (1939-2016) is famous for two films: the intense, powerful, and enduring Vietnam movie The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1979 and also won Cimino Best Director, and Heaven's Gate, the most...
On Early American Yoga
June 15, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesPhilip Deslippe is a historian of American religion with a background in American Studies and literature. His research focuses on Asian, metaphysical, and marginal religions in modern America. Philip is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and writing a dissertation on the early history of yoga in the United States from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho...
Mary Sarah Bilder, "Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution" (U Virginia Press, 2022)
June 15, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesIn Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (U Virginia Press, 2022), Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s—the Age of the Constitution—to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. Bilder finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor. This pathbreaking female educator delivered a University of Pennsylvania lecture attended by George Washington as he and other C...
David P. Oakley, "Subordinating Intelligence: The DoD/CIA Post-Cold War Relationship" (UP of Kentucky Press, 2019)
June 14, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesIn the late eighties and early nineties, driven by the post–Cold War environment and lessons learned during military operations, United States policy makers made intelligence support to the military the Intelligence Community's top priority. In response to this demand, the CIA and DoD instituted policy and organizational changes that altered their relationship with one another. While debates over the future of the Intelligence Community were occurring on Capitol Hill, the CIA and DoD were exp...
Wanda M. Corn, "Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern" (Prestel Publishing, 2017)
June 14, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWanda M. Corn's book Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern (Prestel Publishing, 2017) explores how Georgia O’Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O’Keeffe’s clothes. The author has attributed some of the most exquisite of these gar...
Steven K. Green, "Separating Church and State: A History" (Cornell UP, 2022)
June 14, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutesIn 1802, President Thomas Jefferson distilled a leading idea in the early American republic and wrote of a wall of separation between church and state. That metaphor has come down from Jefferson to 21st-century Americans through a long history of jurisprudence, political contestation, and cultural influence. Separating Church and State: A History (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the development of the concept of separation of church and state and the Supreme Court's application of it in the law. Ste...
Nadia Y. Kim, "Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA" (Stanford UP, 2021)
June 14, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe air in Los Angeles can be lethal, and nobody knows this better than the city’s Latinx and Asian immigrants, argues Dr. Nadia Kim in Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (Stanford UP, 2021). Kim, a professor of Asian and Asian American Studies and Sociology at Loyola Marymount University, spend years interviewing environmental justice activists and other residents of LA’s most polluted neighborhoods to show the depths of environmental injustice in A...
Brandi Clay Brimmer, "Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South" (Duke UP, 2020)
June 14, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesIn Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Duke UP, 2020), Brandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women during and after the Civil War. Reconstructing the grassroots pension network in New Bern, North Carolina, through a broad range of historical sources, she outlines how the mothers, wives, and widows of black Union soldiers struggled to claim pensions in the face of evidentiary obstacles and p...
Louis M. Maraj, "Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics" (Utah State UP, 2020)
June 14, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourBlack or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Utah State University Press, 2020) explores notions of Blackness in white institutional—particularly educational—spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against ideas of difference in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Centering Blackness in frameworks for antiracist agency through interdisciplinary Black feminist lenses, Black or Right asks how those racially signifying “diversity” in US higher education (and beyond) m...
Andie Tucher, "Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History" (Columbia UP, 2022)
June 13, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesLong before the current preoccupation with “fake news,” American newspapers routinely ran stories that were not quite, strictly speaking, true. Today, a firm boundary between fact and fakery is a hallmark of journalistic practice, yet for many readers and publishers across more than three centuries, this distinction has seemed slippery or even irrelevant. We see this play in pink slime local news sites and in the proliferation of truthers claiming to do their own research because of a deep di...
Megan Kate Nelson, "Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America" (Scribner, 2022)
June 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1871 an expedition entered the territory now encompassed by Yellowstone National Park. Led by doctor and self-taught geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, it was to be the first scientific expedition into that mysterious place. But it was also, says my guest Megan Kate Nelson, part of a larger struggle over the expansion of federal power during Reconstruction. Hayden would be one of the three men who would strive for control of Yellowstone, and the surrounding territory. The others were Ja...
Sarah Deutsch, "Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898-1940" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
June 13, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesTo many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the West was simultaneously the greatest symbol of American opportunity, the greatest story of its history, and the imagined blank slate on which the country's future would be written. From the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Great Depression's end, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, policymakers at various levels and large-scale corporate investors, along with those living in the West and its borderlands, struggled over who w...
Paul Lerner et al., "Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
June 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourJewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) investigates the place and meaning of consumption in Jewish lives and the roles Jews played in different consumer cultures in modern Europe and North America. Drawing on innovative, original research into this new and challenging field, the volume brings Jewish studies and the history and theory of consumer culture into dialogue with each other. Its chapters explore Jewish business...
Elizabeth Alexander, "The Trayvon Generation" (Grand Central, 2022)
June 13, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesThe Trayvon Generation (Grand Central, 2022) expands upon Elizabeth Alexander’s gripping essay — under the same name — originally published in The New Yorker amid the 2020 summer social unrest. This collection is a mediation on race by recounting the pervasiveness of racial violence in American culture. The Trayvon Generation weaves prose, poetry, and art to cast historical and cultural resonances to understand the human experience while also humanizing the Black dead and living. This slender...
Danya Glabau, "Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
June 10, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesA detailed exploration of parents' fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy The success of food allergy activism in highlighting the dangers of foodborne allergens shows how illness communities can effectively advocate for the needs of their members. In Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Danya Glabau follows parents and activists as they fight for allergen-free environments, ...
Edward Anthony Avery-Natale, "Ethics, Politics, and Anarcho-Punk Identifications: Punk and Anarchy in Philadelphia" (Lexington, 2016)
June 10, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourEdward Anthony Avery-Natale's book Ethics, Politics, and Anarcho-Punk Identifications: Punk and Anarchy in Philadelphia (Lexington, 2016) explores the ways in which those who identify as punks and anarchists living in the Philadelphia area construct their identifications narratively through the use of ethics. The book shows that contemporary subcultural and political identifications are complicated by the multiplicity of identifications that postmodern subjects must work from. Throughout the ...
Mark Anthony Neal, "Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive" (NYU Press, 2022)
June 10, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWe are living in an era of unprecedented access to popular culture: contemporary digital infrastructure provides anyone with an internet connection access to a dizzying array of cultural objects past and present, which mingle and connect in fascinating, bizarre and sometimes troubling ways. In Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (NYU Press, 2022), Mark Anthony Neal considers the opportunities and challenges that this vast archive represents for Black American cult...
Melissa Vosen Callens, "Ode to Gen X: Institutional Cynicism in 'Stranger Things' and 1980s Film" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
June 09, 2022 08:00 - 40 minutesIn Ode to Gen X: Institutional Cynicism in "Stranger Things" and 1980s Film (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Melissa Vosen Callens explores the parallels between iconic films featuring children and teenagers and the first three seasons of Stranger Things, a series about a group of young friends set in 1980s Indiana. The text moves beyond the (at times) non-sequitur 1980s Easter eggs to a common underlying narrative: Generation X’s growing distrust in American institutions. Despite Gen...
Treva B. Lindsey, "America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice" (U California Press, 2022)
June 09, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesEchoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song that inspired the title, this book is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures. America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice (U California Press, 2022) explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today. Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Linds...
On Religion and Photography in 19th-Century America
June 09, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesDr. Rachel Lindsey is Assistant Professor in Saint Louis University’s Department of Theological Studies. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in American Religion from Princeton University, and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Missouri State University. She is the author of Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth Century America from University of North Carolina Press. We discussed Communion of Shadows and her fantastic projects, Lived Religion in the Digital Age and Arch City Religi...
Risa Brooks et al., "Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: The Military, Society, Politics, and Modern War" (Oxford UP, 2020)
June 09, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesMost existing literature regarding civil-military relations in the United States references either the Cold War or post-Cold War era, leaving a significant gap in understanding as our political landscape rapidly changes. Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: The Military, Society, Politics, and Modern War (Oxford UP, 2020) builds upon our current perception of civil-military relations, filling in this gap and providing contemporary understanding of these concepts. The authors exami...
Bryan D. Palmer, "James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928" (U Illinois Press, 2010)
June 08, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe history of revolutionary politics is rich enough that it includes the full spectrum of inspiration and tragedy. Those with revolutionary aspirations have a number of rocks in their shoes to deal with, perhaps most famously the failure of the Soviet Union and the shadow of Stalinism. Those looking to remain faithful to the spirit of revolutionary Marxism while still seriously reckoning with the tragedies of the past will need to develop new routes, and for that to happen, alternative figur...
Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
June 08, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesThe Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it. In the twenty-one conversations contained in this engaging and highly accessible book, we hear from the musicians themselves, in their own words, direct and unfiltered. Peter Zimmerman’s interviewing technique is straightforward. He turns on a recording device, poses questions, and allows his subjects to improvise, similar to the way the musici...
Stephen Deusner, "Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers" (U Texas Press, 2021)
June 08, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesStephen Deusner's Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers (U Texas Press, 2021) is the book-length study Drive-By Truckers fans have been waiting for. A group biography in the form of a road trip saga, Deusner's book takes you to the Athens scene that has supported the band, the sweltering hot Birmingham studio where they recorded their breakthrough album Southern Rock Opera, and the Muscle Shoals in which a majority of the band was raised. Deusner's trip ta...
A Newly Discovered Essay by Fredrick Douglas: "Slavery" (1894-1895)
June 07, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesToday’s guest is Leslie Leonard, who received their doctorate in American Studies and 19th C. American Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their dissertation, The Burdens and Blessings of Responsibility: Duty and Community in Nineteenth-Century America, is a study of the emergent idea of personal responsibility as it conflicted with more established ideas of duty in the writings of Herman Melville, and Harriet Jacobs. Drawing on a range of sources –works of literature, th...
Andrea C. Mosterman, "Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York" (Cornell UP, 2021)
June 07, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesIn Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Cornell UP, 2021), Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies. In the 1620s, Dutch colonial settlers brought slavery to the banks of the Hudson River ...
Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner, "Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics" (U California Press, 2022)
June 07, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourCannabis "legalization" hasn't lived up to the hype. Across North America, investors are reeling, tax collections are below projections, and people are pointing fingers. On the business side, companies have shut down, farms have failed, workers have lost their jobs, and consumers face high prices. Why has legal weed failed to deliver on many of its promises? Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics (U California Press, 2022) takes on the euphoric claims with straight dop...
Dustin Tahmahkera, "Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
June 07, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFor centuries Comanches have captivated imaginations. Yet their story in popular accounts abruptly stops in 1875, when the last free Comanches entered a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. In Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands (U Nebraska Press, 2022), the first tribal-specific history of Comanches in film and media, Quanah Parker descendant Dustin Tahmahkera examines how Comanches represent themselves and are represented by others in recent media. Telling a story...
On the Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store
June 06, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesDr. Nicole Kirk is a historian of American religious history, associate professor, and the Frank and Alice Schulman Chair of Unitarian Universalist History at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, Illinois. She joined the faculty at Meadville Lombard in 2012 after earning her Ph.D. in American Religious History at Princeton Theological Seminary. She is the author of Wanamaker's Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ...
Erich Schwartzel, "Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy" (Penguin, 2022)
June 06, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesFrom trade to technology to military might, competition between the United States and China dominates the foreign policy landscape. But this battle for global influence is also playing out in a strange and unexpected arena: the movies. The film industry, Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel explains, is the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry between these two world powers. In recent decades, as China has grown into a giant of the international economy, it has become...
Melissa Ford, "A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest During the Great Depression" (Southern Illinois UP, 2022)
June 06, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesIn this first study of Black radicalism in midwestern cities before the civil rights movement, Melissa Ford connects the activism of Black women who championed justice during the Great Depression to those involved in the Ferguson Uprising and the Black Lives Matter movement. A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest During the Great Depression (Southern Illinois UP, 2022) examines how African American working-class women, many of whom had just migrated to “the promise...
Andy Hines, "Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
June 06, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. In Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (U Chicago Press, 2022), Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes a...
Pavla Simková, "Urban Archipelago: An Environmental History of the Boston Harbor Islands" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)
June 06, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe Boston Harbor Islands have been called Boston's "hidden shores." While some are ragged rocks teeming with coastal wildlife, such as oystercatchers and harbor seals, others resemble manicured parks or have the appearance of wooded hills rising gently out of the water. Largely ignored by historians and previously home to prisons, asylums, and sewage treatment plants, this surprisingly diverse ensemble of islands has existed quietly on the urban fringe over the last four centuries. Even thei...
Matthew Mark Silver, "Zionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics" (U Alabama Press, 2020)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourZionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics (U Alabama Press, 2020) moves away from commonplace accounts of the origins of Jewish politics and focuses on the ongoing activities of actors instrumental in the theological, political, diplomatic, and philanthropic networks that enabled the establishment of new Jewish communities in Palestine and the United States. M. M. Silver’s new study highlights the grassroots nature of these actors and their efforts—preaching...
Mickle Maher, "Six Plays" (Agate Press, 2022)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutes6 Plays (Agate Press, 2022) collects six plays written over a twenty year period by playwright Mickle Maher. Maher is a legend of the Chicago theatre. He is a founder of Theater Oobleck, which has produced many of his plays since their founding as a student theatre group at the University of Michigan in the 1980s. Maher's plays often riff on an existing literary or theatrical classic (Shakespeare's The Tempest in Spirits to Enforce, Chekhov's Cherry Orchard in The Hunchback Variations) but th...
Andrew Bickford, "Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military" (Duke UP, 2021)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military (Duke UP, 2021), Andrew Bickford analyzes the US military's attempts to design performance enhancement technologies and create pharmacological "supersoldiers" capable of withstanding extreme trauma. Bickford traces the deep history of efforts to biologically fortify and extend the health and lethal power of soldiers from the Cold War era into the twenty-first century, from early adoptions of mandatory immunizations to bio-pr...
Caleb Elfenbein, "Fear in Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Teaches Us About America" (NYU Press, 2021)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesIn his sparkling and politically urgent new book Fear in Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Teaches Us About America (NYU Press, 2021), Caleb Elfenbein shows with precision and panache the discursive, institutional, and political conditions and processes that have normalized anti-Muslim hate in the United States, especially over the last two decades. How does fear for a caricatured and dehumanized religious minority become an entrenched part of public discourse? Elfenbein engages and answers this ...
Robert Chao Romero, "Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity" (InterVarsity Press, 2020)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFor five hundred years, Latina/o culture and identity have been shaped by their challenges to the religious, socio-economic, and political status quo, whether in opposition to Spanish colonialism, Latin American dictatorships, US imperialism in Central America, the oppression of farmworkers, or the current exploitation of undocumented immigrants. Christianity has played a significant role in that movement at every stage. Robert Chao Romero, the son of a Mexican father and a Chinese immigrant ...
James S. Bielo, "Materializing the Bible: Scripture, Sensation, Place" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
June 02, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWhat happens when the written words of biblical scripture are transformed into experiential, choreographed environments? To answer this question, anthropologist James Bielo explores a diverse range of practices and places that “materialize the Bible,” including gardens, theme parks, shrines, museums, memorials, exhibitions, theatrical productions, and other forms of replication. Integrating ethnographic, archival, and mass media data, case studies focus primarily on U.S. Christianity from the...