New Books in American Studies

An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century The US middle class was a product of state and federal policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. But since the 1980s, lawmakers have undermined what they once built, shredding the social safety net and instituting laws that virtually guarantee downward mobility for all but the most privileged. How can we restore what has been lost? Rigorous and highly readable, The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream (U California Press, 2026) breaks down the policies that have decimated working families and proposes reforms to reverse this trend. As Mechele Dickerson shows, part of the problem is that politicians disingenuously conflate the middle class with the "White lower rich." Such propaganda hides how state and federal lawmakers consistently favor education, labor, housing, and consumer-credit laws that erode the bank accounts of lower- and middle-income people--especially those who are not White and don't have college degrees. Weaving together the latest research with the personal stories of Americans struggling to make ends meet, Dickerson provides a clarion call for political leaders to enact a bold agenda like the one that created the middle class almost a century ago. A. Mechele Dickerson is the Arthur L. Moller Chair in Bankruptcy and Practice and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of Texas School of Law. Professor Dickerson is a nationally recognized scholar on financial vulnerability, consumer debt, housing affordability, and racial and economic disparities. She regularly teaches Remedies and Federal Civil Procedure at the School of Law, has taught a class on civil procedural disputes that arose between the two Trump presidencies, and has taught numerous cross-listed interdisciplinary graduate-level courses on the American middle-class and the COVID pandemic. She is also the author of Homeownership and America's Financial Underclass: Flawed Premises, Broken Promises, New Prescriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

A racial demographic transition has come to rural northern New England. White population losses sit alongside racial and ethnic minority population gains in nearly all of the small towns of the Upper Valley region spanning New Hampshire and Vermont. Homesick considers these trends in a part of the country widely considered to be progressive, offering new insights on the ways white residents maintain racial hierarchies even there. In Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England Walton focuses on the experiences of mostly well-educated migrants of color moving to the area to take well-paid jobs - in this case in health care, higher education, software development, and engineering. Walton shows that white residents maintain their social position through misrecognition-a failure or unwillingness to see people of color as legitimate, welcome, and valuable members of the community. The ultimate impact of such misrecognition is a profound sense of homesickness, a deep longing for a place in which one can feel safe, wanted, and accepted. Tightly and sensitively argued, this book helps us better understand how to recognize and unsettle such processes of exclusion in diversifying spaces in general. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education (Oxford UP, 2025), Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have created an invisible infrastructure not only to affect local school districts but also to shape US education. He illustrates this by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how local organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have transformed data and worked with high schools to address the problem of students dropping out. The book argues that changes in a decentralized system happen less through top-down policy mandates or bottom-up social movements, and more through “outside-in” initiatives of networked organizations spread across various local systems. By detailing change across multiple levels and across multiple locations, Trinidad uncovers new ways to think about educational transformation, policy reform, and organizational change. João Souto-Maior (website: here) is a postdoc at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. T. R. Johnson's book New Orleans: A Writer's City (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Political Scientist Michael Illuzzi has a fascinating new book on peoplehood in the United States, focusing on different political actors at different crucial points in American history, and how the “story” of American peoplehood has been told. This idea of “peoplehood” is not necessarily new, since it brings with it a connection to the country where one is a citizen. But for the United States, this concept has been defined and redefined over more than 250 years and often connects back to the promise of the Declaration of Independence, where the commitment to equality was articulated, but has never been fully recognized or achieved. Part of what Illuzzi is doing in Mending the Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age is explaining, through a number of case studies, the difference between what are called “mending stories” and “bleaching stories”—those narratives that design a country that is more inclusive, that explain the past but also work towards mending earlier injustices, in contrast to those narratives that choose to erase historical injustices and inequalities and, in the process, also define the American fabric as exclusionary. This framework, drawing out these different approaches to narratives about American peoplehood, is vitally important as we find ourselves at this particular inflection point, with daily debates and armed conflicts over who is and isn’t allowed to be considered an American. The case studies at the heart of Mending the Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age include the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, Mayor Samual Jones (of Toledo) and the integration of immigrants at the turn of the century, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Martin Luther King Jr’s coalition building beyond the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition in Chicago in the 1960s, and finally the Poor People’s Campaign led by Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Rev. Dr. William Barber II. In each case, Illuzzi examines different kinds of opposition to more authoritarian, more divisive, or more oppressive approaches, in the speeches and in the coalitions that are being built by those leading towards mending narratives. Part of the analysis is also about how political coalitions are expanded—especially in ways that may be unexpected, when common issues (like poverty, or police brutality, or healthcare access) transcend ethnic, racial, or even political boundaries and groupings. This is a beautifully written discussion of the idea of the United States, and the ways in which politics, race, ethnicity, and class are all woven together within the broader fabric of a country “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Mending A Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age is particularly important in helping us to think about and possibly act on “from many, one” in the age of divisive populism and discrimination. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. In this lecture, a part of the “New American Music Series” of Gallatin Lectures at NYU, Foss discusses the state of American contemporary music, musical minimalism, and his own approach of combining serial elements with spontaneous composition. Foss was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, on August 15, 1922, the son of a lawyer and a painter. He began studying piano and music theory when he was 7, and sketched out an opera when he was 11. His family fled to Paris in 1933, and arrived in the U.S. in 1937. He attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and studied composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale. In 1953, Foss succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as the head of the composition department at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1962, “Time Cycle,” a four-movement vocal setting of texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, premiered with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. From 1971 to 1988 Foss was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. After he left the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in 1990, Foss appeared as a guest conductor and pianist with orchestras around the world. He died in New York City on February 1, 2009. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Mary E. Stuckey, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, has a brilliant new book that dives into the question of who we are as Americans, a theme that Stuckey has long researched and considered in much of her work (Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity, University Press of Kansas, 2004; For the Enjoyment of the People: The Creation of National Identity in American Public Lands, University Press of Kansas, 2023), but she traces this idea of American identity through Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President of the United States, key author of the Declaration of Independence, architect, and enslaver. Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are is an exploration not so much of Thomas Jefferson the person, but Thomas Jefferson as he has become iconic within the American imagination and what that position explains about not only Jefferson himself, but also what it says about the United States at any particular period in the course of American history. Stuckey traces the symbolic and iconic Jefferson in a number of distinct areas, each of which communicate different presentations or representations of Jefferson himself but also how we, as citizens, consume the idea of Jefferson. All of these are avenues to understand American national identity. As a scholar of presidential rhetoric, Stuckey begins the research by exploring how other presidents have used Jefferson in their speeches and their rhetoric, finding that the vast majority of presidents have referenced Jefferson in some form or in some way to legitimize their own policies. Many presidents have integrated Jefferson’s own words (and he wrote many, many words over a long life, especially for the time) as a way to authorize what they were doing while in office. Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are then traces the many memorials and monuments that integrate Jefferson in some capacity. But this section is split into two pieces, one that specifically focuses on the Jefferson-centric presentations, and the other part that integrates Jefferson with other Founders or other presidents (like Mt. Rushmore). Stuckey makes clear the key dimension around the building of these kinds of memorials and monuments: they are as much about the people choosing to build them and how they are to look and exist as they are about the individual, in this case Jefferson, being honored within them. The next section of Remembering Jefferson examines Jefferson in popular culture, particularly in televisual and cinematic popular culture. And while Jefferson is, again, in many places, he comes across in fascinating ways in these renderings, since his relationship to slavery—that he had over 500 enslaved individuals over his lifetime, that a number of those who were enslaved were also his children—is often portrayed as incidental and as a kind of footnote. Jefferson is often hazy and romantic in these narratives. The final section of the book assesses Jefferson within children’s literature, since this is also a realm where Jefferson is taking on a civic teaching, and the presentation is about communicating a kind of citizenship to young people. Mary Stuckey has produced an important reading of the United States by reading Thomas Jefferson in all the places and spaces where he turns up. Remembering Jefferson: Who He was, Who We Are is a delight to read, and discusses the complex ideas of national identity, enslavement, race, power, citizenship, and civic virtue. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Theodore Karamanski joins fellow Lake Michigan enthusiast Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan. Looking down from outer space a vast expanse of blue appears in the heart of North America. Of the magnificent chain of inland seas, only one of those bodies of water--Lake Michigan--is entirely within the boundaries of the United States. Lake Michigan has been uniquely shaped by its relationship with humans, since its geological evolution took place at the same time as Paleo-Indian peoples interacted with the changing environment. Each generation of humans has altered the lake to suit society's changing needs, dredging harbors, building lighthouses, digging canals and channels, filling in shallows, and obliterating wetlands. Great Lake is a comprehensive survey of the manifold ways Americans, from the first Native American communities to the present age, have abused, nurtured, loved, and neglected this massive freshwater resource. Extending 307 miles from north to south, the lake cuts across climatic, environmental, and physiographic zones, from the prairies of Illinois to the boreal forests of the north. Bordered by large cities like Chicago and Milwaukee as well as smaller Wisconsin resorts and northern Michigan mines and mill towns, the lake touches people in urban centers and countryside. Thus, the history of Lake Michigan combines the history of frontier resource extraction, agricultural abundance, industrialization, and dense urbanization in the American heartland. Great Lake is the story of the ever-escalating and divergent demands Americans have placed on Lake Michigan, how the lake's ecosystem responded to those changes, and how together they have shaped the modern American Midwest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their place in a nation still grappling with the legacy of slavery. Often remembered as a period of failed progressive change that gave way to Jim Crow and second-class citizenship, Reconstruction’s tragic narrative has long overshadowed the resilience and agency of African Americans during this time.Requiem for Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) chronicles Reconstruction’s legacy by focusing on key Black figures such as South Carolina congressman Robert Smalls, Judge William Whipper, writer Frances Rollin, and others who shaped postbellum Black America. Robert D. Bland traces the impact of the Reconstruction generation—Black Americans born between 1840 and 1870 who saw Reconstruction as a defining political movement and worked to preserve its legacy by establishing a new set of historical practices such as formulating new archives, shaping local community counternarratives, using the Black press to inform national audiences about Southern Republican politics, and developing a framework to interpret the recent past’s connection to their present world. Set in South Carolina’s Lowcountry—a hub of Black freedom, landownership, and activism—this book shows how late nineteenth-century Black leaders, educators, and journalists built a powerful countermemory of Reconstruction, defying the dominant white narrative that sought to erase their contributions. Find Professor Bland at his website, and on Threads, BlueSky, and X. Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack where she and Professor Bland continued their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent.With Spatial Theories for the Americas: Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024), Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space—drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and mostly architecture—and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of architecture, problematizing its theoretical foundation in relation to the inseparability of modernization and colonization. The second part makes explicit the insufficiencies of a hegemonic Western tradition at the core of spatial theories by discussing a long list of authors who have thought about the Americas.To overcome centuries of Eurocentrism, Lara concludes, will require a tremendous effort, but, nonetheless, we have the responsibility of looking at the built environment of the Americas through our own lenses. Spatial Theories for the Americas proposes a fundamental step in that direction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies