New Books in American Studies

In Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Ian MacAllen traces the evolution of traditional Italian-American cuisine, often referred to as “red sauce Italian,” from its origins in Italy to its transformation in America into a new, distinct cuisine. It is a fascinating social and culinary history exploring the integration of red sauce food into mainstream America alongside the blending of Italian immigrant otherness into a national American identity. The story follows the small parlor restaurants immigrants launched from their homes to large, popular destinations, and eventually to commodified fast food and casual dining restaurants. Some dishes like fettuccine Alfredo and spaghetti alla Caruso owe their success to celebrities, and Italian-American cuisine generally has benefited from a rich history in popular culture.Drawing on inspiration from Southern Italian cuisine, early Italian immigrants to America developed new recipes and modified old ones. Ethnic Italians invented dishes like lobster fra Diavolo, spaghetti and meatballs, and veal parmigiana, and popularized foods like pizza and baked lasagna that had once been seen as overly foreign. Eventually, the classic red-checkered-table-cloth Italian restaurant would be replaced by a new idea of what it means for food to be Italian, even as ‘red sauce’ became entrenched in American culture. This booklooks at how and why these foods became part of the national American diet, and focuses on the stories, myths, and facts behind classic (and some not so classic) dishes within Italian-American cuisine.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Dr. Kareem Muhammad has a new book that focuses on the role of Black voters in the United States – specifically in their power as participants in democracy. In many ways, this is a “love story to the Black community” in the U.S. The book traces the sustained electoral power of Black voters, and teases at the fissures within this significant bloc of voters. Muhammad pays particular attention to what it looks like when policies that are important to Black voters are passed and implemented, and how this process reflects the coalition strength of this particular voting bloc. The research also notes that, historically, the Black vote has not really been taken into consideration as an important and vital bloc of voters, and thus less attention is paid to these voters by either party. But the research also notes that the Black vote is, in fact, decisive in supporting a political coalition that then puts into place policies and legislation that this community of voters wants to see established—like Reconstruction, like the Civil Rights agenda in the 1960s, like the efforts to protect democracy now.The Fight for Black Empowerment in the USA: America’s Last Hope (Routledge, 2023) focuses on just that—the power that individuals have, especially when grouped together, to impact elections, political agendas, and elected officials in office. But this pursuit, of political power and strength within the African American community, is also set in the historical and contemporary context of white supremacy in the United States. This is important to understand since it also highlights what Muhammad refers to as “the bounds of power” within the U.S. It is vitally important to understand the contours of power and what that means and how it is constituted in order to explore empowerment, especially black empowerment. The impetus behind the research and the book was to see if there was collaboration between the black voting bloc and the elected officials they have supported in the contemporary period, specifically the Democratic party and Democratic presidents. But one of the key findings in the research is that there are also gendered differences within the African American community and among African American voters in regard to support and engagement. Diving into popular culture, Muhammad traces these divides, highlighting the sexism, homophobia, and patriarchy that often comes through these cultural artifacts. The research also exposes the discomfort and resentment that some men have with the increased power and influence of black women. The Fight for Black Empowerment in the USA: America’s Last Hope is a complex analysis, including an assessment of political power in the United States, understandings of how culture interacts with positions within communities, tensions around gender and power, and the collaborations between different political entities, voting blocs, and elected officials. The concluding ideas highlight the particularly vital role that Black Americans, especially Black women, have in protecting democracy in the United States, especially as part of the Democratic Party coalition.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 (University Press of Kansas, 2022), 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

Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic (LSU Press, 2023) by Dr. Cassander L. Smith examines the means through which people of African descent embodied tenets of respectability as a coping strategy to navigate enslavement and racial oppression in the early Black Atlantic world. The term “respectability politics” refers to the way members of a minoritized population adopt the customs and manners of a dominant culture in order to gain visibility and combat negative stereotypes about their subject group. Today respectability politics can be seen in how those within and outside Black communities police the behaviour of Black celebrities, critique protest movements, and celebrate accomplishments by people of African descent who break racial barriers.To study the origins of the complicated relationship between race and respectability, Dr. Smith shows that early American literatures reveal Black communities engaging with issues of respectability from the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Concerns about character and comportment influenced the literary production of Black Atlantic communities, particularly in the long eighteenth century. Uncovering the central importance of respectability as a theme shaping the literary development of cultures throughout the early Black Atlantic, Smith illuminates the mechanics of respectability politics in a range of texts, including poetry, letters, and life writing by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and expatriates on the west coast of Africa in Sierra Leone.Through these early Black texts, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic considers respectability politics as a malleable strategy that has both energized and suppressed Black cultures for centuries.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas (Duke UP, 2022) (Duke UP, 2023), Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.Joseph C. Russo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University.Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The era of ska shame is officially over, and ska fans no longer need to hide in the basement, skanking alone.The creator of the popular podcast In Defense of Ska has doubled down on defending the checkered flag genre with his new edition of In Defense of Ska: Ska Now More Than Ever Edition (Clash Books, 2024). The original version was chosen by Pitchfork as one of the best music books of 2021, and was an official recommended read in Rolling Stone’s June 2021 issue. In this expanded version, author Aaron Carnes weaves in tons of new interviews and stories, continuing his crusade to rebuff pop culture’s dismissal of American ska as nothing more than porkpie hats and silly lyrics.Updated journalistic essays, personal stories, historical investigations, and a brand-new epilogue exploring ska’s “lost years” serve as a much-needed crash course on the hundreds of bands, big or small, that formed the passionate community that continues to love and evolve America’s much-maligned and infamously underrated ska scene.Join the movement today and discover why ska is a cultural force that can’t be ignored!Aaron Carnes is a music journalist based out of Northern California. His work has appeared in Playboy, Salon, Noisey, Bandcamp Daily, Sun Magazine, Sierra Club Magazine, and Ozy. He’s also the music editor at Good Times weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, CA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Today we are joined by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Professor of History at The New School, and author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023). In our conversation, we discussed the beginnings of fitness in the United States, how fitness both offered the state a way to shape bodies and liberatory possibilities for counter-cultural communities, and the future of exercise in a post-covid world.In Fit Nation, Petrzela investigates the long history of fitness in the United States to better understand how fitness became such an important part of American life. She notes that the number of people who think fitness is essential for a full life has expanded dramatically since the 1890s and fitness shape our understandings of national community, industry, security, wealth, and wellness.Her comprehensive and readable account begins with the immigration of European fitness fanatics to the United States in the 19th century and illustrates how fitness became one of the most proto-typically American pursuits. The book is divided into seven sections; the first, “When Sweating Was Strange,” shows how American entrepreneurs translated European practices to a sceptical audience. Muscle Beach in Venice, California played a special role in promoting bodybuilding but it also alarmed ordinary Americans who worried about the time participants spent on what many thought were narcissistic and vain habits.One of the major themes of Petrzela’s work is the role of the government in promoting physical fitness and in the Cold War world the state opened the door to mass fitness. In the second section, “Slimming the Soft American,” she demonstrates how presidents starting with Eisenhower put fitness at the centre of their Cold War educational programs. The most notable example of government interventions into fitness was the President’s Council on Youth Fitness (now the President’s Council on Sport, Fitness, and Nutrition.)The third and fourth sections – “From the Margins to the Mainstream” and Movement Culture, Redefined” illustrate how fitness became a central part of the American experience and the limits to that experience in the 1960s and 1970s. Television brought fitness into American houses but gyms remained largely male spaces (although often associated with latent homosexuality.) Yoga and jogging made fitness accessible and linked fitness culture with counter-culture. Women were both the targets of most fitness programs – although not necessarily for liberatory reasons - and excluded from large sections of it.In the 1980s and 1990s, fitness changed further, moving away from the state-led efforts and counter-cultural currents of the 1950s and 1960s. Fitness became big business. In her fifth part, “Feel the Burn,” Petrzela shows how a new gospel of fitness emerged that made gyms, workout classes, and sweating accessible and desirable to growing numbers of Americans. In her sixth section, “Hard Bodies and Soulful Selves”, Petrzela shows how fitness shifted from an obligation imposed by the state for geo-political reasons to a more intrinsic requirement of people living in the neo-liberal era, but not everyone always fulfilled those obligations and many people resisted them.In the final section, “It’s Not Working Out,” Petrzela looks at the present and the future of the Fit Nation. Americans are by some measures less fit than ever before, but Petrzela raises real questions about the potential of any narrow definition of fitness to fix persistent health problems. 9/11, the Global Financial Crisis, and Covid-19 changed the way people worked out – cross-fit, home gyms, and Peloton became more popular than ever but fitness was also politicized into the left/right dynamic that dominates American cultural life.Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In Reckoning with Restorative Justice Hawaii Women's Prison Writing (Duke University Press, 2023), Dr. Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women incarcerated at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in Hawaii. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses mainly on women’s participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project was a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performers and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai‘i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex.Rameen Mohammed is a community organizer based in Texas, a fellow for Muslim Counterpublics Lab, and a soon-to-be law student.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Robert C. Post's book The Taft Court (10): Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921–1930 (Cambridge UP, 2023) offers the definitive history of the Supreme Court from 1921 to 1930 when William Howard Taft was Chief Justice. Using untapped archival material, Robert C. Post engagingly recounts the ambivalent effort to create a modern American administrative state out of the institutional innovations of World War I. He shows how the Court sought to establish authoritative forms of constitutional interpretation despite the culture wars that enveloped prohibition and pervasive labor unrest. He explores in great detail how constitutional law responds to altered circumstances. The work provides comprehensive portraits of seminal figures such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Dembitz Brandeis. It describes William Howard Taft's many judicial reforms and his profound alteration of the role of Chief Justice. A critical and timely contribution, The Taft Court sheds light on jurisprudential debates that are just as relevant today as they were a century ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

How does the Bible instruct humans to interact with the Earth? Over the last few decades, white conservative evangelical Christians have increasingly taken positions against environmental protections. To understand why, Meghan Cochran talks with Neall W. Pogue about his book The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement (Cornell University Press, 2022) in which he examines how the religious right became a political force known for hostility toward environmental legislation. Until the 1990s, theologically based, eco-friendly philosophies of Christian environmental stewardship were uncontroversial. However, when some in the evangelical community began to lean towards environmental activism in response to human caused climate change, their effort was overwhelmed by some conservative leaders who stressed a position against environmentalism. They ridiculed conservation efforts, embraced conspiracy theories, and refuted the expanding scientific literature. Pogue explains how different ideas of nature helped to construct a conservative evangelical political movement that rejected long-standing beliefs regarding Christian environmental stewardship.Suggested readings:  The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change by Robin Globus Veldman (University of California Press, 2019) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press, 2016) Meghan Cochran studies belief and action as a technologist working in customer experience and as a student of religion, business, and literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Scott Gac's Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates one of history's most violent undertakings: The United States of America. People the world over consider violence in the United States as measurably different than that which troubles the rest of the globe, citing reasons including gun culture, the American West, Hollywood, the death penalty, economic inequality, rampant individualism, and more. This compelling examination of American violence explains a political culture of violence from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age, illustrating how physical force, often centered on racial hierarchy, sustained the central tenets of American liberal government. It offers an important story of nationhood, told through the experiences and choices of civilians, Indians, politicians, soldiers, and the enslaved, providing historical context for understanding how violence has shaped the United States from its inception. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies