New Books in American Studies

Tamara Venit-Shelton, author of 'Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace,' discusses the long history of Chinese medicine in the US. She explores the experiences of Chinese herbalists, their interactions with patients, and the impact of rising xenophobia and medical regulation. The podcast also covers the transmission of Chinese medicine, the adaptability of Chinese doctors in the US, and the vital support provided by Chinese herbalists to immigrant communities. Through interviews, it explores personal connections to the history of Chinese medicine and the integration of Chinese herbalists into mainstream medical care.

In The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader (University of California Press, 2021), Jordana Moore Saggese provides the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s.Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist's lifetime and immediately after, previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the most important critical essays on the artist's work, this collection provides a full picture of the artist's views on art and culture, his working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and now.Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Duke UP, 2022), Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Meredith Oda shows how city leaders and local residents in San Francisco fashioned a postwar municipal identity through their promotion of what Oda calls transpacific urbanism. Though the Japanese American presence in prewar San Francisco had been minor, it boomed as Japan came into vogue during the early Cold War. The Japanese Cultural and Trade Center was the apotheosis of urban redevelopment to attract Japanese capital and sell Japanese culture. Oda traces the conflicts and collaborations between a diverse set of stakeholders, including municipal planning officials, local merchant-planners, Japanese American professionals, Japanese-Hawaiian bankers, and African American neighborhood organizers. San Francisco’s rise as a major business and cultural hub in the postwar Pacific World benefited the Japanese Americans who called the city home even as it reinscribed their status as perpetual foreigners in American life.Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Home to the first two drafts of the U.S. Constitution, an original printer’s proof of the Declaration of Independence, and the earliest surviving American photograph, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) is one of the nation’s largest libraries. Published in conjunction with the anniversary of the Society’s founding in 1824, Two Hundred Years: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1824-2024 (published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, with distribution by the University of Pennsylvania Press) is the first book to survey the more than twenty-one million documents, newspapers, graphics, and rare books in its archive.The book presents one hundred essays highlighting carefully preserved artifacts, spanning the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. Drawing on everything from letters and maps, paintings and photographs, family Bibles and musical scores, Two Hundred Years reflects on the early days of the nation, the relationships colonists had with indigenous peoples, the rapid development of Philadelphia, and the evolution of banking, engineering, and medicine, among other industries and sectors. Through such collections as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers and the archives of the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, HSP enables stories to come to light, including those of women, people of color, and immigrants, that would otherwise go untold. Creative artists and their audiences, technological innovators, and the people they impact, are all represented in this extraordinary book.In this conversation, the HSP’s CEO and Librarian David Brigham describes the artifacts and experts that come together in this book, the diverse topics and communities represented in HSP’s collectives, and the ways that researchers and creators might connect with HSP through the material presented here.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

By 1935 William Faulkner was well established as an author of critically praised novels, yet the low volume of his sales forced him to seek work in Hollywood. As Carl Rollyson details in The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), this led to an itinerant life divided between Mississippi and Hollywood. Rollyson shows how his encounters with the politicized writers and European refugees who populated the film industry helped broaden his outlook, which was reflected in the injection of anti-fascist elements into his scripts and novels. By the end of the Second World War, Faulkner enjoyed a growing international status that culminated with receiving the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, which cemented his place at the forefront of American literature. Though a reluctant celebrity, Faulkner embraced his status by becoming an informal ambassador of American values abroad, while using his position as an unofficial spokesperson of the South to criticize the mistreatment of Blacks in the region and call for improvements in race relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The poignant rise and fall of an idealistic immigrant who, as CEO of a major conglomerate, tried to change the way America did business before he himself was swallowed up by corporate corruption.At 8 a.m. on February 3, 1975, Eli Black leapt to his death from the 44th floor of Manhattan’s Pan Am building. The immigrant-turned-CEO of United Brands—formerly United Fruit, now Chiquita—Black seemed an embodiment of the American dream. United Brands was transformed under his leadership—from the “octopus,” a nickname that captured the corrupt power the company had held over Latin American governments, to “the most socially conscious company in the hemisphere,” according to a well-placed commentator. How did it all go wrong?Eli and the Octopus: The CEO Who Tried to Reform One of the World’s Most Notorious Corporations (Harvard UP, 2023) traces the rise and fall of an enigmatic business leader and his influence on the nascent project of corporate social responsibility. Born Menashe Elihu Blachowitz in Lublin, Poland, Black arrived in New York at the age of three and became a rabbi before entering the business world. Driven by the moral tenets of his faith, he charted a new course in industries known for poor treatment of workers, partnering with labor leaders like Cesar Chavez to improve conditions. But risky investments, economic recession, and a costly wave of natural disasters led Black away from the path of reform and toward corrupt backroom dealing.Now, two decades after Google’s embrace of “Don’t be evil” as its unofficial motto, debates about “ethical capitalism” are more heated than ever. Matt Garcia presents an unvarnished portrait of Black’s complicated legacy. Exploring the limits of corporate social responsibility on American life, Eli and the Octopus offers pointed lessons for those who hope to do good while doing business.Matt Garcia is Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies and of History at Dartmouth College. His books include From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement, which received the Philip Taft Award for the Best Book in Labor History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Hip Hop turned 50 this year. It has been five decades since DJ Cool Herc played a party in the Bronx that gave birth to a global cultural revolution. To honor this anniversary and teach this history, the New York City Department of Education has published The Graphic History of Hip Hop. Dr. Walter Greason wrote the text, which is beautifully illustrated by Afrofuturist graphic artist Tim Fielder. As the first in a series of collaborative graphic novels, The Graphic History of Hip Hop brings together a powerful blend of music, art, and history drawn from over sixty years of research by hundreds of professional historians and other scholars from the humanities and social sciences. The book is designed to engage students as they will see, hear and experience how the world of Hip Hop evolved in response to the rapidly changing political and environments from the 1970s through the 2000s. This work is an essential resource to enhance modern urban and world history curriculums and create a unique and engaging classroom settings for students. This shorter version is free to download as PDF and a longer hardcover version will be published soon.Also see the project website, here. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

How did Native Americans make war, not with European settlers, but amongst themselves? Historian Wayne E. Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores this often-neglected question in his book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023). The podcast begins with his explanation of the ‘cutting-off’ style of fight and retreat that characterized this method of warfare and proceeds to an understanding of the root causes of war among Native Americans including the imperative of “blood revenge.” Lee argues persuasively that wars among natives were endemic yet not of the “no-holds-barred” character of the European type. Also, unlike the Europeans, the Native Americans frowned on prisoner exchanges—prisoners, sometimes tortured, were seen as a measure of a campaign’s success—and the natives abjured rape of the enemy’s women as an allotted entitlement of war. Such important differences notwithstanding, The Cutting-Off Way also points to timeless principles in warfare, evident in today’s bloody conflicts, as when he writes: “The cultural mandate for revenge proved extremely difficult to overcome.”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 latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Evoking the political intrigue of the Gilded Age, Laurence Jurdem's book The Rough Rider and the Professor: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Friendship that Changed American History (Simon and Schuster, 2023) chronicles the extraordinary thirty-five-year friendship between President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts.Theodore Roosevelt was a uniquely gifted figure. A man of great intellect and physicality, the New York patrician captured the imagination of the American people with his engaging personality and determination to give all citizens regardless of race, color, or creed the opportunity to achieve the American dream.While Roosevelt employed his abilities to rise from unknown New York legislator to become the youngest man ever to assume the presidency in 1901, that rapid success would not have occurred without the assistance of the powerful New Englander, Henry Cabot Lodge.Eight years older than Roosevelt, from a prominent Massachusetts family, Lodge, was one of the most calculating, combative politicians of his age. From 1884 to 1919 Lodge and Roosevelt encouraged one another to mine the greatness that lay within each of them. As both men climbed the ladders of power, Lodge, focused on dominating the political landscape of Massachusetts, served as the future president's confidant and mentor, advising him on political strategy while helping him obtain positions in government that would eventually lead to the White House.Despite the love and respect that existed between the two men, their relationship eventually came under strain. Following Roosevelt's ascension to the presidency, T. R.'s desire to expand the social safety net--while attempting to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party--clashed with his older friend's more conservative, partisan point of view. Those tensions finally culminated in 1912. Lodge's refusal to support the former president's independent bid for a third presidential term led to a political break-up that was only repaired by each man's hatred for the policies of Woodrow Wilson.Despite their political disagreements, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge remained devoted friends until the Rough Rider took his final breath on January 6, 1919. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies