New Books in American Studies

Writer and editor Landon (Lanny) Jones, a former PEOPLE magazine editor, reveals how the cult of celebrity has shaped our politics, culture, and personal lives. In Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved into a Culture of Fans and Followers (Beacon, 2023), Jones explores how and why fame no longer stems only from heroic achievements but from the number of social media likes and shares and what this change means for American culture. In analyzing the stories of over 75 celebrities, spanning decades and industries, Jones shows how celebrity has been wielded as a weapon of mass distraction to spawn narcissism, harm, and loneliness. Celebrity Nation reveals how the apparatus of fame operates and provides a personal, first-person perspective on an entity complicated further by the birth of the internet and social media.Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Kathryn McGarr’s City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (U Chicago Press, 2022) explores foreign policy journalism in Washington during and after World War II—a time supposedly defined by the press’s blind patriotism and groupthink. McGarr reveals, though, that D.C. reporters then were deeply cynical about government sources and their motives, but kept their doubts to themselves for professional, social, and ideological reasons. The alliance and rivalries among these reporters constituted a world of debts and loyalties: shared memories of wartime experiences, shared frustrations with government censorship and information programs, shared antagonisms, and shared mentors. McGarr shows how this small, tight-knit elite of white male reporters suppressed their skepticism to help the United States build a permanent national security apparatus and a shared, constructed reality on the meaning of the Cold War. Utilizing archival sources, she demonstrates how self-aware these reporters were as they negotiated for access, prominence, and, yes, the truth—even as they denied those things to their readers.James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Conor Rose reads from Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism. This extract, taken from the opening of the book, offers insight into the Black Lives Matter movement as well as new forms of predatory policing, informed by the 2008 financial crash.In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, "Against Innocence," as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—as well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—Virginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries. As an idea of poetry based on genres of poems such as ballads, elegies, odes, hymns, drinking songs, and epistles gave way to an idea of poetry based on genres of people—Black, White, male, female, Indigenous—almost all poetry became lyric poetry. Jackson discusses the important role played by Frederick Douglass as an influential editor and publisher of Black poetry, and traces the twisted paths leading to our current understanding of lyric, along the way presenting not only a new history but a new theory of American poetry.A major reassessment of the origins and development of American poetics, Before Modernism argues against a literary critical narrative that links American modernism directly to British or European Romanticism, emphasizing instead the many ways in which early Black poets intervened by inventing what Wheatley called “the deep design” of American lyric.Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the provision of life's necessities, those basic conditions for the "pursuit of happiness." For others, freedom meant the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and unfettered access to the marketplace--nothing more. As Mark Paul explains, the latter interpretation--thanks in large part to a particularly influential cadre of economists--has all but won out among policymakers, with dire repercussions for American society: rampant inequality, endemic poverty, and an economy built to benefit the few at the expense of the many.In The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Paul shows how economic rights--rights to necessities like housing, employment, and health care--have been a part of the American conversation since the Revolutionary War and were a cornerstone of both the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. Their recuperation, he argues, would at long last make good on the promise of America's founding documents. By drawing on FDR's proposed Economic Bill of Rights, Paul outlines a comprehensive policy program to achieve a more capacious and enduring version of American freedom. Among the rights he enumerates are the right to a good job, the right to an education, the right to banking and financial services, and the right to a healthy environment.Replete with discussions of some of today's most influential policy ideas--from Medicare for All to a federal job guarantee to the Green New Deal--The Ends of Freedom is a timely and urgent call to reclaim the idea of freedom from its captors on the political right--to ground America's next era in the country's progressive history and carve a path toward a more economically dynamic and equitable nation.Mark Paul is an assistant professor of economics at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Again and again, American taxpayers are asked to open their wallets and pay for a national security machine that costs $1 trillion operate. Yet time and time again, the US government gets it wrong on critical issues. So what can be done? Enter bestselling author Thom Shanker and defense expert Andrew Hoehn. With decades of national security expertise between them and access to virtually every expert, they look at what's going wrong in national security and how to make it go right.Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats (Hachette Books, 2023) looks at the major challenges facing America--from superpowers like Russia and China to emerging threats like pandemics, cybersecurity, climate change, and drones--and reimagines the national security apparatus into something that can truly keep Americans safe. Weaving together expert analysis with exclusive interviews from a new generation of national security leaders, Shanker and Hoehn argue that the United States must create an industrial-grade, life-saving machine out of a system that, for too long, was focused only on deterring adversaries and carrying out global military operations. It is a timely and crucial call to action--a call that if heeded, could save Americans lives, money, and our very future on the global stage.AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Why should we study Robert E. Lee? Why did he make the fateful decision to betray his country? How should we judge Robert E. Lee? Allen C. Guelzo, Director of the James Madison Program's Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship, joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and others.Guezlo is the author of Robert E. Lee: A Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

America’s religious and political public forum is no longer confined to debates between liberals (be they Catholics or Protestants) and socially conservative evangelicals and traditional Catholics—with atheists condemning all of the above. There is now among some Catholic intellectuals and academics a movement called integralism that calls for the United States to move towards an integration of church (the Catholic Church) and state. This movement in turn, is opposed by other conservative Catholics who regard integralism as not only unworkable but also undesirable, especially in the robustly pluralistic America of our day.Meanwhile, on both the Woke left and the alt-right there are essentially neo-Pagan movements which reject the American founding’s identification of ethical monotheism as the foundation of fundamental rights and political and personal moral obligations.Enter scholars with a call to rediscover and revivify the classical and Christian sources of the founding. In The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding (Cambridge UP, 2022), Justin Buckley Dyer and Kody W. Cooper argue that this political philosophy, pre-dating Aristotle and continuing through thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas to Lincoln to Martin Luther King to scholars of our own day, offers a way forward towards a just society built on a strong, rich, easily grasped moral framework.The book we will discuss today with one of its coauthors, Professor Cooper, shows that many of the leaders of the American founding were steeped in the natural law tradition and that this tradition, while often developed and nurtured by Catholic thinkers, was also drawn upon and embodied by Protestants of the period of the American Revolution and the earliest days of the Republic such as John Jay, James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, James Otis and John Dickinson.The authors write that many of the founders, imbued with the tenets of classical and Christian natural law thinking, believed in, “a moralistic God of justice who favored the side of liberty such that the revolutionary actors saw themselves carrying out the divine will on the world historic stage in obedience to the dictates of right reason.” The emphasis on reason is a key component of natural law thinking of all types and Cooper and Dyer argue in their book that a reexamination of the writings and belief system of the founding generation shows that far from being religious skeptics bent on creating a new world order that discarded faith in God, many the founders were in fact motivated in their rebellion against the British by their belief that revolt was called for when their ability to move their society in a moral direction based on the idea of natural rights bestowed by God was being hampered by diktats of the British king and parliament.Let’s hear from one of the two authors of this study, Kody W. Cooper.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Child abandonment, theft, kidnapping, prostitution, bigamy, and murder! Bad Bridget is a must-read examination of crime and Irish emigrant women in the U.S. and Canada, written by Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, and out now with Sandycove.Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a very good place to be a woman. Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were many, many young women who travelled on their own, hoping for a better life. Some lived lives of quiet industry and piety. Others quickly found themselves in trouble - bad trouble, and on an astonishing scale. Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women (Sandycove, 2023) is a book about these women and the various kinds of trouble they got into. Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick have unearthed a world in which Irish women actually outnumbered Irish men in prison, in which you could get locked up for 'stubbornness', and in which an Irish serial killer called Lizzie Halliday was described by the New York Times as 'the worst woman on earth'. They reveal the social forces that bred this mayhem and dysfunction, through a succession of stories that are brilliantly strange, sometimes very funny, and often deeply moving. From sex workers and thieves to kidnappers and killers, their Bridgets are young women who have gone from the frying pan of their impoverished and ridden homeland to the fire of vast North American cities. Bad Bridget is a masterpiece of social history and true crime, showing us a fascinating and previously unexplored world.Whether you’re a fan of true crime or looking for painstakingly reconstructed and incredible (true) stories of emigrant women’s lives, look no further for your summer read. Join us on the podcast today as we chat about crime as agency, a rowdy bunch of drunken Toronto women, and serial killer Lizzie Halliday. Then tune into season 1 of the Bad Bridget podcast - and stay tuned for season 2, coming soon!Averill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is a political history of Cambodia from World War II until 1975, examining the central role of Sõn Ngoc Thành. The book is a story of nationalist movements, political intrigue, coup attempts, war, and American intelligence operations. Matthew Jagel shows how central Sõn Ngoc Thành was to the rise of Cambodian nationalism, the brief period of Japanese dominance, the fight for independence from France, and the establishment of ties with the United States. Factoring Sõn Ngoc Thành into a discussion of Cambodian political history is a major contribution that will advance scholarly discourse about Cold War politics in Southeast Asia. Sõn Ngoc Thành’s career requires us to think about pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia with much greater nuance.Dr. Matthew Jagel earned his MA at Northern Illinois University with a thesis entitled “PHILCAG: The History of Filipino Involvement in the Vietnam War” and his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Sõn Ngoc Thành (the source material for this book). Khmer Nationalist: Son Ngoc Thanh, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia is his first book. He has taught at Northern Illinois University and worked for NIU’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Dr. Jagel currently teaches at St. Xavier University in Chicago. When he’s not doing all this amazing academic work, he’s causing trouble with Dr. Eric Jones, his co-host and unindicted co-conspirator, on Napalm in the Morning: The Vietnam War through Film, a podcast that asks serious questions about why John Wayne is facing the wrong way at sunset in The Green Berets and praises the artistic triumph that is Operation Dumbo Drop.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