New Books in American Studies

The history of Black Alaskans runs deep and spans generations. Decades before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, Black men and women participated in Alaska's politics and culture. They hunted whales, patrolled the seas, built roads, served in the military, and opened businesses, even as they endured racism and fought injustices. Into the twentieth century, Alaska's Black residents were often part of the larger, nationwide freedom struggle. At the same time, Black settlers found themselves in a far different context than elsewhere in the United States, as Alaska's strategic military location, economic reliance on oil, and unique racial landscape influenced how Black Alaskans made a home for themselves in the northwesternmost corner of the country.Centering the agency and diversity of Black Alaskans, Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer's book Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest (U Washington Press, 2022) chronicles how Alaska's Black population, though small, has had an outsized impact on the culture and civic life of the region. Alaska's history of race relations and civil rights reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses--determination, activism, and perseverance--are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Victorine Elizabeth du Pont, the first child of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont and his wife Sophie, was seven years old when her family emigrated to America, where her father established the humble beginnings of what would become a corporate giant. Through correspondence with friends and relatives from the ages of eight to sixty-eight, Victorine unwittingly chronicled the first sixty years of the du Pont saga in America. As she recovered from personal tragedy, she became first tutor of her siblings and relations. Leonard C. Spitale's biography Victorine Du Pont: The Force Behind the Family (U Delaware Press, 2022) makes the case that Victorine has had the broadest—and most enduring—influence within the entire du Pont family of any family member. The intellectual heir of her venerable grandfather, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, although Victorine grew up in an age where women's opportunities were limited, her pioneering efforts in education, medicine, and religion transformed an entire millworkers’ community.Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Does China show that capitalism works better without democracy? What can be done to secure the future of open societies in which there is wealth, tolerance and stability. Martin Wolf - associate editor of the Financial Times and its chief economist - has been thinking about these big questions for his book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Penguin, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open.In this comprehensive biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927-2003). Based on extensive archival work and oral histories, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson (Oxford UP, 2023) sets Gibson's life and choices against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Jim Crow racism, the integration of American sports, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and second wave feminism. Throughout her life Gibson continuously negotiated the expectations of her supporters and adversaries, including her patrons in the black-led American Tennis Association, the white-led United States Lawn Tennis Association, and the media, particularly the Black press and community's expectations that she selflessly serve as a representative of her race. An incredibly talented, ultra-competitive, and not always likeable athlete, Gibson wanted to be treated as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a specific race or gender. She was reluctant to speak openly about the indignities and prejudices she navigated as an African American woman, though she faced numerous institutional and societal barriers in achieving her goals. She frequently bucked conventional norms of femininity and put her career ahead of romantic relationships, making her personal life the subject of constant scrutiny and rumors. Despite her major wins and international recognition, including a ticker tape parade in New York City and the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time, Gibson endeavored to find commercial sponsorship and permanent economic stability. Committed to self-sufficiency, she pivoted from the elite amateur tennis circuit to State Department-sponsored goodwill tours, attempts to find success as a singer and Hollywood actress, the professional golf circuit, a tour with the Harlem Globetrotters and her own professional tennis tour, coaching, teaching children at tennis clinics, and a stint as New Jersey Athletics Commissioner. As she struggled to support herself in old age, she was left with disappointment, recounting her past achievements decades before female tennis players were able to garner substantial earnings.A compelling life and times portrait, Serving Herself offers a revealing look at the rise and fall of a fiercely independent trailblazer who satisfied her own needs and simultaneously set a pathbreaking course for Black athletes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Until he passed away in 2021, Colin Powell was revered as one of America's most trusted and admired leaders. Jeffrey J. Matthews' Colin Powell: Imperfect Patriot (U Notre Dame Press, 2019) demonstrates that Powell's decades-long development as an exemplary subordinate is crucial to understanding his astonishing rise from a working-class immigrant neighborhood to the highest echelons of military and political power, including his roles as the country's first Black national security advisor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state.Once an aimless, ambitionless teenager who barely graduated from college, Powell became an extraordinarily effective and staunchly loyal subordinate to many powerful superiors who, in turn, helped to advance his career. By the time Powell became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he had developed into the consummate follower--motivated, competent, composed, honorable, and independent. The quality of Powell's followership faltered at times, however, while in Vietnam, during the Iran-Contra scandal, and after he became George W. Bush's secretary of state. Powell proved a fallible patriot, and in the course of a long and distinguished career he made some grave and consequential errors in judgment. While those blunders do not erase the significance of his commendable achievements amid decades of public service, we can learn much from his good and bad leadership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

When the possibility of wiretapping first became known to Americans they were outraged. Now, in our post-9/11 world, it's accepted that corporations are vested with human rights, and government agencies and corporations use computers to monitor our private lives. In The American Surveillance State: How the US Spies on Dissent (Pluto Press, 2022), David H. Price pulls back the curtain to reveal how the FBI and other government agencies have always functioned as the secret police of American capitalism up to today, where they luxuriate in a near-limitless NSA surveillance of all.Price looks through a roster of campaigns by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and corporations to understand how we got here. Starting with J. Edgar Hoover and the early FBI's alignment with business, his access to 15,000 pages of never-before-seen FBI files shines a light on the surveillance of Edward Said, Andre Gunder Frank and Alexander Cockburn, Native American communists, and progressive factory owners.Price uncovers patterns of FBI monitoring and harassing of activists and public figures, providing the vital means for us to understand how these new frightening surveillance operations are weaponized by powerful governmental agencies that remain largely shrouded in secrecy.David H. Price is Professor of Anthropology at Saint Martin’s University’s Department of Society and Social Justice. He is the author of a number of books on the FBI and CIA, and has written articles for The Nation, Monthly Review, CounterPunch, Guardian and Le Monde. His work has been translated into five languages.Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

For six months in 1961, Richard Nickel, John Vinci, and David Norris salvaged the interior and exterior ornamentation of the Garrick Theater, Adler & Sullivan’s magnificent architectural masterpiece in Chicago’s theater district. The building was replaced by a parking garage, and its demolition ignited the historic preservation movement in Chicago.The Garrick (originally the Schiller Building) was built in 1892 and featured elaborate embellishments, especially in its theater and exterior, including the ornamentation and colorful decorative stenciling that would become hallmarks of Louis Sullivan’s career. Reconstructing the Garrick: Adler and Sullivan's Lost Masterpiece (Alphawood Exhibitions, 2021) documents the enormous salvaging job undertaken to preserve elements of the building’s design, but also presents the full life story of the Garrick, featuring historic and architectural photographs, essays by prominent architectural and art historians, interviews, drawings, ephemera from throughout its lively history and details of its remarkable ornamentation—a significant resource and compelling tribute to one of Chicago’s finest lost buildings. A seventy-two-page facsimile of Richard Nickel’s salvage workbook is tipped into the binding.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In A Lovely Girl: The Tragedy of Olga Duncan and the Trial of California's Most Notorious Killer (Pegasus Crime, 2022), Deborah Larkin tells the incredible story of a 1958 murder that ended with the last woman to ever be executed in California—a murder so twisted it seems ripped from a Greek tragedy. Larkin was only ten years old when the quiet calm of her California suburb was shattered. Thirty miles north, on a quiet November night in Santa Barbara, a pregnant nurse named Olga Duncan disappeared from her apartment. The mystery deepens when it is discovered that Olga’s mother in-law—a deeply manipulative and deceptive woman—had been doing everything in her power to separate Olga and her son, Frank, prior to Olga’s disappearance. From a forged annulment to multiple attempts to hire people to “get rid” of Olga, to a faked excoriation case, Elizabeth seemed psychopathically attached to her son. Yet she denied having anything to do with Olga’s disappearance with a smile. But when Olga’s brutally beaten body is found in a shallow grave, apparently buried alive, a young DA makes it his mission to see that Elizabeth Duncan is brought to justice. Adding a wrinkle to his efforts is the fact that Frank—himself a defense attorney—maintained his mother’s innocent to the end. How does a young girl process such a crime along with the fear and disbelieve that rocked an entire community? Decades later, Larkin is determined to revisit the case and bring the story of Olga herself to light. Long overshadowed by the sensationalism and scandal of Elizabeth and Frank, A Lovely Girl seeks to reveal Olga as a woman in full. Someone who was more than the twisted family that would ultimately ensnare her. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

From fleeing the Warsaw Ghetto and living underground to fighting for social justice in 1960s' Seattle and helping smash the communist system in 1980s' Poland, this is a narrative that erupts into critical moments in Jewish, Polish, and American history. It is also a story of the hidden anguish that accompanies and courses through that history, of the living haunted by the dead. This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History (Cherry Orchard Books, 2022) is told through a conversation, often contentious, between Michael Steinlauf, historian of Polish-Jewish culture and child of Holocaust survivors, and the anthropologist and artist Elżbieta Janicka. It is illustrated with scores of photographs and documents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women’s rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath.In Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (Norton, 2023), a sweeping and ambitious work of history, acclaimed scholar Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century. The air went out of the globalist balloon with the First World War as quotas were put on immigration and tariffs on trade, not only in the United States but across Europe, where war and disease led to mass societal upheaval. The “Spanish flu” heightened anxieties about porous national boundaries. The global impact of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression amplified a quest for food security in Europe and economic autonomy worldwide. Demands for relief from the instability and inequality linked to globalization forged democracies and dictatorships alike, from Gandhi’s India to America’s New Deal and Hitler’s Third Reich. Immigration restrictions, racially constituted notions of citizenship, anti-Semitism, and violent outbursts of hatred of the “other” became the norm—coming to genocidal fruition in the Second World War.Millions across the political spectrum sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of the global economy in ways strikingly reminiscent of our contemporary political moment: new movements emerged focused on homegrown and local foods, domestically produced clothing and other goods, and back-to-the-land communities. Rich with astonishing detail gleaned from Zahra’s unparalleled archival research in five languages, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sources of resistance to globalization. With anti-globalism a major tenet of today’s extremist agendas, Zahra's arrestingly clearsighted and wide-angled account is essential reading to grapple with our divided present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies