New Books in American Studies

Understanding race in America requires understanding its relationship to class.Guests Joshua Bennett, writer and poet Julian Bourg, Professor of History at Boston College Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Today I talked to Ellen Cassedy about her new book  Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie (Chicago Review Press, 2022).Many people may identify 9 to 5 with the comic film starring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin or perhaps only know Parton’s hit song that served as its theme. But 9 to 5 wasn't just a comic film—it was a movement built by Ellen Cassedy and her friends. Ten office workers in Boston started out sitting in a circle and sharing the problems they encountered on the job. In a few short years, they had built a nationwide movement that united people of diverse races, classes, and ages. They took on the corporate titans. They leafleted and filed lawsuits and started a woman-led union. They won millions of dollars in back pay and helped make sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination illegal. The women office workers who rose up to win rights and respect on the job transformed workplaces throughout America. And along the way came Dolly Parton's toe-tapping song and a hit movie inspired by their work. Working 9 to 5 is a lively, informative, firsthand account packed with practical organizing lore that will embolden anyone striving for fair treatment.Ellen Cassedy was a founder of the 9 to 5 organization in 1973. She is the coauthor with Karen Nussbaum of 9 to 5: The Working Woman's Guide to Office Survival and with Ellen Bravo of The 9 to 5 Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment. Ellen Cassedy is a former columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, was a speechwriter in the Clinton administration, and has contributed to Huffington Post, Redbook, Woman's Day, Hadassah, Philadelphia Inquirer, 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

I asked medieval historian Rachel Fulton Brown if we ought to still think of our nation (or any Western nation) as “a Christian country” in the twenty-first century. My reasoning was that I thought our Judeo-Christian inheritance is the foundation—if partially forgotten—of the democratic principles of our republic. The resulting discussion was lively, fruitful, and surprising.Professor Fulton Brown teaches Medieval European History at the University of Chicago, specializing on Religious, Cultural, and Intellectual History, the History of Christianity, Liturgy and Prayer, and Devotion to the Virgin Mary. Professor Rachel Fulton Brown's faculty webpage at the University of Chicago is here. Rachel's blog, Dancing Bear at Prayer, is here. The Mosaic Ark livestream that Rachel does weekly with Kilts Khalfan on Dragon Common Room is here. The recent First Things interview (July 28, 2022), “The Spice Road of Today,” that Rachel did with Marc Bauerlein that we refer to is here. Rachel's blog, “Three Cheers for White Men,” that caused such a stir is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In 1983, ten years after W. H. Auden’s death, the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a series of readings and discussions of his work. In this episode from the Vault, Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor, moderates a discussion between Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Why did thousands of workers at prestigious universities in the United States go on strike in 2022? How did we get to this historic moment, and is it really over? This episode explores: The myriad ways universities can wield power over workers and even their families. Why university workers are divided into different unions—and why some have no union representation at all. How inflation, student debt, housing shortages, health insurance access, and the constriction of the tenure-track put unbearable pressure graduate students, adjuncts, and instructors. The limitations of sympathy strikes. How higher education became a gig economy. Why this generation of students and their parents have more power to change academic inequality than they may realize. Our guest is: Trevor Griffey is a Lecturer in U.S. History at UC Irvine and in Labor Studies at UCLA. He is co-founder of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, and co-editor of the book Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Actiton and the Construction Industry (Cornell University Press, 2010). He currently serves as the Vice President of Legislation for the University Council-American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT), which represents non-Senate faculty and librarians in the University of California system.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: This podcast on dealing with structural inequalities in the tenure pipeline This podcast with the AAUP on how the demise of the tenure system is hurting students, professors, and academic freedom The podcast on one professor's long road to the dream job in academia The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University by Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, And Daniel T. Scott State of the Union: A Century of American Labor - Revised and Expanded Edition, by Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein's piece about the UC Strike in Dissent Magazine This LA Times article, which is one of many pieces in recent years about how graduate students and adjuncts cannot afford housing The Guardian's article on firings of graduate student strikers in 2020 For teaching US labor and social history, this resource which is free and available online (free registration): https://wba.ashpcml.org/ Welcome to the Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we are inspired and informed by today’s knowledge-producers, working inside and outside the academy. Missed any of our episodes? You’ll find over 130 of the Academic Life podcast episodes archived and freely available to you on the New Books Network website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Who gets to define generational cohorts and do they obscure more than illuminate?Guests Neil Howe, author of Generations Tony Tulathimutte, author of Why There’s No ‘Millennial’ Novel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone." The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past (Oxford UP, 2023) challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants were deeply interested in the meaning of the Christian past. Paul J. Gutacker draws from hundreds of print sources-sermons, books, speeches, legal arguments, political petitions, and more-to show how ordinary educated Americans remembered and used Christian history.Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

With the Supreme Court poised to potentially outlaw race-conscious admissions, Affirmative Action may soon be on the chopping block.What will be the legacy of this half-century-old policy? Jason Riley, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and columnist at the Wall Street Journal, discusses affirmative action's impact both on the black community and the broader American education system. Riley is the author of Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell and Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.Riley's piece "Racial Preferences Harm Their Beneficiaries, Too" is here.Riley's article "The College Board's Racial Pandering" is here.Statistical evidence of the impact of racial preferences in college admissions, mentioned in the discussion is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses on emotion serve to create and maintain White supremacy and racism. Throughout history, scientific theories have played a vital role in the accumulation of power over colonized and racialized people. Scientific intellectual discourses on race, gender, and sexuality characterized Blackness as emotionally distinct in both deficiency and excess, a contrast with the emotional benevolence accorded to Whiteness. Ideas on racialized emotions have simultaneously driven the development of devastating body politics by enslaving structures of power. Bold and thought provoking, She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World (Cambridge UP, 2022) provides a new understanding of racialized emotions in the Atlantic World, and how these discourses proved instrumental to the rise of slavery and racial capitalism, racialized sexual violence, and the expansion of the carceral state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

What happens when politics becomes comedy and the jester becomes the king?Guests Emily Nussbaum, television critic for The New Yorker Avi Steinberg, writer Kwesi Mensah, comedian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies