New Books in American Studies

Brian Daldorph first entered the Douglas County Jail classroom in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach a writing class on Christmas Eve 2001. His last class at the jail for the foreseeable future was mid-March 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown; the virus is taking a heavy toll in confined communities like nursing homes and prisons. Words Is a Powerful Thing: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail (UP of Kansas, 2021) is Daldorph’s record of teaching at the jail for the two decades between 2001 and 2020, showing how the lives of everyone involved in the class—but especially the inmates who came to class week after week—benefited from what happened every Thursday afternoon in that jail classroom, where for two hours inmates and instructor became a circle of ink and blood, writing together, reciting their poems, telling stories, and having a few good laughs.Words Is a Powerful Thing brings into the light the works of fifty talented inmate writers whose work deserves attention. Their poetry speaks of “what really matters” to all of us and gives the reader sustained insight into the role that creativity plays in aiding survival and bringing positive change for inmates, and, in turn, for all of us. Daldorph’s account of his teaching experience not only takes the reader inside the daily life at a county jail but also sets the work done in the writing class within the larger context of inmate education in the US corrections system, where education is often one of the few lifelines available to inmates. Words Is a Powerful Thing provides a teaching guide for instructors working with incarcerated writers, offering an extensive examination of both the challenges and benefits.When Brian Daldorph decided the story of his classroom experiences and the great writing produced by the inmates deserved to be told to wider audiences, he struggled with how to bring it all together. Not long after, an inmate wrote a poem titled “Words Is a Powerful Thing,” offering Daldorph a title, concept, and purpose: to show that the poetry of inmates speaks not just to other inmates but to all of us.Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, Ph.D. is a lecturer at Centro de Educación Superior de Enseñanza e Investigación Educativa (CEIE). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough, and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power. Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity—drivers of our access to basic goods and services—rely on approval and legitimation by biomedicine. Moreover, a vast and powerful global market has risen up around the empire, making it one of the largest economic forces in the world. In The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID Pandemic (Stanford UP, 2021), Katz Rothman shows that biomedicine has the key elements of an imperial power: economic leverage, the faith of its citizens, and governmental rule. She investigates the Western colonial underpinnings of the empire and its rapid intrusion into everyday life, focusing on the realms of birth and death. This provides her with a powerful vantage point from which to critically examine the current moment, when the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the power structures of the empire in unprecedented ways while sparking the most visible resistance it has ever seen.Barbara Katz Rothman is Professor of Sociology, at the City University of New York. She has served as President of Sociologists for Women in Society; the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Eastern Sociological Society. Her awards include the Jesse Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association, and an award for "Midwifing the Movement" from the Midwives Alliance of North America, and a distinguished Chair in Health Sciences from the Fulbright Association. She is the author of numerous books, most recently A Bun in the Oven: How the Food and Birth Movements Resist Industrialization (2016).Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In this episode I got to chat about two of my favorite things: the history of imperialism and Star Wars with Daniel Immerwahr, Professor of History at Northwestern University. Our conversation focused on his recent article “The Galactic Vietnam: Technology, Modernization, and Empire in George Lucas’s Star Wars,” in Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories, edited by David Milne and Christopher Nichols (Columbia University Press, 2022). In the piece her uses the film and the figure of George Lucas to explore various aspects of the United States in the Cold War. Were Ewoks the Viet Cong? Was the Death Star a B-52? Was Alderaan Hanoi? Listen and find out.Daniel Immerwahr earned his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2011 after undergraduate studies at both Columbia and Cambridge. His previous work includes Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard, 2015) and the award winning and best-selling How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), which has been translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Korean, and Chinese so far. Dr. Immerwahr's writings have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, Slate, and elsewhere.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

Soon after the birth of Mickey Mouse, one animator raised the Disney Studio far beyond Walt’s expectations. That animator also led a union war that almost destroyed it. Art Babbitt animated for the Disney studio throughout the 1930s and through 1941, years in which he and Walt were jointly driven to elevate animation as an art form, up through Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia.But as America prepared for World War II, labor unions spread across Hollywood. Disney fought the unions while Babbitt embraced them. Soon, angry Disney cartoon characters graced picket signs as hundreds of animation artists went out on strike. Adding fuel to the fire was Willie Bioff, one of Al Capone’s wiseguys who was seizing control of Hollywood workers and vied for the animators’ union.Using never-before-seen research from previously lost records, including conversation transcriptions from within the studio walls, author and historian Jake S. Friedman reveals the details behind the labor dispute that changed animation and Hollywood forever.The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation's Golden Age (Chicago Review Press, 2022) is an American story of industry and of the underdog, the golden age of animated cartoons at the world’s most famous studio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

These days it seems that nobody is satisfied with American democracy. Critics across the ideological spectrum warn that the country is heading toward catastrophe but also complain that nothing seems to change. At the same time, many have begun to wonder if the gulf between elites and ordinary people has turned democracy itself into a myth. The urge to defend the country’s foundations and to dismantle them coexist―often within the same people. How did we get here? Why does it feel like the country is both grinding to a halt and falling to pieces?In Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy (FSG, 2022), the historian Timothy Shenk offers an eye-opening new biography of the American political tradition. In a history that runs from the drafting of the Constitution to the storming of the Capitol, Shenk offers sharp pen portraits of signal characters from James Madison and Charles Sumner to Phyllis Schlafly and Barack Obama. The result is an entertaining and provocative reassessment of the people who built the electoral coalitions that defined American democracy―and a guide for a time when figures ranging from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to MAGA-minded nationalists seek to turn radical dreams into political realities.In an era when it seems democracy is caught in perpetual crisis, Realigners looks at earlier moments when popular majorities transformed American life. We’ve had those moments before. And if there’s an escape from the doom loop that American politics has become, it’s because we might have one again.Sean T. Byrnes is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in middle Tennessee. He is the author of Disunited Nations: US Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, from LSU Press. Tweet at him @ByrnesSean. 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 Federal Reserve: A New History (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Robert Hetzel draws on a 43-year career as an economist in the central bank to trace the influence of the Fed on the American economy. Hetzel compares periods in which the Fed stabilized the economy and periods in which it destabilized the economy. He draws lessons about what monetary rule is stabilizing. Recast through this lens and enriched with archival materials, Hetzel's sweeping history offers a new understanding of the bank's watershed moments since 1913. They include critical accounts of the Great Depression, the Great Inflation, and the Great Recession. The Federal Reserve: A New History arrives as a critical history for a critical moment. It promises to recast our understanding of the central bank in its second century.Robert L. Hetzel is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and a senior affiliated scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The Music of the United States of America Series of musical editions is a monumental undertaking funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities with financial and organizational support from the University of Michigan, the American Musicological Society, the Society of American Music, and A-R Editions. The aim of the MUSA series, as it is called, is to provide expertly researched and edited scores of music from a wide variety of musical traditions performed in the United States. The thirty-second volume of the MUSA series is An American Singing Heritage: Songs from the British-Irish-American Oral Tradition as Recorded in the Early Twentieth Century published by A-R Editions in 2021 and edited by the Anne Dhu McLucas, Norm Cohen, and Carson Cohen. Dr. McLucas passed away before the edition was completed and Carson stepped in to complete the project with his father Norm. This collection of one hundred songs is a record of a fundamental repertoire in American music. Brought to this country by colonists, the folk songs became one of the foundations of the genre that early record executives called hillbilly music which was eventually rebranded as country music. Each entry has extensive notes explaining the piece’s background and text, information about the recording used for the musical transcription, and a list of secondary sources that discuss the song. An American Singing Heritage required the editors to sift through thousands of recordings and songs to pick a representative sample of this large and fascinating repertoire. The editors selected sources for transcriptions in a broad range of singing styles and representing many regions of the United States. The selections attempt to avoid the biases of previous collections and provide a fresh group of examples, many heretofore unseen in print. The sources for the transcriptions are recordings of traditional musicians from the 1920s through the early 1940s drawn from commercial recordings of "hillbilly" musicians, and field recordings in the collection of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song, now part of the Archive of Folk Culture. The American Musicological Society awarded the collection the 2022 Claude V. Palisca Award for an Outstanding Edition.Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), addresses scholars and readers interested in literary studies, visual culture, and transformative justice in modern America. The book also transcends these areas to speak to readers in science & technology studies, in history of technology, or broadly interested in science justice.The premise of the book is that America was living through two collective experiments as it suffered the aftermath of the failed Reconstruction following the US Civil War. The first was the experiment of Black freedom and the second was the experiment of new technologies to document (Black) life at a time when standards for how to use and to read their outputs were excitingly wide-open. In the hands of Black cultural producers, the yield of these technologies was “undisciplined data,” which pointed to the possibility of true freedom not mere social reform as defined by White progressives.Readers follow writer Zora Neale Hurston working with anthropological film, WEB Dubois working with the social survey as a foundation for his urban sociology as well as for his literary novels, and other historical actors who were using documentary technologies to demonstrate the impossibility of capturing the fullness of Black sociality with those very technologies. Producing “undisciplined data,” Womack suggests, is not only a practice of the past, but the hope for greater justice in the present day.This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Science & Technology Studies.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Dan Bouk is a writer, professor, and cultural historian of quantification, or as Bouk puts it, the history all fascinating things “shrouded in the cloak of borningness.” In Bouk’s book, Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them (2022), the author invites readers into the social life of 1940 US Census. The stories of the people who wrote the question, asked the questions, and answered them—or refused—is a lesson in how power is negotiated on the ground. Bouk shows that the census questions were—and are—not only queries but also statements about what matters, who counts, and the values and lifeways celebrated and suppressed in American democracy.The book is written with such humor, tenderness, and insight that it is worth offering friends as a gift. It received a rave review in the New York Times and will be of immediate interest to readers interested in Science & Technology Studies, American History, the data sciences, and social justice.This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu. 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 Ted Conover, author of Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge (Knopf, 2022)In May 2017, Conover went to Colorado to explore firsthand a rural way of life that is about living cheaply, on your own land—and keeping clear of the mainstream. The failed subdivisions of the enormous San Luis Valley make this possible. Five-acre lots on the high prairie can be had for five thousand dollars, sometimes less.Conover volunteered for a local group trying to prevent homelessness during the bitter winters. He encountered an unexpected diversity: veterans with PTSD, families homeschooling, addicts young and old, gay people, people of color, lovers of guns and marijuana, people with social anxiety—most of them spurning charity and aiming, and sometimes failing, to be self-sufficient. And more than a few predicting they’ll be the last ones standing when society collapses.Conover bought his own five acres and immersed himself for parts of four years in the often contentious culture of the far margins. He found many who dislike the government but depend on its subsidies; who love their space but nevertheless find themselves in each other’s business; who are generous but wary of thieves; who endure squalor but appreciate beauty. In their struggles to survive and get along, they tell us about an America riven by difference where the edges speak more and more loudly to the mainstream.Ted Conover is the author of several books, including Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and National Geographic. He is a professor at, and the former director of, New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies