New Books in American Studies

The squatter—defined by Noah Webster as "one that settles on new land without a title"—had long been a fixture of America's frontier past. In the antebellum period, white squatters propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. In a bold reframing of the era's political history, John Suval explores how Squatter Democracy transformed the partisan landscape and the map of North America, hastening clashes that ultimately sundered the nation.With one eye on Washington and the other on flashpoints across the West, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy (Oxford UP, 2022) tracks squatters from the Mississippi Valley and cotton lands of Texas, to Oregon, Gold Rush-era California, and, finally, Bleeding Kansas. The sweeping narrative reveals how claiming western domains became stubbornly intertwined with partisan politics and fights over the extension of slavery. While previous generations of statesmen had maligned and sought to contain illegal settlers, Democrats celebrated squatters as pioneering yeomen and encouraged their land grabs through preemption laws, Indian removal, and hawkish diplomacy. As America expanded, the party's power grew. The US-Mexican War led many to ask whether these squatters were genuine yeomen or forerunners of slavery expansion. Some northern Democrats bolted to form the Free Soil Party, while southerners denounced any hindrance to slavery's spread. Faced with a fracturing party, Democratic leaders allowed territorial inhabitants to determine whether new lands would be slave or free, leading to a destabilizing transfer of authority from Congress to frontier settlers. Squatters thus morphed from agents of Manifest Destiny into foot soldiers in battles that ruptured the party and the country.Deeply researched and vividly written, Dangerous Ground illuminates the overlooked role of squatters in the United States' growth into a continent-spanning juggernaut and in the onset of the Civil War, casting crucial light on the promises and vulnerabilities of American democracy.John Suval holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a former editor of the Papers of Andrew Jackson and Research Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He lives in West Virginia. Website.Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The story of the Thirteen Colonies’ struggle for independence from Britain is well known to every American schoolchild. But at the start of the Revolutionary War, there were more than thirteen British colonies in North America. Patriots were surrounded by Indigenous homelands and loyal provinces. Independence had its limits.North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Jeffers Lennox focuses on Upper Canada, Lower Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and especially the homelands that straddled colonial borders. He argues that these areas were far less foreign to the men and women who established the United States than Canada is to those who live here now. These northern neighbors were far from inactive during the Revolution. The participation of the loyal British provinces and Indigenous nations that largely rejected the Revolution—as antagonists, opponents, or bystanders—shaped the progress of the conflict and influenced the American nation’s early development.In this book, historian Dr. Lennox looks north, as so many Americans at that time did, and describes how Loyalists and Indigenous leaders frustrated Patriot ambitions, defended their territory, and acted as midwives to the birth of the United States while restricting and redirecting its continental aspirations.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

This episode and the next look back at films that came out in the 1980s, a decade when Hollywood seemed to cater to teenage audiences like never before. So it makes sense that the geo-political structure that shaped and influenced so much of global political action - the Cold War - would show up in movies targeting teen audiences. In the broader media landscape, the question was being asked: Could these post-Vietnam teenagers hack the reality of conflict like their dads and granddads had to? We break down two films about teenagers as soldiers - Taps, released in 1981, and Red Dawn, released in 1984. In both cases, what we see is a conversation about American military culture, whether it can still be counted on when times get tough. And if it can’t, if America’s youth reject it, is that a good thing or a bad thing?Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go 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 1910, the future of California wine looked dim. Beset by crises ranging from earthquakes to insect infestations, and with momentum moving toward prohibition, the nascent industry seemed dead on the vine. How then, a mere sixty years later, did a blind taste test from some of France's toughest sommeliers judge California wines superior to their French counterparts? In Crush: The Triumph of California Wine (University of Nevada Press, 2018), writer, lawyer, and University of California Berkeley Distinguished Fellow John Briscoe explains who rescued the California wineries and how they accomplished the task. This is a global story two hundred years in the making, full of fascinating stories and larger than life characters. As California wines face an uncertain, climate-changed, future, Briscoe argues we should look to the past to understand how the state's viticulture has weathered difficult storms in its long and fascinating history.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The Tenth Edition introduces diverse, compelling, relevant texts-from Civil War songs and stories to The Turn of the Screw to The Great Gatsby to poems by Juan Felipe Herrera and Claudia Rankine to a science fiction cluster featuring Octavia Butler and N. K. Jemisin. And continuing its course of innovative and market-responsive changes, the anthology now offers resources to help instructors meet today's teaching challenges. Chief among these resources is InQuizitive, Norton's award-winning learning tool, which includes interactive questions on the period introductions and often-taught works in the anthology. In addition, the Tenth Edition maintains the anthology's exceptional editorial apparatus and generous and diverse slate of texts overall. Available in print and as an annotatable ebook, the anthology is ideal for online, hybrid, or in-person teaching.William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused (Edinburgh UP, 2022) argues that even when a metaphor appears problematic and limiting, it need not be dropped or dismissed. Metaphors are not inherently harmful or beneficial; instead, they can be used in unexpected and creative ways. This book analyses the illness writing of contemporary North American writers who reimagine and reappropriate the supposedly harmful metaphor 'illness is a fight' and shows how Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Anatole Broyard, David Foster Wallace and other writers turn the fight metaphor into a space of agency, resistance, self-knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. It joins a conversation in Medical Humanities about alternatives to the predominance of narrative and responds to the call for more metaphor literacy and metaphor competence.Wohlman has developed the vade mecum for Metaphor Method. You can find it here (in the right column). For the PDF file, click here.Anita Wohlmann is an associate professor in the Department for the Study of Culture at SDU.Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a world-class, Nobel Prize-winning lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science and one of the world's finest research facilities. The leak, harmless to health, came from a storage pool rather than the reactor. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory.A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues such as vaccines, climate change, and toxic chemicals. This story has all the elements of a thriller, with vivid characters and dramatic twists and turns. Key players include congressmen and scientists; journalists and university presidents; actors, supermodels, and anti-nuclear activists, all interacting and teaming up in surprising ways. The authors, each with insider knowledge of and access to confidential documents and the key players, reveal how a fact of no health significance could be portrayed as a Chernobyl-like disaster. The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory (MIT Press, 2022) reveals the gaps between scientists, politicians, media, and the public that have only gotten more dangerous since 1997.Peter Bond is a retired physicist who worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory for 43 years in a wide variety of roles, including interim laboratory director during much of the period covered by this book. 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 Diane Negra about Shadow of a Doubt (Auteur, 2021).Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was British-born Alfred Hitchcock's fifth American film and the one that he at various times identified as his favourite and his best. This scrupulously organized film operates as a masterclass on principles of narrative design while generating resonant commentary on the nature of family life. Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. Analysing the film's narrative system, issues of genre, authorship, social history, homesickness and 'family values', Negra shows how the film's impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content, linking the film's terrors to the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. Finally it understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centred Hitchcock text and a milestone film that marks the director's emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life and opens a window into the placement of femininity in World War II consensus culture and more broadly into the politics of mid-century gender and family life.Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

For many, the Beatles offered a delightful alternative to the dull and the staid, while for others, the mop-top haircuts, the unsettling music, and the hysterical girls that greeted the British imports wherever they went were a symbol of unwelcome social and cultural change. This opposition to the group--more widespread and deeper rooted in Chicago than in any other major American city--increased as the decade wore on, especially when the Beatles adopted more extreme countercultural values.At the center of this book is a cast of characters engulfed by the whirlwind of Beatlemania, including the unyielding figure of Mayor Richard J. Daley who deemed the Beatles a threat to the well-being of his city; the Chicago Tribune editor who first warned the nation about the Beatle menace; George Harrison's sister, Louise, who became a regular presence on Chicago radio; the socialist revolutionary who staged all of the Beatles' concerts in the city and used much of the profits from the shows to fund left-wing causes; the African-American girl who braved an intimidating environment to see the Beatles in concert; a fan club founder who disbelievingly found herself occupying a room opposite her heroes when they stayed at her father's hotel; the University of Chicago medical student who spent his summer vacation playing in a group that opened for the Beatles' on their last tour; and the suburban record store owner who opened a teen club modeled on the Cavern in Liverpool that hosted some of the biggest bands in the world.Drawing on historical and contemporary accounts, Joy and Fear: The Beatles, Chicago and the 1960s (Permuted Press, 2020) brings to life the frenzied excitement of Beatlemania in 1960s Chicago, while also illustrating the deep-seated hostility from the establishment toward the Beatles.John F. Lyons is a Professor of History at Joliet Junior College in Illinois where he teaches classes in British and American history. John on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Are we in a new cold war? And if so, is the US up against China or Russia? Join Owen Bennett Jones for a discussion with Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.Radchenko is the author of Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War and Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 among other works. 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