New Books in American Politics

Political Scientists Alison Gash and Dan Tichenor have a new book, Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency (Oxford UP, 2022), that centers children and young people within the study of democratic politics, filling in a bit of a gap in the literature, especially in political science literature. Gash and Tichenor note in their research that young people are central in so many policy areas but are often not integrated into the policy discussions or applications. As sketched out in Democracy’s Child, young people are often leveraged within our politics and our political discourse. They have been used as symbols and positioned as in need of protection—or at least some of them have been presented as being in need of protection. Tichenor and Gash dive into the idea of childhood itself, which is a more recent concept—developing over the past 150 years—and how this contextualization of young people is a significant point of political conflict. It is difficult to clearly define “young people”—since this may include children, youth, young adults, teenagers, or some constellation of each of these categories. So, while Gash and Tichenor center their research on young people, they note that who is encompassed within that term often shifts and changes depending on the political issue or policy debate.Democracy’s Child dives into three specific areas to examine the role, place, and capacity of young people. These three areas are control, leverage, and agency, as noted in the subtitle of the book itself. Control, which guides the reader through the first section of the book, explores the autonomy of young people, or the ways in which they are managed and controlled by policy, by the state, and by adults in context of policy. This section examines differing theories about young people and how autonomous or constrained they are based on different policies and political demands. The next part of the book focuses on how policies often leverage young people to reach specific outcomes. Thus, in this context, young people are often used by competing groups or policy makers to drive towards particular outcomes. The final section looks at agency, specifically how young people have advocated for outcomes on their own, or at odds with those who are working towards separate outcomes but in the name of young people.This is a fascinating study of democratic politics, policy, and an entire group of people who are both the center of political and policy outcomes and are often seen as such but rarely actually integrated into the dialogue and discussion.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media--from the Founding Fathers to Fake News (Dutton, 2020), Harold Holzer examines the dual rise of the American presidency and the media that shaped it. From Washington to Trump, he chronicles the disputes and distrust between these core institutions that define the United States of America, revealing that the essence of their confrontation is built into the fabric of the nation.Harold Holzer is one of the country's leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. Holzer was appointed chairman of the US Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission by President Bill Clinton and awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush. He currently serves as the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, City University of New York.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With decades of hindsight, the peaceful end of the Cold War seems a foregone conclusion. But in the early 1980s, most experts believed the Soviet Union was strong, stable, and would last into the next century. Ronald Reagan entered the White House with no certainty of what would happen next, only an overriding faith in democracy and an abiding belief that Soviet communism—and the threat of nuclear war—must end.William Inboden's The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink (Dutton, 2022) reveals how Reagan’s White House waged the Cold War while managing multiple crises around the globe. From the emergence of global terrorism, wars in the Middle East, the rise of Japan, and the awakening of China to proxy conflicts in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Reagan’s team oversaw the worldwide expansion of democracy, globalization, free trade, and the information revolution. Yet no issue was greater than the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. As president, Reagan remade the four-decades-old policy of containment and challenged the Soviets in an arms race and ideological contest that pushed them toward economic and political collapse, all while extending an olive branch of diplomacy as he sought a peaceful end to the conflict.Reagan’s revolving team included Secretaries of State Al Haig and George Shultz; Secretaries of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci; National Security Advisors Bill Clark, John Poindexter, and Bud McFarlane; Chief of Staff James Baker; CIA Director Bill Casey; and United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Talented and devoted to their president, they were often at odds with one another as rivalries and backstabbing led to missteps and crises. But over the course of the presidency, Reagan and his team still developed the strategies that brought about the Cold War’s peaceful conclusion and remade the world.Based on thousands of pages of newly-declassified documents and interviews with senior Reagan officials, The Peacemaker brims with fresh insights into one of America’s most consequential presidents. Along the way, it shows how the pivotal decade of the 1980s shaped the world today.Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of How To Be Wrong we talk with author, educator, and environmentalist Bill McKibben, founder of Third Act, an organization focused on bringing together people over 60 for action on climate and justice, and also 350.org, a global grassroots climate campaign. Bill’s work regularly appears in periodicals such as Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, and he has written numerous books, the most recent being The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, published by Holt in 2022. Our conversation explores what went wrong in the 1970s in the US, ideas about intellectual humility, and the role people over 60 can play in addressing problems in our society.John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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/adchoices

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/adchoices

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/adchoices

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/adchoices

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/adchoices

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/adchoices