New Books in American Studies

Nora L. Rubel, "Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book" (Columbia UP, 2026)

In 1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. “I was trying to teach a group of young foreign girls in a crowded neighborhood how to cook simple and nutritious food, yet have it attractive and inexpensive as we prepare it in America,” she recalled. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher recipes, it became a mainstay in Jewish kitchens and an enduring touchstone of Jewish American culture. Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nora Rubel tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book, demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity—and was in turn shaped by generations of Jewish women. Dr. Rubel traces the cookbook’s evolution across forty editions over several decades, through waves of immigration, shifting gender roles, upward mobility, suburbanization, and rapid changes in Jewish life. She argues that the book celebrates pluralism, allowing it to serve at once as a tool for Americanization, a repository of tradition, and a platform for culinary innovation. Ultimately, The Settlement Cook Book is a record of American Jewish women’s history, told through the food they made and the lives they led. A cultural biography of an iconic cookbook, this lively and inviting book shares an inclusive vision of American cuisine. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

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Gayle F. Wald, "This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

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Ella Jenkins (1924–2024) was one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, although many people have never heard of her. A pioneer in children’s music and an innovative educator, Jenkins recorded forty albums and influenced countless children and adults over a sixty-year career. Gayle Wald places Jenkins’s life and work within the larger contexts of the civil rights movement, the folk revival, and the changing worlds of children’s education and entertainment in This is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Committed to civil rights, Jenkins infused her beliefs in social justice and our shared humanity into her work with children and her compositions. She viewed music as a way for children to come together and establish connections with each other rather than as a gateway to musical achievement or literacy. Based on dozens of interviews including with Jenkins and her life partner Bernadelle Richter, Wald traces Jenkins’s life from her childhood in segregated Chicago, her involvement with the integrated folk music scene, and her successful career as a music educator. This is Rhythm was given special recognition by the 2026 Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

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Soraya Murray, "Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination" (MIT Press, 2026)

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Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT Press, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and surveillance culture. Technothriller is about the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Soraya Murray is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the visual culture of innovation, advanced computation, and its imaginaries as imaged in popular American films, for which technology assumes a central role. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), examines popular video games like Assassin’s Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Theft Auto as visual culture. She currently serves as Provost of Porter College, UCSC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

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Robert G Parkinson, "Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier" (Norton, 2024)

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We are divided over the history of the United States, and one of the central dividing lines is the frontier. Was it a site of heroism? Or was it where the full force of an all-powerful empire was brought to bear on Native peoples? In this startingly original work  Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier (Norton, 2024), historian Robert Parkinson presents a new account of ever-shifting encounters between white colonists and Native Americans. Drawing skillfully on Joseph Conrad's famous novella, Heart of Darkness, he demonstrates that imperialism in North America was neither heroic nor a perfectly planned conquest. It was, rather, as bewildering, violent, and haphazard as the European colonization of Africa, which Conrad knew firsthand and fictionalized in his masterwork. At the center of Parkinson's story are two families whose entwined histories ended in tragedy. The family of Shickellamy, one of the most renowned Indigenous leaders of the eighteenth century, were Iroquois diplomats laboring to create a world where settlers and Native people could coexist. The Cresaps were frontiersmen who became famous throughout the colonies for their bravado, scheming, and land greed. Together, the families helped determine the fate of the British and French empires, which were battling for control of the Ohio River Valley. From the Seven Years' War to the protests over the Stamp Act to the start of the Revolutionary War, Parkinson recounts the major turning points of the era from a vantage that allows us to see them anew, and to perceive how bewildering they were to people at the time. For the Shickellamy family, it all came to an end on April 30, 1774, when most of the clan were brutally murdered by white settlers associated with the Cresaps at a place called Yellow Creek. That horrific event became news all over the continent, and it led to war in the interior, at the very moment the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Michael Cresap, at first blamed for the massacre at Yellow Creek, would be transformed by the Revolution into a hero alongside George Washington. In death, he helped cement the pioneer myth at the heart of the new republic. Parkinson argues that American history is, in fact, tied to the frontier, just not in the ways we are often told. Altering our understanding of the past, he also shows what this new understanding should mean for us today. Robert G. Parkinson is professor of history at Binghamton University. Edward J. Blum is a professor of nineteenth-century United States History in the History Department at San Diego State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

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Jeffrey A. Marx, "Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I" (NYU Press, 2026)

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Why were Jews once stereotyped as America's arsonists? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Jeffrey Marx to discuss his fascinating book Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I  (NYU Press, 2026), which uncovers a little-known chapter in the history of American antisemitism. In the decades after the American Civil War, major insurance companies instructed agents to deny fire insurance to Jewish customers, claiming they were uniquely prone to arson. That accusation quickly spread beyond the insurance industry, finding its way into newspapers, cartoons, vaudeville, popular songs, and silent films, helping to cement the image of the "Jewish firebug" in the American imagination. Drawing on fire department records, insurance files, trial transcripts, newspapers, and other archival sources, Marx untangles the complicated relationship between stereotype and reality. He explores why some Jewish immigrants became involved in organized arson schemes, how insurance companies often enabled those crimes for their own financial interests, and why Jews became the only ethnic group in America burdened with this particular accusation. The result is a nuanced history that reveals as much about immigrant life, poverty, and urban America as it does about the enduring power of antisemitic myths. Together, Marx and Katz examine how stereotypes are created, why they persist long after the facts have faded, and what this forgotten episode teaches us about the history—and continuing evolution—of antisemitism in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

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Nelson Lichtenstein on Clinton and Neoliberalism

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We are joined by Nelson Lichtenstein, one of the deans of American labor history. The conversation ranges widely, from the tragedy of the Clinton administration and what might have been, to the importance of studying capitalism, to the politics of baby boomer self-loathing—all key parts of the history of the 1990s! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

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“American Elegy” with author Ed Simon

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I discuss with the author his book American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America (Ig Publishing, 2026). Simon is the founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books. The book is a lively and lyrical medley of short “flash” essays, as he calls them, and our conversation ranges from his notes on “General Tso’s Chicken” as a sticky American fusion classic to his thoughts on Jane Jacob’s early 1960’s exploration of what makes for a vibrant urban milieu. As Simon tells me, there is much in the American experience—in the American song, it can be said—to celebrate notwithstanding all of the discordant notes. Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

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Mary E. Mendoza, "Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border" (UNC Press, 2026)

5d ago00:53:59Tap to summarize

As many as ten thousand people attempt to illegally cross the border between the US and Mexico each month, braving deserts, rivers, and other environmental hazards in the process. But the very illegality of that crossing has an environmental history, writes Penn State University assistant professor Mary Mendoza in Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border (University of North Carolina Press, 2026). It was diseases, microbes, insects, and animals which, in part, hardened the border from a porous array of landscapes into the militarized zone seen on the news every night. However, despite the ecological and political difficulties of doing so, people continue to cross the border between the two countries, defying environmental odds and risking death along the way. In Deadly Divide, Mendoza explains why, underscores the risks involved, and shows how we got to this point, keeping an eye on the border region's stark landscape with every step of the way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

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Diana Cucuz, "Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

5d ago00:35:29Tap to summarize

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Diana Cucuz about her book, Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR (University of Toronto Press, 2023) and also asks her for advice to beginner scholars studying gender and the Cold War. A bit about Dr. Cucuz’s book: throughout the Cold War, Soviet citizens had limited access to US life and culture. Amerika, a glossy Russian-language magazine similar to Life, provided a rare exception. Produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA), America’s first peacetime propaganda organization, Amerika was used to influence the Soviet public and convince women in particular that an American-style consumer culture and conservative gender norms could better their lives. Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds relies on USIA archives, issues of Amerika, and American women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal to show how, during the postwar period, USIA officials deployed idealized images of American women as happy, fulfilled, and feminine wives, mothers, and homemakers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

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Paul Helseth and David P. Smith eds., "New Perspectives on Old Princeton, 1812-1929" (Routledge, 2024)

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New Perspectives on Old Princeton, 1812-1929 (Routledge, 2024) focuses on Princeton Theological Seminary and the theologians who taught there from the time of its founding in 1812 to the time of its reorganization in 1929. It confronts the standard assessment of Old Princeton in the historiography of North American evangelicalism and sets out why a new paradigm is needed. The volume critically engages with the 'Ahlstrom thesis' and other more recent scholarship concerning Old Princeton's relationship to the Scottish intellectual tradition. The contributions seek to move beyond Old Princeton's alleged indebtedness to Enlightenment thought and advance a more constructive reading of the Old Princetonians, their theology, and their place in the American evangelical experience. The book offers a fresh and more accurate assessment of the theological and philosophical assumptions that held sway at Old Princeton and through the seminary to the American continent and beyond. It will appeal to scholars interested in theology, religious history and intellectual history. Paul K. Helseth (PhD, Marquette University) is associate professor of Christian thought at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the author of Right Reason and the Princeton Mind (2010). David Smith (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is pastor in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church and adjunct faculty in historical theology at Erksine Theological Seminary. He received his M.Div. from Covenant Seminary (1995) and completed his dissertation, published as B. B. Warfield’s Scientifically Constructive Theological Scholarship in 2010, under John Woodbridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

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All episodes

Nora L. Rubel, "Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Gayle F. Wald, "This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Soraya Murray, "Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination" (MIT Press, 2026)

Robert G Parkinson, "Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier" (Norton, 2024)

Jeffrey A. Marx, "Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I" (NYU Press, 2026)

Nelson Lichtenstein on Clinton and Neoliberalism

“American Elegy” with author Ed Simon

Mary E. Mendoza, "Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border" (UNC Press, 2026)

Diana Cucuz, "Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Paul Helseth and David P. Smith eds., "New Perspectives on Old Princeton, 1812-1929" (Routledge, 2024)