New Books in American Studies

Daniel Rood, "In the Shadow of the Great House: A History of the Plantation in America" (Norton, 2026)

Dan Rood’s In the Shadow of the Great House (W.W. Norton & Co., 2026) is one of the first contemporary books to focus on the primary engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country: the plantation. The plantation was invented on the small Atlantic island of São Tomé in the 1500s, and the island also became the site, soon enough, of the first slave revolt. The brutal technology was then perfected in Barbados, where planters worked tens of thousands of African captives to their deaths in sugar factories. But it was in the United States, Rood shows, that the plantation found its most powerful manifestations. In Virginia, Carolina, and then the Deep South, successive plantation revolutions transformed slavery into a much more rigid and oppressive institution. Incomparably wealthy planters now insisted on a rightless, eternally available, “increasing” source of labor, and in the process reinvented human bondage and stamped it onto a single race. But the plantation did not die after the Civil War. It metastasized. From the advent of sharecropping in the late nineteenth century to the rise of cotton in mid-twentieth century California to today’s chicken processing plants, the plantation has cast a long shadow over American life. Rood further documents the “dark retreats” carved out of plantation life by the enslaved. It was the enslaved who offered the most clear-eyed understanding of what the plantation behemoths told us, and still tell us, about our country. 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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Krzysztof Rowiński, "Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film" (Routledge, 2026)

1w ago00:45:35Tap to summarize

Today’s guest, Krzysztof Rowiński, is the author of Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film (Routledge, 2026). This book focuses on the concept of non- redemptive failure, a type of failure that is not part of a larger narrative of success or narrative redemption, with attention to how the concept functions between literature, critical theory, and other fields. Examining literature and film from mid- twentieth- century Poland, Italy, and the United States, it traces productive effects of failure which cannot survive into the future, yet have an important, transformative impact in the moment in which they occur. The book engages with the work of John Williams, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bruno Jasieński, proposing a theory of failure at the intersection of literary study, performance theory, and political thought. In discussing these examples, the book examines the place of failure in the broader context of modern and contemporary US American, Italian, and Polish literary and cultural traditions. Because of its interdisciplinary potential, this study might appeal to readers in art history, philosophy, political theory, and other fields within the humanities and social sciences. Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption offers a framework that could not only spotlight the contribution of literary studies to the topic, in the form of narrative analysis but also become part of the theoretical apparatus for further research in these fields. Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance. 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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Nicholas Freudenberg, "Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since The 1960s" (Columbia UP, 2026)

1w ago00:56:11Tap to summarize

Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the CUNY School of Public Health. We are discussing his book, Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since the 1960s (Columbia University Press, 2026). In March 2020, during one of the first major US outbreaks of Covid, New York became an epicenter of the spread. New York's connective tissue, like the walkable city streets, subways, and taxi cabs, became pathways of transmission. In places where ideas and cultures can spread, diseases can, too. As the hospitals began to fill, essential workers from doctors and nurses to ambulance drivers and social workers stepped up to help heal the city in a time of crisis. For a brief moment, health workers became highly visible in our public consciousness. For many, the pandemic came as a shock. It had been more than 100 years since the last pandemic of comparable magnitude hit the five boroughs. We soon discovered that there already existed a network of public health workers and activists waiting to spring into action to blunt the virus's spread. Many wished that this network had been more robust, better developed, and better funded. Fighting for New York looks at the long sweep of public health activism in New York City from the 1960s to now. Covid was not the first public health crisis the city faced, and it certainly won't be the last. Nicholas details various initiatives to mobilize support for public health projects in the city. How have activists identified problems in their communities? How have they gained institutional support in addressing these problems? And how do they discover and implement workable solutions to the identified problems? Though primarily a work of history, Fighting for New York also serves as a road map for public health workers and activists seeking to navigate contemporary issues. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. 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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Lila Corwin Berman, "Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship" (Princeton UP, 2026)

1w ago01:03:22Tap to summarize

The history of Jews in the United States is often told as if they immigrated, gained citizenship, and almost immediately achieved full legal rights. Yet this story fundamentally misses how citizenship rights worked for Jews and countless others who arrived on American shores. In Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship, Lila Corwin Berman draws on case law, statutes, and debates to argue that both the laws of American citizenship and Jews’ position in them changed repeatedly across the twentieth century. Courts, policymakers, and the public persistently asked what it meant to be Jewish under the law. Were Jews a race, a nationality, a religion—or some combination of each? The answer carried profound legal consequences. Not only did it determine Jews’ citizenship status, but it also affected the rights they could exercise. Just as significantly, the meaning of the categories under law changed over time, affecting Jews’ self-understanding, their political ideals, and their relationships to other groups of Americans.Who Is American? tells a history that resonates powerfully with today’s high-stakes battles over citizenship and rights. As Berman concludes, citizenship law has always been better at posing questions about the terms of belonging than at providing any ultimate resolution. The tangled story of Jewish citizenship demonstrates the limits of law and explains why the United States continues to fall into new and, often, unsettling debates about who is American. Lila Corwin Berman is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University, where she directs the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. She is author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton) and Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit. Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Mentioned in this episode: Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Lila Corwin Berman, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion Dollar Institution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). William E. Forbath, “Constitutionalism, Human Rights, and the Genealogy of Jewish American Liberalism,” in James Loeffler and Moria Paz, eds., The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 118-140. Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006). Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Benjamin Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, eds., Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). Posen Library Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative: https://www.posenlibrary.com/Jewish-Studies-Curriculum 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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Stephen Robertson, "Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935" (Stanford UP, 2024)

1w ago00:57:51Tap to summarize

The violence that spread across Harlem on the night of March 19, 1935 was the first large-scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation’s leading Black neighborhood. However, as many observers pointed out, the events were “not a race riot” of the kind that had marked the decades after the Civil War. Racial violence took a new form in 1935. Through a granular analysis of those events and the mapping of their locations, Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 (Stanford University Press, 2024) reveals that Harlem’s residents participated in a complex new mix of violence that was a multifaceted challenge to white economic and political power. Tracing the legal and government investigations that followed, this project highlights how that violence came to be distorted, diminished, and marginalized by the concern of white authorities to maintain the racial order, and by the unwillingness of Harlem's Black leaders and their white allies to embrace fully such direct forms of protest. Focused on capturing rather than simplifying the complexity of the new form of racial violence, Harlem in Disorder is a multi-layered, hyperlinked narrative that connects different scales of analysis: individual events, aggregated patterns, and a chronological narrative. Its structure foregrounds individual events to counter how data can dehumanize the past, and to make transparent the interpretations involved in the creation of data from uncertain and ambiguous sources. Harlem in Disorder is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a Finalist for the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prize, Multimodal Category, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies; winner of the 2025 Ángel David Nieves Book Award for Best Monograph, sponsored by the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus; Honorable Mention for the 2025 Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize, sponsored by the American Society for Legal History, and Honorable Mention for the 2025 Open Scholarship Award, sponsored by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute. Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. 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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Lauren Duval, "The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence" (UNC Press, 2025)

1w ago00:45:46Tap to summarize

What was it like to live in a city experiencing occupation by a foreign army? What did it mean when a family had to quarter an officer in their home? More specifically, how did military occupation affect the women and men who lived in those cities, and alter the gender system? Lauren Duval’s The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2025) tackles the these questions by looking at the experiences of a wide range of Americans, Black and white, in the cities occupied by the British during the American Revolution. Why the household? Because this was the primary social and economic unit of the day, a site where people during the war encountered unprecedented threats to their sense of social order. By looking at households, we gain not only an intimate view of the experience of war, but also a sweeping interpretation of the effects of war on American understandings of gender and power. Some Americans saw military occupation as a threat, full stop. It challenged men’s senses of power and authority over their families, and the ever-present threat of rape hovered over women and girls. But because occupation could loosen some of the patriarchal control in the household, it could also offer tempting new opportunities. Free and enslaved Black people could take advantage of the disruptions to make calculated moves to gain freedom—or more freedom than they currently enjoyed. Black and white women could hope for a different kind of freedom when they forged relationships with military men. In all, The Home Front reveals entire worlds of young women, British officers, anxious patriarchs, enslaved Black women, German soldiers, and wives struggling to survive while their husbands or sons languished in prison or served in the military. And when the book turns to the postwar era, it reveals a stunning assessment of how those experiences of military occupation altered Americans’ views of household social order. As a result, Duval’s book does something unusual: it threads the needle between military history and the history of gender, women, and sexuality. Join us for this conversation between Lauren Duval and Carolyn Eastman (The Strange Genius of Mr. O and President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) and get a glimpse into the experience of living during wartime. 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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Jonathan L. Friedmann, "Chai Noon: Jews and the Cinematic Wild West" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)

2w ago01:11:23Tap to summarize

Only a few Westerns contain explicitly Jewish stories or themes, and very rarely do Old West tales involve identifiably Jewish characters. Yet Jewish contributors have shaped the Western—once Hollywood's most popular genre—ever since the silent era, both onscreen and offscreen, and some filmmakers have sought to infuse the genre with a distinctly Jewish sensibility. In Chai Noon: Jews and the Cinematic Wild West (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), Friedmann engages with larger themes of Jewish identity in popular film, including depictions of race, ethnicity, and foreignness. He also identifies similar concerns within the invention and creation of the imaginary West writ large in American culture. The juxtapositions prove to be both unexpected and intuitively understandable. 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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How “They” See “Us” with editor Madeleine Schwartz

2w ago00:39:15Tap to summarize

The remarkable political ascent of Donald J. Trump and his sustained grip on a certain segment of American society have given fresh life to a question as old as Tocqueville’s visit to Jacksonian America a century ago: How do foreigners regard America, Americans and the American experiment? I explore this question in a conversation with Madeline Schwartz, founder and editor in chief of The Dial, an online publication. She wrote the Introduction to a collection of essays featuring work commissioned by The Dial, the new book titled How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, 2026). We discuss perspectives from Italy, Argentina and South Africa, among other places 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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Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory

2w ago01:03:47Tap to summarize

In Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory (UNC Press, 2026), historian John Garrison Marks tells the story of Americans’ long, fraught struggle to come to terms with Washington’s legacy of slavery. He traces how politicians, abolitionists, educators, activists, Washington’s former slaves and their descendants, and others have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated slavery’s place in Washington’s story, and how they have wielded versions of that story in the political and cultural fights of their time. Dr. Marks shows how generational struggles over our collective memory of Washington and slavery have always been part of a bigger conversation about defining the United States and its people. As debates about the founders’ participation in the system of slavery continue to roil public discourse, Dr. Marks shows with new clarity that Americans have never collectively reconciled Washington’s conflicted legacy. By truly grappling with Washington’s role as enslaver and emancipator, we may come to better understand the nation and ourselves. This episode considers: the life and legacy of George Washington, the role of myth and memory in the New Republic, and how conflicted legacies continue. A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life Guest: Dr. John Garrison Marks holds a Ph.D. in history from Rice University. He is a New Jersey native currently living outside Washington, DC. He is the author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler holds a Ph.D. in history which she uses to explore the stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. She is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the newsletter at christinagessler.substack.com. Playlist for listeners: Never Caught Running From Bondage No Common Ground The Vice-President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom The Social Constructions of Race What Might Be The Untold Story of President Lincoln Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! 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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250 Years of Special Providence: On American Grand Strategy Since the Declaration with Walter Russell Mead

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To celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary, Madison’s Notes is having a special Fourth of July episode to close out the season. So in Episode 12 of Season 5, I have as our guest Walter Russell Mead to talk about American grand strategy since the Declaration of Independence. A Yale graduate, Mr. Mead is a professor at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Foreign Affairs contributor and a Wall Street Journal columnist, as well as the host of the podcast, “What Really Matters.” Drawing on his book, Special Providence (2001), we discuss the history of the four American schools of foreign policy—the Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Wilsonians—and how his analysis of the American traditions has held up nearly a quarter of a century later. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.” 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

Daniel Rood, "In the Shadow of the Great House: A History of the Plantation in America" (Norton, 2026)

Krzysztof Rowiński, "Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film" (Routledge, 2026)

Nicholas Freudenberg, "Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since The 1960s" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Lila Corwin Berman, "Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Stephen Robertson, "Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Lauren Duval, "The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence" (UNC Press, 2025)

Jonathan L. Friedmann, "Chai Noon: Jews and the Cinematic Wild West" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)

How “They” See “Us” with editor Madeleine Schwartz

Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory

250 Years of Special Providence: On American Grand Strategy Since the Declaration with Walter Russell Mead