New Books in American Studies 5i3m69

Known as the Iron Man of politics, Alben Barkley enjoyed a career that took him from rural Kentucky to the vice-presidency of the United States of America. In his book Alben Barkley: A Life in Politics (University Press of Kentucky,…

Cassandra A. Good is the Associate Editor of the Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington. Her book Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2105) offers a historical…

Since World War II, the United States has repeatedly posited itself as a defender of democracy, using its military might to promote freedom abroad even as it ascended to the status of the world’s only superpower. The answer to almost…

Robert Boatright, associate professor of political science at Clark University, is the editor of The Deregulatory Moment? A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Campaign finance reform has been a salient topic during…

Kevin Bubriski, a New Englander and internationally acclaimed photographer, was a freelance photojournalist when he first arrived in New Mexico in 1981 to study filmmaking in Santa Fe. Bubriski recalls, “Although I was working as a news photographer on…

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and ed back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.…

In The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York University Press, 2015), Adam Mendelsohn, Associate Professor of History at the University of Cape Town, embarks on a comparative exploration…

William Resh is the author of Rethinking the istrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush istration (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Resh is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Californias Sol Price…

The Hidden South–Come Home (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2016) is the result of an ongoing project that documents intimate stories of people who are often overlooked in society. Photographer and author Brent Walker traveled around the southern United States meeting and…

Lance deHaven-Smith‘s Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas Press, 2014) investigates how the Founders’ hard-nosed realism about the likelihood of elite political misconduct articulated in the Declaration of Independence has been replaced by today’s blanket condemnation of conspiracy…

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet …

At the start of The Grand Old Man of Baseball: Connie Mack in His Final Years, 1932-1956, the third volume of Norman L. Machts biography of baseball legend Connie Mack, the Philadelphia As which he owned and managed had…

Eric Tang’s book, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Temple University Press, 2015), is an intimate ethnography of a single person, Ra Pronh, a fifty year old survivor of the Cambodian genocide, who afterwards spent nearly six years in…

Who plans the hundreds of political rallies and events each year? Josh King’s new book, Off Script: An Advance Mans Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide (St. Martins Press, 2016) offers an answer. King is a…

In The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews (Princeton University Press, 2016), Michael Barnett, University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at the George Washington University, explores the tension American Jews…

As a trailblazing attorney, Bessie Margolin lived a life of exceptional achievement. At a time when the legal profession consisted almost entirely of men, she earned the esteem of her colleagues and rose to become one of the most successful…

In Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015), John Alba Cutler provides a literary history of Chicano/a literature that tracks the fields formation and evolution from the 1960s forward. The central focus of the book…

What’s missing from contemporary discussions of aesthetics and representation within the natural hair movement? Bert Ashe generously offers a response in Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, an unprecedented of black male identity as seen through our culture’s perceptions of…

As the most populous country in Eastern Europe as well as the birthplace of the largest anticommunist dissident movement, Poland is crucial in understanding the end of the Cold War. During the 1980s, both the United States and the Soviet…

Is it possible to lay claim to ownership of a dance? Is choreography intellectual property? How have shifting conceptions of race and gender shaped the way we think of dance, property and ownership? In Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual …