New Books in American Studies

Sean McCloudView on AmazonExorcisms and demons. In his new book American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sean McCloud argues that not only have such phenomena been on the rise in the last 30 or so years, they also reveal prominent tropes within the contemporary American religious landscape. More precisely, readers are introduced to the first in-depth study of demon fighting in the so-called "spiritual warfare" of Third Wave evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity, a movement that has global ramifications. McCloud examines Third Wave practices such deliverance rituals, spiritual housekeeping, and spiritual mapping. In short, demons are a central fact of life in the imagination of millions of Christians around the globe. Sean McCloud is Associate Professor of Religion at University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Eric FonerView on AmazonIn this podcast I talk with Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University about his book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015). Per the book jacket, "More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North's largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city's underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence―including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York―Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring―full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage―and significant―the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by 'practical abolition,' person by person, family by family." Some of the topics we discuss are: -How vigilance committees provided fugitives with legal representation if they were apprehended. -Why the unwillingness of local juries to convict persons who took part in widely publicized rescues influenced congressional debates over slavery. -The ways resistance to Fugitive Slave Law forced ordinary northerners who had no connection with the abolitionist movement to confront the relationship between individual conscience and legal obligation.

Neil J. YoungView on AmazonIn his new book, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015), Dr.Neil J. Young questions the historical view that post-World War Two challenges to traditional morality led to a growing partnership among religious believers, leading eventually to the formation of a unified Religious Right. Instead, of emphasizing unity, Young shows how politically-active Catholics, Evangelicals, and Mormons managed to work both with and against each other, frequently highlighting theological differences even as they emphasized moral similarities. Through his rich and sensitive study, Young assembles an impressive amount of evidence proving his argument, making this an important read for anyone interested in the relationship between religion and politics in the post-war United States.

Sujey VegaView on AmazonIn Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest (New York University Press, 2015), Sujey Vega Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, traces the way Latina/o Hoosiers established community and belonging in Central Indiana amongst the sharp rise in anti-immigrant/Mexican sentiment after the passage of the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437). Dr. Vega foregrounds her analysis by illuminating the "pathology of forgetting" practiced by the region's non-Hispanic White population as they have reimagined and celebrated the region's ethnic past through the lenses of whiteness and assimilation. Thus, despite their multigenerational presence in the region and regardless of immigration status, Latina/o Hoosiers are perpetually viewed as foreign and unassimilated by many of their White neighbors. Following the passage of H.R. 4437 by the 109th U.S. Congress in Dec. 2005, Dr. Vega explains how the discourses of illegality and nativism intermixed with the region's collective memory to "other" and "racialize" Latina/o Hoosiers as outside the bounds of community and belonging in America's Heartland. Examining religious practices, community celebrations, sporting events, and other forms of socialization, Professor Vega details the formation of ethnic belonging among Latina/o Hoosiers as they appropriated space and claimed membership in Greater Lafayette, Indiana. Amidst the anti-immigrant fervor of the day, Vega asserts that the establishment of ethnic belonging laid the groundwork for civic engagement and political activism as Latina/o Hoosiers participated in public demonstrations of solidarity and protest, like the Immigration Reform Protests that swept across the nation between March and May of 2006.

Michael KimmelView on AmazonMichael Kimmel is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University. He is also executive director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities. His book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (Nation Books, 2013) is an engaging and eye-opening book about the lives and attitudes of white men who are expressing rage and feelings of "aggrieved entitlement" in a new age of gender relations. In the vast social, economy and political changes women have gained increased equality in the home, and the workplace, while many straight white males are experiencing a sense of loss. Having worked hard and fulfilled what they view as the requirements of masculinity, men now find that the economic rewards are slow in coming. Kimmel has spent hundreds of hours talking with men from different economic and social stations who blame women, blacks, and gays for their troubles. With a sympathetic ear, he examines the social construction of men's anger express in politicized anti-immigrant, anti-gay, and racist sentiment flamed by right-wing media. Feeling that the system is now stacked against them, we are seeing outbreaks of mass murder by young men at schools and workplaces and men's rights activism which seeks to restore male privilege and "stolen" fathers' rights to extreme cases of battering and murder of women. Through the political mobilization of the Extreme Right represented in the Tea Party, Neo-Nazi groups and religious fundamentalism, men are expressing despair over their perceived loss of status. White supremacist groups are drawing a growing number of women who are embracing old models of gender relations and the slogan of "taking our country back." The beginning of the end of patriarchy, Kimmel argues, is also the start of a better life for men. Gender and racial equality are good for white men and their children. What is needed is not only to turn down the volume of white male rage, but also to empower men to embrace a new definition of manhood that frees them from a sense of entitlement and opens up for them an equalitarian future.

Michael KimmelView on AmazonMichael Kimmel is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University. He is also executive director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities. His book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (Nation Books, 2013) is an engaging and eye-opening book about the lives and attitudes of white men who are expressing rage and feelings of "aggrieved entitlement" in a new age of gender relations. In the vast social, economy and political changes women have gained increased equality in the home, and the workplace, while many straight white males are experiencing a sense of loss. Having worked hard and fulfilled what they view as the requirements of masculinity, men now find that the economic rewards are slow in coming. Kimmel has spent hundreds of hours talking with men from different economic and social stations who blame women, blacks, and gays for their troubles. With a sympathetic ear, he examines the social construction of men's anger express in politicized anti-immigrant, anti-gay, and racist sentiment flamed by right-wing media. Feeling that the system is now stacked against them, we are seeing outbreaks of mass murder by young men at schools and workplaces and men's rights activism which seeks to restore male privilege and "stolen" fathers' rights to extreme cases of battering and murder of women. Through the political mobilization of the Extreme Right represented in the Tea Party, Neo-Nazi groups and religious fundamentalism, men are expressing despair over their perceived loss of status. White supremacist groups are drawing a growing number of women who are embracing old models of gender relations and the slogan of "taking our country back." The beginning of the end of patriarchy, Kimmel argues, is also the start of a better life for men. Gender and racial equality are good for white men and their children. What is needed is not only to turn down the volume of white male rage, but also to empower men to embrace a new definition of manhood that frees them from a sense of entitlement and opens up for them an equalitarian future.

Daniel TortoraView on AmazonLong viewed conventionally through the lens of inter-European/colonist conflict, warfare in colonial era North America is currently experiencing a resurgence as a new generation of military historians employ a variety of tools and methods borrowed from other fields and disciplines. Our latest guest, Daniel Tortora, does so in his book Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756-1763 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). By focusing on the French and Indian War's Southern theater, particularly in the two Carolinas and Virginia, Tortora crafts a unique account of an area generally overlooked in the face of the larger body of scholarship focused on events in the Northern Colonies and Canada. Carolina in Crisis employs a conceptual narrative and analytical framework often associated with Borderlands theory to craft an intricate account of conflict and how it was viewed across three different cultural boundaries: white European, native American, and enslaved Africans. The end product is a rich and rewarding addition to the historiography of early American warfare.

Julie M. WeiseView on AmazonJulie M. Weise's new book Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South Since 1910 (UNC Press, 2015) is the first book to comprehensively document Mexicans' and Mexican Americans' long history of migration to the U.S. South. It recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos' migrations to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina as far back as 1910. In the heart of Dixie, Mexicanos navigated the Jim Crow system, cultivated community in the cotton fields, purposefully appealed for help to the Mexican government, shaped the southern conservative imagination in the wake of the civil rights movement, and embraced their own version of suburban living at the turn of the twenty-first century. Rooted in U.S. and Mexican archival research, oral history interviews, and family photographs, Corazón de Dixie unearths not just the facts of Mexicanos' long-standing presence in the U.S. South but also their own expectations, strategies, and dreams. Also, check out the book's companion website here for primary sources, teaching materials, and more.

Ted MerwinView on AmazonIn Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli.  A social space and symbol, the deli demonstrated American Jews' connection to their heritage and to their new surroundings.  Merwin addresses the rise and fall of the Jewish delicatessen in America, how we remember it, and its contemporary resurgence.

Jodi Eichler-LevineView on AmazonIn Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children's Literature (New York University Press, 2013), Jodi Eichler-Levine, associate professor of Religion Studies and Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization at Lehigh University, analyses a theme in American religious history–suffering–through the lens of Jewish and African American children's literature. In her analysis of works by authors such as Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, Eichler-Levine deftly examines the ways in which historical narratives of suffering are used by religious communities to claim their status as citizens.

Christine HongView on AmazonIn her new book, Identity, Youth, and Gender in the Korean American Church (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dr. Christine Hong explores the lives of female Korean American Mainline Christian adolescents. Hong's work, an exercise in feminist ethnography and practical theology, focuses on the difficulties these young women encounter as people who face marginalization within both broader American society and their own faith communities, and discusses ways to help them overcome these obstacles. Hong's sensitive analysis is sure to benefit anyone interested in religion, ethnicity, and youth in America.

Phil FordView on AmazonWhat is hip? Can a piece of music be hip? Or is hipness primarily a way of engaging with music which recognizes the hip potential of the music? Or primarily a manner of being, which allows the hip individual to authentically engage with the hip artwork? Whatever the case may be, we know that the hip is meant to be authentic. We know that it is opposed to the square:  all that is inauthentic, conformist, and authoritarian. And we know that attempts to understand hipness tend to locate it in the sonorous immediacy of musical experience. Phil Ford's, Dig:  Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013) uses these attempts to understand hipness as an entry into the altogether more intractable problem of defining hipness itself. Ford traces the hip sensibility from its roots in the African-American subcultures that arose in cities such as New York and Chicago in the aftermath of the Great Migration, through its adoption (or appropriation) by the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture movement of the 1960s. In doing so, he marshals a wide array of sources:   newspaper columns, jazz improvisations, political posters, liner notes, diaries, and amateur acetate recordings, all grappling — in creative, illuminating, and sometimes painful ways — with the impossibility of capturing the lived experience of hipness. In the closing chapters of the book, he turns to two specific figures, Norman Mailer (a major writer), and John Benson Brooks (a somewhat peripheral jazz musician), reevaluating their works — and perhaps more importantly, their methods of working — in the light of the hip aesthetics described in the earlier sections of the book. Further Listening/Viewing/Reading: John Benson Brooks Trio:  Avant Slant Thomas Frank:  The Conquest of Cool Fruity Pebbles Rap Rip Torn attacks Norman Mailer with a Hammer

Jennifer MittelstadtView on Amazon[Cross-posted from Who Make Cents?] Have you seen those Facebook memes floating around, arguing that we shouldn't support a 15-dollar -per-hour minimum wage for service sector workers because the military doesn't earn a living wage? Jennifer Mittelstadt tells us how these stark lines were drawn between the military and the civilian economy – and on how military welfare affects us all. Jennifer Mittelstadt is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 2015). You can read more about her research here.

Mark A. NollView on AmazonMark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His book, In the Beginning was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 (Oxford University Press, 2015), offers a rich and deep examination of the place of the bible, both as an object and a source of ideas, in the public life of early America. Noll sets out to show the evolution of the colonial relationship with the bible in the context of Christendom, anti-Catholicism and the British empire in which it was understood. Noll offers innumerable examples and references of New England as thoroughly immersed in scripture in which a broad biblicalism saturated the imagination, culture, and politics. Both fervent and lukewarm believers took the authority of the bible for granted providing analogies for interpreting immediate events, inductive instruction, and inspiration for a vast number of political and cultural projects. But the bible was also a double edge sword that could both unite and divide friends and foe. Noll teases out the often-subtle difference in views of the bible that had significant political consequence. Dissenters and religious radicals believed that the bible stood against Christendom and church establishment. Other issues were not only about the bible itself, and whether it was the sole or final authority, but also who could read it and understand it. Slaves, women, and common people under the sweep of revivals, increased literacy, and the tool of a versified text began to interpret the bible for themselves rather than look to the clergy for guidance. This worked to undermine Christendom and created a uniquely American attitude towards the bible. What remained was a providential rhetoric that replaced the empire with the nation, and ongoing debates over scriptural mandates on the economy, slavery, and arguments for or against the Revolution. Noll has demonstrated that it is virtually impossible to understand the colonial society without understanding the place, significance, and prominence of scripture in private and public life.

Kimberly Marlowe HartnettView on AmazonIn Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, a writer and former journalist, introduces us to the larger-than-life personality Harry Golden.  A writer, publisher, and humorist, as well as activist, Golden used his popularity and incredibly wide network for a variety of causes, most notably the civil rights movement. Hartnett explores the ways Golden utilized his talents (he was, at his core, a salesman) to make America more equal and free.