New Books in American Studies

This is a very timely book, coming as it does in the midst of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 — the war that gave birth to the maroon community of Prospect Bluff, Florida. In his book The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World (UP of Florida, 2013), Nathaniel Millett shows how an assortment of free African-Americans, escaped slaves, Africans, and Afro-Indians created a thriving, highly organized community in the shadow of the expanding slave empire of the southwestern United States. Inspired by the singular figure of Edward Nichols, and Irish-born British officer of staunch anti-slavery convictions, the men and women of Prospect Bluff forged a community that realized their deepest understandings of freedom in the midst of the era of Atlantic revolutions.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Asian American Studies] Julia H. Lee is the author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011). Dr. Lee is an Assistant Professor in the department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Interracial Encounters investigates the overlapping of African American and Asian American literature. By focusing on the diverse attitudes that blacks and Asian Americans had towards each other, Dr. Lee pushes against dominant conceptions of these groups as either totally cooperative or as totally antagonistic. Lee also explores how American nationalism was produced through this comparison, and shows how Afro-Asian representations allowed readers and writers to consider alliances outside of the American nation-state.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Intellectual History] Molly Worthen, author most recently of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the ideas that moved a variety of evangelicals in America over the last seventy years.  Worthen argues that attentive observers of American evangelical history must contend with the imagination as much as the mind when considering how evangelicals have “navigated the upheavals in modern American culture and global Christianity.”  Expertly weaving the intellectual and religious histories of institutions and movements with the biographies of specific people, Worthen provides a rigorous and fluid analysis of a much maligned and often misunderstood category of American religion.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Culture] Kevin Kerrane‘s Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting (CreateSpace, 2013) represents the first major study of the history and practice of professional baseball scouting.  Based on Kerrane’s ethnographic research with the Philadelphia Phillies during the 1981 season, the book provides an inside look at one of sports’ least understood professions and most unusual subcultures. Originally released in 1984, the book became a cult favorite among baseball analysts and historians, eventually finding a place on Sports Illustrated‘s list of the top 100 sports books of all time.  For the past decade the book has been notoriously hard to find, with copies selling for up to $50 on eBay.  It is now widely available in rerelease from Baseball Prospectus, the leading voice in progressive, contemporary baseball research. In addition to the original text, the rerelease features a new introduction and an extended epilogue updating the book for the 2010s.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Gender Studies] How to research the history of sexual harassment in the office, when the term sexual harassment was only invented in 1975 and it was long tabou to even use the word sex in conversation? Using an array of rich sources — from Treasury Department archives to trial records, congressional investigation files to films and novels, popular weeklies and dailies to postcards, advertisements to confession magazines, private papers to employment advice guides – Julie Berebitsky takes the reader on a discovery of sexuality in the white collar-office from the Civil War to the present day. Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power and Desire (Yale University Press, 2012) analyzes sexual relations, non-consensual and consensual, among co-workers, arguing that the 19th-century ideal of the passionless woman gave way by World War One to an ideal of feminine attractiveness, one that was later transformed by Helen Gurley Brown in the 1960s into a professional strategy for its time. At the same time, feminist groups and the secretarial labor movement coalesced to fight back against decades of discrimination and sexual violence in the office against women workers. Berebitsky concludes her book with an analysis of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas case, which brought the issue of sexual harassment into the living rooms of Americans. This case, and the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton affair, demonstrate that there is both continuity and change in American attitudes towards sex at the office.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Biography] In the field of children’s programming, few people- with the possible exception of Fred Rogers- are as beloved as Jim Henson, a contributor to Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, but most famous for his creation of the Muppets. And yet, he’s remained an enigmatic figure in the years since his death. People remember the Muppets and they remember Jim, but they don’t know much about him. Jim Henson: The Biography (Ballantine Books, 2013), by Brian Jay Jones, is thus an effort to correct that and to pin down the puppeteer: as a man, a husband, a father, and an innovator. For, with the passage of time, we’ve come to take the Muppets and their maker rather for granted. They’ve been around for over fifty years so it’s easy to forget they had to be invented. It’s equally easy to forget how ground-breaking an invention- along with Henson’s other innovations- they were. As Jerry Juhl, the first official employee of Muppet’s Inc., reminds us in Jim Henson: ”This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and found that there was a fifth direction in which one could sail.” And how doggedly he sailed. Henson worked relentlessly, not simply at a job but at his passions. As Jones notes, one of his top business objectives as to “work for the common good of all mankind.” And that is, in the end, perhaps one of the most striking things to emerge from Jim Henson: the fact that Henson was who he appeared to be. A complicated man, yes, with complications in his private life, but also a gentle soul who truly wanted to make the world a better place. And, also, a man who is, to this day, deeply beloved by all who knew and worked with him. Henson once wrote: “My hope still is to leave this world a little bit better for my being here.” As Jones’s biography proves, he did.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] A couple of years ago I was living in a hip district of a university town in the Midwest. It had all the hip stuff you’d expect: a record store (and I mean record store), a big used bookstore, a greasy spoon, two dive bars, a coffee shop, and two restaurants where you could buy 40 dollar meals (hipsters splurge too!). Then, suddenly, a knitting store appeared. It looked out of place. Knitting? So I went in to take a look. Much to my surprise, it was full of hipsters, or rather hipster women. The place was very casual. It had a coffee bar, homemade cookies, and couches. You could just wander in, get a cuppa, and, well, knit. According to Emily Matchar, what I’d seen was a reflection of a return to domesticity. In Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Matchar gives us the why and how of urban gardening, urban chickens, urban canning, and–that’s right–urban knitting and sewing. According to Matchar, youngish women are rejecting high-flying careers to go “back to the land,” so long as that land is in a city. A movement or a fad? Listen to the interview and judge for yourself. All I know is that now that I’ve read Matchar’s book, I have new respect for my mom. She was way ahead of the curve on this one. The woman made all her own clothes. And not only that, she had a career, though not a very high-flying one. She “had it all” before “having it all” was deemed impossible.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. is the author of Chicana/o Struggles for Education: Activism in the Community (Texas A&M Press 2013). He is professor of history at the University of Houston and previously published three books by Texas A&M Press on education and Mexican Americans. This book focuses on the period of 1960 to 2010, a period when Mexican Americans were challenging the largely segregated public education system in many part of the country. Social movements worked to elect Chicano candidates to school boards and which began to choose new school leaders. Despite progress, Mexican Americans students continued to face great segregation which led to legal challenges in cases like Cisneros, Serrano, and Rodriguez. Overtime, strategy shifted from de-segregation to bilingual education and later support for school choice. The book ends with a series of lessons that scholars, policy makers, and activists can learn from this history. A lot can be learned from this book about social movement politics, education policy, and the struggle to assert local control over the education of Mexican American children.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Glenn Feldman is the author of The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944 (Alabama UP 2013). He is professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the author of eight other books. Feldman’s book is a deeply provocative analysis of southern politics and political history. He explains the recurring themes in southern politics as an outgrowth of “Reconstruction Syndrome”. Themes of anti-government, anti-taxation, and deep suspicion of outsiders (African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants), run throughout the history of southern politics, and remain today. Feldman focuses much of his book on showing that the Democratic Party lost the south long before the passage of the civil rights laws in the 1960s. He tracks the shift in political allegiances back to the 1930s and even earlier. The book challenges conventional notions and is likely to stimulate debate and controversy. It is a worthwhile read for historians of the time period and political scientists, alike.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Native American Studies] Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among the most popular tests of all is for so-called “Native American DNA.” All of this rests upon some uninterrogated (and potentially destructive) assumptions about race and human “origins,” however. In Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Kim TallBear asks what’s at stake for Indigenous communities and First Nations when the premises of this ascendant science are put into practice. TallBear, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin and enrolled Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, conducted years of research on the politics of “human genome diversity,” decoding the rhetoric of scientists, for-profit companies, and public consumers. The result is a vital and provocative work, tracing lineages between racial science and genetic testing, “blood talk” and “DNA talk,” and the undemocratic culture of a field which claims it can deliver us from racism.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Biography] John F. Kennedy remains one of the most remembered and most enigmatic presidents in American history, perhaps precisely because, as Thurston Clarke writes in the preface of his new biography JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, he was “more than most presidents– more than most middle aged men… a work in progress.” This is perhaps also why he’s a perennial favorite of biographers: because he proves such a challenge to pin down and because it is so very tempting to try to imagine who he might have become had he lived. Alas, he didn’t. And so we’re left to wonder, a temptation Clarke resists in JFK’s Last Hundred Days. Instead, he mines that period to see who JFK was then and leaves us to the imagining. For, undoubtedly, he was a changed man in many respects: grieving the death of his infant son, somewhat renewed in his commitment to his wife, moving towards a policy of détente with Russia, re-examining American involvement in Vietnam. Clarke borrows from the journalist Laura Bergquist the idea of JFK as our most “prismatic” president, and systematically examines the various facets that were presented in his final hundred days. The end result is a portrayal that, while doing nothing to quell the unanswerable question of who JFK might have become had he not died, does go a long way towards answering the question of who he was while he lived.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] For many people, the most important questions about the Kennedy assassination are “Who killed Kennedy?” and, if Lee Harvey Oswald did, “Was Oswald part of a conspiracy?” This is strange, because we know the answers to both questions: Oswald killed Kennedy and he did so alone. These facts won’t keep people from speculating–everyone loves a mystery–but they might allow us to focus on more pertinent questions about what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. One such question is this: “Why did Oswald do it?” Obviously, the answer will not be straightforward. Assassinating the President of the United States is, well, not really something a rational person would attempt, so we should not expect a completely rational explanation. Oswald was not crazy, but he was doubtless mentally ill. He had “reasons” for killing the president; it’s just that his “reasons” are not going to make much sense to us. To comprehend why he did what he did, then, we must comprehend how his “reasons” made sense to him. In his insightful, well-researched book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Savodnik helps us do just this by investigating Oswald’s decision to defect to, live in, and ultimately abandon the Soviet Union. He convincingly argues that Oswald’s Soviet Period was part of a larger pattern, one that dominated his entire life: that of taking on and abandoning identities, always unsuccessfully. Even as a child (and, as Peter points out, Oswald had a horrific childhood), “Lee” never really “fit.” He could never find a group of people he could rely on, a social context in which he could thrive, a community that would respect him.  As he matured, he began to search for an identity–in politics, in the Marines, and in the Soviet Union. Yet he was always, as Peter says, an “interloper”: he never lasted long in the skin of any given “Lee.” To this reader, the fact that Oswald was essentially an interloper goes a long way in explaining why he murdered Kennedy. It was his last attempt to fit in, to establish who he really was, to find an identity.

What do most Americans know about Andrew Jackson, apart from that he’s on the $20 bill and that he apparently had great hair? Probably not much. Maybe that he was a two-term president who pioneered the aggressive use of the powers of that office, and that he steadfastly opposed the sectionalizing, states-rights tendencies of the South Carolina nullifiers. In short, most of the conventional image of Andrew Jackson situates him firmly as an American. Mark Cheathem‘s new biography Andrew Jackson, Southerner (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) reminds us that Jackson was born and raised in the South, became a wildly successful plantation owner there, and based his formidable political coalition in the American Southwest. Moreover, many of the signal events of Jackson’s presidency — Indian removal, the Eaton Affair (sometimes called the “Petticoat Affair”), and his war against the “Monster Bank” are only fully understandable when Jackson’s southern background is accounted for. Mark Cheathem’s book will ensure that we will never again take Jackson’s southern roots for granted.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Anthropology]  Ken MacLeish offers an ethnographic look at daily lives and the true costs borne by soldiers, their families, and communities, in his new book Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton University Press, 2013). His intimate exploration of military lives makes salient the numerous and often contradictory ways that war enters into the everyday lives of soldiers and their families in Killeen, Texas. MacLeish begins by defining the site of research–Fort Hood is one of the largest military installations in the world, and many of the 55,000 personnel based there have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He then moves to an intense and palpable examination of the embodied experience of being a soldier, making a striking argument that “war persist in the lives, bodies and social worlds it has touched” (4). Thus, he connects the experiences of the body and the mind, exploring both physical and mental pain and the issues that surround the pursuit of healing. Moreover, he analyzes the complex burdens placed on people’s relationships and the love that binds them in contradictory ways through the ins and outs of military life. The final chapters examine the gap between obligations and exchange in relation to the value of a soldier’s labor, showing how they materialize in different aspects of soldiers’ lives from the “burden of gratitude” to the overdistribution, and hence devaluation, of medals and honors. Interweaving brutally honest narratives with critical theory and anthropological analysis, MacLeish invites us to re-examine the condition of vulnerability pervasive in the words and lives of soldiers and their families in Fort Hood, fleshing out the myriad ways in which military life is always mired in the production of war, at home and abroad.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Cindy I-Fen Cheng is the author of Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War (NYU Press 2013). She is associate professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cheng places the conflicted history of Asian Americans in the United States into the context of Cold War politics. US policy makers sought to combat Soviet propaganda that portrayed the nation’s racism and legal discrimination. But as policy makers upended unconstitutional housing policies and racially restrictive covenants, the Cold War also compelled the prosecution of Asian Americans for their alleged links to communism. Cheng pieces together original interviews, interesting interpretations of legal proceedings, and media analysis to tell a fascinating political history of the Cold War era.