New Books in American Studies

Lawrence Jacobs is the author (with James Druckman) of Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Just how responsive is the president to the public? In theory, we all hope very, but increasingly we worry that presidents have grown more distant from the wishes of the public. In Who Governs?, we get an empirical answer to that question that is at once novel and also deeply disturbing. Jacobs and Druckman explore how presidents, since Kennedy, have used public opinion polling to craft public messages and shape public priorities. Polling has grown significantly since the 1960s, both in its utilization, and also its sophistication, and presidents, especially Ronald Reagan, have given increasing attention to their results. But rather than using polls to closely adhere to the average voter, many presidents have catered to narrow segments of the populace, rending polling another tool used to undermine democratic governance.

Most of the year, when the weather lets us, my wife and I wind down on our front porch with a bourbon. We live out in the countryside and, for no particular reason, bourbon feels like the right choice as we watch the long grass waving on the hillside and the birds shuttling back and forth between the far trees. Every so often, I'll suggest we change things up: maybe a Scotch or an Irish whiskey–not really such a big change in the grand scheme of things–but my wife looks at me as though I've made some horrible faux pas, as though I've suggested a tumbler full of cotton-candy vodka or bacon grease. Bourbon, she insists, that's what goes with the landscape. And she's not alone. As Reid Mitenbuler points out in Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey (Viking, 2015), bourbon is our native spirit. This is the fact that Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning affirmed in 2007, when he sponsored a bill to declare September "National Bourbon Heritage Month." Bourbon, the bill stressed, captures the American values of "family heritage, tradition, and deep-rooted legacy." Like most American icons, bourbon's true history isn't so rosy. It is, however, fascinating, as Mitenbuler shows us by tracing the spirit's place in every era of America's past, from the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 to the "Declaration of Independence" for bourbon, which wasn't passed until 1964, when congress voted on a resolution deeming bourbon, in lackluster language, "a distinctive product of the United States." Yet here, too, Mitenbuler finds a great story, about power brokers, corporate maneuvering, and a forgotten man named Lewis Rosenstiel, who is the reason we now have whiskeys aged over eight years. Mitenbuler offers us a rich sense of the true heritage, tradition, and legacy behind the bourbon in our glasses, and it's as complexly American as the country itself. Scotch whiskey? Irish whiskey? My wife is certainly right. What was I thinking?

The Nation magazine, a beacon of the cultural and political left, is celebrating 150 years of publishing. As part of its celebration, it's publishing a daily blog called The Almanac that looks at events on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them. In this New Books Network journalism podcast, you'll hear Richard Kreitner, the magazine's archivist, discuss how The Nation covered the struggle for civil rights including the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling against segregated public schools in 1954; the life and work of the slain African-American leader Malcolm X and poet Langston Hughes's essay on black culture that The Nation published in 1926. You'll also hear the voices of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Langston Hughes.

Is yoga religious? This question has not only been asked recently by the broader public but also posed in the courts. Many argue that of course it is. The story of yoga in the popular imagination is often narrated as an ancient wisdom tradition that informs contemporary postural movements which are intricately connected and indivisible. Others contend that  contemporary yoga is simply a set of health practices that have nothing to do with religion. In Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014), Andrea Jain, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, helps us navigate the recent history of yoga in the west and the debates surrounding its 'religious' nature. Overall, what we find is that while yoga has been mediate through an emerging global consumer market and branded for strategic purposes it can still be seen to serve the function of a body of religious practice for many practitioners. In our conversation we discussed Hindu, Buddhist, Jain variations of yogic practice, Ida Craddock's Church of Yoga, legal definitions, Iyengar Yoga, Siddha Yoga, and Anusara Yoga, Theosophists and Transcendentalists, Swami Vivikenanda's Vedanta Society, counterculture yogis, consumer culture and the mass market, Christian Yogaphobia, the Hindu American Foundation, and the politics of yoga.

Lee Drutman is the author of The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate (Oxford UP 2015). Drutman is a senior fellow at New America. How do corporations seek influence in Washington? And should we be worried? Drutman's book moves beyond simple notions of how money and politics intertwine with nuanced writing and a bundle of new data analysis. He finds that corporate interest in politics has grown enormously since the 1970s, and now represents the vast majority of lobbying in Washington. But rather than simply placing money into a political "vending machine", Drutman shows a much more complex and muddled political process. Corporations win as often as they lose, and the growth in lobbying has to be understood in more sophisticated than simple "pay-to-play" descriptions. Drutman is worried, but not for the exact reasons you might expect, and he ends his book with ambitious proposals to reform lobbying and national policy making.

Oil-soaked birds in Prince William Sound. The "crying Indian" in a 1970s anti-littering ad. A lonely polar bear on an Arctic ice floe. Such environmental images have proliferated over the past half-century, and have played a pivotal role in alerting the public about ecological problems and galvanizing public action. Yet scholars are more likely to focus on the science related to environmental problems or the policy responses to them. Finis Dunaway's new book, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (University of Chicago, 2015) takes such images seriously. He examines these iconic photos and films, as well as many others, and he argues that they were crucial in developing popular environmentalism. Dunaway, associate professor of history at Trent University, shows how such images were produced and traces the effect they had on American culture. More importantly, he argues that such images implicitly or explicitly encouraged consumer-based, individually-oriented responses to the ecological crisis rather than actions focusing on the structural roots of environmental problems.

The Nation magazine is one of America's most distinguished journalistic enterprises featuring the writing and work of such notable people as Calvin Trillin, Noam Chomsky, Jessica Mitford, James Baldwin and Naomi Klein. The Nation was founded 150 years ago this July. It's America's oldest weekly magazine. To mark its 150th anniversary, it's publishing a daily blog called The Almanac compiled by the magazine's archivist, Richard Kreitner. The Almanac looks at significant historical events that took place on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them. In this New Books Network podcast, you'll hear Richard Kreitner talk about The Nation's coverage of events from May 10 to May 16. Everything from The Nation's strong backing for Israel's declaration of independence in 1948 to the prowess of boxer Joe Louis and the death of Bob Marley.

Amy Kittelstrom is an associate professor of history at Sonoma State University. In her book The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition (Penguin Press, 2015), Kittelstrom gives us profiles of seven individual and their circle. They embodied the ideas of what she calls an "American Reformation." Beginning with John Adams, who believed every man had the duty to think for himself, to Jane Addams, who went beyond Christian charity to live among the poor, the book show us how these individuals combined liberalism and moral values to create a post-Christian "religion of democracy." The "American Reformation" was the process of moving from Protestant orthodoxy and dogma to instituting the values of equality, liberty, and democracy within the social and political structure of the nation. These seven Americans combined the classic liberal values of reason and scientific inquiry with element of reformed Christianity, such as free will and equality before God, while rejecting the Calvinist teaching of human depravity. These ideals were not only political but a social practice in a progressive vision of society. In the process liberals acquired a reputation as "godless" discarding religion for a mere moral relativism. Kittelstrom presents us with individuals whose concern for moral values were derived from their religious roots and argues that the democratic ethos of her subjects valuing the individual, as both free and equal, was due to their reconstituted religious beliefs rather than a rejection of religion. The Religion of Democracy provides the reader an opportunity to consider the religious and moral sensibilities of the liberal tradition in America.

The intersection between ethnic and religious identities can be both complex and rich, particularly when dealing with a community that still has deep roots in the immigrant experience. In his book, Memory and Honor: Cultural and Generational Ministry with Korean American Communities (Liturgical Press, 2013), Fr. Simon C. Kim explores these issues in the Korean American Catholic community. In this deeply reflective work, Fr. Kim grapples with the many issues, such as the generational divide between ethnic Korean Catholics who immigrated, the children they brought with them from Korea, and their grandchildren born in the United States, and what it means to be a Catholic of Korean ethnicity when Protestant forms of Christianity are linked so tightly with that ethnic group in the popular imagination. This pioneering work will be of interest not only to scholars working in Asian American religion, but anyone who is curious about the connection between ethnicity and Christianity.

"Conspiracy theories are neither the vile excrescence of puny minds nor the telltale symptom of a sick society. They are the ineradicable stuff of politics." That's a quotation from American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford UP, 2014), by Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, two professors of political science at the University of Miami. Their study of conspiracy theories concludes that nearly all Americans hold conspiracy beliefs and that "conspiracy theories bring to the surface people's deepest political anxieties." The book studies American conspiracy theories over 120 years from 1890 to 2010. It analyzes well-known conspiracy theories such as the many about the assassination of JFK and the events of 9/11 to more obscure ones such as the Congressional plot to kill pet dogs.  In this interview with the New Books Network, co-author Joseph Uscinski suggests American conspiracy theories can teach us a lot about everyday politics.

Last month, VICE NEWS released a short documentary about the Navajo Nation called "Cursed by Coal." The images and stories confirm the title. "Seems like everything's just dying out here," says Navajo citizen Joe Allen. "It's because of the mine. Everything is being ruined. They don't care about people living on that land." About four hundred miles southwest of the Four Corners Power Plant, where much of the coal stripped from Navajo land is burned for energy, stands the gleaming Chase Tower in downtown Phoenix, the tallest building in the state of Arizona. Connecting the two places is a maze of energy infrastructure, hidden and ignored when a Chase executive enters his air-conditioned top-floor office. "Electricity and power lines had become second nature in Phoenix, as assumed and expected aspect of modern life," writes Andrew Needham. "Appearing in Phoenix's homes, businesses, and factories at the flick of a switch, electricity seemed to exist in neither time nor space. It simply was." But it had to be made somewhere, as Needham vividly illustrates in his new book, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2014). With booming desert cities demanding ever more power throughout the last century and into the present, the Navajo Nation's massive coal deposits were targeted for extraction, no matter the ecological or economic cost. People are still living with the consequences.

Conventional wisdom among historians and the public says anticommunism and the Cold War were barriers to reform during their height in the 1950s. In this view, the strong hand of a conservative anticommunism and Cold War priorities thwarted liberal and leftist reforms, political dissent and dreams of social democracy. Jennifer Delton is a professor of history at Skidmore College, and her new book, Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal (Cambridge University Press, 2013) encourages us–as the title suggests–to rethink that conventional view. She argues that in fact the Cold War and anticommunism promoted and justified many liberal goals rather than stifling them. Her book demonstrates that supposed conservatives championed many liberal causes while many liberals genuinely supported the Cold War and anticommunism. For example, she discusses the liberal beliefs and actions of business leaders and politicians like Dwight Eisenhower, who are often thought of as conservative figures, to show the dominance of liberal political ideas during this period. On the other side, she also argues that liberals, such as many labor activists, were themselves strongly anticommunist because they saw communism as truly damaging to their cause, not simply because they aimed to avoid the taint of a communist label. These sentiments had important effects on policy as well. From high taxes to regulation, civil rights and the continuance of New Deal programs, liberal ideas held sway. They had a powerful effect on policy, not in spite of, but because of the larger Cold War context. In the interview, Delton discusses her book and its importance in reforming both historians' views of the period and our broader thinking about partisan politics and nationalism.

Andrew Cayton is a distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In his book Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) he has given us a lucid and beautifully written history of the transatlantic relationships among the circle of radical writers that included William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Gilbert Imlay. Caught in the fervor revolutionary change, these free thinkers believing in the goodness of humanity and reason rejected the need for authority, hierarchies, and tradition in preserving social cohesion and wellbeing. Rather, mutuality and open exchange were offered as a better foundation for society. At the intersection of public lives and private desire, they sought to extend their radical vision beyond politics and into their intimate lives through new a model of egalitarian and free relationships between men and women. Deconstructing marriage their writings reflected the protested against the constraints of conventional society. Cayton demonstrates how these radicals embodied a modern interpersonal ethic arising with the liberal free trade in goods and ideas in which the personal was political. How the sexes were to relate to each other changed forever. Differing gendered understanding of "social commerce," between men and women, brought uneven consequences. Relationships founded on freedom, openness and devoid of binding ties beyond reasoned desire could also produce the fruits of a masculinist frame of mind – the tragedy of neglect, abuse, and abandonment experienced by women. Cayton's portrait of Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Imlay changes how we read them and how we understand our modern selves.

In this podcast I talk to Kirt von Daacke about his 2012 work, Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson's Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2012). Professor von Daacke is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. In this interview a few topics we discuss are: Sources and methods for piecing together a picture of life in Albemarle County and the use of legal documents as a window into a past society The relationship between law on the books and the actual behavior of the inhabitants of Albemarle County Free people of color’s experiences with the legal system The possibilities and the pitfalls awaiting unmarried women of color in the rural antebellum South Some implications of Freedom Has a Face for future work on African American history

The Nation magazine is one of America's most distinguished journalistic enterprises featuring the writing and work of such notable people as Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Molly Ivins, I.F. Stone and Hunter S. Thompson. The Nation was founded 150 years ago this July. It's America's oldest weekly magazine. To mark its 15oth anniversary, it's publishing a daily blog called The Almanac compiled by the magazine's archivist, Richard Kreitner. The Almanac looks at significant historical events that took place on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them. In this New Books Network podcast, you'll hear Richard Kreitner talk about The Nation's critical coverage of events from April 26 to May 2. Everything from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl to the death of J. Edgar Hoover.