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  • Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)

    Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)
    2025/06/05
    In Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, Dr. Brittany Friedman delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques—including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists—to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Dr. Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad. This episode considers: what the official records omit, how the questions we ask guide the answers we find, pattern mapping, racial categorization systems, surveillance mechanisms, the importance of outsider archives, protecting your sources, and why we need to awaken. Our guest is: Dr. Brittany Friedman, who is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: The Social Constructions of Race Hands Up, Don't Shoot The Names of All the Flowers Freemans Challenge Stitching Freedom The Emerson Prison Initiative The Journal of Higher Education in Prison Education Behind The Wall Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help to support the show by posting about, downloading, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
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    51 分
  • Dionne Koller, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport" (U California Press, 2025)

    Dionne Koller, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport" (U California Press, 2025)
    2025/06/04
    Tens of millions of children in the United States participate in youth sport, a pastime widely believed to be part of a good childhood. Yet most children who enter youth sport are driven to quit by the time they enter adolescence, and many more are sidelined by its high financial burdens. Until now, there has been little legal scholarly attention paid to youth sport or its reform. In More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport (University of California Press, 2025) Dr. Dionne Koller sets the stage for a different approach by illuminating the law and policy assumptions supporting a model that puts children's bodies to work in an activity that generates significant surplus value. In doing so, she identifies the wide array of beneficiaries who have a stake in a system that is much more than just play—and the political choices that protect these parties' interests at children's expense. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
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    33 分
  • Bonnie Yochelson, "Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen" (Fordham UP, 2025)

    Bonnie Yochelson, "Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen" (Fordham UP, 2025)
    2025/06/03
    In Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen (Fordham University Press, 2025) by Dr. Bonnie Yochelson, explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and much more.Alice Austen (1866–1952) lived at Clear Comfort, her grandparent’s Victorian cottage on Staten Island, which is now a National Historic Landmark. As a teenager, she devoted herself to photography, recording what she called “the larky life” of tennis matches, yacht races, and lavish parties.When she was 25 and expected to marry, Austen used her camera to satirize gender norms by posing with her friends in their undergarments and in men’s clothes, “smoking” cigarettes, and feigning drunkenness. As she later remarked, she was “too good to get married.” Austen embraced the rebellious spirit of the “New Woman,” a moniker given to those who defied expectations by pursuing athletics, higher education, or careers. She had romantic affairs with women, and at 31, she met Gertrude Tate, who became her life partner. Briefly, Austen considered becoming a professional photographer. She illustrated Bicycling for Ladies, a guide written by her friend Violet Ward, and she explored the working-class neighborhoods of Manhattan to produce a portfolio, “Street Types of New York.” Rejecting the taint of commerce, however, she remained within the confines of elite society with Tate by her side.Although interest in Austen has accelerated since 2017, when the Alice Austen House was designated a national site of LGBTQ history, the only prior book on Austen was published in 1976. Copiously illustrated, Too Good to Get Married fills the need for a fresh and deeply researched look at this skillful and witty photographer. Through analysis of Austen’s photographs, Yochelson illuminates the history of American photography and the history of sexuality. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
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    1 時間 2 分
  • Robert Chernomas, Gregory Chernomas, and Ian Hudson, "The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines" (Routledge, 2025)

    Robert Chernomas, Gregory Chernomas, and Ian Hudson, "The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines" (Routledge, 2025)
    2025/06/03
    Biological justification for all forms of inequality has a long history, with the claim that particular groups suffer disproportionately from inherited flaws of ability and character used to explain a remarkably wide variety of inequalities. Providing an important critique of that biodeterminist history and how the Human Genome Project has inspired some contemporary scientists and economists to follow a similar path of ascribing socioeconomic outcomes to genetic inheritance, The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines (Routledge, 2025) details new research that suggests that the social and economic environment can affect how genes express themselves in specific human traits and social outcomes. Using the three cases of the American white working class, Black Americans and American women, the authors demonstrate that relying on nature as an explanation is seriously flawed - showing that the socioeconomic inheritance created by the conditions in which these populations worked and lived offer a far better explanation than nature for the stratified results. This book is the story of an American history rife with unnecessary misery and the waste of human potential, along with the liberating effect of understanding the degree to which its citizens are the product of social inheritance and the potential power of a nurturing economy and society that equality promises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
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    27 分
  • Jessica Vasquez-Tokos, "Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation" (NYU Press, 2025)

    Jessica Vasquez-Tokos, "Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation" (NYU Press, 2025)
    2025/06/02
    Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation By Jessica Vasquez-Tokos, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon W.E.B. Du Bois famously pondered a question he felt society was asking of him as a Black man in America: “How does it feel to be a problem?” Jessica Vasquez-Tokos uses this question to examine how communities of color are constructed as “problems,” and the numerous ramifications this has for their life trajectories. Uncovering how various members of racial groups understand and react to what their racial status means for inclusion in, or exclusion from, the nation, Burdens of Belonging examines the historical underpinnings of the racial-colonial hierarchy, the influence this hierarchy has on lived experience, and how racialized life experience influences the feelings, perspectives and goals of people of color.Burdens of Belonging is based on interviews with people in Oregon from various racial groups, and brings multiple racial groups’ opinions together to weigh in on the ways in which race contours national belonging and affects sense of self, everyday life and wellness, and aspirations for the future. This book highlights the value of inquiring how people from various racial backgrounds perceive their fit in the nation and reveals how race matters to belonging in multifaceted ways.Filling a gap in research on the everyday effects of accumulated racial disadvantage, Burdens of Belonging brings to the fore an analysis of how racial inequality, settler colonialism, and race relations penetrate multiple layers of social life and become etched into bodies and futures. Michael L. Rosino, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Molloy University Recent Books: Democracy is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside Grassroots Political Organizing (UNC Press) 30% off with code: 01UNCP30 Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and the Media (Routledge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
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    33 分
  • Andy Oler, "Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature" (LSU Press, 2019)

    Andy Oler, "Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature" (LSU Press, 2019)
    2025/06/02
    In light of recent conversations about the crisis of masculinity, let's revisit Dr. Andy Oler's book Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature. I sat down with Dr. Oler to discuss the persistent anxiety about masculinity, the role of regional literature in American modernism, and the need for an expansive definition of the Midwest. We also talked about literary representation of futuristic equipment such as the cabbage transplanter. And for our scholar friends, Dr. Oler offers tips on how to secure texts that are not available in libraries or archives. Andy Oler is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
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    53 分
  • Jon Shelton, "The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy" (Cornell UP, 2023)

    Jon Shelton, "The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy" (Cornell UP, 2023)
    2025/06/02
    The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Cornell UP, 2023) questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the only, way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As Jon Shelton shows, linking education to economic well-being was not politically inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, public education was championed as a way to help citizens learn how to participate in a democracy. By the 1930s, public education, along with union rights and social security, formed an important component of a broad-based fight for social democracy. Shelton demonstrates that beginning in the 1960s, the political power of the education myth choked off powerful social democratic alternatives like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget. The nation's political center was bereft of any realistic ideas to guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. Embraced first by Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Republicans like George W. Bush also pushed the education myth. The result, over the past four decades, has been the emergence of a deeply inequitable economy and a drastically divided political system. Jon Shelton is professor and chair of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. In addition to The Education Myth he is the author of Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order, which was the winner of the International Standing Conference of the History of Education’s First Book Award in 2018. Shelton has also published work in the Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other publications. He served as the Vice-Chair of the city of Green Bay’s first ever Equal Rights Commission and sits on the Board of Directors for the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Wisconsin Labor History Society. He also serves as President for Higher Education of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
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    1 時間 12 分
  • Michael A. Meyer, "Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler" (CCAR Press, 2025)

    Michael A. Meyer, "Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler" (CCAR Press, 2025)
    2025/06/01
    Reform Judaism looks different today than it did a century ago. There are a lot of factors that lead to that change, but among these is Rabbi Alexander Schindler (1925-2000). Doing most of his work in the middle of the 20th century, Schindler was either part of or directly responsible for the changes in Reform (and even American) Judaism that we see today. In his biography of Rabbi Schindler, Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler (CCAR Press), Dr. Michael Meyer paints a picture of an extraordinarily influential leader in the history of Reform Judaism. From 1973 to 1996, he served as president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (today's Union for Reform Judaism), where his charisma and vision raised the Reform Movement to unprecedented influence. Never afraid to be controversial, he argued for recognizing patrilineal descent, institutionalized outreach to interfaith families and non-Jews, and championed LGBTQ rights and racial equality. He was a tireless advocate for Israel while maintaining diaspora Jews' right to speak out independently on the Jewish state. In this conversation, historian Michael A. Meyer brings Rabbi Schindler to life. His book, which he discusses with us, is based on extensive archival research and interviews and paints a definitive portrait of Schindler's life. Michael Meyer is the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History Emeritus at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where he taught since 1967. A leading scholar of modern Jewish history, Meyer has authored several award-winning books, including The Origins of the Modern Jew, Response to Modernity, and recent biographies of Rabbis Leo Baeck and Alexander Schindler. He served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Leo Baeck Institute, and held visiting positions at Hebrew University, Ben Gurion University, and others. Honored internationally, he received the Moses Mendelssohn Award and the Order of Merit from the German Federal Republic. Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is most recently the author of Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
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    45 分