Episodes

  • Garrett M. Graff, "When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

    Garrett M. Graff, "When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
    Aug 13 2025
    June 6, 1944—known to us all as D-Day—is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military triumphs. The surprise sunrise landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of occupied northern France is one of the most consequential days of the 20th century. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff, historian and author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Watergate, brings them all together in a one-of-a-kind, bestselling oral history that explores this seminal event in vivid, heart-pounding detail.The story begins in the opening months of the 1940s, as the Germany army tightens its grip across Europe, seizing control of entire nations. The United States, who has resolved to remain neutral, is forced to enter the conflict after an unexpected attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. For the second time in fifty years, the world is at war, with the stakes higher than they’ve ever been before. Then in 1943, Allied leaders Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meet in Casablanca to discuss a new plan for victory: a coordinated invasion of occupied France, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Failure is not an option. Over the next eighteen months, the large-scale action is organized, mobilizing soldiers across Europe by land, sea, and sky. And when the day comes, it is unlike anything the world has ever seen.These moments and more are seen in real time. A visceral, page-turning drama told through the eyes of those who experienced them—from soldiers, nurses, pilots, children, neighbors, sailors, politicians, volunteers, photographers, reporters and so many more, When the Sea Came Alive “is the sort of book that is smart, inspiring, and powerful—and adds so much to our knowledge of what that day was like and its historic importance forever” (Chris Bohjalian)—an unforgettable, fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation. 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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    54 mins
  • Renata Keller, "The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War" (UNC Press, 2025)

    Renata Keller, "The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War" (UNC Press, 2025)
    Nov 25 2025
    Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for postwar domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground--a standard account that obscures the shock waves that reverberated throughout Latin America. The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War (UNC Press, 2025), as the first hemispheric examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis, shows how leaders and ordinary citizens throughout the region experienced it, revealing that, had the missiles been activated, millions of people across Latin America would have been at grave risk. Traversing the region from the Southern Cone to Central America, Renata Keller describes the deadly riots that shook Bolivia when news of the Cuban Missile Crisis broke, the naval quarantine that members of Argentina's armed forces formed around Cuba, the pro-Castro demonstrations organized by Nicaraguan students, and much more. Drawing on a vast array of archival sources from around the hemisphere and world, The Fate of the Americas demonstrates that even at the brink of destruction, Latin Americans played active roles in global politics and inter-American relations. 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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    37 mins
  • Kenneth Jones, "African American Males and Video Games: How Gaming Technology Can Motivate and Enhance Learning" (Myers Education, 2025)

    Kenneth Jones, "African American Males and Video Games: How Gaming Technology Can Motivate and Enhance Learning" (Myers Education, 2025)
    Aug 13 2025
    African American males are confronted with formidable barriers in their pursuit of quality education, resulting in stark disparities in academic performance, economic opportunities, and social outcomes. Despite numerous educational initiatives striving for parity, African American males persistently bear the brunt of the highest rates of suspensions, expulsions, and dropout rates, surpassing all other demographic groups. Educational environments often fail to acknowledge and integrate the cultural and social needs of Black males, viewing them as "problems" rather than recognizing their immense potential for academic and leadership success. The prevalence of negative stereotypes in media, particularly in video games, exacerbates societal biases, portraying African American males as inherently violent and criminal. These representations contribute to implicit biases that affect perceptions and treatment in real-life scenarios. The systemic issues within the education system, coupled with socioeconomic factors, result in African American males being underrepresented in advanced placement and gifted education programs. This underrepresentation limits their opportunities for higher education and professional advancement. Confronting these challenges necessitates a comprehensive approach that encompasses the creation of inclusive educational environments, the eradication of systemic racism, and the promotion of positive representations of African American males in media. By acknowledging and fostering the potential of Black males, society can strive to reduce disparities and cultivate a more equitable and just education system that recognizes and celebrates their academic and professional achievements. African American Males and Video Gamesexplores the perspectives of four African American male college students aged 18 to 21 on the impact of video games on their academic growth and development. The participants, all maintaining a GPA of 3.0 or higher, shared their experiences with teachers, video games, and coping mechanisms. This qualitative approach allowed for a rich understanding of the participant's experiences and the role of video games in their academic and mental well-being. Video games emerged as a significant coping tool for the participants, providing a mental escape from academic and social pressures. The games allowed them to engage in competitive and creative activities, fostering a sense of accomplishment and reducing stress. For example, games like NBA 2K21 and Forza Horizon 4 enabled them to explore alter egos and interests in a virtual space, offering entertainment and a sense of community. African American Males and Video Gamesis a critical text for exploring alternatives in providing a quality education experience for young African American males. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. 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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    20 mins
  • Eric King, "A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon" (PM Press, 2025)

    Eric King, "A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon" (PM Press, 2025)
    Nov 25 2025
    A Clean Hell opens the doors of America’s most secretive prison and lets the reader step into the cell to experience all the horrors the Federal Bureau of Prisons tries to keep hidden underground. The federal supermax ADX Florence is the most secure facility in the United States, a dungeon of isolation, sensory deprivation, and psychological disintegration. Here, cruelty isn’t accidental; it’s the design. Built in 1995, the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” was made to cage the so-called worst of the worst: bombers, gang leaders, political enemies, and anyone the government deems too rebellious, too inconvenient, or too visible. Among them was antifascist prisoner Eric King, targeted for his politics, brutally tortured by the Bureau of Prisons, and ultimately entombed at ADX after beating a politically motivated federal prosecution. A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon (PM Press, 2025) is a searing firsthand account from inside the most repressive prison in the United States, a place built not for rehabilitation but for disappearance. It tells the story of Eric’s decade behind bars: the years of surveillance and retaliation, the years locked in solitary confinement, the reality of being known as a “race traitor,” and the daily acts of resistance that kept him—and others—alive. More than just a firsthand survival story and exposé, this is a blistering indictment of the carceral state and the sanitized violence it tries to hide. A Clean Hell is a crucial document of solidarity and struggle inside the belly of the beast and required reading for anyone concerned with mass incarceration, political repression, or the inhumane architecture of the US prison system. Guest: Eric King is an anarchist who was imprisoned in 2014 for acts of solidarity with the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising. During his time in prison, which included almost two years in Federal Supermax, or ADX, Eric coedited the political prisoner anthology, Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners, published by AK Press, and wrote many other essays about his experiences in prison. In addition to his writing, Eric is also an activist, antifascist, and loving father and husband. Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. 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 hr and 1 min
  • Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

    Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
    Nov 24 2025
    Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest stars, wrote scores of plays, and toured the United States and England, but he never became a household name. Inspired by this average performer’s life and labor, An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Amy Hughes offers an alternative history of nineteenth-century theater, focusing on the daily rhythms and routines of theatrical life rather than the celebrated people, plays, and exceptional events that tend to dominate histories of US theater and performance. In the process, Dr. Hughes asks uncomfortable questions about the existence, predominance, and erasure of White male mediocrity in US culture, both in the past and present. When historians focus only on performers and plays with artistic “merit,” what communities, perspectives, and cultural trends remain invisible? How did men like Watkins advance themselves professionally, despite their mediocrity? Why did men like Watkins embrace and perpetuate myths like the American Dream, the “self-made man,” and meritocracy, and how have these ideals shaped casting, producing, and celebrity worship in today’s US entertainment industry? Ultimately, Dr. Hughes reveals how this actor’s tale illuminates the widespread tendency to ignore, deny, and forgive White male mediocrity in US culture, and how a deeper understanding of people like Watkins can transform our understanding of the past—and our understanding of ourselves. 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 hr and 4 mins
  • Jim Cullen, "1980: America's Pivotal Year" (Rutgers UP, 2022)

    Jim Cullen, "1980: America's Pivotal Year" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
    Nov 23 2025
    1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching. 1980: America's Pivotal Year (Rutgers UP, 2022) puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot JR, cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s. Jim Cullen is the author of numerous books, including The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Those Were the Days: Why ‘All in the Family’ Still Matters, and From Memory to History: Television Versions of the Twentieth Century. He teaches history at the newly-founded upper division of Greenwich Country Day School. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt 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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    42 mins
  • Julie Dobrow, "Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage" (NYU Press, 2025)

    Julie Dobrow, "Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage" (NYU Press, 2025)
    Nov 22 2025
    Like any set of star-crossed lovers, Elaine and Charles came from different worlds. Elaine, an acclaimed childhood poet from a remote corner of the Massachusetts Berkshires, traveled to the Dakota Territories to teach Native American students, undaunted by society’s admonitions. Charles, a Dakota Sioux from Minnesota, educated at Dartmouth and Boston University Medical School, was considered by his Euro-American mentors the epitome of an assimilated Indian. But when they met just ahead of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, the magnetic pull of love brought them together despite the tremendous odds stacked against them.Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Julie Dobrow offers a dual biography of Elaine Goodale and Ohíye’Sa, (Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman), exploring their individual lives as well as their highly publicized interracial marriage. Both well-known in their own time– Elaine as a poet, journalist, and advocate for Indian education and Charles as writer, public speaker, and ardent activist for Indian rights– their marriage started with a shared vision to work on behalf of Indians. In the face of extreme prejudice, financial burden, and personal tragedy however, the marriage began to unravel.Dr. Dobrow paints an intimate, emotional portrait of the Eastmans’ lives drawn from Elaine and Charles’s letters, papers, and hundreds of accounts of the Eastmans’ lives from newspapers. Along the way, she skillfully illuminates the shifting late 19th and early 20th century definitions of Indigenous identity, and reveals how the Eastmans’ legacies reflect changing American attitudes toward gender, interracial relationships and biracial children. The result is a compelling new history that weds the private and the political, and Native America and the United States of America– entwined yet separated, inextricable yet never fully joined, just like Elaine and Charles themselves. 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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    45 mins
  • John Bodnar, "Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11" (UNC Press, 2021)

    John Bodnar, "Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11" (UNC Press, 2021)
    Nov 22 2025
    September 11th, 2001 marked the beginning of the so-called war on terror, but the attacks of that day also re-ignited battles over the nature of American patriotism. In Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11 (UNC Press, 2021), Professor John Bodnar argues that the nature of patriotism as being war-based or empathetic divided the nation as much as the responses to the 9/11 attacks. Using a variety of public media and private correspondence, Dr. Bodnar explores the different ways Americans tried to understand and remember 9/11, their disagreements over government responses to it, and how patriotism itself was also part of the debate. Dr. Bodnar shows how people on all the various sides to national security debates used patriotism as a motivating factor for their positions. Divided by Terrorshows how patriotism and how it is to be practiced was contested and fought over as much as the policies that it inspired. Dr. Bodnar is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University. He is the author of 8 academic books in addition to numerous journal articles. You can find a transcript here. 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 hr and 8 mins