
New Books in American Studies
Interviews with Scholars of America about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
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Jason L. Newton, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest" (West Virginia UP, 2024)
What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest (West Virginia University Pres

Tom Lynch, "Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and Out West: The Settler Colonial Environmental Imaginary (U Nebraska Press, 2022), emeritus professor of English at the University of Nebraska Thomas Lynch takes those stor
The final volume in Dr. Jehanne Dubrow’s groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse, Civilians (LSU Press, 2025) examines a significant moment of transformation in a military marriage: the shift from active-duty service to civilian life. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, Dr. Dubrow

Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Knopf, 2025)
One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace. We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way
Afterthought: A Family Story (Indiana University Bloomington Libraries Publishing, 2025) by Dr. Heather Akou focuses on the life of her grandmother, Lila Slaback, who grew up in a dysfunctional, working-class family in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the 1930s. In her short adult life, she gave birth to seven children with at

David D. Grafton, "Muhammad in the Seminary: Protestant Teaching about Islam in the Nineteenth Century" (NYU Press, 2024)
Uncovers what Christian seminaries taught about Islam in their formative years Throughout the nineteenth century, Islam appeared regularly in the curricula of American Protestant seminaries. Islam was not only the focus of Christian missions, but was studied as part of the history of the Church as well as in the new fi